Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House

by Неизвестный

  I walked into the room and the door closed. There were animals in there, filtering the air with their strange lungs, pumping out musk and farts. Ben sat on a small velour couch in the corner, wearing his karate ensemble. A ferret dozed on his neck. White cats eyed the weaselly beast as they slunk around. Three Wild boys stalked the room with knives, obsessed with being near their older brother. They’d made a pile of bones on Brian’s dresser. Candles flickered on the floor, bleeding wax onto ancient shag. I took a deep breath of moldy air.

  “Where’s Brian?” I asked.

  “With his girlfriend,” said Ben, and his brothers snorted and made kissing noises.

  “We’re taking over his room,” said Tim. He threw his knife at a cat and metal clattered against the dark paneled wall.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, though it would have hurt me to leave the room.

  “Wait,” said Ben. “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Get out of here, you assholes,” he said.

  “Make us,” said Tim.

  Ben stood up, and the boys ran toward a corner, where I could make out a flight of steps with a wrought iron banister. They crawled up and down the stairs, neither leaving nor staying, snickering and coughing and slapping each other. The ferret leaped from Ben’s shoulder and slithered under the bed.

  “I wanted to tell you I was sorry about the thing, you know,” Ben whispered. “The name I called you. I didn’t mean for it to get around like it did.”

  “Whatever,” I said. My cyclopean breast burned above my mortified heart. I pulled my jean jacket tight around me. “Forget it. Don’t say another word about it.”

  The wolf man’s stupid expression didn’t change, but his eyes, wet behind the plastic, fluttered over my chest.

  “I was just having a bad week,” he said. “You don’t have any brothers or sisters, do you?”

  I told him I didn’t.

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “All that privacy. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy. They never leave me alone. But when Brian goes to college next year, I’m moving down here.”

  “It’s a cool room,” I said. “You can come and go whenever you want.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Want a cigarette?” He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. He made room for me on the couch and I sat down. The couch was too small and I could feel his body burning beside mine. I could smell the dark yellow musk of the ferret that sprawled on his neck. When I leaned in to light my cigarette, I caught the tang of wine on Ben’s breath, and I wanted to drink wine too, from a silver goblet, deep in the secret tunnels the Wild boys had dug under the ground, or high in the treetops, where clouds oozed through prickly branches.

  “Give me some wine,” I said.

  “What?” The wolf man cocked his head.

  “I smell it, and I want some.”

  “No problem.” He produced a jug from a laundry basket overflowing with dirty socks.

  We sat drinking wine and smoking. White cats paced. We didn’t speak, and a beautiful, sweet evil grew between us.

  “How deep do your tunnels go?” I whispered.

  “To hell,” he said, and laughed his television laugh. “One of these days I’m going to take my little brothers down there and sell them to the devil.”

  On the staircase a Wild boy gasped, but the others giggled.

  “I wish I had brothers—or sisters.”

  “Oh no.” Ben shook his head. “You don’t.”

  “I do. At night, when my parents fall asleep in their chairs, I feel so lonely I wish a spaceship would swoop down and kidnap me.”

  “I feel exactly the same way.” Ben’s voice broke. He cleared his throat. “Only worse, more desperate, with a swarm of little gnats always bothering me. And my mother . . . sometimes she calls me Brian, sometimes Tim. I know it’s just a slip of the tongue, but still. And now she’s going to have another one.”

  His eyes rolled behind the plastic and I felt the damp meat of his palm resting on my hand. Our fingers intertwined and the air pulsed around my ears. This was what it was like to hold hands with a boy. I’d never done it before. There was a film of sweat between our palms and the position I was frozen in felt uncomfortable.

  The sliding glass door opened by itself, and the smell of dying charcoal drifted in from the night. The full moon hung over the Bickles’ rotten roof, spilling its silver.

