The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories by Peter Straub

Author:Peter Straub [Straub, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: horror, psychological horror, Vietnam, war, madness, Peter Straub
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2012-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Fee is five, and he is looking at his mother for the first time since he saw her covered with bruises. His conscious life—the extraordinary life of Fee’s consciousness—has just begun.

He thought for a second that his mother was going to answer. Then he realized that his father had spoken to her as he would speak to Jude, or to a dog in the street. He let his fingertips touch her skin. Unlike her face, his mother’s hands were rough, with enlarged knuckles like knots and callused fingertips that widened out at their ends. The skin on the back of her hand felt cool and peculiarly coarse.

“Sure you are, honey,” said his father behind him. “You’re looking better every day.”

Fee clutched her hand and tried to squeeze some of his own life into her. His mother lay on her bed like a princess frozen by a curse in a fairy tale. A blue vein pulsed in her eyelid. All she could see was black night.

For a second Fee saw night too, a deep swooning blackness that called to him.

Yes, he thought. Okay. That’s okay.

“We’re here, honey,” his father said.

Fee wondered if he had ever before heard his father call his mother honey.

“That’s your little Fee holding your hand, honey, can’t you feel his love?”

A startling sense of negation—of revulsion—caused Fee to pull back his hands. If his father saw, he did not mind, for he said nothing. Fee saw his mother floating away into the immense sea of blackness inside her.

For a second he forgot to breathe through his mouth, and the stench that rose from the bed assaulted him.

“Didn’t have time to clean her up yet today. I’ll get to it before long—but you know, she could be lying on a bed of silk, it’d be all the same to her.”

Fee wanted to lean forward and put his arms around his mother but he stepped back.

“We’re none of us doctors and nurses here, Fee.”

For a moment Fee thought there must be more people in the room. Then he realized that his father meant the two of them, and that put into his head an idea of great simplicity and truth.

“Mommy ought to have a doctor,” he said, and risked looking up at his father.

His father leaned over and pulled him by the shoulders, making him move awkwardly backward over the mattress on the floor. Fee braced himself to be struck again, but his father turned him around and faced him with neither the deepening of feeling nor the sparkling of violence that usually preceded a blow.

“If I was three nurses instead of just one man, I could give her a change of sheets twice a day—hell, I could probably wash her hair and brush her teeth for her. But, Fee—” His father’s grip tightened, and the wedges of his fingers drove into Fee’s skin. “Do you think your mother would be happy, away from us?”

The person lying on the bed no longer had anything to do with happiness and unhappiness.

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