“No,” I said. “I’m here to join. Should you wish it.”
YOU’LL SURELY DROWN HERE IF YOU STAY
ALYSSA WONG
Alyssa Wong lives in Chapel Hill, NC, and really, really likes crows. Her stories have won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and the Locus Award for Best Novelette. She was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others. Alyssa can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.
When the desert finally lets you go, naked and stumbling, your body humming with raw power and the song of dead things coiled under your tongue, you find Marisol waiting for you at the edge of the bluffs. She’s dressed in long sleeves and a skirt over her boots, her black hair tucked under a hat and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the night cold. Madam Lettie’s bony horse whuffs at you in the glow of the lantern as you approach.
“You were gone longer than usual,” says Marisol. “I got worried.”
Human speech is always slow to return on the nights when the desert calls you. You nod in reply.
Marisol sets the lantern down and pulls off her blanket to wrap around you. Most girls her age would flinch away from touching a naked boy’s skin, but her fingers brush yours indifferently. She’s seen your body as many times as you’ve seen hers, in all of its pitiful states: bruised and scratched; bramble-bled from running through the thorns with the coyotes; finger-marked by rough hands. ”Did you step on any scorpions?”
You turn your head and spit a brown, dusty gob into the dirt. You hope she doesn’t notice the fur and tiny bone fragments caught in it. “Who do you take me for?”
A wan grin spreads across her face, and she almost looks like the kid she is—that you both are. “Check ’em anyway.”
You glance at Madam Lettie’s horse instead of at your battered bare feet. “She’ll be furious when she finds out that you took Belle.”
“She’s always furious,” says Marisol. She swings onto the horse, and the animal shivers as you climb up behind her. “Besides. She pretends otherwise, but she knows how you get home every night. She’s never raised a hand to me about it.”
“Good. If she does, tell me. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Just hold the lantern,” says Marisol. She nudges Belle forward and the three of you turn toward the road leading to the Bisden mines. A few pinpricks of lamplight glimmer along the ridge from the town beyond, and the path snakes through the sand like a pale sidewinder.
The horse’s back rolls beneath you like dirt in a goldrusher’s pan, and you practice breathing. In, out, with the rhythm of the hooves and Marisol’s heartbeat.
“Some of the men from the big mining company out east visited the house while you were gone,” Marisol says. “The city folk who rode in on the California-bound train yesterday. They’re staying across the street.”
Oh. “Which did you have?” you say.
“The tall one. The one with dark brown hair and the Yankee accent. He speaks pretty enough, but he’s not… kind.” She shrugs. “But then, who is to a whore?”
You hold her tighter.
“One of them asked for you.”
“For me?” you say. No one notices you, not you, the small and half-feral boy kept in the back to clean the kitchen. Bless Madam Lettie’s heart for taking you in, you poor soul, with your dead witch-father and propensity to make discarded bones quiver and shake like living things. Poor souls, both.
“He looked like some kind of preacher. But there was something off about him.” She won’t look at you, not while she’s guiding the horse back to town, but when you press your face against the back of her neck, strands of hair tickling your cheek, you can feel her breathing relax. “I don’t know why, but he reminded me of you.”
“How so?”
“I’m not sure,” Marisol says. “But the city folk are planning to hold a party at Madam Lettie’s in a few days, so he’ll probably be back tomorrow with the rest. You can see for yourself then.”
You’ve witnessed a few parties at Madam Lettie’s, and mostly that means a rough night for Marisol and the rest of the girls at the brothel. Madam Lettie will probably have you attend the guests, too. Just thinking about it makes you wince.
The town is quiet, the sound of Belle’s hooves muffled against the sand. Madam Lettie’s is the only building with candles still burning in the windows, and the empty, boarded up buildings littering the stretch remind you of when the town was still lively, before the silver dried up, before the desert’s call grew too loud for you to ignore.
Marisol helps you up the stairs, past the bar, and together you stumble into her room. It stinks of sweat and musk, but probably no worse than you do. The two of you collapse into Marisol’s bed. It’s barely big enough for one person and your own cot is down the hall, but everything in your body aches, and Marisol feels so human against your bones. You need that right now.
“I saw my pa tonight,” you say into Marisol’s hair. Her dark braids smell like smoke, and you bury your face into them, just behind her ear. ”Walking among the brush with the rest of the dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t find your folks, though. I heard their voices, but I couldn’t dig a path deeper into the mine.” You’d torn your hands to pieces, ripped the skin and flesh down to the bone, and the desert had built you back out of sand and briars, then pushed you rudely away from the entrance to the collapsed mineshaft. The wandering skeletons of slain cattle and men had stopped their nighttime shambling to watch through ant-eaten eyes. Stay away from this, child.
She sucks in a breath. “If you found them, could you bring them back?”
You close your eyes. “No. Not like you want. I could make their bodies move, but it wouldn’t be real.”
She nods and holds your hand tight. It’s a conversation you’ve had a few times, ever since the desert started pulling you away from Madam Lettie’s every night and you started being able to coax dead things into dancing for you. This time, Marisol says, very softly, “Sometimes I wonder if that would be enough, just seeing them again.”
It wouldn’t, but you don’t need to tell her that. Her grip on your hand means that she knows.
One of the company men appears on the doorstep in the morning, black hair slicked away from his naked face, too young and too nervous to be standing in front of a saloon-turned-cathouse in broad daylight. Madam Lettie, who is lean and tough like rawhide, lets him in, and as they pace the ground floor and talk about plans for Saturday night, you and Marisol sneak peeks from behind the kitchen door.
“That’s not the preacher man, is it?” you say. Marisol shakes her head. She’s helping you with laundry today, and the filthy sheets bunch up between you, muffling the sounds of your bodies moving.
“I figured it out,” she says, “the preacher man’s strangeness. He walked like his feet didn’t touch the ground, and he stank. God, he was foul.”