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By Root 560 0

hand, have no fear of him. They seem attracted to him; they hover near, and anyone who came too close to him would surely risk a sting, maybe even two. The man in the garden is easier to see on rainy days, or late at night, when he appears out of thin air like a star you’ve been staring at but only now see, right in the center of the sky. He doesn’t eat or sleep or drink, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things he wants. His wanting is so strong Kylie can feel it, like bands of electricity shaking up the air around him. Just recently, he has taken to staring back at her. She gets terrified whenever he does this. She gets cold right through her skin. He’s doing it more and more, staring and staring. It doesn’t matter where she is, behind the kitchen window or on the path to the back door. He can watch her twenty-four hours a day if he likes, since he never has to blink—not even for a second, not anymore.

Kylie has begun to set dishes of salt on the windowsills. She sprinkles rosemary outside all the doors. Still, he manages to get into the house when everyone’s asleep. Kylie stays up after everyone else is in bed, but she can’t stay awake forever, although it’s not for lack of trying. Often she falls asleep while she’s still dressed in her clothes, a book open beside her, the overhead light kept on, since her aunt Gillian, who’s still sharing her room, refuses to sleep in the dark and has lately insisted that the windows be closed tight as well, even on sweltering nights, to keep out the scent of those lilacs.

Some nights everyone in the house has a bad dream at the very same instant. Other nights they all sleep so deeply their alarm clocks can’t get them out of bed. Either way, Kylie always knows he’s been close by when she wakes to find that Gillian is crying in her sleep. She knows when she goes down the hall to the bathroom and sees that the toilet is clogged and when it’s flushed the body of a dead bird or a bat rises up in the water. There are slugs in the garden, and waterbugs in the cellar, and mice have begun to nest in a pair of Gillian’s high heels, the black patent leather ones she bought in L.A. Look into a mirror and the image starts to shift. Pass by a window and the glass will rattle. It’s the man in the garden who’s responsible when the morning begins with a curse muttered under someone’s breath, or a toe stubbed, or a favorite dress torn so methodically you’d think someone had sliced through the fabric with a pair of scissors or a hunting knife.

On this morning, the bad fortune rising from the garden is particularly nasty. Not only has Sally discovered the diamond earrings she was given on her wedding day tucked into Gillian’s jacket pocket, but Gillian found her paycheck from the Hamburger Shack torn into a thousand pieces, spread across the lace doily on the coffee table.

The silence Sally and Gillian mutually agreed upon at Kylie’s birthday dinner, when they snapped their mouths shut in fury and despair, is now over. During these days of silence, both sisters have had migraine headaches. They’ve had sour expressions and puffy eyes, and both have lost weight, since they now bypass breakfast so they won’t have to face one another first thing. But two sisters cannot live in the same house and ignore each other for long. Sooner or later they will break down and have the fight they should have had at the start. Helplessness and anger make for predictable behavior: Children are certain to shove each other and pull hair, teenagers will call each other names and cry, and grown women who are sisters will say words so cruel that each syllable will take on the form of a snake, although such a snake often circles in on itself to eat its own tail once the words are said aloud.

“You dishonest piece of garbage,” Sally says to her sister, who has stumbled into the kitchen in search of coffee.

“Oh, yeah?” Gillian says. She’s more than ready for this fight. She’s got the torn paycheck in the palm of her hand, and now she lets it fall to the floor, like confetti. “Deep down, under all that goody-goody stuff, is