  “Where are all the parents?” I asked, but Ben didn’t answer me. He dropped my hand and let out a deep moan that made my stomach clench. He shot up from the couch and staggered around on the carpet, fingering his wolf-man mask and groaning. Ben Wild fell to his knees. He lifted his head to the moon and barked. Then an ancient, afflicted howl rocked through his body and ripped the quiet night open.

  He clambered around on all fours, trotting toward me, growling and spitting, and I wanted to dissolve into the couch. He sniffed my sneakers and licked my left ankle and whimpered like a dog. I was wondering if I should run or try to pet him, when he stood up and loomed over me, the air behind him darkening as a cloud passed over the moon. He shook with demented laughter. Then the night went white, and he tore the mask from his face.

  His brothers shrieked and clambered to the top of the stairs. A door slammed, and I knew that I was alone with the wolf man, with all his fury and frustration.

  Ben’s acne had broken into bloom. His face glowed with an eerie bluish luster, and I thought that maybe his father had brought nuclear radiation home in his clothes. Zits swarmed like fire ants on Ben’s brow. Purple pimples glistened like drops of jelly on his cheeks. Fat whiteheads nestled behind the wings of his nose. Only his eyes and lips had escaped the infection.

  Ben sat beside me, holding his mask in his hands. “The moon controls the tides,” he said, “and brings poison boiling to the surface of my skin. But tomorrow I’ll be a normal boy again. I swear.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Some of his pimples were seeping yellow drops.

  “The family curse.” Ben winced. “My father had it, and his father before him. Whoever gets it always ends up having lots of sons.” He rolled his eyes and forced a laugh. A complex blush lit up his zits.

  He took my hand and I let him hold it. His hand looked completely normal, hot and smooth and brown, pretty enough to bite. I could feel the moon licking at my skin with its magnetic light. I wondered if it was true that the moon moved the blood of women. I wondered if mysterious clocks, ancient and new, had started to tick within me. Ben leaned toward me. I threw my head back and vamped for his kiss. I’d spent a hundred nights dressed up in gowns and makeup, kissing stuffed animals, and my lips felt fat and sweet. But the hot suction cup of his mouth hit my throat, and he bit me, digging his braces into the soft skin of my neck. When I swatted him off, he laughed like a hoodlum and scratched his bleeding chin.

  “I’m a wolf man,” he said sarcastically, as though that explained everything. He shrugged and lit a cigarette.

  From the stinging wound on my neck, Ben’s slobber trickled into my bloodstream. I waited. I felt a slight burn when the poison hit my heart. Acid rose to the back of my throat. The taste of dead animals filled my mouth. Wild hope and withering despair tainted the meat, the craziness of animals shut up. The poison was in my body now, changing me, making me stronger and meaner.

  I reached for Ben’s cheek and stroked a mass of greasy bumps. My fingertips drifted along his jawbone and tickled the triangular patch of downy skin under his chin. He closed his eyes like a lizard in a trance and swallowed. I pressed my lips to his neck. I tried not to laugh as I licked the tendon that ran from his collarbone toward his jaw. Ben groaned and grabbed my elbow. His ears smelled like cinnamon. When I stuck my tongue into the silky cranny beneath his left earlobe, he bucked. I could feel the pulsing of intricate muscles and secret glands. I could feel veins throbbing with fast blood. Finding the spot I’d been searching for, I gnawed it gently until I broke the skin and tasted copper. Then I bit him with my
small, sharp, spit-glazed teeth.

  SAMANTHA HUNT

  Beast

  On page eighteen of the National Report, there’s an article about a brother and a sister, a human-interest story telling how the brother has worked for ten years at a chicken-rendering plant by day and a security firm by night. He even sold his plasma a few times. But the clincher, what makes the story a story, is that he does all this work in order to send his twin sister to college. He must be Chinese or Amish, I think, reading the first paragraph. I flip ahead to the jump page to see if there is a picture. There is. He’s just some white guy from Minnesota and I suppose I find that hard to believe. He seems like an artifact from the nineteenth century, from a plainer time when people maybe took turns churning the butter or helped one another tend their fires at night. But he’s not from the nineteenth century. In the photo he’s wearing sneakers and a plastic apron stained with blood. He’s positioned along a conveyor belt that is dotted with the dead bodies of chickens. I wonder if it is love or something else that makes him do it.

