by C M Muller
Her eyes are open now, and she and that skin edge closer to me.
“Leave me alone,” I say, though I know she won’t listen.
“What would you want?” Her tongue traces the outline of her mouth, the soft pink flesh juxtaposed against the scales. “If your body could be anything, what would you want it to be?”
“I would be me,” I say. “Like I am now.”
She snuffs. “How boring.”
Elise stretches out her body, long and taut, and sighs languidly like the heat and the grass and the caustic smell of me rubbing SPF on my shoulders are all too much. Her swimsuit—pastel blue and white polka dots with little ruffles around the edges—is supposed to make her look like a 1950s pinup girl, and maybe in another life, she would have been the reincarnation of Bettie Page or Betty Grable or another gorgeous Betty, but not now. Now the bikini clashes with her iridescent skin. I want to tell her so, want to tell her how ridiculous she looks lounging and stretching and parading around like an alley cat in heat, but my lips can’t form the words, not while I’m staring at the way she shimmers in the sun.
Is she beautiful? She can’t be. Mom and Dad whisper to each other, sometimes when Elise and I can hear, about how strange and ugly she’s become.
But I think they’re wrong. I think she’s lovely.
She runs her tongue across her teeth, and the front two topple out of her mouth and into the grass.
“That’s new,” she says and digs through the dirt to retrieve the pieces of herself. “And not as good as wings.”
The boys at the fence scream out her name and chortle and cheer for more. From their front-row seat, they enjoy seeing Elise come apart like a ragdoll drawn and quartered.
“Out of here!” I storm at them, my arms flailing madly and fists ready to beat their faces to pulp.
They see my expression and retreat, but not before one of them yells “Monster!” and the others laugh in refrain.
Nestled in the grass, the teeth cradled in her palm, Elise’s bottom lip quivers, and for a moment, I’m sure she’ll cry.
But she’s doesn’t. She just shrugs.
“That’s evolution for you,” she says and closes her eyes to nap.
#101: She’s crazy. She cares about all the wrong things, and no matter what I tell her, she won’t listen.
One by one, Elise picks out her teeth and collects them in a jar on her nightstand.
“Do you think if I leave them under my pillow, the tooth fairy will bring me something nice?”
“Stop that,” I say and bury my face under a mound of pillows and sheets.
Her new teeth soon emerge, and new fingernails too. Thick and sharp. Everything on my sister has edges now.
Our parents no longer speak to her. They barely speak to me either. All their conversations are on the phone, whispers to doctors and family members, plans they make to take care of this “problem.”
Elise ignores them. She creeps around the house on legs that seem longer and arms that can reach higher.
“How can you be okay with this?” I ask her.
“What would you have me do? Sob? Beg? Hide in shame?”
Her voice is foreign and guttural. I don’t know if it’s her new teeth, glinting beneath the bedroom light, that make her sound different, or if it’s something else, something inside her morphing and contorting out of sight.
“This is who I’m supposed to be,” Elise says, reclining in bed. “What’s wrong with that?”
She slumbers, but I cannot. There are no more lullabies to guide me to sleep. When the quiet becomes too heavy to bear, I tear off my sheets and tiptoe to her mattress. She murmurs something soft and distant but doesn’t awaken.
Beneath her faded linens, I pull Elise close. Still dozing, she rests a hand on my arm. Her fingernails like daggers trace my skin, and I’m sure her claws—and that’s what they are, claws—will shred me, but the blood doesn’t come. Elise knows how to use her new body. I wonder how, with no one to teach her, she already understands so much.
Dreaming secret dreams, she turns away from me, her shadow tucked to the wall like a fetus in utero, and I lie there alone and study the grooves in the ceiling.
Even though she’s right next to me, I suddenly miss my sister.
#103: She’s always too far ahead. No matter how fast I run, I can’t keep up. She’ll beat me in any race, because I didn’t know we were racing in the first place.
Elise doesn’t walk upright anymore. In biology class, I never paid much attention to the definitions of biped and quadruped, but I know the difference now. The difference is sitting at the dining room table and taking her meals like a person, or curling in the corner like a dog and lapping her nourishment from a pretty silver bowl.
“If she can’t use a chair, what else can we do?” our mother asks incredulously. “Let her lie on the table and eat?”
I grip my silverware until my knuckles go white. “You don’t trust her, do you?”
“That’s not true,” our father says, straightening his posture like a politician at a podium. “I trust Elise. But whatever’s inside her, it’s taken over. That thing is not your sister.”
I wish Elise could tell our parents they’re wrong, that she’s still the same person she’s always been.
But she says nothing at all. Her voice has left her. That’s the hardest part. Not the scales or the claws or the teeth or all the glares and gossip she’s brought upon our family, but her voice—the voice that used to sing me lullabies at night, the one that promised me that if there were monsters in the world, she would slay them for me.
But now I’ve met a monster, and Elise can’t help me.
The next morning, the doctor makes a house call. He doesn’t do it for Elise. His charity is for the other patients.
“Everyone’s scared of her,” I overhear him saying to our mother. “They don’t want to use the exam room after her.”
