Strange Folk You'll Never Meet

by A. A. Balaskovits

  Your father was an elk, but you were born without horns. One night, a man who shared your nose came into your room while your parents, below you, tucked into warm milk and rum. He offered to tie sticks to your head with duct tape and a hot glue gun. “There are bones inside of you,” he told you. “How do you know who you are if you cannot see them?”

  * * *

  A woman lost her daughter in the deep woods. She cried up and down the trunk of every tree until her arms collapsed and she could not lift herself anymore. Kind folks said her daughter was a butterfly now, as all girls are who walk starless roads. Kinder folk brought her the skull of a rabbit. The transformation of girls makes for strange objects, and what was taken away from a mother must be given back.

  * * *

  When the horns do break the skin at the top of your head your mother wept and died. Your father refused to bury her in the ground with the worms. He placed her body on the bed where you were not conceived and where you were not born. The skin sloughed off her face like runny jelly, followed by the muscle and the fat that once perked her cheekbones. Her skull was as round and smooth as a bright, white ball.

  * * *

  The daughter was found before she became dust and bones in that dark wood, but not by her mother. A curious doe sniffed at her palm and lead her to the other side of the woods. Not intentionally. It was walking that way and the girl followed. When she emerged into the sunlight a group of flesh-sellers put a blue ribbon around her neck and passed her off as an orphan to a lonely couple, though her mother was still alive, though her mother now dressed the skull of a rabbit in a child’s hat and painted its front two teeth pink.

  * * *

  When your father died on an island—hunting trip, he told you, but you know he went to tie a cord around his neck—you carried his bones back on a boat made of wood and red paint. The fish followed you for some time, but they swam off when you hit rock. You buried what was left of your parents together in their backyard. The house you sold, because it stunk. Where they rest, no grass grew, no flower spread, no ant marched. You could take their story and make it your own, as all stories end up buried in the earth one day, but not yet. Not yet. You still do not know where you come from. You do not know if that matters.

  * * *

  She cut the ribbon off of her neck on her twelfth birthday, before it threatened to strangle her. The two who purchased her, though they would not approve of it being spoken of in that way, wrapped her in silk threads they’d cultivated in their abdomens. It was warm in those threads, like a cocoon, and above her they crisscrossed threads back and forth so when she looked up at the dark sky, it seemed as if they had hung the stars just for her. “Little rabbit,” they told her, “we will love you forever.”

  * * *

  The man returned to you when the bones on your head brushed the ceiling of your little car. “You can’t hide them forever,” he said to you after you offered him a cup of warm milk and rum. You thought you could. In fact, you had become something of a hat connoisseur. He shook his head and said you looked ridiculous. No one was fooled. “Relax,” he told you. So you did, because you did not know what else to do. The moment the muscles in your arms and legs went lax the bones in your head broke through your skull, cracked it in half like it was an eggshell, and from the remains stepped a different you, all fur and snout and bones as sharp as knives. “Is this real?” you asked the man in a voice that was your voice, but not, but was. “You tell me,” he said, but you had no answer.

  * * *

  Years went by before the two of you met. She came to you in a dress of spider silk, and you had taken to wearing ribbons of gold and silver on your antlers. She told you she never found her mother, the one who had lost her long ago, but she remembered her every time she had to file down her two front teeth when they grew too long. “Did you look for her?” you asked, and she only half-smiled. You gave her a cup of milk, though she said she preferred water, but she drank it anyway. “I think,” she said after a bit, “we have strange bodies. How long will you spend searching for where they came from?” You did not have an answer for that, because you did not know. She carefully removed the ribbons from your antlers and tied your palms together with them. “What would we make?” you ask her, and she smiles and smiles and shrugs. “Something new,” she said, and that was as good an answer as any.

  Once, in a city long forgotten, some young boys and girls between the ages of five and six were playing make-believe with one another. After some discussion, they decided to play butcher. One girl was to play the butcher, another the cook; a young boy was to be the cook’s assistant, and another young boy was to be the pig. The cook’s assistant was to catch the blood of the pig in a tiny bowl, and this blood would be used to make sausages. As they agreed, the butcher-girl fell on the pig-boy with a little knife, and the assistant cook caught the blood in the bowl. The girl started to carve up the pig-boy’s body but had trouble because her knife was so small.

  As it happened, a Man of Words was walking by and saw the children playing. Appalled, and gagging, he grabbed the butcher-girl and took her into the House of Many Men of Words. There they gathered and wrung their hands over the sorry mess, for they could not decide if it had merely been a game gone too far. Then, one Man of Words took a shiny gold coin from his pocket and a blood-red apple from the kitchen and told them that they would test the girl. They would offer her both, and if she took the apple she was to be deemed a child, and let go. If she took the coin, then she was all grown up, hiding in the body of a petite thing, and they would kill her. One man held them both before her, and she studied them with intent. Then, she laughed and grabbed the apple. She took a bite of it, looking them each in the eye as she did, and licked the juice from her lips. She offered the apple back to them with an open palm, and though some were tempted, none dared reach for it. Because they were Men of Their Words, they had to let her go, and off she went, giggling and making merry as only a child can. But each man in that house fell into an uneasy sleep that night, wondering what would have happened had they taken a bite.

