The Message in the Sound
by Mary Renzi
Tomorrow would be the first day of the girl’s summer vacation. It should have been the triumph of Lindsay Black’s eleventh year, but she sat stone-like in front of the old Zenith television set while Blade Runner played on mute. Rutger Hauer rode up to meet his maker.
Lindsay watched the picture, but she listened for the sound of footsteps, or a movement of the bedroom door on its hinges. Her mother had not left the room in over three days.
A freight train bulleted by on the rails outside. It shook the walls and furniture of the small house. Lindsay heard her mother’s vapid moan bleed through the locked door.
It was sometime during the past year when Maddie Black had neurotically singled out the trains as her primary burden. The hammering scream of the flat cars, the violent way the train rocked the tracks, the mini-earthquakes that inspired the girl, sent her mother spiraling into a private hell.
Tonight, she groaned like a patient too drugged to express her pain. It crushed Lindsay to hear it. She did not have the stomach for anguish. There was nothing she could do. She turned the volume back up to drown it out.
***
When the movie ended, the girl made turkey and lettuce sandwiches for herself and Maddie, and she cut them into squares carefully. She felt it was important to take care of things while her mother could not. She grabbed the ice trays from the freezer and filled two glasses with cubes and poured the orange Fanta. She wanted to be disciplined about it. It always started out that way.
From the kitchen window, the girl could see the ruined steel mill. It towered, a dominant shadow in the mature, ash gray evening. It was the central ruin of Sykesville. The sprawling building was visible from any house, or any window, anywhere in their high desert town. The stacks of the old blast furnaces shot up towards the sky like the spires of an ancient stony church.
The mill had shut down one year ago, after the mines had gone dry. The residents who remained in Sykesville were stragglers and hangers-on. They were a strange mix of small-engine mechanics, hawkers, traveling merchants, and social pariahs. The few who were left standing with resources irrigated swaths of valley soil and planted desert crops of watermelon and cotton. But the town no longer had an economy of its own to speak of.
Lindsay’s father was one of the many who had left for greener pastures when the company split town. He had taken off in the early morning with an old footlocker and their Impala, leaving behind everything else.
The girl set up in the living room with the sandwiches. She heard the door finally, and saw her mother move towards the bathroom, shielding her eyes from the hallway light.
“I made you something to eat,” Lindsay said when she came out. Her small arms trembled slightly under the weight of the dishes.
Maddie stopped at the girl’s blockade. She rested against the wall.
“I’m not hungry right now,” she said. “I need more sleep, Lindsay. That’s all.” She had dark crescents under her ruined eyes. She ran her fingers quickly through her daughter’s red hair and said, “I’ll be better soon. I promise.”
Maddie reached into the deep pocket of her dirty robe and pulled out a fist of money. The bills were mixed with lint and half-smoked cigarettes.
“Go get me a carton of Marlboro Reds from Mr. Mackey’s store,” she told the girl. “Use the change to buy whatever you want.”
Maddie dropped the bills onto the dinner plate. Her skin was as white as frostbite against the deep purple of her robe—bloodless, like she had not seen the sun in weeks. She drifted back spectrally.
The girl was thrown by the phantom figure of her mother in the quiet hallway. She felt she inhabited a ghost town, that she did not really belong here, that she was viewing everything through thick glass.
***
But the moon was nearly full outside and the stars blinked clean white light as she started the mile to Mr. Mackey’s store, which Lindsay knew might or might not be open, depending on Mr. Mackey’s mood. The loud song of the summer cicadas surrounded her like a globe, like a vital structure of sound, and the girl smiled, because she knew there was a carton in the freezer, that all of the money was now hers. Little victories, she thought. But she could not help it. She looked back at her mother’s bedroom window.
Instead of the lighted square she saw a pink glow coming from the back yard of her house. It was new. The girl backtracked, and as she came closer, she saw that the glow was coming from the pool, that the light pulsed from some source inside of the basin. The craggy object took shape as her eyes adjusted to the dark. It was a gigantic meteorite, with wild ribbons of glowing pink.
