When Eva thought of Miles, it was only with fondness. He was essentially unemployable, a black mark in hapless doctor-scrawl marking him the way cattle were branded, and his rage manifested in destructive ways. His knuckles were often bruised, his lips bloody. Eva thought of him as a wayward, a bohemian wanderer, some future idol found dead in a hotel room.
Mostly, she saw him as a sort of constellation of small and familiar details: dark eyes, autumn woods, worn flannel, the smell of woodsmoke. At night in her childhood bed she thought stupidly of the crooked way he smiled, the way he swung an axe to chop wood.
Bored during the day, her mind’s eye saw, through a golden ray of nostalgia, the way he shot pheasants and ducks in the blue autumn dawn, fed scraps of meat to the stray dogs. Once he had earned a black eye defending a boy wearing eyeshadow.
Eva knew that Miles thought he still had secrets, and she allowed him the dignity of this belief, no matter how untrue it was. After all, how could she not? Everything from his calloused hands to his shivering spine told the story of his life.
Miles had come into the world in early October, just as she had, but the moon had hung differently on the evening of his birth, and as such he felt fatalistically condemned. There was blood in his mouth before he could talk, he told her once. His teeth fell out frequently in his dreams. She was the lucky one, he said; he was lucky just to know her.
They met in first grade, when he saw her scrapping with a hotheaded tall boy, the son of a marine. They were in the hallway outside the cloakroom. Her long ginger hair was tangled. He broke it up, and she sulked for the rest of the day.
“I could have taken him,” she remembered saying. She would say the same thing, many years later, the night of their high school prom.
His family name was Kettering. Several generations ago they had bought a large farm on which they quietly bred cattle and made moonshine. Eva liked the sound of that, both the living on a farm part and the moonshine part, and as such she felt drawn to Miles.
They were friends instantly. They grew up like typical mountain kids, with bad teeth and scars and dirt smeared on their knees. They attended an old brick school that couldn’t afford heating and crowded middle schoolers into the same building as nineteen-year-old seniors on their second lap.
On the surface Miles and Eva probably resembled their peers, but they learned to stealthily pass notes under their desks and saw themselves as diamonds in the rough, temporarily impoverished socialites who would someday leave this world behind and step in with their real people.
When they were thirteen, they made a blood pact. At some point around this time Eva had developed a terrible crush on him, due to a hormonal surge and the comfort of domestic familiarity, and later he returned her feelings, for a time—but in middle school he only had eyes for a blonde, scruffy boy from church. He liked girls, too, but by the time he learned to see her as a woman she had already decided he was a brother.
In eighth grade Miles’ parents were getting a divorce and as such he decided that marriage was a corrupt institution that doomed women just as much as it trapped them. Eva’s own father was teaching her to build a rabbit box in the yard, and she murmured quiet sounds of acknowledgement as her best friend rambled on about his mother’s black eyes and the evils of alcohol.
Finally, he snapped his head up. Eva watched him carefully, his white aura swelling like smoke and heat around his vibrating body. She jolted when he pulled a pen knife from his back pocket.
“No,” he assured her, touching her shoulder gently with his other hand. He seemed close to tears, at the thought that he had frightened her. “No, you got it wrong. You got the wrong idea and I’m sorry. I want to…”
He made a slick, fast gesture with his wrist, pulling the knife dramatically over his hand, and then mimed putting it up towards hers.
Eva nodded brightly, immediately understanding. “You want to make it official.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s better than a marriage license,” Miles said, biting his lip hard against the pain as he carved the knife into his palm. He gasped as his blood pooled and then spilled into the dirt, dripping warm and sticky.
“It’s better than a piece of paper,” he went on, still carving, fascinated by the sight of the bright red against the milk white of his skin. “Or vows, or hymns, or whatever.”
He handed the knife to Eva, eyes glinting. “Ready?”
