Smothermoss E-Book

Alisa Alering

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 346

Beschreibung

Set in an isolated 1980s Appalachian community, reeling from the brutal murder of two hikers, this novel is deliciously creepy and unsettling, yet gorgeous and dreamlike in its portrayal of two impoverished girls who must come to terms with what's happening on the sentient mountain they call home and also with themselves as they stand on the cusp of adulthood. 1980s Appalachia. Sheila knows she needs to keep her appetites in check. Isolated and struggling in ramshackle poverty, her desires – for food, for escape, for the perfect girls in the pages of her pilfered magazines – are about the only things she can control. But with every passing day, life with her exhausted mother and her half-feral younger sister Angie feels more like a rope tightening around her neck. When a pair of hikers are brutally murdered on the trail, Sheila and Angie find themselves drawn inexorably into the hunt for the killer. The mountain they live on is ancient and powerful – and it's using them for its own ends. Sheila knows the landscape's folklore is dangerous and unpredictable, but as the ever-present threat of violence looms larger, it might be the only thing that can save her and her sister from the darkness consuming their home… Somewhere between a rural gothic and a dark fairytale, Smothermoss beckons readers into the eerily beautiful woods of the Appalachian Mountains—as well as into a lyrical investigation of girlhood, bodies, class, desire, nature, and the otherworldly. Full of the picturesque dread of an A24 horror movie, it's We Have Always Lived in the Castle meets Winter's Bone, and will appeal to fans of Sophie Mackintosh, Julia Armfield, and Kelly Link.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for Smothermoss

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

1The Tangle of Rabbits

2The Twins with Too Many Teeth

3The Diseased Fox

4The Nest that Writhes

5The Creased Girl

6The Gobbling Beak

7The Starved Woman

8The Man of Stone

9The Ragged Membrane

10 The Bloody Red Eye

11 The Edge that Bites

12 The Seen Unseen

13 The Prisoner in the Cellar

14 The Sealed Gap

15 The Blistered Laurel

16 The Unlatched Gate

17 The Secret Keeper

18 The Thing in the Spring

19 The Green Tunnel

20 The Truthteller

21 The Stinking Thief

22 The Twisted Root

23 The Stinging Trap

24 The Hollow Sister

25 The Dark Path Rises

26 The Watcher Under the Rock

27 The Worm King

28 The Brush-Covered Wound

29 The Mountain Itself

30 The Sweetness You Trade For

31 The Retreating Fog

32 The Music of the Moss

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

Praise for Smothermoss

“At the heart of this story are two sisters, the mountain on which they live, and the persistent question as to which is more perilous, the natural world or the unnatural. Beautifully written, tense and absorbing, Smothermoss is an original story from a truly gifted storyteller.”

Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Smothermoss is a brave and beautifully executed novel. Utterly mesmerising.”

Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat

“Unnerving and beautifully weird.”

Claire Fuller, author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Unsettled Ground

“This beautifully strange book of the mountains is alarming and inspiring. Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss goes fearlessly toward realities dismantled by violence and the weird, wonderful world of the woods.”

Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book and The Invention of Everything Else

“A coming-of-age tale set in a world where the realm of the imagination meets stark, brutal reality and the wonders of nature merge with the uncanny. A highly accomplished, beautiful read.”

A. J. Elwood, author of The Other Lives of Miss Emily White and The Cottingley Cuckoo

“Many strange, slippery things draw together in these pages, and at the heart of them lies the complex, surprising relationship of two sisters and the mountain they call home: home, with all the good and bad that entails. Smothermoss has magic; I read it in one sitting.”

Aliya Whiteley, author of From the Neck Up and Other Stories

“Smothermoss is unsettling, intricately strange, and sweet as decay. Angie and Sheila are utterly real, trapped in humid adolescence in the shadow of a mountain who guards her secrets jealously. I loved this trek into Gothic Appalachia.”

Verity M. Holloway, author of The Others of Edenwell

“Smothermoss is an essential read for fans of Appalachian horror. Alisa’s writing is rich and vibrant when capturing the dark themes in this heart-wrenching story of survival and love. Don’t miss this one!”

