Ashes (42 page)

Lillian looked disappointed. Faith put a gentle hand on the old woman’s shoulder.

“A good blanket takes care and patience,” Faith said. “Hope takes patience. All we can do is our part, and let the Lord take care of the rest.”

“Just like with the sick children,” Lillian said.

“Yes. They’re sick, but never needy. As long as one person has hope enough for them all, they are never in need.”

Morris tried to communicate with his eyes, to lie and tell Faith that he now understood, that sick children were never needy no matter what the Kelvinator said, but his eyes were too cold and lost to the world of light and understanding. He was a cynic and had nothing inside but desperation. He gazed at the stained-glass Jesus, but no hope could be found in that amber face as the sunlight died outside.

The gauze of morphine slipped a little, and now he could feel the sharp stings as the needles entered his arms, legs, and torso. Reba was stitching up his inseam, her face a quivering mask of concentration as she worked toward his groin. Daisy’s tongue pressed against her uppers as she pushed and tugged in tiny little motions. Silver needles flashed in the glow of the lone gas lamp by which the sewing circle now toiled. From outside, the plate-glass image must have flickered in all the colors of salvation.

But from the inside, the image had gone dark with the night. Summoning his remaining strength, Morris ripped the flesh of his lips free of their stitches and screamed toward the high white cross above.

“Look, his eyelids twitched,” came a voice.

“There, there,” Lillian said, as if on the other side of a thick curtain. “You just rest easy now.”

“Where—” Morris was in the sewing room downstairs, flat on his back on the table, surrounded by piles of rags. They must have carried him here after they—

He brought a wobbly hand to his mouth and felt his lips. They were chapped but otherwise whole.

“I think he’s thirsty,” said Faith, who knelt over him, patting his forehead with a soft swatch of linen. She turned to the janitor, who stood in the doorway. “Bruce, would you get him a cup of water, please?”

As the janitor shuffled off, Faith again settled her kind, healing eyes on him. “You fainted. A big, strong fellow like you.”

“Must be—” The words were thick on his tongue. He flexed his fingers, remembering the sharp tingle of needles sliding through his skin, the taut tug of thread in his flesh. A dream. Nothing but a crazy, drug-stoked nightmare. “Must be the heat,” he managed.

“It’s okay,” Faith said. Gone was her severe and chiding tone. She now spoke in her gentle nurse’s voice. “We’ll take care of you. You just have a chill. Rest easy and wait for the ambulance.”

“Ambulance? No, I’m fine, really, I just need—” He tried to sit up, but his head felt like a wet sack of towels.

“Your pulse is weak,” Faith said. “I’m concerned you might go into shock.”

“That means we need to cover him up,” the other
Alma
said.

Faith smiled, the expression of all saints and martyrs. “I guess we should use the special blanket,” she said.

“Blanket?” Morris blinked lint from his eyes.

“We made it just for you. We were going to give it to you in appreciation for writing the story and let you enjoy it in the comfort of your own bed. But perhaps this is more fitting.”

“Fitting,” Daisy said with a hen’s cackle. “That’s as funny as Santa in a manger scene.”

Lillian approached the table, a blanket folded across her chest. Unlike the other quilts, this one was white, though the pieces were ragged, the stitches loose, the cloth stained and spotted. “We done our best work on this one,” she said. “We know a sick soul when we see one.”

“Threads of Hope sometimes come unraveled,” Faith said. Her sweet tone, and her soft touch as she felt his wrist for a pulse, was far more unnerving than her previous bullying.

“That’s right,” Reba said. “Sometimes hope is not enough.”

“And kids die and go on to heaven,” Lillian said. “The Lord accepts them whole and pure, but their pain and suffering has to go somewhere. Nothing’s worse than laying there knowing you’re going to die any day, when by rights you ought to have your whole life in front of you.”

Lillian helped Reba unfold the patchwork blanket. Morris saw the white scraps of sheet were actually varying shades of gray, cut at crazy angles and knotted together as if built in the dark by mad, clumsy hands.

“There’s another side to our work,” Faith said. “One we don’t publicize. If it had a name, it might be called ‘Threads of Despair.’”

“I like ‘Threads of the Dead,’” Reba said, in her high, lilting voice. Her remark drew a couple of snickers from the old women gathered around the table. Morris didn’t like the way Reba’s eyes glittered.

“I’ll write the story however you want it, and let you proof it before I turn it in to the editor,” he said, his throat parched.

“Cover him up,” Faith commanded. “I’d hate to see him go into shock.”

Morris once again tried to lift himself, but he was too woozy. Maybe he really did need an ambulance. And a thorough check-up. He was having a nervous breakdown. And these fine women, whom he’d insulted and belittled, were compassionate enough to help him in his time of need. Faith was right, he was the needy one, not those sick children.

As they stretched the mottled blanket over him, preparing to settle it across his body, Morris saw the words “Mercy Hospital Morgue” stamped in black on one corner.

Sheets from the hospital?

