Miscreations Read online

  (Later, a week after I thought I was having a heart attack at the office but wasn’t, I canceled an appointment with a cardiologist after memorizing the ER litany, lovely excuses strung on a line, a comforting weight of words. I cut my coffee down to one cup a day and missed the other four terribly. The palpitations came less often, less thunderously. The panic attacks that erupted alongside them eased into manageable anxiety. The pair of hospital bills hurt, even with insurance, and I couldn’t add to them just yet. It is too easy to ignore sickness in this country.)

  My monster could be a heart attack—the fear of a heart attack, a heart attack that hasn’t caught up with me yet—brought to flesh. The things I can’t deal with. A disease of the heart walking upright, something I can see looming over me when my eyes open in bed, around a corner when I look behind me in the supermarket. A disguised creature parting the crowds toward me without public alarm, its long fingers able to grasp my head full of excuses. It could reach me at any moment and with any audience, like the seismic stopping of a heart.

  I picture its face as I begin to create it. I see it as so much like a man’s face, with beautiful features and quiet, cold green eyes, a face to stare out of billboards. The beauty does something to my pulse, it sends a trill through the blood. But something is wrong with the face, soft and handsome though it is. It is slightly too large. And it is in the moment of beginning to slip from its anchor of ligaments and tissue. If the face spoke—if it were not biding its time—the voice, like my heart, would carry an uneasy glissando that turns the stomach. It is an arrhythmia of nature.

  It will come down out of the mountains, ancient and new as the land. Can it crawl on its legs and arms? Most of its limbs are folded up inside the clothes it wears to follow me out into the world as the semblance of a man. The four limbs I see in my mind could unravel to their true lengths from sleeves and cuffs. Its clothes are nicer than mine. Like its face, they speak of money that can solve problems. The monster would be so tall if it were ready to show itself to me. Its arms would drag behind it on the floor of the detergent aisle, in the gutters of the streets. The limbs I can’t see must be freed from their buttoned container, so that it can come after me like a spider in the end. For now, it smiles at me from a distance. Its beautiful face slides into the corner of my eye.

  The door sensor beeps twice as my partner comes home from work, and the dog, surprised that she didn’t hear her Girl outside while distracted by my need, barks once and sprints from the office. I hear my partner’s voice climb two octaves as they greet each other, reunited again. I hear the clatter of nails on the hardwood, and my heart eases. It beats a sober drum. I put on my not-worried face, and it, too, seems poorly anchored by its ligaments and tissue. I stand and look out the window again and the sun is now just a stain on the mountains—for a moment it brings an early fall to their coloring.

  How will my monster fit into this world? I must assemble it, give it sinews and lungs and something like its own heart, and it will give me a story. Tonight, when the palpitations come, I’ll pretend I am woken by the sound of scrabbling on the roof above us, though the dog will look at me with her eyes shining in the dark instead of giving a warning bark, and I know I’m always the last of us three to hear things, anyway.

  ~

  Why do we create monsters? The mad Dr. Frankenstein, as we see him in films, wanted to play God. In the novel, he wanted to do so less theatrically. Horror authors answer this question differently: to frighten readers. It could be to make a buck; it could be to hold a mirror up to the world, in more ambitious cases.

  I’ve written creatures before that were for readers as much as they were for myself, if not more. I wrote them in the hope that what unsettles me would be a universal thing. But if I create a monster for myself, to coax toward the only heart it is made to haunt, to give voice to fears I won’t allow to bloom inside a stethoscope or an electrocardiograph, how can I frighten others? How can I honor the trust placed in me by the editors of this anthology? If the monster were to break free of this tether and appear on bookstore shelves, how could such a terror hope to translate? Perhaps the sign of a true artist is to make people afraid of things they didn’t know they were afraid of. But the reader has only to say—This is a story about a writer writing a story. I am holding Miscreations, so the writer lived to tell me the story. From the start he is pulling back the curtain to show me the smoke and mirrors, the innards of his monster.

