By Mary Kuryla
Sal was driving away from it when a freeway offramp she swore had not been there a moment ago rose up, and she took the exit. The ramp fed into a bunch of lanes but there was no ambush of traffic, hardly a vehicle, so the merge was one thing she did not have to fear.
Along the shoulder of the road, a woman walked sore footed over gravel outside what may have been a landscaping shop only it looked detonated from within, shards of pottery severing the vines that clawed the collapsed walls. The woman teetered, as if balancing on high heels, but as Sal slowed past, she saw on the woman’s feet the thin flipflops favored by tanned beach girls. The woman wore the build of an adolescent, skinny hipped and all knees, but her abdomen bulged the way only older woman can get, and Sal noticed because of how skimpy her cocktail dress was, how poor the fit.
It was odd to walk so close to an offramp. Odder still, given how rare it was to see anyone out on the streets with what had been going on. The woman gave the feeling of a hostess who had worked the night in a daylit casino. A kind of ordinary sleaze that seemed incomprehensible now. From the woman’s bony shoulder hung a narrow strap that ended in a small gold purse from which hung long blonde hair glowing in a ray of coastal sunshine.
The wig—it had to be—was probably for her job or maybe the woman was just into wearing them. The whitish hair on her head was patchy as the down of molting waterfowl. The wig at her hip, it was so much cleaner and brighter than the woman though it was not entirely fair to say the woman was dirty. The woman was going smaller in Sal’s rearview mirror, and the farther away she got, the more inexplicable the wig seemed, as if the wig were alive, a human scalp veined with pumping blood.
The light at the intersection turned red. Sal eased on the brake, though her foot wanted nothing but to stay on the gas. There was no opposing traffic, not a car, still, the light was red. She sat at the light and felt her heart bang at her chest. Still red. The emptiness of these streets unnerving after the cars and trucks that had jammed for miles up Sunset Avenue, the city’s main artery, precious belongings spilling out car windows, little girls and grandmothers, they were all without end and without beginning.
She must keep driving, moving, though she did not know where she would go. She had left behind everything and everyone whose love had become a burden to her, even her sister, had to, no choice, except for what she carried in the jar in the trunk of the car. She would need the jar to show at the checkpoints. The ones that operated the checkpoints, they liked proof that you had observed your duty.
The street on the opposite side of the intersection was dingy with donut shops and used furniture stores, and she knew the street in a comfortable and familiar way, could as well smell the cheap lemony wax rubbed into the tired wooden furniture in the store, but the neighborhood was wrong. This street did not belong here. Or maybe it was the town that was wrong, and this street had once been in a different part of it. The beach was a couple blocks west, wasn’t it? The air sure was salty, smelled fishy, and tech companies had gentrified the area, she was certain of it, but now all those flashy glass structures had vanished. The light still red. It was like the light had decided to come clean about the situation, stop pretending there was any reason to keep on, as if cars with drivers still needed to take turns if they wanted not to be dead.
Above the furniture store stood a billboard, the signage buckled and peeling as if abandoned in the middle of taking it down. Didn’t matter. Sal knew what it said.
GOOD WOMEN, HOLD YOUR BABE
IN THE WOMB OR AT THE BOSOM
IT’S THE LAW
Sal stared into the red eye of the light, wondering why she still obeyed, suspecting she did because driving through the red light might draw attention if there was still anyone at this corner who would notice, besides the woman back there with the jaunty wig. The wig might have belonged to someone before. Not in the same way the furniture in the store did, or like a wig pulled over your own hair. The wig might have been someone’s hair in the way that hair sprouts out of a human scalp. The hair that had hung from the woman’s purse shone as bright as the spangles on the cocktail dress. Wig and dress had caught what sunlight got through the black smoke that lay over everything now and had together gone all happy-go-shiny, but as she had come abreast of the wig a moment ago, she had sensed something off about it. A stiffness at the hairline where the netting was usually sewn on a wig, a stiffness the way a hide gets when not properly tanned, when butchered and left to curl round the edges. Sal was prone to fanciful thoughts, and she warned herself to go easy. Too late. Now she had an image of blood dripping from the ends of the loose blonde locks and streaming down into the gravel that had hurt the woman’s feet, and this line of thinking made Sal worry that the carnage she had just sped away from was seeping in and coloring like corpse-colored glasses everything she saw.
To hell with the red light. Sal checked the rearview mirror for the all-clear. Nothing in sight, not one moving object. Except the sideview mirror—it had gone comical with little gyrating sparks of light. The woman was at the window of Sal’s vehicle, filling it, fisting it, saying, Let me in, let me in, and she was opening the rear door that was somehow unlocked and she was getting in. The stoplight turned green, and Sal sped out.
