Glissade

From: Issue 5

Sam moves through the woods using the Quiet, the way Daddy taught her. Axe in her right hand, club in her left. Her head is tilted to the side to avoid nudging the lower, snow-heavy branches. Her eyes never stay in one place more than a moment.

She can hear Jamie behind her, stomping twigs underfoot. The thick snow doesn’t dampen the rasp of his breathing. He has no idea how much noise he’s making. Jamie could never get a handle on the Quiet, not the way she or Daddy can. She watched him practise in the forest for months, watched him fail to sneak up on rabbits, sparrows, weasels; one day it was a still-semi-tame cat, loafing in the sun. It was super easy to follow him. She’d watched him coil tighter with every attempt, pushing it out and away from his chest instead of winding it in. He couldn’t understand exactly what it was he was supposed to be reaching for. He knew only enough to know he was failing at it. She’d watched him drive his axe inches deep into a tree afterwards. Pulled it out, drove it in again and again. Until the tears on his cheeks had crystallised.

Daddy puts his big hand on her shoulder. She knows better than to startle while they’re on a hunt—it takes you out of the Quiet for one thing, and you can’t get back straight away, not until you have more sense than fear—but dang, the way he can slide into silence takes her breath away sometimes. She looks up at her father, a fur-wrapped god of the forest. Hushed as moonlight. His coat is unzipped. He doesn’t like things near his neck; a thick cord of scarred tissue wraps around it. He jokes that’s where the doctor sewed his head back on. He won’t talk about where he really got it.

–How’s the new handle?– he signs.

No speech in the Quiet. Sam adjusts her grip on the axe. It feels fine under her mitten. Solid. Everything looks greyed-out while she’s under; in the real world, her mittens are a pretty green, like spring leaves. The handle Daddy made for her is a sturdy ash shaft. It’s blonde, lazy whorls looping around the neck. Just like her hair.

–It’s okay–

–Are you sure? Have you tested it?–

–It’s okay–

Daddy squeezes her shoulder once, then lets his hand drop.

Three nights ago, Sam dreamed of a snow fox. Black-button eyes set into a blaze of white. She was walking through the woods out back; following some kinda ploughed path, no clear direction, but a hungry feeling in her head like she had somewhere to be. The fox loped along beside her, a couple of fists above the snow, paws treading empty air like a swimmer. When she looked back, there were pawtracks overlaid on her bootprints in the snow. The snowbank alongside her was unsullied, except for the blood splatters the fox left in its wake. She lifted her hands to the leather strap around her waist, but there was nothing there—no weapon, no food, no nothing. The animal trotted ahead of her. Red jewels glistened down its hind leg. It deposited a breadcrumb trail of rubies at regular intervals, marking the route. When it looked back, the tears dripping down its face were crimson too, and the scarlet, open mouth howled a thousand soundless sorrows into the night air.

When Sam woke up, blood was smeared over her thighs. When she stood, it oozed down her leg. She had cramps, stomach cramps but lower down, where her inside parts were. She’d seen a picture once, in a house they’d hunted a long time ago, when Momma was still alive. She’d been little then, too little to know how to ask the right questions. According to that picture, her girl insides were colourful; red and yellow and disgustingly bright blue. It made her feel sick to think of it. At least if she had to have funfair organs, they were tucked away where no one could see them, where they couldn’t attract attention. She didn’t know if the Quiet helped with babies or not. She’d been surrounded by only men for years, but they were family and it didn’t seem to be have ever crossed their minds to tell her one way or another.

Sam hasn’t told Daddy about the blood yet. She got it early, she reckons. Momma said that she got it at fourteen, and her momma got it at fifteen. Hasn’t told Jamie either. He’s twisting away from her as he grows, a branch straining to be free of the trunk. She sees it in the way his lip curls when he thinks she isn’t looking. He wants their father to himself. He thinks he could find the Quiet if she wasn’t around, thinks it’s a matter of being taught. She hasn’t bothered to tell him that it doesn’t work like that, that he could be alone in the world with Daddy and he still wouldn’t be able to force the Quiet to come to him. He’s doing it all wrong. You gotta wiggle it gently, like prising up a rock to see what’s underneath, except the rock is under your lungs and your breath is the fingers. She can feel the logs too. They’re close now, and it’s definitely they; more than one, but no more than three. It’s a stone-in-your-shoe feeling, in the small cavern of her chest.

