A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [91]
Ruth shrugged.
“Surely, there’s a way to kill it and . . . not . . . also . . . die.”
Ruth dismissed Melinda with a wave. “Feh. Weak as water, like the rest.” She turned away. “And I thought you might be the one to end it.”
Melinda considered aloud. “If the snake dies first, it returns, stronger. If the host dies first, the curse . . . continues. So, it has to be . . . the same moment . . .” She shook her head. “How does a person kill herself at the exact same moment as a snake?”
Aunt Ruth said nothing.
Melinda’s father shifted nervously. “Melinda, I don’t know what to make of all this. But no one, no one, wants you to die.”
Melinda glanced toward the oldest of her relatives. Aunt Ruth does. She did not speak the words aloud. “Except, apparently, this broch de shlang.”
As if reading Melinda’s thoughts, Ruth spoke into the air in front of her, her back still to her great great niece. “It is not what I want, but it is the only way.” With that, she rose and headed for the door.
With obvious reluctance, Melinda’s father followed the elderly woman. “Melinda, do you want me to come back after I drop off Ruth? Do you want me to take the girls with me tonight?”
“Thanks, but no.” Melinda shook her head, barely dislodging the swirl of thought that left her dazed and wondering. “I need some time to think, a chance to do some research.”
“They all say that,” Ruth intoned from the door. “They all think that, for them, it will be different.” Finally, she turned to meet Melinda’s eyes directly. “But it never is. Simultaneous destruction; it is the only way.”
Melinda’s father took the old woman’s arm and led her outside. “We’ll check on you tomorrow,” he said firmly, closing the door.
Melinda leapt up and locked it behind him. A shiver traversed her. Still in a fog, she ascended the stairs to the room she shared with Paige. The familiar snorting breaths of the sleeping child brought a strange sense of normalcy. Early on, she had spent most of her nights diligently clearing Paige’s airways with saline and suction, as the nurses had taught her. Eventually, Melinda realized that these actions did little more than prevent both of them from sleeping. Paige’s nasal passages invariably reclogged mere moments later.
This time, Melinda walked to her desktop computer and typed in “broch de shlang” in the Google space. Only a handful of entries came up, defining “broch” as curse and schlang as “snake” or, more vulgarly, a slang for penis. Nowhere did she find a site that linked the terms together, although she did find an interesting Yiddish proverb: “A snake deserves no pity.” At the moment, it seemed singularly apt.
The familiarity of the room soon lulled Melinda into a state of normal exhaustion. The curse seemed like a distant joke, silliness that dwelt only in the mind of a addled and elderly aunt. Trading her day clothing for pajamas, Melinda performed her evening toilet, then climbed into the double bed she had once shared with her husband, Michael Carson.
She missed him tonight even more than most.
The dream came to Melinda the moment she drifted into sleep, first in blindness, a whisper of sound: “She is dead already, dead from the moment of conception, yet she has ruined your life, your family, for a decade.” The words seemed incongruous, wrong, and out-of-place. Melinda rolled, but the voice followed her. “He loves you desperately. He loves you both. He would return, and you would all be happy, if only she had gone where she belonged. Gone from this horrible death within life, gone from a world where she knows nothing, where she can only suffer without understanding why.”
Melinda managed a moan, but she could not awaken. A picture of Paige formed in her mind, eyes unblinking, expression unfeeling, like a mindless broken doll.
“What kind of mother dedicates herself to a shell while her living, breathing, feeling daughter is forced to lead half a shackled existence that barely resembles a life? You dedicate everything to this . . . this thing, torturing the man and daughter who need