Nightbitch

by Rachel Yoder

  She pointed herself toward the nature preserve, toward the dark and comforting woods tucked right into the middle of town, to cry and snarl in the darkness beneath the trees, cry and muck about in the tendril of stream that flowed toward her neighborhood eventually, if she followed it long enough, which is what she decided to do as she stood there letting the icy water numb her sore, bleeding feet. She had lost her sandals somewhere along the way, and the water felt so good she let out a little guttural howl. Snot dripped from her nose to intermingle with hot, dirty tears. She careened in the stream, pushing over fallen logs and pulling shrubs from the banks as she searched for something to steady her. It was her goal to make havoc, to leave a mess, to wrest from her form all of the rage and sadness and insanity of these years since her son was born. She had been storing it all in the puckered dough of her thighs, the sad little paunch hanging around her middle. In the dark-brown circles she could not seem to get rid of that framed her eyes day and night. In the joints of her fingers, which had now begun to hurt whenever she was tired or angry or sad, which was always.

  Oh, those women! Those horrible women! She sobbed and splashed her way deeper into the woods, then came to sit on a fallen log and weep. She had not felt this way since, what, high school? Junior high? Less than and left out and lame, adolescent feelings that overcame her and made her feel stupid just for having them. She was a grown woman. She didn’t want to feel this way. It was ridiculous. Yet still she sobbed quietly as she had not done in decades.

  The Herculean effort of the last years, all the disappointments, the worry that she was not, despite everything she had sacrificed, a good mother, the anxiety that she would never return to her art and that this was now her lot in life, motherhood and nothing more, she felt all of it thudding through her and cried and cried, like a heartsick teen she cried. Hadn’t she had a most wonderful domestic weekend full of refreshing sexual drive and normal, untroubled family life as a wife and mother and dog-mother who actually, totally had the dog-mother thing under control? So, so close to true and completely unconflicted contentment, thanks to her disavowal of art, her arduous psychological work of the past weeks to get a handle on her urges, to harness her desires. But then these mothers, these artists, who she considered with the bitterness of a hundred endless night-nights, a thousand artless afternoons.

  She pushed a sound from herself she had not heard before, a long raspy growl made up of rage and breath, yearning and sorrow. There was a great and horrible power to the sound, as every muscle strained to expel it, her abs tightening and throat constricting. Her toes tensed, and her hands curled to claws. A blind animal-cry toward something else. An expulsion of all that had been inside her.

  Beside her, from its hidden den, a raccoon answered her with its own ungodly talk, and without thought she dived headlong into the darkness at the bank, for she saw its two gleaming eyes. It had startled her, and she was furious. How dare it. How dare.

  She took it in her hands and snapped its neck efficiently before it could bite her and threw its body with a splash into the creek. She tipped her head back and filled the sky with a howl as big as her entire life and, with that, was hell-bent on getting home, weeping now, as her adrenaline surged and her muscles overflowed with blood and she crashed through the night.

  By the time she reached the place where she and the boy threw rocks into the water on sunny afternoons, the place just beyond the train tracks, and then, soon after, her very own backyard, she had slaughtered three small rodents and one helpless bunny that unluckily found themselves in her path.

  In her backyard, she stretched out in the grass on her belly and smelled the earth and wiped her face against the soft green fronds. Her legs were scratched and her arms were scratched and her hands filthy and bloody.

  She crashed into the house and did not yell a friendly hello to alert her husband she was home, as she usually did, but instead went straight to the bathroom and locked the door. There she stripped off her sullied clothing and pulled twigs from her matted hair. She turned the shower as hot as it would go, and stood beneath the water, to calm herself and wash the night away.

  She cried herself to sleep in the guest bed and awoke earlier than her husband and son, then got up to cry some more. She saw she had twenty-six unread texts and turned off her phone altogether. She would never be able to face those friends again.

