Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“Sparrow,” said a voice behind me, and if I’d been my namesake, I would have been halfway across the City in a breath.

Context is everything; wrap enough strangeness around them, and familiar things become unrecognizable. It was Dana’s voice, firmly attached to Dana’s person. She leaned in the entryway of a brown brick building. She wore a dressing gown printed with herons and palm fronds that reached almost to her ankles, and a pair of little-heeled slippers of a sort I’d only seen in movies. Her pale hair was loose and brushed back to fall straight down behind her. She’d been standing there awhile; there was half a cigarette in her fingers, and the stub of another on the porch at her feet.

“You okay, sugar?” she asked with a quirk of the lips, and I realized I hadn’t said anything yet.

“Fine. I’m fine. What are you doing here?”

More quirk. “I live here. Upstairs. You act as if I caught you trying to steal that thing.”

I shook my head. The sense of unreality, Dana in mid-necropolis, had doped me.

“No snappy comeback?”

“I guess I’m just not a morning person,” I said finally.

“That’s better. So what brings you out?” She laid the cigarette between her lips and took a long pull. She looked disturbingly undressed without lipstick.

The cigarette wasn’t hand-rolled, and I thought I could see a tobacconist’s mark printed on the paper. Luxuries, rarities, and indulgences: Dana surrounded herself with them.

She had offered me her help. Here was a problem that might yield to wealth and contacts. If she really had them. And where else was I likely to find a solution?

“…I need a favor.”

Dana let the smoke out of her lungs and watched me through it. “Anything I can do?”

I suffered a rush of doubt—had I ever been out of balance with Dana, on the owing side of the Deal with her? Always too many debts. I pushed the corners of my mouth away from each other and hoped it looked like a smile. “I have to dispose of a corpse.”

From her face, I might have just shed my skin. She whispered something and spit left. Her eyes slid away from me, then back. “I guess you better come in.”

I followed the swirl of her hem off the porch and, sunblind, into the building’s front hall. The smell of last night’s lamp oil hung around my head as I climbed the stairs. Very old marble ones; each tread was scooped out and shallow in the middle, as if the stairs had been a watercourse. The second-floor windows were shuttered, but on the third-floor landing, light fell on us like a malediction in shafts of dust. It was very hot in the hall.

Dana pushed open a door and sauntered in. I had never been in a place Dana called home. This one was so much hers that I found myself shying on the sill like an animal at an outstretched hand.

We were in a lavishly cluttered, languorous room, where the light filtered through slatted blinds and folds of lace. The unmade bed beneath one window looked right and proper, as if the linens weren’t woven to lie flat, but would always form those shadowed valleys, that textile refuge. There were rugs on rugs, so that even Dana’s heeled slippers were soundless. The chairs were strewn with things: clothes, magazines, single shoes, embroidered towels, gloves, strands of beads, and a box spilling tissue and printed with a shop logo rarely seen in the Night Fair. On the kitchen table was a bowl of full-blown roses, and I smelled rose incense, very fresh. The room was sleepily warm, and all its colors were indistinct.

Dana swept a robe and a cedar box off a kitchen chair and onto a footstool. “Have a seat,” she said. “D’you want some tea?”

I wanted, in fact, to leave. “No,” I said, and sat down in a cloud of disorientation. “I want to move a corpse.”

“Well, if it’s already a corpse, then there’s no hurry.”

“In this heat?” I wanted to break this slow, hypnotic atmosphere with something crude. But the imagined stink of decay couldn’t hold out against the incense. I looked around and found it still burning on a wicker table half curtained with lace. There was a figurine there, too, draped with veiling, surrounded by an oval mirror, a shell comb, and nine pink candles. Maitresse Erzulie, the queen of love. At the foot of the statue was an apple, cut apart and fastened back together with straight pins. The skin at the cut marks was just starting to pucker. I thought of Cassidy the night before, suffering in silence. What was Dana asking for, so early in the day? What lay under Erzulle’s dominion that Dana didn’t have?

She stood at the counter, filling the kettle from a stoneware jug. Her hair fell straight down, between her face and my eyes. From behind it, she said, “This body, is it… Did you kill somebody?”

Her voice was smaller than it usually was. When I didn’t answer immediately, she pushed back the hair curtain and darted me a glance. I read her expression: If I had killed someone, well, the world was tough, and she was tough enough to live in it, wasn’t she? I realized suddenly that I didn’t know how old she was. A confusion of feeling smacked me from the inside, understanding, pity, tenderness. My thoughts leaped away from all of them.

“No,” I snapped.

“Oh.” She was trying not to be relieved. She moved out of sight behind me. I heard a cupboard open; then her fingers stroked my shoulder. “What kind of tea do you want?”

I shook my head, as if to dislodge something (which didn’t work). “There’s a dead person in my apartment. I don’t know anything about him, except that there were people after him that I don’t want after me. For all I know, they’re not the only ones after him. I don’t want his debts, I don’t want the blame, and I don’t want any tea. What I want is someone who can make him disappear.”

Dana shrugged. “Dump him on the sidewalk.”

“No. I mean disappear. I’m connected to him already. I don’t want City security stopping by. And the people who were after him saw me with him. If he turns up dead, they’ll come straight to me. You know the ritual for splitting with someone, when you draw a line across the threshold with a knife after they’ve passed? I need the real-life version. Just tell me if you know someone who can help.”

“Easy, sugar. While the tea’s making, I’ll go call somebody.” She gave me a sweet, indulgent look. “You see? It’s not so bad, having friends. Nobody can be by herself all the time. So who is—was—this character?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to decide if that was a lie or not. “It was just—sometimes you bump into people.”

“And take them home,” she added sourly. I wondered if she disapproved of my recklessness, or was only jealous of some imagined intimacy.

“Well, in this case, he got the worst of it.”

“What kind of tea?”

“Will you—Earl Grey,” I said, because I hadn’t seen Earl Grey tea anywhere since… Someone, once, had given me some, but I couldn’t remember who, or when. A long time ago.

She laughed and pulled a stopper out of one of a cluster of tins on the counter. The smell, very strong and fresh, added itself to the incense and unlocked a memory. At the edge of a town in what had been Ohio, in a farmhouse kitchen full of dirty dishes, a fast-talking man with piercing eyes behind thick glasses, who told stories as if they’d been corked up in him and my arrival had broken the seal—he had poured tea into a cup for me. The dark liquid had spun and swirled, and wide-eyed, I’d asked, “Why does it smell like that?”

Dana dropped some of the tea in a china pot and lit the gas under the kettle. “Be right back,” she said, and whisked out the door.

“Wait!” I yelled. “Wait… You don’t have a private line, do you?”