“Maybe something with a little more juice in it,” she says. “We’re almost strong enough, Jack, to pull up roots and have us some fun. We could paint the farm red tonight, boy!”

“It’s already red.”

“Redder,” says Mum #3, and she laughs a hoarse, smoker’s laugh.

“Tell me what you want,” Jack says.

“How about you walk that sow over here,” Mum #1 suggests.

“Sow!” says the one with ants all over her face, and her tongue lolls out, and she slobbers on her lips. “Sow—now!”

“Okay,” Jack says. “I understand. Mom? I don’t want to stay here one more night.”

“No,” she says. “You won’t have to. Just do this last thing for us? Bring us a sow to build up a little strength. And then, Jack—”

“We’ll help you do the rest,” say five of the six heads at the same time. The sixth head, the deformed mum, licks ants off her cheek and smacks her lips.

As he reels out of the graveyard, the first poisonous line of crimson light shows in the east. The edge of the world glows like an ember.

18.

Jack is in the kitchen when Beth wanders in, her hair mussed up from sleep and her feet bare. He always expects her to enter from the porch, through the screen door, but instead she lets herself into the kitchen from the front hall, doing up the top button on her flannel shirt as she approaches. Is it her flannel shirt? It looks like a man’s. It looks like one of his father’s.

When she sees him on the far side of the kitchen counter, her chubby, pale face darkens with a blush and her fingers lose their grip on the button. The flannel shirt springs open to show her pretty, freckled breastbone.

“Jack, I—” she begins, but Jack doesn’t have time for her explanations or, worse, her confession. He reels around the kitchen counter, holding his right hand up in the gesture that means “hello” but also “halt.” Blood falls in fat drops from the bright line raked across his palm.

“Oh, Beth. Oh, Beth, quick, quick, come with me. I did something stupid. I did something really, really bad,” he says, and is interested to find he is close to genuine tears, his eyes tingling and the world blurring.

“Jack! You’re bleeding. We ought to do something about that hand—”

“No, no, no, please, just come, just come see what I did, Beth, you’ve got to help me, please—”

“Of course I will,” Beth says, and clutches him to her, thoughtlessly squeezing his face to her bosom. Only a few weeks ago, such an intimacy would’ve dizzied him, but now he finds it as repulsive as a centipede crawling over his face.

With his uninjured hand, he tows her by the elbow to the back door. Blood plinks and plops on the tiles.