The Humanity of Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  “Why can the birds survive and these can’t?”

  “The birds can’t survive. We have hidden feeding stations for them, so it looks like they’re wild.”

  I don’t need my emotions soothed, but the logic of it is also concerning. The world should be further on than this. All of these things should be outside already, with new things coming up from storage. The birds should be feeding themselves.

  “I know how I feel,” I say. “I feel healthy. I should have died. I should wheeze out here, but I ran here.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Something in the sludge.”

  The person stays focused on the butterflies. They’re deciding, so I don’t rush them. “The planet was scorched before we landed. They thought something lived here. Nothing too advanced, but there were signs.”

  “They missed something,” I say.

  “Underground. It’s not dangerous,” they assure me unnecessarily. “It’s a symbiont. It gets a home from you, with warmth and plenty of food. You get healed. Does that make sense to you?”

  “I understand mutual benefits.” My social life is constructed around deciding if a person is beneficial enough to treat well. The sludge is apparently more open about its choice of associate. “Aren’t you worried I’ll tell people?”

  “You might, but you deserve to know. It’s your body.”

  “Thank you.”

  The motives are obvious once I realise the sludge is alien. One terraformer conspires to release the sludge slowly, to strengthen the ecosystem. One wants to keep humans pure, so kills him and tries to clean up the sludge. The guilt is in the question of whether it was worth it. Whether the world really is better without the sludge, as the grass dies and the birds weaken. It’s amazing how people destroy themselves when given so little rope.

  I focus on the tour after that, noting unusual animals and plants. Forming a bond so I can ask a difficult question. I walk the person back to the terraforming station as I consider the wording.

  “Did you release the sludge?” I ask.

  “A storm damaged the pipeline. It’s sealed now.”

  I note the direction they glance at the mention of the pipeline, though I have some idea already based on the patterns of the sludge. “Why seal it? Wouldn’t it help?”

  “The world isn’t ready for it,” they say.

  I nod, face serious, as though I understand the dilemma. I say my farewells and walk away as though heading back to the domes. That’s the trouble with emotion. Even when a choice is obvious, there’s fear of the results, and guilt over the potential damage. These aren’t weaknesses I share. It takes me a few hours to find the pipeline, but once I do, I turn the valve.

  Shortly after my sister applied to run for office, one of my parents died. He’d been the one to give birth to me, so had been a prime target for the gossips.

  “Do you miss him?” my sister asked.

  “No,” I said. “Your girlfriend is cheating on you.”

  She gave me that look, where she slightly raised her eyebrows. She didn’t believe me. I didn’t know if it was true or not. Her girlfriend stayed away from me, after I said my sister only wanted a partner to look good for the campaign.

  “Why do you want us to break up?” she asked.

  “If you leave, I’ll only have our brother.”

  “Maybe she can be like another sister.”

  “No one would choose to be my sister.”

  “Drop the insults about how no one will ever love her, and she might.”

  I hadn’t planned on family expansions. Children maybe, but I didn’t think anyone would want children with me. It was something I’d do alone, the medical way. It hadn’t bothered me much before, but now one of my parents was dead. My family weren’t something I was guaranteed to keep. Expansion was a possible solution, though I wasn’t comfortable with not controlling who got to be a part of that.

  But my sister did her own thing, regardless of what I wanted. She wasn’t easy to manipulate any more. Not in the bad ways. I could make her smile much more easily.

  “Do you think she likes shadow animals?” I asked.

  “It couldn’t hurt to try.”

  I knock on the door, but my sister doesn’t answer. I have all the answers now and I need to share them. I want everyone to know I figured it out. I want my sister to see the birds healthy again. I knock again, but I’m impatient, so I push the door open and enter.

  Her main hall is similar shades of green to the kitchen. It’s narrow, as its only purpose is to provide a route to the other rooms. The tiled floor has fresh mud on it. That’s odd. Even if she’d visited the terraformers, she’d take her shoes off at the door. She hates cleaning, so she makes sure not to get things dirty if she can avoid it.

