by Ellen Datlow
“Well, how can I believe that now?”
Just forget we ever had this conversation, I didn’t suggest. Because if she couldn’t see how important she was to me by now, how she had pretty much always been the only person whose good opinion I truly wanted to keep, then I certainly didn’t know what more I could do to convince her.
But that was how it’d always been for me since that day under the house, that night in the hall, though it rarely occurred to me unless I stopped long enough to feel it: how sometimes I felt so utterly false, an empty mask over a hollow, echoing shell. Or how other times—more times than I liked to admit, in fact—I felt anything but.
I graduated, got a job and did it diligently enough not to be fired, making no enemies yet forming no attachments. Mornings I arrived early, a smile on my face; nights I went straight home, watched TV, slept dreamlessly. Nothing changed, or not very much. Nothing changed, until it did.
Until it all did.
The building I lived in that year was a 1970s-era tower of furnished bachelor and one-bedroom rental suites, the best I could afford until I got my CPA certification. The elevators broke down a lot and the stairwells stank. I learned to recognize people by their faces, even if I never knew their names—the gaunt, too-young hooker I sometimes passed down on the street at night, loitering next to the Neighborhood Watch sign in nothing but a Maple Leafs jersey and short-shorts; a flannel-jacketed guy, black beard so thick you could barely see his mouth; a heavyset lady with a Jamaican accent I only ever met coming out of the mail-room, who always told me exactly the same three stories about her grandkids. I was counting days and dollars towards a telecommuting job I’d already interviewed for and a different apartment, so I kept my head down, nodding politely at anyone who approached me.
The basement laundry suite was technically closed after nine p.m., but the lock had been broken since I’d moved in and nobody cared if you ran loads at night, which was useful to an insomniac whose days were spent cramming tax law. More often than not, I found it easier by far to fall asleep to the washer-dryer’s rhythmic susurration than I ever could in bed. I was drifting off that night, head down on my arms, when the door suddenly slammed open: Blackbeard stood there, mouth working as though he was chewing taffy, staring just past me (the closest he ever got to eye contact with anybody).
Excuse me? I think I thought about saying; my own mouth might have opened, at least part-way. But it was already too late.
“You’re . . . very rude,” he blurted, before I could. “It’s not right to be—like that, you don’t have to . . . You don’t feel, don’t want—it’s fine, that’s fine, it’s okay. But you don’t, you don’t just get to—fucking IGNORE people!”
No warning at all before that last shouted word or the punch he slammed past my ear, right into the cement wall behind. Any potential scream choked off short, a hoarse gurgle; my gut spasmed like a full-body standing crunch, as Blackbeard shook his bloodied fist in my face. “You shouldn’t get to—you don’t. Get to do that.”
Oh, Jesus, I remember thinking, through a buzzy, electrical blur. This isn’t supposed to happen. I’m moving out in five weeks . . . four? I don’t, I don’t, I can’t—
Mimicking his own words without thinking as if he’d actually managed to hit me, so hard he’d gotten inside my head. And then, and then: the light fuzzed out as Blackbeard pushed in, eyes still averted but his other hand lashing out, anything but gentle. I felt his fingers grip my jaw and twist, thumb digging into the hinge; felt the muscle spark, my scalp heave upwards, like it was tensing to jump off my skull. Followed by pain—not the kind you’re expecting, though. Or me, either.
From within, like thin cold hands inside my throat, clawing upwards; sharp wings along my tongue, scoring the muscles so my scream dropped even as it broke my voice-box, hoarsening, blood-hot. I lurched forward, spasming, to loose a gush of bile right at his feet . . . saw him jump back from the hot splash, exclaiming, even as something far more solid rocketed its shimmering way out along with the rest. I remember Blackbeard spinning to stare as it whipped around the laundry room, eyes wide, like maybe it was the first thing he’d really ever seen in his life, his own mouth wide—
Shut that, for Christ’s sake, I might’ve told him, if I’d only been able to speak. Not even knowing why I would’ve wanted to warn him in the first place, aside from the simple fact that he was human, like me. Like we both were. Like that thing . . . wasn’t.