She took it without hesitation, sliced her own hand with the cool and sterile elegance of a trained surgeon. She had read her father’s books, already know which blue lines were lethal and should be avoided. When her blood was let loose and freely flowing down the sides of her hand, she gazed into Miles’ radiant dark eyes, green against brown, swallowing hard.
“What God has brought together,” Miles said as he placed his huge hand against her tiny one, mashing their hot and sticky blood together into one, “let no man separate.”
He smiled wickedly and Eva felt a curious thrill, a low heat in her lower stomach.
“You didn’t even wince,” Miles said, impressed.
She sat back laughing in the dirt, glowing from his praise.
Miles learned to play guitar first, and Eva was angry that he was allowed to write music that howled and stirred, while their Sunday school teacher stroked her long red hair and told her how pretty she was, how sweet and lyrical her voice was as she sang “Amazing Grace.”
Miles’ father had hunted in his younger days, and still displayed a deer head above the fireplace in the living room. Miles had a nervous habit of spinning the globe on the desk, of lighting matches too close to his face, of pacing around the room as he spoke. He didn’t like the way the deer’s eyes followed him wherever he went.
Eva didn’t care about the deer, but she did care about Miles, and in particular, listening to Miles: on certain black nights, he would talk and talk and talk, conspiracy-minded and terrified, as the sky turned from fire to ash outside the window.
Every few months, he discarded his medication. Sometimes he did it quietly, but usually he made a production out of it. When he was nineteen, he drove the truck up into Morgantown and threw his bottle of antipsychotics onto the overpass. A few months later he tossed two months’ worth of pills in front of an oncoming train and screamed his throat raw.
The day after his twenty-first birthday he chose to throw his hateful bottle of blue pills into the Elk River, and then came knocking at Eva’s back door.
“It’s real,” he told her confidently, eyes and spirit like fire. “It’s real. I can see them.”
He reached out to touch the opaque white light around her body.
“There’s no light source,” he said in amazement. “It’s coming from nowhere.”
After three days without sleep Miles saw birds in the ceiling fan light. He rushed to Eva’s bedroom window, a madman on the lawn, shouting that he had seen angels.
Eva saw angels all the time, so she didn’t doubt this, but Miles resented her, because he had to work at it, whereas she had an easy ride, a stable mind, and the curious ability to see death the way some people saw cars passing down the road.
She had seen the macabre too closely to be unnerved by it. In some ways it felt almost charming.
As a child she had gutted the books that disappointed her, ripping them apart like the frail bones of a bird, amazed at how easily the white leaves came undone in her hands.
When Eva was young, she had gone to visit her uncle across the state line. He was a stubborn man, a hunter—that fall he made it his sole mission to turn her into a scrappy, hotheaded warrior, taunting her whenever she showed weakness, betrayed herself as a young member of the inferior sex. Eva showed no fear in the face of gore, so he was delighted.
He took her out into the woods and together they took down a buck. All the while Eva had watched with a clinical and objective curiosity as the shadow of death fell over the animal’s face.
She had not dared to breathe as its almond-shaped head bowed, its velvet antlers caught in a thicket, and it crumpled to its spindle-like knees. It was a quiet process, beautiful—and shocking, for the sole reason that she saw the animal leave its body as casually and swiftly as day turned to night.
In the faint early morning light, a soft, translucent white smoke rose with casual elegance from the center of the buck’s chest. It drifted steadily on and upwards with a clear purpose, and when it reached the top of the pines, it vanished.
That had been the first time.
There were countless other experiences throughout the years, incidents that even in her youth she knew she should never speak of. She buried them with her other secrets, bound up half with thrill and half with terror, a curiosity that belonged with the erotic and the sadistic, something she accepted she would take to her grave.
She saw soft white lights around people: strangers, family, friends. Even animals possessed an aura too intimate to look at for too long. Occasionally they appeared separate from living bodies, entities that followed her through the dusty hallway and into her bedroom. They stood behind her in the mirror or flickered in her peripheral vision as she got ready for school in the mornings.
