I climb to my feet and start for the diner, making small adjustments in my appearance as I go, fitting my looks to my environment. Time to see if I can't talk someone out of a sweater and a plate of bacon, and maybe see if I can't get a fry cook on his way off-shift to strip me down and tell me what the Queen of the Routewitches ordered written on my skin.
Look out, Bobby Cross. Your diamond days are coming to an end, and I'm coming for you.
El Viento del Diablo
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
Rose knows what she's got
Rose knows that she's hot
Rose flashes the fools;
Rose smiles, watch 'em drool.
El Viento del Diablo gets Rose tonight.
No Rose if you lose;
Take care what you choose...
-- "El Viento del Diablo," Bruce Holmes.
The true secret of the palimpsest skin of America is that every place is different, and every place is the same. That's the true secret of the entire world, I'd guess, but I don't have access to the world. All I have is North America, where the coyotes sing the moon down every night, and the rattlesnakes whisper warnings through the canyons. And in North America, the daylight, the twilight, and the midnight are each divided and divided again into thousands upon thousands of realities that never seem to touch--barely even seem to exist in parallel--while secretly, they're like horny teenage lovers who can't keep their hands off of each other. They're stealing kisses at the drive-in, the midnight girls with their daylight boys; they're slipping love notes to their twilight sweethearts, they're telling lies to keep their friends from ever figuring out. They're ripping holes in the world every day, every hour, every second, and they're doing it because people are just people, no matter what onion-skin level of the world they think of as their home. People are just people, and people don't like being fenced in.
The true secret of the skin of America is that it's barely covered by the legends and lies that it clothes itself in, sitting otherwise naked and exposed. It's a fragile thing, this country and this world of ours, and the only thing it can do to protect itself from us is lie.
Things that happen in the daylight echo all the way down to the midnight. It works the other way, too. What happens in the midnight will inevitably make itself known in the daylight, given enough time to echo through the layers, to pass hand to hand down all those chains of secret lovers. What happens in the dark always shines through into the light.
There are times when I truly wish that people weren't so good at forgetting that everything is connected to everything else. Because those are the times when people get hurt.
***
The itching at the small of my back is a low, constant burn, the sort of thing that hasn't been a problem since that hot June night when a dead man ran me off the road at the top of Sparrow Hill. My car went up in flames, my body went with it, and things like the steady itch of healing flesh ceased to be my problem. Try telling that to my back. It's been itching for three weeks now, ever since the Queen of the North American Routewitches decided that dying young in the 1940s shouldn't deny me the right to have a tramp stamp tattoo of my very own.
I squirm against the seat of the battered El Camino that's currently devouring miles along I-75 North, the highway that runs between Key West and Detroit. I'll hop out when we hit the Michigan state line, catch another ride, and make my way toward Buckley Township. There's a phantom rider I know who runs a cargo route through there. He can give me a ride along the ghostroads to the Last Dance, where Emma can hopefully tell me what the hell the sore spot on my skin really means. Hopefully. Fifty years dead and gone, and I'm still no better at some aspects of this "ghost" shit than I was the night Bobby pushed me into the ravine.
I squirm again, attracting the attention of the man behind the wheel. I try to turn my squirm into a seductive wiggle, smiling at him from under coyly lowered lashes. I couldn't tell you his name if you paid me, but I've met his kind before. He'll keep me in the car as long as I don't make trouble, or until we hit the state line. Then he'll put his hand on my thigh and ask whether I want to make a few bucks to help me get wherever it is I'm going. I'll tell him the ride's worth more than the money, and things will proceed from there. Same dance, different partners.
I was a virgin when I died. There's a sort of weird irony to that, because I really don't remember why I thought was so important. I just wanted to be loved. I still do, I guess but it isn't an option anymore, so I have sex with strangers in truck stop parking lots and rest stop bathrooms in exchange for the life they let me borrow and the rides they're willing to give me.
It's not a living, exactly, but it's the only thing I've got, and that makes it good enough for me.