Little Monsters All
by Shana Ross
They come, the men and women of academia, to study us, our strange ways. Our beliefs, our agriculture, our social structure, our music. They observe us and write tomes, make careers describing us. Amusing, pompous fools; when they write, they treat the idea of magic as a fantasy or small insanity. Ridiculous! What better proof of magic than a spell on a paper, sealed with an exchange of money, that drapes a curtain over a whole mountain and protects us from uninvited guests? Property law, they call it. In general, our little village dabbles in sweeter, cleaner magics, but we use all the arts to protect our privacy.
Wild farmers, they call us, a term that doesn’t distinguish us correctly from the perfectly normal humans who seed their land with food stuffs that will grow without tending. We, on the other hand, carefully tend every tree, every bush, every thickening root that will feed us through the winter. We weave an invisible contract with our lifelines over this whole mountain – we will protect you and you will protect us, each in turn, over and over. It is more complicated than most people wish to see, and at the same time, simple as can be.
When some new scholar writes and begs to visit with us, he or she promises to be respectful and curious and unobtrusive. We usually say yes; our community is a small one and it is amusing to have a new person visit. The novelty alone is worth it, but we also extract payment from their institutions, grants to our operating trust, and so forth. Cash is useful.
As a community, we make an effort to say very little while they’re here. Our silence intrigues them. It makes us seem wise instead of silent, which is a terrible thing to conflate, as a rule. But it is wise, in this case, for us to be silent. Let them write about their imaginations instead of our tender truths.
I read one of their papers, when I was young, maybe forty or fifty. The newer ones, when I ask them about it, apologetically say it was a different moment then for anthropology. I doubt things have changed that much. They got almost everything wrong. For starters, we are not a utopian cult founded in the early nineteenth century. The paper, still foundational, “well cited” as they say, only gets less accurate after that opening sentence.
Bane, my bond, laughs when I complain. He says, as far as he can tell, the scholars have taken advantage of our isolation. With no one out in the world to say whether their reports are true or false, what started out as simple mistakes and misunderstandings has turned into a free-for-all of layered claims. They make things up, now, as long as the narrative has charisma. Pushing steadily forward in a game of academic chicken to see what outlandish thing will finally be so unbelievable that it will call everything else into question.
It is to our advantage, he says. What better protection could we invent?
I see his point. And I blame it, and him, for that sense of safety. I let down my guard.
Linden, Lindy, oh, Lindy. An intrepid young woman. Here she came, bright eyed and proud, for a whole summer. To study conceptions of the supernatural in a gender equal environment. She brought a surplus of gear for camping and seemed so proud of her tent that we didn’t tell her for nearly a week that we had a small guesthouse she was welcome to, with plumbing and wifi. Just because we choose not to partake more than necessary doesn’t mean that we’re not equipped to participate in modern life.
I think that rattled her, the way we swept away so many of her misconceptions without shame or pause. That could have been enough for me. I could have stopped there, after shaking her branches just enough to get her to open a third eye down the road; I could have ignored her until the summer faded and she left.
But her first night in the guesthouse, she got the news that someone had died. Not family, I don’t think, someone dear and her own age. The news did more than shake her, it uprooted her. I took pity on her.
She sobbed so hard that I woke up damp and whimpering in my own home, nearly a mile from the village. Her grief was exquisite. I brought her soup and held her as she talked about the dead boy.
She was grateful, and I liked my reflection in her eyes, shiny with adoration. She began to follow me like a pup, and I liked that too, the companionship. I said yes when she asked to come foraging. I said yes when she asked if she could watch when I pounded the gathered fruits into bowls for drying and bowls for fermenting. I said yes when she asked me if I would tell her about what wild farmers believe about what happens to our souls after death.
My sympathy was an immature compassion – the kind that wants to salve pain instantly, before a child can learn to avoid repeating it – but how could I help it?
What happens to souls after death? I told her. Wide-eyed, she sat with me by my fire, nodding slowly like a child who cannot digest and remain awake at the same time. “That would explain ghosts,” she said, in a voice raspy as deep thirst.
That was the moment I chose to not stop myself.
“Oh, no, not at all,” I said. “Ghosts are what you dig up. Do you want to see?”
We went that night, in the stark shadows of a moon two days from full, to the place where the sand and clay mix but nothing will grow. I showed her how to whisper your secret fears and sadness into the knot of the closest pine tree so it will stop gnawing at your lungs, so your squirming breath will become graceful and full and the weight will vanish from your chest and shoulders.
