My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

CHRIS ADRIAN. Teague O’Kane and the Corpse

ONCE THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN NAMED TEAGUE O’KANE. HE WAS probably too handsome for his own good, and certainly too handsome for the good of others, since he was loved by every boy and girl that he met, and he broke hearts by the dozen. He lived in Orlando, and had successfully auditioned for a boy band, and made no secret of this. In fact, it was usually the second thing he told people, after his name.

One night he went out dancing with his many friends, and, as was the usual case, many people wanted to dance with him. People approached him on the dance floor, and he might dance with them or he might not; it all depended on how he was feeling, and upon the quality of their groove, which he could evaluate at a distance, and in the semi-dark, so sometimes they were still a long way off when he had decided that they hadn’t made his cut, and he turned his back on them. On this night there was the usual crowd of aspirants, and some of them were quite pleasant-looking, and others were quite ordinary, and some of them were excellent dancers, and some of them were merely enthusiastic. It was a typical night, until something extraordinary happened.

Teague was minding his own business, sort of dancing with a handsome girl on his left, but also sort of dancing with a pretty boy on his right, when an absolutely hideous man came bopping up to him and audaciously invaded his space, bumping aside the boy and the girl and doing a nasty grinding dance with his hips and his groin. Teague turned his back to him, but the man only stepped around and presented himself again. He was really quite amazingly ugly; Teague placed him somewhere in his fifties, if not his sixties, and he had flabby arms, and two chins, and terribly ill-advised hair. “Dance with me, Teague O’Kane!” he cried, and tried to put his hands on Teague’s handsome hips, but Teague shook him off, and said, “Get away from me you old troll!” But he grabbed at him again twice more, and twice more Teague called him a troll and told him to get away. The man went away after that, but no sooner had he gone but a hideous woman had taken his place, a woman so ugly she could have been the troll’s sister, with her own flabby arms, and her own abundance of chins, and her own terribly ill-advised hair. “Get away from me you hag!” Teague shouted, not even giving her the chance to ask him to dance, and he turned and danced away hurriedly to another side of the floor.

But three more times the old hag came and found Teague, once in the hinterlands of the dance floor and once at the bar and finally in line for the men’s bathroom. He was standing there minding his own business when he felt a tickle on the back of his neck. He turned around and saw the woman standing there.

“Hey, baby,” she said. “You want to dance?”

“Did you just touch me?” Teague asked.

“Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t,” she said. “But that isn’t the question. The question is, do you want to dance with me?”

“Leave me alone,” Teague said. “Don’t you speak English?”

“I won’t ask you but one more time, Teague O’Kane,” the woman said. “Won’t you dance with me?”

“Not in a gajillion years,” Teague said, and he gave her a little push, which he regretted almost immediately, even though she didn’t exactly fall down, but only stumbled back a few paces.

“That’s a long time, Teague O’Kane!” the old hag said, and laughed at him, and it occurred to Teague to wonder how she and the man might have known his name, because even though he had successfully auditioned for a boy band, he wasn’t famous yet.

“My night is ruined,” he said to the urinal, rather too loudly, because a voice came out of the stall next to him, saying, “Mine too! Mine too!” in between horking exclamations of vomit.

“Mine’s ruined worse,” Teague said, aware that he was being peevish, and that he should go right back out on the dance floor and pretend like he hadn’t been nearly molested by a hag and a troll, and that he had not spent his whole night so far oppressed by other people’s ugliness and audacity. He should just get back out there and dance, and so he tried, but his heart just wasn’t in it; his groove was compromised, and his moves, even his signature moves, somehow felt not like his moves. It was like someone else was dancing in his body, somebody who was sad, and ugly, and lonely. He decided to go home alone, and texted seven of his friends to announce that to them, because they were always texting him to say they were going home alone, as if that were his responsibility, or as if he should feel bad because they were going home alone and he was not.

He lived with his father in a big house on a lake, or rather, he lived very close to his father, in a much smaller house next door to the big house. The little house was a present on his sixteenth birthday from his father, who maintained that a boy needed independence as well as supervision, and so he had made his son a gift of the little house, but outfitted it with cameras to keep watch over Teague and make sure that he never did anything to compromise their good name. There was a driver who would have gladly come to fetch him from the club, but because he was feeling agitated from his bad night he decided to walk home, though the way was far. But he liked to walk whenever something unpleasant happened to him, because he could pretend that he was walking away from whatever it was that was troubling him. And as he walked away from the club, down the brightly lit streets of the downtown, and then the half-lit sidewalks of the old city, and finally the darkened paths of his father’s estate, the horrible man and woman, and the bad time they had engendered with their saggy asses and their grabby hands, seemed more and more remote. He had almost forgotten about them entirely by the time he was on the last stretch of his walk, when he had entered into the orange groves that surrounded the house, and could see the light in his father’s room twinkling through the trees. Perhaps, he thought, Father has sensed that I had a bad night, and is waiting up to comfort me.

