by Rachel Yoder
Okay, her grammy said, and the girl hugged her waist, smelling the life of her. She loved no one more. The next day, all the weeds were dead where they had poured the concoction, the rodent body was gone, and the kittens were asleep in their nest as she left for school.
Her mother was good and responsible and holy and always somewhere far away in her own head, or with a headache, or napping, or just, please, leave me alone. Forget your grammy and her book. Be serious. Do something sensible. And always the girl had thought her mother was pushing her out the door, away and away, go fast. She thought this had been a sort of abandonment, but now she saw it for what it was: her mother’s best love. How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.
It had been so long since she had remembered all this, so long since she’d even thought of it, for there had been a great forgetting when she left home—a purposeful forgetting, because to forget her childhood meant she had survived it.
Her own wood-and-bone projects, her sewing with the playground installation, had all called on the skills she’d gathered during her quiet Appalachian upbringing. She knew how to keep bees, dip candles, brush wool, use a spinning wheel and make yarn, dry onions and garlic, develop photographs with vegetable juices, bake absolutely anything, make every single sort of braid, sing every single sort of song, track an animal through the woods. She knew her cardinal directions, how to tell a fast pony from a slow one just from the look of its face. She knew enough to live inside an entire life all on her own, and yet her husband—with his electronics skills, his engineering—he was the one who made all the money, even though she could make a world, and then, too, make a person to live in that world.
And what of that person, her most beautiful boy? He opened his eyes each morning, and the first word from his mouth was Mama. He needed to be lifted from bed, for he was so tiny and so sleepy, then dressed, fed, bathed, played with, sung to, tickled, swung high in the air, chased. He needed her to watch me, Mama, nearly every second of his waking life. Sometimes he took his soft little hand and put it on her face, moved her head to where he wanted her to look. And it was in this gesture she saw an entire impending future, one in which all things of this world revolved around this boy: when she woke and when she slept, where they went and what they bought, the very direction of his mother’s gaze. If she was not careful, he would come to know the world as a place that bent to his every whim, for she did indeed want to bend, because she loved him, but in the hardest moments—moments in which, for instance, she held the limp body of the cat in her bloody hands—she grew resentful of this innocent little soul, whose life would be one of ease, one of knowing that he was taken care of and could have whatever he wanted, that the world was in a very real way his. She didn’t want to deny him things, to make his life harder, but already she felt this pull inside her, to make him responsible in a fundamental way, to tell him no and no and no, and, sure, she was trying to train him against what the entire world told him, was trying to say, Look, I am not all yours, I am not only here for you, but of course, ultimately, she was his, all of her.
three
Oh dear.
Her kitty.
The fluff.
The stupid-sweet little fluffenwaffer. The smoosh. The rug. Fluffy paws and jingle meow. She had once wanted to decorate her with tiny ornaments, because, while sitting, she took on a perfectly conical shape and resembled a Christmas tree. Her ballerina. Her baby. Oh dear, indeed.
How long had she stood there within the bloody mess she had created? Two cartoons’ worth of time? Five? The boy entered the kitchen to find his mother’s face covered in blood, her hands, too, a bloodstained robe sliding from her shoulder as she picked tufts of black fur from her mouth, a pile of black fur at her feet, motionless. Blood on the cabinets. Blood on the floor. Blood on the ceiling.
The boy froze, eyes wide, looking from the pile to his mother, then back again.
Oh no. The boy! What had she done? She stood stock still, watching the boy as he tentatively edged toward her, sniffed her robe, then sniffed the dead cat. He nudged the body with his nose, lifted the cat’s paw, and watched as it fell.
He looked again at his mother, then let out a small, joyful howl, then nudged the cat’s bloody body with his tiny foot.
Oh, honey, Nightbitch said, jolting back to the dry air of the gray day, back to the realities of a mother in her robe and a boy in his pajamas rejoicing over a cat’s dead body in the kitchen, the boy howling and poking the dead animal, bloodying his perfect little toes, how this looked and what this might mean. She did not want blood on his perfect skin, did not want him to involve himself in this insanity. It all must be shut down, must be cooled off, the doggy games and whatnot. Oh Jesus. What had she been thinking?
She hadn’t been thinking. That was it. She had been pure emotion, pure yearning and rage. No thought could have possibly gone into such a thing.
Poor kitty, she said, stroking the animal, now a pile on the floor. She looked into its fixed, dead eyes. She looked at the horrible wound down its belly, purple guts spilling out. She tried to push it all back in. She grabbed a towel from beneath the sink to wrap the creature, to try and dignify this undignified situation.
Oh dear, she said.
Get kitty! the boy screeched, his blood rising from the scent of death, and Nightbitch sank even deeper into worry. Worry that the doggy games had gone too far, that she herself was out of control and had crossed some line, that her son might be permanently damaged from such a childhood, that some might even construe this as abuse, bad parenting, mental illness, if given the opportunity to. Why, there was blood all over the kitchen. Who did this? She needed to do a thorough cleaning immediately.
