About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  I shake the seas or calm them at my will;

  I whip the clouds or make them rise again;

  At my command winds vanish or return,

  My very spells have torn the throats of serpents,

  Live rocks and oaks are overturned and felled,

  The forests tremble and the mountains split,

  And deep Earth roars while ghosts walk from their tombs.

  I did not much want to read any more after that. I put away the book and blew out the candle and curled myself around Maddy, my face buried in the hollow between her shoulder blades, my belly cleaved to her bony spine, and when I finally fell asleep I was grateful beyond measure that, for once, I did not dream.

  I asked her, once, about her tattoos: they moved, I could almost swear it, under my mouth when I kissed her, slipping across her belly—bees buzzing from flower to flower, constellations tracking across the map of her skin, crows’ wings outstretched in flight. The halcyon’s sharp eyes watching me. She only laughed.

  “Who did them?” I asked again, insistent, and she shrugged.

  “I don’t remember. People all over. I did some of them myself. Do you want one? Is that why you won’t leave me alone?” And that was how I came one night to let her dip a thread-wrapped sewing needle in black ink and pick out a tattoo on the inside of my elbow. It hurt like hell, but I thought it might help me keep her. I was so drunk on her I would have let her do anything to me by then, any number of things; I would have gone anywhere she had asked, if it meant more time in her company. Even in those brief days when all my life was her some part of me understood that I could not possibly live like that forever, in her house in the woods, surrounded by coyotes and crows; but as long as she was willing to make me forget myself over and over again, as long as she did not tire of me, I could pretend that I had dropped whole cloth into a world that consisted solely of her. When she finished with the needle I had a black crow of my own, standing with its head cocked, so lifelike it seemed about to leap off my arm into flight. “It’s beautiful,” I said when she’d wiped away the blood.

  She kissed me, soft and full. “Not as beautiful as you,” she said.

  * * *

  Maddy thought we should leave her house; Maddy thought I should learn to drive. “I’ll teach you. You’re not in the city anymore,” she said, unmoved by my protests. “Everyone here drives. What if I get too drunk at Kate’s and you have to drive me home? What if Qantaqa gets sick and you can’t find me?” We had not been to Kate’s in—how long? I had no idea how many days I’d been at her house, but we’d barely left it since the night I’d first slept with her. No matter how much Maddy drank her disposition remained unmoved, her movements as precise and controlled as a queen’s. And I could not imagine any situation in which Qantaqa would be sick, I would be anywhere near Maddy’s truck, and Maddy herself would be nowhere about. But this logic had no effect, and so we put Qantaqa in the back of the truck, she drove me to a gravel lot out by the paper mill—“Generations of teenagers have mastered the clutch on this very ground,” she said cheerfully—and made me switch places with her, and she taught me to drive.

  I killed the engine a dozen times—“Lovely, you are not trying to end a cockroach, less with the stomping”—and sent the truck forward in jolts that made Qantaqa bark anxiously, her wet nose pressed against the glass window between the cab of the truck and the bed as she looked in on us in confusion, the order of her world gone askew. But Maddy was a good, patient teacher, never alarmed by my mistakes, and after a couple of hours she pronounced me fit to try driving on the back roads.

  “I don’t even have a license,” I said, horrified.

  She waved a hand. “I know all the cops,” she said. “Just don’t hit anyone. You’ll be fine.”

  At first I drove at an old-lady crawl, hunched over the wheel, but at her urging—“We could walk faster than this, come on, be brave”—I sped up. I drove down the mill road and back up again several times, executed left- and right-hand turns under her directions, made a seventeen-point U-turn. “See,” she said, “nothing to it. Let’s go out on the highway.”

  “No,” I said immediately. The speed limit on the highway was fifty; twenty-five was frightening enough.

