The Humanity of Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  My sluggish daydreams were phantoms of the field, negatives of its buckled hide and stealthy plants, and the whispered words Eastern Washington, South America, Norway. Scientists might speculate about the geological method of the mounds’ creation until doomsday. I knew this place and its sisters were unnatural as monoliths hacked from rude stone by primitive hands and stacked like so many dominos in the uninhabited spaces of the globe. What were they? Breeding grounds, feeding grounds, shrines? Or something utterly alien, something utterly incomprehensible to match the blighted fascination that dragged me ever closer and consumed my will to flee.

  Hart’s call yanked me from the doldrums. He was drunk. “You shoulda stuck around, Ray-bo. We been huntin’ everywhere for you. Cruz ain’t in a nice mood.” The connection was weak, a transmission from the dark side of Pluto. Batteries were dying.

  “Where are you?” I rubbed my gummy eyes and stood.

  “We’re at the goddamned Mounds. Where are you?”

  I spied a tiny glint of moving metal. The Chevy rolled across the way where the road and the mobile homes intersected. I smiled—Cruz hadn’t been looking for me; he’d been trolling around on the wrong side of the park, frustrated because he’d missed the entrance. As I watched, the car slowed and idled in the middle of the road. “I’m here.”

  The cell phone began to click like a Geiger counter that’d hit the mother lode. Bits of fiddle music pierced the garble.

  The car jolted from a savage tromp on the gas and listed ditchward. It accelerated, jounced and bounded into the field, described a haphazard arc in my direction. I had a momentary terror that they’d seen me atop the tower, were coming for me, were planning some unhinged brand of retribution. But no, the distance was too great. I was no more than a speck, if I was anything. Soon, the car lurched behind the slope of intervening hillocks and didn’t emerge.

  “Hart, are you there?”

  The clicking intensified and abruptly chopped off, replaced by smooth, bottomless static. Deep sea squeals and warbles began to filter through. Bees humming. A castrati choir on a gramophone. Giggling. Someone, perhaps Cruz, whispering a Latin prayer. I was grateful when the phone made an electronic protest and expired. I hurled it over the side.

  The college crowd had disappeared. Gone too, the professor and his admirers. I might’ve joined the migration if I hadn’t spotted the cab of George’s truck mostly hidden by a tree. It was the only rig in the parking lot. I couldn’t tell if anyone was behind the wheel.

  The sun hung low and fat, reddening as it sank. The breeze had cooled. It plucked at my hair, dried my sweat, chilled me a little. I listened for the roar of the Chevy, buried to the axles in loose dirt, high-centered on a stump; or perhaps they’d abandoned the vehicle. Thus I strained to pick my companions from among the blackberry patches and softly undulating clumps of scotch broom which had invaded this place too.

  Quiet.

  I went down the stairs and let the path take me. I went as a man in a stupor, my muscles lethargic with dread. The lizard subprocessor in my brain urged me to sprint for the highway, to scuttle into a burrow. It possessed a hint of what waited over the hill, had possibly witnessed this melodrama many times before. I whistled a dirge through clenched teeth and the mounds closed ranks behind me.

  Ahead, came the dull clank of a slamming door.

  The car was stalled at the foot of a steep slope, its hood buried in a tangle of brush. The windows were dark as a muddy aquarium and festooned with fleshy creepers and algid scum.

  I took root a few yards from the car, noting that the engine was dead, yet the vehicle rocked on its springs from some vigorous activity. A rhythmic motion that caused metal to complain. The brake lights stuttered.

  Hart’s doughy face materialized on the passenger side, bumped against the glass with the dispassion of a pale, exotic fish, and withdrew, descending into a marine trench. His forehead left a starry impact. Someone’s palm smacked the rear window, hung there, fingers twitching.

