Page 64 of Persephone's Curse
“Creepy.”
“Look. I finished it,” Clara said, and her eyes were flashing, a trick of the light from the many candles behind me. She unlocked her phone, scrolled through a few screens, then handed it to me. It was a photo of her painting.
“It’s our—”
“Backyard,” she finished. “It’s our backyard.”
“And what’s that—”
“I have no idea,” Clara said. “But it doesn’t seem good.”
The painting showed our backyard in winter, as it was now. You could just see the back of the brownstone, the wide windows and the door to the kitchen. There were the dormant jasmine bushes and the trees behind them. Movement in the branches suggested a strong breeze. The grass was dusted with snow. It could have been today, actually. The amount of snow was right.
“I think it’s—”
“Today,” Clara interrupted again. “It’s today.”
The weird thing, the thing Clara had said seemednot goodwas directly above the backyard, in the sky.
The sky itself was a blueish gray and crowded with clouds, except for one dark slash, one blackish smudge, like my sister had taken a paintbrush and swiped it from left to right on the canvas. The mark looked like it had been made carelessly, quickly—but itwas the kind of effortless thing that you knew actually took a very long time to get exactly right in paint. Underneath the slash, a sort of shadow. Strange dark shapes bleeding through. But it was hard to focus on the slash. It was hard to make anything coherent out of it. It didn’t look like anything real I’d ever seen before. If you stared at it too long, it almost disappeared. It blurred. It could have been a trick of the light. The candles didn’t help; maybe outside it would have looked completely different.
“Is it a cloud?” I asked. “Like, a rain cloud?”
“I thought so, at first, something like that,” Clara said, shedding her jacket on the gravel floor. “But now I don’t think so. I get this, like…”
“Bad feeling,” I finished.
“A bad feeling,” Clara confirmed. “And look.”
Underneath the black mark, in the middle of the backyard, a small figure was sitting on a bench. She had her back toward us, but I could tell in the shape of her shoulders, in the tilt of her neck, it was Evelyn.
I tapped the screen of Clara’s phone to see what time it was, then handed it back to her.
“Text Bernadette,” I said. “Tell her to meet us at home.”
I didn’t think the priest was ultimately sad to see us go, but I made a mental note to bring him a thank-you card. Something along the lines of:I appreciate you for bringing me down into a private underground crypt and then letting my sister come, too!
Clara and I took the C from Fulton Street up to Eighty-First Street, then power walked the rest of the way to home. We didn’t know what we would find. We kept looking up at the sky nervously, scanning for an unnatural black slash.
Bernadette was waiting for us outside, like maybe she was too scared to go into the house by herself. She looked slightly more animated than she had that morning, fresh from thrifting and smelling like a mix of roses and lilac (even though she had called out of work).
“What are we doing here?” she asked, in lieu ofhelloorit’s so nice to see you bothorwhy do you smell like hundred-year-old bones?Clara had texted onlymeet us at homeand Bernadette had given it a thumbs-up.
Clara had already pulled up the painting, and she showed it to Bernadette now. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at it.
“What’s the thing in the sky?” she asked.
“We don’t know,” Clara said.
“Okay,” Bernadette said. “Let’s go in.”
The house was oddly cold, as if someone had turned the heat down, as if the winter chill had found its way inside. There was a breeze, too, like—
“Is the back door open?” Clara asked, brushing past me, hurrying through the living room and into the kitchen, us following closely behind.
And, yes, the door was open. The kitchen door that led down to the backyard was open, letting in so much cold air, letting in the wind; there was mail strewn all over the floor, some leftover fall leaves that hadn’t yet been buried by the snow.
“What the fuck?” Bernadette said.
