We went to the Society’s apartments and we banged on their doors. We demanded they address us, answer our questions. We confronted them with all the nothing we found (including K. G. in that nothing—where was he? where did he go?).
Each one of the Society, with their solemn and mummified parents standing behind them, eyeing us, told us that K. G. deserved what he got and if we got it too well then we deserved it (and maybe they were right about some of us, but fuck them for saying it). They told us the story of K. G. and the monster again, and ended the story with, “Leave us alone. Or else.” They all said the same thing, like they were giving out a practiced statement.
They didn’t really say the or else part out loud but it was there if you were listening. We heard it. All four times.
THERE ARE MANY MORE WHO WENT MISSING
Every school night after we confronted the Society there was someone else there at the corner to meet them when the van dropped them off. It became the new normal, which is to say it was like this goddamn ritual; it was something that just happened and we were supposed to accept, deal with, like everything else shitty we were supposed to accept, deal with, and to our immense shame we followed the unspoken rules. But don’t think you are any different. You would simply follow the rules too. That’s the truth.
The van and the Society weren’t overrun by a wave of angry and righteous humanity. There’d be just one kid, barely taller than a fire hydrant, or one teen who was confused about everything, confused about why things were the way they were, or one adult who’d given up on trying to figure out why things were the way they were. There’d be a whoever there every night and whoever would punch the van in the same spot K. G. punched the van and then whoever would be led over to the alley, the empty fucking alley. (We’d checked that alley, remember? Empty. And we would check it again and it would still be empty the next day after another whoever would go missing.) And then at night, again inexplicably following the inexplicable rules, whoever would come back and go into that alley with the Society and whoever would disappear.
It’s late October now and I want to make some comparison to fallen leaves, because, you know, it’s fucking autumn, but comparing our missing persons to leaves is wrong, so wrong that you almost don’t notice how wrong it is.
Anyway, in the early evening, we would also go back to the Society’s apartments. (Our little group was growing larger as the number of people, mostly kids, who went missing also grew larger.) We would knock on their doors just like we did for K. G. We wouldn’t expect answers or satisfactory conclusion, and our demands of action were more feckless and desperate. The Society wouldn’t lose patience with us, they would repeat the same story each night and tell us to leave them alone.
YOU AND I GO INTO THE ALLEY AND THEN LEAVE IT
The youngest kid yet is there, sitting on the corner. He can’t be more than eight or nine. He sits on the curb, hands on knees, rolling an empty bottle between his feet. I don’t know his name. I ask him what it is when I walk by and he doesn’t answer me. I ask where his parents are or his grandparents, a grandmother? You got to have a grandmother around here, I say, and then I ask why isn’t he in school and he doesn’t tell me shit. I walk up and reconnect my ass with the front stairs of my building, only a few doors down from the corner. I watch the kid watching for the van. I imagine the monster, if there is one (how can there be one? how can there not be one?), wouldn’t have to open its mouth all that much to eat him. I don’t know about you and everyone else, but I can’t abide by this anymore. Something has to change. We have to change it.
The van rolls in. Kid doesn’t move from the curb and makes the van stick out into the street. Cabs and cars beep at it lazily as they swerve by. The Society gets out of the van. They look older. In two months how did they get so much older? They’re still just kids, we need to remind ourselves. The other kid, the little one, sitting on the corner, he stands up and throws that glass bottle off the side of the van. The bottle explodes into glittering shards. It’s almost beautiful. The van doesn’t stop and drunkenly waddles off on its christened voyage. I stay on my stairs, on my stoop, and I don’t do anything. Not yet. It’s too early. I can see what I need to see from here, for now. The Society doesn’t say anything to the kid and the kid doesn’t say anything to them and together they walk over to the mouth of the alley. Yeah, it’s an obvious mouth, isn’t it. They stand and stare and nothing special seems to happen, not that I can see. Time doesn’t slow down, the city doesn’t stop doing its city thing, and we know the city is a monster too and we’re already inside of it.
The Society walks away first, like they always do, but they’ll come back. The kid stays there. He sits down, right on the sidewalk, a period placed in the middle of a sentence. When we walk by (because we have shit to do, city being city, like I said) he doesn’t move and we have to go around him. I walk by him three times and each time I pass I tell him to go home, to forget about it, go eat dinner. He doesn’t do anything. Fucking kid is so small and thin; hands and feet like a puppy’s. I get him one of those sports drinks and a protein bar. Not much of a dinner but it’s better than nothing. To my surprise, the kid takes it from me and drinks and eats. He tells me in his hardest voice (still little, still small, and it breaks our already broken hearts) that he’s K. G.’s brother. (We should’ve known that.) He tells me to go back to my stoop. I tell him that I’ll be back later.
I’m watching him and watching for the Society as the street lamps flicker on and the temperature drops, and it drops fast now as the sun flees behind the building tops. Hours go by and I keep watch. I don’t get distracted. The rest of us walk by the kid and the alley like nothing is going to happen there, like we’re not supposed to look.
Later. The Society of the Monsterhood shows up, and they show up one at a time, each from a different direction. The kid doesn’t get up off the sidewalk until the four of them are there.
