Lately, despite the bone shudders it triggered every time she stepped outside, Aunt Sally had come to appreciate wind. Down in the Delta where she’d spent the entirety of her life—lives—before the Great Unmaking, what breeze there was had curled up in hollows, in the lee and leaves of cypress trees. It had stirred only when the whole Delta stirred like some great, ancient animal shaking off flies. Most often, it had simply lain still. So that was what Aunt Sally assumed air did, most nights.
Then poor, doomed Caribou had brought her Ju. For reward, Aunt Sally had Unmade him. She’d Unmade all her monsters. And then, free and together, she and Ju had fled the piney-green forests and the drying swamps, escaping into the country she’d heard about all her life—lives—and never known.
Now, five years later, here they were in yet another new town, emerging from daysleep into a world positively wild with wind that rattled any anchored thing and flung everything loose into motion.
What town was this, anyway? Aunt Sally had never valued individual places enough to learn their names.
Was this Ames? Bozeman? Hadn’t there been an Ames, at some point?
Laramie, according to the wooden sign nailed over the entrance to the post office across the tumbleweed-strewn street.
So that’s where they were. Yet another stretch of miles farther from the Mississippi than Aunt Sally had ever been. Tonight, for some reason, she could feel the river’s absence like a weight in her blood. A stilling. More accurately, the river’s absence increased her awareness of the stillness that was always inside her.
The place around her whirled and sang. Sometimes, it seemed her world had been doing those things ever since the moment of Ju’s arrival.
In the sidewalk shadows just outside the cone of light from the juddering lamppost overhead, which leaned like the trunk of some cliff-side tree in the torrent of air, Aunt Sally watched. Paper pumpkins and pillowcase ghosts danced and dangled in ribbon-nooses from awnings and overhangs. The wood and red-bricked buildings whistled, stood their ground but did so loudly, expelling sounds as the wind worked into cracks in century-old mortar, through warped windowpanes and slowly buckling doorframes. Newspapers tumbled by, and a hat. Even the press-on Halloween decals on the windows of the coffee shop—mostly leering, black-and-white skeleton-cattle in pirate scarves—seemed to bubble in place, shiver with the glass.
Inside the coffee shop, on the other side of the glass, Ju strolled among the natives. On every shabby couch, at each stained and grooved wooden table, the denizens swiveled to watch, flinching when she unleashed that smile of hers, each hair on their faux-cowboy beards straining toward her like long grass with a wind in them. It was the same each night, each time Ju convinced Aunt Sally to stop. Ju preferred college towns, which amused Aunt Sally and also confused her a little. Ju was only fourteen and, due to her circumstances both before and after the Great Unmaking, she wasn’t the most likely university candidate.
Yet she always seemed so poised in these places. Downright comfortable instead of careful-cagey like she usually was. Always, she gravitated to the local all-ages music hangouts, where beardy boys and the inexplicable girls (and less beardy boys) who groomed and petted those beards clustered around sludgy espressos and whisper-sang miserable tunes about miseries Aunt Sally supposed they imagined they felt. Sometimes, they’d sing old ballads or blues they’d inhaled, somewhere. Those typically made Aunt Sally laugh, which was why Ju wouldn’t let her come inside anymore, made her go off to find her own amusements or lurk on the streets with only the wind and whoever had the misfortune of happening across her path for company.
Through the shuddering glass, she watched Ju make her slow, head-down way to the microphone on the little bear rug near the order counter. Once on the little stage, she lifted her head high enough to speak into the mic. Aunt Sally couldn’t hear, but she knew Ju was using that rustling-leaves murmur that the beardy boys read as shyness.
But it wasn’t shyness. Aunt Sally had spent the most pleasurable parts of the past five years figuring Ju out. She had come to suspect that what the girl really signaled, most nights, was a reluctance to unleash. What Aunt Sally hadn’t figured out was exactly what Ju was holding back.
A mystery! A bottomless, glinting cave of a person to explore! Not even Mother had brought such fascination to Aunt Sally’s nights, such renewed reason to bother to wake. Not even close.
Out here, far from the Delta, in this windy world full of creatures whose nights ended in sleeps that melted into days they got up for, she supposed they’d call whatever Ju radiated charisma or presence, maybe even talent; all Aunt Sally knew was that it was there, winking in the girl’s deceptively placid green eyes, in the lava curls of her hair where it escaped from her braids. Some nights, Aunt Sally could literally feel it rising off her like heat when she slept.
