Nightbitch

by Rachel Yoder

  She barked from sheer happiness and the boy barked, too, then scratched her on the head.

  * * *

  —

  “…FOR who is to say what wonders and mysteries women grow within themselves?” the passage read, in the dim lamplight, before she drifted away on the couch in that late afternoon, after their daylong canine reverie, the boy snoozing on the living-room floor in just his diaper.

  Who is to say what feats and follies, what absolutely not-able-even-to-be-imagined modes of existence women have accessed since the dawn of human history? A woman, when pushed to her limit, will call on all her faculties, all her skills, all the biological tools and tricks at her disposal, not only to survive but, moreover—for those who have reproduced—to care for her young. As such, the mother’s powers supersede that of the un-childed woman, for the mother—especially the mother of infants and very small children—occupies that peculiar space of in between—not fully human or fully animal—and it is in this liminal otherworld where we find many of the most compelling magical women. In this space her powers are at their most formidable and her constitution at its most volatile, creating a nexus of unmatched capacity.

  She sank deeper into the sofa and blinked to stay awake, for the writing seemed to emerge from somewhere deep inside her, even though it was right there, on the page….

  Perhaps most peculiar: most magical women are not aware of their powers and proceed into the realm of the magical without so much as a parting glance. To them, this journey is as natural as breath, as falling into sleep. To pass from the world of the known to that of the unknown often happens unconsciously, but whether conscious or not, it marks the beginning of what the Kwolo call her aga, or second life.

  * * *

  —

  HER HUSBAND RETURNED HOME Friday evening. It was late in the summer, so late that if you squinted you could begin to see the leaves of the trees turning. It had been a beautiful day and, even after a five-hour drive, he was in a great mood, because why wouldn’t he be?

  The side screen door was unlocked, and the heavy winter door behind it ajar, as they often left it in the summer. A breeze pushed in through open windows, and music played softly from the living room.

  Hello, he said, kicking off his shoes and leaving his suitcase by the washer.

  The kitchen was orderly and clean, the bathroom shady and smelling of bleach. The beds were made and the carpets vacuumed. Beside their bed sat a new kennel, bedded down with a soft throw blanket, a down pillow from the bed. No dirty clothes on the floor, as there usually were. No wayward toys strewn hither and yon, as there usually were. Twilight breathed in and out of the open windows, moving the gauzy curtains.

  He walked through the house and called for his wife.

  Honey, he said, where are you?

  In the living room, he found the boy—happy and clean, in only a diaper—sitting beside a dog who was stretched out on the clean rug. The dog was enormous and reminded the husband of a wolf, with a thick coat of silver-and-black fur. It opened one eye to watch the husband.

  Baby, where’s Mama? he asked. The boy clapped and laughed.

  Dog! he said joyfully, then wrapped his doughy arms around the neck of the animal and laid his tiny head on her chest.

  The animal rose as the husband approached it, hands in the air as if he were being robbed.

  Good dog, he said. Good.

  The animal pulled back its lips to show its teeth, then snarled, quietly, from deep in its chest. In one sharp movement, the dog rose and sprinted to the back of the house, to the French doors, which had been left open, and out onto the lawn, where the long day was darkening. The child screamed with glee, and the husband chased after the dog, out the same open doors. His wife, he thought, moving toward the coming night. She must be out there.

  two

  In the distance, she heard her husband in the backyard call for her, but she was not that woman anymore, that mother and wife. She was Nightbitch, and she was fucking amazing. It seemed she had been waiting for this for a very, very long time.

  She charted her path by keeping to the shadows. She trampled the carefully planted petunias along the house where her across-the-street neighbor lived, a man named Stanley who voted Republican and would never loan out a tool from his sizable collection, would barely say hello when she passed, would not abide for even a moment her son walking on his grass, which the old man tended with the care of a doting nursemaid, would in fact glare at the small child and cross his arms as the mother chastised the boy and bade him come to her, would not even smile when she apologized and tried to make a joke of it.

  His fucking grass, she thought as she crouched by the side of his house and took a monstrous shit. She clawed at the grass beside the pile and ripped up clods of turf, then went to the edge of the green expanse where Stanley had thrown fresh grass seed on the patchy dirt and kicked it onto the sidewalk.

  She made her way through back lawns and along fence lines, avoiding the pools of light cast by streetlamps, to the tunnel that passed beneath the train tracks, and then the small park that ran along a small stream. She knew that homeless men slept on the benches there, and once, while riding her bike, had happened upon a group of young men passing around a pipe. She usually tried to avoid the park, because she was afraid of what might happen to her there, but tonight it was the only place she wanted to be. Her heart thudded as she smelled all the animals, smelled the pungent men asleep on the benches.

