Legacies, page 2
Of course they are, he thinks. God must have sent his angels to look for them, too. So, when the voices connected to the boots start saying stuff like, “It’s over here.” and “I think we found what appears to be a bullet hole on the north facing wall of the unit.” and “It matches what the anonymous caller said on the tip line.” and “I have three patrolmen canvassing the back parking lot for shell casings.” None of it bothers Miles.
Someone knocks loudly on the door. Mom’s hand flies to her chest. Martha drops the amber-colored tube in her hands, and it makes fifteen clickly-clicks as Miles’ Make-The-Pain-Go-Away pills rattle against the plastic.
It’s too soon for Grandmom. She lives sixty-seven minutes away.
Whoever is knocking is here because of Dad. What happens when they find out?
It snows in Miles’ brain, forcing him to close his eyes. His throat closes just as he tries to swallow. The numbers in his head turn sideways. The ceiling fan’s fwip-fwip-fwip slows down. Sometimes, when he feels this way, he imagines he can feel a small amount of tingling in his feet. Like maybe a little fairy is tickling him. But it never lasts long, and Miles knows it isn’t real, even though he wants it to be real.
Iamastupidboy.
He sniffs. He’ll feel better once he finds his best friends.
Miles feels his dad’s shadow fill the room. He looks back at his bedroom door, expecting to see him standing there. He lets out a breath.
The doorframe is empty, but on the floor he sees a small red and black object: Mr. Lopsided Spiderman. Miles pulls himself into his wheelchair and heads toward the hermit crab.
“Miles, don’t go in there,” Mom whispers.
Fists hit the door again. Someone says their names really loud, and for the first time since the shadow fell in his bedroom, Miles is scared. Scared that he did the wrong thing. Scared because everything is his fault.
* * *
Miles always dreamt of monsters. But they were the nice kind, and they never noticed that he was different. And slow. And stupid. They just wanted to scare kids, because that’s what they were taught to do. But the monsters under his bed and in his closet liked Miles, because he gave them a day off.
He imagined that their backs must hurt, or that their claws must need trimming, or that their throats must be sore from all that roaring. He would straighten his thick glasses and doctor them. Miles would line them up by age, or height, or by some other quantifiable measurement, such as a color spectrum, and then listen to whatever troubled them.
Sometimes Martha would join him, and for a pair of three-year-olds, life wasn’t all that difficult. Until it was. The baby in Mom’s belly died, and Dad liked that brown bottle more than anything else in the world, and when the army kicked them out of that house in Germany, the happy monsters went away.
Miles came to rely on and appreciate numbers and shapes and things that were easily defined and always true. One plus one would always be two. Red and blue turned into purple. Martha would always be his twin sister. The year they were born, 1999, would always be a prime number.
But when they turned four, monsters became real. They weren’t fuzzy or furry. They didn’t have five eyes, and they didn’t hide under beds or in closets. They didn’t want—or need—Miles to listen to their problems. Every monster in the world had the face of his dad. Miles tried to help, only to be pushed away. Hard. Martha hid. Mom cried.
Hide-The-Bruise became a way of life. Silence, an absolute must, or Dad-Would-Pop-You-One. It didn’t help that Miles got a lot of ear infections, and needed to go to the doctor on the one day that Mom had trouble with the Hide-The-Bruise rule.
Dad threw him in the back seat, only to fall asleep on the lawn. Miles waited for him to wake up. Waited until the sky turned the color of black licorice. Waited until he couldn’t hold in his pee anymore. He climbed in the front. He touched the wrong things. The car rolled backwards and out of the driveway.
Miles never remember what happened next, only that when he woke up his legs had stopped working, he had missed his birthday, and that Dad was in some place called Behind-Bars.
* * *
Martha opens the door. Mom won’t do it. She sits down on the long couch and covers her face. Miles can tell she is scared, and he doesn’t want her to be scared. He wants to tell her that there is nothing to be scared of anymore. He gives one last look at Mr. Lopsided Spiderman, turns around, and wheels over to his mom just as the tall policeman walks in.
