Three Slices (22 page)

The woman pulls past a mailbox from which hangs some kind of dream catcher—and then into a small lot where a doublewide trailer awaits.

A sign out front:

MADAM SAFIRA: PSYCHIC DIVINATION.

Mm-hmm.

Miriam rolls her eyes so hard, she almost breaks her neck.

The woman gets out. Miriam sucks on the cigarette greedily, flings it into a nearby birdbath.
Tssssss.
The outside of the trailer is a fenced-in miscarriage of lawn decor: a pink flamingo, a cheap mold-and-plaster version of the statue of David, another of Venus, three birdbaths, a brown bear on its hind legs carved out of a log.

Inside, the trailer isn’t any better. Pink and purple curtains. Puke green carpet. More dream catchers. A black velvet painting of Engelbert Humperdinck—not that Miriam knows who the fuck that is, but his name is right there at the bottom of the “art” in glittery script. Plus, the standard trappings of a psychic faker: the crystal ball, the phrenology head, the Ouija board.

Shovelfuls of minor-league horseshit.

Right then and there, Miriam knows what her evening consists of:

Shaming this dumb, dumb woman.

A little part of her mind tries to convince her that this is the noble thing to do. Here’s a woman, pretending to be a psychic and scamming people out of their money. Some of these psychics are basically vampires—shit, they’re not even good enough to be vampires. They’re leeches. Mosquitos.
Little ticks
. They latch on with their lying mouthparts and drink deep as they can, long as they can, pumping their own foul, diseased effluence right back into you.

But a more persistent voice reminds her,
You’re doing this because she’s trying to do what you do.
Trying to steal her thunder. A pretender to this already-dubious throne. And fuck her for that. A petty, cruel desire, perhaps, to toy with this woman, but Miriam wants what she wants. Sure as fate and death and all the other demanding forces of nature in this world.

Whatever. She knows how this is going to go. Safira Starshits is going to reach for the crystal ball. Or try to read Miriam’s palm. Or feel her cranium for the bumps and divots of unforetold futures.

But that’s not what happens.

Instead, she holds up a finger, encouraging patience. She ducks down a small hallway, then returns with an object: a large bell-shaped something draped in black cloth.

(If Miriam had to guess: a birdcage.)

Then she scoots past to the kitchen—which is barely a kitchen, really, as Miriam knows the layout well, having lived in trailers now and again. The kitchen is just part of the larger room—though this one is half hidden behind a shelf of all her kitschy psychic bric-a-brac. The sucking sound of a fridge opening. Then closing.

Something moves under the black cloth. The sound of clicking. Fluttering.

A bird?

Safira returns then with a small wooden cutting board. On that board: a glob of bone-white cheese shot through with arteries of something dark. The smell hits Miriam as it passes, a moldy, heady darkness to it. Musky, off, pungent as the congealed sweat on a dead man’s scrotum.

Miriam scowls.

The woman pulls the cloth off the other thing—

And, sure enough, it’s a birdcage.

With a living bird contained within. A pigeon, by the look of it. Head strutting like it’s listening to music no one else can hear. Stepping left, then right, then left again. It coos and chirrups.

“Are you cooking dinner?” Miriam asks.

But Safira just smiles and pulls out a small, hooked knife.

Oh.
Oh
.

Miriam’s been around. She has, to put it plainly,
seen some shit
. Safira reaches in and withdraws the pigeon from its cage—this is a bird that doesn’t squirm, that seems passive and even complicit in its own momentary demise. The woman takes the knife and, with one quick pull, pops off its head like it was a beer bottle in need of a swift opening.

Miriam feels it. A twinge across her own throat. Like a tightness in the esophagus. The bird’s black eyes caught her in those final moments, glassily regarding her—and she felt the chance to become one with the creature as it died, to be drawn into its life force snuffed out.

She’s glad that didn’t happen.

With the head off, there arrives no great spray of blood, no gout of fluids. Just a trickle of dark red over Safira’s rough knuckles. (Raspberry jam from a ruptured donut.) The headless bird continues moving. Little feet grabbing for ground that isn’t there. Wings shrugging as if to say,
Yeah, so, I guess I’m dead?

A sound comes out of Miriam. Somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. A shocked guffaw. Her mouth hangs open and only droops farther as Safira then—with what looks to be a practiced hand—draws the hooked blade down the center of the bird. Unzipping it like a coin purse.

Its guts fall out. Onto the cheese.

They plop and spatter. Red—almost black—blood like lava down a mountain of cheese. Guts atop it like a pile of earthworms.

Safira forms a claw with her left hand. And promptly begins to smash the mess together. Like she’s working a dough. Claw, mash, lift, mash, again and again—the stink of coppery blood mixing with the rank stench of funky, fucked-up cheese climbs into Miriam’s nasal passages and clings there like a ghost that won’t be exorcised. She stops breathing through her nose but the smell still hangs there. Sucking tight to the roof of her mouth, the back of her throat, the deep of her sinuses.

“What the fuck,” Miriam says. Less a question, more an exclamation.

“This is how we speak to the spirits. Those on the other side of the veil no longer speak our language—the tongue of the living, the words of the quick. The veil distorts and contorts our communication. And so we must create bridges. Ways to translate their words to ours, and ours back to them.”

“Mashing bird bowels into disgusting cheese? You’d think a phone call would suffice.” Miriam holds the back of her hand against her nose. “What about sexting? No sexting the spirits, I guess?”

“
Look
,” Safira says, that one word lifted on a tide of genuine awe. “The way the cheese forms fissures—the moisture lost, broken, and here the blood crawls through these unexpected channels. It tells us so much.”

“Be sure to drink your Ovaltine?”

