~
“Night, love,” my partner says. She’ll fade into sleep within a minute, so I kiss her hand as she rolls away from me. I hug the dog so long she tries to worm out of my arms. Though I’m tired from an extra fifteen minutes on the elliptical, I wait for the monster, counting the soft lines of light the blinds reach across the ceiling like fingers.
I hear it clutch at the doorknob a few minutes past one. The hinge moans, and I see the shape of what I made filling the threshold of the dark room. Its shadow drops and the ends of its twelve legs scratch across the floorboards. My heart wheezes as the ambient streetlight catches the carved marble of its face, as it moves around the bed to me, as it rises up, limbs twitching out.
I hear it for the first time as it leans down over the bed, a crackling drone, arrhythmic with the straining root of its tongue. Only now do I notice it has no scent—I never gave it one. I think of the smell of my parents’ basement the year it flooded, the moldy cloud that took months to get rid of, but the monster doesn’t take the assigned odor into itself. Then a whimper rises, a sound I would know before any music, and the dog is suddenly not on the bed. I slide up onto my elbows and see her crouched in the corner of the room, by the closet, her eyes wide enough to show the rings of white around the dark brown irises, staring up at the creature. She’s terrified, and now I do smell something: the tang of her urine on the floor.
“What—” my partner calls out. “What is it?” And the monster’s arm lowers to me, the growths that give it a hand spreading to grip my chest. The dog makes a noise that is terror and protection and heartbreak, my love makes a noise that is the low beginning of a scream, and I can’t do this anymore.. I can’t bring this into their lives. It wasn’t supposed to be real in this way.
I picture a man, my age, darker hair, murmuring the same assurances of an emergency room doctor. I sketch him in my mind with a blunt pencil, all in a moment. The replacement protagonist—David—reaches up and pulls the monster into an embrace. Its hand meets his chest, it pushes through the sternum and tears out his spurting heart. David’s girlfriend—Ana—shrieks until the monster turns to her. Then she is silent, and the dark thickens in the house. The night falls upon the night, and hides the twelve legs scrabbling out into the dark, the crickets falling as silent as Ana, the mountains poorly drawn silhouettes in the distance. It clutches its prize and a trail of blood follows it into the world. There was never a dog in the room. David and Ana don’t own a pet.
~
I have to send the story to the editors today, but my trick with David—drawing him up in an instant of panic, giving him rudimentary likes and dislikes and a familiar horror of what his heart is doing at every moment inside of him, channeling a kind of electricity through him—isn’t the ending I wanted. It’s an ending a reader is likely to feel cheated by. I fell back on the timeless author’s trick, pitting an evil I created against an unwitting character I created. David saved me.
My dog comes over to the chair and tucks her head under my arm and lifts. She wants me to scratch her magic spot, so I do, grateful last night has faded from her mind. And my partner’s—I swore she’d had a nightmare, nothing more, and she believed me just enough.
But the monster isn’t finished with me—it wants blood, not David’s pixels. When the book is published, the ink in David’s veins won’t be enough. I turn back to the laptop, this narrative with no resolution—unless—until the monster returns, the arrhythmia creeps into the dark room, and your eyes open at the creak of the door hinge. Your wife, partner, husband, boyfriend, dog, or children lie sleeping next to you, caught in their warm dreams. The face, beautiful enough to haunt us all, regards you. Its eyes glitter in what could be moonlight, if you want it to be. Its limbs reach out and flex along their many joints.
Again, you have only to say, This is a story about a writer writing a story. I am holding Miscreations, so the writer lived to tell me the story. But take a moment to imagine the organs filling your body. Focus on your heart, think of how you take it for granted that it will keep beating. Feel its rhythm, feel what happens when it stutters out of true, feel one of its valves close incorrectly, and gasp open again, feel the disbelief that the machine of your body has betrayed you. Your heart has always been there, unnoticed in moments of calm. Focus on it until the calm slips. Feel it palpitate right now and feel it gallop to reclaim the grace of its gait, fighting the abrupt illness of its rhythm. Feel the ugliness of it squeezing blood out and slurping blood in.
