Free Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea by Caitlin R. Kiernan

growing things. The sun is so warm on my face, and I lie on the floor and watch the only cloud I can see floating alone in a sky so blue it might still be winter out there. She was reading her poetry to me. I’ve been drinking cheap red wine from a chipped coffee cup with an Edward Gorey drawing printed on one side, and she’s been reading me her poetry and pausing to talk about the field. At that moment, I still think that neither of us has been back to the field in years, and it’s surprisingly easy to fool myself into believing that my memories are only some silly ghost story Helen’s been slipping in between the stanzas. Not the vulgar sort of spook story that people write these days. More like something an Arthur Machen or an Algernon Blackwood might have written, something more mood and suggestion than anything else, and I congratulate myself on feeling so removed from that night in the field and take another sip of the bitter wine. Helen’s been drinking water, only bottled water from a ruby-stemmed wine glass, because she says wine makes her slur.
    I open my bathrobe, and the sun feels clean and good across my breasts and belly. I’m very proud of my belly, that it’s still flat and hard this far past thirty. Helen stops reading her poem again and squeezes my left nipple until I tell her to quit it. She pretends to pout until I tell her to stop that, too.
    “I went back,” she says, and I keep my eyes on that one cloud, way up there where words and bad memories can’t ever reach it. Helen’s quiet for almost a full minute, and then she says, “Nothing happened. I just walked around for a little while, that’s all. I just wanted to see.”
    “That last line seemed a bit forced,” I say. “Maybe you should read it to me again,” and I shut my eyes, but I don’t have to see her face to know the sudden change in her expression or to feel the chill hiding just underneath the warm breeze getting in through the window. It must have been there all along, the chill, but I was too busy with the sun and my one cloud and the smell of Chinese wisteria to notice. I watch a scatter of orange afterimages floating in the darkness behind my eyelids and wait for Helen to bite back.
    “I need a cigarette,” she says, and I start to apologize, but it would be a lie, and I figure I’ve probably done enough damage for one afternoon. I listen to her bare feet on the hardwood as she crosses the room to the little table near her side of the bed. The table with her typewriter. I hear her strike a match and smell the sulfur.
    “Nothing happened,” she says again. “You don’t have to be such a cunt about it.”
    “If nothing happened,” I reply, “then there’s no need for this conversation, is there?” And I open my eyes again. My cloud has moved along an inch or so towards the right side of the window frame, which would be east, and I can hear a mockingbird singing.
    “Someone fixed the lock on the gate,” she says. “I had to climb over. They put up a sign, too. Posted. No trespassing.”
    “But you climbed over anyway?”
    “No one saw me.”
    “I don’t care. It was still illegal.”
    “I went all the way up the hill,” she tells me. “I went all the way to the stone wall.”
    “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to talk about this,” I say and roll over on my left side, rolling towards her, rolling away from the window and the cloud, the wisteria smell and the chattering mockingbird, and my elbow hits the Edward Gorey cup and it tips over. The wine almost looks like blood as it flows across the floor and the handwritten pages Helen’s left lying there. The burgundy undoes her words, her delicate fountain-pen cursive, and the ink runs and mixes with the wine.
    “Fuck you,” she says and leaves me alone in the room, only a ragged, fading smoke ghost to mark the space she occupied a few seconds before. I pick up the empty cup, cursing myself, my carelessness and the things I’ve