Shadows & Tall Trees

by Shadows

  After fitful sleep Adam woke to another “did u read it” on the screen of the phone. His head felt like shards rubbing against one another. He got up and noticed a photograph pinned to the floor under the night table. A shot of the cabin, framed so that the trees all reached toward it, giving the scene almost the effect of a fisheye lens. The image was washed out with a smudge of black on the roof. He rubbed at it with his thumb but it was part of the picture.

  He tossed it onto the bed and found some aspirin in the cardboard box. Eggs wouldn’t stay down but he wished he had them anyway. He chewed on a granola bar and texted Meli back. Circled the cabin and sat on the porch with the journal open on his lap. Noon came and the mountains felt redder than yesterday. He hadn’t added a thing to the four lousy words about the bees.

  He snapped the pencil in two. Left the journal behind and took “Onanon” into the woods. Against the scabbed trunk of a pine he nodded off then lurched awake to the sound of leaves breaking deeper in the trees. He heard someone laugh in a high voice. A bird strangled a cry in the distance and quiet rippled out from it.

  I coupled behind stars, the first page began. At least he thought that was what he read. Earlier it had been something different but he couldn’t be sure. “Dronning” was simple enough; it was strange but it was made of words. This new one made his eyes ache. Like reading worms instead. The things on the page wouldn’t stay still.

  On the second page he managed to read a paragraph about the mother burying her teeth in the dirt beneath a cabin before returning to her family. To ready her son and herself. Looping migraine phrases. He found himself weeping and the sun halved the sky and the letters on the page changed. A hive swarmed and you opened your mouth. When you were a boy I folded myself into your bed and suckled you. Sowing your blood and murmuring songs of home. The time to leave was nearing. Mountains mossed red yellow gold called from their roots over the horizons. I paused, humming, and fed my saliva between your lips.

  He lay down in the leaves and watched the cloudless sky through the trees.

  A second photo, creased with time, waited on the night table. A young Adam sleeping, posters on the wall of his first bedroom, the blood leached from his face in the slight overexposure. He had to squint to be certain but there was an insect spreading its wings beneath one eye and another bridging his lips. The vantage point looked down from a high angle above the head of the bed. His arms were tucked at his sides under the blanket and a shadow draped across his chest, trailing out from something tubelike just reaching into the left side of the frame.

  He crumpled the photo and let it fall. A few minutes of furtive searching turned up nothing creepy or crawly in the eaves or along the edges of the walls. The old hive hung full of dust above the stove.

  Two days up here and he was moving in circles. He took a fresh bottle of Bushmill’s out into the falling cold and saw three more photographs taped to the porch posts.

  In the first he was a boy again, even younger than the picture back in the cabin, cradled in his bed by a mass of black. He saw vague arms holding him, a dark blur reaching toward his mouth, but whatever it was hadn’t translated through the lens.

  He tore the second photo down and saw his father lying tangled in sheets and the limbs of a woman. A film of sudden sweat made him shiver. It was Meli. She should have been a child when his dad was alive, but right there was the same too-pretty face, the same spill of black hair, the same blood spotted on the sheets. Her arm lifted toward Adam, holding the camera in a lovers’ self-portrait.

  He peered at the last photo, his nose almost smudging it. After a moment what he was seeing clicked. Bees covered a figure seated in a wooden chair. There was enough in the frame to recognize his mother’s room in the nursing home. The figure’s face, openmouthed and entirely coated in the bees, was turned to a closed window.

  Beyond the porch the trees gave up nothing as he scanned them, listening for the rustle of footsteps. Silence clustered and he thought of shouting Meli’s name into it.

  Instead he sat and wrote about his mother and father. This time he didn’t embellish. He wrote of a boyhood that had always felt like a grey smear. No family portraits, the three of them smiling off toward the photographer’s hand. No beach trips. Just school years and few friends and always being tired. He remembered a telescope he still felt guilty about seldom using. He chewed on a new pencil but couldn’t dredge up anything so disturbing from before the day his mother climbed out her bedroom window and disappeared.

