Nothing to Devour

by Glen Hirshberg

  Or rather, that’s how she would have felt without Ju shimmering beside her.

  “I’ll bring some boooyyys in,” Ju whisper-sang, sang-laughed. Even Aunt Sally recognized the misquotes, now, the lyrics Ju loved to tease apart like a cat shredding yarn. “Some skin paraded like the moon.”

  Shivering with the cold she never could escape, Aunt Sally smiled.

  Then she bolted upright in the bed, eyes everywhere. She took in the dresser, with Ju’s emerald-green hairbrush and iPod and rainbow scrunchies and one sock scattered across it; the puffy purple coat flung over the back of the chair, because the girl was genetically incapable of putting anything away (because, in fairness, nowhere and no place was hers, or ever had been, and they were never staying); the other bed, so unrumpled it could have passed for unslept in, except for the corner of sheet Ju always peeled back as she slipped from it, leaving no imprint, just a purposeful trace, so anyone who happened by would know a ghost-girl had lain there once.

  But wasn’t lying there now.

  Was no longer in this room.

  Panic—Aunt Sally recognized it, though it was still a new sensation for her, or so old she’d forgotten she could feel it—flared in her guts. Flinging back her own covers, she swung her feet off the bed, grabbing for the coat she always laid neatly across the bottom, a trick for snatching warmth that Caribou had taught her back in their Delta camp. Because she’d actually slept, today, she had no sense whatsoever of what time it might be. The slit of white-yellow all the way around the edge of the grimy green curtains could have emanated from streetlights or cloud-shrouded sun. The humming wind outside the door gave no clue; that wind hummed day or night, here. The ceiling and walls around her ticked and tapped. Maybe it was raining. Maybe those sounds were paint flaking, the room falling apart.

  She glanced toward the digital clock, forgetting she’d unplugged it; the red blare of the numbers got under her eyelids, kept her awake, stirred the bottomless pool of Aunt Sally’s thoughts in ways sunlight through tent wall never had, back when she’d slept (or not slept) alone in her tent on the Delta. When Caribou was always a command away, and never, ever left her, except when she ordered him to.

  Where the hell was—

  “Even coma toes,” came Ju’s whispered singsong, tinting the air. “They won’t dance and tell.”

  Then her laughter, a barked donkey bray.

  From where?

  To Aunt Sally, surfacing fully inside her own skull felt like clawing up out of a grave. Was this really how not-monsters slept, every single night? What hard work it was resisting the pull of the void, getting all the way awake. No wonder they always seemed so tired.

  In the bathroom, she finally understood. Ju was in the bathroom.

  With someone else. The laughter had been someone else’s.

  The second she thought that—as though to confirm the conclusion—the other person brayed again, more quietly. As though he were laughing through a hand.

  Swaying by the bed, Aunt Sally marveled at the strangeness of it all. The nerve of it all. That girl had actually slipped out, while Sally slept? Had brought someone back?

  Had Ju done that before?

  Aunt Sally launched herself toward the bathroom door. In her mouth was a metallic taste, sticky and sharp, and her cheeks prickled as though she’d been slapped. Unless she was smiling? Oh, yes, she was smiling. Because she was angry? Because she was laughing? How did one tell? She had her hand on the door to throw it open, but didn’t. Instead, she eased it silently back, just enough so she could see.

  The boy—some ranch-tanned, ropy thing with yellow hair and delicious eyelashes, in a navy shirt with a flaming skateboard emblazoned across the chest—was in the bathtub, one blue-jeaned leg flung over the side. His eyes were wide and his smile wider as he watched Ju dance, lean and tilt in front of him. Her hair poured loose down her back. Under her skirt, her bare legs looked so long, all of a sudden, so thin. White as new teeth. Her movements were ridiculous, all wavy-armed and poky-hipped, except they were Ju’s movements, and therefore mesmerizing. Each wiggle seemed instinctive and specific to this creature, inimitable as the shivering of leaves on a particular tree.

