Creature

by Hunter Shea

  Andrew was going to be mad. They’d danced this dance so many times, she knew the lines of both sides of the argument by heart. He worried about her and got furious when she pushed herself to the brink. To him, tidying up the house was an absurdity. There was no sense in her doing it, knowing she’d flatten herself out. He’d yell at her out of anger and fear and exasperation.

  She’d fight right back, angry that he couldn’t understand, no matter how many times she explained it to him. Sometimes she just needed to feel useful, needed. It wasn’t like sitting around was making her any better.

  Shaking off the blowup resounding in her head, she and Buttons went to the bathroom. A little Ajax in the sink and liquid gel in the toilet had it smelling spring fresh. She swept up the hairs – pubic and otherwise – and flushed them. The shower was too much for her to tackle. Bending over the lip of the tub to scrub it clean seemed a physical impossibility. Instead, she sprayed it down with tile and tub cleaner and rinsed it with steamy water.

  Once that was done, she decided to sweep the living room. The dust bunnies were growing in number and had been clinging to Buttons like burrs lately. She put on her headphones and listened to music while she worked, upping the volume to drown out the escalating pain in her bones and dull ache in her chest.

  Sweeping led to rearranging the clothes in the bedroom and organizing their drawers. It was by far the most she had done since they’d gotten here, and she could feel the price she would pay coming on.

  Fuck it. All that wood and old newspapers by the fireplace need to be tidied up. Once you do that, you can take some pills and lie down.

  She didn’t remember finishing that and moving on to sweep the back deck. Lost in her music, she screamed when a hand touched her shoulder.

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack,” she said, tearing off her headphones.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Andrew had dropped a couple of plastic shopping bags on the floor by the bed and must have rushed outside when he saw her on the back porch. The front door was wide open, letting in who knew how many bugs.

  “I just wanted to straighten some things up.”

  He put a hand to her forehead. “You’re burning up. Have you lost your mind?”

  A massive wave of spins sent her tottering against the porch rail. Now that the music had stopped, her forward momentum halted, she realized her fever had returned with a vengeance. A fledgling fire sputtered at the small of her back. She tensed with despairing anticipation.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me helping out.”

  Andrew ushered her into the living room, his grip on her arm a little tight. “Actually, there is. You’re sick, Kate. Who the hell cares about the dishes and the porch?”

  She pulled out of his grasp, sitting on the bed even though she desperately wanted to stand on her own two feet.

  “Yes, I’m sick. It’s not like it’s going to get worse.”

  Andrew closed his eyes and shook his head. “Of course it can get worse! It can always get worse!”

  Kate refused to tell him how much her chest hurt. That would only make him right, and she couldn’t allow that. Not at this moment.

  “It’s not like I did a crazy amount of work around the house,” she said.

  His eyes widened. “I was gone for three hours. From what I can see, there isn’t anything in this place you haven’t touched and straightened. Christ, why do you insist on doing dumb shit like this?”

  Tears sprang to her eyes and she looked away, quickly wiping them with the back of her hand. “Because I can help too. You don’t have to do everything.”

  “Actually, I do.”

  A fat worm of anger twisted in her gut. “Fuck you, Andrew.”

  “I wish you would.”

  He grabbed the bags and stormed to the kitchen, slamming the front door shut. Through it all, Buttons had found a chair to settle on, eyes flicking back and forth between them, bored with having to be subjected to the same old clash of two overstressed people.

  It always happened like this. They went along fine; then something would have them both exploding way out of proportion to the core of their disagreement.

  They didn’t argue as much as they used to, but when they did, it was always a no-holds-barred affair.

  Andrew bringing up the very sore subject of sex was a button neither of them liked to push.

  She thought she’d smelled beer on his breath.

  “Are you driving drunk now?” she asked as he slammed cans and boxes onto the counter.

  “What?”

  “You smell like a brewery. I hope you didn’t hit anyone on your way home.”

  She knew he wasn’t drunk. So what if he had a beer or two with his lunch? But she also knew that it was the right button to push.

  “You’re ridiculous,” he said. “Maybe if I could be on the pills you take, I wouldn’t need a beer to relax every now and then.”

  Another low blow. Kate wanted to spit at him.

  “So now you’re saying I’m a junkie?”

  When he didn’t respond, only giving her a cutting glance, she wanted to do more than spit at him. Yes, he was scared and worried for her, but why was he being such a monster? Moments like this, Kate thought it was a good thing she was disabled, because if she weren’t, it might come to blows. Then again, if she weren’t, they wouldn’t be having these arguments.

  She lay back against the pillows, trying to shut out the sound of him clunking around the cottage and slamming doors.

  He finally settled in the bedroom. Neither of them spoke for an hour. Sometime during their argument, he’d put a new bottle of Tylenol on the table next to her along with a glass of water.

  Seeing the pills and water, she was torn between wanting to launch the glass at the wall or cry. Even throughout them being awful to one another, he cared enough to make sure she had what she needed.

