by Cindy Pereira
I was twelve and had been sitting out on the porch swing with a big old flannel blanket wrapped around my shoulders when the sky started to speak. I was sipping black coffee and biting back a gag because it was still too hot and tasted like dirt. Mom was getting ready for work; the water was hissing from the shower and her rich, melodic voice was singing Johnny Cash. Mom hardly ever sang so I could feel this happy warmth dancing from my tummy to toes. I might’ve tapped my feet. Rosalind, my older sister, was still high and passed out stone-cold.
But there it was: off-note trumpets and drums and then a gradual metallic squealing and scraping. Eeeee-ahhhhhh-oooh-eeee-ehhh, punctuated by an ever-increasing, thump whump thump. It wasn’t a train, and we were rural so it couldn’t have been traffic.
It made me think of the chaotic, industrial music that Rosalind and her greasy boyfriend, Paul, would listen to up in her room whenever he snuck in. The grinding, squelching choruses and frenzied, rhythmic beat.
Far away at first, but then it gradually got closer and louder, only to start fading, and then, moments later, start wailing again. Like someone was fiddling with the dials on a radio.
“What is going on?” I asked the sky. And then the sky answered me with a high-pitched, heart-stopping scream. It sounded like a lady. It sounded like it was angry and in pain.
I leapt from my seat, splashing some of the coffee down the front of my shirt and stumbled towards the storm door. Then, just as quickly as they had shown up, the noises stopped. The day was mostly normal after. Mom scolded me for dumping my coffee into the grass. The air in the kitchen was stagnant and smelled faintly of eggs and dirt.
“Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know,” and then she headed off to work.
Rosalind ended up staying in bed all day with her period—she had these cramps that made her sob and grind her teeth. Mom said she was just being a baby back then. I think she regrets saying that now that Ros is dead.
I heated up a can of tomato soup for dinner and ended up burning the grilled cheese. Mom had brought us a bag of books from the thrift store where she worked. One of them was a swollen, water-logged copy of Wuthering Heights. Rosalind and I took turns reading Cathy and Heathcliff’s batshit outbursts that night. We were curled up in Ros’s bed, just like when we were little kids. I got to be Cathy and Rosalind read Heathcliff. She was wearing a tie-dyed sweatshirt even though it was boiling outside. I was trying not to laugh but Ros was taking the whole thing super seriously. I’m sure that Heathcliff reminded her of Paul. Both were “fatherless” with foul tempers.
Heathcliff was howling and bashing his head against a tree at Cathy’s funeral when we heard this loud thump squawk. Ros gasped and dropped the book.
“Was that a bird?” The words had barely left my mouth when Ros grabbed my wrist. I winced. “Should we go—should we go outside and check?”
Darkness yawned from the open window.
“No, don’t go outside. Not alone, at least.”
“Ros, what’s going on?”
Rosalind’s face was sweaty and pale.
“You don’t want to know.”
The electric fan whirred and hummed. The countryside was quiet, which made me hyperalert. Where were the crickets and owls? We were accustomed to their tunes.
“I heard a strange noise today,” I confessed.
“You can hear them too?”
I shrugged and picked at the corner of the book. “Heathcliff isn’t taking Cathy being dead so well, is he?” I murmured, trying to clear the air. “Just a couple more pages—”
“They’re coming from the sky. I’ve been hearing them for years—they used to wake me up at night, but Mom and Dad told me I was dreaming.”
“Do you think they can hear them?”
Rosalind licked her pale lips. “Probably not. But I do know that every time I hear them, something bad happens after.”
“Oh my God, Ros…”
“It feels like I’ve been hearing them from since before I was born. Just started figuring out how to quiet them. Please don’t tell Mom about the pills.”
“I won’t,” I lied, thinking of the yellow half-moons Rosaline downed with Sunny D when she couldn’t sleep. She said that Aspirin was weak, even though that was my go-to for everything. I wondered how useful she’d be against them if whatever was outside chose to come in. “Did you hear them when George ran away?”
“George didn’t run away.”
I fiddled with the bottom of my nightshirt. “Sorry, stolen.”
“I think I heard them. I don’t know. I was still in my crib.”
I imagined a fat baby Rosalind pawing at the felt farm animals dangling above her from her mobile as the sky trumpeted and shrieked. She wouldn’t have cried. Ros never shed a tear.
“I think we should stick together though,” she said. “The bed is big enough for the both of us. We could pretend that we’re having a sleepover.”
“No way. You’re gonna bleed all over me!”
