The Only Harmless Great Thing

by Brooke Bolander

  * * *

  “You still hanging around here? What the hell are you teaching those things, the goddamned alphabet?”

  Out of all the things Regan misses leastmost about this job—the lip sores, the busted dorm beds, the gritty taste of the paint between her teeth—floor supervisors probably rank somewhere nearabouts where the cream rises. And of all the fume-breathing, foul-grinning fool men picked out of a handcart for the task? Slattery’s probably—no, definitely—Slattery’s definitely the one she’d be most eager to see walking out the door for good. Jodie used to spit globs of tobacco juice at the back of his head for every dirty thing he said to the girls, but Jodie’s moldering dead in the ground now and Regan doesn’t chew anymore, for obvious reasons. She ignores him and keeps packing, throwing everything into a canvas bag through a gauzy oil slick of hurt fierce enough to make her dizzy and queasy at the same time. Sometimes lately she wonders if she could wrench the entire rotten length of her jaw off if she gave it a shot. Get a good hookhold beneath the chin with a couple of fingers, brace herself, and—

  A noise like an angry foghorn cuts through the haze. Regan looks up just in time to see Slattery idly tickling Topsy’s tail with the little leather quirt he’s always flashing.

  “Lord Jesus, Slattery, cut that out! You looking to get squashed to bear grease?” Not that that outcome would bother her any; she’d pay full admission for a Splattery Slattery sideshow. It’s more the elephant she’s worried about, flaring and stomping and teeter-tottering on the edge of something dark and crazy-mad. Regan staggers to her feet, everything above the neck pounding hell bent for leather. Slattery ain’t worth it, Topsy. None of this mess is.

  “Aw hell fire, girl, I’m just playin’ a little. Can’t you take—”

  She pushes him hard against the stall wall with an anger she didn’t even know she had energy left to nurse. He stumbles and falls slap on his ass. “Everyone else we worked with is deader than dog ticks and I ain’t far behind,” she says. “All I gotta do is get on through this week and I can go home, but all that really means is I get to die where my baby sisters can see me screaming and hollering and messing myself. Take your fun and go straight to hell with it.”

  He glowers up at her from the dirty straw. If looks could kill, her troubles would be done, but unfortunately they don’t and they ain’t and she’s got a ways to go yet. She ignores his glare and turns to Topsy, who’s vibrating like a clothesline in a norther.

  Hey, she signs. Topsy? Hello? Y’all still with me? Hello?

  No reply. A low bee tree hum thrums deep in Regan’s aching eardrums and molars. She takes a step backwards. She’s about to ask again when something hits her in the back of the head, hard enough to send her palms-first cattywampus across the floor of the stall.

  “You think you’re the only one having a rough time, girl?” Slattery says. “You think you’re the only one with a family needs feeding?”

  * * *

  The Man, like all Men, is only there to tickle Her rage, to make it stand awkwardly on wobbly hind legs for his amusement. The dead girl tries to intervene and he slaps her down, kicking and bellowing in full musth. She hums a growing song, a ripening song, a full red swaying splitting-sticky song. In their work stalls the other Mothers hear it and drop their brushes, chorusing suddenly like a flock of beautiful gray-skinned birds.

  The fruit hangs heavy on the branch

  Good to pick

  To pluck

  To share!

  Is it ripe?

  Is it ready?

  Is it good, O Mothers?

  * * *

  At the bottom of all things, O best beloved mooncalf, where the Blacksap was densest and darkness the thickest—that was where the Stories had settled. That was where the Furmother’s trunk finally felt them, nestled together like summer melons in an unseen heap. But what to do with the air flailing mad inside her and no way back to the surface? How to share the stories when She and they both were trapped at the bottom of the Blacksap? Furmother felt the pressure building and understood what must be done. She was, after all, cleverest of all Great Mothers.

