Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  The mood vanished. Of all that was strange and wonderful in the universe, most strange and wonderful was that she—herself, tiny, Midwestern Bettyann—should be this moment in Mexico, so far from her home.

  Thinking of home and arrival, she imagined herself standing naked on the front porch in Missouri winter (she had left the clothes she was wearing yesterday in the spaceship), knocking on the door with, she hoped, a degree of self-confidence, and announcing when Dave answered, “I’ve come back from Smith a little early this semester, Dad.” She laughed a bird’s soft cry.

  She supposed she should be thinking something to the effect: naked we came into the world and naked (clothed however much) we will depart it, while in between the end and the beginning there is a little period of not-nakedness called life.

  But the sun sparkled in the snow of the mountain peaks high above, and the winter breeze tasted of spring. She wanted to touch the evergreen trees and race on human legs across the deeply conceiving earth. It was good to be home (home: to this, her planet, which she had almost left and lost forever). Already, she imagined, the spaceship containing the last of the ancient and alien race from which she was descended had risen from the Pacific and hurled itself at the distant stars. Doubtless the mist of its volcanic departure drifted now above the face of the still waters and molded rainbows from the dawn. Good-by, she thought, good-by. They were very thoughtful and kind to have sought her out among humans. She hoped they would understand why she had decided at the last moment that she could not go with them. Good-by.

  Her laughter fell upon the sunlight, and she was in a great hurry to be home with Dave and Jane, parents more real than those who bore her and whom she had never known.

  She spread her powerful seabird wings, and the smooth pinions settled. Her muscles were vigorous with longing, and she launched herself into the buoyant air, circled for the last time out across the fabulous water and soared east.

  The high currents seemed to hurry her along like soft and friendly hands. Every pulse of her wings carried her farther from the silvery ship whose landing port had gaped like a hungry mouth and whose shiny walls had prepared to imprison her forever. Forgotten was the exultation that had filled her when she realized that her own body was strange and wonderful and new. She was lost in the joy of physical conquest. The air spilled above and beneath her and lifted her ever higher.

  But as the sun fell behind her and the light flickered upon the colored clouds, she remembered old man Starke dying—perhaps even now dead—of cancer. She shuddered against the suddenly chilling wind. What could she do? The vast excitement she had felt when she first realized what it might mean to uncover the secrets of her body was, in retrospect, frighteningly blunted with doubt. What could she do? With only a wild and unknown potential, what chance did she have to succeed where doctors had failed? She imagined herself standing beside Dr. Wing, who had cared for her throughout much of her childhood, instructing him about the proper way to treat old man Starke. Before his wisdom she would be dwarfed and helpless. She would merit pity instead of respect from his soft eyes, and his kind and gentle hands would move in embarrassment before her pretensions. She remembered him now with a strange admixture of emotions; she wanted to be able to speak to him as adult to adult of adult things, and, perhaps, even speak to him as woman to man.

  What can I do? she thought. Doubt and uncertainty fluttered uneasily in her mind.

  Long hours later she rested. The sun had fallen away to night, and she slept, perched far inland. And dawn came, and flight. Her muscles were weary and her body ached, and night came down, then dawn once more. Riding lightly upon the high currents of air, she traveled in the bright, thin cold, and the world far below unrolled forever.

  Looking down from above the clouds it seemed to her that every home—every structure, every localization of man—constituted the center of the world. She could see the interconnection and dependence of each. She thought that the world had become—in the perspective of airy distance and perhaps in spite of itself—a single unit: each center linked by an inevitable series of roads and rivers and lakes and oceans and lanes of commerce and sustenance to all the rest.

  And dusk and darkness and then the town lay ahead.

  At the first sparkle of it, she recalled the face of a boy whose name had passed from memory.