  I could rip out their throats while they sleep! she thought, as a giddy power surged through her. She was overwhelmed by her strength. She was awash in her own violence. She wanted to howl, but instead crept down the path that cut through the woods, stepping gingerly so as not to make a sound. The cold woodland creek moved in the periphery of her consciousness, and she thought toward its midnight chill and furtive, relentless flow. In these ways, it was her kin.

  Within the moonlight, she could see the life of the night not normally available to her senses. Bugs crawled on leaves, and a bird startled high up in a tree. Beneath the grasses and old leaves, a snake pushed its way toward a mouse, moving the air around it ever so slightly. The whole of the night clicked and purred about her. The moonlight itself seemed to vibrate and bring to life each and every thing.

  She froze beyond stillness when she glimpsed the rabbit by a cottonwood tree. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and she bared her teeth. She lifted one arm and set it down, then raised the other. Her movements became almost mechanical, slow and measured. She meant to be a shadow that folded and fluttered through tricks of light.

  The rabbit twitched its nose, an ear, then sprang toward the darkness. Each muscle in her body tightened and then exploded with movement. She surged after the animal, crashed into the bushes and ripped through weeds, to trap its hind leg before it could disappear into a copse of briars.

  She clamped her teeth around its neck, and the small animal breathed inside her mouth. She slung it violently back and forth. Her eyes blazed, and she threw it to the ground to see if it would move, then picked it back up and shook it again.

  The musk of its fear!

  The warmth of its blood!

  The give of its skull as she crushed it between her teeth!

  She carried the dead animal in her mouth back through the night, the neighborhood, until she was behind her house, in the farthest corner of the lawn, digging a shallow hole in which to bury the creature, her treasure, her prize.

  Afterward, she paced the lawn. She smelled the spot where her son had lain in the grass earlier that day, and the path he’d walked from door to lawn, the places where his hands had touched the blue ball still at the side of the driveway. She smelled the dirt and she smelled the car tires. She smelled the back steps, where the cat liked to sit in the sun, and then she smelled the path the cat took to the patio and through the lawn, followed the smell to
her spot beneath the crab-apple tree. Beneath the tree she smelled the crab apples and all the phantom scents of chipmunks and squirrels and birds. She lay down and rolled in the grass to collect the smells in her fur and moaned with the joy of it, then proceeded to the compost bin, and the little rock garden where she liked to plant spring flowers, and there was her smell, her human smell—she knew it immediately.

  She couldn’t have known that what she had needed all along—more than medical attention or psychotherapy, more than choosing happiness or adjusting her attitude—was to sink her sharp teeth into something living and bloody and feel its essence drain away until it was simply a rotting and unmoving thing.

  Not iron deficiency or episode. Nothing “wrong” with her. Just one night. One night of violence was what she needed. One night to not care what anyone thought, to shit where she pleased, to not be needed by any living thing, and to be only a body in motion in the dark, a shadow, a ghost of herself, who listened only to the mandates of her body.

  Exhausted, she curled in the grass to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  NAKED AND DAMP WITH dew, curled into herself, she awoke the morning after her midnight escapade with an overwhelming sense of well-being heretofore unknown to the mother—or, should we say, to Nightbitch. The sun crested the far edge of town and bathed the backyard in a clean and even light. Every blade of grass glistened. Every bird sang.

  She was well rested despite her few hours of sleep beneath the crab-apple tree. Her body felt strong and alive, and she was not chilled even though she was naked. She was awake in a way she had not been since her child was born, maybe even before, not groggy, not grumpy, but enthusiastic and, she imagined, completely capable of going on an early-morning jog, though she had never done this in her life. Her sinuses were clear and her eyes bright. Her hair felt clean to the touch, and she imagined her skin dewy and unmarked by the years of not enough sleep and not enough water and not enough sunscreen and not enough salad.

  She unfurled her limbs, spooled out each arm to feel the pull of skin against bone, unfolded her legs slowly, and then wiggled her toes until they snapped. She stood, and her spine popped from bottom to top, then stretched her arms to the sky and yawned wonderfully, as she’d only seen actors do in movies.

  She gazed over the backyard, the bees and bugs coming to life, the soft morning sunlight peeking between branches, the big shiny leaves of the hostas. She didn’t know she could feel this good, this happy, this awake and sated.

  She crept to the garage and typed the code to open the door, stayed bent and low as the door rose with a too-loud mechanical grind, then retrieved the extra key from inside. She scuttled to the side door, covering herself, and let herself in, feeling as Eve must have that first morning out of the garden, but, honestly, what a relief. To understand yourself anew. No longer to linger in the what ifs. To now know the truth.

  The bathroom mirror revealed to her a being hitherto unmet, hair matted and mud-clotted, face smeared with blood and dirt, nostrils caked with a tarlike soot. Her hands looked as though she’d been gardening for weeks. Red scratches crisscrossed her legs. She pulled a thorn from the bottom of her foot, then stepped into the shower.

