Pet

by Akwaeke Emezi

  “I’m not sure, you know. The thing just coming out the way it want so.”

  Its arms were long, even longer than Jam’s. It didn’t have a head yet. The smoke Bitter had painted around it was as dense as clouds, and Jam thought she could see it move, a jerky tendril here and there.

  “Name?” she asked.

  Bitter shrugged. “You could name something when you not sure what it is?” They stood and looked down together at the thing struggling out of smoke. “It’s just waiting sometimes,” Bitter murmured. “Just waiting.” Jam wasn’t sure if she meant that she was waiting for the thing to show itself or if the thing itself was waiting for Bitter to be done making it. Maybe they were one and the same. She took her mother’s hand and pulled her toward the angel books.

  “Ah,” said Bitter. “What you have there?” Jam flipped some of the books open to the pages where she’d tucked the glittered bookmarks Redemption gave her on her last birthday. She pushed the books out across the table so her mother could see the pictures in each of them.

  They were supposed to be angels, but they were terrifying: eyes filled with licking flames even as they looked out from the page, armored faces that weren’t faces, wings full of mouths, wheels of reddened eyes, four-headed forms that weren’t even vaguely human. There was a butchered lion head bleeding somewhere in there. Bitter hummed and touched the pictures.

  Jam looked up at her. “Angels?”

  Bitter hummed some more and nodded.

  Jam frowned. But Lucille, the mayor and the council and everyone who came together to take away the monsters, those were angels, not these, she signed.

  Her mother ran her stained fingers across the books. “ ‘Do not be afraid,’ ” she said.

  Jam didn’t understand, so she kept the frown on her face.

  “That’s the first thing angels does say, you know? Do not be afraid.”

  Jam looked down at the pictures. It seemed like a reasonable opening line, considering how horrific they looked. Her mother laughed at her expression.

  “Exactly,” she said. “We does think angels are white robes and harps and all kinds of pretty things, but chile!” She clicked her tongue. “Look at them. Good reason why they does strike fear into the heart.”

  Jam wondered—if real angels looked like this, then what did that mean for the angels in Lucille? Did it mean people didn’t really know what they were talking about when they said angels in the first place? Angels weren’t supposed to look like this. They were supposed to be good, and how could something good look like this?

  She tapped on the pictures and looked up at her mother, worried, pitching her voice low. “Monsters,” she whispered.

  Bitter’s eyebrows shot up. “You think so?” She hummed some more and turned a few of the pages. “Well, I suppose one could see how you could see that. Only if you don’t know what a monster looks like, of course.”

  What does a monster look like? Jam asked.

  Her mother focused on her, cupping her cheek in a chalky hand. “Monsters don’t look like anything, doux-doux. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem.”

  Okay, Jam thought, fine. She wasn’t worried about the monsters anyway; she was worried about Lucille’s angels, because if they secretly looked like the pictures, then it was hard to imagine that they hadn’t done, well, some pretty bad things.

  Our angels, she signed, the ones here. Are they good? Are they innocent?

  Angels had to be innocent, right? Wasn’t that the whole point of them, to be good and innocent and righteous?

  Bitter tilted her head, and something sad entered her eyes. “It not easy to get rid of monsters,” she said. “The angels, they had to do things underhand, dark things.” The sadness in her eyes deepened, and Jam took her hand, not understanding what pain was coming up but feeling its ripples in the air. “Hard things,” her mother continued. “You can’t sweet-talk a monster into anything else, when all it does want is monsterness. Good and innocent, they not the same thing; they don’t wear the same face.”

  She came back to herself and studied Jam for a little bit, the sadness lifting from her eyes. “It’s good to think about the angels like so,” she said. “Critically, yes? Can’t believe everything everyone tells you, even in school, it’s good to question. But remember, is Lucille angels that organized we. And what did we learn from that?” Bitter squeezed Jam’s hands. “Tell it to me.”

  Jam made a face.

  “You don’t have to voice it, you could sign it, ent?”

  Jam sighed and freed her hands from her mother’s so she could say the words, lifted from an old Gwendolyn Brooks poem, words the angels had used when they gave Lucille back to itself. A revolution cry.