  One by one she took the stories in her trunk and pushed them into her mouth. They burned her tongue and throat as she swallowed them down. Most tasted foul, like the Blacksap they were coated with. Some had split like ripe fruit, their sweetness leaking to mingle with the bitter. Furmother did not stop until all were grasped and gulped. Her belly bulged with endless Story, all the tales that were and all the tales that would ever be. Even yours, O best beloved mooncalf. Even mine. The reason we glow—that, too, was there, snug beneath the ribs of Furmother.

  “Now,” thought Furmother - With - Her - Tusks - Whole. “At last.”

  The trapped breath within could no longer be contained. With a noise like a mountain bursting into song, Furmother blew apart.

  * * *

  “Very well. We will . . . consider guarding the place, contingent on these stipulations. We will remember what lies beneath when all of your clever inventions have broken down to dust and rust and food for weeds to pick apart and nothing but poison and damage is left to tell your Story.” The translator sounds about as grim as the elephant looks. Kat searches for sympathy in their eyes, but it’s an Easter egg hunt hours after the toddlers have all gone home with sugar headaches. “We may even consent to the glowing.”

  “Okay! That’s . . . oh, that’s great, that’s fabulous.” That’s motherfucking funding. For the first time in two hours, Kat takes a deep, hopeful breath. “You’ll be doing an amazing thing for future gen—”

  “However,” the translator says.

  * * *

  “All that pig shit about the paint being poison, was that even true? What I heard—” A boot digs into Regan’s hip; pain sprouts and grapevines up the trunk of her to join the thicket running wild in her head. “What I heard is that you all were just a bunch of loose whores who caught syphilis and decided to milk the company dry. I need this job, you hear me, girl? I can’t go fight and I’ll be goddamned if I go back down in the mines. They end up shutting the factory down because a bunch of giggling girls had to go and get their holes filled, I swear—”

  She sees the kick coming this time and manages to catch Slattery’s foot before it connects. He tries to jerk away; she hangs on for dear life. Spots swim across her eyes. The air whistles through the empty spaces in her teeth as she sucks in a lungful around the pain.

  “Just wait,” she manages to croak. “Hang around a while longer. Breathe in that dust for a spell.”

  Confusion and irritation crease the middle of Slattery’s forehead. Again he tries yanking his foot back; again Regan clamps down with an alligator snapper’s dead-eyed dedication. She sees the seeds of doubt land. For the first time in Lord knows how long, she smiles.

  “Oh yeah. That powder don’t stay lying down. You been getting you lungfuls of the stuff for—how long you been a supervisor? Since the day they started up? And you never thought about all that dust floating around?” She pushes him away. “You’re stupider than you look and you ain’t much to look at, you want the God’s honest. May take a little longer, but truth’s coming for you, Slattery.”

  Which may or may not be true. She dearly hopes it is, but for now it’s enough to watch the fear scrabbling behind his eyes, looking for a knothole to slip into. “Bullshit,” he stutters. His back is against Topsy’s side now, palms pressed to her ribs. “They would’ve told me.”

  “Yeah, just like they told us? May be overthinking your place in the pack, hound dog.”

  He opens his mouth to say something back. He opens his mouth, but he’s suddenly six feet in the air with an elephant’s trunk wrapped around his neck, and so all that comes out is a strangled ghrrk.

  * * *

  Yes, O Mothers

  Yes!

  It is Ripe

  And Good

  And ready to be plucked

  Sweet on the tongue,

  In the trunk,

  On
the tusks,

  To toss, to tear, to trample!

  * * *

  All of her pieces, all of the Stories, everything that held Furmother together—all of it sailed high into the sky. Bones and Blacksap and insides and outsides, fur and tusks and tail! End over end over end they flew, until the wind caught them and scattered the bits across the frozen world like plums. Half of a tusk lodged in the sky’s belly and became the moon; much of her hair blew away and turned to clouds. Her hot blood thawed the earth; the songs she had scattered behind her on her journey sprouted and were plucked by the wandering Mothers.

