Cold Quiet Country by Clayton Lindemuth Page A

it. The door closed silently, and her father’s shadow melded into others. She smelled dried sweat—the scent of redness baked into his forearms and dirt below his fingernails. The most terrifying pungency was dried urine from his shorts.
    His hand found her foot. Guinevere rolled sideways and squeezed her eyelids tight.
    “This isn’t right,” Gwen said. She lay with her arm over the edge of her bed. Her fingers touched the hilt of a paring knife, tucked between mattresses. She’d chosen the knife not to kill, but to wound. While he was inside her, she capitulated.
    “This is wrong,” she said again.
    He was silent. He was a hand on her shoulder, arm below her neck. He was a hand under her breast. He was an acrid smell. He was pain inside.
    He shuddered as she sniffled. Withdrew and climbed from her.
    “That’s Daddy’s special girl,” he said.
    She rolled from the mattress and clutched the knife. Standing deep in a shadow, she saw her father’s waist in a bolt of moonlight; saw him stepping into and pulling up his underwear.
    “What are you doing?” he said.
    She trembled. “You better never come for me again.”
    “Yeah?” He stepped closer, still on the other side of the bed. “Or what?”
    She pointed the blade at him.
    He rounded the bed, snapped his boxers’ elastic waistband. “You don’t like what I’ve been giving you?” His voice was quiet like rocks. “Liked it enough when we started. Came on real strong. Now you changing your mind. That it?”
    “I never liked it. Don’t come any closer.”
    “Or?”
    “I’ll cut you.”
    “Cut me?” He stopped.
    “I’ll scream.”
    “I’ll beat you silly.”
    He stepped into the shadow. She smelled his breath. “I have a knife,” she whispered. She probed slowly, felt resistance. He grunted, slapped her hand and the knife vanished from it. He gripped her shoulders, drove her against the wall. Wrapped his hand over her throat. As the pressure grew, he brought his face close to her ear.
    He exhaled, as if unsure how to express his fury in words.
    She gagged. Struggled against his hand until faintness overtook her and she blacked out.
    Guinevere awoke in her bed, tucked in, like it had all been a dream.
    She curled into a ball and stared through dry eyes at a gray sliver of wall. This wasn’t her father’s second visit. It wasn’t his tenth. She didn’t count. Now, eight months and two days after her grandfather died, when she closed her eyes, Guinevere heard bassoons and oboes—bullfrog notes. The sounds so rich they might have had color. She could almost see them vibrate and wiggle like…sperm flagella on the films they showed in biology class.
    The tones and harmonies whisked away her thoughts until an inevitable realization surprised her.
    Whose face would she see? Burt?
    She crossed her fingers then crossed her heart with crossed fingers. Before she could whisper an apologetic prayer, she saw her grandmother’s face. Grandmother’s eyelids were low, her jaw slack. She saw something she didn’t like; her eyes canted toward the ground.
    Guinevere reached into the vision but it was like reaching into a pool of water. Grandma was too far away—though so close.
    “Grandma!” Gwen whispered. “Grandma!”
    The old woman’s gaze was solemn; her face was motionless. Guinevere lay still. Grandmother didn’t move except to blink. Her watery eyes remained fixed, yet each moment carried her closer to death.
    Gwen threw back her covers. Dropped her feet into slippers. Threw open her bedroom door and hurried to the hallway telephone. She pulled out the card tucked between wall and wall-plate, and held it to the soft green light of the handset. Too faint. She carried the card to the nightlight and dialed her grandmother’s number.
    The phone rang. Gwen counted one bleat after another, over and over, until at twenty she dropped the phone into the receiver.
    Her parents’ bedroom door opened. “Who were you calling? You almost got yourself