Animal On the Inside

For a place in the middle of nowhere, Vannattan had people everywhere. They loomed in the backs of trucks (cars and trucks were never empty- someone was always in need of a ride somewhere) and choked the sides of the roads between farms and seethed on the edges of cornfields, and their animals filled the air around them like gnats.

I had eight brothers, and each brother wore his animal on the outside. This wasn’t their fault, necessarily. I could only blame them for their obedience; my mother had told them that it was best for them to wear their animals on the outside, and it’s hard to disagree with the hand that feeds you and pays your phone bill.

“Why?” I demanded to know when I saw all of their animals for the first time. I was mostly upset because of Jasper and his jackdaw. Jasper was willowy, though he wasn’t very tall. But he still gave an impression bigger than a jackdaw, I’d thought. It would be disappointing, or worse, it would draw attention. People liked to stare when they thought you wore a surprising animal.

My glacier-beautiful mother was busy sitting on a couch with embroidered cushions and plastic wrapping. She had a magazine that was almost entirely advertisments for shops too expensive to set foot in. She looked like she was licking her teeth under her lips, or maybe she had some Faberge eggs in there. “It’s natural. It’s more natural than wearing them on the inside. Is that tone necessary?”

I didn’t ask her if it was natural. I didn’t care if it was. I preferred my brothers just as they were, and I preferred to stand in the same room as them without also feelingthat we’d been joined by a third, uninvited guest from the zoo. My mother preferred them to have animals, because it was eight fewer people to which she had to turn her attention. And she preferred to see people’s animals- how would she know who to associate with without them? She had gone mad with power since my father and his ocelot had whisked away. They’d probably done this for good reason. When I told her this she whisked me away to my room. The tumbler only clicked the next morning when she unlocked my room on the way to work. Vanhattan was my next stop. The bus left every three hours. I had at least a three-hour headstart on my brothers. I hadn’t thought they would all follow me.

Vanhattan had no city corners, only country corners, which meant behind trees and in trees and behind bushes and in bushes if you wanted to be alone to focus on not crying. This was how Hector found me just after dark.

“Linda, this wasn’t your smartest move,” Hector said. He tugged me up with some difficulty. I liked to play ragdoll with him. Then I saw his pressed tweed blazer and the slacks he wore to impress company. I didn’t want to be responsible for sullying them. “You could have probably taken her car and driven it here.”

“I don’t like left hand turns,” I said. This was especially pitiful and not very helpful, so I turned away. I already missed the congested streets of the city. I’d been beneath this tree a lifetime already.

Daniel followed Hector, stumbling into the crabapple trees with us. He was out of breath and his forehead had a sheen on it like manual labour. He carried one of my sweaters over his arm. He gave us both a long look as he sucked in air and heaved his shoulders.

“Did something happen?” I asked.

Daniel opened his mouth a few times to give his mind time to demystify. His fox wound between his legs, tongue lolling between fangs. “Some of us have a shorter legs span,” Daniel panted, looking from his fox’ legs to Hector and his gazelle’s lanky ones. “But you found her!”

He tossed my coat at me. The collar of it still smelled the mustier parts of our mother’s flat. The fox eyes the jacket at I put it on. Probably it smelled like another animal; this entire place did. Vanattan was so full of the smell of other people, moreso than the city. I’d thought there would be fewer animals here, but I didn’t know then that Vanattan was filled with people who wore their animals outside themselves.

“If you were a bit faster, she would be too,” Hector told Daniel, nodding at the fox. Daniel and his fox looked indignant. “Wasn’t Adrian with you?”

Daniel had caught his breath enough to speak, but he waited a moment anyway. Probably just so Hector would give him that narrow-eyed look he was giving him now. “Let him behind to unpack. And shop. He was threatening us-“ He slid his eyes to me and smirked. He was the least frightening of my brothers, but he knew something that I didn’t, just then. For once, his ominous expression was actually ominous. “-by saying we might all be sharing rooms. Three to one. Or two.”

Hector’s eyelid twitched. His smile didn’t move. “We should have upgraded in terms of size. This is Vanatten, not New York. Three two a room sounds like an orphanage.”

They took me out of the shelter of the trees. Instantly we were in the presence of someone else’s animal. Even the wheat grass around us smelled as musty as an animal warren. I couldn’t tell what was regular farm-animal pee and what was the pee of many people’s animals hovering about, unwatched.

“Linda,” Hector said when we found the main road and sat down waiting for a truck to come by with enough space between hay and tools and other passengers for three. “Why Vanattan?”

