And I was hungry. I was always hungry, then. I saw this man, quiet across the bar, not paying attention to my song at all, and I thought he’d fill me. Maybe he had.
“Hadie’s fine. Just a little scared,” Evan said when I didn’t ask, but not accusingly. He watched something that I couldn’t see through the slats in the blinds. I wanted to comfort him, rub his back like you do with small children, or bring him soup.
My husband is a good man. He didn’t trap me into this. He didn’t kill my sisters or make up his own story. He didn’t burn my skin to ashes or force me into too-tight shoes. He didn’t blame me when I killed our son with my genes and couldn’t save him. Or when, after, I crashed the car with his daughter in it.
He sat on the side of a too-small hospital bed and looked at me with eyes the color of the sea, with eyes the color of our dead son’s eyes, and made it okay for me to be broken. Voiceless. Heartless.
And still, I couldn’t touch him. Still, I couldn’t find my voice long enough to say what mattered.
I wanted to go home. Not now home, but then home. I craved the crash of sea and salt, my father’s voice below the waves, the sounds of my sisters in harmony. But there’s no going back. Once I learned the words for love and grief and child, the sea became a language lost to me.
“Can we go home now?” I asked.
“Soon,” he said. “Soon.”
After we got back from the hospital, I refused to be alone around Hadie. Evan was still going to work every day. Leaving the house, wearing a suit that wasn’t black, putting on shoes. I didn’t know how he did it.
“You can’t leave her alone with me,” I said from under the crib. I was curled up, under there, knees to cheek. I had a box in my hand, empty. I’d been meaning to fill it and tape it down and write donate on it, but the nursery smelled like milk and talc. I didn’t think the crib would hold me, and I couldn’t bear to break it, so here I was.
He kneeled down and looked at me, caught beneath, and the only way I knew what a mess I had becomewas by how good he smelled. Fresh and clean like a breeze the morning brought in. I envied past me, who’d gotten haircuts and answered “paper, please” at the grocery store and texted their husband at work to see if they had time for a quickie over lunch. Would I ever be that me again? Did I want to be?
“Evan, I can’t be trusted with a child.” I put the box over my head and talked out through it. Now, at least, there was something inside it. Maybe I was going that kind of crazy.
“I trusted you with ours.” He reached and pulled the box off my head. And in his eyes, trust still. Depths and depths of trust, enough that you could drown in them, if you’d forgotten how to draw a breath. “I still do.” His hand, a lifeline that I took, trying not to pull us both under.
My husband is a good man. I’m the monster.
I knew the risks, and I didn’t tell him. I’ve never told him the truth, although he’s smart and he pays attention, so maybe he’s known it all along. I read the literature, what little there was of it that wasn’t built from myth and magic. I learned to understand percentages. Chances. Rates of anomalies. I had my blood drawn, a needle to the spine, a finger in my insides. I wasn’t pregnant, yet, but I was ready to be. I saw a doctor who specialized in such things. “If you pass this … gene anomaly to your child.” She didn’t know how to say what I was, even though she’d felt the gills in my throat, seen the scars on my legs, smelled the salt in my hair. “… it’s highly improbable that it will live past its first year.”
“But there is a chance?” I said.
She’d nodded in that way that was also shaking her head, no.
“You could consider.” Hesitant. I heard her the way you hear someone’s drowning voice below the water. “You could consider that there are other children who need parents.”
I was selfish, though. And naive. I thought, “I can save him. Of course, I can save him.” I couldn’t. But it’s a thing you think.
My family has a history of despair and destruction. Tearing apart the floorboards of the heart to let the water in. Break upon the rock, lead your crew to darkness, forsake your life and limb songs. Songs to sink and songs to drown.
For Ben, I tried to learn a new song. A saving song, a swimming song. I sang to him in my belly. I sang at his birth. I sang at his death. I sang over his tiny body at the funeral. I still expected him to get better, heal, rise from the dirt. Dirt is not where we live.
But the only song my body knows, still, is this siren wail of death and destruction.
“I love you,” Evan said from the floor beside me. “But we’ve drowned enough. Please.”
Our foreheads were together, and I thought, if I pressed hard enough to the bones of his face, I could send us back in time. To what? Choose not to have the child who’d laughed at the sound of his own voice? No. Choose never to leave the sea and come to this moment? No. To tell Evan the truth?
No. None of those things. I kissed Evan, instead, and he kissed me back so hard our teeth rattled. A hollow, broken sound rose from my throat when he fisted his hand in my hair and pressed me back to the rug. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be held down, to be buoyed.
Our tears slid and pooled in the hollow of my throat. A tidal pool of grief. I didn’t dare get up and spill it, scared of what creatures might already live there. What might already need me that I would destroy.
Evan breathed on the side of my neck, a choked sob, his body softening as I touched his back, and I understood. It was my turn. It was my turn to hold him up. It was my turn to rise to the surface and breathe for all of us.
“I can take Hadie to school tomorrow,” I said.