In the attic, once, she found a King James Bible that had belonged to her grandmother. Once she coughed her way through the dust, she discovered something chilling: notes in the margins, scrawled in shaky blue penmanship. Words she didn’t understand and passages about witchcraft and sage, angels and demons, the blood moons that prefaced the end of the world.
This was no spiritual gift, this thing that she possessed. The devil, surely, was working through her. And so she bent by her sad little bed and cried, pleading with God to turn out the lights, to quiet the ghosts.
She lay on her childhood mattress in her childhood room in the same sad town thinking that if a quarter century of her life passed, she should be better equipped to handle the world, at least without the pills. But now was not the time. Now was not the time.
In the grey dawn hours before the world came alive, she had learned that Miles had overdosed. A message through the grapevine, from his former boss at the music store. An unlikely source. Why not his parents?
She hadn’t cried yet. She wasn’t sure why. She didn’t cry often, but this seemed as good a time as any. Her brain was full of static. Her body was numb. The ghosts crowded in the room, shimmering.
She threw the blankets off herself and slipped into her father’s old jacket. In her black moods she usually preferred to be outside.
She didn’t want to go as far as the train tracks, and anyway, there was no need. Her own property was curiously new to her every time she explored it. The yard was overgrown with weeds her mother had stopped tending to after the torn ligament that had placed her in a semi-permanent opiate fog, and now it crawled with wildlife, attracted corvids with gasoline wings. They pecked at the ground and glared accusatorily at Eva.
Close to the house a path had been worn down by dozens of footsteps, and the trail was easy to follow. Eva passed the half-rotted wooden cages where, for years, they had kept hares. Her father had taught her how to calmly strangle and skin them the fall she turned twelve.
None of that mattered now, Eva thought. Death had never been a mystery to her, as it was to other people, but it meant something different now that it had come for Miles. She knew she would see him, either way, but selfishly, she wanted him the way he had come into this world, solid blood and bone and sinew. She wanted to be able to hug him.
The ground sloped neatly downward at the edge of the Cross family’s property line. The bracken was muddy. Eva picked her way through the field and set her eyes on the horizon. The barren trees reached for the winter-cold sky. At least, she thought, the seasons continued, as cyclical and routine as always.
With all their order, they made sense, even as Miles lay in a hospital bed twenty miles away, breathing through tubes.
She had never known such sharp, intrepid grief, not even when her father died. Even then, he had come to her a week later, smiling by her bedside in his old jacket.
He had put off going to the doctor for months, insisting the pain in his chest would go away on its own. He had not wanted to ask the church for a handout. He had collapsed in the woodshed with his buzzsaw still running and no one had been surprised.
Miles was different, somehow. As such, Eva refused to accept that this could be his fate. He was too young, too belligerent, too cancerous—she could not imagine life without his constant nagging presence.
In their young adult years, the games of violence grew steadily deeper and more complex, with elaborate storylines that Miles invented with all the oratorial skill of a professional raconteur. Eva laughed hard at everything he said, believing without a doubt that he was the most brilliant person alive. They fell asleep to the sound of the trains rolling past the fields.
They liked to sit in the reedy grass by the tracks fighting off crawling gnats and spiders, throwing pennies they would collect later on once the trains had crushed them. On his twenty-third birthday he began talking about moving to Los Angeles.
It was his plan to make it big, even if it took years. He would busk if he had to, he said confidently, and live in an apartment with no heating, and do everything he could.
“You can’t,” Eva said.
“Why not?”
She crossed her arms, shivering in the October cold. “You’d get famous and forget about me.”
“What? No, you’ll be with me.” Miles said it with utter certainty, as though he was stating that the sky was blue or that the earth revolved around the sun. “You’ll be with me the whole time.”
“California is going to fall into the ocean someday,” Eva remarked moodily. “And Los Angeles is the most evil city in the world. Its name is a complete paradox. There are no angels there. Weren’t you listening to Chris all those years?”
