holding her hand. “Maybe she just had to clear her head.” After all there had been times when their mother would pace the apartment with her fingers pressed to her temples, saying she could not hear herself think, saying she had to get out from under these four walls. She always went out to the hall to cry. Their father said it was no way for a mother to behave, but Mom didn’t know any other way to be.
“Daddy said no,” said Ace. “Daddy said she’s just gone.”
Daddy had clearly been in pain. He’d sat in the kitchen like normal, with his green coffee mug steaming and his floppy newspaper open to Opinion, but today his fingers trembled as if the ritual was just for show. He said their mother had always been selfish, a quitter, and he shouldn’t have expected anything different. Then he said “sorry,” which was disconcerting.
On the platform they stood next to a harried man who kept adjusting his tie. A red-haired woman was following him—her eyes were just as bloodshot as his, but her face was rockier, stormier. The man must have known he was being stalked, because he was itchy and jumpy and kept peering down the tunnel, willing the Red Train to come. At first the woman hid behind columns, but she became more brazen as his discomfort grew. When at last he dropped his suitcase and started to choke, she moved into the open.
“How do you like it?” she shouted, although he was too distressed to respond. “Being turned inside out? You see who you are under all that bull? You’re scum! Human filth!”
The man was transforming. His hands disappeared up his sleeves, and his height shrank with his shuddering legs. His head withered and twisted like a sweater wrung by a washing machine—for a second, onlookers caught a glimpse of something pale and worm-like where his head should have been, something much like a fetus—and then his entire collapsed into a heap of clothes. A chorus of shrieks finally broke loose.
The woman’s voice was an edict, her finger the only arrow she needed. She silenced the crowd. “That man messed with my little girl! He isn’t fit to live!” A murmur spread outward through the platform, as if she had begun a giant game of telephone. “Run, you weasel!”
A brown wriggling animal darted out from under the man’s shirt and half-scurried, half-swam toward the edge of the platform. Commuters screamed again, clutching their own clothes as if to keep their bodies from tumbling out. They gave the weasel a wide berth. Rent-a-cops hurried over with BB guns, but the weasel jumped down to the tracks and escaped into the underground, too small to be lit by the green torches on the wall.
“There you go!” the woman shouted. A rent-a-cop tried to restrain her, but his efforts were half-hearted and she shook him away. When she looked around the platform, everyone avoided her gaze. “The police won’t help you. The law won’t help you. This is what good people have to do these days. This is justice in our city!”
Charlie Cunningham introduced his children to his new girlfriend at the zoo. She was sitting by the large panda statue with her purse in her lap; when she saw them coming she stood and waved. Her name was Paige, and she was skinny and dark-haired.
“Paige works for a City Councilman. Theo Robson. Pretty impressive, huh?”
It wasn’t, not really—their mother had been a paralegal and after she came home late smelling like cranberry cough syrup she used to tell the funniest stories about city politicians—besides, they could hear the sarcastic bite in their father’s voice. Paige lowered her eyes demurely and tucked her hair behind her ear. “It’s nothing fancy, I know,” she said. Charlie smiled and took her waist.
The shaded walkways of the zoo were quiet—it was late in the season and the day—but the animals were restless for feeding time. Charlie left the children with Paige at the Sea Lion Pavilion. “You know what we need?” he said. “Ice cream.” He said “ice cream” as if he meant “bullets.”
Paige said, “Don’t worry, I’ll watch them,” and Charlie gave her a tight smile of approval. He was trying to trust her enough to let her into the fortress, but Hazel could see that he didn’t look at Paige the way he’d looked at their mother. There was not enough feeling there. Not enough hate.
The sea lions—Goonie and Cha-Cha—tossed and dove in the artificially aquamarine water. It took them four seconds to cross their tank. Occasionally they would stop and look out through the glass with small oily eyes, watching their watchers with glazed boredom.
“Do you kids like monster stories?” Paige asked. “Or are they too scary for you?”
Ace liked zombies; the bloodier, the better. Hazel liked vampires. “Like Bigfoot?” Ace said. “He’s not scary, he’s just sad. And sea monsters aren’t real.”
“You’re thinking much too big,” said Paige. “Have you ever heard of pest-people? They’re cursed to live as little tiny vermin. You know, rats and things.”
“That’s
“Imagine if you were turned into a skink, and instead of going to the zoo with your daddy, you’d be using your little rubber legs to run away from the whole world, full of predators that want to eat you. Wouldn’t that be monstrous?”
“You can do that to people?” For some reason it seemed worth asking.
Paige giggled. “I know someone who can. A sorceress.”
Ace crinkled up his nose. “Like the Green Witch in Boxland?”
“Yes, like that.” Paige smiled. “Except she doesn’t fly. She has an apartment in the Rattle and a magic knee. If you were just a little naughty, she might turn you into something cute and put you in a zoo. But if you were really bad, she’ll make a gutter-rat out of you.”
The sea lions nipped at each other’s fins. They churned like hamsters in a wheel.
Charlie waved goodbye to Paige out by the gift shop after buying her a dolphin-shaped mood necklace. “Say goodbye, kids,” he said, and the children shook their new poorly-stitched sea lions. Surrounded by dormant machines, Paige looked even more like a tender will-o-wisp, glowing with dead light.
A flier tucked beneath their windshield wipers advertised a Pest Transformation Service run by a man named Dr. Terry Devine.
“I think it’s good,” said Charlie, nodding. “It’s street justice is what it is. Those people that get turned into pests are bad folks, I think that’s obvious. Criminals. Assholes. Derelict people. People who’ve been cheating the system and mooching off everyone else. The thing about life, see, is that everygets what they deserve. Call it what you want, karma, whatever. But maybe this’ll make people treat each other better.”
“And they can’t ever turn back into people?”
“They can turn back every once in a while, for a couple of days. Just like shapeshifters change back into coyotes for a day and a half.” He glanced at them through the rearview mirror. “Couple guys at work used it to take care of some low-lives. Have you seen that sign at Mr. Lowe’s bodega? Act Like Vermin, Get Treated Like One.” He laughed. “Good for him.”
“What if someturns Mr. Lowe into a pest first?”
He gave Hazel a stern look. “Cursing people takes money. Like everything else in life.”
After a few blocks of silence, Ace said, “I miss Mom.”
Their father’s sigh sounded like the whirr of a rickety fan. “I wish she could come back and give you an answer for why she left us, champ, because I sure as hell don’t have one.”
They passed animals on the street; frogs in drains and blackbirds on awnings and more than the regular number of mice eating out of garbage cans. People came after them with kicks and brooms but being so small the pests vanished into the crevices of the city’s architecture, up into pipes and down into tunnels.
A cat appeared on the fire escape outside the children’s bedroom while they were practicing mathematics. It looked nearly drowned with stormwater—there had been a big rain the night before. Ace and Hazel eyed each other, twirling their mechanical pencils. Their father was out having dinner with Paige—she had come over to cook for them but had cried into the marinara sauce when she wasn’t even cutting onions. Charlie said she’d gotten bad news about Mr. Robson and told the kids to microwave a pizza. He said to keep the door locked, but nothing about the windows.
After they swaddled the cat in towels, they saw it was an orange tabby. Judging by its tangible ribs and dirty fur—still stinking of the world—the cat no longer belonged to anyone. Even so it clung to the children with desperation, as if dangling from a precipice. Its claws poked through their sweaters and drew little teases of blood.
The cat had unusually long canine teeth: unsightly fangs that kept catching on the lip of the dolphin-safe tuna
