Out of Salem

by Hal Schrieve

  “Sorry,” Elaine said.

  Aysel said nothing. She felt humiliated and desolate.

  “Here,” said Elaine. She took a different piece of popcorn from the bag and put it in Aysel’s hand. “A consolation prize. It was a good attempt.”

  “Thanks,” Aysel grumbled.

  “You’re great, don’t stress,” Elaine said, and patted Aysel’s hand.

  This was too much. Aysel felt a spark shoot out into Elaine as their skin made contact.

  “Ouch,” Elaine said, looking down. There was a tiny white burn mark on her skin.

  “Sorry,” Aysel said.

  “You’re a hell of a witch,” Elaine said, rubbing her hand.

  “I’m just really—anxious today.”

  “I wish I could shock people when I was anxious,” Elaine said. “That’d come in really handy.”

  Aysel shrugged. “I have a lot of magic, I guess.”

  “I wish I were you. I would have fried so many people’s brains by now.” Elaine sucked cola into her mouth and sloshed it through her teeth. “If the police get their hands on you, you can just—zap!”

  “I’d be burned.”

  “Zap!” Elaine made an enthusiastic motion with her hands. “And they’d be all—” She shook her arms as if being electrocuted. “They wouldn’t stand a chance. You could take out a whole police station.”

  Elaine’s smile inspired confidence in Aysel, but Aysel also was horrified about the police beyond the point of being able to be confident. She felt scared and wanted to hug something to her chest—a pillow or a stuffed animal. She wanted to be nine years old again with nothing to be afraid of, in a world where she was still welcome.

  “Sometimes I think there’s something true about what they say about werewolves,” Aysel said. “I think that maybe we are more crazy or more violent or something. I get mad so much, and I beat people up.”

  “Every werewolf I meet has some kind of issues.”

  “How encouraging,” Aysel muttered.

  “Werewolves can’t get jobs or houses, so we’re unemployed and homeless unless we do electroshock,” Elaine continued—quietly, because people were coming into the theater now. “Doctors want to operate on us or feed us weird drugs or shock us, or else they worry we’ll infect them, so we can’t get health care. We get mad.”

  Aysel stared sadly at the blank movie screen. “God, I’m so scared to grow up,” she moaned.

  “Or,” Elaine added, “we do get shocked, and lose our magic, and don’t transform, and either we report to the Department of Regulations every month—that’s if we did it legally—or we get illegal shocks and then live in secrecy pretending we can’t do magic for some other reason.” She swallowed a mouthful of popcorn. “My least favorite type of wolf is the kind that shocks himself out of his own magic and then spends his life being all anti-werewolf.”

  “What would you do if you weren’t a werewolf?” Aysel asked Elaine.

  “What?”

  “If you were nonmagical, or just regular magical, and could get a job. Any job.”

  “When I was little I wanted to be a marine biologist. I’d never seen the ocean.”

  “The only grown-up lesbian I know had a wife who was a marine biologist,” Aysel said. “Maybe it’s a gay thing.” She said it before she remembered that she didn’t actually know if Elaine was gay.

  Elaine let out a scream of laughter. “Oh my god,” she said.

  “I’m gay, so if it is I need to know,” Aysel said.

  “Ohhh my god,” Elaine said.

  “A lot of us must like science,” Aysel said, pretending that her heart wasn’t racing. “I’m literally president of my school’s science club.”

  “Holy shit,” Elaine said. “Solidarity.”

  Elaine reached over and took Aysel’s hand from her lap and held it like they were on a union poster. Aysel didn’t shock her this time—maybe she was more prepared for it. Elaine didn’t let go; she held it lightly on the armrest between their two seats as the movie started. It was not a tight grip—Aysel could have taken her hand back if she had wanted to, moved it and put it back in her own lap. But this was far from her mind. Elaine’s skin was hot and her palm slightly sweaty, and her fingers were thin and bony and long. Aysel knew Elaine only meant it as a friendly gesture, but she let herself get carried away anyway. Closing her eyes, she thought: small swallows. My hands are small swallows.

