Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  Another time, she saw her beautiful Momma, who was hairy and sleek as a cat. Her eyes were sharp green Sprite bottles, just like Susannah’s. She wanted to dive in.

  “Is Daddy with you?” she asked.

  Momma just kind of stared up from the bottom, like she was so deep in it that she couldn’t hear. Pretty soon, she was gone, and the crying lady was back. The crazy one, who was always trying to pull people in.

  She’d been gone from Las Cruces eight months. Back at St. Poly’s, the Gaylord note now had creases, like Rita’d been carrying it around in her wallet.

  “You ever hear from my daddy?” Susannah asked one night while she was mopping the rectory floors with vinegar.

  Sister Rita scratched her scales so that neck dandruff rained polka dots over her habit. “My ugly orphan, of course not. He’s dead.”

  The third place Sister Rita found happened nine months after Las Cruces. A Sanford junkyard doublewide full of kids and drunk people. Susannah stayed quiet and cleaned up the poop. She changed baby diapers and laughed a lot with the three other ten years-olds, but didn’t drink cough syrup with them, because it made her head hurt.

  Their last name was Halpern, too, and everybody in the family had bad teeth. The mom and grandmomma had both died from incisor infections. They also lied a lot, and were bad at the lottery. They weren’t so different from people she’d met on the road with her Daddy, only none of them was her Daddy.

  It was August—hot and wet. Sleeping at night felt like climbing into a cat’s mouth. And then one night, she heard that Rottweiler barking so long it got her stirred up. Her skin felt like it was on fire. So she sneaked past everybody sleeping on floors and drooled-upon couches. Not even the babies stirred, cause of the NyQuil.

  The dog belonged to the trailer park, so everybody and nobody fed it, which made it mean. Woof! Woof! Woof! It barked so long she felt like she was gonna scream. She got down on all fours and tried to reason with it, which turned out to be a him with giant man-parts. “Hush! You’re makin’ me crazy!”

  But he didn’t see the virtue of her words. So her brain turned off and her skin took over. All she saw was white like the hottest part of a fire poker, and she bit him in the neck until his blood rushed out.

  She got caught blood-faced and in the act by her foster uncle. The whole thing made the newspapers, which was exactly what her Daddy’d warned against. The howlers can read, after all.

  Sister Rita called Susannah into her office on the first day back at St. Poly’s. “Sweet cowgirl, we can’t find a place for you. Not after what happened with the dog.”

  “That’s okay,” Susannah said. “My pop’s comin’ for me. He’ll pay you back for my keep, then some. He’s got a system with the lottery.”

  “My lovely ugly,” Rita told her, then pulled a long, thin branch out from behind her desk. “It’s a sin to lie.”

  Before she could even wonder what was happening, Sister Rita bent Susannah against the desk and pulled down her panties. Slapped her butt cheeks hard with the switch.

  Whock!

  Then she righted her again, kissed her forehead, and gave her a chocolate calcium chew treat. It all happened in maybe eight seconds.

  “Take it,” Sister Rita said, holding the foil-wrapped candy, all breathless and excited and flush-cheeked as a junior at prom.

  For the first time in a long while, Susannah’s skin and head went in opposite directions, and neither won. She looked at the candy. Bared her teeth. But couldn’t bring herself to bite.

  Three: Two-Dollar Love

  Nine months after Las Cruces, a good thing happened: Susannah’s third grade teacher, Mrs. Melton, drowned in the river. Then a bad thing happened: The howlers started up. She could hear them at night, all distant and far away. That was how they hunted—in big circles that narrowed and narrowed until suddenly you were trapped.

  On the first day back at school, she had a new teacher—Ms. Canis from New Mexico. She had smooth skin like the throw-away paper from a sticker.

  Since the kids were all the same as last year, everybody still hated Susannah. Only now, they’d read in the Sanford Sentinel about how she’d bit a junkyard dog to death. Even before the Pledge of Allegiance, they were calling her animal.

  Animal, go crazy! Animal, where’s your collar?

  Animal, you got a black cooter or do you die it blonde?