“You couldn’t have picked somewhere else?” Daniel asked, wrinkling his nose and inching away from a tangle of stinging nettle.

Because if there was a place to get rid of animals, I thought, surely it would be the wild.

The transition to Vanattan was a difficult one. I don’t mean the physical transition- that had been a bus ride. I meant getting to know the city. It sat next to me and leaned over to know what I was doing and when I didn’t respond it opened up immediately to show me what it was up to. It pranced up to me and licked my hands. It was loud with all sorts of animal sounds: birds whistling, dogs howling, cats rumbling like car engines. Even in the dark, when animals stayed closer to their people, it felt like they were on all sides anyway.

Theo gave me a very specific set of circumstances that would allow me to leave the house. Otherwise, I was confined. They and their animals disappeared in the day. I stayed and thought of all of the vicious animals some people wore, the kind that needed to be restrained from goring the neighbour’s dog. We were three to a bedroom, but I didn’t mind. The must of boy was far superior and strong to the must of animal. I was the only one not horrified to be sharing a room. But they fell into a routine, as easily as if they were back in New York again. The kitchen smelled of Indian food whenever Noah had a bad day. Jasper tripped on the same stair every day and nearly kneecapped himself on the stair above that. Daniel and Theo fought until their animals fought as well, and their animals grew much faster than they did. Their fights were always catastrophic. We kept furniture at the sides of the rooms now.

I was inside for two weeks with small trips outside at infrequent intervals. My brothers did the shopping, which was a mistake in retrospect. We ended up having the different parts of different meals in the fridge that didn’t go together at all. Hector was looking through the fridge for something to make into a passable meal when Daniel stumbled through the door. His fox had turned into a coyote, and it tumbled in with him, legs tangled together. They disentangled themselves before they tumbled all over the apartment.

“How do you trip over one another?” Hector said as he rolled a couple of eggs around in his palm. I always thought when he did this he was asking for a floor covered in albumen, but the eggs stayed where they were. “I can’t work out which one of you trips the other one first.”

“Did you lay those eggs or did your animal?” Daniel eyed Hector’s lynx. It was always changing now; the day before it had been a snow leopard and for a moment I’d thought someone else’s animal had somehow got into the flat. But Hector said he could feel it settling down. “Oh wait, no eggs anymore. You can’t do birds anymore. Linda, what did you do today?”

“Nothing.”

Daniel’s coyote pranced into his room. Daniel shook his head. “Sounds awful. Take a walk outside.”

“Theo said it’s dangerous,” I said. I didn’t know why I was saying it; I was desperate to get outside.

Elliot emerged from his room then and snaked around Hector to the fridge. He was two months away from being legal, but you couldn’t tell by the way Hector frowned at the beer in his hand. He didn’t have a shirt on. He was sweaty from running with his deer. He said, “That’s how you know it’s where things are happening, runt.”

Hector kicked him in the ankle. He was trying to separate the eggs and the yolk into two bowls by putting holes in either end of the egg and shaking it. Albumen splattered the countertop. There were six eggs with which to do this. He might end up having his dinner for breakfast. He said, “Linda, you’d be safe around here. Just don’t get on the back of any strange trucks that don’t already have people on them. Oh, there’s a grove of trees near that farm with all the apple trees we saw on our second say. You’d like it.”

“If that was the last of them, I’ll eat you,” Daniel said to Elliot. Elliot rolled the beer can between his hands and then pressed it to the naked back of Daniel’s neck. Daniel yelped, “You traitor.”

Hector’s mouth made a shape like it was holding in a swear word when broken egg yolk began to leak through the hole in the egg. “I don’t even remember who taught me this trip.”

I came over to the bowls and picked up an egg. I didn’t see the point in poking two holes in it when there was an entire shell that would break. Hector wouldn’t forgive me for doing it unless he got his end result so I carefully cracked the egg one-handed, into my palm. I held the yolk in the cradle of my handle and gently shook it. Albumen leaked over the sides of my hand, into the bowl. It took a few shakes to separate it entirely. The yolk looked like a golden dollar, or the sun during a sunset when it was more saturated than blinding. I dumped it into the other bowl.

“Thanks, Linda,” Hector said. “Do you want to cut the vegetables?” I could do this the best of all my brothers except Hector. I felt honoured to be asked.

“You know,” Elliot said, “I saw a woman working with her monkey today in the park. Good with their hands, both of them. It’s like a sort of talent thing you both have-”

Daniel snapped, “Linda is perfectly talented with her animal on the inside.”

