The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (26 page)

Ralph was there as he had been the night before, asleep and barely covered by his bathrobe. The unicorn turned to glance at me, but regarded me only a second before it turned its gaze back inward, or so I assumed, back to whatever it was unicorns thought of when trying to ignore their surroundings, the fact that they were trapped in a shed in a suburban hellhole outside of Houston.

Quietly, I opened the gate and I checked Ralph to make sure he was fully asleep. A bruise had begun to purple on his lips, which were beginning to swell, and one of his eyes looked like it would be seriously blackened by morning, and I wondered at what kind of marital strife had caused this, though I was pretty certain it had something to do with the unicorn. Then I checked the house to see if any windows were lit up, and satisfied that no one was awake and spying on me, I quietly, slowly, gently moved close to her, held my hand out to her, not sure if that’s what you were supposed to do, but figured it couldn’t hurt. She ignored my upturned palm, and feeling hesitant but desperate to touch her, I reached my fingers out to her pearlescent skin, to run my finger down the length of her throat and neck, which looked cool to the touch and soft.

I don’t know what I was expecting to happen when I touched her. An electric shock, maybe, or to feel an incredible warmth or stunning coldness, or to be flooded with memories, of the girls I’d loved, of their perfect faces, their soft lips, of my son’s birth, of my wife’s long, bony fingers, of the first time I’d had sex, or images of the future, my own or the world’s. But nothing happened. Nothing, that is, so drastic or dramatic as any of that. I raised my hand to her head and touched her lightly and then drew back, in anticipation of something, but then gently ran my fingers in a soft line down the length of her neck, the feel of which sent a shiver through me, and she shook her mane, and she made a sound or I made a sound, but whoever made the sound, it was loud enough to wake Ralph, or maybe he had been awake that whole time, awake and standing behind me, waiting for the perfect moment to interject, to say, “What have we got here, Mano?”

It was a strange and violent fight that followed. Strange because, in hindsight, it’s possible Ralph had had no intentions to fight when he saw me standing there, and strange, too, because we weren’t, neither of us, much for fighting. Ralph was short and overweight and strong but clumsy, and I had a suspicion he needed glasses but wouldn’t ever own up to it, a suspicion only cemented by how wildly he swung at me, how long it took for him to catch sight of me out of the corner of his eye whenever I moved to the left or the right of him. He said, “What have we got here, Mano?” and I wasted no time, swinging wildly around even before he hit the
M
of
Mano
. I hit him hard on the neck, though I’d been aiming for his face. This threw him off a bit and made him start coughing, made him grab his neck with both hands, and for a moment, I stopped, not a little upset to see him there in pain like that because of me. He took this opportunity to throw himself into me and slam me into the corner of the shed, hard, so that I felt the pain of that corner digging into my back all the way down to my feet. Then we proceeded to punch and kick at each other, to grapple and push, grunting and swearing, and at least once I landed a lucky punch right on his swelling lips, splitting the top lip open so that now we had some blood in the mix.

When I had imagined this fight between Ralph and me, and I had imagined it a number of times before, though I had never tried to imagine the circumstances that led to it, it was me, always me, who got the upper hand of it, quickly straddling a prone and defeated Ralph. I was the more athletic, the more cunning, I had always assumed, and maybe that’s true, but at the moment, it didn’t matter, and soon enough I found myself flat on my back, Ralph pressing down on me, his red, swollen, sweaty face hanging heavily over my own. Then he spit on me, and then he said, “What the hell, Mano?” Then he spit again, but this time into the dirt. Then he said, “Jesus Christ, what the hell?” And then for a moment I felt like a fool and an idiot and an asshole. Then I heard a hoof paw in the dirt, and I tilted my head back so that I could see the unicorn, upside down and behind us, and then I tilted my head forward again and saw Ralph, his lip bleeding still, his mouth moving, though I didn’t hear or understand what he was saying, and then I tilted my head farther forward and saw that his bathrobe had twisted open so that, except for the corduroy belt still tied around his belly, he was bare and vulnerable from his chest on down, and seizing my opportunity, I jerked my knee up into that softest part of him with as much force as I could muster, which made him pitch forward and land heavily on my face before I could roll him off of me. Then I stood and kicked him once more for good measure, hard enough to stop him swearing and hollering for a moment at least.

