by J. A. Rock
When I was a child, my family lived in a landlocked neighborhood full of slung-up houses and street prowlers with their hardened slouches, long strides, and pockets full of knives. I envied those toughs for what I believed at the time was an elegant attempt at anarchy. I too wanted people to fear me, to cross the street when I approached. To hold tighter to the worthless things they valued in case I made a lunge.
My parents never took my sister and me to the ocean. They told few stories, and those they did tell were told blandly. I knew from a young age a bare-bones legend of the Minotaur—a beast who was half woman and half bull, who, forty years before I was born, had terrorized Rock Hill, killing indiscriminately, kidnapping children and whisking them to her lair. She had taken only wicked children, according to my parents.
So be good, Thera.
And pay attention. And don’t hit.
And eat everything on your plate.
But I didn’t know the story. I had seen paintings of the labyrinth, and they looked like fairy-tale illustrations of a castle. Draped red silk below the windows; a vast exterior of stone and wood. A massive clock tower and a ceiling made of glass. And yet it was a prison. It had kept the beast contained for decades. On the only long drive my family ever took, we had a view of the promontory, and I stared up at the black cliff and its mask of fog and imagined I could see that labyrinth through the mist. Tried to visualize what lay inside. Oddly, no matter how generously I offered evil a place in my fantasy, my vision was one of beauty. Fountains and ancient trees and rib-thin cats finding holes in green hedges.
The town still bears scars you might not notice unless you set out to look for them. There are places where grass doesn’t grow, rooms with rusty stains on their walls. Houses where half the bricks are old and half are new. Piles of debris behind crumbling buildings. A mass grave in the town center, simple white stones around two water-filled ditches dug into the earth to form a cross. Every year, on Unity Day, people throw white flowers into the cross, until it looks full of drowned Ophelias.
The children I played with growing up were terrified of the beast. Abby Serona said the creature was sure to escape the labyrinth someday and return to Rock Hill. Sara Reed asked me once what church my family went to, and when I said we didn’t go to church, she told me the beast had my soul. She said I’d be dragged into the labyrinth and would never leave, even in the afterlife. I knocked Sara into a puddle and clobbered her blond head with a handful of mud, but deep down, I was scared she was right.
The beast was shadowy in my mind. I pretended I was living during her reign, and that each day she galloped through the town on cloven hooves. She ate victims slowly. She tore pregnant women open with her claws and whipped men’s faces to pulp with her tail. How she could, in stories, be both hooved and clawed puzzled me—until I heard from other children that she was magic, that she could transform at will.
I imagined we were tangled, the beast and I. She pulled my dreams down like curtains and stuck her laughing head into the empty space. And instead of cowering, I laughed back. I began to have fantasies where I tamed her. Slipped a golden bridle over her horrible head and became her master.
After three weeks, I was moved out of the solitary room and into a small bedroom with sticky floorboards and twin narrow cots. I was assured I would have a cellmate soon, but days went by and the other half of the room remained unoccupied.
Some nights I would jump on one bed for a while before leaping the small chasm to the other bed and curling up there. I could be quite childish, was prone to acting younger than my years. We all were, even the seventeen-year-olds—the girls who would be leaving Rock Point in a few months’ time. It was a place that, despite its sporadic strictness, gave us all the illusion of not being alone, and perhaps we believed that if we never acted like adults, we’d never be forced out into the wider world to confront the magnitude of our desolation.
I was allowed to stop wearing the Rock Point grays and request regular clothes in addition to the gold sweater and jeans I’d worn to story time. Denson searched the secondhand shops in town and found me some black trousers a size too small that squeezed my waist and rode up my ass. She also brought me a few sweaters, a couple of skirts I swore I’d never wear—though after an hour in the trousers I was rethinking that vow. And a variety of hair clips, which I named and set up in various army formations on my tiny desk, and guided them through battles with the Minotaur.
I had to take pills each morning—pills that would apparently help rid my body of its dependence on other pills. I didn’t like how they made me feel—sluggish and sad—and so I took to hiding them under my tongue and spitting them into the back of a dresser drawer once Denson was gone.
