The WatchersBy M.K. Rainey
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The girl leans over the cracked clamshell fountain, green lichen creeping up the cement surface, and sees her curly black hair tousled in the wind. A vague metal taste rises from the stagnant waters and she spots movement in the reflection of the trees overhead, but when she turns there is nothing. The lime leaves rattle against each other as if their paper skins whisper with the wind, but there is nothing beyond them. She turns her attention back to the fountain. Shadows appear, wavering in the water-mirror and she leans in, dipping her fingers in the clear well, rippling its surface. But above, there is only bright green and white, a cerulean flume streaming through. She watches her reflection and the nameless things watching her watch the reflection and it is then she knows how things can both be and not be all at once.
***
She plays a made up game on her way to school, her dark navy knee socks rolling down her calves as she skips from one fractured sidewalk square to the next, white undershorts winking out from her checkered jumper with each hop. The black birds line the fence as she skips, their feathers twittering nervously, but she minds them no longer.
***
Black feathers bruised with purple that catch in the violent sun. They line the stained glass Crucifixion, beaks on the hot windowpane as she takes the body and the blood for the first time, reds and greens and blues and oranges distorting their dark shapes in the morning light.
***
It is now her sixteenth birthday. A papery white Saturn awaits her in the driveway, keys in the ignition. Her father’s old car with the dent in the back bumper, cracked and rubbed leather seating, unidentifiable russet stains on the carpet. She runs her fingers over the steering wheel, holds her hands where his might have been, an imagined thumbprint on the right side. He has been dead for ten years, but she sniffs the air around her all the same, as if she can still smell the deep cedar wood that seemed perpetually ingrained in his beard.
***
The mulberry leaves hang over the upstairs window, branches knocking into the gables and scraping the glass like fingernails. The girl’s mother watches as her daughter starts the car, schoolbag in the passenger seat. How lovely her daughter is: a lovely girl with a shadow side. The mother glances at her own withered hands and then her waxen reflection in the window. She touches her cheeks, cold fingertips along her weathered skin, but there is another face in the reflection. A colorless human shape standing behind her, watching her. She turns to look, but there is no one. The light in the room dims and she looks back to the window, a dark cloud now approaching. Or maybe not a cloud after all.
***
An empty highway of cracked slabs and dust colored concrete spans out before her and the girl rolls her windows down, letting the damp smell of earth swirl around her. She flicks open a pack of cigarettes, sticks one between her teeth and strikes the lighter against her pleated skirt. She inhales, smiles as liquid-like vapors curl over her top lip. Some mechanical, melodic tune plays on the radio and she taps her fingers against the steering wheel, cigarette stuck to her lips, and a loud pop-smack crashes against the sunroof. She swerves. She looks up, her heart rocking against her fishbone chest, but she sees nothing save the image of an old man’s face powdered in the clouds.
***
The Sister sits in her empty classroom quietly spreading the last bit of canned tuna across her bread. She sucks the excess oil from her fingers, salt and fish taste on her tongue, and watches the morning grow cloudy and dark. The tuna isn’t very good, but she doesn’t have time to search for something better to eat. She walks to the window, holding the gummy fish-bread to her teeth, and sees the girls arriving, swirling in their identically clad hoards, lissome limbs young and firm, strolling across the parking lot without an upwards glance at the darkening sky. She knows how the girls see her, a tottering old nun, and she has a sudden urge to throw open the window and cry out a warning to them. But for what? She chews the tuna instead, thinking, perhaps, that this is not her story.
