Exploring dark short fic.., p.9
Exploring Dark Short Fiction #3, page 9
And so on. It was the nearest anyone had come to making sense, assuming she truly wasn’t crazy. Brit felt completely willing to listen to Crofutt—through the door.
“Say you right,” she finally half-admitted. “These worms eatin’ up everybody’s hopes an’ dreams till ain’t none left?”
“Pretty much. Then they’ll vanish—leave, starve, however you lay out the concept. I’ve seen the effects of the cycle over and over—the ’60s, the ’80s—a lot of innocent people got hurt.”
“I can look after myself okay,” Brit assured him. Maybe he wasn’t a creeper after all.
She still wasn’t about to let him in, though. He could prove that another time, in the daylight, around other people.
And part of what he said didn’t quite compute—“I can make these what you callin’ ‘entities’ do like I want by how I see ’em?”
“Sort of. What they do also influences how they appear to you—”
“Awright. So what these worms turn into after they eat up everyone dreams? Some kinda gigantic moth?”
“Hmm. Could be.”
Images of Japanese monster movies flitted in and out of Brit’s head. She let them come and go. What she really needed to figure out was how to keep the worms from stripping all the silver dream leaves from people’s thought vines—that was what she had decided to name the translucent branches curling through the night: thought vines. Which could belong to anybody. They were tangled up but there must be a way to trace them to their roots, to their sources, which could be anyone. Even her parents. Even her.
Wet and hungry and tired—that didn’t matter. She had left home to find a way to convince Mom and Dad that she wasn’t a whack job. That she knew what she was doing. Which meant she had to know it.
She stopped answering Mr. Crofutt’s questions, and after a while he stopped asking them. She walked straight across the puddle to the stairway where her stuff was, not caring anymore how soaked she got. Because of the idea forming in her achy mind.
If the “entities” had to act like worms once she’d made them take that shape, they had to die like them. Die like worms.
She remembered from her sixth-grade science report how to kill tent caterpillars. You could cut down their nests and grind them to a pulp with heavy boots.
Brit didn’t have boots that big. Nobody did.
You could burn them out.
Could the nests only she saw catch fire? And if they did would the flames spread and burn down her parents’ building? Would the fire she set burn her to death?
She rolled up her sleeping bag and stuffed it in the pack. She pulled out her watch. Midnight. A long, long time till morning. Maybe she’d go home. Slog over to the Westin and find a cab. That’d be a laugh. She wouldn’t have accomplished anything except to piss off Mom and Dad.
She wasn’t scared. She climbed the rest of the way up and opened the door.
The roof was flat and covered in gravel. Brit scrunched over to the edge where the tent stuck up, betting it would be empty. Sure enough, the webbed walls were blank. No writhing. All the worms were out devouring dreams.
She took her box knife from her pants pocket and slashed at the nest’s nearest side, but the knife sank in past its hilt and left no trace, while her hand wouldn’t penetrate the webbing at all, not even a fraction of an inch. She remembered one of the rules for magic in the torn-up book of a runaway staying at their house: you should never use the same tools for mundane and spiritual tasks.
Brit cut things open with her box knife all the time. Mundane things. That left the cigar trimmer.
She hadn’t really been going to give it to Dad. She got it out of the pack and the shop’s bag: a pair of scissors with short, round blades. They made a nice, neat hole in the tent’s side.
She pushed her head into the hole before she could think too much about what she was doing. It was awful anyway. She cut and cut and cut, past layers and layers of webs. Like squirming deeper and deeper inside a haunted house. Arms, shoulders, chest, stomach—she wanted to throw up. Here came that salty taste and the extra spit squirting into her mouth.
She wiggled back out again and breathed through her mouth, hard. And heard a siren in the street below. That was the goad she needed. She grabbed up her pack and went back in the tent. Completely.
The siren died away in the distance. So Crofutt hadn’t turned her in after all. When she was sure they really weren’t coming to get her she wiggled back out again. Drizzle had begun to fall while she shuddered and gagged inside; she actually thought about staying inside the nest all night.
