By K. Wallace King
It is a dense dark part of the woods, uninhabited except for things that burrow underground lightless and sightless. Even tree leaves curl tight and protective, shriveled from lack of sunlight, and the wind blows with a melancholic sigh. Lottie loves the dim of it, loneliness her favored companion, as she prepares a grave beneath a hickory for the sparrow, tiny feet clenched in death.
“Did your wings grow tired,” asks Lottie, “or did the sky throw you out?”
Opal is calling her, but the voice tangles with the restless fluttering of the leaves. The scarce daylight is dying, and Lottie can smell the rainclouds bumping above the trees. She bends more determinedly to her task. “Down deep so a fox won’t find you,” whispers Lottie. She tucks the sparrow beneath damp earth that fills the half-moons of her fingernails. She wants to sing a grave song for this bird she found beside the driveway except Opal is getting closer—
Come home or you’ll be sorry.
Lottie pats the little dome of earth. “Don’t worry,” whispers Lottie, “she won’t ever find you.”
The Lonely is haunted and her sister is afraid of ghosts.
* * *
Lottie lies in bed. The moon is rising. She listens to the chirp of crickets, the baying of coyotes. She doesn’t remember there were never coyotes in town before she was born. How could she remember what she never knew? But she has heard grownups talk about wild things coming down from the mountains. Coyotes, foxes. Even bears. Lottie spied a coyote a few days ago just before the sun went down, saw it slink around the corner of the old milkhouse. It looked like a raggedy dog. She left some cat food out for it but when she checked the next day, the food was still there.
Maybe it got shot. That’s what the farmers do. If the coyote’s light has gone out and Lottie finds it, she will put it in her red wagon, roll it through the cornfield to the woods. It will sleep with the others beneath the sighing trees.
Lottie barely hears the night song of the thrush outside her window, she’s falling into a dream where a woman she can only see in profile—lips red as claret and eyes fixed at a sky only she can see—floats toward her in a sea of roiling clouds. Lottie has re-imagined the painting of Mother Mary hanging in Gamma’s bedroom.
The woman is closer but no longer cloud-borne. She makes her progress toward Lottie with strange spastic movements. She is hopping. Hop hop hop hop. The woman’s legs are twisted together into one thick vine. She hops closer, and Lottie, dream frozen, cannot move an inch.
Lottie hears the woman grunt, she smells her breath, that’s how close the woman is. Breath that stinks of black mud, stagnant water, of things forgotten, Lottie feels the brush of the woman’s fingertips, soft as spider feet.
Run screams her brain, but Lottie is rooted and cannot move. The hopping woman turns to Lottie, revealing a face stretched into a nightmare.
Opal’s red lips are parted, her mouth opened impossibly wide. Beyond her teeth is an enormous black tunnel. Oh, how Opal wants to swallow little Lottie. Wants to swallow her whole.
Lottie would cry but her eyes are as frozen as her feet.
Trees whip their branches, click, clack, the wind moans. Opal’s tunnel mouth will swallow her little sister and Lottie, stuck in dream quicksand, doesn’t notice the brown sparrow as it swoops from the milky dream sky.
The little bird begins pecking the top of Opal’s head, pecking the spot where Opal’s skull gleams ivory between patches of weedy hair. The sound of bird beak hammering bone intensifies, a single tempo drum.
Lottie opens sleep gummed eyes to morning sun picking out the pink roses on her bedroom wallpaper. Outside the window, a red-headed woodpecker drills the trunk of the maple tree. Lottie’s dream is already dissolving into shadow. She climbs out of bed. It’s a school day.
* * *
Lottie smears a slice of bread with raspberry jam and puts it in the toaster oven. The toaster oven is a piece of crap, Gamma says, but they got it for free from church. They got a lot of stuff from church until Gamma told the minister to go to hell. When Lottie eats the toast, the jam is a hot red lava that burns her tongue. Lottie cools her mouth with orange juice that tastes of the back of the refrigerator.
At the kitchen counter Opal is cutting Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage with the butcher knife from the utensil drawer. Opal won’t eat the sausage, but it’s clear as she waves the butcher knife at Lottie, that she loves the shine and gleam of it.
Gamma pulls her sweater tighter and mutters something about the furnace.
