Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  There was about twelve hundred dollars left in a folded piece of newspaper that Maribel didn’t seem especially concerned about.

  David once left a cousin—on his mother’s side—atop a mountain forty miles from the nearest drinkable water for three hundred and eighty dollars and a roll of nickels. He assumed Gerald had lived but hadn’t talked to him since.

  David sometimes thumbed through the money when Maribel was sleeping and thought about ways to leave if he had to go fast.

  Naked in bed, David asked her why she couldn’t get pregnant.

  “I got fixed,” she said.

  “Fixed is the word they use on dogs.”

  “It is.”

  He asked why her brother had called the thing chained to her neck a “pacifier” and she told him to mind his own grits.

  A dry season drove animals in from the desert and deer and coyote were spotted in the city, cannily watching shoppers from the fields of cars surrounding the big box stores. Cats went missing.

  A few times they heard coyotes at night and Maribel would cry and pretend she was asleep.

  David came back from the bar one afternoon and found Maribel sitting on the steps with a lit Parliament between her fingers, blowing smoke at the passing cars.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

  She shook her head and tears brimmed her eyes.

  “At least give me one.”

  David sat beside her and took a cigarette and lit it. He grimaced and tried to lick the taste from his own mouth but kept smoking.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He thought about absolutely nothing at all and smoked the cigarette.

  “It’s not possible,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought,” David said. He tried to make sense of the vanity plate on a passing van that read “OU6ETHNG.”

  She cried and leaned into him and asked what they were going to do. David figured she’d get an abortion if he didn’t say anything.

  She smoked heavily and didn’t stop drinking. Every time he suggested they go to a doctor, she would scream at him beyond all reason. He stopped bringing it up.

  After a month, he noticed more flesh in her face. She smoked less because the aftertaste of vomit took her out of flavor country.

  “Are you going to do something?” he asked. “About the baby?”

  She watched him carefully.

  “It will be too late soon, right?”

  “It’s already too late,” she said.

  They still fucked constantly. She screamed at him daily over nothing at all. Her hips were wider, the skin softer and smelling faintly of loam. She held her belly while she slept and no longer woke screaming.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Maribel said in a tone that didn’t invite company or further questions.

  David opened a beer and sat on the stoop and watched her walk out of sight around the block, trying to remember the exact words he’d once heard an old drunk say about two animals wrestling in a bag. Cats or dogs. Midgets, maybe.

  The old woman from the other half of the house came out and sat beside him uninvited. Oily currents of gin swirled in her iced tea.

  She called him Jason even though they’d never been introduced. David imagined her muting the television to listen to them argue and fuck.

  She said she had two children who took no interest in her, and a husband who “died just in time to avoid the hassle of a divorce.”

  She winked at him and laughed, told him to enjoy the early years.

  “She’s having a baby,” David said.

  “Oh, well,” the old woman said.

  “February. March, maybe.”

  “It’s going to be girls.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You’re the type,” the old woman said.

  “Girls. Plural?”

  “You’re not ready.”

  “What do you mean I’m not ready?” David asked.

  “Men never are. It’s why women have to be moms and men get to be dads.”

  “That’s kind of shitty.”

  “There’s a tradition,” the old woman said.

  She insulted him for a little while and David told her lies about his own childhood to contradict her. They refilled their drinks and disparaged the institution of marriage. David realized she was flirting with him and made excuses to go back inside and she told him the story of La Llorona.

  “Mexican legend, followed them up North but slowly. Not many whites know about it, but for them it’s like Dracula. This woman, she’s a real innocent, young thing, falls in love with some fast-talking man about town. A Don. He talks her into bed before they’re married and she gets familyish.”

  “Famished?”

  “Pregnant. She gets pregnant. You listening?”

  “Sure.”

  “She gets pregnant and goes to the Don to tell him so, but when she finds him, she doesn’t just find him, but him and his whole family. Wife, kids, mistress, dog, the whole can of beans. And the Don needs another kid and another mistress like he needs another asshole, so he looks at this little pregnant girl and goes—who the hell are you?”

  “That’s shitty.”

  “Yes, it is. So she says I’m pregnant and the baby’s yours and the Don says—no lover of mine would be dumb enough to get pregnant, and he threatens to sic the dogs on her if she don’t get off the yard. So she goes back to her mom, but when her belly starts to show, her mom says—no daughter of mine would be slut enough to get pregnant if she weren’t married, and kicks her out of the house.”

  “I thought Dracula was the bad guy.”

  “I’m getting there. So she wanders homeless for months through the winter as her belly swells and she eats garbage and begs and gets chased around by dogs and boys with rocks. Till finally she’s big enough to burst and goes ahead and does it. Has the baby all on her own on a cold and rainy night while the Don is having a big dinner by the fire with his family.

  “And this woman is so crazed with love and despair that she takes the baby down to the river before she’s named it, before she’s even cut the umbilical, she’s still connected to this child, and she puts it in the water and holds it down until her hands go numb. But when she pulls it back up, the baby’s not dead. It was still attached. You see?”

