“Now you.” She gave him back the knife.
But Brian's hands were shaking too much. Without a word, she took it from him. He tilted his head back and stuck out his tongue, squeezing his eyes shut as tight as he could. The pain was startling, and didn't fade at once. He could taste the blood in his mouth, hot and coppery; it made him think of a foundry he'd seen once, the taste of that air.
She plunged the bloody knife hilt deep into the soft black dirt and she reached out to take his face in her hands.
“I... I just...” he shook, staring right into her deep blue eyes, “what if we're wrong?”
She smiled. “You just have to have faith, Brian.”
Her mouth pressed to his. He tasted her blood. Their slit tongues touched and recoiled in pain, then came back together again. Her mouth was hot and wet. His mouth was cool and soft.
When they broke apart, neither of them said a word. They had gone beyond words.
* * *
Juliette slashed blindly at the wispy grass. Her house was just on the horizon. There was smoke rising from the chimney, which was odd, because they almost never burned wood in the summer. She picked up her pace a little, tossing aside her knobbly stick and letting it vanish in the yellow-green sea as the wind drove tidal swells, and ticklish stems brushed the skin beneath her chin. She ran home.
Brian, traveling in nearly the opposite direction, was taking his time. He mother wouldn't care if he was out late. He wondered sometimes if she'd ever actually liked him. It felt sometimes like she only put up with his presence because it was what she'd been brought up to do, because it was the polite thing.
It was turning dark by the time he returned home. There were no lights on inside the house; a window was broken which his mother didn't have the money to fix. They'd taped a piece of cardboard up, but it was cheap tape and the panel kept flapping open on one end or the other. It looked like the aftermath of a crime scene, left empty after a murder.
He was starting to have second thoughts about things with Julie. He wasn't sure anymore what he believed.
“You know better, Brian!” his mother was always telling him, but it wasn't true. He didn't know anything. Not for sure, and she had taught him to be skeptical, above all things skeptical. “Don't believe it unless you can see it, Brian,” she would caution him. He didn't want to live like that.
His mother looked him over when he came in through the door. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“Out.” He went on to his room.
She watched him go, but idly, the way one might watch a caterpillar moving across a flat stone. And when he was gone she put him from her thoughts.
* * *
“Oh God... oh Christ...”
“Don't say that. He hasn't got anything to do with this. You have to do it. Do it!”
“Oh Christ...”
Blood sprays. It sprays over hands and face. Blade sawing, fingers swimming in the hot liquid. Bone snapping, eye rolling, white and red-shot.
“...I... I don't-”
“Shut up! We've got to do it this way, we agreed. We made a promise, a blood promise. You can't break that.”
“But I don't want to do this!”
“It's too late to go back. Everything has changed.”
Blood flows, broken back, limp jaws limp tongue limp limbs limp life pooling hot and wet to be lapped up by the hungry dirt mouth of the world below. And everything changes.
* * *
There were things we knew, but most of life was a mystery to us, inscrutable and unarticulated. Of death, we knew nothing but abstraction. None of us knew – really knew – anybody who had ever died. We had only fiction and abstraction as a guide. We thought that we would be young forever; we thought that we would never die, that nothing would ever change.
I had a bug collection when I was nine years old. My grandfather gave me an old cigar box and, over the course of a single summer, I filled it with the pinned corpses of every insect I could get my hands on. I especially loved butterflies and moths. They were like scraps of lace, so fragile and weak and yet so beautiful, their wings spread and their bodies dotted right through by the sharp silver pin.
I liked to watch them in the killing jar. I don't know... it wasn't to see them suffer. What is the suffering of a mute insect to a boy? There was something beautiful, that was all, about the way that they would slow, the life sinking away, draining slowly out of them, leaving behind nothing but the beautiful body.
I loved the smell, that cloying chemical death smell. Then one day my mother found me with my nose in the killing jar, and that put an end to that. She took away my jar and she took away my pins and she took away the cigar box to be set aside until I was “mature enough for it,” though of course by the time I was deemed old enough I was no longer interested.
