Slice Of Cherry (5 page)

“Maybe this is all we can see from our side. And where the bird is, it’s actually flying around and having a great time.”

“I don’t think so, Fancy.” Kit’s dubiousness had given way to shock. “
Look
at it.”

The hawk molted, shedding feathers as quickly as an illused feather duster. In no time it was nude, like a plucked chicken, its skin nubby and goose-pimply, as though without
its feathers it had caught a chill. Seeing the hawk in this new, pathetic state made Fancy want to help, even though it had tried to kill her. She began to reach into the fairy ring—

“No!” Kit snatched her back. “You want me to stand here and watch that happen to you?”

What was happening was that the hawk was losing its flesh and bone the same way it had lost its feathers—huge chunks of it were simply falling away and hitting the ground inside the ring like rain. But the pieces weren’t staying on the ground. The flesh rapidly decomposed as soon as it touched the soil, until it had disappeared into the earth . . . and into the pig’s ears. The mushrooms were no longer slimy folds, but baseballsized balloons.

“I bet those ain’t even mushrooms. Just something disguised as mushrooms, something carnivorous.” Kit pulled Fancy back until Fancy was half hidden behind her, well away from the pig’s ears. “Whatever it is, it ain’t a door.” Kit turned to face her. “And even if it was, Fancy, what’s the big plan? Run away to fairyland like the Lost Boys?”

Fancy crossed her arms. “Not fairyland.” “Where then?

Where the hell are you trying to go?”

“I don’t know!” Fancy slumped against a tree. “Fairy rings
are just doors. Doors open and close in Portero all the time. If we found the right door, we could do anything: get rid of Franken, rescue Daddy—”

“What?”

“It’s not like I don’t know it’s a long shot. But it happens. Remember that story about the boy who played hide-and-seek with his little brother? He hid inside the broom closet under the stairs, and when he came out, like, five minutes later, he was
five years younger
.”

“Lemme get this straight. You wanna go back in time to stop Daddy from killing?”

“I know it’s a long shot,” she whispered, and looked away from the incredulity in Kit’s face, trying not to feel like an idiot and failing.

Kit pulled Fancy away from the tree and into a loose embrace.

“He wouldn’t’ve stopped. It’s like with me and Franken—once you get a taste for blood, nothing else satisfies.” Kit kissed her fingers like a gourmand.

“Stop joking.” She hid her face in her sister’s neck. “Sometimes I feel like he’s dead already.”

“Everybody dies, Fancy Pants.” Kit steered her sister back toward the creek. “Now I’ll tell you a story. Do you know what
Uncle Miles did before he died in our room, all feverish and snotty? He opened a door.”

Fancy lifted her head and looked her sister in the eye and still couldn’t believe it. “Shut up.”

“Big Mama told me! Well, she didn’t tell
me
. I heard her talking about it with Aunt Sybelline one day, a long time ago. The door that leads from our sleeping porch to the inner room isn’t the original door. The door that used to be there had a keyhole. Uncle Miles put his key into that keyhole and twisted it and twisted it until he unlocked a door.”

Fancy’s hand dropped unconsciously to touch the silver skeleton key dangling from the silver necklace she always wore. Kit and Madda carried their keys on key chains, and Daddy had kept his inside his shoe. All Porterenes had such keys. The Mayor, an ageless mysterious woman with mirrors for eyes, gifted them to all Porterenes on the day of their birth. Porterenes would sooner part with an arm than with their keys. It was as much a part of them as their skin and bones: They were doorkeepers, stranger, braver, and more badass than anyone else in the world.

“What was on the other side of the door?” Fancy asked.

“Death,” said Kit, as though it should have been obvious.

Fancy tried to picture it. “What did Death look like?”

“Not the person. The
place
. Uncle Miles opened a door, not to another world, but to his own grave. A big hole in the cemetery waiting for him to fill it, and the sight of it freaked him the hell out. He slammed that door and locked it and never opened it again. Anybody who wanted to get into his room had to go outside and circle the house and come in through the porch door. Nobody could open that inner door, even after he died. That’s why they had to tear the whole thing out and put in a new door.”

“But it’s not like Uncle Miles locked out death. He died anyway.”