I assume he’s here with a litany of pills and potions, a last-ditch effort to revive my sister, but he hands my parents just one orange bottle.
“Put the tablets in her food,” he says.
Our mother reads the label. “How many?”
“All of them.”
That night at supper, I push food around my plate, but my parents don’t notice. They only care that Elise refuses to eat.
They fill her silver bowl with discolored meat and shove it at her face, but Elise bares her teeth, and they recoil as she darts to the bedroom.
I shove my meal across the table. “What did the doctor say today?”
“That your sister is dying,” they say plainly. “There’s nothing else they can do.”
But that’s a lie my parents want everyone to believe so they can justify what they’re about to do.
I crawl under Elise’s bed and find her hiding there. “You know what they’re planning, don’t you?”
She stares into me, and I know she understands. We sit together in silence and form a plan.
After our parents have their nightly argument, our mother sobbing and father screaming and cursing God, the government, and everyone else alive, they lock their bedroom door and go to sleep. They always lock their bedroom now. They don’t trust my sister not to use those claws and teeth for what they’re good for.
With a careful hand, I open our window, and Elise and I head for the trees.
In the darkness, I stumble, but she moves with the grace of a dancer. It’s the first time I’ve seen her full form, gliding out in the open.
Everyone else is wrong. She is beautiful.
We reach the willows, and I kneel next to her.
“It’s time,” I say.
But she doesn’t move. Her shape spirals around my legs as if to protect me.
“You don’t need to worry,” I say, my hand trembling against her cheek. “I’ll be fine. You go. Find somewhere they won’t follow you.”
Elise hesitates, those dark eyes fixed o
n me, and I want to wrap my arms around her neck and never let her go. But I know I can’t.
Slowly, I uncoil myself from her and step back.
“Goodbye,” I say.
Her new legs don’t fail her. She’s faster than I expected, maybe faster than she expected too. She moves like the wind, in sync with the trees and the earth and the air. Elise is part of this place now. She belongs here—away from the suffocating cacophony of those who will never understand.
At the tree line, she turns back, and for an instant, I see a fragment of Elise in those eyes, a fragment of a seventeen-year-old still giggling and singing and just being a girl.
A flash in the moonlight, and she’s gone, vanished into the forest like a delicate fog at sea.
I stand and shiver in the night and wish I too could belong somewhere.
I wish I could belong with her.
# 105: I hate my sister. I hate her because she was here, and I hate her because she’s gone. I hate her I hate her I hate her. Only I don’t hate her. And that makes missing her so much worse.
I’m back in school, finishing what’s left of the eighth grade, when a hunter claims he got Elise. You can almost hear the audible sigh of relief in town. Since she escaped, everybody’s been waiting to hear she was caught, and though no one will say it to me, even my parents hope she’s found dead, not alive. It would finish what they started.
The newscaster shows a picture of the dead animal on television. The thing is small and brown and probably a deer with mange. Whatever it is, it looks nothing like Elise, and I want to tell them so, want to tell them they’re wrong. But if they believe me, they’ll keep combing the woods for her.
She’s safer if I lie.
I wear one of her dresses to a quickie memorial in her honor. It’s just me and my parents and a local camera crew that plasters the spectacle on the six o’ clock news.
“I’m glad it’s over,” my mother says as we shuffle to the car and drive home as a family. Or what’s left of a family.
On the last day of school, the teachers take us to the public pool.
“Helps you start fresh for the summer,” they say.
The rest of the kids jump in headfirst, splashing and screaming and celebrating the end of another year, but I don’t follow them. On the gray cement at the shallow end, I tremble and don a white cover-up over my polka dot swimsuit.
“You coming in, baby?” a boy calls to me from the water. He looks like the same one from the cafeteria who asked me about Elise, but then all the boys look identical, so I can’t tell for sure.
“Yeah, come on, baby,” another says, and they all start mimicking that word in a childish singsong.
Baby. Like I’m their baby. Like I belong to them.
That’s when I feel it, deep beneath my muscles. An itch. I don’t have to hold my arm to the light to know what it means. From somewhere faraway, Elise tells me what to do.
I shrug off my cover-up, and the white cotton flutters to the cement along with a trimming of my skin. The first boy sees it. Then the second. And suddenly, none of them are catcalling me anymore. From the chlorine, they’re staring, the same wide-eyed stares at the mall that first day with Elise.
But this time isn’t like before. My cheeks don’t flush, and I don’t back away and wish I was someone else. Instead, I smile. I close my eyes and smile.
And I wait to hear their screams.
Nearness
Ralph Robert Moore
Coriander is sitting cross-legged in the grass, bare knees poking out from the hem of her dress, looking down at the long green blades.
Something big pulses out from behind her back, hanging in the air.
Furiously beating its wings, hovering blur of color right in front of Coriander’s face. Her eyes widening as it carefully lets its diminishing effort lower itself towards the grass, its little ridged feet opening, clutching already for the blades before it reaches them.