Even today I remember that smell. Sometimes, at odd times – hunched over my desk at work, riding down the escalator in the subway station, buying cleaning supplies – I'll catch a whiff of a smell, similar enough to trigger the memory, take me back to that sweltering summer when I killed so very many. I remember it fondly, there is no guilt, no shame. I have dreams sometimes, dreams that I am inside my home or at the office or in the subway train or wherever. Every dream is the same: I am doing nothing of consequence and then I smell that familiar smell and I look up and I see the lid going on over the sky and I feel myself growing weaker and weaker as life slips away.
Every time I smell it, I think I am back in that dream and I always look up, excepting to see the lid of the killing jar above me.
Brian and Juliette taught us about death. They taught us that death, even death without meaning, can be beautiful.
* * *
The dog nipped eagerly at Brian's heels. Its mouth hung open, tongue lolling and teeth gleaming off-white in the moonlight. The long grass swayed around him, blue and black in the darkness. He reached down to pat the dog, but thought better of it, and went on his way. They were almost there, and Juliette was waiting.
They had agreed to meet just before morning on the day of the Autumnal Equinox. It seemed a day of special importance. He could almost feel the slow-burning sun somewhere out there beneath the horizon, inching closer as the world turned beneath him. It would be a long day when it came. Sunlight was everything, there was no life without the sun. He missed it now, wandering in the half-light of the stars, leading the animal to its death.
He'd found the dog in the street. Something had drawn them together, the dog and he. It was a mutt, its parentage indistinct. It was a child of the town itself, it had come from all of them. All those childhood house-pets, all those dogs slinking off in the middle of the night and breeding in the back allies and causeways and then back home with a dumb grin on their faces. Beneath the surface was submerged another world, cast-off puppies, seed spilled in secret couplings. Wild dogs, the half-breed mongrel offspring running wild in the shadows.
Brian was starting to feel better about what they were going to do.
It had been easy to find the dog, a good deal more difficult to make it follow him. He'd had to steal a candy bar from the gas station across the street and use it to lure the mutt. The sun was going down, and the streets was nearly deserted. It was almost three miles back to his house. He decided to cut through town the and go straight to the woods. It hadn't worked out so well. A bunch of older kids had seen him leading the dog into an alley and followed.
He had never been chased before, never been in a fight. They surrounded him. They pushed him. “Where are you going?” “What's with the candy?” “What the hell are you looking at, you prick?” they asked him. They hit him. The dog barked. He fell to his knees and his nose burst out in a gush of startlingly bright red that trickled through his fingers. They kicked him until he curled up on the ground and screamed, and then they left him.
The dog lay down beside him and whimpered; it licked his bloody hands.
He lay for a long time in the cold alley. The sun fell and the
stars above all came out. His tears dried on his face. He washed off the blood in gutter-water. The dog was still with him, its mouth an empty smile.
He went on further down the alley, stumbling against the dingy brick. One eye was swollen shut, the flesh puffy and sensitive to the touch. He gave the rest of the candy bar to the dog and staggered on, expecting it to remain behind. He only wanted to make it to his own bed, to lie down there and sleep until the world disappeared.
He turned back at the edge of town. The dog was still at his heels. He crouched down and scratched it behind the ears. “Go back, okay? You don't want to come with me tonight.” The dog smiled at him. Hot drool spilled from its mouth, silver in the blue darkness.
It followed.
He stopped, and he looked at it. He looked up at the moon, full and round as a hole in the sky. He touched his lip, raw where it had been struck. His tongue slipped out; he touched it too. It stung. The cut had mostly healed. He thought of the knife, of the promise. Blood Promise, Juliette had said, as though there was power in the very words, and her eyes had shone with belief. Belief in what? The dog nudged his legs with its nose.
