My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (46 page)
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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“Take it off! Let me see you!” Small says. He pulls at the sheet on the bed, as if it were his mother’s catskin.
The Witch’s Revenge shakes her head. She trembles and beats her tail back and forth. She says, “How can you ask me for such a thing, and how can I say no to you? Do you know what you’re asking me for? Tomorrow night. Ask me again, tomorrow night.”
And Small has to be satisfied with that. All night long, Small combs his mother’s fur. His fingers are looking for the seams in her catskin. When The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he peers inside her mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face. He can feel himself becoming smaller and smaller. In the morning he will be so small that when he tries to put his catskin on, he can barely do up the buttons. He’ll be so small, so sharp, you might mistake him for an ant, and when The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he’ll creep inside her mouth, he’ll go down into her belly, he’ll go find his mother. If he can, he’ll help his mother cut her catskin open so that she can get out again and come and live in the world with him, and if she won’t come out, then he won’t, either. He’ll live there, the way that sailors learn to live, inside the belly of fish who have eaten them, and keep house for his mother inside the house of her skin.
This is the end of the story. The Princess Margaret grows up to kill witches and cats. If she doesn’t, then someone else will have to do it. There is no such thing as witches, and there is no such thing as cats, either, only people dressed up in catskin suits. They have their reasons, and who is to say that they might not live that way, happily ever after, until the ants have carried away all of the Time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?
I was living in Brooklyn, about to publish my first collection and drive across country, on tour with the writer Shelley Jackson. We’d decided it would be a good idea—and fun!—to have something to give away at readings, and so I wrote “Catskin.” Shelley came up with an illustration for the cover. As best I can remember, I wanted to tackle two or three things: I wanted to write my own fairy tale, rather than a reworking or a reversal/revision of a fairy tale. I wanted to write something that sounded like someone else, not like me—this seemed appropriate for a story about inhabiting a skin. I also wanted to write something quickly—that is, write a story, proofread it, print up, and staple it into a zine—in the three days or so before we went on tour. I still have a stack of the original edition, and there’s something fairy-tale-ish about them: hand-sized, handmade, plain brown, and roughly cut, with Shelley’s pen-and-ink cover. As for the story, the starting place was witches and children, and why witches might want children so badly. “Catskin” isn’t a reworking of any single fairy tale, but it does owe a debt especially to “Catskin,” “Donkeyskin,” and “Rapunzel,” but really to almost all of them, as well as to writers like Angela Carter and Eudora Welty.—KL
CHRIS ADRIAN
Teague O’Kane and the Corpse
ONCE THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN NAMED TEAGUE O’KANE. HE WAS probably too handsome for his own good, and certainly too handsome for the good of others, since he was loved by every boy and girl that he met, and he broke hearts by the dozen. He lived in Orlando, and had successfully auditioned for a boy band, and made no secret of this. In fact, it was usually the second thing he told people, after his name.
One night he went out dancing with his many friends, and, as was the usual case, many people wanted to dance with him. People approached him on the dance floor, and he might dance with them or he might not; it all depended on how he was feeling, and upon the quality of their groove, which he could evaluate at a distance, and in the semi-dark, so sometimes they were still a long way off when he had decided that they hadn’t made his cut, and he turned his back on them. On this night there was the usual crowd of aspirants, and some of them were quite pleasant-looking, and others were quite ordinary, and some of them were excellent dancers, and some of them were merely enthusiastic. It was a typical night, until something extraordinary happened.
Teague was minding his own business, sort of dancing with a handsome girl on his left, but also sort of dancing with a pretty boy on his right, when an absolutely hideous man came bopping up to him and audaciously invaded his space, bumping aside the boy and the girl and doing a nasty grinding dance with his hips and his groin. Teague turned his back to him, but the man only stepped around and presented himself again. He was really quite amazingly ugly; Teague placed him somewhere in his fifties, if not his sixties, and he had flabby arms, and two chins, and terribly ill-advised hair. “Dance with me, Teague O’Kane!” he cried, and tried to put his hands on Teague’s handsome hips, but Teague shook him off, and said, “Get away from me you old troll!” But he grabbed at him again twice more, and twice more Teague called him a troll and told him to get away. The man went away after that, but no sooner had he gone but a hideous woman had taken his place, a woman so ugly she could have been the troll’s sister, with her own flabby arms, and her own abundance of chins, and her own terribly ill-advised hair. “Get away from me you hag!” Teague shouted, not even giving her the chance to ask him to dance, and he turned and danced away hurriedly to another side of the floor.
But three more times the old hag came and found Teague, once in the hinterlands of the dance floor and once at the bar and finally in line for the men’s bathroom. He was standing there minding his own business when he felt a tickle on the back of his neck. He turned around and saw the woman standing there.
“Hey, baby,” she said. “You want to dance?”
“Did you just touch me?” Teague asked.
“Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t,” she said. “But that isn’t the question. The question is, do you want to dance with me?”
“Leave me alone,” Teague said. “Don’t you speak English?”
“I won’t ask you but one more time, Teague O’Kane,” the woman said. “Won’t you dance with me?”
“Not in a gajillion years,” Teague said, and he gave her a little push, which he regretted almost immediately, even though she didn’t exactly fall down, but only stumbled back a few paces.