The girl raced forward and hockey-stopped at the edge of the pool. But it was moving, it was breathing, and Lindsay fell back with a startled scream.
“Holy shit,” she said.
She stood and picked up a small rock from the ground and tossed it underhand at the living thing in her pool. There was no reaction, so she tried to provoke it again, this time by making noises in a loud string of inane monkey sounds.
A quiver ran through the creature’s naked mass. It heightened the coral luminescence in a shimmery wave. The girl could make out the general diamond shape of the body. Its armor was craggy and rough, like lava rock.
Lindsay walked around and she stood in front of it. She looked into its round, smooth eyes. It had wild, living eyes, and the girl realized she was staring into the face of a gigantic toad.
The size of the creature was impossible. But it was there, right in front of her. It was as definite as the house that she lived in. It was as definite as the large black oak tree that was planted beside it.
The toad filled the dry pool completely, busting into the tiled sides. Its triangular head rose above the rim regally. The creature was trapped in the tight space, unable to propel its mountainous body up and out of the confinement.
Lindsay raced in for her electric lantern, sweeping books and clothes and DVDs from under her bed, and she ran back out with the light to study the rough, living skin of the creature. She swept her light along the complex, banded pattern of its armor, illuminating the ribbons of electric indigo, and deep, saturated red. There were streamers the yellow-green color of budding spring plants, and serpent bands of dark ochre and cobalt. Its whole body was iridescent under the light, like insect wings.
She could not let go of the feeling that it had come from the bedrock—that this creature had been born in lava.
She did not know how to gauge the toad’s intelligence. She had no knowledge of any wild language to communicate with. But the girl was certain that the creature was not dangerous, the way she knew some dogs to be. There was a powerful stillness in its deep eyes, inaccessible and potent.
And the creature was hers.
Lindsay was certain—it would somehow be the answer to everything.
The girl went in for her sleeping bag, taking the stairs in one stride, electrically. Arcturus and Vega burned on the horizon, and the sky was a blaze of white-hot constellations.
It was summertime, after all. Everything felt new and good.
***
The sun rose.
The girl woke up to the sound of the toad’s loud snacking. She stretched and yawned. The creature’s pink tongue shot by her, the tacky muscle grabbing two mating locusts from a bunch of pampas grass in the yard beside her. It sounded off a chorus of thin insect rattles when it chewed.
After breakfast, Lindsay wanted to find Tree.
Whatever the subject, Tree knew a lot about it. More than other adults, anyway. And the girl wanted someone to share this with. A discovery like her toad could not be hoarded. But she would never knock on her mother’s door. The girl understood, the mystery surrounding the creature could not survive Maddie’s ruined atmosphere. She would dethrone it. Somehow.
***
Diesel was chasing a black squirrel out front when the girl arrived at Tree’s house. She went down and scratched him behind his scarred ears, then slapped his abdomen, raising up a cloud of brick colored dust. The mutt trot-hopped to the back and she followed him.
Diesel was missing a front leg. That made him Tree’s dog more than anything. Her friend collected misfits the way other men in Sykesville collected guns or beer steins.
Tree was a giant in stature. But his eyes were gentle and heavy-lidded, richly brown like loam. His skin was a much lighter shade, like raw silk. From where the girl stood, he was a ponderous shadow in the morning shade. He sat in his yard at a rough table, which was actually a door held up by cinderblocks. The table sat beneath a copse of pinyon pines.
“I have something you need to see,” she blurted out. “At my house.” She stood there in her polka-dot pajamas, rattled.
Lindsay had not meant to sound so urgent. But she suddenly felt frantic that Tree would not come without a clear explanation, which she could not give him.
“So tell me about it,” Tree said. He patted the bench beside him. He looked at his watch to remind the girl that it was still very early. He always interacted with her deliberately. It was a way that he had of training her patience.
“Well, it’s a surprise,” Lindsay said, restructuring her approach. “Anyway, you need to see it.” She sat down coolly.
