Outside of its size, the first thing you notice about Tristan is how quiet it is when it moves. I had always assumed before my first pilgrimage, when the news choppers would stalk it for us viewers at home, that each of its massive trunk- like legs would make the Earth quiver and shake. I couldn’t…
My client wakes at eight on Sunday, so that’s when I appear in his doorway. The schedule says he has two hours of Mr. Yazoo time before he needs to get to Mandarin lessons. We eat our usual breakfast of gluten-free, high-protein, extra-calcium cereal. Despite its professed lack of sugar, he’s doing his I’m-wired-and-want-to-play dance in…
DOCTOR’S OFFICE – DAYThere are no windows. PATIENT, a 25-year-old woman, sits on an exam table, alone, clutching the end of the table and wincing. The room has one computer. On the screen is a patient file that is too far away and too oddly angled for the patient to see that it says HISTORY…
I heard someone say there are no more ghosts in West Texas. That the oilmen drained them all from the ground when they built the derricks that dot the desert plains.I don’t think this is quite true.I see the edges of their bright plastic hats and leather-palmed gloves around every run-down corner in Odessa, rising in…
We wear the mask that grins and lies . . .” — “We Wear the Mask,” Paul Laurence DunbarTysha Wilson adjusted the disposable face mask over her nose and walked faster down the cracked sidewalk outside her grandmother’s house. The braids bundled together at the crown of her head acted like a counterweight and dragged…
He can see everything but her. The rest of the room exists clearly in his mind. The walls painted a sunshine yellow. The sturdy, handcrafted oak bedroom set with dovetail joints and darkly stained grain. The paper birch with the coin-shaped leaves seen out the second-story window. On the night table sits a clock, the red numbering of which reads 7:00 a.m. The digits blink as the alarm sounds. But he doesn’t reach out to silence it. He doesn’t open his eyes.
Next to the beeping clock is a framed portrait of his family. They show their teeth in smiles. They wear matching jeans and white-collared shirts. They stand in a flower-filled meadow. They lean and weave their arms together in such a way that they appear to be holding each other up. He can see his daughter. He can see himself. He cannot see his wife. She might as well have been scissored out of the photo, scrubbed out of his mind, a raw vacancy.
He wants this image to remain true, but it no longer is. He wants to roll over to face the opposite side of the bed, where Pamela ought to be sleeping, her body denting the mattress, but she is not there. Something else is.
The screeching of his alarm seems to grow louder. His veins throb in time with it.
If he looks, that would mean acknowledging what he has to do. A muscle in his jaw pulses. He barely breathes. Morning light warms the bed but he feels cold.
When he finally opens his eyes, he does not scream or even flinch away. He simply stares back with an ugly resignation.
The sheets and the comforter are as white and clean as soap. But the thing that shares the bed with him is not. It is dressed in filth, clotted with what might be dried blood and grave dirt. Sticks and dead leaves cling to it. The fabric of its wrappings might have been stitched out of the night itself and buried for a thousand years. Its face is hooded, so he cannot see the features hidden within, but the shadow there is so profound that he feels he is looking into a cave littered with bones that goes on for an unguessable distance.
The alarm continues to sound, but he no longer hears its noise in intervals, only as a single, uninterrupted, high-pitched scream.
The showerhead hisses and Sam stands under its needling spray. He splats shampoo into his hand and fingers it onto his scalp until bubbles froth up. He scrubs himself with a sponge.
Through the marbled glass, he can see the thing standing in the bathroom, watching him. Even when he doesn’t look directly, he can feel it, like a bruise at the edge of his vision.
The room swirls with steam. When he finishes rinsing off, he twists the knob and remains in the stall until the dripping stops.
He slides the door open and the cold air tightens his skin. He reaches for the towel on the bar, only a few inches from where the thing stands.
“Leave me alone,” he says.
While Sam dresses—pulling on khakis, buttoning a gingham shirt—he can hear his daughter downstairs making them breakfast.
Their kitchen is stainless steel and white quartz; he can imagine Ella down there, snapping on the stovetop burner. The gas flares in a blue ring that matches her dyed hair. She is seventeen and her fingers are busy with rings, including one of a horned skull. She bought it at a vintage shop, along with everything else she is wearing: the shredded jeans, the Korn T-shirt with the cutoff sleeves, the gray grandpa cardigan. That’s not how she looks in the family portrait. She has changed since then.
Everything has changed.
The window over the sink offers a view of the neighborhood—mostly neocolonials and Tudor Revivals set back on three-acre lots. Ella is likely looking out of it now. The sun won’t have burned off the mist yet, and the Land Cruisers and Teslas and Range Rovers will cut through the gray scarves of it as they roll off to work and school.
She will be cracking six eggs into a bowl. With a fork, she’ll stab and stir the yolks. She will drop a sizzling square of butter into the hot pan. The eggs will soon follow and she will let them sit a moment before roughing them with a wooden spatula.
The toast pops. She scoops the scrambled eggs onto two plates. And she carries it all to the round table tucked into the kitchenette—just as Sam pounds down the stairs and enters the kitchen with a leather messenger bag strapped to his shoulder.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” He heads directly to the coffee maker. The carafe is burbling, nearly finished brewing. From the cabinet, he pulls down a mug and splashes it full. He blows the steam off it before taking a delicate sip.
Ella says, “You have to have breakfast.”
“I will.”
“Come sit.” She uses her foot to nudge out a chair for him to occupy.
“You’re the best, but…” His words trail off as he recognizes that his seat is occupied by the thing. It looms only a foot from his daughter.
She scrapes butter onto the toast. Her knife slows when she notes his widening gaze.
“No!” he says.
The scream startles his daughter. She drops her knife with a clatter. “What?” she says, standing up. “What’s wrong?”
He hurries to her fast enough that coffee splashes over the lip of the mug, burning his hand. He drags her from the table and puts his body between hers and its.
“Dad?” Ella says. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I just… I wish I could sit down, but I have this stupid meeting. With the hospital board.”
Her face twists with confusion. “You can’t sit for five minutes?”
“Not today. No. But.” He scoops up the plate she made for him. “Thank you for this—I’ll eat it on the way.”
He rushes to the mudroom, trips over her skateboard and curses, and Ella calls after him, “Are you okay?”
“Fine. I’m fine.”
“What about tonight?”
“What about it?” He tucks his coffee into his elbow and rattles the knob and opens the door to the garage. “What?”
“Mom,” she says in a pleading voice. “We’re supposed to go see Mom.”
He pauses in the doorway, already halfway gone. “Right. Yes.”
“It’s her birthday.”
“I’ve got to… do some things first,” he says. “But we’re going to make that happen.” He nods to himself. “Of course we are.”
He pulls the door shut behind him so roughly the house shakes.
His eyes flit between the road and the rearview mirror. His house retreats into the distance. The neighborhood blurs past. He drives a Volvo station wagon. He bought it after Pamela’s accident—after her car plunged off the road and hit a tree, after her unrecognizable body was found mangled inside—because it had a steel frame and a top safety rating.
