Ragnarök

Eleven: The Letter

After all the pandemonium, Mason is hardly able to sleep that night. He chaperones the widow while she brushes her teeth and changes into her nightgown, then brings her some tea to sip under the covers. Concerned that she'll be sick again before the night's end, he sits up watching TV with the volume turned low, so he can potentially hear any retching that comes from her room.

Around eleven, he falls asleep on the couch. When he wakes, the sun has not yet risen. The TV and Christmas tree are the only lights on in the house. He cuts the power to both and stumbles to his room to filch a few more hours of sleep, before Hansel starts in with his bullshit crowing.

By the time he leaves for school, Mildred still has not found the necessary gumption to get out of bed. He hopes she's only hungover, though to the touch it feels like she may have broken a fever. He resolves to be home by three-thirty, regardless of what invitations or wild caprices are extended to him by the self-described Serpico of Grillow Rock.

Regarding Liza, she seems to have been correct in diagnosing students and faculty alike as "mentally checked out" in anticipation of the holiday break. A restless tenor dominates hallways and classrooms. Many teachers assign a time-killing worksheet or simply put on a video. In math class, Selby has them watch a BBC documentary on YouTube about the Franco-Swiss hadron collider, seemingly unconcerned that this falls within the realm of physics.

Mason and Liza sit together in a back corner, the latter doing ballpoint sketches of what is meant to be Kelly and the teacher in lurid sex positions. Often Selby is ball-gagged, while the Kelly caricature spanks him with a spiked paddle, or clamps jumper cables onto his nipples. Little free-flying zigzags denote an electrical shock. Mason thinks about mentioning the handmade scourge in Mildred's closet, the brass-studded kneeler, but he doesn't find as much humor in them as he would like. A strange humiliation holds his tongue.

On a few occasions throughout the day, he can't help but pass by Viktor or one of his compatriots. An unspoken truce seems to preside, at least for the time being. Leaving school behind for a full week is everyone's chief concern.

When the long-awaited final bell rings, Liza walks Mason home. She's going to hold him to his original promise of taking her hunting. They speak errantly of items on their bucket lists. Liza says she's heard that a kind of chain-mail suit was invented, in which one can survive being swallowed whole by an anaconda.

"That's it?" Mason says. "You want to be eaten by a snake?"

"And live to talk about it. Who knows, it could be kind of peaceful. Like one of those sensory deprivation chambers. And I think I should do a bunch of peyote first. Make a spiritual bond with the animal on top of the physical one."

"You've just described a nightmare."

"I wouldn't know," she says, crafting a gritty snowball in her hands, watching an unsuspecting windshield draw nearer. "I don't dream."

Arriving at the farmhouse, they make the worrisome discovery that the widow is still in bed. Her sheets are damp to the touch, her hands clammy, her forehead burns like an oven door.

"What if she dies?" he asks Liza in the kitchen, heating a can of pea soup on the range.

"Just don't tell anyone. You've seen Psycho, haven't you? Keep her in the basement in an old rocking chair."

"Very fucking helpful."

Once the widow has been talked into donning her bathrobe and relocating to the couch with her soup, Liza helps Mason change the bed linen. At last, they gambol downstairs to raid Edgar's gun cabinet.

She wastes no time in scouring the wall to locate the "brain stain," clapping her hands when she finds it, brushing her fingers across its darkened surface—something Mason has never had the nerve or inclination to do. He swipes the little brass key from atop the cabinet, unlocks the door, and sets to work loading cartridges into the rotary mag for Edgar's Ruger 10/22. He wouldn't even know how to load any of these guns if not for stumbling over a box of dry-caked old manuals in the garage one day.