Music stirred me.

I lay in bed riding the coattails of a dream as the sad voice of Lana Del Rey carried through the house. The hospital. I had been in the hospital, and I had been stirred there too, though not by a song. By moaning. From down the hall there had come moaning and then marching and then, finally, stretchers. Blood in white sheets wrapped around two bodies, squirming bodies, and none of the men moving their mouths, not one of them making a sound as they walked past my room.

Mike Richards, his eyes smashed and his teeth shattered.

Gabriel Vasquez, crushed beneath a safe, breathing blood.

Dying.

Not dead.

Dying.

To slow drumbeats and mournful violins, I climbed into my wheelchair and rolled down the hall. A shadow swayed in the living room. My aunt was dancing, the whiskey bottle loose in her fingers. Her head hung from a limp neck. Her eyes were closed. She rocked back and forth beside the end table, where her stereo rested.

"Listen to me, Ruth."

My mother's name froze me. I sat at the end of the hall, my hands on the wheels, as Aunt Sandy called out to her sister.

"Ruth, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Ruth, listen to me. Why didn't you listen to me? I said I couldn't, I told you. I'm no good, I've never been any good. Ruth, Ruth, little baby Ruth, answer me, talk to me, Ruth, I'm sorry."

The scene pieced itself together:

Aunt Sandy wakes up. She finds herself alone and Ash's car keys gone. She puts on music to match her broken heart. She continues to drink.

I should have told her I was there. I should have shut off the stereo and taken her to bed. But I didn't. I was worried about Ash and Nip, and ashamed that I was safe at home while they were putting themselves in danger, and part of me took comfort in Aunt Sandy's misery. It was nice to know she was hurting, too. So I let her go on thinking I had left. I backed down the hall to my room and all the while the song that had drawn me from sleep, the title song of Lana Del Rey's second album, Born to Die, called out to the night through the dripping screen door.

♫

I rolled down the hall when I heard the crash, and I stopped in the exact same place as last time. Dreaming.

I had to be dreaming.

I wasn't.

The bear was enormous. The bear was brown and matted with blood. The bear was on top of my aunt. Its mouth stretched open, and a vision of Billy's father flashed into my head, his jaws locked wide, dislocated by the scream that had torn out of him. Then the bear howled, shaking the jagged splinters stuck between its teeth, and I remembered the sound I had heard in the woods, the sound of bark being peeled . . .

Or chewed.

The bear began to dig. My aunt's tank top peeled apart, and with it the skin beneath, breasts and abdomen tearing into ribbons, blood gushing out until there was too much blood to make out anything but those long hooked claws and the juices splashing around them. The bear dug faster, like its paws were hot, like it was trying to cool them off inside her. Its breath was ragged. Its eyes were wide, pleading.

My aunt's cheek rolled down to the carpet. Her gaze found me. For the span of one breath there was relief on her face. Then fear colored it over. She lifted her head. She raised her hands. That was when I saw the long pale stripe running down the bear's skull . . . a crack, looking through the bone. Its massive head had gotten split during the earthquake, and now Aunt Sandy took advantage of that, working her fingers into the wound up to the first knuckle. The bear stopped pawing and flailed its neck, but she held on. She held on, and she pulled, like someone trying to pry open a steel clamp.

Blood and something else—thicker, richer—welled around her fingertips.

The bear tore free with one final convulsive shake of its head. It stumbled back across the living room, tripping and falling, rising and falling and rising again, until at last it barreled out through the flaps of the screen door and into the fog from which it had come, drawn by the sound of music.

The candles flickered.

I slid down from Bitchmaster, my legs folding beneath me, and crawled to Sandy on my stomach. Blood leaked from her ears and nose and mouth, but her eyes were clear. They went right to me. "Joel," she gurgled. "I thought you—I thought—"

"I'm here," I said, "I'm here."

It seemed important to tell her that, more important than anything else.

She clenched my arm, and the strength in her grip caught me off guard. I glanced at her body. An anchor dropped down my windpipe. I looked back to her face, blinking.

"Joel."

"Be quiet, be quiet now."

"Joel."

Her nails dragged down my leather sleeve. She reached up again. I caught her hand and squeezed it, rocking on the prop of my elbow. Beneath her the carpet was becoming wet. In the hollow of her throat a shallow red pool trembled with her heartbeat. I said, "Shhhhhh." Thinking, this is what I do now, I say, shhhhhhhh. I say shhhhhhhh and shhhhhhhh and shhhhhhhh until I'm saying it to myself, until she's quiet, please be quiet, please Santy, please, "Shhhhhhhhh."

"Joooooel."

Blood on her gums. Blood on her teeth. Blood coming up the back of her throat and bubbling over her tongue, and her eyes getting wider, wider, wider. I kissed her knuckles. I told her it was okay. I told her to be quiet.

"Jooooo—"

She choked up a splash of darker red.

"—ooooooel."

"Be quiet, Santy. Be quiet." I was talking over her. Her fingers struggled in my grip. In the black of her pupils I saw nothing, and in that nothing I saw myself, my despair. "Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet."

"Jooooooooel."

Her free hand walked across the carpet and climbed to my shoulder. To my neck. My face. "Joooooooooel."

