by Khristian Mecom (Once) There was a group of wild children who had claimed the manor house’s untamed back garden as their own; to rule over as they saw fit, to hide out in when their parents cast them out into the night, and to live in when they yearned to return to a more primitive time in their lives. And ever since Odette had moved in, they had been sneaking about, letting her catch glimpses of their large bright eyes and devious white teeth as they peered out of the hedges and reached out to her from the rose bushes, their thin hands only suggesting the feeling of real skin. Odette wasn’t sure of their intentions or why they had decided to take up residence in the garden; she imagined that they had been living there, behind the manor house, rarely seen and often heard, for years—for many very long years—as they seemed more comfortable living in the garden than she did living in her husband’s ancestral home. But more unnerving than the duration of their stay, Odette wasn’t entirely convinced that they had always been children; she thought, perhaps, a long time ago, they could’ve been something else altogether. And even more than their constant presence, the way they suddenly appeared out of the darkness and then disappeared back into it, even more than the way they pulled faces at her as they peered in through the windows, and the sounds that came from them that woke her from sleep, what worried Odette the most was what would happen to them when they stopped being children. Either way—children or not—the back garden was no place for them. Like the manor house, the garden only held onto a fleeting memory of its former grandeur. The rose bushes were overgrown and shapeless with pale pink and yellow flowers that budded and died in the span of a day, weeds had taken over most of the walking paths, a large arched trellis was completely covered in climbing ivies, an old well sat, close to the manor house, half caved in and crumbling away, and a large juniper tree grew in the center of it all, unchecked and looming, killing all of the grass underneath it. There was also a ramshackle wooden garden shed, leaning precariously to one side, which in its prime must’ve been painted a brilliant blue, but now was faded and worn by the weather; an old car, rusted and missing a door, was parked next to it. When Odette had asked her husband about the neglected state of the shed and overgrown garden, he had replied that he never understood the cultivation of things. Odette then asked her husband about the origins of the wild children. “Wild? No, they’re local kids, I expect,” her husband said. “My grandmother always used to go on about them playing in the garden, trampling her roses, making a ruckus in the evening, interrupting her afternoon tea by throwing stones at the windows. You know, doing those kinds of things that kids are said to do.” And did he, Odette hesitantly said, see the children, too? “Well, no,” he said. “Truthfully, no one really believed her because she was the only who ever saw them. Everyone in the family thought she was bit wrong in the head, you know? She didn’t believe they were real children; changelings, she called them. But I’m sure they’re just the regular kind of kids. The kind from the neighborhood.” And why, Odette went on to ask, did the neighborhood children choose his house, as she phrased it—thinking that she would never belong to this house the way he and his family did—to play around at during all hours of the day and night? “The manor house has the reputation, as you can imagine, of being haunted. And what kid can resist the allure of a haunted house?” No, Odette did not know the manor house had that reputation. But did he believe they were real? “Well, I imagine they’re as real as they can be. I heard them once, I think, when I was out in the garden the day I—” A long pause ensued. Odette had always appreciated his thoughtfulness—if that’s what one could call it. “In any event, I heard the sound of their voices, but I never could catch sight of one.” Odette felt a brief respite of relief; perhaps, she thought, the children were only children after all. Her husband was not prone to flights of fancy. A realist to the bone, he was. His absence of imagination was one of the things that she loved best about him. But then Odette discovered the mermaid, and she learned that he only hid the fantastical parts of himself, and that the things he imagined were of the darkest kind. In any event, it only occurred to Odette later that perhaps the children were trying to warn her. On those nights when sleep was a stranger and Odette spent long hours standing in front of the second floor study window, watching the wild children dance with wild abandon and listening to their chiming laughter and sing-song voices rise and fall in a rapturous chorus, she only thought they were there to taunt her about the mistake she had made. And sometimes when one of them looked up at her and