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

by Неизвестный

  Plus, I’ve been having a really strange week.

  “Honey?” I say once the lights are out, but he only mumbles in reply. He’s trying to sleep. I hold the covers up around my chin and close my eyes, thinking it won’t happen if I can just go to sleep fast enough. But I haven’t been able to fall asleep quickly this week. I know it’s coming so I fret and listen while my husband’s breath deepens, then slows. I panic and my chest gets tight and small. My eyes go dry. Once he is asleep the night changes. I hear every sound and every sound is scary. The furnace, the frogs, the cable wire scraping against the roof. The more alone I get, the louder the world becomes. There are wild animals outside: raccoons, squirrels, skunks, possums. I listen and then I try to brace myself, holding on to the sheets. I know it’s coming like a dream of a tidal wave. I get ready for it. I wait and just when I think too much time has passed, maybe it won’t happen tonight, it happens, very, very quickly, so quickly that I can’t scream. My hands and feet harden into small hooves, the fingers and toes swallowed up by bone, and then the most frightening part is over with, the part where I lose my opposable thumbs. Next the fur, brown-speckled with some white. This sprouting feels like a stretch or like I’m itching each individual follicle from the inside as a wiry hair pokes through a pore. My arms and legs narrow, driving all their muscles up to the flank, in a vacuum. My neck thickens and grows. I feel my tail, which gives me some comfort. I like my tail. Finally my face pulls into a tight, hard nose. My jaw extends, my tongue grows long and thick, my lips shrink before turning black and hard as leather. And then it’s done. And then I’m a deer.

  I still haven’t told my husband. I think it will be difficult for him to understand, even more difficult than it was for me. Still, I’ve been trying to prepare him slowly, planning what I’ll say. “Lately,” I practice, “when you turn out the light, something funny happens to me.”

  “What?” I imagine he’ll ask. Or just, “Funny? What do you mean?”

  “I turn into a deer at night.” I will tell him clearly like that, no hemming, no mistaking what I mean.

  “A deer?” He won’t believe it. I know he won’t.

  “A deer,” I’ll confirm.

  “What the fuck?” he’ll say, just like that. “What the fuck?” with a certain slowness.

  “Calm down,” I’ll tell him, though he’ll probably be calm already.

  “What are you talking about?” he’ll ask me.

  I am very careful, very quiet, planting my hooves on our bed. I stand over him, staring down at his body from up on my wobbly legs, straddling his belly. I sniff his neck, licking the hair of his armpit, cleaning him. I can’t help it, though I don’t want to wake him. I don’t know what would happen if he woke up now. He keeps a .22 and a shotgun in the hall closet.

  When I was growing up the land was different around here. That wasn’t so long ago, thirty-five years. Mostly there were a lot of soybean farms, hog farms, and wide, wide tracts of government-owned land where every now and then you’d see men digging with bright lights late at night, looking for natural gas. Sometimes the gas diggers would wake me up. Their lights were so bright it was easy to imagine they were coming from an alien spaceship. The gas-well sites were all connected by long, straight roads on the government land. These roads went on forever, and as we drove down them, it became easy to imagine that the roads were closing up behind my parents’ car, sealing us in. My brother, sister, and I would stare out the back window. It felt like entering a land of no return. It’s not like that anymore. As soon as they didn’t find much gas the government sold the land off to developers.

  At that time, when we were young, there was a man who lived around here. Everyone said the man had fucked a deer, though I don’t see how they could know that. But it was a small town so rumors were easy to spread, especially about someone who didn’t talk much.

  Soon people started saying even more. They said that the man fucked his own daughter also, and there might have been some truth to that. She had been taken away by Child Services and no one really knew why. They were private people. But the spookiest part of the whole story, and the reason why everyone suspected him, is that the man named the deer after his daughter, Jennifer. He’d call for the deer: “Jennifer. Jennifer.” You could hear him at night. That’d be the only sound in the town. “Jennifer. Jennifer.” Slowly. And the deer would come when called, as if it were a dog and not a wild creature. She’d come to him.

