I Stole You

by Kristen Ringman

  Your story was different than mine.

  Your mother was sick. You only knew her from the side of a hospital bed. Her weak hand in your own grew smaller and smaller as your hand grew larger until she was little more than bones. Until her heart stopped.

  “She was happy to die,” you told me. “Her life was full of pain. If only she didn’t have me. If only she didn’t push herself that hard to bring another stupid person into the world. She could’ve done something with her life.”

  You grabbed one beer after another out of your bag. In the course of our few hours together, you drank seven. I thought beer tasted like piss and told you with gestures. You laughed and drank more. Drinking until you fell off the mountain would’ve been your punishment.

  I saved you from that. That’s what I tell myself when I think of what happened after our stories ended.

  My story’s ending:

  My mother stood under the hemlocks. She raised her head, listening to the birds. She looked at me. Her eyes were auburn fires, glowing in the sunset, just like the glow of blue in your eyes reflecting the sky. I saw my mother overlapping you as I explained; “The bullet entered her chest right over her heart. I never saw where it came from.”

  You cried for me, for my mother.

  It gave me pause, but it wasn’t the same incapacitating pause as my mother’s when she was shot by the hunter, nor the same as yours when you saw me shift and then stayed to chat. I saw my mother in the lines of your face, the creases the sun made, the pink tip of your nose. Memory holds power over me.

  I leaped onto you deftly.

  By the time my teeth found your neck, I was a wolf again. A wolf who’d lost her mother years ago. Who then lost her pack. A wolf alone is no creature to be reckoned with. Nor a woman, right? I would bite you no matter what story you told me—for my mother.

  I ate you slowly, leaving only your backpack, your clothes, and your beer cans.

  Someone would find you. Humans always found that trail when there were no clouds to obstruct their view.

  Some will live. Some will die. Maybe I’ll talk to them first, but I’ll still eat them.

  You all have different faces. Some of you are kind, some cruel, some filled with so much joy, I feel joy again, too. But the truth remains: you killed my mother and it cost much more than any of you can pay. I will steal you. I will eat you until I’m not hungry anymore. Until my mother is avenged. Until I can walk through a forest without seeing any of your kind again.

  * * *

  HULDRA

  I stole you from the cave at the foot of the brown cliffs where the birds fly in wide circles and the trolls once lived long ago.

  That cave was where many of them turned to stone, making the cliffs rise higher and higher. People died up there sometimes. They climb too far, as if they’re reaching for something no one else has found. Was that why you walked miles away from the nearest town to that particular cave?

  I watched you sit cross-legged in meditation.

  You observed the distant flight of the gyrfalcons for a long time before you closed your eyes. I moved closer until I froze myself into the shape of a rock so I could watch you from inches away, smelling the sweat you hid beneath the musky scents you layered over yourself. Why do humans hide their scent? Don’t they realize it’s the most blatant of self-betrayals?

  I wondered whether you’d be respectful or not. I couldn’t tell by the way you sat there so still for so long. So I waited with you. I was hungry, but I don’t eat just anyone. I wait to discover the kind of human they are.

  I’m used to waiting.

  My name itself—Huldra—means “hidden.” I hide and people bring me offerings.

  I hide and sometimes people anger me, so I take them. I step out of the stone or a cave and I show them how beautiful I am—the curves of my body, my perfect face, the curls of my long hair.

  I don’t show them my tail. I don’t let them see that I am part serpent. I’m the kind of creature humans haven’t seen in so many years, they’ve forgotten we exist. Humans are so egotistical that they believe they have created us when really—we were here first. We are as old as the pine trees or the dirt. We’ve always been here and we will be here long after your kind has gone. I won’t be surprised if you are destroyed within the next century. You are careless. You don’t respect the Earth anymore.

  Finally you opened your eyes.

  Your cell phone was vibrating against your chest. When you pulled it out, I expected you to put it to your ear the way other humans usually did. But you didn’t. You held it in front of you and began moving your hands in front of your body. Were you speaking with your body to someone else inside the phone? Technology was something I hated. I had lived for so long in the mountains. I didn’t usually have to see it so close to my home. But the way you were talking without your voice was curious. I wanted to know more about your language of hands. I thought you might be someone I didn’t have to steal.

  When your phone conversation was finished, you stood and turned toward the cave. You walked into it to examine the wet rock, the trickle of water running down the left side of the entrance, the chain other humans had lodged into the stone so they could climb up to a passageway that led miles into the Earth, under the rocks and the mountains. Humans usually didn’t go there very often.

  I stepped up behind you.

  You jumped when you turned and saw me standing so close. I wondered what life was like for you if you couldn’t hear things like footsteps or people’s voices.

  I waved instead of speaking.

  “I’m deaf,” you said with your voice, which sounded different than other people’s voices. It was like you had a foreign accent. I imagined that was because you couldn’t hear yourself.