“I feel better already,” she said, with tears in her eyes, and hugged me tight, something that seemed out of character for a woman who brings dryclean-only sweater sets into the woods for fieldwork.
Of course she thought this was a ritual of psychological value. And loved me for leading her through it.
You should have seen her face when I took her back, three days later, to dig up what she had planted.
They come out looking like white porcelain. Some people look at them and assume there’s a fragility to them; I find their lacquer menacing, an aggressive whiteness instead of a colorless dawn light rising. Both shine, but only one eats away at you like indigestion when you look at it for too long.
They mewl. At the beginning. They make you want to protect them.
Small little things, your secrets, when they become separated from your body. Surely, it’s possible for them to grow while they are still hidden in the meat of your mind, but they don’t. Here, like this, you can see them for what they are.
When I was young, all my ghosts came out misshapen and full of teeth. I couldn’t find the words to seed them better. They clawed back at me, unhappy with their own existence. It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t want to be burdened with the upkeep of those monstrous, ugly things.
I tried to suggest that Lindy follow my footsteps, literally, as I showed her how to grind the nasty little things into the dirt until they pop in a satisfying small squirt of blood and ichor. You can use a toe, but the heel is better suited to the task, especially if they are quick moving.
She was horrified. I shrugged and let her take her ghost back to the guesthouse. We’re not worried about exposure of our secrets. The existence of magic isn’t a secret; it’s simple truth that the rest of the world keeps choosing to reject. Our real secrets grow up to be independent. They shuffle around in the dark woods that surround us.
She made it a little nest with old towels. She kept stroking the different textures on its back and belly, hard scales and something soft like goat leather. She couldn’t quite bring herself to sleep with it, near it, in its presence. I saw the lights on long into the night, the silhouette of her head doggedly pacing in the window, slowing before dawn, which rose to the sound of her keyboard clicking away in fits and starts.
I left her to it until midday, when the ignored beast’s whimpers and hissing had escalated to a keening that put everyone in our community on edge.
“If you’re going to keep it, you’ve got to feed it,” I said as soon as I entered her room, uninvited, but it seemed not unwelcome. She ignored my brusque and abrupt manner entirely.
“How?”
I turned and stalked out, as quickly as I’d intervened. She knew. I knew she knew.
When she found me later that afternoon, walking in the orchard, she had the thing tied to her like a baby, already seeming too heavy for the scarf she’d used, but it lay still enough. I could see the bitemark on her arm, small, almost dainty. I suspect it had not hurt much, if at all.
They don’t just take blood. You feed them something of yourself each time, a mouthful and a morsel. Small things you barely miss at first: the colors from your dreams. The flavor of a tomato fresh from the garden. The tingle just before your sneeze.
I meant to ask her what she’d fed the thing, maybe drive home the price being paid, but Lindy was unbridled. Her curiosity boiled over. She asked me question after question. So many that I began to get flustered, unused to hearing my own voice pouring out of me for so long. I wanted to get rid of her, so I borrowed words from a different wisdom altogether.
“I can’t help you,” I said, “until you can answer this question: your suffering, is it still dear to you?”
She didn’t answer, but her arms tightened around her swaddle. She stared at me so long that I was the one to look away, and I quickly found somewhere else to be.
That night she vivisected her ghost. We allowed it, not wanting to interfere, but it put everyone’s hackles up. Even an outsider must have seen the echoes of distress splashed in the air all over the village, not remnants of the ghost, but scattered debris from everyone who heard the process. Even I confessed to being a little afraid of her, afterwards, and I knew her best by then.
She needed to understand what it was, maybe? She thought herself a scientist of sorts. The most we’d ever done is examine the pieces after ending one, whether through might or starvation. It seemed cruel to peel back its layers, poke through to its pulsing organs. But there aren’t rules for ghosts, even unspoken ones, except for the plain human knowledge that your choices matter, in everything you do. In our community, we always notice how you treat others, even your ghosts.
She cut into it while it screamed.
Bane wanted to ask her what she found. I didn’t. I told him he was welcome to ask whatever he liked, but he didn’t want to ask for himself. At least, I think he never asked.
Three days later, she returned with dirt all over her clothes and three new ghosts. We all wondered who to pity more.