At first no one says anything. The policeman studies them. The suitcases. His clipboard. Miles counts to forty-two before the tall man says who he is and what he’s looking for. Mom only nods. She can’t say anything. She doesn’t own a voice for this type of thing. Martha sits in Mom’s lap and Mom hugs her hard.
“He’s in there,” Miles says, pointing to his own bedroom.
“He?” the policeman asks.
“My dad,” Miles says.
The policeman squints, checks his clipboard, and, after hesitating, he walks into Miles’ room, and flicks on the light. Miles waits for the yelling. For monsters. He waits for winter, for silence, for things to be thrown, for bad words. He waits for his mom’s raindrops and Martha’s frowns.
Miles doesn’t know what to do when none of that happens.
The policeman comes back into the living room. “Was the man in there named Michael Conrad?” When Mom answers “Yes” he steps outside and tells someone to pull up Michael Conrad’s rap sheet. “Get a forensic team, too.” He returns and studies each of them the same way Miles studies bugs each spring. After a moment, the man pulls a chair from the kitchen and sits down in front of them. “Tell me what happened.”
Mom opens her mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. She’s never told before. None of them have. Martha crawls further into Mom’s lap. He notices that she’s squeezing the pink piggy. Out of the corner of Miles eye he spots Mr. Oval Soccer Ball and Miss Intertwining Hearts near the front door, as if they are waiting for something. His heart jumps around. Should he get them? No, he can’t. Mom and Martha need him.
Miles tears his eyes away from two of his best friends and focuses on the policeman. He repeats his question. So Miles tells him everything. He talks about monsters, yelling, Milesisastupidboy, his crushed legs, Martha’s underwear, Mom’s raindrops, her winters, the silence, the falling shadow, Hide-The-Bruise, the night of the black licorice, Mr. Lopsided Spiderman, Mr. Oval Soccer Ball, and Miss Intertwining Hearts, Dad’s Behind-Bars vacation, movie bullets, the shattered aquarium, Martha’s broken voice, prime numbers, his prayers, and finally how it’s his fault that Dad’s shadow fell and died.
* * *
“Are you going to arrest me?” Miles asks.
He takes a deep breath. Someone from outside gives the policeman a folder. Mom’s raindrops fall faster, and Martha watches him closely, but her frown is gone.
“No,” the policeman says, clearing his throat. He wipes one of his eyes. “I would never do that to you or your family, Miles. You did nothing wrong.” His voice is like metal, strong and firm, and Miles relaxes. “It was a drive-by shooting that killed your dad. But…” he trails off as if he might change his mind. As if he might believe in Miles’ prayers.
Something red and black scuttles under the policeman’s chair and rushes to the door. Miles watches as Mr. Lopsided Spiderman joins the other two hermit crabs. They are leaving, he thinks, and he isn’t completely upset about it. They line up, turn in unison, and after seven seconds they disappear outside the door.
He waves goodbye to the three best friends in the whole wide world.
“They really were magical.” It’s Martha’s voice. It’s like crunchy glass, but it’s the most beautiful sound Miles has ever heard.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, they were.”
Miles knows they will no longer have to worry about the silence, or winters, or bad monsters ever again, and when Grandmom comes for them, Miles doesn’t even pretend to look for his best friends. They were long gone.
Mr. Lopsided Spiderman, Mr. Oval Soccer Ball, and Miss Intertwining Hearts were already on their way to help another family.
Just like they helped his.
Introduction to “Sisters”
Our next story is another tale of a courageous young child, this one taking a risky personal stand to honor her sister.
“Sisters” is the first Leah Cutter story I had ever read, and she fast became one of my favorite authors. Her prose is filled with a beauty and an elegance that make her stories works of art.
Like in “Sisters,” Leah loves diverse settings. Her first three novels, Paper Mage, Caves of Buda, and The Jaguar and the Wolf, take place in Tang Dynasty China, World War II Budapest, and the Viking Era, respectively. Her most recent novel is the third book in her Shadow Wars series, War Among the Crocodiles.
