A Town Wary of Beasts

Sadie Chernila

A fire started last night when the neighbor was sleeping. Not in his house, but in the one beside it. The sirens came loud, long after the smoke crept in through her open window. That woman named Miriam lived in that house next door, the one that was burning. She lived there with her parrots that all called themselves Miriam, too. He heard the screeching of the parrots before the sirens, and he heard another neighbor call for Miriam to come out. But the fire had come. And all was left and gone. 

* * * 

Miriam was young when she cheated on her first girlfriend. It didn’t take long for the infidelity genes to kick in. Her mother had cheated on her father, her father had cheated on her mother. No relationships were meant to be kept, and she had always accepted this as a fact. Her girlfriend at the time had been so good, so kind, so special. Her name was Laura and her face was round and soft and always looking at Miriam like she was a bookshelf shelved well, like she was a pastry uneaten, like she was a lost wedding ring, found. But they were young and in love and the love was so still and so steady that Miriam found herself in the arms of another girl, who’s sharp elbows left accidental bruises across her body, who joked about things that weren’t very funny. And it wasn’t that Miriam had stopped loving Laura. That was never it. It was just that she was so young and the love with Laura was so steady. 

* * * 

The parrots lived, for a long time, at the pet store in town beside the grocery store and the laundromat. At that time, the parrots’ names were Jeff, just like Jeff who owned the shop. Jeff was kind and fed them apples and loved how they picked up his vocabulary. Jeff was in an odd moment of life for those years. His wife loved him and yet didn’t love him. His parents were sick of him. His only daughter was grown and far, calling him once a month to tell him news of her newest boyfriend, often a man in finance-- Stewart or Jonathan or Josh-- clean shaven men who idolized their fathers and (as Jeff assumed) sat in bed at night counting the things they’d done wrong. Or perhaps that was just what Jeff did. And perhaps he was once again projecting his own issues onto others. That was why he liked the pet shop, and his parrots called Jeff. They were projections of himself and they held him so sweetly in the mornings, perched beside each other on his arm as the sun rose higher in the sky. Jeff, Jeff! They would call to him, and the parts of himself he wouldn’t be able to muster would be found. One Saturday, some woman he recognized came in and bought every single parrot in the store, all seven of them. And so Jeff took the parrot decal off the front window and felt very lost. 

* * * 

Ellen was raised with her elbows flour-dusted and clothes dough-crusted. Her mother owned that bakery that was never very good, with the stale cookies and the muffins with the streusel topping. But Ellen was proud of her mother, and of the counters that shone from Ellen’s scrubbing every evening before they went upstairs for dinner with her father (dinners where her father would tell a sweet story and hold her mother’s hand at the table). She stole cookie dough in the afternoons and her mother never minded. The customers were kind old women who swore that every week she got taller. And once she was taller, even taller than them, she took their orders from behind the counter and handed them their mediocre pastries until they were all sold out. And soon she had a daughter of her own, and it was her bakery then, and she and Neil lived in the home she’d grown up in. It felt almost sometimes like it was her childhood replayed but the positions had switched, except for that she didn’t love Neil. And Neil didn’t love her. But they kept replaying and replaying, with those little alterations (she was fucking that bartender with the long ringlets, and then the too-young-for-her writer, and then the older man who she wouldn’t ever admit to loving so deeply. Neil was fucking Tanya from down the road. Over and over and over). But it was replay and replay for Miriam, their daughter, who lived flour-dusted and dough-crusted. And the dog spoke in the night and Miriam listened. 

* * * 

The house: shingled blue and just the right size for Miriam and all of her birds. It had a little walkway to the front door, lined with pots of mums. The living room was lined with shelves full of books and fishbowls filled with fish that seemed happy. The kitchen smelled sweet always, and the bits of spices stained the tiled floor, paprika or ginger creating color between the ceramic and concrete. The stairs to the second floor creaked faintly, and the banister was painted a light pink. Miriam’s room was dark with curtains that swayed in the night like someone was trying to get through into her room with the breeze. And sometimes there was. 

* * * 

Laura died at nineteen. The beast got her in the night (a hand crawled through her room and— snatch! It twisted her head off like a bottle cap) and kept killing and killing. The town locked themselves in the community center for weeks, guarding the doors until it felt like the threat was gone. No one thought about Laura or the others very much, just about what might happen to them. Besides Miriam, that is. Miriam, who was fucking that girl the night Laura was killed. Miriam, who sat in the corner of the community center, avoiding any conversation with the girl she’d fucked. Miriam, who wished she hadn’t told Laura she was busy, that instead she had said yes, of course you can come over. Of course you can come sleep in my bed tonight and wrap yourself around me like you love to do. I love to fall asleep with your hand on my chest, rising with my breath. I love to wake up to you beside me. 