  After the movie, they hesitated on the periphery of the theater, cautiously watching a cop car drive by on the street, the tires spraying mud up into the air in slow arcs.

  “Want to see where I’m staying right now?” Elaine asked. “I can introduce you to some people. Other werewolves,” she added quickly when Aysel’s mouth pursed in concern. Aysel was thinking about her mother.

  “Okay,” Aysel said anyway.

  The house was low and seemed to sag in the middle. It was painted black. There was an overgrown brown garden sprouting from the space in front of the porch and behind the sidewalk. Out on the front porch, three women sat looking out at the street. Aysel couldn’t tell how old they were, though they were somewhere between seventeen and thirty. All of them were dressed in clothes that had a slightly ragged look—patched jeans and heavy sweatshirts. They still managed to exude a sense of solid confidence and beauty.

  “Hey, Elaine,” one of them said. Her face was heartshaped, her chin pointed, and she wore lipstick that was coming off around the middle of her mouth. She had three piercings in her nose. The back of her head was shaved and bleached. She held a cigarette between two fingers and stubbed it out on the step she was sitting on.

  “Hey, Alice,” Elaine said. “This is Aysel.”

  “Uh, hi,” Aysel said, lifting her hand halfheartedly and waving. Aysel wasn’t good at making eye contact with new people, so she looked behind Alice to the house. She noticed that in the shadows of the porch there was a deer skull mounted over the window.

  “Aysel, this is Alice, Carmen, and Matilda,” Elaine said, grinning, gesturing to each woman. Alice grinned at Aysel. Carmen smiled. Matilda didn’t seem to be paying attention. She was eating macaroni out of a Tupperware container.

  “Hi,” Aysel said again, feeling idiotic.

  “Heyo,” said Carmen. She was smoking a cigarette, too. Her hair was elaborately braided in a way that made Aysel think it must have taken hours. She had wide-set shoulders and a strong jaw and large eyes, and she stood to greet Aysel. “Is this the kid you were telling us about, Elaine?”

  “I’m not a kid,” Aysel said predictably, defensively.

  “Yes you are, sweetie, but it isn’t a bad thing,” Carmen said. She blew smoke straight into the air.

  “I’m fourteen.”

  “We know,” Carmen laughed. “Elaine’s been on and on about you for days.”

  Aysel blushed and looked at Elaine for confirmation. “Really?”

  “I don’t know, sure,” Elaine said, smiling. “I just haven’t met that many werewolves who are doing as good as you, you know?” Elaine reached around Aysel’s shoulder and thumped her on the back. “It’s cool to meet werewolves who are young and not dead and not messed up. Especially in this fucking town.”

  Aysel didn’t know what to say to that.

  “You smoke, kid?” Alice asked, relighting her own cigarette. Next to her, Matilda finished her macaroni and put the lid on the container.

  “Not really,” Aysel said quickly—too quickly, she worried. She sounded like a loser. But none of the older women seemed to care one way or the other.

  “Did Elaine tell you what this house is?” Carmen asked.

  “Not yet,” Elaine said before Aysel could answer. “I mean, I told her it was where we all stayed, that it was a safe house. She hasn’t met too many of us before, so I wanted to take her to talk to people.”

  Alice smiled, and Aysel saw she had a tongue piercing. “Man, I remember the first time I met some other kids like me. Aysel, right? I hope we get along.” She held out
her hand. Aysel reached forward and Alice grabbed her hand in a powerful handshake. It seemed like everyone’s hands were bigger than Aysel’s. Aysel wondered if her hands would ever be so large.

  The interior of the house was a blatant, unrepentant mess, like one would expect a house of werewolves to be. The shelves that lined the room were crammed with books and loose papers and jars and empty paper bags. At first one’s eyes were overwhelmed by the superficial chaos, but it became clear after a few seconds that there was a method to the spread of objects and scattering of nouns. Parts of it, true, were organic matter: half-empty teacups and beer cans littered a kitchen counter, a pizza crust sat on the edge of the sofa. Most of it, though, was paper. As Aysel looked around, she realized she was standing in the middle of an amateurish printing workshop. The smell of hot ink filled the air and in a corner a fat gray copy machine whirred like a storm, spitting out pages and pages of tiny text intermingled with images. In the corner, a small, fat man was kneeling and stacking each fresh page onto different piles. As everyone came in from the front porch, he stapled a pile together and folded it into a booklet. Aysel craned her neck trying to read the title.