  All through it, popular Carole sneered like a remote control dictator. The kids were drone fighters and she was this silent pilot a billion miles away. Susannah wondered if maybe she ought to act like an animal and start biting them. Or lift Carole by the ankles and jump rope with her.

  “You stop or my zombie Momma’s gonna drown you,” she said.

  Carole giggled. She’d traded her ribbon barrettes for complicated Princess Leia donut braids. “I didn’t know animals could talk!”

  Ms. Canis came out from behind her desk with this long, wood pointer. Another beat stick, Susannah guessed. This was how grown-ups out East laid down law.

  Ms. Canis banged the stick across her desk hard enough to break it in two. Everybody shut up, right then and there.

  After recess it happened again. Carole pinched Susannah’s wrist. “Bark, dog, bark!’ she hissed.

  Even though it got whispered from across the room, Ms. Canis heard. Her big ears pricked. She got up, shoving desks as she walked, like a tornado, until she reached the two of them. Then she hurled Carole’s unicorn Trapper Keeper through the window. Crash!

  Glass dangling and still falling, Carole crying along with a bunch of other kids, Ms. Canis smiled like a pacifist. “Starting out orphaned puts you ten miles behind the rest of the world, and you have to be a marathoner to catch up. You kids ought to show some compassion.”

  The kids stared. Ms. Canis pulled shards loose from the sill with her cardigan. “So we’ll keep this quiet, won’t we? Because I know where all of you live.”

  The kids laughed, but not ha-ha. Scared laughed.

  “Are you a marathoner, Susannah?” Ms. Canis asked.

  Susannah waited for the snickers, but everybody was too hopped up on freak-out. “Uh,” she said.

  “Can you run for your whole life?” she asked, like there was a secret in there someplace. Like she was talking about Daddy and the road and all those ranches where they’d earned their biscuits cleaning stables.

  “I dunno.”

  Ms. Canis tapped a shard of glass against her palm like she wasn’t afraid of a little blood. “Better figure out what you’re running from, Pup.”

  People stopped teasing Susannah after that. They stopped talking to her all together.

  By now, it was a year since Las Cruces. At St. Polycarp’s, things were the same. Sister Rita kept her close and sometimes whipped her but mostly gave her calcium chocolates. Orphan life was starting to feel normal. Bad normal.

  “You hear from my daddy? He ever send word?”

  Sometimes Rita said he was dead. Sometimes, it was jail. Sometimes she didn’t know where he was, because he didn’t care enough to keep in touch. “But I want you, sweetie. I want you like you’re my own,” she always said.

  Around Christmas, the howlers closed in on Sanford. She could smell their pee on park benches, the school hallways, her bedroom window. On good days, she guessed they’d found her because of the junkyard dog, on bad ones, because her Daddy’d betrayed her.

  The first to die were Susanna’s foster family with all the kids, even the baby twins. Their beds got eaten up along with the bodies, so pictures showed cheap mattress fillings unstuffed and mixed with baby’s breath flowers.

  Bounty hunters and Staties came with guns. They shot a bunch of wolves and dogs, but didn’t track the coyotes, probably because when they’re not hunting, they just look normal like anybody else.

  The next to go was the rich family from Camden. They got gored, then the outside of their house painted in blood. More hunters came. People talked about spraying poison with crop dusters, only they couldn’t fig
ure out how to make it okay for people, too.

  In January, Susannah got a late Christmas present from Sister Rita: a new wardrobe from charity that fit her well and looked like new. For every dollar it cost, Rita lashed her. Susannah held to the backs of her legs and wondered if other people were happy, or if they just lied better. Then she passed out from the pain.

  When Rita was done she scratched all under her hot, heavy habit. Skin flaked like desert snow. On the desk, Susannah saw this letter opener made of silver that she could plunge into Sister Rita’s cold, shitty heart. She thought about that as she gnawed her calcium chew. Thought about how her head and skin were all messed up these days, because she wanted to kill Rita, but she loved her, too.

  “It’s time for some new lessons,” Sister Rita told her, still scratching, only further south, like her between-legs were made of lice. “You’re ready for phase two.”

  Susannah’d known just one girl who’d been Rita’s pet this long. She got out by tying her neck with a sheet, then throwing herself out St. Poly’s window.

