The old apple tree was dead.
It was older than Ann, older than her mother, older than her grandmother, and it had almost died more times that she could count – ice storms, droughts, infestations, a fat raccoon on a thin branch – and now it was dead, truly dead and gone, and she had no time to think about it because Beatrice’s birthday was coming up and Arthur’s mother was sick and she had so many times and places she had to feel the right feeling that spending her time thinking of a dead old apple tree was unthinkable and she felt a little sick just imagining it.
Besides, the lawn was overrun with cogblins. She’d already spent all morning oiling them out, spraying down the screaming hordes with the thin mist that coated their eggs and robbed the friction from their gears that let them walk and fight and breath, leaving paralyzed hordes silent in their thousand homes and thousand knee-high skyscrapers, hapless as the ants and the cats and the birds swooped in.
Ann polished the oiler until it gleamed and watched longer than an adult should have. It was acceptable for a child to be fascinated by mass death; in an adult it was some sort of bigger, stronger cousin of gauche that was unmentionable by the polite.
Her phone rang. It was her sister, Clarice. It was the first time she’d called in six years, since the thing with grandpa’s fish. Ann answered it too fast for hesitation, a reflex operating without practice or instruction.
“Hey.”
“Hello.”
The world sat between them, its gravity drawing their conversation into faltering orbit.
“How have you been?” asked Ann, which wasn’t ‘I’m sorry.’
“I’m doing okay,” said Clarice, which wasn’t ‘I forgive you.’
“How’s Patrick?”
“Third grade.”
“They grow up so fast. How’s Stacy?”
“The Cellar People got her.”
“Oh,” said Ann.
“I need to voyage into the Land Behind The Furnace for four days and four nights with a human-wax candle. Do you have one?”
“I could manage the house for you,” Ann didn’t say.
“I could watch Patrick for you,” Ann didn’t say.
“I’m sorry,” Ann didn’t say.
“Yeah, it’s in Arthur’s old school stuff,” Ann said. “I can dig it out in a couple minutes and bring it over.”
“Thanks. Just drop it in the mailbox. I’m out late tonight and Patrick has karate after school.”
Ann didn’t say a lot of things. She said “that’s okay” and “goodbye.”
Then she got in the car, drove twenty minutes to her sister’s house, did the no-odds double-evens skip-the-red-stones dance up the walk that kept the Cellar People from noticing you, left the candle in the mailbox, and told herself that she was a good person and a good sister.
Traffic was miserable on the way back. Bumper to bumper and shot through with anger. A cyberhinoceros screamed in agony at his career, his marriage, and his lost childhood and turned left on a right turn signal, totalling a semi and its cargo of twelve fresh-minted million-dollar uniceratosaurus juveniles. Ann saw the uncreased and flattened brow on the mechanized lifter’s readout as he sat against the rubble of the traffic light and waited to be arrested and sent to the debt-mountain, just as she saw the glassy eyes of the crushed theropods waiting for virginal jockies that would go mountless, just as she saw the frozen cheeks and unsmiling mouth of the traffic copstable operating on an off-the-shelf job-app plugged into his official hat, and they were all different pieces of the same expression and she couldn’t recognize it because she was in it.
She stopped at the ice-walled superiormarket on the way home to get her mind off it. Bought a Death Conger from the fish counter for a song two whistles and a secret. Took it home still-cursing, still-fighting inside its box of regrets, just like grandmother used to when she was little, twenty years retired from the Electricitsea but still living on it every night, gnarled hands twisting cables in the air, hoarse voice shouting to wake the neighbourhood with the call to man the lines and tend the insulation.
Ann and Clarice had been fond of the eels but feared their grandmother, and that had gone both ways. She flinched when she saw them, not just from the perpetual tic that had been shocked into her left hemisphere from a Humboldt Volctopus. They were too small, not slimy enough, not trying to kill her, and that all hurt in places she didn’t like to explain or consider.
The kitchen was quiet when she got home. Beatrice took her time coming back, meeting with her friends in the places teenagers met with their friends. Park benches, parking lots, convenience stores, toadthrone circles, vantablack webrings, and the Last Bleacher where Cindy MacDougal’s skeleton still did her final cheerleading routine every Wednesday evening and the bats refused to roost. Some of them Ann knew too well, others she knew too little, and she worried that she was mixing them up.
The eel was straightforward. She loved that fish, loved the way it snapped at her and fiercely offered her wishes three, loved the way its curses bounced off her grandmother’s shining silvered cleaver, loved the secrets that it whispered loose in the steam as its skull defleshed in the pressure cooker, loved it as fiercely and uncomplicatedly as she’d loved anything, loved it so she didn’t have to hear the thump and clunk of Arthur coming home or smell the traces of the outside world on his skin and sweat and clothing, loved it so much that she missed the soft scuttle of the ventipede as it swung down from the kitchen ceiling and wrapped itself six times around her throat, fangs bared to strike.
Ann snapped, but inside, where it mattered. She swung the cleaver wildly with her right hand, but it was with her left that she killed it, acrylics tearing through armour and fat and into deeper, more private flesh, turning insides out and popping open soft organs like party balloons, grinding with the heel and stabbing with the nails and ripping and gnashing with the thumb until she wore the whole of the beast on her arm like a puppet from a children’s show.
It screamed at her. She hissed in its face and bit its head off, swallowed its adrenaline and cortisol and dopamine like candy and spat out the mandibles, then sat down in a corner of the kitchen and did nothing but rock gently, so gently, without tears or thoughts or blinking, just a spreading numbness from toe to finger to scalp.
Then she scrubbed the ventipede innards away with her bare hands, vomited into the sink to purge the criotoxins, washed her hands with the red, white and infrared soaps, then exited the secret passage from her lair and walked down the hall to the dining room where her husband sat, waiting.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I wanted dinner to be special.”
“Let’s get divorced,” he told her.
Ann nodded. Yes, that made sense.
What a day.
What a typical goddamned day.