This time she kept them. She whispered more and more untold agonies into our earth and steadily dug up a flock of everything that could live outside her. A herd. A pack. A gathering for which there is no collective noun. It’s not natural to articulate and nurture so many ghosts all at once – no one had ever lived with more than one or two at a time.
Somehow, she managed to feed them all, though it quickly began to weaken her, plus the soul-tattering holes left by whatever price she paid. Whatever drove her the first time to learn how they tick and finally tock, whatever knowledge she had gained of exactly where to drive a knife to separate their ligaments exactly at the joint, she never used it again.
For the rest of the summer, she was surrounded by ghosts. They swarmed, hovering and circling and following and howling during the days. At night they would take turns roaming, their skittering claws a lullaby of unease. It became hard to distinguish them from the constant creaking rub of branch on branch in the forest; a sound most of us had once cherished.
They always returned to her before morning. Politely, kindly or perhaps unkindly, we said nothing. I said nothing.
I avoided her and the breathless little things. Their blank sameness made me uncomfortable. They were like looking into a funhouse mirror where the reflections are so fuzzy you can’t tell if the face is yours, receding uncomfortably into dark infinities. When they looked back at you, they all turned at the same time.
Even from far away, I could see them growing fat as she slowed to near stillness, too drained to go far. At night, though, the pitter pats of her typing raced, echoing as uncannily as the scratching footsteps of her ghosts.
I objected. In private, with only Bane to hear, as if that counted.
“Might have been a mistake to show her that particular trick,” he chided me. Or rather, he said it, simply, without caring much at all. I’m the one who wanted it to be a rebuke.
“Always less risk in keeping your own council,” he said.
I wanted to rail against that opinion, offered as a benign and incontestable observation. I didn’t. We went to sleep, together, although I lay awake far longer.
I called a convening, to discuss the summer’s hastening end, the moment when Lindy was scheduled to leave, to ask what our collective plans were.
“Like, a contingency?” asked Marta. “Why?”
“What if she tries to take them with her?” I asked, louder than I’d intended.
“Can’t be done,” said Jill.
“What if they kill her?” I pleaded.
“They seem vicious, don’t they? So exquisitely detailed and savage,” someone said. “And so very many,” said another. “She must be quite tormented. Young people these days.” The meeting disbanded, pleasantly.
In spite of myself, again, I went to talk to Lindy. She had taken to sitting in the early evening on the slight lip of the guesthouse foundation, watching her ghosts frolic in the grass. The white of their skin seemed to glow in the dimming light. I shuddered to be in their presence.
She did, in fact, plan to leave as scheduled, assuming her hive would follow her like a splitting colony following its queen to new lands. I explained the boundaries of our magic, the way our roots tie to the land, for better and worse. She, predictably, did not believe me.
How they howled, those little monsters, when they were left behind.
We tried to ignore them. There is a reasonably regular course to things when you stop feeding a ghost. They rage, they begin to go gaunt, they begin to conserve their energy, they wail like a lost child, a hurt animal, they become sharply skeletal, then sometimes they go still, sometimes they begin to shrink like a hard candy, sucked away at the edges until they’re gone. Letting them waste away like that is the worst way to do it. They’ll do anything to remain in this world, get you to bring them back to full health. A moment’s weakness and they’ll feed to full strength, slice through your defenses, drain you more than can be explained without spite. They’ll do their best to keep you immobilized after that. They’re dangerous, revived.
And what was she, without them, returned to her life in the city?
I was the only one who felt sure something was amiss.
When she left for the city, I started watching them. Like a bird watcher at first, curious and excited by every sighting, but a cataloguer more than a caretaker. Before I knew it, I was immersed in their culture, watching their interactions, their choices. I was sure I understood them all.
They didn’t seem to slow. They didn’t seem to shrink. One month, two. Deep to solstice, the ghosts would not fade, the whole phalanx of them gradually becoming synchronized. Unsettling, everyone agreed, but chose to plaster over with patience.
They were almost mine by now, even if I didn’t know how they’d been born. Bane listened when I found myself stuck between possessiveness and self-righteousness. What do we owe the ghosts of other people? And what do we owe them if they’ve been abandoned?
She’s walked away, we thought, we don’t need to worry about who she is, what she is capable of. Whatever tenderness might prevent her from starving the little things that parted the grass like a nest of snakes, that stood in the night near our houses shining as white as a dream of teeth, whatever weakness was part of her person, it couldn’t matter from so far away. Nothing beats geography for surviving the separation. Regardless, it was her choice. You cannot only respect the right to good decisions. I know. I know that.
