I opened the next layer of the doll and cracked it under my heel. A splintering sound in the kitchen, like cracking bones. What exactly was she cooking in there?
Then, footsteps, but from the wrong direction—from my mother’s bedroom.
The doorknob rattled.
“Tasha?” It was the voice of a young woman, someone my own age. The door shook. “Tasha, you are being a naughty child. Open this door.”
“You’re dead!” I called through the wood.
“Do I look dead to you?” The knob jiggled again, insistently. I could see the shadows of her feet beneath the door. “Open this door and see for yourself how alive I am.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“Of course I am,” said the voice of the young woman. “You are of my own flesh. Just as I am of my mother’s own flesh. She knew what to sacrifice, and planted her seed. Just as I did.”
I shook my head, clutching the doll in my hands, trying to breathe. “No.”
“Infertility runs in our family, Tasha. I should have told you sooner. All the women of our line have been barren.”
I thought the hungry black hole in my gut would devour me.
“Which one is it?”
Silence on the other side of the door.
“Don’t I have the right to know which one is mine?”
“I was going to give it to you,” young Ludmila’s voice came through. “But now I’m not so sure you can be trusted with it. You’ve already broken two very precious, fragile dolls. You’ll have to be punished for that.”
Punished. I had always feared she would put me in the attic, to spend a night with the rats. She never did, but the threat still hung, unspoken, in the air. I leaned against the door. Placed my palms flat, felt its reverberations. And wondered if I was part wood, too. If I rubbed my eyes, would the paint smear? Would I smudge my pupils? Would the rats eat my eyes from my skull?
I pictured my mother sitting at her embroidery, when she was still gray and aging, not young and unfamiliar, and her bones made of wood knocked hollowly together, and somewhere under her face lay a wooden skull, carved and polished, gnawed by termites—
The next layer of the doll came apart in my hands and I destroyed it.
I had to steel myself to open the door and step over Ludmila’s young, broken body, had to force myself not to look. I made it as far as the living room, where I collapsed onto an armchair before the blazing fire, which was the only light in the room, convulsing against the shadows that webbed the line of dolls upon the mantle. My face was wet. The matryoshka dolls watched me, and I wished I had never touched one. I thought of mothers who want children, and daughters who cannot help but have mothers. The house reeked of death and dust.
Then, from down the hallway came a small figure. A young girl, no more than a child, with chestnut hair; a silhouette. She stepped into the light, looked at me, and her eyes were stormy, her eyebrows sharply slanted. Horror clawed its way up my throat. She held out her hand for the small doll in my lap. “You’re making a mistake,” she warned.
And the sight of her reaching out for the doll—not for me, not to comfort her daughter, but to take back what was hers—made me open it and throw the outer pieces into the fire.
The girl erupted in flames: curling over her skin, bubbling it black, eating her away. Flames burst through the cavities where her eyes had been, through her gaping mouth.
Without putting out the fire, I stumbled away, blinded by tears, gasping in untenable breaths. Distantly I heard my phone buzzing, wherever I’d left it—Carter, I thought, with longing—but then I heard, too, the sound of a baby crying.
Still clutching the tiny doll in my fist, I found the infant on my mother’s bed, stretching its pink fists toward the moonlight and scrunching its blue-gray eyes as it wailed. Numb, I picked up the baby, bounced it in my arms until it calmed. Its flesh was warm, cradled against me. Just a helpless little creature who needed love. I felt my heart unwinding, my tension unraveling. My tears drying.
What if, I wondered … What if I just raised my mother as my own child?
She was, after all, of my own flesh. A piece of her was inside of me, buried deep. A planted seed.
But what would happen when she grew old enough to speak? Would she remember that I was not her mother, but her daughter? Would she resent me, as I had resented her for so many years?
I put the child back down on the bed and wondered what I would sacrifice for my own child. What bloody piece of myself I would be willing to part with, to carve away and offer up.
An ache in my gut. I couldn’t think of anything.
I took the last little nesting doll—the one that held the seed, the soul of this many-layered being—and carefully pulled it apart.
Inside was a lump of putrefied flesh, withered, whorled with wisps of hair. Part of an ear. Part of Grandma Inga’s ear.
The baby stirred, coughing wretchedly—hiccupping, seizing, and finally a chunk of rotten flesh burped up from the baby’s mouth, and the child fell still.
For a time, I considered finding my own matryoshka doll, the one containing my mother’s pinkie toe, and destroying it all at once. Have done with everything. I knelt beside the bed, my face pressed into the comforter beside the body of the baby, soaking it with my grief. I coughed on my tears until I realized that the air was acrid, smoky. The fire in the living room was wild, untamed, unmoored from the hearth, and I wondered how much it had destroyed already. If I found my doll and tossed it into the fire, would all my selves unravel as we burned, or would it just be me, would they stay inside of me? The air was warm and smelled of burning cloth. I thought of my mother’s embroidery.
Should I try to get out?
I heard scrabbling overhead. The rats in the attic must be getting hot, must be panicking as the smoke curled its way up through the cracks in the floorboards. At least it would kill them. Good riddance.