Hadie and I were late leaving the house. It wasn’t grief, this time, that tripped us up, but homework. A piece of paper lost somewhere in the chaos. Unfound, still, but we left anyway.
It was so mundane, a thing that I thought I could grasp with both hands. I talked into the wave of noise from the back seat as I drove. “It’s okay, Hadie. I promise. Your teacher won’t be mad.” But nothing abated the cacophony, and I parked right in front of the school, in the place you’re not supposed to be, and lowered my head to the steering wheel and counted the seams of the leather that pushed into my skin.
In the silence that finally came, I heard Hadie say, soft. “Dee-dee?” She sounded like her mom already.
“Yeah?”
The shrrpp of her fingers over the fabric of her seat belt. “Does Ben miss me?”
And my heart, my heart, my heart. Like that. Came awake with the pain of a thousand knives.
“Yes. Just as much as you miss him,” I said. And the words were so easy to say that I felt like I was being disloyal to something I didn’t understand.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”
We walked hand-in-hand up the front lawn. Late enough that there was no one else out front. Nothing moved but us.
“Wait,” Hadie said.
You know those moments when you sense a wrong thing? It’s in the silence or the sound. The way the air compresses around your body like it’s changing form, growing viscous, heavy inside itself. Your bones tightening in on themselves, losing their hollows. The shark in the shadows, looming.
I stood in the green grass outside Hadie’s school with her hand in my hand, and heard the silent predators swimming in the deep, and my lungs ached like they hadn’t touched air in a thousand years.
“Don’t go in, Dee-dee,” Hadie said. Her little hand fluttered inside mine like a fish.
“We won’t,” I said.
A crimson square spread against a corner window, and Doug’s voice from the seminar in my head. So many words I was still learning, even then, Green flag means … Red flag means …
“Go get back in the car, okay?” I said. “Sit on the floor in the front seat. And cover your ears.” My voice was calm. I forced my hand open, forced it to let her go. Listened until I heard her footsteps, the soft squeak of the car door once, and again, and then I turned and faced
the school.
Inside the darkness of the building, inside the blackness of the body, this monster of shade and shadow.
I closed my eyes and listened.
Hidden in the depths of despair, behind doors and windows and bricks, a single body leaned into its purpose, the unsteady thrum of a pulse, the flex of a finger, the brace of a cheek to the stele. A thousand doors locked against a thousand pointed fears. A thousand hands to a thousand mouths, to make a thousand silences. Sirens did not yet wail in the streets, but when they did, they would wail too late.
After our son died, I locked my voice in a box the shape of my heart. Swallowed the key made of bone. My oblation. My promise. My guilt.
Now I rubbed the front of my chest, as if that would move lock and key together again, make them open the something closed inside me. Nothing. Nothing.
I thought, it’s just bone and blood. Just body and breath. I inhaled, so deep and full, I might have sucked the world dry of its terrible, wet anger. I felt box and bone crack and shatter inside me, shards of guilt and grief, sharp and slick as whetted stone.
The sea is dark and deep within me. It calls me home and pushes me forward. It promises respite, peace, everlasting song. It croons, “I am hungry. I am cold. I am lonely. I am your child. I am dying. I am dead.” It is me, it is all me, and I am it.
In its promise, I lift my face to the sky and sing to the darkness inside those walls. I sing, come closer, listen. I sing, crash upon these stones. Turn from these children, who offer you nothing, and swim fast to me, for I am everything you need.
My voice is everything I have ever been and tried to swallow down, lock away, drown in the depths. It is the darkness that lies in all of us, vital and visceral and true.
Come to me, child, I sing, for I shall teach you the names of pain.
And he does. And I do.
After, Doug will tell the camera crews and the police that he was on the floor with the children, hands over heads, whispering to them to be quiet. That there was the sound of a hand on the door, the turn of the handle. Doug rose, quiet and silent, telling the kids to stay down, and went to hold the door, flinching against the sound of the gunfire that he knew would follow. But there was no gunfire. No screams. The door did not open. Instead, there was music. “The most beautiful song,” Doug will say on camera, again and again, shaking his head with disbelief. “Impossible.”
The kids, though, they believe. They have always believed. They will sing the song for anyone who will listen. The song that goes da-da-da-la-la-la-la. You know it. You’ve always known it. A popular band will make a cover of it, and it will end up in a car commercial, and I will catch Evan singing it under his breath, unaware.
Before that, though. Before that, a monster who was also a mother sang in a meadow starred with flowers, and a boy who was also a monster swam from the deeps and came to her. Pushed through the front doors, gun to the sky, poised to resist but unable not to hear.
I sang love and grief and child. I sang death and boy and beauty. I sang all the things there are no words for, and all the things there should not be words for. I was irresistible in the strength of my madness. I was rock and siren and song and promise.
And the boy who was also a monster fell to his knees before me, and bowed his head, and listened until nothing was left of him but salted bone and silent sea.
Scurry
by Rich Larson
Dominique sets the last mousetrap down and straightens up to survey her handiwork: a flotilla of white rectangles on a cold concrete sea, extending all the way to the back of her half-finished basement. It should be enough. She hopes it will be enough. She hears phantom scurrying, and shudders on her way back upstairs.
