SecondLine_PDF

Short Fictions & Curiosities
SECOND
LINE
KIRA BUTLER
SECOND LINE
Short Fictions & Curiosities
KIRA BUTLER
Copyright © 2015 by Kira Butler
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical
means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission
from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
INTRODUCTION
Short Fictions & Curiosities are monthly offerings: a sample of short stories, wonders,
terrors, and experiments in speculative fiction: small slivers of darkness, horror, and wonders from the vault for your enjoyment.
I began this experiment partially for the love of the fantastic, and partially because I
wanted to take mini-vacations from the novel I’ve been toiling over for the last year. I look
at Short Fictions & Curiosities as a collection of oddities that didn’t quite want to fit anywhere else: misfit creatures that occasionally poked their heads out of the murky places
where I’d hidden them.
As bizarre as they were, I still wanted to give them a home. And here we are.
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SECOND LINE
He came back after the storm. The flood waters left their tallies against the cypress, nine
feet high in a brown slash that reflected in the ripples of the Mississippi. Grey shrouds of
moss hung like forgotten sheets in a dead heat, grazing the aluminium roof and catching in
the slats that covered the windows of a shack that sat off kilter, half-drunk and leaning into
the alluvial soil of the swamp. It seemed smaller; the home in which he grew into manhood.
Another ghost sitting off the river bank. Bleached and water-stained, it shrivelled into itself
as he approached; some place that he escaped for a time but lingered just outside his attention.
It still managed to draw him back, no matter how far he’d run.
Persuasion like that was a Southern thing, working away at a fella like erosion sloughed
off the riverbanks. Eventually, it broke down enough of your resolve that you found yourself floating back with the current. Looking over a shoulder just in case it followed you. It
seemed to Marlow that he’d been waiting for this — waiting for something to lead him back
by the wrist.
There were enough sorry jazz tunes about it for him to know before he rounded the bend
in the river that there wasn’t a prayer that he’d be saved this one time.
The water sank the front yard and tried to take the porch. It hung on, even when his skiff
ran it over, and the prow near drove into the front door.
Two weeks prior, sitting in the shoebox apartment in Shreveport Marlow had hidden
away in, Jake had called:
“It come up a big cloud,” Jake had said, his voice crackling through his cell. Three hundred miles away with shitty reception, and Marlow could still smell the wood rot through
the phone. He’d gone ages ago, settled into that vague spell of forgetting that was too tenuous to hold for long. Then Katrina showed up, washed on through most of Louisiana
loosening up everything Marlow had buried. Hadn’t offered pleasantries.
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Jake always had a knack for understatement. Marlow didn’t ask where he’d gotten the
phone, or how he’d scrounged up his number, but the swamp’s stink clawed its way through
his nose hairs, and now here he was.
He’d expected the whole place to sink. Venice of the goddamn bayou.
“Bitch took the cemetery. You best git,” said Jake. He meant Katrina.
That was Marlow’s only warning: They treated the hurricane like a bad divorce. She left
you with nothing but brought you back to pay for the things you thought you owed.
Jake had hung up without waiting to hear if Marlow would make the trip. Some things
didn’t need asking.
All those sturdy cypress roots that once kept him rooted to his childhood home became
blockades for the floating caskets from down river where Katrina cut through the mud and
broke through cement and pulled the bones free. The cemetery was a little thing, hardly
above the water table to begin with, and nowhere near as famous as the ones in the Quarter.
Folk still hid behind the tombs to rob tourists who scaled the gates at St. Louis One. They
visited for Marie Laveau, mostly. They visited to make wishes and leave their marks in the
plaster of her crypt — the famous Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.
No one famous buried out in the swamp. No XXX’s on the graves or coins or chicken
feet left behind in exchange for prayers to come true. That hoodoo garbage never worked
anyway. Not for wishes nor prayers. Marlow had said plenty when she’d gone missing.
