Author's note:

Readers who are tempted to groan about "Deus ex machina" should be warned that the least credible parts of this story are essentially true.

Prologue

 

Two girls playing.

A month before her wedding, my Mother was sitting at the kitchen table sewing baby clothes. She was still living in town with her parents at the time, and still virgin, but she knew, as she often knew such things, that she would have a daughter before another year had passed.

Through the window, she could see across the back yard and the alley and into the neighbor's yard where two girls were target practicing with a bow and arrow. She paid them scant attention, except to wonder in passing if I would be as strong and beautiful as they were.

When Mother left her chair to get more thread, she heard a loud pop behind her. Startled, she wheeled around just in time to see a stray arrow sailing through the shattered window and between the slats on the back of her chair before skidding to rest on the living room carpet.

Fate turns on trifles. I often ponder how the thread of my story might have run out before it began.

Part One

Autumn Equinox

 

"Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them: it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping." Virginia Woolf

 

Chapter One

 

"Dyke" muttered Mrs. Friendly.

I had been shelving books, lost in thought, and her tone of righteous accusation caught me unaware. The last time I had seen her looking this smug was when she learned that Mrs. Mckarry, "the sanctimonious hypocrite", would soon be the Grandmother of a bastard.

I felt my face grow hot as I watched the library begin a slow pirouette behind her.

"What?" I whispered "How?"

She pointed with her nose. "I can always spot them. It's the head bobbing that gives them away, they nod and sneer like schoolboys trying to act tough." Her voice was sibilant and scandalized. Reminding me of a puff adder surprised, without venom, reacting from instinct. She had to whisper, of course, because her library was a sacred place, and the object of her scorn was only yards away, and all the marble and hardwood in that mausoleum made it an acoustical nightmare.

Disguising my relief, I followed where her nose was pointing. The girl had been up at the main desk earlier, asking directions, but I hadn't noticed her at the time. Now she stood in front of the shelves scanning the titles, her head tipped back to bare her slender throat. I studied the boyish red hair that she had slicked back behind her ears in a sort of duck ass, except for the tufts that she had combed down along her cheekbones like sideburns. The hair refused to behave, and kept spilling into her eyes. She wore scuffed cowboy boots with rundown heels. A plaid flannel shirt was tucked into her jeans. The shoulders of the shirt draped to her elbows. The cuffs had been rolled several times, but still barely exposed her large red knuckles. My guess was that she had stolen the shirt from Paul Bunyan. Judging from the set of her jaw and her steady gaze, I would not have been surprised if he had been wearing the shirt at the time of the theft.

An emotional wave swept - raw and visceral. Something I had almost forgotten to feel.

"Can you imagine that?" hissed Mrs. Friendly.

I could. I wanted to go over and introduce myself. I wanted to take that red hair in both hands and force her head back for a deep kiss. I wanted to throw her over a reading table, skin her out of her jeans and feast on her steaming flesh. I hadn't allowed myself such carnal thoughts for years. In the tight confines that had become my world, I knew only contented wives and aspirant brides. They were all off limits, beyond consideration of any relationship beyond a guarded and platonic friendship. Here was a girl that could inspire schemes, or base fantasies at least.

I shrugged. "She isn't doing us any harm." I said.

Mrs. Friendly sniffed, and moved on, and the moment passed. I couldn't hold anything against Mrs. Friendly. The woman was sweet in her own way, devoted to her family and charitable to those in need. It was only the way she had been raised that made her so unabashedly bigoted.

Derryville was twenty years behind the rest of the country, small and isolated, physically and culturally. It was a place where reputation mattered and people with "peculiarities" kept them in the closet. I had moved back there for the sake of my ailing parents, and became mired by my own inertia after their death.

They named me Autumn. My birth was difficult, and the doctor told Mama that she could never have another child. Cancer took Mama five years ago. Papa, who could not imagine a world without her, withered visibly and joined her only months later. They went to their graves without asking me why I never married. I think Mama suspected, but couldn't confront the unhappy reality. She died knowing that she would never see her Grandchildren. I'm sorry, Mama.

I invented a task for myself at the main desk, stationing myself where I could watch the newcomer. She was from the college twenty miles away, I guessed. Now and then students would wander in, when the books they needed were already checked out from the college library, or they were on a quest for something obscure and forgotten. I already knew all of the local girls. They had been unknowingly taunting me every day with their sweet, sexy, and hopelessly unobtainable selves.

I lived at the end of my road. There was a gravel cul-de-sac just past my farm, a turnaround for those too stupid to read the big orange sign at the last intersection. The Betons lived a mile away, but they went south in the winters. Some days the snowplow driver and the mailman were the only humans I saw. I had no reason to stay after my parents died, but no incentive to leave either, so I kept my job at the library and settled into comfortable obscurity. I worked in silence for the most part, speaking only to answer questions from patrons and reassure Mrs. Friendly that her gossip was being heard. Evenings were spent alone, watching historical and geographic channels and sipping a gin and tonic, some nights two or three. Every night Piwacket purred in my arms while I filled her heedless ears with my desperation. The old house was far too large for the two of us. I shut up all but three of the rooms, barricading myself against an indifferent world, and now the empty corners whispered their resentment. Last week I had celebrated my thirty fourth birthday and my first grey hair. Something was growing inside of me, something ravenous and primitive.

"Spinster," the voices in the corners seemed to say. Lately they had grown louder.

When the girl came toward me with an armload of books, I slipped my reading glasses into my pocket and looked down with sudden distaste at my plain grey dress, selected because it didn't show dust and newsprint. Below the hem I could see the toes of my oxfords. All in all, it was not an outfit guaranteed to entice. I put on a smile, hoping that the unaccustomed expression wouldn't shatter my face.

I pushed up the sleeves of my cardigan. Mrs. Friendly was frugal with the taxpayer's dollars when it came to frivolous expenses like heating oil, and the icy tomb we inhabited discouraged loiterers. My sweater wasn't a fashion statement. It was a necessity of survival.

"I want to check these out," she said.

I looked down at her selections - Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Radclyffe Hall. A pattern was beginning to emerge.

"Do you have a card?" I glanced up at her, trying to portray mere professional interest. Her eyes were blue.

"Sorry, I don't."

I handed her a form to fill out. Our fingers touched briefly as she took it. Was I the only one who felt the electricity in that contact?

"If you are a student at Eastern," I suggested helpfully, "you are still considered a resident, so there is no charge for the card."

She had been filling out the form already, and looked up with amusement and surprise. "Are you psychic or something?" There it was, the head bob. I had a brief thought of the ugly dolls that dwell in the rear windows of cars, and scratched my nose to erase my grin.

I tapped the books she had piled on the counter. "Master's thesis - right?" I said.

She smiled and tucked stray hair behind her ear, an oddly feminine gesture for such a tomboy. I smiled back, holding her gaze a moment longer than prudent - a pause for lesbian identification.

"I guess you've got my number," she dropped her eyes. Was that a blush?

"Not until you finish filling out the form."

This was the moment when I might have turned flirtation into assignation, but the words stuck in my throat. I have a habit of reading more into situations than circumstances justify. You might call me the mistress of self deception. I bit my tongue while she finished the form and I typed up her card without further overture.

Moments later, she was headed for the exit with a smile and a salute. The pneumatic door closer sighed shut behind her.