Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  Marie and Rae sit side by side. Under the table, Marie takes her hand. It feels a little traitorous to make a new friend, when she is out of touch with everyone she loves. But it’s happening to them, a friendship. She pictures octopuses bobbing in the sea, their tentacles curling around each other. Diaphanous mothers with great swollen heads, bulbous with fear.

  Shyly, Rae asks the Old Moms, “Did you bargain with it, too?”

  A torrent of stories follows. What this devil once promised to do for them:

  Stop the car from running the red light.

  Shrink the tumor.

  Jail the kidnapper.

  Drain the water from her brain.

  Return the bullets to the gun.

  Swat away the infected mosquito.

  Save the job that pays our rent.

  Prevent the warhead from reaching western Oregon.

  Keep our son safe from the police.

  Reverse the spread of leukemia.

  Bring them home to me safely, my babies, oh, please.

  The interloper, it seems, arrives in a variety of costumes. “Mine was a hawk. It descended on me every night and tore at my breast.”

  “Mine came as a horse. A miniature horse, or possibly a donkey. It had enormous buckteeth. I’m still missing pieces of my shins.”

  “Mine was a bear cub. It had a purple tongue. It sharpened its claws on the fire hydrant.”

  That nobody notices these deficits and bruises says something about the battered invisibility of the postpartum body. People tactfully agree to unsee the brown blood seeping onto their blue sofa cushions, the haunted bulges moving under a friend’s sweater. When Rae was pregnant, these same Linda Blair undulations made strangers smile. “I saw a foot!” a bus driver once gasped, pointing at her abdomen, as if a blue whale had just fluked.

  “I’m not sure what ours is,” Rae admits. “Maybe a badger?”

  Yvette holds up The ABCs of Animals. Together the mothers review the suspects:

  “Was it an anteater? A bok?”

  “It is a capybara,” Marie says, with grave finality.

  The capybara is the largest rodent in the world. It is endemic to South America, a barrel-sized hamster with gingery fur. Rae is not so sure, but she defers to her new friend.

  “Mine was not a devil,” Carol, an Old Mom with carroty curls, says. “It was an extraterrestrial.”

  Rae doesn’t want to begrudge another woman her confidence, her certainly hard-won confidence in a society that prides itself on dismantling women’s testimonies. At the same time, she thinks, Bullshit, Carol. It was a devil.

  “Okay, ladies,” Yvette says, addressing Rae and Marie. She gives them an exhausted smile, and Rae recognizes the bludgeoned kindness of a mother of four children under the age of three. Wait, is that even possible? Three children under the age of five? Her mind is a fog machine. “Let’s not mince shit. You have to stop feeding this thing.”

  Marie gives Rae a look of utter dismay.

  “Does a problem go away on its own?” Yvette says. “It does not.”

  “Mine did!” Carol says.

  “Carol. Please. This is not helpful.”

  “Look,” Marie says. “This approach, I’m glad it worked for you. But I’m not ready to wean yet. I’m afraid of it! I don’t want my family to suffer.”

  “Uh, hello? None of us want our families to suffer.”

  “It speaks with great authority about many calamitous possibilities. Then it promises me that if I feed it, these bad things will not come to pass.”

  “Rookie mistake,” Yvette says. “It can’t do that for you.”

  She sees Marie’s face fall and adds, with surprising gentleness, “It’s understandable, though. It’s not like there’s a manual.”

  Actually, there are hundreds of manuals. Rae has several on her nightstand, mostly unread.

  “Do you know about Clever Hans?” Yvette asks. “No? This was a horse, believed by all to be a mathematical genius. ‘What’s two plus two, Hans?’ his owner would ask. And Hans would stamp four times with his hoof.”

  “Wow. They really lowered the bar for genius for old Hans.”

  “Well, it turns out Hans was just a canny motherfucker. He read cues from his owner, and he knew when to start and when to stop clomping. This thing is like that. A manipulator.”

  Marie looks unconvinced. Rae sees the echo of her own shining fear.

  “What exactly is it promising you?” Yvette asks. “What does it tell you will happen, if you quit?”