Later, when Hector had made dinner for half of my brothers and the other half had foraged or not come home yet, and they’d all split up to their rooms or to the garden or to the living room couch to play video games, I sat at the table and watched Daniel put together a house of cards. His coyote watched from another one of the chairs. I couldn’t tell how many of the beer cans by the door had been emptied by him. My brothers were all a little bit slower in the evening. They always seemed to get drunk together, so there were no degrees of drunk. Daniel’s hands always remained steady, though.

His coyote sat close to me, but I didn’t touch it. I could have- Daniel and I were close like that- but I knew it was impolite to touch someone’s animal, and if not impolite, it was shocking. I didn’t want to shock Daniel into destroying the house. “Does it bother you?” I asked. I tried to imagine my animal on the outside, interacting with the world without my control, being visible and hurt-able.

Theo and Elliot fiddled with the radio. There were advertisements for people who wanted to change their animals and were already settling. No one wants to settle on marmots, someone said. That’s really called settling!  They laughed sort of like crows.

Daniel laid a card top on the third row of his house. He said, “I just don’t always know what they’re there for.”

There was a grove of apple trees in Vanattan. Probably there were several, but this one looked the least like an orchard. The trees didn’t grow in rows. They grew without order. When the sun shone on them they looked dusted with gold. I wondered if that was where all the stories about golden apples had come from. The haze around them looked like the fuzz on a kiwi. It was a good place to watch people, because they all moved through the grove. It was in the sort of hub that had cropped up between farms. It was the sort of place that Vanattan was too small to have, but it was here anyway.

There were children with rapidly changing animals trying to climb the trees and then tossing apples between them. There were men who plucked single apples and shared them with the animals at their sides or on their shoulders. Women lounged in the grass with their bags and their animals beside them. Everyone co-existed with their animals, drowsily and indulgently. It was sort of complex to look at them all, but the longer I looked the less my brain told me there was a difference between the people and their animals. If Hector thought I couldn’t work out why he’d sent me here he was wrong. I had to push away some man’s nosy foxhound before it could put its nose up my skirt. Suddenly, I wondered what my brothers’ animals were like when I wasn’t around.

I was walking out of the grove when I collapsed. It was no fault of mine. Something had rammed into the back of my knees like a clumsy, miniature freight train. Whatever it was tumbled with my, rolling over my knees and onto my back. It felt like Theo, when he decided to sit on me. My mouth was full of grass and my palms were full of dirt. When I wasn’t breathing in loam, I had the clarity to slap at whatever was on me. I wasn’t careful. The jackal flopped over in the grass, either recovered or in shock. The black line along its back was raised. I touched the skin of my knees, which was red, and then the back of my knees, one of which had been grazed by a claw or a tooth. I couldn’t decide whether to be sorry or angry; surprise had taken over all higher brain function for the moment. By the time I’d climbed to my feet and decided that it was at least polite to check on the jackal, it had retreated into the tall grasses of the grove. I was unkempt enough to attract looks. I wondered who wasn’t watching their animal and how they felt now that I had touched it with my bare hand.

“Sorry,” I said. I was sure I wasn’t loud enough to be heard, and it didn’t bring me any comfort to say it, so I walked with as much dignity as I could muster out of the grove.

In the back of a truck pulling hay, on the way home, I tried not to think that if my animal were outside, then I would keep a better eye on it. I knew myself. I was the kind of thing to go bowling into other people’s knees by accident.

No one was in the flat when I got home. Out drinking or working- those were the only two options in Vanattan. Apart from taking your lunch in an apple grove and getting mowed over by animals. I went onto the computer, because Jasper had left it on and no one was stopping me. I wondered what jackals meant, but mot websites told me what I already knew. Different animals for different people, and jackals weren’t all the same people. I didn’t know that it was even a jackal; maybe it was a jackal for a day. Most people who were jackals seemed disappointed that they hadn’t somehow been upgraded to something larger, like a lion or a tiger. Someone with a lion reassured them that they didn’t want one. Lions were hard to maneuver on city buses.

I logged off the computer before my brothers were home. They were preoccupied with Elliot and Daniel, who were in a spat. It didn’t involve me, so I stayed out of it. I told Hector about the apple grove and agreed to go the next day as well. He still hoped to accomplish something sending me there. I liked the grove anyway. I’d decided when I’d finally brushed all of the soil out of my teeth.