He heard voices on the path ahead then, and wondered briefly if his father had come out of the house to welcome him. He stopped and leaned against a tree, and a heavy wind stirred the branches all of a sudden, making the fruit swing gently, and pummel him softly on the shoulders and face. The wind carried the voices to him, and he heard now clearly that there were many people ahead, and that none of them was his father. Burglars! he thought, and then, Admirers! because it had already been the case that various persons had invaded their property before both to steal from his father and to plead a case of love to Teague. He bent down to take up a small thick branch at his feet. It was light and soft with rot, and wouldn’t hurt anybody if he hit them with it, but he thought it would make a good tool for a threat.

The wind shifted, and for a moment the voices were silent, and Teague cocked his head and squinted his eyes. “I’ve got a stick,” he said, but not very loudly. A bell sounded, tinny and high, and the night seemed to darken. The voices returned in a rush of laughter, and then Teague saw figures — all he could make out was the shape of them — capering through the trees, skipping and dancing and falling now and then to roll briefly on the ground before springing up again. He raised his stick up and said it again, much louder this time, as they rushed toward him: “I have a stick!” “And a pretty stick it is!” said a voice that was very familiar, though it took him a moment to place it. “As pretty as the hand that wields it, eh, Porcupine?” The lady from the club came walking out of the gloom, and though the night stayed just as dark, she seemed oddly lit somehow, as if the sun were shining only for her and only on her. She was just as ugly as she ever had been, and seemed even shorter and more bent, and yet somehow she seemed less pathetic than she had in the club.

“Oh, yes, Aardvark, my dear,” said another familiar voice. The man from the club came up behind her and put his arms around her, placing his head just to the side of her neck. Of course they were friends, Teague thought. That made perfect sense, even if it made no sense that they had just popped out of the night within sight of his house.

“What are you doing here?” Teague asked them in a whisper-shout. “Get off my property!”

“Duly, duly,” said the woman. “Duly and in time. But first, won’t you dance with me?”

“No!” Teague said. “Stop asking me that. Are you deaf? What part of not in a million years do you not understand?” The lady was hopping back and forth on her feet and smiling at him, and the man behind her was doing the same thing, but exactly out of sync, so he hopped on his left foot just as she hopped on her right, and he moved his head to peek at Teague from above one and then the other of the woman’s shoulders. Others were coming up behind them, figures whose faces were lit just like the old woman’s with a curious, source-less light, so Teague could tell from far away that they were just as ugly as she was, and indeed some were even uglier, lumpier and more misshapen, or too big or too small, and it was obvious that none of them had given the least bit of thought to their hair, or to what they were wearing. They shuffled and danced toward him, and surrounded the old woman and the old man in a hideous huddle.

“A million years? Will you dance with me in a million years?”

“No!” Teague shouted, not caring anymore if he woke his father up. In fact, he wanted his father to come out with a flashlight and a shotgun, and scare the hideous weirdos away. “I said not in a million years. Not even. Aren’t you listening to me?” The whole crowd of them laughed at him then, an odd sort of chuckle that circulated among the ones on the sides and the back and then came to the old man, who chuckled in the ugly lady’s ear, and she uttered a sharp little bark of mirth.

“Not with me? Not with any of us?”

“No!” Teague said, and he reached into his pocket to get his phone. “I’m calling the police now,” he said. “But I’ll dial slowly, so you have time to just go away.”

“Not with my friend?” the lady said, and indicated a large lumpy bundle which, he suddenly noticed, they were passing back and forth among them, each of them, even the small ones, shouldering the burden and passing it on. He thought it was a sack, but he couldn’t tell for sure because the light that fell on them seemed to miss the thing they carried.

“I’m dialing,” Teague said. But he was very slow about it, because he wasn’t very good at dialing with one hand, and also because he was getting increasingly nervous and afraid, because they were something else besides just ugly and annoying. There were a lot of them — it seemed like there were more of them every time he looked — and he was starting to appreciate that they might want to do something else besides dance with him.

“For the last time, Teague O’Kane,” the woman said, “won’t you dance with one of us, even out of pity, or fellow-feeling, to share just a little of your undeserved beauty with those who have lost their own?”

