Supernatural Noir

The rippling and pulling intensified. The reflection of this u

After, we stood breathless, staring at ourselves in the window. She spoke to me, moving my lips and forcing air from my lungs through the vocal cords and over my tongue.

“We’re very good together,” she said. “We can accomplish so much.”

I asked her what it was she hoped to accomplish, and she showed me the face of a bucktoothed man named Toady. His expression was tense and hateful. He drew back his fist and punched us in the cheek, and Sylvia’s loathing of the cretin became mine.

“There are others,” she said. “So many others. All we need are the icons.”

“And each other,” I said.

“Of course.”

——

We stand at the window, observing the crude bumps and tightly stretched planes of skin, and we whisper back and forth—plans and dreams and longings so deep we have never spoken them aloud to another soul. The words spill quietly from my lips and I observe their formation in the pane, and in one heart-stopping moment we fall silent.

I find us so beautiful I can’t speak another word.

——

Lee Thomas is the Lambda Literary Award– and Bram Stoker Award–wi

| BUT FOR SCARS |

Tom Piccirilli

—

I woke up at four a.m. to a whistling, icy draft and found a teenage girl downstairs feeding my goldfish, Cecil. She’d been at it for a while. The box of fish food was empty, Cecil was dead, and she was scratching at her temple with an S&W popgun .22.

October rain slid against the living-room windows and brown, wet leaves clung thickly to the bottom of the open front door. There was a rusted key in the lock and an overturned rock at the foot of the porch steps. I hadn’t known about the hiding spot. I shut the door.

Emily Wright didn’t glance up.

I knew who she was even though I hadn’t seen her in six years. The chubby little girl had turned a delicate sixteen, with the pale and inviting face of a freshly sculpted young woman. Her once-vibrant blue eyes had grown smoky and muted. Seams around her mouth added a kind of evocative maturity that was already provocative. Men would consider her sexy as hell until she hit maybe twenty-five, and then she’d be downgraded to bruised fruit. By the time she was thirty the neighbors would be saying she hadn’t aged well.

She looked a lot like her mother, without the cruel lips and shamelessness.

I shivered at the bottom of the staircase, barefoot and shirtless, wearing only baggy sweatpants. Wisps of my breath curled through the air. I checked the thermostat. Emily had turned off the heat. I snapped it back on.

She wore wet Sojourner State pajamas and the tatters of ward slippers. Her feet were mucked with grime. The hospital was eight miles out of town, and she looked like she’d walked the whole way here in the rain. She kept tapping the empty box of fish food against the side of the aquarium with her left hand. In her right she now held the .22 loosely in her lap.

Her lips moved but she made no sound. She nodded, shook her head, and even shrugged as if deep in conversation.

I’d seen a few unstable teens in my time. I’d been one myself. I’d hit a bad patch during puberty after my parents died, and skidded into the wall. I’d stolen cars and driven all over the state trying to escape myself. I’d climbed water towers out of my head and broke into houses just to page through photo albums and pretend I was a part of the family. They used to find me curled under the blankets, holding dolls, wasted on crank and muttering, “Mommy.”

I was shopped around from one foster family to the next until they finally packed me off to the juvie detention wing of Sojourner State Psychiatric Facility. I spent two years in hell fighting my way out of gang rapes and forced body modification with broken razor blades. You had to be on your toes to avoid hydrotherapy, where more than a few kids drowned. The orderlies used to stage ward matches between the paranoids, the firebugs, chronic masturbators, bipolars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and depressives. The only reason I ever got my shit together was because I possessed an unholy amount of survival instinct that I never realized I had.

Cecil floated in a tight circle on his side. Emily had finally put down the empty box and was dangling her fingers in the water, making ripples that kept Cecil chugging along. The hand in her lap danced nervously, the .22 swaying left and right, angled at my chest. She didn’t seem to be aware that she was holding it.

“You’ve got scars,” she said.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Where’d you get them?”

“Lots of places.”

“Like where?”

“In juvie detention, alley fights, poker games gone sour.”

“They’re cool.”

Mottled pink and white scars, some of them as thick as a finger, might be considered a lot of things, but I’d never found them to be cool. I felt self-conscious being half-naked in front of this kid. I was also freezing. I went to the closet and put on a sweatshirt. When I turned back to her the gun had quit prancing and the barrel was pointed in the direction of my belly.

I was worried, but not too much. I’d been shot with a .22 before. At this distance it stung like hell but not much more. Besides, Emily had no beef with me. I knew what was on her mind. If I’d been in her place, six years in the state bin with nothing but blood on my mind, I’d have done the same thing. Except I wouldn’t have stolen a .22. I’d have made sure to grab something with real firepower. I wondered where she’d gotten the pistol. I wondered if she’d hurt anyone yet.

“I’m Emily Wright,” she said.

I nodded. “Emily, you shouldn’t be here.”

“My parents were murdered in this house.”

“I know.”

“Why would you buy a house where people were murdered?”

I told the truth, at least a part of it. “Because it was cheap.”

No one else had wanted the place. Houses where two people had been butchered tend to be off-putting. They’d stabbed her father, Ro

I hoped Emily didn’t know anything about that.

She glanced around the living room, made a sweeping gesture with the pistol. “It’s a hundred years old, with three floors and five bedrooms. There’s a pantry and a root cellar and a large yard. Three thousand square feet, not including the half-finished attic.”