Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

"Is this me?" she asks the faces swirling in the stream. "Is this my face, too?" But this when and where slides smoothly out from beneath her before the light can reply, before snapping dog teeth tear her apart; caught up in the implosion again, swallowed whole by her own disintegration.

"They're all dead," the nurse says, and her white shoes squeak loud against the white floor. "Cops up in Milligan think maybe she had something to do with it."

"No shit?" the orderly says. He's standing by the window, looking out at the rain, drawing circles in the condensation with his index finger. Circles and circles inside circles. "Where the hell's Milligan?"

"If you don't know already, trust me, you don't want to know."

Far away, the beautiful man on his black horse fires a rifle into the night.

"How old were you then?" the psychiatrist asks Dancy, and she doesn't answer him right away, stares instead at the clock on the wall, wishing she could wait him out. Wishing there was that much time in the universe, but he has more time than she does. He keeps it nailed like Jesus to his office wall and doles it out in tiny paper cups, a mouthful at a time.

"Dancy, how old were you that night your mother took you to the fair?"

"Does it matter?" she asks him, and the psychiatrist raises his eyebrows and shrugs his bony old-man shoulders.

"It might," he says.

And the fair unfurls around her, giddy violence of colored lights and calliope wails, cotton-candy taffy air, sawdust air, barkers howling like drunken wolves, and the mechanical thunk and clank and wheeze of the rides. Her mother has an arm around her, holding her close as the sea of human bodies ebbs and surges about them, and Dancy thinks this must be Hell. Or Heaven. Too much of everything good and everything bad all shoved together into this tiny field, a deafening, swirling storm of laughter and screams; she wants to go home, but this is a birthday present, so she smiles and pretends that she isn't afraid.

"You didn't want to hurt your mother's feelings," the psychiatrist says and chews on the end of a yellow pencil. "You didn't want her to think you weren't having fun."

"Look, Dancy," her mother says. "Have you ever seen anything like that in your whole life?"

And the clown on stilts, tall as a tree, strides past them, wading stiffly through the crowd. He looks down as Dancy looks up, and the clown smiles at her, real smile behind his painted smile, but she doesn't smile back. She can see his shadow, the thing hiding in his shadow, its spidery-long legs and half-moon smile, its eyes like specks of molten lava burning their way out of its skull.

Dancy looks quickly down at the ground, trampled sawdust and mud, cigarette butts and a half-eaten candy apple, and "Get a load of her, will you?" a man says and laughs.

"Hey, girly. You part of the freak show or what?"

"'Course she is. She's one of the albinos. I saw the poster. They got a whole albino family. They got a boy that's half-alligator and a stuffed cow with two heads. They got a Chinese 'maphrodite-"

"They ain't got no cow with two heads. That's a damn fake."

"Well, she ain't no fake, now is she?"

And then her mother is shoving a path through the crowd, towing Dancy after her, trying to get away from the two men, but they follow close behind.

"Slow up, lady," one of them shouts. "We just want to get a good look at her. We'll pay you."

"Yeah, that's right," the other one shouts, and now everyone is staring and pointing. "We'll pay. How much just to look? We ain't gonna touch."

The psychiatrist taps his pencil against his chin and helps Dancy watch the clock. "Were you mad at her afterwards, for taking you to the fair?" he asks.

"That was a long time ago," Dancy replies. "It was my birthday present."

He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, makes a whistling sound between his front teeth.

"We never went anywhere, so she took me to the fair for my birthday."

"Did you know about freak shows, Dancy? Did your mother warn you about them before you went to the fair?"

"What's the difference between freaks and monsters?" she asks the psychiatrist.

"Monsters aren't real," he says. "That's the difference. Why? Do you think you're a monster? Has anyone ever told you that you're a monster?"

She doesn't answer him. In only five more minutes she can go back to her room and think about anything she wants, anything but fairs and grinning clowns on stilts and the way the two men stalked them through the crowd, anything but freaks and monsters. In the forest, the man fires his rifle again, and this time the shot tears a hole in the psychiatrist's face, so Dancy can see shattered bone and torn muscle, his sparkling silver teeth and the little metal gears and springs that move his tongue up and down. He drops the pencil, and it rolls underneath his desk; she wants to ask him if it hurts, being shot, having half your face blown off like that, but he hasn't stopped talking, too busy asking her questions to care if he's hurt.

"Have you ever been afraid that she took you there to get rid of you, to leave you with the freaks?"

And all the world goes white, a suffocating white where there is no sky and no earth, nothing to divide the one from the other, and the Arctic wind shrieks in her ears, and snow stings her bare skin. Not the top of the world, but somewhere very near it, a rocky scrap of land spanning a freezing sea, connecting continents in a far-off time of glaciers. Dancy wants to shut her eyes; then, at least, it would only be black, not this appalling, endless white, and she thinks about going to sleep, drifting down to someplace farther inside herself, the final still point in this implosion, down beyond the cold. But she knows that would mean death, in this place, this when, some mute instinct to keep her moving, answering to her empty belly when she only wants to be still.

"Ce n'est pas un loup!" the man on his horse shouts to the others in his company, and Dancy peers over her shoulder, but she can't see him anywhere. Nothing at all back there but the wind-blown snow, and she wonders how he could have possibly followed her to this time and place, when he won't even be born for another thirteen thousand years. The storm picks his voice apart and scatters it across the plains.

With the impatient wind at her back, hurrying her along, Dancy stumbles on ahead, helpless to do otherwise.

She finds the camp just past a line of high granite boulders, men and women huddled together in the lee of the stones, a ragged, starving bunch wrapped in bear hides. She smells them before she sees them-the soot of their small, smoky fires, the oily stink of their bodies, the faint death smell from the skins they wear. She slips between the boulders, sure-footed, moving as quietly as she can, though they could never hear her coming over the wind. The wind that blows her own scent away, and she crouches above them and listens. The men clutching their long spears, the women clutching their children, and all eyes nervously watching the white-out blur beyond the safety of the fires.

Dancy doesn't need to understand their language to read their minds, the red and ebony light coiled tight inside her head to translate their hushed words, their every fearful thought, to show her the hazy nightmares they've fashioned from the shadows and the wailing blizzard. They whisper about the strange creature that has been trailing them for days, tracking them across the ice, the red-eyed demon like a young girl carved from the snow itself. Their shaman mumbles warnings that they must have trespassed into some unholy place protected by this spirit of the storms, but most of the men ignore him. They've never come across any beast so dangerous it doesn't bleed.

Crouched there among the boulders, her teeth chattering, Dancy gazes up into the swirling snow. The light leaks out of her nostrils and twines itself in the air above her head like a dozen softly glowing serpents.