The Humanity of Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  Mrs. Ashgrove glanced down at her feet, pale and bare on the banana-skins of the path. “Left them somewhere. Please go in, don’t wait for me. Evan’s in the library, I think.” She looked up, and Cynthia realized it was her eyes that made one uncomfortable: so bright and so direct.

  “But,” said Cynthia’s mother, gesturing helplessly at the garden, a wilderness of thorns and fallen eucalyptus leaves.

  “Come on, Addie,” their father muttered. Their mother took his arm.

  “He’ll tell you I’ve been seeing dragons,” Mrs. Ashgrove called after them.

  She glanced at the children. Her arms were crossed, as if she had a chill. Sequins glittered in the deep V of her gown. “True, you know. At least, it wasn’t a dragon. More like an enormous bat. Horrible.” She looked away then, at the guardhouse, the iron gate. And Roddy, who had barely spoken to Cynthia since his last beating, who for the first time had refused to allow her into his room afterward, although she had brought a cloth and a bowl of water to cool his head because he said the headache afterward was the worst thing about being caned—Roddy clasped Cynthia’s hand.

  “What did you say, Mrs. Ashgrove?”

  Again her flashing gaze. “Something awful flew over the house. But no one else saw it.”

  “Roddy’s seen it,” Cynthia cried.

  “Hush!” Roddy glanced at the house, then grasped Mrs. Ashgrove’s hand and pulled them both away from the path, through the trees.

  Dry leaves crackled beneath them, releasing fragrance. They paused among the slender shadows. “You’ve seen the Nazir, Mrs. Ashgrove,” Roddy said.

  Her eyes widened. “You’ve really seen it, then. You’re not joking.”

  “No.”

  “Oh God,” she whispered. “You’ve told the Colonel? Your father, I mean?”

  “No good. Look, you can’t stay here.”

  “I know.” The brightness in her eyes grew sharper, more concentrated, and became tears. “I know. I’ve got to get away. But I don’t know how.”

  “Roddy could talk to the guard,” said Cynthia, knowing he could persuade anyone.

  Roddy shook his head. “No, he’d be sacked, maybe put in prison.”

  “I’ve thought about going over the wall.”

  “But why not?” said Roddy, excited. He crunched through the leaves and looked up at the wall. “You could do it. We’d help you get up.”

  “There’s broken glass,” Mrs. Ashgrove said. Her voice trembled, and she was not, suddenly, distant and invincible, armored in her golden laugh, fearless with horses and ladders, but one of them.

  “Cynthia,” Roddy said. “Get a blanket from the house. And shoes.”

  Cynthia ran to the house. The door was open, the drawing room empty. They must be in the music room, where it was cooler. She ran up the staircase, past the bust of Kitchener. In the hall she met Hugh.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “We’re playing hide and seek,” she said.

  He frowned.

  “Quick,” she told him, “Roddy’s coming,” and he ran to his room to hide, and years later, when they met in London at a dance, she still felt guilty enough to dance with him and to agree to a drive in the countryside the following afternoon.

  She ran downstairs, a blanket over her shoulder, Mrs. Ashgrove’s riding boots under her arm. In the garden Mrs. Ashgrove pulled on the boots, and when she lost her balance she put her hand on Cynthia’s shoulder for a moment, her touch as chilly and pure as moonlight.

  When Cynthia thinks of Cairo now she remembers a garden party. She and Roddy stood at the window in their nightclothes, looking down. The garden sparkled with fairy lights and everyone looked lovely and somehow distant, the dancers turning slow to the music of the band. They wore transparent wings and garlands of flowers, and laughed as they leaned together, streaks of glitter shining on their cheeks. Her mother held a wand and was tall and beautiful, like a stranger; and the sad donkey’s head with gilt ears was her father. The whole scene often comes back to her in dreams, silent, mysterious. Sometimes it speeds up suddenly, like a film being played too fast. Then it slows down, so that she can read every gesture, every smile. And then it speeds up. And then it slows down. And then it stops.

