Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan

Good Girls Go to Heaven

A Sparrow Hill Road story

by

Seanan McGuire

And no one said it had to be real

But it's gotta be something you can reach out and feel now

It ain't right, it ain't fair

Castles fall in the sand and we fade in the air

And the good girls go to heaven, but the bad girls go everywhere...

-- "Good Girls Go To Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)," Jim Steinman.



Some people will tell you that there are two Americas: the bright and shining daylight country where normal people live their lives and count their blessings, and a second, darker place, a place where men with hooks haunt Lover's Lane and scarecrows walk on moonlit nights. Those people are full of shit. There are a lot more than just two Americas, because every inch of ground on this planet is a palimpsest, scraped clean and overwritten a million times, leaving behind just as many ghosts. Sure, that daylight America exists, and so do a thousand others just like it, but the midnight Americas outnumber them a thousand-fold, and people who aren't careful...people who aren't careful run the risk of slipping into the cracks between the countries.

There's a secret language written across the length and breadth of North America, etched out in highways and embellished in side roads. It sweeps from Canada all the way to the tip of Mexico, telling the story too big and too old for any living soul to understand. There just isn't time. You'd need to ride those roads for fifty years or more, just listening, just learning, before you'd start to have a clue. Even then, you wouldn't really know. You'd just be a little bit less ignorant. Me, I've been running these roads since 1945, and I'm still not sure what some of the side roads and interchanges are trying to tell me. I do know enough to understand that every story starts in more than one place, driving anchors into the flesh of the ghostside where stories are born, digging in its claws and screaming for the right to live.

My story started at a desert crossroads, and at a hairpin curve at the top of Sparrow Hill Road in Buckley Township, Michigan. The roads are still there, if you'd care to go and find them. They'll tell you everything they know. All you have to do is ask them the right way. More importantly, you have to listen the right way, and for most people, that's the hardest challenge of them all. That's what keeps the ambulomancers and the routewitches in business--they already know how to listen, and for most folks, it's easier to pay somebody else than it is to take the time to learn it for themselves. Me, I've got nothing but time.

They have names for me all over the country. The Green Girl of Route 42. The Woman at the Diner. The Ghost of Sparrow Hill Road. The Graveyard's Rose. The name that I was born with--the name that I died with--is Rose. Rose Marshall. Just one more girl who raced and lost in the shadow of Sparrow Hill Road.

***

The truck stop air has that magical twang that only comes from roadside dives that have had time to blend into their environment, a mixture of baked asphalt, diesel fumes, hot exhaust, and hotter exhaustion. Close to the obligatory diner--the charmingly-named "Fork You Grill"--the smell of grease and lard-based piecrusts joins the symphony. My fingers are cold, and the coat I’m wearing is too thin to really warm them. I got it from a twenty-something on his way to California to be a rock musician; he said it belonged to his little sister. From the quality of the perfume permanently bonded to the denim, she was only his sister if his sister was moonlighting as a prostitute. Who am I to judge? I traded the coat for a backseat quickie, and now my hands are cold, no matter how far I shove them into my hooker's-coat pockets, and I can taste the truck stop air. Being dead is one of those things that really teaches you how to be glad to be alive.

The air inside the diner is hot and dry and sweet with coffee and apple pie and the distant ghosts of greasy breakfasts past. Half a dozen truckers sit belly-up to the counter on stools twice the size of standard; this is a place that stays alive on the trucker trade, and isn't above admitting it. Another half-dozen patrons are sprinkled through the place, seated haphazardly at booths and tables. That tells me what the deal is even before I see the hand-written sign that reads "PLZ SEAT YOURSELF, B RIGHT WITH YOU." From the expressions of the folks who aren't too tired to enjoy their food, the staff here cooks better than they spell. That's for the best. Killing your customers with food poisoning isn't a good way to stay in business very long.

There's something not-right about one of the truckers, a barrel-chested man with a neat little goatee and the hands of an artist. Those artist's hands are wrapped around a coffee mug, stealing heat through the porcelain like a small child stealing cookies from the cookie jar. Most of the eyes in the diner skitter right off me, frightened mice catching the scent of a cat, but not him. He doesn't look at me for long, but when he does, he sees me. That, even more than the scent of ash and lilies that lingers in the air around him, tells me that he's the one I've come here for; he's the one that called me, made me give up a perfectly good ride westward to come to this middle-of-nowhere dive with nothing but the coat on my back and the frostbite in my fingers. I know him, or at least, I know his kind. He's in the process of sliding into the space between two Americas, this one, where the air tastes like apples and the jukebox plays Top 50 country hits, and a quieter, colder America, one where the kisses pretty girls sometimes give never taste of anything but empty rooms and broken promises. He's falling into my America, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it--that's not the sort of trip that you recover from.