Lincoln Michel - Upright Beasts

The children count down their thirty seconds, but I keep holding. I want them to get a little taste of fear. To realize death doesn’t stop when you want it to.

Instead they just laugh as Sophie wiggles her body. The children fall to the floor and kick their legs in the air. Norm tumbles around on the ground like a hyena until he sweeps my legs out from under me.

I’m lying on the carpet, looking up at Sophie. Her face is as blue as a naptime mat.

The other children are standing or sitting around me. Some of them are beginning to cry. Carlos tugs on my skirt. It is almost recess.

Sophie’s body is ticking back and forth, marking the seconds, minutes, hours left to fill before the day is done.

When the incidents start, my husband decides that what our neighborhood needs is a neighborhood watch. “We need to watch our assets as closely as we’re going to watch the twins,” he says, tapping the baby monitor screen. The screen is dark and blue. It shows two pale teddy bears in an otherwise empty crib.

The next morning, I come downstairs and see Donald slinking in the corner with a black trench coat and fedora. “What do you think?” he asks. We’re low on disposable income, and, as usual, he bought a size too large.

“It looks a little conspicuous,” I say.

“That’s the idea, Margot. I want them to know someone is watching.”

My husband buttons the top button of the coat, puts on a pair of sunglasses, and leaves. As I slide the toast into the toaster, I see him out the window. He’s sneaking through the bushes in the neighbor’s backyard.

The reason we’re low on cash is that we poured our savings into buying House 32 in a neighborhood called Middle Pond. Middle Pond is located between West Pond on the west and East Pond on the east. All three are part of North Lake, which is itself a subset of the Ocean Shore suburb.

It looks perfect on paper. It has a stellar school system and all the amenities.

“Normally, I’d say we should wait and see,” the real estate agent had said, “but if you don’t snatch this now, you’ll watch it go bye-bye.”

Donald downloaded an app called HausFlippr that estimates property values in exclusive neighborhoods. Each time the Middle Pond score went up a full point, Donald cooked rib eyes on our new five-burner grill.

He hasn’t cooked rib eyes in months.

Our neighbors aren’t as worried about the declining rating. “My father used to say, ‘markets fluctuate like fishes swim,’” John Jameson says at the neighborhood improvement meeting. It’s our week to host, and I’m placing triangles of cheese beside rectangle crackers. Several of the other wives are insisting on helping me.

“We’ll make sure this is the last time you host until after the miracles pop out,” Janice Jameson says.

“Can I see?” Alice Johansson asks while lifting up the hem of my blouse.

“There’s nothing to see. I’m not even showing.”

In the other room, Donald is raising his voice. “Well my father always said you can never be too careful when it comes to property and prosperity. Plus, I already bought the trench coat.”

The three of us walk back in holding the one tray.

“If it will make you feel better, we’ll take a vote.”

Donald is a tall, muscular man. He knows how to use his body, how to loom. The vote is tight, but Donald stares down enough neighbors to get his budget approved.

“Let’s move on to the question of acceptable dye colors for next month’s Easter egg hunt.”

“I refuse to participate if metallics are allowed again,” Claudia Stetson says. “They hurt my eyes.”

The double-wide crib is temporarily in my office. This means that the baby monitor camera is temporarily in there too. It’s shaped like a purple flower and situated between the plants on the windowsill. The monitor is downstairs in the living room. I’ve adjusted the angle of the camera so that it can see the crib but not my computer screen.

I can never allow Donald to see what I look at online.

The property values in Middle Pond are based on the reputation of the neighborhood, which is determined, in large part, by the official score assigned by the North Lake Committee on Proper Property Standards.

We are never told the qualifying factors. From the way the inspectors inspect, the list is long and varied. They inspect the level of seed in the bird feeders, observe the height of the grass in each lawn, and mark down rule infractions during games of sidewalk hopscotch.

Our neighbors probably thought Donald would get bored after a week or give up when the score increased. But the score keeps declining, and by midmonth Donald has an entire operation set up in our basement.

“Look at those paint stains in the Johanssons’ driveway. And see how the Stetsons keep every curtain drawn?”

I’m maneuvering the laundry basket between his monitors and stacks of notes. He calls me over, makes me watch a time-lapse progression of black cars entering and leaving the Jacobsons’ garage. “I’m going to see if the neighborhood board will increase the watch’s budget. I need at least a dozen cameras. What do you think?”

I want to tell him my bladder hurts, my back aches, and I don’t care about the neighbors’ driveways. I want to tell him he was supposed to be helping me during the pregnancy, not getting in my way. Mostly, I want to tell him he should be looking at me, not the neighbors.

Or that’s what I know I’m supposed to feel. In fact, I don’t mind that Donald isn’t looking at me.

I know every marriage goes through these phases, where you look at the other person and can’t remember what you ever saw in them. I know it will pass, and that the babies will give us something new to look at together. But they aren’t born yet.

When Donald starts pinning evidence to his corkboard, I creep upstairs and open my SingleMingle account. I gaze at the pixelated men. Some are smiling, with salt and wind in their hair. Others are introspective, reading a novel in a leather wingback chair. When I click next, a new one materializes. I click next again and again and again. There is an endless number of these men. My favorites are the ones who don’t have shirts on. Some even crop their heads off, leaving disembodied torsos moving across my screen.

Donald’s operation starts out small and consists mostly of warning signs he posts around the neighborhood. These signs show a dark figure with glowing eyes and the words “You Are Seen.”

Nevertheless, during the inspector’s next visit, while he is measuring the dampness of the cul-de-sac gutter, somebody keys his car. The next day, HausFlippr changes our safety rating from A to A- and drops our overall score five points.

Donald’s budget is quickly tripled.

He buys a dozen cameras from Discountsleuth.com and hides them around our property. One is slinked through the hose, looking out at the street. Two face our immediate neighbors’ houses through holes in the fence that Donald drills with an old dentist drill. One is hooked to the weathervane at the top of the house, providing a rotating view of the neighborhood as the wind blows.

The cameras snake down into the basement, where they are monitored by Donald and his two interns, Chet and Chad.

I use a fake zip code on my SingleMingle account. My user information is a lie. My height is shrunk an inch, my status marked “seductively single,” my eyes labeled hazel instead of green. I use photos that obscure my features, angles that make my nose look bigger or my hair a different shade of brown. If anyone who knew me saw my profile, they wouldn’t recognize me. Still, I make sure to browse strangers in other neighborhoods like North Forest and South Beach.