Take a moment to listen for your heartbeat, slow your breathing until you hear something behind you, crawling closer along the carpet or floorboards or blanket of pine needles.
I made David up, and in that fiction he canceled out the monster. It needs something real to claim. David couldn’t take my place because he wasn’t real. But you are real, and I have pulled back the curtain to expose your heart.
Matryoshka
Joanna Parypinski
My childhood was filled with dolls. Painted, bright shawls, red flowers. Lined up on the mantle. Smiling with their rosy cheeks.
Matryoshka.
Ludmila, my mother, collected them. I was never to touch them, even as a girl—a girl who liked to mother dolls and small creatures, whose play was in nurturing. Thinking if I could nurture, I could be nurtured, too.
Seeing those dolls staring out at me again, in this dingy house so immaculately kept if not for its irreversible age, cramped in on either side on the minuscule lot, sent me back to my childhood. Their painted eyes and rounded heads, bulbous against the tacky floral wallpaper, ran back the clock ’til I was ten again, spiteful, collecting bugs from the yard—opening a nesting doll, peeling back its onion layers, closing a beetle in place of the seed. Poisoning one of my mother’s precious dolls.
“Open it,” said my mother.
The Russian doll felt heavy in my lap, and I was weary. “Later, Mama. I appreciate the gift, but I’m tired. I just want to take a hot shower. Have a drink. Go to bed.”
“All right,” she said, giving me her iron-gray stare, hard as slate. Even the deepening grooves in her face did not diminish her. “But the daughter I raised would not fall to pieces. She would find a solution. And if she could not find a solution, she would make one.”
The burning in my eyes, the taste of tears in the back of my throat, infuriated me almost as much as the fact that she could still do this to me. Could still make me feel like a weak, incompetent child. Maybe I was. My mother had raised me alone, working two or three jobs to make ends meet, never complaining. But she had too much of the old country in her. Even though Ludmila moved to the U.S. before she could talk, Grandma Inga had instilled in her the virtues of hard women in a hard country. I was too far removed, perhaps, from that experience; too soft.
“What solution?” I snapped. “There’s no fixing it. I’m just broken.” I choked the words out, hating that my mother was making me go through this again—explain to her my infertility, the revelation of which came after months of trying and the slow dawning realization that something was wrong. As it turned out, I was wrong. It was me. And after my doctor confirmed it, I couldn’t believe Carter’s utter lack of resentment. He was almost cloyingly gentle, at first—minimizing. I wanted him to slam his fist against the wall or go on a bender, but he only held me and told me it wasn’t so bad. “There’s no solution that will fix this,” I told my mother. “Carter thought so and now look at us.”
The picture of a crumbled marriage: my inconsolable swollen-eyed grief, the disconnect of his misunderstanding, heated arguments, muttering frustrations into cups of coffee, the black well of despair. And like a kettle set to boiling, it finally shrilled its surrender: I packed my suitcase and came here, to my mother’s.
Carter thought adoption was the answer. “Think about it: How many kids are orphans, or unwanted? We could help them, Tasha,” he had said only hours after we got the news. Only hours, and mayb
e that hurt more than anything.
But how could I tell him? All I had ever wanted was something of my own. A child of my own flesh. I didn’t want someone else’s child. A terrible, selfish thing. Perhaps. And yet.
Seeing our impasse, my mother fixed me a hot toddy.
“When I was your age, my mother gave me a matryoshka doll.”
“I know. The one above your bed?”
“It is very special to me,” she said, nodding to the doll in my lap. “Open it.”
Knowing better than to refuse my mother a third time, I pulled apart the two halves to reveal the slightly smaller doll inside—and on until the smallest one came apart in my hand. At its core should have been the seed: the tiny wooden piece carved whole. But it was empty.
