by Ellen Datlow
Have you heard this saying? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Zero morals. I’m not proud of it, but my person was taken over by a biological entity, if you know what I mean? Everybody in the crew thought I was a guy. I tried to tell them at first, I was my own kind of woman, but they’d just grin and nod, mostly out of fear I might turn my savage talents upon them. I had my head shaved back then and wore a black, form-fitting sweatsuit. Also, I added yellow-lensed ski goggles to my outfit. I never looked as sharp as that again.
So my boss, a tub of shit with a ketchup stain on his shirt and a vast overestimation of his own capabilities, told me one day he had a job for me coming up and we all stood to make a fortune from it. It was about this time I started to regret my life of crime. From the moment I’d plugged those two goons in the pizza parlor, I’d been on a tear through the underworld, killing, wreaking havoc—some days for one gang and on other days against that same gang. I was enamored of the action, the opportunities to mix it up with so-called tough guys. God, I wrecked a hundred and a half of them.
The gist was one of the other crime bosses had his own special fighter who they wanted me to fight. The purse was two million. There was a lot of talk about my opponent. He was called Thriller, I think because Michael Jackson’s song came out at the end of the previous year. It was hugely popular. The others in the crew tried to explain my opponent to me, but I wouldn’t let them.
The day finally came and we drove down to a spot at the end of Jersey, an abandoned warehouse near a town called Shell Pile. The place was a dump. Inside the old building, they had a large circular chain-link cage. My boss told me to go inside it. As I did, he yelled after me, “To the death. Do you understand?” I didn’t even turn around. I was standing there for a few minutes, and then music started blaring from unseen speakers—the Jackson hit. Other people filed into the warehouse. I didn’t bother to look for my opponent. Finally, I sensed someone standing behind me, and it was him, Thriller. I hadn’t noticed, but there was another opening on the opposite side of the cage through which he’d entered. My defenses came up instantly, the adrenalin, the other chemicals from the well water, and I was growling, as back then I had a tendency to do in such situations. I went from poised to leap to complete stillness in an eyeblink. My opponent, the killer, Thriller, was a kid, at best twelve years old.
He was naked, and his body was covered with long blond hair. He had dog ears instead of human and they came to points. He had the saddest dog face I’d ever seen. Then he charged me, and I knocked him back onto his tail. He came at me again, snapping and frothing. I gave him a love tap on the chin and he went sprawling. By then it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to kill a child, no matter how screwed up it was, and so I climbed to the top of the cage, thirty feet in the air, and exited through a small hole at the very center. From there, I jumped and somersaulted down the side of the thing. This all happened fast as lightning, but it only took an instant for my boss and the crew to see I was abandoning the bout. They had their guns drawn and weren’t about to let me escape. I skipped and leaped around and over them and a couple wound up shooting each other.
I got out of the warehouse and ran off across a field into the thick woods of the pine barrens. Once in under the trees, I slowed down and caught my breath. I’d only rested for a heartbeat before I heard a twig crack behind me and knew Thriller was on my trail. I took off through the barrens like a shot, leaping fallen trees, vaulting creeks, and for a while swinging from branch to branch so as not to leave tracks. Still the kid stayed with me. Around dawn, I realized there was nothing behind me and slowed down. Running away would have been easy, but I had a strange thought, one that wasn’t about myself. I had what I believed to be a feeling of worry for the poor kid lost in the woods by himself.
I retraced my steps and found him curled up, beneath a tall blackjack oak. I lay down next to him, and when we woke he followed me, and I took him in as both my pet and my son. It was the moment I started caring again. He ate ravenously and the cat litter cost a fortune as I could never get him to go on the toilet. I had to get us an apartment and I needed a job. He only lived for a brief time, a few years, before succumbing to splintering bones and organ failure. He’d been poorly bio-engineered by mob doctors in search of the perfect assassin. Some clandestine botched scientific experiment. At the end, the result of it all broke my heart. I’d given him the name Hector and I think we loved each other.
