Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  Boldly, she murmured to Marguerite, “She doesn’t care about the family anymore.”

  Marguerite shook her head, shifted her weight. She had always been considerably bigger than Ruth, and she cast a broad shadow in the hot, shadowed room. “Don’t be a fool,” she said, too loudly, and Ruth felt the familiar rush of fury, the raging intimacy she’d felt with this cousin all their lives.

  They’d always been connected. Conceived at the same time (a party, a game), in the womb for the same weeks and months (Ruth nine days longer, maybe a little reluctant, maybe absorbing more). When their mothers visited each other, babes in arms, one girl would cry and then the other. One babbled and the other echoed. When they started to crawl, they crawled toward each other. There had been terrible fights: Marguerite lost her left eye to Ruth’s black claw when they were six, and when they were eleven Marguerite had gashed Ruth’s side with her teeth, scarring deep and wide. At fifteen they’d made their first real kill together—a lost hiker, his flesh bitter from the useless buildup of adrenaline, but his strong heart still beating. That night they’d been initiated together in the moon-filled canyon where Marguerite lived, Hannah and Mary circling and baying and bringing to the girls (delirious with their own power, singly and together) fresh pelts that might have been their own, for Ruth remembered thinking how vulnerable the mothers looked, how naked and old.

  “It’s our time,” Marguerite said now. Surprised, Ruth demanded, “What do you mean?” although she knew.

  Marguerite stood up, on all fours at first and then erect. There was an enormous hump between her shoulder blades, like a baby carried perversely and forever unborn. Ruth had never noticed the hump until this visit, and hadn’t yet asked whether it was the result of an injury or just old age. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

  “I don’t want to hunt,” Ruth said stubbornly.

  “It’s too hot. There are too many people. There’s no need.”

  Marguerite made the impatient, haughty gesture she’d always made when Ruth was being stupid. “We’ll go to the store then,” she said, disgusted.

  Mary stirred, scrabbled her claws across the tattered sheets. Her eyes, milky with cataracts for the past two decades, had turned glittering yellow and keen. Her skin had loosened, become creviced with wrinkles and rough to the touch. In many places, bristly brown hair had forced its way out through the ancient creature’s pores, so that her genitalia, her low-slung teats, the pads of her hands and feet were set in fur.

  Already on her feet to follow her cousin, Ruth bent and touched the folds at the base of her mother’s throat, the sinewy upper arms. It was a caress, a plea. It was also a threat.

  Suddenly Mary rose onto her elbows and knees, and Ruth snatched her hand back, instantly on guard. Mary’s rectum shone pink and oval, set in gray-brown fur. She growled the name “Deborah,” then stretched her limbs out straight and howled.

  “What?” Marguerite asked from the doorway. “Does she know something?”

  Ruth sighed. “I don’t know. I never know. Let’s just get out of here.”

  The moon crouched in a corner of the rosy-gray sky, allowing its power to gather, preparing to spring. It had protuberances from its lower edge like fangs, and a furry nimbus.

  Ruth thought the moon was oddly positioned tonight, too low in the southeast for midsummer and midnight. Streetlights were brighter and bigger than the moon; variegated lights on wingtips and tails of planes coming in for landing at Stapleton were much more distinct. The stylized red S on the Safeway sign glowed powerfully three blocks ahead of them. Overhead and underfoot was radiating, traveling power in the city’s water, electrical, telephone infrastructure. Wondering if Marguerite could feel it, she made sure to touch pipes and poles as she went by.

  Ruth loved the city. Aware of her cousin’s discomfort, she reveled in her own adaptability. She was, in fact, frustrated not to live in it more intimately. Someday she would run away from the house on Ingram Street and make a den for herself under a bridge along the Platte, or in the sewers.

  Someday she would move to New York City, Calcutta, Manila, Shanghai. Some ultimate city whose heart and bowels were already exposed or could easily be. Some place where people living on garbage heaps were grateful for the shelter, where weakened children would die easily and scarcely be missed, where the city belonged to roaming animals as much as to cowering humans.