  “Yes,” she said, imperious. “You can write a postcard home about it.” Alternately threatening and cajoling, Maddy got me to turn onto the highway, Qantaqa barking excitedly at this change in our progress. “She thinks we’re going to the beach,” Maddy said, and I blushed. How many girls had she taken to the place where she’d first kissed me? My own jealousy shocked me. It was late in the day by now, nearly twilight, and the road was deserted. “Faster,” Maddy said, “you’re going ten miles under the speed limit,” and I gritted my teeth, my knuckles white on the wheel, and floored the gas. The truck leaped forward—and then an amber flash out of the corner of my eye, a grotesquely fleshy thud, the truck jerking—

  “Oh shit,” I screamed, “oh shit oh shit”—the truck veering into the other lane and back again. Maddy’s voice in my ear, cool and calm: “Slow down, slow, slow, hands on the wheel, pull over, there you go.” Somehow I got the truck to the side of the road, shaking so violently I thought my teeth would come out of my head, one of Maddy’s hands on my back, the other on my hand, shifting the truck into park.

  “It’s okay,” she said in my ear, over and over again, “you’re okay, everybody’s okay,” until I calmed down and unknotted my hands from the steering wheel and put them, trembling, in my lap.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  “You hit a deer,” she said.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “It could have been a lot worse. You did great.”

  “Qantaqa—”

  “Is fine. We’re all fine. I promise. I want you to wait here, okay?”

  “Where are you going?” But she was already out the door of the truck and walking back down the road. I watched her in the rearview mirror, long legs in the dim light, and then I opened my door and got out, too. My legs were so shaky I almost fell, and I had to stand for a moment with both hands on the truck, holding myself up, Qantaqa nosing me worriedly. I scratched her behind the ears and she whined.

  “I’m okay, too,” I said, more to myself than her, and I followed Maddy.

  She had walked a long way already and was hunched over something by the side of the road. When I got closer I saw what I had done, and had to stop and look away. The truck had done a lot of damage; its legs were splayed at unnatural angles and its intestines spilled out of its split belly in a steaming, slick red mass. The ground around it was covered in blood. “Oh god,” I said brokenly, and Maddy looked up, her yellow eyes intent.

  “I told you to stay in the truck,” she said.

  “I couldn’t—”

  “Then come here.” I walked over to her and made myself look down at the deer. Impossibly, it was still alive, its dark eyes rolling in terror, jerking its useless legs in an effort to get away from us.

  “Can you finish what you began?” Maddy asked, and when I didn’t answer she bent over the deer again, whispered something to it and touched its trembling head with one hand. It calmed instantly, looking up at her, its bloody sides heaving.

  “There’s a knife in the glove compartment,” Maddy said. I stood rooted to the pavement and she looked up at me with a flicker of impatience. “Go get it.” I walked back to the truck in a daze, opened the glove compartment, saw it: a dull-handled knife in a worn leather sheath, longer than my hand. I walked back to her. She took the knife from me and unsheathed it. The blade was some dark oily metal, with a lethal-looking edge. She said something to the deer again, in the secret language she used to calm me in the dark, and it looked up at her with trusting eyes. She pulled its head back and cut its throat in a motion so fast I did not see her hand move. The deer’s blood geysered over her, but she did not flinch or back away.

  The world around me shifted violently, the trees spinning away from us and fading into green blurs,
the road flickering under my feet; a roar filled my ears like waves rising and in the distance a dog howled—once, twice, three times. The woods were gone; I stood on bare rocky ground under a low, hot yellow sun, the air desert-scorched and clear. Maddy knelt in front of me in a white dress that left her arms bare, and the face she turned up toward me was younger somehow, less wary. But her wide gold eyes had a spark of madness in them, and her expression was awful. Instead of the deer she held a child, asleep, its peaceful face slack.

  A passion drives me greater than my will, she said. The oil-dark knife flashed in her hand and I cried out but it was too late: red crescent gaping where the child’s throat had been and its blood pouring out over her, soaking her dress and pooling beneath her in the hard pale earth where she knelt. I felt bile rising in my throat and the world spun again, and I staggered, putting one hand out to steady myself, but there was nothing there—I was falling, falling through darkness and heat, the dog howling again and again and again, a madness of crows’ wings flapping around me. I hit the ground with a thud that snapped my teeth shut and brought tears to the corners of my eyes. I rolled over onto my side, a lone crow cawing from a tree somewhere above me, my fingertips touching something rough and warm. Pavement. I was next to the road again. Maddy cradled the deer’s head, singing to it softly as its blood ran out and the light in its eyes dimmed, her voice sweet and sad, rising and falling.

