Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  During our break, I bring Dai my blanket. I try to squeeze some of the water from the leaf-velvet onto her tongue, which she refuses. She doesn’t make a sound, but I hiss—her belly is grotesquely distended and stippled with lumps, like a sow’s pregnant with a litter of ten piglets. Her excess thread is packed in knots. Strangling Dai from within. Perhaps the Agent can call on a Western veterinarian, I find myself thinking. Whatever is happening to her seems beyond the ken of Emperor Meiji’s own doctors.

  “Start reeling again!” I gasp. “Dai, please.”

  “It looks worse than it is. It’s easy enough to stop. You’ll see for yourself, I hope.”

  Her skin has an unhealthy translucence. Her eyes are standing out in her shrunken face, as if every breath costs her. Soon I will be able to see the very thoughts in her skull, the way red thread fans into veiny view under her skin. Dai gives me her bravest smile. “Get some rest, Kitsune. Stop poisoning yourself on the stairwell of Gifu. If I can stop reeling, surely you can, too.”

  When she dies, all the silk is still stubbornly housed in her belly, “stolen from the factory,” as the Agent alleges. “This girl died a thief.”

  Three days after her death, he finally shows up. He strides over to Dai and touches her belly with a stick. When a few of us grab for his legs, he makes a face and kicks us off.

  “Perhaps we can still salvage some of it,” he grumbles, rolling her into his sack.

  A great sadness settles over our whole group and doesn’t lift. What the Agent carried off with Dai was everything we had left: Chiyo’s clouds and mountains, my farmhouse in Gifu, Etsuyo’s fiancé. It’s clear to us now that we can never leave this room—we can never be away from the Machine for more than five days. Unless we live here, where the Machine can extract the thread from our bodies at speeds no human hand could match, the silk will build and build and kill us in the end. Dai’s experiment has taught us that.

  You never hear a peep in here about the New Year anymore.

  I’m eating, I’m reeling, but I, too, appear to be dying. Thread almost totally black. The denier too uneven for any market. In my mind I talk to Dai about it, and she is very reassuring: “It’s going to be fine, Kitsune. Only, please, you have to stop—”

  Stop thinking about it. This was Dai’s final entreaty to me.

  I close my eyes. I watch my hand signing my father’s name again. I am at the bottom of a stairwell in Gifu. The first time I made this ascent I felt weightless, but now the wood groans under my feet. Just as a single cocoon contains a thousand yards of silk, I can unreel a thousand miles from my memory of this one misstep.

  Still, I’m not convinced that you were right, Dai—that it’s such a bad thing, a useless enterprise, to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, I think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing. I am a lucky one, like Chiyo says. I made a terrible mistake. In Gifu, in my raggedy clothes, I had an unreckonable power. I didn’t know that at the time. But when I return to the stairwell now, I can feel them webbing around me: my choices, their infinite variety, spiraling out of my hands, my invisible thread. Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. It’s become my sanctuary here in Nowhere Mill. A threshold where I still exist.

  One morning, two weeks after Dai’s strike, I start talking to Chiyo about her family’s cottage business in Chichibu. Chiyo complains about the smells in her dry attic, where they destroy the silkworm larvae in vinegary solutions. Why do they do that? I want to know. I’ve never heard this part before. Oh, to stop them from undergoing the transformation, Chiyo says. First, the silkworms stop eating. Then they spin their cocoons. Once inside, they molt several times. They grow wings and teeth. If the caterpillars are allowed to evolve, they change into moths. Then these moths bite through the silk and fly off, ruining it for the market.

  Teeth and wings, wings and teeth, I keep hearing all day under the whine of the cables.

  That night, I try an experiment. I let myself think the black thoughts all evening. Great wheels inside me turn backward at fantastic, groaning velocities. What I focus on is my shadow in the stairwell, falling slantwise behind me, like silk. I see the ink spilling onto the contract, my name bloating monstrously.