V. Castro, author of Immortal Pleasures and The Haunting of Alejandra

“Smothermoss is written in kudzu, an all-consuming triumph of southern gothic, where the words creep into your consciousness and squeeze.”

Clay McLeod Chapman, author of What Kind of Mother

“Smothermoss is rich, strange, and beautiful, simultaneously eerie and so very honest. An exciting first novel.”

Kij Johnson, author of The Privilege of the Happy Ending: Small, Medium, and Large Stories

“Beautifully written.”

Hailey Piper, author of A Light Most Hateful

“Bewitching and beguiling, Smothermoss is a gorgeously haunting fairytale, written so evocatively you’ll swear you can smell the humid foliage, hear the whirring insects, and feel the snap of twigs underfoot as you tread deeper and deeper into the nightmare.”

Nat Cassidy, author of Nestlings and Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“For those obsessed with Appalachian lore comes a hauntingly atmospheric tale toeing the line of a twisted fairy tale. Centered on two sisters growing up in 1980s Appalachia, this novel is a gothic and propulsive read that will dazzle you from start to finish.”

Barnes & Noble, A Most Anticipated Debut of 2024

“Alering pulls off an evocative portrait of the creepy rural setting.”

Publishers’ Weekly review

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Smothermoss

Print edition ISBN: 9781803369952

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803369969

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP.

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: July 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Alisa Alering 2024

Alisa Alering asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

It is happening again.

Snow melts, the crust of frost cracks and heaves. Water sinks below ground, swelling channels. Sap rises. Wild garlic sprouts, arbutus creeps, and bloodroot quickens. Curved shoots of spotted skunk cabbage thrust toward the light.

Beetle larvae wake and gorge. Red-tailed hawks wheel and shriek. Gusts sweep a fledgling from the nest, hard smack on the ground. The countless populations that call this mountain home are waking, but the seeds of decline are already sown. Eggshells soften, limbs fail to form, leaves wither and curdle, water roils brackish and sour.

Overhead, the stars, distant cold brothers who knew the world before the mountain was formed, revolve unmoved. Redness flares. Scabs multiply, membranes stretch thin.

That’s the moment when unpredictable things seep in.

  1  

THE TANGLE OF RABBITS

Sheila knows she is supposed to love her sister. But it’s hard when Angie is snoring into her stinking bedclothes in the room they share under the uninsulated eaves. Sheila’s side is threadbare and neat, the quilt on her bed stitched from scratchy pieces of men’s suits: charcoal, slate pinstripe, and February sky.

Angie’s side—but that’s the problem, because Angie doesn’t keep to her side. She sprawls like a dog flopped in the mud on a hot summer day. Like the poison ivy twining through the blackberry canes and spreading all over the shady side of the house. Cut down the tangle and in six weeks it will grow back twice as thick.

Sheila, though, likes to know where things are. That, if she needs to, she can walk into the room with her eyes closed and put her hand on the thing she wants. There isn’t much you can count on in life, but most of the time, things stay where you leave them. Things don’t get into fights at the Skyline Inn and draw a knife on the bartender when he tells you to settle down or get out and then get taken away in handcuffs and sentenced to three years in the penitentiary upstate. They don’t die in a motorcycle accident before you get to know them. They don’t haul you off to live in town with some man who smells like smoke and sweat and gasoline and get pregnant with a sister you will never understand only to sneak you all out in the dark one night with only the clothes on your back and creep back in with the old woman on the mountain where you were born. No, things are reliable.

Angie doesn’t have a quilt. Her clothes are mixed with her blankets and her shoes and the comic books she steals when she is sent to buy milk at the store in town. Her pillow is tumbled on the floor with the stuffing leaking across the tattered rug, the whole mess scattered with the dog-eared pack of index cards Angie keeps bundled in a rubber band and is always taking out and shuffling and drawing on.

It’s no wonder the kids at school call Angie dirty and a liar and a thief. She is dirty. And she is a thief. She will stand there with something of yours tight in her fist and look you in the eye and tell you she didn’t take it, you’re crazy, she’s never seen your locket, lunch money, felt-tip pen.