  Elaine looked horrified.

  “Jesus, are you making a library?” Elaine asked. She glanced over at Aysel and back to the man. “You weren’t doing this when I left.”

  “Josh thought it’d be best to go ahead and copy and distribute the zine now,” Carmen said casually over Aysel’s befuddled head. “Alice and her girlfriend are leaving tomorrow for Texas and can take a box of copies with them, leave ’em at safe houses along the way.”

  “Ah. Are there more safe houses than I remember?” Elaine asked. There was an edge in her voice. “Why do we need this many copies?”

  “Calm down, Josh paid for the paper,” Alice said loudly, stepping over a box of pens and assorted wires and disappearing around the corner into the kitchen. There was the sound of a fridge opening.

  Elaine made a scoffing noise. “I don’t care if we shoplifted all eight boxes of copy paper or whatever this is.”

  “Well, then, I don’t see what your problem is,” Alice shouted.

  “Josh isn’t even a werewolf, he’s a white anarchist dudebro who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing,” Elaine said. “And Alice, you are too. What the hell do you know about wolves besides the fact that you’ve been dating one?”

  “I’m not a fucking dudebro!” Alice said. She said it loudly enough that the people outside turned around. Carmen came up the steps and stuck her head inside.

  “Chill out, Elaine, I know you don’t like Josh but just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean we don’t. It has nothing to do with him being a white guy.”

  “Go suck it,” Elaine said. “Josh is probably with the fucking FBI. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “That’s unnecessary,” said the fat guy named Josh. “I know you don’t trust me—”

  “I don’t,” Elaine said.

  “Oh, piss off,” Alice said, and stormed out the front door.

  Elaine turned to Aysel apologetically. “Sorry,” she said. “It usually isn’t this messy or this stressed out here.” She glared over at Carmen and then toward the kitchen.

  “It doesn’t seem stressed out. What’s the zine?” Aysel asked. She stooped over one of the piles and picked it up, turning it over in her hands. The cover had a picture—a scratchy woodcut—of a full moon and two silhouettes of wolves. Wolf Guts #3, the title read.

  “It’s a werewolf information journal we put together every once in a while,” Josh said. “Mostly when there are a lot of us here at once to work on it. It’s nothing special usually—”

  “Usually, as if we’ve done more than three,” Carmen laughed.

  “Well, we try to put information in there that people can use,” the man continued. He pushed his straight greasy hair out of his eyes and over to the side of his head. “Where to get health care, legally or illegally, which doctors to see if you feel like you want to try experimental drugs, how to avoid cops, where to go during moons, that kind of thing. We also have essays and advertise shows and events,” he added as an afterthought. “It’s modeled on other community zines people give each other. Down in the Bay Area—”

  “This is Josh, Aysel,” Elaine interrupted. “He thinks the zine will change the world.” Her voice was light and sarcastic.

  “Hi, Josh,” Aysel said. “I’m Aysel.”

  Elaine was trying to play the role of a good hostess, but it was clear to Aysel that this wasn’t a role she was meant to play. “This whole thing is a mess,” she said in a flat tone, looking around at the interior of the house. She picked up the pizza crust off the edge of the couch and crunched it between her teeth. “I hope you all haven’t left any peanut butter open anywhere, or Craig’s allergy is gonna act up like a bitch. You’d think we were like five years old.” She turned and glared at Josh.

  “I think it’s pretty cool,” Aysel said quietly.

  “Look at this sweetie,” Carmen said, smiling at Aysel. She reached up and tugged at one of the braids in her hair, took out a hairpin, and pinned the braid into place on a different part of her head. “I’m sorry, everything’s just a little crazy right now with everything happening. Can I get you anything to eat? Show you around?”

  “Uh,” Aysel said, looking over at Elaine.

