Stories From the Plague Years (17 page)

His nails cut my back and I started crying, because I don’t have nice loose skin and fur like Mother and Father have and I could feel the red wet going down my back and I tried not to hurt Little Velvet Ears because he is just a baby. I heard the cloth I wear go “
riiiiiipp!
”

Little Velvet Ears put his tongue on the bad cuts. He thought what came out of me was red food for him to eat and that made me hurt worse because red food that comes from rats is good to eat and I am like a big pink rat without fur.

Little Velvet Ears dropped off, and he cried too, because he fell hard on the floor. I ran to my box and hid.

Mother and Father came home and they were covered with red mud and dry skin and smelled like smoke. They saw Little Velvet Ears crying on the floor. Mother picked him up and she and Father came to my box and they looked like they were going to scold me. Then they saw the bad cuts on my back.

I told them what happened and Father picked me up and Mother started cleaning the cuts with her tongue. It felt nice, because she wasn’t licking fast, like Little Velvet Ears did to lap up red food. Mother made little sad noises, “
huh! huh! huh!
” and Father sounded sad when he said, “Don’t be mad at Little Velvet Ears! It’s not his fault! He’s just a little baby . . .”

There is hotness all over me, and I feel bad and sick.

Mother and Father are afraid I might die. Their eyes are all worried, and they keep licking my cuts clean. I am scared the Bad Mother and Bad Father will get me, because being dead is like being in a dream.

Father and Mother say some of the old words when they take care of me, and the big pipes glow all purple and green and red and cold and hot winds come.

Mother presses the cuts to get the sickness out. It smells bad. Then Mother and Father take leaves and mash them in hot water and put them on my back and I don’t hurt so much.

Sometimes I wake up to see Mother and Father crying. They hold each other close and go “
huh! huh! huh!
”

I don’t want to make them sad.

Mother and Father had to go away.

They had to get the leaves they put on my back from a special place while the moon was a certain way. They have to go say special words over the leaves for them to make me better.

Before they left, they held Little Velvet Ears close to me in my box. They said he didn’t mean to hurt me. But I turned away and said, “No! He wanted to, because he’s bad!”

I said those bad things because I wanted him to feel bad. And I was sick and the hotness was burning me up.

When Mother and Father left to get the leaves, they put Little Velvet Ears in his nest and they were all quiet and sad when they went down the big pipe. I felt bad because I was being so mean, just like the Bad Mother and Bad Father who have no fur and have no goodness inside them.

This was when the bad things happened.

I fell asleep and kept waking up and I heard things that sounded like they were in dreams, but I woke up all the way and knew I really was hearing things from down deep in the pipe.

They were sounds like “
clank! clank!
” And voices saying words I didn’t know, the kinds of words the Bad Mother and Bad Father use. It is bad when things in dreams become real.

I peeked over my box, then I went like a mouse that Father stares at to make it not move.

There were lights bouncing down the big pipe that leads to outside.

The lights were talking.

Then I saw under the lights two creatures like the one mother jumped on, with yellow head bones on the outside with lights attached.

When they came into our home, Little Velvet Ears started crying, and they looked over where he was and they started yelling and I couldn’t move because I was so scared. Little Velvet Ears was in the bad lights that came out of their heads and he covered his eyes because they were so bright. Then one of them that was yelling really loud took a big metal thing off its belt and hit and hit and hit and hit the baby over and over again until he was all red and mashed and then they ran away.

I climbed out of my box and the hotness was burning me up and there was wetness coming out of my skin and the crying was in my eyes so I couldn’t see.

Little Velvet Ears didn’t have a face anymore. It was all bashed in, but his chest still went up and down.

When I touched him, he fell over and there was one long last breath that fell out of the baby’s mouth, “
skaaaaaaahgh!
” Then I knew the little one was dead and would never be with us anymore.

I screamed and ran down the tunnels, yelling for Mother and Father. I yelled and cried and yelled. I went “
splash! splash!
” through the water near where we get food. I ran to the door of the white place Father and I come out of, but I couldn’t move the door. Then I ran down other tunnels.

I ran to the tunnel where Father showed me the little animal with the babies and went up the metal things to the round thing that went to the place with the red stone blocks. I felt sick and bad and redness was wet all on my back because the cuts got open again.

I pushed and pushed on the round metal thing and “
shrang!
” it slid open and I went out and ran yelling for Mother and Father, yelling for Mother and Father, yelling for Mother and Father.

But they didn’t come.

Water was coming from the sky, soon.

I couldn’t find the round metal thing I came up from.

Then I fell down near a door to the big building that made all the noises and put all the smoke in the sky.

Everything started to go all dark, and I thought I was starting to be dead. I wanted to be going dead.

Then the door opened and I screamed even louder for Mother and Father.

Because a big creature like the Bad Father came out of the door and looked at me like I was the scary thing. Like I was the awful Monster.

I ran, but I was too sick to run good and the Bad Father Thing grabbed me in its ugly hands and I started yelling “
Aahhhg! Aaaagh!
” The thing pulled me through the door and I tried harder to get away.

Then it hit me hard behind the ear and I went to a bad sleep.

Now I am in a bad place.

There are Bad Mothers and Bad Fathers everywhere.

They put tubes in my nose and fill the behind of my mouth with gooey food that is awful and stick metal things in me and they tie me with cloth strips to a big metal bed and make me sleep after sticking me with the metal things.

They are mean and awful, and they look like me.

Ugly, ugly monsters who keep me here far from Mother and Father, and no one gives me love or good food.