Sheila definitely doesn’t love her sister when Angie takes the last pancake at breakfast, the one that is Sheila’s by any standard of decency since Angie already ate four and Sheila only two. Sheila is eating slow so she can pretend they don’t live like animals, so she can practice chewing one bite at a time, not like the dogs falling over themselves when she brings out the stew pot and dumps the last dregs on the ground behind the porch.

Sheila is eating like she imagines a person in the city might eat. It’s almost working. Her stomach is warm now, and she isn’t ravenous anymore. She has beaten her hunger, defied it, and takes every bite slower than the last. Maybe she isn’t going to eat that last pancake, but she is going to enjoy sitting at the table and staring it down. Slowly but surely outlasting it, winning by being better and stronger. Then Angie grabs the pancake with the fingers she has just licked grape jelly off of, and folds it into her mouth.

Sheila can’t do battle with an empty plate. She can’t show the space where a pancake used to be that she is better than it. When she glares her hate across the table, Angie says, “What? You weren’t going to eat it.”

It’s true; she wasn’t. But that’s not the point at all. That’s what Angie will never understand.

* * *

In spring it is mushroom time. The sisters go out into the woods where, only the week before, the rocks were glazed with frost and tiny fortresses of ice heaved up from the mud on the banks of the stream. They roam under the sycamores, carrying paper grocery bags and staring at the ground. Sheila tries hard, but she is distracted by everything—by snail shells and moth casings and thumbnails of green piercing through the dead leaves. Angie blunders, her big feet tripping. But at the end of the morning, it’s her bag that is full.

Sheila wants to accuse Angie of cheating, but there’s no way she could have. They are out here alone together. The gap where the Appalachian Trail crosses near the farthest edge of the property is empty today. There are no flashes of bright outdoor clothing, no conversations carried on the wind, no scrape of hiking poles on slippery rocks. No one else could have picked the mushrooms for her. Even if Angie had found them on a different day and stockpiled them behind a log to scoop into her sack today, it was still she herself who had sniffed them out from the leaves and twigs and the corncob fungus that looks the same as a morel but can’t be eaten.

Angie drops onto a moss-furred rock with her full bag at her feet, waiting for Sheila to catch up.

“Why don’t you ever have a boyfriend?” Angie asks, picking at a scab on her arm.

“Who says I don’t?” Sheila thinks she sees a mushroom half buried under a lacy maple leaf, but it’s only an old walnut gone black and mushy.

“Don’t you want one?”

This isn’t a question Sheila wants to answer. She feels cold. Or maybe she is hot. Whatever it is, it’s not a nice feeling. It’s raw, and she wants it to go away. She crouches and pretends she has spotted something extremely interesting near a rotting stump. But she doesn’t have to worry, because Angie doesn’t want to talk about Sheila. Angie wants to talk about Angie.

“I want a boyfriend,” Angie says. “Like Troy.”

“Mmm,” Sheila says, like she doesn’t know what Angie is talking about. But she knows perfectly well. Troy is three years older than Angie and two years younger than Sheila. He is on the baseball team. At lunch, he sits with the most popular boys in his class. He is loud. He talks back to teachers. He bullies younger boys and kids who wear glasses. He calls Angie “lesbo” and holds his nose when she trudges by, waving his hand at an invisible stink.

“He’s not very nice to me,” Angie says. “But that’s just because he has to act that way. In front of the others.”

So she does know, Sheila thinks. Why would you do that to yourself? How could you want someone who so clearly despises you?

“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if he asked me to the prom. Or homecoming. When we showed up together, everything would be different.”

Sheila used to imagine scenes like this too. Before she realized that nothing ever changes. Or if it does, things only get worse, not better. In her own dreams, when she tries to imagine other places, other futures, the picture won’t come clear. Her view is blocked by a dense white fog. Beyond that thick smear is the place she wants to get to. She doesn’t know where it is or what it looks like. Only that it’s not here, and not this.

They go back to the house and dump the contents of their bags into a bucket, and Sheila pumps water over them. Angie runs into the house for salt and pours it in. The water is cold on Sheila’s hands as she swishes the mushrooms around, the bugs crawling out to die. Leaf mold and dirt sinks to the bottom.

“They look like brains,” Angie says, leaning over Sheila’s shoulder.

Sheila watches her own hand, strangely blue in the water, and the bugs struggling to find a way out.