Her cemetery, like her funeral, was as subtle as she was — just a pack of memories and a
few slabs of leaning concrete in the mud. A few water-stained articles that talked about the
drowned girl and the boy they suspected of the crime — the girl had died, and the boy had
disappeared with a pardon. They never once mentioned him by name, but the local folk
knew, and the local folk were hard pressed to forget. You could be innocent and still take
the blame.
Marlow jerked a hand through his hair, rocking as Jake’s skiff bumped his from behind
and forced him back into the present.
“Roof’s leaking.” Jake pointing out the obvious:
Your shirt’s untucked. Ma’s gonna whip you good when you get back. There ain’t nothing left anyway, but there wasn’t anyone else to call.
The trees snapped wood when forced hard enough, and even wading into the lean-to
where he grew up, adrift or two of polished oak fragment caught in the reeds with a few
dead catfish that never got loose.
“Man, you know you can take my couch.” Jake lingered, bobbing on the drift in his rowboat. “Bottle of rye waiting. Wash it down some?”
The air carried that unmistakable stink of dead fish lingering in pockets of stagnant
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water. Little reminders of where you’ve been that never really wash out of your clothes after
you leave.
Marlow shook his head. He had to go inside.
“Catch up in the morning,” Jake offered a final time.
Go fishing for former sweethearts, he ought to have said.
They’d visited the cemetery first because Jake insisted that Marlow should see for himself: half of it was already sunk, great slabs of earth with a few protruding finger bone
coffins still clinging to the root system. The others floated, their occupants drowned before
they could complain about the disturbance.
The vaults popped when they flooded. That was the thing — two tons of concrete was a
child’s block in storm water. Forced the coffins right out of the mausoleums and into the
river. Made the news, not only on Bayou Segnette but anywhere else the morticians got
involved in identifying the remains when they turned up on people’s lawns.
No one called for her, which meant she was still out there somewhere.
Jake only shifted the packet of gum in his cheek when Marlow asked; gave him that slanted sidelong look that said the gears were turning. Spat overboard.
“She’s out there,” Jake promised. “Ma Elliot said so.” Like he knew what Marlow was
going to do before even he knew himself. Like Jake knew all along that the very mention
of her was enough to bring him back to this podunk backwater. “Ma Elliot wouldn’t let it
go, you know. She wouldn’t let me get a wink of sleep before I called you home.” Ma Elliot
didn’t have a phone, but she had a knack for being right.
He never needed to say he wanted to see the damned cemetery for himself first. He didn’t
need to say he didn’t want to get in the water just yet. Jake just knew what had to be done
couldn’t be undone, and that was that.
Ruts in the mud stuck the pickup’s wheels halfway. They walked the rest of the way, soaking his shoes, his socks, his jeans up to the knee, just so he could say he paid his respects fair
and square; that Marlow saw it for himself, so he could sleep that first night back instead of
waiting. He wasn’t sure for what. She’d be lost already, her body waiting to be dredged from
the swamp someplace downriver.
“What did you expect?” Jake asked from his elbow, a cigarette minced between his teeth.
Blue smoke ringed him, hung heavy and slow with the humidity. Marlow only shook his
head, not quite able to situate himself at first. The only thing left on the bank where they’d
vaulted her in one of those concrete ovens flanking the river was a flower pot with her plastic namesake notched into the last bits of whitewashed rubble that remained.
They don’t name girls after flowers in the city, and if they do, they’re rare specimens.
The rest of the wall and all its occupants sank.
7
The whole goddamn thing.
Marlow pulled the daisy, the wire breaking free, and shoved it into his pocket like some
sort of talisman. Like it would bring her body home from wherever she’d drifted off. It kept
scratching at him as they made their way back, an electric dragging against his thigh that
rode into the skin with each step.
He thumbed its faded petals, unaware that he’d pulled it into his fist as he stood on the
porch of his childhood home, ankles in the water.
“Motor works alright,” Jake said of the boat. “Paddle out if it don’t.”
Hesitation gave density to the silence.
“Meet you by the bend tomorrow?” Jake offered.
Marlow wiped his hands down his jeans, the daisy tucked away again and itching.
