Grants Pass (6 page)

“
No,” he
agreed. “No one comes anymore. I tried to use the booth, to call India…”

He didn’t need to finish. She got to
her feet, and he followed. When she looked around the hall this time, she
didn’t see anything much to laugh about. “I don’t really want to die.”

She hadn’t realized it until that
moment. But she didn’t.

She missed her brothers. Sweet
Tenzin and his dreams, who’d really disappeared the day he’d gotten sick. Sonam
and his drawings, his temper, his affection, and his fears. Thinley and his
funny emails from America.

Existence was impermanent; she’d
always been okay with that. But she was here. Now.

“
Is there
anything we can do?” he asked, looking at the ground thoughtfully.

Thinley and his emails.

Pema looked up at the boy-monk. “No.
But…maybe there’s a place we can go. If…we can get to America; to Grants Pass.”

It sounded insane to her when she
said it out loud like that.

But Tashi smiled brightly. He
reminded her of Tenzin again. “Will you teach me English?”

Pema smiled. “Of course.”

Biography

K.V. Taylor

K.V. Taylor is an avid reader and
writer of urban fantasy and dark speculative fiction, even though the only
degree she holds in is in the history of art. (Or, possibly, because the only
degree she holds is in the history of art.) Originally from the Appalachian
foothills of West Virginia, she currently lives in the D.C. Metro Area with her
husband and mutant cat. Her work can be found on the web at
http://kvtaylor.com
.

Afterword

The mixing of cultures and
religions in the Kathmandu Valley is dizzying and wonderful; when I lived in
the predominantly Buddhist neighborhood around the stupa a few years back, it
absorbed me as easily as the hundreds of other traditions with roots there, and
became a true home away from home. (It’s also home to the best apple pie in the
world, I’m convinced.) And so, when it came to the end of the world as we know
it, my mind went straight to the Himalayas, their sacred geography, and their
way of looking at life and death.

Boudha
is the name of the stupa at the heart of the neighborhood, the name
of the neighborhood itself, and the Nepali word for Buddha.

Hells Bells

Cherie Priest

Along my windowsill I used to
keep six small bells. They didn’t match at all, because they came from
different places. My mother called them tacky souvenirs, and she said they were
cheap, and that she wished my grandmother had never bought them for me.

But I liked them.

I could sit on the radiator if it
wasn’t turned on, and I could hold the bells between my fingers while I looked
out the window over the hospital parking lot. If I shook the bells gentle, they
tinkled. If I banged them hard, they rang wild. I liked the loud sound best,
when I threw the bells up and down, popping my wrist to make the noise bigger.

One of the nurses said I made her
crazy with the bells. She was afraid that something was wrong when I played
with them, and I was keeping the other patients awake, besides.

I told her that she was right and it
was true, when you ring the bells something’s usually wrong. The loudest bells
mean danger, or sorrow, or warning. I heard them on the long red trucks with
the white ladders, and on the bank building downtown — clanging crazy after the
glass was broken. And I heard them loudest from the church down the road, every
time someone died.

The nurse in her stiff uniform said
that this was all the more reason for me to leave the bells alone. She scooped
them up off of the windowsill and took them away.

I cried, but she wouldn’t bring them
back. I told her that my grandmother gave them to me, and that my grandmother
was one of the early dead, and I thought it might make the nurse sad. I thought
it might make her feel sorry for me.

But she had a headache and other
patients had complained.

I begged her for my bells but she
shook her head and left me in the white-walled room. No one felt sorry for me
except for me.

My mother was one of the later dead;
she followed Grandma, and then my brother followed her too. They shouted all
the time, and they didn’t like my bells either. So even if they’d been alive by
the time I was in the hospital, they wouldn’t have stopped the frowning nurse
who took my bells away.

I bet.

I can’t remember if the church bell
rang for any of them, but I hope it did. I hope that the bell rang and rang,
that you could hear it as far away as the next town over, and they couldn’t
stop it — they couldn’t take it away — because they were dead.

****

When I was first left at the
hospital, it was a very crowded place. I didn’t even have my own room for the
first week. The doctors left me in a hall with a bracelet on. The bracelet was
plastic. It had a note on it that said NNOK.