I went to see her.
I mean, I didn’t go to see her, I went to the city to watch her. Without being seen myself. I wanted to know.
She seemed wild, with the lanky half-grace of a coyote, from the moment she left her apartment. She was fearsome throughout the day, even when no one else was near. I managed to find a way to peer into her windows, to watch what would happen when she thought she was completely alone.
She sagged, ever so slightly, when the door shut and she was home at last. I wondered if it was relief or defeat. I could see through the two windows of her living space, the couch near the dining table across the counter from the galley kitchen. She fixed dinner and ate, then sat on the couch, knees pulled in and chin tucked into them. She sat for a long time. Without an obvious cue, she got up and went to bed, not bothering to change her clothes. She rose in the morning and made a smiling effort with her face when she closed the apartment door behind her.
I watched her three nights in a row with little variation.
Somehow, I decided, she was feeding the little monsters remotely. It was impossible, but it was also the best explanation for how they were surviving and how drained she seemed, of energy and joy and curiosity.
I planned, on the fourth morning, to confront her on the street outside of her building. But she did not rise on schedule and begin the slow heavy bustling of her day. She stayed in bed. I worried. I finagled my way into her building and knocked on the door. Thank goodness she answered.
Confusion flickered in her face as she tried to place my familiar face, then winked out as she fell. She collapsed half in and half out of the doorway, and I’m afraid of what it looked like when I dragged her back into the apartment. Like a field mouse who’s felled a squirrel, I’m sure. Unsettling, even if you are too sheltered to believe in evil.
This was, you’ll remember, my doing. The revelation, the power given, the consequences. I tried not to let her limbs get rubbed raw on the rug, but her knees looked red anyway when I finally got her to the couch.
She came to when I crushed a stem of bugsbane under her nose. She cried. She cried with me, for me, at me. I held her.
You could feel how she was hollowed out. Like a tree felled by a storm, left long enough that you might lean against it and feel it give way. There’s nothing left but the look of a tree. Either you dislodge it from where it stands in the mud and watch it roll, or you crash right through into the soft mess of bugs and splinters held together by appearances.
I let her tire and fall asleep. I wanted to carry her like a baby to her bed, tuck her in, but I’m hollow too, like pipes. I’ve long since adjusted to being this way, but too much pressure or the wrong kind and I bend. I drew a woolen blanket over her, hoping the feel of something soft and real might help ground her, then waited for her to wake up so we could head back to the wild, where all her ghosts prowled.
It was nearly midnight when we rolled in, the headlights on my car tentative, the warmer light of older bulbs through aging glass. We had run out of things to say, and I couldn’t answer any of the questions she had, as obvious and reasonable as they were. What now, what next? How do we fix this?
She brazenly assumed I was invested in fixing her. But the truth was close enough that I didn’t argue. I told her a story of wandering in the woods after a storm once, when the ground was still wet and the raindrops still rolling off of tilted leaves. We knew the lightning had hit something close to home, but I found it, still smoking, a small-ish tree, now burnt through the core. That spring, I went back to visit and found that the char had fallen away, but the rest of the tree had survived and was growing, around instead of straight up, with a nest of some kind in the cavity. So.
She looked at me with betrayed confusion. The look of someone who is hurt and surprised to find they are completely misunderstood. After that, we grew silent.
Bane met us. He held my hand as we walked to the meeting house, the night air fizzing with something not quite ozone, and we knew her ghosts would come quickly rushing in from wherever they were wandering in the fields and forest. We did not lock the door.
What did we expect, as we all sat there, waiting? Our practice is to keep our minds more open by leaving our mouths mostly closed. Human nature is to cling to one opinion more than others, if we commit to it by putting it into words. I look back and wonder what the other options were, what we were prepared to do if things had gone differently.
The whole pack tumbled in. They gamboled like lion cubs, their deadly future peeking through comical bumbling. They flowed and tangled like an octopus passing itself through a narrow opening, unslowed by a bottleneck, triggering awe and shudders in the deep spine. They billowed in and filled the room like volcanic ash. They came vulnerable. They came hungry.
I sat by Lindy. I meant to watch her, but I was distracted by the ghosts, her ghosts. The almost-mine ghosts.
She laughed.
