Slice of Cherry Read online

  Madda huffed. “Stop being so dramatic; nobody’s trying to rip you apart.”

  “Then why can’t we be in the same class?”

  “This ain’t a discussion between me and you, Kit. This has already been decided. Classes start next Monday, but since Juneteenth’s on Monday, both your teachers said y’all can start Wednesday.”

  “Next Wednesday?” Kit picked up the pitcher of orange juice and cocked back her arm.

  “Christianne,” said Madda, her voice full of danger. “Throw my good pitcher, and I’m gone throw you right after it.”

  Kit put the pitcher down.

  “Look at me.” When Madda had Kit’s attention, she said, “I love that you and Fancy are so close. But it’s okay to be close to other people, too.”

  “There are no other people! Are there, Fancy?”

  Fancy, who had been watching in stunned silence, said, “People?” as though she’d never heard of such a thing. “They’re like dolls. Plastic and shiny and fake.”

  “Like if you took out their batteries,” Kit said, “they’d fall over.”

  “Exactly! Who cares about people? It’s not like they matter.”

  It was Madda’s turn to stare at her daughters in disbelief. “Everybody matters. People aren’t toys. You can’t just . . .” She trailed off, and looked away from whatever she saw in Kit and Fancy’s eyes. “The people in this town matter as much as you or me. And the sooner y’all learn that, the better.”

  FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:

  MADDA BROUGHT A YOUNG MAN HOME AND TOLD KIT AND ME THAT HE WOULD BE TAKING CARE OF US FROM NOW ON. THE MAN CLIPPED A LEASH TO KIT’S NECK AND TOOK HER OUT FOR A WALK. A FEW MINUTES LATER KIT CAME BACK ALONE AND WHEN MADDA ASKED HER WHAT HAPPENED, KIT GAVE HER THE LEASH WITH THE MAN’S SEVERED HAND DANGLING FROM THE END.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The sisters sat alone in the dark, shuttered living room, crammed together in a huge rocking chair. After bathing Franken, Kit hadn’t wanted to go to Bony Creek, and neither had Fancy, who felt much too raw.

  “Classes, Fancy!” said Kit, rocking them violently. “Our whole summer ruined over two classes that we don’t even need!”

  Fancy elbowed her sister in the ribs. “Hush.” It would take a lot to wake Madda, who was asleep in the back room, but Kit had a lot.

  “Don’t tell me ‘hush.’”

  “Did you put our allowances in the treasure chest?”

  “The hell with money! Why am I the only one freaking out?”

  A few bars of slanted light came through the shutters and glanced off the fish tank across the room, where a two-foot silver dragon fish cut through the water. It belonged to Madda, who’d named it Merlin and liked to watch it chase down and eat the live fish she fed it. Fancy understood that side of Madda, that small morbid streak. But she didn’t understand Madda’s desire to separate her and Kit. Fancy closed her eyes. “It’s not real to me. I can’t think about it.”

  “You better think about it. Madda’s serious! She—”

  Fancy’s eyes flew open. “Shh. Listen.”

  The rocking stopped, and the sisters’ ears pricked at the sound they’d been waiting for: the telltale squeak of the mailbox opening.

  They waited until they heard the mail truck roar to life and then fade in the distance before they burst out onto the front porch and into the summer heat.

  Fancy quickly weeded out the bills and junk mail, placing them back into the rusty black box beneath the porch light. What was left over was the only thing that could have distracted the sisters from Madda’s summer-killing news: a bunch of handwritten envelopes with no return addresses.

  They hurried into their room with the letters, and after Kit got the sun tea from the porch steps, they sat at the pink, flower-shaped tea table that overlooked the garden. Kit played an old record on the phonograph, which crackled and popped as some woman sang about another woman named Dinah Lee.

  As Fancy added ice and sugar to the tea, Kit began to read:

  “‘What I love about Guthrie Cordelle is that not only is he one of the few black serial killers, he’s one of the best ever. I am glad that black people are finally representing because the world needs to know that black people can be just as crazy if not crazier than white people.’”

  The sisters looked at each other and giggled into their teacups. “That’s what ‘the world’ needs to know?” said Fancy.