I have to tell you, the walk through the decrepit Sank Building and across the dark and inhospitable parking lot at 11.30 p.m. had me looking over my shoulder and sent me images of a deep dark stone well, able to draw you into its heart and not let go. On the two-hour drive home, I wondered if the story could be real. It seemed, even for having to do with Rita, a tad far-fetched. Let’s face it, I was a fiction writer and teaching a class in fiction writing. Even though she said it was her memoir, she might have developed a sense of ironic humor. Perhaps all her physical power was subverted into a glowing intellect. Or fiction was the only way she could capture the staggering epic of her life. Either way or any way, I thought about it and reread the piece more than a few times through the week. I almost told my wife, but the whole thing was far too complicated to explain. The following Tuesday night at the stank, I waited for Rita to show up, even held up the start of class in anticipation of seeing her again. Of course, she never returned.
* * *
Now I’m in Ohio, living out among cornfields and tumbledown red barns, nobody to see for miles. I’m retired from teaching more or less, although I still do a class every now and then at a fairly close-by university. I can’t see very well, but I talk to the dogs a lot, especially when I sit out back on the nice days beneath the apple trees and face out into the two-mile green field. Yes, I have a notebook with me and a pen, and I’m supposed to be writing but, to be honest, I do more thinking. Though you’d expect me to be fed up with all the Rita nonsense by this age, I admit she comes to my mind more than she should. I daydream she lives in a trailer in the wind break in the middle of the vast field before me. In that island of white oak and hickory she passes her considerable golden years, enjoying the experience of aging, of falling apart. She works on her memoir, and I wait patiently for the day she will bring me a jar of freezing water. I keep an ear out for the shriek of her whistle.
Pear of Anguish
Gemma Files
KNOW what a pear of anguish is? Imogen asked me, that last day we spent together, and I shook my head. I’ll show you. Take a look.
She opened up her book and thumbed through it quickly, spreading its dog-eared pages to display two illustrations set next to each other, one a sketch, the other a photograph. Both were indeed roughly pear-shaped, as advertised; the one on the right spread out in petals, weirdly organic, while the one on the left was black iron, spiked all over, sharper outside than in.
You use the screw, here, she said, pointing. Tamp it down, tight, and thrust it up inside, anyplace that’s big enough to take it. Could be the mouth, like a gag, that’s why people in Holland called it the choke-pear… but other people, they say they used it during the Burning Times, on women. Down there.
Jesus, that’s gross, I said. Seriously, what—why? Why would anybody—
—stick that inside someone and pull the screw, let it open up, see what happened? Her eyes were still on the page, half-slit and dreamy, like she was hypnotized. It’s no different than cutting yourself, Una… all on the inside, though, instead of the outside. No scars. None that show.
And somebody else doing it to you, instead of you doing it to yourself, I pointed out. Cutting, I could have said—would have said, later on, when I finally knew how to say things like that out loud—was all about control in a world without it. Hurt yourself to dim or stem the pain you already knew was coming. What kind of control would shit like this give you?
It’s dumb, I told her, finally. That’d kill you. Totally different.
Imogen smiled then, her smile that looked m
ore like a snarl, skewed left and upwards, in a way that made her look as if she was having a stroke. Like you’ve never thought about it, she replied. Steal your Mom’s booze and a bunch of pills so it wouldn’t hurt as much, slit your wrist the right way and let them find you like that. I used to plan on setting myself on fire with the gas can my dad kept in our shed, back in Gananoque, but it’s harder here.
Why not throw yourself off the bridge, you want it that bad?
Maybe, one day. Maybe.
Around us, the Ravine wasn’t quiet so much as full of a very different sort of noise. As part of a system of watersheds downtown Toronto sat overtop, the section we knew best ran underneath the St Clair Ave East bridge, bisecting our shared neighbourhood for a mile in either direction—trace it far enough south and it blended into Rosedale, eventually becoming part of the Don Valley Parkway, which an enterprising hiker might trace almost right on down to Lake Ontario. The trees grew so close they strangled the sky, and the creek rushed by at full flood over rocks and trash, striking liquid against the runoff tunnel’s concrete walls. Green dusk here at the bottom of the slope, true dusk starting to show up above. The insects sang and the leaves rustled, and for half a heartbeat I thought I heard a cicada whine so loud it cut through my skull like a skewer.
