Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“Have you seen Misty today?” William asks.

“I ain’t seen a soul since that lady from the news this morning. It was the damnedest thing. She said some people up at the college wanted to do some soil tests. Water tests, too. They want to know what’s going on,” he says, and his voice is hoarse. “I told them to come on down, they can do whatever they want so long as they pay me for it and they don’t scratch up any of the growings.” He finishes his beer, reaches in the cooler for another. He pops the top on the arm of his chair. He says, “You want to know a secret?”

William shakes his head.

Earl says, “I didn’t plant nothing. Not a damn thing.”

“I know,” William says.

“People keeps asking me how I got it to grow. They think I’m welding them myself, even if it don’t make any damn sense.”

“Misty thinks they’re ugly.”

“They don’t want to believe nothing I say, but it ain’t me. It never was me.”

“I thought they was pretty at first, but now I ain’t so sure. You think she thinks I’m ugly?” William asks.

The lamps Earl installed over the field start to flicker and buzz. The statues glow under the light, letting it glint off their hard edges and soft edges like sun on water. Even as they watch, something begins to grow. It starts near the back of the field. It twists up slowly, three strong bars of bronze that grow straight and narrow, until some meet in the middle while others keep growing and curving. It’s hard to tell what the statue will be before it’s finished, but William still guesses: a blue gill, a seashell, a broken back.

“Maybe it’s God,” Earl says.

“Maybe.”

Earl says, “Don’t you never start drinking,” as he lets another empty bottle fall.

William doesn’t move, and Earl doesn’t say another word. The bronze braids itself into a bridge with heavy slats and a thick rail, where a hand might hold as its body walked across, staring down at the spaces between the boards, at the earth so far below. The bridge stops halfway, at the very peak of its curve, where it should fall to the other side of the field, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t.

William takes Misty back to the barn. It’s midmorning and her mother is grocery shopping and Penny is with a friend and there is only Misty left, sitting on the front porch with her legs kicking over the edge. This time, William tells her to undo his pants. When she won’t, he undoes them himself, and he takes her hand and lays it against him. He does the same thing to her. It is just like the first time, except now he is being touched. Now she is the one who starts. Now they are both the same.

William’s mother makes dinner. She puts on a white blouse and dark jeans. She gives him a radio. A present, she says, from Paul.

“Who’s Paul?”

“You’ll get to meet him soon. He’s real nice. It’s impossible not to like him. He’s just got that way about him, you know?”

She puts more food on William’s plate than he has seen in weeks, maybe in his whole life. Green beans and corn-on-the-cob, mashed potatoes, roast beef, and rolls, the kind that you pull apart from the can and fold into little shapes. William eats three before he touches the rest of his plate.

“This is good, Mama. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, baby.”

She smooths his hair across his forehead and tries to tuck it behind his ear, the way she likes to see it, but it isn’t quite long enough. She barely eats, taking from William’s plate as she washes dishes and wipes counters and checks the phone.

“I feel like I ain’t hardly got to see you with all the extra shifts I’ve been covering,” she says. “It’ll pay off come Christmas though, just you wait.” She sits on the edge of her seat and smiles. She picks at a thread on the plastic tablecloth and the more she pulls on the thread, the more the plastic comes apart. “Then you’re always outside playing with those girls every time I come home. I checked on you in bed the other night and you weren’t there.” She keeps pulling and pulling at the string. “Where was you?”

“I don’t know. Sleepwalking, maybe.”

“That don’t sound like you.”

“Do we have any more beans?”

“I just worry, is all. You’re ten now. It might not seem too old to you, but you’re getting to be of age and I don’t want you making decisions like I did. I don’t want you to end up in a place like me, grown before you’re ready.”

“I know.”

“I there anything you want to tell me?” she asks. “Anything at all, baby. You know Mama wouldn’t think bad of you for nothing in the world.”

The phone rings. William waits as it rings again and again, seeing how long it will take before she gets up. She looks over her shoulder at him as he pushes away from the table, and says, “Remember what I said. You promise me?”

William closes the door to his room. He locks it, too, and later, he doesn’t answer when she knocks. He pretends to be asleep. He lies with his head on his pillow and stares at the ceiling as she tells him that she loves him and that she’ll never leave him and that everything, everything that she does, is for him.

Misty stops coming outside to play. When William asks Penny where she is, Penny shrugs. “She’s sick. She says her head won’t quit hurting. I thought she was faking at first, but.” Another shrug. “She don’t eat much. She cries a lot. She thinks I can’t hear her, but we sleep in the same room, you know? I have to hear her.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

“No,” Penny says. “Why?”

“Have you seen the new statue?”

“God, there’s another one?”

They go to the field together. The bridge still hasn’t finished itself. It doesn’t seem to want to be a bridge at all.

Penny says, “I wish somebody would just burn them all down, you know?”

“No,” William says.

He is staring at all the statues together. There are so many now that it hurts his eyes trying to hold them all in one place. Misty hasn’t even seen all the things that he’s made for her. She hasn’t mentioned them, not even once. William’s vision blurs and he looks down at his own two feet.

He says, “I still think the green one kind of looks like me. Through the nose.”

He turns his head, but Penny is walking back through the yard. There is someone standing in the front door of her trailer, but the sunlight glints on the glass so that William can’t see who’s looking back at him.

Earl sits in the lawn chair every night. He had the test results from the college framed and hung them from a wooden fence post, the stark white paper and fine print saying things about the field that most of the people couldn’t understand. But it means that nothing was found. That the statues are statues and nothing else. Just metal and lead, just grown. There is nothing in the soil or the water or the air to explain where the statues come from and that, the crowd says, makes the field a miracle. Earl doesn’t say much at all.

Once, William thinks he sees Misty. Earl has taken to having open house nights on certain days of the week. It draws more people, somehow, the thought of needing permission. The line stretches down the road, out of the holler and out of sight. William likes to stand in the crowd and listen to the things the people have to say about the field and about God, about how beautiful it all is, how perfect. That’s when he sees Misty standing at the edge of the woods, near the creek. She’s wearing a dark shirt, her hair pulled back in a low ponytail. She’s alone and she looks small between the trees, smaller than he’s ever seen her.

William yells her name. He pushes through the people, fighting against the bodies, ignoring the complaints. He runs across the yard and between the trees. He wants to tell her that he is sorry. He wants to ask her to help him burn down the barn. He wants to play in the creek with her and hold her hand. He runs through the dark, shouting her name, but there is nothing but trees and leaves and dark, wet earth. He finds the hair tie lying at his feet when he turns around. William buries that, too.