Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  I don’t like Uncle Rory. And it’s not just because he is always telling me to stay out of his studio, but it’s because he makes Mom cry. They think I don’t know, that because I’m just a little girl I don’t understand that he’s horrible to her. Mom works so hard at the hotel and she doesn’t like it when Uncle Rory’s friends come have a party and she’s not there. She doesn’t like that the nice ladies visit when she’s not here either. They always close the door and lock it and I can hear them giggling.

  “Go play with your toys!” Uncle Rory growls.

  It’s summer, and the wind blows terribly. It rattles the gutter so it goes brrrrrrrrr, and Mom says we can’t go to the beach when the wind blows but she’s at work so much. I ask Auntie Stella but says she doesn’t like getting sand in her shoes, so we don’t go. Not even to the play park. The nice ladies are busy putting on pretty panties for Uncle Rory, so they can’t take me.

  So I sit by the big window in the lounge sometimes with my face pressed against the glass so I can watch the flamingos shivering in the wind walking on their stilt legs. The lagoon’s water is a nasty bruised color, and the clouds are ripped on the mountain. People hold on to their hats. I once saw a man lose his newspaper. It flew away like a bird. I don’t like going outside when the wind blows because it steals my breath and drives sand into my mouth. So I look at Uncle Rory’s picture books and am careful not to tear the pages. He always says That Child will tear the pages.

  “Tell me about outside,” Lakrimay asks me when I see her again.

  So I tell her about the wind ripping the trees, and the way the dust circles and gets up my nose. We sit and listen to the moaning in the roof, and I tell Lakrimay about the other monsters in the house.

  She laughs softly. “Those are not the monsters you must be afraid of, dear.”

  I ask her if she can take me down to the beach but she shakes her head. “Not during the day.”

  “Why?”

  Lakrimay won’t say. Instead she tells me about Lilium, who is also a little girl.

  “Where is Lilium now?” I ask.

  Lakrimay turns her face into the shadows and won’t talk to me.

  The next morning a white mussel shell rests on my bedside table. Two perfect halves, the inside still moist with sticky grains of sand. They look like butterfly wings and I remember going to the beach with Mom where I filled my bucket with these shells. Sea butterflies that live underwater, I told Mom. She laughed and said the animals in the shells lived under the sand.

  “But how can they breathe there?” I asked. “Aren’t they scared of the dark?”

  Mom couldn’t explain it to me so I prefer to think of the sea butterflies and how their shell wings go from a bony white to inky purple where the two points meet. This time I don’t wait for Auntie Stella to come yell at me for the shell. I get up and go hide the gift in the spare room, with my albatross bone and marble.

  Uncle Rory makes Mom cry a lot more than when we first came to live here. I hide when they start shouting and when I tell Auntie Stella some of the words, like “slut” and “bitch,” she slaps me hard through the face and says I must never use those words again. They are bad words. Dirty words. Go wash your mouth out with soap.

  One day Uncle Rory gets so mad he slaps Mom like I’ve seen on TV. She starts packing up our things but then Uncle Rory comes and says sorry, he didn’t mean it, and the next thing they’re hugging and kissing and I must go outside the room.

  I can hardly see because I’m so scared and my eyes are full of tears, and I go to the basement stairs.

  “What’s wrong, Jennikin?” Lakrimay asks me.

  And I tell her as I wipe at my face and taste the salt of my own tears.

  “Come here, and I will sing you stories,” Lakrimay tells me.

  I want to. She’s holding her arms out to me and her eyes shine there in the shadows. I could go down to her. She’ll keep me safe from the dark, and she’s not an imaginary friend anymore, is she? So I get up and take that first step, but then the darkness creeps up the stairs to me and I remember what it feels like to wake in the night and have the shadow man press his tongue in my eyes.

  “I can’t,” I say, and whimper.

  Larkimay reaches up. She has something in her hands. It is orange and white, and curled like a giant snail.

  “You must come down a little. I have something for you.”

  My fingers tight around the banister, I take a few steps, but not so many that I can’t quickly turn around and fly back up.

