“At any rate ...” Father Aguirre picked up the next skin and laid it out. The shotgun had taken the head off, but the body was mostly intact. The cloth was ancient and crumbling.
“Yucca thread here,” said the priest. “Pretty crude, and the cloth’s old.” He set it aside and picked up the third. “Ah, here we go. That’s newer.”
Grandma craned her neck. “That’s rayon or something, ain’t it?”
He nodded. “Pretty well weathered, but you know how those fabrics are.”
The idea that something magical had attacked her was surreal enough, but that the attack had involved rayon was entirely too much.You could have a world of magic or a world with synthetic fabric, not both. Selena leaned against the wall, slid down, and put her head in her hands.
“You okay?” said Grandma.
No, I am not okay, I am not remotely okay, I am the farthest thing from okay.
But she couldn’t say that. If somebody asked if you were okay, you said you were fine. That was the script. That was always the script. If she had been in a car accident and they’d cut her arm off with the Jaws of Life, she still would have said, “I’m fine.”
She didn’t have a script for what to say when youweren’tokay.
Copper decided that her human should not be sitting on the floor without a dog and heaved herself up. She shoved her nose into Selena’s face and licked her worriedly.
“Good girl,” said Selena, which meant that she didn’t have to answer the question of how she was. She pushed Copper’s face away to avoid being licked to death. “Where did the rayon come from?”
“Could be from an old tent. Could’ve picked it up off a body, if a hiker went missing. Could have just snatched something off a line too. Might have been years ago.” Selena lifted her head in time to see Father Aguirre shrug. “Everything lasts forever in the desert. I can ask around, but I doubt anyone in town is missing anything.”
“It ... it wasn’t someone in town who did this, was it?” A new weight sank in Selena’s stomach. She knew a few people in town now, and she didn’t think she’d done anything to deserve this, surely she couldn’t have offended anyonethatbadly, even if she’d said something very stupid, surely not ...
“Well, not in the usual manner of speaking,” said Father Aguirre. “A local, but not a human local, I’d say.”
She looked at him blankly.
“Spirit trouble,” said Grandma Billy. “There’s things out in the desert meaner than your little squash god.”
Selena pinched the bridge of her nose. If she accepted that someone could send animated owl skins after her, it shouldn’t be hard to accept that that someone might not be human.People, but not human people.
She shuddered hard, once, like Copper shaking herself after getting wet. “Why?”
“Hard to say,” said Father Aguirre. “Spirit logic isn’t like the rest of ours. But I’ve got to say I’m surprised anything would fasten on you ...” He frowned down at the skins.
Selena shrank. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, no.” He looked up. The light winked off his glasses. “That’s just it. You’re polite to a fault. I can’t imagine you offending anyone badly enough.” He smiled at her.
“Some things are attracted to sadness,” said Grandma. “And you came in here a nervous wreck, Selena.”
“Thanks,” said Selena. She thought she’d hidden it better than that.
Grandma grinned at her. “Hey, you got better. That’s the important thing, huh? What would you have done that first day if a bunch of fetches showed up on your doorstep?”
Selena tried to picture it and drew a blank. “Curled up in a ball,” she said finally. “Just ... stopped. I don’t think I could have done anything.”
“See? And here we are now. You pushed the wheelbarrow and everything.”
“Grandma,” said Father Aguirre, giving Selena an apologetic glance. “Not everybody enjoys having their psychology aired out in public.”
“Eh, you’re a priest. Put the seal of the confessional on this.”
“It doesn’t work that way. You’d have to be a priest too.”
“I could be.”
