Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  For perhaps the first time in her life, she knows what to do, and she does it.

  * * *

  The New Moms Group meets at the Milk and Honey Co-op, a cheerfully derelict storefront between King of Subs and the weed dispensary, just minutes from Rae’s house. One Wednesday, at 10:27 a.m., she puts the baby in his carrier and walks down the hill, kissing his fuzzy head every third step.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” she tells him. “This is just anthropology.”

  “Did you know,” she overhears a woman in line to buy a sack of oats telling her friend, “that breast milk is made from our blood? Isn’t the body amazing?”

  “That doesn’t sound true, Ellen,” the friend says, with a blazing lucidity that Rae wants to warm her hands over.

  “That’s what I thought,” Ellen says placatingly. “But Google it. Read the science.”

  Then she winks at the cashier, Nestor, whom Rae knows because he works a second shift at the gas station where she buys, or bought, cigarettes.

  Nestor recognizes Rae and grins. “Hey, what are you doing here?” he asks. “This is a healthy-foods store. No cigarettes.”

  She stifles the impulse to lie.

  “I’m here for the New Moms Group.”

  When Nestor raises a brow, she laughs and says, “Yes, I know. I’m old. Old women can also be newborn. Anybody can.”

  The New Moms Group sits in a circle on a faux-fur rug in the homey, dingy back room. Every adult face looks freakishly huge to Rae. The New Moms get pink name tags; the Old Moms, red ones. It’s Valentine’s Day, a fact that shocks Rae; that’s not the kind of time she’s been keeping.

  Yvette, the group leader, announces that they will “share” around the circle.

  “Okay,” one of the New Moms says. She’s a white woman, wearing sunglasses and overalls and transmitting a definite hostility to being looked at, like a vampire or a vacationing Olsen. “I’ll start. My name is Lisette, and I had a baby girl three weeks ago. I’m wearing a diaper right now. I’ve been finding quarter-size clots of blood in my pants. I piss blood when I sneeze. Okay. Pass.”

  “Hello. My name is Flore,” a hollow-eyed black woman with a newborn gumming her turtleneck says, “and this is Baby Dennis. Baby Dennis wakes up every twenty minutes.”

  “My name is Halimah. I had a C-section, and I feel like a library where they misshelved all the books.”

  These women’s struggles are identical to Rae’s, and yet she has to fight down her distaste, the voice that says, “So what?” and “Shut up” and “You should be ashamed of yourself.” I am a sexist, she admits to herself. Rae notes the rise of acidity in her body as she listens to the mothers describe their secret torments and night terrors and pelvic agonies.

  “My name is Rubecca,” a white woman around Rae’s age says. She has smile lines and a topless blue mermaid tattooed on her left biceps. Rae envies the mermaid. Gravity is on her side, under the sea.

  “Rebecca?” someone hopefully suggests.

  “Rubecca,” Rubecca repeats. For nearly five minutes, she shares about her sciatica. Does she have a baby? It’s unclear. What she definitely has is sciatica.

  Little babies are yawning all around the circle, held on laps and centered against chests. It’s hard not to view the mothers as their large ventriloquist’s dummies, yapping away while the babies pull the strings.

  When they get to Rae, she freezes.

  “Don’t be shy,” Yvette says. Yvette is a mother of three, or four—Rae didn’t catch the exact number. Her children keep running up to her and radiating off again, in an explosion of organic crumbs. She wears her black hair in a high ponytail and looks suspiciously radiant to Rae; she grew up in Miami and works as a choreographer for a dance company; in all her movements, there is a spirited efficiency, a sort of freestyle grace—warm-blooded and unrobotic. She seems to take real pleasure in helping the bewildered new mothers orient themselves in the postpartum tall grass. But she clearly enjoys her role as Yvette the veteran, Yvette the alpha mom.

  “I’m having a hard time with night feedings,” Rae finally says.