  I retreated. Ran, more like. I may have shrieked. Somewhere along the line the valise flew open and its contents spilled—a welter of files, the argyle socks Carly gave me for Father’s Day, my toiletries. A handful of photographs pinwheeled in a gust. I dropped the bag. Ungainly, panicked, I didn’t get far, tripped and collapsed as the sky blackened and a high-pitched keening erupted from several locations simultaneously. In moments all ambient light had been sucked away; I couldn’t see the thorny bush gouging my neck as I wriggled for cover, couldn’t make out my own hand before my eyes.

  The keening ceased. Peculiar echoes bounced in its wake, gave me the absurd sensation of lying on a sound stage with the kliegs shut off. I received the impression of movement around my hunkered self, although I didn’t hear footsteps. I shuddered, pressed my face deeper into musty soil. Ants investigated my pants cuffs.

  Cruz called my name from the throat of a distant tunnel. I knew it wasn’t him and kept silent. He cursed me and giggled the unpleasant giggle I’d heard on the phone. Hart tried to coax me out, but this imitation was even worse. They went down the entire list and despite everything I was tempted to answer when Carly began crying and hiccupping and begging me to help her, daddy please, in a baby girl voice she hadn’t owned for several years. I stuffed my fist in my mouth, held on while the chorus drifted here and there and eventually receded into the buzz and chirr of field life.

  The sun flickered on and the world was restored piecemeal—one root, one stump, one hill at a time. My head swam; reminded me of waking from anesthesia.

  Dusk was blooming when I crept from the bushes and tasted the air, cocked an ear for predators. The Chevy was there, shimmering in the twilight. Motionless now.

  I could’ve crouched in my blind forever, wild-eyed as a hare run to ground in a ruined shirt and piss-stained slacks. But it was getting cold and I was thirsty, so I slunk across the park at an angle that took me to the road near the trailer court. I went, casting glances over my shoulder for pursuit that never came.

  6

  I told a retiree sipping ice tea in a lawn chair that my car had broken down and he let me use his phone to call a taxi. If he witnessed Cruz crash the Chevy into the Mounds, he wasn’t saying. The police didn’t show while I waited and that said enough about the situation.

  The taxi driver was a stolid Samoan who proved not the least bit interested in my frightful appearance or talking. He drove way too fast for comfort, if I’d been in a rational frame of mind, and dropped me at the Greyhound depot in downtown Olympia.

  I wandered inside past the rag-tag gaggle of modern gypsies which inevitably haunted these terminals, studied the big board while the ticket agent pursed her lips in distaste. Her expression certified me as one of the unwashed mob.

  I picked Seattle at random, bought a ticket. The ticket got me the key to the restroom, where I splashed my welted flesh, combed cat tails from my hair and looked almost human again. Almost. The fluorescent tube crackled and sizzled, threatened to plunge the crummy toilet into darkness, and in the discotheque flashes, my haggard face seemed strange.

  The bus arrived an hour late and it was crammed. I shared a seat with a middle-aged woman wearing a shawl and scads of costume jewelry. Her ivory skin was hard and she smelled of chlorine. I didn’t imagine she wanted to sit by me, judging from the flare of her nostrils, the crimp of her over-glossed mouth.

  Soon the bus was chugging into the wasteland of night and the lights clicked off row by row as passengers succumbed to sleep. Except some guy near the front who left his overhead lamp on to read, and me. I was too exhausted to close my eyes.

  I surprised myself by crying.

  And the woman surprised me again by murmuring, “Hush, hush, dear. Hush, hush.” She patted my trembling shoulder. Her hand lingered.

  out they come

  alex dally macfarlane

  She speaks so little, out they come: foxes. One aft
er the other, falling like russet tears. They land on all fours and shake the saliva from their fur and bare their teeth, sharper than knives. She wants to say to the village, “I’m not sorry, I hate you all, you deserve this.”

  They are her strength, come to fight.

  In the islands, foxes are food. Boiled with dandelions in a deep pot, flesh and marrow and bones all, they make many good meals for a woman living alone; and don’t forget to keep the hide for winter, when the ice blows in. The tails make fine collars. Or put them at the edges of the door, to keep the drafts out. Keeps the sheep safe, too, especially in spring when the lambs are small on the damp grass.

