* * *
Marian and Jack came out with Boots by their side. Alan stood by the Mom-thing’s along with everyone else. Marian walked over and embraced her brother. “Okay, Alan. I know the rest of it.” “You’ll have to stay here now, you know?” “I know.” “Can you accept that?”
“Someday, I think.” Marian then caught sight of a new figure entering the cemetery, and smiled when she saw Laura walking toward her. Her sister-in-law’s skin was cadaverous, her eyes blank. She had been torn open from the center of her chest on down. Her stomach, liver, and uterus dangled within shiny loops of grey intestine, caught there as if in a spider’s web. Everything drooped so low it nearly touched the ground.
She was carrying something that was almost too big for her to handle.
Walking up to Marian, Laura handed over her Story-Quilt-wrapped burden, then took her place by her husband’s side, draping one cold-dead arm around his waist, resting her head on his shoulder. Alan kissed her cheek and pointed to the spot where they would rest come morning.
Marian pulled back a corner of the quilt and looked into the baby’s face.
Its head was so much larger than the rest of its body, semi-round with deep horizontal grooves in the flesh as well as the skull beneath. Its eyes were so abnormally large and round, its mouth deformed, its nose misshapen and dwarfed by the rest of its features.
Marian wept joy for its hideousness and blessed the night for the pain it was in, a pain that she was now more than willing to share, to savor along with this creature, her nephew, her son, her lover-to-be.
The Quinlan bloodline would remain pure. She could almost see the faces of the children she would have with this after it grew up. How glorious they would be.
She checked her watch. It was nearly midnight. At sunrise on All Saints’ Day the dead would have to return to their graves and wait for next Hallowe’en to come around before they could rise again. She studied the pile of stones and human heads. “A family cathedral,” she said. The thing in her arms cooed and coughed in approval.
There was a stone quarry not too far away. The lumber mill was even closer. She had the whole town here; young and old, the living and the dead.
They had until dawn.
Plenty of time for a good enough start.
She faced the crowd. “We all know what has to be done. If we don’t finish tonight, we’ll meet here again next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. However long it takes.” She stroked the surface of the Story Quilt, knowing what illustration she’d use for the final patch once this project was completed. She could be patient. She was not alone.
She never would be again. She lifted her head and faced the crowd once again. “Let’s get to it.”
Everyone smiled, the Hallowe’en moon grew brighter as the church bell gave a triumphant ring, and, as a family, they began to raise a dream from the silent, ancient dust of death.
In Loving Memory of My Father,
Frank Henry Braunbeck
May 22, 1926 - June 15, 2001
“No, good sir; the privilege was mine.”
The Sisterhood
of Plain-Faced Women
"We will gather images and images of images until the last—which is blank: This one we agree on." —Edmund Jabés, "Mirror and Scarf"
1. Ones Who By Nature
As she watched people file into the pub Amanda found herself recalling some lines from an old T.S. Eliot poem: In the room the women come/and go/Talking of Michelangelo. How many women, she wondered, had come in here since she’d first sat down, come in quite alone but looking ever so lovely, only to leave with a man in tow, complimenting him on how wonderful he looked and getting the same in return? How much attention had these women relinquished on their faces, their lovely, just right, just so faces, making sure the eye shadow wasn't too heavy, the base not too thick, the rouge not too bright, all of it in an effort to—as that old cosmetics slogan used to say—Right Nature's Wrongs?
In the room the women come and go...
Lighting a cigarette, she blinked away a sad memory and shrank into herself.
There are lonely ones who by nature cannot smile; watching in silence as people pass by, they never dare to speak for fear they might say the wrong thing. It would be a mercy if the Passing People became little more than vague shadow-shapes to the lonely ones, but that rarely happens; always there is something that draws attention: a knowing smile; a certain glint in the eyes; the lilt of a voice; the brief, sensuous, teasing scent of a woman's perfume or a man's cologne that still clings to the body of their partner; an echo of the embrace, the kiss, the humid passions left amidst soft, rumpled sheets and in the damp, sculpted impressions that moistly reshaped downy pillows: O my love, my love, my love....
Amanda looked toward the left—If only I had a smile like hers—and the chill of her isolation deepened; she looked straight ahead—What I wouldn't give for her cheekbones—and suddenly the ache in her center widened, a pit, a chasm, threatening, as it always did, to swallow her whole.
In an attempt to make herself feel better and pull her thoughts out of the mire she reminded herself that, for a good long while now, by choice and thanks to a lot of hard work, hers was a life marked not by giddy emotional highs and gut-wrenching spiritual lows but a steady unbroken line of small disappointments occasionally counterbalanced by equally small satisfactions, all of them the sum total of an average woman's existence; for that was the word that best described Amanda: average.
Or so people told her.
She crushed out her cigarette much more violently than she’d intended, then rubbed her eyes much too hard, amazed again at how pliant they felt under their slightly quivering lids. It would take so little pressure for her thumb and index finger to become spears...
She pulled her hands away, opened her eyes, and caught a glimpse of her inverted reflection in the small silver spoon lying beside her glass.
At least the ugly, the scarred or deformed, were given pity ; awe was reserved for the truly beautiful, but at least the ugly were given some quarter; either way, both received attention from the people who passed.
She stared at her half-empty glass, chastising herself for thinking this way. She'd never been the type to indulge in the false luxury of self-pity—well, maybe once, long ago in dead yesterday, when she’d been younger and so damnably foolish and was quick to spill the contents of her heart; yes, then, probably at least once; but now—now these evenings of quiet soul-searching were the closest she ever came...still, there could be found, from time to time, when one person too many failed to return a look or a smile or an “Hello,” a certain edge in her voice, not quite bitter but more than dark enough, intended to cut not whomever she spoke with but herself. Call it resignation.
For at least the ugly were given pity.
The plain were simply left alone.
At the bar a woman laughed a little too loudly at a joke told by the man sitting two stools to her left. The woman took a second to catch her breath and regroup, her eyes fixed solidly on the man's face, just long enough so he'd know she was appraising him, making a decision, then the moment of truth arrived and she gathered her drink and her purse and gracefully, promisingly, with perhaps a bit more stretch-and-wiggle than was needed, moved closer to him.