I was around eight years old when I realized (as did my family) that I had a unique memory. “Photographic”, they called it. It’s nothing like a photograph.
I always assumed everyone could recall their first day of preschool, or the names of kids they met only once at the arcade. But at eleven years old- my sister Cammie was chosen for a game show on the radio.
Without hesitation, she chose me as her teammate to bring with. She could have chosen either of our parents, or even our older brother, Charlie, who was in college. She could have picked one of her friends, eighth graders like herself. But she chose me.
I remember sitting around the kitchen table, eating dinner, the pitch black Midwest winter night just outside the giant kitchen window behind my dad. He and my mom were totally supportive of the idea.
He had offered even to drive us to the radio station.
“I would have chosen you too, Bobbie” my mom had said, laughing. “You remember every weird fact ever.”
It was true. I could close my eyes and see every house my parents had ever brought us to. I could draw the floor plans if I wanted to. My siblings would ask me to retell stories or movie plots on long car rides.
But it wasn’t until the radio show, and my sister choosing me as her person, that I knew I had something special.
I can still remember going to bed that night after dinner feeling excited. I finally fell asleep in my bed, pressed up against the wall that divided my room from my sister’s. Her voice through the vent above my bed, saying goodnight like she did every night. The smell of dust on the furnace. The sound of old, creaking boards directly above me in the cold attic. That was the last night I was happy to have my amazing memory. To this day, I wish I could forget what happened next.
I wish I could tell you we won the game show. I wish I could tell you, with incredible detail, what it was like at the studio. Maybe then, when I close my eyes I would see all of that, and not the black, whipping night blurring past me as I ran. I would feel the rush of anticipation and my sisters hand squeezing mine, instead of cold, wet gravel scraping my cheek and palms from when I tried to crawl away on two sprained ankles. I would hear the producers cue and the canned audience applause, not the frantic, desperate flapping of leathery wings as they neared.
Maybe I would have won a t-shirt that still sits in my dresser. Maybe my sister would have won the thousand dollar prize. Maybe I would sleep with my door unlocked. I’ll never know. What I do know, without any shadow of a doubt, is that I would not have survived any of it if my family hadn’t believed me. To this day, it is the thing I am most grateful for in the entire world.
It was the day after that dinner, a Tuesday, February 17th. School had been agonizingly slow, as I knew it would be all week waiting for Friday. It was all we could talk about on the way home. For years, I had walked to school with Yuki and my best friend Dominic, who lived on the street perpendicular to mine. The creek crossed under Citrine Drive and wound it’s way along Dominic’s backyard. There are hundreds of childhood memories in my head, of he and I and our siblings jumping over the creek, building bridges from his yard over the creek to the field behind the rec center. Sliding on the ice in the winter, or half-assed fishing and turtle catching in the summer. I always had envied my friends who could walk right from their back door to the our little winding creek.
It was cold, but hadn’t snowed for a few weeks. There were still some small patches of ice on the sidewalk, but most of it had melted, along with the slurry-gray mounds of stale snow along the curbs and in small scattered patches on the grass. I had balked at my mother’s suggestion to wear a skirt and heels to the radio show.
There was massive construction happening on the other side of the creek. They were building a stupid business center on the field we used to play kickball on, the crane was visible between two houses behind us. Snow was due that weekend and everything would be coated and beautiful again.
The downside of a blanket of snow was the eerie quiet it caused, and how hard it was to sleep at night when the moonlight and the snow were so bright, even with my eyes closed.
It was nearing 6pm and the mid-February sky was already darkening. We had stopped under the flickering gold streetlight at the corner of Citrine and Amethyst, my street. I remember huddling close in a group, talking. I remember the wind picking up and the edges of the sky glowing purple behind the houses along Citrine.
This was when my oldest brother, on break for one more week drove up to the corner in our mom’s sedan.
“Hey Bobbie-“ he had called, giving my friends a little wave that they all returned. He was returning some jeans to the mall and wanted me to come with.
