It all began with the woman.
She approached me over dinner, and I saw that she was older than me—sixty, maybe seventy at the outside. Gray-haired, with dark-rimmed eyes, she wore a navy-blue cocktail dress, the shoulders folded down neatly. There was something familiar in seeing her, but it was only before I talked to her that I thought this. When we spoke I knew that I’d never met her before.
“Lake trout?” she asked, looking down at my plate. My husband was away working for the night and would be gone, probably until near midnight. He was renovating an old hotel, a good purchase made by us just last year in the hopes of flipping the property to some ambitious foreign buyers. Grand Marais was a tourist town located in the Northwoods of Minnesota—a kind of Nordic paradise resting on the shores of a sealike Lake Superior. In the summer, entire hordes of visitors from the Twin Cities ascended north, seeking a reconnection to their inner wildman.
We’d gotten the hotel for a song in the sludgy economy, but in order to capitalize on the upcoming tourist season, the hotel needed to be up and ready within two months, sold within three. All of this meant that I was spending the off-season mostly alone, albeit alone with adequate spending money and a beautiful rented cabin in town from which to watch that sealike lake.
“Lake trout, yes,” I confirmed. The woman didn’t move away, but stood looking down at my plate. Around her neck hung a fat necklace, its chain gold, a dark blue sapphire hanging like a grub caught in some spider’s filigreed web. It was the very same necklace, though I didn’t know it then, that my husband would surprise me with that night.
“Is it good?”
“Delightful,” I said, digging into another bite with my fork, though it was mostly for show. The truth was, I hadn’t been hungry all night, not for the last several days, though the restaurant was the best in the area.
“I always wonder,” she said. People were beginning to push past her now with irritated looks. The restaurant, named Fish Hash, wasn’t a large one, but even in off-season it was popular, people waiting up to an hour to get a table. I’d come at four, just to miss the wait, but people were eyeing my table hungrily in the huddle by the door, and I knew that I, alone and taking up an entire table, didn’t dare have a leisurely dinner.
“May I…” the woman asked, gesturing at the empty chair across from me. In truth, I’d almost forgotten she was there, my mind wandering as I’d found it doing so often in the week since coming here, almost to the day, in fact, me walking around like I had a cotton ball tucked around my brain.
“Certainly,” I said, because what else could one say when asked such a question? Besides, having another person at the table might make my presence at it less offensive to the large groups waiting. The woman pulled out the chair and sat quite comfortably down, motioning for a waiter, quite as if she had been expected all along. The waiter came over, and she ordered a glass of something called Minnestalgia, a sweet, raspberry-flavored wine, and an unexpected favorite of my own.
“I don’t usually go in for such things,” she said, leaning conspiratorially across the table. Her left hand was bare, but I could see a barely discernible line where a ring, very recently, had been removed. When she saw me staring at it, she quickly removed her hand from the table and cleared her throat.
“I usually like the full-bodied wines,” she said. “I’m almost embarrassed to fall into this sweet Minnesotan palate.” She laughed, and there, for just an instant, was that feeling of familiarity I’d felt when seeing her walk in, but just as quickly it was gone.
“I agree,” I said. “I’m a sucker for something chewy, but the Minnestalgia is a guilty pleasure.”
“I’ll never tell,” the woman said. “Do you mind if I order something to eat?”
“Not at all. But to be honest, I was just getting ready to leave.”
“Of course,” she said, seeming for the first time that night to lose something of the steely composure she possessed. “I didn’t mean to impose.”
“You’re not,” I said, though of course she was, and at that second my mind wandered away to my warm bed and Sam, and I wondered how late it would be that night before he crept in to lie beside me, only to disappear again before I woke. Like a gut punch, the guilt I felt at being here, guilt mixed with a sense of dissatisfaction at having abandoned my own career, bloomed deep in my belly. But what did it matter about being a high school teacher if the stress kept you from having any children of your own? Time was running out for us, and I needed rest, time to focus on conceiving. Time.
“Excuse me.” I wiped my mouth with the extremely tiny napkin the establishment had provided, laughable, really, in light of the fried fish and tartar sauce served in liter squeeze bottles. “I think I should get going. It was nice to meet you. Please feel free to keep the table.” It was, after all, what I was sure she’d been after.
“Wait!” she said. “Let me buy you some dessert at least.”
