I let myself into the house, crept upstairs, and glanced into Mom's room—she was breathing steady and regular underneath a mound of sheets—before shouldering open my own door. I couldn't sleep though. I just lay there, staring into the dark, thinking about that thing in the woods and listening to something under my bed, this plaintive chittering that turned out to be my alarm clock.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Mom glanced up from her coffee, looking more like the glossy mannequin on her company ID than the woman who used to flop down beside me in her sweats, snorting laughter every time an anvil dropped on Wile E. Coyote's head and the Road Runner raced off triumphant, beep beep zip bang! “You must have gone down early last night,” she said.
"My stomach started hurting,” I told her.
Over Cheerios, I added that I wanted to walk to school.
"You sure you're up to it?” she said. “Is your tummy better?"
I told her my stomach was fine, but she insisted on driving me anyway. “We never get a chance to talk anymore,” she said. The phone rang just before we left—"But I had it down at eleven,” she kept saying, staring at her planner—and she spent the whole drive drumming on the steering wheel with her fingers instead of talking, this faraway look on her face. When I got out of the car, she leaned over to roll down the passenger window.
"You okay, Philip?” she said. “Is something bothering you?"
Just then the first bell rang. My mother frowned.
"Gotta run,” I said, turning toward the building. I wasn't even halfway there when I heard her car pull away from the curb.
Inside, Steve was leaning against my locker.
"Where you been all morning?” he asked.
"Why don't you ask your mother that,” I said, working my combination, and we knocked it back and forth like that—I would, he said, if I didn't have a date tonight with your mother and I shot back, I wouldn't say I date your mother exactly, she just likes to blow me—as I emptied my backpack and got my notebook for first period. I was almost done when the door to my locker banged shut, nearly shearing off the tips of my fingers. So here's Grendel again, leaning against the row of lockers that had been hidden behind the door, stinking of slaughtered Danes. His mother grins over his shoulder, peering out through the Richard Zell mask she's donned for the occasion.
"Cute, that little maneuver of yours yesterday, dickwad,” Grendel says, and it strikes me now, putting all this down, how consummately strange men are, the way the ones who like you and the ones who hate you speak to you pretty much the same way: Where you been all morning and dickwad and Why don't you ask your mother that. Except maybe Steve doesn't really like me, because he seems to have snapped his fingers and vanished. Again.
Which is pretty much what I'd like to do just now. But can't.
So I say, “Listen, Junior, why do you wanna treat me like this?"
"You hear that, Richie?” Grendel says. “Dickwad here wants to know why I treat him this way.” Then he does something totally unexpected. Lifting his hand—it's huge, the size of my dad's hand and maybe bigger—he smashes my forehead into the locker. It feels like a grenade has gone off inside my skull. I try to choke back the tears that spring to my eyes, but it's hopeless, I'm already crying, these huge mortifying sobs, partly because I'm just so sick of all this and partly because it feels like Junior just gave my face a thorough scrubbing with a handful of steel wool and partly because that ravenous crowd has materialized around us to suck down its morning dose of public humiliation.
Junior grins. “Damn, Rich? You see that?” And then, to me: “You got to be more careful with your locker, Phil, you could hurt yourself!"
Titters ripple through the assembled mass and it occurs to me that Junior's toolbox isn't really empty of wit—it's just that in his case wit's a bludgeon.
That's when the second bell rings. Dr. Mattox, the principal, comes rolling down the hall, hammering on the lockers with his fist and bellowing, “Class, kids, let's get to class!” As the crowd breaks up, Junior leans in close to me, still grinning, and hisses, “Try all the clever shit you want today, asshole. I'm taking you down. You can think of kissing that locker door as a down payment."
He claps me on the back like we're the best of buddies. Then he and Richard slump off together, their hands empty of books, and exactly at that moment Dr. Mattox glances toward me. “Peter,” he says, nodding, and that's the way it goes the whole day, my head throbbing and Steve—not unwisely, I suppose—keeping his distance, ignoring me in English, where we had assigned seats, sitting across the room in Algebra, where we didn't, and steering clear of the library at lunch, where I passed half an hour pressing a wad of damp paper towels to my forehead and reading about flying saucers.
