Nightmare Yearnings, page 16
“Sorry about that,” I say, my cheeks flushing. “I—I’m not sure what—”
“Browning,” the man says, opening his eyes. “Town in northwest Nebraska. Population 2,054 as of 1970, but likely much lower now.”
“Yes, that’s . . . I think that’s right.”
But suddenly, I’m not so sure. The word “Browning” has stopped sounding familiar, and I scavenge my memory for even a hint of its meaning. Somehow, my mind arrives at the family barn in the years before its eventual snowstorm collapse. My dad, shotgun in hand, walks a younger me through the red double doors, leading me to my first lesson on mercy. Marielle isn’t getting any better, he says. See that lump under her eye? The lump makes her look like she’s squinting all mean-like. I hide behind Dad’s leg. He cocks the gun. I won’t make you do this one, but you’ll have to do another someday. Fifteen years later, I still haven’t. But maybe Dad didn’t mean putting down cows. My mind returns to Browning. What the hell is Browning?
“When I last visited,” the man says, “the town was called something else.”
I shiver. A silence descends on the car, and there’s only the faint whistle of wind blowing through the door’s faulty weather stripping. My throat constricts, and as stupid as it sounds, I feel like it’ll close up if I don’t keep talking. I realize the man and I haven’t been formally introduced, so I stutter my name before asking him his.
“I’m Brandon, by the way. What’s your name?”
But before he can speak it, his name pulses up into my consciousness like puss from a wound. I try to picture its spelling, but written language captures only a crude approximation of the sound. One acidic syllable after another bubbles up, long buried and yearning to be heard. The name is endless. As it gets louder, I lose focus on the road and my car swerves between lanes. Realizing I haven’t been breathing, I gasp for air and slam on the brakes. My car fishtails to a halt. On a busier highway I might’ve collided with someone in the opposite lane, but out here, I’m completely alone: just me and the man. Car in park, I roll down the window and smash my palms against my ears. I refuse to hear more of his name; it will destroy me. And I know that sounds foolish, but my gut instinct is strong. I’m prepared to run, to abandon my vehicle and take my chances out in that sprawling ghost of an ocean, never mind the coyote packs howling back and forth from one side of the highway to the other.
The creature shifts to face me in his seat. His eyes briefly retract into his skull, then squelch back into place against his eyelids—a zoom lens set in flesh. I’m paralyzed.
“Your people used to love me,” he says.
I say nothing, unable to fathom how anyone could love this creature. It continues speaking, each word the distance between a star’s first spark and last sputter.
“But they tossed me aside when life was good, assuming it would stay that way without my intervention. They were wrong. I see it in this man’s pestilence.”
The creature rips the filthy sleeve off its button-up shirt, but human skin pulls away with it. Tiny black scales gleam underneath, and each one rises from the flesh as if inhaling. Before I can get a better look, the creature tugs its disguise back into place. It’s then that I notice the human skin’s raised brown splotches. They mirror the ones on my body but are much larger. Perhaps mine will grow to that size, too, a possibility I’ve been ignoring by burying my head in school work.
“He would have died within weeks,” the creature says. “An entirely preventable death, but this land punishes those who have little to spare. Now, because of his willing sacrifice, I have a face that humans will not run from, though I admit this skin is an imperfect fit.”
I picture the farmer’s peeled corpse dumped in the hills, sunbaked and beaded black with flies. Coyotes will find him before people do, and then he’ll be nothing more than bones.
“Please, don’t kill me,” I say. “I’ll do anything. You can have my car. Just—”
The creature reaches into the back seat, careful not to let its human skin slough off again. And this is it. This is the end. I’m sure of it. Somehow, I know running won’t save me; my legs aren’t fast enough. That thing will pull a gun from the bag, or perhaps an alien weapon, something humans haven’t yet dreamed up despite our boundlessly cruel imagination. All I ask for is a quick death.
But what the creature pulls out is not a weapon. It’s a translucent pink crystal the size of a thimble. Its center is hollow, containing a few drops of liquid.
“Your people will love me,” the creature says. “And I will end their plague.”
