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  Table of Contents

  And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

  Something Borrowed, Something Blue

  Ten Things to Know About the Ten Questions

  The Clawfoot Requiem

  All the Red Apples Have Withered to Gray

  The Man in the Ambry

  Find Me, Mommy

  Audrey at Night

  The Five-Day Summer Camp

  Skin Like Honey and Lace

  By Now, I'll Probably Be Gone

  Through Earth and Sky

  The Tower Princesses

  And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

  The Lazarus Bride

  About the Author

  AND HER SMILE WILL UNTETHER THE UNIVERSE

  Gwendolyn Kiste

  Copyright © 2017 Gwendolyn Kiste

  "Something Borrowed, Something Blue" © 2015, first published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye

  "Ten Things to Know About the Ten Questions" © 2015, first published in Nightmare Magazine

  "The Clawfoot Requiem" © 2015, first published in LampLight

  "All the Red Apples Have Withered to Gray" © 2016, first published in Shimmer

  "The Man in the Ambry" © 2015, first published in Typehouse Literary Magazine

  "Find Me, Mommy" © 2016, first published in LampLight

  "Audrey at Night" © 2014, first published in Dark Fire Fiction

  "The Five-Day Summer Camp" © 2017, first published in And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

  "Skin Like Honey and Lace" © 2017, first published in And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

  "By Now, I’ll Probably Be Gone" © 2017, first published in And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

  "Through Earth and Sky" © 2016, first published in Bracken Magazine

  "The Tower Princesses" © 2016, first published in Interzone

  "And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe" © 2017, first published in And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

  "The Lazarus Bride" © 2017, first published in And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting JournalStone www.journalstone.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-55-8 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-54-1 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934033

  JournalStone rev. date: April 14, 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Image: Nona Limmen

  Cover Design + Edited by: Jess Landry

  To Bill,

  My beacon in an impossibly gray world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Horror is where the heart is.

  This has been true for me since I was born, and perhaps it was true even before I was properly born. I have never known a time when horror wasn’t woven into the fabric of my every-day life. It has been my comfort food, my heartbeat, the one constant, even when all else looked drab and hopeless. If there is anyone to credit for my love of all things macabre, then I’ll have to blame my father for reciting me Edgar Allan Poe while I was still in utero (see? I was a horror fan before birth), and to my mother for introducing me to Ray Bradbury’s “Homecoming” when I was a strange child of only four. Growing up in a household where Halloween was a sacrosanct occasion and horror movies played on loop year-round was a delight too few children ever know. So many thanks to those parents of mine for raising me right.

  A particularly hearty (albeit snide) thank you goes out to a lifetime of naysayers and tormentors who pushed me down and told me to change, to be like them, to be normal. If not for your negative voices, I would not have had the impetus to craft these fourteen tales of outsiders rising up to face the darkness. And keep in mind, bullies of the world: the outsiders will always rise up, and more often than not, we will win.

  On the cheerier side of things, I want to give a shout-out to my wonderful beta readers: Scarlett, Matt, Gerri, Brooke-lynne, Lee, and Michelle. Thank you for offering your time in service of these stories; the stories most certainly appreciate it.

  Thank you to Cassy, my cousin by blood and sister by heart. Your inspiration from the time I was old enough to speak has always left me in awe, and the way that you’re raising your beautiful daughter Lily to live in wonder (and to love literature) has left me in awe all over again.

  And finally, to Bill, the perfect husband and the perfect muse. You are the guiding influence behind my work, all those stories light and gruesome. Especially the gruesome.

  AND HER SMILE WILL UNTETHER THE UNIVERSE

  SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLUE

  A yellow beak, the shape of a crescent moon, pricks through your abdomen, and you know it’s time. Everyone else knows it’s time too. The townspeople track your pregnancies, right down to the hour, so when you phone the paramedics, the woman who answers doesn’t bother to ask the nature of your emergency.

  “They’ll be there in three minutes, Mrs. Gardner.”

  You’re not Mrs. Gardner, not anymore, but there’s no reason to change your name because these days, you aren’t really anyone, and Mrs. Gardner is as good a moniker as any.

  In the living room, you unlatch the front door, leaving it open a sliver so the men in white scrubs won’t need to break a window to reach you. The overhead lights are already dim. Everything’s gossamer here, paper lanterns on exposed bulbs to minimize the glare, all the harshness in the world scrubbed away. Shadow is best for the things that live in your belly. Keeps them calm. Not that calm matters for long. If this one is like the others before, it’ll flap its wings, sloughing off your blood like bolts of lace before taking flight into the world. Chances are you’ll never meet it. Chances are it doesn’t want to meet you.