waved a bony white arm, beckoning her to come and join in, Odette was sorely tempted to do just that. But she never did; instead, she would sneak back into bed next to her husband and dream she was down there dancing with them. (Twice) As a matter of routine, Odette’s husband went away on business trips. All throughout their relationship he had disappeared for days, weeks at a time. But since Odette had lived by herself in her own little apartment, she never minded as she had a life of her own, things to do, places to be, friends to go out with at night. In his absence, she never once missed him. Then they were married, and she was left in a hulking, decaying house on her own, and there were strange sounds in the night, creaks and bangs and hisses, and the ever present wild children running around in the dark, and doors that did not open, and the feeling of walking into cobwebs whenever she entered a room, and the kitchen was so far downstairs that the walk for a snack or a glass of water felt like a long journey that she might never come back from, and every settee and chair had that distinct feeling of lived-in-ness that made her feel like she could not sit anywhere in fear that someone would enter the room and scold her for being in their spot, and portraits of her husband’s long dead ancestors lined the walls and young ladies in elegant dresses looked down on her with scorn and fat lords sneered at her for being unworthy to bear their heirs, and even outside in the garden she felt like the overgrown vines and weeds were reaching for her and might swallow her up if she stood in one place for too long as they had taken over everything else as it was, and the only familiar thing in that whole house was her husband, so nothing felt right and proper without him there. And that meant she loved him, didn’t it? Only Odette wasn’t so sure. When he had finally proposed after a year of dating, Odette didn’t feel surprise or even jubilation as much as she felt utter relief. Everyone told her that he was the perfect catch and she wasn’t getting any younger. And, indeed, her husband was the most well put together person she had ever known. At a young age he not only had a career in the family insurance business, but he had an impressive manor house; he listened intently when she spoke, and always agreed with her point of view; he always had the perfect part in his hair; he told the most wonderful stories about his time in college and his family trips to the shore that made her feel like she had been there with him; he dressed in a suit every day and his shoes always matched his belt; he showed up on time to pick her up for dates and called her on the phone twice every day without fail, and never made it, or her, feel like an obligation. The only time he ever appeared remotely vulnerable was after they made love, and he would breathe in the scent of her skin so deeply, his face buried in the crook of her neck, as if the salt and sweat on her skin could heal him from a great injury he had suffered but could not speak of. Everything about him spoke to his perfection. And it was a perfection Odette believed in until she came to live in the manor house, and her husband seemed to have little use for her. The business trips increased, and he was gone for such long stretches of time; sex became a rare occurrence, and when they were together, there was a violence in him that hadn’t existed before and she had lost count of the times she had move his hands away from her neck; and underneath his kindness was something unkind, as if he didn’t appreciate her—this stranger—living in his house. Then again, maybe she was just imagining all of those things. Maybe her loneliness was getting to her. And when Odette expressed her unease at being alone in the manor house, her husband presented her with a gift she didn’t exactly want: a small brown tabby cat with startling green eyes that looked hauntingly hungry for love, or maybe food. “I was just passing by the pet store,” he said, “and I don’t know why but I just had to take her home when I saw her. It was like something made up my mind for me. I thought she could be the perfect companion for you. Plus, maybe she can catch all the rodents in this house.” Odette did not know they had a rodent problem. Was that why she heard all that scurrying in the walls? “Most likely,” her husband said. “Old house, you know.” No, she didn’t know; she had only lived in modern buildings with amenities like doormen that got her mail for her and little chutes that she could drop her garbage in instead of walking to the curb and neighbors that did not run wild around the building and, you know, things like that. “You don’t want the cat?” her husband asked, dejected. His affected sad voice always got her, so of course, she wanted the cat. She loved cats, even if she never lived somewhere that allowed pets. Her grandmother had a cat and she loved to play with it when she visited. Odette