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The Anniversaryby C. A. Gardner
a Purgatory's Pets Contest Honorable Mention
Hair whipped into her eyes, slashed her cheeks; she laughed as they sped to the top of the bridge, clutching the metal bar in one hand as she leaned over the side of the Jeep to peer through the holes in the metal slats flying past beneath them, to glimpse the bridge's giant struts, slanting at alternate angles as though they waded through foaming midnight waves.
"What did you decide?" she yelled above the roar of air and engine. "Are you coming to hear the band tomorrow? I wrote you a birthday song."
He shifted and stomped on the gas; the Jeep roared and lurched as they leapt onto the throughway. Her hand jerked for the bar. She stole a glance at Ben, squinting against the dark. Long curls tangled in a halo wild as Einstein's. His eyes glinted from a band of shadow; the mouth below the mustache was grim and hard. They whipped past a Volvo, a van, a tow truck, the highway wall rushing past on the driver's side.
"Ben, where are we going?"
He dodged toward an exit. "There's something I've been meaning to show you."
She glanced down at his hand on the gearshift as they approached a stoplight. The red glow made thick shadows of his fingers. Down a dark tunnel of a road beneath trees that blotted out the stars, then nothing but reeds and tall grass, the marshy smell of green things rotting as he swerved into the soggy shoulder. By the time she hopped down, he was already pushing his way through the weeds. She tore off her shoes to follow, feet slipping in the mud.
The grasses thinned, ended. A strip of sand separated them from the water. The set of his back reminded her too much of another time, when he'd come to school blank-faced, the bruised skin beneath his eyes the only contradiction to that unnatural calm as he told her in a low, flat voice that his cousin had killed herself the night before.
"Ten years ago tonight." His shoes thunked on the crumbling planks of the pier.
"I've never shown anyone else, Syddie. It was just over here--"
She caught up, trying to catch a glimpse of his face. It only got worse every year. He stood near the edge of the pier, knocking chips out of the plank with his heel, watching as they spun away.
"Why do you always force yourself to feel rotten? She's gone, Ben. But you have friends who love you--"
He raised gray eyes to hers. The clear gazed doubled in her vision, and she saw the bruised eyes of the boy.
"Let's leave." Her voice, lost in the lap of waves against the pier.
He shook his head, sitting to dangle legs over empty space.
Sydney wrapped her arms about herself as the moon combed through the clouds. In a low voice, she gave him his birthday present: sang of love and death and letting go, of one friend who meant than any other. While she sang, his lips moved without sound, out of synch as he slumped over the water.
Out of the clear seam of quiet, ripples burst like tiny holes. Closer. Circling the end of the pier.
"What's wrong, Sydney?"
"Can we leave now? Please, Ben. I'm cold. . . ."
"In a minute. Look at that those trees--dark as the gateway to hell. And that moon.
Can I make a request, Miss Orpheus? 'Sweet Genevieve'?"
She'd grown thick to his sarcasm, knowing he was worst near his own emotions. But tonight . . . after his birthday present. . . . Her voice wavered as she tried to give him what he wanted, with an edge of sweetness that always seemed to belong to someone else.
"Oh Genevieve, I'd give the world
To live again the lovely past!
The rose of love was dew-impearled
But now it withers in the blast.
Oh Genevieve, sweet Genevieve,
The days may come, the days may go
But still the hands of mem'ry weave
The blissful dreams of long ago. . . ."
Henry Tucker's words drifted over the dark, rippling water, dropping to die among the trees. The moon skipped between clouds, throwing blue-tinted shadows across Ben's face as he frowned at the water. Syd looked down . . . saw the faint, pale shape of hands beneath the waves, mud running in smooth rivulets, reflecting the moon like marble.
She faltered--but years of training kept her singing. Ben gripped her arm so tightly it brought tears to her eyes.
Below the water, the dense outlines of a head, streaming hair. Sydney leaned close to Ben, mutely comforted by the warm, soft folds of his body. But he never took his eyes from the rising form. Sleek surface, slick with slime--shadowed pits that might be eyes. Turned-up nose, laughing lips, the small heart-shaped face that Sydney knew as well as her own from the pictures in Ben's room. Mischievous, fun-loving, fourteen-year-old Jenny, who'd had no reason to end her life, except to stop her father's abuse. Ben had known, a kid of twelve scared of his uncle, his military father. Ben, crying into Syddie's shoulder for his fault in not saving her--for his memory of the way Jenny cried with his arms about her. . . .