  Inside her gold-plated cage, Matilda spins a melody, the crystalline rhythm of her voice a fervent welcome for the new addition. A bluebird, Matilda was the fourth, and after she escaped your body, you captured her in the kitchen and clipped her wings. That’s the only way anything stays with you—if you shackle it to your side.

  Sirens wail in the distance and you wonder what the candy-coated surprise in your viscera will be this round. A dove, a crow, a canary—you can’t decide as the crescent beak slices through you, and sinuous trails of red map your skin. It’s happening faster than usual, which means you might have to perform the delivery yourself. Something rises in your throat and catches there. You double over and gag a feather into cupped hands. Glistening in your palm, the plumage is pure sapphire, possibly from another bluebird. You hope so. Matilda’s birth was the easiest so far. One twinge and it was over.

  But a new kind of pain, sharp with metallic edges, sears through you, and you know beyond reason this one’s not a bluebird. It’s something else. Your back arched like an anxious cat on a back alley fencepost, you writhe, and mincing your skin, the bird emerges, one puzzle piece after another. Two speckled eyes, a blue throat, one red wing, one black wing.

  When it’s free, the creature stands on
your frayed body, its mottled feathers ruffled with bits of flesh. The colors, the shape are like no bird you’ve seen. With eyes like tiger marbles, it turns and examines your face as if it recognizes you, as if it alone knows who you are.

  Your heartbeat quickens like the flicker of first love. You want to run, but you’re too weak. So you close your eyes, and the world fades away.

  ***

  The first time your belly swelled, everyone wished you good tidings, and your sisters-in-law threw a handsome soirée in your honor. There were games and streamers and party favors with fat plastic babies tied on with satin bows, and somebody gave you a cake built of yellow cloth diapers. You loved the three-tiered creation so much you preserved it in the corner of the living room where it lingers still, five years later, bathed in thick dollops of dust and petrified bird droppings.

  “Boy or girl?” the party guests asked that day, their flushed cheeks and plastered smiles bearing down on you.

  “I want to keep it a surprise,” you said, but you wished someone would ask you why, so you could tell them of your superstitions—the ones your mother passed on to you, the only inheritance she left behind—and how those superstitions made you certain something was wrong. You never went to the doctor, not for an ultrasound or even a routine checkup, because you knew they’d confirm what you feared.

  But your friends didn’t ask. You hid in front of them, hid in the open, and they never noticed. Maybe you were always invisible to them, a faded specter among the living, and this was just the first you realized it.

  So you drank the pink punch so sweet your teeth ached and you opened the foil-wrapped gifts and you thanked everyone for coming. It was what you were supposed to do. Pretending was the only way you could keep yourself from screaming, crying, begging them to set you free from a life no longer your own.

  Your husband tried to make it easier. As a third trimester surprise, he bought you a cottage in the country, a slice of once-verdant land in the middle of a brown forest. Or what was left of a forest. Most of the trees had withered and died, a disease having swept through years ago, but the place possessed a decayed sort of elegance, the frail branches stretched taut overhead like a corps of ballet dancers preparing before a performance.

  The sky gleaming indigo, your husband smiled and carried you over the threshold as though you were newlyweds. For weeks, everything indeed felt brand new and shiny like the intricate treasures a magpie collects to construct a nest for its young.

  “It’s perfect,” you said, a bloated Baba Yaga who didn’t need to eat children for them to end up in your stomach.

  But the world soon lost its luster. You didn’t realize it at first, only saw faint hints of it brimming around the edges of your life. It was in the way your husband’s gaze darted away from you and your roundness waddling down the hallway and into the kitchen. You weren’t shaping up like a soon-to-be mother should. The proportions were wrong, and there were other things too. Like in lieu of pickles and ice cream, you craved seeds. Sunflower, flax, pepitas—it didn’t matter. Seeds were all you wanted.

  “Are you okay?” your husband asked.

  You confessed your fears to him. He laughed and pulled you into his chest.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be a wonderful mother.”

  Though it was summer and the heat hung in the air like thick billows of chiffon, your skin bristled, and you shivered against him, his luminous skin scented with sweet aftershave and the musk of expensive cologne.

  “But everybody tells pregnant women they’ll make great mothers,” you said. “It can’t always be true.”

  Another laugh. “You’ll make it true.”

  But still he wouldn’t look at your belly. After a while, you wouldn’t look either, not when something rippled beneath the surface or when your morning sickness yielded bits of down instead of stomach acid. You couldn’t confide in your husband again. He was the one who wanted the child, and because he was too good for you, his broad-shouldered body and bright-eyed face the envy of everyone who glimpsed him, you feared another confession would be enough to undo the tenuous matrimonial thread that bound you together. He was all things, and you with your hand-me-down dresses and hair like wilted straw were nothing. But he claimed he loved you anyway, and you wanted to believe it, wanted to give him a child to make sure his love never came unknotted.