assured him she was happy to have the cat, and did not mention how her grandmother’s cat used to scratch her so deeply her hands bled and would hiss at her, completely unprovoked mind you, whenever she entered a room. But while Odette was cautious with the cat at first, she warmed to it quickly as it became the easiest thing in the house to care for. Unlike the sinks that constantly filled with brown water that she didn’t dare drink or the creaking steps of the staircases that she was afraid to fall through or the cracked window panes that let in the whistling wind, Odette could take care of the cat; all she required was attention and canned food. And soon, the cat became more than a cat, but her one trusted, constant companion, following her everywhere she went, a sentry and a shadow, always at her feet. Her husband, while pleased that they were “getting along swimmingly” thought it strange that the cat had so quickly became attached to and dependent on her. He often—claiming it was an accident—kicked the cat off of the bed at night, and there were times when Odette caught him staring at the cat as it slept on her lap with an expression on his face that she did not recognize. “No, I’m not jealous of a cat,” he told her after she had teased him about why he didn’t seem to trust such a sweet and loving animal. So, Odette asked him—slightly annoyed at the way he had been treating the cat—what was bothering him then? “Nothing, really. I just haven’t been sleeping well,” he said. “A few nights ago I woke to this weird sound coming from outside. It sounded as if a child was crying, faintly, but loud enough to wake me. You were sleeping so soundly that I didn’t want to wake you, too. I half thought it was those neighborhood kids again. I went to the window, and I saw the cat out there, sitting on the wall of that ruined well, wailing into the night.” Odette believed, but she was no expert really, that cats did that: meowed and howled and yowled in the night. Her husband agreed, but said, “My grandmother always believed that cats were really the spirits of the dead disguising themselves in the skin of the living.” Shortly after that, her husband announced he was heading up to bed, and as he leaned down to kiss her on the top of the head, the cat growled menacingly and swiped at him with a clawed paw. Odette regarded the cat differently after that, not cautiously or warily, but regarded it with the idea that the cat might not be what she presented herself to be. Odette would find the cat in certain rooms—sleeping on a fainting couch or curled up in a bay window—and the door would be closed tight with no way in or out. And sometimes the cat would blink slowly at Odette as if trying to deliver a secret message in Morse Code. But rather than be frightened by her, and of the fact that she might be a ghost in disguise, Odette finally felt as if she had an ally in the house. And what an ally the cat turned out to be, because she was the one who led Odette to the mermaid. Odette had decided that the only way to make the manor house feel more like a home was to clean it out the cobwebs and dark spaces and dust. When she told her husband, he half shrugged and said, “We could always hire a maid.” But Odette felt determined to do it herself, to have some mastery of the manor house at last. On the night before he left for another business trip to the city, her husband asked if she was serious about all this cleaning business, and when she reiterated that indeed she was, he then reminded her about the unsturdiness of the widow’s walk. On her first tour of the manor house, her soon-to-be husband had showed her all of the large parlor rooms with spindly chairs and uncomfortable fainting couches and all of the small rooms with large wardrobes and wooden beds, pausing awkwardly at his bedroom as he hinted that it would also soon be hers; he walked her down the back staircase that led to the depths of an old kitchen and down a steep stair to the basement; and then up the large grand staircase that wound through the whole house straight up in a tightening spiral to the locked door that opened unto the widow’s walk. Her not-yet-husband told her that it was best that she never venture up there as a long time ago—nobody was sure really quite how many years ago it was—the top floor of the manor house had caught fire. Most family members remembered being told about the fire, but no one seemed to actually remember the flames themselves, he said, perplexed, and even though it had been rebuilt, it never had the same sturdiness as it did before; yet, if it had ever been sturdy, no one remembered that, either. “All in all, best not to ever come up here unless you have to,” he said, walking back down the stairs very carefully as if to prove the point. “But you won’t ever have to, come to think of it.” Odette trailed her hand on the smooth, curved wall but saw no indication of fire damage. So when her husband once