The cloth settled over him with a whisper, wrinkled hands smoothing and spreading it on each side. His limbs were weak, his mouth slack, as if the blanket had sapped the last of his strength. Though his skin was clammy, sweat oozed from his pores like newly hatched maggots crawling from the soft meat of a corpse. He was being wrapped in fabric even colder than his soul.

Threads from the dead, from those who had lost hope.

Sheets that would give back all that had gone into them.

A handmade blanket stitched not in the attic of the heart but in the dark basement of the disappointed.

“The ambulance will be here in twenty minutes,” Faith said. “Until then, cherish the despair you deserve.”

She tugged the blanket up to his chin, and then, with a final, benevolent look into his frightened eyes, she drew it over his face.

###

AFTERWORD: FROM THE ASHES

Looking back over old work is like looking at photographs: you see that younger, more innocent, and more foolish version of yourself and wonder how you ever got this far, and how you never really understood much of what was shaping your life at the time.

Writers love their own words. They have to. They spend much of their time isolated, hunched over a keyboard, squinting at a screen until their eyes burn and their spines scream and their wrists stiffen in protest. And all they have to show for the sacrifice is a scattering of glyphs that sometimes seems to have no meaning in any language. To then assume that barrage of symbols will take on a comprehensive narrative and satisfying arc is truly an act of arrogance.

But writers go one step further–we expect people to not only read the words, to not only piece them together into a coherent story, but we demand adoration for our act. And, occasionally, a little bit of cold coin.

The only time I will voluntarily reread an old story is when I am revising it or proofing it for a book like the one you hold in your hands. Because my first instinct is to correct all the flaws that are now so obvious to the wiser and more battle-scarred version of myself, and the second is to cringe and fling the offensive prose into the recycling heap. Sure, there was youthful vigor aplenty in the tales, a little brashness and vanity, and a barely hidden glee in the process of stacking words as if they were a child’s alphabet blocks. But just as the parent must come in and clean up what the petulant child has kicked over, the writer must look at his older work with nothing less than total dismay.

There is one saving grace, though. These stories saved my life and helped me reach this little scenic turnout in the journey.

I wrote most of these stories when I was struggling with alcoholism, depression, fatherhood, divorce, selfishness, fear, and other personal trauma, all of it self-inflicted. And all I could do was scream onto the page in much the same way pre-morphine amputees screamed into the pillows in the field hospitals of bygone wars. Hear me, don’t hear me.

With a little time under my belt, and a little acceptance, the pain seems like such a waste. I would gladly have traded a little peace for all the work I’ve managed to pile up over the years. But perhaps these stories played a part in reaching my new station. Indeed, Dark Regions publisher Joe Morey and I kicked around the title of “Growing Pains” for the collection. Like the fetus in “The Christening,” I had to kick and squirm and squeal to be born. I had to fight for it, even though the fight was only against myself.

As a result we have this collection, largely written over the years 2000 to 2006, as documentation of that period of my life when I could easily have gone the other way–into the darkness and despair that I so often ridicule others for embracing as
poseur
stage costume. Perhaps there’s a lesson in the cumulative pile of burnt offerings, but that old photograph is as much gray as it is black and white.

So here’s a little color commentary to flesh out the fantasy.

Timing Chains of the Heart
- This was one of my first published stories, appearing in the short-lived Internet magazine E-Scape in 1998. I believe it was inspired by some of those old EC horror comics of the “Tales of the Crypt” sort, and a story that stuck with me about someone driving a hearse and the coffin ripping open in an accident, with the corpse ending up behind the wheel. I’ve also developed a small
ouvre
of transformative horror, in which the reader–and sometimes the author–isn’t sure whether the haunting is real or only occurring in the mind of the protagonist. Instead of delivering on the expected crash, I prefer the continued horror of the endless, open road. After all, the scariest part of hell is the allegation that it lasts forever.

Dog Person
– This was inspired by a true story. My friend Al Carson was talking about his dog’s expensive medical problems and how he decided to have Sally “put to sleep” instead of spending thousands of dollars. We discussed a fictional version of the tale and, in his version, there were two shots–first was the mercy killing of the dog, then the suicidal shot. I went with the version here, where the guy loves his dog so much that he just can’t face life without her. And, of course, the treacherous wife gets the fruit of her hateful labors. Originally published in Cemetery Dance Magazine #56 in 2006 and selected by editor Ellen Datlow for inclusion in
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.

The October Girls–
Written under the original title of “Playmates” in 2001, I wrote this for a promotional e-book that fellow authors Brandon Massey and Jon Merz were distributing. The idea of a dead best friend is not uncommon or new, but I like the chilly flavor of the dead friend’s jealousy. In the end, however, our sympathy shifts to the girl who must live a wretched childhood rather than the one whose pain has ended. I’m currently developing this as a book series, with the characters more grown up and firmly in the early 20's. Unfortunately, even young grown-ups are more dishonest than children, so this may be the closest we get to the truth.