  “Oh, go on,” Elaine said. “It’s not you I’m mad at, Aysel, don’t worry. And it’s a cool space, mess or whatever. Carmen will show you around.”

  Aysel followed Carmen into the kitchen and out into a long yellow hallway. The voices from the other room still projected clearly through the walls, and Aysel caught every word of the argument still under way in the front room. Elaine’s voice was the loudest.

  “Just can somebody tell me why the hell we are printing out copies of this like mad just when the police are looking for evidence that a gang of werewolf terrorists exists?” Aysel heard her shout. “It talks about how Archie Pagan did electroshock for people and has just died and so won’t be doing it anymore! For the cops, that’s tantamount to saying we killed him. And when we’re planning a homeless encampment? Someone’s gonna give ’em a tip that we’re all wolves, and they’ll come here, and they’ll ransack every single fucking place we mention in this fucking trash and kill a million homeless people who aren’t even wolves.”

  “Oh, ’cause this is the time to lie low, when we’re being persecuted, good thinking,” Matilda said. Aysel looked over her shoulder as Matilda strode into the kitchen and shoved past a pile of boxes to get to the sink. She filled the Tupperware container with water and shouted over the noise, “Best to stay silent, right? Maybe they will leave us alone.”

  “What else are we supposed to do, get killed? Do you like, remember last moon? Or did you forget y’all dated before the wacko shot him in the head? People are dead. It’s time to stop.” Elaine’s voice, issuing from the front room, grew inappropriately loud. Aysel looked back over her shoulder. She could see Matilda through the kitchen door, gesturing in exasperation with a fork.

  “We knew it was dangerous. It’ll keep being dangerous. That’s a risk we have to take. That’s the price of liberation. We aren’t going to win against them by shutting up.”

  “The price of liberation! They didn’t get shot because of this shit. They got shot for being wolves out in the forest after dark.”

  “Come on,” Carmen said. “They’re gonna be arguing awhile. It’s a hot topic lately.” She opened a door at the end of the hall, and Aysel followed her through it.

  They had left the house and were outside again, looking out at the backyard. Aysel paused and stared with incredulity. She was staring at a blooming garden. Under the gray sky green spread out thickly across the ground and up the tall fences that bordered the yard. High walls of fat pink climbing roses and sweet peas flowered, and bizarre rotund pumpkins and red cabbages nestled in the black earth. Aysel looked across the yard and saw chamomile flowers, lavender, and a mes
s of zucchini spreading into the paths that traversed the soil. And there, near the foot of the makeshift wooden ramp which led down into the midst of it—

  “Strawberries in March?”

  Carmen smiled and jumped over the railing of the ramp to stand in the patch of strawberries. Aysel noticed a tattoo on the dark skin of her calf as she jumped, though she couldn’t tell what it was. “Yeah. This is all Alice and Craig, they’ve got like, hella green thumbs.”

  “My mom’s a garden witch too, but she can’t make anything grow like this,” Aysel said reverently, looking down at a plump red strawberry near Carmen’s foot. “It’s—it’s amazing.”

  “Yeah. It’s funny how magic power works. Some people have all the luck. Werewolves who’ve never gotten shocked are crazy good magicians.” Carmen bent down and picked a strawberry between two fingers and held it out to Aysel. It looked so bright and odd against the gray of the early spring that surrounded it, redder than anything was supposed to be before May.

  “So what is this place?” Aysel asked. “I heard Elaine say it was a safe house . . .”

  Carmen shrugged. “I don’t know how much I’m supposed to tell you, really,” she said. “But yeah, that’s one of the things the house is for. Werewolves come through here and can stay here if they want. Used to be some of ’em were coming for Pagan’s stuff, like, they didn’t want to transform any more. Others were just coming to wait out moons. Of course, it’s not perfect, ’cause when it gets near full moon we all have to clear out and find a patch of forest, and we can’t all do that together, ’cause it attracts attention. Such as the attention you’ve seen lately. Scary stuff, you know. But the rest of the month we can stay here, get hooked up with resources and all that. We don’t always have food and stuff, but we do what we can.”