***
The girl swipes back and forth across the paper with the dulling edge of a bit of charcoal. She glances up at the Sister, but the old nun is hunched above the overhead projector, busily daubing sweat from hand drawn parabolas and cosines. A noisome fish smell hangs ponderously in the air. The girl flips to the previous charcoal in her sketchbook, her black-dusted fingers pausing over a withered face, disheveled habit, and folds of tallowy skin that end in a beach ball bottom. The girl smiles down at her cartoonish, two-dimensional nun. A smash, and the breaking of glass like the surface of some frozen lake splintering under a black sun. She sees a circular dent in the window with cracks rippling out, tiny fissures sprawling astrally through the glass, and searches the skyline, but sees only a lone black dot swooping in the distance. The class has fallen silent, but no one else has noticed the broken window. The girl looks back at the front, her classmates’ blurring into mere flesh-colored shapes on her periphery, and locks eyes with the Sister as if they alone stood in a void separate, permanent, cloistral to life.
***
The ponytails flip up and down as they pass the small window at the top of his door. He feels the ache in his crotch and makes the announcements. Pep rally. Pizza day. Bake sale. He walks to the window, he is sure he locked the door. The girls run laps around the North lawn as he focuses on one after the other and then a tousled head of black hair rounds the bend. Oh yes, he thinks and grabs his groin. The little slut. He shudders as if someone could see him. He turns and there is no one. A swarm of black birds hovers over the field and the old man peeks through the blinds, staring over the trees, past the sky.
***
She slips out of school early, having mimicked the peculiar swoop of her mother’s signature. She drives past neighborhoods constructed from identical boxy homes, ivy creeping along the iron fences, variegated ornate doors. She cuts down roads named Vega Circle and Quasar Ave. She turns left down a signless street and sees the purple and white truck idling. And there he is. The house is black and wild vegetation eats the garden left fallow. Vines choke the grass in ophidian coils, wisteria hangs loose in lavender turrets like seashells, snapdragons sway with rainbow mouths ready. He rings the doorbell and she squeezes the steering wheel. He writes something on a clipboard and then turns, running back to his truck, his muscles and hair damp with sweat. The truck starts and she follows it down the street.
***
The road narrows, branches hang over like hag’s hair and the air smells of rushing water, peaty and cool. She flicks her cigarette out the window, paper damp from the gray air. Trees bow overhead, branches locked and twined in a skeletal embrace. She drives on through their archways. The trees part and the river rushes before her, swirling and dipping, waves lapping against the rocky shoals, nature’s detritus caught in its currents. The road opens to a parking lot along the edge of the water and she halts a few spaces away from the truck. She gets out, the thicket growing over the brink of the cement lot and she stares into the forest space. The woods, as intricate as a butterfly’s wing, are shadowed in the copse beyond. It is beautiful and should serve as a warning, but does not.
***
Breaths, rustles, and heady human smells fill the darkness. They embrace, mouths fastened together as if each were to devour and be devoured in their turn.
***
They flip through her sketches, half-naked, enclosed by stacks of cardboard and bubble wrap, limbs intertwined and folded like wings. She shivers when he touches her, her small breasts fit neatly in his hand. A salvo, rocking, crashing, smashes against the side of the truck. She clings to him in the dark, but his body is rigid and unfeeling as if he was no longer a creature of flesh and blood. It lasts only moments and then quiet. They are still, then mechanically reassemble their clothing. She does not look, but she feels his eyes upon her, black like volcanic glass.
***
“I have to go.” She giggles. She takes her sketches and satchel and straightens her skirt. He kisses her on the cheek and she thinks her heart might balloon and pop from all the love.
***
“No.” The command is quiet, but callous. She hooks the strap of her satchel over her shoulder, her tumescent heart rustling. What was this tone in his voice?
***
The truck is riddled with dents, but the parking lot is empty. Only a few black specks dot the brilliant cerulean sky. The forest is quiet, filled with the dead sounds of trees.
***
She starts her car and waves her fingers, her smile closed-mouthed and curled at the edges like she’s seen in the movies.
***
She reaches for the door handle, but he grabs her wrist and twists. Pain shoots through the crook in her elbow, to her shoulder blades. She screams and claws at his face, she kicks him between the legs and he pauses as if she is no longer there. She flings open the door and runs toward the forest.