In the hall, I met a little
red-haired boy with a tired-looking mother holding his hand. He tugged on my
bracelet and sounded out the letters he saw there. I told him it was my name,
and he could call me “Nnok.”

His mother shook her head and said
no.

She said it meant “No next of kin.”

I think she must have been right,
because Grandma and my mom and my brother were dead by then, and there was
nobody else who ever came to see me. I sat down on the floor and opened my
backpack, where I kept the bells before I had a windowsill. I pulled them out
one by one and held them tightly in my hand so they didn’t ring, but only
clattered.

****

After awhile, the hospital got
less and less busy. I got my own room, and the doctor told me I could decorate
it however I wanted, because it didn’t matter anymore. I asked him what that
meant, and he coughed when he answered.

“
I don’t
think anyone else is ever going to stay in it anyway.”

I took it to mean that this was my
new home, and it wasn’t so bad. I never saw the doctor again, though I heard
him coughing up and down the halls. I only saw the nurses once in awhile, and
sometimes they coughed too. They brought me a tray with food on it twice a day,
once in the morning, and once in the late afternoon, just before sunset.

Mostly, everyone left me alone with
my bells — until the one nurse took them away.

At first I was lonely; when the
other, nicer nurses who were left began to cry in the corners rather than bring
me coloring books and trays with runny white pudding.

And when I’m lonely I get bored.

I crawled out of bed one night,
while the hospital was dark and empty feeling. I thought maybe the nurse had
put my bells in the lounge with the big TV, because there was a desk there and
some filing cabinets, and I knew sometimes the nurses put things inside them.

The TV was on when I tip-toed by,
but it wasn’t showing anything good. It had been left on a static channel,
buzzing with black and white snow and throwing light out in funny patterns on
the floors. If I were tall enough to reach it, up there in the corner by the
ceiling, I would have turned it off.

But I’m too short, so I didn’t. I
didn’t care if the TV played anyway. I wanted my bells.

On the back-side of the desk there
were 5 drawers. I opened them all, starting at the bottom on the left and
working my way around. I found lots of papers, folders and some envelopes too.
There were pens and pencils, and metal clips for holding stacks of paper
together.

I didn’t find my bells, but I found
something else and I took it with me. It was a tiny tape recorder, with a
squeaky little tape and black buttons.

I pressed the button with the green
triangle and the tape said, “For once, the man on the street corner was right.
Every day for fifteen years he carried that damn sandwich board, the one that
said ‘The end is near.’ And he stood on the corner in front of the coffee house
and the bookstore, yelling at the intersection, converting the cars to his
eschatology. Even a broken clock’s right twice a day, I guess, because that son
of a bitch—”

I pressed the button with two white
triangles, pointing to the right. “And when we all are gone, who will bury the
gravediggers?”

I pressed the button with the “X” on
it and the voice stopped.

I thought that this might be fun to
play with, but I would have rather found my bells.

****

Towards the end, before the whole
hospital got silent and I didn’t hear any more footsteps ever, the bell at the
church down the street rang almost all the time. All day I sat at the window
and listened with my ear pressed against the glass. I looked forward to it. I
didn’t mind that it meant danger or sorrow. The church bell sounded beautiful,
and big.

I pressed a button on my tape
recorder, the one with the two triangles pointing left. I let the tape rewind
until it stopped. I guessed it was at the beginning, but I didn’t play it. The
man with the desperate-sounding voice didn’t mean anything to me.

I stood on a chair and pried the
window-clasp open with a clipboard. I then put my arm out the window with the
tape recorder tightly in my hand, my middle finger holding down the button with
a red circle.

At night, I pulled the tape recorder
into bed with me, and I put it under my pillow. I did not press the green
triangle button, though. I do not care who buries the gravediggers, but when
there is no one left to ring the bell, I will push the button.

I had a bell again, but this bell
was for the dead.

****

Three nurses — a blond, the
brunette who stole my bells, and a redhead — were sitting around a radio in the
TV lounge, their faces pulled down close to the round black speaker. Over their
heads the TV was off, not even spraying static light into the room, which was
okay because it was daylight and we didn’t even need the overhead lights on to
see.