Bitsy and I began to request the same chores. We had lessons together, but we wanted more time to talk. Sometimes she fell asleep on the spare bed in my room, but the night monitor always came looking and hauled her back to her own room. One night, Bitsy rolled under my bed when Van Narr came looking. Van Narr seemed surprised not to find Bitsy in my room, and I think we would have gotten away with it if Bitsy hadn’t giggled.
Van Narr damn near pulled Bitsy out by the hair. Bitsy was still giggling. I slapped her side as she was dragged past me—just to let her know she’d ruined things.
I wanted her to be my sister. I had a storybook understanding of sisters. They whispered secrets and held your hand, and you dug in the dirt together and went exploring. They had ribbons in their hair, and they were usually in some way tragic. Too shy and gentle to withstand the brute world’s lashings, they coaxed fawns and sang sweetly and ended up vanishing in the woods or dying of some obscure fever. They were nauseating and lovely, a hindrance and a blessing.
I never wanted to be anyone’s tragic, ribboned sister; I only wanted to have one. Someone I could protect and disdain and kiss goodnight. Bitsy was not tragic or sweet, but she was bitterly fun. Her scorn was almost buoyant, a sort of hobby that brought her a casual, infectious joy. And—I see it now; I didn’t then—it was a veneer. She cared deeply about what others thought of her, and she was frightened of being on her own.
My real sister, Rachel, had been skilled at keeping her distance. She was three years older than I, but the gap seemed more like ten years. She was tall and thin and careful and grave. We engaged in minimal exploring as children, and after our parents died, she was unable to believe I remembered nothing of the accident. I became suspicious and creaturous to her—a dangerous thing that might entrap you in a murky place and toss you riddles until you earned your freedom or died trying.
Rachel and I lived ten years with Auntie Bletch, my mother’s sister. In that time, Rachel grew taller, more elegant, until finally she became a matter of some interest to a diligent farmer’s son named Marc who treated her like a prospective hire: Can you cook? Can you lift? Can you pluck a chicken?
Rachel spent hours at the shops in town, trying on dresses and finding private flaws. I was bored and told her all the dresses were unflattering even when they weren’t. I was cruel, and I knew it, but I wanted her to hurt. She’d hounded me for years after the accident for details I couldn’t give. She’d had her fingers in all my worst wounds. I was only fighting back.
Auntie Bletch was quite ill by that time, and I can only assume Rachel had envisioned a future spent as Auntie’s nursemaid, or as a housekeeper in Rock Hill’s dolorous inn, and had chosen instead a future with Marc—who could provide for both of them, and could contribute some money to Auntie’s care as well.
Rachel went to live with Marc’s parents until the wedding. I would have felt abandoned, had she not already abandoned me years before, and had I not become recently engrossed in two consuming hobbies: raiding Auntie Bletch’s medicine cabinet, and fighting. Twice I was suspended from school for punching other girls. The second time the school included a note saying I was “no lady.” Which felt like a relief, like being assured by a doctor that I did not have some terminal illness.
Auntie Bletch had a pharmace
utical bounty—pills of all colors and sizes in beautiful glass bottles, with lists of side effects and warnings as lovely as parade banners. May cause drying of the throat. Take this medicine WITH or AFTER MEALS.
I was careful at first about not taking what Auntie Bletch truly needed in order to manage her illness. I stole her indulgences—the biweekly painkillers that blunted smaller aches after the narcotics had done the heavy lifting. The muscle relaxants that were to be used only as needed. The sleeping pills that left me half awake, drifting and wetting the world around me into a dream.
But soon I grew careless and took no note of what I was stealing. Opioids, phenacetin, some strange potion Auntie Bletch had bought at a market stand . . . In school I sweated and daydreamed, and on the playground I snarled at anyone who came near. I said things I knew would make them come near—things about their noses, their mothers, their ripped tights and paltry lunches—and when they approached I lashed out, tangling fingers in their hair or punching them soundly on the mouth. I was detained, I was suspended, I was scolded, I was struck with a ruler, and in the end it was suggested to Auntie Bletch that I be homeschooled. But Auntie was barely in a state to walk, and I got the sense that if she had been able to move efficiently her choice would have been to strangle me, not educate me.
