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March 14 - March 18, 2025
Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, where she was to be treated until sane, however long it might take.
pleasant face that seemed somehow false, like a coat of yellow paint on a haunted house. He
“It might have been all right if it was just me, but I tried to poison my wife and child, too.”
The web-shrouded forest murmured quietly around them,
“I didn’t used to be this way. I was happy when I was a child. I had such grand ideas about how life would be. What happened to me? What happened to us?” “We grew up.”
When Veronica closed her eyes they sounded like distant voices, or like the whispers of Galileo’s imaginary sea. Imagine a sea on the moon.
Across from him was a divan, and beside him an uncapped human skull sat on an end table, its hollow provisioned with colorful hard candies.
“Has it occurred to you that your aversion to treatment is a symptom of your illness?”
For the first time in many years, she began to feel hope.
Moon, are you lonely? Are you cold? It’s all right, Moon. I love you. You can live with me.
“Sometimes, when it was very bright, it hurt. I could feel its light in my head.”
so it was with terror and disbelief that she contemplated fetching an ax from the barn and swinging it into the sleeping skulls of her family.
The thought crawled out of the wet black loam of her brain like some horrid new insect. It scrabbled unchecked through her mind, eating everything clean and good in her, laying clutches of wet, mucousy eggs in its stead.
She would continue to live because she was weak.
“I had a dream. It was so bad.” Simply
acknowledging it brought a flood of horror.
she watched in horror as a spider the size of her fingernail wriggled out.
“I like it if it’s a mealworm,” he said. “Mealworms turn into beetles.”
When it opened its mouth to speak, she heard her mother’s voice.
She could pluck out her own eyes and be as sure of her step.
Her father would wake up and hesitate. He would burn a crucial second disbelieving what his own eyes told him. He still believed in the essential weakness of women. Her mother knew better. Afterward, the boys would be easy.
Her horror remained, though, muffled and isolated. Even this happiness was a manipulation.
He looked irritated. “Please don’t talk. It’s very annoying.”
“Oh, Doctor,” she said, unable to contain a surge of euphoria, cascading with a raw and terrible energy through her body. “It’s so beautiful.”
imagined it rolling like a dropped coin down the hallway.
She did not want to vomit with her mouth sewn shut.
She cast a terrified glance down the hallway, sure she would see him there.
Cull did this. Not her husband, not Grub.
her. A casual brutality.
Veronica’s heart fluttered, a small sound escaped her throat. Moon, are you lonely?
“No, Mrs. Brinkley. You have exhausted my patience, just as you did your husband’s.
Nothing you have to say matters at all.”
Cull removed his yearning for love, his self-reflection, his hopes for a return to New York and to Maggie’s good graces.
“When what you need outweighs what you offer. Make no mistake, child. Your life does not belong to you.”
“Ssssh, baby. Stay quiet, please stay quiet.” She looked over her shoulder and saw Veronica standing in the doorway. Her face buckled in fury. “Charlie, shut the door!” she hissed.
And so she did. Mother first, because she was the stronger of the two, unbeguiled by pretty dreams.
She directed the Scholars to take him. She did not need to speak it, only to think it.
Like some horrible lab experiment crawled from its jar, lurching hungrily through the dark. The thought filled her with an emotion so alien to her experience, it took her some time to recognize it as joy.
She had a nagging memory of something grander, buried in the human meat of her brain. It rolled over, struggling to be recalled.
Then she turned away, because there was no more space for her husband in her thoughts.
He did not seem shocked by Veronica’s appearance. It was a time of transformations, after all.
Soon these cold and ghostly forests would throng with life once again, and the moon would open its glaring eye.
She peered down through the long gulf until she found the little girl staring back up at her, a flag of life in the blowing wheat.
