INTERLUDE
THE TRESPASSER
Miriam sits on the beach, her butt planted on a cheap white plastic chair, her hands steepled on a patio table made of the same, her toes burrowed into cold sand like a row of ostrich heads.
Sitting across from her is her first boyfriend, Ben Hodge, the back of his head blown out from the shotgun he ate so long ago. Back when they were both dumb, horny teenagers in high school. They fucked. She got pregnant. He killed himself. And his mother took out her lonely-mother rage on Miriam with a red snow shovel.
That day. The day Miriam was really born. The now-Miriam. The Miriam with this curse, this gift, this thing-that-she-does.
Ben clears his throat.
A pair of dark-winged birds—blackbirds, each with a dime-sized splash of red on each wing—picks at his exposed brain like they’re looking for worms.
The sea slides in, the sea slides out, the ineluctable susurration of the tides.
“I knew you couldn’t stay away for long,” Ben says.
Except Miriam knows this isn’t Ben. Once upon a time, she would have said he was a figment of her imagination, a shape-shifting tormenter of her own devising, and that may still be true. But now she’s not so sure. Maybe she was never sure.
“I am who I am.”
“That’s what we’re counting on.”
She unsteeples her hands and leans forward. “We. That’s not the first time you’ve said that word.”
“We are legion. The demons in your head.”
“So, this is all just a hallucination? You’re just some asshole I made up?”
Ben says nothing. His eyes flash with mischief.
Just then, one of the blackbirds yanks its head upward, and in its beak is something that looks like a stringy tendon. Ben’s left arm jerks up in the air. When the bird drops the tendon, the arm plops back at his side.
The birds, working him like a puppet.
Cute.
And then a shadow passes over Miriam. She looks up, sees a Mylar balloon floating up in the sky, moving in front of the pale disc that passes for the sun here, and when she looks back at Ben, he’s no longer Ben. Instead, he’s the gunman. The one from the store. Replete with bloody mouth and a barbecue fork sticking out of his neck.
“So. How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?” she says, but she knows what he’s really asking.
“Don’t be coy. Your second kill.” Again, mischief glimmers. “Or third, if you want to count your dead baby.”
That hits her like a fist. She tries not to show it, but just the same, she leans back in her chair, looks away, stares out over the gray ocean, over the foam-capped waves.
The gunman shrugs. “Guess we won’t count the baby, then.”
“You need a name,” she says to change the conversation. “You may not have a face, but I want you to have a name.”
“Will I be Ben? Louis? Mommy?”
“I’m not calling you Mommy. Fucking sicko.”
“When was the last time you saw her, by the way?”
She doesn’t bother saying anything. He— or she, or it—already knows the answer.
“I should call you the Intruder,” she says finally. “Because that’s what you do. You intrude. Here, I should be drifting through the darkness before my death, all peaceful and shit, and then you come along. Trespassing on my mental property. Actually, I like that. Trespasser. There we go.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t invite me in.”
“I do no such thing.”
The gunman smiles. A blackbird lands on the neck-stuck BBQ fork.
“Besides,” the Trespasser continues, except now it’s not the gunman who’s speaking but the blackbird perched on the fork’s handle. Still with Ben’s voice. “You’re not dead. You’re just in shock.”
“I’m not dead?”
“Not yet. Soon, maybe. You have work to do first. We can’t let you off the hook that easy, little fishy. This meeting is just our little way of saying we’re glad to have you back.”
“You should’ve brought cake,” she says.
“Next time, maybe.”