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

by Неизвестный

  They climbed up onto the dock, legs dripping. Towels swirled up around their shoulders, feet left wet prints on the dry wood before they slipped into flip-flops. Then the girls were headed up the grassy slope—not running, not eager. Just dutiful.

  I felt a rush of thankfulness that I’d never had children to disappoint. Though I wished the girls were my own daughters; even I would have shone in comparison with the gray doll.

  I didn’t have his wealth. But still.

  I sank down in the water and spied on them, the waterline beneath my nose. I kept my mouth clamped shut.

  The suit was undertaker-black this time and I could just make out a silver-colored headset. He talked into the headset as the girls went up the hill to meet him. Rose stepped toward him awkwardly, as though she wanted to embrace, but he held up his hand and shook his head and kept talking, turning around as he paced.

  She stepped back.

  It occurred to me then that they would be better off if he died, but it was an academic, impersonal thought. It had nothing to do with me.

  A second later, it also occurred to me that, if someone tore the groom in half, the girls would still have his money but not his cold and persistent disregard.

  It was painful, on the other hand, the loss of a father. Even a negligent father. And with the semi-retarded mother on the brink of death surprisingly often—due to the repeated self-starving activities, which made her subject to sudden hospital visits—the poor girls might be farmed out to relatives. Separated.

  So as quickly as I had it, I gave up the idea of murdering him. You know: murder goes through your head sometimes, and then goes out again. It’s normal, in my opinion.

  Anyway, the thought had no bearing on subsequent events.

  After a while the father stopped talking into his headset mouthpiece. By that time the girls had already given up and drifted into the house without, as far as I could tell, even a smile of greeting from him. Some fragments of his one-sided conversation floated down to me—a few words in the twilight, “value-added,” “deal structure,” and possibly “red herring.”

  Then he, too, disappeared.

  What happened later that night was simple, as I would testify.

  Around one in the morning, as I lay trying to sleep on the hangar floor, my back started to hurt. It hurt a lot, mainly because there was nothing between me and the cracked cement but a threadbare sleeping bag I’d filched from a Goodwill bin in Albany. During the vanishing act I hadn’t wanted to reveal myself by using my jointaccount ATM card. And I had no painkillers left from the prescription stash the girls had given me. So finally, driven by discomfort, I crept out onto the dirt road, pain shooting through my back, grasping my heavy, antique flashlight.

  There was a dim glow in the ground-floor windows of the mansion where lamps had been left on, but through those windows I could see no one was reading by their light. The family was sleeping. So I went around behind the house and up the servants’ stairs, taking off my shoes and walking in my sock feet. I found my room as usual and went to sleep myself, so relieved by the comfort of the bed that I forgot my back.

  But presently I was woken up. There was a loud, terrible noise. Bleary, I didn’t recognize it at first. I thought it was a cat, in pain or trying to mate. Then I understood it was human—human and female. I sat right up, jolted with fear for those sweet girls. I had to do something, so I grabbed my flashlight and ran out into the corridor.

  I didn’t know the house at all, only the route to my secret cubby. So I was stumbling down narrow halls like I was in a maze, basically running blind, this way and that, trying to follow the screaming. It stopped for a short time and I faltered—partly in confusion, partly out of a growing conviction that the sound wasn’t coming from either of the girls. It was too feral and too hoarse. But then it started up again and I ran, tearing up and down halls in a panic, because I couldn’t be sure.

  Eventually I came out into a wider hall where lights were ablaze; a long carpet down the middle, and there was the mother. She wore nothing at all and was so emaciated that her jutting ribs resembled zebra stripes. I couldn’t help but notice she was shaved completely bare beneath. And there was the father, in seersucker pajamas, who seemed to be choking or suffocating her. They were thrashing around, and she must have been the one screaming, though now his fingers were over her mouth. He had the upper hand, clearly, being a man and not mentally or physically impaired. A fear seized me—though behind that fear I was relieved that Snow and Rose were not the targets of this violent assault—and without thinking I threw myself into the fray.

  The flashlight was the only weapon I had, and as I said, it was heavy.

