She checked the normal things: ten fingers, ten toes, two feet, a torso, and two eyes evenly spaced. He wailed an unfinished voice, so she plugged her ears with wax and hummed La Vie en Rose.
She examined him under glass to see where the rot began, and there it was: his middle finger was a smidge too long. Glaringly wrong, wrong, wrong among the cultivated rest. She used garden shears, rusted from the sinewy threads of last year’s annuals, and deadheaded the tip. She kissed the mole near his eye. Pretty boy. Snip.
His finger leaked sappy blood, ugly sticky stuff, but she cooed him without looking, and when he’d calmed she bundled him up in her hands, spread her legs apart and shoved him back inside. Another month’s germination and she’d take him out again for another trim. When he came out for the last time, pruned, glorious, cut away to the best whole, he would be everything she could ever hope for, a real blue-ribbon winner of a boy.
The first miscarriage was odd, but not odd enough to cause alarm. The flesh dripped out wrong, in pieces unfamiliar, not human, all pink gummy flesh and blood clots. Her husband only sighed and did the duty of his labor: he buried the meat in the yard under the oak, then took her to bed again.
She told him that she had seen a rabbit that morning, before it went wrong. The rabbit looked at her, its black, little eyes big and round, and she had been afraid.
He told her not to speak of it.
Her belly grew from that night, and after the heavy months passed she went into labor again. Her mother-in-law, who was called in because she was a midwife, and because her husband suspected the first had been mishandled, came into the birth late, and by the time she arrived there was no baby, but skinned parts of lean legs, a purple liver and lungs, and curved ears with long veins.
Her husband fed the pieces to the cat and took her to bed again.
The next birth had him pacing outside her door. When his mother came out with the offering, it was of three long legs with tufts of black fur around its ankles, a long vertebrae with no extensions for arms or legs, and guts winding around the lump.
His wife told them she was dreaming of their cat, which had run away not too long ago, and she thought of it, then, when she was pushing.
Over the next few days, when her husband went to lie with her again, she said she was too ill, and when they woke up there were black eyes and brains between her legs.
At a loss, her husband called in the doctors, who did not believe in such miracles, and they examined the newest parts and said they were too carefully butchered—knife scratches on the bones—and told him to lie with her again. Then, they tied her legs together and tied the rest of her to the bed, only allowing her to sip spoons of vegetable soup. They shuttered the windows, so that she might not see any animals, though she still heard the birds outside, twittering their songs, and at night, the scream of the rabbits as they were butchered for the doctor’s meals.
After the months passed, they untied her and pushed on her belly. A skinned young rabbit with broken teeth flushed out under her dress, as well as so much blood. The cord was still attached to it, and when they pulled on it, it came out from under her as if it had been connected to nothing.
Madness, they told one another. It is pure madness.
They bet their degrees on a hoax and informed the husband that he should lie with her one more time. This time, they allowed her to move, but they watched her carefully in shifts so that she was never alone, and kept her diet strictly to cabbage and oil. Against propriety and her wishes, they sat in the corner of the room as she birthed, smoking cigars and rubbing their foreheads.
The rabbit came out alive, twitching and squealing.
“My child,” she said to it, and asked it to be placed in her arms.
The mother-in-law made to do so, but the doctors snatched it from her arms and threw it against the wall. Then they fell on her as one, tearing the clothes from her body as the women screamed at them to stop. When the mother was naked and sobbing, they backed away from her. The mother-in-law stepped forward and dared put her hands in the space between her legs to feel the soft, gray fur covering her from thigh to belly.
The boys came back from the elm covered in dirt, and they did not come back alone.
Their jeans were a mess. Denim soaked up stains like a dry rag in oil, and there were too many spots to avoid a trip to the laundromat, but one look at the girl’s face and any yell Bella may have made withered in her throat. The girl, the stranger, was a young thing, probably the age of the twins, but was the kind of girl who looked one minute older. She was pretty enough, except for her feet dragging mud in the kitchen like a follow-me trail, but her eyes were odd. Off. Open just a bit too wide; there was too much white showing. Bella could not tell if she was afraid or enraged, and her mouth gave no indication either way.
“Mom,” Georgie said, tugging Bella’s hand. “Can we keep her?” Artie, his twin in all but manners, stared at the ground. He was the smarter of the two, and he knew what Bella would say.
“She doesn’t belong to us,” Bella said, avoiding the girl’s big white eyes. “Go on home now.”
For a moment, Bella thought the girl was dumb and deaf because she didn’t make any movement to show she heard. She didn’t even blink. Just stared for a long moment, long enough to make the guts clench. Then she turned around and left out the kitchen door, like she’d never been there at all, except for her footprints.
Bella didn’t know how long she stared after her, but it must have been long enough to make the twins feel awkward. Georgie seized her in a hug meant to penetrate, but a ten-year-old only has so much strength, and she only had eyes for the door, only had feelings for the breeze coming through. Artie moved her arms to wrap around Georgie, and when the boys went to bed there was a wet spot on her dress. Thank goodness, salt from the eyes don’t stain. No need to go to the laundromat for that.
