Life is an acquisition of lessons. Take your slingshot, hunt them like waterfowl, and string them up to fry in the sun. The truth will simmer up a sweet, charring black.

But the best lessons are the ones that hunt you—splitting bulrushes noiselessly, seizing you by the scruff, and dashing you on the rocks. Those lessons are the only ones worth a memory. A mind needs to smart. Especially a great one, already brimming with visions and ghosts—it has no room for anything less than injury, because a sight steeped in tears is one you don’t forget.

Dip a day in blood and it doesn’t end.

Lisette remembered figures and rays from growing up, but nothing as sharp as Cousin Iris preening in the red of the electric Open sign. She never left that pawnshop. Always at the harp, one temple nuzzling its pocked frame as the rest ran down her sternum, between her knees. She wouldn’t strum. She liked the notes themselves, wiry and dissonant, and made them bleed one into the other. She made the air curdle like burning flowers.

When the trailers were too stuffy for horseplay, the boys would come. They swooped at her with their pliers and play switches, screeching, “Cut it up! Cut it up!” because it was really their heartstrings she was plucking—wiry, dissonant, bleeding for her—and they could only think to haunt her back.

So why not Stephen, too? He didn’t have a switch that Lisette knew of, but he was just as pliable to Iris as those boys. That cornsilk hair and peony skin. She imagined her cousin’s crescent nails, and Stephen singing under them.

Her throat clotted. October, she breathed, thumbing the dust off her mortar and pestle. October. Summer trifles expired, even Iris.

The harvests would draw revelers from all over—craftsmen, drunks, spurred ranchers. It was October when they made Iris wrap the harp in an ash-stained drop cloth. She watched it get stuffed in the bed of a stranger’s truck and driven off. Chewing her knuckles to keep from crying, eyes veined red, she looked like a cherub with its wings ripped out. Finally, she was silent.

Not that it stunted her shining. The boys kept coming. Call it pheromones, she still pulsed that dissonant energy that frenzied them. The wings were gone, but the halo still beckoned. She was fourteen then. She had twenty years to age from fledgling to angel.

No. Lisette cracked her pestle. A succubus. Because angels didn’t whore like Iris. Lisette knew, and if she could just make Stephen see…His voice still throbbed in the back of her brain, dulled after several beers but echoing.

You know what you are—you’re a parasite. You’re a fucking slut! I’m taking the Camino.

Slut, huh? After he found Lisette smirking on the divan in a black-ribboned babydoll and stilettos for him? While the duck roast—his mother’s recipe—was crisping gold in the oven? Before he could scrub the reek of sweat and peonies off his furry fucking thighs, or before he could nurse the pussyburn from another woman on his tongue?

Lisette would have bashed his skull in the mirror and shown him who the real slut was, except she wouldn’t lay a hand on her husband. She loved him.

But Cousin Iris was fair game.

The cabin floor dipped, and Lisette stumbled. Red in the morn, sailors take warn. She’d slept until three, but she didn’t need to have seen a bloodshot dawn to anticipate the storm. She could feel its charges concentrate on the wind, in her bones. For now, though, the harbor was quiet. She heard the petty slap of waves against the porthole. The caw of gulls, the puff of her candles. Nothing more.

She swilled the last of her beer and tossed it over the brazier. The coals spat and died. “Slut. Slut. Slut,” she murmured, tongue curling and lashing. She poured lotus oil into the mortar.

When the Camino screamed out the drive, she learned that marriage was as ugly as they said—and even then it was no less glorious blackened by skid marks than shining at the altar. Stephen would always be the tuxedoed man with silk lapels and a breast-pocket flower, and Lisette loved him enough to save him from the swine he’d become. Starting with Iris.

With a kitten burp, she sprinkled kohl into the oil and pestled into rich black guck. She scooped up a fingerful and lined her eyes. Immunity.

The wind gusted outside, rattling the forestays. Lisette plugged the kitchenette sink and ran the faucet. Unlatching her salt cupboard, she retrieved a vial of fat white crystals and dumped its contents in the water. The natron fizzed, suffusing white, until the water became like milk. She cleaned her hands in it—Purity—and toweled off.

Stephen, Stephen. How long did he last before Iris got to him? She had toasted Stephen at the rehearsal dinner. Did she echo in his brain when he kissed the bride? And when he bought the Cape house, did he do it to be closer to the ocean, or the vineyard, where Iris had settled? Is that why he had Lisette buy the damn boat—so that he could sail off on the weekends and shore up on her cousin? Maybe it wasn’t the cat that had scratched his chin, the last day he wore a close shave. Maybe he grew the beard to hide the raw red crescents on his jaw—and God knows where else?—from Iris.

