Six * (Patreon)

Six.

Malagash hasn't changed. Yes, the sea is darker. The air is colder. We don't mind. Let the trees change colour. Let the wind grow its fingernails long and sharp. The sea can thrash. Let it! Do they think we can't thrash, too? Do they think we cut our fingernails anymore? Dirt and the red clay are caked under these nails.

Simon and I are the ones who have changed. We're something new. Fearless. We are the rustle in the brush at the side of the road. We are the scarecrows standing stock still out in the field at night. We're the shape beneath the waves, we're the glow of phosphorescence trailing your fingers. Malagash is under our skin now, like twisting roots behind our eyes. Like a second set of teeth hidden above our gums.

Stand out in a field at night, if you can. It is cold and your bare feet will be torn up. You can see a car coming from so far away. Watch the headlights as they follow the exact same path as the last set. Curving here. Speeding up there. You can hear the sound of the engine. Once, we heard a sharp squeal when a deer crossed just in front of them.

They just sat there for a moment. Then they drove on. When they get home they will tell their family they saw a deer. "Damn near killed me." Meanwhile we can hear the deer in the field between us and the road. It bursts into the low grass where we've been standing, and stops. Looks at us. We look right back.

Before we came to Malagash, before our father was sick and we left our life behind, we visited a donkey sanctuary. It was all four of us. But right now I can only remember Simon, and how afraid he was to pet the donkeys. How they tried to carry him, to get him close. The fit he threw. Terrified. But beside me he is watching the deer quietly. Animals aren't for petting or for naming and taking home. Animals aren't our friends out here. They aren't our enemies either. They are the rustle in the bush beside the road.

The deer looks at us for another minute and then disappears off into the dark. We have no business with it, and it has no business with us.

Someone should be paying attention. Someone should notice that Simon and I sneak out of the house every single night for hours. But our uncles are exhausted, and our mother? Our mother still hasn't come home.

Our father died eight months ago, and our uncles were only supposed to stay in Malagash for two weeks.

But our mother broke. She broke down and she wouldn't leave her room. She told them, calmly, that she was going to kill herself. She doesn't know when. But she knows. And so our uncle Frank couldn't leave. And so Jonah couldn't leave. I'm glad they're here. I love them. I don't understand them, but I love them.

Frank's wide, soft eyes always seem about to spill into tears around us. Like we're sad little orphans.

Orphans aren't sad, though, they're feral.

His husband Jonah is quiet but always warm. I like him. I like the quiet. Hate the noise. What else? Oh.

My mother is locked on a floor at the hospital. She gets half hour passes, where she can come outside and sit in the grass with us. The left side of her face is criss-crossed with scars from the knife. She's right handed.

When she comes outside to sit with us, we walk to the edge of the woods, and she takes off her hospital gown. She throws it up in a tree.

We sit in the sun.

Almost immediately they are out here after her.

"You can't be naked."

I feel like I need to describe, explain, try and make sense of this part. I need to convey somehow what is going on. I wonder if Simon understands, our naked mother on the hospital lawn, scars all over her face. Her smile warm and cracked.

But I did explain. I explained already. She throws her hospital gown up a tree and sits down naked with us. The nurses get angry.

What else? Oh.

Simon and I have gone mute.

I went mute. Simon followed. It happened so fast. I climbed out of bed, and started to get dressed. Simon was pulling his socks on. He said, "Good morning," and I nodded to him. "I think I dreamt mom going out again last night," he said. And that was when I realized I couldn't talk. Or wouldn't talk. I'm still not sure. That was when Simon realized it too.

"Can you talk?"

I shook my head. Then paused. Then shrugged.

"People talk too much anyway," he said.

And that was the last thing he said before going mute like me. I can't remember the last thing I said. Maybe 'goodnight.'

He understood, though. He understood right away and accepted it. He doesn't look scared, or try to talk to me. He is quiet, too, that's all. You don't need words. Especially out here. Especially in the dark, surrounded on all sides by the dead. Surrounded in time by the dead. Our father behind us. Our mother approaching.

But Frank and Jonah, what are they supposed to do? How can they leave? We're family. At night we can hear them talking in bed. They're "needed here," they say. And at first… at first I thought that meant "trapped." I thought they felt trapped here. But that isn't the way their hearts work at all. They are good.

My grandmother is glad to have them. Frank's deep laugh in the kitchen. Jonah's soft and reasonable dry humour. She loves them too. She loves the company. The family. Someone to take care of her while she takes care of us. The three of them stay up at night, playing cribbage while Simon and I sit on the stairs and listen. Half to their voices, and stories, half to the silence behind our mother's door.

And then every night we climb into our beds and we wait. Eventually Jonah and Frank go to bed. The light goes out. Their voices get quieter, as they talk one another to sleep in the dark. Sometimes laughing. Sometimes just an indistinct murmur that drifts in and out and finally stops. We wait longer than that. We wait until we're sure.

Tonight Simon climbed out of bed first. He started taking off his pajamas as I climbed down the ladder. He doesn't speak, and neither do I. We haven't spoken in a month. Not to one another, not to anyone. Our uncles are worried. But they don't know what to do. There is talk about seeing a doctor. Talk about a psychologist. My grandmother takes us to church. Everyone is at a loss. I feel fine. It is peaceful, not talking. The pressure to fill the space is gone.

In our dark bedroom, Simon waited patiently as I found a sweater. Folded in the bottom of the trunk we share for our clothing. Ready. But he touched my elbow and shook his head no. I realized he was still in his underwear. He went to the door and listened, and then he took his underwear off, so that he was standing naked on the carpet.

I heard the sound of the bathroom door downstairs. Our grandmother's hand on the bannister, and I undressed, too. I folded my clothes neatly on the floor. Our grandmother was still climbing the stairs. We waited until we heard that small click of her far away bedroom door. The master bedroom. Then we moved quietly through the house. We lifted the screen door on its hinges. And then we were gone. Out into the night.

Malagash hasn't changed. It's us that did. We've become part of something here. I have no idea what. Once you've cut your bare feet on the road, that road is your road. That dirt bike leaning up against the caved-in, stumbling elephant house? That is your dirt bike. Those are your sad empty windows. The eyes behind them are not afraid of you. You are not afraid of them.

The ice cold Atlantic ocean is our ocean now. We own it and it owns us. We can see it from anywhere. It blends into the air we breathe, like Malagash is a beach that the tide drowns once a day. Every night we walk beside it, holding hands in silence. Past the pier, and the lobster traps. Past the church and the fields and the dirtbike and the eyes. I slip naked through the grass the way Simon taught me, a half-glimpsed creature from afar.

Simon makes a high pitched howl sound sometimes, laughing.

A creature.

When the deer comes suddenly into our field, it does not seem afraid of us. The last shreds of barrier between us and Malagash are gone. Folded on a floor a million miles away. We're our mother now. We're this deer. We're creatures.

We watch from the dark. You have no business with us, and we have no business with you.

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