  “I…I can’t say. I am afraid that speaking these fears will turn them into prophecies.”

  “Oh, boy. I have a whole shelf of bullshit for you. The Treasure Is the Cave, have you read that? Number one bestseller. Those authors are laughing all the way to the bank.”

  Then Marie explains that her little girl has a fever of a hundred and two. The temperature will keep climbing, she knows, unless it helps. And, to help, it needs her milk. What if she gently weans the devil?

  Yvette shakes her head. Even her no is somehow balletic. Rae watches her swaying ponytail and hears wind in the treetops.

  Couldn’t she leave a bowl of milk out for it occasionally?

  Cold turkey.

  Just this once? This extraordinarily terrible night?

  Cold turkey.

  “We have to stop together,” Marie tells Rae after the meeting. “Promise me. I can’t do this alone.”

  Eight hours later, when she hears the scratching of the little claws on her porch, Rae bolts the door. For the first night since giving birth, Rae nurses only her son.

  * * *

  The next morning, when Rae opens the curtains, her devil is skulking along the road in broad daylight. “Get the fuck back in the gutter,” she says. “Get the fuck away from my house.” Instead it runs up a Douglas fir, whipping its long tail around the trunk. It bounces across the power lines, leering at her. Three black Priuses roll under the devil, unaware.

  That night, it scratches at the door for hours. It crawls into her skull, whining over the giggling baby as he topples blocks. Angrily, then pitifully. Finally, when she can’t take it any longer, Rae gets out of bed. She is midway down the stairs when the baby, her real baby, begins to cry. A cry of pure hunger. Beautiful in its fearless fullness, its expectation of an answer. She can’t leave her son weeping in his crib. Nor, she realizes, can she fail to keep her compact with the creature in the gutter. A compromise, then.

  Orange World. Suiting the poor baby up like a marshmallow at 5 a.m. Jerking on a hat, mittens. Letting him nurse hungrily on her right breast as she carries him down the steep stairs. Opening the door onto the gray, evolving film of dawn. Hurrying down the porch steps, her hand pushing through plushy snow to grasp the railing. (The snow keeps falling this year, breaking records.) Crossing a lake of street light to the gutter. It’s easier than you’d think, to cross an icy road carrying a nursing infant. She commends herself on her good sense—she’s chosen the right footwear, heavy-duty boots. Good soles. Okay. This can work. She can do this. Just this once—

  The creature is waiting at the entrance to the storm drain, washing its paws in the falling water. She balks just as it starts loping toward them.

  “No!” Her baby’s eyes fly open; his mouth goes slack around her nipple. Her son absorbs her horror and pushes it outward in a long, blossoming cry. Together they retreat into the stillness of the house. Across the street, she can hear the devil hissing at her neighbor’s cat, poor incontinent Rambo.

  * * *

  Two nights later, an emergency meeting is convened after hours at the Milk and Honey Co-op.

  Marie looks haunted. “I broke,” she confesses to the group. The veterans struggle to conceal their disappointment.

  “S
o did I,” Rae admits. “I went outside, and it ran right at me and my baby, like a rabid thing.”

  “You brought the baby?”

  Orange World. Rae’s face is hot. She nods.

  “Okay,” Yvette says, breathing loudly through her nose. “That’s okay. Weaning is a process.”

  “Today, I saw it outside,” Rae says. “Howling for me, in noon light. It’s going to hurt my family!”

  “Well,” Yvette says. “This appears to be an extreme case. An extreme manifestation of will.”

  “I think it’s just so hungry,” Marie whispers.

  “Ladies, any suggestions?”

  “If anybody says the word ‘binky’ again, I will scream,” Valerie, an Old Mom who has a sexy lisp and/or is maybe a little drunk, says. “They need help corralling a demon. We can use netting, or a Havahart trap.”

  Old Moms are nodding; sweet Zhaleh, a mother of twins and an oncology nurse, pounds a fist on the table: “We mothers of Southeast Portland cannot entertain this devil any longer!”

  Marie stiffens beside Rae.