  One evening, when she was a sophomore in high school, he had come unasked to the porch. Bettyann was sitting in the swing. Jane and Dave were downtown. He spat on the sidewalk and said, “I’ll kick hell outa that guy, he ever bothers you.” Bettyann did not know what he was talking about. He stood by the steps. He rubbed one hand nervously along his thigh. He took out a knife with a six-inch blade and opened it. “He better not bother you.” He was no more than sixteen; he sniped cigarettes from the gutters and leaned in doorways and looked wisely old when the high school girls came by. He began to speak to Bettyann intently in a soft, eager voice. He was going to New York, he was going to become a famous writer, he was . . . Dusk lengthened, and suddenly he interrupted himself and leaned forward. “Run away with me!” he said. “You come on with me. I’m tough. I can take care of us. I’m big enough to take care of us both.” Bettyann was thoroughly frightened by his intensity. With sudden self-awareness and melodrama, he said, “I’m no good,” and then as if to shock her and the world and somehow reassert his own being, he said, “I’m no God damned good!” He half ran toward the street, but at the walk he turned to cry, “I’m going to New York! You’ll see!” And then he ran in earnest. The next afternoon he stole an automobile, and a week later, after three robberies and one assault, the authorities captured him and sent him to Boonville.

  Coming home, she remembered his face, and far above the world she told herself: He was lonely. She wondered if she could have said something, that spring evening, to have eased his loneliness . . .

  The square was a circle of light that flashed its rays down boulevards and streets to the city limits, and truck and car headlights carried the illumination beyond the town into the darkness of country night.

  The wind was chill and sharp against her, and when the clouds parted now and again, snow glistened between shadows. The town lay against the night and the elements—a world in miniature and life in microcosm. It seemed to her a representative center of duplication, and if she could understand it, with its complexity of passions and relationships, she could understand the world. And as she drew near now, and as her heart burst with pride and longing, she saw the steeple of the courthouse directing aspiration and promising continuity ( a massive and rooted structure that bridged a lifetime of history and a thousand years of art), and she realized with a sharp, piercing sense of loneliness: I am not human.

  Nothing but her own lifetime, the few short years of belonging, linked her to them, while each member of mankind, however alone, was in a larger sense related to time and the world and possessed, in genetic continuity, a million common passions and two billion brothers. Her race came from the stars, from across immeasurable distances, and were old and would travel forever among the planets of a million suns; and while she could never belong to them, neither (she felt now, suddenly, frighteningly, in a moment of intense isolation) could she ever belong again here, in the town and with the people she had known beyond memory.

  Snow lay on the courthouse lawn below where once turnips had defied propriety—where a mute, inglorious humanitarian had with single-minded purpose engineered an outrage to local pride. In the depth of the Depression he (a Dutchman with but scant command of English but with a resolution to action and high purpose beyond his means) mixed turnip with grass seeds and so consummated an indignity the extent of which gradually became apparent throughout the following weeks. His excuse was merely: “Turnips are goot vor eating.”

  Bettyann glided now, fleeting across the treetops; the moon gleamed for a moment and her shadow lay upon the snow. But now it was gone, and with a last flutter, of wings she settled down in the frozen garden behind the d
ark and silent house.

  The back door would be unlocked. In a moment she could be at the service porch. The anticipated drama of a nude arrival would not eventuate. Her heart beat warmly. She could visualize every dark moment of progress toward her second-story room. . . She changed, and was neither bird nor human, and she crouched low in terror of discovery against the frozen earth. A light in an adjoining house flipped on.

  “Sounded like the beating of wings,” came a voice.

  Yellow light made a blunt rectangle across the snow. Mr. Richardson, forever curious, peered into the cold. He satisfied himself that he had heard only the wind (for only the wind remained to be identified as cause: and it whirled high above among the clouds, leaving the surface of the world still and mysterious). He grumbled to himself, a solitary, untraveled adventurer deprived once more of experience. A few flakes of new snow slipped down, and his wife called to him. He retreated. The light vanished. Tomorrow afternoon the local paper would report that several citizens claimed to have seen a great bird sweeping across the moon, and he would shudder with superstitious fear and think: If only my wife had not called; if only I had stayed another minute . . .

