Pretty Monsters. Kelly Link
one you wrote the poetry for.”
“Her name was Bethany,” Miles said. “She died in a car crash.”
“Was she pretty?” Gloria said.
“Yeah,” Miles said.
“You liked her a lot,” Gloria said.
“Yeah,” Miles said.
“Are you sure you’re a poet?” Gloria asked.
Miles was silent. He gnawed his jerky ferociously. It tasted like dirt. Maybe he’d write a poem about it. That would show Gloria Palnick.
He swallowed and said, “Why were you in Bethany’s grave?”
“How should I know?” she said. She was sitting across from him, leaning against a concrete Buddha the size of a three-year-old, but much fatter and holier. Her hair hung down over her face, just like a Japanese horror movie. “What do you think, that Bethany and I swapped coffins, just for fun?”
“Is Bethany like you?” Miles said. “Does she have weird hair and follow people around and scare them just for fun?”
“No,” the dead girl said through her hair. “Not for fun. But what’s wrong with having a little fun? It gets dull. And why should we stop having fun, just because we’re dead? It’s not all demon cocktails and Scrabble down in the old bardo, you know?”
“You know what’s weird?” Miles said. “You sound like her. Bethany. You say the same kind of stuff.”
“It was dumb to try to get your poems back,” said the dead girl. “You can’t just give something to somebody and then take it back again.”
“I just miss her,” Miles said. He began to cry.
After a while, the dead girl got up and came over to him. She took a big handful of her hair and wiped his face with it. It was soft and absorbent and it made Miles’s skin crawl. He stopped crying, which might have been what the dead girl was hoping. “Go home,” she said.
Miles shook his head. “No,” he finally managed to say. He was shivering like crazy.
“Why not?” the dead girl said.
“Because I’ll go home and you’ll be there, waiting for me.”
“I won’t,” the dead girl said. “I promise.”
“Really?” Miles said.
“I really promise,” said the dead girl. “I’m sorry I teased you, Miles.”
“That’s okay,” Miles said. He got up and then he just stood there, looking down at her. He seemed to be about to ask her something, and then he changed his mind. She could see this happen, and she could see why, too. He knew he ought to leave now, while she was willing to let him go. He didn’t want to fuck up by asking something impossible and obvious and stupid. That was okay by her. She couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t say something that would rile up her hair. Not to mention the tattoo. She didn’t think he’d noticed when her tattoo had started getting annoyed.
“Good-bye,” Miles said at last. It almost looked as if he wanted her to shake his hand, but when she sent out a length of her hair, he turned and ran. It was a little disappointing. And the dead girl couldn’t help but notice that he’d left his shoes and his bike behind.
The dead girl walked around the cabin, picking things up and putting them down again. She kicked the Monopoly box, which was a game that she’d always hated. That was one of the okay things about being dead, that nobody ever wanted to play Monopoly.
At last she came to the statue of St. Francis, whose head had been knocked right off during an indoor game of croquet a long time ago. Bethany Baldwin had made St. Francis a lumpy substitute Ganesh head out of modeling clay. You could lift that clay elephant head off, and there was a hollow space where Miles and Bethany had left secret things for each other. The dead girl reached down her shirt and into the cavity where her more interesting and useful organs had once been (she had been an organ donor). She’d put Miles’s poetry in there for safekeeping.
She folded up the poetry, wedged it inside St. Francis, and fixed the Ganesh head back on. Maybe Miles would find it someday. She would have liked to see the look on his face.
We don’t often get a chance to see our dead. Still less often do we know them when we see them. Mrs. Baldwin’s eyes opened. She looked up and saw the dead girl and smiled. She said, “Bethany.”
Bethany sat down on her mother’s bed. She took her mother’s hand. If Mrs. Baldwin thought Bethany’s hand was cold, she didn’t say so. She held on tightly. “I was dreaming about you,” she told Bethany. “You were in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.”
“It was just a dream,” Bethany said.
Mrs. Baldwin reached up and touched a piece of Bethany’s hair with her other hand. “You’ve changed your hair,” she said. “I like it.”
They were both silent. Bethany’s hair stayed very still. Perhaps it felt flattered.
“Thank you for coming back,” Mrs. Baldwin said at last.
“I can’t stay,” Bethany said.
Mrs. Baldwin held her daughter’s hand tighter. “I’ll go with you. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it? Because I’m dead too?”
Bethany shook her head. “No. Sorry. You’re not dead. It’s Miles’s fault. He dug me up.”
“He did what?” Mrs. Baldwin said. She forgot the small, lowering unhappiness of discovering that she was not dead after all.
“He wanted his poetry back,” Bethany said. “The poems he gave me.”
“That idiot,” Mrs. Baldwin said. It was exactly the sort of thing she expected of Miles, but only with the advantage of hindsight, because how could you really expect such a thing. “What did you do to him?”
“I played a good joke on him,” Bethany said. She’d never really tried to explain her relationship with Miles to her mother. It seemed especially pointless now. She wriggled her fingers, and her mother instantly let go of Bethany’s hand.
Being a former Buddhist, Mrs. Baldwin had always understood that when you hold onto your children too tightly, you end up pushing them away instead. Except that after Bethany had died, she wished she’d held on a little tighter. She drank up Bethany with her eyes. She noted the tattoo on Bethany’s arm with both disapproval and delight. Disapproval, because one day Bethany might regret getting a tattoo of a cobra that wrapped all the way around her bicep. Delight, because something about the tattoo suggested Bethany was really here. That this wasn’t just a dream. Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals were one thing. But she would never have dreamed that her daughter was alive again and tattooed and wearing long, writhing, midnight tails of hair.
“I have to go,” Bethany said. She had turned her head a little, towards the window, as if she were listening for something far away.
“Oh,” her mother said, trying to sound as if she didn’t mind. She didn’t want to ask: Will you come back? She was a lapsed Buddhist, but not so very lapsed, after all. She was still working to relinquish all desire, all hope, all self. When a person like Mrs. Baldwin suddenly finds that her life has been dismantled by a great catastrophe, she may then hold on to her belief as if to a life raft, even if the belief is this: that one should hold on to nothing. Mrs. Baldwin had taken her Buddhism very seriously, once, before substitute teaching had knocked it out of her.
Bethany stood up. “I’m sorry I wrecked the car,” she said, although this wasn’t completely true. If she’d still been alive, she would have been sorry. But she was dead. She didn’t know how to be sorry anymore. And the longer she stayed, the more likely it seemed that her hair would do something truly terrible. Her hair was not good Buddhist hair. It did not love the