Kelly Link: Get in Trouble: Stories

She dropped the candle again. It was exactly the sort of joke Alan liked. Not a joke at all, that is. She had a pretty good idea where the other sleepers were — in Jason’s apartment, not on the way to Pittsburgh. And if anyone found out, it would be her job, too, not just Jason’s. No government pension for Lindsey. No comfy early retirement.

Her hand still wasn’t steady. The match finally caught and the candle dripped down wax on Versailles Kentucky’s neck. But if it was that easy to wake up a sleeper, Lindsey would already know about it.

In the meantime, the bed was up against an exterior wall and there were all the windows. Lindsey dragged Versailles Kentucky off the bed.

She couldn’t get a good grip. Versailles Kentucky was heavy. She flopped. Her head snapped back, hair snagging on the floor. Lindsey squatted, took hold of her by the upper arms and pulled her down the dark hall to the bathroom, keeping that floppy head off the ground. This must be what it was like to have murdered someone. She would kill Alan. Think of this as practice, she thought. Body disposal. Dry run. Wet run.

She dragged Versailles Kentucky over the bathroom threshold and leaned the body over the tub’s lip. She grabbed the iguana. Put it on the bathroom floor. Arranged Kentucky in the tub, first one leg and then the other, folding her down on top of herself.

Next she got the air mattress out of the garage, the noise worse out there. She filled the mattress halfway and squeezed it through the bathroom door. Put more air in. Tented it over the tub. Went and found the flashlight, got a bottle of gin out of the freezer. It was still cold, thank God. She swaddled the iguana in a towel that was still stiff with Jason’s blood. Put it in the tub again. Sleeper and iguana. Madonna and her very ugly baby.

Everything was clatter and wail. Lindsey heard a shutter, somewhere, go sailing off to somewhere else. The floor of the living room was wet in the circle of her flashlight when she went back in the living room to collect the other iguanas. That was either the rain beginning to force its way in under the front door and around the sliding glass doors, or else it was the canal. She collected the three other iguanas, dumped them into the tub, too. “Women and iguanas first,” she said, and swigged her gin. But nobody heard her over the noise of the wind.

She sat hunched on the lid of her toilet and drank until the wind was almost something she could pretend to ignore. Like a band in a bar that doesn’t know how loud they’re playing. Eventually she fell asleep, still sitting on the toilet, and only woke up when she dropped the bottle and broke it. The iguanas rustled around like dry leaves in the tub. The wind was gone. It was the eye of the storm or else she’d missed the eye entirely and the rest of the hurricane as well.

Light came faintly through the shuttered window. The batteries of her emergency radio were dead but her cell phone still showed a signal. Three messages from Alan and six messages from a number that she guessed was Jason’s. Maybe Alan wanted to apologize for something.

She went outside to see what had become of the world. Except, what had become of the world was that she was no longer in it. The street in front of her house was no longer the street in front of her house. It had become someplace else entirely. There were no other houses. As if the storm had carried them all away. She stood in a meadow full of wildflowers. There were mountains in the far distance, cloudy and blue. The air was very crisp.

Her cell phone showed no signal. When she looked back at her house, she was looking back into her own world. The hurricane was still there, smeared out onto the horizon like poison. The canal was full of the ocean. The Splinter was probably splinters. Her front door still stood open.

She went back inside and filled an old backpack with bottles of gin. Threw in candles, her matchbox, some cans of soup. Padded it all out with underwear and a sweater or two. The white stuff on those mountains was probably snow.

If she put her ear against the sliding glass doors that went out to the canal, she was listening to the eye, that long moment of emptiness when the worst is still to come. Versailles Kentucky was still asleep in the bathtub with the iguanas who were not. There were red marks on Versailles Kentucky’s arms and legs where the iguanas had scratched her. Nothing fatal. Lindsey got a brown eyeliner pencil out of the drawer under the sink and lifted up the sleeper’s leg. Drew a birthmark in the shape of a battleship. The water in the air would make it smear, but so what. If Alan could have his joke, she would have hers, too.

She lowered the cool leg. On an impulse, she lifted out the smallest iguana, still wrapped in its towel.

When she went out her front door again with her backpack and her bike and the iguana, the meadow with its red and yellow flowers was still there and the sun was coming up behind the mountains, although this was not the direction that the sun usually came up in and Lindsey was glad. She bore the sun a grudge because it did not stand still; it gave her no advantage except in that moment when it passed directly overhead and she had no shadow. Not even one. Everything that had once belonged to her alone was back inside Lindsey where it should have been.

There was something, maybe a mile or two away, that might have been an outcropping of rock. The iguana fit in the basket on her handlebars and the backpack wasn’t too uncomfortably heavy. No sign of any people, anywhere, although if she were determined enough, and if her bicycle didn’t get a puncture, surely she’d come across whatever the local equivalent of a bar was, eventually. If there wasn’t a bar now, then she could always hang around a while longer, see who came up with that bright idea first.

I wish I knew how to thank, properly, the following people. Thanks to my family: my mother, Annabel Link; my sister, Holly, and my brother, Ben; my father, Bill and my stepmother, Linda Link. Many thanks for their hospitality and encouragement to Gavin’s family — Eugene and Rosemary, the MacArthurs, the McClays, and the Grants. I owe Christopher Rowe and Gwenda Bond for their ghost stories. Richard Butner, Sycamore Hill, and the various Clarion workshops for Space! and Time! Kate Eltham and Robert Hoge. Cassandra Clare and Joshua Lewis for an enlightening discussion about evil pants. Fleur and David Whitaker for the use of their names. Ada Vassilovski and Peter Kramer and Jack Cheng and Barbara Gilly. Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Rees Brennan, Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Libba Bray, Elka Cloke, and Sarah Smith for reading early drafts. Thanks to Sean for suggesting that I try to write a new kind of story. Thanks to Jessa Crispin for the astrological reading. Thanks to Peter Straub for his stories. Thanks to Ray Bradbury, whose work was the inspiration for the story “Two Houses.” Thanks to David Pritchard, Amanda Robinson, and Holly Rowland for conversations about television shows. Thanks to the doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists in the Baystate NICU, and at Children’s Hospital in Boston, and at the Franciscan Hospital for Children. Thanks to the all-seeing, all-knowing Holly Black, for her all-seeing eye, her writerly brain, and for rescuing me from holes that I have fallen into. Thanks to my translators, especially the marvelous Motoyuki Shibata and Debbie Eylon. Thanks to the Banff Centre for the Arts for providing a desk, some elk, a bear, and conversation. Thanks to the editors that I’ve had the good fortune to work with, among them Ellen Datlow, Rob Spillman, Brigid Hughes, Francis Bickmore, Stephanie Perkins, Gwenda Bond, Yuka Igarishi, and Deborah Noyes. Thanks to Taryn Fagerness. Thanks to Renée Zuckerbrot, who is the best agent in the world, and to Molly Bean, the best dachshund. Thanks to my fantastic editor, Noah Eaker, for his care, his insight, and his enthusiasm. Thanks to Caitlin McKenna, Susan Kamil, and the entire team at Random House. And finally: much love and many thanks to Gavin J. Grant and Ursula Grant. I wrote some stories for you.