  We are each other’s harvest. We are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond.

  “Yes, child. Angels aren’t pretty pictures in old holy books, just like monsters aren’t ugly pictures. It’s all just people, doing hard things or doing bad things. But is all just people, our people.”

  Jam thought about that. So pictures could be wrong—wait, no. She’d seen too much of her mother’s work to think that simply. Pictures could be flat-out lies, yes, but what she was really thinking was that pictures could be misleading. That made more sense, more trickster sense, showing your eyes one thing and tripping your feet in another direction. Like stories. And besides, she would trust anything her mother had to say about monsters. She knew about her grandfather, the monster that caught her grandmother. If there was anyone who knew what a monster was or was not, it would be Bitter, the daughter of one.

  Her mother reached out and touched her chin. “Matter fix, doux-doux?”

  Jam nodded shyly and smiled. Bitter leaned forward and kissed her forehead just as they heard the front door open.

  “And look, your father home already.”

  True enough, Aloe’s voice boomed through the house. “Where are my girls?” he shouted.

  Bitter ruffled Jam’s hair and stood up to gather and clean her brushes. “Studio, darling!” she yelled back, and they heard Aloe’s feet crash up the stairs. Bitter often joked to Jam that her father moved like a functioning disaster, clumsy and charming and breaking at least one breakable thing a week. He was tall and broad, and he filled up the doorway for a heartbeat when he entered, his face splitting into a smile to see them. Jam always felt lucky when she stood in the path of her father’s joy. He was shrugging off his jacket, and his chest was expansive under it—“I was built to be a local farmer back home on the continent,” he always said, but he’d gone another way and ended up as a paramedic. He liked the adrenaline of saving people. He always wanted to protect them, make it better. It made him good at his job, better as a father. When Jam was a toddler, she’d refused to speak, which was why they’d taught her to sign instead. She used her hands and body and face for her words but saved her voice for the most important one—screamed out during her first and only temper tantrum, when she was three, when someone had complimented her for the thousandth time by calling her “such a handsome little boy” and Jam had flung herself on the floor under her parents’ shocked gazes, screaming her first word with explosive sureness.

  “Girl! Girl! Girl!”

  Bitter had stared before laughing. “All right, sweetness,” she’d said, looking at the writhing child and thinking back on several arguments they’d had about Jam’s clothes, when Jam would sign refusal over and over. “That explains that.”

  Aloe had shaken his head and picked his daughter up, locking her flailing limbs against his body. “Sorry, sorry,” he’d murmured against her head. “Ewela iwe, eh? We didn’t know.” He’d patted her head until she calmed down, and then they took her home and Aloe started researching puberty blockers and the hormones she might need. Protecting his daughter was a life mission he remained dedicated to. When she was ten, Jam
got an implant with the blockers, and it was a few years of vitamins and regular bone scans before she swapped it out at thirteen for a hormone implant, a tiny cylinder nestled in her upper arm, administering estrogen to her body. Jam watched her body change with delight, the way her hips widened, how her breasts were growing. She would poke at them, swiveling in the mirror to see them from every angle, running her hands down her new body. Bitter laughed, then taught her how to do breast self-exams and talked to her about fertility options.

  Jam was fifteen when she told Aloe she wanted surgery, and her father sat and wrapped his arms around her.

  “You know you’re still a girl whether you get surgery or not, right? No one gets to tell you anything different.”

  Jam had smiled at him, almost taller than he was. I know, Dad. She wanted it anyway, and Aloe always gave his daughter what she wanted. It wasn’t like how it used to be, back when the world was different for girls like her. She didn’t have to wait to be considered an adult for her wants around her body to be acted on; her parents understood how important it was for her well-being.

  After the surgery, Bitter painted a portrait of Jam reclining on their porch swing and wrapped in a blanket, her eyes tired but happy, her feet dangling in shimmering air. Less than a year later, the painting hung next to the door of the studio, and now Aloe leaned his hand on its frame as he took off his socks.

  “How are you, darling?” he asked Jam.