The school bus will be here soon, and Lottie goes upstairs to brush her teeth. Opal never brushes hers anymore.
Lottie pulls on her backpack—blue, dotted with faded kissing lips and hearts. One of the straps is broken and the backpack hangs limply from Lottie’s left shoulder as she goes downstairs. She says goodbye to Gamma who doesn’t seem to hear her. Gamma sits in the kitchen beside the cold stove, talking to the hat she is knitting from a skein of orange yarn. But Opal is waiting for her little sister in the doorway with eyes full of waiting monsters.
See ya later, yells Opal after Lottie darts past. Buh bye, buh bye buh bye.
Opal’s voice trails Lottie, it’s as discordant as the Devil’s tri-tone, as ominous as a bag over the head.
On her way to the bus stop Lottie passes the pond. Goldenrod and Queen Anne’s Lace are blooming at its edges, almost summer. Lottie can smell the turn of season. Green water in the pond ripples though there’s not a breath of wind.
Buh bye, she whispers to the brackish water, Buh bye.
* * *
Lottie looks out the school bus window, watching the day develop despite her. She’s trapped on the bus, soon to be trapped at her desk. It’s the second week since Opal
ran away. Wayward Opal, Lottie heard church ladies declare to Gamma. Gamma tried her best, but that girl had a mouth on her that could make you want to scream. Redlipped and hot headed that Opal.
As the bus passes the Lonely, Lottie shuts her eyes and holds her breath until the bus is past the thick cluster of trees on the edge of the cornfield. Their branches are still not fully greened. This copse of trees is always bleak and bony even under bright sun and robin egg skies. Lottie opens her eyes and releases her breath in a huff when the bus enters the on ramp to the highway.
The girl in the slippery bus bench seat across the aisle is staring at Lottie and says, “You always do that until we pass the cornfield. How come?”
Lottie doesn’t answer, the girl has mean eyes, but the truth is she holds her breath so the Lonely won’t know she’s alive when the bus passes. If the Lonely were to learn, it might tell its sleeping dreamers. Wouldn’t they be angry that Lottie eats toast and jam and rides a school bus while they molder away under the dark black earth? It doesn’t occur to Lottie to question that she doesn’t hold her breath when she’s in the Lonely, though the thought is beginning to form when the mean eyed girl says—
“You have blood on your face.”
Lottie swipes the back of her hand across her cheek.
“Other side.”
Lottie swipes her face again and looks at the raspberry jam smeared on the back of her hand.
“Who’d you kill?” asks the girl, leaning forward in her seat.
Lottie feels cold crawling up the back of her neck, like a hand dipped in ice water.
“Didn’t your sister run away?”
Air stirs the hair on the back of Lottie’s neck. Or a breath.
“My brother said she ran away ‘cause she’s a whore.”
Lottie feels the hair on the back of her head lifted, then pulled. She spins swiftly around. Only that boy with the heavy glasses and lazy eye is in the bus seat behind her. He’s listening to something on headphones.
Lottie knows the boy didn’t do it, but she’s filled up with helpless fury. She thwacks him on the head with, Reading and Math Jumbo Workbook, Grade 3, and spins back around. In the seat across the aisle, the girl with the mean eyes widens them.
“Ow!” howls the boy. “Whatcha do that for?”
When the girl leans forward to holler for the bus driver, Lottie hisses like a snake and makes a karate chop in the air, repeating what Aunt Lucy said whenever she smacked Lottie, “Plenty more where that came from.”
Lottie gets an A+ on the spelling quiz. Her teacher gives her a sheet of dinosaur stickers.
#
When Lottie gets home from school Gamma’s bedroom door is closed. She’s broken hearted about Opal, though Lottie isn’t sure why. Opal wasn’t half as mean to Gamma as she was to Lottie—no one got it like Lottie—still Gamma cries a lot now, sniffling into paper towels because Kleenex are too expensive.
“What did I ever do to deserve it?” Gamma asks the picture of Mother Mary in her bedroom, asks the mailman when he drops off the mail.
Lottie stands behind Gamma at Kroger, watching her set the use-by-today package of hamburger, the mayonnaise with the red fifty percent off sticker, on the checkout belt. Gamma says to the cash register woman, “I raised her best I could. But look at how she ran off! Now Everett’s appeal is turned down. Everything has fallen to darkness in this world. God has shut the door.”
