The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard

earth. If I did it right—I hefted the sledgehammer—if I followed the instructions, somehow everything would be fine and Row would be alive and the end of the sentence was approaching and I had a duty and I—
    My coffee cup clattered on the table, bringing me back to my senses. 
    Jesus. 
    What was I thinking? What the hell was I thinking? Phantom advisors, horrible nightmares, and I was here thinking of taking—no, call it what it is, cutting off —someone’s hands? 
    Malcolm, Malcolm, you came here running from your past, and now you were thinking of doing something horrible to someone else? Because some creature instructed you to? Because you found a piece of paper telling you to commit a crime?
    No. I sat down at the kitchen table (coffee, in front of me, steaming, comfort, refilled again to replace the cup I’d spilt) and wrote a letter on the brown paper sack from the hardware store. 
     
    10/23
     
    Chuchonnyhoof,
     
    I didn’t buy you with this land, and you don’t own me as part of your claim. You promise me something that can’t exist. I don’t invite you into my life. It belongs to me, even if nothing else does. Don’t look to me to do your work. Stay in prison, or go elsewhere, but you will not return here. The end of your sentence is nothing to me. I’m not your man. Someone put you in prison. If you come here, I’ll put you back there.
    Don’t contact me again. 
     
    Malcolm Mays
     
    I weighed it down with a rock, left it on the porch, and went back inside, slamming the door behind me. I wouldn’t just sit here waiting for letters. I’d felt passive, here in this house, fed, clothed and bathed like a child, and now I’d responded, however insane it seemed. 
    I should mail the letter like a normal person, not put it out for the post to pick up. As far as I could tell, there was no post. Still, the deliveries were to my door, and so I’d send it that way, too. As though the birds and wind would deliver my letter to someone who didn’t exist. 
    Ironhide, not a goblin but a murdering man, jailed a hundred and seventeen years ago. He would be a skeleton now, and I’d been summoned by the jail to give the money for the burial. It would be a potter’s field for him. I wouldn’t pay to have Ironhide come home, even in a box. What did I owe him? This land was cursed enough, or seemed to be. I wanted to grow things here, and sweep the dust out, and work my way back into living a life. 
    In my head, my wife said again the last things she’d said to me: “Get out of this house, Malcolm. You’re not even a sorry excuse. You’re nothing.”
    She slammed my hand in the door as she pushed me out. 
    “You say you love me,” she yelled out the window.
    “But you don’t love anyone but yourself. Poor Malcolm who accidentally killed his son. Poor Malcolm who accidentally broke his wife’s heart. Poor Malcolm who accidentally deserves nothing he ever had. Get the hell away from me. Never come back here.”
    I thought again of Row, an avalanche of loss, and the promise this thing, this goblin (goblin?) had made to me. The return of my son. 
    That parchment hadn’t come into the house. I looked frantically around the kitchen. No. It wasn’t here. 
    Row, I thought, Row. These thoughts, the dreams, must only be my brain, trying to reorganize its contents. I thought of the stories I’d told my son before bed, the ship stories passed down from my grandfather. My granddad had been around the world, and collected things in ports, stories of goblins and haystacks, ships on roiling seas, the wolf Fenris, the Irish shifting creatures who tugged at hems and tore at skirts. He told them all like he was telling the truth. Row hadn’t really liked those stories. He wanted stories about beautiful things instead, and now I didn’t blame him. He wanted to watch princesses on the television. His mother, at his begging, bought him a crown and a dress, and he wore them. A little boy who insisted he was