Damp worked its way between his shoulder blades, locking into the sweat and cinching
the muscles together. He nodded.
“Suit yourself.” Jake squinted at all the grey water that surrounded them. Greyer trees.
Dull shrouds of moss. The push of Jake’s oars made messy splashes that pattered the oil
drums that kept the shack afloat as he left Marlow standing on the sinking porch. “A man’s
gotta do, I suppose.”
Marlow fumbled his keys, dropping them into the mulch on the porch, and fished them
out with irritation. River sounds and bullfrogs claimed the sunset, but even the pink cast of
twilight dulled over muddy water.
The padlock was rusted and he left it hanging. No use closing up. The shack swelled
with the wet rank of a crawl space. Rotting wood and stale air. No one bothered trespassing
when it got dark. Nothing to steal and hardly anyone left on this side of the bayou to bother.
In his pocket, the daisy pinched into his thigh; its wire stem peeling away from the plastic
casing and leaving a hole in the cotton of his jeans. He tugged at it until the feeling stopped.
He shouldered through the door, slopping water over the threshold and over grey floors.
The swamp tracked him like ghostly footprints, and just like that, Marlow did the thing
he’d sworn off when Daisy died. He came home.
Night drifted to morning, and he woke to cold sheets. Damp collected between the
mattress and his body, leaving a stain on the fabric that left spiralling impressions from his
weight over the coils. The bedclothes hung to the floor. Sodden. All of it. The swamp got
into most things, but the rest of the place was dry save for a bucket he’d set near the wood
stove. One lean crack in the roof putting her to work. Maybe it rained or maybe it hadn’t.
Marlow turned his gaze to the ceiling over the bed. No cracks. No leaks. He stepped up
onto the edge so he wouldn’t put his foot through the frame, and gave himself an added six
8
inches in height.
Even wavering as he was, he grazed his fingers over the ceiling, picking at the slats of aluminium. Rattled like a snare under a hard rain, but there was no surface damage to account
for the water. Only the clench of cold that knotted the muscles around his spine made him
wonder what he’d dreamed.
Sweat left the impression of trouble an inch deep into the batting so that he had to strip
the sheets and let the whole thing air.
Bits of the swamp clung to the mattress surface. Bark and refuse and that grey water that
stained everything bleak. Only one-half the mattress was soaked, one half his life given over
to the swamp.
It barely fit two teenagers, when it had served sixteen-year-old hearts and the knot of
skinny limbs. Her side, he realized — a grey wash of damp. He’d even scooted to the far
edge in his sleep as if to give space to that memory. The mattress sat like a dirty canvas
propped up against the west wall, the marks on which only he could see if he allowed for a
softer focus.
He pushed it away, tugged the door from its stubborn hinges with a squall, and saw that
the water claimed another foot of the porch while he slept. It washed away traces of his
arrival, but the boat hung around like a stubborn reminder that a day’s worth of rowing
echoed future arthritic pains if the motor didn’t take.
Standing in the midst of two hundred square feet worth of debris from a former life,
Marlow pulled on his sneakers, though they squelched, and waded into the world that waited.
“Can’t say I ain’t been waiting long.” Jake’s skiff bobbed, one elbow up on the motor. He
made a gesture with two fingers that spun a circle through his cigarette smoke. “Half seven
already. Figured you’d be up all night anyway, so I thought I’d get the jump on the bullfrogs.”
Marlow’s throat tightened, the vestiges of a nocturne drifting out of reach as if he ought
to recall the details. His hands fought their way into his pockets, not sure what to make of
the imposition, and he jerked at the sharp pinch.
“Got a problem. Ma Elliot told me this morning.” Jake pointed to some indeterminate
place around the bend. “You’ll see.”
A bit of folded petal jutted. It didn’t pluck off when he pulled the flower out, but the colour seeped into the fabric. Red and mustard yellow with the dirt.
“Take your boat.” Jake wasn’t asking.
Around the toes of his chucks, the Mississippi crawled. A petal fell into that swirl of
brown, and he left it to toe the line that held the skiff. Drew it right up to him, grinding
9
over the sunken wood before stepping in and not giving a damn if the whole thing collapsed
as soon as he was out of range.