Their old youth pastor, a recovering alcoholic. He had dabbled with other drugs, too, if the stories were to be believed. He had toured with his secular band for most of his twenties. He had spoken a lot about Hollywood, the way all converts do.
“Yeah,” Miles agreed. “It is. Going to collapse into the Pacific. But before that, it will be destroyed by fire, just like the Gospel of John, in order to sanctify and purify the evil, corrupt Hollywood elite, and they’ll see the light and be redeemed.”
“By fire?” Eva said, unconvinced.
“A huge brushfire,” Miles said confidently. “All through the redwoods, down into San Francisco, and finally the beaches of Malibu. Everything will be gone.”
“How do you know?”
“I keep having this dream,” Miles said, shrugging, as though saying it aloud had made him embarrassed. Suddenly shy, he wouldn’t meet Eva’s eyes.
He picked at weeds in the track, as the ground shook slightly, like an earthquake—another train, passing through the no-man’s land that was their West Virginia home.
As Eva sat by his bedside in the wretched hospital, she held his hand and prayed to her parents’ Protestant god, the god of the rust and the dirt and the night shift at the factory her father had worked until death came for him, too. She spit her prayers out at him like blood and begged him to stay, because she owed far too much to him.
Eventually, because middle school blood pact marriages weren’t legally binding, she was told to leave.
Back at home she swallowed a few pills and waited, sank beneath the covers until the spitting and hacking of the radiator sounded like comforting white noise and the freezing wind a choir of singing birds.
Eventually, she dozed. It was a heavy and somewhat nauseating sleep, but the opiates always made the world calmer. The spirits swarmed her like black flies, but their light was whiter and their messages stranger.
She lay in that contented state for hours until the shrill landline downstairs rattled the hinges on her door, and her mother’s muffled voice drifted up through the floorboards.
Eva closed her eyes and lay against her tattered pillow. The room felt very warm, the bed very soft. She didn’t want to move, even when she heard her mother’s indignant knock at her bedroom door.
“Eva, he’s woken up. He’s stable.”
Eva rolled over in a haze, blinking at the wall. “What?”
“Miles is in stable condition. He’ll be home tomorrow, they’re saying.”
“Oh,” Eva said. “Okay.”
“They had him on that—what do you call it?—involuntary hold, for something like thirty-six hours, to make sure he wouldn’t do it again.”
It felt surreal, to be discussing such matters through a wooden door, and later, Eva would realize it; but under the influence, nodding out, she could barely keep her fluttering eyelashes still.
She hummed a grateful response and promptly fell asleep.
Miles came back bright-eyed with color in his cheeks. He had ugly green bruises on his arm and an abscess from an injection, and his tattered green-and-blue flannel was big on his skeletal frame, but he was alive.
“I didn’t really want to,” he reassured her.
He smiled boyishly, tossing his messy hair off his face. He smelled clean and antiseptic, like the hospital. The white light around him was radiant.
Eva frowned, uncertain.
“Look, don’t worry,” Miles promised, gripping Eva’s shoulder with a surprising intensity. “I’m fine. I promise. I’m really, really fine this time.”
Winter faded into spring, and Miles got his old job back teaching guitar, and he became so creatively persistent that they stopped seeing each other for a while.
Eva realized, within a day or two, that without Miles’ shadow trailing her, her own became all too apparent. She lay awake irritated at the ghosts in the corner of her room, went out into the yard to smoke cigarettes in her father’s old shirts just for something to do.
The boredom was like a rotten tooth she couldn’t stop pulling at, and eventually she acknowledged that if she didn’t keep moving, she would fall into despair. At the end of May she left a note by her mother’s pillow, where the older woman was taking a midday Xanax nap, and headed out for a rare solitary excursion.
The night was huge and endless, the constellations visible against a sky as black as ink. The fireflies glittered like fallen stars in the wildflowers along Bethlehem Creek Road and Eva was enraptured.
She let out a sharp gasp of alarm when she realized she had veered dangerously to the side of the road, where an old woman was standing, pure light and energy.