  She shrugged and closed her eyes as he pulled her into a hug, kissing the top of her head.

  “She asking about angels and monsters and things,” Bitter called over her shoulder, her voice a blend of amusement and pride. “Look at the books she brought.”

  Aloe glanced down and whistled. “That’s very ugly.” Jam giggled as he flipped a page. “What are you asking about them?”

  Bitter wiped her brushes on a rag. “She asking if those angels are monsters, if Lucille angels are good.”

  “Ah, but we know how to handle any monsters we meet.” Aloe tapped the pages with his left index and middle fingers. “Whether on the page or in life.” He closed the books and stacked them carefully on top of each other before turning to Jam and holding her by the shoulders.

  “We close them up, you hear? We lock them away.”

  “Aloe, we’ve talked about this,” Bitter interjected. “Rehab centers not the same thing as prisons.”

  Aloe ignored her, focusing on Jam. “There are no monsters in Lucille,” he said. He was radiating surety, wanting her to feel protected. Her father held more fear than her mother, Jam had always known this.

  She raised her hands between them so he could see her sign, and he dropped his arms to give her space. There are no free monsters in Lucille, she corrected. She wanted to add that we know of, but she saw the fear pass through Aloe’s eyes, a ghost glimmering across a room, so she let her hands stop. A minor sadness crept into his face, and he buried it in a smile.

  “Don’t grow up too quickly,” he said.

  Jam nodded and stepped back into his chest to hug him. His arms were live branches, growing around her. “Forget the monsters,” he whispered.

  They went to look at Bitter’s unfinished painting, and Aloe could feel the thickness of it the same way Jam had. “It feels as if it’s pushing itself up,” he said, his voice soft with awe. He scratched his arm, discomfort pooling around him. “Nna mehn, Bitter. Are you sure this one doesn’t want to become real?”

  Bitter scoffed. Jam could feel a mild frustration in her, that the painting wasn’t clear, that it was hiding around corners from her. She could hear her mother’s thought quite distinctly, colored with some snark: the painting would have to know what it was before it could become real. Bitter always had contempt for undefined things, but only when she wanted them to be something else. Jam stifled a smile. It was nice to see how these conversations went between her mother and the work, this coy dance, this sufferhead behavior, as Aloe would say. Who told you to pick such a demanding discipline? he liked to tease. I didn’t want to be lazy like you, Bitter would tease back. Jam watched Aloe kiss her mother, then the three of them went downstairs to make dinner together. But Aloe’s words to Jam floated around in the studio air even after they’d left.

  Forget the monsters.

  He hadn’t meant anything strong by it. Just to comfort his daughter, prompted by an old fear, by echoes of memories of what people used to do to girls like her. But an echo of a memory is not the same as a memory, and a memory is not the same as a now, and anyway, he’d said it loud enough that the painting heard it. Also, the problem is, when you think you’ve been without monsters for so long, sometimes you forget what they look like, what they sound like, no matter how much remembering your education urges you to do. It’s not the same when the monsters are gone. You’re only remembering shadows of them, stories that seem to be limited to the pages or screens you read them from. Flat and dull things. So, yes, people forget. But forgetting is dangerous.

  Forgetting is how the monsters come back.

  CHAPTER 2

  It took Bitter three more weeks to finish the painting. She grew a new patience with it, like an extra skin. The music she used changed, softened. She was playing ragas now, haunting things full of sitar and tabla and sarod. She even closed the doors to the studio.

  “Watching done for now,” she said.

  Aloe and Jam looked at each other and shrugged. What to do? They sat on the porch swing and ate bowls of homemade ice cream in the evenings while waiting for her to come down for dinner. More often than not, they ate alone together and then went to bed while the light from Bitter’s studio stayed in the window like a glowworm. Sometimes Jam sat with her back against the studio door, her eyes closed and her palms flat on the floor. Aloe brought up her dinner, and when fatigue collided with her body and he found her curled up on her side, still pressed against the door, he slid a pillow under her head and draped a soft blanket over her. When Bitter turned off the ragas and opened the door to see her daughter at her feet, she knelt and slid her arms under the girl, lifting her up. Jam’s head fell against her mother’s shoulder, and Bitter carried her to bed, even though Jam’s weight wrenched at her back.

