FSF, May-June 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  So I did, and spent the rest of the day hating myself for that, too.

  Now, though, Richard just tipped me a wink and shot me with his forefinger. Then he swung in beside Junior and the two of them strode off to roast live kittens on spits.

  I knelt to get my books. When I stood, I realized that Ms. Blevins was standing in the doorway of her room. “Are you okay, Philip?” she asked.

  And what I said is, “Yeah, I just"—I waved one hand, like no big deal—"I just dropped my books, you know. It's all cool."

  The warning bell rang. The hallway emptied with a clang of locker doors and sneakers squeaking on tile. Somewhere a girl laughed, high and sweet. Then it was just the two of us, me at the water fountain and Ms. Blevins in the door of her classroom. She crossed her arms, leaned against the doorframe, and cocked her head. Ms. Blevins wasn't that far out of school herself—she must have been in her mid-twenties, though she didn't seem so young to me then, I guess—and not a lot slipped past her.

  "Are you sure?” she said. “For a minute there I thought that boy—"

  I was nervous all of a sudden, fluttery in my stomach. “Junior?” I said. “Nah, he's just playing around—"

  Then the tardy bell rang and I nearly jumped out of my skin. The hall was so quiet I could hear my heart thump inside me.

  Ms. Blevins raised one eyebrow and frowned. She stared at me for a moment. “You better get to class, then,” she said, and that was how I wound up late to algebra without a tardy note or my homework either. Steve stared at me from across the aisle as I took my seat. What happened? he said, just mouthing the words. So I took out a sheet of notebook paper and wrote Like you don't know on it. Then I dropped my pencil, and when I leaned over to pick it up, I slipped the note into his desk.

  It came back a few minutes later bearing a single sentence:

  Crap, man, what're you gonna do?

  I sat there staring at that question for the longest time. I mean, the hell with quadratic equations, right? And I kept on thinking about it during Chemistry and Social Studies and Spanish, and during lunch, too, when I hid in the library—I mostly starved that year, food being forbidden in the library—and read about this experiment where scientists kept putting more and more mice into a single enclosure until finally they started cannibalizing one another.

  Then it was three o'clock, and the final bell rang. I ducked into a bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and hunkered down on top of the toilet until everything got quiet outside. Then I let myself out and headed toward the west entrance, by the gym. The main entrance—the one across the street from the Stop N Go, where everybody went to buy pop and to smoke weed behind the Dumpster—was to the east. I figured I would cut across the practice field and through the woods to my house. Maybe I'd get lucky tonight and a meteor would fall on Junior Starnes. Stranger things had happened.

  Outside, the air smelled of fresh-mown grass and the sun washed the grounds in that golden autumn light that meant the trees would be turning by the end of next week. The cheerleaders stood in ranks at one end of the practice field, doing calisthenics, and the football team ran laps in a pack around the track, whistling and hooting at the girls every time they passed. Finally one of the girls—Melissa Malone, I think it was—stood up and shot the whole group the bird with both hands, which brought Kessinger shouting down upon her. I took advantage of the confusion to dart across the field toward the woods. Halfway there, I heard Junior Starnes shouting—

  "There he is! C'mon!"

  —and I lowered my head and ran. When I reached the tree line, I snatched a glance over my shoulder. Kessinger, ever territorial about his precious practice field—I think he only tolerated the cheerleaders so he could leer at Cindy Taylor—had intercepted Junior and Richard by the one of the goalposts, where he was working himself into a full-out rage. “If you're not man enough to play then keep your sorry asses off my grass!” I heard him scream as I slipped into the cool pine-smelling shadows and began to work my way through the trees toward home.

  A little while later—I'm not sure exactly when it started—I began to hear this high keening noise. It sounded like the metallic chatter of cicadas, except it was different somehow—more purposeful, and pleading, like the sound of someone crying, if the someone in question happened to be a very large insect.