It was rare Charlie asked me to do anything. I think about that a lot. Had he paid more attention to me before that night- would i have gotten in the car? Would things have been different? I think about all the choices I made that led to what happened- but none as much as the decision to get into the car with my brother instead of walking home that evening.
Maybe I wouldn’t sleep in my closet. Maybe I would have a family of my own. I’ll never know. Then again, maybe we would have never seen Charlie again.
If you asked, I could tell you every moment of that trip to the mall. The conversation we had- mainly Charlie asking if things fit him or were flattering. Charlie had come out to our parents a few months before that night (they were not surprised, or phased).
He had told me that night that he had gone to a gay bar and felt underdressed and now he felt pressured to be fashionable. The last thing Charlie said to me before we got in that damned car was,
“It’s funny, even if you’re different- there’s still pressure to be the same”.
At 8:53 pm, on Tuesday, February 17th of 1998, Charlie and I were in the front seat of our mother’s 1995 maroon Lumina. We were at the final stop sign of the ride home, it was 38 degrees outside and Pearl Jam’s Ten was in the CD player.
We were at the corner of Pondside and Citrine, about to turn left into our neighborhood and home to our family. Our mother had lasagna waiting for us. We were third in line at the three-way stop.
On Charlie’s side of the street was Yuki’s house- with pretty lanterns lining the paved path to the courtyard of their U-ranch home. On my side, past my window, was the pond. The path that led around the pond and up the hill was bright at the edges from the streetlight, but quickly faded to black- with only the occasional twinkle of a back porch light in the distance. The remains of the moon tower built in the 70s were barely discernible against the sky. Only via the absence of stars in the shape of the structure that was only recognizable to those of us who grew up there. It was a scene that had made me feel small and afraid countless times. The cold radiating from the window made me feel even more anxious, though now I realize that was adrenaline- an ancient alarm system going off in my bloodstream. Survival mode manifesting in goosebumps and what I mistook for the heebie-jeebies.
The black-black of the moon tower against the blue-black of the sky shifted as my eyes stared and adjusted. I had thought about a sleepover game Dominic and I had played when we were in third grade- staring at each other’s faces in the dark until they morphed and changed and threw us into giggle fits. It wasn’t until the bottom left star above the hill disappeared that I realized it wasn’t my eyes playing tricks on me. It wasn’t until the pitch grew larger that I opened my mouth to say something. Charlie was deep in the chorus of Evenflow and never heard it coming.
It was a low whistle- like an old man out for a walk- two notes, one high and one lower. It repeated again louder, and I had turned to tell Charlie when I saw the red light of the brake lights of the car in front of us fade from his face as he finally saw what was coming.
Only it hadn’t come from the pitch black over the pond- it came from the other side, slamming into the driver’s side of the car in front of us- shattering the glass into a hailstorm crashing onto our windshield. The impact was so intense that both left wheels had lifted off the ground.
Charlie initially cursed loudly and went to open his door to help. I had screamed at him not to but I barely got a word out before a penetrating silent vacuum filled the air around me- sucking the air from my lungs. Seconds later, my window was shattering over me, glass stinging my cheek and the wind whipping my blood across my face into my mouth as I screamed. I knew before I opened my eyes that it wasn’t just an accident- that there was no car or bike or even human assailant. I knew before I pried my eyes open, that everything I had feared as a child, that all the myths and legends and ghost stories- were real. I knew it wasn’t bats, or birds- I knew as I felt frantic clawing at the nylon remains of my seatbelt- that it was a monster. Not a cute, storybook monster- but an ancient, angry and bitter creature. One that had been there long before I had, or the town had, or even people had. The last thing I saw before I felt hooks sink into my shoulders and was lifted into the black swirling cold, was Charlie slumped over the steering column- Eddie Vedder’s voice still calling out to me until I couldn’t hear him anymore.
