The Road Narrows As You Go by Lee Henderson

while most other kinds of people yielded to it. Even though we snuck in and inspected the body later, after everyone had had a piece, just to see if bits were missing—and there weren’t, there were not —in all parts of our lives thereafter, both mentally and physically, Jonjay’s prank would haunt us.

9
    We wanted Jonjay to tell us one way or another, was the meal real or wasn’t it? Twyla was the first to put the question to him, and he would ask us in return: Why do you want to know? Would that put you at ease? What do you recall?
    We remember green light, green minutes, when, after hours of threatening to do so, Jonjay appeared carrying those pieces for us to eat. This sense of humour, so closely imitating ritual and evidently an appropriate honour to the deceased, was another reason we couldn’t tell if what we’d eaten was in truth a fiction, or if that limpid white flesh we thought might be raw calamari between our teeth was off his body. Then there’s a blank space, an absence or gap not in the narrative but in our conviction. We remember the body was removed by gentlemen mortuarists who would cremate and bury Hick in a cemetery plot in Daly City. One day we would go visit, but not soon.
    Stop thinking about it, Jonjay warned us. Move on.
    And for the moment, we did. Our attention couldn’t cling forever to the sides of that big wicker basket. We took care of Wendy as she spent therest of the week bedridden with a chest cold that wouldn’t quit her. She slept twenty hours at a stretch. When she didn’t sleep she lay on pillows on the living room floor and read sporadically from the bestselling Michelle Remembers . For two reasons Wendy made herself read the entire book: because Hick never finished reading it before the hospital, and because it took place in Victoria. Michelle Remembers contributed to her sickness’s creeps for the satanic story was all true . Every word. She knew this island town described in these pages, it was her hometown. She and her mom used to go on bicycle rides along the seawall and frequently passed the Ross Bay cemetery where Michelle was abused by Satanists. When Wendy was asleep we all took turns reading from it too—the unlocked memories of unimaginable satanic ritual abuse Michelle had been the victim of in her early childhood, including an intentional car crash on a highway, being buried alive in a grave, and numerous other sacrificial rites in forests and caves, culminating in visitations from none other than Jesus and Azazel, aka Satan himself. All of it Michelle repressed for two decades, until in her college years Dr. Pazder’s unique style of Catholicized psychiatric hypnosis uncovered the truth in therapy sessions. Later the doctor would divorce his wife in order to marry his patient.
    No, not possible—it still never occurred to Wendy that Jonjay would do something so heinous. Magic was his motive, not cruelty. The reason Jonjay thought it was a good idea to perform this sort of mad theatrical mockery of flesh after death could be found in Michelle Remembers —and in almost all the books on Hick’s shelves. This occult sideshow was Hick’s lurid fascination, as an artist, not as a practitioner. Hick wouldn’t condone actual practice of superstition, but he loved the aesthetic of the decadent. You could tell just by scanning the titles and authors how interested he was in whatever tread on the meridian, and how this theme inspired his drawings and his story arcs in Pan . Leading a double life as an amateur demonologist stoked by the literature of this tradition gave his Pan its subtle subversive side. Therefore Wendy would finish the last book, benignas all the rest, and break the fake curse—petty symptoms begone! She blew her nose for the thousandth time and coughed out a pint of slime.
    And her second reason to read contradicted the first. Break the fake curse while looking for the proof this