Not a feature altered or mislaid--no sign of the fishes. Sudden frisson: true memory of gloss-haired Jenny, two grades above--her shadowed face hunted as she slipped through the crowd in her last few weeks at school.
Sydney knew Ben's lisp so well she could catch most of his murmured words beneath her song--endearments he'd never given her.
But his voice was breaking, and she kept singing. The thing in the water stretched its arms and began singing with her, head raised toward the moon, sharp jut of pointed chin, hollows around the eyes. Ben muttered counterpoint, "Jenny, come back to me, I've waited so long, ten years, Jenny, he's dead, please don't leave me again--"
"Ben, please, let's get out of here!"
Ben stood up shakily--moment's rush, raw hope. Then he said to the thing in the water: "She means nothing to me. I only brought her to sing for our anniversary, sweet Jenny. . . ."
Incredulity cracked Syd's features like the caking mud on her bare feet.
A few feet away, the young chest rose, strings of blue lace draped demurely from the throat, unlikely remnants of a flowered shirt. Sadness and radiance mixed on the features through a thin layer of mud. Water-weed trailed from her arms; green dredge clung to her navel, the tops of her legs. Long hair shone golden-brown through the green.
Ben leaned forward, as though to dive.
Jenny reached the pier, her arms seeking Syddie, weaving like a plant toward light.
Ben's face crumbled, terrifying gaps like a city in an earthquake. He caught Sydney, struggled with her at the end of the dock while Jenny watched with glistening eyes.
Boards, breaking under their weight. Sydney catstepped free, slipped through the pain of his holds. Her breath sobbed as the songs had done.
A different, icy touch on her ankle. It burned like blue fire when she kicked free, glancing down with horror to see Jenny's face smiling up at her, beatific.
Ben drew back abruptly. "She wants you," he panted, the splinters in his eyes revealing the broken pattern, the wounds.
The lissome figure swam to the side of the pier, then waded toward her, graceful and gawky with a young girl's gangliness. Smiling, peach-sweet lips--so different from the Jenny she remembered, frowning in the cloud of her troubles, tormented and fragile as she tried to dodge through the halls.
"Jenny," she said earnestly, "I remember you, I've never forgotten. I'm sorry--we've all been so sorry, Jenny. But he cuts himself inside, till his dreams bleed. You've got to stop, Jenny!"
"You've got to stop!" the girl echoed. Sydney flinched as the strange white eyes rolled up to heaven. Ben dropped to his knees.
"He calls me. I can't help myself. I become what he makes me," the girl said, each syllable high and clear, precise as a chapel bell. An echo that chimed in Sydney's heart.
And what was left of Jenny smiled, dimpling in that swamp, that slime. "If you give me your life to wear, perhaps I can be what he wants."
Sydney stood then, slowly, deliberately, feeling her body numb, colder than she'd ever been before. And it wasn't because she was frightened. And it wasn't because Ben huddled there, crying and rocking as though she didn't exist.
"What he wants," she said, the egg-stench of the marsh cutting sharp through her
pain, "is to be with you. His perfect girl. That's all he ever wanted, Jenny."
Syd walked carefully over the buckling planks, till she stood directly behind Ben. "If you were alive, I doubt he'd treat you half so well."
Snake-quick, she darted inside the shirt pocket where Ben kept his keys. As Jenny struck the closest figure on the pier, her arms spreading wide as fins, Sydney danced down the planks, bare feet light among the splinters, toes sucking mud as she flew toward the Jeep.
Sobbing that birthday song through her teeth . . . laughing as she'd done on the bridge. Sydney roared out in a plume of sweet exhaust, cursing her heart out as she rolled up over the bridge to melt into the quiet gray of the city night. Leaving them alone to celebrate their anniversary.
(First published in fantasque, Summer 2003)
© Gardner, 2007
With master's degrees in English and library science, C. A. Gardner has been the editor at a private maritime museum and currently serves as cataloger for a public library. Thus far, twenty stories, over a hundred poems, thirty-two drawings and photographs, and twenty-four nonfiction pieces have been published in venues like Abyss & Apex, The Doom of Camelot, Gothic.net, Horror Garage, The Leading Edge, Legends of the Pendragon, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, and Talebones. Two stories and a poem have earned honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. In 2004, Gardner attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop. For more information, visit www.gardnercastle.com.