The heat growing unbearable, blocking me from the living room and the front door, I realized the only place to escape was up. I pulled down the hallway ladder, stared up into the black square, the mouth of the attic. And, hearing it now without the barrier of the ceiling, I realized the scrabbling was too loud, too large, too singular to be a nest of rats.
I remembered my mother taking the matryoshka doll with the beetle and stashing it in the attic, where I could not get it.
Perhaps this was what I deserved. I wondered if Carter was worried that I hadn’t answered my phone. I wondered if he would come, would find the house in ash, would find what I had birthed unknowingly in the attic: something monstrous, not of my own flesh but of my own creation.
Could I love such a thing?
Slowly, I began to ascend the ladder as the fire made its way down the hall toward me. I did not know what was up there, but as I listened to the scuttling of many legs, the clicking of oversized mandibles, I wondered if what I found there would have my eyes.
Butcher’s Blend
Brian Hodge
This was mostly the same speech to the cowed and corralled that Annie had heard before, and the time before that, and the very first time they’d locked her up. But not identical. It had undergone refinements. Three years into these hidden pogroms, the speech was still a work in progress.
“It gives me no joy to welcome you here … any of you … but especially those of you who have been through this opportunity before. Because it’s obvious you chose to learn nothing.”
The standard lead-in from the woman at the microphone, Aryan tall, which she would’ve come by naturally, but the Aryan blonde part, that brittle looking shit came from a bottle. During the most recent of Annie’s in-betweens on the outside, she’d seen a verified picture, an early one, high school yearbook or college, and the woman had started off as mousy brown as a watered-down turd. Still had the crazy eyes, though, even back then. Like she might’ve been lookin
g your direction, but Jesus had just stepped up right behind your shoulder, and she was certain she was the only one who could see him.
Blessed like that, you know.
Mother Constance, was what she went by now. That took some nerve. Over the years, Annie had known the soothing touch of some world-class earth mothers, and not one of them had looked anything like this, all starch and creases in her slacks and a perpetual glare of aggrieved disappointment that simmered all the way to the back of this bare-bones auditorium.
Definite ice-MILF material, for those who went for that sort of vibe. This had to be strategic. Dowdy crones were easier to turn into background noise. A woman who looked like she could leave you a paraplegic in the bedroom, not so much.
She informed the newcomers, and reminded the recidivists, there was a word for them: They were the Disinvited. It didn’t get any more upside-down newspeak absurd than that. Of the thousand or so in her captive audience, nobody would’ve had the option to decline. The snatch teams may have sounded polite and professional when they came for you, but they made sure you saw the Tasers.
“If you don’t know what Disinvited means, let me make it clear for you …”
Up on the stage, amplified by the PA system, Mother Constance looked as comfortable as any woman possibly could when flanked by armed guards and others ready to turn fire hoses on an unruly crowd. They would spray whatever they needed to keep order.
“To be a Disinvited is the worst fate you can bring upon yourself, because it’s so selfish. You have rejected your place in a society that wants to hold you in its loving embrace. You’ve said no to the party, so your invitation has been withdrawn. The good news is your place will be waiting for you when you choose to accept correction.”
Oh, for the courage to shout the obvious: Bitch, just call it like you see it. We’re your undesirables. And nobody’s getting corrected here. All you’re doing is weeding out the ones you can break from the ones you decide one day you’re going to have to kill. Not just an example here and there. Whole cities’ worth of us.
That was what came next. Go back forever, and it was always what came next.
“What we’re doing here is God’s work,” Mother Constance said. “If I may be so bold, we’re improving on God’s work. Because, judging by surface appearances, without looking deeper, even God can get a little sloppy now and then.”
Among the audience, you could tell who was hearing this for the first time, from the ripples of their gasps and murmurs. These aren’t your father’s zealots, kids.
She basked in it, did Mother Constance. “I’ve listened to your claims. I’ve patiently heard you out a thousand times. You are as God made you. You love who you love because that’s how God made you. You think what you think, and do what you do, because God gave you free will. Your life, and the way you’ve chosen to live it, is God seeking to know himself through the variety of his magnificent creation. I’ve heard it all.”
She had a way of strolling about the stage and stopping to glance up at Heaven’s teleprompter as if it was all coming to her on the spot.
“I’ve heard, and I don’t even disagree. We can see eye-to-eye on this. But that doesn’t excuse you.” Her voice sharpened on cue. Every time. “You are still mistakes, and we, here, are charged with the task of correcting the mistakes that God has made so abundantly.”
Annie shifted, cheek to cheek. Beneath her, the bench was hard and unforgiving, bolted to the concrete floor, a seat made for proving your devotion to listen for as long as it took.
The most uneasy part of this? The projection screens on either side of the stage. With an audience of a thousand, there was no need for them. Mother Constance didn’t need camera zoom-ins to command attention. There had to be worse coming, already. It was a kick in the gut: They were starting the examples early this time—the very first night.
“Now, how can it be that a perfect God is prone to making mistakes? Isn’t this a contradiction? Not at all! Even mistakes are a part of the grand design that we’re here to help you see. Our perfect God makes mistakes because it is a part of his perfect plan to do so.”
