Rose Madder

“Yes,” he breathed.

“I saw it. I’ll take care of it, too. I’ll take care of everything.'

But he had no intention of charging wildly across the stream, and maybe falling in. There was something about the water Rose hadn’t liked, and he’d do well to be very careful; to watch his step in the most literal sense. The damned brook might be full of those little South American fish with the big teeth, the ones that could strip a whole cow down to its skeleton on a good day. He didn’t know if you could be killed by things in a delusion, but this felt less like make-believe all the time. She flashed her ass at me, he thought. Her bare ass. Maybe I’ve got something to flash at her… don’t they say turnabout’s fair play? Norman wrinkled his lips back from his teeth, making a grisly expression that wasn’t a grin, and put one of Hump’s boots on the first white stone. The moon sailed behind a cloud as he did. When it came out again, it caught Norman halfway across the little stream. He looked down at the water, at first just curious, then fascinated and horrified. The moonlight penetrated the water no more than it would have penetrated a flowing stream of mud, but that wasn’t what took the breath out of him and brought him to a stop. The moon reflected up at him in that black water wasn’t the moon at all. It was a bleached and gri

“You’re not getting away that easy,” he breathed.

“I don’t-” The stone boy moved then. Its arms came down and seized Rosie’s right wrist. Rosie screamed and beat fruitlessly against its two-handed grip. The stone boy was gri

“Attaboy,” Norman whispered.

“Hold her-just hold her.” He jumped up on the other bank and ran for his wayward wife, big hands outstretched.

“Want to do the dog with me?” the stone boy enquired of her in a grating, uninflected voice. The hands clamping her wrist were all angles and squeezing, bitter weight. She looked over her shoulder and saw Norman leap onto the bank, the horns of the mask he had on digging at the night air. He stumbled on the slick grass but did not fall. For the first time since realizing it was Norman in the police car, she felt close to panic. He was going to get her, and then what? He’d bite her to pieces and she would die screaming, with the smell of his English Leather in her nostrils. He would-“Want to do the dog?” the stone boy spat.

“Want to get down, Rosie, do some low-ridin, put all four on the fl-”

“No!” she shrieked, her fury spilling out again, spreading across her thoughts like a red curtain.

“No, leave me alone, quit that high-school bullshit and leave me ALONE!” She swung with her left hand, not thinking of how much it was going to hurt to drive her fist into the face of a marble statue… and it did not, in fact, hurt at all. It was like hitting something spongy and rotten with a battering ram. She caught just a momentary glimpse of a new expression-astonishment replacing lust-and then the thing’s smirking face shattered into a hundred dough-colored fragments. The heavy, pinching pressure of its hands left her wrist, but now there was Norman, Norman almost on top of her, head lowered, breath slobbering in and out through the mask, hands reaching. Rosie turned, feeling one of his outstretched fingers skate over the zat’s single shoulder-strap, and bolted. Now it would be a footrace.

She ran as she had when she was a girl, before her practical, sensible mother had begun the weighty task of teaching Rose Diana McClendon what was ladylike and what was not (ru

“You started smoking again, didn’t you?” she said. The eyes below the flower-decked rubber horns regarded her with complete unreason. The lower half of the mask was twitching spastically, as if the man buried inside it were trying to smile.

“Rose,” the bull said. “stop this.”

“I’m not Rose,” she said, then gave an exasperated little laugh, as if he were really the stupidest creature alive-el toro dumbo.

“I’m Rosie. Rosie Real. But you’re not real anymore, Norman… are you? Not even to yourself. But it doesn’t matter now, not to me, because I’m divorced of you.” She turned then, and fled.

You’re not real anymore, he thought as he went around the top of the tree, where there was plenty of room for easy passage. She had left the far side of the deadfall ru