  Cynthia has never seen the Nazir. Not once.

  She’s tried everything. At first she thought the key was running away. After she was sent to school in England she ran away twice: once as far as Chiddingly on the train, and once into the woods. After the second time she was sent to London to stay with her aunt. She let a boy take down her knickers in the airing cupboard. Soon afterward her mother arrived from Cairo, dabbing tears of rage with a crumpled glove, and decided that Cynthia had better go to France.

  She never saw the Nazir in France, or Italy, or Greece.

  She has drunk ouzo and water. She has planted a bomb in a public garden. She has bathed nude in the Arno. She has marched and shouted. She has been jailed. She has never been married. What does the Nazir want?

  Sometimes she tells herself that the Nazir cannot leave Egypt. She knows it isn’t true.

  Sometimes she tells herself that the Nazir has passed away, that it faded and fell with the old Cairo life, a life crammed into suitcases now, imprisoned in attics.

  She knows it isn’t true.

  THE SONG OF THE NAZIR

  By Saif Al-Atfal

  One and two and one and two

  Carry me off to the moon with you!

  No, my child, my chick, my crow,

  You’re far too small to the moon to go.

  Teeth you have, but they are thin,

  Buds to keep the summer in;

  Claws you lack and gizzard too

  To crack the skull and grind the stew.

  You must stay a little while,

  And paint the mirror with a smile,

  And hope I do not find you lone

  And weak at night, when you are grown.

  Hope I never find you slack,

  Bearing a rifle on your back,

  Riding a camel, tally-ho,

  Into a desert white as snow.

  If I do, I’ll drink your wails,

  And comb your flesh out with my nails;

  Your brains I’ll suck, your marrow tap;

  I’ll wear your stomach like a cap.

  And bits of bone I’ll sprinkle down

  In every street, in every town,

  While the little ones cry, “Oh Nazir, do

  Eat our wicked parents too!”

  Sometimes she tells herself that she’s too old. If she sees the Nazir now it will kill her.

  She knows that this isn’t true either, because of Mrs. Ashgrove. Mrs. Ashgrove saw the Nazir when she was already grown up, though she was younger then than Cynthia is now. Sometimes when her lover is sleeping Cynthia goes to the window, cups her hands at either side of her face and whispers: “Come.” The glass is so cold, like the ice-cream freezer at Groppi’s. She wants to look into the Nazir’s eyes just once and say: “Do you forgive me?”

  “Come,” she whispers. A fragile print of steam on the dark glass. “Come. If you don’t forgive me, then you can take me, I don’t care.” She strikes the glass with her fist, but softly, so as not to wake the man in the bed. She closes her eyes and imagines a claw breaking through from outside.

  Cynthia heard of Mrs. Ashgrove only once after the war. It was springtime and freezing in Paris, where Cynthia was waiting for the baby to be born. Her mother wrote, with barely concealed triumph, that Mrs. Ashgrove had been recognized by Robertson Bey on one of his trips to Cairo. She was seated in a cart, being pulled through the streets by a little Arab girl. Her legs were horribly deformed, as if they had both been broken. She wore a dirty black abaya, but when it slipped back Robertson knew her profile at once, although it appeared she had cut off all her hair. He sp
oke to her, but she refused to speak English and shouted in Arabic for the girl to pull her away, and of course people gathered to see what was going on, and there was nothing poor Robertson Bey could do, being English in Cairo these days. Mad, her mother wrote. Quite mad. She’ll never come home again either, poor girl.

  Cynthia laid the letter on the bed. She drew her shawl about her and huddled closer to the heat of the gas ring. Downstairs the drunken newspaper vendor was coming in; the floors were so thin she could hear the landlady snapping at him to close the door. Thank God, she thought with tears in her eyes. She wished Roddy were still alive so that she could tell him. She knew, of course, what had happened to Mrs. Ashgrove’s legs. The Nazir had caught her after all, but then, before it could bear her away, before she was lost forever, it had dropped her.

  a handful of earth

  silvia moreno-garcia

  He left, crates filled with earth, bound for England. Left us behind, promising to send for us. We believed him. But as the days went by, I realized he’d lied.