Marlow notched the daisy into the eyelet of the boat before untangling it all; a dollar
store figurehead ready for its rebirth, already baptized by the Mississippi.
“Take your time.” The motor growled to life.
The sliver of yellow plastic-coated fabric still held water. That single petal floated, not
casting as much as a ripple, but still he couldn’t help but watch it slide away on the current,
too far out of reach.
“Not closing up?”
The door hung askew, casting a grey rectangle into the empty shack. Why anyone might
cross the threshold was beyond him, but it was custom: you left the doors open in welcome,
no matter the season. Most took to their porches or tended their gas stoves right outside.
Smoke drifts above the cypress let you know who was home and who was out; who you
could call on if you felt a little lonesome. He didn’t bother to mention that since Daisy’s
passing and he’d left for good, the neighbours left the place alone. Mark of respect, he
thought — one part for his pa — god rest him — one part for the girl who drowned.
Marlow shook his head and pushed off, grinding the boat’s underbelly against the deck.
It conjured an image of floating coffins, hovering trapped beneath the porches of the
nearby shacks that dotted Cajun country — their bobbing like knocks against the doors of
those who still dwelled this deep in the bayou.
Most folk left for the cities after the storm. Some came back, but Baton Rouge and
Shreveport took the brunt of those displaced by flood waters. Whatever wasn’t washed away
outright could be rebuilt; was the motto. Whatever was left fed the gators.
Marlow shivered though the humidity plastered his shirt to his back in a line that slid
from spine to hip and made work of the seat of his pants before he even tried the motor.
“Again,” Jake urged. So he did. It took.
Sagging yellow plastic wrapped the trees like markers. When Marlow found the first, he
thought it’d been a mistake: they were too far from the cemetery, but the trees bled sap like
taffy. A few gashes showed the points of impact in the wood. That Jake had already drawn a
bottle and spun off the top, the other hand on the motor as it sputtered was a bad sign. His
wake cut the points of direction, and while Marlow followed the arrow made by Jake’s boat,
he found the first of them caught in a deeper thicket of cypress.
The hydraulic locks had broken, leaving the lid to spin off the top of the casket and
hang halfway into the water. From where they drifted, the remains of satin batting washed
through, turning grey as the bayou claimed the contents. A few dull flowers floated — the
10
remnants of a buried bouquet.
Marlow turned away.
“Most’re empty.”
A slow gurgle of water laved the tree roots. Splintered pine and cedar boxes dotted the
deeper mires.
The police boats hovered on the edges, unable to draw closer.
Those that could be collected were siphoned, sluicing swamp water from their innards.
Jake pulled on the bottle with a slosh, watching the proceedings.
“Ma Elliot radioed me,” he continued. “The cemetery washed them down right through
here. Police been pulling ‘em out all morning. Lil’ Billy Butcher went fishing for catfish
down river; says he caught a big one. A fighter.” Jake glanced at him; offering the bottle.
“Billy ran all the way back to Ma’s place. Up near the south bend, remember? Near pissing himself.”
Marlow watched as the coffin heaved to the side, spilling grey water in a torrent over the
edge. It wobbled, the supports from the police cruiser unwilling to give up whatever remained inside though they couldn’t quite keep it level. Several caskets stacked against the
stern of their ship already. A barge for the dead. Daisy’s wasn’t among them. He’d know
that Alston Pecan monstrosity anywhere.
He accepted the rye with slick fingers. His grip slid on the bottle, clanking it against his
teeth. Jake waited for him to finish two large gulps. And then a third.
“Was an arm. What was left of it.”
A body submerged for an awful long time took on the grey-blue bruises of the swamp.
Knocked up against the trees, it was usually the head that took the brunt because of the way
they floated. Face down. Arms splayed. Left contusions. Made it seem like a girl had been
beaten before being tossed away — something that only a doctor could figure if it happened
before or after she died. Folk sometimes said otherwise — was the way the gumbo-ya-ya
went. All soupy talk with little substance.