  I could have walked away then. I could have ignored it, and maybe everything would have turned out different. But there was something too awful in that sound to ignore, something so pained and bereaved, so terrible, that to pass it by unheeding would have been criminal or worse. It would have been a sin. So I paused, listening, and I let the sound draw me toward it, pushing my way through tangles of briars that sewed threads of blood down my bare arms and ducking under low-hanging branches.

  I found the thing at the base of a gully, huddled in a bed of rotting leaves by a trickle of brown water—just a sound at first, nothing I could see. I've thought about this moment for a long time now—sometimes when I close my eyes at night it seems like I can hardly think of anything else—but I still don't know what to make of it. There are things in this world that people just can't see, I guess. Our eyes aren't made for seeing them maybe or maybe we've just never taken the time to learn how to, we're so caught up in our own affairs. Sometimes I think the world might swarm with things like that, wonders and mysteries, but only an isolated few ever catch a glimpse of them—the wounded and the weary, the desperate, the weak. I'd like to think so, anyway. But other nights—most nights—I suspect that just the opposite is true, that such things must be rare indeed, maybe unique, and on those nights sleep is a long time coming.

  All I know for sure is that the sound fixed me there in the undergrowth, like one of those butterflies pinned to the bulletin board in the biology room. I stood very still—Junior momentarily forgotten—staring at the source of that awful cry, or at the empty place in the gloom it seemed to emanate from, concentrating until I felt my vision slip out of focus. Everything around me shifted in some subtle way that even now I can hardly describe. It was like looking at one of those three-dimensional pictures where something has been hidden in a blur of color and you can't see it and you can't see it and then suddenly, if you turn your eyes just right, you can. Suddenly it's there, and once you see it you can't unsee it.

  Except that's not right either, because I never did completely see it—not then, anyway, not when it could have mattered—and certainly not straight on, the way you would look at a television or a car or any other earthly thing. I could never fix and hold it in my gaze. It was just a shimmer in the corner of my eye, like a glimpse of moonlight-gilded forest pool, with the faintest breath of wind moving across the face of the water, rippling and strange. That plaintive chitter drew me closer and closer still, until I went to my knees and reached out to touch it, this thing that was there but not quite there. A living thing, too: when you turned your head and let your eyes drift out of focus, you could catch half-formed glimpses of it, a flat face, featureless but for a lipless slash where a mouth ought to be and black slashes for eyes. Then you would blink and there would be nothing at all, just that mournful chittering.

  But even that glimpse of the thing's alien visage frightened me. I scrambled back, grasping at weeds to pull myself to my feet. They slipped in the muck, and I went down again, breath blasting from my lungs. As I lay there, clawing for air the thing touched me. A hot dry palm pressed itself against my own, and fingers—six of them, long and many jointed—closed around my hand, circling it and circling it again. I couldn't see them, or only for a breath at a time anyway. But I could feel them, squeezing my hand with this desperate, lonesome pressure, and what I thought of was my grandmother the last time I ever saw her, in a sterile white hospital room that stank of alcohol and rot. I thought of her sightless terrified eyes and the way her fingers had clutched mine, as if my warmth could anchor her to earth for an instant longer.

  "Okay,” I said, even though my heart was pounding. “Okay,” I said. “I've go
t you now,” which was what my mother used to say when I skinned a knee, and then, before I even really thought about it, I did what my mother had done as well. I sat up, I gathered the thing into my arms. It was like cradling a sackful of kindling, all sharp ends and taut leathery flesh, a tiny thing really, hardly bigger than a child climbing out of his mother's car on his first day of school, and hot too—feverish with heat—like a heap of white-hot coals smoldered somewhere way down inside it.

  "I've got you now,” I whispered, and we sat like that for a time. There were tears running down my face, I remember that, and a kind of blank, mute wonder buzzed inside my head, but that terrible chittering cry had quieted some, and for a moment anyway that was enough. I don't know how long I stayed like that, but by the time I lowered the creature back onto its bed of leaves, the sunlight lancing through the leaves overhead had changed, so that everything seemed dreamlike, watery and strange. I clambered down to the bottom of the gully through that swimming, ethereal light and knelt there to ladle up a handful of dirty water in my cupped palms.