  The labor wasn’t like the Lamaze class said it would be. In the living room beneath lights not yet dimmed, you collapsed to your knees and, through lips cracked and dried, you called out for your husband, but he was buried in an upstairs room far from you, and your voice was too slight to retrieve him.

  A scream no more than a whisper, and your stomach tore in two. Where there should have been placenta, there were tattered muscles and something else escaping. A child. Your child. Eyes bleary, all you saw was a flash of snow-white feathers, and then darkness.

  ***

  The living room returns in swirls of silver mist. For a moment, you don’t know which birth this is. Perhaps it’s only the first, and you dreamt the rest.

  You murmur your husband’s name but earn no reply. Nothing can salvage him for you now.

  From above you, Matilda caws in her cage, and you remember. This is the twelfth birth, and something went wrong. Or went right. Lately, you can’t tell one from the other.

  The men in white are here, and they crowd closer to you as their medical needles stitch your ragdoll body back together. There’s glass on the floor. Even though you left the door open, they must have broken a window anyhow and climbed through to reach you. Thanks to their haphazard entrance, the cloth diaper cake is in ruins. The last remnant of who you were, crumbled into dust like a beheaded Greek statue.

  You search the ceiling and walls for the creature that fled your body. “Where did it go?” you ask, struggling to stay conscious.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am,” the men say. “We’ll take care of it.”

  You try to tell them they have no business taking care of anything except your cleaved stomach, but they never listen to what you say. They take a broom from your closet and beat feathers from the plaster. Matilda screams as though she too can feel the pain.

  “Please don’t,” you whisper, but the words dissolve on your lips like a pillar of salt in the sea.

  Something thuds to the floor, and you cover your face with both hands. If only Matilda could break free from her cage and pluck out your eyes. Then you couldn’t see what they did to your baby.

  ***

  Your first birth ended up in the columns of weird news sections, and a few intrepid reporters trekked all the way out to the cottage to meet you. But you were too tired to answer their questions, and your husband’s face bloomed every shade of crimson, so the gossip item fizzled before it could gain traction. An urban legend, most said, including some of the locals who had stood across the street on the porch of the general store and watched you leave the hospital, your stomach arrayed in butterfly bandages and your complexion as pallid as the dove that clawed its way through your belly. The same dove your husband claimed to have scared through the open front door after he found you bleeding and unconscious on the living room floor.

  “Hopefully, it’s someplace far away now,” he said.

  But every morning, as you swept the cottage porch, your gaze remained with the sky.

  “Don’t worry,” your husband said. “It was just a fluke.”

  But you knew better. The bird was a piece of you. It came from somewhere inside, and when your husband set it free, you lost part of yourself to the firmament.

  Everyone pretended they didn’t blame you, but it was lies. His golden skin cold to you, your husband refused to lie in your bed, but even without his touch, your stomach swelled again. There was no revelry held in your honor this time. No friends or family dared to come near you.

  The only ones brave enough to breach your body were the men in white coats. They X-rayed your belly and pointed to the hollow shape that reside
d not in your womb but in your guts. “It would be an outpatient procedure,” your husband said on the way home from the doctors’ office. “A few snips and gone.”

  You shrugged and said you’d think about it. He told you he loved you and wanted what was best for you. But you knew it wasn’t true. He couldn’t love you, not if he didn’t love all of you.

  He could, however, love another, love her well enough to plant a child with no feathers inside her. Because he was good at make-believe chivalry, he stayed with you to witness the second form rip through your body. A cardinal, its claret feathers matched to the afterbirth that stained your skin. As the paramedics patched you up again, your husband chased the bird out a window, and from the floor of the cottage, you watched through the glass as the shape departed, a single drop against a vast navy sky.

  “I hope it found the first one,” you said.

  Outside, the exposed trees wilted in the wind.

  After the paramedics left, your husband stood in the living room, suitcases quivering in his hands. “You keep the cottage,” he said and took everything else.

  Later that spring, you read the birth announcement in the local paper. As if to torment you one last time, he named his daughter Ava.

  ***

  The men pack up their soiled supplies and march like tin soldiers to the door, the same door your husband walked through and never came back.

  “We need to take you to the hospital,” they say. “They’ll suture you better than we can.”

  You shake your head. Your body heals faster than it should. Maybe it’s the scar tissue built up and toughened from a dozen births, or maybe the birds lick you clean before they leave, a parting thank you to the woman who gave them life. Either way, you have no need for a doctor.

  Matilda sobs in her cage, but only you can hear her tears. The other creature lies lifeless at your feet.