Cuckoo

by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Monica only cried harder. She felt as though something in her chest was tearing open, as though behind the frail cage of her ribs was a terrible box with no smell and no feel to it, a box that had been misheard and unseen, that had never existed at all, and she had opened it up without looking and shoved her daughter inside. She had never liked her daughter. She felt it now, a thought she’d kept wriggling under her thumbnail like an earwig for seventeen years. She had never liked Casey. “I’m a terrible mother,” she wailed.

Casey left, looking puzzled. A few moments later, a burst of Wayne’s laughter came from the den. She’s telling them all I’m crazy, thought Monica, scrubbing fiercely at a smear of oily butter. They’re laughing at me. She felt sick to her stomach. Something was wrong. Something was wrong with Casey, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. They’d taken the daughter she’d hated all her life, whose mouth at her breast had felt like a leech’s boneless orifice, who she’d left one day at six months old in the back seat of their old sedan when it was ninety-five degrees. She could still remember the red flush of Casey’s skin, the slick of sweat on her small body. She’d stood beside the car and stared at her child sitting slumped half-conscious in her car seat, and wondered what would happen if she just waited half an hour. That feeling that had always lain between them, unspoken, uncomprehended. Now it was gone. Now there was … nothing. Laughter echoed in her ears.

Sometimes at night Oji would call, and if Jo reached the phone before her mother he would say, voice trembling with grief and fury: “I love you. There is nothing wrong with you, my brave girl,” and she would mumble something back, feeling dead, feeling like meat rotting on a scaffolding of bone.

“Good morning, Mrs. Glover,” Betty and the rest of her clique chorused, and for a moment they sounded so needy, so pitifully desperate for this shriveled cunt’s approval, that Nadine forgot to hate them. They were just stupid little babies.

Gabe thought it was pretty fuckin’ bold of a guy forcing teenagers to work his ranch land for free to carp about their lack of calluses, a sentiment he saw reflected in more than one hard, angry face around the fire.

The other girl smiled. Her lips parted as she leaned in. Their mouths came together and she tasted like morning breath and cinnamon, like sweat and orange juice and pussy, gross and hot and perfect. Sucking and nipping. Spit between them when they parted to breathe. Too much tongue, teeth scraping Shelby’s chin. Hungry. Perfect, perfect. Perfect.

“We’ve been digging holes, for like, a week. Someone’s beaming shit into our heads like Professor X? I mean, come on.”

There was an ache in his chest for the idea of a home that wanted him, that would care if he was safe or not, if he was warm, if he was fed. You’re not going to have this life, his mother had said to him a little while before the men from Resolution came and dragged him from the house.

Sitting in the hay, the hot pain of the headache ebbing now, Nadine could make out ragged bite marks in the cow’s flank and belly. They were too big to have been made by rats or weasels, the wrong shape for a coyote or a dog. Oh, God, she realized with mounting horror, bile welling up again at the back of her throat. They’re human.

“Who are we gonna call?” asked John. Felix thought it was a mark of how afraid they were that no one ventured even a feeble “Ghost-busters.”

For the first time in his life he had friends, real friends; he wasn’t going to let them get murdered by Jesus freaks or die of dehydration.

Nadine screamed at the belt’s sixth stroke. Her voice broke at the next, and before the twelfth she was sobbing like a child. She was a child. They all were.

Poor girl. Come to me. Let me taste you. Wear you.

I want to be nailed to a cross and burned, and I want everyone to think how beautiful I look and how sorry they are.

“You’re a girl,” she whispered back. Someone was screaming somewhere, but the shapes in the thoroughfare were just shapes, twisting and shifting in the light. Shelby’s

A single word slipped through the panicked morass of Gabe’s thoughts, the snatches of grade-school kisses and the taste of lipstick on his tongue, his mother’s hand, perfectly manicured, the news blaring from the old TV in the lake house living room as Tom Brokaw talked about the wall and the drone of a boat motor off in the distance like some ungodly huge fly, the scratch of nails on skin, and the word was: Cuckoo.

On some level, he thought as he climbed the porch steps, he’d really believed Nadine’s plan would save them, that they’d swipe protein bars from the kitchen like Tom Sawyer packing his bindle and then traipse right out of camp and have a real adventure, that Jo’s grandfather would pick them up in a big gold Cadillac and take them all for hamburgers and milkshakes. He’d never thought it would wind up here, kids held at gunpoint by grown-ups, a toe on the last line of the unspoken pact between their worlds: If you obey me without question, I won’t kill you.

