Little Owl [Short Story: Part 1]

I saw children with barbed wire in their mouths. I saw them last night locked in Miss Catherine’s chicken coop, out back in her garden. The children wore their fingers down to stalks from grabbing at the mesh fence. They bit at the barbed wire until gray blood ringed their chins.

I haven’t slept since.

My husband told me I am not like the other women. I do not have insides of blood and muscle, but of broom and ash and meadow-sweet. I was not born of a mother and a father, but of two witch men from the Adirondacks who tied my limbs with twine and breathed magic into my limbs until I stirred and sat up and gasped for air. That is why I slept with the window open or else the bad dreams visited me. That is why at night the bugs crawled into my hair.

“I won’t kiss you with those bugs in your hair, Little Owl,” my husband said, as he unraveled from my hair a moth, a cicada, a screeching June beetle. He dropped them onto the floorboards of our bedroom and then they flew away.
“There are children in Miss Catherine’s garden. I think they’re trapped there.”
“Why would Miss Catherine do such a thing?”
He kissed me and I said, “I don’t think I belong here.”

I did not understand why he laughed because he told me people only laugh when they are telling little lies.

My husband and I lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood with warm houses that reminded me of pale stripped lungs. There were flowers in every lawn the colors of desiccated, arranged in neat rows, and precisely one tree - either a persimmon or a crepe Myrtle - grew in the middle of the lawn surrounded by cedar wood chips. When we first moved to the neighborhood the geometric precision of everything made me feel heavy and wrong. I was imprecise, with my messy black hair wrapped around my throat and my walnut eyes and clumsy limbs. I thought the geometry of everything would rise up to attack me, it would open its mouth, swollen like a hungry snake and eat me alive.
I started to think that numbers, precision, would make me feel safe. Sixteen steps from the bed to the bath and the water would be warm. Fifteen or seventeen steps and I thought the water would be cold. Ten taps on the back of my spine so that I would not wake up in a bad dream. If I kissed my husband for six seconds then he would never die. If I tore a leaf into three parts then suburbia would not tear me apart.

I did not remember the husbands of the neighborhood except as sleek cars that parked in the driveways at night, left in the morning. I only remembered the ladies. Claudine with the green sweaters and violent, swollen eyes, the one who told me she wanted to be a romance writer until her hysterectomy when all the romance was unraveled out of her. Deborah who had a disorder the doctors called pica, which meant that she couldn’t stop eating paint chips. Her favorites were Cloudless Blue and Desert Orange. I’d see her through her kitchen window like a silhouetted bear with her back knotted over the table stuffing chips into her mouth, chewing, swallowing. Chewing, swallowing.
Miss Catherine lived next door to me and whenever I’d go out into the backyard I’d see her sitting on the back porch drinking a mojito and reading a book. My husband told me she used to be a fashion model. She was six feet and two inches tall with streaked blond hair and a face all sharp angles. I never saw her eyes, as she always wore thick black sunglasses.

I dreamed that instead of eyes there were spider fangs behind those sunglasses.

The ladies used to invite me to lunch. We’d sit down in ivory colored high-backed chairs and eat abstract art that the ladies called food. Sad little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, garnished with spring leaves, tart pies. My husband told me when I was invited I was to eat slow, compliment the ladies, compliment the food, take whatever was offered.
So I did. I cut everything into nine squares. Then I’d take a fork, eat each of the squares with slow and careful movements, chew each bite precisely sixteen times, set the fork down. Say, “this is wonderful. Thank you for the lovely meal.”

The ladies hated me.

I could see it in the way their eyes cooked when they smiled at me, in the rigidity of their shoulders. Their mouths snapped open and shut as if they were inflicted with a sudden rigor mortis. “Look at your beautiful hair,” they said, “You’re so thin, do you ever eat?” and pushed my plate a little closer.

I closed my eyes when they touched my hair, took my wrist. I gripped the sides of the table and started to count. Seven. Eight. Nine. They could not see that my eyes were made out of walnut seeds, that my hair was not human hair but meadow-sweet flowers. They could not see how ugly and out of proportion I was, that there was a flower growing straight out of my head, my ash limbs busting out of their bindings. Fourteen. Fifteen.

One afternoon Claudine baked a cake while I stood in her kitchen, my flowers wilting from the heat.
“I think I’m going to start crocheting again,” she said, “I get so bored when Jean is gone.”
She pressed her green sweater over her mouth and nose while she talked.
“What about writing?” I asked.

“What?” she said, her voice hazy, as if she hadn’t heard me.
She pulled the cake out of the oven and set it on top of the stove to cool.
“You said you wanted to be a writer once, why don’t you do that? I mean, there still has to be some romance left, right?”
She turned to regard me, biting her lip, eyes set on the ground.

“I could crochet you a sweater. Would you like that? I think you’d look good in purple. A nice plum maybe?”
Her hands shook.

A few minutes later when the cake cooled she set it on a glass cake stand.
“Here, can you take this into the dining room?” she asked.
I dropped it.

The glass shattered on the floor. It sprayed me and Claudine, and though it did not hurt me it embedded itself into her bare legs, her thighs. I started to count. That was my problem from the beginning. One. Two. Three. The glass would not have shattered if I’d only counted the spaces in-between each moment. Four. Four. Six. Wait, no, I’d miscounted, but it was too late to start over. It was too late and the blood welled up and dripped down Claudine’s legs. We stood that way for several seconds, the glass and the blood between us, and I knew that if I moved to help her my head would fall straight off.
Claudine screamed.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I took several steps back and tripped over a lamp, which also shattered on the floor. Claudine inhaled a sharp gasp. I could think of nothing to say but a string of numbers, a shield between us, a maddening glossolalia of noise.

“I’m sorry,” I said instead, and I ran.

After that there were no more afternoon lunches.

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