Leah has appeared in five Fiction River volumes: Unnatural Worlds, Hex in the City, Past Crime, Pulse Pounders (the Kobo Special Edition), and Haunted. Her short fiction has also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Talebones, and The Uncollected Anthology.
Sisters
Leah Cutter
Lin Han still knelt in the courtyard, as still as the towering rock steele behind her that the names of her family’s ancestors were carved into. The bleak early morning light washed everything gray: the hard brick she knelt on, the black iron brazier in front of her, the twisted pine in front of the double wall that stood guard before the door leaving the family courtyard. The sacred smoke from the brazier had long since disappeared, but the heavy smell of burnt wood and paint still hung in the air.
Double-hour bells rang in the distance, muffled by Lin Han’s fog. She felt herself stirring, as if she were waking, though she hadn’t slept all night. She blinked dry eyes and stiffness poured through her body, as if she were suddenly no longer young. Her knees started to ache. Her shoulders felt weighed down, as if a yoke with buckets filled with water lay across them, like the laborers she saw in the street. She took a deep breath, the taste of smoke mingling with the tears still gathered at the back of her throat.
Lin Han curled her fingers into fists on her thighs, realizing how cold the tops of her hands were when they touched the warm silk. She pushed herself forward, trying to rise, and ended up catching herself with her hands, the cold hard brick pushing back at her. Her legs were filled with sand, leaden, hard to move.
Slowly Lin Han rose. She swayed like young bamboo in a storm trying to gain her feet.
As if that was a signal, Old Cook scurried out.
“Please, Miss, you must go to bed now,” he whispered urgently.
“No. I will not leave my sister,” Lin Han said.
Old Cook didn’t have to say it. She heard it echoing again against the hard bricks of the courtyard, the proclamation by her mother, her father.
You no longer have a sister.
“Enough of that,” Lin Han said, banishing those ghosts of memory. “I must take her with me.” Sometime in the night a plan had come to her.
Old Cook opened his mouth, then closed it and gestured at the huge brazier. It had Fu dog heads on the sides, each bigger than Lin Han’s head. Ornate legs curved down to splayed toes. It had taken six men to haul it into the courtyard.
Lin Han had grown the last year, and so it merely came up to her chest now. However, she would never grow big enough to carry it away.
“Fine,” she said. “I need, I need...”
The chill of the morning finally entered her bones. She shivered abruptly and swayed again. But she refused to give in to the horror of it, what she needed to do.
“I need something to hold her in.”
“Right away, Miss.” Old Cook bowed low before racing away.
The long shadows of the courtyard wall to Lin Han’s right began defining as the sun rose. The twisted pine took on long needles and distinct branches. The brilliant red tile on the rooftops beyond the courtyard sprang to life. All around the quiet courtyard the city of Yen Tu woke up. Already the street venders with their buckets of millet porridge and clear chicken broth called out their wares. People walked in the street, snatches of conversation floating up over the wall.
Lin Han just waited.
Old Cook came back out with an ornate, porcelain, red-and-white vase. It was skinny at the bottom and blossomed out at the top. Hard nubs of white stuck out from the body in curling lines.
Dao Ming would have wanted to put tall lilies in it, something graceful and overflowing.
Lin Han accepted the weight of the vase, cradling it in her arms for a moment before taking the cold metal scoop that Old Cook also handed her. She stood on her toes and looked into the brazier.
The pile of ash was so small, like Dao Ming had been.
Mama would kill Lin Han for handling ashes. She’d insist on a cleansing ceremony from the stinky Taoist priest with the dark robes who never smiled as well as a second one from the Buddhist priest in his bright orange robes who was more sour still.
Tears gathered behind Lin Han’s eyes again. This was all she had left of her younger sister. A burnt spirit tablet, taken from their ancestors’ altar in the front greeting room.
