Brutes

Contents Landing Page Title Page Epigraph Contents 1 2 3 4 5 Hazel 6 Britney 7 8 9 10 11 Leila 12 Isabel 13 Christian 14 15 16 Jody Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright Dizz Tate Brutes We dug a hole. Our white hair warmed around the thing, we asked, is this a genesis? No, we agreed, the thing was not a genesis. A genesis is when he sweeps across the water. We nodded. It rustled. We stood closer to each other, we asked, what is this, a stillness? We watched it from a distance, we agreed, the thing was not a stillness. SABRINA ORAH MARK Contents Title Page Epigraph 1 2 3 4 5 Hazel 6 Britney 7 8 9 10 11 Leila 12 Isabel 13 Christian 14 15 16 Jody Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright 1 ‘Where is she?’ We imagine her mother asking first. She will say it once, quietly, standing in Sammy’s bedroom doorway. She will see the flat bed. The quivering screen, ripped back from the window. The second time she asks her voice will shake, and the third time it will rise and turn ragged. Her father will run to the room and he will ask the question, too. ‘Where is she?’ At first, his voice will be small, like our little sisters’ voices when they come to crawl into our beds, when their dreams will not let them loose. The second time he asks it will be demanding, like the room is a person refusing to tell him what it knows. The third time he will be on the phone, and his voice will have settled into the one he uses to preach in church, a respectful voice, a calm voice, even when he describes the devil and all the details of hell. The question will spread through the phone lines and cause men to move from their chairs and into their cars. Sammy’s mother will call her mother, and the women she trusts around town, and though they will not repeat the question back to her, they will hang up and call others, or they will even run and knock on neighbours’ doors because the question is impatient, it cannot wait for the whining of rings. We imagine the question rippling out of Sammy’s house, out of Falls Landing, leaking onto the highway, over the ruins of the construction site, spreading up our apartment towers. Even the lake seems to bristle, the question tickling its surface as it moves like a first, threatening wind. Night stains the sky slowly, then all at once. We watch like we have always watched. Soon we see the blue streaks of sirens. Cop cars wind down the highway, one after the other. We watch them twirl down the exit ramp and speed around the right shore of the lake. They thread through the Falls Landing gate and disappear. We can see the roof of Sammy’s house beyond the white walls, strobing from darkness to blue, darkness to blue. We imagine the cops moving toward her door, their heavy hands knocking, and the twisted faces of her parents, as her mother clutches her father, and her father clutches the frame of the door. We imagine the neighbours’ children waking to see alien illuminations on their bedroom walls, blue messages that seem to summon their parents, who rush to check that the children are safely breathing in their beds. Our hands shiver and our binoculars shake. We force ourselves to focus. Figures begin to drift out of the Falls Landing gate. Some are alone, others huddle in groups. They are not women we know, but we recognise them, like women we have seen in the background of movies, or our dreams. They are built for church, in skirt-shorts and pastel-coloured sweaters. They have flashlights strapped to their foreheads so we cannot make out their features. Their faces are circles of light, like unfinished pictures. They march across the construction site and toward the lake as though they plan to conquer it. Some scrape at the dirt with long metal poles. Others have shovels and pitchforks. They poke and stab and spike our ground. They walk as far as the lip of the lake, and some hold their instruments above its surface, but we are satisfied that not one of them dares to disturb the stillness of the water. The lake is dark, indivisible from the low, starless sky, illuminated occasionally by the theme parks’ swerving spotlights. A small moon leaks across the water, vague as a pool light. We track the paths of the women. They do not hesitate, they walk smoothly. They do not seem afraid and we resent this in strangers. They cluster on the construction site, prising up the foundations of the unbuilt houses, peering under forgotten tarps and rotting planks and pallets. They knock their way into the single finished show home, their noses wrinkled, their flashlight beams passing swiftly across the needles, the wine bottles, the stained mattress. Since the roof blew off in a hurricane and the workers left, the show home is a well-known place for love. After it was abandoned, someone dragged in a mattress and strung a tent above it with jumper cables to protect it from the rain. The tent is thin and we have looked down on the shapes and shadows of bodies meeting there for years, watching as they come together and peel apart. Like guardian angels, we watch politely from our windows, but the searching women do not seem to want to bless the place. There is judgement in every move they make. They scrape the surfaces with their flashlight beams, find nothing and leave the door rudely open. Two women march further, keeping to the lake’s edge, past our apartments and toward the wild place lot, the place even we do not dare to go. We swing our binoculars to the left to follow them. The round glare of a flashlight reveals the warning