again reminded her of the peril of attempting to go up there to clean, Odette brushed away his concern, attempting a joke by remarking that with the way he spoke about the dangers of the manor house, one would think that it was about to collapse in on them at any moment. “Don’t make me forbid you,” he said, suddenly stern and menacing. “You will promise me now that you will never go up there.” Odette, feeling like a chastised child, promised to only concern her efforts to the bottom floor. And she spent her planned first day of cleaning in the kitchen, scouring through cabinets, pulling out heavy copper pots and ceramic pans, and sorting through the large, wooden hutch that took up most of the wall it leaned against, wiping clean all the expensive, dusty, and seemingly never used china sets, and rattling through drawers of tarnished silver utensils that hadn’t touched a piece of food in years, if not decades. When she finally quit for the day, she felt achy all over and ready for a long bath. After scrubbing the dust and grime from her own body in the one working bathroom, she went back to admire the kitchen. It was still not what one would call clean, but it looked almost hospitable again, and at the very least, it appeared cared for again. Before making her own dinner, she opened a can of tuna for the cat. But neither the sound of the can opener, nor the strong smell of fish called her to the kitchen. She was there with earlier in the day, chasing after dust bunnies and the occasional large insects that had nested in the pantry and cupboards. Odette called out to her, opening the mud room door to see if she would run in from the garden. But she did not. Odette hurriedly went from room to room, hoping the cat was asleep on some chair, but still she was nowhere. Odette stood on the second floor, panic flooding her rib cage. She had to find the cat. Nothing had ever been more important. So she tore through rooms, looking under beds, behind curtains, and in closets. In the end, the only place left to search was the top of the house, in the widow’s walk. The door was cracked open when she reached the top, just enough to let a cat slip in and out of. The room itself was empty. The windows were boarded up from the inside, so only little slants of light from the setting sun came through. The room had a distinct smell of charred wood, of bonfires in the summer darkness. Odette jumped as something snaked around her ankles, but it was only the cat greeting her, pleased that she had found the place. As she bent down to pick up the cat, scolding him for worrying her so, the glint of a brass doorknob caught her eye, and then she saw the outline of a small door. Odette set the cat back down on the floor. Because it went against human nature to not open a mysterious door, she felt compelled to step forward, to reach out her arm, to grasp the brass doorknob in her hand. Odette paused to look over at the cat, and she flicked her tail and titled her head, and once again, Odette was not entirely certain if she was a real cat or not. What do you keep hidden under that catskin of yours? Odette asked, not sure if she really spoke the words out loud. The cat blinked calmly at her; her green eyes appearing and disappearing behind her eyelids as she told Odette to get a move on, to see what was behind the door. In the tiny room was a not so tiny wooden box. In the box was a multitude of pictures starring a beautiful young woman with golden hair and fine blue eyes. Odette’s husband stood next to the woman in many of them, holding her, laughing with her, staring at her with ardor and lust. In one, they stood together on the manor house’s porch as the woman showed off the same ring Odette was currently wearing. Along with the collection of pictures were documents; a marriage license and a death certificate. So Odette was not his first love, not his first wife. But there had never been any mention of a first wife, nor of a time when he had been married. No stories of his first wedding day or night; no whispers in the dark of another’s name, or cases of mistaken identity; and no hints—not a single one—that he had been so in love with someone else, the same way he was supposed to be in love with her. The cat rubbed against Odette’s hand as if trying to comfort her, and a low rumble of a purr filled the widow’s walk. The one picture that Odette could not look away from was one of the woman in a mermaid’s costume complete with a glittering tail of blue and green scales and a bra shaped out of sea scallop shells. In it, she was underwater, yet still smiling serenely with her hair floating around her face and her arms extended towards whoever had taken the picture; her husband, Odette had no doubt. The woman was unearthly beautiful, but the aspect of her character that made Odette’s stomach tangle in knots was that she had the kindest eyes. Odette, after spending hours staring at the picture, closed the wooden