  She was gone for seventeen months. He’d watched his father give up hope, not quite understanding the hope himself. His parents had done little more than live in the same house. He was thirteen when she returned one night, her clothes stained and hanging off her as she stood swaying beside his bed. She’d lost all her teeth. Two days later she was taken to the home.

  A half hour drained along with the late afternoon light as he sat and tried to remember why she’d been sent away. For her own good, Dad had said. So she could feel better.

  Memory became hazier still then. He remembered a woman, or women, haunting his home at night, faces reluctant to swim to his recall. Now Meli’s face plugged itself in. His father had receded from him, greyed and shriveled until the week after Adam graduated high school, when he succumbed to heart failure in his sleep. Adam had spent a few more months in the house before selling it and moving to the city. He’d started writing. After only a few years his stories began to appear in journals, culminating with Harper’s in ’05 and The New Yorker the following year. Inevitably, he published a collection that many admired but nobody read.

  He scratched this all in the journal. Even the rehashing of his lost glories eased him. But nothing both specific and profane in his memory bobbed to the surface.

  He hugged himself and wished he’d brought a jacket against the chill. Meli’s words were making him sick. That had to be it. They were in his sinuses and tingling in his fingers like pine needles. He went inside and found a lighter in the cardboard box. He pulled “Onanon” from his pocket and sat on the porch steps. The million trees whispered around him now.

  He scraped the wheel of the lighter and held it to a corner of the pages. The words or worms twitched on the paper. Sleep in the dirt under the floor. Dream and remember. Hear the sound of your mother loping over roads and creeks and up into the mountains. From my dry and waiting mouth the proboscis emerges.

  The fire ate it all and in the last corner he read, Stars swell in their bed. You reach over the mountains for them as a child for Mother’s jewels. A moth or a magpie. I am come and you will be my son.

  Heat reached his fingers and he dropped the pages. Charring bits swirled into the yard and winked out. The skin on his fingertips blistered. He put his head in his hands and bit his tongue. Dark fell at last and he burned “Amanda” and “Dronning.” He pulled the battery from his phone and lay in the bed and stared up into the corner.

  Honeybees coated the hill the tired leaves the new earth

  A heavy thump out on the porch woke him and he looked at the windows. Each seemed as though a face had just pulled away. He went outside into the muddled stillness and walked around the cabin twice. The stars were sprayed everywhere. The place had no foundation and he dug his way beneath it in a moment. There was a crawlspace of sorts and he wriggled inside and lay down. Black as absence. He felt something curl up beside him and he slept in its warmth, grateful.

  A finger jabbed him in the ribs. The girl lay pressed against him, her face an inch from his. She licked his mouth with something too stiff to be a tongue.

  He tried to scoot away and knocked his head against the underside of the cabin floor. Sunlight pried in nearly all the way around. He watched as Meli pawed at the dirt and plucked things out of it. “Hey,” she said, her face streaked with filth, “open your hand.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Just do it, open your hand.”

&nbs
p; He held his palm out and she poured a stream of small objects onto it. Human teeth. He wasn’t about to count them but he thought there could be thirty or more. A full set.

  “What the hell are these?” he said. “Why did you want me up here?” He tried to look away but couldn’t. His mouth watered at the smell of her.

  Meli smiled and he saw she had no teeth of her own. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said, and laughed. Her speech was as strong and clear as his mother’s. “What do you think you’ve been reading? Come on, you’re a writer, we reached out to you in your own language. And in case you’re a visual learner, I hoped those pictures I took would help you along a little quicker. I had to come up here just because you’re so slow.”

  “Are these yours?” He shook the teeth in his hand.

  “Look, I know you had trouble with the stories.” She paused and inched toward him. Pushed her hand into his crotch. “Her style is a bit abstract, I guess. You do get that they were from Amanda, right? Dronning? Your mother is ready to make you in her image. Those are her teeth, remember? This is where she lived when she was a girl fresh across the ocean. She buried them here later. When she stopped needing them.”