  “And she misspelled ‘representing.’ What a bozo. Oh, wait. This one has an address from Canada! ‘My uncle shot my aunt in the face. I’m sending you a piece from the shirt she was wearing that day. If you could send me something from one of Guthrie’s victims, that would be awesome. Best wishes, Albert. P.S. It doesn’t have to be bloody.’ How cool is that?” Kit studied the enclosed square of yellow fabric and sniffed the rusty brown splotches staining it. “Foreign fan mail, Fancy, and he wasn’t mean or crazy or anything.”

  “Sane people don’t send bloody clothes through the mail.” Fancy tore off the Canadian postage stamp and placed it in the keepsake box on their desk filled with other such stamps from Algeria and Israel and Nepal. Daddy’s crime spree had made news all over the world.

  “Would we have sent something to him?” Kit asked as Fancy came back to the table.

  “Nope.” Fancy opened another letter. “Probably he’s just looking for something to sell. Like Franken was.”

  “Maybe Albert’s lonely,” said Kit, almost stubbornly. “Maybe he wants to be friends.”

  “You think people wanna be friends with us? Listen: ‘Your father is the devil himself and you girls are the devil’s spawn. He should have killed you instead of innocent God-fearing Christians.’”

  Fancy showed Kit the letter, the angry dark slashes gouged into the notebook paper. “This is what people think of us. And Madda wants us to think they matter. What’s wrong?”

  Kit was toying with the gold switchblade again, hitting it against the table. “You think Daddy did want to kill us?”

  “Trying to understand Daddy is like trying to nail jelly to a tree.” Fancy turned away and swapped “Dinah Lee” for Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.” She hated when Kit started obsessing over Daddy’s possible motives—you could talk and wonder for hours and never get anywhere. Daddy was a mystery.

  “He couldn’t’ve wanted to,” Kit said, almost to herself. “It would’ve been easy as pie. Deep down he must’ve known that we’re just like him, and that’s why he let us live.”

  “He let Madda live.

  She’s not like us.” “She’s not like us and she doesn’t like us; otherwise she wouldn’t be trying to split us up.”

  Fancy grabbed Kit’s fidgeting hands, forced them to be still. “Don’t talk like that, Kit.”

  “Even if Madda does like us, she don’t like the real us. If she knew what we were really like, she’d turn on us like she turned on Daddy.” Fancy felt the tension ease from Kit’s hands. “At least I have you and Franken.”

  Fancy dropped Kit’s hands as if they had suddenly become radioactive. “Franken?”

  “I can be myself around him, too.” Kit gave her a surprised look. “What’s not to love about that?”

  “You don’t love him,” said Fancy sharply. “You love cutting on him. Don’t confuse it.”

  Kit put her switchblade away and poured herself more tea. “Well I ain’t confused about one thing: Nothing’ll ever split you and me up. Not classes, not Madda, not boys.”

  “Not death,” Fancy added, relieved to hear Kit speaking sensibly.

  Kit raised her pink cup to Fancy in salute. “Not even death. Not even Franken’s death.”

  Fancy groaned. “Don’t start that again.”

  “You said yourself we can’t keep Franken forever,” Kit insisted. “Sooner or later we’re gone have to get rid of him.”

  Fancy sipped her tea thoughtfully, fascinated by the way Kit could speak of loving and killing someone in the same breath. But not fascinated enough to let her do anythin
g stupid. “We got all these medical books, right? Maybe we can study up on how to cut out the part of Franken’s brain that remembers stuff. He won’t remember he was here. And we won’t go to jail.”

  “A lobotomy?” Kit gave Fancy a surprised and admiring look. “Why can’t you think of awesome stuff like that all the time?”

  “Bring me some more hostages,” said Fancy, “and I’ll make a list of fun things to do to them.”

  “Oh, boy!” Kit jumped to her feet.

  “I’m kidding.”

  Kit dropped back onto her stool and opened another letter. “Spoilsport.”

  A few days later Fancy finally convinced Kit to go to Bony Creek with her. The sisters parked their bikes near the slow-moving snake of water, which ran deep in the woods about a quarter of a mile from their house. The thick cover of leaves filtered the harsh afternoon sun, and so the light that made it to the forest floor was cool and green and harmless.

