Christopher Golden - The Monster’s Corner - Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

On her face, the hope flares briefly like an ember. Then, under the wash of my words, under all that I require of her, the hope extinguishes. She hangs her head. When she nods, the moons fall from her eyes and break on the ground.

Days pass, and my own waiting grows inside me, a pulsing, moving creature in this desiccated body. All day in my classes, I read from Perrault, leaving a crumb-trail, but not a soul is clever enough to pick it up. I show them films I have found online, À bout de souffle, Les enfants du paradis. Blasphemy is not blasphemy, it seems, when it is in another language. Also, the students don’t understand enough to complain.

When the bell rings, during the interclass prayers, I see how the red-haired girl bulges against her uniform. She notices I notice and startles and pales.

Now I wait for her in a thigh-high sea of Queen Anne’s lace in the dark. Here she trudges, at last, through the gate. If she thinks I don’t notice the flash of mute stubbornness when I reach out to guide her into my house, the pure donkey of her, she is wrong.

The dogs come as I had thought they would, but I had washed her trace from my path with the hose, then dragged her dress full of rocks down to the river and threw it in. All day, we hear the poor dogs bay on the riverbank, and when the Village Ministers come knocking at the door, the girl is safely hidden in the garret, and I am fishing my underclothes from a great pot on the stove.

It is forbidden for men to look upon a woman’s private things, not that the Ministers would want to see my translucent monstrosities. With some pleasantries in French that they only half-remember from my classes and say to please me, they bow away.

At last, the girl and I are alone.

I carry on at the school as if all were normal, as if the girl weren’t at home swelling in my absence. I make the chicory coffee, because I am the one who does it best, and listen to the bloodless criticism of the government in the grunts of the other teachers when they read the State News before First Prayer. Too frightened to make more definite criticisms, too weak to hold it all inside, these pasty, pale creatures call themselves my colleagues.

I carry on. Un, deux, trois for the elementary, Demain, dès I’aube for the high school. A subtext of gossip goes on under my nose. When one is ugly enough, one can feign ignorance with great success. I hear the whispered theories about the girl, who in her absence has become an unlikely Jeanne d’Arc: They say she has rebelled against the Ministers’ strict regime, has fled into the mountains with the anarchists. One can almost see her as these hopeful children do, rushing down from the mountains, swords in both hands, her long red hair licking in the wind. Not even the boys who knew the depth of her badness suspect where she truly is: on my couch watching Gospel shows on the television, eating my rich egg custards, my baked bread, my raspberry jam.

Day and night, the blinds are closed, the house set far from the road. And yet one day I come home to hear her high, clear soprano dazzling all the way to the gate, and clump inside, hiss and spit at her like an angry cat.

After that, she is silent. Her skin, unsunned, turns mushroom. Only her long red hair gleams, still glorious, in the darkness of the house.

I hate you, she whispers over my roasted chicken one night.

I pretend to not hear.

I hate you, she says, louder.

Such gratitude. I slap her.

She holds her hand to her cheek, bloodred in the shape of my hand.

Without me, I say, the Ministers would have you. And where would you be? As soon as the baby came, you’d be dead.

No, she says. I’d have made the boy marry me. I’d be free.

I smile at her, not unkindly. Which boy? I say, and the rest of her skin goes as ruddy as her cheek and she holds my eye for one beat, two. Then she bows her head and salts her meat with her tears.

The time comes. I must gag the girl to keep her screams inside her. I call in sick to work, pinching my nose to pretend sinus trouble, and the secretary is startled: Twenty-five years, and I have never been ill once. And then the bustling, the kettles of hot water, the sheets torn to stanch the blood, the rust spreading across my mattress. I play my parents’ Chopin records loudly to cover the girl’s muffled pain. All day and into the night, we struggle, the girl and I, Jacob and angel. Sweat paints the air.

The girl rips, it seems, in two, and the baby, a waxy livid thing, bawls in my hands. It is a girl with fat folds and curlicues of red hair all over her body. Her eyes open and they are chips of the sky.

I feel myself floating out of the twisted body I call my own when I look at this creature, more beautiful than anything I have seen. This child of mine.

When I look up, dazzled, the girl on the bed is reaching out her arms, her face hungry. Please, she says, and I put the child in her arms.

Oh, she says. Oh, she’s so beautiful. The infant nuzzles her breast, slides her little face to the nipple, tries to latch on. The girl says, weeping, Oh, my baby.

I snatch the infant back. My baby, I say.

No, the girl says. The donkey has risen again in her, kicking, and surprises me. She sits up against the headboard, though it clearly pains her, though she has not stopped bleeding, and levels a finger at me. Give my baby to me.

A demand? I say. You are in no position to demand. All I have to do is call the Ministers, and off you go. You wouldn’t survive a year in the work camps, you know.

The girl’s stupid face has turned into a fist. Whatever the Ministers do to me, she says softly, will be nothing compared to what they will do to you. For a long, horrible moment, this gives me pause. Even idiots, at times, can stumble on truth.

But. One could never have survived the purges I survived in my own youth without being canny. Survived; not unharmed. My leg twisted when they sliced my Achilles tendon, my womb twisted with forced use. I scrubbed potatoes in the rebels’ kitchen, reciting poetry in Romance languages, keeping fresh my Ph.D. in comparative literature. I spent the bad nights on my back translating the poems into English. Such ugliness as mine has been earned.

I played along with the girl. For two days, as she became peremptory, demanding food and help, picking up the telephone threateningly when I even neared the baby, I pretended fear. And then on the third night, I slipped some ground passionflower into her tea. Passionflower, with its variegated petals, with its good, black heart. Her face closed like a letter. She slept and slept.

The infant also drank the passionflower in her mother’s milk and slept for over twenty-four hours. This was fortunate, for by the time the child woke I had ridden my bicycle through the night and the day and the night again, with her bound to my back like an extra hump. By the time she began to stir, I had abandoned the bicycle and was on the train.

I had made a giant bottle in the station, and as the infant was struggling to wake, I put the nipple in her mouth and she sucked and sucked her hunger away.

Now she looks at me, sated, clean, lulled by the quick flash of the very fast train over the countryside, and I smile down to her. I imagine her mother in my bed, just now awakening in her own pain and mess, slowly lifting a hand to her lovely pale face. She winces, I imagine, at the light through the curtains, parted for the first time in so many months. The sun falls on the empty bassinet beside her, and the silence in the house becomes an accusation.

A man in a business suit looks at us over today’s State News and smiles. Grandmother? he asks, and I smile back. Godmother, I say. He says the required response: Blessed be the Godparents, though there is a glint of interest when he looks at my twisted old body. Godparents are normally young and hale, able to raise the children if anything goes awry for the parents, if they are denounced and deported, if the Ministers find deviance in them at all.