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Authors: Elizabeth Hand
Tags: Speculative Fiction
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wiped off my mouth with her handkerchief. Sometimes only one or two bottles were quaffed this way; sometimes a dozen or more. Then everyone would leave—not very quietly, either, and generally to my house or the Wellers’. People would speak fondly of the deceased, but there was no sense of genuine grief or bereavement, even with the suicides of the village children. It was as though you one day discovered a dead chipmunk in the woods, half-buried in the leaves; but every day thereafter it was harder and harder to find, until at last it was gone, completely swallowed by the earth.
So it was with Kamensic: swiftly and remorselessly as an ermine, it devoured its own young.
Somehow it never appeared strange to us. After all, what else did we know? It was the early 1970s, we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. We absorbed Kent State and the Manson Family, evacuated our classrooms for bomb threats and stayed home from school when Albert Shanker called our teachers to strike. Death just seemed to be an occupational hazard if you were young. What shocks me now is how we were all expected to simply take it for granted, how often we met on the playground or school parking lot and spoke in whispers, glancing over our shoulders as a brother or sister of the deceased would arrive and take their place among us. Famous or notorious as Kamensic’s residents were, there were no talk shows, no tabloid headlines, and certainly no school psychologists waiting to comfort the bereaved. Even when Phillip Lawton’s son died—the New York Times reported it as a bad reaction to a bee sting, but we heard otherwise—and the television crews appeared, the people of Kamensic drove them away.
“Have you no decency?” cried DeVayne Smith at the train station where the reporters had gathered, his basso voice quavering with rage. “Go from here, now— go —”
They went. Confronted with the angry mob that had rushed to Lawton’s side—not just DeVayne Smith but Gracie Burrows, Constantine Fox, my own parents, and Axel Kern—the reporters shot a few seconds of taped footage, got into their vans and fled. Fifteen minutes later, heading south on Route 684, a deer ran in front of the van and it crashed. The footage never aired. Lawton’s son was buried in the Kamensic Village cemetery, alongside a weathered statue of an angel with folded wings and a wolf’s muzzle.
5. Children of the Revolution
H ILLARY AND ALI AND I were inseparable as the petals of a rose. Ali had been my best friend since the first day of kindergarten. We had stood in the playground weeping as our parents left us, and then fallen into each other’s arms, wailing—a story which we heard repeated, say, a thousand times over the years. Ali was slight and fey, as I was big-boned and (much against my will) commonsensical. As a girl she wore white fishnet stockings and plastic go-go boots to parties, her long black hair so thick that when you ran your fingers through it they stuck, as though it were taffy. My own hair was a mess, thin and lank. My mother finally gave up on it and brought me to her hairdresser in the city.
“Chop it off,” she ordered, snatching up her copy of Women’s Wear Daily and sinking into a pink lounge chair. And chop it off he did, leaving me with a horrible pixie cut. I was tall for my age, skinny as a rail. With my cropped head I looked like a very young ex-con and was constantly mistaken for a boy. It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I rebelled and insisted on growing my hair out. It took two years, but by the time I reached high school I was a reasonable facsimile of a girl, with shoulder-length hair and narrow hips, though still too quick-tempered and clumsy as a young St. Bernard.
Hillary, on the other hand, remained blithe as ever. He was one of those kids whose popularity transcends the rigid class barriers of high school. The jocks liked him, the freaks who smoked pot between classes, the kids in the Honor Society, teachers:
So it was with Kamensic: swiftly and remorselessly as an ermine, it devoured its own young.
Somehow it never appeared strange to us. After all, what else did we know? It was the early 1970s, we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. We absorbed Kent State and the Manson Family, evacuated our classrooms for bomb threats and stayed home from school when Albert Shanker called our teachers to strike. Death just seemed to be an occupational hazard if you were young. What shocks me now is how we were all expected to simply take it for granted, how often we met on the playground or school parking lot and spoke in whispers, glancing over our shoulders as a brother or sister of the deceased would arrive and take their place among us. Famous or notorious as Kamensic’s residents were, there were no talk shows, no tabloid headlines, and certainly no school psychologists waiting to comfort the bereaved. Even when Phillip Lawton’s son died—the New York Times reported it as a bad reaction to a bee sting, but we heard otherwise—and the television crews appeared, the people of Kamensic drove them away.
“Have you no decency?” cried DeVayne Smith at the train station where the reporters had gathered, his basso voice quavering with rage. “Go from here, now— go —”
They went. Confronted with the angry mob that had rushed to Lawton’s side—not just DeVayne Smith but Gracie Burrows, Constantine Fox, my own parents, and Axel Kern—the reporters shot a few seconds of taped footage, got into their vans and fled. Fifteen minutes later, heading south on Route 684, a deer ran in front of the van and it crashed. The footage never aired. Lawton’s son was buried in the Kamensic Village cemetery, alongside a weathered statue of an angel with folded wings and a wolf’s muzzle.
5. Children of the Revolution
H ILLARY AND ALI AND I were inseparable as the petals of a rose. Ali had been my best friend since the first day of kindergarten. We had stood in the playground weeping as our parents left us, and then fallen into each other’s arms, wailing—a story which we heard repeated, say, a thousand times over the years. Ali was slight and fey, as I was big-boned and (much against my will) commonsensical. As a girl she wore white fishnet stockings and plastic go-go boots to parties, her long black hair so thick that when you ran your fingers through it they stuck, as though it were taffy. My own hair was a mess, thin and lank. My mother finally gave up on it and brought me to her hairdresser in the city.
“Chop it off,” she ordered, snatching up her copy of Women’s Wear Daily and sinking into a pink lounge chair. And chop it off he did, leaving me with a horrible pixie cut. I was tall for my age, skinny as a rail. With my cropped head I looked like a very young ex-con and was constantly mistaken for a boy. It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I rebelled and insisted on growing my hair out. It took two years, but by the time I reached high school I was a reasonable facsimile of a girl, with shoulder-length hair and narrow hips, though still too quick-tempered and clumsy as a young St. Bernard.
Hillary, on the other hand, remained blithe as ever. He was one of those kids whose popularity transcends the rigid class barriers of high school. The jocks liked him, the freaks who smoked pot between classes, the kids in the Honor Society, teachers:
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