box, placed it back where she had found it, ushered the cat out of the window’s walk and closed the door. When her husband came home, Odette told him she had given up on cleaning the manor house and did not mention the mermaid. At night, as she slept, the wild children came to her in dreams, and she danced with them around bonfires and she laughed so much her throat became raw, and she felt such joy in their company. Odette awoke from those dreams with crippling leg cramps that made her writhe in pain and even though she let her husband comfort her, she could not tell him what the cause of it was as that would bring everything down on their heads. (Thrice) “You look pale,” her husband told her one night. “Are you feeling ill? It’s probably from all that cleaning, inhaling all that old dust and dirt. Do you have a cough? Soreness in the bones? Should we call for a doctor?” Odette replied that she felt fine; perfectly healthy, thank you. Her husband then surprised her by grasping her face, neither gently nor harshly, in his hands. He surveyed her face like he had never seen her before, like each of her features was new to him, like they held a mystery he had to solve. Was he seeing her or the mermaid? Odette felt frozen in place. His face, too, became unfamiliar. He appeared somehow younger and stronger in contrast to her—she who felt older and weaker with his secrets weighing on her. So maybe Odette conceded, she had been feeling tired lately. “I’ll draw you a hot bath,” he said. “And then straight to bed with you.” In a large, clawed footed tub, Odette rested in warm water. Her husband stood in the doorway with arms crossed as if he would not allow himself to enter the bathroom. For some time, he watched her, silent and strange, his hair perfectly parted as always, his face relaxed as if he had already come to the proper decision on the matter on what to do with her. He took a step into the bathroom but then turned away abruptly, and Odette exhaled deeply, not realizing that she had been holding her breath. Before her husband came back, the cat snuck into the bathroom and with an agitated swish of her tail and a large meow told her to follow. Odette rose from the water, dressing in the white nightgown her husband had laid out for her, not bothering to dry her soaking hair or damp body. Odette, as she walked out into the night with the cat trailing behind her, believed that she may already be dead. Each step was painful. The rocks and debris on the garden path felt more like sharp knives as they cut into the tender soles of her feet. Her skin felt foreign to her, itchy and tight, too cold in the night air, and like it didn’t quite fit over her bones and muscles the way it always had. The brush of the cat’s fur on her ankles was the only real thing she knew. By the old shed and car, the wild children with their tiny skeleton bodies appeared out of the darkness. Although pale and dirty, their faces were gleaming and bright, their eyes glowing, and their cracked lips were illuminated by the dull light of a fire burning in a metal garbage can. If they—the cat, children, and she—had prearranged their meeting, Odette had no recollection if it. The wild children paused their dancing at her approach. They looked so incredibly sad and lost that Odette felt the overwhelming need to take them back inside with her, clean them up properly, wrap them in cozy blankets, feed them warm soup and bread, and put them safely in the many beds that remained forever empty in that old house. The cat growled softly from somewhere down below her. Then the children were moving again, pressing their hands together in front of them, miming the movement of swimming fish. They were laughing again, although Odette did not know at who or at what. They formed a line, and one by one, they disappeared inside the rusted car. Odette knew she was to follow them as sure enough as if they had given the order. Odette crawled into the car to see the wild children disappearing through the space where a passenger door once was, and then through a hole in the rotted boards of the gardening shed’s wall. But once inside, Odette saw no sign of them. The only things the gardening shed held were old rakes, shears and knives, watering cans, and an old push lawn mower. But in the corner there was also an ancient ice box—almost completely buried in the dirt floor. Heavy pieces of timber were piled on top of it, and Odette removed them one by one, noting that the ice box was strangely cool to the touch, despite the summer air that filled the shed. Odette pried the tightly sealed door open, stumbling backwards as it gave way. The smell was terrible; a smell Odette would never fully rid herself of, a smell of old and rotted flesh and things abandoned in the sun for too long. And inside was the mermaid—in pieces that was. Carefully, Odette reached in and pulled her out, setting her parts and limbs on the ground like she was a life-size puzzle