Kelly Link - Stranger Things Happen

Jasper's tooth, his whole body, burned in the fresh cold air. He looked doubtfully at Serena, at her uncombed spit-curled tails of hair, parted haphazardly over the new livid bruise. Her jeans had holes in them. He was wearing his college fraternity sweatshirt with a cartoon of two dogs fucking on it. His tennis shoes were covered in gray caked mud and his knees were still wet. "Serena," he said, "They're having a party."

"Well, that's what I said," Serena said. "Come on. I love parties like this. Everything's always so fancy. Cocktails and little napkins and weird shit on toothpicks."

Inside, the women wore elegant dresses. The men wore dinner jackets. They were probably wearing cummerbunds. Jasper's tooth ached.

Serena turned and made a face at him. "Come on," she hissed.

"Serena," he said. "Wait for a second. Let's find another door. " The farther she moved away from him – the closer to the veranda she got – the more the weight of the tunnel fell back on him. His tooth was twanging wildly now, like a dowser's rod. He ran after her.

A tall man met them in the open window. The man was all in black. He had a hairy face. "Here you are," the man said. His clothes were old-fashioned, the collar of his shirt narrow and starched. He smiled at them as if they were long-lost acquaintances. His lips in the black beard were red, as if he were wearing lipstick.

"You were expecting us?" Jasper said.

"Of course," the man said, still smiling. "The young lady was most insistent we make room for you both when she called."

Serena said, looking slyly at Jasper, "You do have a room available."

"We made arrangements," the man said. "But you must come in out of this weather. My name is Mr. Donner."

"I'm Serena Silkert, and this is Jasper Todd," Serena said. Mr. Donner held out his hand. It was neither warm nor cold and his grasp was not too firm nor too limp, but Jasper jerked his own hand away as if he had touched a live coal, or an eel. Mr. Donner smiled at him and took Serena's hand, leading her into the hotel.

They came into the room full of people. At that instant the music broke off. The dancers turned and stared at Jasper and Serena. A woman laughed as pages of sheet music lifted off the musicians' stands and came drifting and scuttering across the floor.

The room was longer than it was wide, with two enormous fireplaces set into the wall that faced the windows. From the fireplaces came a gnawing noise; gradually other small noises sprang up among the tables as the diners collected the scattered sheets of music. There were chandeliers and candles on the tables and the wind passing down the room caused the lights to flicker and dim. Between the greasy yellow light of the candles and the chandeliers, faces seemed to float like white masks. A man stumbled against Jasper. He smiled. His teeth were filed down to sharp points and Jasper flinched away. All the people that he saw had ruddy glowing cheeks and shining eyes – Why, Grandmother, what big eyes you have! The firelight elongated and warped their shadows, draped like tails across the floor.

"What kind of convention is this?" Jasper said as Serena said, "You're American, aren't you, Mr. Donner?"

"Yes," he said. He looked at them, his eyes lingering on Serena's forehead. "First thing, why don't you go freshen up? We've put you upstairs in Room 43. The key is in the door," he said almost apologetically, giving them a photocopied sheet of directions. "I'm afraid the hotel is a bit of a maze. Just keep turning left when you go up the stairs. Try not to get lost."

Jasper followed Serena through a nest of staircases and corridors. Sometimes they passed through doors which led to more stairs. From the outside, the hotel had not seemed this large or twisty. Serena walked purposefully, consulting the map, and Jasper stumbled after her, afraid that if they were separated, he would never find his way up or back down again to the dining room. Little drifts of plaster fallen from the ceiling lay upon the faded red carpet. Serena muttered under her breath, navigating. They went left, left, and left again.

Jasper, following Serena, had a sudden familiar feeling. He was following his grandmother, her beehive hairdo looming ahead of him. They were somewhere, he didn't know where. He was a small child. He fell further and further behind, and suddenly she turned around – her face – Serena put her head around the corner of a hall. "Hurry up," she said. "I have to pee."

At last they came to a hallway where none of the doors had numbers. They passed a door where inside someone paced back and forth, breathing loudly. Their own footsteps sounded sly to Jasper, and the person behind the door sucked in air with a hiss as they went by. Jasper pictured the occupant, ear against the door, listening carefully, putting eye to spyhole, peeking out.

The last door on the corridor had a tarnished key in the lock. The door was small and narrow, and Jasper stooped to enter. The ceiling sloped toward the floor, and beneath the white bolsters and comforter, the double bed sank in the middle like a collapsed wedding cake. It smelled fusty and damp. Jasper threw his pack down. "Did you see that man's teeth?" he asked.

"Mr. Donner? Teeth?" she said. "How is your tooth?"

"There was a man down the hall," he said. "He was breathing."

Serena pushed at his shoulders. "Lie down for a minute," she said. "You haven't eaten all day, have you?"

"This is a strange place." He sat on the bed. He lay down and his feet hung over the mattress.

"It's a foreign country," she said, and pulled her sweater over her head. Underneath, she was naked. A thick pink line of scar ran down under her collarbone. There was a faint mark on her breast as if someone had bitten her.

"I did that," he said.

"Mmm," Serena said. "You did. Maybe you broke your tooth on me."

"You have a scar," he said. He had traced his finger along the line of that scar, and she had exhaled slowly and smiled and said, "Warmer, you're getting warmer." He had bitten her experimentally, to see what she tasted like, to make his own small impermanent mark on her.

"That? I thought you were too polite to ask. That was a fire. My father's house burned down. I had to break a window to get out and I landed on the glass."

"Oh, sorry." He reached out a finger to trace that line again, to see if they ended up in the same place again, but she was standing too far away. He was too far away, lying on the bed.

"Don't be," she said. "First I took all the money out of the hiding place under the sink. Always look under the mattress, and under the sink." She pulled something velvety and stretchy out of the pack, held it up against her body. "Are you going to change into something clean?"

"These are my cleanest pants," Jasper said. But he took a woolly sweater out of his bag and put it on. He lay on the bed looking at her. As usual, she looked utterly at home, even in this strange place. He tried to think of Serena in her home, her real home in Pittsburgh. A house was burning down. She sat, domesticated and tame, nestled on a burning couch, watching a burning television, the kitten on her lap all made of flames. She was holding a map, he saw, a book of maps. The fire was erasing the roads, the continents, all of the essential information. Now they would never get home again. He tried opening his mouth as far as he could.

Serena pulled at his feet and he sat up and fumbled the bottle of aspirin out of his pocket. He poured a heap into his hand and swallowed them one by one.

The other thing from his pocket was the envelope with his tooth in it. Serena took it away from him. She stuck her finger in a corner, and ripped the envelope open. She held the tiny bit of tooth in her palm for a minute and then popped it into her mouth.