  David nodded, though he didn’t understand.

  “She tore the umbilical cord with her teeth, like an animal, and put the baby back into the water bleeding and held him down until he was dead.

  “Then she went and found the Don. And she said—I done it. And he said—done what? And she said the baby’s dead. Like he was never born. We can be together. There’s she standing in her homeless rags, all stained with the blood of birth and filth from the river saying you can love me again. And the Don tells her to get good and fucked off and releases his dogs, who chase her down on account of the blood and they rough her up awfully before she climbs the wall and gets back out into the streets.

  “And there she is with nothing left, the murderess of her own child, cast off by everyone who was supposed to love her. And she walks into the river and drowns herself.”

  “And then here’s where it gets scary. Because late nights, people by the river can hear this woman screaming, but when they go to investigate there’s nothing there, just the rushing of the water. And they go home and tell their children not to be afraid, that it’s just the wind and the water. But the kids say—how can wind and water sound just like laughter? ’Cause when the kids hear it, they hear this sound like the best birthday party the nicest lady in the world was throwing you, laughing and singing. And some of those kids, the Don’s kids, are the first ones to do it, go to investigate. And when they get to the river’s edge, La Llorona, the weeping woman, rises up and pulls them in and holds them down until they drown.”

  She stopped speaking and looked at David until he said, “Okay.”

  “She can be anywhere there’s water and pe
ople to believe in her. Enough Mexicans up here now I expect we got her, too.”

  “So you’re saying I ought to be a better dad than that rich old Mexican guy?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “I’ll do the best I can.”

  It was noon and he was drunk when the telephone rang.

  “Hello?” he said.

  He could hear fabric move against rough skin, a muted television in the background playing violent cartoons.

  They called back three more times before dusk. Each time David listened to them breathe a little longer.

  The fifth time they called, Maribel had returned from what she called a walk and David pretended to be asleep.

  David listened with eyes closed to half of a hissed argument in Spanish.

  She told whoever was on the far end that she would kill them and herself if she had to and hung up the phone.

  Twenty minutes later, David pretended to wake up at the sound of Maribel packing.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “I have to go. You can come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Into the mountains maybe. Someplace we can hide.”

  “What’s going on? Baby …” he touched her arm and she snapped around at him like a trap, taking shuddering breaths.

  “Baby?” he said.

  “Can we just go? Can you not ask and we can just go? I need you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Yeah, okay, let’s go then.”

  They put everything in plastic Walmart bags and piled it into the trunk of the car. David drank the last of the beer so it wouldn’t go to waste and Maribel filled a box with their few kitchen utensils.

  He found her staring at their bare mattress in an empty bedroom and took her hand. She kissed his lips and he kissed her neck and slid a hand beneath her shirt.

  They didn’t hear the window glass break for the sound of the bedsprings.

  Maribel screamed when they came in the room and David sprang out of the bed, naked, erect and ridiculous.

  “The fuck?” David said.

  “Hey, Sis,” said Diego. The other man looked just like him but bigger.

  “Put some clothes on and let’s go,” Diego said. “Van’s waiting.”

  Maribel swung out of the bed and crouched over an open box and came up all in one motion with a bread knife in her hand.

  She screamed and swung the blade like she was walking through a cloud of flies. Cuts opened on Diego’s arms before the big one grabbed Maribel’s wrist and squeezed the knife from her grip.

  David punched the big one in the throat and pushed a thumb in his eye. He let go of Maribel and she fell to the ground and scrambled back to the kitchen box.

  Diego yelled and when David turned on him was momentarily stunned and amused by the sight of his dick. David grabbed Diego by the shirt and drove his forehead into the bridge of his nose. Blood splattered onto David’s naked chest.

  The big one tried to grab David’s balls and Maribel stuck a steak knife in his calf. He howled and slapped her and ran from the house crying.

  Diego punched and kicked at David from the floor, and David stomped on his head until he stopped moving.

  They dragged Diego into the closet and shut the door but could still hear the wet suck of his breathing. David shoved the bed in front of the closet door and they pulled their clothes on and ran to the car.

  “Alfonso will come back with others,” Maribel said.

  “He’s the one with the knife in his leg.”

  “Sí.”

  David started the car.

  “I don’t want to meet any more of your family,” he said.

  Four

  They maxed out their credit cards on cash advances and then gave them to a homeless man.

  Autumn accelerated as they drove north and into the mountains. By mid-Idaho they didn’t have enough clothing and had to stop at a Salvation Army.

  They followed signs to a man-made lake on the assumption it would be empty through the winter. They spent a day and a half driving on dirt roads before they found a cabin Maribel thought looked lonely enough.

  David couldn’t jimmy the lock, so he kicked in the door to the mudroom. There were pictures inside of a family David guessed were too blond and too satisfied to be anything but Mormons. Inside they found a month’s worth of dried and canned food, paperback mysteries, board games, puzzles, and a hunting rifle.

