“Jesus, Charles, what about Sam?”
“Relax, I’ll find him. You worry too much.”
Margaret says nothing to this. The sound of the knife hitting the wooden cutting board—THUMP THUMP THUMP—fills the small room like a dying heart.
Outside, by the shed, Tucker is barking to raise hell.
“Anyway, just came in for a beer. Gonna go watch the burn. I used a little fluid…” He smiles sadly. “My father would have hated that.”
Margaret nods, not liking the currents of despair beneath his words. “Dinner will be ready in a half-hour. Please find Sam while you’re out there, you know…” she waves the knife through the air pointedly, “watching your manly inferno.”
As she goes back to cutting, she says: “And for what it’s worth, I think your father would be proud.”
Charles smiles, kisses his wife softly behind the ear, enjoying the way her neck reddens in pleasure. “You know, sometimes I think he’s still here. Lingering. Watching me. Us. A lonely old man…”
“Please don’t be morbid,” Margaret says.
He puts his arms around her waist, squeezes her tight. “You should grab a beer and join me. It’s a beautiful night.”
“Maybe I will,” she says. “I just want to get the meat in the oven and then we’ll see. Now go on, before you torch the whole forest.”
But Charles is already halfway out the door.
Margaret turns, face strained, and watches him through the wavy glass of the old window, walking away across the humped mound of green grass, through the twilight, toward a rising pillar of black smoke that she knows, from experience, reeks of death.
In the window’s reflection she sees a small shadow standing behind her, hovering at the kitchen door. “You better get cleaned up,” she says.
But the shadow does not move and does not answer.
“Sam?” she says, and frowns, the air sour, thick with the stench of burnt leaves.
MARMALADE
BOBBY CLARKE, NEIGHBOR
When Ms. Grimmel finally died she was old as shit. Petrified shit. Jurassic shit encased in amber. I mean, that lady had always been old. Her skin was papery—like dry and wrinkled, but also sorta loose? Hung from her bones like a soggy diaper. Okay, look, imagine the skin covering your whole body was the same skin as your balls. Like, nutsack skin. That’s the stuff that covered Ms. Grimmel’s entire body, especially her face and arms and legs—you know, the parts you could see.
Are you gonna write this down?
…
You’re recording? Good, because it’s important.
…
Okay, okay.
So yeah, she was just this weird old lady, always sitting on her porch, covered in wrinkly skin, rubbing her wormy lips together, busy knitting some scarf or hat or whatever. Just rocking and knitting all day, gums working like she was sucking the world’s biggest gobstopper. You know, from Willy Wonka? Oh, she also had these bulging eyes that always locked onto anyone who walked by her house. They looked like raisins in a bowl of curdled milk, wide and swimming behind huge wireframe glasses. And they would flick up to study the street, watch whoever was passing like they’d done something wrong, you know? Her gums would be working, lips all wet, gnarled old hands clickety-clackety with the knitting needles. Man, no offense? But she was creepy.
Anyway, the deal with Ms. Grimmel is that she became really famous for some stuff that happened one summer a few years back. And now she’s infamous. Like, people hate talking about her, but they also can’t stop. I mean, what happened was just too crazy… but the thing is, she isn’t famous because of anything she did.
She’s famous because of her cat.
Yeah man, no joke. Her fucking cat.
I know what you’re thinking—what, did the cat do tricks or something? Was it a super rare cat? Did it win first prize in a stupid cat show? No, man, no. None of that. This cat was for real. Now, granted, I was only a little kid when all this went down, okay? I was just ten going on eleven. But I heard about it from everybody—again and again, over and over. Always some new fact, some new twist to the stories, as if they weren’t weird enough already. Like I said, around here, you can’t get people to shut up about it. It’s like every party, every school thing, every time the adults get together, it’s Marmalade this, Marmalade that. Hey, remember Marmalade? Holy shit, right?
But the kids? Like me? We’re so sick of hearing about Marmalade we want to throw up. It was years ago! Still, I can sort of understand why it’s a big deal. Truth is, even us kids get that it was pretty, you know…. Horrible. We’re not stupid.
So, here’s the story.
About five years ago, Ms. Grimmel gets super sick. And no, if you’re wondering, there ain’t no Mister Grimmel. That dude died so long ago his cause of death was meteorite. Get it? So, Ms. Grimm (that’s what we called her, mainly because she never smiled) is sick. Like, gonna die any day, maybe any minute, kinda sick. I mean, she was probably gonna die any minute anyway—the woman was old as space.
Still, five years ago? She was still sorta healthy. She could move around and cook or whatever. By the time she finally croaked, earlier this year, she couldn’t even get out of bed. Cat or no cat, her time was up.
Anyway, she gets sick, and everyone’s like “Oh my God, Ms. Grimmel is gonna fuckin’ die!” and freaking out. I think she had gotten pneumonia or something and her lungs were filling with fluid, and she couldn’t breathe, and she was already ancient so her white blood cells were fucked up and she was gonna croak, blah blah blah. No big deal, right? Nature doing its thing.
Here’s where it gets weird.
And by weird, I mean spooky as hell.