So much bullshit, that seemed to be the scientific consensus, which meant that I must have imagined the whole thing—that I was not only a pariah and a geek, but a nut. But since I didn't really believe that, it didn't dam the undertow of anxiety in my thoughts. Worry that the thing in the woods would be dead or gone when I got there after school, or that it would turn out to be the advance scout for an invading interstellar force intent on mating with the likes of Melissa Malone. And worry, too, about what Junior had planned for me. Truth was, even if I had the skills to put up a fight—which I didn't—I didn't have the stomach to use them. Which by the rules in effect at Thomas Jefferson High School—and throughout the rest of the known universe, as far as I could see then—made me a pussy, a mama's boy, a candyass weakling: barely a boy at all, and definitely not a man.
So what I did all day is brood and worry and keep under cover, scurrying around the school like a cockroach and gnawing my fingernails to bloody nubs. I missed—for the second time—the finer points of the quadratic equation and by the time the last bell rang, I'd once again sought refuge in the bathroom, not merely for the safety it afforded but for the comfort it provided to one afflicted with a tummy ache, as my mother would put it.
And the whole time I was wondering about that creature in the woods, if it was doing any better or if it was still curled up at the bottom of the gully, keening in agony. I could feel its lure even there, pulling at me. By the time I was feeling better, the halls had fallen silent. Stepping outside was like stepping into a television rerun, with the girls cheering at one end of the practice field—
"—fight, fight, your cause is right!—"
—and Coach Kessinger ranting at the football team as it ran laps around them. This time I managed to make it all the way to the woods undetected: home free, I think—until Grendel and Grendel's Mom step snickering out of the underbrush.
"Thought you'd pulled one over on us, didn't you, you stupid jerk,” Junior says.
I don't even bother replying. I just run, cutting away at an angle into the woods, hoping not only to escape them but to draw them away from the gully. But I haven't gotten more than fifty yards into the undergrowth—Junior and Richard crashing after me like bears—when I see how impossible that's going to be. This deep into the trees, that unearthly keening cuts through the murk like a beacon—
"What's that?” Richard grunts behind me.
—an awful kind of summons, lonesome and sad and hurting all at the same time, crying out for solace, and all I can think is that somehow, I don't know how, I have to keep Junior and Richard away from it. Somehow I have to protect it.
Changing course midstride, I thrash through a thicket of stunted pine trees and head for the gully. When I get there, I hurl myself over the embankment, skidding downhill and fetching up hard against the bole of a fallen tree. The chirruping keen is even louder down here. It seems to fill up the whole world, like the wail of a train whistle blaring endlessly up from that glossy shimmer in the dim. Not even pausing to catch my breath I launch myself toward it, scrabbling through the mulch, hissing, “Quiet, you've got to be quiet now, you've got to be quiet!” Then it's sobbing underneath me, a tiny childlike thing, its long fingers scrabbling at my face—in gladness or in recognition maybe or in s
orrow or in pain.
Grendel can hear it, too.
He's crashing around at the top of the gully, him and Richard both, like a couple of bull tyrannosaurs spoiling for a fight. “I can hear you, you pussy!” he screams. “I find you, I'm gonna kill you, I'm gonna tear your head off! You're gonna be sorry you were ever born, you hear me!"
"Shut up!” Richard hisses. “This way—"
They shift directions, chasing that mournful howl along the edge of the gully, and still I'm trying to hush the thing. I whisper and I urge and I cajole. I beg and I plead and I beg some more, hissing, “Please, please, you have to be quiet now, if they find us they're gonna beat me up and who knows what they'll do to you, they might kill you, you hear me, you gotta shut up! Please,” I'm bawling, “please!” And the whole time I'm choking back these big braying sobs, swallowing them down like stones between heaves of breath.
But the racket only grows louder, shriller, more lonesome and afraid.