  (Sometimes, too, there’s a tightness near my left shoulder, like the blood I need is trying to squeeze into my heart around an obstruction. I sometimes skim articles about angina and convince myself all the symptoms but the squeezing aren’t present. It’s only indigestion, I must be swallowing air as I eat. I remind myself the palpitations have improved. My partner reassures me, and the look in her eyes tells me she means it. Though I keep many of these thoughts from her and recite the ER litany to myself, familiar enough to hum under my breath as though it were the first measures of a concerto.)

  Mid-mornings at work are the hardest. It’s when my belly is full and indigestion—what I tell myself is indigestion and the only root of this pressure—expands inside me. But more than that, mid-morning is when I thought I was having a heart attack that day but wasn’t. Mid-morning is a nudge for my palms to sweat, for my breath to become shallower than it needs to be, for my heart to gasp in my chest. Mid-morning is when I’m trapped in an office fifteen traffic-clogged miles from home. A panic attack is less likely these days, but if it’s near, this is when its teeth will come out.

  Today I go to the restroom and splash my face with cold water, looking up at the mirror in time to see a too-long arm retracting through the closing door, down near where the carpet begins in the hallway. I didn’t hear the door open. There was no one in here when I came in. A monster I made would do this exact thing, to let the protagonist know it is near and push the story a step further into horror and a heartbeat closer to confrontation. It’s a reminder that the uncanny is insinuating itself into what has been mundane.

  Since the monster is half-made, I spend my lunch break writing this list of components, the parts I will stitch together:

  ~

  Organic and of the same atoms as my body. In another story, the protagonist would drive up into the mountains, wade through the dusk, and cut a palm open. Squeeze blood onto moss cushioning a dead oak, for the symbolism of it, the amateur witchcraft. In this story, my heart aches to be quieted.

  Twelve appendages, long & pale & many-jointed for folding, the pair below the face ending in ten growths that are almost fingers. In another story, the protagonist would have a terror of spiders. I do not—mine is of wasps, but I have no wish to build a creature from a wasp’s blueprints, either. This would place my fear in the wrong box. The extra limbs remove it from any taxonomy I know, and will cause my gut to churn in unease, giving me another excuse to blame all of this on indigestion.

  Hairless torso with distended belly & caved, sagging chest. In another story, the monster would have slept long beneath the mountains’ quilt of nature and eons, waiting for the moon to shine through a hole eaten by a rare beetle in a leaf upon a certain tree. The line of moonlight would strike the earth at an ordained angle above the creature’s open eye. The monster, the god has waited for this beetle to begin its hungry life. Somewhere a cult convenes, unaware that the benign moon has found something they have roamed the earth in search of. Its belly would be full of things that burrowed into the soil to offer themselves to it. In this story, it is the mere bloat of gas, and above it the breathless cavity searching for something to fill it. My worried heart.

  No tail because this would suggest a demonic or religious nature. In another story, faith would be a consideration. Something to cling to, an icon to hold up to evil. Faith would carry more light than a chain of words spoken in an emergency room. In this story, the sermon is given behind a sternum and the ribcage pews are empty.

&
nbsp; Nine feet tall fully upright, its many arms opening to embrace me. In another story, the monster would tower over the protagonist in the dark. It would snatch him up and bear him away to some unspeakable end. I don’t know why the monster must be so tall, or why I feel the need for my horror to gaze upward. I suppose it’s because awe tends to come from a great height, and I look up so rarely. But I will be left in my bed, I believe, in the end.

  A long withered neck, a stem holding the gorgeous face of a twenty-five-year-old Adonis, too large a face, careless brown curls draping the forehead, a wet plump mouth. In another story, such beauty would elicit worship, as it does in the cult that has been roaming cities and townships and poring over old books. In this one, I cannot fathom why this creature must be so handsome. Perhaps there is too much ugliness in the news and I can’t bear to build more of it. Or it is the reverse—how much evil has crawled on the skin of this world with a pleasant pale face?

