Animals We Are

by Valerie Brandy

  ANIMALS

  WE ARE

  By

  Valerie Brandy

  Copyright © 2019 Little Leo Media, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Yosemite National Park is a public space visited by 4 million people each year, located in Central California. Specific landmarks mentioned may be visited by contacting the National Park Service. For more information, visit: nps.gov.

  ISBN 978-1-7342792-0-7

  Cover stock photo provided by D-Keine.

  Photo of the author by Don Q. Hannah.

  Pine Tree separator icons courtesy of IconFinder

  Copy Editing provided by Sharon Lennon-Mehlschau and Linda Triol.

  Cover Photoshop provided by Magicthe24TH via Fiverr.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published by Little Leo Media, Inc.

  To request permission to use passages from this book in any context other than a review, please contact the publisher at littleleomedia@gmail.com.

  Visit the author’s website at: www.valeriebrandy.com

  Dedication

  For my Mom,

  who taught me to bite back—

  -- and for all the girls

  who are finding their fangs.

  FACT:

  The myth of alpha males leading wolf packs is entirely false. Wild wolves live in family units in which two equal partners raise children into maturity.

  1

  Yosemite Valley

  My hands are wide and blistered, swollen with intent: to seek, to clasp, to choke, to burn.

  They claw at wet Earth, red palms seeking traction on the side of the riverbank. A precipice above promises life, promises safety. I stretch toward it.

  It’s out of reach.

  Black stripes of soil cake over my nails, fingers clinging to the bank’s ice-bitten incline. It’s an ugly polish, but perfectly suitable, given the circumstances. Escaping death is woman’s work, here in the place where roots burrow deep but branches reach tall, stretched always between two opposing expectations. She must survive, but she must look good while she does it.

  Beneath me, a chasm of a river splits the Earth in half, calling me toward it like a Siren to a sailor, its white-capped waters offering a beautiful demise. Beauty is pain. If I could let myself fall, it wouldn’t take long to slide backward off the bank, my hair splayed wide, mouth open in a primal scream, revealing teeth that haven’t been brushed in days. The ugliness of it all would be my final act of rebellion. I’d hit the water and sink deep, letting the cold slow my movements, thinking the whole time about the snow, and the forest, and the way it made space for me when no one else did.

  But then again, I might think of my enemy. Somewhere in the wilderness, a murderer has kidnapped the man I love, threatening us both with death and extinction. As the water fills my lungs, I might— on the verge of death— think of that opponent, faceless, taunting, waiting for me in the shadows of some place I can’t reach.

  It’s too big a risk. I’ll have to survive, instead.

  My body thrashes, sensing the lure of death. My lungs rattle as they search for air. My eyes narrow, scanning the sheer slope of the bank, blinded by panic. Limbs tangle, scratching on instinct, but then something strange happens:

  I laugh.

  Even through the terror, the joke is impossible to miss. I’ve become a fish. A gangly, idiotic fish who swam too close to the river’s edge and stranded herself. The thought causes me to stop struggling, and my slide toward the water halts long enough for me to register a new strategy— stillness.

  It’s in this moment that a mental hole emerges— a vacuum in my world-view. Just as the melting frost fills the gaps in the soil, the cavity in my mind swells with epiphany. The dirt on my nails takes on new meaning, spotlighting some part of myself I’ve always known, but looked away from. It’s an essential piece of my being the world asked me to bury— a piece I betrayed by agreeing.

  I’ve concealed this slice of myself for many years, hiding her behind smiles and pink dresses, lipstick and “so-sorrys.” Apologies work best to dull the glint of her teeth. The bars of her cage are built on “after-yous.” I’ve hidden her away deep inside, restrained by padlocks and chains. But now?

  I need her.

  Suddenly, my hands are not hands, but paws, my nails sharp and ready to slice. My teeth are not teeth but fangs, equipped to rip out the throat of the person who did this to me.

  My name is Zoe.

  And I am an animal.

  2

  Friday

  One week earlier…

  I’m new, the world is infinite, and my life will always be made of beginnings.

  The words tumble through my brain as our little Subaru zips up a snake of a road, weaving its way toward Yosemite. Pristine, crisp air glides over the silver hood, four new tires bouncing on uneven pavement. Mike wanted to rent a Prius and I wanted an SUV, so we met in the middle. Compromise. A thing I’m learning to live with.

  Mike glances at me from the driver’s seat.

  “It has more get up and go than you thought, right?”

  “Maybe,” I shoot back, pretending to check the dashboard. “Are you happy with the gas mileage, mister environmentalist? If not I’ll pop open the floor hatch and we can Flintstone our way up the mountain.”

  “Not in these shoes,” Mike grins, opening up the external vents, filling the car with the scent of pine trees and possibility. It makes my head swim, heavy with the promise of an outdoor adventure.

  The passenger-side window glides down with ease when I press the automatic button. I un-click my seatbelt, sticking my upper body out the window.

  Sheets of green whiz by; dense forest spiraling into forever. I’ve always loved the wilderness, if only because it’s a place where no one expects anything of you.