“If you eat enough of them, maybe you’ll get smart,” Sheila says, and whatever feeling had been between them in the woods is gone.

“You’re not the only one who’s smart. You’re just good at following the rules. I know stuff you don’t know. I know things you’ll never know,” Angie shouts and lopes away toward the rabbit hutches, stirring up mud behind her.

* * *

Taking care of the rabbits is Sheila’s job. The rabbits live in a crooked hutch leaning against the western wall of the house. When Sheila brings an old bean can full of pellets to the cage and unlatches the wire door, they crowd into the gap, all soft whiskered noses and liquid brown eyes. Harmless, helpless.

Sheila hates the rabbits. Hates them for being so stupid and so trusting. For making her want to pet them and love them and hold them cradled against her cheek. Hates their whisper-soft fur that feels like love against her skin. She swats at them, and they skitter away. But they come back and crowd around her with their sleek necks and inquiring noses.

Sheila doesn’t have to kill them. Her mother and the old woman do that. But she does have to feed them. To fool them. To keep them alive long enough to die. To make sure the possums haven’t dug up the bottom of the hutch and carried them away. Other kids eat Lebanon bologna and Hamburger Helper. Sheila and her family eat rabbit and squirrel and deer.

In summer, the rabbits stretch out, feet splayed, panting in the heat, their long ears limp. In winter, they huddle together, crouched behind a wind block of old hay and newspaper in the farthest corner, trying to coax a few nonexistent degrees of stray warmth from the house wall.

Angie loves the rabbits, but that’s because she doesn’t know any better. The events of the real world seem to slide off her as if she’s been greased. Angie’s not dumb. She knows what happens to the rabbits, only it doesn’t seem to affect her much. She squeals when she greets the rabbits. She squeezes them roughly and names them all. The one with the white spot above her nose is Sally. The one with the ear that falls crookedly to the side is Jack because he’s a pirate. And when she stabs a fork into slices of them on her plate, she doesn’t seem to know.

The sign fixed at the bottom of the lane is a weathered piece of plywood, nailed to a stake and driven into the ground next to the rusty mailbox. Strokes of red paint spell out “Rabbits $5”. But no stranger ever comes up their long, rutted lane. They only ever trade with neighbors. The rest of the rabbits go into the pot. Into stew in the winter with a carrot and turnips, in summer sliced cold into sandwiches on potato rolls with margarine. Sheila’s mother likes them with baked beans; the old woman prefers them with dandelion.

But there is one gray doe, Pearl, who knows better. She hunches in the far corner, chin resting on folds of fat at her neck. Her eyes are small and distrustful. If Sheila stretches out a hand, Pearl crouches even lower, flattening her ears against her back, and growls.

* * *

There is a scar on Sheila’s neck. On her throat, really. It is thick and pink and goes right around the front like a necklace. She doesn’t try to hide it. Doesn’t wear collared shirts buttoned to her chin. Doesn’t pull her hair forward so the ends fall like cloaking ivy. Doesn’t flutter her hands like birds to distract when she talks, saying look over here not there. She doesn’t offer anything but a flat, challenging stare.

Sheila thinks she remembers the hospital, from somewhere in that mixed-up time after they fled Angie’s father. The white lights and the voices of the doctors. The squeak of thick-soled shoes on tiled floors. Everywhere metal, gray and shining. A long hall with a blinking light at the end. Lukewarm pears in a cup dripping with syrup. Gripping the handrails in the bathroom, the hospital gown coarse against her skin. The cold shiver along her spine.

The doctor leaned over her, his nose hairs like winter briars in her close-up vision. The nurse had pimpled arms, and her breath smelled like coffee. In the daytime, they looked like a doctor and nurse, but at night, by the light of the beeping machines, Sheila could see them for what they really were.

They told her to relax, and everything went blue and green, like opening her eyes underwater. She lifted her arms to fight them off—or thought she did—but her hands stayed at her sides. The doctor pulled up his mask and looked to the nurse, who nodded, her long ears flopping. They were the rabbits from the hutch, and they were wearing white coats. Their eyes gleamed red, and their tails stuck out the backs of their surgical gowns.