* * * 

The others mourned in the community center: Mara Montgomery, age 22 (ate asparagus for dinner, peed like it too, never had sex, just a crush on a boy at work, her mother called her happy but who’s to really say. Found in the morning like a crushed marigold, bones disheveled and cracked, flesh oozing far); Atlas Rivas, age 94 (no regrets, left her hands un-moisturized, picked the flaky skin off as a game, always wished she’d been gay. Found in her driveway, run over by her own motorcycle. A kid drew the beast on a motorcycle and it ran throughout all the newspapers as a warning, and some punk eventually turned it into a tee-shirt once Joan had been dead for twenty years); Max Mcfarlane, age 13 (was writing a science fiction novel about smart snakes found on mars, still couldn’t sleep without a nightlight, had a beautiful voice but no one knew except for the trees that surrounded him when he went to the woods to sing. Found in his bed, heart stopped, nothing gory, just a kid); Jameson Good, age 45 (his wife was bored but wouldn’t leave him, his breath didn’t smell very good and he snored-- that motherfucker snored like a machine! He was a professor at the community college, taught students who loved his teaching, that was the only thing anyone loved about him, not his passion for spiders or his polly pockets collection. Found with a doll down his throat, blocked the windpipe. Another doll was in his nostril for good measure. A little plastic foot stuck out of his ear). 

* * *

Jeff didn’t remember much from that time. It was all a blur, one of those blurs that shakes you and makes you hold onto the one thing that you love most, and that thing was his daughter who was young, young enough to need him. Jeff remembered her toddling around and being loved by each and every one of the town’s residents, remembered finding her curled up on the lap of the grieving mother of Laura Cordova, with her little hands playing with the woman’s hair. He had pulled her away then, and apologized, but Mrs. Cordova laughed a little and said it was what she needed. 

* * * 

The theories: it was a curse (this one came from Julia Roberts’ niece-- not Emma, but another one, who said it was a curse that was cast long ago. But she’d only just moved to the town, so what did she know?), it was that old man down the road who never really talked to anyone (this one came from an anonymous source, who, after investigation turned out to be the accused’s bitter brother, a man seeking revenge after some brotherly money scandal), it was simply a coincidence that they had all died at once, it was something in the water, the new doctor was prescribing some kind of odd medicine, people were sad, people were people, it was Julia Roberts’ niece, she was so old she would’ve died soon anyway, that creep got what he deserved, I taught her when she was little, his heart just STOPPED, did you hear? Did you hear that Max was almost done with his book? We’ll publish it for him, that’s what he would have dreamed of. (Another man whispered to his wife that what if Max’s book wasn’t very good? What if they all had to pretend it was good just because he was a dead kid?) 

* * * 

Parrots live a very long time. They talk beside you. They give you someone to come home to. They make it so you are never alone. You won’t betray them, as long as you keep coming back to them. And so at thirty-five, Miriam moved out of the apartment above the bakery that she still shared with her parents and spent her life’s savings on the parrots and the blue-shingled house. She brought them home and let them sit on her arms all at once. She felt very powerful there, in her living room with the parrots, teaching them to say Miriam. And soon Jeff turned to Miriam and life turned to routine, and she got an at-home job as a kitchen appliance telemarketer. Each day was a wish for a customer to buy a mini-blender. Each night was a lullaby sung by her talloned companions. Each day was a feeling of regret. Each night was a ruffling in the curtains. Each day was one beside the next. 

* * * 

Miriam ate a salad for dinner last night, didn’t bother to turn on the stove since it was so hot out. It was one of those August nights that takes you by the nape of your neck, that slips itself between your thighs, and the heat comes dripping down like what you wish was rain. Her parrots sang a chorus of Miriams as she ate a bitter green salad drenched in oil and salt. She went to bed early and dreamt of her late mother, in a moment where Miriam was small. In the dream, her mother took her by the hand, walking her down the street that she had grown up on. They kept walking. And they kept nearing the bakery but never passed it. They just kept walking. 

* * * 

The parrots cried Miriam. They cried Jeff. They sang as their feathers started to turn to ash. And the beast lit the match again and again. The fishbowls burst with heat, and for a moment, the fish flew beside glass shards and the parrots watched in their last moments of life. They cried Jeff again. 

* * * 

The neighbor asked how they thought it could’ve happened, and the fireman said the gas was on. And here was the smoldering house, nothing but a skeleton of a home. The morning came slowly and the neighbors all sat out on the lawn. None of them felt like falling asleep. Someone said maybe it wasn’t the gas, and someone else asked what they meant. The crows called to their mothers (they had mothers, very many of them) and the mice scrambled East. The sun beat its first lashes on the grass. The neighbor wondered, then, where his wife was. And his wife, in another man’s bed three counties over, hoped her husband would still be sleeping when she came home so she could slip into bed beside him quietly, without a sound. 

* * * 

In hibernation, the beast dreamt of its mother, it’s stomach growling like thunder. And it was thunder. The days began to pass, one beside the next.