She had, for a time, put the disappearance of her medications down to her own delirium—“I must’ve forgotten how many I took”—and then later to the doctors. “They’re not giving me enough. I tell them I need more, and they do nothing, the uncharitable slobs. Nothing.”
But at some point she must have looked at me—foaming at the mouth, dazed into a bizarre ecstasy, squirming in graceless arcs just to feel the damage inside me—and figured it out. That wasn’t the last straw. The last straw was the wedding. But she was furious. “I am frightened of you, Thera. Truly frightened.” She put a padlock on the medicine cabinet, which I learned to pick with bobby pins. I believe she began to think then about sending me away.
The girls’ home stood a few hundred feet from the cliff’s edge. Girls in the east ward could see through the smeary windows to the precipice. There was iron fencing around the entire property, but rumor had it that years ago, two girls had escaped and wandered off into a fog. They’d gone over the cliff, their bodies discovered days later, broken on the rocks, the waves slipping salt into their hair.
Another legend had a girl climbing into the next-door prison yard and being torn apart by criminals. The prison was a solid, gloomy building, separated from the girls’ home by both our iron fence and by its own chain-link barrier, topped with coils of barbed wire. There was much speculation among the girls that one day a killer would escape the prison and come make a mess of the prettiest girls here. I was, in odd moments, disappointed that I was not considered pretty enough to be the imagined killer’s victim. That dubious honor went to Wendy Mabler, or little Rina Graham, or Samantha Bonner. These moments of envy came suddenly, and I loathed them. I didn’t give a shit about being pretty. Yet it’s hard sometimes, in a world that promises you the most basic treasures in exchange for being a looked-upon thing, not to wish your face had been a better construct.
Rock Point offered a dubious shelter to girls up to age eighteen. At eighteen, you were turned out, or you took a job at the home—cooking, cleaning, or taking care of the infants. About half the girls left, and half of those returned. Most who left got married, and group outings to town were considered by many girls to be opportunities for husband searching. Bessie Holmes, when she chaperoned, made sure each girl was as well-groomed as possible, and pointed out young men in the sort of clothes that suggested they wouldn’t be above marrying an orphan.
To me, the most fascinating of Rock Point’s dregs was the cook, Tamna Fen. She had been at Rock Point since the age of nine, and by the time I arrived she had stayed on for three years after her eighteenth birthday. She was a skinny white girl whose silver-blond hair looked like a bleached tree branch—so filthy that it had formed matted, crisscrossing rolls. Her eyes were too large and rimmed in purple. She moaned and hummed, like she was starting a song she couldn’t quite remember. Her fingers were always moving, twisting her frayed hair or scratching at a raised mole on her neck.
She cooked so much corn. Corn casseroles and stews, over-roasted ears, and stir-fries that were primarily yellow kernels. Most girls barely noticed her, but I volunteered to work in the kitchen. Not cooking—I was hopeless there—but stocking shelves and carrying large pots to the sink to drain the water from them. I wanted to listen to Tamna moan and sing. What came out of her was mostly nonsense, and it did not occur to me for several months that she was perhaps genuinely crazy.
Couples would come to Rock Point sometimes for what Bitsy called “baby shopping.” They all wanted babies. They’d take the leanest, squalliest infants—the ones whose wrists you could pinch and dent like a wet bar of soap—over the healthiest, sweetest girls. I grew to hate them, the couples who held hands and commented to each other in voices that sounded like roadside splats.
“These are sweet girls, Mary. Aren’t they sweet-looking girls?”
“Oh, yes, very sweet.”
But they kept their eyes down and looked at our holey shoes and dirty feet, and they waited to be led to the infants’ ward.
“Aw, Jonathan, doesn’t she look like the Bakers’ girl? We’ll have to tell them their long-lost love child is here. You know, don’t you, that before they were married . . .”
I told myself I didn’t care that no one glanced twice at me. I told myself I didn’t want to be adopted. I’d had parents, and I wasn’t looking for more.