I really didn’t want to be alone though, not after that speech. Rosalind grabbed another old towel from her drawer, and I curled up next to her in bed. I fell asleep fast with my sister’s warm breath in my hair and her knobby knees knocking against my shins. We kept the lamp on.
I woke up later squashed against the wall. Rosalind was shaking me, aggressively. I swiped at her in my groggy state.
“Ugh Ros, no, lemme sleep.”
She rasped: “Listen, listen.”
I did. The sky was speaking, again.
I wondered if George heard them that day as he took the shortcut home through the cemetery, back when we all lived together in the city. I wonder what he was thinking about that day—he was only ten. Maybe he was thinking of tomorrow’s spelling bee. Or maybe he was thinking of how he hoped that it was a little brother in Mom’s tummy, and not me.
I don’t know. Poor George.
Rosalind said: “They sound like they’re full of longing, whatever they are.”
I shivered. The sky didn’t sound sad or wistful—it sounded hungry.
The next morning our lawn was littered with garbage. Someone or something had gotten into our trash cans and strewn apple cores, chicken bones, and dirty tissues everywhere. Mom was running late for work and broke down in ragged sobs and gulping breaths at the sight of it. “I can’t deal with this right now, I can’t and I won’t—you girls will.” Still panting, she armed my sister and me with rubber gloves and garbage bags. “Those damn coyotes.”
A family of feral dogs had moved into the abandoned crack den, a broken down shed that used to be inhabited by countryside junkies, a few miles from our property. The coyotes’ real estate made them feel entitled. They had taken to strolling through their neighbors’ yards and causing mischief when the sun went down: rooting through trash, killing chickens, and trampling flower beds and veggie gardens.
Mom thought that it was coyotes, but Rosalind and I had found the mother dog—a German shepherd mix—nursing her young last spring; nestled in dirty rags and burlap sacks, she bared her fangs as her pups suckled and fed. I remember thinking that I could play the xylophone on the mother’s ribs, she was so thin.
We’d shoved cans of spam and boxes of crackers into our backpacks and stumble-ran back to the crack den while carefully avoiding abandoned baggies and debris. We prayed out loud that Mom wouldn’t catch us, since she’d likely spank us for taking that much food. We also prayed that the mother dog wouldn’t try to bite us if we approached her with good intentions.
They became our little secret, and we were content for Mom to believe that the barks and howls that she heard at midnight were coyotes and not Mrs. Dog and her brood.
“They oughta be shot. You’re all giving me a headache” Mom said as she climbed into the front seat of her old black car. “Make sure you water George’s flowers,” she reminded us as the car rumbled down the driveway.
Rosalind shook her head and plucked onion skins from the grass. “It’s your turn to water them. I’m gonna to go get ready for Paul.”
I groaned. “Paul’s coming over today?”
“Don’t sound so pissed. And why didn’t you close the gate—you know that Mrs. Dog and the kids like to visit and poop everywhere if you don’t.”
“I did!” I protested. “And I hate Paul, why is he coming over again?”
“He’s got Pretty Hate Machine and I want to listen to it, also he’s bringing us McDonald’s.” She pulled off her gloves and winced. “Ugh, I smell like shit.”
“Do you think the sky knew about this,” I asked toeing at my overstuffed garbage bag.
Rosalind laughed, “No dummy, the sky only screams like that when some truly awful shit is about to happen.”
“Like what?” I asked.
Rosalind shrugged. “Like George being kidnapped or Dad finally serving Mom the divorce papers. Stuff like that.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“I don’t have time to be scared. Paul’s gonna be here soon. Make sure you wipe the dust off of George’s picture.”
George’s Memorial lived in the shade of a silver birch tree. I always believed that the eyes in the bark of that old tree served as a sort of silent bodyguard; that as long as it stood, George would be safe—wherever he happened to be, even if he was being carted about in sex-trafficking rings, like Mom believed. Dad thought that he was murdered by some random pedo-creep. Ros was convinced it was all a conspiracy. The police called him a runaway. “He’ll come home,” the reporting officer said with a tilt of his head. “Boy’s just trying to give you a spook.”
I liked to think that he was sitting on God’s knee.
The memorial consisted of George’s last school photo and a fairy ring of multi-coloured tea lights that were only ever lit on his birthday and the pretty stones that he used to collect. In the photo his sandy eyebrows arched and his mouth twisted into a bemused smirk. His hair slicked back with enough gel to make it appear a darker shade. He was only in the fifth grade but he had already towered over Mom who was only 4’10 in her stocking feet.