(Still isn’t.)
I knew that light, you see, long before I recognized the noise that came along with it. That dim, sick, wax- and meat-clogged insect trill. Dead Tinkerbell’s ghost risen from the grave, and not some long-gone feverish trauma nightmare, after all: first in the dirt under the deck, then in the dusty upper hall, then inside me, then him—but not for long.
It plunged, straight between his lips and down his throat. I saw his neck bulge, heard his breathing clog, choke as he fell back against the wall, sank down, clawing his Adam’s apple. Saw the bulge disappear through his collarbones’ gate while he threw his head back, trying to scream. Saw blood burst upwards, thick and raw, like he was a blender someone’d turned on after forgetting to close the lid. I watched him spasm and drum and buck and bleed and shrink as if being deflated, consumed, a plastic bag in a fire—face slack, eyes collapsed, from dying frenzy to motionless corpse in an instant. Watched a blood-outline briefly limn the linoleum beneath him before quick-drying Hiroshima-style to black, to grey, to dust.
I clung to the nearest dryer, still warm but no longer rumbling, sobbing for breath and trembling far too much to stand; I think there actually might have been tears on my face, though it’s not like I had a hand free to check. The silence stretched on: one beat, two. Two and a half.
Then: Blackbeard’s throat swelled once more, jaw hinging back open. Something clambered out of him, glistening fiercely; something gaunt and tiny, that same dimly ringing clot of light now stained purple by a coating of gore, bright red over bluish white. Something with hands like microscopic spiders and joints hinged high above its back, leaf-wings blurred like a hummingbird’s hazing the air, flicking the very last of him away with each successive beat—crimson, then pink, then clear, faster and faster, an explosion turned halo. Sparks falling upwards, scarring the eye like solder.
And right in the centre, brightness-wreathed the way sun looks through ice-slicked petals on a frozen flower, a face reminiscent of nothing so much as the skull I’d once touched turned inside out was angled my way: black bug-eyes, mandible-set jaws, teeth like tiny bone needles. Seeming to grin in sheer delight now it could finally see me again first-hand after all those years stuck down inside my chest, fluttering there in the wet red dark like a second beating heart.
This time, it was one of my neighbours who found me, passed out cold on the laundry-room floor next to a pile of Blackbeard’s empty clothes, left balled up in his wake as if he’d simply evaporated out of them. The cops they insisted I call really only briefly considered me a suspect in his disappearance, especially after his mother let them into his room and they discovered that weird half worshipful, half threatening stuff he’d written about me all over the walls. I took advantage of the attack by using it as an excuse to move out far sooner than scheduled, packing up so quick I think I might have left that last load of laundry behind me. One way or the other, I’d been in my new apartment for at least two months already before I woke up feeling nauseous.
Four positive home pregnancy tests and a doctor’s trip later, I found out why. Mom wanted me to get an abortion, assuming Blackbeard had to be the father, but I told her he couldn’t be—I’d had a rape kit done as part of the police investigation, taken the morning-after pill just in case, the whole nine yards. I claimed I’d had a one-night stand during my recovery period and just hadn’t wanted to admit it, but that I was more than ready to raise the kid on my own, if I had to.
Given the circumstances of my daughter’s not-so-immaculate conception, I think Mom’s firs
t guess was more likely true than not, in some insane way.
But it isn’t as if she looks like him, thank God, any more than she looks like me.
Or anyone else.
And now, years later, I lie here thinking how neatly the thing she used to be must have re-folded itself into my body, having finally fed enough to be seen clearly—a bright red streak down my gaping throat, knife to sheath, stuffing the scream back down. How she must have curled into my womb, nesting, waiting for me to quicken.
Knocking at the inside of my as yet un-cracked pelvis to be let out into this world, so she could occupy it in what passes for her version of flesh, the way her long-dead former self surely used to.