It snares a blade in one foot, then stretches out its other foot with rapid, spasmodic dips for another blade. Once it has a blade clutched in each foot, it flaps less and less, its tiny head pointed downwards to gauge how much its weight is causing the blades to sink, the blur above its bent head gradually widening out, slowing, into peach-veined, red-gold wings. The blades it’s gripped curl unhurriedly down to where their tips snag against, then thread into, the green beneath them.
The blue embossed edges of its wings flap a last time, striking adjacent grass, and then its weight is accepted, the natural springiness of the blades it’s clutching lifting up, a fraction, the butterfly.
Square wings fold up neatly above it, exposing the glossy blackness beneath.
The little dark head twitches around, antennae lagging a moment behind each jerk. It points its gaze briefly at the huge, fuzzy bulk of Coriander, then tilts its head sideways to an angle a human could never manage. Stretches its neck out towards a nearby grass blade. Tiny turtle’s jaws vibrate against the side of the sprig, and when it retracts its head to where it is no longer eclipsing the blade, there’s a ripple-edged half-moon missing.
Holds its head absolutely motionless, not even swallowing, and then, unexpectedly, its small ebony head twitches in a sneeze.
Coriander tosses a piece of popcorn at the butterfly. The popcorn misses, but the butterfly lifts off anyway, flaps away.
Past where the butterfly fluttered down atop the grass, two pairs of bare feet slipped from their sandals face each other, leather thongs deflating amid the faraway cries of children.
Coriander rolls her chubby neck back, looking up.
Nana is sitting sideways on the green bench, touching her smile with a long fingernail, talking to the younger woman who had been going by on the walk, but then stopped when Nana said something about her hair. Who, after talking to Nana for a while with her long arms curved gracefully to her hips like a vase, walked over and perched sideways on Nana’s bench, facing her.
“I was right, then,” Nana says.
The younger woman laughs, raising her eyebrows. Big eyes look off, brimming with something, then she glances sideways at Nana and smiles. “Is it that obvious?”
“Nana, she wants to walk.”
“Go ahead baby, but don’t go anywhere I can’t see you.”
Coriander shuffles away from the bench, putting one foot in front of the other, patting the air before her with both hands with each step, the bag of popcorn swinging back and forth, lifting her arms to balance herself, banging the side of her head with the bag, blinking.
She falls sideways onto her behind. Cranes her head around to look back at the two women, who are laughing and touching each other’s forearms, and decides not to cry.
She lowers her face, lips working, looking around her person to be sure, after her landing, that her dress is down and both shoes are still on. With a few cross-sounding grunts she manages to get the long plastic bag of popcorn straightened out across her lap. Colorful balloons with unheld strings are printed up and down its length. She pushes her short hand deep into the throat of the bag, head turned the other way, scrabbling with her virtually nailless fingers to get past the popcorn to the slices of bread at the bottom.
She drags one out, spilling popcorn over her legs, and, eyes squeezed shut, tosses it with great gusto into the air.
It lands beside her.
Three pigeons flap down immediately a few feet away from the bread slice. Coriander slaps her nose with both palms, excited. She begins swaying back and forth on her behind, watching the three birds pick their way sideways through the grass. None of the three pigeons face her directly at any point, though they do occasionally give her a nervous glimpse of their profiles.
Somehow, by moving further away, bending their heads up under their wings, they’ve managed to get a little closer. One looks big and normal, but the second one’s wings don’t fold fully behind it, like they’re dislocated, and the third has two ratty-looking white feathers stuck to
the bottom of one of its salmon feet.
“Your name is Pecker and your name is Sunday and your name is Groceries.”
They percolate their heads at the sound of her voice. The tiny flat eyes of the one with the mismatched wings start to catch more light, like it’s worried.
Soon all three are moving closer to Coriander, and Coriander is very excited, looking at the bread slice like it too may start moving.
But then Coriander sees that they’re not pointing their profiles at her anymore, but at something behind her. She twists clumsily around on her waist, wet mouth hanging open.
A few yards behind her, the grass blade tips are whipping quietly back and forth on either side of a swath of grass getting pulled down, disappearing.
The three pigeons jump up into the air, two of them crashing into each other like helicopters.
Coriander fumbles some popcorn into the air to bring the pigeons back down, but by now they’re halfway over the treetops.
A coppery hull from the popcorn is stuck under one of her translucent fingernails. She slowly points that finger out towards where the grass was moving.
She blinks.
The blades, though, are now still.
Is something, beneath them, hiding?
Her eyes stare down, and then, happily, much closer than she thought it could be, the grass stirs right in front of her knees.
She leans forward, peering into the criss-cross of blades, and spots something large, flat sliding towards her.
Leans forward too far, losing her balance, small hands not strong enough to brace her fall, face dipping into the blades, chin nudging against something rough.
She pulls her face up out of the grass, lips open in a laugh.
Sits upright again, grabbing her wispy blonde hair, giving it a two-sided tug, still laughing.
What was hidden in the blades rears itself up until it’s only partially concealed by the grass. It’s big and flat and dark.
“Pretty bird. Where are your feathers and your wings and your head?”
The large, squarish bird slides a little closer. A long, boneless leg without a foot curves out towards Coriander.