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

Whenever Daddy was away dusting crops, doors were best kept closed at their place. Eyes lowered. Sketchpads held close to the chest. Notebooks scribbled in at night, under cover. Songs breathed, not even hummed. Unseen, unheard, Bets listened while Mamma grumbled on the phone about the sorry state of her house. Her marriage. Her life.

Sure as sunrise, the Aunties would come over next morning, armed with bottles and casks, to float Mamma out of her funk. They’d have Dolly on the turntable, a glass in each hand, smokes burning between chapped lips. The lot of ’em hooting and hollering, having such fun, it never failed to entice Bets into the living room. Soon as she peeped round the jamb, they’d call her in, put her on the spot, ask after her drawings or beg for a ditty, using words like clever and perceptive and dark-horse when she’d finally relent and pass her rough pictures round. Clutching her calico skirt, she’d creep in closer, passing the couch and coffee table, the uncomfortable rocker, and step up on the cold stone hearth to watch the hens peck and cackle. Searching for falsehoods in their flattery. Condescension in their comments. Finding none.

When they put the sketches aside, Bets saw their honesty, generous and plain. They wanted nothing from her but delight, maybe a song. Puffed as a robin, she’d sing ’til her face was pinker than theirs.

“Enough showing off,” Mamma always snapped too soon, shooing Bets out.

“Let her stay, Gayle,” said the Aunties, but by then Bets was already gone. Back down the hall, back to her books and paints. Back on her lonesome.

The cinder shovel’s small but sturdy, the worn handle a good fit for Bets’ grip. The blade’s got some new notches and the shaft is bending, but it’s holding up, keeping pace. Shunt, spill, shunt, spill, shunt, spill . Bets grunts as she digs, conserves energy by tipping the dirt gently beside her instead of tossing it like a stupid cartoon character. Folk who don’t turn soil for a living have some highfalutin notions about work like this—suburbanites and city slickers pay top dollar to visit hobby farms, to crouch in their chinos and pull weeds for a spell, to shove their manicured hands in manure for a weekend and call it a Zen experience. Being in the moment. Focusing on the now.

Horseshit, Bets thinks, shunting, spilling. There’s nothing relaxing about the pain in her lower back, the crick in her neck, the afternoon sunlight glaring off the dregs of water left in her bottle. With every spadeful, she’s time-traveling. Imagining herself elsewhere. The past. The future. Anywhere but the present.

Anywhere but here.

There had to be someplace to start, she’d thought. Some first step she could take. Some way to catch a break.

“Maybe I could get a gig at the Sugar Spoon,” Bets had suggested after dinner one night, when Mamma was mellowing on the couch with a cigarette and a bit of cross-stitch. There’d been an ad in the paper the day before, a local ragtime band looking for backup vocalists. Black and white, no pictures, the opportunity had been crammed in a few lines of text, printed between a psalm and a call for pageant judges.

She’d run the idea past Nanna Teenie that morning; the old ghost had nodded, squeezed, flapped her mouth enthusiastically. No harm in trying , Bets believed Nan’d said. So she’d dusted off the grave-dirt, gussied herself up, gone down to the saloon and auditioned before she could overthink herself out of doing it.

This time Bets performed the song she’d intended. Start to finish. And she’d done all right, maybe more than all right, her voice trembling only when she wanted. They said they’d call her tonight or tomorrow.

They’d smiled and said she was good.

Every time the phone rang, her belly squirmed.

“I hear they might be looking for singers,” Bets had said, aiming for aloof, managing something more like half-contained fidget. Now that she’d already gone and done it, it was safer to broach the topic. Mamma couldn’t ruin it after the fact. “Maybe I could try out,” she said.

Mamma had tied off a thread, then reached for her smoke, balanced it between her needle-fingers. She took such a long drag, her chest rattled.

“Be reasonable,” she’d said, squinting, exhaling clouds. “This ain’t but another whim. Ain’t it. When’s the last time you picked up a pencil? Or played that keyboard of yours? This ain’t no different. You ain’t no singer , Bets. It’s just a phase.”

“But,” Bets had begun. Stopping as the phone rang.

“Get that,” Mamma had said, getting up. Heading off to the john. “I’ve had so much tea tonight my back teeth are floating.”

“Got it,” Bets had replied. Reaching over to the side table, she’d laid her hand on the receiver. Didn’t pick up.

She isn’t asking much. Not some round-the-world cruise on a ship bigger than Napanee County. Not a million dollar lotto win. Not to be fawned over in fancy-girl dress shops like those snobby ladies did Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman —a film Bets had adored, immediately and profoundly, and was foolish enough to say so. While the credits rolled on their TV, she’d sighed happily, hand fluttering up to her heart. “That was so good.”

“Bets is found herself a new calling,” Daddy had said from the recliner, loud so’s Mamma could hear it from the kitchen. “Fancies she’s gonna be a hoor .”

She can still feel the heat of that flush. The lump jagging in her throat. The teary anger at being so misunderstood.

“It’s just a movie,” Daddy had said, laughing, clicking those damn silver teeth of his. “And you ain’t got the figure to make that kind of money.”

All Bets wants is to live a while in the city. Downtown . In an apartment. A sleek one with granite countertops and stainless steel fittings, picture windows without curtains, and halogen bulbs inset in white ceilings, beaming down like alien spotlights. She wants a place with no yard.

She thinks about the type of someone she’d have to become to match those upmarket joints. A catalogue model. A regular guest at the Grand Ole Opry. A rich man’s wife.

Nope, Bets thinks, digging, digging. Scratch that last one.

If she can’t find her own shine, she might as well stay home.

Shunt, spill. One little dig after another, accumulating, really gets her pulse going. She braces herself against the mound as the ground shifts beneath her feet. The crest is rising up fast in front of her; if anyone looked out the kitchen window right about now, they’d glimpse her blond bangs over the ridge, her hair teased up in a wave that’s beginning to droop. They’d see the cool arcs of brows she’s spent hours upon hours plucking. Pale green eyes that blink too much, fluttering to shut out a world that doesn’t yet match the one hidden behind her lids.

Although this third grave’s much smaller than the one Nanna Tee’s in, it’s still big enough to swallow a heavy duty Silverado whole. From chassis to skylight, quadruple headlights to a tray that can haul over three thousand pounds, the pickup’s well and truly covered. No sense burying nothing useful, nothing valuable , Mamma insisted. Sink rustbuckets instead of good timber.

Always was so practical, her Mamma. Never did nothing without a solid reason. Never acted on a whim.

Bets straightens up, cuffs the sweat from her brow. Pauses to take in the familiar view one last time. The flag jutting out from the house’s back gable, parachute fabric snapping in the breeze. All those red and white lines pointing nowheres, those jagged stars fading to nothing. At the end of the driveway, the rickety toolshed. She won’t miss its oil stink, its spiders, its stubborn door. By the stoop, there’s the swan-shaped planters Mamma bought at a flea market, cracked from too many cold snaps. The bleeding-heart bushes have grown wild around them, weird flowers bobbing in grass that was overgrown long before winter, and has now sickened into a yard of pukey yellow-green. Phlegmatic . That’s another word Bets once looked up: means apathetic, unflappable. Literally, she thinks, looking at that useless lawn. So heavy and dull, even the wind can’t budge it.