Lottie takes homework from her backpack and eats an orange peanut butter cracker and a slice of stale cake for a snack. Angel food cake is her favorite and Gamma made it for her the day before Opal disappeared. The farmhouse is quiet, sunlight peeking through the curtains with roosters running across the bottom panel. Lottie hears the hum of the refrigerator and a clang from the water heater in the basement when she turns on the tap to rinse her hands. She should do her homework but then all the almost summer day will be gone. She wraps another slice of cake in a paper towel, zips up her jacket.
It’s still May and the day has turned chill. The furrowed earth in the cornfield is littered with desiccated corn stalks, brittle leaves rustle like starched petticoats when Lottie passes. There was no harvest because Gampy is in jail although he’s innocent. How can accidently running over someone you happen to be in a bit of a disagreement with on a night black as pitch possibly be murder? But what are you going to do when you can’t afford a decent lawyer? The poor prop up the rich, don’t they? A rich man would have skated. This is what Gamma tells anyone who will listen.
The wind whistles through the rusted metal of Gampy’s old Ford F150, sitting on flat tires beside the barn. Lottie’s hair is blowing into tangles—Gamma used to unknot them, laughing, “Lottie got a nest, all she needs is a robin,” but now she knits in the kitchen next to the stove morning and night; hats, mittens, tea cozies. Right now it seems she’s knitting a sweater for a giant, the yarn spreading from Gamma’s lap onto the kitchen floor, a puddle of purple and green.
* * *
Lottie smells rain. She hurries through the cornfield, the paper toweled cake cradled against her chest. When she passes the pond, the surface ruffles into a lacey froth, swirling angerly into a mini maelstrom. Lottie begins to run.
Where do you think you’re goin’?
Lottie races through waist high weeds and spring flowers toward the woods.
Hey, creepazoid I’m talking to you.
Lottie is almost in the woods.
Come back here you little shit.
She feels her sister’s breath on the back of her neck, her side is a stabbing pain, but knows if she stops Opal will be on her. She’s made it into the trees, the undergrowth scratches her exposed skin, but Opal grabs a hank of Lottie’s tangled hair—she’s trying to drag her backward out of the trees, back through the field—but even as Lottie’s hair is pulled from her head she pushes forward. Fallen leaves crunch beneath Lottie’s shoes and the light is fractured and gray.
I’ve got you now.
And it’s true. Lottie feels Opal’s bony fingers wrapping around her neck. Overhead, tree limbs rattle, half-leafed branches wave like worried hands. Lottie ducks, wriggles free and, whirling around, stands face to face with her monster-eyed sister.
“You’re dead, Opal! You are dead and drowned.”
With a shriek, Opal breaks into little bits, swirling shards of people parts, wailing, wailing, a clamorous cacophony ending in a high pitched scream like a knife stab to the ear.
Lottie sees her sister come apart, but knows she’ll soon be back together again, back to haunt not only Lottie but the whole wide world.
Lottie races deeper into the woods, the cake crushed to crumbs against her chest until at last, stopping, she drops to her knees in the Lonely, scattering crumbs in a circle around her, as offering, as protection.
Wind whistles through the trees, cold creeps from her soles and up her back, and Lottie shivers. The light in the woods is a blanket of gray wool. Lazy snowflakes float downward through the trees. Branches click clack above her head as Opal, or bits of Opal, drift like red and black snow just outside the Lonely.
“Come here, come here,” singsongs Lottie, “sit by me,” patting the earth where the sparrow sleeps.
No you come here. Opal’s voice saws the air, a rasp, a haw, Come here you little bitch.
“But it’s so nice in here,” croons Lottie, “come closer, it’s so sweet and quiet, so peaceful, so nice.”
Liar liar I’ll set your pants on fire.
The trees tremble, the earth groans, as Opal appears behind a tree just outside the Lonely, black as a burnt log, red lips agape, tongue curling like a pink snail. You won’t fool me. I won’t ever come in there. No, you come here lil sister and I’ll show you what’s what.
“Sit beside me, Opal, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, darling,” says Lottie. Darling—a word the old man called her when she was waiting in line for a waffle cone at the 4-H Fair. He’d given her a pat on the fanny before Gamma pulled her out of line. “Come sit beside me, It’s so nice under these trees.”