  I read the newspaper in bed at night, propping it open on my bare belly, my boobs falling off to either side as if they were already asleep. The news of the world seems to matter very little after the day is done, as if it were a breath mint or a catalog filled with clothes I wouldn’t ever buy.

  “Archibald Lepore never finished high school,” the article says, “yet every month he sends the Student Loan Corporation, a division of Citibank, a check for $578, exactly half of his monthly take-home pay. Mr. Lepore has been working since he was sixteen years old to support his twin sister. He found a second job when they turned eighteen and she was admitted to Northwestern University without a scholarship. Mr. Lepore, from the refrigerated storeroom of PoulTech, says—”

  But then it moved. Just slightly; still, I saw it.

  “I think I found a tick,” I tell my husband.

  I put down the paper and stretch out the skin of my stomach. A tiny black dot with legs, as if a period ran away from the newspaper and is making a slow-motion, highly ineffective escape across my stomach.

  “Another one?” My husband rolls over onto his side. “Let me see.”

  “Right here.”

  He moves his head in for a closer look. “That’s a pimple you picked at.”

  “I wasn’t picking at anything. I was just reading. It’s a tick bite,” I say. “Do you see anything?”

  He spreads the skin of my stomach, looking closely. “There’s a spot of blood.”

  “You don’t see any legs?”

  “I don’t see anything, really.”

  “Deer ticks are very small.”

  “I know,” he says. It’s the third tick he’s pulled off me this week. “But I don’t see anything.” He keeps on looking at the spot until: “Wait. All right. Wait. I do see something.”

  “What?”

  “They’re squirming a little bit. Black.”

  I knew it. “Please,” I say. “Pull it out.”

  “You’re not supposed to pull them out. Then their head stays inside you.” We had received an illustrated mailer from the county. Lyme Tick Awareness. The sickness is carried in their saliva, it said. Get the head out.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do, then?”

  He looks confused. He climbs out of bed and disappears into the bathroom for some tweezers and a cotton ball soaked in alcohol.

  The cottage we live in is only one story tall and a bit run down. It’s what’s called a carriage house. It’s on someone else’s property. We are caretakers. We mow the lawn, handle the trash, look out for robbers and all that. That is how we manage to live here, a place crawling with deer and ticks, instead of in an apartment in town. At this hour, from our bedroom door, the rest of the house looks black. I can’t see the living room, and beyond that, I can’t see the small kitchen with two windows where I like to sit looking out onto the screened porch that looks out even farther onto the road and the mailboxes. I can’t see any of that right now.

  “Have you been rolling around in the grass?” he asks when he returns. He dabs at the spot and I can smell the astringent. He clamps down with the tweezers. “Ready?” he asks and yanks once, taking a bit of skin with it. “That ought to do it,” he says, again applying the alcohol.

  I look down at the bite. I don’t know if he got the head out. His mouth is twisted, worried.

  “Is it gone?” I ask.

  “Yeah. You’re fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yup. I’ll look again in the morning.”

  “What if the morning is too late?”

  “You’re fine,” he says and takes the tweezers and whatever he has tweezed back to the bathroom. The toilet flushes and I can see him walking through the living room. He wears a pair of boxers and a ribbed undershirt. When we were teenagers my husband worked in Akron’s rubber plants. Now most of those plants are gone and so he found a job running the heavy machinery for, oddly enough, a heavy-machinery manufacturing center. He’s still very strong. He still has the figure of a man who grew up lugging around hundredpound tires all day. We went to high school together and married a few years after we graduated. I feel very lucky. I made a good decision by accident. In high school we all chose boyfriends blindly, like Pin the Tail on the Donkey. I thought he was handsome and that was about all I thought. So I was surprised to find, after we’d been married a few years, that my husband was someone I really did love. There were things about him that he’d kept hidden in school, secrets that made him precious to me, like kindness and wonder and a beautiful singing voice, qualities that took a couple of years to chip away at before they were revealed.

