The Worm in Every Heart

—me?

(For perhaps all gods are conspirators, in truth. Perhaps none of them wish us well . . . or no single one, any more so than any other.)

The seer-girl, smiling: “Tha’rt spiral-end now, brave kill-king, trained and made to die well from tha name-day on; so She knew, when first set eye on tha. And so tha’rt here at last, such long time counting—sent here, by Her, to she. Sent . . . ”

. . . down.

(Down, Roman.)

Nowhere else.

As though, in the end, there were anywhere else to go—

(Not here, at any rate.)

He can feel her fingers on his, rough and gentle; feels her sleek his hair the way one calms a fearful sheep on the altar’s steps, that very same mild mixture of affection and regret. Knows himself at once a Citizen amongst savages and an animal amongst the elect, the two states of being balanced exactly, like Justice’s scales.

And when the lamp falls, when Arcturus’s eyes shut, when her lips brush his forehead one last time—now, then, here, there, everywhere—

—comes only darkness.

The Kindly Ones

IN THE BEGINNING, chaos. From this rose sky, Uranus, and earth, Gaea. And Gaea loved Uranus, giving him many children, but the eldest of them he called monsters and exiled to her deepest depths. So Gaea conspired with her youngest child, Chronos, planning revenge. One day, while Uranus slept, Chronos fell upon him with a sickle and castrated him, throwing his severed testicles into the sea. From Uranus’s spilled seed came Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love, whose beauty sowed similar discord between the children of Chronos until time’s end.

Also fell three drops of Uranus’s blood, from which sprang—other things.

But this is just a story.

* * *

Monday was slow. Rain began in the early morning, still going strong a little after dawn, when Mavis woke. She made herself a cup of tea and studied wallpaper samples until noon, setting aside one with a pattern of thin blue leaves on pearl grey. At three, there was the funeral. She was home by five, and ironed a blouse while watching the six-thirty news.

Soon after that, at dusk, they came.

* * *

It was very late in 1943, during the Blitz, when Mavis met her husband. She had come to London, ostensibly to work in a munitions factory, along with her three older sisters. But all of them knew the unspoken reason for their collective flight from Glasgow. They went because Scotland was an old place, and a cold place, and because none of them fancied ending up like their mother, who had coughed her life away in the upstairs bedroom of their lower-middle-class home only a few months before.

Clara joined the army and ended up in artillery—shooting down Jerry planes all day, jitterbugging with Allied soldiers all night. By VE Day she’d gained two children, but remained staunchly unmarried. The kids turned out bad—one drowned down a sluice-gate, the other an interior designer in Manchester (and we all knew what that meant.) Joan, always the pretty one, drove her ambulance over an unexploded shell in 1944. And Ellie was a nun somewhere in Brussels, but her order didn’t allow mail so Mavis let her slip away without much regret—such a stiff little nit at the best of times, Ellie.

It was cold that night, walking home. She’d just reached the edge of the bridge when the sirens went off—blackout. She heard the bombs whistling around her and froze solid. Then, out of nowhere, a man—jumping past, pulling her with him as he dove for the nearest cover. “Get down, girl, Christ alive!” And they’d tumbled into a ditch together and stayed there all night, her head glued to his chest, eyes screwed shut in his arms and feeling his heart against her cheek like a snare-drum.

Three weeks later, they were married.

Eileen soon followed, and the war’s end, and the boat to Canada.

* * *

The doorbell rang.

It was 7:15 by the kitchen clock—one of Eileen’s presents, an idiotic grinning sun fringed by bent tin rays. Definitely not an hour for visitors, even expected ones.

Mavis rose. As if on cue, her headache drove needle-deep behind her left eye and lodged there, twisting. She squinted against the light, trying to dull it, and moved stiffly down the steps. As she touched the doorknob, the bell rang again. Anger welled up, a jet of blood in her mouth.

“Coming!” she snarled, wrenching it open.

The rain had finally stopped, and the sidewalks lay slick and dark before her. Across the street, Arthur A. Perry Junior High School—square as ever but unusually silent against the sky. An indigo-tinted flood of shadow smeared its outline to a blur, the full moon lighting one corner briefly before a cloud put it out. Mr. Cioberti’s willow creaked to her left, shifting in the wind with a wet slither of leaves.