Tiny Nightmares Read online

  The junkie has no such restraint. With full fists the junkie swings, beating her daughter horribly, saying awful things to her own child, things like, “We never wanted you.” She hits and kicks and spits. The daughter, bloody and bruised, tucks into a protective curl on the floor. The junkie laughs above, landing another boot in the daughter’s side. She pulls back again, ready to strike.

  But then, an unsettling crack, a vessel split open like the padlock, like a memory. The junkie crumples to the ground.

  The daughter uncurls in the silence and looks up to see her protector, a young girl, only seven years old. The shovel is raised in the little girl’s hand. The daughter squints at the girl. “Mom?” she asks her.

  “Yeah, honey,” the little girl says. “Yeah. It’s me. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “It is?” the daughter asks.

  But the young girl says nothing. She’s caught, or confused by a program or stuck a moment, two moments. Processing. Processing. There is no connection.

  Grimalkin

  ANDREW F. SULLIVAN

  The kitten climbs up and out of my sister’s mouth in the middle of the night, emerging as one long strand of hair and bone. I watch as it draws a wet tail past her lips and then drops to the floor, stretching out on the ragged red carpet between our twin beds.

  Most nights, I’m asleep before this happens. I don’t hear the kitten scratching at the bedposts. I don’t notice her leaping up onto the sill, tracking the moon with pale yellow eyes. Tonight, I watch her body flatten out, slipping through the cracked window we leave open for her no matter the season. I listen to her, waiting for a voice to whisper back at me, go to sleep. She is hunting, searching for sustenance before the sun comes out again. I don’t speak a word. I know the rules.

  Grandma hates to be interrupted.

  The promise was to keep her safe. After they found her circle in the basement, Grandma knew her days were numbered in this town. Our mother claimed ignorance and disbelief, joined the chorus of voices calling for her head. Our father sealed himself away in his room, the television drowning out any thought of his mother, her life threatened by familiar faces and strangers alike whenever she left the house. Her car was set on fire. It burned for hours. No one put it out. We were told not to visit, not to speak, not to smile. We were told to be afraid.

  She came to us in the middle of the night, her form new and unpolished. The tail ended in a ball of gluey fur, the ears were shaped like raw bat wings, pink and pulsing with tiny veins.

  You can save me, she said. You can protect me.

  My sister and I stared, each tucked into bed, quivering beneath the covers.

  Only you can do this, she said. The voice was bigger than her shape.

  Do this, she said in the growing darkness. Do this, and I will show you everything.

  Grandma had no daughter of her own. She told us she was not blessed. Grandpa cared only about amassing things—money, property, power. All three one and the same eventually, Grandma said. She was cursed to have one son and only one son. A boy spoiled by his father, a boy unable to understand his place in the world, as everywhere he went he was placed upon a pedestal. A shiftless and ungrateful boy who let his father’s empire of car dealerships and repair shops fall into dust while barely flinching in the process. This explained our shared room, our twin beds, our rotten red carpet that felt wet even when it was dry in the morning.

  Our birth offered her a new chance to pass on what her mother had taught her, old ways of power, old ways of knowing the world. Sometimes they required blood and sometimes they required flame, but they were true and honest. They did not take without reason. They demanded sacrifice, but demands were proportionate. The balance was retained. The balance was essential.

  We offer a balance, my sister and I. Two strands of the same soul, spun into mirrored shapes, spun into soft and malleable flesh. We could push these powers further. We could become more.

  I waited my whole life for you two, Grandma said. And now they want to take me from you.

  When she returns, I stare at the ceiling. After she has fed on mice or birds or smaller things, her tiny body bloats like a tumor. Her hunger is constant and inevitable. Without her nightly feed, she cannot live like this, tucked deep inside our chests, keeping time against our hearts. We take turns, alternating month to month as the moon shifts and the tides change. My turn is coming again. I will dream behind her eyes as she stalks the night, listening for her prey, hunting the weak, the stupid, and the maimed. I will dream in red and pink and white, white bone.

  Before climbing back onto my sister’s chest, she leaves small bones from her kill for us on the carpet. We will grind those bones up into a powder, a powder the keeper will swirl into a glass of water before bed, the spell requiring our participation, our ingestion of the dead. We tell our mother it is for our bowel movements, and she approves. She wants us to be regular.

  I stare at the ceiling and listen to the sound of Grandma sliding back down my sister’s throat.

  Tomorrow, a new cycle begins. I can already taste the dead in my mouth, the particles clinging to the back of my throat like sand. Tomorrow, I must become the keeper once again.

  The spells are small and easy. They are more like charms and incantations. A burst of energy in the mornings after we set the charred sticks in the correct configuration, burn the right herbs in the backyard, telling our father it’s for chemistry class. Our memories improve together, our recall for formulas and history transforming our test scores. Sometimes we answer wrong on purpose, to protect us from suspicion. Grandma says like any gambler, we must know when to walk away, when to make a mistake that everyone can see. We must sow doubt if we want to reap her rewards. We must seem human. We must be plausible.

