The Color Master: Stories (23 page)

Let’s flush it down the toilet, I said.

What?

My eyes were pleading. I could feel them, pleading.

Please, Hannah.

Hang on, she said. She went to the bathroom and splashed her face and spent a minute in there with her crushiness, and then opened up. I brought both mice in.

Both, I said, the old and the new.

Fine, she said. Whatever.

How’d you do it?

I just dropped it in, she said.

On purpose?

Yeah.

I didn’t blame her. Right now, it seemed like these mice were just made for the toilet. I sat next to her on the edge of the bathtub, and dropped in the new guy. He floated around in the clean white toilet water.

Flush away, said Hannah, her eyes all shiny.

I flushed. He bobbed around and almost went down but didn’t. He was slightly too big. The toilet almost overflowed. But still—the nose.

That’s just what I did, she said. She was putting on lip gloss and smacking at herself in the mirror.

I picked up the wet new mouse, and broke his nose right off. It took some pressure, me holding him good in one hand and then snapping it off. You can ruin anything if you focus at it. There, I said.

I put both mice in the trash, and washed my hands. Hannah broke up with her boyfriend a few weeks later because he’d started calling her honey, and I got picked for the kickball team, and we didn’t get any more gifts. Not for years.

Mom found some work downtown as a filing clerk, and Dad almost got that promotion. Hannah went to college nearby but she lived at home because of the price of rent. Grandma got older and eventually died.

When I was about to graduate high school, I did notice a packet of yellow curry in the pantry while I was rummaging around, looking for a snack. It was in a plastic yellow envelope that just said
Curry
on it in red letters. I asked my mom if she’d bought it, and she said no. Hannah? No. Dad? No. I don’t like curry, I said out loud, although I’d never tried it. As an afterthought, I brought it with me to college, where I had a scholarship, so I was the first one to leave home, it turned out, and it sat in the cupboard in the dorm for four years, alongside the oregano and the salt and my roommate’s birth control pills. I took it with me to my first apartment that I shared with the utilities-shirker, and my second apartment with the noxious carpet, and in my third apartment, when I was twenty-seven, living alone across the country, I opened it up one night when I was hungry and made a delicious paste with butter and milk, and then I ate it over chicken and rice and cried the whole way through it.

The ogre’s wife was a good woman. She was not an ogre, but she was ugly, by human standards, and she had married the ogre because he was strong and productive, and together they had made six small ogre children. The children all took after their father. She had not expected otherwise—one look at his giant teeth, height, and huge features, and she knew his genes had to be dominant.

Years earlier, she had left her own village by choice, traveling up and over the green and rising hills in search of a life for herself, and when she had met the ogre in the tavern, him stretched along the entire side wall, his voice scratched from cigar smoke, she thought she might give the alternate world a chance. Everyone in her hometown knew of the ogres, living up on Cloud Hill like that. With their magical boots, and that hen.

With also, she wondered, a range of appetites? Later that night, at his home, the ogre had been surprised at her willingness to take off her clothes, since he’d been rumored to eat people for dinner. As she unlaced her blouse, he touched fingertips to her trembling bare shoulders and explained in his low gravel that he only ate human beings he did not know. I know your name now, he murmured. I know your travels.
You’re safe. Her eyes were closed, and when she revealed her breasts, he sighed. They were sculpted by a different artist, he whispered to her, with a subtler tool. His desire was too much for her at first, overwhelming, but she soon grew to love him and his body, its giant harshness, its gentle gruffness with her. Next to him, she felt herself so delicate. At school, she had been the roughest-skinned, the one with the drooping features, the one no one could ever imagine that way, in a bed. She did not care about not being pretty, but she wanted to be seen as a future woman, as one who could participate, and no high-school boy could take that leap. The ogre, however, found her nothing short of revelatory, and the first time he entered her, he shouted with joy.

One evening, after many years of contented marriage, the children tucked in their bed, asleep, snoring faintly, wearing hammered gold crowns with their nightshirts because their father wanted them to feel like royal ogres in their dreams, a human girl and her siblings knocked on the door, frightened. They were lost, and the ogre was out at the tavern, and the ogre’s wife opened up, and there they were—a group of six live human kids, with bright hair and red felt hats and snapping eyes, reminding her so sweetly of her long-ago nieces and nephews. The ogre’s wife disliked firmly only one aspect of her husband: his interest in eating the children of humans. It could’ve been me! she told him once in bed while he twirled and twisted her hair over his fingers. She could not bear to turn the children out into the ogre-filled night, so she hustled them inside and in a fierce whisper told them they could hide in the same giant bed as her own children, but not to make a sound, not a peep!

When the ogre came home, late, he smelled them, of course; how could she have imagined he would not smell
them? She was half-asleep, twisted in the sheets, and hoped desperately that he would just crash out on the sofa in drunkenness. What she did not know was that, earlier in the night, the smart little girl leader of the human group had swapped their six red felt hats with the six golden crowns on the heads of the deep-sleeping ogre children, and when the ogre cackled hungrily, bumbling around the house, hunting for the source of the scent, he, of poor eyesight, of booziness, of delirium, ended up eating all his own children due to the swapping of those hats.

In the early morning, the human children ran off terrified, giggling.

