Banshee. Rachel Dewoskin

      CHAPTER ONE

      THE FLESH BLEW OFF HER BONES underground. That’s how the waxy anchorman put it; you could feel his lips loving to make the shape of the word blew. The reason they knew? They’d had to exhume her. He sighed, going for horror, but conveying pleasure, maybe not accidentally.

      I was sitting in front of the TV that afternoon—three days ago—on an orange chair in the waiting room of a clinic for breasts, so I happened to be turning questions of tissue over in my mind anyway. In some chambers, the idea of this poor dead girl’s body exploding and being dug back up seemed like more than I could stand, the last click in a game of thought roulette. I waited for the release of a bullet that might knock me flat. But in other chambers, it felt acceptable, predictable, a revelation that I, as a sane adult, should be able to tolerate.

      I imagined the anchorman, that plastic action figure, digging her up with bare hands himself, a spray of dirt and decay blowing into his open mouth. My husband had dated the now-wife of the anchorman in college (a coincidence), and so I imagined her, too, married to the salacious half-rhymer of blew and exhume. She had to listen to his voice and watch his face stretch into approximations of human expressions every night at dinner. Did graphics run underneath him as he brushed his blinding teeth? Did she suspect him of the perversions I did? Or know his actual ones? Maybe she shared them.

      It wouldn’t have surprised me. One disappointing aspect of middle age was how few perversions remained shocking. I did feel a jolt, though, at learning that in addition to dying and liquefying, we also explode after being buried.

      A NURSE CALLED my name, “Samantha Baxter,” and I leapt up, nodding like a doll on a dashboard, and followed obediently. A light-green hall became a light-green room on the right. The nurse weighed me, then stunned my arm with a pressure cuff and said, with her eyes cast down sorrowfully, that my blood pressure was elevated.

      “I’m not surprised,” I told her.

      “No,” she said, staring as if trying to determine whether I was slow, joking, or both. “I mean, it’s significant. The doctor will have to retake it later.”

      She handed me the usual life-sized paper towel I was to wrap around my waist with a plastic ribbon and turned to go.

      “Please put this on, open to the front.”

      I shed my jeans and shirt, folding them into a miniature stack on the light-green chair before placing my bra and socks in my purse. I lined my ankle boots up, not wanting to appear unruly. I learned when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer twenty years ago that I shared the gene that predisposed us to particular cancerous outcomes. It had letters but no name, and sounded to me like bric-a-brac, some country kitchen pattern on a quilt. I had been diligent about climbing into magnetic tubes for MRIs and making my breasts go horizontal in mammogram machines. From the moment I learned about the gene, someone had his or her hands up my shirt constantly. Meanwhile,