His breakfast plate is balanced on the dash and when he rounds a corner, it slides from one side of the car to the other. It is about to sail off, soon to flop onto the floor, when he catches it.
He slows now, easing the brake. The speedometer drops from sixty to twenty-five. He feels far enough away from home to settle his breathing.
In the backseat, the thing sits, blacking out most of the rear window.
“Not her,” he says. “Okay? Never her! Never!”
The thing does not respond. It is silent and watchful.
“You’re hungry?”
He pulls the plate down, balancing it on his lap. He picks up a piece of toast and chucks it into the backseat.
“Then eat!”
He hurls the rest of the plate over his shoulder. “Eat!”
But the thing does not respond, even as the toast bounces off its shoulder, as the clumps of eggs ooze down its chest.
The recovery ward has a particular smell—an ammoniac tang—that Sam has come to associate with fear. Everyone here is close to death. The lights are always dimmed to a twilight glow. The nurses speak in hushed tones. The orderlies try not to rattle their carts or squeak their shoes. You don’t hear much in the way of laughter. Music or even the mutter of a television is rare.
The few hours a day that patients are awake, their eyes appear filled with mist. Sam wears a bleach-white lab coat and sometimes patients will rise out of their anesthetic blur and say, for a second there, they thought he was an angel. “No,” he says. “That, I am not.”
The boy is named Luke. He has dark, hollowed eyes and a naked head that is yellow- skinned where it isn’t bandaged. Some blood stains through the gauze. He lies in a bed with plastic guardrails. Fluids drain in and out of him.
His mother sits next to him, holding the boy’s hand with both of hers.
Sam approaches with a gentle smile. “Hi there.” He checks the dry-erase board and sees her name listed there. “Tina. How are you holding up?”
She gives him an ugly laugh. “Not great.”
“I understand.” He picks up the chart from its plastic sleeve on the wall and consults the nurse’s notes. Then he rolls a stool close to the bed. “What can you tell me about Luke?”
“He was awake for a little while. He had some ice chips.” She picks up a Styrofoam cup that now sloshes with water. “Maybe an hour ago.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He said mom. That was all he said. Just . . . mom.”
“That’s good. This early out of surgery, that’s kind of remarkable, actually.” He scratches down a few notes on the chart.
“I did this to him.”
Sam gives her a double take before his forehead wrinkles with concern. “I know this is hard. Don’t make it harder by saying things like that.”
Her voice cracks in ten places when she says, “It’s in my family. It’s in my blood. I had it too.”
Sam tucks his pen into his breast pocket and gives her a steady look. “And you’re still here. Just like he’s still here.”
She nods, trying to convince herself. “It just . . . feels like death is so close. I don’t know how to feel? Should I feel happy that he’s alive? Or sad that he almost died? He feels like he’s in-between, and I don’t want to believe in something if it’s going to get taken away.”
Sam’s gaze rises, taking in the black ragged thing now looming behind her. “Death is always close,” he says in a hushed voice. “To every one of us.”
The thing lifts an arm—and a long, rotten, gray-fingered hand appears from beneath its sleeve. It is reaching for the boy. There is a creaking, as if of old ropes on a ship.
Sam raises his voice when he says, “But your son isn’t going to die today. I can promise you that. Not today.”
Slowly, the hand of the thing withdraws.
Sam shouldn’t be walking so fast. When he walks fast, he makes people nervous, because it means that something is wrong. But he doesn’t have much time. He moves down the corridor of the recovery ward. The walls are the color of spoiled milk. The fluorescent lights pale every complexion.
He glances into one room—and sees the thing. It is in the next room as well.
And the next.
And the next after that.
It stands beside the beds of the patients, but it watches Sam. Because it wants him to choose.
A voice calls out to him—“Dr. Volk?”—and he nearly shrieks in response.
A woman named Carolyn—with purple braids and matching fingernails—stands from the desk at the nurse’s station. She has a stack of papers in her hand.
“Sorry,” Sam says. “Yes—what is it?”
She gestures with the papers. “Need you to sign off on a dozen or so scrips. And there seems to be an issue with a DNR. Also, Room 13’s daughter called and—”
“Can I check back in with you? In, like, five minutes?” He holds out a splayed hand for emphasis. “Five.”
“Sure. Yeah. Everything okay?”
He waves back at her apologetically when he continues down the hall.
“It will be. Soon.”
On the first floor of the hospital, Sam pushes open a door a crack and peers out the stairwell. The hallway is empty, except for an orderly who carries an armful of blankets and hums a nonsense song. Sam waits for him to vanish around a corner and then he enters the corridor fully and creeps toward the OR.
He pushes through the double doors into the observatory. He can hear the surgeon chatting in the next room, getting prepped, and he can see through a window an old man lying on a stainless steel table. He is naked except for a strip of tissue paper covering his groin. Lights blaze down on him. His mouth hangs open, revealing a serrated line of teeth. He is thin with loose papery skin.
A nurse in a floral smock smears iodine across the old man’s abdomen. Some lines have been stenciled there, indicating the site of the surgery, likely a gallbladder removal.
The nurse finishes his work and departs the room.
Sam can sense the thing beside him. Its fabric shifts like the rustling of dry leaves.
“Him,” Sam says, tapping at the window. “I choose him.”
Minutes later, after the surgeon washes her hands and fits on her scrubs cap and snaps on her latex gloves, she backs through the door that leads to the OR. Here, she almost slips. Because the floor is wet. So are the walls, and the ceiling, everything splattered with blood. The surgical lamp drips like a molten chandelier and burns with a bordello-red light.
There isn’t much left of the old man on the operating table. Some broken ribs and what might be a femur spike out of torn meat. A damp yarny mound of intestines unwinds and plops onto the floor.
Back in his recovery ward, Sam keeps looking behind him. Here is a robed patient exercising with a walker. Here is a custodian pulling a trash bag out of a can.
He tries one room—and observes a man sleeping soundly. He checks in another room and finds a woman sitting by the window, staring out at the parking lot. He pokes his head into Luke’s room next. The boy is awake, and his mother is spooning applesauce into his mouth. He eats greedily and some of it sludges down his chin.
Sam feels his muscles loosen. He takes a deep, cleansing breath. The thing is gone. For now.
He heads toward the nurse’s station. Carolyn pops her eyebrows as he approaches. “Everything good now? Ready to talk?”
“Yes,” he says. “Everything’s great.”
At Valley Grove Cemetery, the grass is mown in tidy stripes and shadows lean and pool between the old oaks. Sam and his daughter stand over a grave. The stone reads “Pamela Volk.”
Sam holds a bouquet of wildflowers. Ella has her skateboard tucked under her arm.
“I can’t believe it’s been a year,” she says. “It feels like no time.”
“It feels like forever for me,” he says.
“I remember how she hated lilies. She said lilies smelled like funerals. So…”
“So.” Sam makes a kind of toast with the bouquet before laying it down.
“So no lilies, Mom,” she says. “Happy birthday.”