Eva went into reverse and pulled back, back, back, until the light had dimmed. She felt it before her brain registered—a collision with another vehicle. The shouts of an infuriated driver. The car door opening and a man in a worn camo jacket jumping out, eyes blazing. A cell phone was in his hands. Eva’s heart sank.
An eternity passed. In the rearview mirror Eva saw a blur of blue and red lights, the crunch of gravel as a police cruiser approached.
She groaned audibly and raked her hands through her hair, bowing her head against the wheel. She accepted her fate as an officer approached, shining a flashlight in her face.
“They took away your license?” Miles repeated, aghast. He wasn’t pacing, for once, but the nervous energy was coming off him in waves.
“Suspended,” Eva corrected.
“Assholes! What right do they have to do that for? Can’t you appeal it?”
Eva shrugged, moody. They had been drinking and smoking fairly steadily all afternoon, and her body felt sluggish, tired. This was the last thing she wanted to talk about.
“It’s not like I can tell them why it happened. The real reason.”
“What are you going to do?” Miles asked.
Eva thought for a moment. “I guess I’m just going to write.”
There was a contest, with a reward of twenty thousand dollars, for the best piece of short fiction written by an Appalachian young adult. Eva had seen the poster in the coffee shop a few weeks ago, a crude charcoal rendition of a folksy beat poet with a typewriter.
She must have stared at it for a second too long, waiting for her drink, because the barista, a wisp of blonde hair escaping from her ponytail, leaned across the table and said, “Worth a shot. I remember your essay on The Grapes of Wrath.”
Eva blinked, momentarily caught off guard. Then a vague memory surfaced, and the features of a stranger, as they sometimes do after many years, hurried together to create the image of a long-forgotten acquaintance.
“Shiloh,” Eva pronounced with confidence.
“Eleventh grade English,” Shiloh confirmed, grinning and leaning forward casually on the counter. “Did you and Miles Kettering ever end up getting together?”
Eva gnawed at the inside of her mouth, uncomfortable with the way his name sounded in another person’s mouth. She hadn’t realized how long she had gone without thinking about Miles until someone brought him up.
“Sorry,” Shiloh apologized. “I get the feeling that’s an old wound. You’re better off without him, anyway. I heard he tried to kill himself a few months back, or something. Crazy motherfucker.”
Eva forced a smile, grabbed her drink off the bar. She snapped a photo of the poster and its tempting promise, trying not to allow herself to feel the flood of excitement in the pit of her stomach, the mixture of thrill and apprehension. She hadn’t felt it since the last time her fingers pulled a trigger.
She sat down on a bench outside, scrounged in her wallet for a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. Across from the library, in what she could only assume was an attempt at irony, there was a new bookstore open.
She jaywalked across the road though a car was approaching and pushed open the door of the shop.
Leaving with no money left to her name and the journal in her hands, she felt radiant and afraid and guilty. All she could think in that moment, standing on the corner of the street in the town that had raised her, the town with dead fathers and trucks and crumbling brick, was how Shiloh had lost her accent in college.
Eva’s mother’s tooth was rotting, had been for months, but she refused to acknowledge it, only prayed and bore the pain stubbornly. She could sell plasma, or pawn off her wedding ring, but neither seemed like very reasonable responses to a circumstantial crisis that wouldn’t matter once the rapture came.
One morning she stormed into Eva’s room, face drawn and pale, shaking and swollen from the pain.
“I know you have some of my pills,” she said breathlessly, a shot of uncharacteristic fire in her hazel eyes. “I know you’ve been using, and hell if I care—I’m not about to tell you what you can and cannot do with your life. We’re both adults here. Where are they?”
Her small body radiated such tense and terrified energy that Eva leapt from her bed, loose sheets of paper cascading onto the hardwood almost cinematically. She yanked open the uppermost drawer, reached beneath her tattered and frayed lace bras until her fingers wrapped around the cold contours of the pillbox.
