you will be free

The woman lives in Grove Park, in a run-down wooden hut hidden in the woods that line the edge of the gorge. At night the monsters she dreams come to life – revenants, walking corpses, bony wolves that skulk in the shadows of the trees. 

In the daylight her creations seek her. They cannot leave the park, but neither can she. The creatures fade before each new night falls, only to be replaced by a fresh slew of nightmares. 

She spends her last night sleeping under the stars in the heart of the park, lying on top of a rusted train car at the lowest point of the ravine. No trees grow up the sides of the rocky gorge to obscure her view of the velvet-black sky. As the sun edges into the morning she rises and returns to her shack, pretending not to notice the broken figure that howls at her ankles as she walks past quicker than it can drag itself after her. 

In the outer rooms of the house a party thrums. Only the bass of the music is distinguishable, pulsing through the building like the tide. I stumble from room to room, trying to find the kitchen again for another drink. Most of the rooms are more people; playing Pong, making out, sleeping on a pull-out couch. When I open the door to the dark, warm room, it seems empty. I step inside with a sigh of relief, glad to escape the party-chaos for a moment. 

The glow of the fire catches my eye first, then I notice the girl sitting in front of it. She’s sideways to me, cross-legged on the wood floor with her gaze on something in her hands. The fire is in the belly of an old-fashioned iron stove, the kind with the tall pipe on top and the grate that swings open in front. The girl looks up now and smiles to see me standing there. She looks warm like the stove, with softly curling brown hair and wide, dark eyes. She lifts her hands toward me and I step closer to see what she’s holding.

“Pick a card.” She offers them to me, fanned out. It’s half of a deck of Bicycle playing cards, the other half stacked and laid out like tarot cards in front of her. I draw the ace of spades and she takes it, lips pursed, and feeds it into the stove.

“Don’t go.” The girl’s friend stands in her doorway, frowning as the girl finishes packing a satchel. “The Below is too dangerous, you’ll never come back.”

The girl packs another folded map, a tin of healing salve, and a water skin, then fastens her bag and slings it over one shoulder. “I’ve got to go. I can’t stay here anymore. You want to come with me? For backup, since it’s so dangerous.” She grins.

Her friend looks away. “You know I can’t. Just stay. It’ll kill your mother if anything happens to you too.”

The girl shakes her head as she bends to check the knife tucked in her boot. “She’s past saving. I’ll be careful, though.” She hugs her friend, who returns the gesture, then ties her hair back and walks out the door.

“It won’t bring him back, you know!” Her friend calls after her. “Even if you find the goblins that killed him, what will that get you?”

The girl doesn’t stop walking, only throws the answer over her shoulder as she starts down the path. “Revenge.”

*

She leans against a rough wooden fence, arms crossed over the worn beams. In the corral the herd grazes contentedly, enjoying the green grass and pleasant weather. The man who owns them approaches the girl, standing with his hands on his hips. He scans his gaze over the animals instead of looking at her.

“This is the finest herd in the Above, if you’ll pardon my bragging. Any of ‘em catch your fancy?”

She looks away from the only white creature in the paddock. In her peripheral vision its shape flickers; it looks like a horse, then a bear, then a wolf. “The white one there. How much?”

The man startles, looks at her for the first time. “You don’t want that’un, ma’am. The people I got him from would have paid me to take him. His name means ‘Mistake’ in their words. Pick another.”

I am awestruck by the woman in white. She is spellbindingly glamorous in her oversized, round sunglasses, the lenses so dark that it’s impossible to tell which way she’s looking. She carries a fur clutch, white, and wears an expensively fitted pantsuit, white. Even the click-click heels with the sharp toes that she wears are white as pearls. Her silk-soft hair is white blonde and her skin is unpainted porcelain. The only color she wears is a pristine red lipstick. When she beckons to me her teeth flash moon-white behind her scarlet smile and I am hooked.

A peddler’s van is parked at the end of my driveway. Its doors are swung wide to reveal shelves of trinkets, polished and grimy, broken and brand new. There are chairs stacked upside down on top of each other like puzzle pieces, necklaces hanging tangled from the ceiling, gauzy and gaudy costume dresses used to cushion delicate vases. 

And there is the music box. 

Small, wooden, white. When I pick it up it is familiar in my hands. I feel that I could trace each petal of its painted pink roses with my eyes closed. When it opens I hum along to the tinny song that plays as the blue-dress ballerina inside twirls in front of her tiny, oval mirror. 

What fills the insides of the music box are the only things unfamiliar about it. When I wind the key to let the song play again, a secret compartment clicks open. Sharp and glittering, the gems that spill out of the satin-lined drawer are cold in my hands. Unlike the dresses that soften the peddler’s van, these are no costume pieces. Rubies and emeralds and diamonds, blood and seagrass and ice purer than any colored glass could be.

A shadow falls across my jewel-heavy palms and I jam the stones back inside the box, snapping the lid shut to mute its off-key tinkling. The peddler smiles at me and shakes his head when I start to put the music box back.

The stairs cut through the mountain. Steep, narrow, infinite, they spiral up-and-up-and-up into the cold stone. I am one of many strangers on the stairs; we have been climbing for hours, maybe, or days. Inside the mountain there is no way of knowing. 

The air is stale but not stifling, neither warm nor cool, unmoving. A constant dim glow keeps the tunnel lit from just around the corner, but no matter how far we climb we cannot catch up to its source. There are air shafts cut diagonally from the ceiling of the tunnel. No light comes through, but we still breathe. The shafts stretch out away from our heads toward where the outside of the mountain should be. 

Directions are strange in the tunnels. We have twisted and circled and looped so many times that no one can be certain of where we started or which way we now walk. All we know is to continue upward. When we reach the end of the stairs we have been climbing for days, maybe, or hours. 

We are in a small room, dark, cold, empty. A rough ledge has been carved into the walls of the room and I climb onto it to see above the heads of the strangers who crowd in beside me. From my new vantage point I can see that the room is not entirely empty after all. Against the far wall there is a wooden cot, rotted and splintered with age. There is no bedding; maybe it was once here and has since deteriorated, maybe there has never been any. 

It is incongruous in its existence. Delicate and sharp at the same time – harsh lines edged in gentle thread. It hangs on a white backdrop, my mimic of a gallery wall. The rough wooden frames contrast the soft linen stretched inside, the slick thread knotted across. The embroideries aren’t pictures, no stitched flowers or ferns to look pretty. Instead they are the dull grays and blacks of a television not tuned to broadcast. They are the hazy blur of a video tape played past its blue screen. Static embroidered three times over; a fragment of the age of technology in a medium as old as art itself. I look at the triptych and I know its title the way I know that it’s mine; I feel the ghost of needlepricks in the tips of my fingers, I hear the dissonant static of a dead channel crackle at the base of my skull. When I brush my fingers against the wall beside the rightmost frame a gallery tag appears, sleek and white with black print:

NOISE Mixed media.

I cast off my bike and left it, wheels spinning, on the street as I fell to my torn-jean knees in the grass in my neighbor’s yard

it was almost pristine, almost sleeping, still warm under the white spots under my palm (there was blood on its nose, congealing in the summer sun in the dead of the day)

I was reverent in the presence of death; hardly breathing, fingertips barely touching hair coarser than I’d imagined