Sheila wanted to say, “Didn’t I bring you dandelion? Didn’t I smash the ice on your water when it froze?”

But the rabbits knew she hated them. They said, “Didn’t you peel back our skins and hang us by our hind legs? Didn’t you break our bones and put them in your pot? Didn’t you season us with salt and pepper and mop us up with bread?”

Even as she tried to deny it, Sheila remembered the smell of the pot simmering on the stove, deliciously rich and meaty. Her stomach rumbled, and the rabbit doctor twitched his whiskers. “We know what you are. We’re going to cut it out of you.”

The nurse stroked Sheila’s hair, her hand calm and soothing. Just like Sheila when she visited the hutch. The nurse had a dark spot on the back of her hand, just like Norma, the rabbit that pushed to the front to get the most dandelion. The one that would step on her brothers and sisters to grab a huge mouthful and lunge away to chew as fast as she could and come back for more.

Sheila always shoved Norma away, heaping the greens on the other side of the pen from her. She tried to make sure the other rabbits got their fair share. But now greedy Norma was in charge. Sheila was on her back and couldn’t move. Greedy Norma laid a paw on Sheila’s forehead.

“There, there,” she said, and Sheila saw her teeth, long and square but still somehow sharp.

Norma pushed Sheila down into the bed on the trolley. What had seemed to be hard steel now gave way like spring mud. Sheila sank back as it oozed around her arms and legs, burying her strength to kick and fight. The rabbit doctor lifted the scalpel. His whiskers tickled Sheila’s face as he leaned over her to make the cut.

The blade wavered in his unsteady paw, tufts of brown fur sprouting from his gloved hands. Sheila struggled and shrank, trying to squirm away as the scalpel drew closer. A scream clotted in her throat as Norma held her head with soft fur fingers.

The slice of the blade was ice and fire, a slippery unzipping of her throat. Air whistled against her opened skin.

Sheila fell down inside herself, plummeting into a dark well.

When she woke, it was late afternoon, and she reclined in a room that smelled like applesauce. Voices murmured in the background. She could hear someone breathing nearby, underneath the applause from The Price Is Right playing on the television mounted in the corner. Her head felt huge, and her throat was raw. Her tongue lolled thick and useless in her mouth.

No one came to visit her. That night, Sheila lay in the bed with rails, clutching the spoon from her supper tray that she’d concealed beneath the sheet. When the rabbits came again, she would be ready. But they never came. Every squeaking footstep turned out to be a nurse. A regular, real, human nurse, wearing lipstick and smelling like Aqua Net hairspray. Sheila never saw the rabbit nurse or doctor again. Never saw greedy Norma.

Ever since, Sheila’s throat has been on fire. It burns and itches. She knows that it looks to everyone else like a scar. A remnant of something that once had been but now was gone. But Sheila knows different. The mark on her throat is not a reminder of the past but a clue to what is still there: a rope. A rope around her neck like she has been lassoed.

It started as a single thread that she hardly seemed to feel at all. But another thread soon appeared, winding around the first. Then another, and another, twisting together. By fifth grade, the twined threads were as thick as a shoelace. Now, in her senior year of high school, all those fine accumulating fibers have braided themselves into a rope strong enough to hang a man. Or woman.

No one else can see how the rope trails down her back, how it floats out behind her, how it catches on classroom chairs and other people’s waving arms. How it snags on branches and slops in the mud. How sometimes, whoever or whatever holds the other end draws it taut and gives a vicious, reminding yank.

  2  

THE TWINS WITH TOO MANY TEETH

Angie thinks a lot about the end of the world. About globe-destroying mushroom clouds and how to survive when everything she knows has been blown away. About how much better that would be, to have the world erased and to be forced to rely only on her own wits.

She takes down her brother’s hunting jacket from the hook on the back porch. When she puts it on, his dog Sue whines and thumps her tail at Angie’s feet. The coat is too big, the sleeves too long, and Angie rolls back the cuffs at her wrists.

The boys in the movies always have a bandanna tied around their heads, but Angie doesn’t have a bandanna. She finds a worn-out towel in the kitchen, washed almost to holes and the cloth thin enough to fold, and ties that around her forehead. She checks her reflection in a window. Her bangs are scrunched under the cloth. She pulls them over the top of the towel and finger-combs the strands until they drop over her brow. Better.