There was an oak-slab chessboard on the table in front of her. A gouge and a carving knife rested on top of the board. Tree’s fingertips were black with dye, and curly-cues of wood had settled lightly at his enormous logger’s boots.
“I’ll come,” he said, “as soon as I’m done here.”
“You’re building a set?”
“Not building. Carving is the opposite of building. It’s subtractive. You remove the parts you don’t need.”
Tree held up a wedge of pine, which was the size of a young child’s building block, and in his other hand, a finished rook.
“Subtractive,” the girl said. She enjoyed the exactness of the word. She liked how it remained after she spoke it like something solid, like the chess piece that Tree held.
He lifted a darker basswood piece from a small bowl beside him. His primitive black dye smelled acrid, like rust and vinegar. “Well, maybe they’re ready,” he said. “I’ll just finish the white Queen. You can tire Diesel out for me. His rope is behind that creosote.” He pointed with the rook to indicate which shrub exactly.
“I’ll tire him out. Don’t worry,” the girl said.
Lindsay and Diesel thrashed towards the rockery.
Diesel worked himself into the crevasse between two sangria boulders, and chomped hackberries from a low branch there.
Lindsay shouted, “He wouldn’t fit if he still had his front leg, Tree.” She saw some poignancy in this.
The girl felt at home here. In this yard. With Tree and Diesel. But now there was the creature. And its pull was too strong for comfort. She saw the creature clearly every time she closed her eyes.
***
They heard a long, low vibration like a foghorn as they approached the girl’s house. It was followed by a braided ringing—a trilling, like the call of a gigantic insect. The sound was full and alive.
“It’s in the pool,” Lindsay said.
Tree stopped at the edge of the basin. “H. Christ,” he said.
“It’s friendly. I also think it’s…” Lindsay would not say magical. Tree would expose the word as childish. “From another place,” she concluded.
To demonstrate the creature’s gentleness, she lay down on her stomach and extended her arm to stroke the thick skin. It felt dry, like cornhusks.
At the girl’s touch, a vibration moved through the creature’s naked mass, charging the serpent bands electrically. The flush was spontaneous, a hematic response.
Tree lay down on the cement deck beside her. The toad’s tongue shot out, threading the space between them to snack on a dark beetle.
“I think it is a she,” Tree said.
“Why?”
“My gut is telling me.”
“You mean, it has a female vibe?” She looked into the creature’s large eyes. They were reflective turquoise pools. They gave the girl no sense of gender.
Tree laughed. “Yes. A female vibe.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Lindsay said. “Like her.”
“She is a mystery, isn’t she?”
The creature’s presence suggested the patience, the endurance of landforms. The toad waited as though a river would one day carve her from confinement. Her rough armor suggested brutal landscapes cut by wind. Tree noted something slow and intelligent in her calm eyes.
“I pet her this morning. She still felt moist,” the girl said. “Now she feels so dry.” She walked over to the spigot and opened the valve, then she unwound the hose and dragged it with her. The water spilled out weakly. Lindsay fogged the stream with her thumb, and walked around the pool, misting the creature.
Immediately the baked skin softened, and the color radiated cleanly from the serpent bands of the creature’s slaked armor.
“You are beautiful,” Lindsay whispered.
Tree told her, “I have a nozzle for that at home. I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.”
There was some sort of majesty here, he decided, caged and unfamiliar. And it had been placed right in the girl’s lap. Tree knew that he was committed to this, although he did not know what that commitment would mean, because he could not see ahead. They had started down some new, indeterminate course together.
But he would be here with her. He cared for Lindsay deeply. Long ago, Tree had recognized a certain potential in the girl for extreme independence. It was rare.
He pointed and said, “Your mother is up. I’m sure it was all the racket.”
Lindsay looked in. The curtains were mostly drawn, but she caught some dark movement.
“Does she know?” Tree asked.
“She’s been sleeping,” Lindsay told him.