  At the edge of the village, any wild animal that sniffs at a stone wall goes into the pot.

  Stey hides these foxes.

  Her house is small and plain, stone walls and a grass roof for the goat, only one room inside. There she layers tapestries on the floor and walls to keep the cold out. Through winter nights there’s precious little else to do but sit and work. In spring she starts trading her excess tapestries: the holy scenes with the church, the wild scenes with the other women. Though she works alone, she’s fast, determined. If she stops being exceptional, there won’t be any more chicks or fish or sheep-wool. In the scant weeks of summer, she opens the wooden door and the breeze blows in, full of sea salt. She scatters cushions on the floor, which is also her seat and her bed, and spins the wool, and the chickens run inside and out as freely as the air.

  The foxes make her house crowded, but it is autumn when they fall from her mouth: their warmth is appreciated. She curls with them at night, like the chickens in their pen. There are only five, at first. The smell is not so bad.

  She locks them inside the first time she goes into the village, and not just to keep them from pots. She doesn’t trust them with the goat.

  But it’s not animals they’re after.

  When she’s just eleven years old, Stey sneaks out of church to watch the foxes fight. Two vixens, barking, baring teeth, over someone’s dead lamb. Stey tells stories about them: foxes that fight, foxes that fly, foxes that dive into the sea and bring back the rarest treasures. In church, she blocks her ears and thinks of the foxes. In school, she thinks of their teeth. How can you believe in what you’ve never seen?

  Coughing up foxes makes sense: they are her comfort, they are her strength. She has believed in their teeth for years, from girl to woman. Only—the strength is in them, not her, and she doesn’t think she can put them to their use.

  They scratch at the door to get out.

  At night they lie around her, content to sleep, but at day they interrupt her work. Stey sits by her stove, minding the mutton casserole—from her mother’s flock, given for a cushion cover—and stretches out her recently woven nettle-cloth, pinning it to frames. She begins to sketch her winter’s work on the cloth. Another selkie. Another warrior-lass, with brows hard as axes and thistles in her hair. Another Virgin, eyes on her golden son. In one design, new, a quintet of foxes gathers around a woman’s feet, nipping at the ends of her long, dark hair—but she cannot decide the woman’s expression: hidden behind her hair—or not. She spins more wool as she thinks.

  The foxes put their jaws on her knees and stare at her. They scratch and bark. They circle her small house, like caged animals, which she guiltily supposes they are—of a sort. Animals that don’t need to eat or defecate.

  She goes walking to gather lichens and dulse for her dye-jars, leaving the foxes behind.

  She meets the man whose name begins with J, whom she has tried to avoid for years, on his way to the beach to shoot gulls. Cringing deep inside, she smiles and hugs him and asks how he has been, in the years since they ate together in the school hall, all the village’s children under one roof. He tells her that it’s so good to see her again. She agrees.

  Five more foxes fall from her throat that night, hurting her on the way out. They join the others as she gasps and cries into the cold air of her house. They gather around her, hot as anger. Lying on her tapestries, wrapped up in blankets as the wind whistles draft-songs around her door, she welcomes them, companions to her thoughts, which are too big to bear alone. The foxes surround her.

  They scratch at the door, unrelenting.

  There is never a moment when she decides to let the foxes out. Only that the following afternoon she looks up and the door is open and her house is strangely quiet, empty. Pungent.

  Though she smiles, with a malice that would frighten even her mother, she doesn’t join them.

  It doesn’t take a lot to teach silence. No. It takes: a boy whose jokes are putting his hands on her, ignoring her insistent “No!”, and almost all of their friends laughing with him. It’s just a joke! It’s just hands on her thighs, just sticks poking her breasts, her crotch, day after day for two years. It’s nothing serious, nothing bad, nothing, nothing.

  It is far harder to teach herself not to be silent, not to put her anger behind smiles.

  She sketches the woman with her face hidden by her hair.

