Her Husband's Hands by Adam-Troy Castro

Author:Adam-Troy Castro
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Hugo Nominee, Science Fiction, Horror, nebula award nominee, collection, Fiction, Fantasy, Collections & Anthologies, Short Stories, Short Story
ISBN: 9781607014089
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2013-12-03T13:00:00+00:00

The Shallow End of the Pool

I don’t know which one of us woke up first. I do know that when the light changed, illuminating a sky that the wire above us sectioned into little diamonds, I was curled like a wounded ball by the concrete steps, my skull pounding from the beating I’d taken, my arms numb from lack of circulation and my jaw aching like a dead thing attached to my skull with six-inch nails.

You would have expected us to have collapsed in opposite corners, in the traditional manner of the gladiators we were, but when I opened my eyes I saw that we’d slept only a few feet apart. His eyes were already open, and though it was hard to tell, he seemed to be smiling.

My Mom the Bitch lived in a desert fortress.

At least that’s what my father had always told me, sometimes whispering the words, sometimes slurring them, sometimes growing so tired with the same old stories that he spoke in a monotone, making the words sound like a prayer from a faith he could no longer believe.

She’d nursed me when I was born. But things had already gotten bad between my parents by then, so bad that after less than another full year of trying they split the kids between them. She took my twin brother Ethan, and Daddy took me, raising me to remember her as the Psycho Bitch she was.

I didn’t lay eyes on her again until the summer of the year I turned sixteen.

On that sweltering day in August my father and I flew to Vegas, rented a car, and drove four hours into the desert to a place where the local roads almost disappeared under the windswept sands. There we took an almost invisible turnoff, and navigated another forty minutes along an abandoned road to the skeleton of a sign that had, once upon a time, decades ago, advertised roadside cabins.

The resort had never been prosperous. It was just a place for travelers on a budget to rest their heads for the night. Now, it was a wreck, hidden behind a natural outcropping of stacked boulders that God had arranged to look like praying hands. Once, the rocks had protected the guests from road noise. These days the barrier hid the blackened skeleton of the main office, the three cabins still standing out of the original eight, a swimming pool that hadn’t seen water in years, and the mobile home where the Bitch lived with Ethan. I don’t know if the cabins were still officially owned by anybody, nor do I have any idea how the Bitch had ever managed to find such an isolated place to live.

We pulled up in a cloud of dust to find the Bitch on the mobile home steps, smoking a cigarette, dressed in faded jeans with torn knees, and a sleeveless white t-shirt. She’d aged since the last photograph I’d seen, which dated back to some months after my birth. She’d been young and pretty in that one.

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