  Marguerite said, “It’s our time now. It’s time for us to take over.”

  “They’ll never let us.”

  “They don’t have to let us. We just do it. We just take the power, you and I.”

  A shudder passed along Ruth’s flesh, up and down her spine. She said nothing.

  Marguerite had been talking since they were teenagers about the day they would fulfill what she said was their destiny as leaders of the family. Ruth had never been nearly as certain as her cousin that such a thing would ever happen, but it had always seemed so far away that she’d been willing to participate in the fantasy rather than antagonize Marguerite, who was formidable.

  So over the many years they’d planned and practiced and acted out. How they would learn everything they could learn from their mothers, including how to overthrow them. How they would reunite the mountain and the city factions of the family into one invincible unit, or failing that, how they would set up an apocalyptic conflict that would decimate the family and leave it open for their usurpation.

  How they would always be allies, but Ruth knew better than to believe that. Marguerite was a consummate opportunist. Most of the time, Ruth remembered not to trust her fully, remembered that Marguerite would not hesitate to kill her or abandon her or use her in some way when the time was finally right.

  Sometimes lately Ruth forgot that, or abruptly didn’t understand what it meant. But mostly she remembered, and understood, and tried to be careful.

  A kid rattled past on a skateboard, nearly knocking Marguerite down. Marguerite had taken the first two or three long strides after him before Ruth stepped into her path.

  A black-and-white cat cut in front of them and ran out into the street. Ruth stopped still, held her breath, and followed the animal only with her eyes. Marguerite kept walking, either not having noticed the cat or scorning it.

  The cat settled onto the center line, which would be warmer and smoother than the unpainted pavement, and began to groom itself. A car came through the green light too fast and screeched to a stop not a foot from the self-possessed feline. Headlights gleamed on the white parts of the fur and made the yellow eyes, which were really so impassive as to be almost blank, glitter as if cleverly. The blat of the car horn, the curses of the driver and passengers, the thrumming bass and drums from the radio, the insolent purring of the cat—all these sounds and sub-sounds made Ruth’s ears ache and her groin itch unbearably. Confused, she squatted and rubbed herself along the sidewalk.

  The cat finished its washing, stood up and stretched, and crossed placidly to the opposite sidewalk. Ruth yearned to chase it down, but traffic had already filled in between them. Besides, an animal that small was hardly worth the effort.

  She straightened and hurried to join her cousin, who was nearly to the next corner.

  In the middle of the block between Grove and Federal was a bright yellow house set close behind a bright yellow fence that abutted the sidewalk. Marguerite’s head lifted and her nostrils flared. Ruth smelled it, too: the strong, sweet odor of sex that wafted tonight from the screened porch. On some nights, not this one, it would be easy to scale the fence and rip through the flimsy screen. Her mouth watered.

  As they passed the uncurtained side windows of Fire Station No. 12, Marguerite sidled all the way to the curb and Ruth, too, felt exposed. Lights were on inside and so her reflection was indistinct, but it startled her. She raised a clawed hand, drew her lips back from her teeth, and saw the suggestion of both movements in the glass. Marguerite’s image was hulking and translucent.

  Like every neighborhood child, Ruth s
tared in for a moment at the firefighters, who were eating a meal at the long table. One of them saw her and waved. The pale back of another one’s neck showed between his dark hair and the black collar of his uniform shirt. Ruth stepped back, almost off the sidewalk.

  Two spotlights were mounted under the eaves in boxlike metal housings. Careful to avoid getting the light directly in her eyes, Ruth stood on tiptoe to check the housings for birds’ nests, but this time they were empty. Last year, the six blue-and-white eggs, though tiny, had been succulent.

  “Did you think,” Marguerite was asking in a low, rough voice, “that they were just going to hand it to us? They had to fight for their power, too, you know. Why do you think the four sisters came here from Pennsylvania in the first place? Because Grandmother Ursule wouldn’t step aside.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “Probably.”