  I’ve been thinking about this man a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about how messed-up people are by sex, by other people, because despite his failings as a human being, I could never help myself—I liked this man. He was interesting to me because he knew a lot about the woods, about nature. He knew which kinds of mushrooms you could eat and which kinds would kill you. He collected the old seedpods of bat nuts. They looked like hard black stars. He told me that when deer are young they have no scent. That way, before the deer can walk, their mothers can hide them in the tall grass and as long as the mother goes away, no predators will find the babies, because they can’t smell them. Like some divine plan. Almost. The man found Jennifer when she was just a fawn. He stumbled onto her in a field. Her mother must have been killed by a construction truck, because the fawn was about to die from hunger. She’d been waiting in the tall grass but her mother didn’t return and so the man found the fawn, picked her up, carried her home, and made her a bottle of milk. He raised her in his barn after he lost his own daughter to the state. And then, when the deer was old enough, the rumor was that he treated the animal in a similar manner.

  Eventually I fall asleep, and when I wake in the morning, I am a woman again. I am still thinking about the deer man. My husband is just starting to move, smacking with his lips. No one ever thinks that animal fuckers might actually be in love. Maybe the man just thought, Well, I’m no better than this deer, am I? And I think that’s a good question. I don’t know what happened to the deer but the man is dead now and so I feel like I can say it here under the covers with my husband still asleep. I always thought there was something romantic about the way he named the deer after his daughter. Even if it was messed up.

  When I tell my husband what is happening to me at night, which I’m going to do, very soon now, he’ll want to know how, and then, after that, he’ll want to know why I am becoming a deer. That’s the part I’m not sure I can tell him yet.

  “My name’s Erich,” he said. “With a ‘ch,’” he clarified. I knew he was lying because anyone who uses too much detail is usually lying. People only use detail when they absolutely have to. Married, I thought, and I was annoyed that he would lie to me so I told him my real name. I even told him where I worked. I even told him I was married.

  When my husband asked me later that night, “Did you have fun with the girls? What’d you all end up doing?” I filled his head with details just like that “ch.”

  I told him how we went up to Akron and went to some new, fancy club that had a bouncer at the door and a velvet rope. I told him how Sarah tripped and knocked into a cocktail waitress who was carrying a tray of three drinks, how Vicky had been getting religious lately, and I told him how Meghan had gone out on a date with Steve Perry, the singer from that old band Journey. I even told him how she said Steve Perry was nice but a little old for her. She didn’t feel much attraction to him, and plus, the whole time she couldn’t stop singing, “Don’t stop! Believing!”

  “Sounds good,” my husband had said. “Steve Perry. That’s cool.”

  In an evening filled with that many details, there wouldn’t have been time for me to meet Erich, or whatever his name was, in the line for the bathroom. There wouldn’t have been time for him to follow me into the ladies’ room, where, with his hand up my shirt, he started biting my neck and chest like he was lost in some fever, like he was going to eat me with his lips that were so thick and filled with blood.

  “I’m going to call in sick to work,” I tell my husband.

  “You don’t feel wel
l, hon?”

  “No. I’m fine. I just can’t go to work today.”

  I walk into the living room, pick up the phone, and call my boss. It’s early enough that I can just leave her a message. The machine picks up. “You’ve reached Sachman’s Real Estate Agency. No one is here to take your call. Kindly leave your name, number, and a brief message, and one of our agents will get back to you. Thank you.”

  I tell her I have Lyme disease. I tell her I won’t be coming in. I cough into the phone and then say good-bye. I hang up and get back in bed. The cough might have been overdoing it.

  My husband is getting ready for work. He is wearing socks, boxers, a T-shirt, and a flannel. He comes into the bedroom, eating a bowl of cereal, looking for his pants and shoes. “You don’t feel well?” he asks again.

  “I feel fine,” I tell him.

  “Then why are you staying home from work?”

  I stare at a blank spot above our bureau. “I hate it there.”