The cabin they’re looking for is at least a mile away from the main road. Daddy always picks the targets. He always picks the right ones too. She doesn’t know how he does it. Uncle Bill is pretty good—was, she corrects herself. Was pretty good. They find it easily. It doesn’t have any smoke coming out of the chimney, that’s how you can tell it’s a target. It’s bitter cold outside but she’s got her coyote-trimmed hood up and that takes most of the bite out of the air.

-Ready, family?- Daddy signals. -Let’s go-

She nods. Jamie has sidled up beside them. She flinches away from the noise; amplified in the Quiet, his footsteps boom like boulders thrown into a dry creekbed. Jamie nods too, then tries to dig an elbow into Sam’s ribs so he can squeeze past her. He’s dumb enough to rile her up, but smart enough to wait til Daddy’s back is turned before he did it. She’s still in the Quiet though, so she sidesteps this swipe and pokes him in the back hard with her axe handle. He stifles a grunt of pain an instant later, but by then she’s three feet away, batting innocent lashes.

She knows her place. She’s a rearguard. She picks a decent-sized tree, thirty feet from the front door, while Daddy creeps towards the cabin. Jamie fidgets, crouched behind a bush closer to the door. The bush is too small to cover him, its pale flowers wilting with exhaustion. Sam sniffs, getting a whiff of the sweat and pinesmoke scent of her brother. He used to be way better at hiding. And washing. She sniffs again. The air feels heavy in the Quiet and tastes like greasy milk, but past that there’s something else; a bitter, cloying residue, just on the edge of detection. Log smell. Bleugh.

On some unheard signal, her father rushes up the steps and kicks the door down. There’s a big crash, then several smaller crashes. Jamie heads in at a run, swinging his doubleheaded axe up before he even steps over the threshold. More crashing follows, but it sounds further away now. The fight is moving through the house. That’s her cue. She rises and enters the cabin, emerging from the Quiet as she does so. She’s not supposed to but she likes to look at the houses sometimes. The world comes back into sharp focus, bright colours revived. It’s cold inside the house. Lots of stuff on the walls; antlers, paintings of ships and hills, a cloth map of the stars hanging on the back of one of the doors. Everything reeks of rotted meat, a smell she knows only too well is dang near impossible to get out of fabric. She steps over a broken chair and sidles upstairs, ignoring the sounds of struggle coming from the rooms below. The littlest logs are always upstairs; those are her job. Daddy said so.

She pushes the first door open. It’s just a bathroom. Nothing there. Boring. The next door is already half-open. Sam puts one mitten on the wood, eases it back until she can see the whole room from where she is. It’s scary when they sneak up on you and she’s not super good with an axe yet. There’s a log on the floor in front of the empty fireplace. Just one. It’s small, wrapped in a lacy white shawl. It rocks slightly from one side to the other. She takes her time, props her club against the wall in the corner. Hefts her axe, brings it down hard. Not hard enough to slice fully. The log is still twitching. The fabric wrapped around it must have caught the blade on the way through. Maybe she didn’t sharpen it enough before they left. Oops. I’m gonna be in trouble.

“Report.”

Jamie is in the doorway. She hadn’t realised how much he’d grown over the summer. Seeing him now, almost filling this rectangular space, it’s a shock. Like seeing home again after weeks on the trail. He’s broad like Daddy, but with Momma’s dark, spiky hair. Just another reason he can’t use the Quiet as well as she can. The best Quiets are always blonde. Daddy said so. It was a dang shame what happened to Momma, everybody says so. But if you got no Quiet, you ain’t got a holler in hell.

“I said report, Sam.”

-I’m doing it- she signs.

“Use your words.”

She rolls her eyes at him. Jamie ignores this, looks past her. He thumbs his bleeding lip. The log is still moving, rocking feebly from side to side. It’s not making any noise though. None of them ever do.

“You didn’t cut it in half.”

“I know. I’m not done.”

“You have to cut it in half,” he insists, and stalks into the room.

“I was gonna.” She can’t quite keep the whine out of her voice. She doesn’t savour this part the way he does. She likes the Quiet, likes being able to get close enough to boop a squirrel on the nose, likes being able to sit for hours and let the world flutter down and settle on her. Daddy says that isn’t what the Quiet is supposed to be for, but she doesn’t see why it can’t be. Snow is clean, unsullied, pretty as a picture. The log on the rug is a bloody red mess. Pink goo everywhere, seeping into the faded blue floral pattern. If only we were all made of snow inside.

There’s a loud crash downstairs, followed by a bellow of pain. “Daddy?” She’s already sprinting down the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Daddy!”