Cicadas wheeze. A breeze rises and ripples through the leaves, curling up their silvery undersides. A cardinal wings by in a red flash.
“I,” Sam says, clearing his throat. “I remember how she used to call for us. ‘Sam and Ella,’ she’d say. But fast, like: ‘Salmonella.’ People would always look at her funny when she did that.”
A beat of silence passes before Ella says, “I remember how she would always make you split your order at the restaurant. So she got to try two things.”
“I remember,” Sam says, “how she used to put her feet on me when she got into bed. Her feet were always freezing cold, even in the summer.”
“I remember how she would quiz me constantly on math facts. Nine times seven, twelve times eleven; that kind of thing.”
“I remember how she loved to sing along to the radio but always got the lyrics wrong.”
“I remember how she tried to ride my skateboard in the driveway and broke her wrist.”
Sam says, “Then she made everybody sign her cast, so she looked like a twelve-year-old.”
Ella looks up at him. “Dad?”
It takes a long time for him to meet her eyes. “Do you ever wonder if she…” Her face flinches.
“Do you ever wonder if she killed…”
He can’t hide the sharpness in his voice when he says, “What?”
“If she killed herself? Do you wonder that?”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought you meant—no. No, I don’t think that. Why would you say that? She died in a car accident.”
“But what if—”
“No.”
“She would get so sad sometimes. And scared. Don’t pretend like you don’t remember. She would go be alone, sometimes for days, before coming back.”
“Ella. Please.”
“The last time I saw her, when she grabbed her keys and left, she looked like that. I called out to her. I said, ‘Mom, wait!’ but she wouldn’t even look at me.”
“Your mother loved us, and we loved her. That’s what we should be focusing on. The good parts.”
“But she had bad parts.”
“Everybody has bad parts, and when you love someone, you accept that as part of the deal.”
Ella takes in the gathering shadows of the woods. “It’s just… sometimes I get this feeling… this feeling like something dark is close. And I know… I know sometimes that stuff is inherited and…”
“Ella,” he says and pulls her into a hug. “Come here.” Her body trembles in his arms.
“You know what I used to say to your mom?”
Her tears dampen his shirt at the shoulder. “What?” she says in a quiet voice.
“When things got dark, I’d say, ‘I want you to put all of that poison in me. I’ll soak it up. I’ll eat it for you. Because I can take it. I can take it.’ I’d hold her just like this, until she calmed down. Until she felt better.”
Ella sniffs. “Did it work?”
“You tell me. Whatever pain you’ve got, just give it to me. I can take it. I promise.”
She pulls away from him and roughs some tears from her eyes. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Did it help?”
“It helped.”
He pushes back her bangs and kisses her forehead. “That’s what family is for. We carry each other.”
She motions to the grave. “I feel like we should—I don’t know—bake a cake or something.”
“Your mom loved Dairy Queen Blizzards. Should we go get one? I kind of feel like one.”
“Yeah.” She tips her head into a nod. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
Then she drops her skateboard onto the asphalt path and jumps onto it. “Race you!” she says. “Loser buys the ice cream.” She pumps her leg once, twice, rolling swiftly away.
He gives chase, yelling, “Oh, it’s on!”
And with that, they leave behind the cold stone and the bright flowers and the steadily darkening woods.
At Dairy Queen, on the outdoor patio, they eat cheeseburgers and dip their French fries in ketchup. Ella turns her chocolate Snickers Blizzard upside down, as a test, before spooning into it with a laugh. When a crow hops close, she tosses it a fry and asks it to come home as her pet.
Sam talks to her but feels as if he is only half tuned-in to the conversation. He pokes at the salty crumbs in his basket without remembering having eaten a single bite. He keeps looking over his shoulder, hunting for something that isn’t there. The sun is dying on the horizon.
At one point, Ella has to say, “Dad,” three times before he says, “Sorry. What?”
“I was asking if we can look at photos when we get home.”
“Yeah. That sounds nice.”
A half an hour later, they’re in the living room, digging through cardboard boxes and stacking albums and scrapbooks on the coffee table. Ella curls up on the couch, and Sam finds his recliner.
She says, “I used to think it was weird, how Mom insisted on printing up all our photos at Walgreens, but now I’m glad. There’s something more real about them this way.”
They flip through baptisms and camps and soccer games and picnics and vacations.
“Look at this one,” she says and rotates the album to show off a photo from Yellowstone. The three of them stand before a steaming mud pot, pinching their noses. Pamela had a smile that seemed to reach all the way to her ears. Her hair was the color of sunlight. She complained constantly about the lack of pockets in women’s clothing, so she bought men’s shorts and shirts and tailored them to fit her. That’s what she was wearing in this photo: pockets. So many pockets. She hid so much in them.
Sam says, “You wouldn’t stop complaining about the rotten egg smell. So we made a game of it. It was our goal to find the stinkiest attraction in the park.”
“Mom was convinced I was going to get eaten by a bear.”
At the bottom of a box, Sam finds a black book that appears more like a journal. The spine has the ribbing of vertebrae. He flips it open randomly— somewhere toward the back—and finds a photo of Pamela.
She is a teenager with a perm that looks like it weighs twenty pounds. She holds a volleyball and wears a jersey that advertises her favorite number: seventeen. But—and here’s the thing that makes him lean forward—there is a black figure roughly Sharpie-d into the background.
He flips back one page, and then another, and another after that, and finds the same. The thing is with her. At the county fair, when she won a blue ribbon for her sheep. At Christmas, when she showed off a new sweater beneath the tree. At a birthday party, where she puffs her cheeks to blow out the candles. There are words scratched onto the pages too: “Choose,” “Choose,” “Choose,” “How can I choose?” “I can’t choose.”
And: “Will it stop?”
And: “What if I give myself to it?”
There are also newspaper clippings—of car accidents, farm accidents, a string of homeless murders. Here are ten obituaries, nine of them in hospice, one of them a seemingly healthy teacher.
And then—Sam keeps flipping back, back, back—on the very first page of the album, there is a photo of her in a church. She stands with her mother. They both wear black. Their faces are dour. On the altar is a coffin with lilies all around it. A large photograph of a middle-aged man is placed on a pedestal nearby. The thing is Sharpie-d into the background here. “Dad left,” she has written in the margins. “And it chose me.”
He realizes that he’s been sucking his breath in and out of his teeth when Ella says, “What’s wrong?”
Sam slaps the book shut and blinks at her rapid-fire. “Nothing. Just getting tired.” He rises, taking the book with him. “Think I’m ready to say good night.”
He startles briefly because his reflection ghosts the glass of the nighttime window, and he pulls together the curtains, blocking out the night.
When the red numbers on the bedside clock turn over to 7:00 a.m., his alarm sounds and his eyes snap open. The family portrait on the night table stares back at him. The three of them, in matching outfits, smiling in the sunlight. It’s almost disgustingly wholesome. He’s known for a year that it was no longer true. But now he recognizes that maybe it never was. There might as well be a black wraith scribbled into the background, a fourth member of their family.
