Husk

by Dave Zeltserman

  ‘Is your family from New York?’

  ‘Yep. I was born and raised in Staten Island. My parents are still in the same house I grew up in.’

  ‘You had me fooled,’ I said. ‘I thought you might’ve been from Massachusetts since I found you at that rest stop.’ Somewhat stubbornly, and I guess as a way to explain myself, I persisted, adding, ‘It just made sense given it’s Labor Day weekend and you were traveling from your home somewhere in Massachusetts to school in New York.’

  Jill shook her head. ‘I was visiting my jerk ex-boyfriend at his parents’ house. We were driving back to the city together, and you know the rest.’

  Her mood had darkened just as mine had earlier. Her hand slipped free of mine, and we stood silently for the next several minutes staring out at the city below. She didn’t let her dark mood last. Before too long she asked, ‘You couldn’t tell from my accent that I was a New Yorker?’

  I turned to see that she was grinning at me. The truth was I couldn’t tell their accents apart. It was only that some of them were harder for me to understand than others.

  ‘You had me fooled.’

  ‘Gawd, I hope I didn’t pick up any sort of Massachusetts accent from spending time with that jerk. That would be wicked awful!’ Her grin grew into the mischievous kind I’d seen earlier. ‘It’s funny, you don’t have a New Hampshire accent.’

  I shrugged. ‘I can’t help it. I’ve been there my whole life, but I’m not sure what a New Hampshire accent is supposed to sound like.’

  She thought about that and shook her head. ‘Now I think of it, I can’t really say either. I know what a “Bahston accent” sounds like, and a Maine one, and even a Rhode Island accent. But I have no idea what a New Hampshire one is supposed to be. Maybe you have the prototypical one, and I just never realized it until now.’

  We stood where we were for several minutes, and then I followed Jill a quarter of the way around the observation deck. Where we were standing now, we were facing north, and Jill pointed out a large area of greenery and trees that lay straight ahead and told me it was Central Park. She pointed out a winding body of water to my right as the Hudson River, and another to my left as the East River. Dusk had arrived, but we continued to stand motionless, looking out at the sights before us. Before too long Jill’s hand found mine again, and not much after that lights began to turn on throughout the city below us. As it grew darker, I looked up and was amazed at how few stars were in the sky. I’d never bothered to notice that about their world before.

  I’m not sure exactly how long we stood like that. Without the sun to guide me, I have a hard time judging time. Maybe it was an hour, maybe longer. But the whole time we stood in silence, until at the very end Jill told me in a soft, dreamy voice how much she loved being up there at this time of night. ‘The city just looks so peaceful and calm right now. But I’ve hijacked you long enough. It’s been a long day, and I’m sure you need to be heading back.’

  After we took the elevator down to the ground floor and left the building, we continued north, the sidewalks almost as crowded at that hour as they had been during the day. Jill took me next to Grand Central Station, and walked me through it so I could see the stars they had on the high curved ceiling overhead. There were more there than I had seen in the sky.

  From there we navigated through the station and got in a subway car. Unlike the sidewalks, the car at that time wasn’t nearly as crowded as the one I’d been in earlier. Even if it had been, I don’t believe I would’ve felt the panicky uneasiness that I had earlier. I was getting more used to feeling their heat close to me and being inundated by their scent. Jill was very different from the rest of them, though. From almost the very beginning, I found her scent exotic and pleasant. The same with the closeness of her body to mine.

  We didn’t stay long on the subway car we had taken, and soon had to get on a different one after walking almost half a mile to a different part of the station. After a forty-minute ride, this one took us to where we had a short walk to Jill’s apartment building. I felt a heaviness well up in my chest as we approached it. When we reached my van, which was directly in front of her building’s entrance, both of us hesitated as if we had something we wanted to say to the other.

  I spoke first, telling Jill how much I’d enjoyed spending the day with her. I felt light-headed as I blurted out, ‘Can I see you again? Maybe take you out for a meal?’

  She smiled brightly. ‘I would really like that.’