  This is the closest I’ve ever been to Lakrimay. Her skin looks like milk in a green glass bottle, all shiny. Her eyes are large and slitted, and her hair flexes and coils like the octopus I saw at the aquarium, only it’s blacker than the shadows. It smells of fish down here, and like the sea.

  Lakrimay hisses when her hand creeps out of the shadow, as if the light makes her sore, and her movement is quick, feather-light as she puts a shell on the step below my feet. Then she withdraws, her hand clasped to her belly.

  Quick as a cat, I snatch up the shell and run back up the stairs with my gift pressed against my chest.

  “Thank you, Lakrimay,” I say.

  “Every time you are sad, I want you to press the shell to your ear and listen to the sound. That’s the sea in there.”

  I press the open end of the shell to my ear, just like she said, and it’s true. There, faintly, the hiss-hiss-hiss of waves on the sand.

  “Do you like it?” she asks.

  “Very much!”

  The shell goes into the little treasure chest with the albatross bone, marble, and white mussel wings. But almost every other day Lakrimay brings me another gift. Small cowries with little teeth; a mermaid’s purse, all slick and black; delicate sea urchins like buttons; blue, brown, and green sea glass; and bits of polished driftwood.

  Whenever Mom and Uncle Rory fight, I go hide in the spare room and pack out my sea treasures. I listen to the sea whisper in my nautilus shell—Lakrimay taught me the words for all the shells—and sometimes I can even hear my friend sing. She always sounds sad, like she lost someone. Lilium, Lilium, Lilium. When I’m playing with my treasures, I don’t hear the slamming doors, the screaming or stuff being broken. I have the sea here, inside, and I make up my own stories about adventures Lakrimay and I have in the other place, in Midian where the monsters go.

  “Take me to the sea, take me to Midian,” I ask Lakrimay.

  “Not in the day,” she answers. “But if you come to me after the sun sets, and your mom’s gone to bed…” Her white teeth flash, and hope burns fierce and bright in her gaze.

  But at night I’m too scared of the shadow man and the thing under the bed, and I sleep with the covers pulled tight over my head so the skeletons can’t stuff their bony wrists down my throat. If I open my eyes just a crack I will see the shadow man dance at the foot of my bed. I don’t care if the air is stuffy under the duvet. It’s better than the things waiting to get me, waiting for that one moment when I’m not careful and stick an arm or a foot out by mistake.

  I want to keep Lakrimay’s shell by my bed so I can press it to my ear when I’m scared but I worry that Mom or Auntie Stella will want to know where I got it and then they’ll make me throw it away.

  Mom and Uncle Rory have a terrible fight one day during lunch and it’s all my fault. We sit at the kitchen table and I ask why big people like to wrestle without their clothes on. A sudden, terrible silence drops into the air, and Uncle Rory and Mom both stop cutting at the food on their plates.

  I’ve got my bowl and my spoon in front of me but I’m not very hungry. I don’t like the way Mom cooks when it’s her turn, and it is her turn today. Auntie Stella is off, as Mom says, which means I don’t have to see her.

  “Where did you see them wrestling?” Mom asks, her voice very quiet.

  “In the…”

  Uncle Rory has gone ice-white and his stare is enough to make me want to shrivel up like a snail covered in salt.

 
“Studio…” I finish, that last word a whisper.

  Mom’s shriek makes me slip under the table, where I hide while plates and glasses go flying.

  “Bastard!” Mom screams.

  Uncle Rory says terrible things about Mom, about how she’s a user, and he roars at her like an angry lion like on TV. But that’s when I scamper out of the kitchen, tear-blinded. I run straight to the spare room. I would go sit at the top of the stairs by Lakrimay but it’s too close to the kitchen. Once I have my treasures packed out across the orange quilt I can no longer hear the yelling. Or maybe it’s because the yelling doesn’t matter anymore.

  I’m the princess who drinks tears. The albatross carries me across the moon to the land of Midian. We live in a chamber of mirrors with mother-of-pearl floors, and Lakrimay brushes my hair with a comb carved from bone. When the bad man tries to hurt us, the monsters rise up out of the shadows and they tear him into little scraps. Rip, rip, rip.