Oil and kohl stung the corners of her eyes. She saw everything now.

I’m sleeping.

Come on.

This isn’t working.

I’ll be quick.

 You’re not listening.

Don’t act like you don’t remember. That night at the Hilton?

Jesus! Touch me again, and I’m going.

The wind whistled through the cockpit opening. The boat pitched, but she held her ground. In the distance, the commodore’s dogs started to bark. Lighting the myrrh incense, Lisette shook out a pouch of tamarisk bark, picked the driest piece, and started chewing it soft. She could only imagine the other half of that conversation—the Iris half.

You’re soaked! Do you know what time it is?

 Can I stay here tonight?

Oh, baby. What did she do to you?

(Splutter and sob, deny. Stephen had really wanted his wife that night. He had left her to go fuck Iris, but with each thrust he prayed another Act of Contrition for Lisette. He was a poor lamb, seduced by the succubus against his vows. He obsessed over her, but he didn’t love her. She was his shame. It was his wife he loved, and he really did show her that night. He had shoved her back to her side of the bed because he couldn’t bear to defile her with his dirty fingers, still sticky with Iris. He was cold and distant because he was so full of love, he didn’t know how to express it. That was all.)

Lisette groped her way up the stairs and stumbled out the hatch. The wind blew salt-sweet from beyond the breakwater. It flattened her hair to her scalp and forced the kingfishers into hackled balls. They cheeped weekly when they heard her. She kept their cage up on the stern, tucked snugly between pushpit and steering wheel, so they wouldn’t overheat in the stuffy cabin. But today was cool enough to take them inside—the sun was barely a streetlight behind the mucoid clouds, and the fishless waters undulated the dreamy dark blue of a bruise. She took the cage back with her into the cabin, still chewing her tamarisk.

She put the cage on the kitchenette counter, set a skillet on the gas stove, and opened her penknife, pinching the fat on her forearm just below the elbow. The commodore’s dogs—gold and black-muzzled mastiffs—barked in the distance as she swirled her knife in the sink to sterilize. Then she turned her arm up and sliced.

A chunk of flesh fell to the counter. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. She tossed it to the kingfishers, which pecked and batted each other for purchase. Lisette smiled. It was the pawnshop boys all over again, rushing each other like fiends for the same scrap of meat.

She waited for them to finish their dinner, wrapping her arm in gauze, before coaxing the handsome one with the bluest back plumage onto her finger. She drew it from the cage, stroking its golden breast, and wrung its neck. The other birds thrashed madly but she ignored them, twisting the wings off her fresh kill. She plucked its blue feathers one by one like flower petals and dropped them in the skillet. She added alkali, saliva, and cornsilk. She switched on the gas.

The mastiffs howled.

She had seen them a few times through the commodore’s hedges. Noble creatures with honey glazed coats and massive necks that threatened to burst their collars. Nothing like the dogs that paced the laundry lines at the trailer park. The children were banned from the area so that they couldn’t disturb their mothers or re-muddy the linens, so they were told. They knew, however, that it was really about the dogs. Strays with matted paws, cataracts, and ears downturned would skulk between rows of technicolor sheets, licking their teeth at the women’s bare calves. The barked like desert ghosts when the wind was dead. The children would pace the Laundryland border—the first clothesline, always hanging a quilt or carpet so you couldn’t see past—and try whistling the dogs out. Sometimes they got a pink nose poking under the border, but nothing more. The dogs never crossed over, no matter what the children offered them. A half a snakeskin. A wishbone. A Felix the Cat cookie jar. The dogs were not tempted.

Lisette stuck her thumbnail into the kingfisher’s throat and dug until the arteries fattened into aorta. When she withdrew she held its heart, bubbled and vein-strung, in her palm. She took it to her bug jar and fed it to the carrion beetles. They swarmed the organ like black scabs.

She checked on the skillet and, satisfied, killed the flame. The chemical sludge of feathers and alkali simmered down so that she could stir it without getting splattered. Craning into the foul blue vapor, she spat out her mouthful of tamarisk and kept stirring.

At noon the dogs would show like black shades through the trailer park linens. When the sun set, they shifted. Their shadows lengthened and honed along the ripples of sheet. Their muzzles stretched into snouts, ears rising in spades. Mutts became jackals.

