Getaway

I paid with blood and bone. I made gifts of myself

And put them on my door to keep it away.

Sorrow is a monster.

(Sorrow is coming out for you)

I locked my door, to my siblings, to my mother.

It crept in the windows.

I ran into the woods, that the trees might hide me.

But what do trees owe me?

It heard my heart like it was quaking earth

Sorrow threw me into the water.

(Sorrow dug into my bones)

It will be my blood that surfaces first, then my heart.

Art by Robert Carter

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Beast

Wild beasts rule this city

Rage with fang and talon

Language without words

Song without notation

Awake and eat that thing called man

And sleep inside that thing called man

As for me I am the only artist

Crawling along in an animal hide

Think me no less fierce for what I do

I’ll dip my brush into your veins and paint

Art by Naomi Butterfield

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Ocean Bed

The ocean crept up on me

From over the horizon it climbed my toes

Sprayed salt on my skin

Algae on my stomach

Slipped sea grass into my throat

I said no to its body on mine

But it was already in my hair, on my lips, in my clothes

When the rip tide pulled me under

Pushed me into the ocean bed

With the waste and sea glass

I was full of reef and sea

Sick with unbridled current

And crawling with sharp-toothed creatures

I surfaced and crawled onto the sand

And spat my last mouthful of salt

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Punishment

It was dirty work. It didn’t matter how often I did it- which was every night, or every day; if I’d bothered to count I might have known- it never got any less unpleasant. Dust and dirt and bones and clay aren’t good company, no matter how you look at it. That’s all it really takes to make one of them. Bones, of any kind, dust, from a fireplace or a windowsill. My place was full of dust and dark, and I had nothing else. Dirt, from graves or from the ground beneath you feet. And clay, to hold it all together. I spat in it, each time, to keep my creations at bay. They were like horses, I learned after  a time. If they learned the scent of me, they learned the lines not to cross. Even before they were born. In some inchoate way, they would not cross any line I spat onto. They would heel if I spat on my hand and held it up.

They were nothing until I gave them a name. But I could not think of any animal they were like. They were an animal I’d seen from the corner of my eye, when my mind tricked me into believing one thing was another. A smeared version of a cat, a bird, a snake. Nimble, beautiful, with a starry pelt. A collision of paints on a palette, not so much a step on the evolutionary ladder as a branch.

They weren’t good company, without voices, without tongues. Tongues came last, because I wanted the silence until I had no choice at all to hear them. Their voices made small my hands, and small hands made poor, slow work. I could have made them anything else, but I could not bring myself to make foxes or birds or dogs. Nothing I would have recognized from my life. There was no real creature I could stand to ruin.

Breathe I told the head of one as I gouged out eye sockets ith my thumb, and smoothed out the inside of the cavity. The bones of its skull were hardening slowly, the longer I kept my hands off the clay. Wake I said to the ears as I shaped them. I patted the dirt around the bones, held the crumbling clumps with clay and smoothed it into joints. Stretch. I painted mud over the rib cage, spat into the mouth and nose, separated the paws with my longer nails.

This was where it became important and difficult. Difficult to get their faces right; so much rested on how much cruelty was in their faces, what expressions I gave them. A cruel face could spur the animal to do anything, so long as it involved bloodshed. There are some animals that eat you with their eyes; my Chimaera created meals with their eyes, and tore them to pieces with their teeth. I could have not given them teeth, but they would have found another way to tear. A way I was sure I could not stand to see.

If I had the eyes to.

When someone else stumbled inside, I knew that I was close. And that it was my turn to teach. I tried to remember, how it had been done before. My thoughts were all start and stop; I could not think and keep my hands moving. But molding the Chimaera was not optional, and everything became secondary to it. I knew that, no matter who appeared here, they could not help when the time came. They might have been able to help before, though. And I bent my mind to the task of teaching them to make Chimaera with me. I had nearly made it last time. Two away. Twice as many hands might help me.

At least, that was why I assumed he was there. I couldn’t guess at anything else.

“Are you going to stand there forever?” I said when he swayed in the dark. Perhaps his feet had fallen asleep, because the rest of him looked wide awake. I had meant it to be a joke, but I’d spent too long without company (excepting Chimaera) and did not know how to make him, or anyone, laugh. In any case, I’m not sure he was listening at all. His eyes wandered from dark corner to dark corner. The problem was not the dark, but the number of corners. Which was exactly enough to eradicate corners entirely. There was just darkness on either side. No use arguing against it, though. If that was where he wanted to stay, he could stay there. “You’ve going to be here a while, though. You’ll have to get used to sitting on the ground at some point.”

He said nothing. He pushed his hands into his pockets as though he might find something, but my pockets were empty when I came. My fingers had shaken badly when I’d not been able to find my lighter, even though the craving itself never came. I wondered, if he’d had cigarettes on hand, would he invite me to have one? I didn’t kow where the smoke would go. I thought of the filter between my lips as I dabbed the pad of my thumb over the end of the creature’s snout to dimple it. There was a circle of dirt around the skull. The inside of the skull cooled, while the outside warmed, as though flesh were growing on it as I watched.