Then she is outside and on her guard against the roving gangs of survivors, the mutants, and the Russians. It’s a dangerous world, and every day is a struggle for survival. First, she must find clean water. Angie takes off into the woods, jumping over logs, dodging from tree to tree, crouching behind boulders, heart hammering in her chest. When she reaches the spring, clear water trickling from the cleft in the hillside, vibrant green plants growing at its edges, she rejoices. She is saved. She will survive another day.

Angie cups her hands and slurps the cold water from her palms. Water achieved, food is her next mission. She zigzags commando-style back to the last house she passed, checks over her shoulder, and ducks into the root cellar. The people who live here are all dead. She has seen their decayed and blistered bodies in this abandoned house. They won’t need these jars of fruits and vegetables lined up on shelves against the stone wall. They won’t mind if she takes them.

She reaches for a jar and stops, hand in midair. What if the dead family have booby-trapped their supplies? She takes a deep breath to steady herself. Cocks her head and listens—but hears only her own breath rasping in her ears. That and the faint boom of guns and explosions in the next valley over. She doesn’t have time to be careful. She closes her eyes, grabs a jar, and sprints for the exit.

Safe outside, she hunkers behind a boulder to shelter from the toxic wind. The cold of the half-frozen ground soaks all the way through her jeans and panties to numb her bottom. Panties: what an awful word. Angie cringes at the shape of it in her head. So childish, not the name for something worn by the brave survivor of a radioactive wasteland.

Angie doesn’t know what the men and boys on the TV shows wear under their jeans and overalls, but it isn’t panties. And what do those men have under that? Something on the outside. Something they stick inside you. She unscrews the jar of spiced pears. She can’t get distracted. She has to eat to keep up her strength in case she has to run for her life. A gang of bandits could be over that hill, creeping silently in her direction, ready to overrun her. To take her supplies, strip her body, and kill her. Eat her, even. The world has gone crazy with cruelty, and anything is possible.

Angie tips the jar to her face, slurping the sweet juice and gulping the pear halves, their gelatinous weight slipping down her throat like oysters; sugar and clove instead of sand and brine.

She knows oysters from the before, from a late night when a cousin appeared with a glass jar of them and a sack of boiled shrimp, and the adults all sat around the table covered with newspaper, cracking shells and drinking beer after beer, their talk growing louder as smoke filled the kitchen and her mom wobbled to the stove to make coffee. When Angie looked into the milky jar and saw a colony of gray boogers and asked what they were, they gave her one. Her mom said it was wasted on her, but an uncle showed her how to dip the giant booger in peppered vinegar and toss it back into her mouth in one gulp.

The adults watched, holding in their laughter. She bit down on an explosion of warm mud, and she knows her eyes bulged, but she wasn’t about to be their joke. She swallowed the oyster without crying or gagging or any of the things they were hoping she would do. After it was gone, she thought it wasn’t so bad after all. She asked for a second, but her mom tossed her a loaf of store bread and told her to make a sandwich.

The clack of voices in the distance brings her back to the present. A flash of bright nylon flickering between the branches of the just-leafed trees, signaling the uneven bob of hostiles traveling along the old hiker’s trail. Angie flattens herself against the ground, inching into cover behind a log.

In this blasted world, Angie is on her own. Her only advantage is that she knows this land. She doesn’t fool herself that the rocks and trees are on her side, doesn’t expect them to provide some hidden aid, smooth her passage, or stumble her pursuers. But she knows the flow of the water, the best places to hide, the tactical advantages. The others are city people, town folks, farmers. The mountain is not their place. This is her only advantage, and she must use it.

* * *

Some days the old woman in the back room doesn’t talk, barely makes a sound, and Angie wonders if she is already dead.

The old woman is not her grandmother, though she is some sort of relation. Angie sometimes wonders how they got her, if she is a quirk of the house like the cupboard door that swings open when you walk by and the mildewed scraps of clothes in the attic and the rusty-toothed trap in the tractor shed.

“We had to go somewhere when we got away from your dad,” Sheila says, scouring the burnt-on grease at the bottom of a pan. “Thena took us in.”