Not for one second did I think it was a dream. The cold made sure of that. My legs heavily dragging across the broken glass of the car window, ripping my jeans and slamming my legs into the frame- I knew it was real. The biting night sky whipping around as I violently sank a few feet as the hooks in my shoulder began to slip. I experienced a new level of pain as I felt jagged talons pierce my side and I folded forward, as I was yanked backwards into the pitch. I felt another agonizing piercing on the other side of my torso before being yanked up away from the earth and everything I had ever known. I was pulled into the pitch past the streetlights, but whatever had me was struggling.
I fell twenty feet onto the ice hard gravel path but wasn’t freed. Violent, metallic screams flooded my ears and bones as my forehead and chin were scraped along the gravel path. I desperately clawed at the earth, trying to find anything to grip but only found fistfuls of gravel and goose shit. The talons in my side ripped out suddenly and I felt a sickening oozing coming from my sides. I had tried to roll over to my knees but the pain on each side was so horrible I felt bile swelling in my throat.
A patch of dirty snow was inches away and I tried to crawl towards it to try to ice my bleeding injuries.
That was when I felt leathery whips on my face and violent snags in my hair, pulling and snapping. My stomach lurched as again, I was yanked up into the night, higher into my own icy, black death. I tried desperately to grasp on to whatever had me, terrified to fall as we climbed higher.
The cold stung my raw shoulders and hips and I felt the blood freezing. The deep scrapes on my knees and face burned with the wind, feeling like icy razors scraping my cheekbones. My numb fingers found a thick, velvety limb- coarse hair bristling and slipping under my blood. Six daggers dug into my skull and neck. Even over the roar of the wind and the pounding of wings I could hear a horrible scraping and squeaking of claws on my skull- from the inside.
I struggled to breathe, blood and vomit filled my mouth and tears threatened to suffocate me. Suddenly the little air that I had in my lungs was forced out violently as my midsection was slammed into the highest beam on the moon tower, the crunching of my ribs was unmistakable. My vision and even my own thoughts darkened with what I can only describe as wetness. Later, I would be told that my ribs were so violently broken that they pierced my lung.
For a moment, the moon illuminated my nightmare. I was nauseatingly high up, one eye was swollen shut but I could see the frozen pond, dull and distant. Closer, I could see a row of houses- their windows glowing but cruelly out of reach. One house still had Christmas lights up, complete with a giant light-up plastic mold Santa Claus tied to their chimney. It felt wrong and cruel- a warm and happy impossibility. I looked down to see a stream of my blood pouring from my body in a steady flow, then broken by an aggressive gust of icy cold wind.I choked on a scream as I was grabbed again, talons stretching out the existing wounds on my shoulders- and birthing brand new ones on my lower back. I couldn’t hear my own screams over the wind and the angry, metallic shrieks like barbed wire on a rusted trampoline.
I remember at this point, I could see the pond shrinking south of me as once again my host struggled with it’s prey. Suddenly, we dropped right above the creek. My legs slammed into the fence surrounding the construction site. The crane looming over us, the two security floodlights at it’s base finally providing light.
The construction site was deep in the ground, a parking garage with a basement level built to be tornado proof.
I’ve heard countless times from other people with violent experiences, that they forget chunks of their trauma, or that they blacked out. I try not to seethe with jealousy. If I could forget any of it, I would want to forget what I saw under those garish, white construction lights.
I can remember every tiny, ice cold pebble digging into my skin. The shimmering bokeh on my tear-soaked lashes. The gritty, jagged pain of my pulverized rib bones. I remember the smell: a mix of cold sweat- like when our dad would come home after his jogs- diesel, and blood. There was another smell coming from the base of the crane- sickly sweet like almond extract gone bad.
Behind the crane was a trailer, the paneling was beige and a huge green tin sign had read “Argen Construction”. I thought for a moment that a phone might be inside. I pulled myself up onto my knees and looked around- it was difficult since my left eye was useless and my right one was full of tears and blood. My assailant was nowhere in sight- I thought maybe it had gotten injured or caught on the fence. Stupid. I know now that it simply was rousing it’s companion- because it was dinner time. I was an offering. Like when my cat Nala would bring me a dead robin. Here I was, with my wings ripped off.