I took a moment to catch my breath and then saw that a light had come on in one of the upstairs windows, and then I thought I saw the silhouette of Melissa move away from the lit window, and then other lights started to come on in the house, and so as quickly as I could, I grabbed at the harness Ralph had tucked over the unicorn’s head and I pulled, firm but gentle, not sure what I would do if the unicorn decided not to go with me. It didn’t take any coaxing at all, though, and I had her out of the shed, and then I kicked open the gate, and then pulled her into the alley, which dead-ended, and then led her around the side of Ralph’s house and into the front yard. Then as soon as we’d cleared Ralph’s property and were moving into the street, that unicorn stopped and abruptly and smoothly tossed her head, and with a subtle flick put a gash in my chest the length of my arm and then swept my legs out from under me, and the last I saw of her she was trotting down the street, spearing that horn through every mailbox she saw; I watched that unicorn lower her head and spear through first one mailbox and then another and then another, and before long I lost sight of her, but I could hear her still, her hooves against the pavement, her horn tearing through the aluminum boxes, the crash of them hitting the street. Then I laid my head back against the street and I closed my eyes and I listened for as long as I could, and I waited. I waited for something else, anything else, to happen.

“Wolf!”

M
y father didn’t become violent until, one night while camping outside of Nacogdoches in the East Texas Pineywoods, he was bitten by a stray and sickly wolf.

Perhaps it was a dog.

Before I continue I would like to put to rest some of the myths concerning werewolves, reveal truths that, had I known them before, might have saved more of us:

The Full Moon

Father’s changes were not restricted by the light of the full moon. The changes, in fact, began even before he returned from his trip, rushed home by his fellow bird-watchers.

His beard had filled out, climbing up his face, covering his cheekbones, and reaching up to the lower lids of his eyes.

His nails had grown longer, sharper, and seemed, at the end, to be made of something harder than metal.

His snout had grown, too, allowing for an enhanced sense of smell.

In fact, all of him, by the end, had grown large, and at times I wondered at the deep reach of his long arms, at his hands and how vast they had become.

Silver Bullets

No matter how many I fired—

into his chest (near his heart),

into his side (piercing, so I discovered after the autopsy, his kidney),

through the thickest part of his neck,

into his soft underbelly,

and into his skull—

no matter how many silver bullets, he refused to quietly lie down, fall into a peaceful, interminable sleep, refused to keel over dead, refused, even, to turn from my youngest sister, whom he slaughtered before I could fire even my last shot.

Sunlight

When we captured him, my mother and I, finally, after two weeks of hiding and foraging and planning, after having buried the rest of his “brood” as Father liked to call us, or, rather, after we buried what was left of them, most of them being—well, let’s not go into that just yet—but finally capturing him with a net knotted together by my mother’s thick, supple fingers, Father was sleeping on his back in a wide strip of sunlight that poured into the living room and spilled across the rug and across his favorite chair.

Father had gone to the Pineywoods (more specifically, into the Angelina National Forest)—that year as he had every year since my birth and most likely before—in search of Henslow’s sparrow.

Not that the sparrow in question is particularly difficult to spot, though it is listed as an uncommon and inconspicuous bird. Not that he hadn’t observed and recorded his observations of Henslow’s sparrow numerous times in the past.

More that this particular sparrow was an obsession of his, one none of us outside of Noah quite understood, and we had our doubts about Noah, too.