  And when dawn comes, and I slug my way over to the workbench and plunge my hands into the boiling vat, I see that the experiment was a success. My new threads are stronger and blacker than ever; silk of some nameless variety we have never belly-spun before. I crank them out of my wrist and onto the dowel. There’s not a fleck of green left, not a single frayed strand. “Moonless,” says Hoshi, shrinking from them. Opaque. Midnight at Nowhere Mill pales in comparison. Looking down into the basin, I feel a wild excitement. I made it that color. So I’m no mere carrier, no diseased kaiko—I can channel these dyes from my mind into the tough new fiber. I can change my thread’s denier, control its production. Seized by a second inspiration, I begin to unreel at speeds I would have just yesterday thought laughably impossible. Not even Yuna can produce as much thread in an hour. I ignore the whispers that pool around me on the workbench:

  “Kitsune’s fishing too deep—look at her finger slits!”

  “They look like gills.” Etsuyo shudders.

  “Someone should stop her. She’s fishing right down to the bone.”

  “What is she making?”

  “What are you making?”

  “What are you going to do with all that, Kitsune?” Tooka asks nervously.

  “Oh, who knows? I’ll just see what it comes to.”

  But I do know. Without my giving a thought to what step comes next, my hands begin to fly.

  The weaving comes so naturally to me that I am barely aware I am doing it, humming as if in a dream. But this weaving is instinctual. What takes effort, what requires a special kind of concentration, is generating the right density of the thread. To do so, I have to keep forging my father’s name in my mind, climbing those stairs, watching my mistake unfurl. I have to drink the toxic tea and feel it burn my throat, lie flat on the cot while my organs are remade by the Agent for the factory, thinking only, Yes, I chose this. When these memories send the fierce regret spiraling through me, I focus on my heartbeat, my throbbing palms. Fibers stiffen inside my fingers. Grow strong, I direct the thread. Go black. Lengthen. Stick. And then, when I return to the vats, what I’ve produced is exactly the necessary denier and darkness. I sit at the workbench, at my ordinary station. And I am so happy to discover that I can do all this myself: the silk-generation, the separation, the dyeing, the reeling. Out of the same intuition, I discover that I know how to alter the Machine. “Help me, Tsuki,” I say, because I want her to watch what I am doing. I begin to explain, but she is already disassembling my reeler. “I know, Kitsune,” she says, “I see what you have in mind.” Words seem to be unnecessary now between me and Tsuki—we beam thoughts soundlessly across the room. Perhaps speech will be the next superfluity in Nowhere Mill. Another step we kaiko-girls can skip.

  Together we adjust the feeder gears, so that the black thread travels in a loop; after getting wrung out and doubled on the Machine’s great wheel, it shuttles back to my hands. I add fresh fibers, drape the long skein over my knees. It is going to be as tall as a man, six feet at least.

  Many girls continue feeding the Machine as if nothing unusual is happening. Others, like Tsuki, are watching to see what my fingers are doing. For the past several months, every time I’ve reminisced about the Agent coming to Gifu, bile has risen in my throat. It seems to be composed of every bitterness: grief and rage, the acid regrets. But then, in the middle of my weaving, obeying a queer impulse, I spit some onto my hand. This bile glues my fingers to my fur. Another of nature’s wonders. So even the nausea of regret can be converted to use. I grin to Dai in my head. With this dill-colored glue, I am at last able to rub a sealant over my new thread and complete my work.

  It takes me ten hours to spin the black cocoon.


  The first girls who see it take one look and run back to the tatami.

  The second girls are cautiously admiring.

  Hoshi waddles over with her bellyful of blue silk and screams.

  I am halfway up the southern wall of Nowhere Mill before I realize what I am doing; then I’m parallel to the woodpecker’s window. The gluey thread collected on my palms sticks me to the glass. For the first time I can see outside: from this angle, nothing but clouds and sky, a blue eternity. We will have wings soon, I think, and ten feet below me I hear Tsuki laugh out loud. Using my thread and the homemade glue, I attach the cocoon to a wooden beam; soon, I am floating in circles over the Machine, suspended by my own line. “Come down!” Hoshi yells, but she’s the only one. I secure the cocoon and then I let myself fall, all my weight supported by one thread. Now the cocoon sways over the Machine, a furled black flag, creaking slightly. I think of my grandfather hanging by the thick rope from our barn door.

  More black thread spasms down my arms.

  “Kitsune, please. You’ll make the Agent angry! You shouldn’t waste your silk that way—pretty soon they’ll stop bringing you the leaves! Don’t forget the trade, it’s silk for leaves, Kitsune. What happens when he stops feeding us?”