These days, along with my usual work organizing other people’s money, I also make jewelry and sell it on Etsy. It’s stress relief and a second stream of income combined, something to keep my hands busy as I watch the same bunch of too-young movies over and over, just because my daughter likes them: Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, classic Pixar, anything Disney. Just sort and string, string and sort, match colour to texture to pattern—let each necklace grow organically, intuitively, in the spaces between my own long, slow breaths. As a form of self-comfort it’s cheaper than booze or anti-depressants, and better for the complexion; as a form of meditation, it certainly helps the hours pass. And assembling the components helps me plan my free time, too, now that my daughter’s old enough to ride the subway on her own, surrounded by that floating gaggle of girls whose names clog the smartphone she’s had since she was six. Now that she has her own devices she can leave me from, and I can leave her to—all the interests I tried to distract her with when she was undeveloped enough that something old and odd and hungry still occasionally seemed to peep out through her eyes: dance lessons, art lessons, drama lessons. The skills she uses to construct a mask of humanity no one will take notice of long enough to ask questions.
Her teachers like her, apparently; everybody does. Her marks are high. She has social cred I could only dream of at her age. And sometimes the other mothers on my playdate phone tree chide me gently about the amount of freedom I allow her, how I’ll often just hand her a twenty and my MetroPass, telling her to go have fun. She knows to text me if she wants to stay out later than discussed, for all I rarely answer. I suppose, on some level, what I’m waiting to see is exactly how long I can go without talking to her before she simply decides to never come home at all.
It’s a dangerous world, Emme, they say. Think how you’d feel if you lost her. To which I simply smile, sometimes having to physically restrain myself from replying: I should be so lucky, ladies.
But I’ve never been that lucky.
Last night she was out with her besties, probably chaperoned by Linda’s mom (or Rosie’s, or Ning’s, or Gurinder’s—anyone but me, obviously). I sat in front of the TV with my nature shows on and my bead-box out, wondering why it ever surprised me to consider that the world might once have been full of whatever ended up buried beneath my deck, whole shining swarms of them, fluttering schools flocking like starling across the skies in search of prey and singing their pale, trilling songs, their creepy ghost-insect buzz: bioluminescent, poisonous, each one a miracle designed to latch on and bite deep, tearing free chunks of man-meat with their tiny lamprey mouths. Each one spinning silent yet deadly through the air like sparkler-drift, like acid snowflakes, like glass bells lit from inside and thrown high ‘til gravity pulled them back to ground, wounding on contact.
Feeling around in the box, I felt my fingers touch something familiar and pulled it out, frowning: the nail. I hadn’t remembered I still had it. So I polished it with oil, knotted it on a length of rawhide and tied it around my neck like a pendant, tucking it away under my shirt. And when my daughter came home at last, she opened her arms for a hug before flinching away when that rusty iron length of it touched her chest, even through a layer of cloth: “That hurts” she said, with just a hint of surprised dislike. “Wow, Mom—what is that, down there? Ugh.”
I tapped my own chest, drawing a circle around the nail as it swung, angled down, pointing the way to my Caesarian scar. “Just something new, repurposed. Want to see?”
Her eyes widened slightly, strangeness flickering just beneath the surface, an anglerfish’s phantom lure. “Pass, thanks. What’s for dinner?”
I’d made her favourite earlier, liver and bacon, no onions. She ate it with her hands, licked the juices from her fingers, then waited until she thought I wasn’t looking to tip up the plate for the rest. After her bath I saw her standing in front of the mirror, frowning, a hand over her breastbone. “I can still feel it,” she complained. “That thing of yours. Mom, you have to get rid of it.”
“Of course,” I agree. “Did it scratch you?”
“It burnt me. Look.”
She fanned her fingers, showing me a small, red mark between the nubs where her breasts still hadn’t quite grown, as yet. She’s not shy, my daughter, but I know it annoys her that other girls already have boyfriends, or the middle-school version thereof. Tall and slim she might be—taller than me, soon—but she reads like a child, an orphan princess, a wanderer through wooded places. She won’t let me cut her silky hair, which falls to her mid-back. Her hands are long, good for piano. No one can tell me what colour her eyes are, so large and odd, sockets like an owl’s.
