Apricot brandy by Lynn Cesar

photos out.
    Eight-by-tens, old black-and white glossies. The first was of a sandbar in a jungle stream, with a canvas shoe, the toe of it, jutting up from sand. And these dead branches, a little farther along the sand… they were the bones of an arm and the small web-work of a skeletal hand.
    All the photos were of corpses, some new, some older.
    She tilted the cannon again and drained this glass in a breath.
    They were battle-dead to judge by one, a skull that still had its leathery skin and a collapsed tunic, with shoots and sprouts poking out of it like arrows and darts that had found their mark. Another sandbar shot showed a more recent death, a man sunk sideways, one reaching arm exposed, the open mouth, like a swimmer’s taking a breath, half full of sand. Had died when the river was in flood, it seemed.
    She thumbed through them, nearly a score of them. She stopped at a group-shot of living soldiers, posed in fatigues, backgrounded by palm trees. Jack Fox’s platoon or company or whatever, because there he was, at the end of the front row of crouching men. It struck her at once he was older than most of the others. He had a grave, refusing face, giving the camera only so much. In his forehead, above the juncture of his brows, there was a slight knot. An inward grappling— even then— with some dark problem.
    Susan lifted her face from the photos. Her will had ratcheted tight to the pitch of pure certainty. This Unclean chamber cried out to God for the flames.
    She tipped some valedictory inches from the cannon and caught a flash of detail from the intricate carving around its spout. She leaned close, tilting the spider-fine web of incisions against the light. All at once, the pattern surfaced from the weave.
    It was a dragon, sinuous, exquisitely scaled, circling the spout. Its tail did not quite meet its grossly fanged jaws, but both were buckled to the same human victim. The jaws engulfed the head and shoulders of a naked woman. The tail looped to present its dragon loins frontally and copulated with its meal.
    With a hiss of outrage, as if scalded, Susan reached down to her side, uncapped the gas can, and toppled it on the floor. As she straightened again, she found the cannon suddenly quite near her face. She looked down its spout. And the crystal cannon, for just a nanosecond, was a pouncing insect, its crook-legs like diamond razors flexing, stabbing its crystal proboscis deep into Susan’s neck. She became a nova of blinding white light, became a spike of pain driven home by a wrecking ball… .
    And she was stumbling, falling, scrabbling on the floor for her cane, then flailing it, in a frenzy to get up on her legs.
    An utter drunkenness had descended on her. The whole earth lagged massively out of sync with her least movement. Wherever terror thrust her— and she was purely terror now— her movement was too soon, or too late, to stay in plumb with universal gravitation.
    There was the gaping door— a big hole she could pitch through, out into the night, out of here. Her left shoulder collided with the frame and she toppled around it. Somewhere between the door and her car, the cane fell away, because it ceased to matter. She made the car, fell inside, found the keys’ dangle, and twisted.
    At the car’s first forward surge, Susan felt a remote burst of hope, but as the floodlit trees roared past on either side, understood she had not yet escaped, that this earth under her wheels and the green deformities that sucked their lives from it, were all him, were Jack Fox. That she was not yet emerged from his body, his will, and that she had taken his poison inside her.
    She was staggeringly, metronomically drunk, toppling left and right, upright only on the average; the car plunging in and out of the deep ruts, but— veering— she just managed to keep the wheels in the lane. The tires shrilled, trailing a plume of dust like a darker night on her tail.
    Here, dear God, was the house at last, almost out,