Free Who Made Stevie Crye? by Michael Bishop Page A

vacillating. In fact, the cumulative portrait of her own character in this disgusting little sketch was almost as ugly as the description of Marella’s ruined body.
    That ’s a self-centered way of interpreting this nonsense, Stevie suddenly realized. Besides, the sketch doesn’t make you out a complete Lucrezia Borgia. As far as that goes, it’s probably a modified transcription of the nightmare you were having before you heard this damned machine pounding away and came stumbling over your own furry slippers to behold its treachery.
    You’re angry with yourself for not getting here in time, and you’re angry with the machine for making a gruesome, condescending joke of a relationship you cherish.
    This reasoning had a calming effect. Her heart slowed its thunderous beating, and her hands trembled less from fear and anger than from the cold. She had the sh-sh-shakes.
    Marella, Stevie thought. What about Marella?
    Nightmares slipped through her consciousness like sand through the waist of an hourglass. Once awake, she could never remember them. All she ever retained of her dreams was a mood, whether upbeat, neutral, or despairing. If she had actually dreamed the sequence of images and dialogue typed out on this strip of paper by the Exceleriter, well, the sound of its sinister industriousness had stolen from her even her postnightmare blues. She had focused her entire will on getting from her bedroom to her study undetected by the culprit. She had not succeeded. It had finished its story and turned itself off before she was halfway to her destination.
    Marella! a dogged portion of her consciousness reminded her. Maybe you can’t remember the lost dream that inspired this ghoulish lampoon, Stevenson Crye, but it isn’t really lost, is it? It’s right here under your hands, in stinging black and white. It describes your daughter as a roller-coaster framework of bones over a lava flow of flesh—but instead of going down the hall to see about her, you stand here mentally abusing your typewriter for making up such filth, for portraying you as impatient, self-centered, and wishy-washy. Why, at this very moment you’re in the unbelievable process of living up, or down, to its characterization of you.
    “Marella, I’m coming,” Stevie said aloud. “Don’t fret, little sister. Mama’s coming.”
    She groped her way down the dark hall, entered the girl’s room, and picked her way over the clothes and stuffed animals littering the floor. After squeezing between the twin beds book-ended by the dormer windows, Stevie lowered herself to the empty bed and switched on Marella’s porcelain night-light.
    The girl lay cocooned in the bedclothes, scrunched into a question mark in the middle of her narrow mattress. Stevie could not even see her face. In a way, this was a relief. The reality of the moment departed significantly from its imaginary parallel in the typewriter’s version. Marella was okay. Earlier that evening, after all, her nervous stomach had improved miraculously during her and Teddy’s favorite television show, The Dukes of Hazzard , an inane compendium of Good Old Boy humor and silly car crashes. She had gone to bed without complaint and had been sleeping soundly ever since. For these and several other reasons, then, the typewriter’s version was undoubtedly a lie.
    Uncover her and check, Stevie urged herself.
    Her hand went to the satiny hem of the electric blanket, but did not forcefully or even feebly grip it. Her fingers lacked the necessary resolve.
    Go on. Go on.
    At last Stevie drew back the bedclothes, and, as she had known all along, uncovering Marella produced no surprise, no unbearable shock. The girl moaned because her blanket had been taken from her. She tilted her head, briefly opened unseeing eyes, and curled her nightgowned body into a tighter question mark. Asleep, lost in sleep, and Stevie pulled her covers back into place and tenderly tucked the overlap beneath the mattress. The