But she had no guarantee the worms would stay out eating till sunrise.
Instead she sat cross-legged on the cold, damp gravel. She took out and unrolled the bag and half unzipped it so it lay like a puffy, down mantilla on her head and neck and shoulders, and formed a little shelter on either side of her. She laid out her tools underneath it: the butterfly lighter, the six fat cigars, ends ritually trimmed, ready to burn.
Then she waited for the worms’ return. It wouldn’t do any good to destroy an empty nest.
She tried not to sleep but dozed off despite the cold and discomfort. Obviously that meant she wasn’t one bit scared of the morning. The red dawn. The horrible vibrations shaking the nest as its denizens poured back inside, ignoring—as she’d hoped they would—the slits and slices she’d made in their home.
Drawing on it as deeply as she could, Brit lit the first cigar. When it was going strong she reversed it and put the glowing end inside her mouth, bending to blow a stream of fragrant smoke into the nest’s heart.
At first the worms stirred at the intrusion, blind heads seeking nonexistent fresh air, but by the fourth cigar they settled down where they were. To rest. The fifth. To sleep. The sixth. To loosen the grips of their hooked legs, fall to the tent’s floor, and die.
She tossed the mantilla over the hole she’d used, changing it to a shroud.
Dizzy and nauseated, Brit struggled to her numb feet. Up, up, up: light and air and hope towered height upon height into heaven. The sun rose clear of a band of clouds. Too bright to the south and east to tell how many more nests awaited destruction.
She stumbled to the roof’s other end. Her shadow stretched north across the city. Beyond it lay her parents and her home. Warmth. Blessed dryness. Anger, undoubtedly. But she would apologize. Even go to the psychiatrist a few times if that was what they wanted. She’d tell them that she’d been wrong, that they were right. That she wasn’t scared anymore, because there had never been anything to be scared of.
She would tell them where she’d spent the night. And let them think they understood.
STREET WORM: A COMMENTARY
* * *
THIS REMARKABLE STORY INTRODUCES US TO BRIT (a spunky and gifted girl we will meet again in this collection in “Conversion Therapy”). She’s a questioning young woman whose essential journey is discovering who she is as well as how to understand and manipulate her otherworldly visions. This story shows us Shawl’s fabulous talent for crafting characters who are multi-layered, questioning, and powerful in ways that the world around them cannot comprehend. We see runaway Brit “passing” for different personalities as a means of survival, and using what other people assume about her as a way of conning them into helping her. Like many of Shawl’s protagonists, the young woman exploits the weaknesses in the system to navigate it, and partners with those who are either empathetic or innocent victims of their situation.
The story gets hyperreal when it references Brit’s supernatural skills as being akin to “The Shine” in Stephen King’s The Shining, inviting readers to see the relationship between Crofutt and Brit as similar to Hallorann and Danny, inverted in race and gender. Crofutt helps Brit discover her power as a “visioner” who can “translate non-physical entities into concrete, manipulable analogies.” This description treats her as a magical superhero type of character in the story proper, but we can also read it quite directly as a metaphor for the speculative fiction writer, for this is precisely what authors do with abstractions.
And what is Shawl doing with this story? Many things, especially in regard to cultural identity. Brit’s independent spirit stands as a testimony to the autonomous power of young women who are Othered by their cultural circumstances. But the setting—the “street” of the title—makes this social allegory an interesting critique of the blindnesses of bourgeois life, as Brit hops in and out of fancy restaurants and abandoned buildings. Her encounters reveal the stratification of city life and the urban blight to which the dominant classes turn a blind eye. Brit uncovers the “worms” that are infested everywhere in the world, if one only pays attention. “The worms ate dreams,” Brit realizes, coming to a clearer understanding of her vision. But here Shawl, the storyteller, creates dreams with her work, thereby calling attention to social issues, treating reality as allegory, and crafting a rich, culturally-informed drama.