He punches off the alarm. In the hush, he rolls over to check the other side of the bed. He finds it empty. A sigh filters through his nose.
He throws aside the comforter and climbs out of bed—only to find the thing standing between him and the bathroom.
“No.” He retreats until the backs of his legs strike the mattress. “No, I gave you what you wanted.”
The thing continues to observe him with its dead abyss of a gaze.
“It’s too soon. Leave me alone, goddamn it.” The thing waits.
“Is it because he was old? Did that not . . . satisfy you or something?”
The thing watches.
Sam shoves his fists against his eyes. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus—I can’t keep doing this.”
When he pulls his hands away, his vision is blurred red, and it takes him a moment to find his focus again. The thing is now even closer, swallowing up most of his vision, as if night has returned suddenly to his bedroom.
“Get away!” Sam bashes into his night table, knocking over the framed photo, shattering the glass. The thing speaks in its rusty wheeze of a voice: “Choose.”
Sam dresses in a rush. He doesn’t bother combing his hair. His unbrushed mouth tastes a little like the ammoniac air in the recovery ward. He chases his way down the stairs and peers around the corner of the kitchen and says, “Thank God.”
Because his daughter is gone. She has left him a bagel with cream cheese and raspberry jam on it, along with a burbling carafe of coffee. Next to his mug is a note—written in her spidery script—that reads, “SAT prep before school. Had to go. Eat your breakfast or else! Love, Ella.”
He feels a cold trace in the air. To his right is a shadow where one wasn’t before. Every part of his body stiffens except the note shivering in his hand. “Come on then.”
Sam normally pays little attention to his neighborhood. It is a place he drives through on the way to someplace else. Now he swings his head back and forth, intensely studying lawns and garages, looking for someone who might be a suitable candidate.
The thing waits in the backseat. He tries not to look at it, but in the same way that staring at a light can stain your vision, so does its darkness. He sees it even when it is out of his range of vision; its contamination is always with him.
A man walks down his driveway to fetch a newspaper. His bathrobe hangs open and his belly swells out of it. He has a ruddy face, appears to be in his late forties, and might be sixty pounds overweight. Sam looks at him the way he would a patient and decides he likely has some combination of diabetes, high cholesterol, and hypertension—a prime candidate for a stroke or heart attack.
He feathers the brake, slowing the car.
The man snatches up the newspaper, unfolds it, and reads the headline. But he soon senses the Volvo and a stare seals between them.
Sam licks his lips. “Okay. Okay, how about—”
Just then the front door of the house opens and a boy and a girl run down the driveway. They wear backpacks and carry lunchboxes and might be in first or second grade. They grab hold of each of his legs and he ruffles their hair while giving Sam a hard look.
Sam stomps the gas and speeds off.
An ambulance is parked in the middle of an intersection, its light bar flashing.
Two squad cars are also present and the officers redirect traffic. Flares burn. Their brightness draws Sam’s gaze from three blocks away. “Give me something. Please, please, please,” he says, and the Volvo picks up speed.
At the same time, the thing leans forward, and places its rotten hand on the headrest. Its nails tear the leather with a squelch.
Sam leans forward, whimpering, trying to avoid its touch.
“Choose,” it says.
“Just be patient. Just give me a goddamn minute.” His words come out as nearly a scream.
Some sort of accident has taken place, as a sedan is parked crookedly. The windshield is shattered and bloodied, and the asphalt is littered with sparkling jewels of glass. He can’t see much, in his hurry, but the EMTs are rolling a stretcher, a stretcher with someone belted to it, toward the rear of the ambulance.
“There!” Sam says. “There! Go! Just leave me alone. Leave my family alone.”
The Volvo comes to a rocking halt. He jams the gearshift into park and rushes out of the car without even killing the engine or shutting the door.
When he looks back, he finds the backseat empty.
He chokes out a laugh and spins in a dizzy circle and runs a hand across his face. And then pauses. His hand begins to tremble and falls to his side. “No.” He walks—and then jogs—and then sprints forward. “No!”
One of the officers tries to stop him, holding up his hands. “Sir, please step back!”
“I’m a doctor,” Sam says, dodging past him. “I’m a doctor!” He nearly falls, sliding on some broken glass, and then he is upon it. The skateboard. His daughter’s skateboard, with the pink wheels, its bottom plastered in stickers. It’s been splintered beneath the sedan.
“Not her! Anyone but her!” He keeps running, breathless, toward the rear of the ambulance, where the EMTs heft the stretcher. “Take me! Take me instead! Take me!”
In the rear of the ambulance, Ella lies on a stretcher. Her arm and cheek are speckled with glass. Her hairline is split open, revealing a slick gray stripe of skull. One of her legs bends crookedly in the wrong direction. The EMTs hover over her ruined body, checking her vitals. Her breath is shallow and her pulse is elevated. She won’t respond to their voices as they call out to her.
But they are soon interrupted.
Outside there is a sudden screaming. Of one voice, then two, then three, four. They make the agonized music of those who have witnessed something horrible.
One of the officers rushes to the rear of the ambulance. His face and uniform are freckled with blood and he gasps as if he has run a long distance. “Get out here! You’ve got to get out here!”
When Ella finally wakes up, she doesn’t know how much time has passed or where she is or what’s happened. Her thoughts are muddied from pain and medication. She is in bed. She knows that. She is in bed and her leg is hanging from an elevated harness with screws burrowing into her skin. One of her eyes is half-lidded, crusted and bruised. Her head is mummied with bandages and when she looks one way, then the other, it takes her vision a second to catch up.
A heart monitor beeps with the regularity of a slow alarm. There are cards and flowers and stuffed animals on a nearby table. A hospital—the word comes to her gradually—she is in a hospital.
She searches the room further and notes a figure standing in the corner. “Dad?” And then she realizes it is not a person, but a manifestation of shadows, like the night incarnate. “Hello?”
The thing approaches, not walking, but gliding.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
Its voice gasps out a single word: “Choose.”
The last thing my sister Elspeth tells me is what she and Terric had done did not, technically, qualify, and so probably she would be fine. When places like this say “virgin,” it’s really more along the lines of, like, how young they are.It’s supposed to be only virgins who can face dragons. Maybe you’ve heard…
The cornfield’s dirt is black and its stalks are luminous. The broken heavens above are shaped of dark fog; there are places where a purple void studded with white stars show through. I am grateful that my eyes can interpret light from such distances. I undulate in the dirt, waiting for my mother- in-law, feeling the…
Part I: Hors D’oeuvresA month ago, my papi and I moved to the panhandle, a place that lacks the constant stream of Spanish that Miami is known for. Here, everyone has blond or light brown hair and light eyes. Here, people say, “y’all,” and one out of five gives you odd looks when you say…
They do put the hand back together. It takes all night. We start in the plastic waiting room chairs and as it grows later, we sprawl on the carpet, sneak sips of Spotted Cow, and try to stay awake. Mel offers the receptionist a beer, which sends her into a very vowel-forward “Oh no I…
I was twenty-two the first time it happened. My father slapped me so hard that I bit my cheek open and a thin trickle of blood spilled over my tongue while he stood there, jaw locked, holding the pearl in his hand. He looked at it, not me, his eyes only for the smear of light…
A monster grew out there in the tobacco.