“That’s what I said! Nobody can escape death, not even Daddy. If you did go back in time and warn him, he’d probably get hit by a bus or something. Daddy made his bed, and now he’s gotta die in it.” Kit squeezed Fancy’s shoulders. “I’m not saying it doesn’t suck, but sometimes you just gotta face facts.”

Fancy, who had zero interest in facing facts, pulled out of Kit’s grip and plopped down next to some shrubbery near the creek. “I don’t wanna talk about death anymore.” She reached in her pocket and removed a worn leather pouch. “You wanna
play marbles? I found a cat’s-eye the other day. It’s pink.” She fished it from the pouch. “See?”

“Forget that.” Kit sat next to her. “All this talk about death has me in the mood to see Daddy. Show me.”

“In what?”

“One of those marbles?”

“They’re too small.”

“In the creek?”

“Too big.”

“I know.” Kit went to their bikes, leaning tiredly against two pine trees, and retrieved her water bottle. She then kicked off her flats and pulled off her leggings and waded into the creek in her black bikini, navigating the skeletal river stones that gave Bony Creek its name. She splashed the clear, sunny water on the back of her neck as she filled the bottle.

“How’s this, Goldilocks?” she asked after she’d returned to her sister.

“Just right,” said Fancy, glumly.

She took the bottle from Kit and stared at the clear water, and after a short time it darkened.

It was like watching a wee film. A grim one featuring a slight man in an orange prison jumpsuit swinging gently from
an improvised noose made of bedsheets that dangled from the ceiling of a narrow gray cell.

Kit gasped.
“Daddy?”

The man’s legs twitched at the sound of Kit’s voice, then kicked up and out, high kicks like a Rockette as Fancy hummed the cancan song under her breath.

Kit looked away from the dancing man in the bottle and scowled at her sister. “That’s not funny.”

Fancy abandoned the cancan for the
Charlie Brown
theme song. Immediately the man performed the Snoopy dance, twisting violently on the rope.

“I said that’s not funny! Stop it!”

Fancy stopped humming and squirted the bottled water at Kit, destroying the image inside. “You’re the one who wanted to see him.”

“
Him
. Not one of your weirdo fantasies.” She wrested the bottle from Fancy and squirted her back.

“I can’t.” Fancy scrambled away from the water and sat near a shrub overrun with mustang grapes.

Kit followed her. “You could if you wanted to.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You promised!”

Fancy picked a grape and popped it into Kit’s mouth; Kit accepted it in surprise, then puckered her mouth as though it was sour.

“What if he’s getting raped?” Fancy asked. “You wanna see that?”

“Nobody gets raped on death row,” said Kit, like she knew anything about it. “They’re all isolated from each other and lonely. Maybe Daddy’s just lying around, thinking about us and missing us terribly. Why don’t you fantasize about that? Or, I know! Show the day he took us fishing on the Sabine. That was the best day ever.”

Fancy tried a grape. They were
very
sour. “I can’t see the past. Or the future. Unless I make it up. I can only see the present.”

Kit shoved Fancy aside so she could reach the grapes herself. “You’re so useless sometimes.” She unscrewed the cap from the bottle, emptied the creek water, and began to fill it with grapes. “You think Franken’ll like these? They might be too sour for him.”

Fancy, who cared nothing for Franken’s likes or dislikes, said, “People might be looking for him by now. We should probably do that lobotomy soon.”

“What’s the hurry? There’s only him and his drunk mother, and she won’t even notice he’s gone.”

Fancy slipped off her cover-up, revealing a black one-piece suit dotted with pink teddy bears. She was frowning. “How do you know that?”

“He told me. His home life is
extremely
tawdry.”

“You been going down to the cellar without me?”

Kit paused in the act of picking grapes, seemingly surprised by the upset in Fancy’s voice. “You make him nervous.”

“Me? You’re the one slicing him up every night.”

“Well that’s just it, Fancy Pants. I know him inside and out. Literally. So he feels like he can talk to me. And I didn’t cut on him at all yesterday. I decided to let him heal like you suggested, and since I couldn’t play with him, we talked. I told him about our classes, and he thinks they’re a good idea.”

“Who cares what he thinks?”

“It’s just conversation, Fancy,” Kit said calmly, the way Madda would have, refusing to argue when that was what you most wanted to do. “Let’s go sit in the creek.”

The sisters settled themselves in the middle of the creek. The jolt of cold water up to their hips made the idea of summer bearable again. Odd but harmless blue fish with forward-facing
eyes swam fearlessly around the sisters’ legs.

