The Girl from the Well

The dead girl, like many other dead girls before her, resembles these chochin. When she begins to shine so very brightly, I take her gently in my hands, the soft heat suffusing my being with a sense of peace I am unaccustomed to. It is only for a few seconds. But when you have resigned yourself to an eternity filled with little else but longing, a few seconds is enough.

I release her soul outside the Stained Shirt Man’s apartment. By then she is nothing more than a glowing ball of fire cradled against my withered form. I close my eyes, trying to absorb every bit of warmth I can take from her—to bring out and remember during other colder nights—before lifting my hands to the sky. Unbidden, she rises up, floating briefly above me as if granting benediction, before she continues to soar higher and higher like an autumn balloon, until she becomes another speck of cloud, another trick of the light.

Fire,

fly.

I am where dead children go. But not even I know where they go when I am done, whether to a higher plane or to a new life. I only know this: like the chochin of my youth, where they go, I cannot follow.

I stand there for a long time, just watching the sky. But nothing else moves in that darkness, and in this wide expanse of night, I see little else but stars.





CHAPTER TWO


    The Tattooed Boy


The city wakes to the rhythm of daylight.

They first arrive in ones and twos. Lone boys with bicycles and newspapers, waging war against doorsteps. I count them: four, five, six. Men and women running down streets, singing aloud to music no one else hears. I count them: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. A portly official thrusting important papers and packages into every other mailbox. I count him: one.

Then they arrive by the dozens. Men and women hurrying down sidewalks, a few in dark business suits, but the majority dressed simply in plaid or jeans. Some glance down at their wrists with an impatient air before boarding the horseless carriages they call buses or the smaller ones they call cars. (Twenty-seven.) Others saunter down the road with less urgency, with dogs of various breeds and sizes scampering ahead, restrained only by the collars around their necks. (Fourteen.)

A few dogs see me and growl, baring their teeth. I bare my own teeth and immediately they are off, tearing down the street in fright like hell has come nipping at their tails, their masters helpless in their pursuit. I have little regard for animals, and I imagine the feeling is mutual. Their leashes remind me of my own. Collars are as much a form of slavery whether they encircle necks or wrists, whether they are as heavy as lead or as light as a ropestring.

Finally, they come in droves. People in rich suits and richer tastes hurrying along, their minds immersed in the petty affairs that consume their lives (thirty-eight). Children squabbling in cars on their way to school, mothers and fathers behind the wheel (sixteen). They have no reason to see me—an unavenged spirit, a nothing-more. I am not a part of their world, as much as they are no longer a part of mine. They have the rest of their lives before them, and I do not.

I often spend the passage of days in a strange haze. When there is little to attract my vengeance, I lie in unusual states of hibernation.

Some days I curl up in attics and abandoned sheds. I do not sleep, so instead I exist in a period of dreamlessness, a series of finite instances where I think little of things and dwell on the wonders of nothing. It lasts for hours or days or years, or the time it takes for a bird to flap its wings, or the time it takes for a deep breath. But soon the rage curls again, the quiet places inside me that

whisper, whisper whispering find more find more

and so I rise, driven to seek out, to

devour, to make to break to take.