  I scratch my fingers on the rough fabric of the bedspread and I imagine that they have little sharp claws hooking into Uncle Rory’s flesh that scratch him like the time I hooked my leg on a rusty nail.

  The door bashes open and Mom stands there. Her face is very red and she’s breathing hard.

  “Why don’t you answer when I call you?”

  “I—”

  She notices my precious things, all lined up on the bed, and her face turns all ugly. “What the fuck is this? We’ve got enough shit without having to deal with you carting this rubbish up here.” Mom strides forward, pulls me up, and delivers a hard smack on my bum.

  I scream at the pain. She hasn’t hit me in a very long time and the shock of it makes me blank for a moment.

  “Go to your room, and stay there!” Mom yells. Then she mutters to herself as she scoops my treasures into the wastebasket next to the bed.

  “No!” I yell, and try to stop her. “You’re break—”

  The albatross bone drops to the wooden floor and shatters into two smaller pieces and many splinters, and something inside me breaks too.

  “Go!” Mom shouts. “We don’t need more trouble from that man if he finds out you’ve been messing in the upstairs where you’re not wanted.”

  I follow her to the dustbin down in the kitchen, screaming and screaming about my treasures, until she smacks me again, hard. This time through the face.

  … where you’re not wanted …

  We stand, both of us still, and the house echoingly quiet. I touch my cheek that’s so sore, and my eyes blur with tears. Only then do I run to my room—my bedroom this time—but I’m a big enough girl that I know how to lock the door from the inside. No one’s coming in, not even Mom.

  The house is very quiet later. I think I hear the front door a few times. A car leaving. Someone tries the door to my room but I’m not sure who; I’m too tired and sad to go find out. I don’t have any more tears. The person stands outside the door, as if waiting for me to let them in; then the footsteps grow distant in the passage.

  My pretty nautilus, my little cowries like baby toes, and the albatross bone—all the little treasures—they are in the dustbin outside now where it stinks, and their magic is gone because they are broken.

  I lie on my bed and fold my hands over my chest like the pictures of the Egyptian mummy I saw in one of the books in the lounge. If someone could wrap me in bandages I would be hidden too, locked away in a room forever. I try to imagine what this must feel like. Perhaps waking up and being completely muffled in bandages, alone in the dark. I cry again, but this time the tears are an endless, slow stream that soaks my pillow.

  The house is full of sighs and a pigeon is calling from the roof. I stare up at the ceiling, at how the room grows darker and darker, and still I can’t move. Outside cars rumble past. Dogs bark. But the house is so empty, just like one of the pharaohs’ tombs.

  Tap-tap-tap at my window.

  Immediately I sit up. It’s dark now and I’m freezing. The orange of the streetlights spills into my room and outlines a figure looking into my room. How did they get up here? I’m on the second floor.

  A small squeak escapes me. Maybe it’s one of the monsters.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  Long fingers tipped with tickety nails against glass. Writhy snake hair.

  Lakrimay.

  It’s not a monster. I know her name and she gave me treasures.

  I slide off the bed and run over to the window. Lakrimay is perched on the windowsill, where there’s only just enough space for her to kneel.

  “Hurry, Jennikin. We don’t have much time,” she says. Tap-tap-tap.

  The brass fastenings are difficult for me to reach, and I have to pull up the bedside table so I can manage. Mom always says I’ll be in so much trouble if I ever open the window or climb on the sill, but if Lakrimay can do it then it must be fine.

  The window pops open and Lakrimay half climbs into the room.

  “What are you doing out there?” I ask her.

  “You are crying,” she says, and reaches out.

  Her gaze is warm but her fingers as they trace down my cheek are so cold, and my skin goes numb where she touches me. A small shiver runs through me but Lakrimay is so gentle, so kind, and I go to her and let her arms slip around me so she can hold me. Her smell is like the sea, and when she whispers in my ear I can hear the wind brush the albatross’s feathers and taste salt on my tongue.

