Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

Across the street, young Lassa Gwinn stepped out of the Fast Grab convenience store where she worked. She was as round as her big sister, Tiffany, but on a much smaller scale, and radiated kindness. “What’s going on with the poe-leece?” she called. “Somebody in trouble?”

“Fella done lost his wife,” Peggy answered. “Turned his back on her, and off she went.”

“Tall redheaded thing?”

“That’s her.”

“I seen her come out this morning. She was down talking to Rockhouse before.”

“That ain’t what he told the deputy.”

Lassa snorted. “That a surprise? Saw Stoney down there, too.”

Peggy felt claws of ice dig into her heart. “No you did not.”

Lassa nodded. “I sure did.”

“Was Stoney talking to the girl?”

“Didn’t see that. But if a pretty girl disappears within a hundred yards of Stoney Hicks, what do you think? Ain’t the first one, won’t be the last.” Then she went back into her store.

Peggy looked down the street at Rockhouse, and the urge to smack a shovel against his smug skull had never been stronger. Peggy took the final drag from her cigarette and tossed the butt into the street as she went back inside.

The school bus stopped at the end of the dirt driveway leading to the trailer. It was a single-wide, and there was a swing set beside it where Bliss Overbay sat waiting.

A lone ten-year-old girl got off the bus and waved at her friends. As the bus drove away, she trudged along the grass strip running down the driveway’s center. She had her head down, and she hummed to herself.

Without looking up, she said, “Hey, Bliss.”

“Hey, Mandalay. Got a minute?”

“Lots of math homework.”

“It won’t take long.”

The girl shrugged. “Okay.” She dropped her backpack on the cinder block steps and took a seat in the swing next to Bliss.

Although she was only a child, Mandalay Harris was the head of the Tufa First Daughters, and Rockhouse Hicks’s equal and opposite. Time and memory worked very differently for the Tufa, especially the full-blooded ones, and Mandalay understood that more than any of them. Bliss often wished she could gaze into those dark, enigmatic eyes for hours, searching for the secrets the girl possessed, secrets older than the mountains around them. But for now, Mandalay walked the world as a ten-year-old girl, and Bliss operated as her eyes, voice, hands, and occasionally, fists.

“There’s somebody in town who shouldn’t be,” Bliss said. “He looks like one of us, but he’s not. There’s not a drop of the true in him. I know it, Peggy knows it. You’d know it if you spent five minutes with him.”

Mandalay kicked at the dirt with her Sleeping Beauty tennis shoes. “I already know it.”

“But here’s the thing. He found the Swett graveyard. He saw the inscriptions.”

Mandalay frowned as she swung. “That ain’t right, is it?”

“I don’t know,” Bliss said honestly. “But remember how you told me to watch for a sign last night? I accidentally dropped two guitar picks in the water, and the wind blew them together.”

“He knows the music?” Mandalay asked.

“He’s a musician, yes. And he knows the verses on the Swett stones are from a song.”

“Then you have to go play with him.”

“But—”

“The sign’s pretty clear. The night winds want you two together. You fight them, they can make it a lot worse than a suggestion.”

She remembered the surge of unwanted desire when she first saw Rob at the Pair-A-Dice. Had that been the winds, making sure she noticed him? “ Why, Mandalay? Why him? Why me?”

Mandalay looked up at the sky, squinting her eyes against the sun. “Why him, I don’t know yet. But why you… because you’re the closest thing to what they want that the night winds can reach.”

“Closest to what ?” Bliss said, thoroughly confused. “You?”

“No, not me.” Mandalay looked at her with that patient, vaguely superior air she got when something was obvious to her but to no one else. The soul behind her eyes did not belong to a ten-year-old girl.

Then Bliss got it. “Oh, shit.”

Mandalay nodded. “Her time’s running out. This season will be her last. When the final leaf falls from the Widow’s Tree this year, she’ll be lost for good. Lost to memory, lost to time. Lost to the winds.”

Bliss could barely breathe.

“I don’t know what the night winds want yet. And if I don’t, Rockhouse don’t. But he’s got a bigger stake in this than I do because he started it. It’s in his best interest to finish it once and for all.”

“So is Rob here to help him, or—?”

Mandalay shrugged her little shoulders.

“That’s not fair,” Bliss said.

“I ain’t arguing that. But it’s what’s coming.”

“Does she know?”

“I don’t know if she even knows her name after all this time. She’s just a wisp of a thing now.” The girl began to swing higher.

“No,” Bliss insisted. “No, she’s not. Not yet.”

Mandalay jumped out of the swing and landed at the edge of the grass. “That’s all I can tell you. It’s all I know. I’m going inside now, I want to finish up my homework before iCarly .”

Bliss made a hand gesture that conveyed respect, obedience, and affection. Mandalay returned it, started to walk away, then stopped.

“I don’t know this for sure,” the girl said carefully, “but we’ve always been able to have babies with human people. So we can’t be that different from them, right?”

“Oh, we’re different,” Bliss insisted.

“No, that ain’t what I mean. Cut us, we bleed red. Tickle us, we laugh hard. Whack us in the head, we get dizzy.”

“I don’t follow.”

She smiled. The knowledge and maturity behind the smile, coming as they did from the face of a child, were terrifying. “You will. It’s right in front of you.” Then she went inside.

Bliss sat on the swing for a long time, watching her feet drag through the dirt as she slowly moved back and forth.

Exhausted, his head pounding, Rob fell asleep almost immediately. His mind dived straight into dreams.

He was alone, on a high spot that overlooked the valley. Here the great hills seemed different, sharper and edgier, as if they hadn’t yet achieved their lyrical, rolling quality. Birds swooped through the skies, but they weren’t buzzards or crows. They were immense and black, like ravens on steroids, and looked capable of snatching small children. In the distance, a single tree rose higher than the others.

Behind him, he saw a picnic table in a clearing, and beyond it a tree with a huge ball deformity in the trunk. An emu walked across the clearing, oblivious of him, and disappeared back into the forest. Then Rob saw an old man perched on one of the deformed tree’s large root knobs. He had a pipe in his teeth, jet-black hair, and wore overalls and old-style workboots.

And he was, at most, three feet tall.

Rob approached this perfectly scaled miniature old man. In dream-logic, this didn’t seem strange. “Hi,” he said.

“Howdy,” the old man replied.

“My name’s Rob. Who’re you?”

He tapped the root with the stem of his pipe. “You can call me Jessup. I’m the tree.”

“You’re the tree.”

“Sure. Just like them.”

He waved his pipe to indicate the woods around three sides of the clearing. When Rob looked again, he saw that each tree had a small person seated on it, near it, or in it. They were as varied as any group of normal people, men and women wearing jackets and jeans and T-shirts. They weren’t moving around or speaking, and they didn’t seem concerned with him, either.