  I watch my sister growing tired as the months pass, see her fading every time her month arrives, the burden in her chest drying out her skin, puckering the corners of her eyes. Grandma says it’s the stress of keeping a secret, the wear and tear of the lie working itself across our bodies. She says what we’re doing is beautiful and necessary, sacred even. When I find my sister puking in the grass behind our school, Grandma says we should be grateful she has chosen us.

  Tonight I take the powder, swirl it around the glass. I stand before the mirror and then watch myself raise the glass to my lips, watch myself pause and then pour it all down the drain.

  My sister is already asleep in the other room, worn out by her month incubating Grandma. The role of the keeper is not easy. It takes and takes and takes. The deal we have made is not proportionate. We can feel the years slipping away, the time passing us by, the time she is taking until she can seize one of us. We talk about this in whispers, wondering if she can hear from within our chests, her long pink ears pressed against our ribs, on alert for any betrayal.

  I shut the door and lie down in bed. I leave the window cracked open. I close my eyes and wait for sleep to come. There is no death lingering at the back of my throat, no tiny bits of bone floating in my stomach acid. Grandma will have to fight her way out from inside me tonight, each claw a pin pressed into my lungs. I intend to keep her there until she starves.

  Doggy-Dog World

  HILARY LEICHTER

  I know this couple in a casual way. A neighborly way. They went to the adoption place to adopt a cute friend. Something soft and sweet, something to love. We want something to love, they said, and I said, Besides each other? They said, In addition to. We want something waiting for us by the door. A fan, a witness, this is our wish.

  By my front door, I have an antique mirror so I can be my own fan, my own witness.

  The first puppy didn’t work out. The first puppy was sick and needed people with experience. This couple had a lot of experience, but not the right kind. They cried about the first puppy. I made them an interesting blend of tea and stroked their hair until they felt better.

  The second puppy was as tiny as you can imagine. Whatever you’re imagining is correct.

&
nbsp; Perpetually bouncing, like it could blow away any second, just float up in the air like a cute, flying, cartoon sort of creature. She was a dear little friend, and they loved her very much. They let her sleep in their bed and eat out of their bowls and make messes as long as the messes were on the tile and not the carpet.

  One thing: this couple was not super-perceptive. They were not the kind of people who noticed other people. There was the time I cut my hair and they did not see that the hairs were cut. Or the time I was in a car accident and walked on crutches for weeks. After a month, the couple said, Hey, what’s with the crutches? There was the time I was in love with this couple, both as a couple and as individuals, loved them in a visible way, an embarrassing way, for years. Then the feelings expired and I felt relaxed, easy. It is sometimes good to go unnoticed.

  My point is: when the puppy turned into a human baby, it took them a while to catch on. First the sounds coming from her puppy mouth were baby sounds. Then the paws on her puppy legs were baby paws, which I guess are just called feet. Maybe it was hours before the couple noticed. Maybe it was a whole afternoon. She had maybe already been a baby for a few days before the couple said, Oh my god.

  Everyone around town was talking. The first thing I personally do in situations like these is to make myself mindful of precedent. Consider the frog who turns into the prince, and the beast who turns into the prince, and consider all of those princes sprung from the bodies of beasts. Now, consider the puppy who turns into a child, and what sort of suburban spell could have put her in such a difficult spot? I volunteered as babysitter and helped care for her, this very special baby. She was not as bouncy as her former incarnation. She was not a creature who could fly away, in fact, she wouldn’t. When describing her, the word that came to mind was responsible. I looked into her eyes and found a steadiness I could relate to.

  The couple converted their office into a nursery with an air of Okay, this is what we’re doing now! They replaced the puppy toys with baby toys, the puppy bed with a baby crib. They replaced the dog park with the playground and the poop scoop with a closet full of diapers. They transitioned so naturally from puppy to baby that there was no trace of the puppy I once knew, not at all. The puppy things were in garbage bags in the basement, tucked away in a far corner.

  This is the part of the story where the couple started calling themselves the family. I should start calling them that too, but I won’t, because of what happened to the couple next.

  It was at the restaurant across town, the one that serves pieces of toast topped with fancy foods. The couple was on a date, and I was watching their child. The woman from the restaurant who called on the phone said it happened during the third course of the meal, the dessert toasts.

  The couple started bickering, but their bickers turned to barks. Their faces went furry and small. They tried to pick up their slabs of bread, but they had dog paws instead of human paws, which I guess are just called hands. The couple was a couple of hounds, noses sniffing plates of expensive carbohydrates.

  I strapped the baby to my chest and fetched them from their date. I brought some of the old puppy leashes, and leashed them up, walked them home. I brought the rest of the puppy things up from their basement, and over to my house. I stroked their fur and made them an interesting blend of dried foods to eat, since they had missed their dinner.

  I set the two doggie beds near the front door, under my antique mirror. I look at myself when I leave for work, adjust my collar, adjust my skirt. Adjust the stroller and adjust the baby tucked in the stroller. I look at my dogs. I look at my family, all together. I adjust my face, make sure it looks normal, for I, too, have sprung from unexpected things.