A man on the radio was talking,
asking if anyone was listening.

I laughed at him, because a radio is
not a phone, and no one could answer him anyway.

“
Shut up,”
hissed the nurses, all together.

The man’s voice was shaky, and
sounded like mine does if I haven’t slept well.

“
If anyone
is listening, there’s a place where I’m going to go, with what’s left of my
family and a couple of other people we’ve met along the way. We’re going to a
place called Grants Pass. It’s in Oregon.

I know there are still people out
there. I know someone must be. This is a hail Mary thing, really. I don’t know
if anyone’ll be there. I don’t know if anyone’s going to go, but someone
might.”

“
What do you
think?” The blond nurse asked the other two.

“
We can’t
stay here, not forever.” The red-haired nurse agreed.

“
It’s better
than nothing. A goal, anyway.” She looked over at me and nodded. “We’ve got to
find other people. We can’t stay like this forever. And her — we’ll load her up
and bring her too.”

I shook my head because I didn’t
want to go anyplace with them, but they ignored me.

The blond nodded. “Of course. We
can’t leave her here. Is there anyone else left? Anyone at all?”

“
Not
anymore. We’re it.”

“
It’s
getting late,” the blond nurse said. “We could pack up tonight. Leave in the morning.
I don’t know how far we’ll get, but one of the ambulances has a full tank of
gas. We could take it and run it ‘till it stops, then see if we can’t find
another vehicle.”

No, I shook my head. No. Not with
you. No.

****

I got mad at the nurse again, the
same one who took my bells. She cried all the time and made me feel bad. She
came and went with my food, but only once a day, and I couldn’t find anyone
else to give me anything to eat.

She told me that I could go out and
look for my own food for all she cared, if I was going to complain. I said that
I didn’t think I was supposed to leave the room, and she told me she didn’t
give a damn and that everything was different now.

“
Look
around!” She practically screamed it at me, and I don’t like it when people
scream at me. “Look!” She said it again, waving her arm around the room, and
pointing it out at the hall.

I did, but I didn’t see anything or
anyone except for her.

And then it occurred to me that I
hadn’t seen anyone except her or the other two women for a long time.

She coughed and leaned against the
door frame, putting her forehead to the back of her hand. When she walked out
and left me, she tripped on her shoelace, caught herself before she fell. I
wondered if she was getting sick.

****

That night while I lay in bed,
listening to the sounds of nothing, I began to wonder if maybe I hadn’t gotten
it backwards.

Maybe the church bell rang and
people died, not the other way around.

I didn’t like the nurse. I thought
maybe it would be okay if she died, as she didn’t like me either. I could hear
the bell — even if there was no one left in the church to ring it.

I reached under my pillow and ran my
thumb over the button with the green triangle.

I pulled the recorder out, and I
padded over to the window on my socked feet, sliding a little on the tile. I
lifted the window and felt all the night air swirling cold, and I put the
recorder outside — holding it with my hand and squeezing the green triangle
button hard.

In the perfect stillness, the sound
of the bells pealed out. I rolled the wheel on the side with my thumb and the
chime went louder, louder. More. Higher. Bigger. The banging, clanging, ringing
bells made my chest feel big and tight at the same time. They made me smile and
forget to wish for anything else.

The next morning there were only two
nurses left; the one I didn’t like was gone. I asked the blond nurse where she
was, but she didn’t answer me.

“
Did you
shut the door?” the other asked over my head.

“
Of course I
did. What else could I do? She’s dead, and there’s no one to bury her.”

“
And now?”

The yellow-haired lady in the
formerly white uniform looked over at her friend and then down at me.

My eyes were red and my face was
probably puffy, because I hadn’t slept well the night before. I’d sat with the
tape recorder at the window, and I’d played the sound of the bell over and over
again until I fell asleep, dreaming about the death bell at the church.

Maybe it looked like I’d been
crying. Maybe they thought I was sad about the brown-haired nurse, but I
wasn’t. I was excited. I was happy. The bells worked both ways — you rang the
bell when people died, and the bell rang when people died. Twice the bell
ringing, the way I looked at it.