  I nodded, confused in a way because I was still deceiving myself; and because it didn’t make sense that I would ask her what I did. All I could think then was that it was something that must’ve been building up inside me and had just burst out. I stumbled as I turned toward the van, still trying to sort out why I’d asked her something as impossible as that.

  Jill’s voice made me turn around again. ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.

  I stared at her blankly before fully making sense of her question. Because if I was asking to see her again, that meant I was planning to stay in New York and not drive off so I could start to fill up the burlap sacks with stragglers and any others I could find before starting my journey back home. ‘I’ll be sleeping in the back of the van until I find a place to stay,’ I said.

  ‘Uh-uh. That’s way too dangerous.’ In the glare of the streetlight I could see the determination hardening her slender face as she came to a decision. ‘You rescued me earlier today, I’m rescuing you now. You’re going to sleep on my couch until you find a place. And I won’t take no for an answer.’

  Since I still wasn’t ready to accept the truth, all I could think was that this had gone too far. That I had let it go too far. But I couldn’t keep myself from nodding.

  SEVEN

  I lay on Jill’s couch fully awake, my nerves on edge the same as if I were smelling out a kill-crazy catamount skulking about the room. Even if earlier I hadn’t come to the realization that I had, I wouldn’t have had a chance of falling asleep that night. To be fair to Jill and her apartment, I’d never slept in their world before, never even attempted to, even the times when my trips had lasted more than forty-eight hours.

  Back at the clan, when the fires are extinguished it’s so utterly dark at night that you’re unable to see your fingers an inch from your eyes, and the only noises in the night’s air are animal, bird, and insect sounds, and the wind rustling through the trees or rain pattering against the thatch of our homes. Here it was two hours after midnight, and it wasn’t much darker than dusk and the noises drifting in from cars, sirens, horns, dogs barking, and even some of them shouting and laughing as if nobody else mattered, were enough to keep any of my kind awake. Even if all that hadn’t been a problem, the air here would’ve kept me from sleeping. Back home the air is clean and soothing; this city air made my eyes itch and left an unpleasant taste in my throat. And while I was sure the couch Jill offered was a fine piece of furniture, it was far softer than the bed I was used to.

  But there was far more to it than those problems, and no matter where I was sleeping it wouldn’t have been possible – not after finally accepting the truth that my spending the day with Jill wasn’t a lark, as I’d earlier tried convincing myself, and I wasn’t just playing out a peculiar fantasy of being one of them for a day.

  Hours ago I’d finally accepted what I must’ve known early on, at least deep inside. That I would stay in New York with Jill as long as she would let me be near her. That for her, I would abandon my clan and kind. And what was more, I was pretty much powerless to do anything other than that.

  This realization was staggering, and it left my mind bombarded by worries, guilt, and questions, so much so that it was hard to stay on that couch. As tempted as I was to bolt from it, I didn’t want Jill waking to find me crazily pacing her apartment.

  As far as I knew, none of my kind had ever tried living among them. So I had no idea whether what I was planning to do was even possible, though it didn’t seem so.

  I ne
ver bring our food with me when I travel into their world. It seems too reckless to do something like that. It would be bad enough if the police stopped me, especially if they looked in the back of the van after I had already started filling up the burlap sacks. If they were ever to find a meat stew that I’d brought from home and they realized what it was, that could be disastrous for the clan. When I was given my responsibilities, I would have cold sweats worrying about something like that happening, thinking that if it did it might cause them to search deeper into the wilderness to root out my clan. Since I never brought our food with me, the cravings would leave me jittery the times I was gone for two days. Even now, when it has been less than twenty-four hours since I last ate one of our meals, I was feeling the cravings stirring inside me.