She stops dead at the bottom of the stairs. Jamie bowls her aside as if she weighed no more than a puppy. She smacks her shoulder on the wall, rebounding hard. Their father is on the ground, trying to rise from one knee; both hands are pressed over a spreading patch of ugly scarlet on his sweater. Beside him, a big log is face down, legs kicking with some strength still left in them.

“Take care of it.” Daddy backs away, staggering towards the door but goes down hard on his knees again.

Jamie takes off the log’s head with one blow. He rushes to help but Daddy’s a big man. It takes both Jamie and Sam, with every muscle straining, to get Daddy to his feet and outside onto the porch. They ease him down onto a rocking chair. He sucks air in through his teeth. His hands never leave the wound.

“How di—” Jamie begins.

“It was holding a knife.”

All three of them stare at each other.

“But they don’t do that,” Jamie runs a hand through his dark mane, making it stick up even more. “They don’t know how.”

“That one did.”

Sam bites her lip. “I never saw that before.”

Through the sweat, Daddy’s eyes are shining. He’s scared. Like, really scared. She never saw that before either. Jamie’s eyes flicker to her; there’s something wolfish in his look, something with bared teeth. She blinks and it’s gone.

“You remember your way back to the road?”

“Of course.” Jamie straightens, holds himself tall.

“Take her and go. Head to town. It’s a hard couple of miles but if you stick to the road it’ll be easier. Get to the store and tell Johnson what happened. He’ll take it from there.”

Jamie looks down at Sam. “I can go faster by myself.”

“Son—”

“She’ll slow me down.”

“I’m not asking your opinion. That’s an order. We’re a family and we stick together.” Daddy’s breathing is faster, his broad chest rising and falling underneath his coat. Sam can see the pulse in his neck fluttering, a butterfly trapped under a jar. “You can’t do it without her and you know it.”

Jamie’s jaw clenches. “Yessir.” He grabs Sam’s arm. “Come on. We gotta run.”

“I wanna stay with Daddy.”

“I’ll be fine,” Daddy says, and adds in sign -I promise-

His skin, normally a frosted pink, has paled considerably with the effort of moving his hands. “Take care of her.” He closes his eyes and leans back. “Family first.”

“He told you to come, so come,” Jamie snaps, and half-drags her along for the first few seconds. She keeps trying to look back, but Jamie has her arm in a tight grip. He lets go once they’re among the trees and sets a pace, much faster than she can comfortably manage. She does her best, tucking her axe into her belt to free her arms and running in his traces like a dog. The empty loop on the belt reminds her that she left her club in the upstairs room. Daddy is going to be mad at her again.

“Are there any nearby?” Jamie calls over his shoulder.

He knows she can’t use the Quiet while she’s running; it’s a dumb question even for him.

“I dunno.”

He slows down to a jog. She stops, bends forwards and puts her hands on her knees to relieve her aching lungs. Her stomach has started to cramp again, warning pain sparking upwards. “If we stop for a minute, maybe I cou—” The punch is a surprise, knocking her off her feet.

She rolls in the snow, dizzied, pulse thundering. Bile rises in her throat and she coughs, sucking air. Jamie is standing over her. Past his right knee, there’s movement in the forest. Fifty feet away, a log has started to turn in their direction. It’s a big one; red flannel shirt, boots, trucker hat. Broad shoulders, long arms. Probably a lumber guy, back when people were too busy to cut their own. Pretty skeletal now though. Easy to take, as long as you see them coming.

“I don’t…” Jamie hesitates. “I don’t wanna take care of you.”

The log is coming towards them. Forty feet. Hurtling through the snow, full pelt. Jamie hasn’t heard it. They don’t make noise. They never do.

“No,” Sam reaches up, touches her nose. Her mitten comes away red and sticky; no longer the innocence of spring. “I don’t want that either.” Thirty feet.

“If I have to, Daddy won’t make it.”

This is a lie they both understand. It’s not about Daddy. She braces her feet on the snow. Twenty feet.

“I’ll tell him they got you.” Jamie nods. “Yeah. And I couldn’t do nothing, ’cause I was running for help. That makes sense, right?”

He hefts his axe to shoulder height. Ten feet. Sam tenses, spitting a gob of blood onto the snow.

“Right?” he repeats, raising the axe above his head.

She holds his gaze while his face contorts. Is he trying not to cry? The log hits Jamie from behind at full speed, ramming into him with a sickening crack that sound like a twig snapping. They hit the ground together, axe dropping with a muted thud; Sam scuttles backwards, swinging herself up and into the nearest tree, squirrelling higher and higher. The log has pinned Jamie to the ground; he’s writhing under the weight, trying to reach for the axe with one hand, trying to hold the log off with the other. It’s trying to bite him, jaws snapping together again and again on only air.