Liar liar.
Lottie is crossing her heart and hoping to die when the wind stops and a shush falls over the woods. Waiting, thinks Lottie. The Lonely is waiting.
“Yes,” she says to the silence. “I understand.”
The trees bow around her.
* * *
Lottie waits in the circle of cake crumbs until Opal slinks away. Or dissolves. Or slithers out of the woods, belly to the earth. Lottie lays new leaves on the kitten’s grave, makes a twist of sticks good for chewing for the old dog left runover in the road, puts a first-of-summer dandelion atop the parakeet Gamma forgot to feed. She scatters handfuls of purple clover over all the unnoticed, the forgotten, the unloved in the Lonely. “Dream,” she whispers. The thread-thin light is fast disappearing.
Twilight. Eventide. Owl light.
It is nearly pitch dark as Lottie makes her way out of the woods. Above the cornfield the sky is gashed red by the setting sun. Across the field she goes as pair of redwing blackbirds swoop low over her head. She knows what they would say if they could speak.
The pond is still, black as onyx, though an evening breeze is ruffling the grasses, setting cattails swaying. In the house a light should have turned on at dusk, but the windows are inky and blank. Dread at what awaits in the dark house settles on Lottie like one of Gamma’s knitted blankets. What if Opal has done to Gamma what she did to Gampy before she died? Crawling into his brain, eating into his heart. What if Lottie goes inside the house to find Gamma setting it on fire or shooting at something unseen with the shotgun Gampy kept behind the bedroom door? Could Opal still do it even now? Crawl into a mind, leave it unwoven, thoughts jagged and confused? Make what you see the same as Opal sees—not this world but one like a wriggling snake. Crooked, filled full of black bile, blank but for exaltation in another’s pain. Opal has always been like this. Before. After. Always.
On the bank of the pond beneath the navy blue sky, under the first flickering stars, Lottie takes off her shoes.
The water is surprisingly warm though the mud is cold between Lottie’s toes. She pats the surface making little splashes, as if this is a new form of echolocation to help her find what she seeks.
She is fast up to her shoulders because the pond is suddenly deep, falling off from two, to ten, to thirty feet in scarcely three muddy steps. Lottie, her head just above water, looks across the pond. Was it this side where she fell in? Her big sister. This is where Opal drowned.
Isn’t it?
* * *
The kittens were brand new. Small as closed fists, soft as the skin on her belly. Lottie had found them in the barn when the mama cat went hunting. There they were in a nest of straw, mewling and blind, just waiting for Lottie to hold them to her heart, kiss their delicate skulls, fragile as eggshells.
“What’s that?”
Lottie turned, kitten held so gently in two hands beneath her chin. “Helen had her babies. Musta been last night, ‘cause I saw her still fat in the yard yesterday. Look, this one’s all black, even the inside of his ears.”
Lottie held the little thing closer still. “There’s three more, a spotty one, a striped one too.”
“Lemme see,” said Opal, squatting to the straw. She poked a finger at the tiger striped kitten then grabbed the black kitten from Lottie’s startled hands. “I’ll take this one,” said Opal, standing.
Lottie reached up for the kitten, “It’s mine, you can have any other. It came to me.”
Opal snorted, “It can’t come anywhere, it can’t hardly walk. You don’t know anything.”
“Give it back.”
Lottie leaped, trying to grab the kitten, but Opal at seventeen, so much taller, held the squealing kitten high above her head, laughing in that Opal way—not so much a sound as a feeling; a knife drawn across soft skin.
Lottie kicked her big sister as hard as she could, surprising Opal. Knocked off balance, she nearly fell from the hayloft onto the barn’s concrete floor below. But Opal caught herself. The kittens in the straw mewled. The black kitten held tight in Opal’s fist mewled louder.
“Give it to me, Opal.”
“You fucking little toad.”
“You’re hurting it!”
Opal held the black kitten higher.
“Please. Please give it to me. Please.” Lottie fell to her knees begging, crying tears so hot and heavy she was nearly blind, begging begging begging.
Opal flung back her arm and threw the kitten, fast as a hardball against the wall of the hayloft. Still grinning, Opal climbed down the ladder to the barn floor.
Sunlight filled the loft making prisms of Lottie’s tears.