The other occupant of my place couldn’t have been old. He was younger than me, a young man, filled with uncertainty, but not fear. He looked as though he believed he’d walked into the wrong room, but truly his face just didn’t lend itself to true reactions. I had begun on the long curving spine, which involved laying out the bones atop a bed of dust and clay, rolling it between my hands after to mold it. I wrapped the clay around the chain of bones and patted it down gently. Though from what I’d seen, it could handle not-gentle.

“I don’t understand,” said my companion, without preamble. “I don’t think I can do that.”

I didn’t dare look at him. I’d not seen someone like myself in a long time and I knew that I would get caught up in it, would miss my deadline. There was so much I wanted to see in the human face from then, but I couldn’t risk it, not now that I’d finished my second-last. “I’ll show you how. It’s really not hard. The clay wants to do what you want to do. It’s about intention, mostly.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Well, what did you mean?” I asked, though I could already guess what he was about to say. It would start like this, wouldn’t it? The way it had started with me. It had been a good time before I’d realized. It wasn’t a matter of realizing it, anyway. That was a matter of staying safe. This was a matter of understanding. “Do you mean you don’t know how to use the clay and bones? They’re the only materials you have. You’ll have to use them.”

“I mean,” he began, eyes narrowing. He looked haughty and righteous, a sinner riding on the law and riding it at the same time. “Why would you do this? Why not leave it alone? There wouldn’t be anything, then. No more pointless attacks.”

One more, I told the underside of a wing as I began stuffing the clay with feathers. I wanted to explain to him why it had to happen, but I could only think of the time, of the last of the Chimaera. It was almost time, and if this did not go as planned, he would learn soon enough how it worked.  

Chimaera, I named it as I gouged a single hole into the side of its ears and ran my tongue along its hardening teeth.

“Fine. What happens if you don’t try at all?” he said with some aggression.

I ran my hand along spine to tail, then slipped it beneath the creature. “If I do nothing, it’ll be worse. I can choose the object now at least and I get the chance to make them obey me. I can mold them however I want to.” What it boiled down to was this: I got to choose my poison. I chose one that was easy as I could make it, and familiar.

“But I don’t get it,” he replied. “What for?” He sounded petulant, as if he thought, after all this time, I was here to meant to help him. I could teach him about intention, I could teach him about clay, but he was not the one who would be facing the consequences of being a Chimaera short in a few minutes. On more.

“Because something has to happen, and I’m trying to lighten the load,” I said. There was no lightening the load, really. Only the traditional way. But it helped to have something to think of. The skull was fully formed, and two wings, four paws. I was unfurling the spine and lining up the rib café when the clay stiffened beneath my hands.

My stomach twisted. I sighed, and this sigh sounded like every harsh breath I ever exhaled at once. There had been a time before this, I thought. And there would be a time after. But it did not hide the fact that I was one short. One short of a herd of Chimaera. Just enough to turn it outward.

The Chimaera lined up on the floor twitched, like dogs waking from dreamy sleep. Some crackled through the air, a current twisting around me so sharply I felt it like the touch of an eel. I stood back to watch the first Chimaera breathe. I’d been careful to give them each kind faces, but it took all of a few seconds for several of them to scowl, and in scowling, reveal each tooth I’d crafted. They pressed themselves closer to me, and I saw my companion stiffen, as though they might come for him. They might be curious, but-

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to him as the Chimaera shook themselves awake. “Just stand back and they won’t touch you. But don’t try to interfere. Don’t try to enter or stop.” It felt a little useless to say, since I already knew what he wouldn’t be doing, and that was: he would not be stepping in front of me to protect me. I didn’t expect him to. There was no such thing as heroics in the dark.

“It has to happen to you?” he said, sounding shocked and sad and for the first time as though he understood. “Why?”

“Because I didn’t finish,” I said. Or said, mostly. I was looking at the floor when I said it, and some of that rock must have swallowed up my voice. “You have to watch this time. I guess every time, until I’m done.” I’d thought at first that the Chimaera would hurt him, or someone else. That I was creating a weapon, but it was only a weapon pointed at myself. You would think that I would be merciful then, but in this place, after the first time they got a hold of you, you stopped wanting mercy. You wanted pain to get rid of other pain. And then once you started, you couldn’t stop.

Pain begets pain I thought, as I pulled away from the circle of dirt on the floor. I could see the outline of myself where I’d been sitting, as the first of the Chimaera lunged.

They all bounded at me. Wings flapped uselessly above them, tongues rolling from their mouths, eyes happy and bright. The largest one pressed it paws to my shoulders first, then followed me down as I went. They didn’t want anyone else. They wanted me, and when the first one swallowed my scream, they got to their happy work. They didn’t seem to have a preference for whatever they took apart. They took apart my arms and legs first, snapping at them until they burned.

This is when I cheated on my first boyfriend. Something wet smeared my cheek and my ear burned. I put a hand up to the side of my head and found I did not have much in the way of ear left. This is when I lied to my mother about getting fired. One of the Chimaera twisted over me and buried its muzzle in my abdomen. I was smeared across the floor of the space. Already, my companion had pushed far back into the darkness, realized there was nowhere else to go, and wondering what would happen when his time came.