“Hello, police?” Teague said into his phone. He had dialed 911, but it wasn’t ringing yet. “I am being attacked by ugly people.”

“Attacked?” the woman said. “We only wanted to dance!” But just then the ugly old man picked up an orange and threw it at Teague. It missed, but another, thrown from farther back in the crowd, connected solidly with his head.

“Hey!” he said, and then he was hit again, on the ear he was using for the phone. A lady answered just as the phone flew away. He scrambled after it, stooping to pick it up, but before his fingers could reach it another orange struck and knocked it farther. “Stop that!” he said, and three more oranges came hurtling out of the darkness, two for his face and one for his stomach. Then a whole barrage of them started, and he stood there for a moment, trying to protect his face and his stomach and his groin, but when he covered up one part of himself they only hit him in another. He turned and ran.

He hadn’t gone very far before it occurred to him that he should be trying to run toward home, not away from it, that if he could make it to his front door he could rush through and lock it against them. And he hadn’t gone very much farther than that when they started to appear in front of him in ones and twos, strangely lucent in the darkness under the trees, smiling at him hideously as they lobbed oranges at him. He and his friends had been in the habit lately of driving along Orange Blossom Trail and throwing oranges at the prostitutes, just for the fun of it, and now he found himself regretting that, as fruit after fruit connected with his head. Looking back, he saw that he was being pursued by the wily crowd. They ran close together, one roiling beast, and in their light he could see the sack (it was definitely a sack) balanced on their shoulders, being passed among them as they ran. There was something terrible about their faces, in the glimpse he had of them before he turned his head around again, that was very different from mere ugliness.

He put his arms over his head, peeking out between his elbows to watch his way, and ran as hard as he could, not caring whether he was going toward the house or away from the house, only wanting to get away from them, and very shortly tripped, whether over a root or an outstretched foot, he didn’t know, but he found, as he fell down, that he was somewhat grateful for the trip, and he was less panicked, as he rolled and skidded on the dirt and coarse grass, than he had been as he ran. Well, he thought, I tried to get away, but there are too many of them, and they have too many oranges, and now they are going to get me. He lay on his back, looking up through the leaves of the orange trees at the dim stars, and they clustered around him.

“Orange you sad you didn’t dance with us now?” said the hag. She leaned over him with the man, and all around them the others were giving him orange-rind smiles, wedges of fruit stuck in their mouths, and juice dripping down their hairy chins.

“Go on and do it,” Teague said. “Rob me. Take my wallet. Take my jeans. They’re not going to fit you, and they won’t look good on anyone you know. But go on. Just get it over with.”

“Rob you?” said the hag.

“We aren’t here to take anything away,” the old troll said.

“We’ve come to give you a gift, Teague O’Kane,” the hag said.“It would have been a merry gift, if you had chosen to dance with us. It would have been a gift of poodle breath and panty lace and eyes bright with joyful tears. But you have spurned those who only meant to bless you, and now you must take another kind of gift from us entirely, and do a deed for us, or else.”

“Or else what?” he asked.

“Or else dark deadliness of poodle!” the old man said. “And suffering sobs!” said the woman. “And an acid bitter sadness in your soul that will last a million years.”

“A million billion!” said the man.

Teague wanted to say that was stupid, that nothing lasted that long, not — he was pretty sure — even the universe itself, but instead he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Only this,” the woman said. “Take our friend home, and put him to rest.” There was a flurry of activity among the others. Within a few seconds they threw down the bundle in the sack and uncovered it. Teague could tell there was something unpleasant in there by the noise it made when it hit the ground. It’s full of steak, he thought, and Who carries around a big sack of beef in the middle of the night? It seemed to attract the darkness as it lay on the ground, but when they uncovered it he could plainly tell what it was, and he shuddered because he had never seen a corpse before, nor ever seen a body in such an unnatural posture as it assumed when they rolled it toward him with their feet. It lay with its back to him, one arm stretched out underneath it and another up over its head. Its feet and its chest were bare, and the face was turned away, but he could tell by the breadth of its shoulders and back that it was a man, and he could tell that his jeans were of a very high quality, because he had a special sense for things like that, and could tell a good pair of jeans from across the street, or in the dark, or by the touch of his hand against somebody’s bottom.

“Take him and bury him inside the Catholic church at Pine Hills, or, if you cannot bury him there, in behind the Salty Pig sausage factory in Windermere if there is no room for him at the church, and if all else fails then take him to the Green Swamp near Orlo Vista and lay him to rest in the bog.”