Tree knew about Maddie’s long sleep cures from the girl. In town, she was known to be subject to crippling depressions, and also strange, violent abreactions.
The girl hung her head and walked.
Inside, the refrigerator door was open and Maddie stood in the space. She lifted a carton of milk and smelled the contents before selecting a glass from the cupboard.
She turned and saw her daughter there.
“Lindsay. You gave me a scare.” She did not look frightened, though. She only looked tired.
But she was up, and drinking. The girl knew that it was a good sign.
Maddie filled two glasses. She set the cups down on the small kitchen table. “Give me a hug,” she said, and beckoned Lindsay with her arm. “Don’t worry about me. I’m recovering. I’ll be as fit as a fiddle soon.”
The woman rested her chin on her daughter’s head and began a slow dance with her beneath the yellow cabinets. Lindsay could feel her through the dank gown. She was as slat-ribbed as a refugee.
Maddie pulled her head back and their lilt stopped.
“You have been using my hairspray, Lindsay. I smell it on you.” She looked at the girl’s face. “My makeup, too.” She wiped a trace of smoky red lipstick with her finger, which the girl had pilfered the night before. She studied Lindsay’s hands, flipping them.
Maddie’s slight body had become tense and shivery. Her eyes were awake now and half-wild.
The girl leaned in and hugged her mother fiercely. The hug was her way of pleading. She knew her mother’s anger could spike violently from these calm moments.
Maddie breathed long and deep below Lindsay’s powerful hug. Then, with great intention, she picked up the earlier rhythm, dancing slowly with her daughter in the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, Lindsay,” she whispered. “I’m not well yet.” A quick sob rattled from her throat.
***
The following week was full. The girl felt happy. She spent every moment she had with the creature, who she named Oya. Oya fit perfectly because the name was beautiful, and unfamiliar, like her creature. She liked how it rolled off her tongue.
Tree erected a ramada to shade Oya from the brutal sun. It was made from four large mesquite posts, fastened down by a gigantic blue tarp. The trill of the creature, once the shade was erected, was—Lindsay imagined—thankful. She was starting to hear the messages in the creature’s sound.
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From her new post in the yard, she could look back and see the dark square of her mother’s window dripping condensation. Maddie did not know yet of the creature’s existence. There might have been an ocean separating her from her back yard.
Tree had taken over most of the responsibilities inside. He helped the girl cook and clean, and he made sure that Maddie ate at least one meal a day in her bedroom. He would remind Lindsay to brush her teeth. The girl was so rapt by the spell of the creature, she forgot simple hygiene. Tree would ask about her reading and they talked books. Lately, it was Ray Bradbury. Lindsay consumed his whole catalogue as she sat under the ramada with Oya during the long summer days.
In the evenings they sat in old lawn chairs, the girl so deeply interested in the shifting colors and pulsing luminescence of the creature’s armor. Reliably, Tree was beside her, toying with a bishop and drinking strong coffee from his blue camp mug.
One evening when the weather was cool, the bluish emanations of the creature matched the deep blue-black of the approaching night. Tree had cooked up a light fish stew with sea bass and cilantro. He brought it outside in a steaming decanter and poured the meal into three bowls. The girl brought one dish to Oya, and the creature’s powerful tongue over-shot the target. So she placed the bowl again, this time at a distance, and Oya hit her mark, capturing some of the meal but projecting the dish sideways like a bowling pin. The meal splashed Tree as he sat in his chair, and the girl fell over with laughter. She found a method of pouring the soup into Oya’s trusting jaws. Everything was good.
When Tree left at night, the girl stayed outside with the creature. She hardly visited inside at all. It was too vacant. It felt barren, like an empty schoolroom. But the beauty of the creature absorbed and excited her. Nothing else had ever brought Lindsay to such a level of attention. She began to draw Oya on her Strathmore sketchpad, although she felt the emerging picture was far too clumsy. She did not have the ability to capture the alien beauty. There was a dimension to the creature that could not be recreated with lines and curves and her average skill.