  I watched stupidly as the deer died, as she wiped the knife on her pants and sheathed it again, then stood up. “I’m going to move her off the pavement. It is better for creatures like her to go back into the earth.” I felt as though I had fallen into tar, the air so thick that I could not speak or move my limbs. Maddy did not ask for my help as she dragged the deer’s carcass away from the road, and I did not try to get up. When she came back I saw that there was no blood on her clothes or her hands, though I’d watched the deer bleed out all over her. None of what had just happened seemed in any way real. With a flap of dark wings the crow, my crow, fluttered out of the trees above us and landed near me, hopping toward me with its head cocked.

  “Come on,” she said, offering me her hand and pulling me to my feet. “You going to be sick?”

  “No,” I whispered, although I wasn’t sure if this was true.

  “Good girl.” Her hand, firm on my back, gentled me back to the car: One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one more step, come on sweetheart, that’s right, one more step. I sank into the passenger’s seat with a shuddering sigh, Qantaqa’s cold nose pushing inquisitively at my palm; I petted her instinctively, and she clambered up and over me, whuffing, and settled next to me on the seat. Maddy got in on the other side.

  “Let me take you to a party,” she said.

  I couldn’t think of anything I wanted less, but I shrugged and she started the truck. Trees flashed by in a darkening blur. I rolled the window down to feel air on my face and Qantaqa readjusted, draped herself heavily across me and thrust her muzzle upward. I tangled my fingers in her fur. You hit a deer, I told myself, you hit a deer, and it was the worst, and it’s normal to freak out, and nothing else happened, you hit a deer, and Maddy killed it because it wasn’t going to live and you weren’t brave enough to put it out of its misery. You hit a deer. I was still shaking. Qantaqa whined and pushed the top of her skull into my hand, and I scratched behind her ears. The deer’s panicked eyes and then its eerie calm, the hypnotic lull of Maddy’s voice. She was good with animals, that was all, she was good with animals. “We should have taken it to a vet,” I said aloud.

  She was humming to herself as she drove, and now she reached over and turned on the ancient radio, fiddling with the dial until she found a song she liked, her eyes still on the road. “The first death is always the worst,” she said.

  “I don’t ever want a second.”

  “It gets easier,” she said.

  We drove in silence for a while, past the edge of town, farther than I’d been since I first came. Down a long winding road, edged on one side by a steep drop to the water and on the other by more woods. I curled over Qantaqa and put my face in her soft fur. She smelled like Maddy’s house: rosemary and lavender and incense and underneath it a not-unpleasant chemical tang of the kerosene Maddy put in her lamps. Qantaqa thumped her tail against the seat. The glistening mass of its guts, red blood dark on the pavement, its black eyes rolling, the smell—oh god, the smell, the smell, I had done that, I had done that—I sobbed into Qantaqa’s coat, my shoulders heaving, and she licked my ear. We turned again, and I felt tires crunching on gravel, more bumpy dirt road—god, how I missed New York and its own streets riddled with sinkholes and craters—the truck slowing to a stop. The clamor of voices and outdoorsy scent of wood smoke drifted in through the open window. I didn’t move. Maddy put her hand on my back. I want to go home, I thought.

  “Tally, my lovely girl,” Maddy said, her voice in that low, sweet register, the voice she’d used on the deer; I could feel it winnowing in through the cracks of me, filling me with a balmy warmth. Shane, I thought, Shane, his smell, his room, its haze of pot smoke, a record on the turntable, bologna and Wonder Bread sandwiches, my own home, familiar as the skin I live in. His raspy voice, telling me about some effects pedal. A rush of homesickness, a flash flood tumbling me down a chasm. Make it be normal again, just make it be normal—

  “Tally, lovely, lovely,” she said again, and her gentle voice drove all thought of anything else out of me. She pushed Qantaqa gently to the floor of the truck, and I put my head in her lap, and she stroked my hair out of my face, her fingers teasing apart the knots—how long since I’d brushed my hair? Taken a shower? Eaten a meal? I couldn’t even think. “Lovely, lovely,” she repeated, her voice a deep dreamless sleep falling over me. “Don’t think about it anymore,” she said, and my mind went blank.