—Michael Arnzen, PhD
CONVERSION THERAPY
* * *
“THESE PEOPLE WON’T LET ME DO ANYTHING!” Delighta’s artistic scrawl complained. “Including sleep—they keep waking me up all night to check I’m not dreamin about sex with other girls. They feed me rotten bananas and nasty peanut butter crackers for breakfast lunch and if I don’t answer their questions right for dinner too.” The rest of the lined and dirty page was torn away, leaving behind only random letters for Brit to guess into whole words.
She pulled the paper straighter, flatter, as if stretching it further would make the missing parts reappear. Of course not. She looked up at her friend and mentor, Mr. Crofutt, seated in her dorm room’s sole chair. He nodded and frowned. “Looks like the trouble you picked up on is real,” he said. She’d met him in Seattle two years ago, as a fourteen-year-old runaway. He was a counselor, freelance, and got her last summer’s job at the arts camp he sometimes worked. The one where Brit gave in to the “bee” entities she was supposed to fight. The one where she’d used magic to lay occult claim to the nine kids she taught.
But arts camp had closed for the year and they’d scattered to their parents’ homes. The one compensation Brit had received for letting go of her unofficially adopted charges was sensitivity to their whereabouts. Kids had to leave the nest, and Brit’s nest wasn’t even official—she’d only been the camp’s martial arts instructor. Their parents came for them on the last day, but Brit had felt them near, had kept in touch all the following year via dreams and emails. And now—
“Where you find this?” Brit stood and went to the window. Nothing but trees outside.
“In the canoe, like I thought I would, from what you said. Easy enough to insist on a tour of the facilities; the camp director swallowed my ‘concerned parent’ cover story, and Grey and Tanzi are good actors.”
And their parents trusted Mr. Crofutt, an established counselor in the community.
The window Brit looked out of faced east and north, away from Puget Sound. Toward Scrolls of Glory Purification and Rededication Camp, where Delighta Johnson was apparently being held against her thirteen-year-old will. Brit’s worry over Delighta had soured her early matriculation into Evergreen College. The Ebonics she espoused to spite her bougie Mom and Dad hadn’t fazed admissions. They knew brilliance when they saw it.
But Delighta—something was wrong with her. Brit could tell. Not only were they spiritual mother-and-child, they were both short and cursed with voices like Betty Boop. Both the fiercer because of that.
Soon as she moved in, Brit hung the folding fan Delighta had colored for her above her dorm room’s doorway. She loved its rich colors—like a Summer of Love butterfly. But it only made her happy a few days. After trying a solid week to ignore the grinding unease she felt in her room and the extra jolt of queasiness she felt whenever she touched it walking in, Brit began trying to reach her favorite unofficial adoptee. When that didn’t work she went on to contact all the other eight. It was Grey’s cousin Jazman, Delighta’s former crush, who tipped her the clue as to why Delighta hadn’t answered Brit’s calls and messages: she’d been sent away in disgrace. Incommunicado.
Brit broke out alternative methods then and finally got through. “Okay. I can communicate—a lil bit.” Precision was not the strength of the bee-entity channels she’d employed. She’d persuaded the girl to write a letter about her abuse and leave it for Mr. Crofutt to collect. But the three fluttering scraps he and his supposed children had retrieved—only one of which bore anything like a coherent sentence—were not much help in terms of planning a rescue. And they’d be none at all in executing it.
Frustrated, Brit slapped the double-paned glass, flat-palmed. She could have broken it with an edge-strike, she was pretty sure. But what good would martial arts do? “We need us a map!”
“I could draw you a fair one from memory,” Mr. Crofutt claimed. His supernatural power was Finding, and making maps was as easy for him as breathing in and out. Brit’s power was called Visioning. She could make the invisible visible, make any non-physical magical entities she encountered physical so that they were vulnerable to physical attack. Like she’d done to create the giant tent worms the first time she met Mr. Crofutt. Like she’d done with the entities she turned into mystical bees last summer, when she took responsibility for Delighta and the rest of her class.