The creature watched her too. Oya’s hooded eyes followed the girl as she set up her tent at night, or gathered the hose for her watering, or slapped her knees like bongo drums, or whistled some tune she had heard on Tree’s crank radio that day.
Every morning when Lindsay crawled out of her sleeping bag, she found that new transformations had taken place in her yard.
Dewy ferns had shot up from small breaks in the weathered cement deck. With each sunrise, there was an accumulation of slick moss, and putrid wetland mud. A population of emerald caterpillars crawled beneath the stems of the new vegetation. The bracken ended abruptly where the cement deck hit her dirt yard. It was a square oasis of green, with Oya at the center.
Then one day as Lindsay sat with Tree, the message in the creature’s sound was suffering. Oya’s wail emerged sharp from the general quiet. There was no mistaking the grief in it.
The girl was distressed by the revelation of pain.
Tree told her, “Oya is alone and trapped. Maybe more alone than we know. Perhaps there is no other creature like her.”
But Lindsay did not think that made sense. “Then who does she cry for?”
Tree did not have a good answer.
He said, “But she doesn’t look well, Lindsay.”
The creature seemed diminished in her confinement. She no longer had the stature of a mountain. The skin around her eyes had gone loose and sickly gray, like spoiled meat.
The girl became occupied with freeing Oya after that. Her ideas were mostly improbable. She thought of military jets hoisting the creature from the basin and flying her to a remote expanse where she could thrive with others like her. When she looked at the towers of the old mill, Lindsay considered mining equipment and huge mechanical claws resurrected from machine graveyards. They would tear up the ground and release Oya from her prison. She saw Oya loaded onto a freight car and bulleted away to some magical land at the bottom of the ocean, where the train tracks ended in the silt. As a general practice, the girl always envisioned this clash of machine and creature, of industry and wild. Her imagination veered towards the technological. It was a habit she had acquired from science fiction.
The original intention was to keep Oya a secret. The girl and Tree had never actually discussed such a plan, but it worked out that way.
The girl’s mother was in such a dark place, she could not see outside of it. And Lindsay and Maddie did not generally receive visitors. Their closest neighbors, the Randall’s, were a quarter mile down Tuckerman.
On some level they both understood they could not blab about Oya like a tabloid headline. It was a general feeling they had for the proportions of the situation. They knew the character of their town. If Oya were discovered, there would be conflict.
But there was no practical way to hide the massive toad. So it was somewhat of a relief when Don Forrestal broke into their world that Sunday afternoon. Now the waiting was over. Now certain cards were going to be dealt.
***
Don stood on the edge of the basin. He ran his fingers through his thin hair and wiped beads of sweat from his brow with a dark bandanna. An inarticulate noise rose and died in his throat. He crossed himself, and gripped his King James Bible closer to his chest.
The girl watched as he walked around the pool. He checked the spectral armor of the creature. Don slipped on a mat of slick moss in his polished church shoes.
“It’s crawling with electric serpents,” he muttered. “Strange, charged, snake-things.”
He shook the mesquite posts of the ramada as he walked under the structure, as if it might be rigged to collapse on him. Don studied the girl and Tree. Their faces were impassive.
“What—in the name of God—is it?”
“Her name is Oya,” the girl said. “She appeared in my pool a week ago. We are trying to get her…home.”
“Appeared,” Don said, nodding. The explanation satisfied him. “From the depths,” he added, sub-vocally.
He wore a pair of khaki pants and a white tee shirt. The plain dress matched his pale skin. Don’s spine curved gently like a sodden stalk.
Don had been courting Lindsay’s mother, or something like courting, for the past year now, ever since her father had split Sykesville. But he worked without apparent passion. He had been pursuing Maddie with the metabolism of a snail.
Don held a carnation, which he dropped down to his side. He said, “Why hasn’t she told me about this?” Then he added, “She still doesn’t trust me.” But he spoke in a rigid and mechanical way. He knew that it did not matter. He was used to casual rejection. The real issue here was the beast.
