‘June, 1975’

“The memorial ground yawns outward through verdant overgrowth, a spiral of sepulchers and headstones that go on farther than she can see. In this town the dead outnumber the living three-to-one, four-to-one. Sally can’t begin to guess.”

Sally puts the Mustang in park and wipes the sweat off her brow.

“Lise, wake up,” she says, not looking at either of her passengers. “We’re here.”

In the backseat Elise opens her eyes and touches the window, not really understanding where she is. Sally and her sister came to pick her up from the hospital and she fell back asleep as soon as the car door closed.

Sally peers through the windshield and sighs. The car is parked on the grassy shoulder of a rutted dirt road. Farther on down the way, a pair of cemetery gates forms an enormous wrought-iron rictus.

“What are we doing here?” Elise asks.

Sally stares back at her from behind the wheel and Cassie sulks in the backseat. She hasn’t spoken a word the entire trip.

“Ready to boogie?”

Elise nods slowly, her lips parted, though Sally can tell by the look on her face that she doesn’t really comprehend where she is, or why. She can only stand to look at the woman in glances: her skin bears the imprint of horrific violence, a crosscutting of red bevels already fading to pink scar, and for a while the words sole survivor echo in her head, and sometimes she confuses Elise’s story with all the frightful narratives her boyfriends tell her about Vietnam – vulnerable words spoken after the intimacy has dried up but before they think to leave the money on her desk and disappear back into their own misery.

“I think we should walk,” Sally says, pointing at the mud. “The car’s dirty enough already.”

There are no other cars, no people. Elise untangles herself from the backseat and winces against the sopping summer sun. She limps toward the cemetery gate. Her limbs don’t move the way she remembers.

Sally is a few paces ahead, tiptoeing through the mud and giving her sunglasses a little coquettish adjustment here and there.

Cassie stands by the car’s open door, squinting off toward town. Sally wonders what she’s looking at: there’s nothing there but an intersection, the rear of a convenience store, a pile of fenced-in trash, a refrigeration unit. She tries to smile at her sister, but she lost the ability years ago.

The cemetery butts up against a decommissioned iron mine, and Sally can’t tell which property the concrete substructures belong to. Maybe both. Maybe the cemetery is full and they’re just piling up the dead in those big empty tunnels underground, but it doesn’t matter: the last few weeks still feel like a dream from which she hasn’t yet woken, and nothing else is real, only a dream dreamed within another, and another, until the recursion makes her head throb.

The memorial ground yawns outward through verdant overgrowth, a spiral of sepulchers and headstones that go on farther than she can see. In this town the dead outnumber the living three-to-one, four-to-one. Sally can’t begin to guess.

Elise moves like a ghost among the tombs. Her loose pajamas swirl around her body like an aura. Sally wonders if she even remembers what happened.

“It was here. Around here,” she murmurs. “I thought…”

Elise grazes her fingers over her arms, her cheeks, beneath her shirt. The wounds are pink and raised and red and some of them moist, and they coil around her like warning colors. This body isn’t home anymore.

“What’s around here?”

“Maybe we went the wrong way.” Sally takes off her sunglasses and wipes her forehead. “I can’t remember.”

Elise staggers for balance. The ground is moving beneath her, and the sun burns too close to the earth.

“Why are we here?” she manages. “Sally?”

“Yeah, just – one minute.”

“I wanna go home.”

“We will, hon, we will. Just … one minute, okay?”

Cassie moves wordlessly behind them, arms out, winding her way among the gravestones like a child playing a made-up game.

Sally puts her sunglasses back on.

“I could’ve swore.”

“Let’s go home.”

“Lise, Jesus, one minute, okay?”

She blocks her eyes from the sun and stares at her feet. The ground around her tennis shoes is more mud than grass. Cassie stomps past, spatting Elise’s legs with black mud.

“Do you know where Mom is?” she mumbles, not even looking at her sister.

“Over there.” Sally points toward the treeline. “Second row before the fence.”

“I’m gonna say hi.”

Cassie bounces off to the far side of the property. Sally turns her back to Elise and lowers her head. For a long time there’s no sound but the wind in the leaves, or a stray lost bit of The Mining Journal cutting a wrinkled path through the rushes. None of this makes sense.

“Sally—”

“Give Cassie a second,” she says, still not turning around. “I’m tired too.”

Elise limps her way back to the Mustang and leans on the rear quarter-panel until the metal is too hot to bear. Across the trail a white-and-pumpkin camper trailer lies crushed and abandoned under a fallen sugar maple. Something rusty bulges up just past.

“Sorry, Lise,” Sally mumbles, afraid to get too close to the woman. “Like, it was there the other day. I was there. I must’ve got turned around. I can’t remember where…”

Elise’s parents and sister were buried here somewhere. Sally hates herself for not remembering where, but at the funeral her mind was elsewhere – a daydream of beaches and palm trees, a drink in her hand – the kind of dreams people have in movies. She’s mostly forgotten the funeral.

Elise looks like she’s about to fall asleep. Let her, Sally thinks – that way she won’t need to look at her for a while.

She thinks about her boyfriends instead, though boyfriend is just a euphemism now. Some have gone hollow from the war, the ones who enlisted for want of anything else to do, the others who had no choice in the matter, and they came back quieter, harder to see. Entertaining them began to feel more and more like the job it was.

Somehow they’re complicit in what happened to Elise and her family, complicit in a way that Sally can’t quite figure out. It was someone just like them who did it, someone who probably told the same horrifying stories when the lights were out, and woke up crying at night the same way.

Cassie, the poor senseless thing, is prancing around along the rear fence. Elise has folded herself back into the car, and into sleep.

Sally sighs. She imagines the ruined town past the treeline, the ruined houses scattered across the fields, each one worn down just a little further every night. One gust would take off a shingle, another a shutter. A few more would scrape branches across the walls until the paint was stripped bare. The rains would come and soak the wood. The snows would come and weaken the frame. The houses that haven’t collapsed yet might stand to see another winter, maybe two, and the ones that have already toppled retreat further from view every year. She used to dream about getting away from here.

She balls her hands into fists and grinds her teeth, and for a long time she stands there counting her breaths. Eventually she waves her sister back to the car and fights a surge of nausea.

“Come on,” she says, to nobody. “Let’s go home.”

Adapted from The Winnowing Season.