I turned. Her eyes wide, the grin was still in the process of blooming. It was a smile full of relief and uncomplicated joy and surprise and silk. How easy it opened.
“I couldn’t imagine what they were growing into,” she said. “Where I couldn’t see them.”
Jill and Marta and even Bane nodded and clucked as if something had become clear to them all.
“They’re so small,” she said, laughing again in erratic bursts. “They’re…boring.”
Lindy smiled beatifically, a sun coming to light this tastefully somber meeting room. The ghosts did what ghosts do not – they began to fade. It happens in movies, in oversweet cliché . But there’s something devastating in watching something in this world, of this world, dissolve into a mist, into nothingness. The pack turned and headed for the door, to finish evaporating in the woods, in the starlit meadow, the smallest ones gone before they left the building.
I ran after them.
One slowed, paused to stare at me.
I recognized it, the near twin of my own, long gone. Like seeing your own child’s eyes and quirk in a strange toddler’s face, decades misplaced. The nose all wrong, the jawline angled where your beloved was round, yet so very, deeply, painfully familiar that you wonder if it’s not a new being at all, but your very own, however many ways that is obviously impossible. The desire to hope is drawn into your lungs as you gasp in recognition.
I remembered why I came to this odd haven in the first place.
I should not have picked it up. It fit into a single palm, curved to hide my theft. It stayed solid in those moments when everyone filed out of the meeting house, using their bodies to calmly stitch the yellow man-made spills of light to the cold blue of moonlight, embroidering the seam between civilization, if that’s what you might call our collective, and the unknown. No, the unknowable. We watched the ghosts finish dissipating.
“That’s a new one,” said Jill.
Marta held Lindy by both shoulders, waited until she met her gaze, and then drew her in for a hug. I couldn’t hear, from where I stood, halfway into the meadow, whether Lindy’s yelp was a last hysterical giggle or a single sob. She returned the embrace.
I didn’t want to draw more attention my way, so I slipped the little thing into the pocket of my fleece, hoping it wouldn’t gnaw through, and came back to the fold. We celebrated with warmed and steeped wine, singing and telling stories until near dawn, stretching out the blessing of a successful healing.
Lindy called a car to take her back to her real life, as she described it, worried that she might offend us, but equally worried that we might feel some claim on her. Her eyes darted to me when she said that. She left with lightening steps, near dancing by the time she tossed herself into the car.
I found an excuse to go to the orchard alone, exhausted but unable to rest. Finally alone, I took the ghost from my pocket. An alabaster lump. Barely moving, but by design not injury. Confident and quiet little thing. Implacable. I know this ghost, even if I mistook its mother.
Lindy is better suited to this world than I. She devours expectations that shaped me. We aren’t much alike at all, even if I wanted so dearly to see a match in our angles. The acceptance stings.
It turns into a grief that tugs at my bones, cold and heavy as steel in snow. Gravity bends me where I sit, holding this ghost as it nuzzles into my corners, one after the other, looking to feed. I relearn it, stroking its skin over and over with a single finger until its curves are as familiar as my own. I offer it a sip of salt memories, of licking lips after a day at the beach, the same taste as tears amassing, not yet dropped.
Through the trees, the village council arrives. Jill is grinning, Bane is laughing along to a conversation as they walk. Marta, with a terribly undignified and oversized plastic bat, yanks my little monster out of the cradle of my arms before I can react, my reflexes syrupy with self-pity. She tosses and whacks the thing, watching it fly a few feet in a satisfying arc. It scampers back only to be walloped by Bane’s tennis racket before it reaches me. He pauses to pose in perfect follow through before returning to a good point he was making to Jill, pleased with himself.
No one validates my misery by talking to me, they just batter the ghost, over and over and over, until I finally give in. With a tear in my eye and a laugh that bubbles up from old wounds that will heal again, Marta lets me grab her bat, and I end this business.
Ghosts are quite fragile, really; just a tap and it shatters over a pile of fallen fruit. But you must do it yourself. The arms around me as we walk back are stronger than the things we do not say.
Shana Ross bought her first computer working the graveyard shift in a windchime factory, then spent a good while authoring a stable life before finally turning her attention to the page in 2018. Her work has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, Ruminate, Bowery Gothic, Kissing Dynamite, Writers Resist and more. She is the recipient of a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly. She holds both a BA and MBA from Yale and rarely tweets @shanakatzross.