Shanty Shanty Shanty

Organized religion can be a trap.

I’m mainly referring to Christianity, or Catholicism. Church-goers are consistent, and even though they don’t like the word “superstitious”, it isn’t so far from the word “devout”. Not in this case. If you were to blow a tsunami onto their shores and stop it when it spits on their front porch, they would call it a miracle and turn their thanks upward, instead of forward, to the sea that so benevolently did not steal their livelihood (or lives) from them.

I took control of this shantytown over three months ago, and I have hardly had to leave the beach since then. I’ve been admiring it from the shore for a few days now, with several fish flopping on the sand next to me. Or, they were flopping.

The shantytown was not a difficult place to liberate from its old owners (the residents). When I say shantytown, I mean there are several thousands of souls here, and hundreds more that tear through a part of it on the highway. There is almost no one tearing out of here, though. And despite the town’s small size, it took six days for news to reach from one end of the town to the other that I had seized it. And then there was not much for them to do.

There is a large house on the shore that belongs to a family that lives elsewhere. It was their summer home, and now it is my court. I believe in things like courts, the same way Christians believe in churches, but more political and less spiritual. There’s power in these walls, though there isn’t much else. It is more beautiful and daunting on the outside than on the inside, because the inside is saturated with the lived-in smell of old linens and pipe rust and carpets. I sit on the porch, facing the water, and rise when the humans come to speak to me, if only to make them believe that I have taken notice of their interruption, and I have no intention of this conversation interrupting me more than it must. Really, the interruption is somewhat welcome, because otherwise I walk indoors and then out the other side, and sit beneath the beech tree and inspect the changes in my legs (new freckles, new hairs, the way muscles shift around bones when I move them).

It isn’t a superpower, what I do. My colleagues (acquaintances, family, kin, etc.) all shoulder the burden of this same super power. They must see it as a burden, because there are hardly any recent story about our clever ways. Our charms, our glamours. There are ways to look human, one of my kin once told me, quietly and fervently, like it was a secret, something superior and forbidden and tantalizing. Then everyone was doing it, and suddenly it lost its appeal, apparently. We have charmed children to look like tree branches and tubers and large vegetables. Some of us- not my kind specifically- have traded them and made off with the children. My kind just decided to start leaving their skins about everywhere. It was all a planned sort of laziness. A trap that required nothing more than a shucking off of clothing. Then luring others to it. We did it so efficiently, so unthinkingly, that I imagine we were something like smart children in a boring environment. Learning to adapt, condensing into adulthood. But ability fades without use. If most of them were to try to stretch that muscle now, they would achieve nothing but snapping it.

The glamour is nothing more than a safety precaution. If humans were to see us with their children in hand often, there would be some problems. It is better by far to hand over a piece of driftwood made up to look like a drowned child than to offer up a drowned child. There are only so many children in this shantytown, anyway, and humans being sent to talk and negotiate would notice a sudden decline of the one generation keeping them going. So it is branches and sticks of wood and pieces of tarp that become a part of the ruse. A way to smooth the edges, and pave and sand the streets. A few days later, when the children (or beautiful wives or handsome husbands or sickly parents or lovers) are back to being bits of driftwood and nothing more, there must be some relieved exclamations. Yet I’ve never been called upon to explain myself.

I only know it has been enough to secure this shantytown, and it is the superstitious, religious folk that would build me an altar and sacrifice everything but their firstborn to keep me appeased.

Some of them put crosses on their doors too, to no effect. It was a fun couple of days, listening to them hammer away.

The first of the negotiators came within two weeks. Sent by some power of the United States. Homeland Security, of the FBI, or some other waste of taxes. Citizens of the United States had much better options, but this was what they gave me. A twitching, often young, member of the shantytown, stumbling over their words as they asked what it was I wanted or needed, to keep them and the town safe. I had a hell of a time telling them that there was nothing Homeland or the FBI or the President of the United States himself could offer that would appease me. I would disappear into the beachside house and come out the other side, steal a twig from the beech tree, and between the front door and the back door I would make it appear like the arm of a child. I screamed once, for good measure. And broke some glass once, just for the illusion. This is not something that my kin would do- this is not part of being clever. This is what comes, I suppose, of being the only one up here, the only one on the sand rather than in the waves. Eventually, the loneliness is enough to make you a little dramatic.

The negotiator would leave, and I would sit on the porch and look at the waves and think that this was a stupid shore to have washed up on, and if I could choose again, I’d go the long way round and do to the west coast, or I’d cross all the way back to my people’s first home. There was better music there, I heard, and even more superstition, of the old-but-not-Christian variety.

It’s been nearly five months now. The fish keep tumbling onto the sand and dying, which isn’t normal. Members of the shantytown bring me food I don’t care to eat, and wine I don’t care to drink. None of them bring the one thing that could stop me, because only one person has it. I don’t know who it is, and if they never return here, then I will never return to the waves. So it’s all on the humans, really. One human. Until that day, if it comes at all, I’ll remain here, and the humans will have as little choice as I do to deal with it.

There were other efforts made, before now, to evict me from the shantytown by force. But present a SWAT team with some glamoured pieces of flotsam and jetsam, some crosses charmed to look like the bodies of children or beautiful women (always women and children, they all want to save the vulnerable ones) and the SWAT team begins to sweat beneath their fatigues. If I’m stuck in a stalemate, waiting for one of their kind, then they can be stuck in a stalemate as well, waiting for me to leave or do whatever I will with this town.

