The Pairing

Grandview Park split upper Grandview and lower Grandview, design as a gathering epicenter for both halves of the town to join together in gaiety and community spirit, but now lay as an empty hole today because of the incoming violent storm. At the epicenter of the park and frozen in time were the founders of Grandview, cast in towering, verdigris-stained bronze: Grayson Boone, Howard Green, and Darlene Weatherby. The sculptor shaped the men with the shameless grandeur of old gods. Boone loomed with broad, impossible shoulders, his jawline chiseled so violently square he looked less like an eighteenth-century timber baron and more like an avenging titan ripped from the marquee of a summer blockbuster. Beside him, Howard Green gripped a rolled land deed with the severe, unyielding posture of an emperor surveying wilderness he fully intended to strip to the bedrock. Then came Darlene. The town council almost came to blows when some of the women in town wanted her to be included stating that Darlene was a respectable landowner with a widowed fortune and a noble woman whose money also made Grandview possible, honoring Darlene, they argued, gave Grandview an air of progressive evolution—a shiny lure designed to draw modern commerce and fresh taxpayers into a suffocating, dead-end lumber economy. The sculptors had delivered their verdict in the metal, dripping with passive-aggressive spite. Where the men leaned into the wind with virile authority, the portrayal cast Darlene as a shriveled, formless crone. Billowing folds of heavy colonial skirts smothered her entirely, and an absurd, suffocating bonnet shadowed her face so deeply that her features were reduced to a hollow smudge. She stood as a monument of perpetual penance—a bronze ghost entombed by civic modesty, doomed to stare forever at the dead gravel. Jasmine Barley sat on the cold granite directly beneath Darlene’s hem. She took a slow, punishing drag from her cigarette, listening to the tiny crackle of dry paper as the ember flared vermilion against the dusk. The smoke hit the back of her throat, bitter, dry, and instantly stabilizing, coating her lungs before she forced a thin stream of gray into the biting air wanting the stormy depression in her to leave with the smoke. Jasmine flicked the cigarette against the damp granite curb. A loose spiral of ash vanished into the mulch. She leaned her head back against the pedestal, her neck resting against the frozen rim of Darlene’s bronze skirt, and watched the brillant blue sky swirl into the gray darkness of the incoming storm. The air carried the reek of burning copper and sulfur. Atmospheric pressure was bottoming out, dragging a heavy, electric crawl across the skin of her arms. In less than twenty minutes, the squall would breach the mountain crest: sheeting, near-freezing rain, jagged strokes of cloud-to-ground lightning, and a concussive thunder that would make the old sash windows throughout Grandview rattle in their frames. Jasmine hadn't consulted a barometer. She never had to. The pulse had begun three days ago—a rhythmic, sickening pressure coiled tight against the base of her skull, throbbing behind her right ear. She always knew when the sky was about to tear open. When she was a little girl, before she understood knowing things was a dangerous luxury, she had treated her premonitions like parlor tricks. She remembered sitting on the sunlit Formica of the kitchen counter, swinging bare legs, proudly rattling off the exact hour the afternoon squall would knock the electricity out, or when the river’s south fork would overflow into the timber mill’s access road. Back then, Mary would just laugh—a warm, crystalline sound from the years before the cough took hold—and cup Jasmine’s cheek with slender, calloused palms. Her mother would gently stroke the wild, coarse tangle of Jasmine's dark curls, murmuring about how remarkable her youngest child was, how profoundly she resonated with the pulse of the planet. Her spotty visions were a constant amusement to her mother until kindergarten and Mrs. Connie Jefferson. Mrs. Jefferson upon first meeting had been a bright bubbly teacher always willing to give a child a hug or had a kind word, but one day her teacher came to the classroom empty of smiles and happy greetings, moving through the day like a zombie. Jasmine remember staring at Ms. Jefferson through out the class until it ended and she remain behind seated at her small desk. When the class had been emptied of the final child, she had walk over to the hunch over chubby woman and told her: “Tell her I’m safe with her father now. Tell her she doesn't have to keep waiting.” To a five-year-old, passing along the words had seemed as trivial as handing back an eraser dropped under a chair. Jasmine had trotted over, small black patent shoes scuffing the floor wax, reached up to tug the hem of Ms. Jefferson’s mustard-yellow cardigan, and delivered the sentence verbatim, pitch-perfect. The memory still made Jasmine’s intestines twist. The teacher hadn't smiled. She hadn't cried. Every ounce of color had drained from Ms. Jefferson's skin until her lips looked blue, her jaw unhinging in a spasm of raw, nauseated horror. And Mary had crossed the threshold at that precise second to pick Jasmine