  In my day-to-day life, I’m a hotel manager, and the job requires me to focus on appearances. We’re an upscale establishment. Chandeliers trickle from the hotel ceilings like sticky icing on the side of a cake. Walls covered in dense floral wallpaper muffle the secrets of our guests, framed by drapes so soft you could fall into them and never find your way back out again. It’s all about decorum, there, and it takes a special kind of person to do the job. Ninety percent of my time is spent addressing grievances with, “We’re sincerely sorry for that, ma’am,” and “Apologies, sir.” The other ten percent involves smiling even though I want to smack someone. But none of that matters out here, in the wild. The forest doesn’t care if I’m rude, or dirty, or a beast. She only cares that I show up.

  My fingers turn white, gripping the hard edge of the window. My head tosses back, and my lips form a perfect “o” as I howl into the infinite everything.

  “Watch out everybody, she’s on the prowl,” Mike reaches for the back of my jeans and puts a hand on my ass, and I whip around like a dog who doesn’t like his tail grabbed.

  “You better watch it.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll bite you.” I kiss his neck— reckless— not caring that he might take his eyes off the twisting mountain road. It’s been too long since I’ve had a vacation, and now that I’m in wolf-mode, practical Zoe has left the vehicle.

  “Wow,” Mike pretends to be surprised. “When
I signed up to drive for Uber, I had no idea I’d have such friendly passengers…”

  This is a game we play sometimes; that we’re strangers who are just meeting.

  “You’re about to get a five star review…”

  “Jesus, Zoe, the road—”

  “It’s your fault for bringing me into the wild,” I tease him, still thinking about what it would feel like to be a wolf, with no one to answer to except the forest herself. The wind whips through my open window, and I turn my attention away from Mike’s neck and back to the vast landscape outside. This time I lean even further into the openness, sitting on the edge of the window frame like a bird on a perch, one arm extended wide, invincible.

  “Careful,” Mike lets his foot off the gas a little, always the more cautious half of our partnership. “And I believe I requested a tropical setting,” he sighs.

  It’s true. I forced him to come to Yosemite, and promised we’d do something tropical another time. It was a rare moment for me. Usually I let the other person have their way, no questions asked. But years of therapy in carpeted offices littered with chimes and crystals have made me more mindful of my patterns. When I met Mike, I promised I’d break my bad habits. Apparently, I’m a people-pleaser who “struggles to voice her needs, is habitually distrustful of others, and creates distance as a form of self-protection.” It’s a nice way of saying that I’m an aloof bitch who copes with fear of abandonment by down-playing her own feelings, desires, and investment in a relationship. People never know where they stand with me.

  There’s a kind of love story— you’ve heard it before— where the princess is trapped in a castle, and the prince comes to save her. She knows at once he’s the one, and they live happily ever after.

  Ours is not that kind of love story.

  In our story, Mike is the princess. He is kind, and good, and trusting. Flowers spring up on the grass where he walks. His smile makes the sun shine brighter. Animals gravitate toward him because they can sense the purity of his heart.

  Meanwhile, I’m the gnarly ogre who guards the castle bridge. I question everyone who dares pass, making them answer three riddles before proceeding. If they don’t answer correctly, I cast them into the moat, caustic and brittle in my conclusion that they’re not to be trusted.

  The hotel I work at is my fortress, surrounding my ugliness with beauty, cloaking the worst of me in wrappings so lush my shortcomings are easily overlooked.

  When I told Mike about my metaphor for our relationship, I half-expected him to come to his senses and break up with me.

  “Don’t you see? You fell in love with the ogre when you should’ve waited for a prince!”

  He laughed. “What can I say? The big ears really do it for me.”

  That’s the thing about Mike. He has his own kind of magic. It enables him to look past the external— the thorns and barbs around the flower of a person— straight into the core of who they are. He only sees the best in me.

  An alarm blares, taking me by surprise and making my hand slip from the edge of the window. Suddenly, I’m teetering toward the black asphalt, scraping against the car’s smooth paint toward oblivion. I’m sure I’m going to fall, but Mike grabs onto the belt loop in my jeans, pulling me back into the car. We weave into the other lane, but there’s no oncoming traffic out here in the wilderness. If we were still in Silverlake, we’d be dead.

  “You okay?” He asks, a little shaken.

  “Yeah,” I answer, trying not to let on how close I was to becoming road kill.

  There’s a moment of silence in which we’re both considering the fragility of what’s stable, and the nearness of disaster. Then, a silky sound echoes beside me as Mike uses the driver controls to roll-up the passenger-side window.

  We lean in to look at Mike’s phone— a text message is the source of the alarm bell— strapped to the dashboard in a holder connected to the vents. It’s not beeping anymore, but it shakes as the car hits rough asphalt, as if it dreads the name on its screen as much as Mike does:

  Cassandra.

  Mike groans, “Not again.”

  “Do you want to read it?”

  “No,” he hesitates. “Do you?”