Richard and Junior come on, thundering through the bracken. “I get you, you're dead,” Junior's saying, chanting it almost under his breath like a mantra, not for my ears but for his own, a running litany of his frustration and his rage. “I'm gonna get you because I can hear you, I can hear you.” Then, screaming, “You hear me, motherfucker? I can hear you! And when I find you I'm gonna tear your sorry ass to pieces!"
Still the thing is keening, those long fingers tracing the contours of my face. “Please,” I whisper, “please—"
I can see them now, maybe twenty yards away, flashes of blue jeans and booted feet hacking their way along the rim of the gully, Junior still chanting, on and on, “I can hear you, motherfucker, I can hear you, I can—"
Drawing in a long shuddering breath, I stretch my body the thing's shimmering length, and take it in my arms. I hold it the way my mother held me once, all those years ago, cooing, Be still now, shhh, shhh, barely even speaking the words aloud. And to stop that awful chittering I fold my hand across its mouth.
Silence, then.
I press my face close against it, whispering the words so low that it's like I'm not even really saying them aloud, saying, Shhh, be still, everything's okay now, everything's going to be all right.
Not ten feet above us, Junior and Richard halt at the lip of the gully. I can see them standing there in the shadows, listening. I tighten my grip across the creature's mouth, and those long fingers draw back from my face. The alien relaxes under my weight, and I lie so still that I can feel my heart booming inside my chest. I can almost hear it, and for a single dreadful instant, a crazy certainty seizes me: that Junior and Richard will hear it, too—the telltale heart, as Ms. Blevins might say—and come hurtling down the embankment after us.
Instead, Junior says, “The hell?"
Richard lifts his face, like a bloodhound scenting the wind.
"Where the fuck are you?” Junior screams. “What do you think you're gonna do, never come back to school? You might as well just come on out and take it like a man!"
"Shut up,” Richard hisses. “Listen!"
So they listen.
Five minutes pass. Ten. I can feel the seconds slipping away in the pulse of blood at my temple. Finally a stick cracks farther off in the woods—a deer foraging through the underbrush maybe—and I see Richard's hand come up to seize Junior's biceps. Nodding, he lifts a finger to his lips. He points, his lips shaping words—
—over there—
—and they move off into the trees, picking their way, one breath, two breaths, three—and they're gone, swallowed up by the woods.
Still I crush the thing against me like a baby, whispering little comforts to it as I stare up at the rim of the gully, not even knowing if it can understand me, or if it has ears to hear me with in the first place.
Silence. A decade of silence is what it feels like. A century.
Then I blow out a long breath. “They're gone,” I whisper. “Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be okay now.” Drawing away my hand, I sit up. The creature lolls across my lap, boneless, empty of volition, wrong. And when I look down, I can see it, really see it, I mean, a tiny thing, the size of a second-grade kid with damp leaves clinging to it and mottled gray skin visible in patches through glistening streaks of mud, joints where it oughtn't to have joints, a slit for a mouth, black slashes for eyes, and no nostrils of any kind. No nostrils at all.
And still. So still, without all that shimmery glister.
A kind of frozen horror seized me.
I just sat there holding it for the longest time. Staring down at it. Just holding it and staring.
Shadows began to stretch under the trees.
When the creature in my arms started to get cold, I stood, cradling it against my breast, and carried it down to the muddy trickle at the base of the gully. I scooped out a nest for it among the leaves there, and I tried to clean it up, scooping up handfuls of water to flush away the smears of mud until I couldn't see anything in the gloom but clean gray flesh. Then I buried it, prying smooth stones out of the creek bed and stacking them over it and covering those with leaves until there was nothing there. Maybe it would be enough. Maybe the animals wouldn't get to it now. I kind of doubted it. But maybe.