“No, thank you, I…”
“They have a secret dessert, you know. It’s not on the list, but it’s to die for. Their…”
“Maple syrup shot,” I finished with her, and she met my eyes with a smile.
“Yes, that’s it, exactly,” she said, sounding delighted. “A fellow aficionado. I didn’t realize anyone else knew about it.”
“I come here alone sometimes,” I said. “The waitress, Shelly, took pity on me.”
“The very same dear who enlightened me,” the woman said, and before I could stop her, she had magically waved the waiter down amidst all the hustle and placed the order for the shots. “I didn’t just come over here to bother you, you know,” she said, turning back around and settling herself firmly in the chair. The restaurant was made in a U shape, in such a way that every table was tucked neatly against an outside window looking toward the lake. The water was dark, its day-clear depths now murky with mystery, the waves looking as thick as the maple syrup the waiter laid in front of us. The syrup’s depths glowed in the muted gold light of the restaurant, the light that turned the wood décor and exterior waves into a world quite separate from reality, as though we were floating in a fish tank, a dingy remnant of somebody’s den in which they’d left the aquarium upon moving out, and we few were the last specimens of the once noble pets.
“Cheers,” the woman said.
I picked up my own, the amber liquid warm against the glass. “Cheers,” I said. “And thank you…”
“Cassandra,” she said, holding up her glass and clinking my own before downing it in one shot. I followed suit, the liquid leaving a warm, thick trail of sweet down my throat, the maple nuanced with shades of ash and oak, and then, at the end, an unexpected bitterness that I hadn’t ever tasted before. I coughed a little, quickly wiping my mouth.
“Thank you, Cassandra. I love that name, by the way,” I said. I did, too, though I’d been a little startled to hear it fall from her lips. It was the very name I’d always craved having as a child, always thinking it to sound very adult, very grand and beautiful. I had named all of my dolls Cassandra, but until this point had never met a living, breathing specimen.
“Thank you,” she said, and paused. It took me a minute to realize that she was waiting for me to supply my own name. “Natalie,” I told her. “And now I do have to go. My husband will be waiting for me.”
Cassandra raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow at this, almost as if suggesting she quite knew that this wasn’t the truth. “Of course,” she said. “But please do allow me to walk you out, Natalie. I know this must seem very strange me bursting in on you like this, but I really did have something I wanted to talk to you about.”
I agreed only to be rid of her. I was beginning to have my own suspicions concerning Cassandra. Shelly, the waitress, had told me there was a pocket of Jehovah’s Witnesses out this way who liked to prey on tourists, and I thought perhaps I’d seemed an easy target sitting alone like I had been. But my house was only a block away, and she couldn’t very well follow me inside if I didn’t want her to. She uncrossed her legs to stand at the same time I did, and one of her heels caught me sharply in the shin, sending a wave of bright pain up my leg. I hissed an intake of breath.
Cassandra stood and smiled at me, either pretending not to have noticed the contact or choosing to ignore it. “Shall we?” she asked.
We walked out past the crowded tables, stopping at the register to pay. It was another quirk about the restaurant, having you pay up front at the anchor-shaped desk just like you’d pay at the front of a Denny’s or a Perkins. But this gem of a Grand Marais restaurant was far from a Denny’s, and the prices on the ticket reflected this. Before I could hand the gum-popping teen behind the register my card, Cassandra snatched the ticket from my hand. “Allow me,” she said, and with the speed of a clearly planned action, presented the ticket with a fresh hundred-dollar bill to the girl behind the register. Cassandra was wearing gloves now, I saw, navy blue gloves with a sateen shimmer finish. I wondered when she’d had time to put them on.
She took her change and then hooked my arm. “Ready?” It was funny, but when she touched me like that, I felt like just sinking into her. It was comfortable, that touch. Comfortable and familiar and yet…
The cold wind from the outdoor hit us with the pop of the double-sealed door breaking free of its frame as we pushed through. The night was thick and black, but the stars were out and so beautiful that we both paused, as one, to look at them. The waves from the lake behind us slapped at the shore, and we stood, transfixed, looking up into the black sky, arms linked, and the water gently lap, lap, lapping away behind us like a lullaby, and I felt, in that moment, happy.
Cassandra began to walk, and I had no choice but to follow, entwined as we were. We walked up the hill, past a new gaggle of eager diners bundled in their best furs and wools, and up onto the main street, where Cassandra did not turn right but walked straight ahead, toward my house.