I went to the grove in the afternoon, when no one was taking their lunch. It was only children with their animals now. It played a game where I tried to pinpoint the exact moment a mouse changed into a hawk. I could see how triumphant the children with larger animals were, as though their animals would stay so big when they settled.

There was only one adult in the grove, and he stopped and looked right at me when he spotted me. He looked sort of dapper, in a white shirt of a kind that I didn’t think people wore anymore. There were dusty paw prints on his slacks. It was too late to get up and leave when he started across the grass. We had made eye contact. We were maintaining eye contact.

“Is this seat taken?” He asked. He pointed at the ground beside me.

“I think seat is a little excessive,” I said, then pulled the remains of my lunch closer to me so he didn’t have to sit on apple core. “No, it’s not taken.”

The young man sat. He must have been Jasper’s height, but Hector’s age. He said, “You were here yesterday, too.”

This made every one of my hairs stand on end. Foolishly, because what could he do to me in a public grove. But I was startled. If I had an animal, it would have bristled just then. The young man must have noticed, because he leaned away. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he looked more uncomfortable than intimidated. “Were you watching me?”

“I was trying to apologize to you. My jackal knocked you over.”

I looked at him for a moment, stupidly. Then I had the good sense to look for his jackal, but there was none in the grass. “It was yours? I don’t see it.”

“It’s not a jackal, right now,” he said wryly.

“How did you know I would be here today? Then- what is it, then?”

“I’m not sure.” He sounded a little miserable, which kept me from snapping at him. He didn’t seem to have any more idea where his animal was than I did, but he also wasn’t looking around. “It keeps going back and forth between a jackal and a meerkat. I really thought it would settle on jackal, or that this was the stage before- I don’t know. But now it’s just switching between the two.” He sighed. He didn’t look exactly like a farmer, or someone who worked for one. He had slacks on instead of cargos, for one thing.

“Did you tell it to stay a jackal?”

“No point. It’ll stay whatever it stays. It’s hard to upgrade when you’re this old. Where’s yours, then?” He looked at me like he might be able to see my animal somewhere on my person.

“Not here,” I said. This was sort of a lie. “Are you on a break?”

He shook his head. That would be why he had no lunch, or refreshment at all. Anyone who worked the fields always rested with a full beer or lemonade or pond, depending on how thirsty they were. I offered him some nuts from my lunch. He munched and talked at the same time. He was surprisingly articulate: “Are you on a break?”

“I’m not working,” I said.

He squinted at me. “What do you do with the day?”

“Get knocked over by jackals.”

He rubbed his hands on his nice slacks, and then regarded the sort of oily residue it had left behind. This is why you shouldn’t wear nice clothing, it shows all the nastiness much more readily. “I really am sorry about that. I try to control it but once it starts settling. You know, you work with what you’ve got. It’s the four legs. I think it just gets clumsy and overenthusiastic. It’s better than being a baby giraffe. I had to apologize all the time when it just sidestepped into people. Being anywhere busy was terrible.” He gave up on the pants. “What’s yours?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He looked all around me. With his gaze this much closer I felt like crossing my arms over my chest. I waved to bring his attention away from me. “I guess yours won’t settle for a few years, or course.”

Settling seemed the worst part of this. I had some sort of vicarious dread fill me. “My animal isn’t outside of my, thanks. It’s not going to settle into anything. I don’t have time to look after it; I’ve got to look after my brothers’.”

He took another bunch of nuts without asking, but by now I didn’t really want them. He breathed around them, then managed, “Why do you have to look after them? Aren’t they capable?”

Of course they were, and I didn’t really do anything with their animals except avoid them, when they were around. My brothers did all the taking care of, and I just sort of hovered and wondered what would happen if they turned around and their animals wandered off or stuck a paw in the blender or an organ in the path of a speeding car. “As best as they know how, I suppose.”

“Some people could be better," he said diplomatically. Even though I led him to the implication, I didn’t like it. “So are you here to see how other people do it? Learned anything? Do none of them want their animals on the outside, like you?”

This question bothered me the most because even before I opened my mouth, I knew I didn’t have a straight answer. Hector sort of liked having his animal around, because he was never alone. Daniel liked to curl up with his and keep warm. Theo and Jasper were always entertained. Even Elliot, whose animal was small, didn’t seem to hate having it on the outside. And beyond that, I didn’t actually know if I hated having my animal on the outside.

“I’ve never had my animal on the outside.” I’d never tried. I could see him processing the fact that I’d never tried.