I yell out at them. That’s all I have to do to stop it, right? Dumb-ass that I am hoping it’s that easy to stop whatever it is that’s going to happen. The Society ignores my rants from the stoop and walk into the alley first, one at a time, single file, a progression. I’m off my stairs and running (I can’t run that fast, not anymore, and it’s less a run and more a fast limp), and I need to get there to stop the kid from going into the alley. He’s too young (would him being two years older, five, ten, make a difference?). He’s too everything. This isn’t right. We’ve all had enough of the monster, and yeah we all believe there is a monster, we always did.
The city is still the city. It doesn’t stop for this, or for us; it never has and never will. I’m not quite sure how I manage to do it, but I must be faster than I think because I get to the alley before K. G.’s brother goes in. I grab his shirt, the back of his collar, and he yells and hits my arms. He squirms out of my grasp but had to go backwards, away from the alley to do so. I’m not fast or strong or tough, or that kind of tough, anymore, but I’m big enough to block the entry to the alley. K. G.’s brother is full-on crying now and he tries to scoot by me, to scramble under my legs, but I stop him. He yells at me and says things a kid his age shouldn’t know how to say so well. I tell him in a quiet voice to go home. He doesn’t give, and he’s wearing me down. I’m breathing hard enough that there’s a stitch, a little knife in my chest. He rams into my stomach, shoulder-first, but I push back, harder than I should, and he goes flying backwards and lands on his butt on the sidewalk. I say, “Please.” Maybe the please does it. Or maybe he just gives up. I don’t know. I don’t exactly see him go away because I take the opportunity with him stunned and on his ass to turn and run into the alley ahead of him. Only one of us can go in, right? That’s the rule.
And it’s still just a fucking alley. That’s it. Garbage cans and dumpsters and bins all spray-painted different colors. Black skeletons of fire escapes dripping high up from the back walls. There’s no monster.
The Society of the Monsterhood stand up against the back of the Bra
zilian market. If they’re surprised to see me come in and not the little kid, they don’t say it or show it. The Society holds a chair leg, a piece of rebar, a folded-in-half NO PARKING sign, a metal rod that might’ve had a bike seat on its end once. They stare at me. They stare at me and hold those things like weapons.
I yell at them, ask them what the hell they think they’re doing, some half-assed gang, ready to, what, beat down that little fucking kid out there who doesn’t know any better, and now me, instead? They don’t react. I lose it and I’m yelling all the terrible and unfair things that have been said to them by some of us and I yell the stuff that I know they’ve been hearing at their rich white school too; I make sure to say those things, to say everything. And then I hear it behind me, coming up from underneath the garbage bags, growing from out of nothing. It knocks over the barrels and even flips one of the dumpsters and black, garbage-smelling dumpster water rushes over the tops of my sneakers. It’s bigger than I am, so much bigger, and it’s humanoid for an instant and then it’s not, and how it moves, like a movie with frames missing, and it’s kind of white, then it’s dark, and has two arms, then more, then none, and it grows and shrinks, expands, retracts, and it’s coming toward me. I turn away and the Society are walking toward me too, and I’m shaking and my legs won’t work anymore, so I bend down, a dead-battery robot; one knee crash lands on the dampened alley floor. The Society all raise their weapons over their heads and over my head for their mightiest swings and smashes but they sail right by me and attack the monster. And I mean they fucking attack it, wildly swinging their weapons. I scuttle away and don’t get too far, sitting on my butt like that little kid was, and I watch. At first I’m thinking that I got through to the Society, showed them how wrong this all is; yes, I got through to them and now this will be the end. I watch them hit the thing, bashing it like a piñata, and opening holes in it, and there is blood, and then they lose their weapons but they beat it with their bare hands and they snap its arms and legs over their knees and stab and pry with their fingers and tear open deep gashes in its hide, in its skin, and the sounds the monster makes, so awful, I can hear it without my ears. I know that this isn’t happening because of what I said or did; this is what happens every time they take a whoever into the alley and to the monster. They do this every time.
I’m crying and I can’t help it because they won’t stop and the monster looks like a toy with everything twisted and warped into unnatural directions, and it twitches, painfully trying to correct itself, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. The beating goes on for hours but they don’t kill it. I can still hear it and see it breathing.
The Society does stop, finally. They stop. And they stumble out of the alley without saying anything to me or to each other. The monster is still there, smaller than it was before, or maybe it’s always been that size and what I remembered from before is a trick, you know? I’m already not sure what I just saw earlier or even what I’m seeing now. But what I do know is that I’m going to disappear from this neighborhood too. I’m going to get up and walk down to the Downey St. Metro stop and get on the train and take it to somewhere else and I’ll never come back. How can I come back here after all we did and didn’t do, and then seeing this? How can any of us? This isn’t to say I know where the rest of us went when we disappeared because I don’t. We just go.
