March 13, 2008
BETTER OUT HERE
| SAMANTHA HENDERSON |
It’s better out here.
When he visits, he sits lofty on his accumulated good intentions. The nurses coo and bring him cool drinks, fluff a pillow to put at the small of his back. It’s the closest to an intimate gesture they can get, without ruining the image of erotic melancholy, mourning its frozen bride.
He smiles sadly at them, his pale, untouchable odalisques. He plays his role to the hilt, settles in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair, contemplating my immobile form.
But I am not there; I watch him through the window, my clawed feet sturdy on the branch outside, tail extended for balance. I see the side of his mouth, the side nobody else sees, quirk into a wry smile.
No one sees but me.
It took a long time to work up to a squirrel. It took me months, almost a year, before I could see, really see, the fly that buzzed around my sheets, black crawling on white. And it took me days to realize that when the room, when people’s faces split into a thousand facets of white wall and variegated flesh, I wasn’t mad and I wasn’t dying. I was the fly.
I practiced jumping in and out of it—from the bed to the wall, from the bed to the ceiling—then it was gone. Squatted or sprayed, possibly. Squatted aside like a fly.
No one could ever suspect that of him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.
I believed that too, until that last millisecond before his fist met my jaw.
He must’ve been terrified that he’d killed me. But maybe now he wishes that I’d die. But, as it is, he gets the money, or the use of it. And he plays his part so well. He must enjoy it.
After the fly was gone I almost did go mad, stuck inside this coffin of rotting flesh. Then, outside the window, a tree full of half-decayed fruit brought the rats.
I was better at it now. A week of concentration, and I could take a rat.
Getting used to four feet made me—the rat—clumsy. It was my fault that it zigged when it should have zagged, and the hawk struck.
An instant of pain, deep and thrilling, and I snapped back to the white bed and the rotting carcass.
For a while I envied the rat.
But the second time was easier.
He’s bending forward now, studying my face.
I think the exercise of hopping from creature to creature has saved me, kept my brain going, kept enough reflexes and stirrings and flutterings for the doctors to refuse to give up for now. But in time, maybe soon, they’ll grow impatient. They’ll end it. They’ll stop the feedings and fluids that keep me alive.
Watching him bent so close to my face, I wonder what he’s thinking. I can guess: when will I wake up? Will I remember? Or will I betray him?
I see him glance at the complicated apparatus that keeps me breathing. I see him consider turning it off.
Knowing I am dead inside, would anyone blame him?
I remember to adjust my squirrel’s balance, watching for predators. I’ve never taken a human. I probed, tentatively, at one of the nurses, but recoiled—it was like trying to merge a golf cart onto the tracks of a roller coaster. Too much, too fast, and she went home with a headache, and I lay there, my temples throbbing.
But now that I’ve found I can jump, from animal to animal, I think I’ll take a little vacation from myself. I think I’ll take the squirrels away from here and go into the woods and find myself a bear.
Or a whole pack of raccoons, perhaps, with their clever, little hands.
I’ll take us back to the nursing home, when the shift changes after lunch, and they’re understaffed. The bear will break in—who could stop it? and steal my body from my bed. The raccoons will take the IVs and the saline. They’ll take me deep in the woods, and chew my food for me, and drip water into my mouth, and I’ll practice jumping from one to another, and grow stronger.
And then I’ll come back, me and the bear and the raccoons, and we’ll find him, and then I’ll see if I can jump a human.
Then we’ll see what it’s like to be the tragic hero with the fortune and the comatose wife.
We’ll see.
Samantha Henderson’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Helix, and Lone Star Stories. Her book Heaven’s Bones will be out in September of this year. She lives in Southern California with her family and assorted other animals and is not allowed to write the sermons anymore.