  “Listen, you…” She leaves a beat for the unspoken noun, a very unfriendly noun. “It’s easy for you Olds to tell us to drive it off. Nothing is at stake for you. Personally? It has protected my baby. My daughter’s last MRI was totally normal. Not one of the nightmares has come to pass.”

  “Congratulations. Good for you.” Yvette rolls her eyes. “You must think your milk is white gold or something.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Believe me, if I thought this thing could protect my kids? I would give it my viscera in a sippy cup,” Yvette says. “But it can’t do shit.”

  Rae and Marie exchange a long look, flaunting their complicity. So what if the Old Moms are judging them? The Old Moms have no idea what they are up against.

  “Women like you love to play the martyr, don’t you?” Yvette says. “You would rather this thing be the real devil than admit that you are powerless like the rest of us.”

  Anger tightens Rae’s chest. She imagines lunging at haughty, gorgeous Yvette. Women like you love to get Groupon plastic surgery and pretend to be twenty. Women like you—

  “You think I’ve never been tested? You think I’ve never begged for help?” Yvette stares at them. She was a cheerleader in high school, Rae can tell. She has that way of smiling even while screaming, a red-lipped control.

  “My daughter died,” she says. “Genevieve. When she was two months old. That is why I say I have four children. Because it would be a lie not to include her.”

  Rae pushes a fist into her mouth. Marie, beside her, starts to whimper.

  “Do you want to know how she died?”

  Yvette folds her manicured hands on the table. Her smile is terrifying. Nobody speaks.

  “Right,” she continues. “Tell me, honestly: If I had let that thing suck my tit at night, would she still be alive today? Should I have taken the deal when it was offered? Do you ladies think I killed my daughter?”

  In the silence that follows, Rae hears the spinning of a thousand roulette wheels.

  If you believe that, what else do you believe?

  * * *

  The stakeout begins at 3 a.m. Bonnie and her sisters run a wildlife-removal company, and she shows up in her van. There are enclosures ranging in size from squirrel to panther.

  “Trap and release,” Bonnie promises. “Nobody gets hurt.”

  Valerie donates a Wallababy sling.

  Zhaleh brings a case of injectable sedative.

  Ellen brandishes a cap gun. “It’s just a toy. I hate guns, personally. Somebody went off registry.”

  Earlier in the evening, Rae had asked her husband if he could give their son his bottles; she was socializing with some new friends. “It’s a sleepover, actually,” she said. “A sort of initiation, for the New Moms Group. We take a night off and sleep like the dead. Yvette is hosting.”

  “A sleepover! That sounds awkward.” But he’d sounded truly happy for her; Rae could take a long time to warm up to people.

  They park the van across the street from Rae’s house. After so many nights alone, it feels strange to know that the others are watching her. She can’t see their faces from the gutter. But she feels self-conscious, lying on her side in a cold sweat, waiting. Right at 4:44, the creature climbs out of the storm drain. Nothing in her lifetime has come to her as reliably as this monster. It keeps a faithful calendar. Yvette must be right—the real devil, Rae feels certain, would not be taken in so easily. Without suspicion, it bounds over to her and begins drinking ecstatically. She waits until its gelid eyelids flutter, then gives the signal. Valerie stands in front of the storm drain; Carol blocks off the exit to Powell.

  As gently as she can, she inserts the needle. Drugging a devil is no easier and no harder than cutting her baby’s fingernails. There is a plexus of vessels under the forked tongue where the detomidine is absorbed. This isn’t going to work, she thinks. But, as it turns out, her fear of failure changes nothing. It does not slow the progress of the sedative, and soon the creature’s chin dribbles against her shoulder. She brushes dirt from the leathery webbing of one paw. Sleeping in her arms, the creature feels no heavier than her own son.

  In the back of the van, she draws her knees up to her face. Her devil is in a large cat carrier, its fur poking through the holes.

  “You see?” Marie prods her. “Capybara, for sure.”