Death seems less certain than it did moments ago, but I remain statue-still, halfway out of the car, trembling hands gripping the door. The receding sunlight glints off the bag’s remaining contents—thousands more of the crystals.
“With this,” the creature says, snapping the crystal open and pouring its contents over the farmer’s cancerous skin. “I will save them from sickness.”
The liquid sizzles and foams against the raised brown patch. I’ve seen plenty of similar chemical reactions in science labs, but this is the first to make me gag. I picture the mystery liquid burning its way through the skin to those fishlike scales underneath. But when I look up from the ground, there’s a smell like honeysuckle. The fizzing recedes into silence like an antacid tablet dissolved in water, and when the creature wipes away the foam, the cancerous splotch is gone. I’m gaping. The creature takes out a second crystal.
“I sense you, too, are afflicted,” it says, offering the crystal to me. “All I ask for in exchange is love.”
The creature leans in and stares at me, unblinking. Up close, its eyes appear inhuman—pupils too large, whites too small. And perhaps it’s warping my mind again, but I sense compassion in the creature’s gaze. That, and eons of loneliness. I don’t think I’m imagining it.
The sun is almost gone now, its light fuzzy on the rim of the hills. Long, curving shadows spread across the highway. It will be dark soon, and my parents will be expecting me.
I remember Mom falling when we spoke on the phone last week. She claimed she tripped on an upturned corner of the rug, but I didn’t hear her walking around before that. I think her body just gave out. Dad wheezed as he tried to help her up, a process that took minutes when it should have taken seconds. When I asked if they were okay, they assured me everything was fine, failing to hide their gasps for air. I hung up the phone and tried not to cry.
“Will you take me to your people?” the creature asks.
It’s June, but night is coming on and there’s a chill in the air. The highway’s shimmering heat has vanished. Overhead, the black silhouette of a nighthawk cries out—one sharp note signaling that the stars aren’t far behind.
I nod at the creature, climb back into the car, and start the engine. We drive home, soon to be born again.
When Mothman Came to Queer Lake
Ellie and I fled Crawford after our big secret came out—pun intended. The mom-and-pop grocery store owner Mr. Reynolds caught us kissing behind the Dumpster and fired us on the spot. We were off the clock and out of uniform, but the man couldn’t have homos scaring customers into shopping at Wal-Mart.
He was shocked when we filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, and he nearly fainted when we won in court. Our winnings were enough to score us a plot of land far away from Crawford, complete with a fishing pond and golden prairie as far as the eye could see. Thus, the town of Queer Lake was born. The fact that the state didn’t officially recognize it as a town only made Queer Lake queerer.
Ellie built us a house with slanted floors and enough cracks for mice to nestle in (as if I could do any better), but there was still the problem of food. It was a two-hour drive to the nearest grocery store—yep, that grocery store—which gave us all the push we needed to grow our own crops. Learning to farm was a joyful process, though. We would till rows in the soil and make corny jokes about what we were planting. When the exhaustion set in, we’d spend the evenings cuddling and watching X-Files on our shitty antenna TV. On the rare occasion that we got tired of spending every second together, it was easy to give each other space: Ellie fished the pond while I wandered the hills and tried to avoid prairie dog holes. But on those hikes, I often found myself glancing back at Ellie, admiring her arm muscles as she reeled in catfish, the rod bending under their weight. I could never stay away for long.
However, paradise came with the anxiety that it might crumble at any second. We’d seen energy company vans stopping on the road in front of our house. The workers surveyed the land, taking notes and measurements of who-knows-what. Ellie thought they might be planning the route of an oil pipeline—a black snake that would soon plunge its fangs into Queer Lake.
A more familiar threat also drove that road: trucks sporting Confederate flags and bumper stickers for homophobic senators. Whenever those drove by, Ellie and I went inside, not wanting the drivers to see us holding hands. You’d think we’d be safe doing that out in the middle of nowhere, but apparently not.