Still, despite the yearly trips and frequent sightings, I could only find this blurred photograph of the bird in his office, in a box that contained other ornithological trappings (some ten notebooks describing sightings, habitats, movements, dates, times, etc.; some twenty ornithological texts, including
The Audubon Guide to the Birds and Waterfowl of East Texas
; two pairs of binoculars; and a small box of photographs [all of them as unfocused as this one, for though he was a fine observer and though he could sight birds quicker than his bird-watching fellows, he never had the steady hand necessary for photography]).

What I am trying to say is: My father was a patient man, an observant man.

The point I’m trying to make perfectly clear is: My father was a man who liked birds, and that men who like birds are, on average, men of a peaceful nature.

My youngest brother, Noah, who had, more than any of us, inherited Father’s ability to sit and wait and record, sat at our father’s bedside for two days after he was returned to us from his camping expedition. The doctor had been summoned, had arrived, had administered medicines, and had proclaimed him (our father) in no real danger.

“But what about the hair on his face?” Noah asked. “What about his fingernails?” he said.

The doctor laughed and said, more to Mother than to any of us children, “Your father merely needs a good shave and some super-sturdy nail clippers. Certainly nothing to worry about.”

“And his nose?” Noah asked. “What do you make of his nose?” he said.

But the doctor had a ready answer for that as well: “It’s only made to look bigger by the hair on his face. See if he doesn’t look as normal as Sunday once you’ve given him a good shave.”

Or maybe he had said, “As right as rain.”

In any case: Mother had my sisters shave him.

They used clippers first and then shaving cream and a fresh razor and then more cream and a new razor, as the other had been dulled by the bristles of his beard.

Two hours later, Noah, who had sat silently by throughout the entire process, came to us, Mother and I, and told us that Father’s beard had grown back again.

“Just as full?” I asked.

“More so,” he said. “And, also, I’d like to take a moment to point out that against a clean-shaven face, his nose looked even larger still.” That is how Noah spoke. Very much like our father.

“Must you watch him like that?” Mother asked. “Haven’t you homework or housework to finish?”

“I’ve done it all,” he said.

“Fine, then,” I said. “Keep us informed. Tell us what you find out.”

To that effect, Noah kept notes. But his notebook is incomplete.

What I can read of my brother’s notes reads much like Father’s bird-watching notes. It is amazing how even his handwriting looks so similar to Father’s. Father, it seems, taught Noah well. None of the rest of us cared so much for birds or for sitting quite so still. The date, a brief description of the weather, small descriptions of the length and growth of Father’s hair, the hardness of Father’s nails, how they grew now to sharp tips, the low guttural, mewling coughs rising up from Father’s throat that gave Noah chills—such were Noah’s final observations before Father woke, newly and fully transformed, and filled with what I can only imagine was a terrible hunger.

Mother fashioned the net out of raw silk and numerous thin bands of copper wire.

I don’t know why Mother and I were spared for so long or how we survived while the others, one by one, were hunted, slaughtered.

Noah first, but quickly followed by Josephine, who had been sleeping poorly, waking early in the mornings (had, in fact, been awake and watching Father the morning he left for his trip, watching him as he packed the last of his things, long before the sun had risen, before any of the rest of us had woken), who had, in the middle of the night, stumbled to the kitchen for water and then to the guest room, where we kept Father while he lay unconscious, drawn there, I suspect, by the light beneath the door, hoping, perhaps, that Noah was still awake and watchful, or that Father had finally woken.

Then there was William, who might not have been third, but who—

But wait. I’d rather not go on in this manner. I’m not yet prepared to rattle off their names, the gruesome manner in which Father took them.

I would like you to understand something.

I would like you to recognize that I am trying my best to get through this.

I’m trying to be straightforward, honest, earnest.

To present facts, and only facts.

To paint a picture.

But.

What if I were to say I have nothing left to give?

What if I were to confess that I loved my mother dearly but that I am happy the rest of them are gone, eaten, disposed of? Noah, Josephine, William, Richard, Sarah, Rebecca, and Ruth? Even Father?

What then? Am I a bad son, a bad brother, a bad person, if I tell you that I liked that it was just Mother and me and no one else? Does that make me a monster, too?