The Shining Girls

Kirby and Harper ^{22 NOVEMBER 1931}

Time heals all wounds. Wounds clot, eventually. The seams knit together.

As soon as she crosses the window frame, she is somewhere else. She thinks she must be going mad.

Maybe she’s been dying this whole time and everything has been an extended hero-trip, her brain’s last huzzah as she bleeds out in the bird sanctuary with her dog tied to a tree with wire around his throat.

She has to push through the heavy folds of curtains that weren’t there before, into a parlor, old-fashioned, but new. A fire crackles in the hearth. A decanter of whiskey sits on the side table beside a velvet chair facing it.

The man she followed into the house has already left. Harper has gone to 9 September 1980 to watch girl-Kirby from the parking lot of a gas station, sipping on a Coke because he has to hold on to something to stop him from crossing the street and grabbing the child by the throat with enough force to slam her off her feet and stabbing her again and again and again right there in front of the donut shop.

In the house, Kirby finds her way upstairs to a bedroom decorated with artifacts taken from dead girls, who are not dead yet, who are perpetually dying or marked to die. They shimmer in and out of focus. There are three that belong to her. A plastic pony. A black and silver lighter. A tennis ball that makes her scars ache and her head reel.

Downstairs, a key turns in the lock. She panics. There is nowhere to go. She yanks at the window, but it won’t budge. Terrified, she climbs into the wardrobe and crouches there, trying not to think. Trying not to scream.

‘Co za wkurwiajqce gówno!’

A Polish engineer, drunk on his winnings and actual alcohol besides, fumbles around in the kitchen. He has the key in the pocket of his coat, but not for long. The door opens behind him and Harper limps in on his crutch from 23 March 1989, with a chewed tennis ball in his pocket and Kirby’s blood still wet on his jeans.

It takes him a long time to beat Bartek to death, while Kirby hides in the wardrobe in the room and clutches her mouth. When the squealing starts, she can’t help it, she moans against her palm.

He comes clomping up the stairs with his crutch, dragging his leg, one step at a time. Tok-tok. It doesn’t matter that this has happened before in his past, because it is folded over into her present, like origami.

He comes to the threshold of the room and she bites her tongue so hard it bleeds. The inside of her mouth is dry and copper. But he passes right by.

She sits forward, straining to listen. There is a mad bear in here with her. Her breathing, she realizes. She’s hyperventilating. She has to be quiet. She has to get herself under control.

There is the unmistakable porcelain clink of a toilet seat being lifted. The splash of piss. A faucet running as he washes his hands. He curses softly. A rustling. The sharp tine of a belt buckle hitting the tiles. He turns on the shower. The curtain rings rattle as he yanks it across.

This is it. Your only chance, she thinks. She should walk into the bathroom, take up the crutch, and smack him in the skull with it. Knock him out cold. Tie him up. Get the cops. But she knows – if he doesn’t wrest it away from her – she won’t be able to stop until he doesn’t get up ever again. The connections between her brain and her body have petrified. Her hand will not move to open the wardrobe door. Move, she thinks.

The water sputters. She’s lost her moment. He’s going to emerge from the bathroom and cross over to the wardrobe to get clean clothes. Maybe if she rushes him. Shoves him and runs. The tiles will be wet. She might have a fighting chance.

The hiss of the shower resumes. The pipes playing up. Or he’s fucking with her. Now. She has to go. Now. She shoves open the wardrobe door with her foot and scrambles out, across the floor.

She needs to take something. Some kind of evidence. She snatches the lighter from the shelf. Exactly the same one. She doesn’t know how that’s possible.

She steals into the corridor. The door of the bathroom is open. She can hear him whistling underneath the rush of the water. Something sweet and cheerful. She would be half-sobbing if she could breathe.

She edges past, her back pressed against the wallpaper. She is clutching the lighter so hard that her hand is aching. She doesn’t notice. She forces herself to take one more step. Another. Not so different to the time before. And another. She forces her mind to blank out the man with his brains smeared across the floor at the bottom of the stairs.

The water turns off when she is halfway down. She bolts for the front door. She tries to step over the body of the Pole, but she’s going too quickly to be careful and she stands on his arm. The give is horrible, too soft under the roll of her boots. Dontthinkdonthinkdontthink.

She reaches for the latch.

It opens.