  “We’re in each other’s teens,” Ju sang, mangling the line, charging it, so that it sparked as it left her mouth. “We’re on each other’s teens.” Then she leaned over the tub, over the boy, whose eyes seemed to be peeling themselves to get wider before giving up and falling closed. She settled over him. Aunt Sally felt the moment their lips met, that thousand-tipped tremor of nerves awakening, startling, surging toward sensation like blooms toward sunlight. Ju was still singing, straight into her boy’s open mouth.

  Aunt Sally supposed she should be angry. She thought it might be her job to announce herself, now, put a stop to this, though she wasn’t sure why, exactly. She didn’t actually move until Ju gasped and stopped singing—though not kissing—as the boy rose off the fiberglass, closing his arms around the girl’s back. At first Aunt Sally couldn’t make sense of the sight, but then their faces turned slightly and she got a better look at their lips. The redness bubbling out of the corner of the kiss, across Ju’s cheek.

  Where he’d bitten her?

  Aunt Sally was on them so fast, even she never felt herself move, was simply there. Ju half lifted and half scrambled backward with her skirt flying up around her hips like the bell of a fleeing jellyfish and her hair flailing in the air like tentacles. The boy never even made it up on his elbows. The sight of Sally slammed him back against the fiberglass even before her hands engulfed his thin, teenagey shoulders. Of course, he understood more quickly than Ju just how much trouble he was in.

  “I…” he started, and that was all she let him manage.

  “Never speak,” she hissed, staring down.

  “Aunt Sally,” Ju murmured, neither singing nor laughing, now. At least the girl still knew when to stop testing.

  “In a minute. Quiet.”

  In the tub, the boy stirred, tried to, and Aunt Sally flattened him with a glance. She let one hand slide off his shoulders, slip down the open buttons of his shirt onto his chest, which was so warm, flat and hard as a pebble baked by the sun. Smoothed by that relentless wind.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?” Aunt Sally murmured, to the kid and to Ju behind her. Letting herself enjoy herself, momentarily. What an addicting sensation enjoyment turned out to be, even at her age.

  “Get off him,” said Ju.

  Aunt Sally straightened, let the kid drop, and stood still for a second. Just to make certain she’d heard correctly. Then she turned.

  Ju stood with her back against the wall, her fingers at her reddened mouth. If she’d sounded snottier or angrier—any of those things Aunt Sally had somehow learned that girls Ju’s age generally sounded—Aunt Sally might have slapped her. Or maybe laughed, and pulled Ju to her.

  Instead, Aunt Sally stood and swayed, barefoot and uncertain in this drafty, urine-saturated bathroom. She felt suspended between the girl she’d claimed and raised—partway raised, at least, and shared life with, kept company—and her girl’s crush. Conquest. (Victim? she thought, then dismissed that thought.) The feeling spilling through her wasn’t new; it was, in fact, the oldest feeling Aunt Sally remembered, quite possibly her first one. But she hadn’t experienced it in at least a hundred years, and it took her a moment to recognize it:

  This was terror. Plain and simple. Now, after all this time.

  And the cause, she realized, was that more than anything, just now, Ju had sounded bored.

  “Honey,” she finally started, and Ju laughed. Her silver-shimmer laugh, sizzling down Aunt Sally’s veins like electrical current, burning like sunlight but cold as the moon.

  Mercifully, the laughter stopped. The girl rubbed hard at her mouth, seemed to shudder as though she were the one electrified. “I’m sorry, Aunt Sally.”

  That was all it took. Instantly, Aunt Sally was beside her, reaching a hand toward Ju’s hair, her face, n
ot knowing, as usual, where to touch. “You don’t have to be sorry. You just surprised—”

  “Uggh.” The girl leaned away, almost slammed herself back against the doorframe. “Could I just get one hour—how about ten minutes?—of actual privacy? What do you think of that?”

  Aunt Sally felt herself sway again. “What do I…? Why—”

  “Ten minutes. Just so I can get an idea of what it’s like to be alone? I hear some people like it.” Suddenly Ju had tears in her eyes. They shimmered, like the rest of her.

  Beautiful fairy-girl. For the millionth time, Aunt Sally wanted to grab her, cup the girl’s chin in her hands, touch that light. Tonight, the shimmer glowed even more fiercely than usual, turned the girl positively wavy right there in the doorframe.

  Unless it was her own tears, doing that? Was Aunt Sally actually crying? Was that a thing that could happen?