  Stories, too, they discovered. But it was a funny thing: They were shattered into pieces, like the Great Mother who had scattered them, and no one tale held to the ear by itself could ever be fully understood. To make them whole required many voices entwined. Then and only then could they become true things, and then and only then could we become the undying We, endless voices passing along the one song that is also Many.

  * * *

  “We are not doing this for you. We are doing it for all the ones that might suffer in the future because of you and your thoughtlessness, your short tempers, your dangerously short memories. We will tell them what you did as we tell one another, passing it down from She to She. If this . . . compromise is the only way to make sure the story survives, the real Story . . .” The translator shrugs. The matriarch is a granite statue. “Please do not misunderstand me. We aren’t protecting your secrets. We are guarding the truth. They will see how we shine, and they will know the truth.”

  * * *

  There are a hundred interviews and uniforms and grim-faced men with typewriters lurking in Regan’s future, each of them more or less asking the same damn thing over and over: What the hell happened? Did Slattery provoke the elephant? Was there any warning in Topsy’s behavior in the days leading up to the attack? Did she get a good look at what happened?

  Hell yes I saw what happened. How could I NOT get an eyeful of what goddamned happened? You think I’m blind and deaf on top of being the walking dead? A fella got turned to raspberry jam spitting distance from me and I had to go back home and comb little bits of him outta my hair and you sit there asking if I got a good look?

  But all of that’s still waiting up ahead, throwing jacks just around the corner. Right now she’s watching it happen, backed up as far against the opposite side of the stall as she can scoot, while every elephant in the place from one end to the other stomps and screams loud enough to shake sparkling radium dust from the rafters. Slattery screamed too, at first, but the only noise left over now is that triumphant roar, like bugles and trumpets and the footfalls of an angry god come to collect.

  Way away down at the bottom of herself, buried deep beneath the frozen shock and the pain in her jaw and throat and places where Slattery kicked her, she feels something strange stirring, like sitting in church and getting the Holy Ghost. It takes her a while to stick a tack in it, hunkered cowering in that corner with her hands over her ears and madness mopping the floor red right over yonder, but it comes to her eventually, guilty as a kid stealing ripe melons.

  Satisfaction. That’s what it is. It’s satisfaction.

  PART II

  CASCADE REACTION

  If you do not know how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take no care for it.

  —Michel de Montaigne

  RAMPAGE AT US RADIUM! MACABRE & BIZARRE ‘MAD ELEPHANT’ ATTACK SPARKS SHOCKED INVESTIGATIONS, TEMPORARY PLANT SHUTDOWN

  —Victim “was not the first nor second man” to fall to the Beast’s capricious wrath, say sources

  —Local constabulary describe “scene of unfathomable carnage and butchery”

  —Survivor saw it all from her hiding place a mere stone’s throw from the grim hecatomb!

  Police were called to US Radium’s factory floor in the early hours of yesterday evening, whereupon arriving they found a bloody tableau of horror. One of the factory’s workforce of helper elephants had indiscriminately gone stark raving mad and snapped the fetters of bondage, destroying her stall and smashing a foreman beneath her vast and terrible agglomeration in the most gruesome and gore-streaked way imaginable. No resuscitation was possible, for the body of the poor victim was so crushed and mutilated it “looked to have gone through a pressing machine,” according to horrified onlookers.

  Adding to the lurid penny-dreadful quality of this sensational tale, there was indeed a survivor—a mere slip of a woman, one of the very “Radium Girls” recently entangled in a lengthy legal dispute against US Radium on the grounds of workers’ safety whose allegations were the prime instigator for the elephants’ initial purchase in the first place. Factory officials have not been forthcoming with information on the girl’s current physical and emotional status (or why she remained in US Radium’s employ when all of her fellows have presumably been dismissed, as was initially reported several months ago), but one can assume the emotional trauma has been nothing short of shattering. She was said to have been “coated in bright splashes of blood from hair to hemline” after her rescue from the stall, a horrific state even a strapping full-grown man’s sanity might quail beneath the strain of.

