It’s all I have time to say before Jackie comes out of the kitchen screeching. But it’s all I know to say, really, and what good would it do to lose myself now? He would have hated to die from clumsiness, and that’s what I take away from this house when I leave.
Out on the lawn, the children are jumping up and down laughing and crying. There is a moment in which time slows down, and I’m heartsick to see their tiny perfect features shift, coarsen, the flesh losing its elasticity and acquiring a dry, plastic filler look, as if they might become puppets, inanimate figures controlled by distant and rapidly-vanishing souls. I see my little Evie’s eyes dull into dark marbles, her slackened face and collapsing mouth spilling the dregs of her laughter. I think of Robert dead in the farmhouse — and what a mad and reprehensible thing it is to survive one’s child.
But of course I can’t tell these children their father has died. Maybe later, but not now, when they are like this. If I told them now they might savage the little that remains of our pitiful world. In fact, I can’t tell them anything I feel or know or see.
“Help me find your grandmother!” I shout. “She’s gotten away from us, but I’m sure one of you clever children will find her!” And I am relieved when they follow me out of the yard and into the edge of the woods.
I have even more difficulty as I maneuver through the snarled tangle of undergrowth and fallen branches than I thought I would. I’m out of practice, and with every too-wide step to avoid an obstacle, I’m sure I’m going to fall. But the children don’t seem to mind our lack of progress; in fact, they already appear to have forgotten why we’re out here. They range back and forth, their paths cross as they pretend to be bees or birds or low-flying aircraft. Periodically they deliberately crash into each other, fall back against trees and bushes in dozens of feigned deaths. Sometimes they just break off to babble at each other, point at me, and giggle, sharing secrets in their high-pitched alien language.
Now and then I snatch glimpses of Alicia moving through the trees ahead of us. Her blonde hair, her long legs, and once or twice just a bit of her face, and what might be a smile or a grimace; I can’t really tell from this distance. Seeing her in fragments like this, I can almost imagine her as the young athletic woman I met fifty years ago, so quick-witted, who enthralled me and frightened me and ran rings around me in more ways than one. But I know better. I know that that young woman exists more in my mind, now, than in hers. That other Alicia is now like some shattered carcass by the roadside, and what lives, what dances and races and gibbers mindlessly among trees is a broken spirit that once inhabited that same beautiful body. Sometimes the death of who we’ve loved is but the final act in a grief that has lingered for years.
I think that if Alicia were to embrace me now, she’d have half my face between her teeth before I had time even to speak her name.
As mad as she, the children now shriek on either side of me, slap me on the side of the face, the belly, before they howl and run away. I wonder if they even remember who she is or was to them. How only a few years ago, she made them things and cuddled them and sang them soft songs. But we were never meant to remember everything, I think, and that is a blessing. It seems they have already forgotten about their parents, except as a story they used to know. The young are always more interested in science fiction, those fantasies of days to come, especially if they can be the heroes.
I watch them, or I avoid them, for much of the afternoon. Like a baby sitter who really doesn’t want the job. At one point, they begin to fight over a huge burl on a tree about three feet off the ground. It is only the second such tree deformity I’ve ever seen, and by far the larger of the two. I understand that they come about when the younger tree is damaged and the tree continues to grow around the damage to create these remarkable patterns in the grain.
Their argument is a strange one, although not that different from other arguments they’ve had. Evie says it’ll make a perfect “princess throne” for her after they cut it down. The fact that they have no means to cut it down does not factor into the argument. Tom claims he “saw it first,” and although he has no idea what to do with it, the right to decide should be his.
Eventually they come to blows, both of them crying as they continue to pummel each other about the head and face. When they begin to bleed, I decide I have to do something. I have handled this badly, although I can’t imagine that anyone else would know better how to handle such a crisis. I stare at them — their flesh is running. Their flesh runs! Their grandmother is gone, and they don’t even know that their father is dead. And they dream wide awake and the flesh flows around them.
What do I tell them? Do I reassure them with tales of heaven — that their father is now safe in heaven? Do I tell them that no matter what happens to their poor fragile flesh there is a safe place for them in heaven?
What I want to tell them is that their final destination is not heaven, but memory. And you can make of yourself a memory so profound that it transforms everything it touches.
My Evie screams, her face a mask of blood, and Tom looks even worse — all I can see through the red confusion of his face is a single fixed eye. I try to run, then, to separate them, but I am so awkward and pathetic I fall into the brush and tangle below them, where I sprawl and cry out in sorrow and agony.
Only then do they stop, and they come to me, my grandchildren, to stare down at me silently, their faces solemn. Tom has wiped much of the blood from his face to reveal the scratches there, the long lines and rough shapes like a child’s awkward sketch.
This is my legacy, I think. These are the ones who will keep me alive, if only as a memory poorly understood, or perhaps as a ghost too troublesome to fully comprehend.
We try and we try but we cannot sculpt a shape out of what we’ve done in the world. Our hands cannot touch enough. Our words do not travel far enough. For all our constant waving we still cannot be picked out of a crowd.
My grandchildren approach for the end of my story. I can feel the terrible swiftness of my journey through their short lives. I become a voice clicking because it has run out of sound. I become a tongue silently flapping as it runs out of words. I become motionless as I can think of nowhere else to go.
I become the stone and the plank and the empty field. I am really quite something, the monster made in their image, until I am scattered, and forgotten.
THE ONLY ENDING WE HAVE
Kim Newman
The windshield wipers squeaked … like shrilling fiddles, scraped nerves, the ring of an unanswered phone. Another reason to trade in her ’57 Ford Custom. For 1960, she’d like something with fins. Not that she could afford next year’s showroom model.
Unless Hitch coughed up the ransom.
For the thing it was all about. The mcguffin.
The thing the audience doesn’t care about, but the characters do.
“Good eeeev-ning,” Hitch said, every goddamn morning … like in his TV show with that nursery/graveyard tune burbling in the background. “Funeral March of the Marionettes.” Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump …
“Good eeeev-ning, Jay-y-ne …”
His gargling-with-marbles accent was British. Not like David Niven or Peter Lawford, but British crawled out from under a rock. Hitch was a wattled toad in a grey-flannel suit, with inflating cheeks and jowls. His lower teeth stuck out like the Wolf Man’s. His loose, babyish lips got moist when she came on set. Even before she took off the bathrobe. When she unwrapped the goods, he was spellbound. After a half hour, he’d have to gulp down drool with a little death-rattle.