  Bettyann waited. The town was silent; white flakes spiraled down invisible slots in the air. She was fleeting shadow without shape. She merged with the darkness around the porch. In a moment, soundlessly entering the cold house, she made her way toward her room: a flicker of motion whose passing seemed only to be the settling of the boards.

  She entered her room. She resolved the familiar contours of it from the darkness. Nothing had changed; nothing was different. But she was no longer the same, and her identity with her own past seemed to dissolve away and she knew that she was, herself, new and unfamiliar.

  The moon was gone; the stars were far; only the snow, silent and immediate, came down upon the world to bear a message from elsewhere. There was regret and a sense of loss, and then those emotions vanished and warmth and pleasure replaced them.

  Her winter clothing was all at Smith College. She went to the closet and slowly and quietly opened the door. To the faint tinkle of wire hangers, she removed a cotton print dress.

  Regaining her familiar and reassuring body, she dressed. When she was finished, she left the house, her light summer coat across her arm, and swiftly planned her second and more conventional home-coming.

  She tiptoed down the driveway to the street. Snow sifted into her footprints behind her. She was on the sidewalk. She took a deep breath; her face flushed with excitement. She started toward the front porch.

  Then, through the stillness of the night came a sound strange and familiar: plaintive, tuneless, strong, and defiant—seeming in the moment to capture a thousand emotions at cross purposes, seeming, in the moment, to identify itself with all the town. She turned. She saw a block away, passing beneath a street light, Whistling Red, going home late to loneliness and sleep. The sound grew in her mind until it encompassed everything: the complexity of living filled with the overtones of time . . . She watched until he was gone and until the sound was only memory.

  Then she was knocking on the front door. A freight whistled, leaving the Missouri Pacific station, wailing steam into snow and isolation. And she thought again, I am not—not human.

  A light came on, a sleepy call, “Yes? Who is it?”

  She was knocking quickly and desperately. “It’s me! Bettyann!”

  Dave was opening the door. In the first second his eyes searched her with quick fear; and then, seeing her whole and sound (his first irrational thought, upon hearing her voice, had been of a bruised, bloody, and hysterical face) relief replaced the fear, and he said, “My God! What are you doing home, Bettyann?”

  Jane, halfway down the stairs and tucking her robe in place with nervous haste, called, “Is she all right, Dave? What is it?”

  “What’s wrong?” Dave said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m—I’m . . .”

  Jane was rushing toward her to gather her in protectively. “Darling, what is it?”

  “I came back, I—I left college. No, I’m all right. I’m not hurt. It’s . . .”

  Jane had both arms around her. “There, there, tell us what it’s all about, now.”

  Bettyann closed her eyes and shook her head. “Please, Mom, Dad. I’m all right. I don’t want to talk about it right now, that’s all. I had to come home. I wasn’t in any trouble. It wasn’t anything like that. I just had—I just had to come home.”

  “Now, now,” Jane said.

  “You’re all right?” Dave said. “You’re not sick or anything, you’re sure?”

  “I’m . . .” Bettyann tried to hold back the tears. “I’ll be all right in a little while.” She blinked her eyes rapidly. “I—I, gosh, I’m sorry to get you out of bed.”

  She was acutely aware of her alienness. For the first time she was isolated from Jane and Dave. “I don’t want to talk right now, please, please, Mom.” Her nature had been established at a nonhuman conception and her real parents had chosen this present body for her when she was very young, in a period she could not even remember. After the automobile accident that had injured her arm and killed those parents, she had lived and thought of herself as a human girl. And now facing the parents who had adopted her, she thought, What can I tell them? I’ve turned out to be a visitor, marooned just after I was born on your planet, and now that I know—in a vague way only—what I’m really like, I’ve turned out to be quite . . . accomplished? I can change bodies like you change clothes? I can . . . do parlor tricks of the most astonishing kind?