up. One look at the teacher’s terrified, rigid posture, and the air in the doorway had plunged twenty degrees. The hissed, rapid exchange in the hall had been short, clipped, and deadly cold. By Monday morning, the school had enrolled Jasmine across town. And that evening, in the dim light of the laundry room, Mary had seized her shoulders with fingers like iron calipers, digging into the tender hollows above her collarbones until Jasmine’s breath hitched. Her mother’s pale, startlingly light-blue eyes had been wild with a primal panic that chilled Jasmine more than any ghost voice ever could. “You say nothing,” her mother had whispered, the alien timbre in her vocal cords buzzing with desperate terror. “Not about the rain. Not about the voices. Not a single breath of what moves behind your eyes. You bolt the iron door, Jasmine. Do you hear me? If you let that door swing open, they will track us to this porch.” Jasmine had taken those words to heart, constructing a quiet exile that severed her from the world—and, eventually, from her sister and mother. With her father dead since her infancy, there had been no human tether to keep her grounded. She had grown comfortable in the hollow spaces, haunted by a persistent, heavy dread she had never learned how to outrun. “Jassy?” The voice sliced through the damp chill, dragging Jasmine back from the dark edge of her thoughts. Down the gravel walkway, weaving through the crooked limbs of the bare oaks, a tall, angular shape emerged. Lily Thomas, one of the few friends she has. Her dyed raven hair, cut straight at the jawline, featured vivid strokes of neon blue that glowed in the dimming gray light. She had on her usual armor: heavy steel-toed boots that crunched deliberately on the stones, ripped fishnets visible through the tears of oversized black trousers, and a faded crust-punk band tee that exposed a narrow band of pale hip. "Thought I’d find you here," Lily said, her gravelly voice cutting through the rising wind as she reached the stone curb. Her gray eyes swept up Darlene’s leaden, hooded bronze with clear amusement. "What are you doing out here freezing your ass off?." "Just sitting here," Jasmine murmured, grinding the butt of her cigarette against the bottom of her boot until the heat was gone, then dropping the crushed filter into her jacket pocket. Lily despised the chemical stink of cheap menthol tobacco, a hypocritical quirk which she found hilarious, given that Lily spent half her life smoking weed in the library stacks. “I guess today is the party?” Lily jammed her hands deep into her frayed sleeves, her slender frame shivering as a freezing draft gusted off the ridge. She sat down hard on the cold bench next to Jasmine, their shoulders bumping together through heavy denim and leather. "Yeah," Jasmine said. "Mallory’s got the entire coven over there, right?" Lily asked, blowing a cloud of steam into the damp afternoon. "All of them," Jasmine said, glaring down at the scuffed toes of her boots. Lily let out a sharp, nasty snort. "God. I do not miss those bitches. Amanda Cartwright still gives me that look like I'm carrying the bubonic plague on my clothes." "You spiked her meal-replacement shake with horse laxative in her last senior year," Jasmine reminded her, a faint, genuine smirk finally breaking through her misery as she remembered Amanda—tall, red-haired, and desperate to mimic every syllable that came out of Mallory's mouth—heaving in the bathroom stalls while her cheerleader skirts turned into a disaster zone. Amanda had spent half her youth trying to morph into Mallory’s identical twin; now that she was married to a local car dealer and visibly pregnant, she still followed Mallory around like a spaniel. "First of all, it was veterinary-grade and entirely nontoxic, and second, magenta really brought out her pale skin," Lily shot back without an ounce of remorse. She tilted her head, watching Jasmine's knuckles tighten inside her coat pocket. "Look. My mom's will be gone all night. You can ditch the party and we can pig out on pizza and binge watch ole’ vampire movies." Jasmine looked at her with a hopeful smile. "The black and white kind with Bela Lugosi?" "Thin crust, extra cheese, plenty of black olives, and yes, I have downloaded about ten of them," Lily promised, "cross my heart." Jasmine gave her a thoughtful expression; that is all she really wanted to do. Leave the world behind and get lost in old horror classics. "Deal." She stood, stamping feeling back into her freezing toes, while Lily threw an arm around her shoulder, steering her away from the towering, hooded bronze of Darlene Weatherby. "Maybe tomorrow , we should walk into your living room and announce our elopement over breakfast," Lily mused, leaning her weight against Jasmine as they began strolling down the gravel path toward the rusted gates. "Just to see if the veins in your sister's forehead actually burst." Jasmine laughed out loud, the sharp air stinging her throat. "Mallory would take the butcher knife to both of us before the tea kettle even whistled, Lily." "Let her try. It'd ruin her French tips." Lily dragged her into a dead sprint as the ceiling of clouds above them fractured with a concussive, low-frequency roar that rattled the stone curb beneath their feet.