“How did you know I lived this way?” I asked, after we’d safely crossed the wide street and stood under the glow of a streetlamp.
The light above caught her face, just so, as she turned toward me, and I saw that she wasn’t as pretty as I’d thought she was. An army of lines worked their way across her face, lines that in the dark light of the restaurant had been hidden by a thick slate of makeup. Here, though, they were completely visible, and I saw one under her right eye that was so deep as to almost look like a scar. It ran itself in a hooked C from the eye’s center out to just short of her hairline.
When Cassandra saw me staring she ducked her head, and I felt horribly embarrassed.
“Cassandra,” I said, having made up my mind to just be rid of her, to tell her that my house was just at the corner and it was so nice to meet her, but…
The shriek of tires cutting through the empty night severed my intentions, and I looked up to see a small girl in a red coat standing straight in the car’s path.
We were alone on that street corner. I’d been sure of it. The night was a cold one, tourist season was over, and the only people foolish enough to be out with the last warmth of the sun tucked securely away beyond the horizon were those making their way toward the few restaurants across the street for dinner.
No, we’d been alone, entirely alone, with Main Street stretching ahead and behind, empty, the sidewalks lining either side of it lit up by streetlamps and glowing white like two sets of teeth, with nary the specter of a shadow to disturb them. Only us.
Except…With the scream of the tires, the night collapsed in on itself, doubled over in the folds of itself to cradle that shriek of rubber on road, to caress it almost, squeeze the largest bit of sound possible from the interruption of silence.
I spun around just in time to see headlights swerving along the road, headlights of a strange, almost blue color, and just beyond the headlights was the body of the car, whitish and of a shape that seemed foreign, certainly something I’d never seen before—even in the space of those few seconds I was sure of that. The car seemed to have the kind of slide doors one might see on a minivan, only this car was compact, maybe even a two-seater.
But I did not focus on the doors for long. I felt a pinch, and as I turned I saw Cassandra gripping my arm and her face was once again lit white by the lamps, white and old and pursed into lines of terror. She was looking just ahead of where the car had begun its skid and the terror on her face along with the pressure on my arm, it was almost as if she was pulling me toward the sight, makings me follow her gaze back out to the road and…
I can hardly bear to continue.
The little girl who’d run into the middle of the street did not move but stood still, and even as I was running toward her, she looked up, and the car fell upon her. The girl disappeared in a matter of seconds, and then reappeared at the other end of the car, but not before I heard the soft spreading of her under its wheels. The car sped away and as I ran to her I saw that there was nothing at all left of her head but a red smear that ran onto the pavement in sticky chunks, as if an extension of the coat.
Did I tell you I screamed? Oh, yes, I screamed. The couple who found me said they heard it from clear inside the restaurant.
I awoke to the sensation of something hard against my cheek, hard and cool and uncomfortable, and I lifted my head to find myself facedown on the pavement, an elderly couple standing above me, the man gently shaking me awake.
“Miss?” His accent, a thick blend of somewhere back east, reached down through the night to cut clearly through my fog, and in an instant I was sitting straight up, looking wildly around.
“The girl!”
“What girl, honey?” the woman asked, and she too bent beside me, laying a cool, manicured hand against my face. She was wearing a yellow sweater with a large brown moose embroidered on it, and in that instant I had a terrible urge to laugh, to just open my mouth and laugh and laugh and laugh. I didn’t. I clamped my lips tightly together, knowing that if I began I would never end, would go on laughing and laughing until the sanity drained clean out of me.
The woman stared at me, confused. “There isn’t any girl here, sugar. Rest easy, now. Do you mean your daughter? Was she with you when you fell?”
“The girl!” I yelled again, pushing the couple from me and running into the street, expecting to see at the very least blood. There was nothing. The pavement glowed as black and solid as ever. I sank to my knees and began to sob. Behind me, I could hear the older couple talking.
“It really could be the fish, you know,” the woman in the moose sweater said. “My cousin Bill, he ate a bad clam once and was sick for near on a week. Said he had a fever so bad he saw Jesus coming out of his walls.”
Sam met me at the hospital. By that time, the doctors had gotten the whole story out of me. There was no girl. Of that I’d been assured time and time again. No little girl in a red coat, no car accident. Nothing. I simply fallen and hit my head. Clean passed out. But there was a good reason for that, the doctor assured me, smiling, his big bald head gleaming in the hospital lights. He figured me for somewhere five weeks on. Maybe six. Hadn’t I noticed I’d missed my period?