  Of the two of them, Todd was more upset when the baby bled out. Beyond the physical pain, which was great, there was no innate strain of motherhood in Cora that inspired regret. When she held the plastic stick with the pink lines up to Todd’s face, she knew she did not particularly desire the change, but she supposed she would shoulder the child as one burdens all the milestones: the first menses, marriage, tax audits, and picking out the gravestone your mother might have wanted. Once, she had read that the brain released chemicals after a child is born so mothers, tired from the endless wailing, would be brainwashed into loving the fragile things and not smother them for one night of uninterrupted sleep. Evolution’s protective flip switch: it’s not screaming, it’s my little baby-love.

  Cora was ten weeks along, give or take, when she began spotting red. Todd drove her to the hospital, murmuring about reading an article online that clinically explained it was not necessarily serious, this happens, but he knuckled the wheel and glanced at her belly at stop signs. The doctor ran a cold machine over her and looked at Cora’s neck when she said there was no heartbeat.

  Did she want it taken out, or did she want it to slide out naturally? It might take several weeks on its own.

  Todd gripped her hand while the doctor explained that it was a missed abortion, and the tissue—tissue, now—would have to slide out one way or another. It could not remain.

  Around eleven that night her belly constricted and released. Cora sat on the toilet to piss, she thought she had to piss, and felt the pain wind up her abdomen. When she relaxed her muscles, she felt the splash. There was so much blood, and a small sac.

  Todd hovered in the doorway. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “You don’t have to look.”

  She’d already looked.

  She waited in the hallway for the toilet to flush, holding a clump of toilet paper be
tween her legs, fearing she would stain the carpet, not knowing how long it would take to fully empty out. She heard the faucet running and peeked in. Todd was gently, lovingly, washing off the sac. He must have plucked it out of the water. It was clear and gelatinous with a dark center.

  It was an intimate moment she was not supposed to see, Todd holding that part of her, of him, that should have been kept inside. Cora supposed she ought to cry but felt drained enough just from crying out between her legs, and that was enough wetness for one body.

  She never knew what he did with it. She never asked.

  Later, he bent down on one knee and gave her a golden band wrapped in diamonds.

  “Why now?” she asked.

  “It’s not the child,” he said.

  That was the first secret moment with him, the one that made Cora think she might love him.

  * * *

  He only told this story to Cora once, but she remembered it and carefully cultivated it, like it was her own memory. When he was nine, Todd had fallen in mad love at a petting zoo. His parents had dragged him in an effort to show him that he was capable of making connections, even if it was just for a moment, even if it was with a dumb animal, bred to be gentle and accommodating. Todd found making friends with other children difficult, though he had trouble making enemies as well. The other children didn’t bully him or shove him into a locker or call him names. They acted as if he was not there at all and, if they were partnered with him for a craft project or asked to work together on spelling or addition in groups, they stared at him like they had never seen him before.

  Todd liked the ducklings, their strange flat feet, and the way they would run from him but look behind to see if he was still chasing them. The quarters for the feed machine jangled in his pocket. A goat chewed on his shirt and he let it, too afraid to move, too afraid that it would walk away to any of the other children who made little piles of food around them and waited for the animals to clamor up.

  There was another girl there with braided brown hair, shaking as she brought her hand up to pet the backside of a graying donkey. The animal was fat and old. The hair around its eyes and mouth were white. Some of its teeth were black and chipped, but it wiggled its shagged tail back and forth.

  Todd must have made a noise, because the girl looked at him, really looked at him. She had dark eyes and a smudge of dirt on her cheek, gaps between her teeth. Todd shambled over to her. He didn’t know what to say to her, afraid that anything he did would wake her up and she would remember that he was invisible and forget how to see him.

  The other children were so odd to him, the way they moved and spoke without any sort of consideration for the angle of their bodies. During crafts, they snaked their hands into the crayon bins and were happy with whatever they grabbed. The lions in their coloring books were pink or green, whatever was the closest color at hand. They chose so easily. He tried to mimic them, closing his eyes and reaching into the bin and pressing whatever was in his hand onto the paper.

  “That’s very nice, Todd,” his teacher murmured when she walked by. “But try coloring in the lines?”

  Don’t think, he told himself, just act for this girl who could see him. Todd reached out and grabbed one of her braids—soft and wild, loose strands tickled his palm. She screamed, the wild yelp of a surprised and indignant child, and flailed her hands, hitting the donkey on its backside. It bellowed, a hoarse choking sound, and kicked its leg out, knocking Todd to the ground.

  He briefly remembered hearing the brown-haired girl crying, then the long shadows of his parents falling over him, putting their hands on his face.