Then came Mothman, our strangest visitor by far. We’d first learned about him as children from a library book about cryptids. But it wasn’t until two decades later, as we returned from the fields, that we saw him for ourselves, perched atop our house. Ellie dropped her armful of corn, and I about pissed myself. Mothman was a tall, dark silhouette in the twilight. His eyes were large and red as stoplights, and his wings were long enough to graze the gutters on both sides of the roof. Spotted, he flew upward falcon-fast and disappeared into the clouds. We craned our necks for a good while, waiting for him to reappear, but by the time the clouds passed, the horizon had already swallowed the sun. As we made our way inside, I glimpsed a quick, black shape passing over the moon, but by then I was disinclined to trust my eyes.
We sat on the couch in the dark for a while before either of us could speak. Unsure what else to say, I broke the silence.
“Want to watch X-Files?”
“Pretty sure we just did,” Ellie replied.
I snorted, trying to hold back a laugh, but the dam burst. Both of us fell into a fit of giggles. Tearing up and gasping for breath, Ellie collapsed into my lap.
A thunk on the roof halted our laughter. We stared at each other through the darkness, and neither of us dared breathe.
A minute of silence, then Ellie whispered, “It’s him, right?”
“It’s got to be. Why the hell is he here?”
We’d both seen him, so we weren’t crazy. But just because our minds were fine didn’t mean everything else was. Where Mothman showed up, tragedy struck. In 1967, he tried to warn the people of Point Pleasant about the impending Silver Bridge collapse, but his omens were esoteric at best, transmitted through dreams that left more people scratching their heads than taking action. Forty-six people died in the Ohio River that December, and Mothman vanished.
* * *
Each morning, Ellie wrote a new tragic prediction on our refrigerator whiteboard: “Ellie will come out as straight,” “Wachiwi will develop a corn allergy,” or “the mice will eat us in our sleep.” Seeing these jokes made me smile, but I couldn’t always bring myself to laugh. Had the people of Point Pleasant done the same thing as us, dismissing Mothman’s omens only to pay the ultimate price? I mentioned this to Ellie one day as we were harvesting potatoes.
“What if it’s something serious?” I said. “A drought. A wildfire. Violent homophobes. Or Proud Boys coming to—you know. I mean, there’s nowhere to run out here. No way to protect—”
“Let’s not psych ourselves out,” she said, wiping her muddy hands on her jeans. “Maybe Mothman was just passing through on his way to Crawford. Plenty of tragedy to warn people about in that shithole. And in any case, don’t you trust me to protect you?”
She flashed a flirty smile and flexed her muscular arms. The tension in my chest eased up, and I couldn’t help smiling back. I felt silly for worrying in the first place. It had been three weeks since the Mothman sighting, and he hadn’t appeared again. It was probably just a fluke.
But Mothman returned that evening. He stood beside the pond, his red eyes reflecting off the water. Ellie and I watched him from the relative safety of our home, daring only to peek through a crack in the curtains. Mothman was shivering. His whole body trembled, and his knees looked close to collapsing. When at last he fell, he landed facedown in the pond, his wings twitching in sharp, spastic motions. Ellie and I looked at each other, wide-eyed and frozen. She sprang into action first, running out the door. I hesitated to follow, suspecting a trap, but if Ellie was going to die, I’d die beside her.
We rushed toward the pond, and the closer we got the more I wanted to turn back. Mothman had the wingspan of a pterodactyl and the build of an NBA player; he could easily fuck us up if he wanted to. But that didn’t seem to register for Ellie as she barreled forward. She wouldn’t be able to pull Mothman out of the water on her own, so I kept following despite every hair on my body bristling.
When we reached Mothman, no bubbles came up from where his face rested in the pond. I worried we were too late, but we each grabbed a leg and pulled him out. His fuzzy form prickled me with static electricity, only the static didn’t discharge after one touch. The sensation was constant as we dragged him onto dry land and, with tremendous effort, tipped him onto his back. Seeing him up close, I could only discern his eyes. Shadows bunched up around his other features as if they weren’t for us mortals to see. It was the kind of darkness one might find at the bottom of a well—an amorphous black that banished all light. And while it sounds like I should’ve been frightened, my heartbeat slowed in his presence.
