Page 125 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Fern couldn’t really stand people most of the time.

Not anymore. They weren’t any kind of reliable.

They all wanted to take something from you, but always pretended they didn’t right up until the snatching and the struggling.

To Fern’s mind, that was pure raccoon behavior and she had no truck with raccoons.

Sometimes she thought she’d never met a real actual person in her whole life excepting her own self, just a wide and diverse variety of raccoons.

She knew a pile of things she had no coherent reason to know, like what a Cape Cod house looked like, or what spaghetti sauce and high heels were, or what the word coherent meant.

Not everything, but the pile was not small.

It was just as much of a mystery to her as to anybody who didn’t understand what she meant by astronaut .

When Fern needed to know certain things, they just turned up in her head like second socks.

Fern couldn’t remember even once feeling full or satisfied.

She’d been hungry her whole life. Even that one day a couple years back in Somewhere, Michigan, when the unpicked apple trees bent down breaking under the weight and the salmon were running up the river so fast and happy every white splash sounded like home home home .

Fern’d stuck her hands in the water like a big joyful bear, over and over, giggling, pulling fillets out of the water as easy as a grocery store freezer.

She ate so many apples and fish her belly looked six months along.

She’d sat out under the stars licking gobs of soft, shiny orange salmon eggs off her fingers and even then Fern was plain starving.

There was a hole in her nothing filled up.

Nothing really even interested it. Except those little cairns of pages she hunted through houses and garages and sheds and office building lobbies.

The people who couldn’t run away from her.

The dead pleading for her attention from a grave full of ink.

But the worst wrong thing was the dreams. Fern’s dreams could get bad. Real bad. Wake-up-screaming-biting-on-your-own-tongue bad. These days a bed looked no different than a knife to that girl. Either one meant to get inside her and start twisting.

Always the same. The same places, one or the other.

A fresh clean whitewash and scrubbed-pine schoolroom.

Tall cross-sashed windows ran down the walls.

Five rows of tidy little desks waited empty, the kind with chairs bolted on so you couldn’t ever really get comfortable.

The tardy sunshine let itself in politely through the window glass, the hills outside slept gently through their lessons, and the bright brass school bell hung down from a spiderless hollow belfry.

Bigger than any bell had a right to be, bigger than any schoolhouse could hope to contain, bigger than a dead star hanging in space, casting no shadow on the slick wood floor.

Or a treeless plain where the earth glowered black and red.

Where great stones lanced the boil of the land and nothing grew, nothing ever even wanted to grow.

A place where the nicotine-colored sky felt all the time like it was just about ready to pull back its rictus lips and she’d see the teeth behind the whole world.

Trouble was, no matter which nightmare jumped her in the night, the dreaming felt so bright and true and clear and correct that everything un-dreaming seemed fake, and thin, and small.

Like an old sign with a photorealistic picture of a girl’s life on it, but take one big step around the back and it’s two inches thick, held up by nothing but a beam of plywood crawling with black bugs who meant to chew it clear through.

Some nights Fern dreamed a teacher for the schoolroom.

But that didn’t make it better. The miss stood with her back to Fern, staring at a spotless green chalkboard in a long pale nightgown and no shoes on her muddy cold feet.

No matter how many times Fern tried to talk to her, her voice wouldn’t come out.

And no matter how many times Fern walked all the way around the miss to find a friendly face, she only saw long white hair falling flat and heavy to her waist, flat and heavy to her belly, flat and heavy over each shoulder to each hip.

But in the other place, she was never alone.

Across that black-red scalded desert, a man came walking.

The same every time. That one who downright loved to show his face.

Shaggy hair all round his skull like a yellow flame using up a match head.

Eyes that dug into Fern’s face like fingernails.

Denim jacket. Denim jeans. A handsome man, but the handsome writhed sometimes.

It tried to crawl off him, but it couldn’t get away.

“Who are you?!” he roared at her. Or crooned.

Or sang. Or whispered against her neck like he had the right.

So many times. So many ways. Like he enjoyed saying it.