He did not know yet what God wished for him to do. He did not know what the real meaning of the creature was. But a dull horror churned his insides as he stared at the beast. The proportions of the creature were incorrect. It smelled of ozone and wet dirt and algae bloom. There was a deep underground smell surrounding it like decaying wood.
Don stared at Oya, but he spoke to the girl. “You and your mother were not at church, so I thought I would come by. I need to talk to her. Now.” He felt fear rising inside of him like ice. His knees wanted to buckle beneath him.
Don stumbled towards the back door of the small house.
He muttered, “Serpent of the earth. Yes. Serpent of the earth. Certainly.”
He thought of the old iron mine where he had worked all those years ago. He saw the gaping wound of the pit, like an open mouth to the center of the earth. And in his vision, there was a strange substance growing on the buried ore that burned with the cold light of the beast, attracting and collecting like small pools of mercury to build the unnatural creature.
The image was strong. It was true. Inspired. Don looked up at the hot sky.
The girl watched as he recklessly opened the door, and stumbled over the threshold to her mother’s room.
Things had changed. The town would be here tomorrow.
“I think we will need our sleep tonight,” Tree said. He hugged the girl to his side before he left. “We will figure this out, Lindsay. Your Oya will be all right.” But he could not bring himself to promise.
The girl looked at the creature. She resembled an anemic god in the swimming pool. She pulled the hose and fogged Oya with water.
Maddie’s bedroom light was on, and Lindsay heard Don’s raised voice through the glass, although she could not make out what he said.
Tonight, Lindsay would sleep beside the creature in the wetland growth. She wanted to lay right on top of Oya, feeling the warmth and movement of her live body. But she would settle for closeness, and the warm cloud of the creature’s breath.
***
The next morning, Maddie Black sat eating her grapefruit with the flattened eyes of an insomniac. It seemed as though she was viewing everything through a small keyhole. Her daughter sat across from her at the breakfast table drinking orange juice, the girl’s red hair matted with sphagnum. A streak of green mud had dried across her cheek. Maddie had the vague thought that, as she slept, her daughter had turned wild.
Don had seen to it that she would be up today. He’d told her she would have visitors. That she would have to stand. He needed her to go through the motions. It was crucial. He would help her figure things out, but not today. Whatever demon it was that possessed her soul, he would discover it, he promised her. He would ask the lord for insight, and when he prayed, God listened. When he prayed, things happened.
But tomorrow, he apologized, she would have to stand. Everyone else went to work, he told her. They showered, they watered their plants and took the garbage out, even as they suffered deeply. This was life, he said. A trial. It helped if you knew there was a God, but she did not know, did she? Because she would not be so hopeless if she had faith. But he would help her. It was important that she understood this.
The most crucial course of action, he told her, was to call a town meeting—that night, no less—to discuss the creature. He was certain that the very soul of Sykesville was at stake. He stood up and paced Maddie’s bedroom as he spoke. He seemed to be on fire. When he sat back down on the bed, he slid his hand underneath her gown, between her slight legs. Maddie had never seen such passion from Don. He was a new man—heated—and his blood boiled with purpose.
***
The first visitors came peacefully. They rapped on the door lightly and carried small gifts with them. Sarah Engels came, holding her family rug pattern on a piece of yellowed paper. Maddie had asked her about it years ago. She had found the intricate, circular patterns striking.
Sarah handed the paper to Maddie and said, “A get well gift. We heard you were feeling ill.” But she walked towards the window as she said it, and the brittle gift fluttered to the ground.
Sarah pulled the drapes. “My sisters and I can weave that pattern with our eyes closed,” she continued. “We know it when we are born.” She spoke hypnotically.
The bracken almost hid the creature from her view, but Sarah saw its rock-ribbed armor above the vegetation, rising and settling with the creature’s slow breathing. She stumbled towards the door.
Lindsay threw her favorite pink cap on backwards and followed Sarah Engels outside. She took up her post by Oya in the wetland growth. She used a soccer ball to sit on and rolled a pine baseball bat thoughtlessly under her foot.