“Oh, all right,” Teague said, sitting and then standing up slowly. “Is that all you want me to do?”

“Nothing more and nothing less.”

“Okay, then,” Teague said. “But first there’s something you should know.”

“What’s that, Teague O’Kane?” she asked, smiling at him in a very unfriendly way.

“Just. this!” Teague said, and cast the orange he had picked up at her face. He didn’t wait to see if it hit her or not, but turned to run again, leaping nimbly over the corpse and sprinting for home. But he hadn’t been running for ten seconds before he was tackled from behind, and all those ugly old people were swarming all over him, their terrible moth-ball breath in his face and their starchy sprayed-up hair brushing his cheek and neck. It felt like they were all sitting on him — for a moment he could hardly breathe — and then the pressure let up, but there was still a great weight on him. They jumped back and away from him.

“There now!” said the woman. “Now you are ready!” Teague lay on his belly, slowly understanding that they had put the corpse on his back, and that the dead man’s arms were crossed over his shoulders.

“What did you do?” he said. “Get it off of me!”

“We certainly won’t,” said the lady. “You alone will do that. Now take him to be buried and be quick about it. If the sun rises on you before it is done, you will regret it!”

“Get it off of me!” Teague said again, and now he was crying, and struggling on the ground, flopping around to throw the thing off, but the dead man held him fast.

“You do it,” said the woman. “And remember what I said to you. Dark tears of the great poodle of sadness! Acid in your heart! Burning forever! Get you gone, Teague O’Kane. You have chosen not to dance with us, and the night is running out!”

“Get it off,” Teague said again, but no one answered. When he looked up they were all gone, and if not for the weight on his back, he would have thought he had imagined them. He got slowly to his knees, and then he stood, the corpse very heavy on his back. When he looked around there was no sign of the crowd of ugly people, but they had left him a message on the ground, words spelled from torn rinds of orange. “We will be watching you,” it said.

“Help!” he shouted. “Help, somebody!” His voice sounded very loud in his ears, but he had the sense that it wasn’t carrying very far, and among the trees he could see none of the lights of his home, and he wasn’t sure which way he should go for help. “And I don’t even know where Orlo Vista is,” he said sadly. At that a hand rose up before him pointing, and it took him a moment to realize who it belonged to. With a shout he started to run again, trying to get away from the corpse on his back, but he only fell again, and he lay there weeping again for a moment.

“Crying won’t get me buried,” the corpse said behind him then. “Get up, idiot.”

Teague cried out again, and tried to crawl away, saying, “You can’t talk to me! It’s bad enough as it is but you’re not allowed to talk.”

“The dead do as they please,” the thing said, but then it was silent. Teague lay panting with his face in the ground, and then he did get up, and started to walk in the direction that the corpse had pointed. It was very slow going at first. The corpse was heavy, and the night was dark, and he didn’t know where he was, for all that he could not have been very far from his own house. But the trees looked strange, even when he left them behind he walked for what felt like an hour without encountering a highway, only a narrow dirt road that looked more fit for horses than cars, but was easier to walk on than the soft ground. If he had seen a car, he would have flagged it down to ask for help, though he wondered if anyone would have stopped for him, a man with a corpse on his back, no matter how handsome and alluring he might be. It occurred to him, as he trudged slowly down that road, half-fearing that the corpse would speak again, but half-hoping that it would as well, because he was feeling very lonely and afraid, that the night would have been much easier if he had agreed to dance with either the man or the woman, that he must be dreaming, and the changeless quality of the road made it seem this must be so, and he started to feel like he had been going along on it forever. “I’ll just keep walking,” he said, “until I wake up, and if later tonight I see any ugly people on the dance floor, I’ll run away from them right away.” He closed his eyes a moment — the road was so unchanging he suddenly decided there was no need even to watch where he was going. Then he was jolted by a sharp pain — the corpse had reached into his shirt and pinched him on the nipple! “What was that for?” Teague demanded, though of course he knew what it was for. He stopped a moment on the road, feeling very frightened and very awake.

Not long after that he saw the church, sitting all alone at the top of a hill, lit up by a single street lamp. The road led right to the door, and passed through a parking lot that was full of cars. It was hard going up the hill: when he got to the top he just wanted to lie down on the hood of one of the cars and rest for a long time. He went to the door of the church and paused there. “Are you supposed to knock on the door of a church before you go in?” he wondered aloud. He had never been in a church before.

“Not necessary,” said the corpse.