I curled inward, as though it would help. It was less the Chimaera, more the thoughts. I felt prodded into smallness. My wrists felt fragile, my ankles thin as the tines of a fork. There went another layer. I’d been so happy when my friend and I stopped calling one another. I would never have to tell her that I was sleeping with her boyfriend. I’d been glad to die in that car accident. I would have died after it, if I hadn’t. Once I’d known how few people had actually survived.

The Chimaera slowly melted away, as though they were being pushed through an invisible sieve, coming apart in the air in powdery clouds. The dust fell on my legs and clung to the red smears on the floor. Already things were starting to regrow in me. There was a strange sensation as though someone were pushing their finger into my ear. I could taste dust in my mouth and knew that it wouldn’t matter if I spit into the Chimaera’s mouths next time. It would not keep them at bay.

I put a hand to my abdomen. The skin was almost fully healed. My organs were blooming under it. My companion watched as he took a step forward. His face was drawn, his eyes asking why him, why did he have to go through it.

“I was one short,” I told him.

His wretched face became more wretched. He was gnawing his lower lip, tearing the skin from it with his teeth.

“If you’re fast,” I said, “You can get out of here fast.” I began to shape each feather I would need for the wings. I rolled clay into suitable lengths for fangs and began to taper pieces of it into points. “I had a fight with my friend. It’s not really important what the circumstances were. But there was a family in the other car. None of them made it. I was so drunk I couldn’t know until I’d sobered up in the hospital for a night. In time to have an aneurysm.”

I could see it slowly dawning in his face. And I could feel that dawn was coming too, soon. Or sunset. Either way, I was back at the beginning, with the clay and dust and dirt and spit. He seemed to realized what this meant, how inevitable it all was, the creating the turning-on-you. I’d been doing my job, teaching him, without realizing. I didn’t think he understood how long it was, though. Not when he sat down so quickly and plunged his hands into the dust.

I wanted to ask him what he’d done, to get here. To deserve it. But I’d volunteered my information. He was under no obligation to do the same. He crossed his legs, like I had, and hunched forward. He would also learn, very soon, that it was murder to find a position you could stand sitting in for more than ten minutes at a time. I shoved some more dust in his direction, then spat in the dirt to make mud to use as glue for the feathers.

His hands were dirty immediately. They wouldn’t be clean again until he left. I had gotten over that pretty quickly. As a part of my intestine regrew, I rubbed the spit and dirt between my fingers.

“So,” I said to him. “Do you know how to use clay?”

Art by Leilani Bustamante

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Sugar in the Garden

I used to think Mother and Father used religion like a shield. When we went to mass and I sat through excruciatingly long homilies and was warned against sprinkling my garden with sugar because it would bring about the sugar gliders and God would no longer see me as worthy of ascending after death, I though they were telling me a story, to warn me. Fairy tales are warnings, I reasoned. But in the end Red Riding Hood escaped the wolf and her grandmother was saved. That is a single version of it, but I believed it. Because I wanted to.

Which was how religion worked, I thought.

I wasn’t to speak to sugar gliders. I was not to posture about whether or not they belonged in heaven or hell because they were unlike any creature on earth and therefore belonged in no place that had been concocted by a mind on earth. Even purgatory didn’t seem the place for them. Consider fairies: angels, not good enough for heaven, cast out. Sugar gliders knew nothing of heaven or of being cast out. There was nothignt o cast them out of. They appeared and disappeared, riddled with brevity as mayflies.

I knew sugar gliders- no, I knew of them. They sometimes peaked at me from behind the wall of wisteria in our front garden, though there was nothing about me that could hold their attentions for more than a few moments. Attentions as fleeting as mayflies too, Mother used to say. I saw them on the street when it was too cold too early and the winter struck them down mid-flight. There was an awful winter in which we could not drive down the street without the car rattling, bumping over each sugar gliders’ body. I’d thought they were beautiful, covered in new frost. But when I’d seen enough of them, their beauty became invisible. Wonders get tiring very quickly.

One of our neighbours did sprinkle his garden with sugar. It glittered like snow atop the hydrangeas and grass and morning glories. Butterflies rested before the sugar gliders came. There were two of them, when they did, and my neighbour looked pleased, pleased and proud as though he had drawn them there himself. The sugar gliders ran long fingers along the tops of leaves and the thorn-less parts of vines and licked the sugar off their fingertips. After, they lay down in the grass and ran their tongues along the grass blades. There were many of them that summer in our neighbourhood because someone had decided to sell lemonade and orange juice on the street perpendicular to ours. They were spilling sugar daily, handing out 25 cent cups to anyone that came by. Until their mother told them not to sell to sugar gliders, and then had to explain who they were. She tried to point them all out but sguar gliders grow rapidly, and it was a lot of work to be able to recognize both child and adult sugar gliders.