Another gust roared down the street, pouring into Aunt Sally’s nostrils but carrying no smells, filling her ears but telling no tales because it came from nowhere, from the empty plains, meeting no one on its way. She huddled deeper into the checked wool coat Ju had picked out for her somewhere, its greens and blues and oranges ridiculous, like the coloring on an old-time picnic blanket. Like the picnic blanket in Aunt Sally’s father’s plantation house—the house she’d burned to the ground, more than a hundred years ago, during her very first Unmaking—which he’d spread in grassy places along the perimeters of his tobacco fields on sunny afternoons so he could hear the work songs of his picaninnies. The one he’d most enjoyed raping her on. Come to think of it, he’d probably made Aunt Sally on that blanket, one of those times he’d raped her mother on it.
Not that Ju knew any of that, of course. How could she have known? Except that every now and then, when Ju lifted those firefly eyes to her, Aunt Sally thought that maybe … somehow …
At the microphone inside the coffee shop, Ju was singing. When she sang, Ju’s eyes narrowed but stayed open so she could watch the effect she was having. She swayed just enough to set her lava hair swirling. When the door opened to admit another beardy boy, Aunt Sally heard her voice briefly, husky-quiet. The context was completely wrong, so it took Aunt Sally a moment to recognize the tune. When she did, she shook her head. What a strange, marvelous girl she had chosen to Make, instead of Unmake.
“Grace Holler.” One of those ballads that had seemed to swell from the very earth in the Delta, to float, already whole, on the sweet summer breeze, streaming out of some half-imagined shadow-past no one could quite remember. Of course, that song recounted a very real incident, or two incidents, really: the nights Aunt Sally’s monsters—acting on Policy, doing exactly as Caribou had said the numbers decreed—swept down on that tiny hamlet at the edge of the piney-green woods, and left it empty and silent as the lost Roanoke Colony.
From the trees, poor boys
From the trees, poor girls
They came, and they went,
As if heaven sent …
Heaven sent, Aunt Sally thought, half humming, missing the Delta if not her monsters. She missed Mother, too, of course. She even missed Caribou, briefly, in a particular, between-her-legs sort of way. Both of them gone these five years, now.
Way down in the humming, Grace Holler–emptiness of Aunt Sally’s heart, something stirred, wakened. Turning away from the window, she caught sight of her own reflection and stopped.
Ju’s song dropped away. So did the street. The wind, the line-dance racket from the bars next door and the more-than-occasional wolf whistles from passing manboys in their pickups, it all winked out, as though she’d switched them off. Or her reflection had.
Was that really her face?
That sharp? That thin?
With her fingers, she traced the edges of the cheekbones, twin points of a single blade. An Aunt Sally ice pick buried in there. How long had it been? she wondered. She reached out toward the window, but whether to cup her reflection or try to smear it away, she had no idea.
Months, she realized. It had been months. A year? Was that even possible?
In the beginning, the not eating—the eating less—had been a sort of game, like the Parties she’d once thrown her monsters just to give their nights variety, give them all something to look forward to. Or like Policy. It had provided structure and, better still, intensity to the endless, traveling nights with Ju. It had also been a challenge, the sort of sacrifice she’d been told mothers made for the good of their children. Aunt Sally had decided to make this one for Ju, so that Ju never had to see, or even know, until and unless Aunt Sally decided she should.
But eating nothing? No one? Was that even possible? Shouldn’t the Hunger have come for her, by now? Or rather, shouldn’t it have overwhelmed her, left her no choice? Because the truth was, it never left. It never had, not even in the old days, not even right after she’d eaten. Certainly, it was with her now. It was practically screaming inside her.
“From the trees, poor boys.”
From the trees, poor Sally …
The hand she’d raised trembled on its thin wrist like the last leaf on a dead branch. Aunt Sally cocked her head and watched it.
Hunger, she hummed, in an almost-tune she was inventing on the spot. Why have you forsaken me?
The man appeared over her left shoulder, out of nowhere, as though she’d summoned him out of the glass. She mistook him, at first, for another beardy boy; he had the beard, all right, and wore the same sort of heavy, crabapple-red checked overshirt. But he held his head too high, and his hands floated comfortably at his side, didn’t fold over each other or disappear mournfully into pockets. Also, he stood too still.