I was halfway to the trailer, limping as fast as I could. Every step was excruciating, breathing was like pins and needles. Even with my sobbing hyperventilating- I heard it. I hear it now. I can always hear it. The two-toned whistle. Haunting and dreadful- like even if I hadn’t been at death’s door- that tone would still have shaken me. Like a doomsday alarm. Like useless sirens wailing as meteors crash into the boiling sea.
Under the whistle, a thick, wet breath. Echoing from beneath the base of the crane. A dark recess in the cold wet ground, with darkness somehow leaking from it. Darkness so black that only a staccatoed steam was visible- something was breathing.
I wish I could tell you that the construction unearthed something ethereal- a beautiful sleeping giant- an angel- a groundbreaking discovery.
But I don’t even think it was the construction. I just think she’s always been here. Maybe for years she had survived on squirrels, or deer. Maybe she thawed during a warm winter. Maybe she was left behind.
The first thing I saw was the tattered, jagged tips of wings, bat-like and narrow, dark-veined like bruised plum skin. Her pulse visibly pumping through veins that raised and ripped through her paper-thin skin stretching over her wings so tightly it seemed painful just to exist. Like she wasn’t finished yet, like she had been birthed from the earth prematurely and she was angry. Her hair was matted in clumps but where it was free it was long enough to drag along the ground, slimy and cold and full of dirt, leaves and dirty snow. Her scalp was suffering. I could see every follicle piercing her scalp, like diseased plant roots- bulbous and swollen. Open sores at her hairline showed what I can only stomach to explain as insect activity. Layers of sick, sheer skin being actively eaten away by miasis, forehead wrinkles deep and scarred into place. She had no eyebrows or lashes that I could see from my crouched hiding position. Her nose was just a cavity- like a Halloween skull- also swarming with parasites. When she breathed in- a flapping rippled down her face, and wetness dripped over her mouth.
Her mouth.
Years later, an art teacher had told me that while he enjoyed my monstrous horror drawings- that even special effects departments had boundaries and I would be unlikely to get hired if I didn’t tone it down or attempt to make them more realistic. If only he had known I was following his rule: draw what you know.
She had the familiar sagging of a toothless old woman, with flat, cracked, corpse-like lips. But then she parted them. The rot was dizzying. Her gums had been clawed away, scabs and scars in thick bands of roped grayish mauve flesh. Her top and bottom jaw bones were not simply bared- they were jagged, layered razors. Filed. But not with anything modern or sharp or clean. Time, madness and desperation had filed and shaped that nightmare maw. Makeshift teeth of rocks had been manically shoved under the skin- adhered with infection and growth. The entire left side of her face was worn through layer by layer, her tongue slipping in and out of what should have been her throat. Sharp, gaunt collarbones literally piercing through that tissue-like skin, dark rancid blood pooling in the deep recess of her collar. She had one misshapen breast, the left side of her chest was deeply scarred and textured- as though it had been burned. Her fingers were bones with jagged talons blackened at the tips. Thick scar tissue marred her shoulders where her wings took her from somewhat humanoid to monstrous. Scars everywhere. Rotting wounds dripped larvae and blood onto the frozen ground. I wish I could forget the momentary warmth I felt as urine poured down my legs- immediately freezing and burning- sticking my jeans to my razed bloody shins.
I tore myself away from staring at her to look for an escape. She had chosen her feeding place well. The deep recess of the site was the length of a football field- since that’s what the field had once been. High walls of frozen earth surrounded us on three sides, climbing up in my condition would have been impossible. There was a ramp at the far entrance but I wouldn’t have made it past her. Only behind me was the fence I had slammed into on the way in, the creek only a few yards from that- and then a row of backyards of houses that included Dominic’s. I had cried then. I cried thinking that only a few minutes away, my best friend was probably getting ready for bed. That he would always remember the night before he woke up to find out his best friend was dead. He had no idea that my blood was spilling all over the places we had run and played. He was warm, with his own mom just feet away. I sobbed then. Thinking of my own mother. It wasn’t the idea of her finding out too, or knowing I would never see her again- it was a guttural, instinctual painful need for her. It was like being too far underwater and being out of breath- kicking as fast as I can but knowing I wouldn’t make it. I needed her but wouldn’t make it to the surface- to her.