I rode my bike in the park every afternoon that summer, trying to rid myself of the wobble in my wheel. It was possible less a fault of the wheel and more a fault of my own. Balance required speed and speed required confidence. Atop a bike I was skittish, and I could hardly keep my wits about me enough to stop when someone did enter my path. I rode under the horse chestnut tree, tried to avoid the spiky green shells, and barely avoided hitting the sugar glider.

“Oh. Are you alright?” the sugar glider asked, looking down at me. I was doubled over, my legs on either side of the small bicycle, feet on the ground, waiting for the ground to feel as though it had stopped moving. I had nearly hit the sugar glider, though she didn’t seem to mind. She had a face like a sunset, which was to say a face that blazed and made you feel as though she were already leaving. I quickly did a mental inventory of my person, but I’d left my sweets (I’d bought a packet of sugary gum against Mother’s wishes the day before) at home.

“I’m fine,” I said, wishing she would look the other way. Sugar sliders were never disgraceful. They moved with the ease and certainty and balletic glide of huge cats. I knew because I’d watched them often. Mother said that the youth these days were going to waste away watching either television or sugar gliders. I could not see how she and Father couldn’t see the way sugar gliders were beautiful. “I’m sorry I almost hit you.”

“Don’t be.” She sounded like she was smiling, or chewing. Maybe she was chewing a horse chestnut. But no- they were too busy for sugar gliders. She folded her hands in front of herself; I saw them because I was still looking down. There was delicate, diaphanous webbing between her fingers, the same pale shade as her fingernails. “You didn’t actually hit me. What do you think would have happened if you had?”

She sounded amused. Like she had looked at me once and already knew the answer.

“You’re fragile,” I said, because it didn’t occur to me that she might be insulted. I saw those pale hands twitch. “Frost kills you. Cars kill you.”

“And neither of those would kill you?” she said. “Or not in the same measure?”

I frowned. I could be brave enough to contradict her if I was not looking at her face. “Winter kills your kind. If I touch you, I could kill you.”

The sugar glider laughed. It was less delicate than I thought it would be. A jackal’s cry and a small explosion that rippled through the air. It drew my eyes; I saw her throw her head back. Her hair was the muted colour of wheat. It was wild and unbrushed, curling between her shoulders and around her arms. “How do you think you would accomplish that?” she asked.

I looked up at her bright face. She might look older than me, as any sugar glider over a day old did, but I was older, I reminded myself. By years. I tried to summon those years into my voice when I replied. “My touch could tame you. What will you do when you don’t know anymore how to hunt? How to feed yourself?”

Her mouth half-curved, gravity and lingering bemusement warring in her face. Her sunset expression darkened. She was leaving already. “That is always a very real risk,” she said. “But if it were so dire and easy as all that, do you think sugar gliders would walk around the street so easily?”

I was frustrated, by the answer to her question, by raising more questions for me than I had answers to. Sugar gliders were tricky things, I decided then. Mother would have been pleased that I’d learned it, finally. Even if I didn’t learn it in a church.

The sugar glider was distracted, already. She walked away, toward a group of sugar gliders opening a packet of hard caramels on the baseball diamond. I wheeled my bike home and blamed my skinned knee on my wobbly wheel.

At the beginning of high school, academics and the church tried to teach me the importance of silence. It was not forbidden to speak to sugar gliders, but God didn’t like it, the pastor didn’t like it, and my teachers didn’t like it, nevermind that it was the hottest summer for years and over-heated sugar gliders were dying on the green outside, plastering themselves all over school property. A group of seniors dragged away a dead sugar glider, pulling her by her hair. She must not have weighed much. I knew nothing about the weight of them, but she slid along the grass easily as they turned toward the field in the back.

Sugar gliders were not allowed in churches. Mother and Father impressed upon me that it was not safe for them either; they were clearly trying to appeal to my empathy. Mother had wanted an empathetic child and did not realize how well her plans were working until I asked her one day for a spoonful of sugar for the starving sugar glider outside. Empathy can be a sin, now, she might as well have said for the long lecture she gave me before confiscating my empty spoon and closing the front door to the sugar glider.

Mass occurred twice a week, and with the installation of crews the regularly clean dead sugar gliders from the pavement, I saw fewer and fewer of them. I proposed bringing one into church and tried to explain what the sugar glider had told me a few years before. “They’re not that fragile,” I told Mother. “The church won’t hurt them that much.”

“It absolutely will,” Mother said. “You don’t want that kind of pain on your conscience, do you?”

“No,” I said. Then, because she hadn’t actually explained why the church could possibly hurt a sugar glider, I went to Sister Agatha. She told me that church was safe only for those with souls, though that didn’t mean, of course, that I had to fear sugar gliders. Or I would never step out of my door otherwise.

“So they don’t have souls?” I said. “Not like us.”

“We don’t have souls either,” she pointed out. “We are souls. We have bodies. Now do you understand the difference between sugar gliders and yourself?” There was a scorched quality to her expression, as though she wished I hadn’t come to her with this line of questioning.

“So they can’t go to heaven?” I said. It was unfortunate, I thought, that they should have nowhere to spend eternity. They lived so few days, and now had no other days to spend, in any state, in any place.