Poor, poor kitty, she repeated. It was an accident. I tripped over her and must have…Here she stopped for want of what to say. I must have lost control of my human faculties and gone dog-bananas on this poor cat? I did hate her, but she didn’t deserve to die? She was very beautiful yet very, very dumb?
They both looked at the animal.
Eat it? he asked after a lengthy consideration.
Oh no, Nightbitch said, touching the top of his head. Kitty isn’t for eating. We must bury her in the backyard. Say goodbye, kitty. We loved you. Kitty was our friend.
So that’s what the pair spent their afternoon doing, digging in the backyard, first with shovels and then with their hands, spraying dirt behind them as they tunneled into the earth, deeper and deeper. It was, in a word, a delight. The smell of the loam, the wriggle of worms, thick tree roots in which to sink one’s teeth and pull and pull and pull.
When they finally had a hole deep enough for kitty, both mother and son were blackened with their work, faces muddy, with tender fingers, but still—it had been worth it, for the fun of it.
They wrapped the cat in an old baby blanket and laid her in the ground. The boy looked on solemnly.
We should say some nice things to send her off, she said.
Oh, cat. You were quite beautiful, and your meow used to be so sweet, like a bell. Thank you for being our kitty.
Kitty soft, the boy said, then scampered into the hole to place the last remaining unopened can of cat food beside her.
She was scared now, really really scared, even more scared than after that first transformation and nighttime romp, and she did not turn from this emotion but instead fell all the way into it. It was the same scared she’d felt back in her twenties when she drank too much and, in the morning, was left with a vague sensation of dread. What had she done? Where had she been? She needed to Change. She must, she must, she must Get It Together. She frantically decided (yet again) that it was, in fact, high time, that she could
not go on like this, with the unhappiness and this now uncontrollable rage, especially not around her son, her poor sweet little angel of a son, whom she would never harm, not ever, but, still, look what she had done to the cat, it was terrifying and she was terrified, brought nearly to tears of ultimate terror when the thought of gripping the back of her son’s neck in her teeth passed by her like a driverless school bus packed with hysterical children careening toward a cliff. She would really lean into setting goals and achieving outcomes. She would get back on track in a real way, no matter what. She would now take a deep, cleansing breath and set her sights on being sensible, as her mother had once, had always, commanded.
She must maintain a placid disposition of motherly care even while the panic of the world whizzed around inside her. No coffee. More vegetables. Cook the meat. Clean the house. Go for walks. A consistent bedtime each night, and consistent getting-up time, too. Plenty of socialization…But she could not bring herself to leave the house, and instead committed to a quiet week of crafts and trains and cooking and lawn care.
* * *
—
FIRST, SHE CLEANED THE kitchen, top to bottom, wiping down everything with water and vinegar, giving the boy a bucket and a rag to slop all over the floor.
Make a mess! she commanded, pointing at the bucket of sudsy water. His eyes grew large, and he set about his work seriously, and messily. After the water, she gave the boy the vacuum hose and put him to work sucking up every bit of twig or leaf or dirt, and this he did with unmatched zeal, bidding his mother scooch the oven away from the wall ever so little so he could suck up the cobwebs behind, tearing a piece of construction paper apart piece by piece and placing each one into the end of the hose to have it sucked efficiently and satisfyingly into the clear plastic receptacle.
After the kitchen, she set about deep-cleaning the bedroom. She pulled up and smoothed the rumpled bedcovers while the boy dived beneath them, canceling her work. She and her son dug from the sheets two old tennis balls and a rawhide bone, the boy’s leash—which he held above his head in celebration, for he had already forgotten about this treasure—and, finally, a short length of rope knotted at each end, good for chewing or pulling or fetching. She wiped the thick coating of dust from the ceiling-fan blades. She wiped water from the floor around the dog dish. She collected the piles of clothes and threw them all on the freshly made bed to fold.
Beneath the sweatpants and sports bras and T-shirts piled by the bed she found a stack of the boy’s bedtime books and, at the bottom of that, her Field Guide. She must read this again, tonight! But as soon as she had made such a resolution, she doubled back on it, for could this book be trusted? Was this book really an original source? Could she in any way realistically attribute scientific authority to an expert in mythical ethnography? And why had Wanda ignored her e-mails?
Well, what else are you going to do? she asked herself. In these times, under these circumstances, what will you do? Even if she was Getting It Together, it was clear that her answers were not going to reside in the land of logic, the land of doctors and prescriptions, the land of peer-reviewed journals, the land of the goddamn sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Yes, answers to her questions resided in the land of the backward sun, the land of counterclockwise rotation, in the land populated only by artists and fortune-tellers and people on stilts. And wasn’t Wanda White, mythical ethnographer, indeed a native of such a land? Whether scientist or something else, she was on a similar journey. And so Nightbitch would read Magical Women and take it to heart, because there was very little else her heart could realistically handle these days.