My sobbing had given me away. That horrible metallic sound reverberated around me and I remembered- I was being fed- she was feeding me to something. I had taken a deep breath, bracing myself for the pain; and made for the fence. Before my feet even hit the ground- her claws were in my neck. She flung me further from the trailer and onto the cement that had been poured a few warmer months ago. I gave up, I’ll be honest. I accepted that I was going to die. Then I had heard something unexpected- and sickening. Small, furtive movements. Unmistakable vocalizations. Even just from primal grunting and wet groans- I knew. I knew it was young, and I knew it was human.
I felt her toxic breath on me before I realized she had moved. She paused for a second, mapping the wounds she had inflicted- so that she could use them again as grips. That was when she dug in so tight into the openings on my shoulders that I could feel her nails were deep inside my muscles and even the tips of her actual fingers were deep inside the wounds. She flung me further across the cement- closer to the sickening furtive movement. I squeezed my eyes shut. I smelled rancid, organic decay- and the unmistakable odor of feces. I felt small, fluttering fingers on my neck. Small. Little.
Child-like.
I made the inevitable mistake of opening my eyes. I saw dirty blonde hair, tinged with green, draped across tiny feet. Human feet. Baby feet.
He was maybe three. Dirty and small. His fingernails were long and sharpened to a point. He smiled and thick mucus stretched across several blackened sharp teeth. He was missing some, but what remained were crooked, stained and diseased, stuck in purple rotten gums.
Instead of chubby rosy cheeks, he had hollow sunken grey skin. The bags under his eyes were purple and veined. Instead of bright, youthful eyes, there were haunted orbs, devoid of color. Faded milky irises deformed around dark soulless pupils. He wore what at one time had been pajamas. Under layers of blood and grime, little trains chugged across his small body in a pattern.
The sobs had returned from their hiding place in my chest. I had felt the need to comfort this small broken doll of a child. That’s when he lunged. His broken glass mouth sinking deep into my forearm. The pain was unbelievable, bright and loud like the headlights of a truck barreling down on you. I pulled away and heard a horrifying squelching sound as my forearm flesh ripped and hung from his tiny plump lips. I gagged as he hungrily shoved my skin into his mouth. He ran to the monster, clinging to her body, his stubby hands sinking into her rotting fruit skin.
I held my hand tightly against my forearm, watching the blood spill in tributaries between my fingers and join in a river down my arm, dripping down to the ground. It began to snow. Tiny delicate laceworks fell into and melted into the steaming pools of blood at my feet. A disgusting gurgling sound brought me back and I watched in horror as the little boy nursed from the nightmare’s surviving breast. Thick blood spilled from the sides of his mouth as she gently swept the hair from his face.
Years later, I would look up the missing childrens database online. I would narrow my search to my state, select the birth year, clumsily guess at the date missing. It would take me six days and two breakdowns- but I would find him- along with an inaccurate age-progression picture. His parents had named him Mason. He was a twin. He had a baby sister and a dog. He went missing from a family camping trip when he and his brother were one.
But I didn’t know any of that when I watched him wash down my flesh with bloody breast milk from a demon I hadn’t known existed a few hours earlier. Hours earlier I had been at a mall for Christ sake. The mall, with Charlie.
I guess remembering my brother’s body hanging limply across the steering column had jarred me into action. Knowing he wasn’t even a football field away from me got me moving. If I could get over the fence, I could make a beeline for Dominic’s backyard, I would just have to jump over the mostly frozen creek to get there. Then I could run to his parents’ window and have them call the police. I could see the yellow square in the dark that was the sliding glass door to their kitchen from where I was. If I ran through their house as a shortcut, I could run down their driveway and straight down my street to my house. My heart broke a little as I thought of my parents and my sister beginning to worry about us as we were only a block away fighting for our lives.