Delmae had seen it. Shapeless as night. Well, heard it. A howl like a coyote—no, a screech like a bobcat. Or was that the feral tabby who liked to hang around out back for the chicken heads Mama unzipped from their bodies, for supper?
Well, no matter. Delmae sensed it. Knew it was there. It lived in small touches against the earth, and when it reached out, the universe touched back. The sway of the tobacco leaves when there was no wind. The sudden flight of crows when there were no men in the fields. The patchy death of rotting grass underfoot when there was no drought.
When her Mama thought she was asleep along with her brothers and sisters, Delmae would tuck her small frame into the sill of their bedroom window and stare out at the endless rows of shivering tobacco. A whole farmhouse between her and that monster. Still she sensed it.
Its eyes would not be sparks of fire, she decided. They would be blue, like hers. Like those’n on the doll she wanted from the general store in town but that her Mama said they were too poor to afford. Blue was a fierce color, and one day, Delmae was determined to find a pair of blue eyes that could stare back as hard as she stared out.
She asked her Pa one morning, when dawn was just a whisper over the fields. This was their ritual. Or rather, hers. As the eldest girl, she’d wake up early enough to pack sandwiches for Pa and Mama and her siblings. Shuffling white bread like playing cards didn’t take long, but she knew if she came alive before everyone else, she’d get a moment with Pa, just the two of them, before he left for work. Before his limbs were heavy, before his back was hunched, before his skin was sweat. Before his temper was short.
“Pa,” she’d start, little fingers curling back the tin lid on the S.P.A.M. can like she was pulling the covers off of Mama, who did not like to rise early at all. (She never understood why—if Mama never got up early enough, she never got to kiss Pa goodbye for the day.) “Did you know there’s a monster living out there? In the fields?”
Her Pa was doing up the laces on his work boots, the big ones he used to crush monsters in the house, mostly fiddlebacks. “Is that the truth?” he grunted. Somedays he worked in the fields, somedays with the gas-n-electric company, somedays with the mines. The more hours he worked, the fewer hours he spent in the house with Delmae and Mama. The mines were the worst. On those days, her Pa came home looking something scary.
“Uh huh. I know it. And it knows I know. It waits out there, watching us. I think it was here before us and we just gone and moved in on it. It ate the chickens last Christmas—”
“That was a fox,” her Pa shot, voice gruff. “They get hungry in the cold.”
Delmae peered at him over the kitchen counter, which was almost too tall for her. She didn’t tell anyone, but she hid a small crate in the cabinets; she’d pull it out to stand on whenever folks was on the other side of the kitchen, unable to see.
“No, it’s a monster! A big one, too. Not ugly, though. Like a shadow, you know. Or a big dog. Like the Jeffersons’ dog down the way, Bullet, I’d bet they be friends—”
“A fox, Delmae,” her Pa said, voice sterner this time. No room for arguing.
“But Mama said when we close our eyes at night, all sorts of things come out of the dark and that’s why we gotta stay in bed, why we gotta go to bed early, sometimes even before you come home at night—”
“Don’t listen to your Mama. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Lets her mind get away from her, is all.” His eyes—blue, like Delmae’s, but darker, or maybe, she thought, washed with the wrong color somehow, like a poisonous sock in the laundry bin—studied his work shirt where Mama had stitched up a hole. Not well enough, apparently. His brow grew low and wrinkly over his eyes and Delmae knew she had only a little more time.
“It’s real though. I’m not just making things up, I’m too big for that now. I’m not the baby, no matter what the boys say. I bet I could even help you start planting next season. Then I’ll show you. It’ll be out there, I swear it.”
Her Pa only shook his head. He already seemed worn out today, or maybe that was just her imagination. Her brothers were always teasing her for an imagination. Said they didn’t know where she got it from on account of they couldn’t much afford any books.
“Oh!” Delmae explained. “Maybe it’s waiting out there cause it’s hungry!” The revelation sung through her veins stronger than the church choir on Sundays. That had to be it. “Hey Pa,” she said, unfolding newsprint to wrap the sandwiches in. “How come we can have fields and animals but we can’t buy a doll?”
Her Pa stood then, towering in the room like a statue that had been sized all wrong for its garden. Silent as concrete, he stalked toward her and grabbed two newsprint-wrapped S.P.A.M. sandwiches off the counter without a word.
Then he was gone.
Delmae looked down at the remains of her sandwich operation, cheeks singing with warmth but not any kind of warmth that reminded her of a pleasing choir.
Every morning, she cut a single can of S.P.A.M. into eleven slices for eleven lunches: Two sandwiches each to the three boys and Pa for their long school and work days; one each to Delmae and her little sister; and one to her Mama, but Mama always ended up giving hers away to their crotchety neighbor down in the holler, Ms. Lacey, even though that tough old woman always said she didn’t want one but took it anyway. Delmae’s brothers always joked that their Pa and Mama stopped having kids when they got two girls in a row because Pa didn’t want the boys to be equally matched. Equally matched was too much the same as outnumbered.
Every morning, she cut the slimy chunk of S.P.A.M., jiggly and as lifeless as an un-beating heart, into eleven slices, each slice so thin that if she held it up to the window, she could see the sun rise over the fields through it. She’d slice, layer the meat gently into a pocket of white bread eleven times, and play her favorite game: Imagining what the S.P.A.M. letters really stood for. Sunlight Paraded All Morning. Supper Probably Ain’t Much.
Someday Pa Answers Me.
This morning, she looked at the chunk of S.P.A.M. and thought for a minute. And instead of cutting the rest into the remaining nine veiny slices, she made ten, twelve slices total.
One extra slice for the monster growing in the tobacco.
He was probably starving.
A monster grew in the air that summer.
Delmae could smell it. Something fowl baked in the air quicker than cornbread batter crusted in a hot oiled skillet.
A little after noon, every time she came back from delivering a S.P.A.M. sandwich to the monster in the tobacco (her new favorite habit), she caught a whiff of something sour decaying in the humid June air.
Her three older brothers left for school in the mornings, after Pa left for work. She was old enough for learning, too, and had even gone a spell in the school house in town. But then her baby sister’d cried her way into life and her Mama had needed more help than her own two hands from God could provide. So Delmae’d left school; after all, whatever husband she ended up fetching would have gone to enough school for the both of them. Maybe even to high school. Delmae liked to imagine what it might be like to rifle through an entire room of books she’d have in her future big house with her future husband who would spend so much time off at work in town that he’d never bother her while she spent all day reading.
Delmae had been right, of course. Not that her older brothers or Pa listened to her long enough to even entertain the ideas she was spewing. Sometimes Mama would give her an ear, but only in the golden hour of the afternoons, when Pa and the boys were gone and the littlest girl was deep in her nap. Only when Mama’d slept her full twelve hours and had a cup of coffee in her, maybe coffee with a little splash of something else stronger and more sour than whatever Delmae was smelling outside. Those afternoon hours were Delmae’s and Mama’s, their own special time when it felt like the entire earth could spin around two tiny lives.