***
She runs to her car, jabs the keys in the ignition and reverses out with the nauseating scent of burnt rubber. The road narrows again, twists and turns, the stagnant smell of dead earth. She comes to the main road and swerves, hands shaking. Screeching overhead and she looks up, but the birds are flying past her and she looks back, she has drifted into the other lane and there is a car coming. She lurches to the right and hits the stippled trunk of an old pine tree.
***
Birds circle the forest, swooping in and out of the low hanging clouds. She runs through thickets that stab her bare shins, but she does not stop. She can hear him calling her name.
***
A lively tune plays on the radio and the girl strums her fingers over the steering wheel, cigarette poised between her fingers. She knows this song, loves it. She sings aloud as the sun filters through the clouds. The beat, the wind, the sublime smell of earth. But something interrupts this moment. Suddenly there is traffic where the road was clear. Ahead she sees the flickering blue and red lights of patrol cars, ambulances, humans clustered together and a tendril of black smoke curling above them.
***
The forest, as intricate as a butterfly’s wing, creaks in the afternoon squalls. Leaves rattle against one another, whispering into their paper skins until secrets pulse through the branches and soon the whole forest knows what is happening from one end to the other. The pines, the tamaracks, the conical spruces. The timorous birch shivers as it bends its pale trunk before the mighty sycamore. The birch mourns the loss of a friend felled by a car and the sycamore stretches to full height. It can see something, yes! Possibly a girl, and black dots gliding through the low hanging clouds, and something- but wait, above the sky, what is that?
***
Her vision blurs, but she somehow knows he is not far behind her. She stumbles from the wreckage and down a muddy embankment, into the woods. She hears the screech of birds and tires and throws her hands to her ears.
***
She slows as she comes upon them. The people clear, running between cars, stretchers and radios and life-saving implements. In their wake she sees a car smashed against the base of a felled tree, hood bent, glass scattered over the ground, the steel husk showing through the chipped white frame. She cannot take her eyes from the wreckage and nearly hits the bumper of the car ahead, but slams on her brakes just in time. Just in time, she thinks. For what?
***
She hears sirens and shouts, but they are a long way from here and she has not followed any path. She cannot find her way back.
***
Flesh-colored blurs streak by. Barbed limbs and thorns and brush catch her skin, her arms and legs and face drip redly, but she keeps running. She can feel him nearing.
***
She watches two uniformed men pull a stretcher away from the wreckage, a stiff lump covered in a crisp white sheet. The men shake their heads. A hand falls limply from the side of the sheet and hangs, bouncing with the stretcher as it is loaded into the ambulance. A swarm of black birds land upon the trucks, the wreckage, without a sound. That poor soul, the girl thinks.
***
The truculent birch shakes its pale trunk before the mighty sycamore. Comrade! It calls to the larger tree and tells of a poor soul felled by a mechanical white beast. The sycamore howls a dead howl and stretches to full height. It can see something, yes! Comrade! The birch calls. An eye for an eye! The forest ripples in communion.
***
She pulls over, wiping her wet cheeks, and parks near an opening in the woods. The smell of peonies hangs in the air. She thinks of her mother and suddenly misses the woman with an overwhelming pain in her chest. She will pick a bundle of flowers and present them to her tonight.
***
She runs into a clearing, a copse of cowslips and clovers. She stops to listen, but hears only the dead sounds of trees in the wind and the sublime murmur of the little brook.
***
A pallet of damp leaves and moss covers the ground, but a small, bubble-like tremor travels under its surface. The rat emerges, shaking the dirt from its mottled fur. Teeth bared, he rips at tangled roots, but then stops and sticks his snout to the air. He sees a flesh-colored blur and, suddenly, as if some invisible hand held it back until this moment, the great black branch of a sycamore comes hurtling out of the forest space, knocking the human back into the shadows. The rat shivers and scurries back into the brush.