Sister Agatha’s arched brows arched higher. The mouth beneath them twisted and thin. “With what? There is no soul, and God only chooses good souls to ascend to heaven anyway. If they had souls, do you know what they would be?”

Sinners was probably the answer she was looking for. I pretended I did not know and Sister Agatha pretended she was too busy to answer questions and asked me if my parents expected me home for dinner?

When Sister Agatha was busy, I tried to coax one of the sugar gliders into the church with me. She didn’t seem afraid, not the way I expected, but perhaps fear only existed in those with souls. I pulled her along by her hand. It was the first time I’d touched a sugar glider, and their hands felt very much like ordinary hands. Maybe a little softer, for not falling down or lifting heavy objects. The webbing between her fingers felt like I was pushing at cloth. Her hands were small; I’d chosen a sugar glider only a few hours old. She was already almost as tall as me, but she smiled a kitten smile. A budding spring smile. I squeezed the bones in her hand; they were thin as toothpicks, strong as iron rods.

“Why the church?” she asked. Her eyes were very wide, very alive, very oceanic. She was like one of those Russian dolls that opened up over and over again until they were too small to open, but in reverse. I felt I could open her up as much as I wanted and find only more layers, and if I backtracked she would be as impenetrable as a fortress.

“I want to see what God thinks of you,” I said.

She shook her head. Her hair flapped around her like wings. “He won’t think much,” she said. “It’s a He isn’t it?”

I nodded and pulled her inside, right up to the knave. When the sugar glider didn’t take her hand out of mine right away, I remembered what Mother had said about taming them. Taming them didn’t seem as awful though when you considered they only lived a few days at the most.

“I thought this would hurt,” the sugar glider said.

“Why?”

“They told me it would.” She looked at the pews. “What are the seats for? Without tables?”

“We pray here,” I said, and sat down and plucked a volume of songs from in front of me to show her. “For mass. Or when we need to.”

“I could never simply sit that long,” she said. She sounded confused, and lacing that was admiration.

I wanted to show her what praying looked like, so she would understand that it was not as incredible as she might have thought it was. Instead I put the book back and closed my hand. I could not tell if I was feeling my fingertips in my palm or my palm with my fingertips. Only that my hand was colder than the sugar glider’s.

There were a few harsh winters and short summers after that. Sugar gliders died all over the streets, frozen solid in snowdrifts, blocking traffic, leaning against street signs and rubbish bins and cars. In the summer they were ravenous, and desperate to get their population back up. There were few of them, then, suddenly, hundreds. All over the place. There were new names for them, too. But I didn’t say them and pretended not to hear them.

Because Mother hated when I used the word whore.

Without Mother and Father around, breaking their rules was easy. There was only one rule I didn’t break and, in fact, if I hadn’t gone to mass, I wouldn’t have seen her. She was just outside the church, looking at the sky. It was cornflower, stretched over the top of a yellow-leafed tree. It was just the edge of summer, with spring still lingering, and the yellow tree looked out of place. Ridiculously bright and buttery, insincere. It was still a little cold for sugar gliders, but she was there, sucking on a jawbreaker that stained her lips green.

She looked a little lonely. She was the only sugar glider visible across the green and she would probably be dead before she found another. She was perched on top of a bollard, hands curled around her knees, ocean eyes damp and wide. Sugar gliders were rarely this close to a church, and the church-goers went around her as though she spat sparks.

When they had all left and the pastor was back inside, invisible from the doorway, I went to the sugar glider. I had walked past several dead ones the other day in an alley. They tended not to get cleared away unless they were blocking major throughways for pedestrians or vehicles. I tried to gauge her age from her face. She looked a bit older than me, so she’d probably been around a day and a bit.

I stopped in front of the bollard. She looked at me and her green mouth was curious.

It was hard to be brave, face to face. So I looked at the green stain.

“You’re alone,” I said.

“So are you,” she said.

I remembered the first sugar glider I’d touched. I’d pulled her into a church. And here was another, just outside of one. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

She nodded. So we went to get food. The grocery store was a few blocks away, and she looked like the wind blew right through her, but she didn’t want my coat. I realized that I was supposed to be seeing my professor for History to the 16^th Century about my thesis outline. Instead I bought a bag of sugar and we went outside to look for grass.

“What was that you came out of?” she asked me. “Just now. Before you came up to me?”

I looked at her over the top of the sugar bag. “Mass? In the church? It’s something the pastor leads. I go to it twice a week, usually.”

She lifted her hands and looked at them as though they were the concerning thing. “But why? What do you get out of it?”

“I go to pray,” I said. “So I won’t get sent to hell before I die.” I realized that even if I explained hell to her, she might not understand it. Sugar gliders only had a few days to commit sin, if it were possible to get them sent to hell. There was so much more time for the rest of us.

“That’s what you’re doing with all of this?” The corner of her mouth twitched, like she was amused. She was not trying to hide it. It prickled me, strongly, like stinging nettle. I wanted to rub my skin where she was looking at me. “Just praying to try and take care of yourself when you die?”

“What do you mean all of this?” I asked her.