  “You do?” he asks, surprised.

  “Well, I just started to yesterday.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  He shakes his head so I lie back in the bed. From under the covers I hear him open his dresser drawer. I think about how he has arms and legs that move perfectly. How he pulls ticks off me. He came from his mother and nothing is wrong with him. He went to elementary school, where probably, one day, someone wasn’t nice to him. Maybe they called him “jerk.” Under the covers, I hate these kids that might have said that to him, because I didn’t mean to cheat on him. It was an accident, like a car crash. Except I’d tell him if I had crashed the car.

  I pick up the paper from the floor, where I dropped it last night. Insurgents in Afghanistan. Murder in Darfur. Target to open a store in Manchuria. Manatees in Florida, some getting killed, some getting saved by environmentalists. And then I open to the center spread. It looks a bit like the periodic table of elements. The photos are tiny, but there, crammed onto the page, are the images of all the local soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. It’s a lot of people. The dead stare out from their enlistment photos or high school senior portraits. They are arranged alphabetically. I notice how young they are. I notice how many soldiers share similar last names, as if entire families have been wiped out. But of course they’re not family. They probably didn’t even know one another. Anderson. Brown. Clark. Davis. DeBasi. Green. Hall. Kern. All those young people. I close the paper. None of it matters to me. I know it should but it doesn’t. I have my own problems. All my head can think about is what I’ve done and all my body wants is to do it again.

  Erich’s lips tasted like a meal, a meal of a stranger’s breath. I was surprised that someone new, someone I had just met in a bar, had spit that tasted a little bit familiar, a little salty, and I knew in that moment that we really all did come from the ocean once. Huge lips and watery eyes. That’s about all I ever dreamed of. Erich told me, like a cut in my ear, “I’d fuck you to death,” and for the past five days I’ve been hearing him say that over and over again. Touching the scab. “I’d fuck you to death. I’d fuck you to death.” Each time it feels like getting punched in the stomach, only lower, deeper than the stomach, like I can’t breathe in my legs. And then for the past five nights I’ve been turning into a deer.

  The phone starts to ring. It is probably my sister. I lie in bed, listening to the ring.

  When my sister had her second baby a couple of months ago I told her, “That’s weird.”

  “What is?” she asked.

  “You just made another death in the world.”

  “Fuck off,” she said. I guess she thought I was referring to our brother.

  “All right,” I told her. “Okay.” But she’s been a little bit angry at me ever since. She’s been a little mean, as if I were responsible for the fact that we all have to die sometime.

  My husband and I both just let the phone ring. It’s too early and soon enough, after five rings, it stops. I hope it wasn’t the office calling me back.

  I will tell him. Any minute now I’ll say it. “Imagine what it’s like to lose your opposable thumbs, to have them bone up into hard hooves. It was scary at first,” I’ll say. “How do you think deer open doors?” I’ll ask him.

  “I don’t know. How?” He’ll think I’m telling him a joke.

  “They don’t.”

  If I tell him, though, maybe he could build a special door for me. He’s handy like that. A door that doesn’t require opposable thumbs. Still, he’ll want to know where I’m going at night. And what would I say? Out with the other deer? He wouldn’t like that. All the deer around here have been forced out into the open by the new construction. They get hit by cars all the time. He won’t want me to go out with the deer. So where would I go? Back to the nightclub? The bouncer would be surprised to find a deer trying to enter a club as nice as his, but he’d let me in. “It takes all kinds,” he’d say, throwing open a velvet curtain on the room. Just knock three times and whisper low. The song says something about castanets and silhouettes. I’d scan the nightclub for Erich. Couples would sit around small cocktail tables, snapping their fingers in time to the rhythm of the song. A scent would hit me and I’d turn into it just like a movie star slapped across her face. Beautiful with a fever. I’d rev my hoof across the dance floor. I’d smell thick lips. I’d smell the blood of an animal the kitchen staff was preparing. I’d lick my lips, slowly, letting my pink tongue dangle out of my black mouth a little, just like some animal waiting by the side of the road for the driver who killed it to come back one more time and kill it again.