  Before I knew it the groom doll lay upon the ground, the left side of his head stove in.

  Once we understood the gravity of the situation, we threw ourselves into reviving him. I knelt beside him and performed CPR, which I’d learned as a lifeguard in the seventies; Rose, in her frilly teddy-bear nightgown, ran to the telephone and called 911; Snow sat, her face solemn, and held one of her father’s limp white hands, which I noticed was almost effeminate in the perfection of its manicure. Only the starving mother, still naked, hung back, sitting with her knobby knees raised to her chin against the far wall’s wainscoting, beneath the pompous portrait of a wattled ancestor.

  As you may already be aware, if you’re the type to follow crimebeat or society news stories, the father did not die. In fact—and this is little-known—he came out of the hospital substantially improved. It was as though he’d had a personality alteration, the sort that might follow a frontal lobotomy, for instance. He was more pleasant, after he recovered. He had more time for his wife and his children.

  I even heard from my lawyer that he sought professional help for the mother. Not for the retardation, I don’t think—there isn’t much they do for that—but for the eating disorder.

  And me, I never heard from the girls again. Not personally. But they must be better off now, too.

  Because the father, who’d already made enough money to keep the family in fine linens and silverware for life, was no longer interested in business. That part of his character had simply been removed, either by the impact of the flashlight or the subsequent brain bleed. It wasn’t that, as my lawyer assures me, his cognitive capacity was reduced, per se. He still performed adequately in standard aptitude tests.

  No, it seemed to be more a matter of a changed disposition.

  Myself, I didn’t fare so well. It adds up against you when you’re indigent at the time of felony commission, abusing alcohol, etc., even if the crime was committed in defense of a vulnerable party. And there was the trespass issue—although the girls, I have to say, did not desert me in my hour of need. They told the police I’d had their full permission to sleep in the house that night. Sadly, due to their ages—eleven and twelve—that testimony did not go far to clear me of the trespass charge.

  I sometimes dwell on my last moments with those girls. It’s true we sat upon an old carpet, discolored by the father’s spreading blood, between dark-painted walls adorned with grim, even judgmental-looking paintings of the girls’ dead relatives. It’s true our clothing was splattered and gruesome, and the unconscious father was stretched out between us, casting a pall.

  But I gazed up and around, when I’d done all the CPR I could—it was a kind of coma, I guess, though it wouldn’t last long once they got him to the emergency room—and saw the semi-retarded mother. Even a ballerina, I remember thinking, did not deserve to be asphyxiated, and I was still glad I’d come to her aid. Now she was staring at me with eyes as big as saucers, murmuring something in her native tongue. She spoke the dialect of Spanish where everyone has a lisp. I saw Snow, whose lovely face, lit from within, bore the light, drying tracks of tears, and the vibrant Rose, nervous and biting her nails beside a Tiffany table lamp effulgent with orange-pink roses.

  And I was overcome with a curious feeling of belonging and satisfaction, as though I’d eaten a full m
eal and was preparing now for a long winter sleep. With the father lying inert between us in his blue-and-white seersucker, I felt we were all where we were meant to be, all posed in a tableau whose composition had been perfectly chosen a very long time ago. Whatever came afterward, I recall thinking, this was a warm cave full of soft, harmless things.

  ALISSA NUTTING

  Hot, Fast, and Sad

  I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound, our intestines and mouths stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain.

  The guy next to me looks like Elvis because of his fluffy, vaguely pubic black hair. It could be the humidity.

  Across the kettle a man is trying to cry, but his tears keep evaporating before they can roll down his cheeks. For a moment, I have the romantic thought that maybe we are actually boiling in tears, hundreds of thousands of them, the sweetest true tears of infants and children, and not a yellowy, chicken-ish broth.