It was one thing to kill a wild bunny, but quite another to kill the family cat, especially so gruesomely, and while her young son was in the house. She thought about this at naptime, as the boy snored ever so quietly beside her in bed. Sure, they had had fun burying it, but, no matter how resilient the boy’s psyche, that indelible image of his mother in the kitchen remained: hands slick with bright blood, tufts of black fur still stirring in the air, the dark-blue-and-purple guts of the animal slipping onto the worn wood floor, a floor that needed to be refinished. The blood had stained the spots where the varnish had worn off the boards and abided no matter how much she scrubbed.
Fuck, she muttered to herself.
Then Fuck again.
Her husband would be home on Friday and would, of course, inquire about the cat, as he always did. And what would she say?
She meditated at length on this, the best approach, how to present the situation so that it would have the least impact, so that it would land as gently as a feather on his forehead, so very, very lightly that he would barely feel it at all.
He was not one to overreact or jump to wild conclusions, but he also wasn’t one to take risks or overlook things that needed a good looking.
Should she lie? Bend the truth toward a less grisly scenario?
And would the boy even remember today? He was two, after all. She didn’t remember anything from being two, not a smidge, and so perhaps any permanent memories and/or damage would be avoided?
She would simply have to frame the whole thing as a horrible accident. Perhaps she dropped one of the cast-iron cooking pots on the cat accidentally while ferrying it from stovetop to counter? Or perhaps she found the poor creature flattened in the street, an anonymous driver already far off on the other side of town. A hit and run! she would declare.
But of course there was the matter of the boy, what he had seen and what he now knew and remembered. Surely he would want to volunteer the information of his mother’s bloody hands or the cat’s most curious innards. She could not bend the truth too far, and so she thought and thought and finally came to a totally reasonable explanation and thought some more as she fell into sleep next to her napping son.
That night, given her afternoon nap and gruesome events of the morning, she could not sleep and she could not sleep and she could not sleep, and finally opened her Field Guide to find Wanda discussing predatory women, those “truly rare breeds” who, though terrifying, “would never injure their own young, even to their own detriment.” (God bless, Wanda, she thought, with relief.) “Take, for instance, the highly poisonous Apothecarian tribe, who, on the brink of starvation in the mid-seventeenth century, ensured that their young were not only fed, but fattened, while all the matured adults of the species died off one by one.”
White continued:
Even greater proof of the magical woman’s fierce devotion to the furtherance of her species, we find the WereMothers of Siberia…a particularly evasive species. It is unclear from where they originated or how they mother cubs without males nearby. (It should be noted that males perhaps do not even exist, for there has been no empirical confirmation of their habitation in Siberia. It should also be noted, males are not necessary, since the WereMothers appear to be self-fertilizing. More on this later in the text.) Yet there have been sporadic sightings of this truly regal species.
The Siberian WereMothers are one of the few species I’ve had the pleasure of seeing firsthand. On a personal excursion for reasons unrelated to research, I found myself in the farthest reaches of the region in the deepest part of winter. Daytime lasted but a mere six hours, and though my provisions were well stocked, I still feared for my safety and warmth.
A Soviet military helicopter had dropped me near the center of the Eastern Siberia taiga, an eco-region spanning over twenty degrees of latitude and fifty degrees of longitude. Despite their suggestions that I not undertake such a remote trip during such a harsh seasonal period (temperatures dropped to sixty degrees Fahrenheit below zero at times), I was still able to convince them of my aptitude, hardiness, and resolve, and they acquiesced to my request.
Once in the larch forest, I hiked through the shallow snow covering the permafrost with a forty-pound pack. Adept at winter camping, I was prepared to spend three weeks in this terra
in. However, that first night, I was overcome by an intense fear I had never before experienced. I would categorize this as a sort of psychic malaise, irrational and disorienting.
I found myself wandering through the snow in my sock feet and many thermal layers in the early-morning moonlight. I was both sweating and hypothermic. I was unaware of who I was and why I was in such a locale. As you might surmise, this was rather out of character for me, a person who considers herself to be highly rational and levelheaded.
Ahead, in a moonlit clearing, what appeared to be two heavily furred women beckoned me. They appeared to be pregnant, with distended torsos, and gathered around them were anywhere from twenty to forty cubs in all phases of maturation. The WereMothers walked on all fours, though they had opposable thumbs on their front “paws,” if I could even call them that. Rather, they appeared to be modified hands, incredibly similar to those of Homo sapiens. Their faces I found to be quite beautiful, a mix of human and canine features, with a protruding snout and large, soulful eyes. Though I cannot be entirely certain of the accuracy of my memory at this particular moment, I recall that these creatures told me of their origins in Pripyat, Ukraine, some forty years earlier and three thousand miles to the west, though they did not speak in the customary way. Rather, it seemed they used some sort of telepathy to dispatch this information directly into my mind.
I approached the WereMothers, barely aware of my actions and the astonishing appearance of these creatures, though later these indelible images would return to me in hypnotic, waking dreams.