Teague pushed the door open and went inside. The church was lit with candles, and the gentle flickering light made the faces of the many statues seem particularly alert and alive. It wouldn’t have surprised him at all if they all started talking to him, insulting him or asking him the time or scolding him for not dancing with them. But they stayed silent. As he stared at them, though, he thought he recognized the light that had fallen so strangely on all those ugly old people: their faces looked like the statues, as if the light that shone on them came from invisible candles.

“We’re here for a reason,” the corpse said.

“You don’t have to remind me,” Teague said. He started to walk around the church, up and down the aisles, and peeked down the lines of pews, looking for a place to bury someone. People belonged in graveyards; it made no sense at all to him that somebody should be buried inside a church, even one that was carpeted, like this one was, in tacky indoor/outdoor carpeting. That was typical of Florida, he thought, a place where extremes of bad taste flourished.

“Dig!” said the corpse, when Teague had been looking for a while here and there for a place.

“With what? My hands?”

“Until they bleed and your bones poke through the skin!” it said harshly. But then it pointed Teague toward a closet, where, among tall stacks of kitty litter and ammonia and paper towels, a shovel was waiting. Teague took it and picked a spot near the altar. “Do it!” the corpse told him when he hesitated. He raised up the shovel in both hands and stabbed it down, thinking he was going to have to break through cement underneath the carpet to get to the ground. He gave a yell as he brought the shovel down, the loudest noise he had ever made, the angriest noise and also the saddest noise. He was sure the shovel was just going to bounce off the concrete, and that the wooden handle would split, and that his hand would break from the shock of it. He didn’t care if it did.

But it was just soft ground underneath the carpet. The blade sank in completely, and he had to put his whole weight on it to pull up the earth and carpet. A smell rose up — an odor of fresh loamy earth that made Teague think of rainy days and earthworms. The corpse took a deep breath of it behind him, but didn’t let it out. “I am about to get rid of you,” Teague told it, but it didn’t respond. He got to work, driving the blade of the shovel into the carpet again and again, and marking out a rectangle long enough to fit the corpse. He said it again and again, speaking a word every time he made a blow with the shovel: “I. am. going. to. get. rid. of. you!”

The corpse didn’t talk back, and he was just starting to convince himself that he wouldn’t hear from it again when a hideous shriek sounded in the air. “What?” he shouted, dropping the shovel and jumping back. “What did I do? Why are you screaming?”

“Wasn’t me,” said the corpse, and there was another cry, much softer but still angry. Someone was obviously very upset. Teague walked to the edge of the grave he was digging — it was only a couple of feet deep — and looked in. There was movement in the dirt. Something was trembling underneath the soil. A sinkhole opened up in the dirt, just mouth-sized. The dirt fell in, and then was spat out again in another scream, and then suddenly, horribly, a dead woman sat up out of the shallow grave that Teague had been uncovering.

“Oh, oh, oh!” she cried. “What are you doing to me?”

“Nothing!” said Teague, which was patently untrue, but the first thing he thought of to say.

“Nothing? Nothing? Why have you disturbed my rest, horrible boy? Rude boy! Terrible boy!”

“I didn’t mean…” Teague began. “I mean. I just wanted to bury my friend!”

“He’s not my friend,” said the corpse behind him. “And he is very rude. Terribly rude.”

“Cover me up!” the woman, cried. “Cover me up, boy, before I get cold.”

Teague did as she said, heaping the dirt back on her when she lay back down, and throwing the carpet on top in a disorganized heap that he made no attempt to neaten. He left the shovel leaning on the altar and ran out. He stood outside panting and feeling ready to cry again. The corpse heaved an enormous sigh against his neck, and then did it twice more.

“Stop that,” Teague said. “Stop sighing. You don’t need to sigh. You don’t even need to breathe.”

“I am disappointed. When I am disappointed, I sigh.” It sighed again, and then Teague did it, too.

“I forget where the other place was,” Teague said after a moment. “The other place I was supposed to take you.” The corpse was silent, and Teague thought it figured that it would talk when he wanted it to shut up, and be silent when he was asking it for help, but then it lifted its hand again and pointed the way.

The Salty Pig sausage factory was set in a dell instead of high on a hill, surrounded by a greasy, low-lying fog that smelled of bacon. Teague carried his burden down the road for an hour until he smelled it, and it was another half hour before he saw the smokestack spires poking up, tall shadows against the stars. Instead of cars, the factory was surrounded on all sides by a field of gravestones, which made no sense at all until Teague was close enough to read some of the names on the stones: Snorty, Fatty, Missy, Mr. Snorfle, Petunia, Wilbur, Otis; they were pig names. “Why would they bury the pigs from the factory?”