I threw down the doll in disgust. Its hollowness was inside me. Mocking me. “How could you?” The dolls lined up on the mantle stared. “You knew it was empty.”
My mother reached over and took my hands in hers, wrinkled and knobbed with age. I thought of my own hands growing gnarled, growing old, alone.
“So fill it,” she said.
“With what?”
Her smile, as it had ever been, was thin and wooden, did not quite reach her eyes. “A piece of yourself.”
Pressing my lips together, I reassembled the doll with its hollowness inside. How many dolls, plants, insects, clumps of cloth had I poured my love into as a child? “I’m not playing.”
“It isn’t play. It will help.” She stood, took my empty glass. Behind her, the fire crackled. “Maybe it is an old wives’ tale.” She shrugged, the fire dancing behind her. I could not make out her face in shadow. “But maybe not.”
~
I half-expected Carter to call, to check in, but the phone kept quiet.
The house was quiet, too. My mother didn’t like TV. She preferred embroidery, crossword puzzles, polishing her collection of dolls. Watering the droopy plants which didn’t receive enough sunlight inside, where the few dusty windows were crowned with ugly valances.
In the quiet, I could hear faint restless scratching in the attic, the scrabbling of claws. I looked at my mother, busy with her embroidery. “Rats? Still?”
“They don’t cause any harm,” she said without looking up.
“Mama, you can’t just let rats live in the attic.” The scratching sound clawed at my ears, sent knives up my spine. “I can’t believe you still haven’t taken care of it.” There had been rats in the attic since I was a kid. It was why I never went up there. At night, I dreamed of dark little creatures scrabbling around, their dull beady eyes red with the reflection of dim light. Burrowing into the wood floor and walls, nesting in cardboard boxes of old clothes.
“I’ve always taken care of things around here,” she said sharply. “Have I not?”
I thought about offering to help, reminding her that she was not so young anymore, and that so many years of manual labor had aged her beyond her sixty years. Reminding her that I, too, was capable of taking care of things. Instead, cowed, I said, “Yes, Mama.”
“Have you planted your seed yet?”
Casual, off-hand; clearly she was not as bothered by the scratching above as I was, sharp little claws on my nerve-endings.
“What am I supposed to put inside?”
Finally she set down her hoop and linen, looked up at me. I saw she was embroidering a rose embraced by its own prickly stem. “What are you willing to sacrifice for your child?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then maybe you are not ready,” she said, returning to her work.
Sacrifice? The word followed me to work the next day, drawing my mind inward on itself, plunging deeper and deeper until I was so ensconced in layers of rumination my colleague had to rouse me from the depths by putting a cup of coffee right in front of my face, draw me back to the surface. I knew having a child wasn’t easy, but I’d always thought of it as gaining something—an addition, not a removal. Did my mother see me as a sacrifice?
When I came home, I asked her what I should have asked when she first posed the question. “What were you willing to sacrifice?”
Puttering about the kitchen, she turned, lifted the hem of her house robe, and carefully toed off her left slipper; a calloused foot with yellowing nails emerged, missing its pinkie toe, a subtraction that had always stopped her from wearing sandals in public.
“I don’t understand.”
She dropped her robe and managed to get her slipper back on with her other foot; she had a bad back that prevented her from bending over.
“You’ll have to decide,” she said, picking up a wooden spoon and returning to the boiling pot on the stove. “Then you can plant your seed.”
Despite the warm smells of cooking, my stomach turned. I had to leave the kitchen, had to move to keep my own revulsion at bay. I did not understand. I did not want to understand.
I found myself in my mother’s bedroom, a place I’d hardly been allowed as a child. Even now, it felt like a small rebellion to be in here alone.
On her headboard sat the old matryoshka doll she cherished most, polished but faded with age, the eyes nearly rubbed off into white smudges. The rosy cheeks gone gaunt, almost gray. I picked it up, felt the heft of its many hidden layers, wondered at my mother’s secrets.
