Nightbitch

by Rachel Yoder

  Here she stands, naked. Her hair hangs in her eyes and over her face. Her open palms face the audience.

  She begins this performance as she has begun every performance, by opening the space within her chest, then opening her mouth, opening a single perfect channel between heart and voice and letting out a long, high howl that echoes throughout the room.

  Someone gasps as the lights rise a bit more. She opens her eyes but sees no one. She falls to her hands, then lopes across the stage. She turns to snarl at the audience. Someone laughs. Someone stifles a scream.

  Music begins to soar in the background, as if from a long-forgotten childhood dream, or nightmare. Violins swell. The trumpets herald the beginning of something, though what precisely the audience cannot yet be sure. A tympani thuds, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. On a stage somewhere far away, a soprano presses her palms to her chest and opens her mouth to release a long river of song, winding and glorious, full of grief, full of love. She sings in German, or a language that sounds like German, it’s hard to tell, what is that she’s saying? The audience imagines this singing woman, her heaving breast, her ropes of braided hair. They imagine her, most peculiarly, on a dark lawn, unspooling her song in the night. She is barefoot and the supple grass threads her toes. She sings beneath a tree with wide branches in which hens roost. She wears a simple cotton farm dress. Each and every person sees this same woman in their mind’s eye, and each and every person wonders who she is, what her song means, marvels at the chickens in the trees. This is just the first of many tricks of Nightbitch’s performance.

  Nightbitch paces on the stage, the music surges in the background, the audience grows uneasy. But of course what makes them the most uneasy is the artist herself. She is what they have come to see. She is why they have handed over their hard-earned dollars, to witness such a spectacle, because, well, what is it, exactly? Is this real? Or is it all a ruse? And what exactly is even in question? Surely this woman exists, but what about her hair? One could imagine reasonably that the hair on her head is her very own, but what of the hair on her back? Her arms? Her feet?

  Most unsettling is the way that Nightbitch moves, on all fours, with animal fluidity. It is the sort of thing they have only ever seen before in horror movies or, if they are not horror fans, in their most distant nightmares. How does a person move the way this woman does? Surely she must be trained in dance or some pioneering modern movement practice? Certainly she must have practiced for hours to get the movement just right, this carnal pacing, this instinctual awareness, the way she tips her head to smell the air, the way she lopes forward toward the audience, then spins with lightness and bounds back into the shadows?

  After the performance, the audience convenes around the front doors of the theater, some saying that the bunnies that arrived onstage soon after the music began had most certainly hopped from the ink-black shadows of the wings, easing their way into the light to stare and twitch softly. They all agree that certainly this had not been some enchantment, that there must be a reasonable explanation for such bunnies, since none of them are yet ready to embrace what, deep down, they feel was very true: that the bunnies had arrived onstage, and not in any customary way. Even more terrifying is what the audience would ponder later, each one of them tucked in their beds: but from where had the animals come? This is what bothered them so. Were they real creatures, the same kind one might come upon on a safe and leisurely hike in the woods? And were there now bunnies missing from the woods somewhere, bunnies that had just been nibbling on flowers but then popped out of existence in the woods and into existence there on the stage? And if they hadn’t been transported from a place, then what were they? What were they made of? And who had made them? These questions made each and every audience member want to weep, but instead they wandered off into uneasy sleeps, where they stayed all night.

  Yes, the bunnies were the inciting incident in Nightbitch’s performance. All of the reviews had reported as much, though none had mentioned the barefooted soprano beneath the tree, the collective vision, we might call it, the entire audience had. This was considered a spoiler, something the audience had to experience in the moment.

  And so, the bunnies arrive onstage, first one, then a handful, then a dozen. Some cower near the woodsy backdrop. Others threaten to jump right into the audience, so close are they to the front edge. Nightbitch, meanwhile, waits, as still as the darkness around her. You can see each muscle as it moves, see her tenseness, see her waiting inscribed on her body.