Two small pots of violets sat shoulder to shoulder with George.
I ran a paper towel over the glass encasing his photograph and chatted with George in my head, as I always did when tasked with checking up on him: Hello George how are you, are you alive or dead, what’s your favourite movie, have you seen the puppies, do like the smell of wet grass or gasoline—
Rosalind screamed. I dropped the photograph, cursed, and sprinted towards her voice. Poor George. Poor me.
Rosalind was crouched down on her knees beneath her bedroom window. Her back was shuddering violently. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh God,” she kept saying over and over again. Laid out in front of her was the body of one of Mrs. Dog’s puppies.
His stomach had been torn open and black ants crawled over his purple intestines. His eyes were cold and murky. Vomit lurched up my throat, hot and acidic.
I thought of the wet meat thud of his body slamming into Rosalind’s window.
“Sky sounds,” I ran my wrist over my mouth. “It’s happening, isn’t it?”
“Get the shovel. And a garbage bag,” Rosalind said.
We wrapped the puppy in a garbage bag and buried him in the empty, abandoned gravel lot about a mile from home. We knew that the ground would be softer there. Mom would be less likely to ask questions.
I was tasked with carrying the body, which was cold and stiff as a doll. We were silent during our trek. The air suddenly became crisp. Like we’d stepped into a deepfreeze.
“Smells like rain,” I said.
Rosalind sniffed. “Yeah, maybe.”
We thought it was ash at first—forest fires ran wild that year, and so we almost shrieked when the snowflakes landed on our bare sun-baked shoulders and legs.
Rosalind’s lips were turned blue. I swear. She hissed the Lord’s Prayer as she covered the puppy with gravel and dirt.
“Rosalind, let’s go,” I whimpered. “Something horrible—“
“I know, I know! I’m almost done.”
“Ros, please!” I grabbed her wrist. “It’s happening.”
And then the sky began to trumpet and scream.
We scrambled under the barbed wire fence and abandoned our shovel in the dead brown grass. We ran, holding hands, and gasping for breath through the woods separating the properties. I twisted my ankle tripping over a root, and was all but dragged the rest of the way.
“Please, please, please,” Rosalind muttered under her breath, as she fumbled with the lock on the front door. She dropped her keys and cursed. Spittle curdled on her lip. The sky continued to snarl and moan.
“What does it want from us?”
“I don’t know, Darla, can you just shut up for one second?”
She whooped in relief once the door finally opened, and she shoved me in the damp-smelling safety of our mudroom.
“Should we call Mom? What about Dad?”
“They can’t do anything.” Rosalind raked her fingers through her hair. “Shit, I don’t know. Let me think. They haven’t been this bad since George.”
She paced about the living room. I sat on the couch and watched my older sister like one would a tiger at the zoo. My stomach growled and I winced in embarrassment.
“Do you want something to eat? We’ve got baloney and some crusts of Wonderbread—I could make us some sandwiches?” I was already moving into the kitchen to pour us each a glass of Coke, the Aspirin was tucked behind a wilted head of lettuce for some reason. I shook my head and the Aspirin was gone. How weird.
Rosalind stopped pacing and poked her head in to the kitchen. She wrinkled her nose. “How can you think of eating anything after we just buried a puppy?”
My head twinged. “I don’t understand—”
The ringing phone startled us both though Ros still pounced for the receiver, nearly wrenching the telephone off the wall. Her strength could be freakishly Herculean.
“Paul?” She asked hopefully. “Sorry, sorry. Hi, Mom?”
I chewed my nails and willed for Mom to come home. I would’ve crawled back inside of her in that moment if I could. She would protect us. Mama, Mama—please, come home.
“Mom, can you hear me? I—Oh, okay.”
I felt my stomach drop with the gravity of my sister’s tone.
“What’s going on?” I blurted out. “Ros, tell Mom—“
“Yeah, we will. Okay, okay. We love you too. Mom, Mom?” Rosalind cradled the phone between her chin and shoulder for a moment before she sagged forward in defeat.
“Mom?” I inquired, already knowing the answer but not wanting to believe it.
“The snow’s hit them too, and she doesn’t want to tackle the highway in the storm.”
“So?”
“So it’s just you and me. She’s staying the night at Auntie Margie’s.”
“Oh.”
The hallway clock ticked, and outside, the wind howled.
“I think I’m going to go to bed,” announced Rosalind. “Maybe you should try to get some sleep too.”
I furrowed my brow. “But it’s the middle of the day.”