“Respect,” said the corpse.

“Where is the shovel?” Teague asked.

“In your hands,” said the corpse. Teague held up his hands in front of them both, and it clarified, “Your hands are the shovels.”

“That’s not fair,” Teague said to the corpse, and then he lifted his head and said it again to the air and the fog and the strange piggy graveyard. “That’s not fair! I’m doing what you told me to. I’m doing what you asked. The least you could do is give me a shovel!” But silence was his only answer, so he knelt down in a place between graves that looked likely to be empty and started to dig with his hands, tearing up the coarse grass and then scooping up great double handfuls of earth and tossing them to one side or the other (when he tossed them over his shoulder the corpse complained bitterly). And he hadn’t dug far before he touched on a leathery bit of something that proved upon examination to be a pig’s ear, and shortly after that he uncovered the rest of the pig, a dried-up husk of muscle and skin with a slit down its belly. “But there’s no stone!” Teague said. “And why are they burying the muscle parts? What did they put in the sausage?”

“Not meat,” said the corpse. The pig opened an eye at that — the socket was quite empty — and began to squeal wordlessly, but Teague got the sense of what it was saying: Cover me up. Leave me alone. I’m getting cold. He covered it up swiftly, then knelt on the grave with his face in his hands.

“Get up!” said the corpse. “Try again. The dawn is coming, and if I’m not buried by then you’ll be sorry sorry sorry!” Teague was so tired from digging, and so dispirited from failure, that he didn’t even argue, but moved a few hundred feet away and tried again. But he had not been digging ten minutes before his hand touched on leathery skin, and a muffled sound of squealing came up through the dirt. Teague jerked his hand back and cried out. “Again! Again!” said the corpse, but the next time the squealing started as soon as he started to dig, and then there was squealing even when he trod on a grave, so with every step he took there was another squeal, each one in a slightly different tone, so as he stepped and jumped, trying not to step on a grave, he made an odd sort of music, and the whole graveyard had become an instrument for him to play, and he was its exhausted, unwilling virtuoso. When he finally escaped it he sank again to his knees and started to weep freely.

“There, there,” said the corpse after a while. “There, there. It’s not so bad as that. There’s still the Green Swamp, and dawn is still a little while off.”

“Dark dread diarrhea of poodle!” Teague said. “Deadly sad acid bitterness! I can feel it starting already!”

“That is something else you feel,” the corpse said. “You have not yet failed in your mission, and the kindly ones keep their word to the letter. Get up and take me to the swamp. I hear my grave singing to me and feel sure you’ll find a place for me there.” So Teague pushed himself up, and followed the pointing finger of the corpse one last time.

It wasn’t very long before the ground started to become soft, and not much longer after that that he was walking in places through sucking mud, and he very shortly lost his shoes, and then his socks. The stars began to dim, and the sky to lighten. “Hurry!” the corpse whispered to him. “Hurry! The sun is coming, but we are close, close!” Teague felt sure he could hear other voices telling him to hurry along. He thought he heard the voices of the old man and woman coming at him from the trees, telling him he was almost there, and being more encouraging than scolding when they demanded haste of him. He thought a possum, hanging upside down by its naked tail, told him to hurry it up, and an alligator, just a dark shape at the edge of a pond, opened its mouth and told him to run. He tried to do that, but he was so tired all he did was speed up his shambling, weeping lurch through the swamp. “Ah!” said the corpse. “The sun. the sun! Don’t let it touch me. we are so close!” And indeed they were. There weren’t any corners in the swamp, but Teague had the impression of rounding one, and then there it was: a tidy grave set under the sweeping branches of a willow, as pretty a place to be buried as you could ask for, and nicely dry as well for all that it was in the middle of a bog. Teague lurched toward it just as the sun was rising, and the gray swamp suddenly became green all around him. He was sure he was going to fall in with the corpse and be buried with it, but he fell short, and rolled on his side just to the edge. The corpse let go its hands and fell in.

Teague rolled over and looked in. “Are you down there?” he asked, because the grave was full of shadows. “Yes,” said the corpse. “Good-bye, Teague O’Kane. Think of me every time you dance.” Then it was quiet, and Teague never heard its voice again except in dreams. He stared another moment into the darkness, even though something in him told him he should look away, and so when the sun rose up and cast a little light into the grave he saw very plainly that the corpse’s face was his own.