Furnace

by Livia Llewellyn

  Anyway, so we got to Oceanside in the late afternoon, when the sun was setting over the Pacific and the sky was pink and orange and red, and the air smelled all sandy and salty like brine. Dad drove down the main street and parked next to the chowder house where we’d have dinner, and we got out and stood in the middle of the road. Just like near the cottage, you’d usually be able to see all the way to the ocean, it would look like the road just kept going on through the beach and then under the waves. Except, not anymore, because of the wall. Dad’s a really important architect and he helped design this, for Oceanside and for other towns all up and down the coast that are having family reunions, for whenever it’s their time. Except Ocean Shores, of course, and a couple other places that didn’t build a wall and got destroyed. Mom took more pictures, and then we went inside.

  We got to the cottage after dark. It was exactly like I remembered it, all the nautical stuff everywhere and the flowered couch that turns into a bed. Mom got teary-eyed when she saw the trunks of toys, but she covered it up and fussed around in the kitchen with the food while Dad and I pretended not to notice. I’ll admit, I got a bit sad when I saw the puzzles, too. I remember Alex and me putting them together on the rickety cardboard table Great Auntie set up for us. That was the last summer before he started getting sick. It was the inoculations. All the men in our family start taking it when they’re about nine, to fight some infection they’re not immune to when they grow up, but sometimes they’d have allergic reactions to it, and it would do terrible things to their bodies, like it did to Alex. Dad felt so guilty, but how could he have known?

  Anyway, it’s been quiet. There aren’t any interesting boys here at all, they’re all at the wall, I guess, along with the men. I’ve been spending the days with my mom, and some of the other relatives and their daughters, who I guess are my cousins, reading and getting a tan in their yards. No one cool is around here. None of my cousins are interesting. One girl didn’t even know who Beyoncé was! I brought my good bikini for nothing.

  The Wall, Oceanside, July 5th

  Yesterday was the 4th, of course, and all over the Dunes there were lots of backyard parties and barbeques. I finally met a few cute boys, but they were all my cousins, of course, and they wouldn’t even talk to me and were pretty rude. Of course, we all ate dinner in the afternoon, because when it got dark, everyone in the town and from the Dunes met at the wall. It was insane. We all walked down the long main road, no one was in their car, and none of us were allowed to bring our cameras or phones. Most of the lights were off except for some crazy lamps in a few store and restaurant fronts, these large circles of glass that glowed a deep green. They were so pretty and strange. I kept looking down at my skin—it looked like it was being lit from inside. All the women and the girls looked like that. All the boys and men were dressed in black suits, even though it was really hot. I mean, this is the middle of summer, after all. A lot of them didn’t look very happy about it. But it’s tradition, Dad says. It’s part of the reunion. And another tradition is that this was the one night all the men escorted the women to the top of the wall, the only time we were allowed to be up there. Well, I’m sure the tradition started out as another night, but having it on the Fourth of July probably gave them an excuse for all the fireworks and beer.

  When we got to the wall, the men escorted us single file inside, up these long narrow corridors of stairs that go to the top. It was kind of like a school fire drill in reverse. There were no lights in the stairs, and I pretty much had to climb them with my hands and feet like a dog. I have no idea who was behind me, but I’m glad they couldn’t see my butt in their face. When we got to the top, there were about ten observers waiting for us like the ones I saw in the parking lot, naked and faceless with high top hats. I couldn’t tell if some of them were the same ones from the parking lot. They didn’t look so friendly close up. Everyone grew really quiet and still. We all stood in line around the curved edge, all the women in front so they could see over the metal railing, and the men behind them. I wanted to see the town because we were so high up, but the guy behind me grabbed me and forced me to turn back around. What an asshole.

  Anyway. We all stood there for a few minutes, in the dark. If we were supposed to be looking at something, no one said. No one spoke. The beach was black, with that same sand Dad and Mom and I had found by the quarry site, but here it was smooth and completely bare. I didn’t realize how high the wall was, but it’s enormous, so wide that all of us—maybe close to a thousand people—can stand on it, and the beach that it circles around is huge. The waves were further back than I remember, or at least further back than they are by the Dunes, and they were massive. I was shocked. If they’d been any closer, they would have come right over the wall. They would rush in toward the wall like a herd of gigantic animals, like serpents made out of water and foam, and I felt everyone sort of gasp and shrink back all at once, me included, and then they’d come crashing down, dragging the sand away and leaving the beach smooth and clean.

  So we watched for a few more minutes, and then the fireworks started over the town, and everyone turned to the other side of the wall and oohed and awed. It was a pretty good show. I kept turning back to the beach, though. Having my back to those waves made me a bit nervous. I bent over the railing slightly to get a better view of the beach and the bottom of the wall. I don’t know how we’re expected to get down there for the ceremony—I couldn’t see any stairway openings, and the wall goes right into the ocean, for a really long way. Maybe we take boats around the edges? I don’t know. And then the fireworks were over and everyone went back down the steps. There were some parties in town, at the bars and restaurants, but Mom and Dad went home with me instead. The neighbors down the road were having a big pool party, which seems really redundant (having a pool, that is) when you live next to the ocean but whatever, so I knew they’d go there. Mom asked me if I had any questions about the beach, and I said no, but I was lying. I don’t know, I didn’t want to talk about it. Mom put her arm around me and said everything would be fine. Funny, when just three weeks ago she was the one having complete kittens about the reunion.