There are other little ones here. They look like me, but they are scared of me. They get to move around the big, big room we are kept in.

I will never see Mother or Father or Little Velvet Ears again.

Mother and Father will think I hurt Little Velvet Ears, because the thing the creatures used to kill him is like one of the metal things that hangs off the belt I keep by my box, that goes “
clanka, clanka
” when you shake it.

They will think I am Bad, like the Bad Mothers and Bad Fathers I look like.

The place is too bright and makes my eyes all hurting and the sun comes through a hole in the wall that has cage bars on it.

It is my bad dreams all come true.

Sometimes I dream Father is looking for me. There are green lights and cold winds, like when he says the special words. The lights and winds are looking for me and when I wake up, I think I see the lights fading and the winds stopping to move the air.

Other times I dream about the black stone steps going down, down, down to the nice place. I almost get to the bottom of the steps, and I can smell Mother and Father close, but before I can call them, I wake up in the bad place.

But one good thing could be happening.

On the front parts of my hands, there are little grey hairs growing.

Maybe I will grow up to be like Mother and Father anyway.

Then I will be big and strong. I will rip the cloth things that hold me down and break the cage bars and find Mother and Father. They will be happy to see me and love me and won’t hurt me.

And we will come back and take all the sad little ones here away. We will take care of them and love them and not let Bad Mothers and Bad Fathers hurt them and make them grow up ugly.

We will give them red food and let them grow up strong and pretty, not like ugly pink rats.

And we will hurt the Bad Mothers and Bad Fathers if they stop us. We will hurt them bad.

A Bad Father comes with the tube to put food in my nose.

I say old words at him, and he hunches up like a rat smelling something bad.

The words are making him scared.

If I can say them right next time, I will make him burn.

I felt myself blacken as if charred, felt my skin drink fireless smoke as I was stained with the echo of solidity. I remembered and relived another moment, one of freezing cold in the midst of a bright warm summer, a moment of my taking the fair color of frost amid green meadows and barrows as I was made pale as lime-bleached skin scant days before I’d first heard the sound of a man’s eyes turning to wood.

And with that long-ago press of smooth wood against the soft cups of his sight, I had been freed.

I am not now free, any more than is the boy whose shade I reflect through his demonization, through the reverse-exorcism canticles that tend the seed of spite deep within him. The seed sprouts. I feel it. It earth-breathes despair the boy cannot grasp, but that the boy knows with the same intimacy that he knows his dreams. The boy does not feel the germ quiver to life . . . to
my
life . . . and the lives of my distant, more bodiless kin who sleep in his imagining.

I now know no meadows, no earthwork mounds heaped over chambers of rusting swords. This is a place and a time in which eyes are not turned to wood, but are turned to things like shining dark stones. There is no sound to accompany this changing of eyes to stone, for unlike the crack of rowan bursting thin socket-walls of skull,
this
change of eyes involves no alchemy of pain—it is merely the reflection of moving light that is pulled out of the air and forced to dance in a box with a face of curved glass. The glass face of the box gives the eyes of those who stare into it the same dead sheen I have seen in the eyes of blind grandmothers who crossed themselves feeling my nearness.

Invisible, I looked into stone-smooth eyes. I breathed without lungs a darkness like deep winter midnight behind the box that flickered the blue light of moving images no less alive than am I. Invisible, I swallowed the black of dead spectra while fear of persons and things dark-skinned worm-twitched in the minds of the boy’s parents and envenomed the boy’s mind and his image of himself. I felt myself stamped with fears I did not welcome, fears that would further color me and force upon me untouchable shape. I am clay molded by hands without nails, skin or nerves. I could be beautiful. I have been beautiful before, heralded by the crash of a snow-coloured stag from out the brush and by the songs of birch to oak. But here, now, there is no desire or need for me to be beautiful.

I felt kinship with the image moving within the glass face of the box. The image was flax-pulled from the ether by wire and metal that flowed with tamed and thunder-less lightning . . . just as I had been pulled from the air and given unfinished shape by this house of stifled, silenced anger. I am changed by this house, as a blown horn changes the air within it.

Later, as I was soured by the dreams of the child who slept above me, I wept a deaf nothingness from empty sockets of dust, knowing what I’d be made to feel and become.

The boy sweats poison, resting above me in a nest of blankets he twists about himself. His parents would welcome the hatchling of a cuckoo. They would embrace a twisted, stunted changeling, such as I had once been, running from the scalding of a font atop the backs of pews that were splintered by my hoofs. They desire a monster in lieu of their son, for such a monster would free them from knowing the child they have.

Longing for a monster, they craft one—and I am echo-crafted as well. Just as a smith would beat impurities from iron he shapes, so do they remove things they do not wish the boy to have, such qualities as they doubt exist in themselves, that they snuff to convince themselves of their worth.

With morning, comes a new crafting.

“What is this?” asks the mother. Like the air above a bellows, the room shimmers in my eyeless sight as she speaks. She kicks with a soft slippered foot a portrait of dust-grey strokes and red glowing eyes. It’s a scrawl. A collision of bracken-angry lines. A portrait of me. The paper leaf-glides across a floor so smooth and clean as to seem rubbed with beeswax; it skids past where the boy lay on his belly next to a wall and comes to rest in my hovel that is the underneath of his bed.

The boy says nothing. I hear in his mind the belief that he speaks the word, “
Nothing
.” The belief churns the haze of the room. He draws a dragon on another piece of paper with a nub of green wax. There is no dust, here in my hovel. The picture of me, of the impressions of me that he has caught in moonlight, flutters from a slight draft that rides the smooth floor.