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The north wind’s been spraying Mainland Runoff in our faces for days, but that’s nothing new, nothing worth complaining about. Here on Murder Island, we have a little saying: “If ever you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes and you’ll be murdered.” Or as the Weatherman likes to say: “Radar’s telling us to brace for more hot gusty winds, Mainland Runoff, and murder.” The forecast never changes.
Some things you can’t figure out. Not even with a whole heap of scratch paper and a ribbon of data from a chattering teletype machine. Not before time runs out. And time is like progress—she’s not stopping for anybody. The answer is out there, though, in the weather.
During the baby’s nap-time, a housefly buzzed past the new screen somehow, and landed on Danielle’s wrist while she was reading Us Weekly on the back porch. With the Okeepechee swamp so close, mosquitoes and flies take over Graceville in summer. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.
At the request of the author, this story has been removed from our online archive. We apologize for the inconvenience.
“I’ve had enough. I’m getting out of here, I swear to God I am.” Amy had been sitting cross-legged on the end of Ben’s bed, wearing the same jeans, t-shirt, and trainers she would disappear in later that night, when she whispered the words to herself, or to him or to the pitch black outside. Ben wasn’t sure which or even if she’d meant to say the words aloud at all. He just sat silently in the dark and listened.
Randolph hadn’t expected the map to misrepresent the route to the motorway quite so much. The roads were considerably straighter on the page. The high beams roused swarms of shadows in the hedges and glinted on elongated warnings of bends ahead, and then the light found a signpost. It pointed down a lane to somewhere called Lorn Hall.
Once, I thought I knew something about love. Once, I could stand on the roof of the tallest skyscraper in the city and look out across the shimmering candyscape of nighttime lights without thinking of what went on down in the black canyons between the buildings: the grand melodramatic murders, the willful and deliberate hurt, the commonplace pettiness. To live is to betray. But why do some have to do it with such pleasure?
I have this persistent sleep disorder that makes life difficult for me, but still I want to keep it. Boy, do I want to keep it. It goes back twenty years, to Vietnam. To Graves.
We begin in August, when the summer nights are ripe and voluptuous. Moths beat against the window, seeking solace from the darkness. August brings violent thunderstorms; cut power lines draw the darkness closer. We cup a flickering flame and make love that brings purple bruises.
Mary Hogan wrote the word Afterlife in red chalk while the children whispered. There was an urgency to their words, like spoken prayers. “Now, now. Pay attention.” Mary’s prim voice bounced against the dusty attic walls. She was forty-five years old. The time was now. The place was her mother’s townhouse in Astoria, Queens, from which she’d soon be evicted. Magic lived here. So did monsters.
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