  When we got to the edge of the Dunes, Dad tapped my shoulder and told me to look around. All along the wall, those green globe lamps had been placed. You could see this huge curve of weird green lights hovering in the air between the town and the beach, all of them flashing like little lighthouse beacons or the lights along a runway. He asked me if I thought that was cool and I said yeah, awesome, or something like that. And that’s when I really started to bug out about this whole reunion thing, and felt my skin grow all hot and cold and shivery again, although I acted like I was totally chilled out and fine.

  Here’s the thing. When I was staring out at the ocean, when everyone else was looking at the fireworks, I saw something. I swear I saw something. Way far off in the ocean, past all the waves, it was in the moonlight, just for a second, and then it was gone. It wasn’t an orca or a blue whale, I’ve seen those tons of times before. I swear to god I saw a gigantic hand.

  The Dunes, July 11th

  Nothing has been happening. I guess it’d be a great vacation, if it were a vacation, if I didn’t have this constant ball of anxiety inside that makes me double over in pain every once in a while. It’s really hot now, almost 85 every day. I go to the neighbor’s house most days, and lay on a blanket by the pool listening to my iPod or reading. I’ve got a great tan. Mom goes with me and gossips with the other women, or sometimes we’ll go into Oceanside and just walk around, shopping for trinkets or clothes at the little stores, buying magazines, eating lunch at the one cafe. When we’re outside, walking down the narrow sidewalks, I’ll try so hard not to, but I always look up at the wall. I can’t help it. The lights are still flashing, day and night, and sometimes there’s a huge booming sound and the ground shakes a little, like the waves are reaching the wall and trying to knock it down. Most of the men from the town and the Dunes are up there, and a lot of observers, too
. Dad spends every day there. He doesn’t talk about it, and I am so relieved that he doesn’t. We’ll have dinner—Mom’s teaching me how to cook, I made spaghetti last night!—and then we’ll watch TV if the reception is good, or play board games, or go over to a relative’s house and hang out. No one talks about the wall. Sometimes I’ll look up and catch a bunch of Mom and Dad’s friends or relatives looking at me, and they’ll stop talking and look away. They do this with all the girls. Super creepy.

  Last night I snuck outside and tried to take a picture of the lights, but something’s wrong with my phone, it doesn’t work at all. I think it’s broken. This summer blows.

  The Dunes, July 23rd

  I’m so tired, but I can’t get to sleep. Dad just left. It’s about midnight, and maybe about an hour ago, some men knocked on the door, and Dad spoke with them for a few minutes, and then he changed into his black suit and left. He told us it’s almost time, and to get a good night’s sleep, and early tomorrow morning the men would come for us and the ceremony would begin. I kind of freaked out a little, but Mom calmed me down, then she poured us both a small glass of wine—my first ever!—and she got all teary-eyed again and gave a little speech about how everything was going to change and tomorrow I was going to become a woman (GOD! so embarrassing) and how she was so proud of me and that she knew that no matter what happened, someday I’d be a wonderful mom. The wine tasted terrible, I thought wine was supposed to taste like fruit, but she made me drink the whole glass. I feel a little gross now, kind of floppy and fuzzy. I keep thinking about Alex. I think about his skeleton, under our backyard, all twisted and spiraled and decayed. And Abby, my big-eyed pug, her little skull filled with worms and dirt.

  Why do all the men wear top hats?

  Why do I hear horns

  The Dunes, August 29th

  Wow. I lost a month.

  The cast has been off my arm for a couple of days now, and even though the fingers are a bit stiff, I can finally write again without bursting into tears. When I say that, I mean I can write without my fingers hurting, and I can write about what happened without tears rolling down my face, without dropping my pen to the floor, staring off into space, at the wall, through the window, staring anywhere except my journal, where I have to remember what happened and put it into words. Which I guess we’re not supposed to do—that is, the women aren’t supposed to do this, make records of anything. But I think I should, for reasons I won’t go into just right now. I just think it’s important to remember, to have a record of my own. Mom and Dad have gone into town for the afternoon to check on my new sisters, so I’m all alone.

  So this is what happened.

  THE BEACH, July 24th

  I don’t remember falling asleep. It was the wine, Mom explained later. The men put a little something in it to help us sleep. It just makes it easier for everyone.

  I woke up in a cage, naked. My head was against Mom’s thigh, and she was stroking my hair like she used to when I was a little girl. The cage was iron or steel, and it was covered with thick canvas and fastened underneath the bottom, so you couldn’t lift it or see outside no matter which way you looked. I could smell the salt of the ocean, and hear the rumble of waves. I knew we were outside, right on the beach, but it sounded far away, like at low tide in the morning. I felt really disoriented, I sat up and tried to ask Mom what was happening, but she shushed me. She was naked, too. I was so embarrassed, I wanted to die. Then she whispered to keep quiet, and just do everything she and the other women did. She said if we got separated and I got confused or afraid, my instincts would tell me what to do.