  Live forever. Love forever.

  Anca and Ioana looked to me for guidance, as they always did. Technically, they were older than me. I was the last one to be brought to the castle. Mentally, they were younger. Frozen in their teenage years, letting me mother them and lead. I’d had five sisters and watched over them. Authority came naturally.

  My sisters and I had shared a single, cramped room. Some days, when I was tired of doing the washing and watching over the others—our mother died birthing the youngest child, our father was a strict man who filled my days with endless household tasks—I’d look out the window, towards the distant silhouette of the castle. It had no name. We simply called it “the castle.” High upon a cliff, edging towards the sky, while we lived beneath its shadow. I pictured myself going up its hundreds of steps, rushing through the hallways and dancing in rooms decorated with rich tapestries.

  When he swooped from the towers, a piece of night detaching from the sky, why would I resist?

  I had five sisters, but disease took them from us. Tiny little graves marked their passing, though I did not recall their precise location afterwards.

  My father and I sat alone at the table. He was quiet, staring at a distant point.

  We were already half-dead. The air stank, everyone rotting and melting away. So why not live forever?

  I stood in the highest tower of the castle and tried to pierce the night with my eyes, to see beyond the mountains and the forests and gaze upon the distant shores he’d escaped to. I wondered if he thought of us or if the memory had been ripped apart.

  Anca and Ioana were not twins. But they might have been. So close in looks and mannerisms, with the same glossy black hair and knowing eyes. Something about them always made me think of birds of prey. They flew easily, bodies light and bone-thin, their laughter streaming from the rafters.

  Flight did not come naturally to me. My other shape was of a massive white wolf. Smaller than his own wolf body had been, but still a sight to see.

  Anca and Ioana feared the outside; they spoke of arrows raining over a castle. There had been a great battle, though they could not recall if it had taken place in this fortress or another one. Either way, they would not venture with me.

  I rushed through the forest, seeing all manner of things in the dark as I hunted for us.

  He had kept us in our rooms, like the women in a Turkish harem I spied in the etchings of books, before the books were ravaged by moths and time. There we were to patiently wait for him, never stepping outside the walls of the castle.

  There is death outside, he’d warned us.

  Yet he’d gone out, beyond the safe limits of our home and aboard a ship.

  I’d been right. He had never loved. He never loves.

  Not that it mattered now.

  There were Anca and Ioana to look after.

  I ran through the forest, sometimes naked in my woman-shape, sometimes in the wolf’s pelt. I chanced upon a traveler or sneaked into a small house, creeping through the windows. Then I’d drink upon a sleeper, compel him to follow me through the night, and back to the castle. I’d let him ride upon my back, my wolf legs taking us swiftly through the darkness. Up, up. Towards Anca and Ioana.

  In the daytime we slept in the old chapel, inside carved sarcophagi much more ornate than the graves my sisters had been given. Ioana once told me the castle was built upon an older castle and I thought this might be true, for the sarcophagi seemed of a style that did not entirely correspond to the ruined chapel, images of women holding garlands of flowers upon the lids. But even Ioana could not say how long ago the previous castle had stood, or who had been its master.

  Not that it mattered. Now we were its mistresses, laughing as we swirled inside the empty chambers, decked in clothes of ladies who had long turned to dust, ravaged by worms.

  He had not liked our liquid laughter, the way it bounced against the ancient walls. Hating it as though it might peel the bricks away revealing an older layer of stones. He was gone, and we laughed.

  I braided tiny flowers into Anca’s hair while Ioana told us fairy tales from her childhood. Sometimes, she forgot the endings and we invented our own.

  I was careful with my looks and attire. I’d compel Anca and Ioana to bathe with me under the cold rain. Or to pull water from an old well and fill a great copper tub. Anca always said I was the vainest of us all. Ioana said I was the fairest.