A beardy man, then. Beardy grown-up. Assuming that’s what beardy boys eventually did, if they got the chance.
Then it hit her. Startled and even scared her.
How was it possible for this guy to stand this close to her—barely five feet away, right over her shoulder—and stay that still? Even if all he could see was her reflection, and even if she’d barely noticed him?
Had her own charisma dissipated, along with her Hunger? Just how much of herself had she traded away or cast off for Ju’s sake?
“They grow up so fast,” said the man through his beard, and even before he’d finished, Aunt Sally started to laugh. She was relieved, she truly was. The issue wasn’t whether she’d looked at him, wasn’t her at all, in fact. The issue was that he hadn’t looked at her, yet. Not all the way.
She eyed his reflection in the glass. He was staring right through their reflected selves into the coffee shop, toward whichever beardy boy was his. Aunt Sally saw him smile.
“I shouldn’t be out here watching, I know. He’d kill me if he saw me. I just … I kinda love seeing him … I don’t know … claim his world, you know? Does that make any sense? Am I a terrible father?”
Laughter exploded out of her and shut him up. This was astounding, she thought. Amazing. Even better than mesmerizing or unmanning or—God knew—fucking them. It was better even than Hunger.
Or rather, this was a better kind of hunger. Tonight, it had come to her heightened, seasoned with something brand-new: the sensation of standing in the evening chill with another parent—caretaker, guardian, whatever—and keeping an eye on the kids, together. Watching them do their kid things. Claim their world.
Aunt Sally, Scourge of the Delta. Soccer mom.
The guy still hadn’t noticed her, yet. Not consciously or properly, though the process had begun. Aunt Sally could see it in the slow swivel of his hips as the pull she exerted trickled into him, through all the usual, vulnerable places. He kept on chattering away, though.
“Sometimes, you almost forget there are other people going through the same stuff, you know? You get so locked up in your own shit, or your kid’s shit, which, let’s face it, is pretty much your shit by this point, at least all the shit you have time for, right?”
“So right,” Aunt Sally said. She put a hand over her mouth, but laughter spilled out through her fingers. That made her laugh even harder.
“What?” said the beardy man, starting to turn his head. Aunt Sally quickly lowered her own, prolonged the moment just a little, because this was so much fun. Because it really was new …
The guy laughed, too, but not like he knew why. “Okay. Why are we laugh—”
“It’s just like you said,” Aunt Sally purred. “Here we are, without even trying. Without even planning to be here. Just staring through a window, standing together in the cold.”
“This isn’t cold. Not for Laramie. You’re not from here, are you?”
“Standing together where our kids can’t see us, but we can see them. Sharing a little…”—she could barely get out the words through her giggles—“adult conversation.”
And with that—she couldn’t hold on any longer—she lifted her face and let him see. He really was lonely, poor guy. A single dad, perhaps, and nearly as starving as she was, in his way. Because even that first, sloe-eyed, shadowy glimpse completely blew him out, shut him down, like an old speaker with too much music cranked through it.
There he stood, all locked up. Even his beard erect.
“Sorry,” Aunt Sally said, and laughed even louder. She touched his face carefully. She thought he might explode like a firecracker she’d lit.
The thing that made it all so marvelous was that she really did feel sorry, at least for a second. She thought she did, anyway. This was some poor beardy boy’s dad, after all.
Positively snorting her delight, she put a hand to the man’s chest, slipped her thin—so thin!—fingers between the buttons of his heavy shirt and felt the beating under there. The sensation restored her, some. Reawakened her. Resexed her, she thought, laughing still more. Lady Macbeth in reverse.
“Come on, partner,” she said.
More gently than she could ever remember—not that she bothered remembering these moments often—she led the beardy dad around the corner, into the alley between the coffee shop and the line-dance bar. The guy’s arms wriggled pitifully. His substantial, faux-cowboy body seemed to curl in on itself: an ant in the midst of giving up wriggling, succumbing to her flood.
She had continued talking out of habit. Teasing, the way she used to tease Caribou on the nights she let him fuck her. Or, to be fair to his memory, make love to her. That’s what he would have called it, surely. Almost certainly what he’d imagined he was doing. It had been fun, in its way, and for a surprisingly long time. Decades.