One day, a man stumbled into the kitchen while I was working with Tamna. He had booze on his breath and flecks of food in his beard. He glanced around as though confused. I was startled to see a man—apparently unaccompanied by a wife—and didn’t move or speak at first. His gaze fell on me.
“Well, well.” He leaned back sloppily and stuck his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “How much is the doggie in the window?” He looked me up and down. Then glanced at Tamna, who was staring at him and moaning softly under her breath. “Is this one for sale?”
You’d think, given all the people I’d socked and shouted at over the course of my life, that I’d have been prepared to deal with someone like him. But I could only gaze at him, stunned. My shock increased when Tamna stepped forward. Tiny, ghostlike, she walked right up to him and jabbed him in the chest. “Girls are not for sale, sir, no, no.”
His mouth opened in a small O, and then he grinned. “My mistake.” He turned and walked back out the door, singing to himself, “‘How much is that doggie in the window? The one with the bea-u-ti-ful tail?’”
I said nothing, just went back to scrubbing pans. For several minutes after he left, Tamna repeatedly reached between her legs and grabbed fistfuls of her skirt and what lay beneath it. She tipped her head back and gasped over and over, a moan as quick and hot as a spark behind each breath.
I didn’t eat the corn casserole that night.
One day, Bitsy and I stood in the yard and watched the unloading of prisoners. Through the iron and the chain-link fences, we saw three men, two tall and one short, chained together at the ankles. They shuffled across the ridge toward the prison entrance, ushered by a guard with a club. The truck that had delivered them had a slatted trailer, as though for transporting animals. The back was open now, and I saw straw bales, jumpsuits, canvas bags, nets, and chains.
I nudged Bitsy. “Look at all the stuff in the prison truck. What’s it for?”
She turned from the prisoners to look at the truck. “Well, the chains, it’s obvious. The bags must be for carrying out dead bodies.”
I felt sick and fascinated.
“A shame.” Bitsy was back to watching the new prisoners. “They’ll stay there until they start to rot, and then they’ll be taken to the labyrinth.”
“How do you know?”
“Most prisoners end up there if they’ve done
something unforgivable.”
“Well how do you know those men have?”
“You can tell just by looking at them.”
“Have you ever seen the labyrinth?”
She shook her head. “My mother has been to the spot where the beast was found as a baby.”
“What do you mean?”
Bitsy studied me with a chilly sort of pity I wished I could learn to imitate. “You don’t really know the story, do you?”
I hated to let on when I didn’t know things, especially to Bitsy. “No,” I admitted finally. “Just that there’s a beast who lives in a labyrinth. She’s got the head of a bull. And the labyrinth is like a palace.”
Scorn in Bitsy’s gaze. “That’s not even half of it.” And so she sat with me on the grass and told me the story of the Minotaur. She told it well, as though she had rehearsed it many times. I tore blades in half, looked for clovers to mangle, and listened.
“Long ago,” Bitsy began, “a master wood-carver had three daughters. The wood-carver was very ill—about to die—and she didn’t know which daughter to leave the shop to. So she asked them each to make her something to demonstrate their prowess.” Bitsy glanced at me, as though to make sure I was properly enraptured. “The eldest daughter carved a boat. Lavishly structured and grandly painted. Yet as soon as she set out to sea in it, a storm tipped it, and she drowned.
“The youngest daughter constructed a bracelet of the finest wooden beads. Each bead was intricately carved with the topography of a continent, so that the whole thing looked like the world pulled apart. It was a beautiful piece, but looking upon it caused an instant sadness, a sense of unfixable chaos.”
She paused to glance at me again. I whipped her elbow with a clover. “Well, go on.”
She cleared her throat and removed her arm from my reach. “And the middle daughter built a white wooden bull, set to lead the parade of animals her dying mother had been carving for a carousel. The bull was handsome and alarming, its shoulders broad, its head small, its eyes blank, and its horns curving like scythes. The middle daughter decorated it with scars and rips in its hide. It looked as if you might push aside its tattered flesh like curtains and find something beyond imagination inside.”