  “Breathe, honey,” his mother’s voice kept repeating. “Come on, just breathe, breathe for me, baby.”

  He tried, he really did. Thought back to the times he’d puffed out his chest and held the air in when the kids in class ignored him and he thought if he just made himself a little bit larger, took up a bit more room, they would see him. Each time he tried it burned, each time he tried to move his chest ached.

  They kept him in the hospital for a week, his parents alternatively holding his hand, talking to doctors who said things like cracked ribs and collapsed lung, and screaming over the phone at the owners of the petting zoo about lawyers and emotional damage.

  He’d have that half-round scar on his chest for his whole life.

  He asked what happened to the little girl with the short dark hair, but his parents couldn’t really say.

  Later, he overheard his parents whispering that the beast had been put down.

  After he had finished his story, his hand resting on her thigh, she knew that this was the moment she could love him. Love, after all, was having secrets you only told one other person. Of course, she told her friends this story. But only so that they could know the fullness of his character and approve.

  * * *

  It was Marjorie who inadvertently convinced Cora to accept the proposal, a week after he had given her the ring and she told Todd she would consider it, “Let me think on it”, but wore the band on her finger. She asked Winter and Summer their opinion. They were children of overgrown hippies who met online in a support group for parents gone to seed, and stayed together because they both voted Republican for fiscal reasons but hated pearls.

  “Well, of course you should,” Winter told her, holding Summer’s hand in his own. “He’s so good with kids.”

  “Can’t knock a guy who is good with kids,” Summer repeated.

  “Spends his weekends coaching field hockey?” Winter asked.

  “Softball,” Cora said.

  “Yeah. And doesn’t he co-lead that Girl Scout troop? You couldn’t pay me to pretend to enjoy gluing sticks together while someone’s crying because little Martha is being a bitch. Again.”

  “Is that what they do,” Summer said, intently staring at Cora. “Glue shit for hours?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Christ,” said Summer. “What a saint.”

  Cora remained unconvinced at this praise of Todd’s character. Summer and Winter had been aching for her to marry any of the men she had slept with for longer than a week. They were fond of throwing parties and claimed her single status made the married guests twitch away from her, like she was radioactive and bright.

  Later, Cora went to Marjorie’s and sat in the old woman’s kitchenette. They talked together near the open window so Marjorie could smoke. The neighbor, a plump woman who went running every day but slogged back after an hour with a sack of fast food, fake-coughed whenever Marjorie was on the landing, lighting a cigarette with the dying ember of another. Marjorie was an odd choice for Cora’s godmother, particularly because she was an atheist, but she was Cora’s mother’s dearest friend and the only one who had never married. There was a part of Cora that suspected her mother really believed that all woman just wanted something to nurture, even if it didn’t come out of their own bodies.

  “I thought I was crazy,” Marjorie said, “watching a documentary about penguins. You know there’s all those kids who don’t have enough to eat and here we are in Antarctica training our cameras on little waddlers, as if we’re somehow going to find some mystery about the human experience from birds. They can’t even fly.”

  Marjorie was flinging herself around the kitchen in the way that only a woman who had no real idea what the space was for could do. She opened cabinets and closed them, opened the fridge door, moved condiments around, checked their dates, frowned, and put them back. She settled for boiling water on the stove, one of her few skills, and sat a tray of assorted teas—most likely swiped from one hotel’s continental breakfast or another—in front of Cora.

  “It’s a six-part series. On penguins. Can you imagine?” Marjorie gestured at the diamond on Cora’s finger. “That’s a pretty thing,” she said. She did not sound excited.

  “He’ll never leave me,” said Cora. “That’s
a point in his favor, right?”

  Marjorie cough-laughed. “There’s trouble right there. Thinking you can make a thing permanent just by wishing it.”

  Yet Marjorie couldn’t understand that it had been six months before Todd had let Cora see the scar on his chest. They’d rolled together in the bed in complete darkness, and he undressed and redressed before she could see what was there. He held her hands above her head and laid heavy on her forearms when she tried to feel his skin or turned her around and took her from behind. When she demanded he show her himself, all of him, he had stilled on the bed. Eyes up at the ceiling. Arms limp at his side. She dragged the shirt over his head like he was a child, pausing at the horseshoe scar. She touched it with her fingers and he shuddered. He looked so ashamed, and so grateful, when she ran her tongue over the smoothness that had stretched as his body expanded.

  “Men with scars are the kind you fuck, but they don’t stay put.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Cora said, steeping her teabag and watching the water darken. Marjorie did not believe in spending time on beverages. A quick heat up and a quick swallow.

  “They don’t. They’ve survived being opened up. So they’ll keep doing it, over and over. It’s a psychosis. It might not be another woman, or another man, but it will be something. Maybe he’ll spend hours taking pictures of his cock and slipping it into letters online. Or he’ll skydive, try to make new scars.”

  That was what Marjorie could never understand about Todd: his grateful looks that she saw him and responded.