Free A Natural History of Hell: Stories by Jeffrey Ford

real clouds. It was a good couple of miles out to Chary, and so eventually we slowed down and Alice told Pretty to also.
    “Why’s this lady live all the way out here by herself?” asked Alice, slow pedaling beside me.
    “I don’t know too much about her, but she had a husband who either died or ran off.”
    “Probably ran off,” said Alice.
    “Ma says Mrs. Oftshaw’s from some other country.”
    “Which one?”
    “From across an ocean.”
    I didn’t say anything for a while, and Alice asked me, “Is that all you know?”
    “Oh, you must ’ ve seen her. She’s got a smoking hog name of Jundle.”
    We laughed, and when I focused back on the road, I spotted Pretty Please, way up ahead, making for the tree line.
    Alice no doubt saw it before I did and had taken off, pumping her legs furiously. I worked to catch up with her. Every once in a while, Pretty would get what we called “the urge.” Sometimes he just bolted away. It didn’t happen often, maybe once every couple weeks. This time he was really moving at a clip, and we both saw him reach the boundary of the woods and slip inside. We left the road and cut across the short field that bordered the tree line. Riding our bikes amidst the trees was slowing us down, so we dropped them and went forward on foot. Alice’s voice could be ear-splitting, and she used it every few steps. “Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, Please,” she called.
    She grew more frantic the farther we went. “I can’t lose him,” she said to me.
    I tried to tell her he’d turn up, but every time I spoke those words, she shook her head and walked faster. By the time I had to take her hand to calm her down, we’d come to the top of a rise. We stood at the crown of the hill and looked down through the trunks of cedar pine and birch trees at a glittering pond. Sitting at the water’s edge was Pretty Please, investigating something in the sand. At the sight of him, Alice sighed and turned in toward me. I put my arm around her and froze. She shrugged me off and took a seat a few feet down the incline. I followed and sat next to her.
    “I want to ask that brother of yours, pretty please to not run off like that anymore.”
    “My old ma, not your ma, told me once that Pretty was a bag of flesh filled with wind.” She took a couple breaths, staring down at her brother. “My Ma was a mean bitch.”
    When she said that, we both broke out laughing. That one knocked me over. When I sat back up I took her hand in mine again. She didn’t make like she noticed. We sat there quiet, taking in the smell of the cedar pines and the sound of goldfinches. The glitter on the water was diamonds and stars. She turned to look into my eyes and said, “We should kiss.”
    At the moment, I couldn’t think of one good reason not to. So we did. And before long she stuck her tongue in my mouth and then we were rolling on the ground rubbing each other up. So much rubbing—we had “the urge”—I thought the two of us would be erased. We reached a point where I had my hand up her shirt, and she had just grabbed my pecker down my pants, when out of the blue, she gets suddenly still, turns her head, and yells, “Pretty Please.” In a heartbeat she was off the ground, fixing her clothes. Pretty was gone, and it was the only time I ever wished him ill.
    We ran through the woods, toward the base of the mountain, and the undergrowth grew more tangled and difficult to manage. We’d follow a natural path through the trees and then eventually be stopped by a wall of thorn bushes and turn back to find another way forward. Alice was frantic again, and I had to keep her a few times from trying to find passage through the heart of one of those bushes that would rip her to shreds. Eventually we came to a clearing in the shade of the mountain. It was, by then, late afternoon, but dark as twilight where we stood. I was happy just to have some open ground before us.
    Alice noticed it first. The place was so covered in ivy and