  She was mad at herself for caring, mad at herself for feeling like a failure. In fact, wasn’t viewing yourself as a failure the first step toward actually becoming one? She couldn’t think that way. It wasn’t productive. Yet, still, all she wanted to do was watch dumb movies and stay in her pajamas, and she could do that, because she didn’t have to be anywhere in the world that day except with her son. She had nothing of import to do, no one depending on her expertise or excited to see a new piece from her. No, no one needed her but a two-year-old. She could do whatever she wanted—except for the crying, which she would do in limited increments while pretending to use the bathroom.

  The obnoxious cat meowed and meowed and meowed brainlessly until she fed it a disgusting slime-sauced breakfast from a can, which it lapped up noisily. She deposited four frozen sausages into the tiny skillet on the stove, as she dropped frozen waffles into the toaster, as she sliced a banana and washed some strawberries. She wanted to pound through the walls with her fists as she moved the wet laundry from the washer to the dryer. She imagined herself ripping the head off a songbird with her hands as she wiped the kitchen table with a sponge, then turned to her son’s tiny little plastic table and wiped that, too. She blew her nose and put on the coffee and listened to the news. She fed her family breakfast, helped her husband find things he needed to put in his suitcase since the poor guy couldn’t keep track of his own stuff. He was never there, the silly goose! Of course he didn’t know where anything was!

  Her husband wanted to know what was wrong, and she told him it was just her monthly cycle, the erratic nature now of her midlife hormones, and he said, worried, Well, I’ve never seen you cry like this, and she just waved him off and began crying again.

  I’m perimenopausal, she said, still sobbing, and was plunged even deeper into her hopelessness, yet in under ten minutes finally put a smile on her face, so as not to trouble her husband. He was a good man and didn’t need the extra stress of worrying about her—not that he would even do that once he left. She didn’t imagine he thought much at all about her emotional state when he was gone.

  The next morning, she sent her husband on his way—after he had the little breakfast and cup of hot coffee she had prepared, which had been waiting for him upon his wakening, after he’d had a leisurely, restorative shit, after a nice long shower and an awaiting stack of clean clothes warm from the dryer, which she had folded neatly and left on the toilet for him after spritzing a little air freshener—and then descended further into her self-loathing, now sending hateful thoughts after her husband’s car as it pulled away.

  I’d like to take a leisurely shit one day, she thought bitterly.

  Try as she might, she could not pull herself from it, and turned on cartoons and lay beside her son, watching as two bug things pounded each other over the head with mallets, laughing maniacally. This was too violent for him to watch, but he loved it, clapped and giggled. Yes, she was a bad mother, a horrible one. She felt another cry coming on, and rose to feed herself, for she had forgotten to do so while remembering to feed everyone else in the house; she again found the horrible cat, not even an hour after its breakfast, waiting on the corner of the rug in front of the sink, where it always lurked.

  The rotting potatoes in the garbage smelled atrocious; the air was so dry, the clouds outside so thick, and the morning so gray. She realized with a yip, while hunched in front of the open fridge, that there was not a scrap of meat in the house, save for the horrible cat’s horrible cans of food, for which she was again whining, meow after incessant meow. As Night
bitch scooped yet another can into the cat’s dish, she sniffed at it, wondering, but it was too slimy and flaked, too altogether anonymous to excite her appetite. She watched with disgust as the cat sloppily gulped and smacked her way through the pile of unspeakable meat. The boy’s cartoon dinged and beeped while Nightbitch seethed in the kitchen, glaring at the cat as she sipped a tepid cup of coffee, her bathrobe slung loosely around her.

  She tried listening to the news, but it only incited her blood-thirst, so she shut it off and paced back and forth by the sink. She searched through a cupboard for something to stop the throbbing in her head and slammed the cupboard door without finding so much as an ibuprofen. She picked up a knife to cut…something, anything, turned to search for an apple or carrot or goddamn beef jerky, then stepped on the stupid cat, which had just finished its second breakfast and come to hover, weirdly and silently, just behind her feet. Nightbitch, of course, tripped, sprawled hard on the kitchen floor, and in doing so came down hard on the cat, which sent the cat skittering toward the living room, eyes wide and green, the ball of her body bobbing on spindly, cartoon-fast legs.