  I am the only woman in the kettle, which strikes me as odd. I’m voluptuous and curvy; I can quite understand why someone would want to gobble me up. The men do not look so delicious. One, a very old man across the kettle, keeps drifting in and out of a semiconscious state. His head droops down toward the broth, then suddenly, just as the top of his nose touches one of the surface bubbles, he snaps upright and utters a name. “Geoffrey” is the first. The second, “Laura.” We think he is saying the names of his children; we even continue to humor him after he gets to the fifteenth (perhaps he’s moved on to grandchildren?), but as he yells his fortieth name it’s clear that he is not poignant but nuts.

  “He isn’t crazy,” the crying man sobs. “These are the last few moments of our lives. Shouldn’t we all be calling out the names of everyone we’ve ever met? Ever known? Ever loved?”

  “Uh-huh,” agrees Elvis.

  But the man on the other side of the kettle is not so fond of this idea. Teardrop tattoos on his upper cheek indicate victories in multiple prison-kills. Ironically, he is tied up right next to the crying man. “I like quiet,” the tattooed man says.

  The man next to me, he isn’t really my type. His features are feminine in a way that makes him look boyish like Peter Pan. But he’s smiling at me through the spices and trimmings shoved into his mouth; despite them he manages a nice, soft look.

  Since we’re about to be eaten, I lower my standards and choose to be bold.

  “I love you,” I say. It’s coming from a good pretend place. I just want to pack as much into these last few moments as I can.

  Yet when I watch the impact my words have on his face, the effect is very real. Maybe, I figure, since we are all cooking toward the finish line, things are fast-forwarding. Maybe what I’ve just said can actually be true.

  And then it is. Seconds pass and love for him grows suddenly, like ice crystals or sea monkeys, all over my body.

  We stare at one another and he scoots toward me as much as our fetters will allow, enough that our fingertips can touch. “I love you too,” he says. “If we weren’t tied up, I’d give you the softest kiss you’ve ever felt in your life, right on your steamy lips.”

  From the corner of my eye, I notice that the tattooed man, who up until this point hasn’t been very chatty, is suddenly showing multiple upper teeth. His lips pull back wide in order to verbalize the list of things he would do to me, were we not tied up. They are not romantic or legal.

  “You’re a monster,” my lover says to him. “The rest of us shouldn’t have to boil in your juices.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Elvis.

  “We’re dying just like this criminal,” weeps the crying man. “It isn’t fair.”

  Suddenly the old man raises his head. A drop of yellow broth falls from the tip of his nose. “Kelly,” he rasps, then his eyes roll back and his head falls down. I smile.

  “That’s my name!” Glee fills me, though I don’t know why. “He just spoke my name,” I tell my new lover, whose fingertips squeeze my own.

  “Kelly.” My lover whispers my name into the hot mist.

  “What if it’s some kind of death list?” the crying man snivels. “What if that old codger has been here for ages, been in pots with hundreds of people who’ve all been eaten, but he always gets left because he’s so old. It would drive a person crazy. It might make him repeat over and over again the names of people he’s watched die in a halfhearted attempt to bring them back.” After pondering this, the crying man lets out a long, shrill sob that is chirp-like. It reminds me of a parakeet I had when I was young. I try to remember its name.

  “Thomas,” the old man says.

  “That’s my name,” my lover says and laughs, bouncing a little in the water. “He just said our names back-to-back. The power of our love, it planted them in his head!”

  The tattooed man makes a gagging noise.

  For fun, I ask everyone to please mouth his name, just to see if the old man will say it next. I encourage them to hurry up and do it while the old man’s head is flaccid beneath a layer of broth.

  “James,” whimpers the crying man.

  “Fred,” sings Elvis.

  “Fuck off,” mutters the tattooed man.

  Thomas and I watch the old man with anticipation. Finally his old head surfaces, and he gums the broth dripping down his cheeks before saying, “Cinderella.”

  “See,” my lover coos. “Our names before; it was magic.”

  I want this moment to stay. I want it to multiply on and on with the unnatural growth of things just before death, speeding off the pure fat of life’s last moments. I want the feeling of our brushing fingertips to breed like cancerous cells.

  When the steel door opens, even the old man sits up and blinks his wet lashes. A chef walks in sharpening a long knife against a stone. “Who first?” he barks. We’re all silent, though I think I hear the old man whisper, “Shirley.”