  “They believe they’ll live forever, too, you know. Our mothers. They believe they’ve been wonderfully and consistently cruel, enough to earn the curse of immortality.” She laughed a little at the phrase. Now that she’d said it, she wasn’t at all sure what it meant.

  “Even werewolves aren’t really immortal, no matter how accomplished they are. If we have to kill them, there are ways.”

  A three-story brown house sat at the back of the next lot, among pine trees and thick spiky yuccas. From it tonight came the odor of blood, pungent enough that Ruth was surprised other people weren’t noticing. She had detoured well up into the curving front sidewalk before she realized what she was doing and circled back out again. A red-and-white banner was strung between two trees. She always had trouble reading it; she tried again now. It was so high and faded that many of the words were illegible. It proclaimed something about the Blood of Jesus and the Body of Christ.

  Ruth was suddenly ravenous. Eating couldn’t wait until she’d reached the too bright supermarket across the too crowded street, found cheap hamburger among all the other plasticized and barely odoriferous cuts in the long chill aisles, stood in line with other midnight shoppers who all had their own peculiar reasons for being out so late and who either avoided each other’s eyes or tried to start up conversations in an annoying impression of camaraderie, paid with bills and change that made increasingly less sense to her, and finally made her way to the deepest of the not-very-deep shadows in the parking lot. Eating couldn’t wait while she maneuvered her country cousin through the city mazes. She had to feed now.

  The Dumpster behind the 7-Eleven was, as usual, overflowing. Ruth slipped behind the brick half-wall that surrounded it on three sides, crouched, and pawed through the spilled garbage. Waxed paper cups, napkins with food stains of various textures and colors, candy wrappers. Once, even hungrier than this, she’d tried eating paper products, and she’d choked. Beer bottles, plastic spoons, cans.

  Finally she came upon a half-eaten hot dog sprinkled with dirt and coffee grounds, and shoved it into her mouth. The sharp, unpleasant tastes of onions and mustard made her grimace, but the meat was enough like meat to be edible, and it assuaged her hunger somewhat.

  She was rummaging through the garbage again in search of some tidbit for her cousin when Marguerite snapped, “Don’t bother.”

  Ruth looked up. “What’s the matter? City food not good enough for you?”

  “Not clean enough,” the other woman declared, and moved away.

  For a long time then, the two of them stood on the northwest corner of the intersection of 26th and Federal, trying to cross Federal. All the red and yellow and green and red and white lights confused Ruth, although she’d crossed here numerous times before. Some of them blinked, or ran together, or changed color as she looked at them, and she didn’t know what any of it meant. She couldn’t tell what cars were going to do, whether they would turn or stop or hit her, and the uninterrupted noise of them both frightened and infuriated her.

  Twice she started across, with Marguerite hanging back just enough to break her stride. Each time, the gap she thought she’d seen in the traffic wasn’t there. She gasped and growled. She pressed herself against the signal pole, shaking her head irritably as the paper and cardboard sign advertising yard sales and lost cats fluttered into her face. One car roared by so close she could smell the hot metal of it; she swung her clawed hand but missed, and the car kept going, oblivious to them.

  Someone whistled. Ruth’s head snapped up and swiveled as she tried to locate the source of the sound and its meaning. The whistle came again, from some distance now, and moving. She couldn’t tell where it was in relation to her.

  A young woman and a toddler came running across the street. The little boy lost his footing, almost fell, and swung shrieking from his mother’s hand. The girl yelled at him to watch what he was doing. Excited by their rapid, ragged motion and by the vulnerability of the child, Marguerite leaned toward them, and once again Ruth stopped her, pulled her back onto the curb just as a pickup took the corner too fast and too tight. The speed and noise of it, the heat of the rubber and metal so close to her flesh, aroused and angered them both.

  Ruth collected her thoughts and remembered then how to cross the street. The lights suddenly made perfect sense: she watched the signal to her right until it turned yellow, timed her advance into Federal against the trajectory of cars turning off 26th from both directions, and was several steps beyond the opposite curb and ahead of Marguerite when the light changed again.