His own face smirking up at him from beneath clods of runny, sucking mud. His own fingers curling around his wrist as he knelt to dig deeper. Someone’s beaming shit into our heads like Professor X? I mean, come on.

I love you, she had said, but what was there worth loving? She’d let herself be drawn out through the door, had left Nadine behind and stood there helpless while she died. Who could love something so weak and slow and stupid?

What’s your name? Nadine’s voice whispered in her ear. The close heat of a bathroom stall. Golden light pouring in through the high, narrow windows. Shelby.

Slowly, one by one, they turned and walked away from the memory of that sandy hair, those green eyes, the bruises and split lips and bloody teeth. Each of them, in their own way, left the ghost of Nadine and all the others behind.

Shelby was a few paces ahead of him. He wondered if she’d felt this way, if she still felt this way. How long did it take to slip out from under their burden and start life as something new?

“Mommy’s hurting me, Malcolm.” Mary’s voice. “Kill it,” Malcolm begged. He felt like he was going to lose his mind. “Kill it. Shoot it. Shoot it.”

There was no way to know how far the Cuckoo’s work had spread. There was no way to know who was safe and who was just a glove of skin around a knot of alien muscle. Mostly she managed not to think about it. Mostly.

It wasn’t that they hadn’t been close, it was that they’d never been able not to be. They were her family, and seeing them made her feel like she was drowning.

Felix pulled out the last chair at the little round table. It was dark outside and their reflections swam in the water-spotted glass of the diner’s storefront, haloed in light. They were silent. It stretched on until Mal leaned toward Felix, cleared their throat, and said gravely: “Freddie Mercury’s corpse called. It wants its mustache back.”

They had it pinned by the time she reached them. It lay on its back, Jo holding its legs, Shelby kneeling on its right arm, Felix on its left, John behind it with its head pressed against his belly and his crowbar against its throat. Its eyes were squeezed shut, swollen and red, and blood matted its short, light hair, but she knew its face. Knew and loved and hated it. Had filled in its thin, colorless eyebrows and plucked the fine wisps of its mustache from its upper lip a thousand times. Had traced its jutting cheekbones with a contouring brush and tugged turtlenecks up over its protruding Adam’s apple. It had stared back at her from the mirror every morning of her life. It wasn’t a dream.

It’s John, they told themself, wishing they’d had time to fill their Klonopin script, wishing they had weed or Benadryl or anything to declaw the thoughts racing back and forth through their head. It’s really him, or he’d have killed you already.

“Do you think we could—would you ever—would you try again, with me?” They knew it was a mistake as soon as they opened their mouth, but the words wouldn’t stop coming, slipping out of them like entrails through a wound. “I’ve done a lot of work, I know last time it was bad, I fucked up, I hurt you a lot, but I keep thinking of you, John.” Their voice broke. “I’m always thinking of you.”

Another sizzling flash of white and the seeing was done, the headache it left behind the filthy, stabbing pain of an infected tooth. Lara doubled over and vomited on the cavern floor. The Cuckoo was all around her. She could hear gunfire, but she couldn’t see the others. The skin of its flank split, reversed, and squirmed over her shoulder to cling to her neck like a thawed chicken cutlet, wet and cold and rubbery. Fingers grew to stroke her chin and cheek, to fumble at the corner of her mouth. Soft nails. Wrinkled knuckles. Its skin tasted of neroli and civet, sugar and cardamom, a nauseating, gluey flavor smeared across her face. Fingers knit together, a hand bubbling up behind them. It pried her mouth open, forcing thumb and forefinger inside. A pinkish membrane slipped over her eyes, veins pulsing in the expanse of fragile skin. Against her ear formed tender lips, a pointed tongue which brushed the fine hairs of her cochlea. You will never be alone again.

After a while, John’s eyes flickered open. He cleared his throat and looked at them. “Am I dead?” he whispered hoarsely. “No,” Mal sobbed, and then they bent and kissed him, still crying, and he took them in his good arm and kissed them back, and that was how Felix and Shelby found them.

“I knew Nadine—knew your sister,” Shelby said, a lump in her throat as she remembered that long-ago bathroom and the dry heat of the stall where they’d first kissed. “A long time ago.”

Nothing was worse than this: to look at her people, her family, and not know if they were real or if their smiles would split, their skulls bloom red and stinking like corpse flowers as they bent to wrap the tendrils of their faces tight around her own. To never know, even in a lover’s arms, who was us and who was them.