  “Oh, baby,” she finally said. “You don’t need privacy to be alone. I can tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about what being alone is like.”

  Except—and the question jolted Aunt Sally so hard, she actually grabbed the edge of the rust-riddled sink to hold herself steady—could she? Because when, really, in all her endless eons of nights-as-days, had Aunt Sally ever been alone? Certainly not in the tarpaper cabin where she’d been born. Not in the slave-child bunkhouse where she’d been raped the first five or eight times. Not in the years after her … awakening … however that had happened, when she’d whirled like a hurricane through the South, collecting and dispatching and, just occasionally and accidentally, creating companions. Lovers and listeners. Sycophants and slaves of her own. Not during the decades in the Delta, either, when she’d had Mother and Caribou and all their monsters.

  No. Not until she’d met Ju—become a sort of mother, at last, the only role she could think of that she hadn’t yet played—had Aunt Sally ever been alone. Felt alone.

  “We’re living ruuu-ins,” Ju sang, the words emerging new, transformed, from her mouth. “In palaces we’ve dreamed.”

  “And you know,” Aunt Sally answered—sang! She was actually singing!—while Ju touched her tongue to her bloody lip, blinked through the tears in the corners of her eyes. “We’re each other’s—”

  Ju’s laugh silenced her. It sparkled cold between them like frozen breath. “Just stop, Aunt Sally,” she said. “Don’t…” She turned away, straightening her skirt on her little bird-hips as she walked into the blackness of the bedroom.

  Dimly, Aunt Sally felt the boy stir behind her, rising out of the tub. She was aware she’d left him alone too long. But Ju’s laughter echoed in her head, seemed to attach to corners in her brain like spiderwebbing and wrap up her thoughts. All she seemed able to do was watch the girl move to her bed, switch on a light, grab her latest stolen phone off the nightstand and start perusing. If she even remembered that she’d brought a boy to this room while Aunt Sally slept, she gave no sign.

  Aunt Sally felt the boy’s footsteps behind her, now, silent as he could make them, which of course wasn’t anywhere near silent enough. She could have turned on him at any moment, halted him without so much as lifting a finger. But she didn’t seem to be doing that. She seemed, instead, to be letting him creep closer. Right up behind. If he had a knife or some other sharp thing, he could actually annoy, even hurt her. And she seemed to be allowing an opening for that. Waiting to see what he’d do.

  To see who he was. What sort of boy Ju brought home.

  Not a boy inclined to stab her, apparently. And smart enough to plaster himself against the door as he edged past, and to keep his head down. He really was just a boy, it turned out. A coltish, hay-colored thing, sand-skinned and bright-maned. Sticking out all over himself, too, of course, because even if he was trying not to look, he was in Aunt Sally’s presence, after all. Close enough to touch, if he’d dared, or she’d invited him to.

  Unless it was being near Ju that had done that to him?

  He hadn’t buttoned his fly or his flannel shirt, and he just kept shuffling determinedly toward the door, the world out there, the wind still whistling from nowhere to nowhere, relentless as Aunt Sally’s Mississippi had always seemed but so much emptier.

  By the time she spoke, she’d half forgotten the kid was even in the room. “Ju. Tell me what you like about this one.”

  The boy jerked to a standstill, trapped between Aunt Sally and the bed, as though he’d been lassoed.

  Ju glanced up from whatever she’d been reading or looking at, swiped to the next page or contact list or whatever, swiped again, and only then bothered to look up. The second she did, Aunt Sally felt the challenge radiating from her. The … not quite defiance … not yet, but …

  “Who?” Ju murmured. “Oh. Him?”

  It was the tone as much as the words that infuriated Aunt Sally and alarmed her still more. Leveling her gaze, she bore down, burrowing into and through Ju’s eyes as though directing a table saw. With satisfaction, she saw the girl flinch and tear up again. And then, with admiration—and also something much deeper, richer, and more hurtful—she watched Ju straighten again. The girl even tried lifting the phone to block Aunt Sally’s glare before dropping it back to her lap.

  What had the girl said the other day, back in that alley outside the coffee shop in Laramie? You think I don’t know?