She said to the creature, “They can look, but they can’t touch you without going through me.”
The girl knew that Oya was in some kind of danger, although she did not think the inhabitants of her town would risk open violence. She thought of King Kong, then of Oya, displayed on a platform under harsh stage lights.
A low-ranged sound erupted from the creature. The notes were deep and muscular. The girl looked up at the dark sky. The sun was hidden behind thick clouds. It was a canvas of purple, threatening rain and wildfire.
But the weather held off as the morning passed. The trickling in of the first curious visitors had turned into a crush of bodies by noon. Hundreds of feet turned the space into a dust cloud.
Lindsay was aware of the rally in her yard like the loud drone of an air tanker behind her. But she was not a part of it. She did not know if Tree was there, or if her mother and Don stood together. The girl could not stand back and look at Oya through their telescope. It was what adults liked to do, viewing things from a distance. Condemning or approving them. Separate. They planned. They made pronouncements about the nature of things.
But the girl was in contact with the creature. She thought about Oya all the time now. She was sensitive to every small sound that rattled from her body; her world was Oya’s warm eyes. Each impulse that ran through the creature’s armor was a new and shocking spread of color. Emerald caterpillars from the oasis crawled over the girl’s shoes. Some clung to the delicate stems of the vegetation, or hung upside down from the light fronds.
Lindsay heard a sharp voice say, “Where else? Of course it came from the mine. That land is…black. Of course it did.”
A yellow sarong and a pair of platform shoes crowded in beside the girl. Lindsay did not know who had spoken because she did not look up. The girl did not speak one word to the visitor. Or the next. There was a broken line of bodies throughout the day—the brave souls who wanted to look right into the eyes of the beast.
But they did not dare to break the silent solidarity of the girl and her creature. On some level they understood: their intrusion here was shameful, they did not belong, they were disrupting something vital. In this way, the girl was able to protect the creature to an extent.
Oya’s health had worsened noticeably since the night before. Even as she radiated her beautiful light, the creature’s bearing was wilted. A filmy serum covered large areas of Oya’s armor, and a spongy growth like mold carpeted the sack of her throat.
The girl opened a Ziploc bag that rested on the ground beside her. It was full of raw, salted trout. She fed the fish to Oya, then laid her hand on the creature’s giant head. When she pulled her fingers away, they were covered in slick membrane.
“Oya,” she said. “What can we do about you?”
Lindsay looked up at the dark sky. It was a harsh, steel curtain now. There was one small break in the clouds not far from the horizon. The opening blazed with the swift orange of the setting sun.
She heard a man say, “The roads are gonna flood. You know they are. Well, we haven’t had rain since February. We need it now more than ever.”
Someone added, “We aren’t getting across Fat Man once the rain starts.”
The storm was setting up nicely over the valley. From the Black’s back yard, strikes could be seen lashing the far ridges violently, or side-striking from cloud to cloud. Gray colonnades of rain hung solidly over the far peaks.
An updraft whipped the girl’s cap from her head. It touched down lightly on the creature, before skipping across the yard like a pink tumbleweed.
As the hot air rose, the creature gave off her light in a new way—it was a solid, primary glow. The shifting bands of color were gone, and Oya’s body breathed and burned with the steady radiance of burning charcoal.
The gathering outside of the oasis was moving now. Some of the crowd gathered their small children and moved towards the vehicles out front. They wanted to beat the hammering of weather that was certainly coming. But the majority of the crowd stood stock still, arrested by the sight of the creature’s dynamo. They were hypnotized by Oya’s cool fire.
The girl stepped back for a fuller view of the spectacle. Then Tree was beside her. He pulled the girl back further, and unclipped his bowie knife, releasing the long blade.
“Your reflection,” he explained. He held the knife for her, catching the porch light and using it as a mirror. Strands of the girl’s hair stood out statically.
“This is dangerous?” she asked.