She made a small flourish with her hands at the sky and the street and the grass, then sat down in the middle of it. Her gaze bounced onto the bag of sugar, then away. “All of this. What if the point of the rest of it? School and everything you all do?”

“To learn. To grow.”

“Are you grown yet, then?” She pulled apart the seal on the bag, licked her finger, and dipped it into the bag.

“Grown for us means dead,” I said. “At least, when we’re done growing.”

“And then what?” She tipped the bag over and sprinkled it in the grass, then sprawled on her belly. Her long legs tangled with one another. They were bare where they emerged from the hem of her dress. It was not warm enough for that kind of skirt yet. “You go to heaven?”

“Hopefully,” I said. So she did know a little about religion. Did she care that she didn’t have a soul, I wanted to ask. Did she even know? “That’s my plan post-mortem. What about you?”

“Oh, I don’t plan.” She shrugged and licked at a blade of grass. Sugar glittered on her tongue for the long moment it took her to pull it back into her mouth. “That’s ages away. Have some.”

I should not have laid down next to her, but the grass was cool and it sparkled with sugar instead of frost. The dirt was hard and cold, but she was warm and soft. She got older as she licked the sugar off the blades under her. She got older as she kissed my mouth. Then it was harder to forget she would be dead soon.

She refused to go to church with me the next day for mass, but we went in before, when the pastor was still driving to the church. She looked as unperturbed as the first sugar glider I’d brought into a church. She didn’t burn without a soul. She just looked at the candles at the altar and asked what happened when one was lit. She looked unimpressed when I told her that nothing happened.

“So if I believe in Him,” she said, “I would have to decide between heaven and hell by doing something good or something bad.”

“By being good or being sinful,” I said, but these were not easy concepts for her grasp. I didn’t tell her that she was thinking of religion the wrong way, either. “If it doesn’t happen, what do you think does happen when you die?”

“You stay dead,” she said. “And you don’t have to go to hell.”

“Or heaven. Aren’t you afraid?”

She put one of her fingers on my cheek and pressed until I opened my mouth. But she didn’t kiss me, just stood next to me and wrapped her webbed hand around my fingers. “We should go,” she said. “If the church is making you cry.”

Mother did call, a few days later, when the sugar glider was dead. She asked if I’d been to mass. She asked what I’d been up to. I didn’t tell her that I’d had to take a dead sugar glider out of my room the day before, into the main street where she would be cleaned up and taken away. I still had half a bag of sugar in my cupboard that the sugar glider hadn’t eaten. She’d gotten older until she hadn’t been able to anymore and if she had a souls he would have gone to heaven. I’d been with her most of her life, long enough to know how many sins she had committed.

Long enough to know I would commit many more.

Since I had so many more days to go.

Art by Rebecca Yanovskaya

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Thump

I got used to the farm quickly.

Mother wasn’t used to farms for a long time, not since she’d escaped the one she grew up on years and years ago. But I believed it was perfect, quartz and wildflowers to the cities diamonds and roses. The main farmhouse was charming and breezy, three stories tall (you hardly find anything three stories tall in New York unless it’s a crummy walk-up or a house too nice to afford) with gothic-looking trim and a turret with curved glass panes in the windows. It was L-shaped, too, so that a part of it looked straight out into the fields behind the house. Inside the ceilings were high, the floors creaky, the hinges of every door loud and complaining. There were field mice in the yard and field mice in the house. Mother asked Father, as soon as we stepped inside and set down the first round of our suitcases, how he could stand a place like this with its drafty rooms and flimsy curtains letting in all the light at hellish hours of the morning. Father told her he liked its character. Character was a word he used a lot to gloss over the leaking pipes and asbestos in the basement and the sulfurous smell of the water coming out of the taps in the bathrooms.

But the farmhouse and the property, and everything on the property, was ours now. I remember the look on Mother’s face when the executioner of Grandfather’s will told us that Grandfather had left us the property. And the murderous expression when Father told her he wanted to move there, at least for the summer, to fix up the place. After all, how could we sell it when it’s such a mess, Elizabeth?

“There are micee droppings in the closet,” Mother said. “Did you hear me, Richard? Mice droppings.”

“Part and parel with the property,” Father said. He swept through the house like a king taking in his new estate and finding it exceeding expectations. “It’s a little cold as well, but the girls will get used to it, won’t you, girls?”

We didn’t get used to it. Our rooms were drafty in the morning and arctic in the evening. Summers in the city were warm, with the heat of exhaust and the sheer number of people, and the sun bouncing off all of the high rises. Even in Central Park, in the depths of it unreachable by city life, it didn’t get this cold at the dead of night. Father gave us a few blankets and while he was fixing up the roof, Mother helped us wash the blankets that could be washed and air out the rest. She got busy with the bleach and the mop and broom while we decided that the best way to keep out some of the chill, and the light, was to string some of the blankets up in front of the windows as curtains, instead of laying them on the beds. Father wouldn’t have minded; he would have been sad to see the holes we put in the blankets to fit them on the curtain rods, but he would have bought new blankets. Mother hated to buy anything we didn’t need. It didn’t matter how much money she had now, she couldn’t forget the filth-under-your-nails feeling of scrabbling for money when she was a girl. She wouldn’t be pleased.