  Bonnie drives stick and knows the mountain roads. In the cage, the thing begins to howl in its sleep. Someone hands Bonnie earplugs. The real danger, of course, is the ice on the road. “Fucking Portland,” she says. “We need a cloud of salt to fall now!” On a sharp curve, the van fishtails. Every mother is thinking of her child, her children. Who will care for them if I die? The question floats above their heads in a collective thought bubble, like that wordless prayer that unites two hundred passengers during airplane turbulence: Let me live, let me continue. Return me to the earth, alive.

  Who are you bargaining with? Rae wants to ask. Who do you imagine is listening?

  “Bonnie! Watch the goddamn road!”

  They drive for two hours and pull over at an arbitrary spot just shy of the sandy border where, if you look down at the glove box and up again, Oregon will have transformed from coniferous forest into high desert. Two women hoist the carrier, and together they push through the underbrush to a meadow of snow. It is Rae who kneels and opens the door.

  “All right,” Rae lies. “You’re free.”

  They watch in silence as it scampers off. At first it has a pale, vulpine face. But, as it runs, it seems to shimmer in and out of view, its edges melting and revising themselves. Very quietly, almost undetectably, it begins to break apart. Huge-eyed and snuffling, it looks back at the women. A final trick: tugging at the heartstrings. It mewls pitifully, faking a limp. “Nobody move,” Yvette cautions. But even her eyes are filling. It is hard to watch anything die. As the sun sparkles on the sides of Mount Hood, the creature continues to shape-shift: a wolf cub, a bunny, a kit fox, a spotted fawn. Every animal protagonist of their infants’ board books.

  “Oh dear. It’s forgetting its shape.”

  “Poor motherless thing. Look at it looking.”

  “It’s exhausted. It can’t keep itself together. It doesn’t know what it is anymore.”

  “It knows it’s hungry.”

  It keens at Rae like something twisting on a spit, pinioned above leaping flames. Snow crosses Yvette’s impassive face, and Rae understands why they had to travel hundreds of miles from their children’s bedrooms. The sound is shattering and unforgettable. Its edges crisp and blacken. The creature bobbles off, unsteady on its legs and disintegrating where the sun pierces its furry body. It screams again, smoke rippling from its shoulders. It turns and fixes the pain-dulled sau
cers of its enormous eyes on Rae’s face. “Mama?” it says. “Mama?”

  It goes streaking into the woods, a burst sac of pure light. It calls to the women in the voices of their children, doing a nightmare karaoke. It shrinks into a whisper, a plea for more life. Hunger with nothing but itself to offer for barter. It seems to levitate, midway up a sunbeam, before disappearing from sight—not with anything as dramatic as a flash, but with a gentle scattering of motes, domestic and unremarkable. On a rock near the trailhead, Valerie discovers its skin, already bubbling with the forest’s bright-bodied flies. There is no corpse to bury and nothing left to nurse back to life.

  Yvette can’t stop yawning, for some reason. She buries her face in her hands politely, but it continues for a very long time. The others touch her back and shoulders. Marie is crying openly. Bonnie shows them the hairline cracks in her glasses. “Its screams did that.”

  “I’ll drive,” Rae volunteers. “I’m a pretty good driver, actually.”

  * * *

  And where has Rae’s own mother been all this while?

  Her mother is still on the other side of the globe, caring for Rae’s grandmother in a shadow story, a solemn and uncertain leave-taking. Feeding her puréed fruits with a little spoon, combing her eight remaining hairs. They are so far apart on the parabola that Rae’s morning is her mother’s night. When the phone rings at an obscene hour, Rae knows it is her mother.

  At the same moment, they ask each other, “Is everything okay?”

  While Rae watches, her baby’s eyelids crease and open. Sunlight splashes all around the kitchen. Joy threatens to take the roof off the house. The light is almost blinding today. She crouches over him to shelter them both.

  A feeling leaps into her from the past: “Mother! You felt this way about me!”

  “Yes,” her mother says. “And I feel that way about you still.”

  Green World. Rae is learning to identify it very late in this life. Her feet push into the floorboards. Happiness travels through her, heels to skull. She cradles her son. She cradles the phone. Remotely, her mother is cradling her.