“That’s a long time, Teague O’Kane!” the old hag said, and laughed at him, and it occurred to Teague to wonder how she and the man might have known his name, because even though he had successfully auditioned for a boy band, he wasn’t famous yet.
“My night is ruined,” he said to the urinal, rather too loudly, because a voice came out of the stall next to him, saying, “Mine too! Mine too!” in between horking exclamations of vomit.
“Mine’s ruined worse,” Teague said, aware that he was being peevish, and that he should go right back out on the dance floor and pretend like he hadn’t been nearly molested by a hag and a troll, and that he had not spent his whole night so far oppressed by other people’s ugliness and audacity. He should just get back out there and dance, and so he tried, but his heart just wasn’t in it; his groove was compromised, and his moves, even his signature moves, somehow felt not like his moves. It was like someone else was dancing in his body, somebody who was sad, and ugly, and lonely. He decided to go home alone, and texted seven of his friends to announce that to them, because they were always texting him to say they were going home alone, as if that were his responsibility, or as if he should feel bad because they were going home alone and he was not.
He lived with his father in a big house on a lake, or rather, he lived very close to his father, in a much smaller house next door to the big house. The little house was a present on his sixteenth birthday from his father, who maintained that a boy needed independence as well as supervision, and so he had made his son a gift of the little house, but outfitted it with cameras to keep watch over Teague and make sure that he never did anything to compromise their good name. There was a driver who would have gladly come to fetch him from the club, but because he was feeling agitated from his bad night he decided to walk home, though the way was far. But he liked to walk whenever something unpleasant happened to him, because he could pretend that he was walking away from whatever it was that was troubling him. And as he walked away from the club, down the brightly lit streets of the downtown, and then the half-lit sidewalks of the old city, and finally the darkened paths of his father’s estate, the horrible man and woman, and the bad time they had engendered with their saggy asses and their grabby hands, seemed more and more remote. He had almost forgotten about them entirely by the time he was on the last stretch of his walk, when he had entered into the orange groves that surrounded the house, and could see the light in his father’s room twinkling through the trees. Perhaps, he thought, Father has sensed that I had a bad night, and is waiting up to comfort me.
He heard voices on the path ahead then, and wondered briefly if his father had come out of the house to welcome him. He stopped and leaned against a tree, and a heavy wind stirred the branches all of a sudden, making the fruit swing gently, and pummel him softly on the shoulders and face. The wind carried the voices to him, and he heard now clearly that there were many people ahead, and that none of them was his father.
Burglars!
he thought, and then,
Admirers!
because it had already been the case that various persons had invaded their property before both to steal from his father and to plead a case of love to Teague. He bent down to take up a small thick branch at his feet. It was light and soft with rot, and wouldn’t hurt anybody if he hit them with it, but he thought it would make a good tool for a threat.
Burglars!
he thought, and then,
Admirers!
because it had already been the case that various persons had invaded their property before both to steal from his father and to plead a case of love to Teague. He bent down to take up a small thick branch at his feet. It was light and soft with rot, and wouldn’t hurt anybody if he hit them with it, but he thought it would make a good tool for a threat.
The wind shifted, and for a moment the voices were silent, and Teague cocked his head and squinted his eyes. “I’ve got a stick,” he said, but not very loudly. A bell sounded, tinny and high, and the night seemed to darken. The voices returned in a rush of laughter, and then Teague saw figures—all he could make out was the shape of them—capering through the trees, skipping and dancing and falling now and then to roll briefly on the ground before springing up again. He raised his stick up and said it again, much louder this time, as they rushed toward him: “I have a stick!” “And a pretty stick it is!” said a voice that was very familiar, though it took him a moment to place it. “As pretty as the hand that wields it, eh, Porcupine?” The lady from the club came walking out of the gloom, and though the night stayed just as dark, she seemed oddly lit somehow, as if the sun were shining only for her and only on her. She was just as ugly as she ever had been, and seemed even shorter and more bent, and yet somehow she seemed less pathetic than she had in the club.
“Oh, yes, Aardvark, my dear,” said another familiar voice. The man from the club came up behind her and put his arms around her, placing his head just to the side of her neck. Of course they were friends, Teague thought. That made perfect sense, even if it made no sense that they had just popped out of the night within sight of his house.
“What are you doing here?” Teague asked them in a whisper-shout. “Get off my property!”
“Duly, duly,” said the woman. “Duly and in time. But first, won’t you dance with me?”
“No!” Teague said. “Stop asking me that. Are you deaf? What part of not in a million years do you not understand?” The lady was hopping back and forth on her feet and smiling at him, and the man behind her was doing the same thing, but exactly out of sync, so he hopped on his left foot just as she hopped on her right, and he moved his head to peek at Teague from above one and then the other of the woman’s shoulders. Others were coming up behind them, figures whose faces were lit just like the old woman’s with a curious, source-less light, so Teague could tell from far away that they were just as ugly as she was, and indeed some were even uglier, lumpier and more misshapen, or too big or too small, and it was obvious that none of them had given the least bit of thought to their hair, or to what they were wearing. They shuffled and danced toward him, and surrounded the old woman and the old man in a hideous huddle.
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