  “All right then.” The chef points his knife at me and moves it a little like he’s writing his name in the air. “I’ll take you, since you’re the meatiest.”

  I give my lover a farewell glance but suddenly his screams fill the room. “No!” he cries, thrashing madly and fishlike. “Take me in her place. Please, I beg you, make her the very last one.”

  “Yes,” says the chef, but first he twirls his knife at me a little more like he’s casting a spell, just so I know who’s in charge.

  Two men wearing long oven gloves come over and cut my lover’s ropes. He stretches his lips out to kiss me, but is too soon pulled away and carried from the room like a ladder—one man at his shoulders, the other at his feet. “Please,” he begs, “one kiss,” but the two men aren’t as permissive as the cook and they possibly do not speak English.

  “That was so beautiful,” says the crying man, sobbing. “Such love.”

  Despite my grief, I try to live in the moment. “Do you sing?” I ask Elvis-Fred.

  “There’s a moon out tonight,” he croons. The garlic cloves really muffle his vibrato.

  When the chef and his goons reenter, the tattooed man speaks up. “Take me,” he says, “I hate these people.”

  So they take him. As he’s pulled from the water, we see that he also has a tattoo on his arm that reads, “MOM.” This makes Crying-James cry even harder. I should’ve called my mother more,” he laments. “Told her I love her and appreciated her cooking.”

  “This one’s for Mom,” says Elvis-Fred. He begins singing again. “You are the sunshine of my life.”

  Crying-James’s sobs are uncontrollable. His emotion touches me. The ripples in the broth move from his torso over to mine, lapping at my stomach like a soft current. “It will be okay, James,” I assure him. I want to extend my foot across our little bullion pond and wipe his tears with one of my brothy toes, but my legs are bound together at the ankles.

  When the door opens, four men, increasingly sour from the first to the fourth, enter with the chef. “I need two,” he orders. The men grab Elvis-Fred and Crying-James,
who continue singing and weeping, respectively, as they are carried away.

  Alone with the old man it’s very quiet, and I realize how loud the boiling has become. He lifts his head and says, “Tanya.”

  I knew a Tanya once. From a ballet class in high school. I imagine being taken from the kettle and laid onto a silver platter next to a giant cake, and on top of that cake Tanya is posed in a graceful pirouette.

  When they lift the old man from the broth, I’m surprised to see he is missing a leg. I wonder if he arrived with it missing, or if they’d already eaten his leg and then put him back. Without the others, the boiling bubbles feel far more scalding than before. I am bad at science and uncertain if before we had all somehow shared the heat but now I alone bear its brunt. It seems so. I miss my lover, and my willingness to suffer perhaps makes the broth feel hotter as well.

  As the footsteps come, I wonder if there will be anything after death. Perhaps Thomas will be waiting for me on the other side and our new and budding love will be allowed to blossom from the beyond. Then, although morbid, I try to prepare myself for what it will feel like when they cut me up. “There are worse ways to die,” I tell myself, “than being boiled, then sliced with a knife.” But it takes me a while to think of one.

  Finally I imagine being carried out the door to a table where all five of my kettle mates are waiting, forks and knives in their hands, skins still pink from the boiling broth. I imagine Thomas saying he has dibs on my heart, and the others laughing; Elvis singing “Good Night, Sweetheart,” as my carving starts and I lose consciousness to the sounds of battling forks and knives. This daydream dampens the horror of my fate like a bowl placed over a candle. You can bear anything, I tell myself, if you know you’re not alone, and cold air stings my boiling skin as the men lift me into their arms. Their fingers are strong with knowledge; I’m only going where others have already been.

  GINA OCHSNER

  Song of the Selkie

  Having swallowed too many bones, the sea has a bad case of indigestion. This sound of dyspepsia shatters the nerves and Erlen Steves knows that is why no one wants to live at the lighthouse. It doesn’t help matters that three men died during its construction. When the mail boat ferries him to the docks, this fact is just one of the many things Erlen knows to keep quiet about in the presence of the local coasties.