I am at the wide world’s mercy, those eyes say, always. No one is like me, not exactly. Come closer, don’t be afraid—see me, pity me, help me. I need you. I need.
When she goes to hug me again before bed, she finds she simply can’t: the iron’s just too disturbing to her, even hidden inside my fist. It makes her brows furrow. And I want to be strong, looking at her—hopefully, this will be enough to make her leave, eventually. Hopefully I’ll never be weak enough to take it off again.
From the way I talk about my mom sometimes, you’d assume I hate her, though the opposite is true. But I never write about the parts of my life where she and my dad were together, when I was untaintedly happy, or thought I was. I can barely remember what it was like to be that person.
I mean . . . in high school I fell in love with a boy, and every time we were together it felt as if we were wrapped so tight we lived inside each other, a strange knot of bliss, always tightening. The actual time we spent enmeshed was relatively brief, but it remade the world. And the minute we broke up it was like none of that ever happened—there was no point in remembering any of it, because all it meant was that at the time, I just hadn’t realized yet that it didn’t mean anything except how stupid I’d been not to see the end of it all coming, to think I’d actually been loved.
He was very upset when I told him that. “Well, it meant a lot to me,” he said. “Obviously not,” I replied. “Considering you broke my fucking heart.”
So that’s what it’s like, for me: my parents broke my heart, and after they divorced none of my “happy” childhood meant shit. I’ve enjoyed the adulthood I’ve eventually been able to have with my mom, and (to some extent) my dad. But that right there, the holidays, the photos, all those hugs and kisses, those goodnight stories? That was a lie. I just didn’t know it yet.
I know how that realization felt, how it hurt—but now, years later, a mother myself, I finally know how it must have hurt my own mother to see me suffer. Because that’s the other side of it, of course, the sting in the tail. So when I look at my daughter and think that I don’t want to break her heart, it isn’t just because I don’t fully understand what she might do, if I did. It’s because even if I don’t think there was ever a time when I believed she was fully human, I know there must have been a time when she did. When she didn’t know any better.
Is that just another trick, another lie? I don’t know. I can’t know.
I don’t think I ever will.
Will she search the rest of her kind out when she leaves me at last, one by one, wherever they’re buried? Will she teach them to snare humans of their own, playing on them the same sort of trick she p
layed on me? I hope not, and not just for our sakes.
For hers, as well.
One day, a long time from now, for me—but maybe not for her—she’ll go away one last time, forever. And even now, even now, I still can’t tell if that prospect makes me happy, or not. Only that it’ll happen, either way. That it’s beyond my control, and always was.
Be different, I want to tell her, explicitly, before she leaves me. Be yourself, whatever that is—not was, is. Make your own path.
Fly away, stranger, and don’t come back.
I think, but I don’t say; I hope, more and more. I try not to pray. While she looks at me now and then, her strange eyes throwing back the light, not quite smiling. And I hear her voice inside my head the same way I once did, so long ago: like a glass bell, a distant ringing. Like the buzzing of some monstrous fly.
But how can I leave? It seems to say. I’m yours, after all, like you’re mine. Your very own.
Thin cold hands reaching down again, tightening around my heart. Squeezing ‘til I feel their fingerprint embed on the tissue, ‘til the veins bulge and the chambers contract, resentful love pumping out like blood.
You are home, Mother.
My home.
A TINY MIRROR
ELOISE C. C. SHEPHERD
Iheard this story on a night flight back from Dubai. I didn’t feel much like sleeping. We flew into darkness, heading for London, the white noise of the engine below and in the next row a baby’s fitful whimpering. The woman next to me pulled her blue blanket over her knees, but she stayed awake. She was watching something loud and cheerful on the tiny TV in front of her. She had one of those small sad glasses of wine. I paid attention to her first because she seemed so anxious.
So I spoke to her, although I don’t know how I thought I could help.