Brian changed direction, starting into the fields on the edge of town. The copse of trees was out of sight, far beyond the horizon. It would be a long trip out there. If the dog turned back at any point, Brian decided, he would too. He started walking.
* * *
The dog padded slowly into the clearing. It bent its head and sniffed at the barren ground. Dying and wilted poppy flowers littered the dirt, red petals decaying in the soil.
Juliette stood at the edge of the water, stripped to the waist with the knife in her hand. She met the dog in the clear moonlight and knelt down to embrace it. “He's so beautiful, Brian!”
Brian put his hands in his pockets. He remained on the edge of the shadows. He looked over his shoulder and saw the field shimmering behind him. The starlight and the shadows and the wind did strange things in the long grass. It was another world, different from any he had ever known.
Juliette was drawing shapes in the dirt. Some of them were familiar – having been previously chosen by the two of them – others were new, swirling looping lines drawn deep in the dirt. The dog stood patiently in the center of the unfurling lines. It seemed to know what was expected of it, what was going to happen. It had shown no hesitation. In fact, Brian had begun to feel that, by the final leg of the journey, it had been leading him.
Juliette ushered him forward. She shimmied out of her dress and laid it on the gnarled roots of the willow. Her skin was luminous in the darkness, pale as death. She nodded at him, and he took that as instruction that he too was to remove his clothes. He did so with some hesitation. The horrible white eye of the moon glared hideously down on him.
“Brian!” Juliette stepped against him, pressing her hands close to his skin. He started, then realized that she was tracing the angry purple outlines of the bruises on his body. “What happened?” Her blue eyes were electric pools, wet and flashing.
“Nothing,” he shrugged her away. “Forget it.” He looked at the symbols in the dirt. “Are you sure you want to-”
She pressed her hand over his mouth. She held up the knife, held it between them. Brian couldn't tell if she was trying to threaten him or reassure him.
“We already decided, Brian. Take the knife.”
He nodded, swallowing hard. The knife was cold in his hand. He looked at the dog. It stared at him, eyes wide and innocent, open. It seemed to be waiting for them.
Juliette closed her hand around his, lacing her fingers into his. “This is right,” she said, her voice glowing with a degree of fervency that Brian had never before encountered outside of his own thoughts, never before seen put out into the world. The dog closed its eyes and lifted its head. It howled at the sky, a terrible sad sound that made all the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
And then the killing.
* * *
“What happens to little girls when they grow up?”
“You won't be young forever.”
“Don't let them touch you. Don't ever let them touch you like that.”
“Make him happy, it's your job to make him happy. That's all you have to understand.”
“You'll be a woman soon, do you know what that means?”
* * *
The water glistens beneath her, hideously blue, dreadfully torpid. She stands ankle deep on the first rung of the steel ladder. The sun above is crawling by so very slow. Her father walks through water deep as his breast. He reaches up and takes her in his arms. He lifts her out over the water. She is afraid of him. There is a horrible twisting inside her, a pain at the base of her spine that cuts up into her. His big hands wrapped around her waist, she is safe. He holds her up to heaven like a sacrifice. This is not mine, he says, I give it to you, Jesus. But she will not be anybody's sacrifice.
Yesterday, Juliette's father stood over her. Outside the window the sunset spread out rosy across the hills. He was proud of her, proud of the thing he had made. She looked up at him. She could see it in his eyes, he thought he owned her, he thought she was nothing without him. He bent down and put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. He smiled at her. “You're turning thirteen tomorrow. Would you like to be baptized, Julie?” She did not have the strength to oppose him, to confront him. She shook her head a little bit, her face pale. Not like this! She had no belief in his world. But how could she say so? How could she go against the will of her father? She shook her head.
He patted her on the shoulder. He smiled warmly. “I knew you'd say yes,” he said, beaming with pride. He was so proud of her. Couldn't he see her? Couldn't he see she's trying to say no? “We'll do it tomorrow,” he said, so proud, and he left her trembling.