Lindsay smiled. She enjoyed the silly image. But she moved back as Tree suggested. The girl felt the excitement of the building storm in her blood.
Her mother stood near the porch with the group from Calvary Baptist. She was side by side with Don. They hooked arms, loosely unaware of each other’s bodies. There seemed to be a mutual disinterest between them.
The girl thought for a moment that her mother was looking at her, but Maddie’s eyes were half closed, her skin blanched, her mood unfocused. Neither the girl nor the creature held any interest for her. The rising winds did not cue a warning. She stood because Don required her there. She did not have the energy yet for self-direction.
The heavy drops of rain started down slowly. And with the downdrafts came hard ground currents—missiles of wind that channeled over the Black’s back yard from all directions, centering on the creature. Oya opened her jaws wide and drank the strong currents of air.
Don Forrestal watched with fierce gray eyes as the creature burned and pulsed in the basin. He watched as the beast ate weather with the appetite of a primitive god. The magnitude of the biblical display incensed him.
He studied the rapt faces of the Calvary group, keen with the wonder and fear owed only to the one, true God. He knew then that he would slaughter the Scarlet Beast. With or without the consent of the town. It was all that mattered. He decided he would bring his rifle tonight while the girl slept.
The rain fell harder, and the yard swirled with stinging grains of sand and microtrash. Don swept Maddie inside and the remaining crowd clamored towards their vehicles, most of them forgetting to lock their hubs as they bulleted off with the realization that they had waited too long.
The rain came down in sheets now. Tree was a monolith and Lindsay anchored into him. The glow of the creature was drunkenly abstracted through the heavy water. Oya pulsed like a beacon, her light fractured by water fall. And then it was dark; the girl could not see the creature until her light reappeared, burning brightly beneath the black oak tree.
“Oya!” Lindsay cried. “Oya!” She jumped up and slammed down in the slick desert mud. “Hah!”
The creature tore off into the wild, berserk with her new freedom. She bounded into the country with earth-shaking strides. She did not pause to say goodbye. She did not know about such courtesies. She only knew life and movement and deep primal power.
Lindsay chased Oya’s glow, maneuvering through the dark desert, infected by ferocious joy. She hopped over creosotes and jumped cacti. She threaded between agave plants, never losing her footing. The girl was possessed by an expert grace she was unaware of.
The creature bobbed and weaved in and out of the ravines. Her light lilted and pulsed against the easy slope of the valley floor, wavering like heat. They ran.
Lindsay could not keep up, but it was enough to have Oya in her sight. They moved farther from the buttoned-up houses of Sykesville, and from the strange, closed-off lives. They passed old car frames and beaten cattle tanks—industrial trash owned by no one and half swallowed by the desert sand. In the open valley Oya was a lit tank moving heavily over the terrain. When the creature leapt, she left behind craters the size of mountain lakes, which filled with rainwater.
The girl came to the south fork of Fat Man Creek and stopped at the swift channel. She had never seen it so swift or heard it so roaring. It was the end of her trail. She sat down on the muddy bank and she watched Oya’s light recede towards the rocky peaks. Without the light of the creature close by, the desert became inky.
“You changed everything, Oya.” She said it to Oya as the light disappeared behind a knife ridge.
The girl’s clothes were saturated with rainwater. The desert air was warm, and she felt strong, as though Oya had left behind a piece of her animal heart, which beat inside of her now.
And later that night, when Lindsay lay down to go to sleep, she found she was not able to. She lay there instead, studying the crude drawing she had made of the creature underneath her book light. She closed her eyes to see Oya more clearly. An excitement like a low bass line traveled through the girl’s body. She felt she could jump to the moon, or dive to the ocean bottom. Lindsay tucked the drawing carefully beneath her pillow and closed her eyes, her mind alive with all the awesome possibilities ahead of her.
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About the Author
Mary Renzi works as a wildland firefighter for the National Park Service. She enjoys writing stories in which the invisible and alienated are thrown into extreme situations.
“The Message in the Sound” © 2013 Mary Renzi
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