A Gentle Hell Read Free

it was smaller than I remembered. It cupped the sun in its head and shimmered a softer green-blue.
    “Wake up, ” I said to Boxy, “we’re here.”
    “I just want to sleep,” she said, “let’s go home.”
    “You’ve been sleeping for years, Boxy,” I said.
    “Boxy?” she asked, “ who’s Boxy?”
    “Jeanine,” I said, “I mean Jeanine.”
    We got out of the car.
    “Why are we here?” Jeanine asked.
    “I never got to take you to that lake,” I said, “you know, after the desert.”
    “We broke up,” she said.
    “I know, but now we’re here,” I said.
    We walked to the pier. We were the only ones at the lake, us and the sun, dipping low to heat the water, and Jeanine stood at the edge of the pier in her hospital gown, the ties teased by the wind.
    “You don’t have a machine in you, do you? Jeanine asked. She turned toward me.
    “No,” I said, “I was going to get one, but something made me stop.”
    “What made you stop?” she asked.
    She turned back toward the water, reached behind her and untied the strings of her hospital gown. It fluttered around her hips and she caught it in one hand, held it out over the water, blue and orange hair blown off her neck, hospital gown struggling like a butterfly. I could count every vertebra on her back, touch the shoulder blades protracting like wings.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “Deadhead,” she said.
    She let the hospital gown go. It flew out of her hands and dropped into the water. She jumped into the lake.
    The sun lit my fingers. I took off my shirt and jumped in the water after Jeanine, into the place where light overtakes the dark.
     
     
     
      Your Demiurge is Dead
     
    It's been forty nights since Jehovah washed up on the Gulf of Mexico in three black trash-bags. After that, the Triple Goddess showed up at the White House and announced to a live television audience of thirty million that a new era had begun. This was right about the same time I answered an emergency call at four that morning and went down to Mimi’s trailer where she lived with a catatonic white boyfriend and twelve children. I pulled her oldest daughter dead out from the fennel in the backyard where she slit her wrists and lay down to die.
    “I raised my kids better than that,” Mimi said, as my partner Thatch and I zipped up her daughter’s already-blue corpse into a body bag. The remaining children, who had Mimi’s dull green feral eyes and slack faces, hovered close to me.
    “I can make you some sweet tea before you go,” Mimi said.
    “Goddamn it woman,” Mimi’s boyfriend, whom I only knew as the boyfriend, called from his recliner, “nobody wants your goddamn sweet tea.”
    “We’re very busy tonight, Mimi,” I said, “as you can see.”
    I indicated the body bag.
    “Perhaps some other time, then. Come on kids, it’s past your bedtime,” she said.
    But the children followed me out to where my police cruiser and an ambulance waited on the street. The paramedic was asleep in the front seat of the ambulance. Thatch and I put the girl’s body in the back. When I turned around there the children were, silent and sharp-faced in the dark.
    “Are you married?” one of the girls asked Thatch. She was about sixteen years old, sick-skinny, with white hair like a powdered Christmas tree.
    “Yep,” Thatch said, “twelve years now.”
    She turned to me. “What is your name?” she asked. “Are you married?”
    “Officer Redding,” I said. “And no.”
    “Why not?” she asked.
    I looked over at Thatch. He shrugged. I looked back over at the girl, her brothers and sisters surrounding her like she was a satellite while they made hunger eyes and bit their hands.
    “I don’t like the thought of someone else having a say in what I do or who I am,” I said.
    “All relationships are about control,” she said. “What’s your first name, Officer Redding? My name’s Tuesday.”
    “I’m sorry, we don’t really have time for this,” I