  As I worried myself more about how the cravings would affect me, I remembered a year when we’d had an exceptionally harsh winter that had brought snow and ice deep into the spring, leaving us snowbound almost two months longer than the elders had expected. This was well before I had taken on my current responsibilities, and for many years I, like the rest of the clan, had tried to forget about this nightmarish time. Now I tried to remember as much of it as I could. I was a teenager then, probably no older than thirteen, and my great-uncle Jedidiah had the responsibility of collecting them for the clan. We ended up running out of meat and had only our vegetables and grains to eat, and it was almost three weeks before Jedidiah was able to bring more of them back to us. The cravings near the end of those three weeks had gotten so bad that it left us on the verge of lunacy. I remembered the elderly writhing on the ground in agony, womenfolk rocking back and forth as they gripped their knees and screamed out gibberish, my own ma and pa with their eyes squeezed tight, their hands clutching at their faces as if at any moment they might start ripping apart their own flesh. In my own situation, I remembered how feverish I was and how it seemed like I was looking out into a blood-soaked fog.

  It was only the day before Jedidiah returned with his pickups that we decided we couldn’t wait, and in our madness chose one of our own for the slaughtering ritual. This is the only shameful occurrence I know of where a clan has done this, and in this case it was a slow-witted boy who was a fourth cousin of mine, who I believe was the same age as myself. It was all for nothing, though. Once the slaughtering and the preparation were complete, the smell of the simmering stew made many of us nauseous, and those who tried to eat it found themselves violently ill after only a few minutes. Three of the clan who’d been poisoned by the stew, including a direct aunt of mine, ending up dying within the week. Whatever the physiological differences are between us and them, we learned then that it makes it impossible for one of our own to be chosen.

  I sank into despair as I thought more of that dark period in my clan’s history. If this was the way we were after three weeks, how could I possibly hope to stay with Jill in this city? Soon my thoughts began drifting again and again to what seemed like the only answer. That I would need to find a place where I could continue the slaughtering rituals and prepare the meat on my own. After ruminating more deeply on the matter, I decided I couldn’t do that. If I were ever discovered, which was likely in a city like this no matter how careful I was, the knowledge of what I was and what I was doing would ruin Jill. She would never be able to understand it, and would look at me as some sort of blood-crazy maniac, and I couldn’t fault her if that happened. No, if I was going to live with Jill as I hoped, I was going to have to live as one of them.

  That was the conundrum torturing me. If I stayed, the cravings were going to become something awful; but as long as there was a chance I could be with Jill, I couldn’t leave.

  Before this day, my lot in life seemed cast in stone: until I died, I would be with my own kind and do what the clan required of me. My path had seemed simple and unalterable.

  While I’d come across romance in novels, the concept of romantic love had eluded me, appearing even more foreign and puzzling than their custom of gift-giving. There certainly was never any romance between Patience and me during our short-lived marriage. As required by the clan, we had sexual relations each night while she was capable of conceiving, but it was a joyless and at times distressing activity where I felt as if I were forcing myself on a feral creature who despised me. There was never any tenderness between us. Never any trust. We barely spoke to one another, and looked at each other even less. All I felt when she died was relieved and grateful.

  That’s not to say it’s impossible for tenderness to exist within the marriages in our clan. After enough years a small degree of tenderness might possibly develop between a husband and a wife, but I’ve seen scant evidence of it – and certainly nothing approaching the romantic ideals I’d read about. My own ma and pa have as little to do with one another as possible, and even though they share a bed I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard them speak to each other when it wasn’t necessary, other than ill-tempered words. It makes sense for it to be this way. Women are uprooted from everything they know and everyone they are close to so that they may move to a foreign part of the country and become the wife of a man they’ve never met and live among strangers. Because of the distances and the risks of having our kind travel within their world, there’s never any visiting between clans, so these women are never going to see any of their blood family again unless one of them ends up being married off to the same clan. And while customs within the clans might be similar, there are still differences that, understandably, may seem foreign and discomforting to these unhappy new members. From what the elders have told us, only the slaughtering rituals and meat preparation must remain unchanged among the clans; everything else could be altered to suit the circumstances of the individual clan. It’s no wonder that our women are so miserable when they’re married off, and why the men in our marriages end up being no happier.