  Everyone clucks. Advice rolls over her: Ferber, No-Cry, weighted blankets, white-noise machines. Has she tried Baby Merlin’s Magic Sleepsuit? Binkys? Loveys? These words embarrass her. They seem to leach the intelligence from her body, in the way that the starving devil leaches mineral from her bones.

  At the end of the meeting, Yvette approaches her. They stand in the bee-products aisle, surrounded by castles of natural laxatives. “I hope that wasn’t too overwhelming,” Yvette says. “Really, you just need to experiment and find out what works for your baby.”

  “The baby, I love the baby. I love nursing the real baby…”

  Rae feels dizzy from sleeplessness. She can feel herself blinking rapidly, water escaping down her cheeks. Oh, God! For years she was a vault, but now she is a leaky mess. She can’t keep anything inside herself, not the blood ruining her underwear or her oozing milk or the moisture in her eyes or the words beading on her tongue: “It’s not our baby I was asking about. Every night since I got home from the hospital, I’ve been nursing the devil.”

  Rae describes the devil in a rush, with a sick satisfaction—its bulging eyes and the spiny paddle of its tail, the way that it looks sometimes like a prehistoric porcupine, sometimes like a sort of mutant red raccoon. Now she watches Yvette’s face and awaits her reassignment, from weary stranger to dangerous lunatic.

  Yvette doesn’t bat a false eyelash. Indeed, a look of naked exasperation flashes across her carefully made-up face.

  “That fucking thing. It’s been coming south of Powell?”

  The aisle seems to narrow, enclosing them in a daylit tunnel. Is Yvette making fun of her?

  “You…you’ve heard of it?”

  “Uh-huh. Two winters ago, after my second daughter was born, it came around every night. It moved under my house and never shut up.” She shakes her head.

  Rae’s cheeks are on fire. “Did you…did it promise you something, too?”

  “Oh,” Yvette says, and laughs bitterly. “It certainly tried. I wasn’t interested.”

  Shame nettles over Rae’s skull like a tight red cap. “I see. Well. I, ah, I bit? I made a deal with it.”

  Smoothing her hair back from her temples, Yvette fails to conceal her disappointment. She has long acrylic nails, a chic blue. “Rookie mistake, babe.”

  Rookie mistake?

  Her whole body flushed, Rae leans in to defend herself, which somehow results in an impassioned defense of the very entity that is draining her life: “It saved my child. When he was still inside me—”

  “That thing!” Yvette laughs angrily. “That thing can’t add a minute to your child’s life and it can’t take a minute away. It preys. That’s all it does. It feasts on blood.”

  Down the aisle, Yvette’s children are drawing on the freezer door with beeswax lip balm, giggling. As Rae watches, the older boy takes a big bite of wax and swallows.

  Rae looks at Yvette with a freezing dread, a melting relief.

  “Are you sure? It was pretty convincing. Its eyes, you see…”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Yvette snaps irritably. “And the voice like a peal of thunder.”

  Rae nods warily. It feels like sacrilege to be discussing this out loud at noon.

  “Whatever you do?” Yvette says. “Don’t read anything online. Those message-board bitches are crazy. They’ll tell you your baby is going to die and sign off with an angel emoji.”

  Yvette scribbles her number on a piece of paper and hands it to Rae.

  “Here. Call me sometime. You have to break the cycle.”

  The baby is awake, blinking its dark, innocent eyes. Now Rae worries that Yvette is the lunatic. What is this woman saying? How can she possibly adv
ise breaking a compact with the devil?

  “Look, it is not the devil, okay?”

  “It’s not?”

  “It’s a devil. Like, one of the little ones. A knockoff Satan.”

  Rae swallows her shame. “It’s not omnipotent. It doesn’t claim that. But it is powerful. The things it knows—”

  “You really think it’s reading your thoughts?” Yvette yawns. “A plant could do that.”

  “No, you don’t understand…”

  Rae looks down at her son’s wispy head, pale as lettuce with intricate blue veins. Veteran mothers seem so smugly certain of everything. Yvette, with her cloth diapers and her homemade yogurt—how does Yvette know for certain what this devil can and cannot do?

