Steve Erickson: Zeroville

The father picked up the daughter and carried her to the nearby cave where a campfire burned. The wind clicked as it blew, and with the passing clouds, the light of the full moon overhead fluttered twenty-fours times a second.

0.

But when she woke the next morning, she knew her father was dead, and she wondered whether it was because he had defied God or just because his time to die had come, a soul reset at zero.

She built the makings of a pyre, where fathers and daughters alike might go up in the smoke of holy fires. With great effort, she pulled his body to the place and set it on the pyre, and it was only in the light of the torch with which she was about to set the fire that she noticed it: there was, below his left eye, a red teardrop, caught in his beard, that she couldn’t brush away. And when she took her father’s blade and cut away some of the beard, she saw there was no brushing away the teardrop, that it was like stigmata stained to his flesh. Then she noticed the dark mark at the root of his hair that she never noticed before, and began to cut away with the blade more of his hair, that she might determine whether it was a mark made by God, or something no God could account for.

And there on the top of his head were faces like she had seen only in a dream, almost too beautiful to be recognized as people at all: the most beautiful woman and the most beautiful man in the world, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her.

I WOULD LIKE TO thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its generous support. Part of this novel originally appeared in different form in McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories .