The Ape's Wife and Other Stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan

all seemed so inevitable, and any attempt to stave off the inevitable seemed absurd. In my life, I have loved two things. The first died before we met, and with my grieving for the loss of the first did I kill the second. Well, did I place the second forever beyond my reach.
    If I have not already made it perfectly clear, I have no love for The City, nor my apartment, and most especially not for the career I have resigned myself to, or, I would say, that I have settled for.
    Last night I called. I thought no one would pick up.
    “Hello,” I said, and there was a long, long silence. Just hang up, I thought, though I’m not sure which of us I was wishing would hang up. It was a terrible idea, so please just hang up before it gets more terrible.
    “Why are you calling me?”
    “I’m not entirely certain.”
    “Its been three years. Why the fuck are you calling me tonight?”
    “Something’s happening. Something important, and I didn’t have anyone else to call.”
    “I’m the last resort,” and there was a dry, bitter laugh. There was the sound of a cigarette being lit, and the exhalation of smoke.
    “You still smoke,” I said.
    “Yeah. Look, I don’t care what’s happening. Whatever it is, you deal with it.”
    “I’m trying.”
    “Maybe you’re not trying hard enough.”
    I agreed.
    “Will you only listen? It won’t take long, and I don’t expect you to solve any of my problems. I need to tell someone.”
    Another long pause, only the sound of smoking to interrupt the silence through the receiver.
    “Fine. But be quick. I’m busy.”
    I’m not, I think. I may never be busy again. Isn’t that a choice one makes, whether to be busy or not? I have, in coming to The Village, left busyness behind me.
    I told my story, which sounded even more ridiculous than I’d expected it to sound. I left out most of my talks with the thing that lives atop the hill, as no one can recall a conversation, not truly, and I didn’t want to omit a word of it.
    Whether or not each word is of consequence.
    “You need to see someone.”
    “Maybe,” I said.
    “No. Not maybe. You need to see someone.”
    We said goodbye, and I was instructed to never call again.
    I hung up first, then sat by the phone (I’d used the motel phone, not my cell). 
    A few seconds later, it rang again, and I quickly, hopefully, lifted the receiver. But it was the voice from the hill. Someone else might have screamed.
    “You should leave,” she says. “It’s still not too late to leave. Do as I have said. It’s all still waiting for you. The city, your work, your home.”
    “Nothing’s waiting for me back there. Haven’t you figured that out?”
    “There’s nothing for you here. Haven’t you figured that out?”
    “I’m asleep and dreaming this. I’m lying in my apartment above Newbury Street, and I’m dreaming all of this. Probably, The Village does not even exist.”
    “Then wake up. Go home. Wake up, and you will be home.”
    “I don’t know how,” I said, and that was the truth. “I don’t know how, and it doesn’t matter any longer.”
    “That’s a shame, I think,” she said. “I wish it were otherwise.” And then there was only a dial tone.
    You can almost see the hill from the window of my motel room. You can see the highway and a line of evergreens. If the trees were not so tall, you could see the hill. On a night eleven years ago, you could have seen the lightning from this window, and you could have seen the glow of the fire that must have burned afterwards. Last night, I was glad that I couldn’t see the hill silhouetted against the stars.
     
    5.
     
    The three times I have visited the library in The Village, the librarian has done her best to pretend I wasn’t there. She does her best to seem otherwise occupied. Intensely so. She makes me wait at the circulation desk as long as she can. Today is no different. But finally she relents and frowns and asks me what I need.
    “Do you have back issues of the