  “Hello?” I listen and there’s a faint sound of a chair scraping from the kitchen.

  I rush to the kitchen door. She’s inside, tied to a chair with tape over her mouth. Liquid covers her and the floor. She’s trying to speak. I pull the tape free.

  “Our brother—” is all she says before the world explodes, starting with the liquid around her feet. In the last moments as the heat surrounds us, I remove the monitor from my wrist.

  My body recovers during the night, to the surprise of the hospital staff. They want to run tests. I humour them long enough to find out the monitor recordings survived, my brother is in custody and the sludge is back. After that, I wave off the staff and go looking for my sister.

  She is in a room not far from mine. A machine gives her oxygen, to soothe her burnt lungs. Her skin is wrinkled and raw.

  My sister’s girlfriend is in a chair next to the bed. To go into the room, I’ll have to acknowledge the girlfriend. If my sister dies, what I do won’t matter. If she lives, I’ll have to deal with whatever I say. My sister still hopes I’ll end up with two sisters, which I’ve warmed to as an idea, if the girlfriend proves to be sufficiently interesting.

  I move away from the room and search for the hospital’s food area. I’ve seen the girlfriend’s preferences, so get her favourite hot drink. I return to the room and enter. She looks at me with more horror than my previous manipulations warrant. I offer the drink silently.

  She recovers from her reaction and takes it. “Thank you.”

  “How is she?” I ask.

  “You were the same yesterday.”

  “I heal quickly,” I say.

  The girlfriend is tired. Her eyes are bloodshot and she’s having trouble not yawning.

  “You should sleep.” I consider smiling, but decide it’s the wrong reaction. “I can watch her for you.”

  “Your parents said they’d come.”

  “They’ll be late. There’s always one more thing at work. It’s no problem.” I’m good at reassuring. It’s a tone of voice that’s rarely assumed to be a lie, because everyone wants to believe it. They want to know the world will be fine in the end.

  It takes some discussion, but the girlfriend finally leaves, and a nurse offers to find her a place to sleep. My parents aren’t here yet, so I have time. I start work on detaching the wires.

  I stand on the cliff, with my sister in my arms. She’s gasping in the air, but still breathing, just about. Her eyes open a slit, as though she’s aware.

  “I’m sorry I killed your bird,” I whisper.

  Saying sorry to your sister when she’s hurt is the right thing to do. I follow my lists. Better than the gossips. Better than my brother. They’re worth less than a bird in a cage.

  I jump and we fall towards the sludge. The birds are never the same.

  mantis wives

  kij johnson

  “As for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror.”

  —John Wyndham

  Eventually, the mantis women discovered that killing thei
r husbands was not inseparable from the getting of young. Before this, a wife devoured her lover piece by piece during the act of coition: the head (and its shining eyes going dim as she ate); the long green prothorax; the forelegs crisp as straws; the bitter wings. She left for last the metathorax and its pumping legs, the abdomen, and finally the phallus. Mantis women needed nutrients for their pregnancies; their lovers offered this as well as their seed.

  It was believed that mantis men would resist their deaths if permitted to choose the manner of their mating; but the women learned to turn elsewhere for nutrients after draining their husbands’ members, and yet the men lingered. And so their ladies continued to kill them, but slowly, in the fashioning of difficult arts. What else could there be between them?

  The Bitter Edge: A wife may cut through her husband’s exoskeletal plates, each layer a different pattern, so that to look at a man is to see shining, hard brocade. At the deepest level are visible pieces of his core, the hint of internal parts bleeding out. He may suggest shapes.

  The Eccentric Curve of His Thoughts: A wife may drill the tiniest hole into her lover’s head and insert a fine hair. She presses carefully, striving for specific results: a seizure, a novel pheromone burst, a dance that ends in self-castration. If she replaces the hair with a wasp’s narrow syringing stinger, she may blow air bubbles into his head and then he will react unpredictably. There is otherwise little he may do that will surprise her, or himself.