Rosalind shrugged and jogged up the stairs to her bedroom. I heard her rustling through drawers and cupboards. “I know just the thing—” She emerged shaking a small bottle of pills and holding our dented tea kettle. “Pills and chamomile tea.”
“Where—Where did you get those?” I asked though I already knew. “Is that—Is that safe?”
Rosalind responded by placing the kettle back onto the stove, now lit, though the flame was orange instead of blue, before tapping two bone-colored capsules into her palm. She smirked, and then dry-swallowed them.
She didn’t cough or gag. I was impressed.
A few minutes later we sat across from each other, sipping steaming cups of tea. The pill caught in my throat on the way down, but a firm open-palmed smack between my shoulder blades from Rosalind set everything straight.
“If we’re gonna fight the whatever’s coming out of the sky, we’ve gotta do so with level heads. No going all spastic and flailing,” she explained. “We’ll be badass and stone-cold. We’ve gotta hunt these things. Show them that we aren’t going to go with them. Not like George.”
“Is Paul still coming over?” I asked, hesitant.
“I don’t think so,” Rosalind admitted. “Probably for the best. Honestly, I’m kinda happy that it’s just us girls today. I don’t think Paul gets it. Plus he punches like a girl.”
I nodded weakly in agreement. “Yeah, just you and me against the world.”
“You starting to feel it, little sis?”
I nodded. My head felt heavy on my neck, so I placed my forehead on the table. Then, I closed my eyes and let the darkness take control.
Behind my eyelids I heard my older sister hiss: “oh shit, I should’ve dosed you different—”
I woke up in my own bed after what felt like a hundred years to an almighty THUMP and the distant cries of eeeee AHHHHHH oooooh eeeeee. The room was as bright as it would’ve been during the day; shimmering, crystal lights cast rainbows across the eggshell-coloured walls and the air was buzzing with static electricity. I lurched out of bed and raced down the hall crying out for Rosalind. A heavy body threw itself on top of me.
I screamed. In my panicked state, I registered that the body was male. His long, dank hair hung in tendrils around his face and his breath smelled rank. “Shh, shh,” the man whispered harshly. “It’s just me, it’s just me.”
In the distance, I heard Rosalind shriek: “George, get off of her! What are you doing?”
The man rolled off of me, and I lay on the dingy carpet, gasping for breath. Rosalind crouched next to me. Tears were streaming down her face. “Our brother is home,” she whispered excitedly. The man smiled, and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. His teeth were small gray pebbles. His eyes were shiny, the pupils blown wide.
“George,” I asked hesitantly.
The man held his hands out to me. They were covered in thick pink scars and rust-brown scabs. “Hello, baby sister.”
If I squinted and used my imagination I guess I could see my big brother around his eyes and his long, thin mouth. The man, George, held my sister’s hand as she looked at him with stoned, glassy-eyed awe. She looked at him like she saw God.
“Long time, no see.”
“See Darla, he wasn’t dead. He was in the sky the entire time.”
“The sky?”
“Yes,” George said. “Come look.”
He dropped Rosalind’s hand and held his out to me. I accepted and pulled myself up. I winced—his grip was tight, like a snake coiling around a mouse. George didn’t wear a shirt and a green dragon tattoo glimmered on his chest amid a spatter of bruises and scrapes.
“Everything’s okay, baby girl. George has something to show you,” Rosalind cooed.
George gently pushed me back into Rosalind’s bedroom. The air smelled sickly sweet, like Rosalind’s strawberry body spray and underneath that, something sharp and sulphuric.
“Look out the window!” Rosalind called out excitedly.
I did, and was greeted with a spectacular vision. The sky was bathed in jewel-toned shades of red, pink, and blue. The colours shimmered and shuddered and formed patterns and cracks. In the distance a large black disc zig-zagged up and down, this way and that. Several jellyfish-like tendrils oozed out of one of the cracks.
I grabbed George’s hand as the tendrils curled and swayed. They brushed against the tops of the pine trees, and made papery, scratchy sounds upon contact with the needles: shhhhhrick shhhhrick. George squeezed my fingers back reassuringly.
“They’re calling us home.”
My teeth began to chatter in my skull. I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
“But we live here, George,” I insisted, made frantic because of his dream-like tone.
“We’re not from around here,” whispered George. “Don’t you ever feel alone? I do. Rosalind does too.”
“I—I want to go back to bed.” I tugged my fingers away from his. “Please.”