The rear door flew open and shut then open again, and getting the door to stay shut without falling out of the car took some doing on the woman’s part. It was as if the woman could not decide if she wanted in or out of the car, even though her body had gone and gotten her inside. She was petite, true, but her size was not really the cause of the mayhem. The woman’s arms seemed at odds, unwilling to coordinate with the closing of a door. But the woman managed the door at last. She settled on the hump of the rear bench. Sal glared into the rearview mirror at her, but the mirror would hold only half of the woman’s face, no matter how Sal adjusted it.
“What makes you think you can hop in somebody’s car—in my car?”
“This is not your car,” the woman said.
Sal threw a glance over her shoulder to see what the woman wore on the whole of her face after a comment like that, but the wig hanging off the woman’s knee like a waterfall made of yarn caught her eye, and she looked back at the road only in time to avoid a head-on with a furniture truck stopped dead in the oncoming lane.
“Eyes on the road,” said the woman. “I watch the hair. I aways got an eye on it.”
The fuel sign lit up on the dash. Sal would need to find a filling station, but the road had fed into suburban office parks, empty, not an elf, not a sprinkler, and she could not say for certain how long this car drove on empty. She was a stranger to it. A dinging sound echoed through the interior. The woman’s head tipped in the direction of the low fuel alert. Sal told herself she was lucky to have gotten this far, driving this fast, without needing to refuel. She scanned the passing streets for a station, but behind her eyes the image of the hair’s scalp on the woman’s knee acted like a scrim. The scalp on the knee appeared to be making the sucking motion of the open mouth of a wading fish or was it the squeezing motion of a hand on a small breast?
“I see you notice the hair,” the woman said.
“Look, I don’t know who you are—”
“That makes two of us. Maybe three.”
“You and that shitty wig—”
“Does calling it a wig help? I have not found the word to be of much help.”
The woman produced one of those travel hairbrushes picked up in toiletry dispensers in bus stations. The plastic bristles made spastic snaps as she thinned the snarls. Next, she peeled the hair off her knee, it made the sound of a drain’s final swallow, and laid the scalp portion over her fist that closed reverently to receive it and commenced brushing with florid downward strokes. Even so, it took a few strokes to get the rhythm right with those arms of hers. Sal told herself that the grunts that accompanied each stroke were of the woman’s vocals; there was nobody else in the car, right?
“The hair likes to be brushed,” said the woman. “It’s not so much in how much you do it as in your attitude. You got to deal each stroke with a certain pomp. Honestly, between you, me, and that stoplight, the hair is petty and small-minded.”
At that, Sal saw the stoplight, red, and slammed on the brakes.
The woman shrugged girlish shoulders. “A roll of the dice,” she said. “I’m not complaining. The hair doesn’t insist on much, just those strokes. Some, not the hair mind you, but others of its ilk can get threatening.”
“Scalp?”
Soon as Sal said the word, she wished she had kept her mouth shut. The woman was deranged, talking nonsense, making out the hair was alive when it was not, though Sal could not say for certain it hadn’t once been part of something living. Well, what could she expect? You did not get away from the ones Sal had been driving from by playing nice.
The woman seemed not to have heard Sal, her attention on the wig, turning it side to side with a little bounce as if to show in the rearview mirror how the brushing had brought out the glow. “It prefers to be called the Hair,” she said. “See, petty. Overall,” the woman said, “the relics are unpredictable, but it’s the nostalgic ones you got to watch out for. The worst.”
The woman spoke resignedly, as if she were standing beside another hostess before a mirror in the casino toilets applying makeup to cover a black eye. “I have my own little theory about that,” she said. “It all depends on whether the merge went over without a fight.”
Sal had to keep reminding herself to watch the road. It was like everything she had gotten away from had caught up and now sat in the backseat.
“You got it wrong,” the woman said. “We are your solution.”
Before Sal could lie that she did not know what the woman was talking about, the woman said, “I think you and me, I think we can do it without a fight.”
Sal spotted a gas station. She would shake the woman and her wig as soon as she filled up the tank. She pulled beside a pump, patted her pocket to make sure she had the key and opened the door to get out, but the woman reached through the opening between the front seats and grabbed the flesh of Sal’s upper arm. The small hand pinched worse than a clam’s claw.
“You got away,” the woman spoke fast in the raw violet tone of a seven-year-old girl that has chain smoked for 30 years. “Don’t tell me how you did it. Don’t want to know. We’ve all had to do super uncute things. Rotten things. Foul. You’ll go on like this for a while, but it’s not because they can’t find you. They can take you anytime they want. Unless,” she said and she settled the wig on the passenger seat beside Sal, “they can’t find you.”