  Small piles of bones, glinting with gold, dot the dark stage. Nightbitch stands in the center and raises her open hands at her sides. Slowly, as the music fades and a dull, low note throbs into the theater, she raises her palms as if conducting the slowest and most silent orchestra ever imagined. As her hands float up, up, and then a bit higher still, the piles of bones shift and glimmer, and the gold plating catches the spotlight and reflects it back in a million brilliant shards. The bunnies hop offstage in fear as the bones rise, as if on strings, as if they are some sort of otherworldly zombie marionettes, though the audience can see no strings or other trickery, no matter how intently they squint, no matter how carefully they search. The bones take on the shapes of small animals, though not an ordinary sort. This one, a type of coyote with long ear bones reminiscent of prairie rabbits. Another, what seems a deer, but with a tiny catlike head. Yet another, with the hind legs of a rabbit and a set of the tiniest antlers, antlers that in no way could have been found in nature. Yet there is still a natural quality to the bone animals, the audience will report. A logical quality, even. They make sense within the world of Nightbitch, their small, delicate movements, their heads that twitch back and forth, the small careful steps they take, the ways in which they tumble to the black floor and then move back into alignment, reconstituting themselves as if through the power of a god.

  It is then that Nightbitch and the bone animals perform an uncanny choreography—“an enchanted hunt,” the critics call it—as Nightbitch by turns moves in time with and then in hunt of the gilded skeletons, all to the throb of the low, dark music. The audience will report they could have watched the performance endlessly, so rapt were they by the animal movements of the woman and the bones—which seem to float effortlessly about the stage all on their own, how did she do it?—so stupefied were they by the spectacle, so perplexed by what they were seeing, unable to separate reality from artistry.

  Yet they all, that night, waited for what came next, for of course they had heard what was to happen by that point. The show had now been written about and reported on, critiqued and analyzed and condemned and looked at from every angle possible by critics and writers and animal-rights activists and the public at large. And though it was indeed a bit gauche to identify Nightbitch simply for her real-time slaughter of bunnies onstage, that is indeed what she was best known for, though it should be noted that there were so many other aspects of the performance far more interesting and peculiar.

  And so, after her dance with the bones, she stalks the bunnies, now hidden in the shadows, the hunt itself strangely lovely, intoxicating, even the moment she pounces and takes a creature in her mouth and shakes and shakes it until it hangs limp in her mouth. The theater now is quiet, dead quiet, and she lays the unmoving animal on the stage and then looks at the audience. She growls, and they grow uneasy. It seems she is now stalking them. A few folks at the back rise slowly and edge from the room. A moment of stillness, and then pandemonium breaks out as Nightbitch springs from the stage and the audience members burst from their seats to scream and scatter.

  Some audience members will report that it was then that they were chased into an inexplicable forest area, so thick with leaves and vines that it was hard to decipher whether this was something the artist herself had constructed or in fact a space-time anomaly that had emerged just for the performance, only to disappear after that night. During the unspecified event, as it came to be known, they came upo
n a den of WereMothers, who took them in and gave them delicious soup. Others will report that, during the unspecified event, they encountered marvelous bird women with extravagantly feathered wings who taught them how to fly, and it was in this way that they exited the theater. Still others will speak of women who appeared and disappeared at will during their unspecified event, goddess-type apparitions who conjured in viewers the most profound feeling of goodwill and unity, to the point where they wept in their presence and fell at their feet.

  The collective mania and alleged hallucinations commonly experienced at the show were studied at length by psychiatrists, who concluded there must have been a large-scale drugging—after all, each audience member was given a small packet of pills, labeled Howl, upon entering the theater, as well as a little paper cup of water, and encouraged strongly to quickly swallow them down so as to challenge notions of wellness and perception in addition to experiencing the most immersive effects of the performance. Or perhaps the drugs had been administered surreptitiously, pumped through the vents via the heating and cooling systems at each venue. Who could really say? If not drugged, the audience must, then, have been hypnotized, the psychiatrists reasoned, and led into an imagining by the artist, though Nightbitch reported she had not studied hypnosis, nor was she a licensed practitioner. If they had been hypnotized, she said, it was inadvertent, and a testament to the mesmerizing nature of the art itself.