  Around the feast of St. Nicholas, school let out for a half day because of the snow. It came down in white puffs like liquid clouds and wasn’t nearly so cold as she’d feared. The rest of the kids headed out for busses, but Susannah figured she’d walk around. Maybe beg for change at the Mobil, get a Rainbow Slushy. Tell Rita to fuck herself and run away, even if it meant she’d never see her Daddy again.

  “I’m glad you stayed. I brought you something,” her teacher Ms. Canis told her. Then she handed Susannah a fancy box from Target. It had tissue paper and she inhaled the new, unspoiled-ness of it.

  “What?” she asked.

  “To wear,” Ms. Canis said. She had brown hair that was gray at the roots and her fingers were always bitten down, but she kept herself fit, her teeth sparkling white. She ate fruit and vegetables and nuts like a squirrel. Healthy on the inside—dumpy on the outside, which was pretty much the opposite of Sister Rita.

  Susannah picked the present up. It was a silver chain—or at least, painted silver with a kind of pod on it that smelled like dried weeds. It felt electric, sort of, like the live wire around a chicken coop.

  “It’s supposed to help you keep your head and skin in agreement so you have control of both,” she said.

  “I don’t like it,” Susannah lied. “It’s ugly and stupid and I don’t know what you’re showin’ it to me for.”

  Ms. Canis smiled. “That’ll be all.”

  Susannah got up and started out.

  “Take it with you.”

  Susannah kept going. Ms. Canis followed her with the thing. “Take it.”

  Susannah didn’t turn around. She was crying and didn’t want nobody to see. When people do nice things, it’s awful. Feels like your heart is all rotten and full of puss, and they’re scraping on it. Maybe they wanna clean it out; maybe they just like puss.

  That night at St. Polycarp’s was like the rest. Cheese sandwiches, Pepsi, and Grandma’s brand chocolate chip cookies for desert. Then Sister Rita beat her thirty lashes. When she was done, she took off her shoes and socks so Susannah could see her smooshed big toes and blue-green leg veins. Her whole body was flaking like a coat of cheap paint.

  “You hear that story about the woman who drinks the blood of the young, and stays young because of it?” Sister Rita asked.

  Susannah nodded, because anything else would earn more lashes.

  “Wrong answer,” Rita said, then lashed her thirty more.

  The howling came real close that night. Susannah propped herself on a blood-stained pillow, opened the window and listened. Maybe her Daddy’d been wrong and they weren’t so bad. Maybe she didn’t care, because getting et up might be a relief.

  They came right up. All four, with a big Momma behind them, watching over. They were half-grown, had to stand on top of each other to reach her window. The smallest and lightest nosed through the opening and licked her.

  She shut it fast and squeezed her eyes tight. Shoved the pillow over her head while they howled, and the rest of the orphans cried out in fear. But still, she kept her arm unwashed for a day, palming where the little werecoyote’s tongue had gone, sweet and gentle as a family kiss.

  The next day, the newspapers announced another bunch of coyote murders. This time in the trailer park with the dead dog. Everybody got killed, even the babies and the old people. Not a single Halpern left in all of Sanford. It was like the howlers were eating up Susannah’s trail, so nobody’d know there’d once been a girl who got dumped on a train.

  Cops came to St. Poly’s, asking to talk to Susannah because they’d figured out the coincidence, but Sister Rita told them they needed a warrant. Then she locked her office door and held Susannah tight as a tick under skin while Susannah stared at the letter opener, wishing she was somebody un-broke.

  That Monday the amulet was on her desk at school. She tossed it in the garbage first thing. Ms. Canis shrugged and kept up her lesson about the dust bowl that happened because everybody fenced in their cows and it ruined everything. “But the Old West is coming back,” she told the class. “Civilization is an idea, and so is savagery. The former crests and collapses, the latter persists in light and in dark. A hundred years from now, we’ll hunt in tribes again, and our tall buildings will house only death. Humanity itself will die out, leaving dominion of the Earth to the things that are wild.”

  She talked like that sometimes. Especially when the moon was full.

  At recess, Susannah sat by herself. Imagined where she’d go and run away to. Back West, probably. A ranch or horse farm. Or maybe that other tribe. Maybe the howling.

