Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

I pretended there was something I needed to talk about, and asked him about excavators, but when we reached my house, Uncle hurried me out of the car and left. Dusk had settled on the yard, erasing any sunshine or puffy white clouds, leaving only ghastly fiends. I stared at the ground, hurried to the door, and looked for the key. We usually left it under the mat or on the windowsill on the side of the house. I turned because I had a twitchy feeling on my back that somebody was watching. Nothing. The key wasn’t where it was supposed to be, so I looked under the potted plant on the front step. I turned again and this time saw Bacawk behind me. He’d taken off his overcoat, and for the first time I could see his dark-brown body. He was made up of tubelike, curving bones and a row of ribs that extended into claws. There was a crunching and a crackling as this immense spiderlike creature reared over me. My jaw dropped, and I closed my eyes, hoping it would disappear by the time I opened them again. I keeled over backward onto my mom’s potted plant. When I looked again I saw Chickichee popping up from behind the giant bug with a hoe and swinging it at me. It was clear he aimed to smash me on the head, and so, soundless with terror, I flung myself out of the way. He whacked me hard twice on the shoulder with the dull side of the hoe and once on the knee. On the next swing the hoe slipped from his grip. I leaped to my feet and lunged, pushing my way between them. I shoved Chickichee aside and felt a sharp stab in my back, just below my head. Everything went black from the pain, but I kept running. I ducked around the corner of the house and sprinted toward the neighbor’s fence. For the first time in my life, I leaped over it—I have no idea how—and hid behind an old wooden outhouse the neighbors no longer used. It began to look as if dawn might be breaking, even though, in fact, dusk was just settling in. I was breathless and thought the whole world could hear me gasping for air, so I pressed one hand firmly over my mouth. I ran my other hand across the back of my neck and felt the swelling and dampness where I’d been stabbed. My hand was red with blood and dark with grime from the claw. Just when I thought the danger had passed and they’d gone away, Laddie, the neighbor’s little dog, came trotting around the corner. At first he just looked at me and wagged his tail. I gestured to him to come over, so Bacawk and Chickichee wouldn’t see his fanciful tail waving in the twilight. His fur was white, and they could easily have seen him. He stayed where he was, wagging his tail, and started barking. He wanted to play, I knew the bark. I made a face—as if that would have quieted him—and laid my finger across my lips. Laddie, of course, didn’t understand. He barked again, louder. I threw myself onto him, hugged him close, pulled him to me behind the wooden outhouse, and lay on top of him.

“Hush, please, Laddie, please, hush, hush so they don’t hear us,” I whispered, and hugged him tighter, but he whined all the louder. His fur smelled of Turoš cheese. I felt his bark come from deep in his throat, and I pressed him there tighter. Laddie stopped wagging his tail; instead he began writhing and twisting around, trying to bite my hand or face. I mustered all my strength and pressed his neck as hard as I could till I felt something move under my fingers, something soft and slippery. I held his head and the upper part of his body so he wouldn’t bite me, leaving only his belly and legs free to move. He thrashed a few times more. When I pulled away I saw he was lying still, not breathing. I peered from behind the outhouse and saw the porch light on by our front door. That must have been my mom and sister. Bacawk and Chickichee didn’t like light. The light also went on at the neighbors’ house, and Tonči and his wife came into the yard.

I thought of Dad just then. Not because I needed somebody to look after me, but because I knew I had the power to kill if I chose.

I couldn’t explain what I’d done, and I could no longer pretend I was like other kids. Blood was oozing from the wound on my back, my shoulder and knee were bruised, and I was smeared head to toe, again, with mud. I went to vault over the fence, hoping that at least the neighbors wouldn’t spot me.

“Matija, what are you doing?” asked my neighbor gently. “Playing? Does your mother know you’re here?” Everybody knew I’d run off to the Mura that night.

“Just leaving, see ya, bye!” I sang out, and made a beeline for the gate.

“Hold it right there, Matija,” Tonči said sharply. He was standing by the outhouse, staring at his dead dog. He came over, and I saw he was clenching his jaw because he didn’t want to show how heartbroken he was. “I’m going with you. I’ll have a word with your mother.”

I said that Laddie had attacked me and tried to bite me, and I thought they’d believe me because my shoulder was bruised and there was the wound on my back that felt like a huge, slimy hollow with a scabby edge. Mom asked me coldly whether Laddie also knocked over the potted plant and smashed the flowerpot. Tonči started saying more to Mom about the two dead kittens he’d found in his yard. Mom asked whether he thought I did that, too, but he said nothing. Tonči started saying something more to Mom about Laddie, and she asked him whether he wanted money for the dog, and said she’d be going to the bank next week, but he just shrugged and left. The whole time my sister stayed in her room, listening to loud music. Mom dumped me into the bathtub, which was full of hot water, grabbed a washcloth, and scrubbed me without a word, pressing hard on the bruises on my knee and shoulder, the scab on my face, and the wound on my back. It stung, and I thought she was making the wound even worse, but I said nothing. She would have pressed harder if I’d said it hurt. That night I slept with her in bed and slept so well because I had no dreams at all. For that one night I was able to forget that soon everybody I loved would be dead because I didn’t have the courage to rescue Dad from the will-o’-the-wisp folk.

At kindergarten we were told to draw a picture of autumn and the many-colored leaves falling from trees. I drew a big spider standing on two back legs, a big horsefly with a hoe, and myself killing a little dog. I put that drawing in my bag before the teachers could see, and then drew trees and some children playing in the leaves. At home I wrote a message on the first drawing, about how everybody I loved would die, and I gave it all to my sister when she went to the cemetery. I asked her not to open it, just to leave it under the lantern. Mom and I waited for the people from social services. She dressed me up as if I were going to Mass and parted my hair with a comb. She started telling me what I was supposed to say, but then she stopped midway through a sentence. I sat at the table and watched her slice cake and brew coffee. There was something tense about her movements, something that worried me, so I came up with a new fantasy. I imagined that the spoon, fork, and knife were friends, each with a different secret power. The knife could cut through stone and fly up high, and sometimes it could make things disappear. The three utensils would laugh in the drawer, listening to people looking for whatever it was the knife had made disappear. The fork could speak with four different voices and in four languages. Sometimes the tines of the fork quarreled among themselves, but they didn’t understand each other, and then the fork would hiccup. The knife and spoon thought the fork was confused. But the fork always knew what time it was and what the weather would be like the next day. The spoon was the most reticent, but it was brilliant at acting as a TV antenna. When it did, the knife and fork could watch, on its curved surface, shows from other countries that were sometimes broadcast on Ljubljana TV. But the spoon sometimes turned around, and then it was better if nobody looked. On that side everybody—even the knife and fork—could see themselves and what they were truly like. Most things and people, I thought at the time, were speechless after such a sight—lost and sad. I surely would be.