  The sisters, in their swim clothes, weaved in and out of the trees. They seemed to have sprouted from the forest floor, with their reddish-brown skin the color of autumn leaves, as doe-eyed as the deer that occasionally wandered into their kitchen garden to snack.

  “See anything?” asked Fancy over the trickle of water and birdsong.

  “Sure.” Kit slapped a mosquito against her neck. “Poison ivy and deer crap and rocks. Oh, my!”

  A scream of laughter shrilled from the forest, one ungodly yipping laugh . . . and then a chorus.

  Fancy stopped dead, her skin rough with goose bumps, her peaceful slumbering forest now awake and heavy with malice. She whispered, “Cacklers? This far upsquare?”

  Kit didn’t say anything, but as the laughter crescendoed, her frown grew darker.

  Fancy had once overheard Big Mama speak of a man she’d lived next door to when she was a child, back in the fifties, a neighbor who had caught a cackler and kept it chained in his front yard like a pet for weeks. It had scared Big Mama to death to have to walk by it on her way to school. She’d said the worst part was how human it had looked, a slimy white mannequin with a pumpkin-sized head and pink eyes. It never barked or laughed or made any sound like cacklers normally do, but every time Big Mama passed her neighbor’s yard, the cackler followed her with its eyes and seemed to grin at her with a white, needle-toothed mouth that split its face ear to ear.

  But one day on her way to school, Big Mama noticed that the cackler was gone. Instead her neighbor was chained in the yard by his throat, and the lower half of his body was simply gone. Eaten.

  Fancy pulled on her sister’s arm. “Let’s go back.”

  “Screw that.” Kit shook her off. “I ain’t letting some trespassing cackler run me outta my own woods.”

  She turned slowly, as if she wanted the cacklers to get a good look at what they were laughing at.

  “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, creeps!” she shrieked, startling not only Fancy but the entire forest. “Does that sound like dinnertime? You think you can come into our woods and make a meal outta us? These are our woods! You hear me?

  THESE ARE OUR WOODS!”

  Silence.

  Kit waited, scanning the dappled trees, animal-still, waiting for any excuse to strike. Fancy imagined the cacklers gathering their young and slinking away into a safer stretch of forest. Fancy couldn’t help but smile at her sister—Kit was such a badass.

  When the silence continued unabated, Kit relaxed and said, “There’s one.”

  Fancy grabbed Kit. “A cackler?”

  “No, stupid girl, a fairy ring.”

  Fancy followed Kit’s pointing finger to a circle of mushrooms, at least two feet in diameter, nearly hidden in a copse of dogwood trees. The mushrooms that formed the circle weren’t storybook-friendly red caps, but pig’s ears—slimy brown mushrooms that looked like the flesh of a creature had been scratched off and left to rot on the ground.

  When Fancy curled her lip, Kit said, “Beggars can’t be choosers. Come on and let’s get this idiocy over with.” They made their way to the pig’s ears, and as they stood before the circle of mushrooms, a hawk screamed somewhere above them. Otherwise the woods were unnaturally silent, as though simply being near the fairy ring had moved the sisters at least halfway out of the world. Fancy could feel the laces of time and space wanting to unravel. She just had to find the right place to tug.

  Fancy marked the starting point with a photo of Daddy taken a month before he’d been sent away. He was doing a muscleman pose with his shirt off, which was hilarious, because Daddy was almost as skinny as Kit.

  “What’s the picture for?” Kit asked, watching Fancy position the photo just so against one of the mushrooms.

  “To help me focus. Shh!” She looked at the picture for a long time, until she could almost see Daddy’s blood pumping through his biceps. She held the image in her mind, willing a door to open to him the way she’d tried to will herself to see him in the kinetoscope. Hopefully, today she’d have better luck.

  “Ready?”

  Kit rolled her eyes, which Fancy took as an affirmative.

  “One, two, three, go.”

  The sisters began walking in opposite directions around the outside of the fairy ring.

  Fancy grabbed her sister. “Not that way. Counterclockwise.”

  “We never go counterclockwise.”

  “Maybe that’s why it’s never worked. Now come on.”

  After a few minutes of circuitous walking, Kit said, “I feel like a dork.” She scowled at the hawk screeching in the treetop. “Like all the birds are laughing at us. How many times we gotta go around this thing?”