Problem was, doing anything about entities required a face-to-face confrontation. Besides, were entities even involved in this?
Grey and Tanzi swooped into the room, jangling the bells dangling from Brit’s doorknob, fluttering the fan, laughing and drinking juice they’d bought from the hall’s vending machine. They stopped after only a couple of steps. “What? Didn’t we bring what you wanted?” Tanzi asked.
“You need us to go back?” Grey didn’t wait for a response. “Cool. That place had a serious stench.” At least that answered the entity question. If Grey smelled entities they were around the camp somewhere. Like Mr. Crofutt, the teen was shaping up to be another ace Finder.
“Yeah. Overnight if you can.”
Mr. Crofutt grabbed his silver ponytail and put the fist holding it under his double chin. “I suppose I could make a sizeable donation to the church in exchange for a trial stay for my ‘kids’. And there’s a motel near the road into the camp for you and me, Brit.”
“The donation gonna be funny money, I hope?”
“Oh, I’m cancelling that check soon as I issue it.”
~
Brit kicked her heels in the Scrolls of Glory waiting room. Literally: her feet barely touched the carpet tiles beneath the padded stool where she sat. Scoot back far enough and her tai chi-slippered feet swung free. She hoped the ragged beat she drummed against its metal legs annoyed the woman keeping her waiting.
To be fair, on the phone the woman had clearly stated that they weren’t actually looking for staff. Which made sense; the summer was practically over.
But the neck-pricking sensation of entities hovering over the adjacent property wouldn’t allow Brit to wait calmly in the hotel for darkness and a chance to sneak onto the camp’s grounds with Grey and Mr. Crofutt. She needed to be here now. Applying for a nonexistent job was the best excuse she could come up with for walking in here openly.
“Thanks for your patience. The Director is ready to see you,” said the woman. No detectable signal had passed to her—no buzz of intercom or flash of light—but the woman sounded sure, and the door behind her opened. Sliding off the stool, Brit went in.
Peculiarly yellow dust motes filled the midafternoon sunlight slanting in at the office’s windows. They gilded the spines of the books standing upright on the edge of his desk and smeared the frames of cross-stitched samplers lining the wall to Brit’s left. She itched to wipe them clean. To her right ran a shelf holding more books—these stuffed with tasseled bookmarks and tattered, browning papers.
A slumping silhouette settled into the dark, high-backed chair behind the desk. From it came an entity vibe and a creaky voice. “Be seated, please.” Brit perched on the edge of another stool. “An interesting application, Miss Williams.”
“Ms.”
Impossible to see the Director’s expression with a row of wide, bright windows behind him, but he sounded more amused than angry. “As you wish. I suppose you refer to homosexuals as ‘gays’ as well. Or ‘queers’.” He laughed, a sound like crumpling a grocery bag. “What I wonder is how you expected to gain anything by filling out our form at the end of the season and then insisting on an interview. Invoking the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is hardly going to . . . endear you to any prospective employer. So—” The door behind Brit opened—silently, but she felt the slight breeze of its movement dry the sudden sweat on her scalp. “—we suspected a trick.”
Brit dropped to the musty carpet. Arms closed shut above her, where she’d just been—the receptionist—another entity. Rolling away and jumping upright she grabbed a book in each hand and ran toward the windows. Smash! Glass and wood scattered everywhere. Brit leapt through the jagged opening and landed on her feet, hardly stumbling. No one around to see. A quick glance and she oriented her bee-entity sense of the land with Mr. Crofutt’s intel. Downhill lay the lake and boathouse and storage racks for a dozen canoes—full. Uphill lay the cabins. Dead ahead the commons: cafeteria probably empty but classrooms likely full of kids. Next to that the showers.
No time to launch a boat—and they’d only launch another after her. Brit ran for the nearest shelter—the showers—shoved the pine board door open on the cool darkness, the dampness—a scent of mildew rising like the echoing scuffs of her footsteps and a sniffling breath—No. No one should be in here but her.
But there again—a tiny, choking sob—
