Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

“You were great, girl!” She hugged Lady Mary.

“All I had to do is say what you told me to. You were so great, Fish. And you’re so smart. And no one ever did anything like that for me before. I can’t ever, ever thank you—”

“Stop sniffling! Don’t run your makeup. You’re starting a new job, girl, don’t mess up.”

Lady Mary nodded, found a tissue, dabbed her eyes. “You’re right. And I’ll be good, Fish. I’ll turn so many tricks Jacky-boy’ll never want to get rid of me! You’ll see.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get carried away and make the rest of us look bad, either.”

“Okay.” Lady Mary nodded seriously.

“And one more thing.”

Lady Mary looked up at Silverfish as a car slowed.

“You were asking before. About a silverfish. See, it’s an ugly bug. But it does one cool thing.”

“It does?”

“Uh-huh,” Silverfish said, sauntering off in the direction of the now-stopped car. “It eats other bugs. And especially,” she called back to Lady Mary over her shoulder as she got in the car, “especially, it eats roaches.”

Vacation by Trina Corey

Department of First Stories

Trina Corey has made her living as a teacher for the past twenty years. When she decided to try writing fiction she chose as setting a place she’d traveled to in college, and came up with this atmospheric tale. She lives with her family in northern California, and is currently working on a story set in the nineteen thirties.

* * *

My ex-husband was dead, God rot him, and I had given our daughter all the solace I could (which was quite a lot, I am a very good mother). But I was tapped out, and after hugs and pats on the arm and “don’t worry”s from her and me, I had turned over Jenny’s grief support to my son-in-law, and was heading out of town. For deep in the corners of my only partly healed soul, I wanted to dance and sing and whoop to the sky that I had outlived the bastard.

The cover story was that I was going to look at the wildflowers which were having their bloom of the century after a winter of extraordinary rains. Since we were only eight years into the century, this didn’t do even partial justice to what was going on in the wilds. Seeds that had waited through two, three, or four decades were rooting and flowering. It made the papers. Crowds of people were thronging to see. I decided to say I was joining the throngs, and it was true, I’d look at the flowers. I love flowers. I know flowers. And if people saw me out there with a giddy look on my face, I didn’t need to tell them that it wasn’t because I’d seen my first trout lily, but because I was drawing breath, and Stephen never would again.

I headed for Death Valley because I’d never been there with him, and I had, most happily, been there with my first serious boyfriend. It had been a lovely trip, full of heat and life and, much to my surprise at that time, plants growing in what I’d believed to be an empty desert.

The only campground where I’d been able to get a reservation was barren of all life, except people and more people. Even flower lovers come with noisy generators and blindness-inducing lanterns. I set up my tent on ground that was more rock than dirt, took a small pack with water bottles, a sweater for the cold that came with full night, and a flashlight to pick my way past the howling circles of propane- and kerosene-driven lights. Quiet and darkness came within five minutes as the trail curved around and up a steep hill. I wasn’t looking for flowers now, I was looking for stars, and needed to have open ground between me and the sky-drowning glare of the campground.

There were millions, billions. Worlds upon worlds of lights, thick across the center of the sky, more sparse toward the jagged shadows of the Panamint mountains, and colored — look long enough and you’ll see the blues and golds and reds of the stars. I watched them, and breathed the clear, empty wind falling like cold water from the higher slopes. Watched until the stars had moved partway across the sky. Watched until I could see my hand’s shadow on the ground from their light. Watched, and practiced breathing the clean air of a world that no longer had in it the man who had scarred me.

When I got back to camp, it was quiet, and mostly dark. I pulled my bag out of the tent and slept under the wheeling stars.