  “Urrrgg,” Ju burst out, startling Aunt Sally and breaking her hold. “See?” And then, “Oh, okay, right, that’s right. Do the eyes, now. Here it comes. Do the hurt Aunt Sally look.”

  The fact that Aunt Sally had no idea what Ju was talking about made her want to throw her arms in the air, or dance for joy. She couldn’t have explained any of that, even to herself.

  “Come on, Aunt Sally. Give me the lecture. You tuck me in, you get my meals, I’m your fairy girl. All you ask is that you get to watch me walk, eat, sing, and sleep, every single second of my life. Go ahead. Say you love me again.”

  I say that? Aunt Sally couldn’t remember saying that, and then she did. She had said it. Only once or twice, both recently, but yes. At least twice. Surely that meant she actually did …

  “The truth is, though, Aunt Sally,” Ju said, slipping under the blankets and pulling them up toward her throat. For protection, maybe, or to make herself vanish. “Really, you just want to be me.”

  And that, at last, was what did it. Throwing back her head, Aunt Sally erupted into laughter. Never in her life had she laughed like this. The sound, the feeling swelled in a giant bubble from her guts, splitting her ribs, expanding her until she thought she might burst from happiness or amusement. Possibly, other creatures—the ones she preyed on, the ones that dreamed, that walked in daylight—knew the difference between those things. Aunt Sally neither knew nor cared. She just laughed while the girl stared and the boy shuddered between them like a wedged log in a whirling eddy.

  “You know what?” she finally managed, still laughing, holding her own stomach, feeling her formidable self inside herself. There was just so much of her, now. Inside, anyway. “You know what, my fairy girl? Witch-light of my world?” She stopped laughing, but only long enough to wink. “You could be right.”

  In response, Ju glared. Then she let the covers drop and stared back. The smile that crept across her face was almost shy; certainly, it was sweet. Definitely, there was love in it; Aunt Sally was all but sure.

  “So,” said the boy, and the fact that he could speak was a surprise, possibly to all three of them. “You’re like her nanny?”

  There was a moment—right after her teeth punctured his temple and the side of his face, but before his cheekbone exploded in her mouth—when Aunt Sally experienced yet another brand-new thing. She hadn’t even meant to be looking at the boy, because even as she’d struck, she was aware of what would be new to Ju, right then, no matter what the girl claimed she already knew. And Aunt Sally wanted to see the reaction.

  But she was looking at the boy, partly because his arms kept flopping around, still trying to encompass her, his
body surging against her torso and his brain twitching and firing even as she slurped it from its pan, churning with all those dreams she’d dredged up in him, the ones they all seemed to be born with, of finally finding that one love or fuck or flickering connection profound enough to shatter their shells, free them from the very hungers and sensations and skin that triggered dreams in the first place.

  Because she was looking at him, she saw his eyes. They were positively ablaze with terror, but also with a welling, bubbling sadness as they bulged, side by side, toward the sills of their sockets. Like jumpers, Aunt Sally thought as she chewed and slurped and sucked. From the top of a burning building.

  Was that how they felt as she finished them? Had it always been? She’d just assumed, somehow, that the dreams she stirred anesthetized or at least distracted them.

  The boy bucked hard once more, spasmed, flailed his weed-stalk arms but without purpose, then crumpled as she rode him to the ground. Even as she did that, Aunt Sally forgot the boy entirely. Her attention returned to the girl in the bed even as her teeth found the seams in the sides of the kid’s throat, parted him like a curtain. She could feel those fairy-eyes on her, light as light. Ju wasn’t looking away. She wasn’t even blinking.

  You think I don’t know? Ju had said.

  She knew now.

  With that certainty came liberation and relief. But also—and here was yet another new thing, the fifth or five-thousandth of the last five years, after a century of virtually no new things—a pang of some emotion Aunt Sally had never felt, yet recognized almost immediately. She’d heard it sung about, often enough, heard Mother and her Whistling Fool mewling on and on about it. She’d even seen it in the bulging eyes of the boy beneath her.

  So this is regret, she thought, sucking her gums, though it took her a bit to realize what she was regretting. As it turned out, tonight marked the end of a dream she’d had. Not a healthy or desirable one, maybe, and she didn’t even know where it had come from.