  I sit up in bed now and spread out the skin of my stomach. The hole the tick made has swelled up into a bead, a pink bead of skin, like some new growth. I pick at it but it is hard and I can’t get much purchase on it. I rest the tip of one finger on the spot as if my finger were a stethoscope. I try to listen to what is happening underneath and I think I hear something. There is something going on under there. A rumbling. Maybe he didn’t get the head out. It’s not his fault. It’s hard to get the head out and he’s squeamish when it comes to hurting me. Even when I ask him to.

  “I wonder if I have Lyme disease,” I finally say to him but this is actually a minor fear, a made-up fear, compared to what I am really thinking about: my tail, my hooves. He turns to look at me. I try again. “I mean I’ve been thinking a lot about deer.” He has a seat beside me on the bed, raising his eyebrows. But that is not quite what I mean and so this time I try to be honest with him. I say it. “I mean I think I’m becoming a deer.”

  “You think you’re becoming a deer?” he asks.

  Erich called me at work yesterday to tell me what he wanted to do to me. He said he wanted to see me. He said he wanted to eat my roast-beef pussy. One thing very general, one thing very specific. It made it difficult for me to breathe, hearing those very specific words. No one had ever said that combination of things to me before. I was shocked by how powerful those words were. I started to think that maybe he actually wanted to kill me. Thus, the reference to beef. Thus, “I’d fuck you to death.”

  After he hung up I thought about Becky and Tom Sawyer in the cave, though I haven’t read that book in over twenty years. I don’t think Tom would ever talk that way to Becky. I couldn’t actually remember what happened to them down in the cave or why they were there but I know that danger was nearby and Tom was keeping Becky safe. There were bad men in the cave, bad men who filled the cave with the stench of their badness. I bet Becky could smell it. I bet it made her think differently about Tom. Maybe she would have been interested to hear the things those bad men wanted to do to her.

  This morning I can see through the living room into the kitchen. I can see the mailboxes waiting by the edge of the road. Lust makes room, the way a bomb exploding makes room, clearing things out of the way. I listen for a moment, trying to position my ear near my heart. I can’t get my head very close. Ticktickticktickticktickticktick. I don’t actually hear any bombs ticking. I’m just worried for m
y husband.

  “You’re becoming a deer?” he asks me again. My husband is looking out the window. He is wincing. Maybe he is thinking about something else, something that happened at the heavy-machinery plant. Maybe he is thinking about another woman, perhaps one we knew in high school who didn’t have problems like this.

  We sit in silence. I don’t want to say anything more just yet. I want, for a moment, to let it be.

  “Will you show me?” he asks and doesn’t wait for an answer before telling me what to do. “Show me tonight.”

  That’s not what I thought he’d say.

  “Okay,” I tell him very quietly. “I will.”

  “A deer,” he says.

  “A deer,” I repeat.

  “All right,” he says, “all right,” and then he leaves without kissing me good-bye.

  “Bye,” I yell.

  He grabs his coat and the front door slams shut, not because he’s angry but because the wood has swollen and in order to get our front door to shut, one has to slam it closed. Or maybe he is also angry and he is just disguising his slamming in the swollen door.

  I stay in bed during the day, while he is at work, as if I really am sick. In the bed I feel something foreign bloom in between my husband and me, an intruder, a mold. I see my husband with eyes that don’t know him, as if he quite suddenly became a man from Brazil, or grew a beard, or started speaking in a Southern accent. As if, after eleven years of marriage, he somehow had all of his secrets returned to him, made secret again.

  We don’t talk about it at dinner or even after dinner, when we’re watching TV or brushing our teeth. Instead he tells me a story about a guy at work who’s been running a credit card scam and got caught. “You never would have suspected this guy,” he says. “Older fella, balding and stooped. He didn’t seem smart enough. He didn’t seem like he cared enough about being rich to become a criminal.”