We skip ahead five years, because five years were full of nothing but searing pain and tears. Five years of lying on the bed unable to move, slogging up to do the basic functioning needed to hold things together, then back to bed. Five years of scathing bitterness at ogres, and also at humans, at where she came from, and the worry that had led her to open the door; I should’ve let him eat them first thing! she said, weeping into the down of her pillow, though she felt sick anytime she had even gotten the hint that her husband had eaten a child. But her own! There were two that she mourned the most, much as she hated to admit it to herself, but she had loved Lorraine and Stillford best, the two most-complex-looking ogre faces, who had emerged post-utero like gnarled wood knots, and who had turned out to be all sweetness in nature. How they had loved their human mother. They nestled on her lap and nudged their big heads into her shoulders. They were gentle during the breastfeeding, unlike their siblings. Ogres grew teeth early, and she had to stop feeding most of them or they
would’ve ripped off her nipple, truly. She, many times, ran to the bathroom with blood streaming from her breasts from a careless slash, a little ogre child happily lapping up the red drops on the sofa. To those she gave formula. But she was too softhearted to decide for them all; for each new child she risked her breast, and Lorraine and Stillford had been different, angled their teeth just so and suckled like little human babies, and perhaps held within their selves some of her human genes that knew not to tear at the gentleness offered. Now they were dead, digested in the system of their father, who had been so angry he split a bone out of his neck while overclenching his jaw and had to go to the hospital, where he broke four beds and injured a nurse. He was angrier than ever these days, and their marriage and its focus and tenderness had faded. His favorite had been Lutter, the super-ogre demon child, who was so kinetic she rarely saw him still, and who had scraped the walls into shreds with his nails and twice tried to swallow his mother whole. She had let him train with her husband only, and why Lutter, even in his sleep, had let himself be eaten, could only have been due to the deep dreamy trust he felt of the smell of the mouth he was entering, a mouth he knew from its firm position over his shoulder, telling him instructions on how to rip through cartilage and sinew, and an inability, due to that core of trust, to imagine his fate could end this way.

After enough time had passed, she was able to get out of bed for hours at a time. She could go to town and engage in minutes of small talk. She could sit outside on the porch and watch leaves twist on the birch trees. She could read a short article in the newsletter. On this day, a day of change, she
cleaned the house, top to floor, using swaths of cloth that grew dark with dirt and dust. She swept tumbleweeds of lint out the front door, and poured scrubbing detergent into all the sinks to scour the vast yellowing basins. At the market, she bought root vegetables by the dozen and chickens and sausages. She stuffed the chickens and made a stew and fed her husband, who came home ragged from his work climbing mountainsides to look for caves packed with jewels and gifts like the magical harp that that thief Jack had stolen from his brother years ago.

We are pillaged, constantly, said the ogre, laying his loot in a sparkling heap by the door. And they fear us?

He kissed her on the ear, and sat down to roll a cigar out of crisp brown paper and a fist-sized wad of tobacco.

Good stew, human, he said, after dinner.

Please don’t call me that, she said, for the hundredth time.

That’s right, he said, patting his belly. I’m sorry. Love that sausage, delicious. He lit the cigar and inhaled deeply.

She wiped the globs of leftover chicken off the dining room table with a sponge.

While he mumbled to himself, digesting, sleepy, she filled the pots with soap and water to soak, and ate a little bowl of the chicken stew behind the counter. She rarely ate at the same table as her husband anymore, as she now feared him during mealtimes, couldn’t stand to watch him slurp up animals with that vigor and those grinding, pointed teeth.

Husband, she said, putting her bowl aside. She walked out from behind the counter. I have decided I need to go on a trip, she said.

The ogre was finishing his fourth mug of wine. He liked the darkest wine, the red almost black.

Go where? he said, wiping his mouth. To see your family?

She shook her head. Her family lived below, in the people village, and last time she’d been home, before the devourings, everyone had lectured her on ogres and complicity and betrayal. She’d waved them off. He’s a good one, she had said. She had not dared show pictures of her children.

I’d like to see something pretty, she said. Maybe a lake?

There’s a river that’s supposed to be nice a few valleys over, he said, exhaling bracelets of smoke to the rafters.

Okay, she said. A river.

I could go with you, he said, turning a giant brown eye to hers. His eye like a pool hers could swim inside.

A mucky pool.

No, she told him. I need to do this alone.

He nodded. He understood. They both coped in their own ways. He had women on the side, ogre women, everyone knew. Maybe she didn’t know, but probably. After all, although being with a human was the ultimate in showing off both self-control and status, sometimes a man just wanted a woman like himself. There were no prostitutes in the ogre village, as it was a barter economy and females chose males with equal discernment, but there were a couple who liked this particular ogre, and every few months he’d make a little sojourn as a way to honor where he came from. It’s for my mother, he told his ogre-woman once, and she’d laughed and laughed, nude and mottled and calm, sprawled over a mattress, one arm crossing loosely over her forehead.

The ogre helped his wife pack up. He buttoned up her bag and told her he would miss her, which was true. From his plunder, he gave her a magic cloak that would turn her into the color of the dappled light that shot through foliage, and also a cake that would become more cake once she’d eaten half. He
kissed her forehead, roughly, and she melted a little under his arms.

Do you know how long you’ll be? he asked.

I don’t know, she said.

Okay, he said. I’ll be here.

They spent the night almost close, her forehead pressed against the wall of his triceps. Come morning, she walked through the door and into fields of glistening green.

What marriage could recover? She did not plan on ever returning. The ogre wasn’t sure, but he thought it was unlikely. He was not insensitive, despite all suspicions. The day she left, he skipped work and went to the tavern for lunch and drank ninety-five beers. You’re a machine! the other ogres said, admiringly, as he slammed down another stein. Foam made an old man’s beard around his mouth, and he burped in an echo that trembled the hillsides.