We made a fire in the backyard, to burn anything that we deemed rubbish. Possibly, Father should have been more specific in telling us what to burn. Possibly, we should have exercised some common sense and made a pile of things we weren’t certain about burning, to ask Mother and Father about later.  But the flames rose higher and higher and breathed foul plumes of smoke in the air. It streaked across the cornflower sky. We waved some of the smoke across the fire, to cover one another with it, keep the bugs off of us. We trampled the grass as we sprinted back and forth between one of the barns and the fire. The gasoline had long burned off but the fire kept climbing. We threw on a few things that made the fire erupt in sparks, or flicker in a different colour, as if the flames became dingy. There were a few things covered in fleas that we heaped on the fire, too. We poured water in buckets around the edge of the fire to keep it from spreading. The grass was dry, flammable. That was Bett’s idea, not mine.

Mother left the bleach long enough to come out of the house, and I looked carefully for signs that the fumes were getting to her, but she didn’t seem woozy. Just withdrawn, then tense, when she saw the fire. Bett and Moira both pointed at me, though it wasn’t my idea. I’m pretty sure.

“Father told us to burn what we didn’t need,” I said. A piece of damp wood from one of the chairs in the barn popped in the fire behind me. A cushion disintegrated.

“He did?” she said. She didn’t sound angry. She looked back at the house. She’d taken off her cleaning gloves. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think we’ll be having lunch inside, today. There’s a table in the back yard. Though that needs to be cleaned up as well.”

Her cheeks were pale. “Is something wrong, Mother?” I asked.

“There are no spiders and too many webs,” she said.

That made us all stop and think for a moment. I tried to dissect what she’d said in little pieces, as though it might translate better in parts than in a whole. But in simple words it was still as confusing as a sum. I asked Mother what she meant, if she’d found a nest of spiders or a spider sack. The smoke was still rising above us, and now the cinders were shifting a little in the wind. It was not much of a wind. Nothing blew very much in the farm, even across the flat ground. Mother didn’t give us a definite answer until we spelled out her words for her and asked her what she meant. She gave us a look, as though we were vexing her, and went back into the house. We didn’t follow. We didn’t want to inhale any of the same bleach fumes she was.  

Father went in and out of town. He didn’t take Mother, though she desperately wanted him to some days. He told her the house still needed a good clean, that he would be back quickly, that it was no use bringing the both of them when he only had so much room in the car and more than a week’s worth of groceries to collect for all of us. He was always delighted to come back to the loud doors and warped floorboards, and to complain about the city. Mother listened to him speak and looked bleaker every time.

“Cheer up,” Father said. “The girls are having fun, aren’t you, girls? It’s an adventure. Not everyone from the city gets to see these wide open fields. Do you like them?”

We replied that we did. I told him that I’d gone all the way to the edge of the property.

“What did you find there?” Father asked.

“Cow patties,” Moira said, wrinkling her nose and glancing at Mother, whose expression shifted from bleak to hopeless. It was no use telling her that the cow patties were on the other side of our neighbour’s fence, with the cows, and that we couldn’t reach them and they couldn’t reach us. The very idea of them offended her.

“This is an awful place,” Mother told us all.

“Oh, Liza,” Father said, which once was endearing and now just made Mother turn her head away when he said it. He didn’t look at her; there was strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert that day and it took up all of his attention. “Just the summer. You should like the peace and quiet.”

Moira and Bett shared a room, the larger one, and because Mother hadn’t had a chance to clean the second room, I was sharing it with them. There were only two beds but we pushed them together and I lay in the small dip between mattresses, hoping that the beds wouldn’t somehow slide apart in the night and I’d find myself on the mouse-droppings-and-dust floor, looking up between their beds. I was glad we wouldn’t share the room for all of the summer. But what if Father wanted to stay longer? Bett and Moira would only put up with sharing with one another for a few months at best. We talked about it a little, then we listened to the crickets cry and the cicadas buzz. The insects were bolder, bolder than any I’d heard before, as loud as though they’d all crowded outside our window.

I was nudged awake by Bett’s sharp elbow and Moira said, groggily, “Mother’s not right.”

We ran down the hallway in our nightgowns and cardigans. The floor was cold as an ice flow under us, and half-asleep we stumbled as though we were on the deck of a ship. Mother was in one of the spare rooms, which we’d half emptied of rubbish. She’d been crying out a moment before, but not now. Now she had a hand jammed against her mouth, as though to stop any sound coming out of it entirely. Her shoulders quaked.

“The webs were moved. Something behind them,” Mother said, pointing at the spider webs on the wall in front of her. They were partially stretched over the post of a bed frame that had been separated from the rest of the frame, but she was looking at the thick web on the wall. It was more like a cobweb, thick and cottony, than a spider web, but there was nothing between it and the wall.

“Something moved,” I said, and reached out to prod the web. Moira and Bett made disgusted sounds, but it was dry and spider-less. I hadn’t actually seen a single spider since we’d moved in, though there were dozens of ancient dead flies on the window sills and lots of webs in corners.

