Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  I wake before dawn, only a little rested. My shoulders and hips and back all ache from the way I am leaning, but I have no energy to get up. I have no energy to do anything but endure. Elizabeth nods, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, but neither of us speak.

  Finally the train slows. We come in through a town, but the town seems to go on and on. It must be St. Louis. We stop and sit. The sun comes up and heats the car like an oven. There is no movement of the air. There are so many buildings in St. Louis, and so many of them are tall, two stories, that I wonder if they cut off the wind and that is why it's so still. But finally the train lurches and we crawl into the station.

  I am one of the first off the train by virtue of my position near the door. A soldier unlocks it and shouts for all of us to disembark, but he need not have bothered for there is a rush. I am borne ahead at its beginning, but I can stop at the back of the platform. I am afraid that I have lost Elizabeth, but I see her in the crowd. She is on the arm of a younger man in a bowler. There is something about his air that marks him as different- he is sprightly and apparently fresh even after the long ride.

  I almost let them pass, but the prospect of being alone makes me reach out and touch her shoulder.

  "There you are," she says.

  We join a queue of people waiting to use a trench. The smell is appalling, ammonia acrid and eye-watering. There is a wall to separate the men from the women, but the women are all together. I crouch, trying not to notice anyone and trying to keep my skirts out of the filth. It is so awful. It's worse than anything. I feel so awful.

  What if my mother were here? What would I do? I think maybe it was better, maybe it was God's hand. But that is an awful thought, too.

  "Child," Elizabeth says when I come out, "what's the matter?"

  "It's so awful," I say. I shouldn't cry, but I just want to be home and clean. I want to go to bed and sleep.

  She offers me a biscuit.

  "You should save your food," I say.

  "Don't worry," Elizabeth says, "We have enough."

  I shouldn't accept it, but I am so hungry. And when I have a little to eat, I feel a little better.

  I try to imagine what the fort will be like where we will be going. Will we have a place to sleep, or will it be barracks? Or worse yet, tents? Although after the night I spent on the train I can't imagine anything that could be worse. I imagine if I have to stay awhile in a tent then I'll make the best of it.

  "I think this being in limbo is perhaps worse than anything we can expect at the end," I say to Elizabeth. She smiles.

  She introduces her companion, Michael. He is enough like her to be her brother, but I don't think that they are. I am resolved not to ask; if they want to tell me they can.

  We are standing together, not saying anything, when there is some commotion farther up the platform. It is a woman. Her black dress is like smoke. She is running down the platform, coming toward us. There are all of these people and yet it is as if there is no obstacle for her. "NO NO NO NO, DON'T TOUCH ME! FILTHY HANDS! DON'T LET THEM TOUCH YOU! DON'T GET ON THE TRAINS!"

  People are getting out of her way. Where are the soldiers? The fabric of her dress is so threadbare it is rotten and torn at the seams. Her skirt is greasy black and matted and stained. Her face is so thin. "ANIMALS! THERE IS NOTHING OUT THERE! PEOPLE DON'T HAVE FOOD! THERE IS NOTHING THERE BUT INDIANS! THEY SENT US OUT TO SETTLE BUT THERE: WAS NOTHING THERE!" I expect she will run past me, but she grabs my arm and stops and looks into my face. She has light eyes, pale eyes in her dark face. She is mad.

  "WE WERE ALL STARVING, SO WE WENT TO THE FORT BUT THE FORT HAD NOTHING. YOU WILL ALL STARVE, THE WAY THEY ARE STARVING THE INDIANS! THEY WILL LET US ALL DIE! THEY DON'T CARE!" She is screaming in my face, and her spittle sprays me, warm as her breath. Her hand is all tendons and twigs, but she's so strong I can't escape.

  The soldiers grab her and yank her away from me. My arm aches where she was holding it. I can't stand up.

  Elizabeth pulls me upright. "Stay close to me," she says and starts to walk the other way down the platform. People are looking up, following the screaming woman.

  She pulls me along with her. I keep thinking of the woman's hand and wrist turned black with grime. I remember my mother's face was black when she lay on the platform. Black like something rotted.