If she stays in this tree, she’s abandoning her brother. Her heart pounds too hard, her breath catching in her throat. Family, family, family. If she stays in this tree, she’s going to have to deal with whoever survives the fight.

Her brother calls her name as she slithers down the trunk and hits the ground running. There’s a snap; Jamie howls, a dreadful noise that cuts off sharply. She can’t look back, but she’s gotta do something. Daddy would want her to do something. Family, family, family. As she staggers onto the road, a yellow signpost ahead from the long ago times announces that town is 3 miles ahead. Next to that sign, there are four logs. Three big, one little. And every of them is holding a knife.

Sam pulls her axe from her belt and forces herself to breathe. The Quiet has to come. There’s no time to be calm, no time to coax the feeling. Here it comes, forcibly dragged from her chest—ragged, but it’ll have to do. She submerges, drowns herself, goes too deep and chokes again, the blood from her nose trickling into her open, panting mouth. She spits on the ground, the soft expulsion leaving a red trail, and is suddenly reminded of the beautiful fox from her dream. Family, family, family. The logs look like a group, somehow; they’re dressed differently but there’s something about them that suggests a pack. They move together, not straying farther than a few feet from the centre of the group. They haven’t seen her—they’re listening for something. All she has to do is wait until they pass. The road will be hers. Free and clear to town, as long as she can stay in the Quiet. Already she’s dog-tired; the panic which had propelled her for the first half-mile is already fading away, and the Quiet feels like trying to hold water in her cupped hand. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. She spits again, unable to bear the metallic taste of blood on her lips.

The noise smashes through her senses and knocks her face-down into the snow. She lies still for a moment, unable to think, unable to feel. Pain along her right side, a shrill buzzing in her ear. Rolling over, she touches her ear with her left mitten—the one that isn’t already bloody—and is surprised when it comes away clean. The yellow sign for town is bent at an angle. The surrounding trees creak, whipping back into place. There is the sound of cracking, falling branches not far off. The logs have been knocked over too, but they’re getting up now. They don’t help each other, but they do pick up their knives again. Daddy was right. This is new. This is a problem. The boom comes again, sweeping through her body, and she can’t stop herself from screaming, can only bury her face into the snow and hope it’s muffled enough. She utters the worst curse-word she can think of, one she heard Uncle Bill saying one time and Momma laughing as she shushed him.

There’s something about the way the noise smells—it sounds crazy, but even through her bloody nose she can practically taste it—that reminds her of Jamie. That distinctive smell of boy-sweat and pinesmoke. He’s doing this. She doesn’t know how, but he’s responsible. He couldn’t handle the Quiet so he’s got himself a Loud, she thinks, and the thought is so absurd that she has to stuff her bloody mitten in her mouth to keep from laughing. There’s a wetness on her thighs, and she stares up into the clouds and marvels at the way blood seems to hate being imprisoned inside her body, seems to want to escape wherever it can.

The logs are moving in her direction; she wriggles backwards into the trees, only rising when she’s sure they can’t see her. The Quiet has been shattered by the booms, and if there’s another one this close she isn’t sure she’s going to be able to stand, never mind get to town. A movement through the trees to her left, and here’s another pack, moving towards the source of the noise. In some way, he’s helping her, and in some way, maybe he knows that. If he draws them towards him, she might be able to make it. She might be able to save Daddy. Jamie might be a traitor, and a coward, but he loves their father as she does. And these logs, moving as a herd, moving as a family—do they love each other too? Do they cry their own fox-tears, and fox-blood?

She passes out on the edge of town, unable to stay conscious any longer, and wakes to rough hands shaking her; two truths and a lie—Daddy’s hurt, and ‘bout three miles east, and I don’t know where Jamie is. Someone carries her inside, lays her down on a hard cot. They let her be. She dreams of Momma, petting the white fox from her dream, both of them decorated with skeins of beaded blood. She dreams of Daddy, shaking Uncle Bill’s hand, the smell of affection and loyalty rising between them like warm bread. She dreams of Jamie, lying motionless in the snow with his guts missing. Silence achieved at last.

© 2021 Lindz McLeod

From: Issue 5

About the Author

Lindz McLeod is a queer writer who lives in Edinburgh and dabbles in the surreal. Her short stories have been published by the Scotsman newspaper, the Scottish Book Trust, Twist in Time Magazine, and more. She is represented by Headwater Literary Management. https://lindzmcleod.co.uk/ @lindzmcleod