Her hair was brown like mine, too, and she had those cheekbones and that chin, what Daddy called a valentine face, pointed at the bottom, broad in the middle, with at widow’s peak at the top—a face like mine.
“I wanted to talk to you about the flowers,” she said. She held out the ice cream cone to me. “Sure you don’t want some?”
I looked at my mother’s gray granite tombstone. MOIRA ALONZO it said, BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. The day she was born and the day she died. She had died the day I was born.
“I don’t want any ice cream,” I said.
“Yes you do. Everything you do says so. Lexi, I’ve been dead for twelve years now, and you only started bringing me flowers six months ago.” We both looked down at the frozen roses from yesterday, and the dozen pink and white carnations I was carrying today. I was babysitting for everybody on our block, and spending all the money on flowers.
“I’m sorry I didn’t bring them before,” I said.
“I don’t want them now, honey,” she said. “They aren’t really mine. They smell funny. They smell like you’re thinking about somebody else when you’re buying them and bringing them here.”
I looked at the carnations in their waxed paper. I sniffed them. They smelled like carnations always smell, spicy and fragrant.
“By the time they get here, the flowers have turned to knives,” she said. “I would rather not have my grave covered with weapons.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lexi,” she said, her voice soft. “Every evening you buy a bouquet and put it in the refrigerator where everyone in the house will see it. You’re spending all your energy trying to hurt someone, and that’s like eating ice cream in the snow.”
I thought about Candace, who wanted me to call her Mom. She was always trying to touch me. She wanted to hug me every time I came home. It was enough to make me want to leave home forever.
“What you do is up to you, of course,” she said. “Happy birthday, honey.” She offered me the ice cream cone one more time, and this time I took it from her. She smiled and disappeared.
I laid the carnations on the grave. Leaning against the tombstone, I took my first lick of the ice cream, from the bottom scoop. Definitely coffee, my favorite flavor. It tasted good, but now my tongue was freezing, along with the rest of me. I tasted the other two flavors anyway. It was the best ice cream I’d ever had.
Still holding the cone, I knelt and picked up the frozen roses. They wore clear sheaths of ice. Then I looked at the carnations.
School would start in a half an hour and I had to go home and collect my lunch and change my shoes and socks. I hesitated a long time, staring at the pale flowers against the dark earth and grass of the winter grave. The ice cream cone didn’t even pretend to melt. At last I collected the carnations too. I left the ice cream sitting upright in the little vase place on the grave.
I put the roses in the trash by the cemetery gate.
I took the carnations home and put them in a glass, then placed them on the desk in my bedroom. Maybe everybody else forgot it was my birthday. My mother and I knew it. I sat on my bed and changed my shoes and socks. When I looked up at the flowers, they were blurry. My face felt hot. I thought it was as good a place as any to start warming up.
SALT SNAKE
by Simon Clark
Simon Clark was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire on April 20, 1958, and presently resides in the South Yorkshire village of Adwick-le-street with his wife and two children. Clark first appeared in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: XIV; this is his fourth appearance here, and in the interim his writing career has prospered. Connection?
Clark offers this bit of chill regarding himself: “When Simon Clark was five years old, he fell through the ice of a frozen lake into deep water. Drowning, his cries for help unheard, he realized he’d have to save himself. Somehow he managed to haul himself out. Maybe this near death experience in the water has infected his writing. Many of his stories involve the other worldness of the sea or rivers or lakes. For him deep waters hold more dangers than common-or-garden drowning. In his novel Nailed By The Heart, the ocean delivers up miracles, monsters, and an old, old god with an appetite for sacrifice. In ‘Salt Snake’ the sea threatens once more—only this time it’s not content to sit beneath the high tide mark and wait for man to venture into its cold, briny body.”
“Are you going to give the bitch one?”
“Aye, go on. Then drive the car through the front of the house and set it on fucking fire. Burn the bloody lot.”
“Shut it, bollock brain. I’m thinking.”
Viper, leader of the gang, sat on the edge of the antique oak table smoking a cigarette. Tattooed snakes writhed up his long bare arms in red coils. Two tattooed snake heads, jaws open, fangs dripping blobs of venom protruded from under his FUCK YOU! T-shirt. Around his neck was the tattoo he did in Borstal with a safety pin and a biro nicked from some fat-arsed screw. The dotted blue line bisected his neck. Ugly letters pricked CUT HERE.
Viper cleared his throat and spat thickly on the rich carpet. “You ’aven’t touched her then, Spuggy?”
“Course I ain’t,” said a blond-haired lad.
“Good job, or I’d split your fucking face.”
“If you ask me,” said the third, Joe, in a leather jacket that smelt of piss, “she’s out of her tree. All she does is look out of the window and go on about the sea being full of salt.”
“Well Viper’s not going to give her an IQ test first, is he?”
Viper threw what was left of the cigarette at a fireplace big enough to roast a whole pig in, and stood up. “I’m starving. Get the beer from the car, Joe.” To the blondhaired one he said, “Spuggy, get some snap on the go. Chips with something. Make it a boat load. I’ll give the mad bitch upstairs a seeing-to later.”
Spuggy smiled as an idea prodded into his mind. “We got them video cameras on the last ram. We could—you know—film it.”
Viper scowled as he lit another cigarette. “No one’s taking home movies of my bollocks.”
“No.” Spuggy looked sly. “Get Joe to—you know—after you’ve done. Then we could do a snuff film. Sell it. You know, make a few grand.”
“What, kill her? Yer out of ya tree, Spuggy. Go peel some spuds.”
Viper returned to the polished table to smoke the cigarette. For the past week they’d torn through Lincolnshire, twoccing cars and ram raiding shops. Anything from off-licenses to electronic stores. Now they’d got enough booze, cigs, videos and hi-fis to return to the Yorkshire estate where they squatted and to live like the sons of Tory MPs for a few weeks. Viper spat. The only trouble was the cops had got too friggin close. When the weather got bad, fog so thick you couldn’t see as far as your arse, they’d lost them. Then they’d driven the van along roads that seemed to get narrower and more twisted by the mile. At one point, they’d seen a sign that told them they’d made it into Norfolk. They’d kept going, looking for a nice empty house. Miles from anywhere.
By dark they’d reached one. A big old manorhouse or something at the edge of the sea. The nearest village was ten miles away. This was nice and quiet. They’d rest, fill their bellies, get pissed, shit all over the duvets and kick in the oak paneling. Then they’d go.
But the house hadn’t been deserted.
In a bedroom, they’d found a girl of about eighteen, just dressed in a short cotton nightie. With the longest legs you’ve ever seen, Spuggy had said she was wearing no knickers but Viper hadn’t seen anything. Not that it mattered. She’d got long blonde hair all the way down her back. And her face… Well, it was no oil painting but there was something striking about it.