  "Here," Elizabeth says at an old door, painted green but now weathered. The door opens and we pass inside.

  "What?" I say. My eyes are accustomed to the morning brightness and I can't see.

  "Her name is Clara," Elizabeth says. "She has people in Tennessee."

  "Come with me," says another woman. She sounds older. "Step this way. Where are her things?"

  I am being kidnapped. Oh merciful God, I'll die. I let out a moan.

  "Her things were lost, her mother was killed in a crush on the platform."

  The woman in the dark clucks sympathetically. "Poor dear. Does Michael have his passenger yet?"

  "In a moment," Elizabeth says. "We were lucky for the commotion.

  I am beginning to be able to see. It is a storage room, full of abandoned things. The woman holding my arm is older. There are some broken chairs and a stool. She sits me in the chair. Is Elizabeth some kind of adventuress?

  "Who are you?" I ask.

  "We are friends," Elizabeth says. "We will help you get to your sister."

  I don't believe them. I will end up in New Orleans. Elizabeth is some kind of adventuress.

  After a moment the door opens and this time it is Michael with a young man. "This is Andrew," he says.

  A man? What do they want with a man? That is what stops me from saying, "Run!" Andrew is blinded by the change in light, and I can see the astonishment working on his face, the way it must be working on mine. "What is this?" he asks.

  "'You are with Friends," Michael says, and maybe he has said it differently than Elizabeth, or maybe it is just that this time I have had the wit to hear it.

  "Quakers?" Andrew says. "Abolitionists?"

  Michael smiles. I can see his teeth white in the darkness. "Just friends," he says.

  Abolitionists. Crazy people who steal slaves to set them free. Have they come to kidnap us? We are recalcitrant southerners, I have never heard of Quakers seeking revenge, but everyone knows the Abolitionists are crazy and they are liable to do anything.

  "We'll have to wait here until they begin to move people out, it will be evening before we can leave," says the older woman.

  I am so frightened; I just want to be home. Maybe I should try to break free and run out to the platform. There are northern soldiers out there. Would they protect me? And then what, go to a fort in Oklahoma?

  The older woman asks Michael how they could get past the guards so early and he tells her about the madwoman. A "refugee," he calls her.

  "They'll just take her back," Elizabeth says, sighing.

  Take her back-do they mean that she really came from Oklahoma? They talk about how bad it will be this winter. Michael says there are Wisconsin Indians resettled down there, but they've got no food, and they've been starving on government handouts for a couple years. Now there will be more people. They're not prepared for winter.

  There can't have been much handout during the war. It was hard enough to feed the armies.

  They explain to Andrew and to me that we will sneak out of the train station this evening, after dark. We will spend a day with a Quaker family in St. Louis, and then they will send us on to the next family. And so we will be passed hand to hand, like a bucket in a brigade, until we get to our families.

  They call it the underground railroad.

  But we are slave owners.

  "Wrong is wrong,' says Elizabeth. "Some of us can't stand and watch people starve."

  "But only two out of the whole train," Andrew says.

  Michael sighs.

  The old woman nods. "It isn't right."

  Elizabeth picked me because my mother died. If my mother had not died, I would be o
ut there, on my way to starve with the rest of them.

  I can't help it, but I start to cry. I should not profit from my mother's death. I should have kept her safe.

  "Hush, now," says Elizabeth. "Hush, you'll be okay."

  "It's not right," I whisper. I'm trying not to be loud, we mustn't be discovered.

  "What, child?"

  "You shouldn't have picked me," I say. But I am crying so hard I don't think they can understand me. Elizabeth strokes my hair and wipes my face. It may be the last time someone will do these things for me. My sister has three children of her own, and she won't need another child. I'll have to work hard to make up my keep.

  There are blankets there and we lie down on the hard floor, all except Michael, who sits in a chair and sleeps. I sleep this time with fewer dreams. But when I wake up, although I can't remember what they were, I have the feeling that I have been dreaming restless dreams.

  The stars are bright when we finally creep out of the station. A night full of stars. The stars will be the same in Tennessee. The platform is empty, the train and the people are gone. The Lincoln Train has gone back south while we slept, to take more people out of Mississippi.

