Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

They were watching our suburban Fourth of July parade, whose route comes down our street every third year. There were floats and bunting that glittered red, white, and blue; there were some kids in an off-key marching band, a girl turning cartwheels. Up came a horse-drawn buggy decorated with stars-’n’-stripes and the name of a car dealership, and then, in the bed of a pickup truck, a human-sized blow-up statue of liberty with a big head. Its torch flames were made of yellow plastic streamers, blown upward from a small fan below in the truck bed. They snapped and fluttered in the breeze.

The Lindas were looking out at the street and didn’t turn. Nearby Don and his aged father stood near a waxy rhododendron bush, the father leaning on his cane; up toward the sidewalk, on the burnt July grass, were the other motel guests, Navid and the Dutch couple. There were Burke and Gabe, just getting out of a car parked at the curb. I thought maybe I should talk to them, thank them for coming, but they were watching the parade, all of their faces turned toward it. I would wait, I decided.

I walked down the sagging wood steps and went over to Lena, feeling the grass poke between my toes; I took the gum-stick from her gently and tossed it into a bush. With her hand in mine I turned to look at the parade.

But as I gazed at it — the high school marching band passing — the marchers changed. Their uniforms faded to drab brown and gray; some of them were wearing hoodies or hats, some dragged bags after them, scraping the street — their instruments were gone, and instead of the instruments they carried sacks full of trash, sacks leaking fluids I couldn’t make out, leaving brown-red streaks on the road. Their heads hung down. Their passage had a dreadful weight.

As I stared at them, all at once, they raised their faces to me. Hideous. Some seemed to be wearing gluey, primitive masks; some looked like burn victims and others were pimply teenagers, some were middle-aged with bad teeth and glasses. Some were diseased, their eyes red-rimmed, lesions that looked like eczema or leprosy splitting the skin of their faces. The worst were crones with thinning hair, clumps of ragged gray sticking to yellow scalps.

But they were all Lena.

“No,” I said out loud.

They were Lena old, young, wretched, in a hundred distortions. That’s why we have to die first, I thought, panicked: before they get so old. I shook off the urge to throw up.

Around me the motel guests were watching the parade and smiling. They didn’t see what I saw.

I had to be defiant. It wasn’t the time to play dead.

“Is this show all for me, Ned?”

The parade shifted so that, for a moment, I saw normality — a second of cheerleaders with pompoms. Then the ruined Lenas were back, deformed and crooked, shambling. They made noises low in their throats. I saw a toddler so thin she was almost a skeleton.

“This is ridiculous,” I said, summoning a desperate bluster. “Give it up, Ned.” I moved my eyes off the parade and fixed them on the solid, actual Lena beside me. No one seemed to be hearing what I said.

I looked over my shoulder and saw the front windows of the house and sure enough there was Ned, his grin a death’s-head rictus through the glass.

“They got here fast, didn’t they,” came a voice. Will’s.

He was on the porch. I pulled Lena with me, stepping back onto the lawn to meet him as he walked down the steps and grazed my cheek gently with the backs of his curled fingers. Once he was near us the yard felt more physical, the house — and when I turned back to the street the parade was normal, just a small-town parade befitting my parent’s sleepy suburb.

My body slumped in relief.

“I thought we were supposed to be the ones that didn’t go crazy,” I said, and leaned against Will, my whole body sagging against his side.

“You’re not crazy,” he said. “He just wants you to feel that way. And look like it. So your suicide’s credible. Do you believe me?”

I cocked my head at him and nodded slowly.

“The others are here,” I said.

“They came when they heard about your father.”

“But Will. Ned’s calling the shots. He’s still — he’s in my head, messing around with me. The parade? To me it looked different.”

“So,” said Main Linda, approaching. “Hey. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“We’re all so sorry,” added Big Linda.

Navid hugged me lightly. He wore a dark suit almost as expensive as one of Ned’s, I noticed. And he was clean-shaven again.

In the street several jeeps passed by with banners supporting the armed forces.

“Soldiers,” said Lena helpfully.

“Brave young Americans,” came Ned’s voice from behind us. “How do you like the parade, Anna?”

I opted not to turn around. The others barely acknowledged his presence either, but I felt them tense and stiffen, I felt their mood turn gray.

“Can we see fireworks?” asked Lena.

“It has to be dark for fireworks,” said Will.

“That’s later on tonight,” said Big Linda.

“But can I stay up late?”

“Of course you can,” I said.

“I’ll see you then,” said Ned, and he strode down to the sidewalk, two suited bodyguards converging on him as he went, the engine of a parked car revving.

Watching him get into the backseat of the car, hearing the curt slams of three car doors in a row as the bodyguards got into the front, was when it hit me: one job remains to me. However bad it is now, I saw — his cartoon-thug tactics, the way he used my love for my daughter against me — it will be far worse if he wins. And not just for Lena and me, not only for us, not at all.

I’ve been blindered for months — maybe the whole length of my life. These visions and pixels make it obvious. Around me is the desperation of others, the arms of supplicants growing out of the dirt, and I’ve walked through those fields as though there’s nothing there but tall grass. I should have played dirty long ago.

The living spring from the dead, was the first thing I had heard.

I smile thinking of it. Maybe the dead had been me.

I won’t have Lena if I don’t even have myself. And Ned has a sociopath’s overconfidence, that’s his weakness. Maybe he’s made mistakes that can be used against him, one or more of his obvious, arrogant, flagrantly taken risks.

“Why are they really here?” I asked Will as we headed back into the house with Lena. The motel guests were drawing closer together on my parents’ lawn.

“To be of service,” he said.

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. —King James Bible, Revelation 12:7

62 percent of Americans. . think recent natural disasters are evidence of global climate change while 49 percent say such disasters are evidence of biblical end times. — Washington Post, 11.21.2014

I WRITE THIS in my old room with the bulletin board, where among the dust bunnies on a closet shelf I found a fortune-teller made of pink construction paper. It’s numbered with blunted pencil on the finger flaps, and inside each flap is an outcome scrawled in miniature writing. My friends and I made them up, giggling hysterically, during a sleepover when I was in sixth grade . You will be Famous (for Burping the national Anthem) / You will be Rich but Really Dumb / Our Love will never Die.

In the corner is a crate of my old records, on top of which an LP lies flat. It bears a once-famous logo, a black-and-white dog staring into the cone of a gramophone beneath the words His Master’s Voice .

When I looked into this Word file to see what I might have written during my lost spring, all I found after the cut and pasted-in email from Kay’s parents were two fragments.