He took another handful of nuts. Maybe he needed them to think. He held one out to the jackal that appeared at his side. It’s face slid into a meerkat’s face, and then back, quickly. The young man didn’t even seem to notice when, jackal-formed again, it draped itself over his lap, like Daniel’s coyote when he was watching television. The young man tipped his head over and squinted in the sun. “You know, I think yours would be a little wild.”

I wouldn’t tell Hector about this conversation. He liked to say, I told you so. I told the young man, “Maybe that’s why we moved to Vanattan.”

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Being Prepared

No one in her family had dated a psychopomp before. Her family was traditional, the way ritualistic fires and children being sent into mazes was traditional. She didn’t ask her mother for advice, not just because her mother had never dated a psychopomp. She couldn’t tell the difference between dating a psychopomp and anyone else, except that this one was more sensible than her last boyfriend and didn’t try to describe her mouth as a rosebud instead of just “ your mouth”.

He’d told her the moment they met why he was exciting. He was the first one to a party, he’d told her. I’m the first one there when the car veers off the road. I’m the first one there when the finger slips on the trigger. He seemed to enjoy being a first. She’d just assumed at the time it was his competitive streak placing him adjacent to the police or a coroner. He did not tell her that he disliked authority, but it was clear that he did. Any authority that wasn’t his own. She figured as well that the black leather jacket and the tattoo that shot down his spine were memorabilia from a phase. The eye on one vertebrae became the blossom on another became the screaming mouth on another. The entire thing clawed up the back of his neck and disappeared into his hair as well. When he got his hair buzzed, two months after they started dating, she saw that the claws were all different: talons, wolf claws, raptor claws. She’s mistaken the whole tattoo as a shadow at first. But most people did. Like they mistook him for a shadow.

The psychopomp part came a little later. She wasn’t surprised, then. She told him that if he had urgent business because someone died right before dinner, he had to text her before she left the house. He smiled.

She did not care about his odd habits, and he didn’t care about her idiosyncrisies. His habits were only odd for people. She didn’t know what they were for psychopomps. She could associate them with lonely humans or curious humans, or sometimes with animals. He had to touch something to fully understand it, sometimes. Mostly items that had something inside of them- he’d touched a cow’s heart in the grocery store once and bought it only to open it in the parking lot and show her the beetle living inside of it. He closed his eyes and lied horizontally for the night, but he didn’t sleep. He could eat packages and packages of candy without gaining weight. When she brought the beginning of a rowan tree home in a pot and put it in the middle of the living room, he turned around it clockwise. He smiled when she only walked counter clockwise around it. He was meticulous and slow about chores. When she salted the window sills and doorways, he vacuumed and dusted around them.

When he came home with sand in his shoes- black and chrome coloured sand, sand that had never seen light and smelled like a place that had never seen light, she told him about the dirt her parents put in her shoes when she was young and likely to wander off outside of their eye, so she could never wander too far. When he muttered in Latin, she responded. When she picked up the newspaper and looked at the obituaries, he listened until he tired of the game and told her who had died before she could read it. He cupped centipedes and spiders in his hands and brought them outside. He made a rack for her tiger’s eye necklaces because he had nothing to do for hours of the day. He rapped his knuckles on the horseshoe on the front door when he got home, just for the sound of it.

You might as well come home with me, she said. When she took him to meet her parents, he got to the front door first. There were terrible reactions inside while her parents scrambled for charms. Her father wielded a stang. She was shocked and pleased by this, because it was on of the most exciting things she had seen her father do in all the time she’d known him. She introduced her boyfriend and pretended not to notice when her mother tossed a handful of dirt into her shoes at the door. She was pleased he did not shoptalk at the dinner table. Her parents squinted at certain parts of him to determine that they were flesh and not shadow. He had to be looked at all over first, as though it made him solid.

The psychopomp was intrigued by their house, and by the herbs she had kept in lockets. He asked her why she didn’t wear them anymore. She hadn’t since she was young and believed in trinkets. She’d been wearing one the day they met. She had been trying to make a good first impression. She’d made a better one than him, because she’d spent the first five minutes she knew him making sure that all of him was there. He asked if she had a different name for creatures like him.

She made a cat’s cradle from a coloured ribbon strung with bells that hadn’t been put away two months after Christmas. She told him, I only have the name you gave me.

There were volunteering opportunities and job offers but the psychopomp never took anything longer than a week. Ordinary work baffled him. Papers and documentation of all kinds were arbitrary. A desk was in front of a chair specifically for putting his feet up. He disappeared often and without reason. She waited for him these days because there was something spooky but indulgent in hearing about the death of someone that didn’t affect you.