  Nightbitch’s knee pulsed with pain, as did her haunch. Her eyes flared with silent rage as she lunged after the cat, caught her by her back legs, pulled her across the hardwood floor, and plunged the knife into her chest. Though she did not think it possible, the cat’s green eyes widened even more, not a hint of any intelligence behind them, just dull instinct, the smallest amount of instinct required to keep such a stupid animal alive.

  She jerked the knife through the soft girth of its belly. The animal split open like a pair of tight pants. Nightbitch growled in her chest as she bent to wrap her teeth around the nape of the cat’s neck. She rose in blind fury and shook the body back and forth, the cat deflating—squeak by small, breathy squeak—with each fling, blood splattering on the white cabinets and across the worn wood floor. A loop of purple intestine slipped from the wound and flipped back and forth like a wet scarf. A thick warmth spread down Nightbitch’s chin and onto her chest, and in this ecstasy, she swung her head back and forth with even greater fervor, intestines and organs slapping her face and falling to the floor. She shook harder, furiously, blood flung to every corner of the kitchen, until a sharp snap, and the body relaxed into ultimate resignation. She stopped. Blood dripped onto her bare feet and in between her toes. She dropped the thing from her mouth into her hands and held it there, to sniff it and nudge it with her nose, examine it with an animal curiosity. To watch it and in this strange reverie stand still inside a gripping and extraordinary chaos.

  And only now in her remembering did the events of the recent weeks begin to make sense. For of course she had known about it since she was a child, growing up as she had within the old German ways, with her old parents in the old Appalachian foothills, those thickly dark hills gripping in their valleys the secret of decades, of centuries. She watched her mother’s hands, always in motion, crocheting intricate angels from thin thread, working in the herb garden and then binding the cuttings she had collected and hanging them to dry from the kitchen eaves, cleaning the meat from a chicken carcass, working her fingers between the ribs, holding the wishbone up in the window light to admire it, flicking a paring knife this way and that over a bowl of strawberries, folding together the freezer boxes, lining them with plastic bags, pouring and twist-tying and securing and stacking, searching through bushes taller than she for thousands of blueberries, in her curly hair, scratching her skull, her eyes tired and closed, working the knots from her husband’s neck, kneading dough, searching beneath suds for dirty forks. She remembered the heavy navy-blue coat her mother wore year-round at the meat locker and its thick zipper, the force of her mother’s hands as she wrenched the teeth closed and then touched each frozen side of meat, as if to comfort them. They swung in her wake, as if comforted. The single bulb within the locker cast a cold, hard light on the muscles and bones. The girl had known what blood smelled like from a young age, and knew the consequences of violence. Her parents, their religion, claimed pacifism, but there was violence in every day of their lives, the chicken heads and cracked eggs, the dead kitten in the little nest in the hay bales, a pig hung from a tripod to bleed, the slow bodies of deer turning in the trees.

  Her mother had wanted to be a singer, an opera singer. She had the sort of voice that soared up above everything and took the air up there to transform it into something sharp and translucent and perfect. Instead, she collected her hair and covered it and went to church to sing four-part harmonies each Sunday. It was a virtue to blend in. It was a virtue to put the group above oneself, so she did, for her entire life. She had sung a solo long ago at a Wednesday-night service when she was still a girl, and who was in the audience but a cousin of someone or other, a big-city cousin there to absorb some local flavor. After the service, he approached her mother, wiping tears from his eyes with a crisp white handkerchief, to tell her he had never heard the likes of such a voice, that he worked in theater, that he himself would become her patron so she could go study at the best vocal school in Europe, and he handed to her a little white card. She kept this hidden in the base of a music box on her dresser, for her family thought the dream to sing in Europe was the height of stupidity, the height of vanity. She promised herself she would do it when she grew up, but little did she know. This is how she told the story, and then how she ended it, little did I know, and her daughter would always ask, Know what? Know what?—was desperate to know—at which her mother laughed longer and harder than seemed called for and told the girl to go to bed, it was late.