  Twenty-First-Century Vetala

  AMRITA CHAKRABORTY

  My last body was a gentle woman, in life. From the small bedsit I lived in then, I used to watch her from across our balconies, humming a Hemanta Mukhopadhyay song as she put the laundry out to dry. Her hands were scarred and always slightly damp, water dripping from them as she cooked or wiped or washed another wanting thing. Because I was, or at least appeared to be, a man she knew as a mere fellow tenant, there was never any true communication between us. Only my curious glances above the books I held out in front of me, looks she was too busy to ever acknowledge, aside from a curt nod if she happened to meet my eyes.

  Nor did I pursue that interest any further, at least not until afterward. I’m not like my brother, after all, who found the most striking man in Kolkata and waited it out until he died from a heart attack at forty-two. (Dada’s never been clear on whether that was a natural occurrence.) The last time I saw him, he had brought a girl to the graveyard we shared as an occasional local haunt, and she clutched his arm the entire time he spoke with me, giggling uneasily. I doubt he truly enjoys anything about it but their admiration, the thickening sensation of being the center of another’s want.

  No, I’m not like him. There’s little about behaving like a human myself that interests me—I would never wish to be one of them. But I do consider myself somewhat of an expert on the things that drive them to behave the way they do. To feel what they feel. I have worn so many human skins, seen the world through near-infinite pairs of eyes. Sometimes I tire of them and wish I could stuff this stray consciousness, this mass of ephemera, into some species of animal with fewer concerns weighing on it. Or a plant, even a rock. But my kind were made to stay in humanity’s shade. To live eternally on the crest of their death.

  In the days before Moyna died, I had been just barely clinging to the body of the aging law clerk who rented the flat opposite hers. Despite the delayed decay due to my presence, his skin had started to attain an unnatural green tint, and I could tell that the body was dangerously close to the stage at which the internal organs would burst and begin to leak out, when it would obviously become useless to me. I never stayed past the point when people would notice anything more than a peculiar illness taking hold of their neighborhood loner or the newcomer to town; there are few these days who know the old stories to oust or destroy us but I take no risks when it comes to the survival of our kind. Despite the degradation of my assumed form, though, I found it more difficult than usual to move on. You might guess why.

  Moyna was generous with her time and labor, as most women I observe are; giving and giving and scraping the bottom of the well when nothing else is left. Whether this was in her nature or simply her choice to fulfill the needs of those around her—what did that matter? After I first oriented myself in the tenor of her breaths, memorized the particularities of her muscles and neural grooves, I was taken aback by how much was expected of her. That first morning, I couldn’t get anything right—not rising by dawn to prepare her husband’s humble breakfast of a paratha and mint achar, not getting the children dressed for school, and certainly not the intricacies of preparing food for eight people while doing the washing and caring for an elderly mother-in-law. These difficulties of daily life were precisely why I rarely took hold of bodies like this, indispensable tethers to their families.

  Oh, but when it came to Moyna, I could not resist, however inconvenient. How can I explain this to you without resorting to shoddy metaphor? Here: one morning she stood in the doorway to the balcony, her head resting on the chipped wall. She closed her eyes and lifted one hand out of the shadows, as if to cup a measure of sunlight for use in some celestial recipe. Shontu, her three-year-old son, came toddling out to meet his mother, hugging the tail end of her saree. I glanced down at my book then, the moment suddenly too effulgent for my borrowed vision. When I looked up again, she had hoisted the child up onto one hip, and drawn his hand out to meet the sun. Her nose pressed into Shontu’s cheek and he laughed, and suddenly, her eyes. Anyone would have wanted to live through them.

  I swear I left her behind as kindly as I could. On the pallet that served as her bed, nearing the evening so her husband would find her once he came home from his work at the nearby processing plant. I put her children down for their afternoon n
ap before I laid her down. The stove stood at attention, a fresh, if awkwardly cooked pot of daal their final gift from her.

  Yesterday, my brother met me at the graveyard, and when his new girl drew her arms around him and whispered in his ear, I looked away. I looked into the fiercely sunlit ground.

  We’ve Been in Enough Places to Know

  COREY FARRENKOPF

  The condos’ septic failed. It was among the deficiencies that developed over the first two years of habitation. The paint job peeled around month two. The cellar’s cement walls cracked after month six. The HVAC system coughed acrid black smoke on the first cold day in November. The list went on, but the septic was what forced inhabitants out, what prompted the lawsuits over the shoddy construction, forged permits, and the outrageous price residents paid to inhabit the crumbling beachside villa.

  The building had begun to lean toward the bay. High tide lapped through backyard decking, dragging the seawall away, speeding erosion. A red X was painted across the front door, situated between two boarded-up windows that Glen knew were Tiffany glass. He’d snapped cell phone shots of the ornate panes from within to show his girlfriend how misplaced the builder’s priorities were.

  Glen worked for SeaSide Property Management. Twice a week, he walked through each condo looking for squatters. The owner believed he could salvage his business venture before the structure descended into the sea. Glen had his doubts, considering the amount of water in the basement and the veins of mold beneath the peeled paint. Then there was the thing swimming in the basement, drifting between steel Lally columns, the ridge of knotted spine pressing up through the water.