  What is the art of the men, that they remain to die at the hands of their wives? What is the art of the wives, that they kill?

  The Strength of Weight: Removing his wings, she leads him into the paths of ants.

  Unready Jewels: A mantis wife may walk with her husband across the trunks of pines, until they come to a trail of sap and ascend to an insect-clustered wound. Staying to the side, she presses him down until his legs stick fast. He may grow restless as the sap sheathes his body and wings. His eyes may not dim for some time. Smaller insects may cluster upon his honeyed body like ornaments.

  A mantis woman does not know why the men crave death, but she does not ask. Does she fear resistance? Does she hope for it? She has forgotten the ancient reasons for her acts, but in any case her art is more important.

  The Oubliette: Or a wife may take not his life but his senses: plucking the antennae from his forehead; scouring with dust his clustered shining eyes; cracking apart his mandibles to scrape out the lining of his mouth and throat; plucking the sensing hairs from his foremost legs; excising the auditory thoracic organ; biting free the wings.

  A mantis woman is not cruel. She gives her husband what he seeks. Who knows what poems he fashions in the darkness of a senseless life?

  The Scent of Violets: They mate many times, until one dies.

  Two Stones Grind Together: A wife collects with her forelegs small brightly colored poisonous insects, places them upon bitter green leaves, and encourages her husband to eat them. He is sometimes reluctant after the first taste but she speaks to him, or else he calms himself and eats.

  He may foam at the mouth and anus, or grow paralyzed and fall from a branch. In extreme cases, he may stagger along the ground until he is seen by a bird and swallowed, and then even the bird may die.

  A mantis has no veins; what passes for blood flows freely within its protective shell. It does have a heart.

  The Desolate Junk-land: Or a mantis wife may lay her husband gently upon a soft bed and bring to him cool drinks and silver dishes filled with sweetmeats. She may offer him crossword puzzles and pornography; may kneel at his feet and tell him stories of mantis men who are heroes; may dance in veils before him.

  He tears off his own legs before she begins. It is unclear whether The Desolate Junk-land is her art, or his.

  Shame’s Uniformity: A wife may return to the First Art and, in a variant, devour her husband, but from the abdomen forward. Of all the arts this is hardest. There is no hair, no ant’s bite, no sap, no intervening instrument. He asks her questions until the end. He may doubt her motives, or she may.

  The Paper-folder. Lichens’ Dance. The Ambition of Aphids. Civil Wars. The Secret History of Cumulus. The Lost Eyes Found. Sedges. The Unbeaked Sparrow.

  There are as many arts as there are husbands and wives.

  The Cruel Web: Perhaps they wish to love each other, but they cannot see a way to exist that does not involve the barb, the sticking sap, the bitter taste of poison. The Cruel Web can be performed only in the brambles of woods, and only when there has been no recent rain and the spider’s webs have grown thick. Wife and husband walk together. Webs catch and cling to their carapaces, their legs, their half-opened wings. They tear free, but the webs collect. Their glowing eyes grow veiled. Their curious antennae come to a tangled halt. Their pheromones become confused; their legs struggle against the gathering web. The spiders wait.

  She is larger than he and stronger, but they often fall together.

  How to Live: A mantis may dream of something else. This also may be a trap.

  proboscis

  laird barron

  1

  After the debacle in British Columbia, we decided to crash the Bluegrass festival. Not we—Cruz. Everybody else just shrugged and said yeah, whatever you say, dude. Like always. Cruz was the alpha-alpha of our motley pack.

  We followed the handmade signs onto a dirt road and ended up in a muddy pasture with maybe a thousand other cars and beat-to-hell tourist buses. It was a regular extravaganza—pavilions, a massive stage, floodlights. A bit farther out, they’d built a bonfire, and Dead-Heads were writhing with pagan exuberance among the cinder-streaked shadows. The brisk air swirled heavy scents of marijuana and clove, of electricity and sex.