  I knew I’d been his favourite and the constant ablutions, the ribbons in the hair and the heavy, old pieces of gold against my skin had been meant all for him. His absence had not altered my routine. I was still prim and careful with my clothes, my hair. Through the years, I had noticed that Anca and Ioana sometimes ignored such niceties, nails caked with dirt and blood. As though they had forgotten, or did not care, to keep any semblance of life.

  When they were in this state—and they sank into this miasma, deeply upon his departure—they might remain still for several days. Not a muscle twitching. Nothing. Just a deep silence interrupted by bouts of terrible ferocity. They sometimes gnawed at each other, not a pup’s nipping, but a full-blown attack.

  In those moments I did not know them and I wondered if this was a sign of their true age. Or simply the vast melancholy that clothed them.

  Either way, I reeled them out of this state. Reeled them into little dances and the clapping of hands. The castle vibrated with our voices.

  And whenever I’d catch myself thinking of him again, my hands running over the maps he had left behind, I’d seek their comfort and their smiles.

  It happened as it was meant to happen. The spell shattering abruptly, as it must.

  Ioana dreamt the castle crashed into the river far below. I held her in my arms as she wept, speaking of a terrible omen. I convinced Ioana and Anca to play hide-and-seek with me, like I’d done with my sisters when we were little. We rushed through long corridors, sneaking beneath archways and laying still, as lizards and slugs crawled beside us. Night creatures, the lot of us, out to play.

  The wind and rain whipped the castle, lightning striking nearby, and we giggled.

  I raced up to the tallest tower of the castle, wolves howling, wind screeching, and stopped in my tracks feeling a tug and a pull inside my skull.

  I knew he was returning home.

  Emboldened by his nearness, Ioana and Anca agreed to step out of the fortress some nights later. We looked for him in the coldness, in the dark, hoping we might encounter his carriage. Instead, we found the woman and the strange man. The woman bore his mark upon her, glowing like an ember. Another sister for our tribe.

  The man was untainted. Strongly-built and blue-eyed. He reminded me vaguely of my stern and resolute father and I stared at him for a long time. I thought of the night I slipped out of my house, headed up to the old castle, and the distant cry of surprise I must have imagined—I must have—springing f
rom my father’s lips, escaping the desolate, little white house.

  We can never look back or we will be turned into pillars of salt. I suppose that is why Anca and Ioana remembered very little of their youth. Perhaps that is why they forgot themselves some days, growing fierce and empty.

  I stared at the man and he stared back at me while Anca and Ioana laughed.

  I think my silence, my eyes upon him, were my salvation.

  I do not know why he did not kill me. Though he tried. He did try. But the stake did not lodge firm against the heart. Distraction? Weariness? Perhaps my own power over mortal minds, woven in that long look, shielded me. Perhaps he felt pity.

  Whatever it was, I woke to the icy knowledge of Anca and Ioana’s death. I did not even have to look at their sarcophagi to know. But I did look. Empty. Not a bit of hair, not a speck of bone. Nothing but dust.

  I knew he was dead too. I felt his absence. I had not been this alone in years upon years. Centuries even. The loneliness reverberated through my body.

  My shift was stained with my own blood upon the breast, where a stake or a knife bit the flesh before he pulled away. I let my usual sense of cleanliness escape me and did not change my dress, eating millipedes and insects for three whole days.

  I feared leaving the chapel. I thought his enemies might return. On the third day there was a great murmur through the fortress, a rumble that startled me and had me pressed against the wall in terror. When I ventured out of the chapel I realized a section of the castle had collapsed. The old bricks had finally given away, groaning and plunging into the river below.

  The sight roused me. I no longer felt safe in the chapel.

  I turned into a wolf and leapt beyond the castle walls, not knowing where I’d go. The icy night air cut my hands, my feet.

  It was easy to find my sisters’ graves. I had not forgotten the location. I had merely buried it away, and now dug through layers of memory until I arrived at the plot of earth that kept their bones. My father’s remains might be there too, though I did not know for sure.