“Goodbye,” she said, and gently slipped it in. I heard my brother’s voice ring in my head: “Now!” For just a moment, as I felt the metal enter me, I wanted it, and I was full of joy; but a tall wave of pain crashed over me and washed all the joy away. A cresting scream rose in me and broke out of my mouth, the loudest sound I had ever heard, louder than Sheriff Travis’s scream, louder than my father’s scream, louder than any of the dogs or cats or rabbits. It flew over the ice in every direction and assaulted people in their homes. I saw windows lighting up in the hills above the river as I scrambled to my feet, still screaming. Molly had fallen back, her face caught in a perfect expression of astonishment. I turned and ran from her, not looking back to see if she was chasing me, because I knew she was. I ran for my life, sliding on the ice, expecting at any moment to feel her bodkin in my back. I cried out again when I climbed over the sea wall and ran across the road, because of the pain as I lifted myself. I clambered up the ravine, hearing her behind me. On the spruce that led to my bedroom she caught me, stabbing my dangling calf, and I fell. She came at me again, and I kicked at her; she didn’t make a sound. I held my hands out before me and she stabbed them. With a bloody fist I smashed her jaw and knocked her down. I got up the tree and into my room, too afraid to turn and close the window. I rushed down the stairs into my parents’ bedroom, where I slammed the door behind me and woke them with my hysterical screaming. My mother turned on the light. Despite my long silence the words came smoothly, up from my leaking belly, sliding like mercury through my throat and bursting in the bright air of their room.
“I want to live!” I told them, though my heart broke as I said it; Colm’s image appeared in the floor-length mirror on the opposite side of the bed. He was bloody like me, wounded. He looked at me as my parents jumped out of bed with their arms out, their faces white with horror at the sight of me. I cried great heaving, house-shaking sobs, not because of the pain of my wounds, or because my parents were crying, or because I knew Molly was on her way back to the river, where she would turn her knife on herself and at last take a human life for her soul-eating dagger. I didn’t cry like that over the animals and people, now that I knew just how much a knife hurt, though I did feel guilty. And I wasn’t crying at my pending betrayal of Molly, though I knew I would say I had no part in any of it and there would be no proof that I had. I cried because I saw Colm shake his head, then turn his back on me and walk away, receding into an image that became more and more my own until it was mine completely. I knew it would speak to me only with my own voice, and look at me with my own eyes, and I knew that I would never see my brother again.
2006
BRADFORD MORROW
THE HOARDER
Bradford Morrow (1951-) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but grew up in Colorado, receiving a BA from the University of Colorado, then undertaking graduate studies at Yale University. He traveled for the next ten years and worked in various jobs, including as a jazz musician, translator, rare-book seller, and medical assistant. He has taught at Princeton, Brown, and Columbia, and has been a professor of literature at Bard College for twenty years, where he has been the editor of Conjunctions, the prestigious literary journal, for its more than fifty issues.
After five volumes of poetry, Morrow turned to the novel; his first, Come Sunday, was published in 1988. The Almanac Branch (1991) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His next novel, Trinity Fields (1994), which the author identified as the first volume of his New Mexico Trilogy, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Giovanni’s Gift (1997), among readers’ favorites of his books, came next, followed by the second volume of the New Mexico Trilogy, Ariel’s Crossing (2002). He has also written two children’s books: A Bestiary (1991), illustrated by eighteen contemporary American artists, and Didn’t Didn’t Do It (2007), charmingly illustrated by Gahan Wilson.
Among Morrows awards are an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), the O. Henry Prize, for his short story “Lush” (2003), the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing (2007), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007).
“The Hoarder” was first published in the anthology Murder in the Rough (New York: Mysterious Press, 2006).
I have always been a hoarder. When I was young, our family lived on the Outer Banks, where I swept up and down the shore filling my windbreaker pockets with seashells of every shape and size. Back in the privacy of my room I loved nothing better than to lay them out on my bed, arranging them by color or form — whelks and cockles here, clams and scallops there — a beautiful mosaic of dead calcium. The complete skeleton of a horseshoe crab was my finest prize, as I remember. After we moved inland from the Atlantic, my obsession didn’t change, but the objects of my desire did. Having no money, I was restricted to things I found, so one year developed an extensive collection of Kentucky bird nests, and during the next an array of bright Missouri butterflies preserved in several homemade display cases. Another year, my father’s itinerant work having taken us to the desert, I cultivated old pottery shards from the hot potreros. Sometimes my younger sister offered to assist with my quests, but I preferred shambling around on my own. Once in a while I did allow her to shadow me, if only because it was one more thing that annoyed our big brother, who never missed an opportunity to cut me down to size. Weird little bastard, Tom liked calling me. I didn’t mind him saying so. I was a weird little bastard.
When first learning to read, I hoarded words just as I would shells, nests, butterflies. Like many an introvert, I went through a phase during which every waking hour was spent inside a library book. These I naturally collected, too, never paying my late dues, writing in a ragged notebook words which were used against Tom at opportune moments. He was seldom impressed when I told him he was a pachyderm anus or runny pustule, but that might have been because he didn’t understand some of what came out of my mouth. Many times I hardly knew what I was saying. Still, the desired results were now and then achieved. When I called him some name that sounded nasty enough — eunuch’s tit — he would run after me with fists flying and pin me down demanding a definition and I’d refuse. Be it black eye or bloody nose, I always came away feeling I got the upper hand.
Father wasn’t a migrant laborer, as such, and all our moving had nothing to do with a fieldworker following seasons or harvests. He lived by his wits, so he told us and so we kids believed. But wits or not, every year brought the ritual pulling up of stakes and clearing out. His explanations were always curt, brief, like our residencies. He never failed to apologize, and I think he meant it when he told us that the next stop would be more permanent, that he was having a streak of bad luck bound to change for the better. Tom took these uprootings harder than I or my sister. He expressed his anger about being jerked around like circus animals, and complained that this was the old man’s fault and we should band together in revolt. It was never clear just how we were supposed to mutiny, and of course we never did. Molly and I wondered privately, whispering together at night, if our family wouldn’t be more settled had our mother still been around. But that road was a dead end even more than the one we seemed to be on already. She’d deserted our father and the rest of us and there was no bringing her back. We used to get cards at Christmas, but even that stopped some years ago. We seldom mentioned her name now. What was the point?