  The girls that day played married, walking down the aisle with boys they crushed on, then sharing Doritos and SweeTarts like a proper reception. The cool ones talked about kissing. Susannah wiped her hairy chin and thought about her liar daddy, who’d told her she was pretty.

  She booked it after class, went straight home where Sister Rita was waiting. “You killed all of them, didn’t you? All those families I assigned you. God told me.”

  Susannah nodded, because if she denied it, she’d get beaten. Sister Rita pointed at two packed bags. “Take my things to the car. We’re leaving here.”

  Susannah didn’t hesitate. That’s how far gone down the well she’d fallen. She picked up Rita’s leather satchel and started out. Dropped it inside the old Saab that everybody called the Jesus Mobile because of all the bumper stickers and rosaries. The satchel opened up and on top was a bunch of letters bundled together with red ribbon. The first was the Gaylord note, the next had a picture of Las Cruces.

  “Deer Susannah,” the Las Cruces card read inside. “I love you very much. Please take this money and buy yerself something that matches yer eyes.”

  There were more. She opened them, one by one. They were postmarked from the New Mexico county jail. They all said they had money, but they didn’t. Then came the last letter, from a warden, saying that during transfer to maximum security in Baltimore, her Daddy had escaped. This was two days ago. They said they thought he’d come looking for his daughter.

  Suddenly, Rita was at the driver side, opening the door. She started the car and waved for Susannah to sit. Then she saw the letters. “Sneaky, sneaky. I know what’s good for you,” she said with that crazy smile.

  She leaned across the car, like to reach up and give Susannah a slap. What happened next, Susannah didn’t know. She blacked out.

  It felt like Crack! Crack! Crack! lightning in the sky. Her head and skin stuck together again and made electricity. Her whole body thrumped and throbbed. She got low. Everything changed, even her eyes and smell and the beat of her heart.

  And then the car was shaking, and glass all over, and the sharp, shocked sounds of Rita’s screams. And blood. So much blood.

  She woke up in a strange bed that was low to the ground, wearing Ms. Canis’ amulet. Something sizzled in the next room and she staggered there. It was empty except for a steak in a frying pan, and a cou
ple of scientists talking on the radio about polar ice caps.

  “That’s the thing,” Ms. Canis said from behind and Susannah didn’t turn, because she knew somebody’d washed the blood off and kept her safe from the police.

  “Coyotes survive anything. We mate with dogs. Wolves. Lawyers. The rest of the world is limping toward apocalypse, but we keep getting stronger.”

  Ms. Canis passed Susannah, flipped the steak with a fork, then threw it on the floor like that was where food belonged.

  “You’re the one broke my family?” she asked. The shirt she wore was two sizes too big. Something that probably belonged to the real owner of this house.

  While Susannah watched, Ms. Canis changed. She got hairier and her nose elongated. She didn’t turn full animal—just something smart and lowdown, in the nightlike in-between.

  “It’s generations. On and on. We’ve mixed for thousands of years. Your mother was more human than most. Dangerous because of it. You two legs are all heart and no instinct. You change because of the moon or a bad mood. We’d kill you if you weren’t so smart—there’s no way we’d have crossed the Mississippi without you.”

  “My momma watches over me,” Susannah said.

  Ms. Canis let out a throaty click. “If anybody, she does. More than the other pups, you take after her. It’s what they call an evolutionary leap.”

  “Momma was perfect and beautiful,” Susannah said, and for some reason, just the mention of Momma’s name from somebody who used to know her started the waterworks.

  “She was ugly. But she loved your Dad so much that her tubes knit back together. She bore you pups even though her hips weren’t wide enough for those big, human brains. You’d think that kind of sacrifice would have made you kids ease up, but you were worse than the coyotes. You chewed your way right out her womb.”

  “That’s a lie,” Susannah said.

  Ms. Canis laughed. “You think so? Either way, you belong with us. I was your momma’s half-sister. I raised your five sisters like my own. We’re your family.”

  Ms. Canis started to gnaw on the meat. The sound was familiar. Susannah’d dreamed it during full moons. Outside, the howlers started. She couldn’t tell if they were laughing or crying.