  I nodded and smiled, careful not to turn my body around because you might see the tail peeking out from the back of my skirt. If you saw me—I wouldn’t have a choice.

  “Have you been up there?” you asked me, pointing to the passageway at the top of the chain.

  I shook my head and mimed a human climbing a chain only to slip down and die. I didn’t want you to do anything stupid before I decided what to do with you.

  You shrugged your shoulders and said, “I like to climb! I’m very careful, but if you’re nervous, you can stick around to make sure I’m okay.”

  I wanted to stop you, but I don’t meddle in the lives of humans unless they anger me.

  You made the climb easily enough, turned and shouted down, “That was easy!”

  Then you turned around and disappeared down the passage.

  I waited again.

  I didn’t feel dread. I didn’t worry. I just watched the gyrfalcons circling the cliffs until it was too dark to see them clearly anymore, and the mouth of the cave was as dark as pitch. I loved those birds. They were gorgeous birds of prey, always searching the mountains for ptarmigans or rodents sneaking between the rocks below. I understood birds of prey because if I were a bird, they were the kind that I would be. I lived too long taking humans to be less than that.

  I wondered if you had a flashlight. I wondered if you were prepared for the cave to go on and on the way it did before the small opening on the other side—too small in fact, for any human to slip through. That was how very few people died, because not many people would walk so far into that cave without eventually turning around. Hardly anyone trusted that there might be an opening on the other side, fifteen kilometers down through the darkness. You seemed smarter than that. I didn’t think you’d make it that far at all. I figured you’d be back soon. Any moment now.

  I curled up and turned to stone to sleep.

  The next morning was gray. The gyrfalcons circled around through the low clouds, blending in even when the clouds were behind them. They had the look of ghosts; mere outlines of the powerful birds they once were rather than the birds themselves.

  You had not returned. At least you hadn’t died from falling down along the chain. That would have been messy and I did
n’t want to get your blood all over my new dress.

  I waited for another day and another.

  Two weeks passed, and I knew that by then you had died.

  I climbed the cave wall up to the passage because I could do it effortlessly. I walked through the darkness for nearly two kilometers before I found your body curled up against the flowstone and stalagmites, cold and blue-skinned.

  Why didn’t you come back to the mouth of the cave?

  What were you doing that far down? Was it suicide? Or just mindless curiosity? An overreaching sense of adventure?

  I listened to the soothing sounds of dripping water from the stalactites above me, wondering for a brief moment what it was like to walk through a cave without being able to hear.

  I picked you up and carried you on my back to the entrance and down the chain to where the gyrfalcons still circled round and round above my head and the moss and bush-covered hills looked like waves of green all the way down to the valley below and the distant village and beyond that—a lake glittered in the sunlight.

  Deaf or hearing. Blind or seeing. Disabled or not—all you humans are the same, aren’t you? You’re always leaping too high for your bodies to land without breaking. You’re always assuming you can do anything.

  Well, you can’t. You’re not invincible. You’re not gods or fae.

  If only you were able to listen to the voice that speaks from deep inside yourselves. Because that voice comes from the dirt, from stone and caves, because we all come from that if you go back far enough.

  No life exists in utter solitude.

  No creatures exist alone.

  I carried your body to my own cave, way up on the side of the cliffs by the gyrfalcon nests. I fed until I was full and turned back into stone to sleep.

  * * *

  SO MANY OF YOU WANT TO DIE

  I stole you because you wanted to die.

  It was never about me. Who I am—or what I am—doesn’t matter. You flirted with death in so many ways before you even noticed that I was watching you. Before you realized someone was noticing that you were not having an easy time being alive. So many humans live with so much guilt, so much blackness.

  I’m tired. I’m tired because I’ve lived for hundreds of years and only the souls of suicides sustain me. I shouldn’t exist.

  I. Should. Not. Exist.

  There is it, though. Another gunshot. Another head in a bag. Another body dangling from the ceiling. Another wrist slashed. Another person falling down from a bridge, off a cliff, down a waterfall. You’re so creative as a species, and it shows in the ways you decide to die.

  You had a thing for rivers. You wrote poems about them while sitting in your canoe. We spent weeks floating on the lake while you wrote in a leather-bound journal and promptly tore each page out and placed it in the water.

  Let me go back.

  I came to you when you tried to die in the woods. You brought cases of beer and sleeping pills. There were days where I was busy with other suicides, so I didn’t see you camping by the lake, writing by day and swimming naked each night by the light of the moon.

  On what was supposed to be your last night, you took down your tent, packed your truck, took the pills, and walked back into the woods to the shore of the water.