“But who is she?”

“She’s your granny’s sister! Don’t you ever pay attention?”

Angie slides a finger through the water slopped on the counter. Sheila always acts like she knows everything.

“You don’t remember.” Sheila tips the pan onto a towel to dry. “I used to tag along after her in the woods. She had a cane with a handle that opened into a seat, and she would sit on it when she got tired and tell stories.”

Angie doesn’t believe it. Not about the stories—Thena still tells those sometimes—but about her traipsing through the woods. The old woman is bent and hunched and drags one leg peevishly behind her when she comes to the supper table. She used to have a plate of startlingly pink-gummed teeth she kept in a cup beside her bed, but she doesn’t bother with them anymore. Angie saw her once, sitting on the bed pulling on her stockings in the morning, and her legs were bald like a baby’s, but her hair there was gray and wispy like an old man’s beard.

The old woman complains about everything. She complains that it is too cold, and then she complains about the smoke when Sheila opens the stove door to put on more logs. She complains that the food doesn’t taste like anything: Sheila can’t cook, there isn’t enough salt, the meat is tough. She complains that Sheila is too quiet and Angie is too loud.

“I still don’t see why we’re the ones who have to take care of her,” Angie says.

“We’re her family. We don’t have a choice.” Sheila says, stacking dry dishes in the cupboard. “I don’t see why you’re complaining. It’s not like you do any of the work.”

“She’s so mean,” Angie says.

“I guess you’d be mean too.” Sheila spoons instant coffee into a mug and snips off the end of a bag of milk and pours it into a pan to heat on the stove. The old woman is the only one who drinks milk. Their mom brings it home just for her, the bags stacked like ghostly pillows in the sweating old icebox.

It is for Thena that they go out and cut dandelion shoots with a black-handled knife and bring them back in a crumpled paper bag. Then into a pot go the bacon ends, vinegar, an egg fresh from the chickens, the yolk as yellow as the school bus that ferries them an hour through hell every weekday at 7:30 and again at 3:00. The whole mess, sweet and bitter and sour, is poured over the wilted greens with their jagged leaves and offered to the old woman like she is a queen or the president.

She tastes it, and she blames them. What have they been feeding the chickens? Because the egg doesn’t hardly taste at all. It’s like it came from the store. What did they have to go and cut such tough leaves for? Didn’t they know they were only supposed to collect the smallest ones, fresh and tender and new? If she had her good leg, if she had her health, she would show them the right way to do it.

But she doesn’t have her good leg or her health. Both are gone into the past and are never coming back. Angie and even Sheila don’t know what that kind of loss means. They are twelve and seventeen, and everything they see looks to them as if it has been fixed that way forever. Change, to them, is vague and abstract: The year before they were in that grade, and now they are in this one. The store in town used to be called Hartzell’s, and now it’s the IGA. Their brother used to live in the house, and now he doesn’t. To them, people don’t change who they essentially are. Imagining Thena as young and capable goes no further than putting a wig on her gray head and surrounding her hunched back with teenagers, where she looks preposterously out of place.

* * *

Angie’s index cards are slightly yellowed with faint blue lines, the pack held together with a rubber band. She draws monsters on the blank backs of the cards with felt-tip markers. She knows the creatures are monsters because they have too many eyes. Their necks are too long, and their legs are too short. She used all of her red marker and the orange one too, drawing the blood that drips from their fangs.

She writes their names thick and black across the tops of the cards, the letters squeezed against the edge where she runs out of room. She sits on her bed cross-legged and deals them out in front of her like she has seen her mom do late at night with the poker deck when she is off shift, drinking sassafras tea and listening to Loretta Lynn on the radio.

Angie deals the Dustman onto the quilt next to the bird thing with the black scribbles in its guts and twisted forks for legs. The Broken-Backed Turtle next to the Twins with Too Many Teeth. She says their names aloud when she lays them down. Saying the names is power, like knowing a secret.

Some monsters stay for weeks after they pour out of her pen onto a card, content to doze in the pack among their fellows. Others seem to kick the moment they arrive, demanding release into the wider world. When a card wants to be free, it weighs down the rest of the pack. Angie shuffles the cards through her fingers until she can feel the one that is heavier, slower, more real, more rounded.