I said I hadn’t. There’d been bleeding only a week ago, just lighter than usual. That happens sometimes, the doctor said, nodding gravely. Sure it does. It’s called uterine implant bleeding. He was nodding and smiling so big that I couldn’t shake the image of him as a grotesque pumpkin man, his head a crazy jack-o’-lantern. I shut my eyes tightly, then felt a breath on my face. It was Sam, leaning down to look at me, and I opened my eyes to find his own directly lined with my own.
“How are you doing, hon?” he asked, and I saw a barely contained glee behind his eyes, saw that he was masking it to first grant me concern.
“I…” How was I, then? There had been no girl, and no woman, either. None that anyone had seen, though I hadn’t thought to ask about the woman until I was already at the hospital, the little girl dominating all my thoughts. “I’m fine,” I finished. And I would be, too. Hesitantly, I reached down to rub my still-flat belly under the paper-thin white gown with blue flowers the hospital had given me.
“A fall like that, it can get you seeing all kinds of things,” the pumpkin doctor said. He must have left his house that night in a hurry, a doctor on call, because I saw a dab of what looked like mustard far to the left of his mouth. Poor pumpkin doctor, I thought. Called him clean away from his dinner. And then I had to close my eyes because there was that laugh again, that crazy, crazy laugh…
“Hey,” Sam said, pulling my face close to whisper in my ear. His voice brought me back from the brink, and I leaned in to him, smelling dear, sweet, solid Sam, his smell of wood and sandpaper and sweat. I felt his arms go up and then something cold and heavy around my neck. I jerked away from him and looked down. There, resting against my chest, was the fat blue-jeweled necklace, its filigreed gold cold against me.
“Do you like it?” Sam asked, grinning. “I saw it in the windows on my lunch break and…I don’t know. It just looked like you, that was all. I saw it, and something made me go right on in and buy it.” Sam kissed me on my forehead, and I reached down to pull the cold jewelry away from my neck. I held the weighty stone in my fist and heard the pumpkin-headed doctor laughing above.
“Ain’t that just something?” he asked. “Boy hoo, now there’s a husband that gets himself a get-out-of-jail-free card for use if ever there was one. Boy hoo, who says men ain’t got intuition?”
And after that? Well, after that it was winter, then spring, and I forgot all about the girl and the woman in the blue dress. Sam had sold the hotel, and I was pregnant. Our gamble had paid off, and all was right with the world. And, oh, what a world it was! I inhabited it as if it was me who’d just been born, me who was discovering all its glories for the first time. Sam said I was glowing, a pregnant woman’s glow, and while I wasn’t sure that I really looked that different (minus the larger belly), I certainly felt different.
I was heavier, fuller, more completely there in every way. When I tasted the sweet butter-brickle of a spoon of ice cream, felt the burnt sugar of the toffee crunch between my teeth and the cool slide of the ice-cream trickle down my throat, it wasn’t just me tasting it, but the very center of me, not the baby, exactly, but the part of me that would become the baby, the life inside me that was just waiting to be, be, be, and oh! It was so hungry!
The days passed and with the profits from the hotel Sam and I bought ourselves a house in Grand Marais. It was pleasant there, and Sam had been offered a job with a local contractor. I was pregnant and had no desire to leave. All in all, the place seemed one of the utmost blessing, a place to expand in health and happiness and to welcome the third member of our family.
A month before my predicted due date, Sam was called out of town for a renovation in Duluth.
“It’s only for a day, Nat,” he said, rubbing my toes where they poked out from under our down comforter. It was spring here, but spring in northern Minnesota was still cold. The feather comforter wouldn’t be put away until May at the earliest.
“What if I go into labor while you’re away?” I was aware of the pout in my voice.
“If you do, then the doctor’s number is by the bed, and Mrs. Karin is ready and willing to take you wherever you need to go whenever you need to be there. But you won’t need either of them. You’ve got a month to go, Nat. Little Bumpo isn’t ready to leave Mama’s belly just yet.”
Little Bumpo was the name we’d bestowed on our unborn, both of us deciding not to find out the sex of the child until it was actually born.
“Fine, then,” I said, kissing the rough scratch of his cheek and sending him on his way. “Just don’t expect me to hold out on eating the rest of the rocky road while you’re away.”