Anyway. Delmae was always right. There was most certainly a beast in the tobacco and he was most certainly hungry.
As usual that morning, she upturned a can of S.P.A.M. and let the pink stuff drop onto a plate with a sound that reminded her of Pa’s boots sticking in the mud by the creek. And as usual in the early morning quiet and empty of the kitchen, she bullied that S.P.A.M. into twelve slices. She was particularly proud of them this morning, even though the only taste that ever came through was the white bread; they were so thin, they reminded her of the fragile pages of the Bibles in church.
They didn’t go to church much anymore; that was one thing she noticed her folks agreed on. Pa didn’t seem to have the time or energy when Sunday was the only rest day he got, and even then, he spent it out on the farm. Mama didn’t have the patience. Whenever someone approached them on one of the rare occasions Mama took Delmae into town for an errand, they’d always wonder when Mama was gonna bring the children back to services. They were missed.
Mama would just stare at them, the plow lines on her face getting deeper as her features sunk into the same look she often threw Pa when she thought no one was looking, like when he tracked mud through the house or when he came home late and decided to sleep on the sofa. Delmae saw everything, of course.
Delmae didn’t like the soft-spoken preacher much, anyway. No one did. If folks were either S.P.A.M. or white bread, that man was definitely the whitest and blandest of breads. Awful lot of folks caught up on their napping, especially on summer Sundays when the church was hot and the preacher man was prisoner to one of his mumbling, droning sermons.
Eight slices for the boys.
Sir Preacher Always Mutters.
Three slices for the girls.
An extra slice.
No one saw Delmae slip out of the kitchen and into the tobacco fields around lunchtime.
The tobacco was much taller than she. She wasn’t positive why just yet, but this lunchtime charity of hers was best kept secret. There wasn’t much left to be personal in a small farmhouse with seven people. And that didn’t even include the chickens! This was hers. No one else’s. Besides, the boys wouldn’t like knowing their sandwiches were thinner, and Mama told her to never wander out into the fields, especially alone.
You’ll get lost.
Will not! Pa doesn’t get lost.
Your Pa’s never not lost, sugar. But Mama usually murmured that last part like the preacher mumbled. There are monsters out there, Mama’d try again.
Ha! Delmae giggled to herself as she stalked through the tobacco, small hands gripping a small plate with a small sandwich. Silly Mama. That kind of reasoning was like butter on crusty cornbread to Delmae; the more someone slathered it around, the more she wanted. Truth was, her stuffy school teacher was probably glad he didn’t have to handle her curiosity anymore. She had approximately fourteen phenomenal questions in her brain every hour. Monsters, for sure. If only Mama knew.
So when the tobacco leaves enveloped her small frame in a cocoon of smells that reminded her of Pa, letting her disappear from the outside world for a moment, it was for sure a sign from the universe. She was meant to be out here; the forces at work would keep her from being spotted and getting in trouble. She loved learning about the universe and the planets and what lurked in the shadows of the oceans. She’d spend hours at the library in town when she could, but it was only ever open when cranky old Ms. Lacey felt well enough to make the trek in from deep in the holler and open it up.
Delmae stopped in a specific clearing in the tobacco, the plants stamped down under tiny footprints here. Noontime sunlight streaked through the leaves, but it still felt cooler this deep in. It was nice to be small sometimes. No one would be able to see her from the farmhouse, and this far out in the fields, the noises of the world calmed just a little bit. No chicken squawks, no dogs panting, no static radio nonsense blaring from Mama’s bedroom. Quiet.
She set the plate on the ground, like she had many times before.
“This batch turned out real nice,” she said into the silence. The tobacco swayed in front of her as the wind whispered through. Silence. Delmae noticed there weren’t any little critters running around in the underbrush out here anymore, not since she’d discovered the monster. No field mice or rabbits. Not even a barn snake. Like they all knew they’d shifted from animals to prey right quick.
Not for the first time, Delmae pondered one of her favorite questions. Did this monster like little girls?
“We even had some jarred onions I forgot Mama pickled a while back. I threw a couple of those on there, too.”
Silence.
This is usually how it went. Delmae would talk, offer the sandwich, talk some more, and then leave. The sandwich would always be gone when she came back for the plate in the late afternoon. She pondered what kind of monster this one might be, but as she never saw the creature, that was hard. If not a monster, then what? She swore she saw flashes of lightning bug-yellow eyes at night when she stared out from the bedroom window, but he was no dog or bear or coyote. This monster was…new.
Delmae dared to ask a question she’d never be able to in church. “Are you a god?”
The stillness answered back. Then a low rumble sounded. A growl? A hungry stomach? She very much wanted to know more about this monster. Where had he come from? Grown up? Did he have a Pa and a Mama and siblings and absolutely no time and space to do things on his own so he’d run off and now here he was…More importantly, would he be good at her game?
Saints Ponder Ancient Meaning.
Yes, this monster out in the tobacco felt ancient.
Seeing they were done for the day and knowing he wouldn’t eat the sandwich until she left, she gave a small wave and made her way back to the house.
At the bottom of the back porch steps, Delmae immediately knew something was wrong.
She took a few steps into the house and let the answer claim her senses. The sour smell wasn’t from her monster, or from the fields. Not the outside world. The foul odor was coming from inside the house.
It was then she realized there was still untouched coffee burning on the stovetop. Mama had not come down to the kitchen today.
A monster grew in Pa.
At least, that’s what Delmae guessed, because Mama spent more and more time in bed on account of not wanting to deal with your Pa today, sugar.
The days got hotter, the nights grew longer, and Pa came back later. He got home in entirely new days sometimes; Delmae heard midnight chime on the old grandfather clock in the den about the same time the front screen door banged open and closed. She was usually up, sitting at her bedroom window sill, watching for her monster. Monsters liked to come out in the spooks’ hour, of course. She knew this from books in the library. They loved the time between midnight and three in the morning, so she learned to love it, too. Hoping she’d spot the dark mass of a creature brushing sandwich crumbs from his fur…
Tonight, another late night, Pa did what he always did when he finally stumbled home from work or town or wherever he had been: Pa wound the grandfather clock in the den. Delmae knew it; heard it. He loved that thing more than Mama’s biscuits (ridiculous), more than his children (shameful), and certainly more than Jesus and church (understandable). He’d wind it and wind it only to fiddle with it some more, his calloused hands, dirt caked under the fingernails, for once gentle.
She started to understand why Mama always got a twisted-up lemon look on her face when she caught Pa doing that, caressing the clock’s hands and pieces with such love and care it was like he’d married them. But what was the point of a gosh dang clock that couldn’t keep time? A clock that went bad every single day and had to be made un-bad? A more preposterous idea than the idea of a monster living out in the tobacco, if you asked her.