  I sat up and got out of the truck. We were at a party. Whose party? Who cared. Qantaqa jumped out of the cab behind me and lumbered off into the trees. I heard a harsh caw and looked up: a ragged black patch flapping against the less-black night, a black glint that could have been a beady eye. The sky was silvery. There must have been a moon. How did I not know the moon’s phase? How did I not know what day it was? Buzzing in my ears. I shook my head and it went away. Maddy at my side, her hand slipping into mine, her mouth at my ear. “Good girl,” she said.

  The party was noisy and alive. People standing around a bonfire, people running in and out of the woods. A few faces I recognized, from Kate’s bar, but mostly strangers. Lots of black boots and torn black jeans, like the crust punks who festooned the streets of New York every summer with their backpacks and their dogs, and lots of the logger clothes people wore out here: work pants and billed caps, here and there even a flannel shirt. Maddy’s hand at my back, resting on my bare skin underneath my shirt. I shivered. I wanted to grab her and throw her to the ground, eat her alive, tear her to pieces.

  I tugged her into the shadows, away from the circle of people where the bonfire’s light didn’t reach, shoved her against a tree. Her yellow eyes met mine, and she grinned and pulled me into her. I kissed her hard and she kissed me back harder, hungry, her thigh wedged between my legs, her fingers undoing the buttons of my jeans. She bit my lip with her sharp little teeth, so hard I tasted blood, and I yanked her hair. She worked her hand into my jeans and shoved her fingers inside me, and a harsh animal noise came out of my throat, a sound that I had no idea I could even make. I was like a tiny sailboat on a sea mad with storms. I held tight to her shoulders, clinging desperately to the anchor of her body as she moved deeper and deeper inside me until I came in a shuddering wave that I thought would undo me. I buried my face in the curve of her neck and she held me tight, kissing the top of my head, my ear, my forehead, stroking my back until my shaking subsided. If she had not been holding me up I would have fallen to my knees.

  “I’m falling in love with you,” I said into her shoulder.

  “I know,” she said.

 
After that, the party was a blur. How we must have looked—our hair in tangles, our eyes alight, drunk with sex like maenads, like furies. A glittering host of curious eyes. I drank a beer and then another and said nothing, and Maddy was mostly quiet, too. Somebody’s toddler was underfoot, running in and out of a forest of legs looking for a mother. I pretended not to see it. The bonfire washed away the dark, made faces lovely in its light, but none so marvelous as hers—her soft skin, the fox-fine bones of her face, her huge yellow eyes. I could not look away from her. I did not talk to anyone, and nobody talked to me; it was as if she’d woven a force field around me, so that anyone who tried to come close would catch fire with the power of the charge she’d set.

  “I want to go,” I said finally. I couldn’t even remember why we’d come here.

  “Back to Jack’s?” I looked at her, helpless with lust, and she smiled.

  “I see,” she said, and drove me back to her house instead.

  After that was a blur: her body, her skin. Sweat and salt and teeth. I couldn’t remember anything from one moment to the next, couldn’t remember my own name or hers, or whose hands were between my legs, whose cat-quick tongue, or where I had come to, or how I had gotten here; and then it would come back to me again in a swift flood like a storm surge, and I’d remember—my name is Tally this is Maddy this is Maddy’s house—and recede as swiftly as it had risen. I couldn’t stop crying. The air tasted of blood, and I didn’t know why—white dress silver knife—and I screamed out loud, and she stopped kissing me and held me tight. “Hush,” she said, “you’re safe now, you’re here.”

  “Tell me a story,” I said against her soft mouth. “Please. Tell me something true.”

  “Long ago,” she said, her voice low and heavy, calming the flutter of my heart, “when the gods came down among the people and made trouble, a king who wanted a son had a daughter instead. He was so angry he left her on a mountain to die. But a bear found her and nursed her, and with a bear for a mother, the girl grew up strong and without fear. She could run as fast as any animal in the forest. Finally the bear knew it was time for the girl to go live among her own kind, and so, though it grieved her, she gave her human daughter to some hunters. The hunters taught her to shoot true, to move silently through the woods, to live wisely and alone.