Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

She had an antique walnut dresser, with a mirror attached to it, one that could be tilted back and forth. Photos had been stuck into the mirror frame. They were sun-faded and curled with age and showed a toothy, black-haired girl in her teens, with a skinny, boyish build. In this picture she wore a Little League uniform a size too big for her, her ears jutting out under the cap. In that picture she stood between girlfriends, all of them sunburned, flat-chested, and self-conscious in their bikini tops, on a beach somewhere, a pier in the background.

The only hint of the person she was to become was in a final still, a graduation picture, Georgia in the mortarboard and black gown. In the photo she stood with her parents: a shriveled woman in a flower-print dress, straight off the rack in Wal-Mart, a potato-shaped man with a bad comb-over and a cheap checked sport coat. Georgia posed between them, smiling, but her eyes sullen and sly and resentful. And while she held her graduation certificate in one hand, the other was raised in the death-metal salute, pinkie and index finger sticking up in devil horns, her fingernails painted black. So it went.

Georgia found what she was looking for in the desk, a box of kitchen matches. She leaned over the windowsill to light some dark candles. Printed on the rear of her shorts was the word VARSITY. The backs of her thighs were taut and strong from three years of dancing.

“Varsity what?” Jude asked.

She glanced back at him, brow furrowed, then saw where he was looking, took a peek at her own backside, and grinned.

“Gymnastics. Hence most of my act.”

“Is that where you learned to chuck a knife?”

It had been a stage knife when she performed, but she could handle a real one, too. Showing off for him once, she’d thrown a Bowie into a log from a distance of twenty feet, and it had hit with a solid thunk, followed by a metallic, wobbling sound, the low, musical harmonic of trembling steel.

“Naw. Bammy taught me that. Bammy has some kind of throwing arm. Bowling balls. Softballs. She has a mean curve. She was pitching for her softball team when she was fifty. Couldn’t no one hit her. Her daddy taught her how to chuck a knife, and she taught me.”

After she lit the candles, she opened both windows a few inches, without raising the plain white shades. When the breeze blew, the shades moved and pale sunshine surged into the room, then abated, soothing waves of subdued brightness. The candles didn’t add much light, but the smell of them was pleasant, mixed with the cool, fresh, grassy scent of the outdoors.

Georgia turned and crossed her legs and sat on the floor. Jude lowered himself to his knees across from her. Joints popped.

He set the box between them, opened it, and took out the gameboard—was a Ouija board a game board, exactly? Across the sepia-colored board were all the letters of the alphabet, the words YESand NO, a sun with a maniacally grinning face, and a glowering moon. Jude set upon the board a black plastic pointer shaped like a spade in a deck of cards.

Georgia said, “I wasn’t sure I could turn it up. I haven’t looked at the damn thing in probably eight years. You remember that story I told you, ’bout how once I saw a ghost in Bammy’s backyard?”

“Her twin.”

“It scared hell out of me, but it made me curious, too. It’s funny how people are. Because when I saw the little girl in the backyard, the ghost, I just wanted her to go away. But when she vanished, pretty soon I got to wishin’ I’d see her again. I started wantin’ to have another experience like it sometime, to come across another ghost.”

“And here you are now with one hot on your tail. Who says dreams don’t come true?”

She laughed. “Anyway. A while after I saw Bammy’s sister in the backyard, I picked this up at the five-and-dime. Me and one of my girlfriends used to play around with it. We’d quiz the spirits about boys at school. And a lot of times I’d be movin’ the pointer in secret, makin’ it say things. My girlfriend, Sheryll Jane, she knew I was makin’ it say things, but she’d always pretend like she really believed we were talkin’ to a ghost, and her eyes would get all big and round and stick out of her head. I’d slide the pointer around, and the Ouija board would tell her some boy at school had a pair of her underwear in his locker, and she’d let out a screech and say, ‘I always knew he was weird about me!’ She was sweet to hang around with me and be so silly and play my games.” Georgia rubbed the back of her neck. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “One time, though, we were playin’ Ouija and it started workin’ for real. I wasn’t movin’ the pointer or anything.”

“Maybe Sheryll Jane was moving it.”

“No. It was movin’ on its own, and we both knew it. I could tell it was movin’ on its own because Sheryll wasn’t puttin’ on her act with them big eyes of hers. Sheryll wanted it to stop. When the ghost told us who it was, she said I wasn’t being funny. And I said I wasn’t doin’ nothin’, and she said stop it. But she didn’t take her hand off the pointer.”

“Who was the ghost?”

“Her cousin Freddy. He had hung himself in the summer. He was fifteen. They were real close…Freddy and Sheryll.”

“What’d he want?”

“He said there was pictures in his family’s barn of guys in their underwear. He told us right where to find them, hidden under a floorboard. He said he didn’t want his parents to know he was gay and be any more upset than they were. He said that’s why he killed himself, because he didn’t want to be gay anymore. Then he said souls aren’t boys and aren’t girls. They’re only souls. He said there is no gay, and he’d made his momma sorrowful for nothin’. I remember that exactly. That he used the word ‘sorrowful.’”

“Did you go look for the pictures?”

“We snuck into the barn, next afternoon, and we found the loose floorboard, but there was nothin’ hidden under it. Then Freddy’s father came up behind us and gave us a good shoutin’ at. He said we had no business snoopin’ around his place and sent us runnin’. Sheryll said not finding any pictures proved it was all a lie and that I had faked the whole thing. You wouldn’t believe how mad she was. But I think Freddy’s father came across the pictures before us and got rid of them, so no one would know his kid was a fairy. The way he shouted at us was like he was scared about what we might know. About what we might be lookin’ for.” She paused, then added, “Me and Sheryll never really made it up. We pretended like we put it behind us, but after that we didn’t spend as much time together. Which suited me fine. By then I was sleepin’ with my daddy’s pal George Ruger, and I didn’t want a whole bunch of friends hangin’ around askin’ me questions about how come I had so much money in my pockets all of a sudden.”

The shades lifted and fell. The room brightened and dimmed. Angus yawned.

“So what do we do?” Jude said.

“Haven’t you ever played with one of these?”

Jude shook his head.

“Well, we each put a hand on the pointer,” she said, and started to reach forward with her right hand, then changed her mind and tried to draw it back.

It was too late. He reached out and caught her wrist. She winced—as if even the wrist were tender.

She had removed her bandages before showering and not yet put on fresh. The sight of her naked hand drove the air out of him. It looked as if it had been soaking in bathwater for hours, the skin wrinkly, white, and soft. The thumb was worse. For an instant, in the gloom, it looked almost skinless. The flesh was inflamed a startling crimson, and where the thumbprint belonged was a wide circle of infection, a sunken disk, yellow with pus, darkening to black at the center.