  “It can’t do shit. It’s not clairvoyant. It’s just a rat fink with a taste for mother’s milk.”

  Yvette’s daughter darts between them, a strong, beautiful girl. She sticks her tongue out at Rae.

  “Quit feeding it. Cold turkey. You’ll see.”

  * * *

  For a while, Rae is almost euphoric with relief. But as the sun sets, her fear rises. While her husband and her son sleep, Rae reads news stories on her tiny screen, Red World stories. Women in ICE detention centers, separated from their children. Women in Beijing, afraid to breathe the toxic air. She reads and reads until her teeth are vibrating from the sustain pedal of the tragic-news cycle; the horror feels bottomless. She wonders how far afield the devil goes; there are deals to be made all over the globe.

  By the time 4 a.m. rolls around, her resolve has evaporated. Rae sees that she has no choice; she has to feed it. To deviate from the pattern she’s established would be to risk other deviations.

  Even the walk from the front door to the gutter is beset with peril. More snow crystals the trees. A car full of teenagers comes shrieking around the corner, blowing through two stop signs. Only one of the taillights is working. Before giving birth, Rae wouldn’t have blinked at any of this. Now she hears the ticking menace latent in the most banal arrangements of weathers and objects and personalities. Orange World. The freezing sky and the night and all the people in it.

  Carefully, Rae lowers herself into the gutter. She grips the asphalt, recalling her labor, that earth-splitting pressure. Pain can mean such different things, depending on what you believe is drawing closer to you, pushing into view.

  The devil’s tongue has a ridge that splits it down the center. Her extraordinary rash, infernally authored, is easy to conceal as an ordinary rash. Nobody wants to look too closely when she nurses, not even her husband. Nobody but Rae is studying her left breast like a painting. Grains of psychedelic color stand out against her skin. A Braille that says THE DEVIL WUZ HERE.

  Unlike her son, the devil has no problem latching on. The pain is bearable if she focuses on the nursery window, gleaming on the opposite side of the empty road. Then it starts to chew, and reflex gets the better of her. She shrieks, unthinking, and pulls its snout from her breast. No sooner is she free of the latch than the visions pour into her, a dark flood.

  “What are you, really?” she asks.

  Standing on its hind legs in the gutter, foaming and bristling, it seems to grow larger and thicker, wilder and sicker, its bright, eggy eyes gleaming with moisture. Oh, God. Is the devil crying?

  “You’re playing me,” she accuses. “You think I don’t know the literature?”

  The devil bashes its jaw into her collarbone like a shovel.

  “Ow!”

  Feed me, or else, its eyes shine at her.

  She sees Yvette’s face in the sunny co-op.

  “You can’t see the future,” she says. “You’re just plagiarizing my imagination.”

  How much longer can this continue? A year? Two? Much longer, the devil’s ravenous eyes suggest. Starving even while feasting, poor thing. Eating fuels hunger, a devil’s full belly flattening as milk stretches her breasts. She watches her hand reach out to smooth its cold, spiny fur.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  Fire is spilling around the distant mountain. Limping home, she can feel the road through the sole of one shoe. She forgot to lock the front door behind her. Her son, awake in his crib, sees her face and begins to cry.

  * * *

  Perhaps this was the wrong strategy, to antagonize the devil. The next night, the creature sinks its fangs into her. Blood sheets down her breast. Now she is infected with new visions. They seep through the porous boundary between her and the creature, whose snout feels as tight as a clothespin against her skin.

  This will be your future, the devil’s eyes beam up at her. If you don’t obey me.

  What it shows her is so monstrously original that she has to bite her cheeks to keep from screaming and waking her son on the other side of the road. Tonight’s special: a made-to-order evil. Her devil has never put this on the table in such precise terms. It must be stealing words from the briny jars in her mind, unspoken and unspeakable—because how could a scaly demon-rat know the verb “predecease”?