  “You’re two very passionate people,” her mother had told her in a rare moment of sincerity. This was back when she was first diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Putting name to it was scary, but at least it explained why her shoulders and wrists kept dislocating, and her increasing fatigue. “This isn’t going to be easy because neither of you like to back down. You’re gonna fight, you’re gonna cry. But that’s because you love each other. Love and anger, they’re all the same thing. The day you don’t fight is the day you worry.”

  Kate recalled that conversation often.

  Well, she and Andrew must really still love one another.

  She dozed off, waking when she felt someone staring at her. Andrew was in the chair across from the bed, a magazine on his lap, his eyes locked on her.

  She wanted to say she was sorry, but pulled back. How could she be sorry for doing something that made her feel more whole?

  “You know what gets me?” he said, his voice much softer, all of the feverish anger bled from his tone.

  She met his stare.

  “All of that energy you expended today could have been used to do something good and fun.”

  “Oh, like have sex with you? Is that why you got so mad? I could have been blowing you, but instead I cleaned the house?”

  Andrew visibly sagged.

  “First, you say having sex with me like it’s a horrible thing. Of course I want to have sex with you. You’re my wife.” Flipping the magazine aside, he took a deep breath and rubbed his face. “So yes, sex would be nice. Or we could go to the dock. Or have a barbecue and sit beside the fire pit. Watch the sunrise on the beach. Or a million other things that are a billion times better than scrubbing a toilet. And your excuse is always, ‘it’s not like it can get worse’. But it can. We’ve seen it get worse. You get this amnesia when you go manic like this. The problem is, my brain won’t let me forget.”

  She didn’t know what to say. He was so calm, so resi
gned. Her husband looked like a beaten man.

  Normally, after a big dustup, they would apologize and move on, neither wanting to dwell on the negative. They had enough of that to deal with.

  Andrew rose from the chair. “What hurts me most is…you choose that stuff…over me.”

  Kate felt the hot tears cascade down her cheeks.

  “I’ll sleep in the bedroom tonight,” Andrew said.

  He walked slump-shouldered out of the living room.

  He’d even left her a cheese sandwich on a plate covered in plastic wrap on the end table.

  Her pride kept her rooted to the bed. He might have been honest, but that didn’t make him right. She hadn’t chosen cleaning a house over being with him.

  She hadn’t.

  Then what the hell had she been doing?

  No sooner had he left than her body ignited. She grabbed fistfuls of the sheet and tugged. Her blood boiled. Her heart went out of rhythm. Kate’s vision wavered, and for a moment, she thought she was going to throw up.

  She lay back and closed her eyes, concentrating on making the flames go away.

  Please, dear God, leave me. I can’t take it!

  She tried to picture being on the ice planet Hoth, the chill winds and snow dousing the blaze in her body, Luke Skywalker doing his best to bring down her body temperature. The image didn’t last long. It was easily replaced with a vision of crackling flames.

  When she was at the brink and about to cry out (for relief or merciful death, she wasn’t sure), the cottage went sideways and she nearly blacked out.

  The pain had crested and, just like flipping a switch, was gone.

  Kate buried her head in Mooshy and sobbed, wanting Andrew desperately and not wanting him just the same.

  Chapter Sixteen

  She’d refused to eat the sandwich earlier. Now that she was up once again in the dead of night, she was hungry. Kate didn’t remember taking the plastic wrap off the sandwich. The bread was hard as a rock.

  Every muscle in her body was killing her. Looking over at the kitchen, she thought she might as well have been gazing at the shores of Ireland. There was no way she could will her bones to get out of the bed and into the kitchen to make something to eat. Her foray into housekeeping had done a number on her, as it always did. So why was she still surprised?

  Stomach grumbling, she settled for chewing on her nail.

  It was her first night alone in bed since they’d come to Maine.

  Andrew had told her a week ago that there was a small island, not much more than a pile of rocks and dirt with one lone, skinny tree jutting from the random clod of earth, smack in the middle of the lake. It couldn’t be seen from the cottage. He’d spotted it on one of his runs.

  Kate felt like she was on that island, removed, alone, and uneasy.

  “But-But?”

  Even the dog was nowhere to be seen.

  Probably in the bedroom with Andrew. I’ll bet he bribed him with treats to get him away from me.

  She made a fist, digging her nails into her palm.

  You know he didn’t do that. He wasn’t even mad before. He just looked, I don’t know, sad.

  Shifting in bed to find the remote was agony. Bones popped and nerves shouted at her to stop.

  Tomorrow would be a bad feels day. She really had overdone it. The bad feels would sit on her chest like a demon for more than just a day. They would leer at her from dark corners. Wait for her when she stumbled into the bathroom at night. Whisper terrifying words in her ear just as she was about to fall asleep.

  Why can’t I find a middle ground? Why does it always have to be all or nothing?

  A cool breeze wafted through the living room, making her shiver. She wiped her brow and her hand came away damp.

  Her fever was back to boot. Of course it was. But at least it wasn’t that goddamn microwave feeling. That was a fever of an entirely different order.