  Suddenly she thought: I’ve started to smoke?

  The incongruity was overpowering. The tension and the fear was gone. She began to laugh.

  The three of them stood in the midnight corridor and erupted with mutually contagious laughter—at what, not knowing, knowing only that there were three of them together.

  “She’s all right, she’s just fine,” Dave said. “Make some coffee, Jane.”

  Now that the laughter was gone, Jane felt the return of empty apprehension. Worrying her hands helplessly, she turned to go.

  “Come on in and tell us what it’s all about,” Dave said.

  “Light the fire in there,” Jane said. “She must be frozen.”

  “I’ll do that. Come along, Bettyann.”

  In the living room he lit the oil heater and stood before it. They could hear Jane drawing water in the kitchen. Dave, without looking directly at Bettyann, cleared his throat in interrogation and shifted the weight of his body. Bettyann wanted the lengthening silence to continue. Each passing second seemed a reprieve from decision. She felt that if she could avoid speaking for only a few more moments, the necessity would pass.

  Dave wished she would say something. The longer she delayed, the more uneasy he became. Soon he felt a tiny stirring of fright. He was no longer at all certain that he wanted her to say anything at all.

  Bettyann moved about restlessly, touching old, familiar objects as if to assure herself that they were real. She bent down to read the inscriptions on the backs of his record albums; she knew perfectly well what they said.

  Dave wished Jane would hurry with the coffee.

  “It’s so wonderful to be home!” Bettyann said.

  Dave wanted to smile, but at the same time his eyes burned strangely. Her tone made it seem that she had rediscovered something she thought she had lost forever. For no identifiable reason, he knew he had nothing to fear. She was back with them; that was enough. He waited with paternal understanding, and forgiving patience.

  “The coffee’s ready!” Jane called. “Shall I bring it in there? It’s warmer in here with the oven on, I think.”

  “We’re coming right in,” Bettyann said. A crisis seemed to have passed.

  The coffee cups were arranged in a triangle upon the red and white oilcloth of the table. They drew up kitchen chairs. Jane’s hand trembled slightly as she poured. Her smile reminded Bettyann of the way an adult smiles at a children�
��s party, a smile unhinged from its wearer’s thought. Dave put too much sugar in his coffee, noticed what he had done, frowned to himself, and blew to cool a spoonful for verification. Jane’s eyes were deeply uneasy before the unknown.

  Bettyann was lighthearted and she loved them wildly for their trust. They were waiting to come to her defense should she need them. But in the far back of her mind—as she looked out upon them—was a little whimpering voice that said, you are an alien, a stranger, and from far way.

  She sipped her fiery coffee. Suddenly she was ineffably sad, and that passed, and then she was afraid with a vast and formless afraidness, and the whimpering voice was louder in her mind. The silence was almost terrifying.

  “I wrote you a letter,” she began. Then she forgot what she had intended to say. She gave a sharp little intake of breath. “That letter! You mustn’t open it!” She felt her heart leap at the thought. “You really mustn’t open it!” She was thinking: I told you I had to go away, and that I was going away so far that I could never see you again, but it wasn’t true, and you mustn’t read it, because I couldn’t go away. I don’t want you to read it.

  “We won’t, if you don’t want us to,” Dave said.

  “I’ll give it to you when it comes,” Jane said.

  “Much as we like getting your letters,” Dave said.

  Bettyann was going to cry. She gulped quickly at the coffee and through the tears, she said, “My! It’s hot!”

  “I just made it,” Jane said.

  Bettyann put the cup back on the saucer. She blinked the tears away and sniffed and shook her head.

  “We’d better get you off to bed,” Dave said.

  “I don’t want to go back to Smith this semester,” she said in a nervous burst of words. “Will that be all right? It wasn’t anything that happened there. I mean, I didn’t get in any trouble at the school or with any other teachers or anything.”