***
She enters the wood, as intricate as a butterfly’s wing, and the path is dotted with filtered light that leaks through the canopy. The glow shimmers off the wet translucent strings of a spider’s nest as she strolls along, humming the same melodic tune. She can see that the forest is thick and dark further down the path, but the inebriating scent of lavender and honeysuckle surrounds her and she picks little wildflowers, bundling them together with a bit of shoelace.
***
What about the birds?
***
Her cheek burns, the harsh red of fresh blood dripping down her neck. Even the trees conspire against her. She sees the black birds swirling overhead, dipping into the branches. Her tuberous heart, schuk-schuking, schuk-schuking. No, she thinks. “No!” she yells.
***
The trees distend inward, narrowing the path, but she sees a hummingbird flitting between the waxy petals of a red-tipped tulip. She runs towards them and adds three of the blood-colored heads to her bouquet. Clouds move in rapid cylindrical furrows, the forest darkens, and she looks up at the shadowed wood around her. The trees are cloistered and cheerless and their whorled trunks like eyes make her uneasy.
***
She runs into a clearing, a copse of cowslips and clovers. Wait, haven’t we already been here? The brook, the wind, the dead sounds of things. Define ‘here’, the transcendental birch replies as it sways its pale trunk listlessly. Oh shut up.
***
She waits, camouflaged by tangled vines with giant leaves like stars. She sharpens a branch from a birch tree with a jagged rock she found near the creek. The trunk glows in the dark and she stares at it as if the pale stroke of wood had done some great wickedness against her. She feels as if someone is watching her with approval. She hears the crunch of pine needles as he nears and she can see his silhouette. She aligns the spear with her shoulder, waits until she has a clear shot and-
***
They rip and pull bits of tendon, muscled gristle, sucking the marrow from the clean-picked bones. She stands near and watches the birds devour the body, flesh-by-flesh, bone-by-bone, until only the tumorous heart remains.
***
She leaves the woods and immediately repents all her bad behavior. She grows up and marries a nice man and has nice children and writes nice stories about girls that are nice. She never mentions the deliveryman again and when his name appears in the paper, she takes out a pencil and does the Sudoku.
***
She is dead. Sorry.
***
A feast! A feast! The cries are heard throughout the village and the masses come, swarming the site with salivating maws, mandibles maiming and pincers pinching. A carnival-like party with stands for flesh cakes and meat pies and All-You-Can-Eat buffets. Step right up! Try your hand at Larvae Fishing or Maggot Lassoing! The springy black hair is ripe for bungee jumping and a ventricular Slip-N-Slide is set up for the kids. Screams can be heard from the Aural Blood Loop as locals swoop and land in soft tufts of cerebral membrane and everyone enjoys sweet candied livers and the salty crunch of deep-fried fingernails. For the Adventurers we’ve got the Corpse of Doom! Take your sweetheart through the Tunnel of Love Bites and don’t forget to bring your gal down to the big Harvest the Heart festival tomorrow night! There’s something for everyone! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! For a limited time only! This party will decompose!
***
There is a break in the clearing where a little brook runs through, clay-like silt and pebbles dot its bed. She stands at the edge of the shoal, water lapping against her bare ankles, and stares down at her reflection, hair tousled, skirt frayed and wrinkled, droplets of blood on her collar and hands and brambles clinging to her shirt. She looks around at the woods, branches hanging like fingernails. She feels something watching her. The forest resonates with the dead sounds of trees. No wind, no creatures, no whispers, nothing. She looks back to the water, a dark shadow ripples in its reflection. She looks up, past the black branches and low hanging clouds, through the white space. Who is watching?
Who?
M.K. Rainey is a writer, teacher, and editor from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the 2017 Winner of the Bechtel Prize at Teachers & Writers Magazine and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, 3AM Magazine, The Collagist, Fiction Southeast, and more. She co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series and lives in Harlem with her dog. Sometimes she writes things the dog likes.