Why couldn’t she have just held my hand and told me, yes, this is terrible, this is the worst thing that has happened, and you have every right to grieve? Why couldn’t she have told me that Carter was being an imbecile, so let’s turn up the radio and have a few extra drinks? Maybe eventually I could even come to accept my barrenness, if only everyone would stop trying to invalidate the feeling that I’ve plummeted off a cliff. But then, what did I expect from her? None of my grievances, growing up, had ever been enough to stir her remotest sympathies.
A flash of impotent rage sent the doll flying from my hand. Its outer shell shattered against the wall, the inner dolls rolling onto the floor still intact.
Regret soured in my mouth. I picked up the broken pieces. What would my mother say of this childish outburst?
I brought the pieces to the kitchen to tell her I would mend it, I would glue it all back together, but as soon as I stepped in the doorway I dropped the pieces again.
My mother lay on the floor.
Her arms and legs twisted at the wrong angles; her skull was cracked, red lines separating her head into three pieces; blood pooled into the grout between tiles. Milky white eyes stared off in different directions, gauzed with death. She was a jumble, a ruined puzzle.
I struggled to breathe, stumbled away looking for my phone, my memory a pale void. The pot on the stove boiled over, and I shut off the burner, trying not to taste the tang of blood in the air, the vomit rising in my gullet. Murdered. She must have been murdered. How else could her body lie so irrevocably broken? Thinking this, I blindly grabbed the first solid object my hand touched when I opened a drawer—a meat tenderizer—and clutched it to me as I crept into the hall, my ears ringing.
A sudden scratching, and my heart pirouetted—just the rats in the attic.
The shifting groan of a footstep. My imagination, surely.
The squeak of a door swinging on its rusty hinges, opening like a yawning maw.
With a cry, I lunged in the direction of the sound, the meat tenderizer raised high, ready to bring it down on the figure who stood in the doorway of my mother’s room, the shadow stepping out into the hall—
The figure switched on the light, momentarily blinding me, setting me off-track; and when I looked again, I saw it was my mother.
My head swam. “You … you …”
The woman came closer. I recognized the hard slope of her nose and the slash of her crooked eyebrows; the slight droop of her left eyelid; it was her.
But her iron-gray hair was threaded with chestnut brown; lines in her face ha
d smoothed, like God sweeping his hand over rutted sand. Her hands lacked their grooves and liver spots.
It was my mother, but it wasn’t.
I recoiled. “Who are you?”
Ludmila smiled, and it did not reach her eyes. “You don’t know your own mother?” She took the meat tenderizer from my hands. “What were you going to do with this? Smash me, like you smashed my matryoshka doll?”
“I’m sorry,” I said at once, blundering into my own faults and away from the inexplicable sight of my dead mother standing, alive and youthful, before me. “I’ll fix it.”
“It’s too late for that.” There was an edge to her voice, sharp as when she’d found the beetle I’d hidden inside one of her dolls and slapped me, scolded me, sent me to my room without supper. Such harsh words for such a small thing, but nothing was more precious to her than her dolls. Nothing.
“Is this how I’ve raised you?” Ludmila said, frowning at me. Disapproving, disgusted. “You behave this way, a child of my own flesh. Destroying what is mine, after all I’ve given you.”
“What have you given me?” I shrieked, keeping my eyes open, for if I closed them I saw her body in the kitchen and wondered which one was her.
“Go to your room.”
I’m not a child, I wanted to say, but she looked just like she did when I was a child, so maybe I was wrong. I went to my room and sat on the lumpy twin bed. I listened to her walk down the hall to the kitchen, listened to the scrape of her picking up the broken pieces and dropping them in the trash, bending over effortlessly. Was the body still there? Had I imagined it? Was I losing my mind?
As she cleaned, I snuck back into her room and found the doll, bringing it back with me and shutting, locking the door.
She cared more about this doll than anything, and all I wanted was to care more about something, some creature that needed me, than anything. And yet she was the mother. I was just a hollow, barren thing. A toy.
Miscreations Page 3