From her place in the kitchen one morning, Delmae watched her Pa wind the grandfather clock. He’d actually come home early enough yesterday to go to bed before it needed to be wound, even had supper with her and the boys (Mama was asleep), although it was just corn soup and stale bread croutons. Slice after slice of S.P.A.M. fell to the plate as her Pa busied himself with the clock; she was ready to stash the slices and bread into the breadbox in case he turned around and saw how many sandwiches she was making.
But she lost count of her slices when a ghost floated down the steps, the floorboards creaking even beneath a willowy frame. Mama was up. Out of bed. In the morning. Delmae almost shaved off her thumb as her eyes followed her Mama as best they could from the kitchen. She was in her dressing robe, hair not done, but still. She was alive in a whole new part of the day. Her Mama approached Pa at the clock. Delmae didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew something was off between them, like they had pasty clumps in their buttermilk. Were they getting back to being friends again?
Her Mama and Pa sunk into a terse, whispered conversation. That didn’t sound like being friends again.
Signs Point Against Maybe.
“Why didn’t you come down to supper last night?”
Delmae couldn’t quite see their faces, but that was Pa. Pa always started with questions.
“Why did you make it to supper last night?” Definitely Mama. Silence. “What happened, Charles?”
“What was always going to happen. They’ve lost too many men in the mines this season so they sent us home. Folks is starting to pay too much attention. That mine’ll close. The money’ll move to anothern, a smaller town further away with better mountains and poorer men. Men ever more desperate than us.”
“There are no poorer men. We’re it—”
“Is that the truth?” A hacking cough out of Pa. Delmae’s oldest brother told her it was the mines. Apparently, mine monsters were mostly made of coal dust and crawled into your lungs so they could hitch a ride out of their caves since they were trapped down there, sometimes for centuries. She didn’t believe that nonsense. Not really. It was silly. Mostly. Honestly, why would a monster ever have to get un-trapped? A monster was the trap.
Her Pa was speaking again, and Delmae’s ears went hot when she heard her name.
“Del’s old enough to work now. And I don’t just mean around the house. She can join the boys in the field maybe, or go in town—”
“Honestly, Charles. Del ain’t even got proper clothes to leave the house. You’d know that if you spent any time with her. She needs new shoes.”
“She can wear the one’s she’s got for now just fine.”
Delmae wiggled her free toes on the cold kitchen title. Thank goodness she didn’t have to wear shoes in the house. Her middle toes were longer than the others, and were starting to permanently curl in and under in her worn Mary Janes. They didn’t hurt. Much. She couldn’t run in them, mind you. And sometimes her ankles started to smart because she kept walking on her heels to keep her toes lifted off the ground and free of the pressure—
Did her monster out in the tobacco have shoes? What if his feet were cold? Bruised and broken? If her Pa couldn’t even get his baby girl new shoes, who was taking care of her monster?
Just then, her stomach rumbled. She was pretty used to the feeling by now, but for some reason, her gut grumbled louder than her folks’ argument this time. If she was hungry, then surely her monster was, too. She sliced faster, only half paying attention now.
“She cannot wear those old things anymore. They’re gonna cripple her feet. You think she’ll dance well enough to get any attention from boys with those feet?”
Boys! Delmae wanted to snort. What boys? Pure trouble. She didn’t have time for boys, not for their silliness. Not that she saw many boys anymore since Mama took her out of school. Slice. The boys in class had stared too long at her dusty shoes and crooked teeth, and not nearly long enough at her blue eyes or the tiny bow of twine she braided her hair with. Slice. It was twine she secretly clipped from her Mama’s best and only hat one day, with her older brother’s knife. That hat lived at the back of the closet, anyway. Boys were stupid. Slice.
Stupid People Anger Me.
“That just means she’s growing, which means she’s old enough to start some real work. It’d be good for her.”
“It ain’t good for you, why would it be good for her—” Her Mama’s voice caught in a strange gurgle of a sound then, strangled and short, the way the barn dogs choked on the bones of the chicken scraps they got a hold of after supper.
Then Delmae heard a wheezing gasp, like her Mama’d come up for air after swimming through a deep, dark well.
In the next instant, erratic boot-stomping echoed toward the kitchen. “Better than wasting away around here, learning your example, sleeping all hours of the day—”
Delmae didn’t look up in time. Her Pa and Mama barreled around the corner into the kitchen and she didn’t even have half a second to squirrel away the evidence of the extra sandwich. There were twelve slivers of delicate heart-pink S.P.A.M. in front of her, twenty-four pieces of white bread.
Her parents halted in surprise. Pa’s face was flushed with red anger. Mama’s eyes were sunken in pools of purple, baggy exhaustion, and a red patchy painting was forming around her neck. Silly Mama. Her neck always got like that when she insisted on sleeping with her goose-feather pillow. (Delmae didn’t know why her Mama didn’t just get rid of that pillow when it gave her so much trouble.)
Her folks were silent, staring. At the fact that Delmae was up this early making sandwiches and had likely overheard them, or at the extra sandwich? Oh lord, she hoped the first. Worst case, she’d just say Mama was bringing an extra sandwich to Ms. Lacey, who was only ever not so cranky when she had a little something to eat, and she needed something to snack on after all if she was going to make the trek to keep the library open for Delmae—
Mama’s eyes went to Pa and then followed his gaze, which was fixated on Delmae’s small hands hovering above smaller sandwiches. Her folks glowered at the slices of S.P.A.M., thinner than a top layer of delicate skin. Delmae’d read once that their outside layer of skin was already dead anyway, always dying and replenishing.
Pa turned and fumed out, stomps echoing to the front door.
Mama stayed a moment longer, the sadness in her eyes losing the fight to tiredness. Her Mama never seemed to be able to win the fight against her enemy of exhaustion. Without a word, she left her daughter alone again in the kitchen.
Delmae brought the rest of the sandwiches to life. She gave extra care to the twelfth. Even spread a little bit of the mustard they had left in the jar on top of the S.P.A.M.
Were they really that poor, she thought, as she left a sandwich out in the tobacco fields that day. How could she be poor if she still had something to share?
Sure enough, supper was quiet that night. As she and her siblings came to the table, Delmae stared at the food Mama placed in front of them when it was clear Pa wasn’t making it home.
Soggy Peas and Macaroni.
Yes, she thought. Oh yes. The monster outside might have been hungry, but the heartbeats inside the house were poor in all the wrong ways.
A monster was not an easy thing to hide, as it turned out.
Delmae made a mistake. As with all mistakes, this one started with a storm.
One August night, late summer heat and a lonely front of cool air mixed worse than old skillet grease and the chilly water from the kitchen faucet. And soon, when the moon was high but shadowed behind the clouds, the atmosphere gave birth to a locomotive.
The sky screamed at midnight, and suddenly the world was awake. Still half dazed with sleep and barely out of a dream, Delmae sprinted after her older brothers through the house. The walls shrieked around them as the old farmhouse bent and shook and swayed in the gathering winds. Picture frames fell and cracked. The few pieces of china they had shivered from the cabinets and shattered. Delmae’s sister, the little one, was crying up a storm of her own but then the baby was in their Mama’s arms and Mama was trying to sing a lullaby over the sound of the train coming right down from heaven—
“The cellar, out back!”