And girls became laundry girls. Lisette first, being the oldest. The mothers put her on the wash rack, where she kneaded and beat their stains clean. She was built for work, but she had yet to earn her callouses. She scrubbed until her knuckles shined like cherries as the sun electrified her metal washtub, searing her wrists to tiger stripes. At night she would stick them in the icebox and let the cold sting away her burns. Iris, meanwhile, would clip the clothes on the lines and shuttle baskets to and from trailers. Diligent but fragile. She couldn’t take a day at the tub. She was made to be pretty. Lisette pruned in detergent vapor while Iris turned gold.

So when Iris tripped and fell over a sleeping mutt and got bit to the bone, Lisette felt something like justice spread warm and wonderful through her gut. The dog was a pitbull mix, and its lockjaw on Iris’ foot was so strong that it couldn’t have let go if it wanted to. Lisette flicked its nose a few times, wrested teeth from flesh and bone, and carried her cousin to the drive, where one of the neighbors took them to the ER. When they returned, Lisette made instant lemonade and replaced Iris’ ice bags every twenty minutes and, when the painkillers sent Iris to sleep, returned to the site of the accident where the clothesline remained, low and inconspicuous in the overgrown weeds. Who could have known? She coiled it into her apron pocket and decided to steal one of the boys’ pliers. She would make herself a necklace.

Now she transferred her compound from skillet to mortar and shook the bug jar out over it. The carrion beetles clicked and screamed as she pestled them into the hot semiliquid. It purpled. She stretched tinfoil over the whole and set it aside. Unhooking the walkie-talkie, she dialed the launch.

“Hyannis Yacht Club launch. Hyannis Yacht Club launch. This is 46-3 requesting pickup.” Always the mooring number. She never said the name of the boat. It was personal. She didn’t want it overheard and chuckled at.

“This is Hyannis Yacht Club launch for 46-3, heading your way for pickup in five.”

She sensed the launch driver’s unease over the radio channel and grinned. Lisette had not well integrated with the boating crowd, especially an old sea dog like Keenan—all guttered forehead, crisp seafoam hair, and pressed khakis. But she had to respect a man who knew his place.

When the launch chugged to a stop before her, Lisette had in her canvas tote the tinfoiled mortar, the kingfisher carcass, and a glazed pot containing red clay. Also her personals: keys, lipstick, penknife.

“Good morning, Lisette.”

She climbed onto the launch. “It’s almost five, Keenan.”

“I know. And I know you,” he pointed out, gassing the engine. The launch chortled in a half circle, angling toward the wharf. Lisette took a seat, tote on her lap, and watched the stern of her boat begin to shrink.

Stephen had let her name it. Her first thought was Broad Reach, but that wasn’t right. Later, Doldrums, but that wasn’t much better. Stephen didn’t care, so long as she stayed on the dock while he sailed off.

Lisette watched the salt-crusted letters blur. Tell-Tale Heart. It had meant one thing at the time but had since phased into something else.

Then she remembered—she had left the kingfishers in the cabin. They would bake come sunrise.

Let them. Let their pimple hearts boil and pop. They had served her, they were done. Callous, but again, she’d earned it. She had learned that everything expired. She had.

But that was a lapse. Some things revived. She had learned that, too. Everything she had learned from Iris.

The granite island had been covered in flour and eggshells, and Lisette had thought, How does a bedpan nurse afford this? when Iris told her about Rush. Who? No one yet, but the product of a trailer boy, Lisette decided, with no teeth but always his pliers. She bit her cheeks to keep from laughing. The trailer boy with his pliers on the urine-stained sheets she had handled too many times, his seed congealing in Iris. Iris the slut. Who had a degree and a mortgage and white trash blood she couldn’t escape anymore because it was inside her now, balling up into an anchor.

This is why you have us over! You need money.

Fuck the money, Lisette. I thought you’d be happy for me. You know I didn’t ask for this.

Fuck you.

Excuse me? I’m sorry you’re having problems, coz, but this isn’t about your marriage. I was going to ask you to be the godmother.

How’s the cake? Stephen peeped in. Sweet, stupid—not fat yet, but Lisette could imagine how he got that way, by whose spoon. If she had indulged his sweet tooth, a cake instead of a duck roast that one night, maybe he wouldn’t have left the next.

When the launch docked, Lisette got off and cut across the boatyard. Her rusted pickup was waiting up the street, but she headed down to the commodore’s house. She could hear him chiding the mastiffs as they continued to growl. Keep him occupied. She stole down the hedges and dropped her tote just shy of the shorefront, where the low tide grasses sang like a thousand asps and grey pits of silt glistened between.