Marlow took another pull from the bottle though it burned.
They’d barely managed to keep her waterlogged whole together. He could never remember the technical term the coroner used — he only recalled the way the skin slipped when
he’d taken her bloated fingers in his when he’d gone to Martell’s to identify her remains.
Gloving. They called it gloving because it slid right off the flesh.
A grey stub slipped from the coffin, bobbing up from the water before it sank.
The bones didn’t float, but the rest pulled apart in soggy pieces.
Marlow turned, the world wavering as he gripped the sides of the skiff. The bottle
clunked against the deck, striking his shoe and spilling. Face suddenly hot, throat too full,
11
he keeled sideways until his reflection swam in hazy ripples where he pitched over the edge
and heaved until he could no longer see himself in the patterns.
“Waste of good booze,” he thought he heard Jake say.
The sweat dappling his arms pebbled the skin, leaving him shuddering around the sour
taste of his stomach. When he next opened his eyes, it was to the grey drift of things beneath the surface; uncertain in form but gathered together in pieces by the imagination.
Bodies claimed by the brackish water.
They’d never find them all.
A shout filtered through the muzzy batting stuffing his ears, and though his eyes
streamed, Marlow peered upwards. It jutted a little to the left of the cruiser, unfettered by
the splayed roots but sinking fast: a creamy brown coffin lacking ornament and missing the
part of the lid once closed to viewing when it had been new. The hinges, rusted to splinters,
dangled fingerlike and trailing like a lazy caress over the water as the fishnet reeled it in.
“Marlow.”
He jostled, the sting in his thigh bringing him back to an upright position. The world
swam around him, silverfish clotting his vision. He hadn’t realized he was standing until he
noticed the jut of yellow from his pocket. Tearing the daisy out, he gripped the bloom in his
fist. The petals crinkled, poking through his fingers, biting into the skin where the plastic
peeled back to reveal jagged edges.
“She’s not in there, Marlow.”
She wasn’t anywhere anymore.
He dropped the flower, hands fumbling for purchase as he rocked back and his heel
caught on a tangle of rope. The force of impact crackled the wood beneath him as Marlow
struck the pool that gathered between the slats that served as seats, feet still kicking even as
Jake climbed aboard and held him down in that brown murk of mingled alcohol and stagnant vegetal broth that stank of alluvial sediment. Like he knew all along that it would come
to this when it came to it. Like Jake knew but wasn’t offering all the answers to questions
Marlow couldn’t voice.
Where the hell was she, if not in that coffin.
Why the hell had she gone, and why hadn’t she taken him with her.
Two kids that only ever wanted to be together. The thought sank. Marlow shut his eyes.
The plastic flower buffed against the prow, tangled up in the ropes; caught in some eddy
that wouldn’t let it go.
When he woke, it was to the grey cast of before-morning. Jake must have set the mattress, and curled into his side as he was, Marlow could watch the slow creep of water as it
12
lapped over the porch and spilled over the threshold. The door stood ajar, and even in the
dim light; he could see the remains of puddles across the weathered flooring.
The boat rocked outside on the non-existent current. Bullrushes made their conference
to the waning night. An errant woodpecker rattled its complaints, and Marlow felt each rattle and tap in his bones. They creaked when he sat upright, his head billowing an ache like a
curtain caught in a draft.
Shrouded in a thin sheet, he found his wet sneakers and jeans draped over the stove. He
put his feet to the floor, his toes squelching over fish skin — that clammy sensation that was
mucosal slick and still slippery.
Footprints. From the door to his bedside. Jake probably, laying him to rest the night before. He couldn’t recall the details beyond Daisy’s coffin; the edges smeared into obscurity
when he tried to hear past the drone in his ears. His lungs hurt. Face wet on one side like
he’d cried in his sleep.
He lifted his foot but found that nothing clung to it to account for the chill, save for a
thin membrane that rubbed off almost transparent, like waterlogged tissue.
When he wiped his hand on the mattress, something tumbled from the bed.