“What, are you telling me you’re going to tell?”
“I wouldn’t bother. They’ll track you down when they’re good and ready.”
The grip on her arm caused Sal’s flesh to burn and when she tried to yank her arm out, the fingers pinched in earnest. Her eyes landed on the wig. If what she was seeing was true, the scalp was nuzzling up against the leather seat like a newlywed.
“How come they don’t track you?” Sal only asked so maybe the woman would let go. Blood sprung on the arm flesh under the claws.
“You got to be untrackable.”
“Is that what you are?”
“Yeah, I merged with someone about a month ago. I think it was a month, feels month-y, you know, a whole moon.”
“Merged?”
“Call it how you like. You just kind of get with another person and after a bit, you become one person, a new person.” The woman smiled at Sal. “Presto-change-o,” she said, “now the guys in the tracksuits can’t find you. You don’t fit any of their data stores. They can’t find what they don’t know exists.”
“You get off on fucking with people? Why not just kill me?” Sal said.
The woman let go of Sal’s arm, but Sal just sat there shook up and wiping the tears on her cheeks. She whispered, “What happens to the other person?”
Sal did not know if she had asked to humor the woman or because she had begun to hope what the woman said was true.
The lines in the woman’s brow wavered. Her eyelids opened and shut but not at the same time and her mouth worked over phrases, lips smacking as if what she had to relay was long forgotten, was coming unburied.
“The other person,” the woman finally said, “is in you, and not. A lot of the other person gets sloughed off from the merge and that leaves a relic…a…a reminder, like of a time before all this had to happen. Before those guys pulled on those god-awful tracksuits and said they were the boss.” The woman thumbed at the gas pump. “Maybe it’s to remind us of the cost of stuff. But I’m no authority so quote me not. Some say the relics do no good to nobody, but I say play the odds.”
Sal listened with half an ear. On the passenger seat, the hair was curling at the ends the way a little girl’s hair will when she worked up a sweat. Some strands on the wig had twisted into knots all on their own, without anyone touching or the wind blowing or anything. How fine the hair on the wig was, now that she really looked, a childish fine golden towhead.
“Who was the other person?”
“Don’t kid yourself,” the woman said, ignoring Sal’s question. “The relics can be burdensome. They need constant looking after. That can be tough on us, loose-footed ladies. The relics will on occasion take on a life of their own. Okay, maybe I was a bit neglectful.” The woman smoothed down the hairs on the wig. “I took the relic for granted. It animated. You got to understand, the relic is what’s left of the other person. That is the one drawback with doing a merge.”
“Who did you merge with?” Sal said again. She no longer cared if asking about the merge had the power to give the thing shape and form, to breathe dread into life.
“Most merges are peaceful. All parties agree and things can go smooth when it’s all said and done. But some folks put up a fight, it can be a real battle—they don’t understand the benefits, ah, naïve or something, especially the youngsters, but, you know, she lost—they always do.” The woman winked at Sal. “Then the loser stews, and that yields one cranky relic, you bet.”
“What did you do to her?” Sal shouted as if the ones that she had unburdened herself of shouted through her.
“You suppose the little girl’s room is free? Wow, do I have to tinkle.”
The woman alighted from the car, and hopping from one leg to the other as children do when they’ve held their bladder too long, said, “You can no longer make this scene, baby, not in your body, not alone.”
She slammed shut the passenger door and ran into the station, vanishing behind the mirrored glass. Sal opened her door and stumbled out, colliding with the gas pump and accidentally knocking off the handle with her forehead. She had better get it together. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a wallet and stuck a credit card into the payment slot. They were rounding up nonnurturing women and their allies, shooting and burning out any that had stopped obeying their men, or plain stopped cooking for their men and laundering their tracksuits, and despite this, the banking system carried on. You wanted fuel, you had to pay for it. The machine accepted the payment. She shoved the nozzle in and turned on the pump. The rubber tubing throbbed under her palm and the sound of the liquid sploshing into the empty fuel tank told Sal she was going to be alright. But could they track her each time she bought gas? It wasn’t her credit card. She was probably okay.