  "Will you come back and save more people?" I ask Elizabeth.

  The stars are a banner behind her quiet head. "We will save what we can," she says.

  It isn't fair that I was picked. "I want to help," I tell her.

  She is silent for a moment. "We only work with our own," she says. There is something in her voice that has not been there before. A sharpness.

  "What do you mean?" I ask.

  "There are no slavers in our ranks," she says and her voice is cold.

  I feel as if I have had a fever; tired, but clear of mind. I have never walked so far and not walked beyond a town. The streets of St. Louis are empty. There are few lights. Far off a woman is singing, and her voice is clear and carries easily in the night. A beautiful voice.

  "Elizabeth," Michael says, "she is just a girl."

  "She needs to know," Elizabeth says.

  "Why did you save me then?" I ask.

  "One does not fight evil with evil." Elizabeth says.

  "I'm not evil!" I say.

  But no one answers.

  Interview: On Any Given Day

  (Pullout quote at top of site.)

  Emma: I had this virus, and it was inside me, and it could have been causing all these weird kinds of cancers-

  Interviewer: What kind of cancers?

  Emma: All sorts of weird stuff I'd never heard of like hairy cell leukemia, and cancerous lesions in parts of your bones and cancer in your pancreas. But I wasn't sick. I mean I didn't feel sick. And now, even after all the antivirals, now I worry about it all the time. Now I'm always thinking I'm sick. It's like something was stolen from me that I never knew I had.

  (The following is a transcript from an interview for the On Any Given Day presentation of 4.12.2021. This transcript does not represent the full presentation, and more interviews and information are present on the site. On Any Given Day is made possible by the National Public Internet, by NPIBoston.org affiliate, and by a grant from the Carrol-Johnson Charitable Family Trust. For information on how to purchase this or any other full site presentation on CDM, please check NPIBoston.org.)

  Pop-up quotes and site notes in the interview are included with this transcript.

  The following interview was conducted with Emma Chicheck. In the summer of 2018, a fifteen-year-old student came into a health clinic in the suburban town of Charlotte, outside Cleveland, Ohio with a sexually transmitted version of a proto-virus called pv414, which had recently been identified as a result of contaminated batches of genetic material associated with the telemerase therapy used in rejuvenation. The virus had only been seen previously in rejuvenated elders, and the presence of the virus in teenagers was at first seen as possible evidence that the virus had changed vectors. The medical detective work done to trace the virus, and the picture of teenaged behavior that emerged was the basis of the site documentary, called The Abandoned Children." Emma was one of the students identified with the virus.

  The map Site provides links to description a of the protovirus, a transmission the of map of the virus from Terry Sydnowski through three girls to a total of eleven other people, and interviews with state health officials.

  Emma: I was fourteen when I lost my virginity. I was drunk, and there was this guy named Luis, he was giving me these drinks that taste like melon, this green stuff that everybody was drinking when they could get it. He said he really liked all my Egyptian stuff and he kept playing with my slave bracelet. The bracelet has chains that go to rings you wear on your thumb, your middle finger, and your ring finger. "Can you be my slave?" he kept asking and at first I thought that was funny because he was the one bringing me drinks, you know? But we kept kissing and then we went into the bedroom and he felt my breasts and then he wanted to have sex. I felt as if I'd led him on, you know? So I didn't say no.

  I saw him again a couple of times after that, but he didn't pay much attention to me. He was older and he didn't go to my school. I regret it. I wish it had been a little more special and I was really too young.

  Sometimes I thought that if I were a boy I'd be one of those boys who goes into school one day and starts shooting people.

  (Music-"Poor Little Rich Girl" by Tony Bennett).

  Interviewer: What's a culture freak?

  Emma: You're kidding, right? This is for the interview? Okay, in my own words.