“His eyes,” Ellie said, her voice far away.
I kneeled down to get a better look. Mothman’s eyes still glowed with life, and something danced below their glassy surface. It was a swirling mist that vacillated between form and formlessness. I caught glimpses of fire devouring homes, tactical boots crushing necks, and people dying in the streets of some town—distant or near, I couldn’t be sure. The images flashed by so quickly that it was hard for me to keep up. But even if I didn’t consciously register each one, my unconscious mind still pieced together their meaning. Tears welled in my eyes. Acid rose in my throat. I turned away from Mothman and vomited into the grass.
After my gut emptied and I’d dry heaved several times, I turned back to Ellie. She was no longer looking at Mothman. Instead she stared off into space, her knees pulled to her chin. My gaze lowered to Mothman, and I realized he was still breathing—hyperventilating, really, the rise and fall of his chest quick and shallow. Not knowing what else to do, I placed a hand on him and moved it in soft, slow circles. The static sensation prickled me even more than before, but the longer I spent soothing him, the weaker the sensation became. Eventually it diminished to nothing more than gentle moth fuzz against my skin.
Mothman’s wing twitched away a horsefly—one of the last still alive before the frost. I stepped back. After a minute of strained movement, Mothman pushed himself onto his feet. He looked at Ellie, then at me. At least for now, his eyes didn’t swirl with a thousand omens. I held his gaze for what felt like hours, wondering if it held a message. With little warning, he took off into the night to carry on his work.
When the black sky consumed him, Ellie shuffled over and hugged me from behind. She sniffled, and her cheek felt wet against my neck.
“I think this place is his sanctuary too,” Ellie said, her voice hoarse.
A truck roared down the road. While I could only see the headlights, I pictured a driver with a MAGA hat inside. I pictured him getting out of the truck with a rifle in hand. I pictured hate pouring from his mouth and screams pouring from Ellie’s. I pictured two unmarked graves. An energy company laying down pipe. Our home demolished. Our pond shimmering with the wrong kind of rainbow, black and viscous.
That night, I dreamed about Crawford and the world we left behind. Ellie woke me when I started screaming in my sleep. And as grateful as I was to wake up in Queer Lake, I could feel that other world encroaching on our paradise. It was not a matter of if it would reach us but when. I wondered where Mothman would rest after this place was swallowed up.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank my partner, Kate. In addition to being hilarious, intelligent, and compassionate, she has always supported my creative work, even when our tastes differed. I love her deeply and I am grateful that the years have only brought us closer.
I also want to thank my beta readers. Without them, this book never would have happened. Thanks to Dizzy Gabrielle, a lifelong friend and phenomenal critique partner. Thanks to my lovely writing group: Marc Woodman, Ashley Novak, Aryn Huck, Grace Stallworth, and Meghan Leadabrand; I always enjoy our workshops. Thanks to Anthony Engebretson, an excellent workshopper and comrade. Thanks to Eric LaRocca, whose critiques and publishing advice have helped immensely. Thanks to Sam Richard, a great friend, supporter, and inspiration. Thanks to Gabino Iglesias, Patrick Barb, Patrick Tumblety, Lilyn George, Donyae Coles, Cynthia Gómez, Danny Marks, Gordon B. White, Oscar Lee Krinket, and William Sterling. All of them helped make this book a reality.
Thanks to Rae Oestreich for the detailed and immensely helpful edits.
Thanks to Matthew Revert for the killer cover design.
Thanks to my writing teachers over the years, especially Deborah McGinn, who sparked my love of writing.
Thanks to my parents and my sister. I appreciate how supportive they’ve been of all my obnoxious, concerning interests. Much love!
And last, shout-out to all the weird, queer anti-capitalists out there. This book is for you.
Story Notes
Mother’s Tongue
I got the idea for this story after watching Free Solo, a documentary about rock climber Alex Honnold, who decided to climb El Capitan with no gear whatsoever. What disturbed and fascinated me most about this film was his complete disregard for both the deadly risk involved and his partner’s reasonable fears on the matter. Basically, “Mother’s Tongue” is Free Solo turned Weird.
