Echo Lawrence: They don't know I saw, but I woke up in the backseat of the car and saw Shot kiss Neddy Nelson on the lips. Shot said, "There, now you're infected."
And Neddy said, "I'd better be, because I'm not doing that again."
Irene Casey: The man reached to finger the sleeve of my sweater, and he said, "Isn't this pretty."
I started to step back, making my fist tight around the gold coin, to hide it in case it was his. Nodding at the cattails, I told him, "There's wild dogs, mister."
His eyes and mouth made just a look. Not a smile or frown, more how you'd look if you was alone. The man's fingers worked into the knotted yarn, and he said, "Relax."
I told him, "Don't, mister." I said, "Quit pulling, please."
He stretched the sleeve toward him, so hard you could hear the seam at the shoulder creak, a thread popped, and he said, "I'm not hurting you."
Holding the coin to hide it, saving it, left me with only one hand. My shoes sliding on the ice. To save my sweater, I stepped closer, saying, "You're going to ruin it…"
Neddy Nelson: Don't you know rabies is key?
Irene Casey: The sweater, the white yarn worked like a net. An acrylic spiderweb. With both hands, his fingers were tangled, worked deep into the knots and stitches, and when he dropped to his knees, his weight dragged me down. Buttoned to my neck, I twisted away from his clouds of ghost breath, and when he slid flat onto the dirty ice, he pulled me with him. The two of us tied and knotted together.
In the brush around us, dogs barked. The man put his lips together in a kiss and said, "Shhhh. Hush." The heart inside his coat, beating one thud for every four times mine jumped.
His eyes rolled to look toward the barking, the dogs, and I told myself he was saving me. I was fine. He'd only grabbed me and pulled me down to protect me. He heard the dog pack coming, and he wanted us to hide.
As the barking faded, moving down the river, his fingers still knotted in my sweater, he looked at me, from too close to see anything but my eyes. His eyelashes brushing mine, he said, "You ever wonder about your real daddy?"
Neddy Nelson: Isn't rabies what wrecks your port so you can't boost peaks? After that, aren't you free to flashback?
Irene Casey: I remember trying to hold my breath, because, every time I breathed out, he settled on top of me, heavier, making my next breath smaller. Crushing my insides, smaller, until stars of light spun around in my eyes. In the blue silk sky.
He said, "I've been watching your trash."
I remember the long sleeves of the sweater, wrapped and twisted around me, tight as those coats that crazy people wear in movies so they can't move their arms. My, each of my fingers, tied a different way.
From watching the trash, he said, "I know the hours and minutes since your last period." And he said how the baby I'd have, right now, would almost for sure be a boy. He would be a king, that boy. An emperor. A genius who would make me rich and exalted above all other women.
And with my every breath out, he settled heavier on top of me, making my next breath more shallow, until I was only half awake.
Neddy Nelson: Isn't that why the government pushed to port everybody? Because weren't too many people Party Crashing to mess with history?
Irene Casey: The air smelled like clean water in a clear glass on a hot day. The ice smelled like nothing. The dirt, froze stiff. The river, froze solid. No wind. Like we was outside of time. Nothing happening except us.
He said how boy sperms swim faster, but don't live as long as the girl sperms, and his breath smelled like a burp after you've ate pork sausage for breakfast.
I said I had to pee.
And he said, "When we're done."
Neddy Nelson: Don't you know about the covert government effect? People aren't even aware it's boosting, but doesn't the effect keep you stuck here so you can't mess with history?
Irene Casey: I remember I told him how sorry I was for peeing on him. Peeing on both of us. But it hurt so bad, and the cold air made the hurt worse. Those days, walking out, I'd layer maybe nine, maybe ten pair of panties. To give me hips till I'd fill out.
I didn't want to, but when he worked my zipper down and slipped his cold thumb inside all those panties, inside me, I peed. All hot, creeping through my jeans and underwear. The hot wicking up the yarn of my sweater. The rest of me, ice cold.
In the dirt, in my Christmas sweater, with this man crushing the air out of me, calling me "the mother of the future," I couldn't picture how this'd get any worse.
I remember him turning his hand in front of my face, his fingers wet and steaming in the cold, and me saying, "I'm sorry."
I said, "We're safe."
His wet fingers inside me, I kept calling him "mister." Kept saying, "Those dogs are long gone."
Neddy Nelson: Don't Historians call it "Oblivion," the place without place, where time's stopped. The place outside of time.
Irene Casey: This man brung one knee up to my chest, like to kneel on me, and he brung it down, hooking the toe of his black shoe in the crotch of my jeans. As he stomped the jeans and panties down around my socks and ankles, in that instant, I remembered how many folks were sat down to Christmas dinner at my house. Too many for my mother to ever miss me.
Echo Lawrence: The Easter egg that Rant left for me, he'd written on it with white wax, so that when I soaked it in dye I could read his hidden message.
Irene Casey: Worse than Basin Carlyle fouling you, nailing you too hard, down there with a dodgeball in phys ed. Worse than the cramps. That punching, pushing, shoving inside, it hurts. Gritty and grinding with dirty water, the ice, melted under me. That thin part of ice, turned to mud puddled under me.
I pictured fabric, stuck in one place, stabbed again and again in a big, slow sewing machine.
My arms wrapped tight as a baby or a mummy, just-born or dead-helpless, the man moved on top of me, faster, until he stopped, and every muscle and joint of him turned hard as stone, froze.
Then all of him went loose, relaxed, but he didn't let go. His fingers kept a hold of me.
His heart slowed, and he said, "It didn't happen, not yet. To be safe," the man said, "we'll need to go again."
Echo Lawrence: Instead of dye, I dropped the egg in a cup of coffee. After I drank the coffee, the egg sat there in the bottom of the paper cup, Rant's words telling me: "In three days, I'll return from the dead." Some kind of Easter quote.
Irene Casey: While the man waited, he sniffed his hand and said, "You smell just like your mama and grandma and great-grandma smelled at your age…"
Nothing moved. Nothing barked.
"Have this baby," he whispered, his mouth on top of my eyes, his lips on my shut-tight eyelids, "and you'll be the most famous mother in all of history…"
Down there, he was moving again, pressing me into the ice, through the ice into the river, and he said, "You don't have this baby and I'll come back to make you have another…"
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: If you must know, the hidden message written on my egg was "Fuck You."
Irene Casey: "Yes," he said, his chin grinding whiskers against the side of my neck. He said, "Yes. Yeah. Oh yeah." He said, "Please."
His hips bucked against me so hard, one crack, two, three lightning-bolted through the ice underneath. Water lapped up from under. White cracks, zigzagging toward shore.