  For a time, even after her mother had birthed a perfect baby girl, there was talk toward Europe, so much talk it almost turned evil, threatened to tip over into the terrain of the self-involved—the individual, her husband reminded her, was of little import to the church—and so. Her father was a fine man, but her mother was extraordinary. She remembered warm summer nights, her mother sitting barefoot on the lawn, a record player spilling opera all over the now black grass, the now black air and unmoving trees. That’s how the girl fell asleep each night, with opera unspooling through the open windows and her barefoot mother in a flowered skirt, lying there staring up at the stars. One night, she had a dream of her mother, outside in the grass, set upon by foxes and raccoons and wolves. Her mother meowed like a kitten, and each time one of the animals attacked her, she petted it lovingly and meowed as it pulled her apart. The girl watched from her dream window with a great despair growing in her. I knew it, she said to herself. I always knew it. She woke heaving and went down to find her mother, to make sure she was safe, the dream still alive though she was awake, the whole thing a confusion: Her mother was out there with the kittens? But her mother didn’t even like the kittens. No, wait. She was singing….And she saw, by the light of the moon, that her mother was still there on the lawn, unmoving. The girl feared her dead and called her name, at which her mother sat up with a start and wiped her face. Why are you crying? the girl asked, and her mother said, I’m not crying. I’m tired. Go to bed.

  It’s just that the kittens would not stop following her, had followed her on the long walk to the bus each morning. She sobbed and threw rocks at them, scolded them for following her, and told them to go back home, but they knew her fingers tasted like milk and wanted to lick them and have her tuck them away in her warm jacket. She begged her parents to take the animals inside so that they wouldn’t follow her, wandering so far from home and certainly becoming lost for good once she boarded the bus. She imagined them crying all day in the rocky lane, hungry and cold, then wandering off into the woods to be eaten by a fox. She sobbed and begged her parents, and they were wide-eyed at her despair. They’ll be fine, they claimed, perplexed by this small sobbing girl. You’re going to miss your bus, they said, pushing her out the door. They could not be bothered to watch over the kittens, for they were just animals, and the girl ran as fast as she could the half-mile to the bus stop, crying and running, her
legs hot with it, her lungs full of gravel, for she loved these little kittens as if they were her own children, she cherished them, and her parents could not be bothered to care, and in this way she knew there was some horrible chasm between them that would never fully be spanned. She felt very alone as she waited for the bus, her face wet and shoes muddy, and always the air of that era was cold, colder than she had expected, in the forever shade of the dark woods under a no-sun sky.

  She went to her grandmother for a solution, a wrinkled near-blind woman who lived in a little house on their property and only ever wore plain dresses and plain shoes and smiled as she sat in the sunlight. Her mother’s mother, she barely spoke English, instead muttered in convoluted German, but still the girl went to ask for a spell, for she knew her grammy had them in her little book, whose worn cover featured hex signs and unfamiliar symbols, the text all in German. I need a spell to keep the kittens safe, she said to the old woman, who sat silently in a straight-backed chair on her little porch. The woman smiled, her whole face lighting, and bade the child enter her little shack, which smelled of garlic and dirt and candle wax. She pulled the little book from her nightstand and thumbed the soft pages. The girl was wondering how she could read the faded words when the old woman pulled a magnifying glass from the stand to examine the book more closely. She studied it for a time, looking for just the right page, and then took the book to the kitchen table, where she left it open to consult intermittently while pulling jars from her shelves and putting a heavy metal pot on the open fire. As the girl watched, she dumped into the pot dried herbs and fresh ones, an amount of carefully measured water drawn from the hand pump at the crude sink. She told the girl to collect three dandelion heads from the lawn, which she did obediently, and as she came back into the shadowy house, she saw her grandmother slipping the body of a small rodent into the brew. When all ingredients had been collected and concocted, they drank chamomile tea until the pot reached a boil, at which point her grandmother took it from the fire with a towel wrapped round its handle and to the fence line at the edge of the pasture, where she dumped the boiling mixture under and along the fence while mumbling quietly in German.