A month after the dinner, her mother called her. She’d sent over a jar of dirt. Hide it. Her father offered her the Christmas decoration. She pressed her finger to her tongue and then to the windowsill. She looked at the salt crystals and told her parents she could handle it. He filled the fridge with pomegranates from the farmer’s market. He filled her jewelry box with rings and bracelets of every material and beauty. He told her they were bargain finds or ditch finds. She pulled the receipts out of his wallet later.

She forgave him for killing her daffodils. He hadn’t meant to touch them.

She relocated the plants to the balcony. They thrived with a door between them. He told her of the flowers in his family’s old home. They were more beautiful, he said, with his intriguing mouth arrogant. He took her wrist in his fingers and tugged her until she was close enough to kiss. He offered her a pomegranate, then ate the inside of the fruit all at once when she declined.

One day he rolled over in bed, mouth red from pomegranates, and looked over her pink collar bone at her. He said, it’s been a year. She considered; he had been here in her room a year ago as well. She asked how his last girlfriend had survived. She didn’t, he told her. She said, neither did my boyfriend. He pulled her up and they dressed. He put her boots and coat at the door. The eye on his spine winked at her as he passed. He showered; she opened her jar of dirt and spread it on the inside of her boots.

The psychopomp met her at the door. There was a piece of pomegranate in his teeth. He tugged her forward. Rocks and loam rattled in her sole. “You might as well come home with me.”

Art by Anna Dittman

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Going Nocturnal

Autumn was flushing red for the last time when my mother’s Turned. It was both expected ans surprising.

It didn’t have a name for a long time, and then it was christened by a group of fanatics with a Dungeons and Dragons book filled with monsters and too much time on their hands. Nightwalker probably sounded better than any sort of “itis” or “flu”, or whatever they might call gang green’s cousin. Nothing fell off, but it was undeniably necrotic. Nothing on the outside died, but once a patient Turned, everything inside of them seemed to decay.

It wasn’t airborn. There was nothing to protect the healthy from the sick, so there were no precautions to take. Without precaution, the healthy could gaze at the sick as much as they liked. Behind homemade casserole gifts they could wonder whether the Nigthwalker got to their mouth first, their skin, or if it would be their arms that changed first. When the casseroles became useless, it was harder to disguise the interest. I wondered how my mother felt when her sickness transformed her into spectacle. I thought it was better than turning her family against her, like our neighbour’s family and their son with AIDS.

Once Nightwalking spread, the clinics spread as well. There were pamphlets upon pamphlets of information about how to tell one’s loved ones that they were plagued with Nightwalking, and what to expect in the following weeks, and about how the world did not stop turning just because Nightwalking had ruined one’s life. There was information about invasive treatments and homeopathic medicines that I did not believe for a second. No one bothered with homeopathy anymore, unless they were feeling nostalgic, and beneath the homeopathy was a steady treatment of science and research. I was in my room, adjusting my sun lamp, when my mother walked past my door and detoured into the frame.

“Do you think you’ll want to look at these?” she asked, holding up the pamphlets. There were pictures on them that looked like the pamphlets I’m been handed at school, now that we were supposed to think about university, and our future.

I inspected the faces on the pamphlets. They had roman features and beatific smiles. They were jubilant and probably poorly paid models. My mother twisted them this way and that so I could get a look at the titles. It didn’t look like anything I couldn’t find with five minutes and Google. I leaned back in my bed. The sun lamp made my room feel like morning and sleeplessness. “What would I do with them?” I asked. I didn’t need to read about coming out to one’s family members: my mother had done that already, and no one had expected any less of her.

My mother rubbed her temples. It was dark outside, but my lamp probably hurt her eyes. She would have them the longest, and most people did. Nightwalking didn’t destroy them, but some patients came out of treatments wishing that they did. There was nothing to be done about those. Curiously, the dark eyes almost never made it into the pamphlets. I suppose, as glossy as they were, the eyes would have looked abnormal and dark, like black water. There was no room for those black eyes when they could instead photograph the long limbs of a Nightwalker playing tennis as though nothing at all had changed. They cold have been the pamphlets for the universities I’d looked at. For campus gyms. For life insurance. For gardening programs.