Then she’d burned him alive. Twice! That had also been a type of fun, Aunt Sally thought, though cruel. She didn’t especially want to be cruel, tonight.
So she jammed the beardy dad up against the cold bricks, slid her hand behind him, and pulled his head back to expose that magical, bristled, beating, soft place, complete with little Adam’s apple to bob for. So delicious.
“About the kids,” she murmured, leaning in slow, holding his eyes. Letting him like it. She’d forgotten how much fun it was sometimes to let them like it. How sexy that could be. Mother used to go on and on about that in the days when she ran around with the whistling fool she’d somehow Made. Before she’d up and ran off with him. And look where that had gotten her. “The thing is, kids just get so reckless. I have to admit, I find that kind of … inspirational. You know?”
At the mouth of the alley, the wind whimpered like a wolf. One of her man-wolves from back in the camp, waiting for her scraps.
Poor beardy dad’s every muscle was twanging now, stretching toward and recoiling from her at the same time. This was how guys like this reacted sometimes. The ones that fought her, that actually wanted to stay. Again, she felt a flicker of something like regret as she lifted on tiptoes, covered his mouth with her own, and sucked him in.
Then, and only then, did real Hunger sweep down on her. Oh, she’d forgotten. How had she forgotten this? Already, so fast, her lips slid to his throat. Against her breasts and hips, the man bucked, swelled, sighed, shuddered. She opened her mouth wide, wider, welcoming the whole world back in. She was literally at the instant of releasing her jaws when Ju laughed.
Jerking as though she’d been Tased, Aunt Sally froze, her teeth imbedded in the beardy man’s skin but not clamped together, his Adam’s apple against her top teeth like a pit and his juices oozing warm around it. In horror—in something approaching actual fear—she glanced toward the mouth of the alley.
Ju laughed again, a light and silvery sound, like rain down sheet metal. Aunt Sally wasn’t even sure if it was the sound or the sight of Ju there, the look on her face, that terrified her so. But the effect proved so strong that for a second, she couldn’t even get her teeth free of the beardy man’s skin.
There was nothing new about Ju’s expression, she realized. It was the one Ju almost always wore, the one that had bewitched Aunt Sally from the moment they’d met. That smile just seemed so unconstructed somehow, unpracticed, equal parts amazed and joyful and mocking. Or maybe none of those things. Aunt Sally had never been able to sort it out. It was just … a pure smile. Smile in its elemental form, with neither judgment nor doubt nor pleasure nor malice clouding it, which made it almost inhuman. Fairy-like.
That thought was silly enough to rattle Aunt Sally out of her stupor. Keeping the beardy dad pinned with her palm, she eased back, scraping bits of beard off her teeth with her tongue and the insides of her lips. “Hi, hon,” she called. “I was just—”
Ju’s next laugh silenced her, unsexed her all over again. That was the laugh that went with that smile, for sure. Pure laugh. Fairy laugh.
“You think I don’t know?” Ju said.
Aunt Sally gaped. Stared. The sensations that flooded her now were new, all right. Delicious. Horrible.
What did Ju know? And how did she know it? In five years of traveling together, the girl had never asked about anything, really. Not where they were going—except when Ju suggested another college town—or why Aunt Sally had chosen and taken her. Not whether they could have some home other than Aunt Sally’s Le Sabre or a hotel, or if they could travel by daylight, see some sun. She’d never asked to go back to the orphanage where Caribou had found her and say good-bye to the survivors, assuming he’d left any. She’d never even asked what had happened to the little boy and girl she’d come to the camp with on the night of the Unmaking, when Aunt Sally had erased the monsters she’d created from the face of the earth—interred them in the ballads disappearing along with her beloved Delta—and vanished into myth. Started over, with Ju by her side.
“Know wh…?” Aunt Sally started, but she couldn’t make herself finish the question. She was afraid of the answer.
Actually afraid.
So thrilling. What an adventure! Her first adventure in decades, maybe the first real one of her entire endless, merciless life.
Aunt Sally, Scourge of the Delta. Laid low by motherhood.
“What do you know, little witch-girl?” she finally managed.
But by then, Ju had vanished from the mouth of the alley, her laughter trailing behind her.