Seriously, I said, at last, don’t be so fucking stupid; don’t pretend like it even matters how. You’d still be just as dead.
Sure. But think about how they’d all feel, if we did.
From “me” to “we,” in one small slide. That was Imogen, all over.
They’d laugh at us, Im, is all, I told her, after a long minute. Look sad in public and make fun of us in private, for being weak-ass losers who couldn’t stay alive long enough to get into high school. Like usual.
But Imogen simply sat there studying those horrible pictures, as if she thought somebody was going to test her on them later, ignoring me entirely.
* * *
The very first day I met Imogen, I followed her down under the St Clair West bridge without even thinking twice, straight into the Ravine’s heart. She let herself out of the recreation yard through a crack in the fence and moved downwards into the green shadows through weeds that grew big as bushes, clumps of nettle and deadly nightshade, scrums of birch with big torn strips of bark hanging down from their trunks like loose bandages. There was a path, but she avoided it, preferring to make her own.
I’d been coming back from lunch when I spotted her, still reading that book she’d been nursing under her desk all day in the corner of the recreation yard, ignoring a clot of “popular” girls discussing her from near enough to make it obvious, yet far enough away to make objecting to being discussed more work than it was worth. I didn’t know any of their names yet, but I recognized their faces from earlier; I didn’t know anybody here yet, given I hadn’t known I was changing schools until Mom had told me the week before, when she’d picked me up at the airport after coming back from Melbourne only to take me “home” to a completely different house from the one I’d left a month before.
“You’ll like it, Una,” my mom told me, “it’s a whole fresh start.”
“Sure,” I agreed. No point in arguing.
Arguing never helped.
One p.m. on Day One at the new school near the new house, and the only one in class whose name I’d managed to learn thus far besides the teacher—Miss Huergath, roughly my height but twice my width, sporting red plastic frames and a big cross at her neck—was Imogen, who nobody seemed to like and everyone seemed to be afraid of. She didn’t seem all that scary to me, but then again, why would she? Usually, I was that kid.
That alone made me want to follow her, to see what all the fuss was.
“And what did you do over the summer, Imogen?” Miss Huergath had asked, that morning, after the national anthem was over and we’d all sat down again. I followed her gaze to see who she was curving her mouth at and found it was a girl sitting almost beside me, head cocked and long, pale hair half-shading her face, eyes glued to whatever she had in her hands. She barely looked up, flicked her eyes back and forth, before replying.
“I spent most of my time reading mythology,” she said. “Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Aztec, African. Christian.”
“Christianity isn’t mythology,” Miss Huergath said.
Imogen twitched one shoulder, not quite a shrug, but not quite not one. “All right,” she said.
One of the other girls snorted. “But why?” she asked, as if the answer implied: Because you’re the most giant geek who ever geeked, obviously. And for a minute she seemed like she might go on, but Miss Huergath raised her hand instead and snapped her fingers at the same time, silencing her.
“Jennifer Diamond,” Miss Huergath said, “do we talk out of turn in this class? No, we do not.” And then she was turning my way, scanning the attendance sheet. “So,” she began. “Mmm… Una, is it? And how did you spend your vacation?”
Everybody looked at me, then, the way I’d been praying they wouldn’t, freezing the breath in my lungs and thoughts in my brain together at once, for one painfully long moment, as I struggled to form my next sentence. “In Australia,” I told her, at last, when I was able. “My dad lives there.” Which drew a snicker, of course, courtesy of what sounded like the same girl as before: Australia? But why?
I felt my face heat, all my pimples flaring up at once, and tried to distract myself from the strong, immediate urge to throw something at her by looking back at Imogen, whose eyes were back on her book. That was good; I remember thinking how I wanted to know what the title was, whether it was one I’d already read, and tried to crane my neck to see. But the light on the spine was too strong for me to make anything out, even if she hadn’t had it opened so wide.