She held it in her upturned palm as an offering—and her mother’s eyes, daring her to question or put up a fight, softened.
“Thank you, baby,” she murmured, dry-swallowing two at once. The roar of thunder filled the room with the curious sound of white noise. Eva realized that it had grown dark and cold outside her window.
Eva’s mother sank onto the edge of her daughter’s bed, massaging her cheekbone, somewhere close to where the tooth must have been, blackened and sore. She was wincing visibly against the pain even as it faded, opioid receptors alighting to settle the score. For a moment she looked about to cry, and Eva panicked, but then her mother gestured to the pages on the floor.
“What’s all this?”
Suddenly, in the small room where she had grown up, with her too-thin mother shaking on the bed next to her, what Eva was doing seemed idiotic. She felt such white-hot shame that she may as well have been caught doing something illicit. It might have been easier to explain, even.
“It’s nothing,” she said, and in that moment, she almost meant it. It was nothing, nothing more than a stupid dream, an entitled attempt to fight her fate. She hung her head with shame and the tears came suddenly, an onslaught of emotion she was not prepared for.
Her mother wrapped her in an awkward, sickly sweet perfumed embrace.
“They’re hiring down at the butcher shop,” she said kindly. “I thought you might want to put in an application this week.”
Eva nodded sullenly.
“I think it would be good for you.”
Eva ripped herself away from her mother, recognizing her love for what it was: a tepid, unfriendly marshland in which she could allow herself to sink. She bent to pick up the scattered pages on the hardwood, brushed her long, tangled hair out of her face. The woman on her bed was now a stranger.
“Baby,” the stranger crooned, sadly. “Is it something I said?”
The creek flooded over and Miles’ dad did a stint in rehab and the cicadas came out. Spring collapsed steadily into summer, and suddenly, to Eva’s bemusement, it was June. The days were longer, the evenings smelled like tall grass and campfire smoke, and the summer appeared to stretch on endlessly, a bright star in a black sky.
The coffee shop had strung up Edison lights and now served a lavender lemonade. It tasted expensive. Her body tingled with the taste of it.
She slid into her usual seat by the window one afternoon and nearly dropped her drink when she saw Miles’ father on the other side of the road, pacing the sidewalk outside of the pawn shop. He was staggering around in all black, despite the heat, his posture like that of a street preacher and a pauper all in one.
The coffeehouse had begun to attract rich kids from further out, charmed by the ambience. They were noticeable by their clothes and their shoes and their hair. Most days, they didn’t bother Eva. Today they saw Miles’ father, a local curiosity, and made a show of their laughter.
Eva guiltily looked away.
All those years, and Miles had never once tried to kiss her. During the first week of August he rushed her in the quietest corner of the library next to the dusty stacks. She cried his name aloud, aghast, but he hushed her, laughing like a little kid, as the printer on the desk churned out the pages of Eva’s manuscript.
“I realize now,” he said dramatically, pressing her against the rows of alphabetized encyclopedias. “It took me a while, and I’m sorry about that. But I see now. You’re the love of my life, Eva Cross, and you are too goddamn talented and good for me, but this is my last chance.”
Eva was very uncomfortably aware of how taut the muscles in Miles’ upper arms were. She almost laughed aloud. Who was this person? His bravado was fake, like something from an old movie.
“Either marry me,” Miles said seriously, “or let me go now, because I can’t do this without you. On God, I will kill myself if I don’t get an answer.”
There were moments when the abyss between two people became too great to fully comprehend, when the realization that physical or even emotional intimacy could not account for everything that existed in the bleak psychological world of another, when the momentary joys you experienced in their company came under question.
Eva allowed Miles to kiss her. It was not chaste. It was demanding and desperate. His hands wrapped around her waist as though he wanted to bruise her. The ache of loneliness was so profound that she didn’t realize she was crying until Miles pulled away and she saw her mascara on his ratty shirt.
Loved this. ❤️🔥