But if I got to the far end of the fence, before the incline up- I could get to Charlie- keep him safe, keep him warm and talking until the ambulance arrived. Surely somebody had called, the impact on the the cars was so loud- the other driver surely had a car phone or maybe a cell phone. Maybe even Yuki’s Akita puppy Mochi had heard and was barking up a storm. Maybe the police were already there.
For a moment, I thought of grabbing the boy, even if he bit me, I would carry him on my back and get him away from her, get him home to his family. But even as I stood there, I could barely hold myself up, the world had started to spin around me, blood thickly but steadily pooling in my shoes, my bra and at the top of my jeans.
A few feet from my right lay a rubble pile, not large but mainly chunks of rebar and concrete. I had barely made a few inches of progress towards it when her metallic screeching again assaulted my senses. My hands covering my ears, I shuffled towards the pile and grabbed a chunk of the rubble- a crude, misshapen and awkward hammer to wield against an impossible enemy. A rusted, twisted metal handle with a heavy and uneven weight of concrete, hard to hold and even harder to swing- but it was all I had- and I knew it only had to get to the weakest part of her. I only had to incapacitate her long enough to get within earshot of Dominic’s house- it couldn’t be much past 10 pm, someone would have to hear me.
I gripped my shoddy weapon tightly at my chest with both hands and felt her swoop down violently as I dove for a cement tunnel, her empty-handed dive throwing her balance off. I scrambled awkwardly towards the far end of the tunnel as I heard her raspy wings pulling her upwards before her second strike. Instead of waiting for her to cut me off at the tunnel, I ran as fast as I could, darting from the opening and towards the sickly-sweet smelling of her nest. The only thing between the fence and me was a blonde baby boy. Blood swirled in my mouth and a gritty, sharp feeling forced me to spit. I don’t know why the image of my tooth in my hand covered in blood triggered a response in me then but it did.
I knew I was dying. Not just that I was going to die- that this monster my parents had never imagined in their worst nightmares would take their daughter away forever and they would never even have her body to bury- but that I currently and actively was dying.
The damage to my ribs, lungs, spleen and arm would kill me if the blood loss or hypothermia didn’t do it first. I knew I was dying and it turned me into a monster too.
I ran, not straight for the fence, but for her nest, I could hear her above me, barreling down. I ran right towards that little boy and swung a twenty pound chunk of concrete down on his tiny hand, smashing it into the ground. The sound he made wakes me up at night to this day. His screams were animal-like and I dropped my weapon to cover my ears. The rusted metal screaming from the sky crashed down like a bomb and I ran. I didn’t look back. I ran to the fence and with all the strength I had left, I pulled myself up, shoving my foot into a diamond-shaped hole made by the chain-link. I had hopped a thousand fences this way in my life and to this day I am grateful I had the experience.
My bleeding hands found the freezing, horizontal pipe of the top of the fence and groaned in pain as I hefted myself over. All the fence hopping experience in the world wouldn’t have made climbing with shattered ribs and bleeding flanks any less impossible and I could only crash to the ground. Both ankles jarred into the frozen ground and my scream stuck in my throat, caught on blood and bile, escaping only as a choking sob.
Her violent, crazed screams were still on the ground as she tended to her baby. I didn’t let guilt slow me down, I ran as fast as I could for maybe six feet before my ankles gave out. Dominic’s house was all I could see, a tunnel of black closing in on my vision. I never looked back. I gripped my fingers into the frosty ground, pulling myself up. I hobbled, sprinting across the dark field. The night sky above me swirling with snow flurries. My busted, bloody fingers fumbling at my jacket zipper. I could see the flickering blue glow of late-night tv coming from Mr and Mrs Rossi’s bedroom. The tunnel grew smaller and I could see less and less.