Around us, the class went on with Miss Huergath’s Q&A, a steady drone, busy-dumb as bees in a hive. And I was able to sink back into myself, invisible, or at least as much so I ever could be—me, with my adult height and full pubertal shift at age ten and a half, almost eleven. Me, so gawky and inconveniently well-developed, my face painfully sunburnt from that last trip to the beach before boarding the flight back to Toronto; I still wore the horrible navy-blue acrylic turtleneck I’d spent a day and a night travelling home in, if only so nobody had to gape at those long strings of red-brown skin working their way off the back of my neck and into my cleavage, let alone the scars on the insides of my wrists.
Which was uncomfortable, but no more than anything else, really. The glasses with lenses so thick they sometimes fell off when I leaned too far; the braces, rubber bands linking my top to my bottom canines, tending to snap when I yawned. The stretch-marked C-cup breasts I’d somehow grown over those last two weeks of August, so fast I had to wear one of my mom’s bras until we could take a trip downtown to the Eaton Centre, with her underwire cutting into me every time I slumped.
And all that fucking blood, that was the worst of it. The way it always seemed to catch me by surprise after that first time, with an acne flare-up, a pre-migraine squint and a general feeling of having been punched in the crotch as heralds that I’d yet to get used to tracking.
Not to mention the rage that came with it, stronger than it had ever been before, which is saying something.
I hated it all, hated my body, hated myself. Didn’t help I’d always felt like a monster, long before looking like one—never in on the joke, not until I figured out the joke was always me. Like a bomb with a timer anybody could wind up, a storm made from screams, thrown fists and broken furniture. Like anyone could make me explode by looking at me the wrong way. Like everyone would, eventually, because it was oh-so-fun to watch when I did.
My last school had been like that, from Grade One on. You make it so easy for them, Mom used to tell me, and I guess I did. I guess I always had.
So yeah: if there was someone else who already filled this new class’s mockable outsider slot, I’d love to make sure she was the person I had to make fun of in order to keep the roving eye of social ma
levolence securely away from me, for once.
Down into the Ravine, therefore, trailing after Imogen. I didn’t even know her last name then, and it didn’t matter—I wanted to see what she’d do. My plan was to spy on her, take notes, carry stories back to the clot of “populars.” Be practical and start out on the right side of things, for whatever good that turned out to do me.
Didn’t work out that way, though.
* * *
You’ve been hanging around with Imogen, Jenny Diamond said, as I put my glasses back on after drying my hair, still huge and naked from my post-swimming-lesson shower—I surfaced blinking, taken aback to find her there and horrified to see she had the whole fucking pack with her, all the “populars” at once: Fazia Moorcroft, Nini Jones, Peri Boyle. I mean… we wanted to make sure you knew about her, before you made a mistake. It’s not too late.
I already knew I was blushing again, probably all over, clutching my wet towel like a shield and wanting to hit her so hard she’d cough blood, so hard I had to breathe a moment, deep, before I spoke. Too late for what? I asked her, finally.
Nini and Faz grinned at each other. You know she’s a witch, right? Faz asked.
Witches aren’t real, I said.
That’s what a witch would say, Nini told me. You a witch too, Una?
No, I snapped back, already knowing it was the wrong answer.
Later, after they’d gone—after I’d screamed at them until they left me alone, at last, hard enough to hurt myself, hard enough that swallowing felt like something scraping the inside of my throat—I retreated to the toilet and crouched there crying slow, hot tears, rereading the back of the cubicle door top to bottom like a litany: le freak c’est chic, heather sucks dick, frig yourself, imogen = witchie-poo. Pretty soon my name would be up there too, probably misspelled. So I bit into my thumb until I could taste salt, until the tooth-marks were deep enough to sink an entire nail into, until I knew I’d still have bruises two weeks on, purple-grey in yellow. Like swearing blood brothers, I guess, but without the other person.