Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All: List 2

I hated watching ghosts act out their last moments, hated their fruitless, frantic agitation.

The girl quirked a sharp brow, a hook piercing the skin.

His face was friendly when he wasn’t pounding the pulpit and going on about hell.

Once, Father woke up in the middle of the night to see a tiny wizened creature sipping at the bowl.

The sparrow was having none of my nonsense, or maybe it just wanted to hear the sound of its own voice. “Canada Canada Canada,” it warbled.

The tree was a huge oak, bare branches raised ecstatic and saintlike to the winter sky.

He took in my indigo silk dress, the length of it, the fringe of beading around my knees, my bare feet, my face.

Mermaids with long flowing hair and iridescent tails, peeking out of the water to laugh at the blue girl sitting in a snowbank.

Do you remember popcorn?
He blinked, idly touching the handle of the knife. Sure do.

Frankie sat there, oblivious to them all, the pastel warm between her fingers, thinking about the fact that Sam knew her name, thinking about the way his lower lip curled under his teeth to pronounce it, thinking about his lips and teeth and hair and bones and all the other truths of a body that seem so mundane when that body is yours, and so fascinating when that body belongs to someone else.

Frankie sat there, oblivious to them all, the pastel warm between her fingers, thinking about the fact that Sam knew her name, thinking about the way his lower lip curled under his teeth to pronounce it, thinking about his lips and teeth and hair and bones and all the other truths of a body that seem so mundane when that body is yours, and so fascinating when that body belongs to someone else.

But Bilbo didn’t tell anyone about the magic ring that could render him invisible.

He stopped snuffling and looked up, reproaching me with eyes like the amber in my mother’s bracelets.

Stella was an only child born to a silvery sylph of a woman even more beautiful than her own daughter and a man so handsome that both men and women would stop on the street to stare.

They knew they were beautiful, and they knew their child was too, so they’d spent all of their savings to commission a painting of the three of them.

Stella’s father sat by the fire, drinking and staring at the portrait of his family, too beautiful for this life. And though his own beautiful daughter was hungry for food and for solace, though she brushed her own hair till it shone and dressed herself as nicely as she could, he gave all his attention to his bottle until he too was in the ground.

If you asked me, sticking your hands underneath a wet dress seemed far more lewd and far less effective an act than simply washing a naked body, but no one was asking me, a scandalous and shameless girl, not nearly dead enough.

I’d come home disheveled and damp, but no more disheveled and damp than I always had.

But I was seventeen now, not seven. Mother said it was unseemly. Mother said it was scandalous.

“The war and the flu will kill all the young men, and she’ll end up a spinster anyway.”

“What a pearl, our Pearl,” Frederick sang. He held his wineglass to the light, turned it, appraising. “She is a treasure, something you lock up in a box and only take out on holidays.”

“Charles Kent,” I repeated, conjuring up his slicked-back dishwater hair, the downturned mouth, overly pink lips in a pallid face, the petulance that emanated from him like musk.

“Charles Kent,” I repeated, conjuring up his slicked-back dishwater hair, the downturned mouth, overly pink lips in a pallid face, the petulance that emanated from him like musk.

The thought of Charles, the revulsion, caught in my throat, and I coughed.

She tried to find something to say, something to talk about, but she was distracted by the scant whiskers that darkened his chin, one small cut on his jaw.

“Girls!” yelled Sister Bert, who was waiting with everyone else up at the corner. “Stop lollygagging and keep up, please!”

“One of the nuns is described as a beautiful tea cozy,” said Sister Bert. “Don’t I look like a beautiful tea cozy?”

And then there was the thought that wormed its way up out of the dark recesses of her brain like something out of a fresh grave: Your father doesn’t want you.

My father kept a small collection of books in his study, books I was not allowed to touch. Only British writers would do for my father’s shelves—Charles Dickens. Thackeray. Hardy. A smattering of women, too: Brontë, Austen.

My father didn’t read any of the books; he displayed the rows of embossed spines to impress the men who came to discuss business over cognac and cigars.

The lake beckoned the way it always did, and I left the book in the sand.

Sometimes I remembered that waterlogged book when I moved through Chicago, with all the bits and fragments of other eras, other lives, stitched here, there, everywhere—a patched-up monster shambling along.

I said, Converse?
Talk. Speak. Opine, she said, drawing out the I.
Opine, I said. How is it that you can opine?

A tasteful gold cross winked from the hollow of her throat; jeweled combs sparkled in her dark hair.

Her whole arm, in fact, was made of gold. And not just any kind of gold, a malleable sort of gold that let her move the arm, wiggle the fingers—the sort of gold that gleamed brighter than any sun.

The next evening, the man was sitting by the fire, the bear and bobcat eyeing him warily from across the room.

The man heard the snap of the chains and the scrabble of claws on the floor as the animals fled into the night.

Here she was, in the nuns’ section of the kitchen, lifting the cover from a steamer to steal a few carrots, sweet and garish as candy.

Outside the greenhouse, the world was just waking up, green buds just forming on the trees. Inside the greenhouse, however, was riotous with tulips and daffodils.

He wanted to tell her that the war encroached on his visions like a nightmare, and sometimes he woke up panting in a tangle of blankets.