I felt a sting and wobbled backward. Something slipped from the pocket of my leather coat and caught between my arm and side. As I picked up Billy's switchblade, warmth ran down my cheek where my aunt's nails had cut into me.

"Joooooooooel."

That wet, tortured voice.

"Joooooooooel."

Those red, searching fingers.

"Jooooooooooel."

I pushed up onto my elbow. My breath was coming in chops. I covered her mouth with my hand. Her lips moved against my palm, and I heard my name muffled inside her throat.

"Jooooooooooel."

I pressed down harder, all of my weight on her jaws, driving her skull down into the carpet.

"Joooooooooooel."

Blood ran hot between my fingers. I shook my head. I shook it side to side to side, faster and faster, and I begged her to be quiet, shut up, be quiet, and with one hand over her mouth, I lifted the switchblade into the air and released the blade and buried it to the handle in her neck. Her voice came in damp, gusty stutters. "Jo-o-oo-oooo-o-o-el." I dragged the knife sideways, sawing through meat. The blade caught. I forced it back the other way, back through the gasping cartilage of her windpipe, back, back, until my knuckles touched carpet. Her mouth squirmed moistly against my palm. Blood spattered my face. I worked the knife like a lever, pulling it back and forth, back and forth, and all the while her eyes held onto me and her hands crawled up my leather jacket, clutching, groping. The blade locked against bone and twisted from my grip. Her throat was spread out across the floor, cords sliced, muscle hanging in tatters. A present, a Merry Christmas present wrapped in red paper and torn open by an eager child. Silence inside it. Sweet, voiceless silence.

I let go of her mouth. It moved slowly, shaping my name.

Jooooooooooel.

I yanked the knife from her spine and stabbed at her lips. Slugs of flesh slid down her cheeks. I kept stabbing and cutting until there was nothing left, until my aunt was grinning bared gums. Had I started screaming yet? I don't know. If I hadn't, I would be soon.

Her mouth opened and closed.

Opened. Closed.

Joel.

Joel.

I turned the knife over in my hand and beat at her jaws with the blunt of the handle. I hammered and hammered. I pulped the skin on her cheeks and smashed the hinges beneath into splinters, and when her mouth could no longer move, when it could only hang open, its tongue lolling out on one side, I dropped the knife and rolled away from her. My head knocked into the end table, and that felt good, that felt right, so I did it again. And again. And again. Above me the stereo rattled and a woman sang about somebody in blue jeans, somebody who made her eyes hurt.

Gooey, cinnamon heat dripped on the back of my neck.

I looked up. The candle had tipped and was oozing wax over the table. A dying flame trembled on the wick. My arm reached up slowly, almost lazily, to right the candle. As I let go of it, a shadow fell over me.

My aunt stood on unsteady legs. Coils of gut peeked from her belly. Her breasts hung in ribbons, soft pink and fatty white. The ladder of her ribcage glared beneath tangled flesh and fabric. I could see her heart.

It was beating.

She took a lurching step, and her head rolled from one shoulder to the other, clinging to her body by nothing but her spine. She took one more step, and her head rolled the opposite direction, sliding her chin and lipless mouth across her collarbone. I pushed back against the end table. She fell onto my legs, and I felt her warmth and wetness soaking through my jeans. Her hands reached between the flaps of my leather jacket and clenched my undershirt, and she slid up my body like an earthworm, slow and sinuous, her head nodding its way higher and higher.

Her dark hair on my face.

Her shattered mouth dripping over mine.

Her eyes, full of impossible life, full of pain.

She sank her nails deep into my chest and dragged them down, raking through my shirt into my skin. Digging. Pawing. Like an animal. Like a bear. Her hands spoke for her mouth. They begged me. They called my name. As my blood mixed with her blood on the white cotton, her face leapt into sudden brightness, every broken detail of it drawn with sharp clarity.

The candle flame climbed Sandy's head, curling her hair, pulling big smoking clumps out by the roots. I pushed her off. She landed on her back and within a second was sitting up again, turning toward me. Fire ate at her scalp and charred her once beautiful face. I shoved her away.

She came.

I shoved her away.

She came.

I rolled over and dragged myself across the carpet. My body stopped, suddenly twice as heavy. I glanced back. Her hand had closed around my ankle. She pulled herself closer. Her eyes reached out to me from blackening flesh. Looking forward, I spotted the bed sheet dangling off the couch. The flames on her head were running out of tissue to devour as I twisted around and flung the sheet at her.

It took a moment to catch.

A long moment.

The hand loosened on my ankle, and I pulled away from my aunt, who continued to crawl underneath her blazing shroud. By the time I made it to Bitchmaster, black trails of smoke were rising from the carpet. The hungriest flames leapt to the couch and gobbled at Nip's book. I wheeled across the room to the door.

From there I looked back.

My aunt rose to her feet. The bed sheet fluttered off her in pieces. The blood sizzled on her skin. She stood tall and slender and devastatingly bright. Above her on the wall, the photograph of the burning house caught fire.

♫

On the driveway I realized I was screaming.

I could not stop.

As flames reached up behind me to the wounded night sky, I collapsed back in my wheelchair and I screamed myself unconscious.

____ ____

Author's Note:

Feel free to tell me how much you hate me here. It's all right. I hate me, too.

Coming up on Tuesday, what does it matter anyway? Aunt Sandy's gone . . .

. . . or is she?