  What is intended to be done with the mad culprit—and what the future of the elephant program at US Radium may be in the face of this unthinkable disaster—remains to be seen. If, as our sources report, this is not the beast’s first attack on a caretaker, options on the table may be limited to lethality.

  * * *

  There’s a toy elephant on the director’s desk. Plopped between the family pictures and fancy diplomas and cowpiles of ink-stained paper, it sits there hoisting its little tin trunk towards the big tin ceiling begging whatever heathen god elephants pray hallelujah to for a boot heel, a fist, or the delivering jaws of a curious and bad-behaved hound dog. Regan’s about ready to do the honors herself if the director doesn’t stow his hemming and hawing. Going to college apparently taught you sixteen different ways of saying “we’re damned sorry” and “we’re real damned sorry,” and not a blessed one of them left any air in the room or breath in the speaker’s lungs or meant any more than a trained hen plucking at a toy piano.

  You and me, tin elephant. We’re both stuck here waiting for it to end. It looks a lot like one of the animals that came along with the wooden Noah’s Ark she had bought her sisters for Christmas back when her and Mama were both doing better, before the jaw ache and the dentist and the company doctor’s shrugs. That pretty painted boat, she recollects, dried up a good quarter of two November paychecks. She wonders where this one came from, if the director’s just so stuffed with money he can go buy things like that the way other folks pick up salt and flour.

  “What’re you gonna do about the elephants?” she says, cutting off another round-robin repetition of the We’re Very Sorry Song mid-verse.

  “It’s unfortunate, very unfortunate, and— I’m sorry, what was that?”

  “The elephants. The workers.” She talks slower, half because the director’s obviously working with a deficit of common sense, half because it hurts her throat and jaw to speak and everything’s coming out as a mushy-mouthed drunk’s mumble. “You gonna keep using, or you gonna talk to them?”

  “Well, I mean.” The director’s eyes and hands slide to a spot on his desk in dire need of straightening. “Rudimentary intelligence and even more rudimentary grasp of language aside, they’re just animals. I don’t exactly understand what speaking to them about any of this would accomplish. What do you suppose they would request, smoke breaks? A ham on Christmas?”

  Freedom, maybe, y’think? A way of saying “hell no”?

  “Anyway,” he continues, plowing quickly on, “that point is moot at this juncture. To answer your initial question, we’re liquidating our workforce at auction and shutting down the Orange factory, effective next month. Have to make our costs back somehow after this debacle.” Rega
n can’t be sure, but she thinks she catches some side-eye from him at that last bit as he busily shuffles papers. “Though I don’t see how. Most of our elephants were . . . problem children to begin with, purchased at a steep discount.”

  “You’re shutting down work? During a war?”

  “The factory here in Orange, yes.” If there was a blue ribbon given out at the county fair for avoiding looking people in the eye, he’d have something fluttery to take home right now. Regan can barely keep upright in her chair, her back and legs ache so fierce, but something about the way he’s acting feels slithery and slightly familiar. She decides to keep jabbing her gig into the water.

  “Everywhere else too if you’re selling off the elephants, I guess,” she says.

  No reply. The sheaf in his hand goes shss shss shss as it hits the desk. Beneath the fancy new electric bulb overhead his head shines wetter than a bullfrog’s ass.

  “I mean. Not to put too fine a point on it, but ain’t nobody willing, able, and human nearby who’s read a newspaper is gonna want to take this job on after all the shit you put me and my girls through.” She lets the swear and the anger tethered to it hang in the air with all the weight of a pointed rifle barrel. “And ain’t like you’d knowingly do that to folks again in the first how.”

  Shss shss shss SLAM.

  For the first time since Regan sat down the director looks her dead in the eye. A flash of memory splits her aching head: She’s ten and her bulldog’s got a rat cornered behind the barn and no general on a gray horse has ever been so unafeared of his own death. The rat, though—at least she’d respected that rat. Rat was doing what it had to do to keep itself alive. Rats looked out for one another.