The sisters fell silent, listening to the woodpeckers jackhammer the trees. After some time Fancy asked, “You think it’s true? What they say about Cherry? That she can grant wishes?”

“Madda swears it’s true. My problem is, I have no idea what to wish for.”

“I’ll probably ask for tickets on a steamer ship.”

Kit crinkled her nose and let the fish swim between her fingers. “Nobody travels by steamboat anymore, stupid girl. Not around the world they don’t.”

“Fine, then,” said Fancy, disappointed. “Plane tickets.”

“To where?”

“The South Seas. Some island nobody’s ever been and could never find.”

“How you gone get tickets to a place nobody’s ever been to and could never—?”

Fancy splashed water at Kit. “Don’t bug me with details.” She thought some more. “I’ll wish for Madda to get promoted. Then she won’t have to work double shifts and we can all be together.”

Kit splashed Fancy back. “If we could make wishes like
that, I’d wish for Daddy to get a ‘get outta jail free’ card, but Madda says that at Cherry Glade you can only make a wish for yourself. It’s too bad I don’t know myself that well.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The blue fish huddled in Kit’s lap, as if their weird, sad eyes could see her distress. But Kit didn’t want to be comforted. Not by fish. She shooed them away. “Something’s missing, but I don’t know what it is. Ever since Daddy left, there’s this hole.”

“
I’m
here,” Fancy said, and hugged her sister as tight as she could.

Kit hugged back, squeezing hard enough to hurt Fancy’s spine, but when Fancy let go, Kit slumped like an overwatered flower. “That didn’t fill it.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “That’s what I’ll wish for, I guess. Something to fill this emptiness.”

A
SHIRTLESS WOMAN LAY FACEDOWN ON THE CELLAR FLOOR. DADDY WAS STRADDLING HER AND YANKING BIG, SILVER BATTERIES OUT OF HER BACK.
W
HILE HE WORKED, HE WHISTLED A SONG.
I
THINK IT WAS
“H
APPINESS
I
S A
W
ARM
G
UN.”

The sisters biked along the road that led into town, on their way to buy new dresses for Juneteenth. Even though summer hadn’t officially begun, the sun was brutally hot, burning the high grass and nourishing the virulent sunflowers that overran the fields.

“Music for you makes sense,” Fancy was saying, longing for a heat rash or sunstroke so that she would have a reason not to go to Cherry Glade. “But me and art? I can barely draw stick figures.”

“I’m not going to that class.” Kit removed her black newsboy cap and splashed water over her head from her water bottle, gasping as if it were freezing.

Fancy was surprised into silence; the pink ribbons on her black sun hat flapped in the wind. Not even Kit would defy Madda. Would she?

“What could Madda do?” said Kit, reading Fancy’s mind. “Put us on punishment? And if she did, how could she enforce it? She’s never home!”

“I don’t want her to be mad at us,” said Fancy hesitantly.

“Who cares if she gets mad!” Kit yelled, startling a flock of oil-colored grackles from the sunflower fields. The birds spun like a blue-black dust devil before resettling out of sight. “Why should I have to go to some phony-baloney class just to make Madda happy? How come nobody ever tries to make
me
happy? Why can’t I ever do what
I
want?”

For once Fancy didn’t feel that Kit was being a drama queen. Madda acted as though they never saw other people. The sisters saw plenty of
other
at school, where they were in not only different classes but different grades. Fancy knew exactly how to deal with people: stay away from them, and when that was impossible, ignore them. People inspired too many unhealthy urges.

The sisters coasted along in silence for a while, the trees thinning as they rode into downtown Portero, or the square,
as everyone called it, after Fountain Square, a landmark in the middle of town that Porterenes used to orient themselves. Upsquare was north of Fountain Square, and downsquare was south. Anything north of upsquare or south of downsquare was way upsquare or way downsquare. Anything farther away than that was outside the borders of Portero and therefore of no interest to anyone but outsiders.

Fancy and Kit jounced along redbrick streets past low, colorful buildings. The docile trees lining the medians had cute little cages around them and nothing in common with their cousins in the wild forests upsquare. The whole town generally smelled pine fresh or, when the wind was right, like freshly baked bread, thanks to the bread factory in the warehouse district. Many days, however, Portero smelled like blood.