I got to my feet and stumbled out of the woods, dragging my backpack behind me, not even trying to be quiet. Junior and Richard could beat the hell out of me for all I cared. I guess I kind of wanted it to happen. By the time I broke free of the trees, an emerald gloaming had settled over the world. The cheerleaders had gone home and out on the practice field, in the hot yellow glare of the sodium-arc lights, the football team was dressed out and drilling. The clamor of it all came to me across the grass, the grunts and the curses and the angry shriek of the whistle between plays. Pads cracked like gunshots and boys who ached to become men hurled their bodies together with a kind of beauty that was heartbreaking. Coach Kessinger was out there, too, shouting at them at the top of his lungs, telling them how it was they had to do it. I knew that was what he was doing. I could see his mouth moving. But the truth is, as I turned away and walked into the twilight, the sound of his voice faded into nothing at all behind me. It faded into silence.
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Short Story: FOREVER by Rachel Pollack
Rachel Pollack's most recent work of fiction is Tarot Of Perfection, a collection of linked short stories.
It happened one day that the Blessed Lady of Dark Forever went for a walk in her garden of black leaves, past the Seven Broken Doorways, and down to the ferries, where the refugees arrive in endless outpourings. She was watching her servants—"facilitators” they called themselves these days—play a game of Snatch the Bone when she heard whispers behind her, then laughter, then more whispers. When she looked around she saw no one but the endless rolling landscape of the dead. She tried to tell herself it was just the usual back and forth between the oldtimers and newcomers, but the sound stayed with her, itchy under her long gray dress. Finally she had to admit it. Her sisters were meeting somewhere. Without her.
Forever called Gatekeeper Number Seven, a young man with blond hair, creased striped pants, sharp teeth, and satin buckled shoes. “I'm going away for a while,” she told him. “Take care of things.” He smiled, pushed the tip of his finger against an upper tooth until a single drop of lavender blood appeared, then flicked it on the ground, outwardly a sign of obedience, but really.... She said, “No redecorating. No parades. And no puppets to frighten the children. I won't be gone very long.” The servant bowed his head.
She found her sisters in an abandoned library of burnt books. She flung open the door, but instead of embarrassment, her sisters clapped their hands. “You came!” Ocean said, and Sky added, “Now we can start."
"Start?” Forever said, and wondered if they'd sent some invitation the staff had managed to forget. That crowd of dead beetles the other day—they had seemed determined to reach her. She should pay attention to such things.
Ocean said, “The
game. The contest."
Of course. What else but another competition? It was Sky's doing, it always was. Ocean, as innocent as foam, just thought it was fun, and a memory of their childhood, but Sky always had to win. It was what drew her back from the edges. Forever told herself she should leave. Go back to work. But if she didn't play, when would she ever see her sisters? “What is it this time?” she said.
It was simple. They would choose a skin woman and try to predict what would happen to her over the course of a single year. The loser, the one who strayed furthest from the truth, would have to spend a day among the humans, disguised as one of them. How easy, Forever thought. Fortune-telling was her domain after all, for what prediction was more certain than death? “Who chooses?” she said.
Sky waved a hand. “You can choose. You were always the most trustworthy."
Forever cast her mind across the world, spotted a young woman whose body was two-thirds eaten by cancer. A wave of her hand summoned a picture of the woman in front of them. “A year from now,” she said, “this girl will be settled down below, and her family will be already bored from weekly visits to her grave to pull weeds and scatter poppies."
Ocean smiled. “I don't think so,” she said. “I say, a year from now, she will put down fresh roots."
Sky added, “And reach up to the Sun.” Forever laughed. Sky said, “Oh, and skin people will come to her with seeds and offerings, asking for help to escape, well, you.” The Mother of Silence laughed louder. They sat down to watch.
* * * *
The Kindly Ones (as people sometimes called cancer, hoping to placate it) ate more and more of the girl, gnawing their way from the inside out. The doctors offered more medicine, more cutting, more invisible fire, but she refused. She began a journal, a record of everything she loved. A friend read it and told her to let others know the wonders they ignored as they rushed through life. She wrote a blog, Chronicle of the World's Beauty, that every day was read by more and more people.
FSF, May-June 2010 Page 21
