The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [57]
When he got back her car was still in the driveway, but she was nowhere in the house, not upstairs, not in the utility room; nowhere. Feeling a little silly, he looked in the closets, even considered looking under the bed; nothing. "Anne," calling her, louder and louder, "Anne, stop it, where are you," walking through the house and a movement, something in the backyard, caught his eye through the big kitchen windows. Letting the screen door slam, hard, walking fast and then seeing her, stopping as if on the perilous lip of a fire.
She was on the fence. The back fence, old now and leaning, half its braces gone. She sat at the spot where the rotted wood ended and the bare fencing began, legs straight out, head tipped just slightly to the right. Her arms were spread in a loose posture of crucifixion, and through the flesh of her wrists she had somehow pierced the rusty wire of the fence, threading it around the tendons, the blood rich and thick and bright like some strange new food and while he stood there staring and staring a fly settled down on the blood and walked around in it, back and forth.
He kept staring at the fly, it was suddenly so hot in the yard, it was as if he couldn't see, or could see only half of the scene before him, a kind of dazzle around the perimeters of his vision like the beginning of a fainting fit and back and forth went the fly, busy little black feet and he screamed, "Son of a bitch!" and moved to slap the fly away, and as his hand touched the wound she gave a very small sound, and he pulled his hand back and saw the blood on it.
He said something to her, something about my God Anne what the hell and she opened her eyes and looked at him in a slow considering kind of way, but with a certain blankness as if she viewed him now from a new perspective, and another fly landed and more hesitantly he brushed that one away, and still she did not speak at all.
"You have to go to the hospital," he told her. "You're bleeding, it's dangerous to bleed that way."
She ignored him by closing her eyes. Ants were walking over her bare feet. She didn't seem to feel them. "Anne," loudly, "I'm calling an ambulance, I'm calling the police, Anne."
The police were not helpful. He would have to press charges, they said, trespass charges against her to have her removed. They became more interested when he started to explain, in vague halting phrases, exactly how she was attached to his fence, and in sudden nervous fear he hung up, perhaps they would think he had done it to her himself, who knew what Anne might tell them, she was obviously crazy, to do that to herself she would have to be crazy. He looked out the kitchen window and saw her looking at the house, her eyes tracking as he moved slowly past the windows. He didn't know what to do. He sat in the living room and tried to think.
By the time the sun went down he still had no idea what course to take. He did not even want to go back outside but he did, stood looking down at her. "Do you want some water? Or some aspirin or something?" and in the same breath enraged by what he had just said, the extreme and dangerous stupidity of the whole situation, he shouted at her, called her a stupid fucking idiot and walked back inside, shaking, shaking in his legs and knees and inside his body, felt his heart pounding, it was hard to breathe. She had to be in pain. Was she so crazy she didn't even feel pain anymore? Maybe it was a temporary thing, temporary insanity, maybe a night spent outside would shock her out of it, a night sitting on the cold ground.
In the morning she was still there, although she had stopped bleeding. Ants walked up and down her legs. The blood at her wrists had clotted to jelly. The skin of her face was very white.
"Anne," he