* * *
There was an art to gambling how long clothes can hold up before needing to be cleaned. Jeans could go the longest, provided they were the dark kind. Bella had a point system. Fourteen days for jeans, subtract a day for wear, so long as you only normal-sweat. You might go longer in the colder months without too much of the water leaking out of your skin. Shirts were always bought black, because they hide stains the best, but you could get away with a navy blue dress for the rare occasion you can’t get out of going to church, though it had been a long time since Bella couldn’t get out of going to church. She learned long ago the value a “yeah, maybe” could have in conversation. A bra did not need to be washed until it smelled, and you only had to wear a bra when others were around. The big problem was underwear, and the hole between her legs. She took to wearing dresses whenever she could and went without panties, and if she did have to go to town a carefully folded wad of toilet paper caught most of the drippings. It meant a longer reprieve from washers and dryers.
No matter how perfected her art, though, the boys had a way of making her go earlier than her system allowed. At least they were old enough to leave at home when she went to town—two less things to worry about—though unsupervised they were likely to go and get their clothes soaked in mud and grease. It was an endless, useless battle, like that man Bella heard about in school who was pushing a rounded stone up a mountain. She didn’t understand it at the time why he didn’t let the rock roll to the bottom and give up, but as she grew she figured the rock wasn’t just a rock, but all sorts of detergents and softeners.
She made the boys peanut butter sandwiches—two each, loaded with cream until it was likely to burst out the edges with a good squeeze—in the hopes that while she was away they would rub their bellies and take an afternoon nap. The laundry took up most of the backseat of her little gray two-door and piled up so she could barely see out the top of the rear window, but there was no need to look behind.
In the parking lot, she loitered, car still running, until Martha Gladsby noticed her
through the large, smudged windows of the laundromat. Martha, at eighty-three years old, kept working because her son thought if she got out of the house she would live a more fulfilling life, but he didn’t know that she had a nicotine addiction as strong as her affection for yelling at teenagers. Because she had lied to him for years about quitting, she needed to get away from him every day to sneak the long, thin sticks she was fond of. Everyone in the town who didn’t have their own washer and dryer had an agreement of some kind with Martha: you didn’t snitch on her to her son, and she didn’t say anything if you washed underwear that didn’t belong to your spouse. Bella and Martha had a different agreement; Martha gave her a nod if it was safe to enter, and Bella explained to Martha’s son that the yellow stains on his mother’s fingers were from the chemicals in the soaps, nothing more.
“He was here earlier this week,” Martha said as Bella walked in with her first load. “Doubt he’ll be back today.”
Bella nodded and filled one machine before going back to her car for another load.
“Were you in town yesterday?” Martha asked her once Bella had five machines running. “No, I suppose not. Leaves are changing. The tourists are upon us.” Martha rolled her eyes all the way around her sockets. They both shared the same opinion on their annual visitors.
Martha continued to prattle at her. At her age, the old woman no longer required the help of another conversationalist to keep the chatter going, though she did appreciate a body in clear view. Bella sat curled on the floor next to the machines, counting the rhythmic bumping. She no longer needed to wait for the ding to know when it was done. She had a system for this, too.
“…and goodness knows they don’t watch their children,” Martha said over the dull hum of the machine. She repeated this line again, and again, until Bella lost count of the rhythm and looked out the window where the old woman was pointing a yellowed finger.
It was that girl from the night before. She wore the same graying dress that fell just a little bit below her knees and no shoes, even though she was standing on cracked concrete. There was no expression on her face, save those too-large, too-white eyes, open as wide as human skin is allowed to stretch. The girl was staring straight at Bella, and Bella could do nothing but stare back at her and concentrate on her own breathing.
Remember, one breath in, one breath out, focus on the way it enters and exits your body. Everything that enters your body will eventually leave. One in, one out.
The ding of the dryer startled Bella into a cry, and she got to her feet out of habit. When she looked out the window again, the girl had turned around and was walking away on her dirty feet.
Martha shivered and reached under her chair where she kept a packet of cigarettes duct taped. “Ugh,” she said. “I feel like someone walked on my grave.”
* * *
Over a decade ago, a young man who believed himself to be a small-town poet took to writing verse in his head at the coffee shop and the courthouse, but found the ambient noise to be all a little too much for slant rhymes. He decided he was a nature poet, a poet of the plains, and instead took long walks through the fields and sparse trees. One day, as he was leaning against a large, rotting elm tree on a small hill, thinking of what he could say about dead wood in spring, he felt a sharp pain in his back. Examining the tree closely, there was an odd white lump, barely visible. He tore away at the wood and found, to his horror and delight, a skull peeking back at him, with fungus veined out around the left eye socket. He did the appropriate thing, which to him was to alert the local authorities, but also the local paper. A reporter caught the photos of her whole skeleton as it was dislodged from the body of the tree, almost like she had been consummated and grown there.