  The amplified ukulele music was giving me a migraine. Too many people smashed together, limbs flailing in paroxysms. Too much white light followed by too much darkness. I’d gone a couple beers over my limit because my face was Novocain-numb and I found myself dancing with some sloe-eyed coed who’d fixed her hair in corn rows. Her shirt said milk.

  She was perhaps a bit prettier than the starlet I’d ruined my marriage with way back in the days of yore, but resembled her in a few details. What were the odds? I didn’t even attempt to calculate. A drunken man cheek to cheek with a strange woman under the harvest moon was a tricky proposition.

  “Lookin’ for somebody, or just rubberneckin’?” The girl had to shout over the hi-fi jug band. Her breath was peppermint and whiskey.

  “I lost my friends,” I shouted back. A sea of bobbing heads beneath a gulf of night sky and none of them belonged to anyone I knew. Six of us had piled out of two cars and now I was alone. Last of the Mohicans.

  The girl grinned and patted my cheek. “You ain’t got no friends, Ray-bo.”

  I tried to ask how she came up with that, but she was squirming and pointing over my shoulder.

  “My gawd, look at all those stars, will ya?”

  Sure enough the stars were on parade; cold, cruel radiation bleeding across improbable distances. I was more interested in the bikers lurking near the stage and the beer garden. Creepy and mean, spoiling for trouble. I guessed Cruz and Hart would be nearby, copping the vibe, as it were.

  The girl asked me what I did and I said I was an actor between jobs. Anything she’d seen? No, probably not. Then I asked her and she said something I didn’t quite catch. It was either etymologist or entomologist. There was another thing, impossible to hear. She looked so serious I asked her to repeat it.

  “Right through your meninges. Sorta like a siphon.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I guess it’s a delicacy. They say it don’t hurt much, but I say nuts to that.”

  “A delicacy?”

  She made a face. “I’m goin’ to the garden. Want a beer?”

  “No, thanks.” As it was, my legs were ready to fold. The girl smiled, a wistful imp, and kissed me briefly, chastely. She was swallowed
into the masses and I didn’t see her again.

  After a while I staggered to the car and collapsed. I tried to call Sylvia, wanted to reassure her and Carly that I was okay, but my cell wouldn’t cooperate. Couldn’t raise my watchdog friend, Rob in LA. He’d be going bonkers too. I might as well have been marooned on a desert island. Modern technology, my ass. I watched the windows shift through a foggy spectrum of pink and yellow. Lulled by the monotone thrum, I slept.

  Dreamt of wasp nests and wasps. And rare orchids, coronas tilted towards the awesome bulk of clouds. The flowers were a battery of organic radio telescopes receiving a sibilant communiqué just below my threshold of comprehension.

  A mosquito pricked me and when I crushed it, blood ran down my finger, hung from my nail.

  2

  Cruz drove. He said, “I wanna see the Mima Mounds.”

  Hart said, “Who’s Mima?” He rubbed the keloid on his beefy neck.

  Bulletproof glass let in light from a blob of moon. I slumped in the tricked-out back seat, where our prisoner would’ve been if we’d managed to bring him home. I stared at the grille partition, the leg irons and the doors with no handles. A crusty vein traced black tributaries on the floorboard. Someone had scratched R+G and a fanciful depiction of Ronald Reagan’s penis. This was an old car. It reeked of cigarette smoke, of stale beer, of a million exhalations.

  Nobody asked my opinion. I’d melted into the background smear.

  The brutes were smacked out of their gourds on junk they’d picked up on the Canadian side at the festival. Hart had tossed the bag of syringes and miscellaneous garbage off a bridge before we crossed the border. That was where we’d parted ways with the other guys—Leon, Rufus and Donnie. Donnie was the one who had gotten nicked by a stray bullet in Donkey Creek, earned himself bragging rights if nothing else. Jersey boys, the lot; they were going to take the high road home, maybe catch the rodeo in Montana.