  She popped a couple of Tylenol with a nerve-blocker chaser. Her fentanyl patch was due to be changed tomorrow. There was never much left in it by this point in the cycle, which helped the pain waltz right in, front and center.

  There was no harm in slapping on a new one a day early, but the patches were in the bedroom.

  She could call out for Andrew and he’d be up in a flash. He’d get her a new patch and fix her something to eat. Yesterday’s argument would be forgotten while he took care of her. Just by saying his name loud enough to be heard one room away, she could be fed and in less pain, comfortable enough to fall back to sleep.

  So why wasn’t she doing it?

  Because you’re a stubborn bitch. It might not be your finest quality in Andrew’s eyes, but it’s the one trait that’s kept you going this long.

  It would be the thing that would keep her from having to undergo chemo.

  How many doctors had told them her will alone had gotten her through several life-threatening situations? Enough for her to believe it, which was why she kept her stubborn streak honed to a fine, sharp edge. It was her last defense against the thing she didn’t care to think about.

  Lost in her thoughts, she barely heard the first plink on the roof of the house. It was so light, so benign, she just assumed it was a falling pine cone.

  The second was louder, loud enough to get her full attention. It sounded as if something had hit the roof directly over her head.

  Could be a bird. Maybe it dropped a little something on the way to its nest.

  She was looking for something to watch when a snatch of a lesson from the sixth grade came crawling from the depths of her memory.

  Birds don’t fly at night.

  Wait, was that true?

  Kate looked at the ceiling, the slotted boards and light fixture washed out by the gray-and-white glow from the television. Her aching muscles tensed, waiting for something else to fall on the roof.

  Grabbing her tablet, she did a quick search to see if her school lesson was correct (or her memory, for that matter).

  There were actually plenty of birds that were nocturnal, including owls, the potential culprit of the flesh-crawling scream they’d heard that night.

  Jesus, people talked about big cities never sleeping. Whoever had coined that phrase had never lived in the woods. The noise and hustle and bustle were markedly different from Times Square, but there was a whole world in constant motion up here.

  There was a harder tap, this time on the side of the house. Kate pulled the covers up to her chest. She knew it was ridiculous, but the thin sheet was all she had to cower behind. Sudden sounds in the night were damn good reason to cower.

  “Hooooooohhhhh!”

  The scream was so sharp and resounding, she heard Andrew stumbling out of bed. Kate released a sharp yelp in answer to the cry in the night.

  “What was that?” Andrew said, sliding on the bare floor in his socks.

  “It came from out there,” she said, pointing to the open kitchen window.

  “It sounded like a monkey or something,” Andrew said. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes. Cautiously walking to the kitchen, he cocked his ear to the window.

  “Andrew…don’t,” she pleaded. She did not want him near that window. Whatever was out there sounded big. Andrew had said it was like a monkey, but to her, it was more like a larger primate. An orangutan or gorilla. No, that had to be wrong. It couldn’t be either.

  But it was an animal. No person could make a sound like that.

  It was real and it was alive and it was right outside their cottage. The nearest help was miles away, and all they had to defend themselves were some feeble locks on the doors and a scattering of steak knives.

  “You hear anything?” she whispered.

  She jumped at the tick-tick of Buttons waddling into the room. He stood between her and Andrew as if unsure which way to go.

  “
I think I hear something moving in the woods,” Andrew said.

  “Just close the window and come here.”

  He held up a hand to silence her.

  Then she heard it too. The steady crunch of leaves.

  So, so close.

  Andrew pointed at the window, his body turning, finger following the progression of the footsteps. Kate watched with growing dread as whatever was outside walked along the side of the house, making its way to the backyard.

  The backyard, where all that separated them was a pair of flimsy sliding-glass doors. She threw the covers back, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Her hips strained, the cold floor feeling like fire on the soles of her feet.

  Andrew bolted to the doors.

  “Quick, lock them,” she said.

  Instead, he grabbed her tablet, swiping crazily at the screen.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Doesn’t this thing have a flashlight app?”

  Before she could answer, a blinding beam of hot, white light burst from the tiny square at the back of the tablet. He went to open the door.

  “Don’t!” Kate exclaimed.

  “If it’s an animal, the light should scare it off.”

  With a half turn of his wrist, the lock disengaged. He paused to look back at her, his face betraying the certainty in his voice.

  What she wanted to say was, “What if it isn’t?”

  “Please,” she said instead, but there was no stopping him.

  Andrew pulled the door back, the night sounds invading the cottage. A tangy smell of earth and something else, something old and rancid, made her cover her nose. It was a fleeting thing, a pocket of trapped gas waiting for release. But it resided on her tongue, trapped in the hairs of her nose.

  Cri-crack. Cri-crack.

  Whatever it was, it was lead-footed, unconcerned with stealth. Almost as if it wanted them to hear it.

  Andrew stepped onto the porch, holding the tablet before him like Moses with the stone tablets. The light didn’t penetrate deep into the woods. Kate struggled to her feet and stood, holding the edge of the door. The night air was cold and damp. When she spoke, her breath swirled in a heady mist.