Of course, eventually someone will realize that the bodies I send out are unidentifiable, and that I’ve exceeded the population of this town with my body count, or that the town has not actually decreased in size despite the growing body count, and then I might have to do some creative truth telling. But on that day, if things continue in this boring way, I might just be happy to face the challenge. My kin always said I wasn’t good at being idle. None of us are.

I’ve reached five months and the beach smells of rotting fish. I hear a car approach and watch it around the side of the house. The person standing on the asphalt is no one I know, but I don’t need to know her to recognize her. She is a negotiator, donning the neon vest that makes all negotiators look like perhaps they are planning to direct air traffic. She also carries something in her arms, and it looks like a sweater, which is odd on such a warm day.

“Fuck,” I say, when she comes closer, and I can see that in her arms it is no sweater. It makes me smile, and it makes me relieved, and it makes me feel that I’ve lost the game. I doubt They (They being the people behind these machinations, behind sending her, the FBI or Homeland Security or whoever it is) knew what they were doing when they sent her, or knew just how equipped she is to send me away.

Because she has my skin folded in her arms.

I wait on the sand, because I may as well be close to the waves, in case the unlikely does happen.

“Please wipe your feet on the mat before entering,” I say when she finds the back porch.

She looks at the grainy, wet sand on the beach, and the grainy, wet sand on the porch, and then the grainy, wet sand on her feet. She’s younger, but quite pretty. Could be worse. “What is really going on here?” she asks.

I say, “I’ve taken over the town.”

She hoists my skin up in her arms. She doesn’t even seem to realize it’s there, but she must. She says, “Why this town? What are you doing here? We’ve never had this kind of trouble before. Why didn’t you take it somewhere else, like, somewhere bigger or something? You’re afraid of being found out, aren’t you.”

Perhaps They had chosen her because of her intellect, and not because of extreme fortune in coming across my skin. I would never again just leave it out to dry on a rock, I decided. “I’m afraid of nothing. Haven’t you heard? I’m a killer and scoundrel. I’m here to stay, unless, the obvious were to happen.”

“Or unless I just take you away right now. What’s the stop me from just carting this away from the ocean and making you follow me?” She shakes the skin a little, to taunt me or to frighten me.

“My charm.” I flick my fingers and the wave behind me jumps. If she is so smart, she should know that it’s we that have stopped the sea from swallowing this town, on occasion. “My dashing good looks. My personality. Or the fact that you owe me. Don’t you?”

“I’ve never made a deal with you,” she says, because apparently she truly is that smart.

“I know that. But don’t you believe in having a little gratitude?” She doesn’t say a thing, or give up my skin. “If I were another thing, I could convince you to dance with me until your feet grind down to nubs and your bones turn to dust and everyone you love is dead.”

She grimaces, like I’ve just shown her a picture of the outcome. “I’m not really a dancer. I’d say no. And you can’t do that, so.”

I make the waves jump a little higher, and crash on the sand, over my feet and right up to hers. “I could take your firstborn and leave you with another and you wouldn’t notice until one day you had a child that couldn’t lie or travel across water or stand the smell of human blood.”

“That’s unoriginal,” she says. “Try again.”

I nudge a dead fish with my foot. There are fewer right now than there were a minute ago. The waves I called have taken some of them out. “I could make you a lady among my people. There are humans that would die for that opportunity, you know.”

She smiles into my skin. I could almost smile myself, which is when I realize that it will have been the first time I’ve smiled in over forty days. I can almost feel her smile pressed into my skin. It is right there, in front of my, and the ocean is right there, behind me.

“A lady,” she says. The waves crash behind me, through no work of my own. “As tempting as that sounds, I don’t want to see what your home is like, if this is what you’ve done to my town.”

“I’ve been bored,” I say. “My home is nothing like this. You’d be the only one to have seen it for dozens of years. What do you say to that?”

“What difference would that make? Would it stop you from doing this again?”

I smile. “What would stop me from doing this again is in your arms, but you don’t seem to want to give it up. If you come along with it, then we’ll both be happier. Or leave yourself behind, and I’ll make sure we remember your generosity.”

She looks down, where silvery fish bodies are being rolled by the froth and the brine into the waves. The beach looks like rippling, living metal. She says, “I know you can’t lie, but I’m sure you’re not telling the full truth.”

“I’d tell it if you asked for it,” I say. “You’re the human one here.”

More fish roll into the sea. One hits my ankle and stays there on the sand, staring up at me. The vitreous humour dried out a while ago, so it’s nothing but a dark socket and some scales. I can already tell where this is headed, because she’s human and I’ve been around them for months now, and for years before that. “You sound pretty human yourself,” she replies. “You look it too, without this on. I think you’re hardly something else anymore. There’s almost no point.”

I hope my kin push back and drown this town.

“I’m going to hold onto this for a while, just so you can’t do this again,” she says, turning away with my skin in her hands. Now that I’ve seen it again, I cannot easily let it out of my sight. “No more dead bodies. That’s the first rule.”

She leads me around to the front, past the beech tree, and if she hears the sea start to toss, she doesn’t say anything. I have no choice but to watch her keep the skin on her lap as she drives me into the police station, accompanied by applause from half the town.

Their clapping sounds almost like the tide coming in.

Art by Anna Dittmann

Text by Lucie MacAulay