She would not wait for the tank to fill, just enough gas to put distance between what she had run from and that woman tinkling in the goddamn little girls’ room, too. The woman would be back any second. Sal scrambled to the trunk, opened it, and took a step back from the smell. The wide squat jar was where she had left it inside a laundry hamper, snuggled inside a baby blanket. Nobody was around, she checked over both shoulders to make sure. She lifted the jar by the lid and looked in at the pale pieces of fetal tissue suspended in the thick red fluid, the partial bits, foot, torso and so on. Oh, god—Sal’s sob was mourning holed up too long—she would have to get it to a refrigerator. But what refrigerator could she use now? The small one they had been allowed in their apartment had been stacked, every shelf, with jars that cast pink light on the walls and made what little food the fridge could still hold taste of pond. Sal had taken one jar, her only jar, when she left. The other jars belonged to her sister. Unlike Sal, her sister vowed to keep at her duty, no matter how many jars it took to please the men. Her sister hadn’t wanted Sal to go, and her fists had filled with the short black hairs of Sal’s head when she finally broke away; this was the burden of ripping out of the beloved’s hold. All at once, Sal hoped her sister had put that hair in a treasured place. She wanted to get back behind the wheel and drive to her sister and beg forgiveness for abandoning her.
But the woman had already come up behind Sal, quiet as anything that stalked, and placed a mild hand on her shoulder, a consoling hand, and Sal felt a rushing relief at the touch. “That business in your jar won’t help you anymore,” the woman said before Sal could snuggle the jar back into the blanket. Then the woman took a bite out of Sal’s shoulder.
The jar dropped from Sal’s hands and rolled under the car.
“Don’t fight me,” said the woman, and she spat Sal’s flesh on the blacktop. Sal was using the tailgate to hold herself from falling as the woman dabbed the blood circling her mouth.
The woman threw her hands on her barely hips. “I wouldn’t do it, initiate the merge, if I didn’t need so much to do it. I can see you’re a fighter and would beat my butt if you weren’t in shock. The saliva gumming up my mouth, well, it works good, and that’s why this one took.” The woman swept a hand down her petite torso. “But nothing lasts forever,” she said in a voice ringing with sitcom punchline. “If the hair could talk, it would say, Told you so.”
Sal stood gasping without putting air into her lungs. While the woman reeled off betting odds of good merges and bad, Sal could not get a breath. But now a pulse shot through her arms, searing to the tips of each finger. Electric blood, hot and twitchy, Sal sucked in air. She leaped at the woman, but the woman did a neat sashay and dip as if setting down cocktails on a tray. She dodged Sal without a spill.
Sal slammed the trunk shut. The move shot pain into the hole on her shoulder. She howled but did not look back at the woman, just wove in wayward drunkardness to the driver’s side and dropped behind the wheel. The woman droning from behind, ticking off each finger on a child’s hand, “Nausea, dream falling, twisting, ringing in ears, you going to feel it coming on peculiar. Like a mini stroke. Or, like, if you ever been knocked up—will you look at me! Of course you been.”
Sal tugged the door shut. The woman stood by the closed window and her mouth kept moving and her fingers counting off, and Sal heard nothing more of the mouthings. She started the car and would have sped off—but something tugged against the car. A fist banged at Sal’s window. The woman pointed at the fuel hose stretched between the pump and the car like the arm of a loved one who could not let go. Sal rolled down the window an inch to bark at the woman to unhook the nozzle.
“Abuse of corpse. That’s what they’ll get you for,” the woman said. “Felony abuse of corpse. It’s nothing you’ve done, of course—”
Sal punched the gas pedal, the tires of the car streaking the concrete black until the hose gave up and set her loose. In the rearview mirror, the woman’s body gyrated chrysalis-like as she dodged the hose.
* * *
Sal had put about a mile between her and the woman when the road before her rose at a steep incline. She gave the car gas at the same time feeling a tickle on the tongue. She stuck the tongue out and dragged her index finger over the rough bumps, her nail hooking the thing on a shudder of disgust and pulling out from between her lips a single golden strand of human hair. The car crested the hill, and a billboard loomed on the horizon.
TAKE CARE, GOOD WOMEN
DON’T ABUSE THE CORPSE
The words stretched in red letters across the black billboard, echoing without sense the sound of the woman’s voice still ringing in Sal’s ears. Those words were some of the words the woman had used to warn her. Sal pictured her lost jar, spinning like a roulette wheel under the tires of the car. That woman had gotten inside her head—she was insane, not her fault, it was how they got to you, made you crazy or killed you. The rear of a vehicle fed now into Sal’s vision. She would have slammed into the car if she had braked any later. The car was stopped in a line of other cars before a checkpoint. The rolls of razor wire, the high-strung canines, the men in black and gray tracksuits and the machine guns, they were things Sal recognized, knew, could wrap her head around. The men might even help if she showed them the bite on her shoulder, might direct her to those medical tents for the displaced. She would say she was attacked by a dog. They would accept that; they knew what dogs were capable of.