Bawling, I forced my arms out of my jacket as I reached the bank of the creek. Dominic and I had spent summers of our childhood testing the width of the creek along its entirety and I knew that the bend behind his house was not jumpable. My toes slipped over the crest of land and razor sharp talons slashed at my hands. I screamed and screamed and swung my jacket into the writhing storm of limbs and wings above me, feeling solid impact on one of the swings. I let go of my jacket and flung myself across the frozen creek, landing with a foot left, my feet crushing through the glass-thin ice and my ankles crumpling beneath me. I could only see a pinhole I’m front of me- a flickering blue of tv light. I could hear her above me, driving down finally for the kill. Her metallic screams, and the deafening boom of Mr Rossi’s handgun, the one I never even knew he had.
He was standing on the back porch, one hand over his head, gun pointed to the sky. Mrs Rossi stood next to him, Dominic’s baseball bat in her hands. The last thing I saw was the golden, warm glow of the Rossi kitchen, and the pinhole closing as the world darkened around me.
I’ve read the statements Mr and Mrs Rossi gave to the police. That they heard what they thought were animal noises behind the house, but when they opened the back door, they heard human screaming as well. They saw a large, dark shape in the night but only for a second before they saw my body slumped over, my fingers barely making it to their property. They had called 911 and then my parents. The ambulance that brought my brother and the other driver to the hospital had only arrived thirty minutes before mine did. My dad had run to the Rossi house while my poor confused and frantic mother rode to the hospital with Cammie and our neighbor.
When my dad and I recently recalled the events of that night, I cried hearing the usually funny and goofy man choke up remembering seeing me slumped over Mrs Rossi like a rag doll, her white robe covered in my blood. He said that my face was so bruised and swollen that he thought an animal had mauled my face. He wasn’t exactly wrong. Mr Rossi had stood guard with the bat until the police and EMTs arrived.
Animal control didn’t press me too hard. In fact, the vaguer and foggier my memory was, the happier they seemed. I knew that if I told the truth, I would be locked up, medicated, or assumed to be a victim of something else. A monster woman from the sky. Before I even tried to say it out loud, I knew better and feigned memory loss. To this day the official story is two cars on Pondside were struck by a wild animal, and the passenger of one of the cars was attacked and dragged by the animal until a neighbor heard the commotion and fired a gun, scaring the animal off. While I was in the hospital, a handful of flowers, candles and teddy bears were left at the stop sign.
Charlie doesn’t remember anything. He says the last thing he can recall is running to the car in the parking lot and turning the heat on, before pulling the car around for me. I’m actually happy this is the last thing he remembers. I wonder if he’s telling the truth.
Cammie would come in my room at night for years. She would sit on the floor next to my bed, with her fuzzy Disney blanket draped over her shoulders. She knew the whole story from beginning to end- even about Mason- a detail I had kept from my parents. Cam and I would stay up together until the sun came up, our eyes locked on the window in my room, the one facing south. Some nights she would get in bed with me; both of us sitting with our backs against the wall, our shoulders resting on one another’s, both of us looking at the window, scanning every inch of the gray blue pitch fading to flint every morning- searching for a growing speck of black.
My parents- proud pacifists, had purchased a gun each, and a few years later they had Cammie and I in judo classes. But the best thing they did was believe me. Even that first night, after the first surgery, they had listened intently, never interrupting or telling me I was imagining things or lying. However, it was made it very clear that while our home was a safe space- we weren’t to talk about it outside it’s walls.
I know she’s still out there, I know Mason is too. Even after I moved away, my mom would send newspaper articles, first clippings in the mail, then eventually links in text messages as time went on. Police blotters about animal activity, missing dogs, unexplained accidents- and missing blonde boys. She took one every few years, from different areas, and I thought initially maybe she had killed or eaten Mason once he was too old. Until I saw them both one night. I had heard that whistle and didn’t even need to look up, but I did. But that’s a story for another time.