  Fancy thought it over. “Thirty-six.”

  “Thirty-six?”

  “That’s how long it’s been since we last saw Daddy. Besides, three is a magic number, and thirty-six is a multiple of three.”

  “There’s no such thing as magic.”

  “Just do it, Kit.”

  “What did I tell you about ordering me?”

  Fancy looked over her shoulder. “You said somebody’s gotta do it, so it might as well be me.”

  “Wow, is it Smart-ass Day?” Kit took a swipe at the back of Fancy’s head and only just missed. “You shoulda told me; I’d’ve brought you a present.”

  Fancy squealed as Kit chased her around the fairy ring, managing to stay just ahead of her. “Just curtsy every time I walk by. That’ll be present enough.”

  “Oooh, you think you bad?” Kit sang. “Huh? You think you bad?”

  “Bad enough to make you mad,” Fancy sang back, laughing, then squealing as Kit grabbed at the middle of her back.

  But the old playground rhyme came to an abrupt end as a storm-gray hawk swept out of the dogwood tree and attacked Fancy.

  She shrieked and dropped to the ground, batting the hawk away with one arm, the other shielding her face from its vicious yellow talons.

  “Come on, bird,” said Kit, yelling over the screeching hawk. “Everybody likes street rhymes. How about this one? Down down, baby, down down the roller coaster—”

  “Kit!”

  “Lemme sing to it.” Kit grabbed the bird under its long, pointed wings and flung it high into the air. “Music has charms to soothe the savage beast. Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack. All dressed in—”

  “You are not charming that bird,” Fancy yelled as the hawk wheeled above the trees.

  Instead of going back to its nest, the hawk zeroed in on the sisters again. But this time it dived for Kit, its hell-red eyes full of rage.

  “Maybe it’s deaf,” said Kit, waiting patiently for the hawk, her switchblade in hand, but the hawk’s flight halted in midair.

  The sisters gaped at the motionless bird in silence. It could have been stuffed and mounted, it was so unnaturally frozen, and centered directly over the fairy ring.

  The fairy ring!

  “It worked!” cried Fancy. She grabbed Kit. “We opened a door!”

  Kit circled the hawk, careful to stay far from the mushrooms lest sh
e get trapped as well. By the time she reached her sister’s side once again, she was frowning. “If that’s a door, why didn’t the bird disappear? It’s just stuck up there.”

  “Maybe this is all we can see from our side. And where the bird is, it’s actually flying around and having a great time.”

  “I don’t think so, Fancy.” Kit’s dubiousness had given way to shock. “Look at it.”

  The hawk molted, shedding feathers as quickly as an illused feather duster. In no time it was nude, like a plucked chicken, its skin nubby and goose-pimply, as though without its feathers it had caught a chill. Seeing the hawk in this new, pathetic state made Fancy want to help, even though it had tried to kill her. She began to reach into the fairy ring—

  “No!” Kit snatched her back. “You want me to stand here and watch that happen to you?”

  What was happening was that the hawk was losing its flesh and bone the same way it had lost its feathers—huge chunks of it were simply falling away and hitting the ground inside the ring like rain. But the pieces weren’t staying on the ground. The flesh rapidly decomposed as soon as it touched the soil, until it had disappeared into the earth . . . and into the pig’s ears. The mushrooms were no longer slimy folds, but baseballsized balloons.

  “I bet those ain’t even mushrooms. Just something disguised as mushrooms, something carnivorous.” Kit pulled Fancy back until Fancy was half hidden behind her, well away from the pig’s ears. “Whatever it is, it ain’t a door.” Kit turned to face her. “And even if it was, Fancy, what’s the big plan? Run away to fairyland like the Lost Boys?”

  Fancy crossed her arms. “Not fairyland.” “Where then?

  Where the hell are you trying to go?”

  “I don’t know!” Fancy slumped against a tree. “Fairy rings are just doors. Doors open and close in Portero all the time. If we found the right door, we could do anything: get rid of Franken, rescue Daddy—”

  “What?”

  “It’s not like I don’t know it’s a long shot. But it happens. Remember that story about the boy who played hide-and-seek with his little brother? He hid inside the broom closet under the stairs, and when he came out, like, five minutes later, he was five years younger.”