What was she thinking? Her skull had gone upside down. She had better get right with things quick, turn the car around, get out, but soon as she eased her foot onto the accelerator to pull out of line, a car came hurtling from the other side of the hill she had just come over and rear-ended her. Sal jerked forward and slammed back in her seat. Her breath seared her chest, and she tried but could not twist out of the seatbelt that cut across her. In the rearview mirror, the young woman driving the car that struck hers threw up both hands as if to say, No harm meant. But the young woman did not get out of her car. Sal did not get out either. Safer to stay in the car, act like it didn’t happen, prepare to go through the checkpoint. To do anything else would draw attention, scrutiny, dogs.
The line was moving fast, a sign the drivers in the cars were pleasing to the men. Sal practiced speaking without her teeth clattering, her body shaking though it was desert hot outside, even as the blood from the hole rolled in clumps over her collar bone to slick between her breasts. Facing straight ahead, expression blank, seemingly untroubled, about to explode, she knew what was required of her face. Could not have gotten this far, solo, her sister left behind, without this capacity to placate the men at checkpoints. One more car and she was next.
She slapped her hand across the passenger seat for something to soak up the blood. Her hand landed on silky strands of hair. The strands seemed to quiver under her palm. She swore the wig licked and tongued inside her shirtsleeve, and she snapped her hand back in horror, hairs stretching stickily from her palm to the thing on the seat that the woman had left. Sal allowed her eyes to shift rightward without showing she was looking. The thing fanned up at the lip of the scalp, giving an impression of waving at her.
The sound of barking at the checkpoint, a shock of yellow bared teeth.
Terror honed Sal’s vision and dulled it in equal measure. If not for how the tracksuits had begun to multiply and swarm around the car in front of her in the way ants do around a crippled beetle, she would have killed the engine and gotten out of the car and onto her knees and prayed for salvation from that thing on the passenger seat.
The driver of the car in front had produced a large glass jar with a red lid. She held it out the window of her hatchback family wagon for the men in tracksuits to see. Her arms were toned and the bangles she wore trembled. The thing inside the jar was visible from where Sal watched behind the wheel. The jar proved that the woman in the hatchback had taken the proper steps when the baby came out too soon, the way of most pregnancies now. But instead of letting the woman and her jar pass through the checkpoint, the men took the jar out of her hands, and reverently. When the woman lunged for her jar, the tracksuits tugged her by the hair through the window and dropped her face down on the ground and made of her a black and gray mound.
Sal sat dazed. How could the woman be there one moment and battered and flattened into the pavement the next? How could the ambush of black and gray tracksuits pull it off so fast?
The hair brushed against Sal’s hand that had formed a fist on her thigh. She recoiled at the silken touch and looked down at it, open and prone on its back, scalp exposed and veined and oozing, welcome and urgent, the strands radiating out. Was it exhorting her?
One of the tracksuits was waving to Sal to move forward as the others cleared off what was now a smear on the blacktop, the dogs taking care to lick around the last of it. The visor on the vehicle Sal drove was thick and made to hold items of import. The visor had up to now done a good job of blocking Sal’s face from view. She put her hand between the visor and the windscreen and let her hand do the work of waving at the beckoning man. By the scalp, she pinched up the hair with her other hand, telling herself it was just a wig, the hole in her shoulder was just a bite, the woman who talked of merges was just a mad hostess, but without a jar, her own jar, she had to take the gamble. She drew the wig over her forehead to set it on her own short black curls. The hair squeezed her skull like a hand fisting a pair of dice. She swore a hot breath blew across her forehead for luck. Was the woman somehow still with her, would they form something altogether new, how could she possibly know the mechanics of the merge?
Nausea, dream falling, twisting, ringing in ears. Sal mouthed the words over and over as she drove between the steel gates of the checkpoint, and she sensed that leaving behind everyone and everything that burdened her was no longer possible, would never be again. The golden strands spilled at her shoulders, nuzzled the bite. Her car window falling—the man in the tracksuit seeming pleased with her—Sal was going through.
* * *
Mary Kuryla lives in Los Angeles, California and teaches screenwriting in the School of Film and TV at Loyola Marymount University. Her collection Freak Weather Stories (University of Massachusetts Press) received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, The Baffler, Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (forthcoming), and elsewhere. Her debut novel Away to Stay (Regal House Publishing) was called “a delightfully quirky debut” by Publishers Weekly. Kuryla also writes horror scripts, adapted from her short stories, and occasionally acts in horror films, wearing a wig.
