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

said because I’m scared and too drunk not to show it, and somewhere in the house a door slams. Later on, I think, Helen will believe it was only an accident, and I’m not so drunk or scared or stupid to know I’m better off not going after her. Outside, the mockingbird’s stopped singing, and when I look back at the window, I can’t find the white cloud anywhere.
     
    2. The Field (October)
    This is not the night. This is only a dream of the night, only my incomplete, unreliable memories of a dream, which is as close as I can come on paper. The dream I’ve had more times now than I can recall, and it’s never precisely the truth of things, and it’s never the same twice. I have even tried putting it down on canvas, again and again, but I can hardly stand the sight of them, those damned absurd paintings. I used to keep them hidden behind the old chifforobe where I store my paints and brushes and jars of pigment, kept them there until Helen finally found them. Sometimes, I still think about burning them.
    The gate with the broken padlock, the gate halfway between Exeter and Nooseneck, and I follow you down the dirt road that winds steeply up the hill through the old apple orchard, past trees planted and grown before our parents were born, trees planted when our grandparents were still young. And the moon’s so full and bright I can see everything – the ground-fall fruit rotting in the grass, your eyes, a fat spider hanging in her web. I can see the place ahead of us where the road turns sharply away from the orchard towards a field no one’s bothered to plow in half a century or more, and you stop and hold a hand cupped to your right ear. 
    “No,” I reply, when you tell me that you can hear music and ask if I can hear it, too. I’m not lying. I can’t hear much of anything but the wind in the limbs of the apple trees and a dog barking somewhere far away.
    “Well, I can. I can hear it clear as anything,” you say, and then you leave the dirt road and head off through the trees.
    Sometimes I yell for you to wait, because I don’t want to be left there on the road by myself, and sometimes I follow you, and sometimes I just stand there in the moonlight and branch shadows listening to the night, trying to hear whatever it is you think you’ve heard. The air smells sweet and faintly vinegary, and I wonder if it’s the apples going soft and brown all around me. Sometimes you stop and call for me to hurry.
    A thousand variations on a single moment. It doesn’t matter which one’s for real, or at least it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not even sure that I can remember anymore, not for certain. They’ve all bled together through days and nights and repetition, like sepia ink and cheap wine, and by the time I’ve finally caught up with you (because I always catch up with you, sooner or later), you’re standing at the low stone wall dividing the orchard from the field. You’re leaning forward against the wall, one leg up and your knee pressed to the granite and slate as if you were about to climb over it but then forgot what you were doing. The field is wide, and I think it might go on forever, that the wall might be here to keep apart more than an old orchard and a fallow plot of land.
    “Tell me that you can see her,” you say, and I start to tell you that I don’t see anything at all, that I don’t know what you’re talking about and we really ought to go back to the car. Sometimes, I try to remember why I let you talk me into pulling off the road and parking in the weeds and wandering off into the trees.
    We cannot comprehend even the edges of the abyss.
    So we don’t try.
    We walk together on warm silver nights,
    And there is cider in the air and
    Someone has turned the ponies out again.
    It’s easier to steal your thoughts than make my own.
    “Please, tell me you can see her.”
    And I can, but I don’t tell you that. I have never yet told you that. Not in so many words. But I can see her