AllFreeNovel
Share Us
—Rainer Maria Rilke, "The First Elegy," Duino Elegies
Corny woke on the hillside to the sound of bells. He was shaking with cold. His teeth were chattering, his head felt thick and heavy, and just shifting his weight made his stomach lurch. His jacket was gone.
He was lying alone on a hill in a graveyard, and he had no idea how he had come to be there. He saw his car, hazard lights still dimly flashing where he had pulled off alongside the road. A wave of dizziness hit him. He rolled weakly to one side and retched.
The taste of the wine he vomited brought back a memory of a man's mouth on his, a man's hands stroking him. Shocked, he tried to form a face to go along with that mouth and those hands, but his head hurt too much to remember any more.
He pulled himself to his feet, trying to keep his queasiness under control as he stumbled down the hill toward his car. Despite the lights being on all night, when he turned the key, the engine turned over and roared to life. Corny flicked the heater on full blast and sat there, basking in the gush of hot air. His body shuddered with pleasure.
He knew that there was a bottle of aspirin under all the fast-food wrappers and discarded novels. He couldn't make himself move. He leaned his head back and waited for the warmth that was creeping through his limbs to relax him and chase away the nausea. Then he remembered Kaye in the backseat, and the beginning of the evening flooded back with disturbing intensity.
Kaye's skin cracked and peeling, the first flutter of wet wings, her strange new self stretched out in the car, the music… then alone on the hillside, tangled memories tripping over one another. He had heard stories like this—men and women waking on a hill, dreaming one night in Faery. The hill never opened for them again. Angrily, he wondered if Kaye was there still, dancing to distant flutes, forgetting that he'd ever tagged along.
His stomach clenched as he thought of another explanation for being alone on the hill.
It was a memory, really, Kaye hunched over him whispering, I'm going to find him. Wait for me here.
Because the more that he thought about it, the more he remembered the brutal parts. The distant scream he couldn't place, the sight of some of the revelers, teeth red with blood, and the man, the man with the cloak of thorns who had found him sitting drunk in the dirt and…
He shook his head. It was hard to remember the specifics, only that soft mouth and the scraping of those thorns. His hands fluttered to the sleeves of his shirt, rolling them back. Angry red wounds running up and down his arms were incontrovertible proof of how he'd spent the night.
Just touching them filled him with a longing so intense it made him sick.
Kaye stumbled in the backdoor. A quick look at the red digital numbers on the microwave told her that it was late morning.
Exhaustion settled over her as she strained to sense the wend and weft of magic in her fingers. She felt like a too-taut piece of string, fraying as it was pulled. She'd looked and looked, but there was no way back into the hill. Perhaps it opened only at dusk. She'd have to go back tonight, retrace the same path, and wait.
Her senses were overacute; the flimsy glamour she was wearing now was nothing like the one she had before. She could still feel the slight rustle of wings against her back, still smell the trash under the sink, even separate out smells—coffee grounds, eggshells, a bit of moldy cheese, detergents, some thick syrupy poison used to bait roach traps. The air thrummed with energy she had previously ignored. If she opened up to it, she might be able to leave her fatigue behind.
But she didn't want to—she wanted to cling to the facade of humanity with both fists.
"Kaye? Is that you?" Kaye's grandmother came in from the other room. She was wearing a robe and slippers, her thin gray hair pinned up in curlers. "Did you just get in?"
"Hi, Gram," Kaye said, yawning. She went over to the kitchen table, shifted a pile of newspapers and circulars out of her way, and put her head down in her hands. It was almost a relief to just let her grandmother yell at her, as if everything could be normal again.
"I called the school this morning."
Kaye forced herself not to groan.
"Did you know that you are not allowed to drop out of school without a parent's written permission? According to your transcripts you haven't been in school since you were fourteen!"
Kaye shook her head.
"What does that mean? Was that a no?"
"I know I haven't been in school," Kaye said, disgusted at how childish her own voice sounded.
"Well, it's a good thing that you know, missy, but I want to know what it is you have been doing. Where are you sneaking off to?"
"Nowhere," Kaye said in a small voice. "I just didn't want you to know. I knew you'd be mad."
"Well, why didn't you hightail it back to school then? Do you want to be nothing your whole life?"
"I'll get my GED," Kaye said.
"Your GED? Like a drug dealer? Like a pregnant teenager? Do you want to wind up trailer trash like your little friend?"
"Shut up!" Kaye yelled, holding her head. "You think you know everything about everything, don't you? You think that the world is so easy to understand. You don't know me at all—you don't know one single thing about me! How can you possibly know anything about Janet when you don't know anything about me?"