George’s eyes were wide, and dark; the pupils blown completely out. His smile was knowing and serene. “Okay. Pleasant dreams.”
“Good night, George.”
I turned on my heel and tip-toed towards the door. Like Lot’s wife though, I made the mistake of turning to look at him. His long, tangled hair was trailing down his pale back. It might have just been the way that the lights were dancing across his skin, but I swear to God there was something moving beneath his flesh—the way that it rippled and pulled and strained. George groaned and pressed his forehead against the window, and his breath fogged the glass.
“See you later, sis.” He traced a cross into the glass, and then an “x.”
I tightly curled myself up like a seed pod in my bed so that none of my limbs would be exposed. I could still hear them though, even with the blankets over my head. I recited my multiplication tables over and over again in an ill attempt to calm my nerves. “Five times five is twenty-five, six times five is thirty, seven times five is thirty-five, eight times five is—”
Thump whump THUMP.
“—Forty. Nine times five is—“
Shrick shrick shrick.
At one point my sister crept into my room and tried to reason with me. She smiled as placid as the Virgin Mary as she told me about all of the wonderful things that George had seen.
The creatures with their opal-tinted skin and their wings. “Oh Darla, their wings,” she sighed. “We’ll have them too.”
But our parents, your boyfriend… The puppies.
“What about their—our teeth?”
Rosalind tilted her head. “Oh, we’ll have splendid fangs, and we won’t get cavities.”
“But you don’t want to eat meat.”
“George isn’t the one who killed the puppy, if that’s what you think. It was one of the others, and they’re really quite sorry about the whole thing.”
“How do you know that’s our brother? Where did he come from? Why did you let him in?”
“Because he’s George. I just know it—My guts say that it’s him.” Her strong knuckles massaged my back through the sheets. “He isn’t gonna hurt us. He just wants to take us home.”
“But this is our home,” I insisted.
“No, it isn’t. I’ll let you rest, and I’ll check up on you in a bit.”
“Okay.”
Rosalind lifted the blanket from my face and kissed my sweaty forehead. “Everything is gonna be alright, Darla. I promise.”
The lights swirled about Rosalind’s head like a halo. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, and her hands were clasped as though in prayer. “Get some sleep, and I’ll pack your bag.”
I never saw my brother or sister ever again.
I woke up again a few hours later to the sounds of sirens and flashing lights, synthetic red and blue. I was placed on a stretcher and hurriedly carried out to a waiting ambulance. In the background. I heard the sound of rushing water and wailing.
I thought it was the sky, but when I turned my head to the side I saw my mother being held back by the police and paramedics.
“Darla! Rosalind! George!” she kept screaming over and over again.
I closed my eyes. Sleep was so much easier. My head felt like it was full of rocks. My tongue turned to wool.
He shambled off into the woods again. A gas station worker from nearby claimed she saw a man who looked like George heading down the dirt roads close to Highway 17. She chomped chewing tobacco and spoke with a wet lisp: “he was carrying this thing wrapped in a pink sheet, I think it was a girl but maybe it was just a bundle of wet laundry.”
Still, no one believed that the man was George. My sister was gone. George was dead, again. The news liked that story, too—two kids from a Podunk white trash family to up and go like that in the span of less than thirteen years? Dad was questioned, so was Mom.
I got dragged off and sat down in a bunch of rooms—therapists talked soft and slow, some policemen gave me hot coco, others just rolled their eyes at me. One time a hypnotherapist waved a pendulum in my face and I pretended to nod off simply for her sake. Still no Rosalind, still no George. After hours worth of interrogation from well-intended folks with PhD’s and other fancy things, they determined that it was likely the pills speaking to Rosalind. That or the scentless carbon monoxide gasses that swirled inside her lungs and tangled up inside her skull.
Mom and Dad held a press conference every year. Dad’s face became tired and pinched, Mom’s all wet and swollen. They did this despite the social worker finding all of the pills. Dad got custody of me, and Mum stopped singing, this time for good. She hardly spoke.
They declared Ros legally dead on her twentieth birthday.
But I know. I know where she is. I eventually moved up North to be closer to the Aurora Borealis. I know it’s not home, but it’s close. On cold nights when my breath turns to smoke and the black sky turns violet and emerald, I drag my old body up the hill behind my mortal home.
I whistle and wave: please, take me home.
Cindy Pereira is a recent graduate of the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. Her work has previously appeared in ‘Sad Girl’s Club Literary Blog,’ ‘Chronically Lit,’ and ‘The Maynard.’ She currently lives in Edmonton, AB.