  But in the end I convince all of the workers to join me. Instinct obviates the need for a lesson—swiftly the others discover that they, too, can change their thread from within, drawing strength from the colors and seasons of their memories. Before we can begin to weave our cocoons, however, we first agree to work night and day to reel the ordinary silk, doubling our production, stockpiling the surplus skeins. Then we seize control of the machinery of Nowhere Mill. We spend the next six days dismantling and reassembling the Machine, using its gears and reels to speed the production of our own shimmering cocoons. Each dusk, we continue to deliver the regular number of skeins to the zookeeper, to avoid arousing the Agent’s suspicions. When we are ready for the next stage of our revolution, only then will we invite him to tour our factory floor.

  Silkworm moths develop long ivory wings, says Chiyo, bronzed with ancient designs. Do they have antennae, mouths? I ask her. Can they see? Who knows what the world will look like to us if our strike succeeds? I believe we will emerge from it entirely new creatures. In truth there is no model for what will happen to us next. We’ll have to wait and learn what we’ve become when we get out.

  The old blind woman really is blind, we decide. She squints directly at the wrecked and rerouted Machine and waits with her arms extended for one of us to deposit the skeins. Instead, Hoshi pushes a letter through the grate.

  “We don’t have any silk today.”

  “Bring this to the Agent.”

  “Go. Tell. Him.”

  As usual, the old woman says nothing. The mulberry sacks sit on the wagon. After a moment she claps to show us that her hands are empty, kicks the wagon away. Signals: no silk, no food. Her face is slack. On our side of the grate, I hear girls smacking their jaws, swallowing saliva. Fresh forest smells rise off the sacks. But we won’t beg, will we? We won’t turn back. Dai lived without food for five days. Our faces press against the grate. Several of our longest whiskers tickle the zookeeper’s withered cheeks; at last, a dark cloud passes over her face. She barks with surprise, swats the air. Her wrinkles tighten into a grimace of fear. She backs away from our voices, her fist closed around our invitation to the Agent.

  “NO SILK,” repeats Tsaiko slowly.

  The Agent comes the very next night.

  “Hello?”

  He raps at our grated door with a stick, but he remains in the threshold. For a moment I am sure that he won’t come in.

  “They’re gone, they’re gone,” I wail, rocking.

  “What!”

  The grate slides open and he steps onto the factory floor, into our shadows.

  “Yes, they’ve all escaped, every one of them, all your kaiko-joko—”

  Now my sisters drop down on their threads. They fall from the ceiling on whistling lines of silk, swinging into the light, and I feel as though I am dreaming—it is a dreamlike repetition of our initiation, when the Agent dropped the infecting kaiko into the orange tea. Watching his eyes widen and his mouth stretch into a scream, I too am shocked. We have no mirrors here in Nowhere Mill, and I’ve spent the past few months convinced that we were still identifiable as girls, women—no beauty queens, certainly, shaggy and white and misshapen, but at least half human; it’s only now, watching the Agent’s reaction, that I realize what we’ve become in his absence. I see us as he must: white faces, with sunken noses that look partially erased. Eyes insect-huge. Spines and elbows incubating lace for wings. My muscles tense, and then I am airborne, launching myself onto the Agent’s back—for a second I get a thrilling sense of what true flight will feel like, once we complete our transformation. I alight on his shoulders and hook my legs around him. The Agent grunts beneath my weight, staggers forward.

  “These wings of ours are invisible to you,” I say directly into the Agent’s ear. I clasp my hands around his neck, lean into the whisper. “And in fact you will never see them, since they exist only in our future, where you are dead and we are living, flying.”

  I then turn the Agent’s head so that he can admire our silk. For the past week every worker has used the altered Machine to spin her own cocoon—they hang from the far wall, coral and emerald and blue, ordered by hue, like a rainbow. While the rest of Japan changes outside the walls of Nowhere Mill, we’ll hang side by side, hidden against the bricks. Paralyzed inside our silk, but spinning faster and faster. Passing into our next phase. Then, we’ll escape. (Inside his cocoon, the Agent will turn blue and suffocate.)