* * *
It was a week later on a cloudy day—muggy, the air thick with humidity, tornado weather—when Lottie spied Opal at the edge of the pond muttering to the hands held out before her as if surprised to find them attached to her body. Intent on whatever she was doing, calling down familial demons? uttering a vile spell?—whatever she was muttering didn’t sound like words so much as grunts and soft squeaks. Gnats swirled above Opal’s head, a shadowy crown of flickering insects. Opal didn’t notice her little sister behind her.
Lottie, her own hands outstretched, rushed Opal from behind and shoved her big sister so hard, so fast, Opal had no time to react. She crashed into the water, sending waves into the reeds, setting frogs to croaking. Standing among the cattails, Lottie waited.
When Opal rose, frothing the water with panicked flailing, she opened her red-lipped mouth to scream, a mouth stretched wide as a tunnel, but it was full of mud.
Lottie waited until Opal disappeared.
Gnats clouded the brackish water. A water strider sped across the surface as one last ripple subsided. The sun moved sluggishly from behind a cloud, but the light only made the pond seem darker.
Opal never learned to swim.
* * *
Lottie has no idea if Opal lives (though dead) in the pond itself or can ghost her way about wherever and whenever she pleases. She has brought the red wagon to the edge of the pond and it waits on the little rise above. It is almost night now. The pond is warm as tears. Lottie takes a deep breath and down she goes. She can’t see anything, but that doesn’t matter. She’ll know by touch. She is good at holding her breath. Her lungs are young and she is determined. She feels something, but quickly understands it’s only a car tire, slimed with underwater weeds. Something brushes against her ankle and it’s all she can do not to dart to the surface, sparkling with starlight. Blindly, Lottie pats her way, rises for breath, dives down again. She is only in her underwear, so she is sleek as an otter. Deeper down she goes, patting, hands outstretched until—there. There it is.
Her sister’s hand is cold and slippery. Lottie ties the rope around it, the rest is wound around her own waist. Slowly, she pulls her sister’s body behind her to the surface, not realizing how easy it would be, not knowing about bodies eventually rising in water.
Getting Opal out of the pond is much harder. It takes all Lottie’s strength and every ounce of will to drag her onto the bank and to roll her halfway, it’s all she can manage, the body is uncooperative, into the wagon.
Under the starlight, there is no moon, Lottie pulls the wagon across the stubbly cornfield, pausing often to roll another part of her sister back into the red wagon. Getting her into the woods, through the bracken, would seem impossible, but nothing is, not when you’ve made up your mind. Lottie wonders if Opal’s ghost will appear to this strange procession, wonders what she might do to stop Lottie. Can Opal kill her even though she’s dead? She can’t allow herself to be afraid.
* * *
Lottie is about to turn nine. Soon she won’t remember all the things she knows now. But at this moment she sees what older eyes have forgotten, hears murmurs from beyond the “known world.” Right now, Lottie comprehends mysteries that time will gradually erase, leaving only a vague memory, like the beginning of a headache or a phantom limb that refuses to acknowledge its gone forever.
In the Lonely Lottie digs and digs. Above her head the trees sigh and crack their limbs. It is always so dark in the Lonely, the trees crowding out the sky, but tonight starlight drips like candlewax as with a grunt, Lottie rolls her big sister into the shallow grave. She scatters loose earth over Opal, covers her up with pulled bracken and dead branches. The trees drop their papery leaves around Lottie, gathering in whispering piles.
“There,” says Lottie. “Dream.”
A small brown sparrow chirps, a black kitten rubs her ankles. Lottie doesn’t know it yet, but this is her last visit to The Lonely. When she next tries to find it she will be ten and the summer will be over. The haunted clump of trees will seem to have been absorbed in the wider woods.
Lottie wheels the red wagon out of the woods, bumping across the cornfield toward the farmhouse as the light in the kitchen turns on.
* * *
K. Wallace King’s recent fiction appears, or is upcoming, in Harvest the Night, an Anthology of Folk Horror, White Stag, the No Sleep podcast, Chthonic Matter, Aseptic and Sadistic an Anthology of Hysteria Fiction, Cosmic Horror Magazine, and, as winner of the Novel Excerpt Award, judged by Laird Barron, her entry, The Sailor, appears in Uncharted Magazine. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
* * *