  Back up then, on my knees, water slopping over my hands. “Here,” I said, and I felt those long fingers reach out to steady me. A dry leathery tongue slipped out to lap at my fingers. Three times I made that trip before the thing was sated. Three times before it settled back into its bed of leaves—I could sense the movement, I could see it in iridescent flashes—and that mournful chittering started up again, quieter now, but still sorrowful and alone.

  "Okay,” I said, digging in my backpack for the lunch I couldn't eat in the library. “I'm gonna leave you some stuff, okay? An apple and a peanut butter sandwich and some Oreos. You'll like the Oreos, I promise. And here, here's a Capri Sun,” I told it, punching the straw into the foil packet and arraying these paltry gifts around the thing like an offering.

  "I'll be back,” I said. “Soon."

  I snatched up my bag, terror and wonder humming inside me like live current, scrambled up the embankment, and headed home, Junior Starnes and Richard Zell forgotten. But that doleful chittering sound followed me all the way through the woods, so omnipresent that I thought it must have wormed its way inside my head. I burst out of the trees into our yard and used my key to open the door.

  Silence, the house empty, with only the red eye on the answering machine for company, winking in the dim kitchen. My sister Donna had been away at college two years by then, a half-tuition scholarship, but it wasn't enough—not with me on the way, Mom was always saying—so most days it seemed like my folks had gone with her. I guess they had, in their way. Dad had started pulling more hours at work, traveling a couple weeks every month, to plants in Georgia and South Carolina mostly, but also out west, to Texas and New Mexico and this week some kind of meeting in Las Vegas. Mom had taken a job as a pharmaceutical rep. She seemed like a different woman now, with her leather sample case, a closet full of dark pantsuits, and a nametag stamped with the image of a shellacked blonde that might have been a distant relative—at most—of the frowzy brunette who used to kick back on the sofa with me to watch Looney Tunes reruns.

  Today I was glad to have the house to myself, but even so there was something awful in the silence. I spent half an hour shoving stuff into a backpack—bandages and aspirin, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a tube of antibiotic ointment from the medicine cabinet in Mom's bathroom; a couple of chocolate bars, two plastic containers of apple sauce, and a pull-tab can of peaches from the pantry; a flashlight from the junk drawer in the kitchen. The whole time my mind worried at that silence, probing it the way your tongue nags the socket where a tooth used to be. Done, I found myself back at the kitchen counter, staring at the blinking red light on the answering machine.

  Two messages:

  Mom, apologetic as always, she had dinner with a client, I should warm up the meatloaf in the fridge and no television before I finished my homework—"I mean that, Philip,” she said—and she'd try to be home before I went to bed, but her meeting might run long so not to wait up.

  Then Dad, his voice booming into the silence, Hey Champ, having a great time, wish you were here, ha ha, and I hope you're making some time to practice your hoops—here his voice dropped an octave, the way it always did when he meant to discuss Serious Business—I really want you to try out this year, Phil, I think it might turn everything around for you. Then a gout of raucous laughter in the background, and Dad saying, Shut up, guys, and hey gotta run, Champ, duty calls—

  Then silence.

  Outside, twilight had fallen. I crossed the driveway, passing under the basketball goal Dad had erected last spring, jamming the post into a hole filled with wet cement, and slipped into the damp cool under the trees. It was full dark there. In the flickering cone of the flashlight, tree branches whipped toward me like the spring-loaded monsters in the haunted house at the county fair. I heard things scurrying through the bracken, and once a horrible screaming that I knew to be the sound a rabbit makes when it's scared or hurt. I'd tried to rescue one the previous summer, after the neighbor's cat had mauled it. It had died in my hands, a tiny thing, bloody where the cat had stripped back its fur, its black eyes shiny with terror. But in the dark that screech sounded like a kid screaming: this high-pitched eee-eee-eee, and then, suddenly, nothing at all, just silence. Any other night, I'd have turned back. Tonight, though, I felt the pull of that creature in the gully, and soon I heard it, too, crying out, luring me on into the darkness.