  David gathered wood and beat a trail to the lake. Maribel cleaned and organized the cabin, suddenly cheerful and industrious as her belly grew.

  Every couple of weeks, David would broach the subject of her family again, and again be met with such energetic vitriol that he would shrink from the topic like a flame.

  He killed deer and rabbits to supplement their dwindling stores. Whole weeks passed in which Maribel ate nothing but flesh. Days passed without a spoken word. David read mysteries with predictable endings.

  “Jason is a good name for a baby,” Maribel said sometime after Christmas. They sat before a fire in a cabin surrounded by woods and knee-high snow.

  David felt movement in her belly and tried to understand that he was going to be delivering a baby.

  David broke a three-day silence with an elaborate story about his sister-in-law’s pregnancy that ran so far askew of the facts of Maribel’s basic empirical experience that she laughed until she pissed herself. David tried to talk through her laughter, but his words slowed and floundered and eventually he just watched her laugh and wished the cabin had something to drink in it.

  “God damn Mormons,” he said.

  He shot a doe through the haunches at dusk and then followed the trail of blood a quarter mile to where she stood wavering like a lost drunk. He shot her in the neck and she died.

  He unzipped her from sternum to asshole and opened her up and spilled her guts onto the ground.

  The sky was fleshy and red, smeared with ashy clouds, the snow banks a dirty pink.

  Gray shapes moved in the corner of his eye, behind the steam rising from the carcass. They vanished when he looked at them directly.

  He wet the blood on his hands with snow and wiped them on his pants and picked up his rifle.

  Shadows moved at the edges of his vision all around, lost in the pinkish gray swells between trees.

  He became still and rested the rifle on his knees. He focused his eyes on the doe’s bloody ear and counted to ninety-nine, watching the coyotes move at the edge of his vision.

  He could see eleven of them. The sun kept sinking.

  David raised the rifle. The coyotes waited.

  He fired a shot skyward, a sharp crack in cold air.

  The coyotes waited.

  David stood and looked at them all. Their fur was the yellowish gray of dead men’s teeth, eyes black and bright. Thick plumes of breath fogged their muzzles.

  David raised the rifle and sited the nearest of them and pulled the trigger.

  Snow jumped behind the coyote and he turned and trotted back into the woods. David looked for the others and they were gone.

  He dragged the deer back to the cabin and hoisted it by a post on the deck and ripped its skin off.

  “I want the heart,” Maribel said. She wore panties and a thin t-shirt despite the cold, her belly huge and tight.

  David cut the heart out and gave it to her.

  “Come in and eat. You can butcher her in the morning.”

  “It’ll be froze by morning,” David said.

  She shrugged and smiled and smelled the bloody heart and walked back into the candle-lit cabin.

  David built a fire to work by. He set a tin pitcher of snow by the fire to melt. He sharpened his knife on a stone and roughly sawed meat from the carcass and piled it in the snow. Runnels of blood froze.

  When half of the meat was processed, he paused to carry it inside and pile it in the sink.

  Maribel stood over the stove mechanicall
y shoveling pieces of warmed heart into her mouth.

  David went back into the yard and stood by the fire and drank from the pitcher of melted snow.

  A dozen pairs of silver eyes watched him from the woods. He stared back at them, tightening a bloody fist around his knife.

  “Go on,” he said.

  A few coyotes moved closer, orange light from the fire burning around the edges of their flat eyes like the moment of an eclipse.

  “Go! Go!” he shouted, and then roared at them without language.

  They watched him. With the fire at his back, his vision adjusted to the darkness and he saw pieces of teeth hanging beneath their eyes.

  He screamed at them in the darkness.

  “They want our babies,” Maribel said from the porch.

  David didn’t turn to look at her.

  “It’s the blood. The deer.”

  “It is blood,” she said, “You have to kill them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t let them take our babies.”

  “Nobody’s taking our child.”

  He folded the knife and put it in his pocket and backed to the porch and picked up his rifle.

  He walked out past the fire and cocked the rifle and took careful aim at the nearest pair of eyes and fired.

  The eyes blinked and juked sideways and then settled on him.

  He aimed and fired again and again until the rifle clicked empty.

  A coyote leapt from where there had been only darkness and bit his arm, hanging briefly before flesh tore free. David yelled and cursed as the coyote fell and scrambled, smiling, back into the darkness, licking blood from his chops.

  “Get inside,” he told Maribel.

  The coyotes swept in, moving over the ground like the shadows of birds. David ran, blood sheeting from his arm, swinging the rifle as a club.

  Maribel stood huge and wavering inside with the door all but closed.

  David kicked a coyote into the fire and it rolled away smiling in the snow, trailing smoke.

  Jaws snapped at his legs, tearing canvas and flesh.

  A coyote leapt and clawed its way up his back and bit off a piece of David’s ear.

  He stumbled on the stairs of the porch and fell and three coyotes climbed his back. David looked up at Maribel inside the door and knew that she would close the door and leave him out here to be eaten before risking the life of their unborn and love filled him up.