A hard spike of hurt pierced her chest as she remembered how her parents were going to deny Dao Ming’s birth, just like they’d denied her death. They claimed now that there had only ever been two children: Lin Han and her older brother. Dao Ming had been written out of the family records. Father had talked of bribing the census takers to cross out her name. All her clothes had been given away or burned. Her favorite straw-stuff doll destroyed.
Last night, Mama and Father hadn’t even held a funeral, barely said a single prayer before they’d placed Dao Ming’s spirit tablet in the brazier.
Someone had to do something for Dao Ming. There was nothing to anchor her spirit. She would become a red-faced angry ghost, stealing food and paper ghost money meant for others.
Lin Han’s tears fell as she stuck the shovel in the ashes. The mound crumbled, the fine ash sliding away like sand. When she lifted the first scoop, the early morning breeze puffed away some of the soot, sending it dancing across the courtyard.
She carefully tipped the scoop into the vase so no more of the ash escaped. Moving slowly, she completed her task, though some of it had spilled onto her fine dark-blue robes. Mama would be mad, but Lin Han didn’t care.
Finally, Lin Han stepped back. With a bow, she solemnly handed the small scoop to Old Cook, who just as solemnly took it.
“I will bury this,” Old Cook assured her.
Lin Han swallowed around a dry mouth. “Thank you,” she whispered, touched that he was treating Dao Ming’s burnt spirit tablet like a body, as if they were actually handling the dead.
“You take care of Little Miss,” Old Cook instructed. “We will hide you as well as we can today, me and the gardener and your mother’s dressing maid.”
“Thank you,” Lin Han said again, bowing low.
Though her family might deny Dao Ming, Lin Han was still going to see that at least in the afterlife, her sister would be taken care of.
* * *
Lin Han stood on one side of the dusty street, looking at the Taoist priest’s shop on the other. The tiny wooden shack sat nestled between two larger stone buildings, almost as if he’d blocked off an alley to make his home. No paint decorated the walls, no mystic symbols were carved into the wood. Just a hand painted sign, weathered gray wood with bright red paint promising suitable mates for all.
The mid-morning bells had already rung. A few laborers remained in the street, squatting under the eaves of one of the stone buildings, rolling dice and drinking strong pear wine. They hadn’t seemed to notice her—no one had. Lin Han knew her fine blue robes didn’t belong in this part of Yen Tu, knew that the vase she carried was worth more than a few cash.
Either Dao Ming protected her, or Lin Han had also turned into a ghost.
Finally, the old man she’d watched go into the Taoist’s shop came out. He clutched a brown leather bag tightly to his chest as he hurried off. Maybe the old Taoist was also an apothecary, though he didn’t have a sign for that.
Feeling great daring, Lin Han stepped out of the shadows and into the brightly lit street. She rushed across though there was no traffic, no people or palanquins to avoid this far from the city center. She fumbled with the latch and had to use her elbow to push on it so she wouldn’t have to put down the vase.
The dark of the shop made Lin Han stop and blink her eyes for a moment. Spicy medicine smells, the scent of burnt jing sticks and incense all came to her, as well as long boiled tea and sweet chrysanthemum. The Taoist sat silent and still behind the counter against the far wall. Rough wooden floorboards snagged her sandals as she walked forward.
Jars bigger than her vase filled with bulbous white roots in yellow liquid hung from ropes from the ceiling. A long dried snake skin marked with a black diamond pattern stretched from one side of the room to the other and swayed in the slightest breeze. Eggs cooked in tea sat in another jar on the counter. The back wall held row after row of sealed porcelain jars, all meticulously labeled with either red or black characters.
The Taoist rose from his seat. His long face ended with a hanging jowl and his forehead lifted up to a bald skull. Fringes of greasy white hair curled down from just above his ears, over his shoulders. His nose hung like a foreigner’s and his ears stood out like long handles.
“Good day,” he said, giving her a small bow. His voice belied his skeletal stature, ringing from him like a deep bell.
“Good day,” Lin Han said. She hugged the vase closer to her, the hard nubs pressing into her chest. “I need to find a mate.”
At his raised eyebrow, she made her voice stronger. “For my sister.”