  She begins to stitch the woman with fox-teeth, gleaming with the last of her gold-thread, a church bequeathment.

  The village doesn’t react well.

  The foxes run down every road, baring teeth sharper than knives, and they tear at ankles and legs. They leave blood on the cobblestones. In the afternoon, when the stoves are cold, they scramble down chimneys and stain the tapestries. They run into the village hall, into the school. On Sundays, when people gather in the church for the warmth of many throats speaking prayers, they run under the pews and wait by the prayer cushions for knees. No one notices that they eat air, not sheep. No one notices that they don’t attack everyone.

  Stey hears of the names: men—mostly men—and some women, who laughed, who didn’t care. So many of them, in this small village.

  A meeting is called, in a room floored with stone not earth, its doors locked tight, its corners lit too bright for foxes to hide.

  They call it a plague of foxes and Stey laughs, silently.

  She cannot laugh when she next walks through the village. Foxes: two strung up on fences, one hanging outside the pub like its name-sign, one curtaining the village hall, the others decorating the shoulders of the people with the most tattered legs. Those men limp, smiling. Stey flees from them. The foxes’ eyes are dull. Russet-haired children hide indoors, their mothers cautious. A dog pup is flayed for looking too foxy.

  She is practical, and the winters are long and cold: she has killed foxes before. Put their bodies into a pot in pieces, added the hides to a blanket.

  This is not winter’s need.

  Better to spend the months of ice in her house, making her tapestries, good working woman, burning wood slowly, preciously in the stove, milking the goat, collecting eggs, sipping nettle tea.

  She weeps for the foxes and imagines that they must be scared now, because her throat remains empty. The smell gradually leaves. She wants them back. No. She wants silence and forgetfulness and tapestries. The selkies need the sea around their ankles, the sky as grey as their sturdy seal-skins. The gold-toothed woman is not even half-finished. There is work to be done, year after year, and what good is remembering? Just pain and dead foxes.

  No.

  She wants the foxes’ warm bodies against hers, she wants their teeth. She’s tired, so tired, of silence and quiet, but she knows she can’t end it alone.

  The nights are long.

  When she thinks of the man she loved when they were young, whose name begins with T—who taught her the word “over-reacting”—she coughs a green-eyed fox onto the warm stones in front of her stove.

  “It won’t stop, will it?” she whispers.

  The fox gives what passes for a smile on such a pointy face.

  “Well, now we can make it stop.”

  She keeps thinking of her memories and out the foxes keep coming, though it hurts her throat again, th
ough it gets her dragged from her house—because eventually someone notices how the foxes go out of her door and never in, how her ankles are bare of bites, how she holds up her chin when she passes a strung-up fox in the street and smiles at any still living.

  “Pray,” they say, throwing her in the jail, where there are no tapestries to keep out the bitter winter cold, “that the punishment is light.”

  She believes in nothing but the foxes.

  She makes enough of them to keep her warm. The men who watch the jail—who were once boys, laughing in the school hall—stare through the barred window in the top of her door, telling her how the foxes will die at the ends of their shotguns, but there is already fear in their voices.

  Once a week, her mother visits with fish stew and nettle tea. “It’s not right.” She’s not talking about the foxes. Her pale eyes remind Stey of the winter sky, which she cannot see from her cell, and she wants to be on the other side of the door, staring at the sky by her mother’s side. She wants to be making tapestries of warriors and selkies, not thinking of hands, not fighting. “You shouldn’t have to do this.” Echoes of older words.

  “I wish I’d listened to you,” Stey says, because she has wanted to say it for years. “You were right. I don’t know why I never told anyone.”

  “No. None of this is your fault.”

  Stey smiles, fox-like. “I know.”

  She’s so tired of waiting for the village to change.

  Now she has the foxes, whose teeth are sharper than her small voice, and they will do far more than tear at ankles.

  The floor of the cell is russet fur, is upturned jaws with teeth bared. Stey stands among them, barely bending over as she coughs, multiplying what she starts to think of as her army.