  She warmed her skin beneath the hot water and watched as coarse hair and fur rinsed down the drain. Mud from her hands and feet. Bits of leaves and sticks from her hair. Even what she assumed were the points on her canine teeth chipped off, and she spat them into the murky water.

  An overwhelming sense of rightness, of I told you so, of profound sanity gripped her as she dried herself, slipped on a cool, clean shirt, and then slipped herself into bed between her dreaming husband and dreaming son.

  * * *

  —

  THE FACT OF THE matter was that she had not been wrong about anything. She had not been wrong about the creeping hair on her body or the sharpening teeth. She had not been wrong about the tail or the pack of dogs that arrived inexplicably on her front yard. Her feelings, in fact, about every single thing had been reasonable and precisely on point, not only about the dog stuff but even before, how she was so angry and tired, how she didn’t feel it right that she was now at home, out of the workforce, career on hold, art on hold, life on hold indefinitely, while her husband fulfilled himself. Not right that her work raising the child was devalued, women’s work, housework, that once she became a housewife she began, ever so slowly, to disappear, until she only fully existed in the presence of her ward. When she considered how she spent each day, it was fair to wonder: without him, did she even exist at all?

  Yes, it could be concluded that she was indeed the winner, though of which argument in particular might be more difficult to pin down. She felt she could safely assume she was the winner of all arguments, at least recent ones. She felt she could safely trust her instincts and judgment from here on out, even if at first such instincts seemed insane. She could and should feel vindicated, could revel in her rightness, yet how truly infuriating that she could reveal none of her rightness to her husband, now sleeping beside her in bed.

  No, certainly, she could in no way, not ever, reveal her transformation to the good man. Though he was a kind man, a reasonable man, she could not be sure of what he might say, what he might do, were she to show him the truest part of her true self. Would he force her to see a doctor or, worse, a psychiatrist? Would there be many orange bottles of prescription pills to dull her transformative jubilee or, worse, halt it altogether? Might he institutionalize her? Separate her from her child? Would she waste away in a bright white room, arms and legs tied to a chair, wearing a soft and downy robe, her eyes blankly staring out the window? Surely he would in no way be able to see how natural her transformation was, how healthy and restorative. Certainly he would not be able to see that their child was well cared for despite her canine propensities, despite their doggy games.

  * * *

  —

  YOU SIMPLY CAN’T DO that, her husband said in the kitchen the morning after her transformation, a look of concern on his face. I get home and you’re not here? The boy’s alone? And that dog?

  Nightbitch stared flatly. She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them in a small gesture of magnanimity. She told herself to try to remain friendly during this conversation, not to snarl, not to show her teeth, not to participate in any aggressive displays, because, truly, she did want to work this out with the smallest of fusses, mostly because she did not want to reveal to her husband what she had done last night, or why she’d had to leave early. She wanted her secrets to remain secrets. Her secrets were the only things these days that were purely hers, things apart from mother and wife and middle-aged woman. Now her secrets were nearly as precious to her as her art had once been, and, as she thought about it, there was something that had been secret about her art, too. The dreaming of ideas, the excitement she held silently inside as she began to work, the heights to which she fantasized a project might grow, the hours of work alone, the thinking and imagining, the conversations with herself. There was something beautifully, deliciously secret and intimate and intoxicating about that life, the art she had made.

  To talk about a project too soon would ruin it. And to talk about it too much after it was done would also turn it into something common.

  The best way was to make something, silently, secretly, and then have it appear in the world in all of its magnificent and surprising glory. Like birth, she thought. To push a thing from the most private part of yourself. To have it scream upon its arrival. To have it be perfect and glorious, to not have to say a word about it, to simply hold it in your arms, to extend it to the world with just one word of imploration: look.

  Yes. Her art. Her secrets. She must keep them as her own, whatever small bits of them were left.

  Her husband still waited for an answer, some sort of response.

  I left you a note, she said, refusing to apologize, refusing to concede. It
wasn’t as if she had disappeared inexplicably and completely. The note she had been smart enough to leave behind on the kitchen counter plainly said that she had gone for a long walk and wouldn’t be back that night, that she just needed some space, that it was no big deal and not to worry, that she was sorry she’d left the boy by himself but she could tell from the map on her phone that her husband was close by in the car—blocks away, really—and nothing would be hurt by leaving a few minutes early, the house was driving her bonkers and she just needed to get out, she loved him and she loved the boy and she would see them in the morning.

  After all, her husband never conceded. He never apologized. He simply argued his way out of everything, or tried to. He simply stood his ground and explained himself evenly and didn’t ever undermine his own self-interest. And now this is what she would do as well.