Lisette scooped up a handful, opened her clay pot, and mixed silt with clay. And one last thing. She sniffed. A little to the left, dog dung. She added it to the pot, kneading a dark red loam. Then, squatting in the pungent sea grass, she sculpted.

Squeezing out a bastard should have had Iris at her worst. She could have at least gotten fat. But no—she was a sensation when Rush was born. The two of were madonna and child with their soapstone eyes, buttery skin, cornsilk hair. When the time came for Lisette to tip him over the holy water, she could have let his velvety head crack on the basin. Instead the rite went on and the priest sprinkled the infant as he smiled up at her, lips bubbling.

She finished the effigy and retreated behind the hedge. They died down as she returned to the truck. From the driver’s seat she uncovered the mortar and smeared her effigy in the purple glaze and set it on the dashboard to kiln.

Spiked ears, puffed chest, lockjaw—a mutt. A laundry dog, perhaps.

“Go for the legs,” she whispered. And snap her neck.

* * *

Lisette parked on the shoulder, razing the hosta bed. She wended through the rock garden, snapping daffodils underfoot as she made her way to the birdbath, where she rinsed the blood and shit off her hands.

Since the Laundryland incident, Iris was terrified of dogs. There was talk among the mothers about a loose change campaign to hire animal control, but the idea of outsiders with sticks and flashlights sniffing around the park soon killed the idea. Instead they exempted her from work. Come to think of it, that was the summer of the harp. The harvest, the trade, the silence that wasn’t silence until now.

Lisette pictured the death. Iris cowering under the overhang of that ridiculous granite island, chiffon tangled up her legs in the mad struggle to get away, revealing the scars from twenty years ago. Iris singing to the rest of the angels, pissing herself before the end.

The screen door hissed shut behind Lisette. She ascended the stairs with the bronze bowl light fixtures that she had dog-eared in the catalogue and turned onto the upstairs hall. It shuddered down the length in alternating spheres of light and shade and at the very end, the outlet to the master bedroom, darkness. It seemed to stir as Lisette approached. She smelled her work before she opened the door and saw Iris splayed on the sofa, saturating it. Her lips were peeled like cornhusks from her teeth and her jaw hung low in what Lisette imagined was her swan song.

As she turned to leave, Lisette glimpsed something slip from the cushions and streak down the hardwood, up the wall beside her. It was a gaunt shadow with harelike ears and bent forelegs, sniggering quietly in hot, runny breaths. She reached out, and it diffused through her fingertip.

She started back down the hall. She would shake the wrinkles from the old babydoll and wait for Stephen, a cake in the oven this time, one hand in the batter.

“Lisette.”

She flattened into the wall. The boy. He wasn’t supposed to be here.

“Rush,” she gulped, “I was looking for your mama. It’s been so long since we had a chat.” Then, an afterthought: “You knew I was here?”

“Your truck is outside. You ran over the flowers.” His voice echoed up the stairway, ringing in the bronze bowl chandelier a frequency that made Lisette cringe.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” she asked, sidestepping from the bedroom.

“It seems neither of us is where we should be.”

Her insides squirmed. She had forgotten how vexing the boy could be. Any other day, she might have found it endearing. But today…he wasn’t supposed to be here. She wet her lips.

“What are you, fourth grade now? They’ll notice you’re gone. Me—I’m old. No one misses me.”

“No one wants you.”

Lisette blinked. But she was close enough to the stairs that the banister peeked into her line of vision. “I am your aunt,” she said, feigning authority. “Remember that, boy.”

“You’re not like other aunts.”

She slipped the penknife from her pocket, voice edging. “Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean you disrespect me.”

“Maybe you’re not my aunt after all.”

Lisette threw the knife back and jumped around the corner. The stairway was empty.

“After all, you never wanted to be.”

She spun around to find Rush staring at her from a splatter of freckles.

“Can you help me?” He raised his hands, which shone a dark, wet crimson. “I couldn’t find the soap.”

He must have spilled his mother’s wine again. Alcoholic slut.

He fixed her a stare that made her lungs burn. What a beautiful child. It was the baby skin and the eyes—those soapstone eyes that lit like steel when he lost an argument or skinned his knee on the asphalt. Lisette realized in a flash of panic—they were hers.

Iris wasn’t dead until Rush was, too.

Lisette lowered the knife as if neither of them had seen it poised overhead like a stinger. Then she stroked his cheek, thinking. She couldn’t hurt the boy. He wasn’t his mother. Through the jaw and forehead he was a different kind of familiar, but not Iris.

“Let’s go to the kitchen,” she decided. “We’ll find what we need there.”