to be solved. As it always was, strange things compound stranger things. There was never just one odd thing to be found or seen. The mermaid’s head began to fuse back together with her neck and her neck reconnected with her collar bone and her collar bone became part of her chest again and her chest reached down to find her torso and her torso became not a pair of legs, but a mermaid’s tail again. The mermaid was pale and hollow looking, but thankful that she had been put back together. She cried tears of joy and wrapped her cold, and still uncoordinated, arms around Odette. And Odette patted her knotted and thinned hair carefully, trying to comfort her and avoid breathing in the mermaid’s rancid smell. Odette held the mermaid, held her and thought about the fragility of things, but also their resilience. And how had the mermaid come to be in such a state of disconnection and almost disrepair? “He drowned me in the bathtub,” the mermaid said. “I sometimes liked to wear my fin in there and—this is embarrassing—and pretend I was a mermaid stranded on land. I always wanted to be a real mermaid as a kid; I used to practice holding my breath in the pool all the time. I moved here when I was eighteen, just so I could join the aquatics show and be a real mermaid at last.” Odette told her that she had made a beautiful mermaid, at least in the picture she had seen. Very striking. The mermaid smiled crookedly at the compliment; her teeth small and yellowed. But then she sobered, her face darkening, as she recalled the event of her death: “He snuck in behind me. I heard a creak in the floorboards, but I was always hearing things in that deplorable house. Then his hands were holding me under the water. I think it took longer than he had expected as he started to panic above me and he was losing his grip; he didn’t expect me to hold my breath for so long, I guess,” the mermaid said. “Even as I was struggling, trying to pry his hands off my throat, I never believed he would be capable of such a thing; he was always so mild mannered and kind.” He was, Odette agreed, always so kind. “It was all because of his first wife,” the mermaid continued. Oh, his first wife. That made her number three. “His childhood sweetheart. She drowned in the sea on their honeymoon. He tried to save her, but when he carried her out of the water, she wasn’t breathing, and no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t bring her back.” But why kill her in the same way then? The mermaid’s body was beginning to come alive again; color was returning to her face and her eyes were clearing. “I think he wanted to save me.” The sound of the children grew loud once again; they had gone back to their ritual dancing and singing. Through one of the grimy windows, Odette saw the flames from their fire brighten. The cat, purring loudly, circled around her and the mermaid. “Once, twice, thrice,” Odette said, counting the wives. Odette forced the shed door open; the hinges had rusted completely and the whole door fell to the ground. Her husband was still upstairs in that old manor house filled with dusty relics and the lives of the dead. She knew that if she went back up to him, crawled into bed next to him, breathed in the smell of his skin, she would never leave the house again; it would swallow her whole, take every moment of her life. She was not fit to play the role; not the one of his first love, not the one of wife. In the shed, she found an old broom. The mermaid crawled her way across the floor to look up at the manor house in contempt, but with a trace of wistfulness, too. The cat sat patiently; its eyes reflecting the fire, its ears flicking in anticipation. The wild children hid themselves in the hedges and trees, waiting with fervor. Odette dipped the end of the broom into the trash can fire and it flamed to life; she walked towards the manor house, opened the mud room door, and threw in the makeshift torch; she then wrapped the mermaid in an old cloth and heaved her on her back as the wild children sang and danced before the spreading fire, reveling and joyous; the manor house burned, and Odette walked off into the night, the mermaid grasping her neck, the cat close behind. Khristian Mecom was born in Oklahoma but grew up and still lives in South Florida where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of the novella Love & Black Holes (Black Hill Press/1888Center), and her fiction has appeared in Slice Magazine, Passages North, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere.
Find her online at weoncelivedincaves.tumblr.com.
3 Comments
Alice
11/18/2016 05:54:22 pm
You just became my writer goals. This was absolutely exquisite, Khristian!
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Khristian
1/11/2017 08:03:05 am
Thank you so much! Glad you liked it!
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I'd loooove to have you transform
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