Annie glanced around at her neighbors to see how they were taking this in. Who was rolling with it, who was getting steamrolled by it. Pay attention, and you could always find somebody who could use a friend for the next two weeks.
“Why? Why would he do such a thing? Why would God go to such lengths and allow you all to endure so much suffering, crushed by the burden of what you are? It’s because we …” She spread her arms as if trying to wrap them around her goon squad. “… we have been given an even heavier burden. It’s so those of us with the clear vision to see his mistakes can assume the responsibility for correcting them … and in our quest for perfection, we are all drawn closer to God.”
That yanked Annie’s attention back to the stage. This last bit was definitely new. She would’ve remembered a thing like that. The rationalizations, getting more elaborate. The self-aggrandizement, layering on more and more crazy. The urge to vomit, dialing up and up and up.
Call it the Gospel According to Mother Constance: And on the eighth day, God looked at all that he had made, and said, “A little help here? I kinda fucked up some. But I meant to.” And this lanky bitch gave every appearance of believing every word. Why not—it was perfectly self-contained, watertight in its internal logic. Sit her down for a hundred years and you couldn’t come close to talking her out of it. No cracking that shell. It was true believer stuff—the rest of you ignorant defectives wouldn’t understand. Because you were denied the capability.
Trust us.
It went on, of course, the condemnatory harangue delivered in a wrapper of love, sticky and coated with dead flies.
Back to her fellow undesirables. There … the bench in front of her, four seats to the right. The poor kid was looking around as if he were about to drown and getting desperate for someone to toss him a rope. That was the trouble when everyone around you was just as scared: lots of hands but no lifelines.
Annie held her gaze until he felt it, as sure as she’d tapped him on the shoulder. He stared back and she gave him her best reassuring smile. He had a long, thin face, and wide eyes, and straight black hair down to his Adam’s apple. It drooped across his face from left to right. A few years ago, she would’ve found it annoying, the frequency with which he twitched his head to flip it out of his eye. Now? Now she just found it endearing, the nervous tic of it. There was probably a time when he thought it made him look nonchalant, didn’t give a fuck ’bout nothing.
First time? she mouthed. She’d been blessed with a wide mouth, all the better for lip reading.
The boy nodded.
You’ll be fine. Okay?
Again, he nodded. An easy sell. He wanted to believe.
She checked the stage again, saw who was coming out.
It’s about to get bad. Don’t watch. But don’t let them see you not watching.
The boy gave her one last nod, tentative at first, then more confident. Thank you.
Onstage, Mother Constance was wrapping up her main spiel in a nice big … bow? Hardly. Tourniquet, more like it. Watch and learn, she commanded them all. See the price for choosing not to learn. See where your transgressions could ultimately lead, if you continue to stubbornly refuse correction. God’s word couldn’t have made it any plainer: If thy eye offends thee, pluck it out. If thy hand offends thee, cut it off.
A lot of implied leeway there. These people could find so much about the body that caused offense.
As for the man who’d come onstage to make examples of those adjudged no longer worthy of leniency … until she’d seen it for herself, Annie would never have believed someone could know so much about cutting, about plucking. It seemed that a man with these capabilities could only have existed in legend. Yet here he was.
Legend was where he should’ve stayed.
Three more of Mama C’s beefed-up enforcers dragged out a struggling fellow, somewhere in his middle years but his voice screeching as high as a middle schooler’s. On the close-up screens, his face streamed with so much sweat Annie wondered how slippery the rest of him was getting.
He was, according to Mother Constance, an incorrigible and unrepentant developer of role-playing games, which had been found to have a corruptive influence on those who played them … young minds especially. To pretend to meddle with spellcraft was to open the soul to engaging in actual spellcraft.
The punishment hardly ever seemed to fit the crime here. Cutting the offending hand off a thief made a medieval kind of sense, yet during Annie’s prior detentions, she’d never seen them deal with those sorts of wrongdoings. But: When all you have is a hammer, went the old saying, every problem looks like a nail. And when all you have is a fourteen-inch carbon steel butcher knife, even thought crimes come down to soft tissue and joints.
And the man who wielded it? She’d yet to hear him called by anything like a proper name, only titles. The Blade of God. The Lord’s Butcher. The Master Carver. His rubber apron, dark green, looked like serious business. The expression on his face, anything but. He hardly seemed to be there at all, balding and bland, with a look in his eyes that in any other context might be called dreamy.
Mother’s goons took a far more active satisfaction in their work. It required two of them to hold the game developer steady despite his struggles, and the third to stretch out his left arm, away from his sleeveless shirt. The Carver inspected the naked arm; wrapped a hand around the elbow; probed here and there with his fingers and thumb.
With a single deft stroke, jiggling slight changes of angle in the middle, he drew the knife all the way through, from the inside of the elbow to the outside. The holder let go of the wrist, and the lower arm dropped to the stage in a gout of blood. At first the developer scarcely realized it was gone, until he staggered and wailed while they held him upright as the tourniquet was applied and tightened.
Miscreations Page 4