  That’s right. Tits out, bitch.

  The devil feasts.

  * * *

  Rae’s mother is the best woman Rae knows. What would her mother say if she could see Rae, shivering in the gutter, pulling down her modest nursing bra to top off the devil? A devil? Yet her son has years and years ahead of him, she hopes, on this earth that can spin from green to orange to red in one nuclear flash.

  The bra is new. The devil stares at it thoughtfully, then eats the sale tag.

  * * *

  Only once, in all these lonely months of nights, is she spotted. Lying on her side, she is caught in the headlights of a garbage truck. She clutches the devil to her, lacing her fingers through its trembling fingers. Something incredible happens—the driver locks eyes with her, and then goes right on driving. The implacable pace of the truck, huffing mammoth breaths in the street light, makes Rae feel as if she had actually been run over and left for dead. Only as the truck rounds the corner does Rae realize how badly she’s been hoping for rescue.

  Crawling into bed at dawn, she wakes her husband. Adrenaline hums inside her chest. Once again, she has escaped with her life. Deep in some hell, the devil, swollen with her milk, is beginning to empty again, even as life surges through her. Her husband sighs happily, rolling toward her. She finds his mouth with her mouth, moves lower. Soon his body is rigid and awake, his mind still trailing dreams. She has almost forgotten that this kind of synchrony is possible, so different from the bad business being transacted in the gutter. Afterward, stroking the healed bruises above her tailbone, he asks, “Were you feeding the baby this whole time? You must be so tired.”

  “I am. But it feels good to be food.”

  “What—”

  “I said, I feel lucky to know what it means to be food, before I am dead.”

  * * *

  January 2. Dear Baby: You have been here long enough to accumulate dirt under your fingernails.

  Rae stares down at her Mom’s Line-a-Day journal. At some point, this had sounded like a very manageable goal. One line a day. But she is seriously in the red. The last entry—You are getting a tooth!—is followed by a month of snowy blankness. Guiltily, Rae stares at all the empty days. Before her son’s birth, she’d worked as a science journalist. This is a new kind of writer’s block.

  February 19. Dear Baby: Today, a little scratch disappeared above your left eyebrow.

  All her life, Rae has been rehearsing for the worst imaginable scenarios. Her fears often get fact-checked, their validity confirmed. She’s written about the acidifying oceans and sarin attacks. It’s psychic whiplash to turn from these assignments to the baby’s sleeping face koalaed against her chest, in a marsupial accessory recommended to her by the Old Moms. For $49.99, you, too, can convert your deflated abdomen into a pouch.
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br />   March 1. Dear Baby: I like the way you turn in half circles on the mattress, like a senile clock.

  “The baby” sounds cold to Rae, but “my baby” sounds too cozily proprietary. “I am your mother,” she tells him instead, reintroducing herself dozens of times each day. “We belong together.”

  March 22. Dear Baby:

  She thumbs through the blank pages, shining and white. The happiness she feels is frightening to her. It’s nothing she’s ever rehearsed for. Only an idiot would try to write about it.

  * * *

  Her mother sends her a gift, a “smart” sock that will beep if the baby’s heart stops in his sleep.

  Two stars, the top-rated online review gives it. “I was expecting to get more use out of this.”

  * * *

  “Look, I don’t mean to sound harsh,” one of the Old Moms says, in a Theraflu voice. “But you established a precedent. You set up this routine, and now it expects to be fed at the same time every night.”

  Rae nods miserably. She did!

  “It’s a vicious cycle.”

  Yvette has convened a special meeting, Friday at 8 p.m., which feels like midnight to Rae. The co-op is closed, its windows shuttered. Six women sit around the table, Old Moms with demonic experience. The seventh woman is another New Mom, Marie. She and her wife run the piano store on Franklin; Yvette put her in touch with Rae. Sometimes they meet at the park, trotting behind their strollers like bleary centaurs. Marie has also been feeding the devil, in a ditch behind the Windy Grove apartments.