She stops.

Yes, this one.

On the card, the Tangle of Rabbits are knotted together. Rabbits stand on rabbits, half devoured by other rabbits. Rabbit legs thrust in all directions—a foot into a face into a stomach into a tail. The rabbit made of rabbits crouches in the briars, hiding from its enemies, quivering and trying to survive without being seen. The briars weave around it, snaring its hind legs and tangling around its neck. Thorns tear its tender ears.

Angie barely remembers drawing this one, it was so long ago. Before their brother left, she thinks. Now it wants out. Sometimes finding the right place is quick, an impulse that calls the card from the pack to its destination in an instant.

Other times, like now, it’s slow. Angie trails through the house, feeling the tangled rabbits in her hand, listening for their homing signal. In the kitchen, she pulls out a chair and climbs onto the table and slips the card into the shade of the light that hangs above them every night while she and her mother and the old woman and Sheila eat.

Angie is just putting her foot back down on the chair when Sheila’s voice cracks out of the darkness.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Angie’s foot slips off the edge and the chair topples, bringing her crashing to the floor.

“I turn my back on you for one minute and you break something.” Sheila’s voice is flat, accusing.

“It’s not broken.” Angie rights the chair and shoves it under the table before Sheila can notice that one of the legs is wobbly. “I’m not hurting anyone.”

Angie stoops to pick up the other cards that have spilled in the fall. As Sheila watches her sister crawl across the scarred wooden floor, the rope cinches tight. She feels like someone has stuffed a sock down her throat. She wants out of here, somewhere there is more air, where she can breathe.

But where is she going to go? Out there is only the mountain, as familiar as the planks Angie scrabbles across, the battered table with its mismatched chairs, the faded curtains, the chipped plates drying beside the sink. As familiar as the finger marks on the walls, smooth and shiny from generations of hands touching the same places, year after year after year.

Angie collects the last card and gets to her feet. In the dim light, shadows shift across Angie’s cheeks, uncovering the imprint of their family. Sheila can see their mother Bonnie’s face in there, and Thena’s too. The long line of women stretching endlessly back into the fog of time. And ahead. Forward, into the future.

Feeling Sheila’s scrutiny, Angie rolls her shoulders defiantly. “What?” she demands.

“Nothing.” Sheila turns away and climbs the stairs to their attic room, dragging the rope behind her.

  3  

THE DISEASED FOX

Many feet roam the mountain, and the mountain knows them all as they track across her skin. The three toes of turkeys, the split hooves of deer that gouge her mud, the bear that turns over logs and scrapes the broken leaves for grubs. The bare feet of Sheila and the heavy tread of hikers passing through. Every step is a breath, a tickle, a pinch, a sigh. The mountain sleeps through most of them, no more than the twitch of a spider along her unconscious rib.

Two pairs of feet trip along a bare shale spine. Their thick-soled boots dislodge shards that tumble down her slopes as they climb. The creatures tread in tandem and pause often. They breathe the mountain into their lungs and breathe themselves back out. Their hearts beat against her. They are not of her; they smell of northern granite. Of cities and exhaust and a salt-tang whiff of the ocean far away east. Still, their pores are open, and they take her in. They nibble her leaves and pick her berries. Rub her moss between their fingertips and spin her quartz in the sunlight like jewels. They treat each other with the same careful wonder.

These creatures smell like humans, but they must be rabbits because they are stalked by a fox. Unlike real, watchful rabbits, they don’t know how to protect themselves. Don’t know to circle among the briars, white tails flashing, and scoot safely into an underground warren. They are too far from home.

They come to a stream and crouch to drink from the mountain’s neck. They sip her water, and the mountain slides inside them, exploring their contours, knowing she will be back home to herself first thing in the morning, if not before. They stand and stretch and walk on.

The fox climbs behind the rabbit women, masking his breath, concealing the giveaway blaze of his eyes behind a shaggy hickory. The mountain doesn’t like the way the fox smells. Not just starved for a meal but diseased, blighted, wrong. The fox pants not with hunger or need but with fury. It’s in the acid of his sweat, the way he crawls and mumbles, the vile words that drip from his lips like tainted drool.