He grinned, and then, just like on so many other jobs before this one, was gone. I was alone.
I went to the Fish Hash for dinner. It had been a long time, not since three months ago when I’d eaten there with Sam, and that had been at his request. I knew that my “experience” from the winter months had been a result of my bumped head, but something about it all still seemed too tangible to pass off so easily. I’d avoided the Fish Hash, but with Sam gone and the evening to kill, the noise of the tourists drew me toward it.
It was an unusually gorgeous night in Grand Marais, the kind of spring evening that the tourists come for, the lucky few who decide to chance the weather and hope for an April evening that flowers instead of showers. Tonight, Grand Marais did not disappoint.
Although it had snowed only the week before, now, everywhere, the fledgling spring made itself known. From the warm breath of the near-sixty-degree air to the cry of the birds, newly invigorated, and finding good nesting spots in the budding trees. I walked to the Fish Hash with a happy heart, ready to welcome all changes, including the one kicking at my belly. The lake water whisked itself in a welcome against the Fish Hash’s dock, and I saw what I took, at the time, to be a good omen—the three otters who often visited the dock in hope of scraps. I spent a few minutes watching them play, the littlest of them delighting the tourists by surfacing in great breaks of waves and then diving down again whenever one of the larger otters would try to come near him. It was a merry chase, and I laughed out loud at their antics, thinking of how in the springs to come, I could bring my own child here to watch them.
The restaurant was, as I expected, crowded, but by some miracle I found Mrs. Karin, our new neighbor, already there. The woman was late-middle-aged and kindly; we’d grown close in the past few months.
“Natalie!” she cried, standing from her table to wave me over. I joined her, and the two of us spent a good hour ignoring everyone else in the restaurant.
“Thank you,” I said, as our meal ended and we both ordered a hot cocoa over which to linger. “It’s so nice to have company with Sam away.”
“Psh, I should have thought to invite you before I ever came over,” Mrs. Karin said, blowing on her newly delivered cup, steam rising from her hot chocolate. “I would have, too, but I didn’t want to impose.”
“Please! Spending time with you is as far from an imposition as a person could get,” I assured her. “It’s delightful.”
When our hot chocolate was over, we amiably linked arms and walked out into crisping air of the evening. For a moment, I was taken back to the night in the winter when I’d discovered my pregnancy. When I looked down and saw Mrs. Karin’s hand upon my own, a glovelike shadow from the building’s overhang made me think of the woman in blue I’d dreamed up, and a shudder ran through my frame.
“Are you all right, dear?”
“I’m more than all right,” I said. And I was. This was no phantom woman, Mrs. Karin, and the evening was not a dark winter’s one. Instead, the setting sun washed everything in an ethereal glow of the utmost beauty; the lake’s waves looked like skeins of orange silk. “Everything’s wonderful,” I said, and I felt the life inside me kick, as if in confirmation. I took Mrs. Karin’s hand in my own and gently laid it on my belly. The kick came again, and as we stood at the lake’s edge smiling at each other, I felt a great rush of happiness come over me.
Mrs. Karin dropped me off at my house with promises of coffee in the morning. We’d lingered on the walk back, and the sun had left the sky almost fully, the light changing from an orange to a pale silver. When I stepped inside the house, I was struck with the pleasant silence of it, and a smile crossed my lips as I imagined how shortly such a silence would be relieved.
I had just removed my shoes (pink ballet flats; I’d been able to wear nothing but flats since the pregnancy and my seemingly ever-growing feet) when, clutching the doorframe to help me stand straight again, a misplaced shadow caught my eye. I stopped, the way a deer might stop in a forest seeing the shadow of a hiker’s backpack fall across the trail.
Someone was in the living-room chair. A shot of adrenaline followed this realization, and I felt myself go shiver-cold with it, my hands trembling so much that I nearly fell over and had to push back hard at the doorframe to steady myself. In doing so, I looked away from the chair, and when I looked back again…nothing. No figure at all.
I was a fool, of course. That is what I told myself. The night had got me thinking about darker things, as a woman close to her time was wont to do. There was nothing more to it than that. All the same, I turned on all the lights in the house, every damned last one of them, and hurried myself upstairs and into my warm robe and the comfort of a cup of hot tea and the bed. I slept easily that night, even without Sam’s warm body beside me. Only on near dawn did I awake, and then it was to two hands, pressed very firmly, on either side of my belly.