  “And look,” I say, counting down the wall: twenty-one workers, and twenty-two cocoons. When he sees the black sac, I feel his neck stiffen. “We have spun one for you.” I smile down at him. The Agent is stumbling around beneath me, babbling something that I admit I make no great effort to understand. The glue sticks my knees to his shoulders. Several of us busy ourselves with getting the gag in place, and this is accomplished before the Agent can scream once. Gin and Nishi bring down the cast-iron grate behind him.

  The slender Agent is heavier than he looks. It takes four of us to stuff him into the socklike cocoon. I smile at the Agent and instruct the others to leave his eyes for last, thinking that he will be very impressed to see our skill at reeling up close. Behind me, even as this attack is under way, the other kaiko-joko are climbing into their cocoons. Already there are girls half swallowed by them, winding silk threads over their knees, sealing the outermost layer with glue.

  Now our methods regress a bit, get a little old-fashioned. I reel the last of the black cocoon by hand. Several kaiko-joko have to hold the Agent steady so that I can orbit him with the thread. I spin around his chin and his cheekbones, his lips. To get over his mustache requires several revolutions. Bits of my white fur drift down and disappear into his nostrils. His eyes are huge and black and void of any recognition. I whisper my name to him, to see if I can jostle my old self loose from his memory: Kitsune Tajima, of Gifu Prefecture.

  Nothing.

  So then I continue reeling upward, naming the workers of Nowhere Mill all the while: “Nishi. Yoshi. Yuna. Uki. Etsuyo. Gin. Hoshi. Raku. Chiyoko. Mitsuko. Tsaiko. Tooka. Dai.

  “Kitsune,” I repeat, closing the circle. The last thing I see before shutting his eyes is the reflection of my shining new face.

  The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979

  The gulls landed in Athertown on July 11, 1979. Clouds of them, in numbers unseen since the ornithologists began keeping records of such things. Scientists all over the country hypothesized about erratic weather patterns and redirected migratory routes. At first sullen Nal barely noticed them. Lost in his thoughts, he dribbled his basketball up the boardwalk, right past the hundreds of gulls on Strong Beach, gulls grouped so thickly that from a distance they looked like snowbanks. Their bodies capped the dunes. If Nal had looked up, he w
ould have seen a thunderhead of seagulls in the well of the sky, rolling seaward. Instead, he ducked under the dirty turquoise umbrella of the Beach Grub cart and spent his last dollar on a hamburger; while he struggled to open a packet of yellow mustard, one giant gull swooped in and snatched the patty from its bun with a surgical jerk. Nal took two bites of bread and lettuce before he realized what had happened. The gull taunted him, wings akimbo, on the Beach Grub umbrella, glugging down his burger. Nal went on chewing the greasy bread, concluding that this was pretty much par for his recent course.

  All summer long, since his mother’s termination, Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails—and then right at his nadir, he’d agreed to an “avant” haircut performed by Cousin Steve. Cousin Steve was participating in a correspondence course with a beauty school in Nevada, America, and to pass his Radical Metamorphosis II course, he decided to dye Nal’s head a vivid blue and then razor the front into tentacle-like bangs. “Radical,” Nal said drily as Steve removed the foil. Cousin Steve then had to airmail a snapshot of Nal’s ravaged head to the United States desert, $17.49 in postage, so that he could get his diploma. In the photograph, Nal looks like he is going stoically to his death in the grip of a small blue octopus.

  Samson Wilson, Nal’s brother, took his turn in Cousin Steve’s improvised barber chair—a wrecked church pew that Steve had carted into his apartment from off the street. Cousin Steve used Samson as a guinea pig for “Creative Clippers.” He gave Samson a standard buzz cut to start, but that looked so good that he kept going with the razor. Pretty soon Samson had a gleaming cue ball head. He’d cracked jokes about the biblical significance of this, and Nal had secretly hoped that his brother’s power over women would in fact be diminished. But to Nal’s dismay, the ladies of Athertown flocked to Samson in greater multitudes than before. Girls trailed him down the boardwalk, clucking stupidly about the new waxy sheen to his head. Samson was seventeen and had what Nal could only describe as a bovine charm: he was hale and beefy, with a big laugh and the deep serenity of a grazing creature. Nal loved him, too, of course—it was impossible not to—but he was baffled by Sam’s ease with women, his ease in the world.