Free North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud Page B

until it looked like an abandoned house, and would have likely attracted the usual doomed human ecology of abandoned houses were it not for the occasional errant stabs of light glimpsed through windows, and the mournful sounds which from time to time seemed to exhale from the building itself and spoil the air around it.
    A small band of black kids made their way down the street, one of them swinging a long stick in a sweeping arc, like an explorer hacking his way through heavy foliage. They talked easily, loudly, apparently indifferent to anything in the world other than themselves and their own immediate impulses. Nick watched them come with a puzzling lack of emotion: they were just kids tonight, kids he didn’t know. He tried to summon the anger he believed was justified and proper, and failed. The one with the stick whacked it against the fenders of parked cars, sending little detonations ricocheting down the street. Normally this would throw Nick into a fury, which he would nurture from the near-obscurity of his front porch; but tonight each crack of the stick vanished into a gulf inside him. As they passed in front of his house, they fell abruptly silent. They did not look at him or his house, and they held their heads back and sauntered with their customary loose-limbed bravado, but he knew the place spooked them. Sometimes that embarrassed him, other times it made him proud. Tonight he just felt defeated.
    Finally they disappeared around the corner. Their voices picked up again, and soon he heard the steady, diminishing whack of the stick against metal. He waited several more minutes; the wind increased, and heavy clouds moved in to obscure the moon. Nick watched as two headlights glided around a distant corner and made their steady way to him. Trixie had finally arrived.
    Before he opened the door for her, he said, “It’s dark inside. They ain’t cut the power back on yet.”
    “That’s okay.”
    He led her inside. By now he had become accustomed to the darkness, but he remembered his first time coming home to it, and knew how Trixie must feel. It had been so overwhelming that he had actually experienced a rush of vertigo, and a brief, terrible conviction that he had been struck blind, or that perhaps he had died.
    He dug a little flashlight out of his pocket and flicked it on. The grim state of their home bobbed into sight, like surfacing detritus from a sunken ship. Clothes lay in careless piles on the floor, unwashed plates and empty or nearly empty glasses—insides rimmed with coagulated syrup from soda and sweet tea—were stacked and strewn across the coffee table. Furtive shapes clicked and darted amongst them, erupting every now and then into violent skirmishes: cockroaches, which had found in his home a kind of Eden. They cloying stench of fried meat and stagnant air covered them like a shroud.
    “Jesus, Nick,” Trixie said.
    A sound crawled toward them out of the darkness: a broken, lurching squeal, like a rat being ground beneath a boot. It was so alien, and so painful, that he half expected some nightmare creature of tall, scraping bone to amble into view, its jaw swinging loosely beneath a searching, serpentine tongue.
    Nick ushered Trixie into his bedroom, located right off the living room, and gave her the flashlight. “Wait here,” he said. “I got more flashlights in here you can light. I’ll be right back.” He shut the door on her, and turned toward the sound coming down the hallway.
    It was his mother, in her grandmother’s old wheelchair, looking so much older and smaller than she had before the accident. It was as though some ancient version of herself had bled back through time to confront him, dismayed and death-haunted. A blanket was bunched around her legs, which only barely registered as two thin ridges underneath. She held a votive candle in an ashtray; it was the only light she would permit herself.
    “Nickie, you’re home,” she said. “I was worried.”
    “I’m