The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

step, watching the city die. There were fires in a dozen places.

“It’s pretty,” said Peter.

“It’s beautiful,” said Saint John.

The boy considered. He nodded.

The golden embers floated down around them.

RUE by Lauren Groff

THE GIRLS SLIP IN AT NIGHT. I see the ravages in the morning, the bald patches in the tansy, the yarrow mowed in swaths. Vervain and pennyroyal, feverfew and sage, ginger, lemon balm, parsley. A tincture or tisane of any of these, and the white bellies of the girls stay smooth, scrubbed from inside out. It is true: Secretly I planned my gardens for these girls. After the Ministers seized the country and remade it in God’s name, I could be hanged in the gibbets for my garden; I could be laser-flayed for the powers of my plants. But the girls only talk between themselves, and steal, and in any case they are too quick for me. They watch my house for movement, or listen for the slide and drag of my bad leg. When I know they are there, I stand and clump over to the door as quietly as I can. But in the sudden crack of light that falls into the garden, a girl is always leaping, a white doe, over my stone fence.

Tonight, I hear another one out in the darkness. I pause the movie I am watching and move silently through the house and onto the warm lawn. I can come close enough to catch this girl’s arm: She is either stupid or her ears are too stuffed with panic to hear. She spins under my grip and I see her broad, triangular face turned to dumpling in terror, the pillowcase in her hands stuffed with rue.

I know this girl. She is the long-legged one who breathes her wet breath onto her desk. Then she makes a brush of her red hair and paints the moisture into designs that fade as she draws them. The boys find this behavior mysterious. I find it gross. Her essais in my class are trite beyond belief, not to mention ungrammatical.

I know why you’re here, I say.

She blinks and her eyes fill with tears. Two waning moons are reflected in them. Don’t tell, she whispers. Don’t call the Ministers.

I shrug: I must, I say. It is illegal, what you are doing. You will go to prison and maybe die there. Or one of the work camps, if you are lucky.

Oh, she says. Madame. Please. I’ll do anything.

She looks me deep in the face, trying not to look away. Anything, she says, and reaches out a hand and makes an attempt at a caress. I watch her hand near my bicep and falter, then fade away. She can’t look at me.

Not that, I say, drily. But there is something.

On her face, the hope flares briefly like an ember. Then, under the wash of my words, under all that I require of her, the hope extinguishes. She hangs her head. When she nods, the moons fall from her eyes and break on the ground.

Days pass, and my own waiting grows inside me, a pulsing, moving creature in this desiccated body. All day in my classes, I read from Perrault, leaving a crumb-trail, but not a soul is clever enough to pick it up. I show them films I have found online, A bout de souffle, Les enfants du paradis. Blasphemy is not blasphemy, it seems, when it is in another language. Also, the students don’t understand enough to complain.

When the bell rings, during the interclass prayers, I see how the red-haired girl bulges against her uniform. She notices I notice and startles and pales.

Now I wait for her in a thigh-high sea of Queen Anne’s lace in the dark. Here she trudges, at last, through the gate. If she thinks I don’t notice the flash of mute stubbornness when I reach out to guide her into my house, the pure donkey of her, she is wrong.

The dogs come as I had thought they would, but I had washed her trace from my path with the hose, then dragged her dress full of rocks down to the river and threw it in. All day, we hear the poor dogs bay on the riverbank, and when the Village Ministers come knocking at the door, the girl is safely hidden in the garret, and I am fishing my underclothes from a great pot on the stove.

It is forbidden for men to look upon a woman’s private things, not that the Ministers would want to see my translucent monstrosities. With some pleasantries in French that they only half-remember from my classes and say to please me, they bow away.

At last, the girl and I are alone.

I carry on at the school as if all were normal, as if the girl weren’t at home swelling in my absence. I make the chicory coffee, because I am the one who does it best, and listen to the bloodless criticism of the government in the grunts of the other teachers when they read the State News before First Prayer. Too frightened to make more definite criticisms, too weak to hold it all inside, these pasty, pale creatures call themselves my colleagues.

I carry on. Un, deux, trois for the elementary, Demain, des I’aube for the high school. A subtext of gossip goes on under my nose. When one is ugly enough, one can feign ignorance with great success. I hear the whispered theories about the girl, who in her absence has become an unlikely Jeanne d’Arc: They say she has rebelled against the Ministers’ strict regime, has fled into the mountains with the anarchists. One can almost see her as these hopeful children do, rushing down from the mountains, swords in both hands, her long red hair licking in the wind. Not even the boys who knew the depth of her badness suspect where she truly is: on my couch watching Gospel shows on the television, eating my rich egg custards, my baked bread, my raspberry jam.

Day and night, the blinds are closed, the house set far from the road. And yet one day I come home to hear her high, clear soprano dazzling all the way to the gate, and clump inside, hiss and spit at her like an angry cat.

After that, she is silent. Her skin, unsunned, turns mushroom. Only her long red hair gleams, still glorious, in the darkness of the house.

I hate you, she whispers over my roasted chicken one night.

I pretend to not hear.

I hate you, she says, louder.

Such gratitude. I slap her.

She holds her hand to her cheek, bloodred in the shape of my hand.

Without me, I say, the Ministers would have you. And where would you be? As soon as the baby came, you’d be dead.

No, she says. I’d have made the boy marry me. I’d be free.

I smile at her, not unkindly. Which boy? I say, and the rest of her skin goes as ruddy as her cheek and she holds my eye for one beat, two. Then she bows her head and salts her meat with her tears.

The time comes. I must gag the girl to keep her screams inside her. I call in sick to work, pinching my nose to pretend sinus trouble, and the secretary is startled: Twenty-five years, and I have never been ill once. And then the bustling, the kettles of hot water, the sheets torn to stanch the blood, the rust spreading across my mattress. I play my parents’ Chopin records loudly to cover the girl’s muffled pain. All day and into the night, we struggle, the girl and I, Jacob and angel. Sweat paints the air.

The girl rips, it seems, in two, and the baby, a waxy livid thing, bawls in my hands. It is a girl with fat folds and curlicues of red hair all over her body. Her eyes open and they are chips of the sky.

I feel myself floating out of the twisted body I call my own when I look at this creature, more beautiful than anything I have seen. This child of mine.

When I look up, dazzled, the girl on the bed is reaching out her arms, her face hungry. Please, she says, and I put the child in her arms.

Oh, she says. Oh, she’s so beautiful. The infant nuzzles her breast, slides her little face to the nipple, tries to latch on. The girl says, weeping, Oh, my baby.

I snatch the infant back. My baby, I say.