  “Can you take off your clothes?” I ask him when he returns.

  “I like my pajamas.”

  “Those aren’t pajamas. They’re underwear.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  He takes off his clothes anyway and then he looks at me once, as if I am a brand-new flashlight whose bulb, for some reason, has already dimmed and malfunctioned. But I’m not brand-new. We’ve been married for almost eleven years now.

  He gets back into bed and I curl up, wrapping my body around the tick bite. I can see the picture of the chicken-rendering brother from Minnesota. He is smiling up at me from the floor, where I dropped him. I have a sister. She’d never work at a chicken plant for me. I also had a brother once but I don’t think he would have done it either. Not because he wasn’t kind. He was. And not because he was too busy with his own plans either. He really wasn’t. He didn’t have any plans or if he did he kept them very secret. My brother had trouble knowing what to make of his life. Though there were days when he’d feel inspired by a Tony Robbins infomercial or something equally stupid and he’d think, Well, maybe I should get a job, he never was able to hold down any sort of position except for a few short stints working at a dry cleaner’s in town. He reminded me of Abraham Lincoln, tall and very skinny, but even quieter. When he graduated from high school he just sort of froze as if he were caught in the headlights, as if he were distracted by every leaf on every tree. He couldn’t move forward because he couldn’t, he said, see the point of it. “Don’t you know where forward is headed?” he asked me one Thanksgiving. I didn’t have an answer. He’d scratched his ear. He’d stood and stared out the window of our parents’ house as if there might be some answer out there, some sign. I don’t think he saw anything, because he sat back down and stared at the carpeting on the floor. And maybe I should have said something but I didn’t know what to say. Yeah, I know where forward is headed but I try not to think about it.

  We didn’t find him for three days, because no one even realized he was missing for a while. He’d hanged himself from a tree, one of several that grew in a small sliver of land between my parents’ house and the neighbors’, out by a swing set that hadn’t been touched in years. He timbered over like a sapling when my father cut him down, his body gone stiff. Afterward, my mother, a stonefaced woman, a very hard worker, kept repe
ating a phrase, as if it were the motto of my brother’s suicide. “He was just too in love with the world.” She said it to everyone even though it wasn’t really true. My mother was just trying to make sense out of something that didn’t make sense at all, something that there was absolutely no reason for.

  “You know The Pajama Game?” I ask my husband, with my mouth close to the side of his chest. “The musical?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, you do. It’s an old one. It has that song in it. ‘Hernando’s Hideaway.’”

  “No.”

  “Just knock three times and whisper low that you and I were sent by Joe?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Well, I never understood what they were doing inside Hernando’s Hideaway.”

  “Hmm.” His eyes are closed.

  “So what were they doing?” I ask.

  “What?” He opens his eyes.

  “Inside Hernando’s Hideaway?”

  “What were they doing? I don’t know. Drinking, dancing, fooling around. Adult things.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. You’re right. Adult things. That’s why I was scared.”

  “You were scared of a song?”

  “Well, that song. There was something going on inside that club, something criminal.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “Like you said. Adult things.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, what’s the most adult thing?”

  “Fucking?” he asks.

  “No. Fucking’s for kids. Dying is adult.”

  “Oh. Shhhh,” he says and turns to rub my face. He puts his hand on my cheek to stop my jaw. He doesn’t want to hear about how I always thought people were dying inside that song’s nightclub. That the dying was the reason they kept the security so tight. My husband gets nervous now if I say anything too strange. He thinks it all has to do with my brother, that I might also end up swinging in the breeze one day. But I don’t think that is contagious. I used to say strange things even before my brother died. “Shhh, baby,” he says one more time before shutting off the light.