  It’s a rare invitation. Mike is like a piece of sea-glass, multi-faceted and saturated, hard to look away from but still easy to see through. He doesn’t keep secrets, and he’s an open book about everything in our relationship, except her. He’s given me the basics: a disgruntled ex who stalks him, new addresses and phone numbers be damned. He’s been fair in sharing details, and revealed that he had a stalker as soon as things between us got serious. He said he wanted me to decide if it was something I could live with, and he’d understand if it wasn’t. I stayed, but the ogre in me keeps one eye open, looking not at Cassandra, but at Mike.

  Strangely, Cassandra herself doesn’t bother me. In fact, I think I might like her. The letters she sends, sprayed with perfume, soft and sweet, not so strong as to be cloying. The way she leaves the mail by the door, stacked in order from important to junk. She might lack boundaries, but even in her trespasses, Cassandra tries to be unobtrusive. I’ve never met her in-person, but her actions describe her character. There’s a permanent question in everything she does, like she’s walking through life with her hand patiently raised, waiting to be called on by a teacher who’s no longer there. It’s a side-effect of some deeper phenomenon all women experience, one I can relate to but can’t quite put into words. The closest I’ve come to describing it is that it’s like being told you’re a brunette, but looking in the mirror and seeing a blonde. It’s some fundamental mismatch between who you are, and how others see you, and I know if I met Cassandra— if I mentioned it, even just the start— she’d understand immediately. If she weren’t stalking my boyfriend, I’m pretty sure we’d be friends.

  No, it’s not Cassandra who makes my inner ogre raise the drawbridge. It’s Mike, and his refusal to disclose the details of their break up. My ogre doesn’t like his answers to my riddles.

  “She’s sick,” is his favorite refrain, his dark eyes webbed with sympathy. “She’s not right in the head. One day she’ll get help.”

  He claims he’s trying to shield me from something that’s “his problem,” but his vagueness makes me sure there’s more to it. But then I remember that I have eyes coated in doubt, and that I’m always looking for the worst in people, even in the very best of moments. In the comfortable darkness of night, wrapped in sheets we spent too much money on, the TV humming with the evening news— in the seconds before sleep, when any other woman would roll over and tell the man she loves how glad she is to have him, I curl into Mike’s arms and ask a wordless question. It’s one I can’t utter aloud, but can still reach out and touch, passing it between my fingers like a lucky coin I won’t get rid of.

  Is there a monster in you?

  He’s done nothing to deserve the question, and I know enough about myself that I’m sure I’d be asking it anyway, even if Cassandra didn’t exist. It’s occurred to me that I could, one day, stop asking it, but that will be the moment Mike reveals the worst in him. Call me superstitious, but Murphy’s Law applies. The night you don’t check for monsters under the bed is the night one eats you.

  Temporarily invited into Mike and Cassandra’s secret world, I pull the phone from its holster. It’s a weapon in my hands, explosive and unstable. I type in Mike’s lock code. He gave it to me once to check an email and never changed it. Like I said, he’s sea-glass. Other guys won’t let you see inside a sock drawer, but on date number one, Mike will give you his banking information and mother’s telephone number.

  “Drove past your office,” I read aloud, wondering what Cassandra’s voice sounds like and if it’s anything like mine. “Didn’t see you through the window. Where are you?” The words are followed by a few kissy face emojis. Predictable and a little tacky, but lacking in pretense. That’s another thing I like about Cassandra. She’s too screwed up to pretend to be anyone other than exactly who she is. I
search for Mike’s reaction, but for a moment he’s an enigma, unreadable. “At least she doesn’t know where we are,” I prompt.

  “That’s true,” he answers, but the slant in his voice says it doesn’t make him feel any better.

  He looks like a person who’s just run through his highschool hallways naked, only to realize it wasn’t a dream after all. I understand why.

  Dating in adulthood— when you’re past your college freshness, and your stories have grown longer with more cryptic endings— means coming into a relationship with a certain amount of baggage. We all have it. Dusty luggage with too many stickers, corners shredded by conveyor belts, locks that don’t work and zippers that get stuck.

  At twenty-eight, I’ve spent well over a decade unpacking some of the worst suitcases you’ve ever seen, only to repack them again and send their owners to the nearest bus depot.

  First there was Dave, who forgot to mention that he’d folded up a wife inside his carry-on. Then there was Aaron, who bundled up a debilitating fear of commitment and placed it in the front pocket of his sensible duffle-bag, to be removed only when two years of energy had been spent “working on the relationship.” He got married six months later, unpacking another surprise: he wasn’t afraid of commitment. He just didn’t love me enough. Last but not least was Jerome, whose baggage was basically just that he was an asshole.

  Each of these relationships left its mark on me, until one day I opened up my own suitcase (a wheel-along weekender with very comfortable handles), and found an inability to trust anyone, at all, ever. It was probably always there, hiding under crumbs and receipts, but it doubled in size, and I fed it daily like a beloved pet. It kept me safely alienated from the perils of love for awhile.