Buried in a grave. Masked behind a smile. Concealed on the dark web. Hidden beneath the skin. There are secrets waiting to be revealed in Janes, OR.
What’s Underneath is a sinister collection of four short stories set in the fictional town of Janes, from the author of Our Tragedy and Another Elizabeth.
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Excerpt from the story Under the Peach Tree:
Your mother just left, distraught and teetering on the edge of destructive. She came to me as a friend, a confidant, a second mother to you. Someone called her, claiming they saw you at a bus station in Santa Monica. They gave her no name and no bus number. They only left her with hope. You know I want to tell her not to go, but I won’t.
She’s packing as I write.
While her thoughts are on you—imagining your flushed ruddy cheeks and plush body weighed down by your heavy backpack lost in a sea of commuters and other runaways, mine are anywhere but. You know where they are. You know what I’m thinking about.
We were never close, you and I, though outward appearances would have implied otherwise. I think we tried for a while. Didn’t we?
I’m grinding my teeth at the moment, which is a nasty habit I’ve always had.
Once, you commented on it. I was pretty angry, if I’m being honest. A kid telling me what to do. The nerve you had. But after the dentist told me it was wearing the enamel down something fierce, I stopped. Not to mention the sensation has always sent shivers up my spine.
Thinking of you wandering around in another city, another state will bring that kind of habit back to a person, I guess.
The sounds outside the window you and Cody broke when you were eight keep me on edge too, though. I guess I haven’t taken a full breath in a while.
Two American Robins persist on chirping every morning despite my taking down the bird bath and feeders. There are still newscasters unable to take a hint. Those died down, moved on to something else once they believed they had collected all of the shards of information, squeezed every drop of soap from the rag. If the newscasters had asked different questions—the right questions—the narratives would have been different. Still, the cheerful bird songs at daybreak remain, reminding me that life moves on and some things are more stubborn than others. You, like these damned robins, are hard to shake.
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