Page 48 of Mazywood

Imani shrugged. She remembered to take off her jacket, helmet, and gloves, but instead of hanging them on hooks beside Sharise’s, she dropped them in a heap near the door. The sweat sliming her skin from climbing the Steps of Death felt like tiny icicles everywhere. The garage was cold. She was shivering again.

“You want your jacket to dry, remember?” Sharise reminded her.

Imani sighed, but she hung up her jacket. She had to admit she would be pissed if her jacket was still wet tomorrow. It might not dry no matter what.

She glanced around the cramped garage to see if she could spot a dryer, but the only appliance, right beside the kitchen door, was a large standing freezer turning pee yellow from age, probably once white. Her eye noticed that the freezer was padlocked, although both the lock and attached hinge were crawling with rust. Interesting. Why would anyone lock a freezer?

“I’m gonna go ask Dad about this Caddy,” Sharise said, brushing past her to climb the two steps to the kitchen door, as if Imani wanted to race her.

Imani lingered behind in the newly emptied space, sinking into her solitude. It was hard to map a new space with anyone talking around her, so she stayed by herself to get a better feel for this garage. Superbright fluorescent lights—so ugly and overwhelming—illuminated neatly stacked shelves of lighter fluid and tools.

And that freezer, with the lock so glaring and misplaced, sitting in silence. The plug on the wall behind it was empty. The freezer wasn’t plugged in.

Without thinking about it first, Imani grabbed a crowbar from the tool shelf and stood in front of the freezer, which was as tall as her waist. She tried yanking the top up. Although it gave a couple of inches, the flimsy lock held and wouldn’t allow her to see inside.

Through the door, she heard Mom and Dad ask Sharise how she liked the ski hill. Imani held her breath, afraid Sharise would narc about the deer’s head, but Sharise only complained about the steps and asked Dad when he would fix the ski lift. That made Mom and Dad both laugh like, Yeah, right. Imani closed her eyes with a shiver of relief.

Imani struck at the lock with her crowbar with a snap of strength that surprised her. She’d only been thinking about breaking into the freezer when her arms shot out. Impulse control, her teachers called it. The rusty lock clattered to the floor.

She looked up, expecting Dad to burst in to ask what she was doing, and by the way, why had she left the gas cans behind?

“Dad—I’m so mad you never brought us here before,” Sharise said. “That’s so wrong.”

Imani would have loved to chime in too—she and Sharise had spent a lot of time griping about why it had taken so long for a family trip here, especially after they took up snowboarding—but she was more interested in what was inside the freezer.

She lifted the top, bracing for the stink of rot.

But the only smell, if anything, was clotted dust thick enough to taste. She must have imagined that she might find the chopped-up deer carcass inside, because she didn’t expect the neat rows of meat packages, piled nearly to the top of the freezer. The labels on the packages were fading, but she could still see the words McCloud Butcher Stop in a loopy red script.

Inside the graying plastic wrappers, she saw what was left of the butcher’s meat.

If she had chanced upon the freezer fifty years sooner, while the packager was still overrun with maggots and ostentatious stink, she would have gagged. Vomited, most likely. But now, tamed by time, the contents of the packages looked… settled. Everything was dry like an archaeological dig instead of a box of decomposing flesh. Imani was so fascinated that she picked up one of the packages in her gloved hand, light as a feather—the hummingbird’s weight of a shriveled bone—to read the fading expiration date: USE OR FREEZE BY 1-6-80.

“Damn…” Imani whispered.

No one had seen this meat graveyard in—she calculated the number, although math could kiss her ass—nearly fifty years?

“This is craaaaazy…” Imani whispered.

She moved a few packages aside, sending dust flying—although wasn’t dust just dead skin, so didn’t that mean the dead meat was seeping into her nostrils? The scent wasn’t bad, but it didn’t smell like nothing either. It smelled like time and confinement, distinct enough to make Imani drop the package to cover her nose and mouth with her other hand. With her right hand, which felt soiled inside the glove now, she moved more old meat packages aside, stacking them while she burrowed down. How much meat was hidden here?

The freezer didn’t have shelves. She didn’t keep digging beyond six layers, but she saw no bottom to it. As far as Imani could see, the entire space was packed with meat. Maybe fifty packages, she guessed—nearly one package for every year the meat had been undiscovered. The packages were as cold as the garage. During the summers, the old locked freezer must have baked in the heat. Imani didn’t want to guess about the dark moldy spots spattered across the freezer’s inner lid, but she couldn’t help it. Ugh.

Imani hurriedly replaced the packages she’d moved so she could slam the freezer lid back down. It rested slightly askew now because she had disturbed the order within, and she didn’t like the sight of the dark gap where the ancient meat dust might be floating out. The heaviest thing she saw to weigh it down with was the red gas can. Dad might not like her moving it, but she’d rather face his irritation than leave the freezer lid askew.

With the gas can on top of the freezer, the gap was almost gone, the lid’s shrunken seal like pursed lips. Imani still had her gloves on, but her skin tingled. When she was younger, she used to wash her hands over and over, and she wanted to do that again for the first time in years.

She backed away from the freezer and flung open the door to run into the house.

As it turned out, Imani didn’t want to be alone after all.

The faucet in the kitchen’s narrow sink took forever to heat the water, so Imani washed her hands for a long time, rubbing antibacterial dish detergent that smelled like overripe oranges between her fingers, while Sharise helped Mom grill burgers. The orange smell was disgusting, but it was the only soap nearby. Imani had been wearing gloves when she touched the old meat packages—and why had she touched them, exactly?—but her palms were tingling the way they used to in elementary school, as if they were vibrating with cooties. She noticed Mom and Sharise exchanging knowing looks, so she finally turned off the faucet, which whined like it was begging her to finish cleansing herself. She grabbed a dish towel to dry her hands, sure to reach the webby skin between each finger.

The old freezer felt like the beating heart of something important. And dangerous.

Her old therapist, Dr. Kim, had helped her see that she washed her hands because it helped her feel in control. So what if her great-grandmother had a lot of meat? This had been a lodge with rich guests, and maybe rich guests really liked steaks—like, a lot. And then they got sick of eating steak every day and— The packages sat in the freezer for fifty years? With a padlock? It didn’t make sense, just like the white Jeep outside, parked as if the driver had expected to come right back. The deer head made sense in a law-of-the-jungle kind of way, but when Imani clustered the three strange discoveries together, they added up to something that scared her. She didn’t want to freak Sharise out even more by telling her about the meat, so she had collected her second big secret of the day. Secrets sat close to lies, and Dr. Kim had helped her break her lying habit. Imani didn’t want to go back to lying to her family with ease.

Sharise made a face while she flipped the ground beef patties, and for the first time Imani understood her sister’s distaste for meat. Imani was hungry, but the blood bubbling around the browning burgers in the old-fashioned frying pan wasn’t appetizing.