  Bitter finished the painting in the dark morning of a day—it was well past midnight when Jam heard the studio door creak open. She stared into the velvet black of her room and listened to her mother’s footsteps walking into her and Aloe’s bedroom. There was a weight thrumming through the floorboards in a low song, and that was how Jam knew the painting was done. Bitter’s feet were singing the news.

  When her mother’s feet were no longer touching the floor and things got quieter, Jam knew that Bitter was in bed, and so she swung her legs down and snuck out toward the studio. The air was as dark as pitch, but Jam knew every piece of their house whether she had eyes or not. At the studio door, she put her hand on the enamel doorknob. She was about to turn it and push the door open—she’d thought she was ready to do that—but all of a sudden, she became uncertain. The painting must be so fresh. Maybe it would be better to let it settle a little. Maybe it was too soon, it had just left her mother’s hands, it seemed wrong to expose it to her own eyes without letting it have some time to itself. Just to exist, you know, just to be. Everyone, everything deserved some time to be. To figure out what they were. Even a painting. Bitter finishing it was just her telling it what she thought it was, or what she’d seen it as. It hadn’t decided for itself yet. Jam didn’t want to be rude, or inconsiderate, so she went back to bed.

  Bitter left the studio alone for the next couple of days. It was the weekend when Jam finally decided to go and look at it, while her parents were out getting groceries. The studio door swung open and silent under her hand, surprising Jam. The creak was gone. Maybe the painting had eaten it.

  Midday light was pouring through the large windows, and Jam could see that her mother had left t
he painting uncovered, flat on the floor. Even the last brushes she’d used on it were still there, the bristles stiffened with streaky red. Bitter hadn’t cleaned them or put them away; she must have finished, dropped everything, and just walked out, which was strange. Bitter always cleaned her brushes. Jam went toward the painting, trying to keep her feet light, aware that she was basically trying to creep up on a canvas. It was so big, though, feet and feet of it on each side. At the edge of it, she leaned in.

  Bitter had completed the figure in the middle, but it was nothing like what the softness of the ragas would have predicted. The goat legs had stayed, jutting thighs and all, but from the waist up, the figure was new. A torso twisted all the way around, still furred, but the thick white was interrupted by a new bloodiness, intermittent streaks, as if the figure had made a mess while eating something. Or tearing something apart. The arms remained long, but they were feathered now, an iridescent gold ending in obscenely human hands. Photographs of Bitter’s hands were strewn around as studies—she’d painted her own hands into the figure, painted crude stitches that grafted her wrists to its feathered arms. Jam shuddered; it was weird to see her mother’s hands butchered like that. Bitter had painted the skin a brown that was stripped of any vibrance, so they looked dull and dead. Only the fingernails had color; they were metal claws the same gold as the feathers, as if some essence of the figure had pierced the mutilated flesh and burst out from the cuticles.

  Jam’s eyes traced up the arms and to the twisted torso, the arched back, the chest turned up to face the top of the painting. There were glints of silver in the splashed white of the chest, some metal her mother had embedded in the paint. The figure’s head was heavy with curled ram’s horns, clotted red, and the face was an interlocked geometric mess of metallic feathers that smothered any features. Only the shape of a mouth was visible, and it spewed the same smoke that filled the rest of the painting.

  All of it scared Jam, way down into her bones. It was unlike anything her mother had ever painted before. It didn’t feel good. Just looking at it made her feel dizzy, like the canvas was the only steady point in the world and everything else was slipping. Jam tried to straighten up, but her head was clogged and heavy and her toes hit the edge of the canvas and then she was falling, so slowly that it was floating, but she was falling onto the canvas. She threw out her hands to break the fall, and they landed on the figure’s chest. One scraped across hardened paint, but the other became a slice of pain that cut through the dizziness. Jam gasped and scrambled backward off the painting until she was pushing away from it, her chest rough and heaving, her left palm loud with hurt. She glanced down and saw that it was bleeding.