  “You don’t know me. That’s what I remember.” It was difficult not to push her down and climb onto her.

  “Haven’t you ever wondered about your mom? I would’ve thought up a hundred stories in all these years. Did you know she got out of the home last night? They’re looking for her right now. If you put your battery back in you can listen to the voicemail.”

  “My mom’s practically catatonic. She gave up on herself a long time ago and now she can hardly walk or string together a sentence.” He reached to slap away her hand but she started kneading him through his jeans.

  “Call it sleeping, what she’s been doing all this time. It’s what the Queen does until the petals open. Where’d she go when you were a kid? It’s in the stories, dummy. Home to the old country, where she found her true husbands, her drones, and they fucked in fjords and fields beneath mountains different from these. She’d yearned for so long. Maybe that’s when she gave up on life and took on something else.”

  Yearned, yes. Her fingers squeezed and everything he thought to say turned to vapour. A door slammed shut and the floor overhead gave a long stuttering creak.

  “And maybe she came back with me in tow, her sprouting little girl. We purebreds have a quick gestation. A couple of years and I was menstruating. So I was able to watch you grow up. You don’t remember me keeping your dad company while Mother had gone inside herself to wait. The nights I slept over or the night I had a little too much to drink and his heart stopped beating for me.”

  She slipped his belt open and unzipped him. He was moaning already, trying to tell her to stop it, wanting to claw his way out from under the cabin, get to the car and drive anywhere that was away. “Maybe now is our time,” she said. “Onanon, without an end, and I mean you, too,” and she took him into her burning mouth and he lay in the fading light and shuddered.

  She climbed from under the cabin and left him still spurting into the dirt. He barely had the strength to tug his pants back up. When he emerged, the yard was empty and the sun had fallen behind the mountains. A bulging moon lifted. The teeth were still clenched in his hand. Biting his palm. He dropped them into a pocket and fastened his belt.

  He took a step toward the cabin and stopped. His mother peered out at him from a grimy window. The pane lifted up and a long pale tube slipped beneath it where her mouth should have been. It tapered and petaled. The rest of her face followed, eyes opening wide into wet holes.

  “Mom?” A liquid hum came from her as she wormed through the window. It took on a melody. He recalled the nurse outside her door and something stirred further back in his mind. “Mom?”

  She folded down onto all fours and scrabbled across the porch. Adam ran to his car. He was behind the wheel when he realized the keys were in the cabin. His mother dropped onto the hood and placed her hands against the windshield. Long blackened fingers splayed on the glass.

  He fell from the car and fled into the trees. The hum grew. Something vast pulled at the air. His mother, he thought, singing the sky dark. Songs of home. He ran through limbs and the rising sound of birds screaming as they escaped with him.

  Before long the land steepened and he came to the crook of the two hills, the cabin behind him and the far slope dipping down to the feet of the looming mountains. He saw bees dotting the ground at his feet. They had no wings. The sky was a blind expanse stretching from end to end of the earth. He gazed up at it and the stars were gone, whitish blurs in their place. As if they had been rubbed with pencil erasers.

  Leaves crunched behind him as he watched the heavens flicker to violet, to orange, to the brown of rich soil. The moon broke open like a fruit and the sun was already coloring the jagged horizon again. Hands slipped around his waist and up under his shirt, barbed fingers tracing patterns on the skin of his belly. He struggled and the arms locked him in place.

  Meli stepped up beside him. “Think of it as pollination,” she said, “instead of trying to wrap your head around the old human evolution bit. Every hive starts with one Queen. There will be many of us. You’ll get the hang of it when you feed. Look around you, the world is in bloom.” He watched her tongue slip from her mouth but it kept coming, a hollow, curved thing hanging past her chin and sucking at the air. Her eyes went black and he looked away, down to the ground covered with red and yellow and gold leaves and the sluggish bees trundling over and between them.

  He felt his mother’s proboscis push into the base of his neck. Her humming song vibrated there and a sweet numbness spread. She caressed him and at last he was able to remember the nights she tucked him into her arms against her breast, until he fell into his childish dreams and God knew what she had done then.