A few droplets still clung to the petals, but the plastic daisy settled into the puddle next to
his heel.
The marking swam into clarity when he looked closer:
The toes pooled together. A splotch for a heel lacking a shoe. Barely a size seven.
They dotted the floor in small strides, leading out to the porch and the grey world beyond.
When Marlow tried to find his voice, the sound only broke into a whisper.
It had the disconnected wonder of still-dreaming. An auditory hallucination perhaps.
Sleep-paralysis holding him in its embrace a moment too long. Night terrors — a glimpse
of something you thought was there but truly wasn’t. It brushed against his conscious understanding and released its hold on him.
Grey moss, maybe. A shift against the water that arched and swayed, and then vanished
as quickly and left him rubbing his eyes back into clarity.
Awake. He was awake.
He was past the door and in the water, the supports of the porch giving under his weight
before he realized he was knee-high in the mulch and sinking deeper. He ignored the boat.
Beneath him, a brown cloud billowed from the river bottom engulfing his feet. Tangles of
decaying plant life wrapped his ankles, brushing against his skin, their hold on him faltering as he tripped forward into the river.
Empty and still. The figment he thought he saw not more than a vanishing cloud of mist
13
across the water.
Couldn’t have been.
Panting, he cried out: something guttural and formless but might’ve been her name or
might’ve been anguish. There was no one around to hear; not the girl he imagined:
That ghost of blond silk and white linen painted with crawfish shells so that the stains
blushed pink, barefoot and draped off the porch in the summer.
Daisy.
Daisy. Daisy. Daisy.
Those tiny white fingers hovering just beneath the water like she’d tried to pull herself
ashore, slack from the strain towards survival; those pale blue eyes like cream turned rancid
and the little silver fish that nipped at the pieces of her.
Daisy. Again and again until his lungs bled and he could barely screw his eyes shut.
Gone like a curl of smoke that hovers insubstantial before fading to nothing.
Jake found him swallowing river water halfway into the treeline. The first vaulted arches
of tupelo and cypress rose around him, and Marlow, shirtless and spitting curses, tried to
pull as much of the swamp into his lungs as he could. The bayou didn’t want him, but he
forced himself upon it between sobs; dragged it into his mouth and spat it out again; trying
to hold himself under.
Hands grabbed at him, pulling him by the shoulder and the elbow, then at last, by the
hair, concluding his splashing though he imagined soft fingers in the place of rough callouses. He hit the side of Jake’s boat temple-first, gripped its edge with weak fingers, confessions made to the water. Pleas and promises. Forsaken things.
Drenched and streaked with lily pad gore, Jake loaded Marlow into the boat without
saying a word. The sky overhead first went pink between the clouds, then dulled under the
insistence of thunderheads.
His gurgling coughs subsided, but the taste on his lips he thought reminded him of those
last stolen kisses from her swollen mouth.
Ma Elliot’s sprawled across three jettied shanties. Welded aluminum siding caught
the first sluices of rain as they fell, shimmying off the roof in rivulets that ran together in
streams back into the swamp. A plastic Target bag of catfish sat next to the door, beside
which Jake sat him in a folding chair, and Billy cleaned the scales opposite while wearing a
glazed expression.
The scent of gumbo permeated the air in gusts beneath the overhang of dried herbs and
airing snakeskin.
Threads of murmured conversation carried over and through him. The click of a rotary
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phone notched back into its cradle. The creaking shuffle of footsteps as Ma Elliot worked
the stove and Jake sat and smoked, tinkering with the victrola.
A bowl was thrust into his hands, his fingers tucked around a spoon like a child being
taught for the first time.
“Eat it, son. It’ll put things right.”
He barely heard her. The weight of Jake’s scrutiny felt featherlike and uncertain. Billy
never one looked up though the clunk of fish heads set a rhythm that seemed to match the
wavering patterns made by the rain against the water.
“Storm like this stirs things up. Nothing wants to settle much.”
Her fingers were warm against the back of his neck; the whole of Ma Elliot’s presence a
cloud of vetiver and camphor and red brick dust.