  Marguerite was panting. “I’ll wait here.”

  “No. It’s not safe. Too many people. Come in with me.”

  She sprang up onto the curb and, bent low, ran along it. Marguerite followed. No one seemed to notice. Shoulders hunched up protectively around her head, she raced to the sloped end of the curb, leapt across to the sidewalk, and waited impatiently the two or three seconds it took for the automatic door to slide open.

  It was aggressively cold in the store. Marguerite recoiled from the rush of chilled air and sniffed it suspiciously. Light bored into Ruth’s eyes—much too bright white light made more glaring by its tinge of blue, shadowless, flickering almost subliminally in her peripheral vision.

  The turnstile stymied her, although she knew she’d gone through it numerous times before. Marguerite dropped onto all fours and hastily pulled herself up again, growling in her throat. Increasingly frantic that someone would notice them, Ruth prowled back and forth between the checkout stands and the floor-to-ceiling windows, which were so completely filled in with posters and gigantic disconnected letters that she wouldn’t have been able to trust anything she saw through it even if the reflections hadn’t made the glass almost opaque.

  Finally, she pushed herself under the turnstile, which could have been some sort of elaborately baited trap but apparently was not. Marguerite hesitated, then did the same, although her larger bulk was harder to push through. If anyone saw them do it or thought it odd, there was no indication. The few people Ruth saw around them—a late-night shopper or two, a checker in a red smock, a security guard jingling his keys—might have been cardboard cutouts.

  For long moments then, Ruth and Marguerite stood trembling just inside the store, while Ruth tried to get her bearings. Too close to her was a uniformly gleaming, odorless pack of shopping carts, each nested so neatly into the next and the next that she couldn’t distinguish the form or function or intent of any one of them. Their handles made red slashes across the expanse of gray; she knew the red wasn’t blood.

  The aisles and shelves made very little sense, although she was dimly aware that there had been times when their arrangement had been quite clear and usable to her. She wished she didn’t remember that; she kept glimpsing and then losing again, into the tangled underbrush of instinct and acquired urban knowledge, the meaning and purpose of all these trails. The more confused she became, the more palpable were both her fury and her hunger, and Marguerite could hardly control herself at all.

  Remembering that there were directories, Ruth squinted into the glare until she thought s
he’d located them, so high that her neck cramped when she tried to read them. Vaguely she knew that they told something about where to find food in this place, but the symbols were pieces of a code that tonight was utterly inaccessible to her. Even the red aisle numbers that she did recognize on the right and left margins of each sign blended so thoroughly into the gray background that they might have been designed for protective coloration instead of to communicate anything to her.

  Ruth was not afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of. When the moon was full again and her strength and wits had returned, she would come back to this frightening place. Alone.

  But now she had to find something to eat. Her own hunger was a creature prowling inside her, gnawing at her entrails and the cavities of her body and mind. Marguerite would, if not fed, find something to feed herself; the prospect intensified Ruth’s worry. Worse was the ravening presence of her mother, waiting in the dark layered house on Ingram Street for Ruth to bring her something that would assuage her hunger. Her mother was insatiable.

  But she had to get out of here. Now.

  She strode down an aisle that led nowhere.

  “This is sick,” Marguerite snarled beside her. “No wonder you’re such a coward. No wonder you–'

  On one side were items she could identify—milk, cheese. It was even colder here, and cold was all she could smell. Turning away from the cold, she was hemmed in by boxes and cans and bags of things she had no names for and certainly no use. Light gleamed off too smooth surfaces. Colors were random, out of place and unnaturally vivid. Her shoes clicked and squeaked on the tiles, but there were no echoes to tell her how far away from anything she was.

  Panic gathered like anger in her throat and the pit of her stomach. She lengthened her stride until it was nearly a lope.

  Randomly she turned a corner. It seemed to her that she’d just been here, was going in circles. Then it seemed she’d never seen any of this before. She didn’t know where Marguerite was, and it was more than she could think about.