  “The intoxicating effect of the show only underscores Nightbitch’s artistry,” Jen offered in an official statement to the media to counter the doubters and naysayers, to respond to those who would say of the show that it was nothing more than “druggie left-wing poppycock,” not “real art,” nor “serious art,” but, rather, a “common sideshow” meant to titillate and wow the dumb masses. “The effects experienced at the end of the show represent the culmination of over two decades of rigorous artistic practice. The sometimes extreme experiences that audience members have at Nightbitch’s show only underscore the heightened level at which this artist is working and the transformative capacities of art.”

  And in response to those who called her show “needlessly brutal” and “the worst of performance art” and “an abomination that conjures the basest element of humanity and puts it on exhibit for all to see,” Nightbitch herself explained that her work was meant to underscore the brutality of motherhood, how a child’s first act is violence against the woman who created it. Yet the mother loves the child with the most powerful love known in this universe.

  This thing comes from us, she would explain in interviews. It rips its way out of us, literally tears us in two, in a wash of great pain and blood and shit and piss. If the child does not enter into the world this way, then it is cut from us with a knife. The child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. It is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. And this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutered and sanitized. We are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. Womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces.

  Her most devout fans wear pins that ask where do you go at night? with the image of a ferocious dog, mouth open, about to attack. The pins and other merchandise are the work of Jen, who has proved herself to be a PR genius, creating the most dazzling of campaigns, with bunnies showing up in high-profile and peculiar locales, mysterious social-media blitzes, a masterfully concocted and exquisitely executed “mystery” her crowning professional achievement. Sales of the once-out-of-print A Field Guide to Magical Women skyrocket, though no one, absolutely no one, can track down Wanda White. When researched by reporters, the University of Sacramento proves to be a short-lived institution no longer in operation and White herself a persona which exists only as an online profile at a defunct school.

  Those few audience members at the theater who manage neither to panic nor to flee, who harbor a most resilient and imperturbable disposition—an engineer’s evenness, one might say—these folks bear witness to the very end of the show, Nightbitch there onstage, with a small boy—her son—to whom she delivers the limp body of the bunny, for him to sniff and then caress. As the curtains creep closed, this is what those few brave folks see: a feral woman and her offspring with the still-warm body of a rabbit in his hands. They will report that the duo emanated a beauty they had not seen before, despite the protestations of some that exposing a child to such a thing was abuse.

  No, those who had seen it would argue.

  Here was a woman who now knew that life unfolded through mystery and metaphor, without explanation, who looked upon her perfect son in front of her, a person she had made with her strongest magic, standing right there in a blinding spotlight as if he weren’t a miracle, as if he weren’t the most impossible thing in the entire world.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my agent, Monika Woods, for your steadfast guidance, as well as to Margo Shickmanter for your superb editorial stewardship. Thank you to the entire team at Doubleday—Tricia Cave, Lauren Weber, Lorraine Hyland, Victoria Pearson, Maria Carella, and Emily Mahon—for all the care and work you put into this book. Thank you to my smart and generous friends and readers, in particular Sarah Shrader, Kerry Howley, Nina Lohman, Alisha Jeddeloh, Jenny Colville, Helen Rubinstein, Sarah Viren, Ariel Lewiton, Kristen Radtke, Zaina Arafat, Lauren Haldeman, and Ingrid Yoder. Thank you to the Iowa Arts Council for financial and professional support. Thank you to Jami Attenberg for your #1000wordsofsummer, which is how this book got drafted. Thank you to Lee Running for your artistic genius and inspiration for this book. Thank you to Melanie Bishop, whose mentorship is the reason I’m a writer. Thank you to Mark Polanzak for your decades-long camaraderie and collaboration. Thank you to Paula and Tom Michel for all the hours of child-care. Thank you to Linda and Wayne Yoder for encouraging me to follow my own path. Thank you to Seth for being my biggest fan even on my worst days. And thank you to my one and only Coco, who transformed me. I love you.

  About the Author

  RACHEL YODER is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. She holds MFAs from the University of Arizona (fiction) and the University of Iowa (nonfiction), where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her stories and essays have been published in literary journals such as The Kenyon Review and The Missouri Review, as well as in national outlets such as The New York Times, The Sun, and Lit Hub. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and son.

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