I pulled the curtain shut and turned up my sun lamp. I could almost always stay awake. It was easier to accomplish when I could no longer see the dark night beyond my lamp. My mother looked abruptly away from the window. She looked exhausted to have been caught looking out of it in the first place. She rolled her eyes at me as though I’d just said something particularly childish. “Learn something. About what’s going to happen to me, and what will happen to you after. Find support.”

I didn’t think there was support to be found. I was good at accepting inevitable things, even then. I could see what would happen come winter, to my mother, and how it would change our lives. If there was something I forgot to take into account, it would be solved or discovered soon anyway. My mother gave me more pamphlets than I could have asked for and than I read. I preferred National Geographic, or wildlife photographers. There were a lot of segments and stories then about diurnal and nocturnal creatures and the way were impressed our own lifestyles on them. I would read them at night, when my brain still thought it was daytime.

My mother threw out the rest of the pamphlets, and then the ones I had when she realized I wasn’t going to read them. The clinic had given her some medicine to ease the transition, a sort of holding off of the worst effects, and some painkillers for the bone growth.

She read the sides of the pill bottles to my sister and I first. “Side effects may include nauseau, vomiting, feelings of hopelessness,” she read. It said something similar on my grandmother’s depression medication, which always seemed wrong to me, or incorrect.

It was just beginning to turn into Autumn when we heard about cousin Christopher. It wasn’t often that someone found a way to hurt themselves before the Nightwalking took them completely. He didn’t seem to want to take the pamphlets’ suggestion to learn to live with Nightwalking and incorporate it into his daily life. When his mouth began to close, he stuffed it full of all sorts of things to try and keep it open. It didn’t work, he only succeeded in suffocating himself and having to be taking to the emergency room to keep him breathing while they tried to figure out a way to remove what was in his mouth without actually opening it.

We got very little news about Christopher after that.

My mother watched her intake after that. Her intake of water and food and sugarless gum. None of it would have stayed in her mouth anyway, but she wasn’t about to risk it. She measured the edges of her mouth by poking at them with her tongue. She measures her arms with a meter stick and combed her fingers through her hair like it was already gone.

My sister didn’t like to see it, but she dealt with these things like she might deal with gossip she didn’t want to see, or one of those chases on the Animal Planet channel. She turned away from it. My mother didn’t say anything about it.

She took us outside on a sunny day, despite what the pamphlets said. I could imagine her skin feeling more and more sensitive to the light. She tugged her shirt sleeves all the way down her arms, but they didn’t quite reach her wrists.

My sister drove us to the park, and then to the farmer’s market. The sky was darker today than before. The clouds that swirled across it were the kinds we learned about in school, light with debris and particulate matter, but dark because of how poorly the clouds reflected the light of the city. The street lamps were turned up nearly to baking temperatures and light, as the city liked to do at the end of the summer. It was always better to simulate summer than to let it go completely, they always said.

Under the sun lamps, we went through the farmer’s market while my mother and sister tried not to loose their minds too quickly. Late in the summer, there were advertisements everywhere for iced lollies made from phosphorescent citrus fruit. People ran past us, some with Nightwalking, getting the last of the sunlight in their bones and skin before it began to hurt them too. They ran a little faster than the others of course. My sister ignored my mother when she stalled to look at the extra joints in the Nightwalkers’ arms and legs. My sister showed me a sign for gelato made from synthetic eggs, which were supposed to taste just like real eggs except they didn’t come from infected chickens, only vegetables from the infected ground. We all went out for tea, which tasted like grave loam and made my tongue itch. My sister downed half of her mug before her bravery began to falter. My mother educated herself on the virtues of the tea, via the pamphlet that came with our cups, and then decided that regulated bowels and slight euphoria were not worth the liquid in her cup, which she spat into a patch of artificial flowers. We went looking for food after that, anything that my mother could stomach before the flesh began to fall off her ribs. My mother glanced at the reflective cutting board in one booth, and the side of a knife in another. My mother tapped her on the elbow when she spent too long inspecting her hairline and her eyes and her wide mouth.

“Don’t drag at me like that,” my mother snapped when my sister began to haul her away from her reflection. Her tone told me that it didn’t matter how stir-crazy we all felt in our house with two other people and a diagnosis, it would get more uncomfortable here in a minute if we didn’t leave. My family was always trying to one up one another by humiliating them in public. But none of us were really humiliated by causing a scene. Except me.

“If I don’t, you’ll calcify or Turn before you actually leave your reflection alone,” my sister said. “You want to do something useful about it? Re-read the pamphlets the clinic gives you. Don’t poke anything into your mouth. Go to the therapy your doctor talked about.” She didn’t sound furious at first, then all of a sudden she was. That was her anger. It heard that it was invited to the conversation and instead of leaking in bit by bit, it charged in. Now she was comfortable in it, she wouldn’t let it go.