“Sam?”
The pressure on my belly grew firmer. There was a pain. I shot upright in bed to look around. No one. Just the early light gray of coming dawn streaming through our curtainless second-floor picture window. Gray that bathed the room, poked a trembling finger into all of its corners, to the bureau, to my vanity with its ragged bench, on to the easy chair in which no one ever sat, except…
There, quite clearly, a figure now rested, its head hunched low upon its chest. I opened my mouth to scream when, like a jack-in-the box, up popped the head, revealing the ghost-white of a face that I knew.
“Hello, Natalie. How’s the baby coming along?” The woman’s silver hair blended so perfectly with the gray of the light that it, along with the white of her face, made her seem nothing more than a waterstain on the background of the room. My hand flew protectively to my belly, and yet…there was no fear. Hadn’t I known? Hadn’t I always, in some way, thought to see her again?
“How did you get in, Cassandra?”
Coolly, with the grace and ease of a water eel, she stood, and I saw that she wore the same blue dress that I’d seen her in months ago. She writhed a clean and lanky dance to my bed, where, instead of sitting down, she leaned over to extend a cold, white hand to me. “Shall we?” Without waiting for a response, she pulled my hand away from my stomach and drew me to stand, the sheets puddling at my feet and revealing my skin to the room’s cool air. With a quick yet somehow tender motion, Cassandra drew me to her, enfolded her arms around the back of my neck, and we stood, almost like lovers, my large belly pressed against her flat one.
There is nothing I can say to myself nor to anyone else that will make the rest of this make any kind of sense. I’ve told the police this over and over again, although I know they hardly take me seriously. You see, they can tell from the forced window that someone was in the house. A real, honest-to-God person, and not just me.
But they didn’t find any prints. “She must have worn gloves,” they told me. “The only prints here are your own.” And then they wink their eyes at one another and wait to hear the rest of my story. They try not to laugh when I tell them.
“Why would you dance with her?” they ask me, looks of puzzlement crossing their faces.
But yes, it was just that. Dancing. I danced with her. We danced. My belly against hers, and I listened to those words that she whispered.
“Give her to me. Give her to me, please.” And her belly pressed, pressed, pressed against mine. And I knew that not only was she real but that she was familiar, that scent that she wore, the feel of her belly matched so comfortably against my own.
“You saw what will happen to her,” she said. “What must happen later. If you give her now, then I can bring her into it after the fact. Please.”
When she said the last word, I pulled away from her because there was such desperation in it. Such horrible longing, such…evil. Yes. I thought then and I think now, that there was evil in it.
And when she pulled away, I understood what it was she was asking. She wanted the child. She wanted my baby. I understood something else, too. Something terrible.
When Cassandra pulled away, I looked at her clearly for the first time and saw how old she looked. How tired. Her eyes were puffy, that jagged hook of a wrinkle that I’d noticed over dinner more prominent now, the skin around her mouth pulled in a permanent frown with lines where I was just beginning to get them. Marionette lines, they were called. And her eyes, oh, her eyes…
“No,” I said.
“You don’t know.” Cassandra raised her hands, and there, on her left hand I saw a ring that I knew. “You can’t know,” she said, “how much it’s cost me to come here. How much…”
“No,” I said, more firmly. “No, no, no! No!” I was screaming. I saw the look on her face shift, saw her lower lip tremble, and now I was not screaming, I was laughing. Laughing so hard that the air would hardly come. “No!” I said, hiccupping it in between the laughs. “Whatever game you’re playing, you can’t have her. No!”
I reached beside me and lifted the phone, dialed the three necessary numbers, and waited for the voice of the authority, the voice of reason.
Cassandra gave me one last, terrible look. A look so sad, so tired, and so…yes, I said it then and I say it now…evil, that I had to drop my own eyes, so evil that my hand went straight to my belly.
“You don’t know what a person can be willing to do for a child,” she said, “the distance she will travel.”
When she left, I was still laughing.
The police periodically follow up on the investigation of the break-in. I tell them that I haven’t seen her since then.
I wish this were true.
The marionette lines grow deeper in my face every damned day, and sometimes, when I am alone, I find myself whispering the words “Give her to me,” just to see how they will sound.
Sometimes I even add a please.
It all sounds very…familiar. As if I’ve said it a million times before.