The whole thing became something of a small sensation, enough where folks who wouldn’t have dared taken their town exit before now made a short detour to see the tree-woman with her fungus face, and bits of taffeta lodged in her throat, kept on display at town hall after no one claimed the body. It was gruesome, the town agreed, but it was hard to argue with the influx of tourists and tourist wallets. Even the tree was left in as much peace as it could be, though it was torn in half and worms had taken up residence there, eating and defecating in a cycle of mud.
Bella only made two trips to the tree in her life, and only one to see the skull. As a child, her father decided he ought to know what the whole hullabaloo was and took her to the tree first. “It’s a tree,” he said, all disappointment, even though there was a small plaque commemorating the woman. Not much was known about her, the sign said, but more than likely she’d been in the tree for fifty years, based on the fungus growth, and, of course, someone had put her there. Dutifully, her father followed the suggestion at the bottom of the plaque, which was to take the three mile walk to town, and he held Bella up by her armpits so she could get a better look at the display.
She didn’t remember much about the trip, but her father always reminded her how she screamed something fierce when she saw the skull.
They never did find out who murdered the woman in the tree, or who she was. The mystery only added to the income. All sorts of amateur sleuths ate the story and their fill of burgers with American cheese at the local grill and bar. The mayor named the exhibit “Strange Folk,” and used tax dollars to fund billboards on the side of the highway three miles in each direction. “Come visit the Strange Folk,” they said beside a painted skull.
* * *
The sandwich trick worked, thank goodness. Both boys were yawning away the nap from their faces when she returned and dumped piles of clean clothes on her bed. In order to get out of the laundromat sooner, Bella didn’t bother folding the clothes at the machines. The boys started separating clothes into their own piles to bring to their bedroom, aimlessly bickering over whose shirt was whose, even though most of them were solid black and the same size.
That evening, the boys were uncharacteristically quiet. Usually, they were loud and screaming at one another. They were still working out the benefits of sharing, and Bella could rarely afford two of the same toy at once. They sat on the battered couch from the local thrift store and whispered, shooting looks at their mother when they thought she wasn’t looking. She was looking—at ten years old, they were too young to be subtle or secretive—but she graciously allowed them the illusion of privacy. Her habit, at the end of a day, was to sit near the little window in her living room on her grandfather’s rocking chair and sway back and forth, forward and back, until the boys decided it was time to turn their minds to dream. Her window faced the hill with the tree, but in the darkness, at that distance, Bella imagined there was no tree on the hill, no skull in the courthouse, no body on the grass. She only imagined a long stretch of emptiness, expanding out like the unfurling of a great winged animal, all that soft black, punctured with small dots of white.
The boys stopped whispering to one another and looked out into the darkness, but Bella could not see what grasped their attention. Georgie took to his feet and ran out into the field, clumsily slipping, more than likely staining his jeans with green and brown, but Bella did nothing more than stop her rocking. How far could he go in the darkness? And, anyway, his brother would bring him back if he wandered too far.
Soon enough he returned and he did not return alone. He dragged that pale, strange girl behind him, like an overexcited dog tugging on the leash. Artie ran to meet them partway across the lawn, and the boys began to argue, raising their voices loud enough for Bella to know they were upset, but not loud enough for her to make out what they were saying. The girl stared in the window, directly at Bella. Neither of them blinked.
There was not much hope that ignoring the issue would make it fade into memory, so Bella rose from her chair and went outside.
“She can’t stay out here all night,” Georgie said as soon as he spotted Bella. “It’s cold,” he added, as if Bella was unaware of the temperature.
A
rtie stared at her, face blank, except for the wrinkles near his eyes.
“Where is your family?” Bella asked the girl.
The girl did not open her mouth, and Bella wondered what the girl was keeping closed up inside of her. Was that the reason she did not speak? She never believed the stories, but her parents were often fond of telling each other fairy tales of girls and boys who coughed up frogs and toads when too much rain threatened to drown the harvest. Horrible stories. Even though her parents told her—it’s made up! Imagine all those slimy things swimming around the wet land, having the time of their lives—Bella kept her mouth clamped shut for almost a month, only drinking water through a straw, and was only relieved from the fear of monsters swimming around in her belly, waiting to be released, when her mother washed her mouth out with soap, telling her the bubbles would drown anything alive down there.
“She can stay the night with us,” Artie finally said, as if he had the authority to make such decisions. “We’d be bad if we didn’t let her.”
The girl’s wide eyes were too awful to look at, so damned white. Bella turned away from the three children and walked back into the house, which her sons took as permission, and dragged the girl along with them, each of them taking an arm and pulling.
Inside, as they released her, the boys marveled at how where they’d touched her they’d left black marks on her skin and checked their own palms to see if they were dirty.
Georgie rushed to his own bed and started to pull out sheets to make up the couch for the girl, and though Bella couldn’t bear the thought of the girl’s dirty feet on anything that needed to be washed immediately, she said nothing. She waved at the girl to follow her and ran the hot water in the tub.
“Water’s hot,” Bella remembered to say.
Strange Folk You'll Never Meet Page 5