It’s cold out but I’m not cold. I stand up and the stitch in my chest is gone and my legs work again. Maybe I won’t take the Metro and I’ll just walk. And then I get this idea. Shit, it’s the best idea that I’ve ever had: I’m going to take the monster with me. I am. It’s that simple. I can save everyone else in the neighborhood from this continuing madness. I can save us and you and take away this poor, terrible thing that’s blighted our neighborhood for two months, has always blighted our neighborhood.
I go over to the monster and I’m not sure how to pick it up, how to get my arms around it and its ripped and rented pelt, broken and bent corners, holes leaking blood and fluids, mouth somewhere leaking pitiful cries. Its fur feels mealy, like the hair (is it hair? something else entirely?) will slough off at my touch, but it doesn’t. It stays together. I feel it straining to stay together for me and it allows me to compact it gently, a collection of untied, loose sticks. I sling some of it over my shoulder and hold the rest of it to my chest with both arms. I try not to gag at its smell and then one step, two steps, and I’m walking out of the alley.
Concentrating on walking away, going away, disappearing, and as I’m walking out of my neighborhood and into the next and then the next and then the next my biggest fear is not that the monster will heal and subsequently attack my sorry ass (this thing will never heal, it’ll be broken forever). No, my biggest fear is that my best-idea-ever isn’t so best, you know?
What if all those who went missing before me are walking around in their somewhere-else carrying their own busted-up monster too?
THE MAW
by
NATHAN BALLINGRUD
1
Mix was about ready to ditch the weird old bastard already. Too slow, too clumsy, too loud. Not even a block into Hollow City and already they’d captured the attention of one of the wagoneers, and in her experience you could almost clap your hands in front of their faces and they wouldn’t know it. Experience, though; that was the key word. She had it and he didn’t, and it was probably going to get him killed. But she’d be goddamned if she’d let it get her killed too.
She pulled him into an alcove and they waited quietly until the thing had passed.
“You need to rest?” she said.
“No I don’t need to rest,” he snapped. “Keep going.”
Mix was seventeen years old, and anybody on the far side of fifty seemed inexcusably ancient to her, but she reckoned this man to be pretty old even by those standards. He was spry enough to walk through streets cluttered with the detritus and the debris of long abandonment without too much difficulty, but she could see the strain in his face, the sheen of sweat on his forehead. And a respectable pace for an old man was still just a fraction of the speed she preferred to move at while in Hollow City. She’d been stupid to take his money, but she’d always been a stupid girl. Just ask anybody.
They turned a corner and the last checkpoint, a little wooden shack with a lantern gleaming in a window, disappeared from view. It might as well have been a hundred miles away. The buildings hulked into the cloudy sky around them, windows shattered and bellied with darkness. The doors of little shops gaped like open mouths. Glass pebbled the sidewalk. Rags of newspapers, torn and scattered clothing, and tangles of bloody meat lay strewn across the pavement. Cars lined the sidewalks in their final repose. Life still prospered here, to be sure: rats, roaches, feral cats and dogs; she’d even seen a mother bear and her train of cubs once, moving through the ruined neighborhood like a fragment of a better dream. The place seethed with it. But there weren’t any people anymore. At least, not the way she used to think of people.
“Dear God,” the man said, and she stopped. He shuffled into the middle of the street, shoulders slouched, his face slack as a dead man’s. His eyes roved over the place, taking it all in. He looked frail, and lonely, and scared; which, she supposed, is exactly what he was. Despite herself, she felt a twinge of sympathy for him. She followed him, took his elbow, and pulled him back into the relative shadow of the sidewalk.
“Hard to believe this is all just a few blocks away from where you live, huh?”
He swallowed, nodded.
“But listen to me, okay? You gotta listen to me, and do what I say. No walking out in the middle of the street. We stay quiet, we keep moving, we don’t draw attention. Don’t think I won’t leave your ass if you get us in trouble. Do you understand me?”
He disengaged his elbow from her hand. At least he had the decency to look embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said. “This is just my first time seeing it since I left. At the time it was just, it was… it was just chaos. Everything was so confused.”<
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“Yeah, I get it.” She didn’t want to hear his story. Everybody had one. Tragedy gets boring after a while.
Hollow City was not a city at all, but a series of city blocks that used to be part of the Fleming and South Kensington neighborhoods, and had acquired its own peculiar identity over the last few months. Its informal name came from its emptiness: each building a shell, scoured of life, whether through evacuation or the attentions of the surgeons. The atmosphere had long turned an ashy gray, as though under perpetual cloud cover, even around the city beyond the afflicted neighborhood. Lamps burned all the time, but not in here. Electricity had been cut off weeks ago. Nevertheless, light still swelled from isolated pockets, as though furnaces were being stoked to facilitate some awful labor transpiring beyond the sight of the surrounding populace.
“There’s things coming up that’re gonna be hard to see,” she said. “You ready for that?”
The old man looked disgusted. “I don’t need to be lectured on what’s hard to see by a child,” he said. “You have no idea what I’ve seen.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. Just don’t freak out. And hustle it up.”
Mix did not want to be here after the sun went down. She figured they had five good hours. Plenty of time for the old bastard to find who he was looking for, or—more likely— realize there was no one left to find.
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