Safira ignores her. Instead, the woman says:

“You’re searching for something.”

Sigh. “Yes, we’ve established that.”

“An escape. An
end
to something.” Then her eyes light up. Her awe deepens. “You are like me. You are a seer.”

I’m nothing like you, moonbat
. But—? Maybe that’s not true. This woman knows things. She’s receiving information she shouldn’t have—admittedly, not in a way Miriam has ever seen before, but she’s met how many other bona fide psychics? A half a dozen? Not even? What’s to say what’s normal with numbers that small? It’d be like meeting six girls and thinking you know everything there is to know about what it is to be female.

Maybe this “Safira” is the real deal, even if her name isn’t.

“Go on,” Miriam says, narrowing her gaze.

“You have come here. Looking for a woman. Melissa. Melora. Mary.
Mary
. Ciseaux. Stitch. Scissors.”

Holy shit.

She knows.

She fucking knows
.

Miriam says, “Tell me. I need to know.”
I need to be rid of this power. I need to cut it the hell out of me.
This she says despite knowing she still wants it, too. It’s like trying to kick heroin: she knows it’s bad for her, but hey, how about one more hit? For old times’ sake?

Then: Safira’s eyes roll back in her head. Showing just the whites, like tops of skulls. Her head rolls around on her neck, loose, unpinned, a low whine from the back of her throat. Two fingers thrust down into the mash of blood and cheese, scoop a glob of the white cream and dark gore, and then begin to furiously scribble numbers—nine of them.
239159184.
The odor swells like a tide as what looks like some kind of grotesque miscarriage is stirred—like ghosts bothered out of their graves. Finally, a smear of viscera beneath it: a crass, violent underline.

As if for emphasis.

“I don’t get it,” Miriam says. “It’s just... It’s just a number.” Nine numbers. What’s nine numbers? A phone number has ten. Could be a social security number, maybe. Safira’s hand, the one with the fingers dripping, goes to her face—she goes suddenly pale, a green color like something spoiled.

Then she turns and retches. Gagging. Dry-heaving.

“Get it away,” Safira says. Words spoken through strings of spit.

Miriam looks down at the cutting board. The red mess. The glob. The string of numbers off to the side. Then she lifts it, takes back to the kitchen. Nearby, she spies a couple of pens in a ceramic mug that looks like a ladybug—its wings cracked and chipped—and then she pulls a swatch of paper towel off its roll.

She scribbles the numbers across it.

239159184
.

Then: back to Safira.

“You okay?” Miriam asks.

The woman offers a meager, wan smile. “Yes.”

“You look like kicked shit.”

That earns from Safira a dark, bitter stare as response. But then she nods. “Speaking with the spirits is...not always pleasant. Their world is different from ours. A world of decay and madness. Even crossing momentarily to the other side is...harrowing. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

Miriam folds her arms, shoving the flats of her hands under her pits. She needs another cigarette. “So, what does it mean?”

“What?”

“The number. What does it mean?”

“They don’t explain themselves. It’s a message. They expect you to understand it.”

Miriam sneers. “Well, I
don’t
understand it. The spirits can suck a bucket of ectoplasm through a long straw if they think I’m picking up what they’re laying down. I don’t speak numbers. I don’t speak math.” She holds up the paper towel and shakes it in the air. “This? Is useless to me. It might as well be a booby doodle drawn by some bored, horny kid.”

The woman dabs at the corners of her mouth with a long, purple handkerchief. “I’m sorry. That was the message. They have no more for you.”

“Great. Thanks.” Miriam plunges an angry hand into her pocket, pulls out a dollar bill. That one hand crumples it into a boulder, and then she flings it into the woman’s lap. “Thanks for absolutely nothing.”

“I wish this was more helpful to you.”

“Me, too. Can we go now?”

“Yes. I can take you to where you’re staying...”

Which is a dinky-fuck motel off 70, and it’s too far a drive and Miriam’s now burning with a hot, high-fuel concoction of inchoate rage and utter bewilderment (with a splash of total desperation for good measure), and instead, she decides that she’d rather go back and drink more. A lot more.

“Take me to the bar. The lodge. Whatever it’s called.”

“Vega. Yes. Of course.”

5. Now: Sestra

I’
M
M
ELORA.

I’m your sister
.

She looks familiar. Miriam can’t place it. But there
is
something about her.

“I don’t know you,” Miriam seethes, the side of her face pounding. Her tongue drifts across the tops of her back teeth, gives a little push. The tooth wobbles in the gum.

The woman smiles—a big, broad, manic grin. “We’re sisters. We share...so much. We both drowned... the river, always rising.”

It all starts to come back to her now. Her memories like the pages of a book flitting past. The number. The land. Pigeon guts mashed into soft cheese.

John. The Caldecotts. The swallow tattoo.

The vision.

“The Mockingbird Killer,” Miriam says. “You. Still one of you left out here after all, isn’t there? One more of your sick fuck family.”

Melora looks aghast. Something well beyond insult.
Injured
.

“Oh, Miriam,” she says. “There’s so much you don’t understand.”

Miriam kicks her in the crotch.

6. One Week Ago: The Bar Bet, Take Two

S
AFIRA SAYS
one last quiet apology. Miriam offers nothing in return. She gets out, and then Safira rolls down the window and says, her breath showing in icy puffs as she speaks, “The number must mean something, Miriam. Take heed.”

“Uh-huh,” Miriam says. “Thanks for nothing.”

The VW Golf gutters and grumbles away.

“The whackadoo tell you anything good?” asks a voice behind her.

Miriam, heart suddenly fluttering like the wings of a startled sparrow, wheels, her hand already moving to her pocket where she keeps her knife. A quick part of her thinks,
I need to get more knives. Because knives are cool.