Sucking the juice off every syllable. He liked snagging her chin in his big calloused hand while he kept on listening to himself talk, a handful of phrases over and over like a hymn.

Who sent you, wonderful girl?

No solicitors, baby doll. Not a ONE. We’re remodeling, see? Closed for business until the season starts.

You’re not her. It’s too early for that. They’re not ready.

This little habit of not falling to your knees is really starting to bore me.

You’re all wrong. You know you’re all wrong, don’t you?

Run along, little girl, you’ll never make it to grandmother’s house before dark.

You’re not supposed to be here. You’re new.

Fern tried to tell him her name. The way she tried to tell bad raccoons her name sometimes so they’d remember they were human, even though it only ever seemed to make them squeeze her harder. But he kept up asking who she was. Every time. Every night.

“Oh, Fern, Fern,” the handsome man hissed under the toothy sky, “I’m gonna make you BURN.”

But Fern’s voice worked just fine in his place.

She’d back-talked her share and then some to that tall glass of acid-washed stepdad swagger.

Sometimes Fern got her ruff up and yelled, too.

Well, fuck you, too, Mr. Rhyme Time! Are you stupid?

What’s your fuckin’ name? I told you mine like a thousand times.

Sometimes she tried to bargain, stuck out one hip a little and dropped the other.

Listen, big fella, you don’t gotta holler like that, I’m right here.

Sometimes she cowered and begged him to protect her.

I’m sorry, okay? Yes, sir, right-o, I’m bad.

I’ve done bad stuff for sure , so whichever one made you mad at me, I’m so, so sorry and I’ll never the fuck do it again.

Pinky-promise, okay? The handsome man seemed to like that one real good.

The night before she found a wet cardboard box in the McKivers’ garage, Fern Ramsey just didn’t have much of anything left in her when that denim dude started up his singsong rhymey-ass bullshit again. She didn’t even know you could be tired in a dream.

“Jesus nun-fisting Christ, why ? I didn’t do shit to you! God damn , man, I’m just a kid. Switch to decaf, Gramps.”

The dream that had played on repeat in her head for more than a year jumped a track.

The handsome man didn’t throw back any of his previous hit catchphrases.

His face did all the things a face could do at once.

For a second, Fern thought he might laugh, then she thought he might kiss her, then she thought he might snap her neck and eat her face.

Finally, she began to contemplate the possibility that this right here was a very all of the above kind of guy.

The dream man bent over and got his business right up into hers. She’d never smelled him before, but she sure as shit could now. And Fern hated it. She hated it so much .

That fucker smelled wonderful . Every cell in her just wanted to huff the tobacco-burnt-brick-laundry-on-the-sunshine-line-applejack collar of that stupid jean jacket for the rest of eternity. He smelled like home.

The handsome man’s voice came clipped and sharp and bare. No more wheedling, no more teasing, no more good-time guy.

“Get the FUCK off my wheel, you miserable little cunt .”

Summer, 2002

An elephant lumbers unsteadily down the carpool lane, westbound I-80 across the grand wasteland between Terre Haute and St. Louis.

Her calf burbles plaintively and jogs to catch up, wiggling his trunk around like a fresh noodle.

They stopped a while to drink from the rain puddles ellipsing down median berm and nosh themselves silly on the wild corn and wheat rotting unharvested all around them.

But now Mama wants to move. She feels like they need to move.

The elephant understands a lot more than anyone in the Otherwhile could imagine.

She knows her small name was Layla. The small ones gave it to her.

She knows existence comes in seasons, and no two seasons can know each other’s gait.

Layla’s first season was somewhere hot and loud and short and greener than love.

Her second season was in a place that looked like home, but was only pretending.

The sign over her second season had so many pretty shapes on it.

Even though Layla never knew what all that meant, she remembers how they stood and how they stood looked like this:

E L E P H A N T E N C L O S U R E

Layla’s third season is all around her, the biggest one she’s ever had. The third season stretches so far behind her. So far ahead. So far side to side. It is full of rotten corn that makes her feel good. It is full of openness and forgot how to stay closed.