  I’m twenty-eight, so I’m still young enough for my clan to arrange another marriage for me, but there is little likelihood of that happening. My kind can be a suspicious and superstitious breed, and with Patience dying so young and so shortly after our marriage the other clans would be wary of sending me another of their daughters. I had nothing to do with her death. It really was from a tooth abscess, and if she had ever told me that her tooth was aching I would’ve made sure it had gotten yanked out. But she never trusted me, just as I never trusted her. And so she died, and I became someone unworthy of marriage, even if those words went unspoken. I accepted that and grew to greatly prefer the idea of a solitary life, especially understanding that another marriage could very well be more wretched than the one I had with Patience. But today everything had changed.

  Love at first sight. I’d read about that in several of the novels, and when I was informed that I would be marrying a girl from the Webley clan I indulged myself in the fantasy that I and this Webley girl would fall in love at first sight, even though I wasn’t quite sure what that would be. No surprise that the opposite happened, and I bitterly told myself that these books were lies, just as the ideal of romantic love had to be a lie. Now I knew otherwise.

  I can’t say I fell in love with Jill immediately upon seeing her, but I know that I did the moment she looked into my eyes, even if at first I refused to believe it. But it’s what happened. From that moment, I couldn’t think of her as one of them. It was far more than that, though. This dizzying sensation overtook me and made my knees weak, and it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. And each time she smiled at me, it took my breath away and made me feel almost as if my heart might stop. When I finally stopped lying to myself, I accepted that her smiling was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen, or could hope to see.

  When we held hands that first time, I became hers forever. I might not have been willing to admit it at that time, but at some deep primordial level I understood that as long as she wanted me I would never leave her. That I needed her as much as I needed to breathe air, and that I would suffer whatever I had to for her happiness. Even
the cravings.

  I knew my feelings for Jill weren’t one-sided. I had seen it in her eyes and in her smile, and felt it in the warmth of her touch. And I had sensed it in her as strongly as wolves might sense fear. Her feelings for me might not last, though. I knew there was the possibility that she might grow cold to me. It could even happen the next time I saw her. She might wake up and leave her bedroom and look at me as if we were strangers – or worse, see me as the predator that I’d been in their world – and act as if yesterday had never happened. It would be cruel if that were the case. To give me a taste of something so wonderful and intoxicating and joyful only to just as quickly take it away. But if that were to happen, I still wouldn’t look at Jill as one of them. I would leave her unharmed. Somehow I’d find a way to continue with the responsibilities required of me by the clan, and I’d try to forget how different life could be.

  So I lay there and worried that in the light of the new day Jill would look at me differently, and that the romance I believed existed between us would be dead. And I worried equally about how bad the cravings would get if she continued to look at me the same and I stayed. I also worried (or I guess I should say it was more that I was sickened with guilt) about how I would be betraying my clan if the latter happened, because I understood fully the hardships I’d be bringing on them. I tried consoling myself that as difficult as my disappearing might be for the clan, at least I wasn’t damning them or leaving them in dire straits. But that was little comfort.

  When I’d left on this latest trip, there was still a month’s supply of meat remaining. There was also another van, not too different from the one I was driving, filled with burlap sacks and rope. It was mechanically sound last time I checked it out, and in good running order. In several days, maybe a week, assuming nothing changes between Jill and me and I am able to stay with her, they’ll come to the conclusion that something has happened to me – either that I’ve been caught or killed by the police or some other calamity has befallen me. My ma and pa will be saddened by this, at least as much as any of us are saddened by any of our deaths. My brothers also, though to a lesser degree. Same with my little sister Olive, and possibly my other sisters if they hear about it at the clans where they were sent for marriage. It’s hard to grieve much when you live the hardened lives we live. But there’s more to it than that. There’s an additional weight that we carry, knowing what we do to survive. We might work hard to convince ourselves that they only have one purpose, and that we’re doing only what nature requires of us, but the knowledge still weighs on us and coarsens us to death. Still, I was sure it would sadden my immediate blood, though it would be far better for them to think of a tragedy befalling me than to know the truth, that I had betrayed them.