  I can take any form, but I like wolves best. Their fur is warm and soothing to me against the chill of the air in the evenings. I sat within the shadow of the hemlock trees just close enough to watch you drinking beer after beer. You crushed each can meticulously and placed them in a recycling bag. You cared about nature in a way that other suicides didn’t. If only some other fae could have stolen you. If only you were transformed into something else so you wouldn’t want to die. So many humans are not human deep down—they’re something else trapped in human bodies, stuck in their towns and cities, confined by their jobs.

  I wished I could set them free.

  I wished I could set you free.

  The pills began to take effect quickly as you drank.

  On your third beer, your hand slipped and you slumped down on the sand. A poem you were writing fell out of your hands.

  I moved closer, but the wind stole the paper before I could read it. I heard something in the trees and moved back in the shadows.

  A friend of yours rushed over to your sleeping form. I knew it was a friend because she kissed your cheeks, she tried mouth-to-mouth, and when that didn’t work, she took you over her shoulder and carried you away.

  I waited.

  I found other suicides and consumed them.

  Months later you returned to the same spot—alive.

  This time I couldn’t stay hidden. I took human form, a plain brown-haired, brown-eyed girl.

  I walked up to you and sat down.

  “Hey,” you said. “You want a beer?”

  “Okay,” I replied with my voice, but I also signed. A deaf person had just killed himself by leaping off a cliff in the mountains not far from us. When I take people, I take their memories, their bodies, their language. The signing enamored me. I was so excited I could finally try it out on you, even if you didn’t understand it.

  “Are you deaf?” you said while handing me a can.

  “No, I just finished some classes in sign language and I like using it,” I said while signing at the same time. It wasn’t something deaf people did very often because it dilutes their language, but I wanted to sign so badly and if I only used my hands, you’d never have understood me.

  “It’s cool. I like watching your hands. I write poems. Maybe you could tell me a story in sign and I could try writing it down and see how close I get to the real meaning? Do you know enough sign to try that?”

  You had no way of knowing how many poets I had taken.

  You had no way of knowing how much I’ve loved them all—loved poets more than any of my human casualties. They’re like shiny coins at the bottom of a fountain, made beautiful by the waters they use to drown themselves, the ways that they drift toward death. Sylvia Plath was one of the greatest poets who ever lived. I was certain of it. I replayed her death so many times in my head after it happened because it was the only time I was completely at one with her. She and I shared her body for those precious moments of her departure while her children slept fitfully in the other room. The thoughts that ran through her head were enough to sustain me for years. I lived and breathed her words. I played them back again and again like music. If I could have helped anyone to live forever, never to stop writing poems, it would have been Sylvia.

  I knew you would succeed in dying eventually, too. All of you did. But for a little while, I fancied the thought that if I could hold you in my arms, I could read the soul you inked into the page not after you died but before it. I had taken so many, but I rarely knew them before.

  I smiled, took a sip of beer, and began:

  “I don’t remember how I was born exactly. My first memory is blood flooding a bath from the wrists of a human girl. My second memory is the inside of an oven, warm air, sleep. My third memory is the taste of gasoline, filling me, thickening in my throat. My fourth memory is so much water, flooding my lungs, suffocating me, the thick liquid air pushing me down, down, down. I didn’t cry at first. Not for years.

  “But lately, the fact that I am made of humans who choose to die, who self-destruct, weighs me down. I feel myself wanting to die too, but every time one of you kills yourself, I become stronger. I couldn’t always take physical form, but now I can take nearly any form. Now I can be a wolf every night if I wish it. I can roam the woods and the cities. But every time a person takes their life, my soul is sucked into their body and I feel everything they feel, I die with them, only to wake up stronger for the next. I die every day. And now, for just a little while, I am hoping you don’t kill yourself too soon. I am hoping for a reprieve. A break from so much death. Time to float instead of drown. Please?”

  I felt the tears in my eyes mirroring the tears on your cheeks. I knew you couldn’t have understood
me, but maybe, somewhere inside of you—you did understand?

  You put down your pen because your hand was shaking. “I—” you started, took a sip of beer, and continued, “—I don’t know what to say.”

  “Did you write a lot?” I asked, peering down at the messy handwriting in your journal but you closed it before I could read anything.

  “No. I think—I think I felt your story more than I could make sense of anything you said and it hurt my heart. I don’t know if—do you need to tell me with your voice? Like—somehow it seemed you were saying things you don’t really want me to know …”

  I smiled at your kindness. I wanted to voice it then—to tell you the whole bloody truth of my existence.

  But I couldn’t.

  Something stopped me, maybe the same thing that made you close your journal and never show me the words you wrote—the lines you pulled out of the air between my hand shapes and movements.

  We weren’t ready.

  When you saw that I wasn’t going to say or sign anything more, you took my hand and said, “What’s your name?”

  I was stumped. I didn’t have a name. “Ummm …”

  “You must have a name.”

  “Sylvia,” I said finally, taking the name of my favorite suicide because in a small way, you reminded me of her.

  “Okay. Well, I’m Sam. Do you like canoeing?”