  “Come with me, little one.” She presses chilled lips to my forehead then slowly kisses the tears from my eyes. With each kiss, my sadness grows lighter. I’m with Lakrimay. Everything is going to be all right.

  “Are we going to Midian?” I ask her.

  “We can’t go to Midian, but I can take you down to the beach and show you the sea.”

  “What about my mom? She’s so sad and angry. I don’t think she’ll like me going to the beach without asking first.”

  “Your mom’s broken, and there’s only one thing to do when someone’s broken,” says Lakrimay. Her arms tighten around me as I look up.

  “Fix her?”

  Lakrimay smiles, and her teeth are sharp little fishes’ teeth.

  AND MIDIAN WHISPERED ITS NAME

  Shaun Meeks

  The ghost of the dead had called to him, brought him to the overgrown place that had once been soaked in blood. He stood at the gates and stared into the ghost town of a ghost town, listened to see if he could hear them call out again. For months they had spoken to him, whispered the name of Midian in his ear as he lay in bed and tried to sleep. From the shadowy corners he saw their pale faces, unseen to anyone but him, and they told him about Midian, the Nightbreed; begged for him to seek out what had once been.

  Speaking to the dead wasn’t anything new to Kaleb. Since he was eleven the dead had been a constant in his life. That was when his father went from room to room at the farmhouse he had grown up in. His dad put a bullet in each one of his family members before he shot himself. His mother, two brothers, and sister had died of their injuries, but Kaleb lived. He had passed at first, but something had pulled him back to the land of the living, and since then, he had been able to see and hear the dead. It was not something that was easy to get used to, but eventually he did.

  His father had also lived, though he had blown away more than half of his brain and was to live the rest of his days in a hospital, strapped to a machine that helped him breathe. Kaleb was glad that he had lived. If he passed away but didn’t move on to the hell that surely waited for him, there was a possibility that he would see the man who had taken everything. The thought of being haunted by the man he had once called Father, the monster that had nearly been his murderer, would have been worse than death.

  He didn’t want to think of his father, though, as he stood in front of what had once been the great city of monsters. Midian had been hidden from the world, a refuge for those who were nightmares to some and myths to others. Kaleb closed his eyes and listened to the echoes of the world that once was, able to hear the laughter
, the joy of those who had been part of that world. There had been children who ran alongside fanged beasts with no fear, no hesitation. To them, werewolves and demons were as common as cats and dogs.

  Then the true monsters arrived.

  Mankind.

  Humans showed up with guns and fire. They opened up the ground and burned the sky to kill the things they could not understand. Blinded by fear and religion, they followed the lies of an insane man. They showed that humans were the true monsters and destroyed the only home and sanctuary for the inhabitants of Midian—those once known as the Nightbreed.

  Kaleb opened his eyes and looked around. He had been called to Midian, asked to come and help them, but he didn’t know why. There was nothing left. Even the memories of the fire had been lost to nature. Grass and trees overgrew the damage and the carnage and made it look as though everything was just as it should be. He could see in his mind what had happened, but to his eyes, Midian had overgrown with the false sense of normality that the rest of the world had been painted in.

  “What am I supposed to do? How can I help you?” he whispered to the old memories. The wind shifted, blew toward him from the ruins of the lost city. He thought the voices of the dead would speak to him and tell him why they had called, but there was nothing there aside from the scent of dust and rotted wood.

  Then, he heard a faint rustle, followed by a strange rattle, and when he looked down at his feet he saw that the wind had blown small, frail bones toward him. The bones, delicate and gray, continued to come, and as they did, they came together and made a makeshift skull. It was warped and misshapen; looked as though it was from some sort of large animal, but it was impossible to tell. Once the wind stopped, a pale green light emanated from within the newly formed skull and Kaleb picked it up and held it in front of his own face.

  “Help us,” the skull whispered with the voice of many. Young and old; male, female, and things in between spoke to him in a chorus. “We need you, Kaleb. Midian needs you. You must help to save us.”