Delmae saw Pa shout the words before she ever heard them, and suddenly hands and elbows met ribs and everyone was shoving and clawing their way out of the house, speeding like the devil for the cellar out back. Near the tobacco fields. Her ears rung and her head felt like it was overflowing with cotton, and she could barely think straight. The fields! Her Monster—he was out there alone and he must be confused and frightened and lord he was probably so hungry, late-night storms always made her crave milk and some sweet cinnamon dumplings—
Outside, a mass of black hovered on the horizon, spinning in some kind of odd, slow-tempo dance. The tobacco wouldn’t be any kind of shield for her monster.
Mama shouted over the horn section of winds, at their eldest. “Go check on Ms. Lacey!”
Pa whirled on their Mama, the lose skin of his face catching and slipping around on his cheek bones like an old sheet. “Are you insane? Don’t send him out there—”
But Delmae’s big brother went sprinting in the opposite direction, toward the road, without even his shoes on.
Pa was so distracted he didn’t see Delmae slip back into the house.
The foundation of the house shook and nails popped and she was sure her world was vibrating but maybe that was just her brain knocking against her skull. She made it to the kitchen, to the stack of sandwiches she’d already made last night ahead of time, when she knew folks was asleep and she wouldn’t run into Pa.
But Pa found her this time, a newspaper-wrapped sandwich in her armpit, her feet pointed toward the back kitchen door where he was now standing.
“What the hell’re you doing, girl? Get your ass out into the cellar.”
Her eyes went wide with what she knew had to be guilt, hair swirling all around her head and looking mighty tangled and pitiful. She didn’t move. In fact, she did him one better. She shook her head.
Her Pa broke for a moment, his record scratching. “What?” A pause. The locomotive screamed closer. “Did you just tell me no, girl?”
“I have to feed the monster,” she finally shouted. “The monster, the one in the field. The one I told you about.”
“The monster—” His head tilted and he suddenly looked like he might vomit. “Stop being silly and put your goddamn shoes on.” It was only then that she noticed her Pa had carried her shoes out with him, from the house, like he’d actually been thinking about her.
“But my monster—”
“There’s no monster! You’re spewing nonsense and we don’t got time for this bullshit so put your goddamn shoes on—”
The back screen door cracked right off his hinges. Something cracked in Pa, too. Understanding passed over his face as he fully heard what she’d said. Delmae had read about the calm in the eye of tropical storms. She just didn’t think she’d ever live long enough or go far enough to see one up close.
“You’re leaving our food out there in the fields? For what, the animals? Teaching all them wild creatures to come back and make a mess…You’re just leaving it out there.” Pa always started with questions but now none of his questions sounded like questions anymore.
She gave the smallest of nods.
“You’re leaving our food, my goddamn food that I goddamn paid for, out there for the vermin of the world?”
She thought it was the house at first, but no, it was her own bones trembling under her skin this time as her Pa approached her. It happened too fast for her to see it coming. One of her shoes hit her in the side of the face. Pa’s left hand was empty, her right shoe in his other.
“Answer me, girl!”
She didn’t budge. Just clutched the sandwich tighter, squished that single slice of S.P.A.M. into an even thinner version of itself.
“Fuckin rat—”
Her right shoe smacked into her temple and for a breath her world flashed white in the overwhelming darkness.
“If you can waste my money, my food, Jesus Christ knows you don’t need any goddamn new shoes, you spoiled bitch.”
She blinked, thinking of her monster, who survived all alone out there in the tobacco fields, who’d probably survived a long time before she ever came along.
Soon Pa Apologizes More.
She said, “Those didn’t even fit right anyhow.”
That did it.
Her Pa lunged after her, murder in his blue eyes that were not really blue anymore, but dark as the mass of air and earth and debris and chaos churning out there in the midnight.
Delmae was already in motion. She fled into the living room, heart pounding in time with the thunder outside. Her Pa’s heavy boots plowed behind her and when she hopped over a fallen coatrack, she finally had an idea, not for her Mama or her siblings or even for her monster but for herself. She did the only thing could think of.
Pa raced behind her. She got to that ancient grandfather clock in the den, that ghost of a thing that’d somehow managed to stay upright through all this hell.
And she got behind it and pushed.
It crashed to the floor in such a cacophony of sound that she almost forgot about the storm outside. Then her Pa tripped over it where she’d pushed it into his path and crushed whatever of the precious thing was left. His face hit the floorboards, nose first, and she heard crunching and cursing before she tore the hell out of the house and into the backyard.
She didn’t have much time. Her Pa would come after her. But she didn’t run toward the cellar, where her Mama and her brothers were waiting.
No, Delmae didn’t desert her monster. She dove into the tobacco fields, sandwich tucked in her arm like she might have cradled that doll from the general store in town. Sprinting through the thick stalks, she thought only of her monster, of feeding him, making sure he stayed alive. A minute later, when she heard Pa follow her into the tobacco, his loud cursing an angry battle cry, she smiled. Just as he was supposed to do.
She was doing this for her family, she told herself. For her sister and her brothers and her monster out here. Most especially for her Mama. The winds spun and the locomotive chugged faster and the world went dark as the inside of a coffin. Most especially for Mama, who deserved all the peace and quiet Delmae could find for her, who probably never got to have a monster all her own to look after, her own private little thing she could nurture until it either grew scary enough to not have to hide from anything anymore, or happy enough that it didn’t want to.
A sandwich for her monster, a single slice of something to keep it fighting. The world cracked open above and around her. A man’s strangled cry tore across the back of her mind.
Save Pa and Mama.
She plunged to her knees, sandwich in the dirt, wrapped her arms over her head.
Save Pa and Mama.
She stayed small, unseen, something she’d practiced for a long, long time.
Save Pa and Mama.
Then Delmae’s head went quiet. The air pressure lifted like the heavens were taking a much-needed breath. The humid air of August cocooned around her again. A bird whistled a tune. She stood, knees shaking, eyes jumping from a felled tree to their overturned truck to the farmhouse which was leaning into the ground like it was drunk. And the fields—
The tobacco fields were completely flattered around her, and not just where she stood. For as far as they reached, as far as she could see. The sandwich was gone. Her monster was gone, too, his hiding place no longer a dark spot in the world.
And so was her Pa. Vanished where she had no doubt he had just been before, behind her, ready to put his hands around her neck.
Her Mama surfaced from the cellar then, a daisy fighting its way out of the earth. She looked around just once, just long enough to see her daughter standing there alone in the leveled field. Only Delmae. No one else. A question appeared on her Mama’s face, the littlest girl clutched to her Mama’s breast so she didn’t get sucked away.
Delmae answered the question with a smile.
A proud smile, really. After all, she was good at some things. Had a lot to be proud of, most certainly.
A monster grew in her.