The Ammonite Violin & Others by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page A

thinking you can show yourself out. You’re a big girl.”
    “I’m sorry about your cousin,” she tells him, even though it isn’t true. She’d always meant to kill the piper who stole her skin, and some part of her feels cheated that a disease has beaten her to it. She’s dreamt his death many times, how she might separate him from out his skin before the end.
    “Don’t bother. He really was an asshole. It was always only a question of which would kill him first, his cock or his mouth or the liquor.”
    “You won’t see me again,” she says, and slips the bundle of sealskin beneath her grey coat, holding it there against bare flesh, and already it feels a part of her once more.
    “All I got to say is this better not fucking go up in a great puff of pink smoke when you’re gone,” he says, and mutters something else under his breath and squints more intently at the coin. So she leaves him there with the trunk and the piccolo and all his other hoarded treasures, retracing her steps to the green curtain and down the shop’s narrow, death-haunted aisle. The green door jingles loudly, and then she’s across the threshold and out in the sun again, and there’s only the indifferent noise of the taxis and buses, only the busy city streets, between her and the sea and home.

Ode to Edvard Munch
    I find her, always, sitting on the same park bench. She’s there, no matter whether I’m coming through the park late on a Thursday evening or early on a Monday evening or in the first grey moments of a Friday morning. I play piano in a martini bar at Columbus and 89th, or I play at the piano, mostly for tips and free drinks. And when I feel like the long walk or can’t bear the thought of the subway or can’t afford cab fare, whenever I should happen to pass that way alone in the darkness and the interruptions in the darkness made by the lampposts, she’s there. Always on that same bench, not far from the Ramble and the Bow Bridge, just across the lake. They call that part of the park Cherry Hill. The truth is that I haven’t lived in Manhattan long enough to know these things, and, anyway, I’m not the sort of man who memorizes the cartography of Central Park, but she told me it’s called Cherry Hill, because of all the cherry trees growing there. And when I looked at a map in a guidebook, it said the same thing.
    You might mistake her for a runaway, sixteen or maybe seventeen; she dresses all in rags, or clothes so threadbare and dirty that they may as well be rags, and I’ve never seen her wearing shoes, no matter the season or the weather. I’ve seen her barefoot in snow.
    I asked her about that once, if she would wear shoes if I brought her a pair, and she said no, thank you, but no, because shoes make her claustrophobic.
    I find her sitting there alone on the park bench near the old fountain, and I always ask before I sit down next to her. And always she smiles and says of course, of course you can sit with me. You can always sit with me. Her shoulder-length hair has been dyed the color of pomegranates, and her skin is dark. I’ve never asked, but I think she may be Indian. India Indian, I mean. Not Native American. I once Awaited tables with a girl from Calcutta, and her skin was the same color, and she had the same dusky brown-black eyes. But if she is Indian, the girl on Cherry Hill, she has no trace of an accent when she talks to me about the fountain or her favorite paintings in the Met or the exhibits she likes best at the Museum of Natural History.
    The first time she smiled...
    “You’re a vampire?” I asked, as though it were the sort of thing you might ask any’ girl sitting on a park bench in the middle of the night.
    “That’s an ugly word,” she said and scowled at me. “That’s a silly, ugly word.” And then she was silent a long moment, and I tried to think of anything but those long incisors, like the teeth of a rat filed dawn to points. It was a freezing night near the end of