July, 2010

Redburke, Northern Arizona

The needle traces across the grooves of vinyl, picking up a trace of blood with each rotation. The turntable and the stylus spread the blood in circular patterns across the disc. It’s an early eighties record player, silver and squat.

Crackling to life—a song starts. “You Can Do Magic” by America.

The turntable sits on a modest card table under a screened panel window. The screen is warping and curling outward in distress. Outside, a Jeep bumps along the road.

Paige Breskin, with straw blond hair and perpetual desperation in her eyes, bounds up the porch and through the front door of the cabin. She enters. She’s the sort of hopeful soul who always gives the homeless person in the parking lot a dollar.

“Kyra!” Paige shouts loud enough to be heard across the whole cabin space.

She competes with the music.

The living room is a wood-floored space, well-furnished and quaint. Paige looks across the room. On the opposite end is a bedroom door left half open. Next to it, a cast iron radiator and a square mid-century armchair. Hanging above the wall lives a framed map of a mountain range titled REDBURKE. Against the wall adjacent to Paige at the door, is a seventies era couch of rust orange color. On either end of the couch are secondhand end tables that barely hold up.

Paige moves swiftly through the living room, toward the half open bedroom door on the opposite side. She quickly emerges back into the living room, eyeing the turntable. The blood catches her focus. She hurries, left now, through a doorway into a separate kitchen area.

A feeble voice calls out from a second bedroom room. “Paige?”

Paige runs from the kitchen, straight across the living room, to a second bedroom that is just past the window and front door. The record skips…to another spot, seemingly on its own. The circulating blood on the turntable drips off the side of the carousel.

In the second bedroom, Paige’s eyes move rapidly over a cityscape of neglected camping supplies and cardboard moving boxes. Installed in the corner is the cabin water heater. Standing—barely—in front of it is Kyra, neglected and bony with large doll eyes. Kyra would be only manic depressive if not also wrapped in self-imposed contradictions. Her sharp shoulders heave with each deep, undernourished breath.

“I took the whole bottle, Paigey,” Kyra states with a crackling rasp to her voice.

Paige goes red with tears of torment. “Kyra…”

As Paige approaches, Kyra shakes her head and wavers in her stance. She’s about to collapse. Paige shoves a few boxes out of the way. She’s at Kyra’s side before she falls. They collapse together into a kneel, and Paige cradles her.

“Kyra…no. Kyra.”

Kyra looks up at Paige, as if for the first time. “Hey,” Kyra coughs. “Tell…him…”

Paige nods in premature agreement.

“Tell him you…did this.”

Paige cannot comprehend. That cannot be it. She shakes Kyra. “No. Kyra. No.”

The music from the other room carries in.

Kyra’s eyes don’t go blank—they color over dark red, like empty glass spheres filling with red wine, or blood. Kyra’s lifeless face is fixed in a sly smirk. Paige collapses from her knees to her back, still cradling Kyra. She plunges into heaving sobs.

“I can still help you. I…I can help you. Please.”