“Stop that,” Mother said. “It isn’t there anymore.”

“Was it there in the first place?” Father said. He was standing in the doorway, in a shirt and robes. He didn’t look like he’d gone to bed. He didn’t ask Mother why she’d been in the spare room instead of in bed. He looked at the wall, skeptical. There were an awful lot of webs, but nothing behind them.

“I’m going to stay in a hotel,” Mother said. “In town.”

“Elizabeth.”

Father tried to persuade mother to bed, and when that didn’t work he told her they’d decide on it tomorrow and that she couldn’t drive this late at night anyway when she was so obviously unwell. This did prompt her to bed. Then he prompted us back to our room. Then I heard him prompting himself to the kitchen for a glass of scotch.

We listened to the crickets and cicadas warring outside again. It was a different sound from the city, but just as loud.

The next day Mother expected more from us than setting things on fire in the yard. Father had repaired the roof, mother had swept out an entire floor, so we collected all of the dust and dirt on a huge rug, tied it up, and brought it outside to dump. Then we went around putting new screws in several of the doorknobs. Then we unscrewed light fixtures, emptied them of bugs, and screwed them back in over the bulbs.

In the late afternoon, when the heat was just beginning to fade, there was a thump from inside the house. A sort of someone-has-fallen thump. I was sent in to look in on Mother while Bett and Moira bared their arms to the sun in hopes of getting darker. I could tell them both they were going to burn, it was all that Anglo-Saxon blood in us, Father always said, but I just went inside to find Mother in her and Father’s bedroom. It was the cleanest room in the house. Clean enough that when Mother had fallen onto the floor she didn’t seem too inclined to get up. I leaned over her and looked around to see what she’d fallen from, but there didn’t seem to be much, unless she’d been standing on the bed.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“It thumped,” Mother said. “In the walls. It tried to get past the webs.”

I wanted to get Father, to collect her off the floor and make me feel like it wasn’t my job to tell her why it all sounded so implausible. But Father had moved on to the other barns and was spending a peaceful day there, undisturbed. He only had so much time and patience in him to called her Liza and explain that we were here all summer and she should cease complaining. So I looked up at the webs between the wall and the wardrobe and saw that they were thicker than the webs in the rest of the house. And they weren’t flat.

They looked like a sheet pulled tight and pushed against, though they couldn’t have been that strong. If something pushed against them, I reasoned, the webs would give way immediately. Spider silk was fine and fragile, but this didn’t look like spider silk. It was thick and stretchy as skin. I couldn’t fathom how many spiders and how much dust it would take to make a web like this. There was a lot of space between the web and the wall. If a shadow moved, I thought, it would look as though there were something on the other side of the web.

“Did you fall?” I asked Mother. “When you were frightened by the web?”

“It knows we’re here,” she said, voice trembling. “It wants to get past the webs, now.”

“Maybe you should dust in this room, Mother.”

Bett and Moira came in them, to see what had taken so long or because they were hungry, maybe. But they saw the web on the wall and recoiled, as though it really had reached for them. There was something disconcerting about it, about the way shadows fell across it when none should have.

We didn’t tell Father, and neither did Mother, when he came back and found all of us in the living room and told him that Mother wasn’t feeling well enough to cook. That was the final straw for his long day of avoiding us. He collected a glass, a bottle of scotch, and then collected himself off to the front porch. Bett and Moira and I were quietly discussing what could be wrong with those webs and whether or not ordinary cleaning would be enough to get rid of them.

When Father and Mother had a row that night, none of us were surprised. We lay awake and listened as the crickets and cicadas screamed and the tall, black grass outside pressed against out window.

Mother was crying. “Nothing is going to fix this house, Richard!” she said.

This might have been true. There was quite a lot to do, and we’d already been here three weeks. My Father was the only one who really knew how to fix things. My sisters and I had never had to fix a thing in our townhouse in New York. Father made a sound as though he didn’t agree. There was a thump against a wall. Any wall, we couldn’t tell which one. We heard Father say, “This damn house makes all sorts of noise. You just can’t stand old places, can you. And what about the dusting? It needs to be done? There are cobwebs everywhere, Elizabeth.”

“I’m not getting rid of them,” Mother said. She was weeping now. “It’s the only thing keeping it in there.”

“I’m not playing this game,” Father said. “You can’t stand to be back in this house, is it? Even for your family? For me? I didn’t marry you to get you away from this place, Elizabeth. This isn’t about the webs, is it?”

There was a silence. An absolute silence. As though all of the cicadas and crickets were holding their breath. It was the first moment of real quiet we’d had since coming here. There was a cobweb in the corner of our room, and I watched it in the dimness. It didn’t sway, like an ordinary cobweb. It was pulled taught over the wall. It hadn’t been so thick the other day. I pushed myself up onto my elbows.

Bett and Moira had their eyes open too, fixed on the web. There were five points of dark on the web, like the touch of fingertips from the other side of it.

Then, there was a thump.

Art by Eevien Tan

Text by Lucie MacAulay