She loved the illustrations, and when her eyes and mind tired after a sentence or two, she rested them on the intricate collage work. Peter, the boy in the book, could’ve been Howling.
“Snow had … fa … ll … en … dur … ing the … night. It coe-vered—covered—ev … er … ry … thing as far as he … could see.”
She smacked the book shut, watched it skid across the table and slam into a saltshaker. How naive she’d been to think she’d ever be able to read the sort of books required to know anything real about the world.
“Stupid,” a voice sneered.
Hesitating—for she knew a haunting awaited her—Vern looked up. A skeletal woman with soft features and cool gray eyes and hair the color of dead grass stood in front the stove, eyes dead on Vern.
“Leave,” said Vern, tensing her chest into a steel plate. Her exoskeleton jolted awake, bracing for a fight, though there was nothing to fight but her own mind.
The woman took a jagged step toward Vern.
“I said leave!”
The woman’s bones cracked and contorted as she gained speed jerking forward. She lunged on top of the table in a single motion.
Her dress was from another age, puffed like a hot-air balloon, lacy and ivory. A pair of metal shears in her hand, she crouched into a squat.
Vern pushed herself backward in her chair, nearly toppling it. “Leave,” Vern said once more, whispering, but the woman laughed at Vern’s command and from her mouth slid that slur as old as this poison nation itself. Vern always thought it apt how it rhymed with trigger, for the word was a swift and exploding bullet, and it turned to shrapnel in Vern’s chest.
When Vern gasped, openmouthed, the woman took her shears, grabbed Vern by the tongue, and snipped. “Try to sass me now,” the woman said.
Pain shocked Vern blind as she asphyxiated on the flesh of her severed tongue. The taste of salt and iron bloomed in her mouth, and Vern was forced to swallow blood, the cavern between her cheeks full up.
Laughing, the woman licked the blood off the shears.
When Gogo returned to the cabin with the children, blood flowed in a stream down Vern’s throat, her severed tongue attached by a thread of uncut flesh. She could only moan when Gogo rushed to her aside.
“Vern, you are here,” said Gogo. “Nowhere else but here.”
But the potency of the haunting was too much for Vern to fight, and she nearly passed out from lack of air. Gogo carried Vern to her bedroom and put an oxygen mask to her face, but the sensation of drowning in her own tongue did not pass until midnight.
* * *
VERN READ DESPITE.
Each time the woman came, Vern stuttered out the words, severed tongue and all. While the woman—some long-ago plantation mistress—laughed giddily, straw hair falling out of her bonnet, her gray-blue eyes dark bruises above her round, girlish nose, Vern bent her bloody tongue into the proper forms.
She read from the book about the red-suited boy in the snow every day, daring the woman to deride her imperfect articulation. Weeks passed, and Vern moved on to another book and then another, spurred on by the woman’s cruelty. Board books and picture books.
Had the plantation mistress not been there, mocking Vern with her scissors and her corded neck that rippled whenever she swallowed, Vern might not have improved as quickly as she did. Defiance would always be Vern’s purest and most plentiful resource.
Bitterly, she’d spend afternoons listening to Howling read aloud from his picture books as clearly and fluently as a grown person. A mam, she should’ve had only gentle thoughts about her babe, but she resented Howling for being so good, and she resented Feral for being as slow as her but more committed than she’d ever been at that age.
But it came in time. Vern thought of how much less lonely her childhood might have been had she been able to read.
By mid-May, she was reading chapter books, and had recently begun leaving Howling in the dust. A mam shouldn’t be proud of surpassing her child, but she was and couldn’t help it. Whenever he stuttered over a word as he read aloud, she swooped in and announced it clearly.
Fri … fry … frik … Howling would stumble.
Frightened, Vern read for him.
He appreciated her interventions, but there was nothing noble about her aid. She was using him to stomp out her insecurities.
Vern knew she should be kinder, but her life was a torrent of hauntings, and they infected her with their pains. Without Gogo there to talk her down, she’d get lost in them indefinitely. During the hauntings that Vern couldn’t wish away, Gogo remained by Vern’s side, reading aloud to her to remind her where home was.