Thirteen!
That is some kind of landmark, she is sure of it. Not a child anymore, not an adult yet. The in-between, tadpole with legs. Her father lowers her into the water. Her wet dress clings to her skin. There are people all around them: Stern men holding their hats before them, clutched in wrinkled fingers stiff as wire. Sad women who will not meet her eyes, as though they cannot bear to see her now.
And she sees us, most of us. We stand at our parent's sides. Some of us have already been baptized, here in the community pool. Some of us have yet to be, but knew that we are all fated to go eventually into that water. We watch her and she is not the person we thought her to be. She stands on her tip-toes, neck deep in the chemical blue, and she shivers with fear. Her eyes are red with tears and chlorinated irritation. She is like a martyr down there in the water, a martyr to something without a name. We wonder what she knows that we do not.
Her father reaches down to touch her cheek, to lift her chin up so that he can look into her eyes. He does not seem to see there the same defiance we see, the same hopeless fear. He sees only his daughter, his property. He puts his hands on top of her head to push her under.
The morning before her daughter's baptism, Juliette's mother ran a comb through her hair. She spoke softly, reciting words with no meaning beyond their soothing sound. Juliette stared into the mirror. She saw her face, and her mother's face behind her, eyes downcast. Like looking into the future. She felt a pain in her abdomen, a harsh new pain that ate inside her, a cramping down in her pelvis. She wanted to lay down, to sleep. Her black hair fanned through her mother's shaking fingers. Juliette looked at her face, and her aging features twisted with anguish, only for a moment, only for a second before she forced back on her placid mask.
If only she could be with Brian, he would know what to say, what to do. Together they could do anything. How many hours have they spend laying under the stars, staring up and speaking of earnest things, of hidden truths and the way of all things.
She thinks of the last time they met in the woods. Dancing together, cheek to cheek, tears running down their faces though they knew not why. They both felt it; this hot summer was a poor cover for an autumnal world, for the universe moving into its final wint
er. “Everything is ending,” she whispered, “it's all falling apart.” He didn't say anything, he just danced on, and the new green seemed pale around him. He held her close.
Her father's hand is on her crown. “In the name of the father, the son, the holy ghost.” She doesn't know their names, doesn't want to know. The water is so cold; cuts into her prickled skin. He begins to push her down.
Her knees lock, her neck stiffens. For a moment, she resists. Tears pool in the corners of her eyes. Her abdomen is ringed in such pain. She stares into her father's troubled eyes, pleading please no, please don't.
He frowns, confused. He shoves her down. Too strong for her, much too strong. She gasps desperately, swallowing chemical-tainted water as she goes down.
We hear a horrible cry from her lips, a despairing moan which makes our mothers reach down to clasp tightly our hands. And we stare open-mouthed at the girl being pushed into the clear blue water, her face a mask of agony.
Underneath. Her eyes shut for a second, and she feels herself upended in the cool water, as though drifting weightless through the cosmos. Her father's hands on her like leather clasps holding her under. The moment seems to last an eternity.
Can she weep underwater? She is floating in her own tears. She is limp, body drained of struggle. Her eyes open, but she does not feel the pain of the tainted water. She stares up into a clouded sky, translucent and bending as though the nature of light itself has been changed. Everything relaxes in her, and she feels her father's hands slip away from her.
She does not have the strength to rise. She floats. Why doesn't her father bring her back up out of the water? That is how it must be done, he has to bring her back up or it isn't a baptism, she knows that, has seen it happen enough times. He is supposed to lift her back up into her new life, her life of service and complacency. Why doesn't he? Is she free?
Juliette herself lifts her head above the surface, sucking the cold air and coughing blue water like sludge from her lungs. She blinks away the sting and looks out.
Her father is treading water on the deep end of the pool, horror on his face. The faces around her, the faces of the adults, are colored with suspicion, anger, disappointment, disgust. Hatred.