  “Mom,” he said, his tongue hardening against the roof of his mouth.

  Now she was drinking him. Three of his teeth loosened and fell from the gums. He swallowed them. A groan slipped out and his mother turned him around to her and passed his fluids back into his mouth blended with her own. He again tilted his head to the sky. He looked everywhere for its stars but saw only a great paling lens. A jar lowering, a world going on and on.

  IT FLOWS FROM THE MOUTH

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  I’d been flattered when asked to be the godfather of little Ian Wheeler, of course, but I’d had certain misgivings. When I’d met up with Max in the pub, something we liked to do regularly back then, I’d tried to explain at least part of the problem. “Oh, don’t worry about the whole spiritual adviser nonsense,” said Max. “Lisa’s no more religious than I am; this is just to keep her parents happy.” So I caved in, and went along to the christening, and watched Ian get dipped into a font, and afterwards posed for photographs in which I must admit I passed myself off quite successfully as someone just as proud and doting as the actual father and mother.

  But my real concern had nothing to do with any religious aspect, and more with the discomfort of shackling myself for life to a person I had no reason to believe I would ever necessarily like. I’d had enough problems when Max started dating Lisa—Max and I had been inseparable since school, and now suddenly I was supposed to welcome Lisa into the gang, and want to spend time with her, and chat to her, and buy lager and lime for her—and it wasn’t that I disliked Lisa, not as such, though she was a bit dull and she wore too much perfume and I had nothing to talk to her about and she had a face as dozy as a stupefied cow. It was more that she had barged her way into a special friendship, with full expectation that I’d not only tolerate the intrusion but welcome it. She never asked if I minded. She never apologized.

  And so it was with little Ian. I’m not saying he was a bad child. It was simply that he was a child at all. I’d never been wild about children, not even when I had been one, and I had always been under the impression that Max had fe
lt the same, and I’d felt rather surprised that he wanted one. Surprised and, yes, disappointed. But then, Max had done lots of things that had surprised me since he’d met Lisa. And my worst fears came to be realized. On the few occasions I went to visit, I would be presented before Ian, as if he were a prince, and every little new thing about him was pointed out to me as if I should be entranced—that he had teeth, or that he could walk, that he’d grown an inch taller—sometimes I was under the impression I was supposed to give the kid a round of applause, as if these weren’t all things that I myself had mastered with greater skill years ago! I just couldn’t warm to my godson. It seemed to me that he was constantly demanding attention, and I could put up with that if it was only his mother he was bothering, but all too often he’d pull the same stunts on Max. Still, I tried to be dutiful, and at Christmas and on birthdays I would send Ian a present. But is it any wonder he made me uncomfortable?—this infant who had crept into my life, though his birth was none of my doing, though his existence wasn’t my fault. With his strangely fat face and his cheeks always puffed out as if he were getting ready to cry. I played godfather the best I could, but I felt a fraud.

  When Ian was killed at the age of three, knocked down by a car (and safely within the speed limit, so the driver could hardly be blamed), I was, of course, horrified. The death of a child is a terrible thing, and I’m not a monster. But if a child was going to have to die, then I’m glad it was Ian.

  Max and I had always been rather unlikely friends, or so I was told: at school he was more popular than I was, more sporty, more outgoing. I suspect people thought he was good for me, that’s what my mother said, and I resented that—I’d point out that, in spite of appearances, he was the one who had sought me out, who wanted to sit next to me in class, who waited to walk home with me. I’d been there for him when he failed his French O-levels, when he got dumped by the cricket first XI, when he first smoked, drank, snogged. I’d been best man at his wedding to Lisa, and I’d arranged a very nice stag night in a Greek restaurant, and given at the reception a speech that made everybody laugh. And I tried to be there for Max when Ian died. We’d meet up at the pub, at first it was just like the good old days! And I’d get in a round. How was he feeling? “Not so good, matey,” he’d say, and stare into the bottom of his pint. “Not so good.”