They descended the stairs, Lisette’s hand on his shoulder, the knife behind her back. They made their way to the granite island, where Lisette ran the water to steam and slathered his hands in dish soap, working the scouring pad until they were a spotless pink, the drain gurgling dark suds. She inhaled the chemical steam and looked away, drying her hands on her pants.

“All clean. Now how about a treat for a good boy?”

Then she thought of her cousin stinking up the house. She had to get Rush away. Let the neighbors find his mother like that, mauled and unbecoming. Let Stephen. She rooted through the cupboards for a lunchbox or cooler. “We can take popsicles for the boat. I always meant to take you for a ride. If we go now, we can catch the sunset.”

“You’re wrong.”

Lisette froze. The boy was pointing at his face.

“I’m not all clean.”

Squinting, Lisette licked her thumb and wiped his nose.

“Why did you do it?” he asked as the freckles smeared red.

She recoiled. Rush had never had freckles.

“You’ve made a mess, Lisette.”

With a steadying breath, she took the knife from her pocket again. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she warned. But part of her did. It was the eyes. When they blazed defiantly up at her, her vision shuttered, gathering energy at the corners so that she saw infrared.

He inched brazenly closer. “You took my mother from me.”

Not yet. She swung.

The boy wailed. Blood squirted through his fingers as he covered his face.

Lisette balled up a dishtowel and offered it with a tender smile. The slut was gone.

“Come,” she said. “Press that there like that. Got it?”

The boy moaned into the dishtowel, but the pain would expire. All exorcisms needed a little blood, and the world was cleaner for it.

But the noises Rush made—so grating, discordant…

“Hush!” She seized his hand. It must have been the house that made him act out. She had to get him out. Then she would enroll him in the charter school over the harbor and pack his lunchbox full of little cakes.

“No!” He spat red as he sobbed, “Get off!” and bolted.

Not again.

She chased him out the door, tears flying. “Don’t you run from me, boy. Come back here! You are mine!”

She flailed, trying to catch him on the front steps. The gesture rocked her forward. The yard somersaulted as she fell. Candytuft and baby’s breath whirled into a reel of white—she was suddenly back at the Hilton, facedown on the generic white comforter, eating the thread count as Stephen sweated over her. He was hers, finally and forever, I do and I do flapping nonstop through her brain as husband and wife did things Lisette could only fantasize now—their young honeymoon hands, not yet runnelled with veins, scars, years of cabbage chopping and other marital idiocies. Maybe the lifetime thereafter was payment for the first few hours. But, come what may, they were worth it. Stephen couldn’t deny that.

Unless he didn’t remember those nights with his wife—if someone else blotted them out. Maybe that was the reason Stephen had kept the lights low. Make Lisette a mannequin on which to superimpose his lover’s face, something prettier to rut to.

So if he didn’t remember Lisette, what they supposedly had been or could be together, what was she to him anymore, if she was ever anything? What was he to her?

Lisette tumbled to the bricks and slowly unfurled, loosing a crushed whine.

She loved a ghost.

Ghosts could not be had. Ghosts were gone matter. Not even Iris was perfect enough to trap one; it would simply vent through her fingers and disappear. It could only steal itself, swallow its own tail or slink into another bed. It blamed its wanderings on the wind, but it chose its path.

Lisette rolled onto her knees and shivered. Rush was long gone, and the back of her head stung, no doubt a gash from the fall. It ran cool down her neck and shoulder blades. She staggered to the truck. The air was stuffy inside, traced with an earthy something. The effigy was gone.

One leg sprawled out the door, she rifled through the glove box. Her fingers bloodied the registration papers. She averted her eyes from the mess. When will you learn, Lisette?

Another, deeper voice replied, I just did.

And you’ll remember it. You have to remember for it to count.

Toward what, anyway? She was tired of ghosts. She drew Stephen’s old pistol from the glove box. There are some lessons that don’t need knowing, much less remembering.

She pointed the gun out the door and fired onto the pavement. Someone would call the police. They, at least, would know what to do, calloused enough by routine that they wouldn’t remember the minced woman on the sofa or her son, if they found him. Lisette hoped they would before dark. She was sorry to think of Rush gouged and alone in the suburb briars. But she needed to stop smothering. The boy could stand a few trials. He was his own child now.

She pulled out of the hosta bed, letting her thoughts bleed out with the rest of her brains. She could afford to lose some—to desaturate and undo, synthesize something else or nothing at all. Dip a day in blood, or let it bleed itself blank again. Her choice. When she took to the sailboat that night and motored past the breakwater, she raised the main and let the winds decide.