  A culture freak is a person who really likes other cultures, and listens to culture freak bands and doesn't conform to the usual sort of jumpsuit or Louis Vuitton wardrobe thing. So I'm into Egyptian a lot, in a spiritual way, too. I tell Tarot Cards. They're really Egyptian, people think they're Gypsy but I read about how they're actually way older than that and I have an Egyptian deck. My friend Lindsey is like me, but my other friend, Denise, is more into Indian stuff. Lindsey and I like Indian, too, and sometimes we'll all henna our hands.

  Interviewer: Do you listen to culture freak music?

  Emma: I like a lot of music, not just culture music. I like Black Helicopters, I really like their New World Order CDM, because it's really retro and paranoid. I like some of the stuff my mom and dad like, too; Pupae and Lauryn Hill. I like the band Shondonay Shaka Zulu. It's got a lot of drone. I like that.

  (Music-"My Favorite Things" by John Coltrane.)

  I'm seventeen. I'll be eighteen in April. I went to kindergarten when I was only four. I've already been accepted at Northeastern. I wanted to go to Barnard but my parents said they didn't want me going to school in New York City.

  My dad's in telecommunications. He's in Hong Kong for six weeks. He's trying to get funding for a sweep satellite. They're really cool. The satellites are really small, but they have this huge, like, net in front of them, like miles in front and miles across. The net, like, spins itself. See, if space debris hits something hard it will drill right through it, but when it hits this big net, the net gives and just lets the chunk of metal or whatever slide away so it doesn't hit the satellite. That way it won't be like that satellite in '07 that caused the chain reaction so half the United States couldn't use their phones.

  My morn is a teacher. She's taking a night class two nights a week to rectify. She's always having to take classes, and she's always gone one night a week for that. Then there's after school stuff. She never gets home before six. When I was little, she took summers off, but now she does bookkeeping and office work in the summer for a landscaper, because my older brother and sister are in college already.

  The landscaper is one of those babyboomers on rejuvenation. He's a pain in the ass. Like my dad says, they're all so selfish. Why won't they let anyone else have a life? I mean, the sixties are over, and they're trying to have them all over again. I hate when we're out and we see a bunch of babyboomers all hopped up on hormones acting like teenagers. But then they go back and go to work and won't let people like my dad
get promoted because they won't retire.

  They want to have it both ways. My mom says when we're all through school, she's going to retire and start a whole different life. A less materialistic life. She says she's going to get out of the way and let us have our lives. People have to learn how to go on to the next part of their lives. Like the Chinese. They had five stages of life, and after you were successful you were supposed to retire and write poetry and be an artist. Of course, how successful can you consider a high school teacher?

  (Music-"When I'm Sixty-four" by the Beatles.)

  Okay, we were out this one Saturday, hanging outside the bowling alley because the cops had thrown us out. The cops here are the worst. They discriminate against teenagers. Everybody discriminates against teenagers. Like, the pizza place has this sign that says only six people under eighteen are allowed in at a time-which means teenagers. If they had a sign that only six people over eighteen or six black people were allowed in at a time everybody would be screaming their heads off, right? We rented shoes and everything, but we weren't bowling yet, we were just hanging out, because we hadn't decided if we were going to bowl and they threw us out.

  We went over to the grocery store and the CVS to hang out on the steps and there was this boomer there. He was trying to dress like a regular kid. See most boomers dress in flared jeans and black and stuff and they all have long hair, especially the men, I guess because so many of them were, like, bald before the treatments. This guy had long hair, too, pulled back in a dorky pony tail, but he was wearing a emo jumpsuit. He'd have looked stupid in county orange, like he was trying too hard, but the emo jumpsuit was okay.

  In 2018, Terry Sydnowski was seventy-one years old. Click here for information on telemerase repair, endocrinological therapy and cosmetic surgery techniques of rejuvenation.

  We were ignoring him. It was me and Denise and Lindsey, and this older black guy named Kamar and these two guys from school, DC and Matt. Kamar had bought a bunch of forty-fives. You know, malt liquor. I was kind of nervous around Kamar. Kamar seemed so grown up, in a lot of ways. He'd been arrested twice as a juvenile. Once for shoplifting and once, I think, for possession. He always called me "little girl." Like when he saw me he said, "What you doing, little girl?" and smiled at me.