  I slid down the side of the gully on my rear end, holding the flashlight with both hands. I could see the pitiful cluster of offerings I'd left before—the peanut butter sandwich and the Oreos, the Capri Sun—all untouched, but in the darkness I couldn't see the creature at all, not even that silvery shimmer it hid inside of. Just the sound of it, that high-pitched keening. “Shhh,” I whispered, shrugging my pack into the leaves. “I'm here, I'm here now.” It reached out of the darkness and folded those long, long fingers around my hand, and once again I lifted it—it was so light it was like lifting a child—and brought it into my lap.

  I cradled it there as I ran my hands the length of its body, moving methodically, searching for some kind of wound or something, anything I could try to treat. Once, when I touched a knob on its leg—the creature seemed to be shaped more or less like a human being, but its body felt jointed all wrong under my hands, and in too many places—the pitch of that keening shifted. It shot up two or three notches, louder and more shrill, in what I took to be pain. I jerked my hand away as if I had been burned.

  "I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm sorry.” And I rocked it there in my lap until the sound began to die away again. That's when the absurdity of the whole situation really hit me: a fourteen-year-old kid trying to treat the injuries of—what, an alien? I figured it had to be some kind of alien. An alien he could hardly even see even when it was light out. In the middle of the night. With the contents of his mother's medicine cabinet.

  For all I knew, a single aspirin could kill the thing.

  So ha ha, as my father had said. Wish you were here.

  "I'm sorry,” I said again. I was crying now—silently, biting my lip to hold back the tears. I slipped down into the damp leaves and pressed myself into the circle of the thing's heat. This close I could smell it, a dry woodsy odor, like the potpourri my mother kept in a dish on the back of the toilet. We lay there like that for a long time, me crying and the thing beside me keening quietly—crying, too, in its way, I guess. After a while, I reached out and turned off the flashlight. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the forest canopy took shape overhead, black against the sky. Stars peered down through gaps in the leaves, and I found myself wondering what it was that I held there in the darkness, where it might have come from and what it might mean—not just for me, but for—well, everyone in the world, maybe. And I wondered who I should tell about it and why and whether anyone would listen. I was just a kid, after all, and when I started down the list of possibilities, nobody seemed very promising. Ms. Blevins maybe—I kept seeing her in the doorway
to her room, asking me about Junior—but whenever I thought about how the conversation might play out, the whole thing collapsed into absurdity. What would I say, after all? So, Ms. Blevins, can you believe I found an alien in the woods behind the school?

  And there was something else, as well: the thought of the scientists I'd read about in the library, shoving more and more mice into a cage until they started eating each other alive.

  Then a flying saucer was chasing me through darkness. I looked back at it, a wheel of blinking red and blue lights, and saw Richard Zell at the controls, high up under the translucent dome at the saucer's center. Junior Starnes rode shotgun. Don't make me come looking for you, he screamed, and then I was awake, stiff and cold and disoriented. A thin moon rode high among the leaves above me. As I gazed up at it, the day came rushing back to me—Junior and Coach Kessinger and the thing in the woods, of course, the thing in the woods most of all. It was crying quietly now—a whistling moan in the darkness—and I could feel the heave of its respiration against my side.

  Part of me wanted to stay there with it, curled up inside the blanket of its warmth. But it was late. Mom would be angry.

  Retrieving the flashlight, I scrambled up the embankment. I paused there, looking back. Shadow cloaked the gully, hiding the thing's weird shimmer. But I knew it was down there now—even if I didn't understand it—and I made a silent promise, to myself and to the creature, too. I would figure something out. I didn't know what, not yet, but something.

  Then the nightmarish walk back through the woods. The trees stood black and mute in the flashlight beam, my feet tangled in the scrub, and I sensed something terrible always at my heels—the way you do in the woods at night—hurrying me along. I was out of breath by the time I burst out of the trees into our yard, and the pack chafed at my shoulders like a sack of bricks.