“Therapy won’t make it go away. I’m not feeling hopeless, anyway, so I’m all right,” Mother said.

“You’re not all right, you’re being a shit,” my sister said. I clamped a hand over my mouth. I couldn’t imagine calling my mother a shit. My mother looked like she couldn’t imagine it either, or couldn’t believe it had happened at all. “You’re pretending to be all right with it and letting your condition worsen. Just because it isn’t the end of the world doesn’t mean you should stop fighting.”

“Fighting what?” my mother snarled. “There isn’t much to fight for the next few months. It will be easier to just let it happen. And do you know what I think about when I see it happening to me? I think about what it’s going to be like for you when I can’t go out in the day, and when I start to really fall apart. Or about how you might not be able to tell me apart from the others. My sister was almost invisible when she had it. She could have been any Nightwalker. She walked straight into the sunlight when I didn’t recognize her. Right in front of me. I don’t want to do that to you, you understand?”

My sister was too shocked to flush at first, but when she did it was a terrible, guilty flush. She told my mother that she did understand, and she was sorry for upsetting her. She wasn’t sorry for what she’d said, or that she meant it, only that my mother had had to see her sister go. Mother never mentioned that I was there when it happened. It was a regular visit to my mother’s sister, but combined with the sudden outburst of Nightwalking outside of the city, there were several Nightwalkers on my aunt’s property, and no way to tell which one was which. I watched my mother trying to puzzle it out while I sat in the front of the car.

I wished we would leave, even if we didn’t find my aunt. I didn’t want to see any more Nightwalkers than I already could. I didn’t like the way they were mostly human, but not. Excessively long-limbed, with dark alien-eyes, the ridged heads and a rib cage as desiccated as a great Dane. The mouthless-ness was the worst, because there was nothing a Nightwalker could say once they Turned. There was no expression they could make that was less frightening than the ones conjured by their dark eyes and liplessness. I knew that inside of them, their organs were slowly turning to sand. It was the worst part, and many Nightwalkers couldn’t take it, but opening their mouths was as good as exposing every organ to the outside world. A gust of wind would blow them away. They died in increments.

It was an inefficient death, but easy to clean up after.

My mother rooted through the barns on her sister’s property and found several Nightwalkers. I could tell from her wrinkled brow that she could not immediately dismiss them all, even when she was sure they were not her sister. There was no way to explain to her sister that this was more a function of my mother’s forgetfulness than my aunt’s appearance, if that was her concern. Many eerie faces peered at her from the dim barn. Not one of them made a sound. For such tall people, with such drooping arms, they made very little sound. My mother only found her sister because her sister still was of mind to garden.

My mother saw what she was about to do before her sister did it. She shouted her sister’s name as she ran toward her, across the driveway and the garden.

My aunt had had her eye on my mother for minutes, though, and she had already made her decision. No amount of running could stop her. She flicked on her garden’s sun lamp and stood beneath it. A couple of Nightwalkers fled from the light, but two other joined her. They always joined one another right before they died. They looked like they were drifting when they lay down in the tall grass and stopped moving, black aliens in a green sea.

My mother was different after that, in a way that hurt my eyes more than the sight of her Nightwalking. She did not want to tell my sister what happened, but when we drove back from the park, I got the idea she was glad she had. If she was in complete control of her body, I’m sure she wouldn’t have been crying. She didn’t make a noise as she cried, but that was the Nightwalking, I think.

My mother found sunlight in a local schoolyard after she Turned. Before that she was a part of several events to raise money for Nightwalking Research Foundations and Funds. She tied ribbons around her fingers and the fingers of strangers. She read up on the latest advances and stayed out of my room when my sun lamp was on. She drank non-allergenic juices and gardened in the dark. She smiled in front of a camera at a benefit jazz concert outside of city hall and smiled with her small mouth when a neighbour called that night five minutes after eleven to tell my mother that she was a celebrity.

In February, my mother walked into the schoolyard in the dead of night. I went to collect her ashes and what was left of her in the morning. I showed them to my sister and went to watch a program on television about mole rats that only emerged in the sunlight, and the number of endangered diurnal species, which was on the rise. I poked my tongue at the corners of my mouth, just to make sure they hadn’t gotten closer together.

Art by Alex Diaz

Text by Lucie MacAulay