  The canvas rose up—and the smell hit us, not just of the ocean but the low tide stench of something leviathan and dying. I heard a couple girls vomit. The wall was on one side of our cages, and the beach on the other. It was early morning, so early that the sand and water and sky looked all the same color, sort of a flat dark blue. Something was on the beach, white and malformed. I guess I thought it was a whale at first—what else could be that big? And then I realized it was an ocean liner—no whale could be that huge. Mom pushed at the cage, and one side swung open. All around us, against the curve of the wall, cages were opening, and women and their daughters were stepping out onto the sands, maybe five hundred of us in all. We were all barefoot, and all naked and shivering in the cool air. I squinted and turned my head, and that’s when I realized. It was so large, I hadn’t recognized it at first. But then, yes. I’d seen it before.

  It was a woman. A woman so massive I couldn’t see the ends of her legs. They were still in the water, the waves lapping at her knees. Her arm was stretched out, fingertips almost touching the row of cages. That was the hand I knew I’d seen at the ocean’s edge that night, pale and grasping in the distant moonlight. We started to walk down the beach toward her face, some of us running. Long blue-green hair like seaweed, spread across the black beach. She lay on her back, face to the side, saucer-wide eyes open. She didn’t look like some hideous fish creature. She looked like any of us. She looked like me. I could feel the heat of her breath. She was beached but alive, barely. And her stomach! It rose up like Mount Rainier, white and round and full.

  She’s pregnant, I whispered to Mom, and she nodded. Are we supposed to dance around her? I asked.

  Not quite. We have to help her give birth, she replied. But before that, we need to be brave. There’s something very difficult we need to do.

  An object slid off the woman’s belly and dropped onto the sands. I almost didn’t see it at first, it was the same color as her mottled flesh. It rose up from the sand, and everyone jumped back a bit. Another object slid down her belly, and one more slithered out from under her breast. All across her body, I could see movement, hundreds of ripples breaking free. Mom grabbed my arm, hard, so I couldn’t run. All around me, the women were whispering to the girls, holding their arms.

  Don’t fight them, Mom whispered. And don’t run. Just let them do what they need to do.

  What are they, I asked.

  I don’t know. Maybe the men know. They ride her body up to the surface of the ocean, and now they’re waiting for her babies to be born.

  Babies? I asked.

  She has eggs, hundreds of female eggs, and when they hatch, they’ll be waiting for the girls.

  To eat them, I said?

  No, Mom said. To spawn.

  From beside me, a high-pitched scream. I saw a girl break free and start to run, and then we all screamed, the thin sounds bouncing back and forth across the wall. I punched my mother in the stomach and pushed her away. We all ran, we ran as fast as we could across the soft slow sands back to the cages and it didn’t make any difference, none of us were fast enough and none of us were strong and something grabbed my hair and flipped me up high in the air like one of my auntie’s dolls. I came down flat on my back, and it was on me in a flash, soft squishy skin and sucking mouth and the smell. And it was hammering into me, with its huge hard lumpy thing that hurt so much I cried and threw up, and it licked my face and stuck its flappy tongue in my mouth and I threw up some more and choked and it just wouldn’t stop pounding against me and I felt my right wrist snap under its grip, and the sudden pain made everything bright and calm and clear. I lay still, and the creature fucked me over and over and I looked up at the iron sky and waited for the sun to break over the wall.

  And after a while it stopped, and rolled off me, shuddering and flopping like a giant fish. I lay on the sands with my legs open, mouth open, watching it die. All around me, girls and women were fighting and screaming, the grunts and groans filling the air, the smell of rancid water and vomit and semen and chum. Everyone sobbed. I sat up, slowly. Every muscle in my body hurt, every bone felt broken or bruised. Already half of the creatures were dying or dead. Some were fighting viciously over girls, tearing off each other’s limbs with thick claws and lantern-jawed teeth. I didn’t know where my mother was, but I didn’t want to look. Next to me, a girl lay half buried in the sand. I recognized her from the
Dunes. Her head was caved in, the dead creature’s thing still resting in the broken nest of teeth spilling out of her mouth.

  I would have thrown up again, but I was completely empty inside.

  Behind me, the cages started to clatter. I turned around, keeping my head low. Large knives were falling onto the tops of the cases, some of them bouncing onto the sands. Long sharp butcher knives and machetes. Nets followed, huge fishing nets slithering down like punctured balloons. I stared up at the wall. In the growing light, I could see some of the men hurling the knives down the long curve of stone. The rest of them stood at the railing, writing notes in books, talking to the observers, staring down at us through telescopes and binoculars. And then I saw. Most of the men had their penises out. They were masturbating. They were watching us, watching their wives and their daughters scream and break apart and die on the beach just like that giantess, and they were masturbating through the metal rails as if it were the most exciting thing in the world.