Saturn is waiting for her at the top, mewling for food. He is old and diabetic and useful for some things, but not for the rat problem. Dominique fills his bowl, and gives him his insulin while he’s too focused on eating to feel the needle slide into the scruff of his neck. She rubs his head.
While he finishes his food, she finishes getting ready for work: she takes her Tupperwared lunch out of the near-empty fridge, her ID lanyard and keys from the hook on the kitchen wall, her puffy, blueberry-colored parka from the closet.
“Be good,” she says to Saturn. “Amuse-toi.” She speaks quietly because lately she worries about her duplex neighbors hearing her through the walls, and she would rather they forget she exists.
She leaves, locks the door, creeps down her icy steps—she needs to buy salt for them soon—and heads for the bus stop. The winter air is scorching cold. The sun won’t be up for an hour yet. There’s a plow rumbling through the cul-de-sac, amber lights flashing in the gloom as it piles up little mountains of powdery white snow.
Her stomach churns, stretching the welt on her tender skin. Maybe she should have eaten breakfast today. Maybe it would have been okay today.
The Ottawa-via-Portage bus arrives three minutes late, which will make her seven minutes late for work. The driver stares straight ahead as Dominique and the other passengers troop onboard. She finds a seat near the rear exit. They keep the buses warm; she has to wrestle out of her parka as quickly as possible, before she starts sweating.
A man across from her watches. He looks like he is wearing last night’s clothes. Over-tight sweatpants, Chicago Bulls cap, earbuds trailing down into the neck of his sweater. His gaze doesn’t waver or blink, and for a flicker she thinks, nonsensically, that he knows about her rat problem and hates her for it. Then he moves his hand to his crotch and smiles at her.
She gets up and marches to the front, tells the bus driver he has a pervert aboard who needs to be kicked off the fucking bus right now. She leans back with a cold, withering stare and says something biting, something clever like keep feeling around, I’m sure you’ll find it eventually. She reaches forward and slaps him right across the face.
She does none of those things. She stares determinedly at the ads over his head, reading the French and then the English and counting how many letters are different between them. Her face is burning. Even though her parka is off, she can feel sweat pooling. Before she goes into the office, she will have to stop at the bathroom and sponge her armpits dry and reapply her deodorant. She will be nine minutes late.
When she gets off the bus she has to check over her shoulder to be sure, absolutely sure, that the man in the Bulls hat isn’t following. Then she hurries down Slater, weaving through slower walkers, mostly all of them with lanyards and briefcases. She turns at the corner of the church, where there is a statue of a huddled mendicant, hooded, whose lap sometimes has change in it, but not today.
Up ahead, she sees the woman in the bright green nylon vest who hands out the Metro and always smiles at her, but today Dominique doesn’t think she can handle someone smiling at her. She knows her face won’t work right when she tries to smile back, and they’ll think she hates them. So she pretends not to see her.
A block later, she enters the revolving door, pushing at it with her hands as if that will move it faster. She shows her ID to the security guard and puts her bag through the scanner, then takes the elevator to the seventh floor. Her stomach makes a gurgling noise that she is certain the man beside her can hear, but he stays straight-faced, staring at their doppelgängers in the shiny metal door.
On her way to the bathroom, she runs into Claire. “Oh, good morning,” Claire says, even though Dominique knows her first language is French, same as her. “I didn’t see you at your desk.”
“I haven’t gotten there yet,” Dominique says.
“Well, you probably should.” Claire gives a fake cheery laugh. “The manual came back. They want revisions done by the end of the week. I sent you an email.”
Dominique’s cheek twitches. It does that whenever she thinks about the 172-page manual on their new location code system that is required by policy to be translated into French, but according to Claire cannot be farmed out to a translation company because the terminology is too company-specific.
<
br /> She tells Claire that she is not a trained translator. She tells Claire to do it herself—she’s more familiar with the system than anyone, and her French is just as good as Dominique’s even though she likes to pretend she’s not from the Gaspesie.
She says none of those things. She gives a fake cheery smile. “I’ll make it a priority,” she says.
“You do such good work,” Claire says, and for a nerve-shredding second it seems to Dominique like she’s eyeing her abdomen.
As soon as she is gone, Dominique goes into the bathroom and rips a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. She uses them to wipe away the sweat threatening to trickle down her ribcage. She puts on more deodorant from her bag. Her stomach is growling, and while she rinses her hands she imagines she can hear scritching and scratching noises, too.
But there can’t be rats here. There just can’t.
“There’s glare on my screen.”
Dominique looks up. Dan is staring balefully over the top of his monitor, black frame glasses too wide for his pinched face.
“When you open the blinds like that, it puts glare on my screen,” he says.
She looks at the window, where watery morning sunlight is struggling through the glass. She compares it to the harsh white fluorescents in the ceiling. “You could move it,” she says.
“Yeah. To where?”
“I don’t know. To the left.”
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