“Eat before the swamp gets into your bones.”
She took the spoon, her hand around his wrist, and guided it to his mouth herself, muttering a psalm into his ear for luck; he expected, though it might’ve been a curse.
An exchange, the blink of yellow passed between hands. When he turned, it appeared
only a worn tea towel. Jake worked the fabric into a knot against his knee.
Ma Elliot watched him, thick fingers pressed into his collarbone, searching for something in his face.
“You let him home, son,” she told Jake. “The man’s gotta pay what he owes, fair and
square. And stop looking so nervous. Y’ ain’t a cat in a room full rocking chairs.”
A bleat of jazz crackled through the speaker, and Jake started.
Some worn tune, far too happy for the weather. Rebirth Brass, probably — the fete that
followed the band through the streets of New Orleans; a funeral party for when you didn’t
have a body to bury. Ma Elliot loved those second lines; her handkerchief twirling like there
was always something to celebrate.
Marlow expected a dirge.
“Don’t feel right,” Jake muttered, squinting.
“Don’t feel right,” echoed Billy, smiling through cracked lips with downcast eyes.
“Hush.”
Thick fingers worked into an apron pocket, extracting a delicate thing — absent a petal
or two. Ma Elliot pressed it into his palm, whispering in that low drone of hers — a second
language shrouded in secrets — making the dime store flower seem like more than it was,
though it felt no different to him.
“Gon’ be fine, child. Things we love fierce enough never really stray too far. Sometimes
even for all your searching, they find their way back on their own. The swamp’s a fertile
place to be reborn.”
15
He wouldn’t stay; something in the downturn of her mouth seemed like she knew it too.
She crossed herself, shuffling off.
“Eat your gumbo.”
He came back after the rains subsided. The low shack tipped forward into the flood waters, the river creeping up to meet the brown mark of the waterline against the trees. Jake’s
boat was set to drift on the current, and Marlow stood to the knee in a still pool of stagnant
water where the porch once was.
The sun burnished the horizon, throwing long shadows through the trees. When Marlow turned his head to catch the errant ripple of a catfish, the swamp stood empty. Spanish
moss swayed, waving dreary goodbyes. The door stood ajar two inches though he hadn’t
recalled closing it. A sliver of mottled shadow peeked through to an empty home.
Jake could visit the coroner in the morning. Marlow was going home — back to that
other life he’d scraped together for himself in the absence of growing older in an apartment
that smelled of week-old laundry. A place where your shoes didn’t stick in the mud and the
damp didn’t greet you as if it were an embrace from some long-lost lover.
His fingers ghosted the door. In his other hand, he thumbed the little yellow daisy he’d
retrieved from the remains of her grave. All that was left bound up with a little dirt and
blood; a few prayers and a little lost faith set adrift across murky water. There were her
last remains — a preserved bit of her that he thought he brought with him, but instead he
found it waiting for him instead.
Marlow pushed open the door, lifting a heel to the jamb and hefting himself upwards
the three feet to crest the rise. Floor dotted with footprints leading to the bed; the shadows
peeled away to allow a lean sliver of waning light into the room. Lithe, grey arms lifted to
him, expectant, inviting — as if after all this time, he should have known she’d draw him
back to her in the end.
He heaved a breath, the light catching the dew of her cheeks, the slick patches of pink
where the skin leeched away. Blue lips and silver patterns in her scalp where the fish set up
residence. That milky glow that lit like white fire in her gaze.
She drew him to her as if he were pulled back with the current.
Marlow dropped the plastic namesake, and in three strides, sank into the chilled circle of
her arms.
16
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kira Butler writes speculative fiction for adults, new adults, and young adult readers. She
especially appreciates dark urban fantasy and low key horror, and likes to write about everything in between. She lives in Montreal, where she is working towards the completion of
her first young adult horror novel.
facebook.com/kirabutlerauthor
twitter.com/kirabutler
www.kirabutler.com
NOISY GHOST BOOKS
Find other Short Fictions & Curiosities at
www.noisyghostbooks.com