  A voice box with no voice, the root of a tongue that never grew (my self-complicit silence). In another story, it makes an awful, awful noise, a burring clicking choking garble. But if I turned to my partner and told her my thoughts, if I used my own voice, perhaps the monster would have a tongue, or perhaps the monster wouldn’t exist at all.

  ~

  I can picture this thing clinging to the side of our house and peering through the top of the window, crouched in the vacant cubicle next to mine, bundled in the hatchback of my little black car. I can imagine it—I can almost feel it on my skin—creeping into our bedroom in the crease between night and morning. It’s bent over staring into my face. Its eyes glitter with a distant beauty. It drags the tips of its fingers through the sparse hair on my chest, above my heart. All of its legs are out and flexing in the dark air. And I can see my partner lying beside me, but not the dog—where is she? How could I bring the idea of something like this into the lives of my two loves?

  How could this creature scare anyone other than me? Many authors say they write for themselves, but it’s not enough. I waste the rest of my lunch hour staring out a window, into a parking deck, and see something moving in the shadows between cars. I make it through the rest of the day. Traffic home is thick, an orange paste of taillights and sun glare, and my car is an oven. The air conditioning can’t keep up and my blood pressure must be elevating. I worry about hypertension. I recite the emergency room benediction. My eyes keep darting to the rearview mirror, in case something is hiding behind the back seat. But it’s not ready yet. Neither is its maker.

  ~

  We take it for granted our hearts will keep beating, and when they shudder out of their clockwork, we stare down at ourselves in disbelief. We feel our bones, the density of them, with a new clarity, we feel the tendons creaking between them. We feel the organs stammering inside of us. The spark of life glows brighter in a desperate confusion. We are made aware of the machines of us, and we find we don’t know them after all—the synchronicity of all these gears is suddenly frightening. And when we survive these interruptions, we build meticulous architecture with our minds and hope our hearts will settle into the new rooms. We exercise. We lock the bourbon away. We salt our food less. We let time pass.

  On Saturday, I take a nap and press my chest into the mattress when the day’s first palpitation comes. My pulse lurches, then grows tranquil until I am lulled to sleep, then sputters again. Late in the afternoon, I buy a used elliptical from an online marketplace and begin doing cardio for the first time in my life. I start slow, feeling my heart slam like an uninvited, furious fist on a cheap door. I tape a note beside the display screen that reads WITH A HEAVY HEART.

  The exercise seems to help. My heart thinks it’s stronger and so it is. Sunday there are no palpitations, and we pull up poison ivy outside in the wet blanket of heat, our arms and hands covered in protection against the vines that are monsters, too, in their invasiveness. The mountains are hidden behind a screen of our pines and a neighbor’s sprawling oak, a sluggish creek bisecting our properties. We eat roasted chicken Monday night, dinner salads Tuesday, and I push my heart on the elliptical, a few more minutes each day. A drop of sweat jumps from my face onto the note, causing the AR in HEART to run, the ink blossoming from the paper. I hope and I worry that my monster is dying against this new determination.

  Perhaps the deadline for the story will become its own creature—it crawls behind me, ten days left, seven, three. Doug and Michael send a mass email reminding the solicited authors that they’re looking forward to reading our takes on the Frankenstein theme. I remember Doug telling me last year that we can interpret it loosely—war is a monster, I thought then, the president is a monster, division is a monster, we made these monsters—and this looseness becomes its own little prayer I repeat. After all, I have committed to the fear of my own heart.

  Evenings I sit in the office with my laptop and watch a handful of suns drown in the trees through the window. The mountains like teeth, the sky a gullet, but the monster begins to swell in my imagination and my fear subsides in the blank face of such vastness—a cosmic Lovecraftian god cannot stir the creative hairs on the back of my neck anymore. My dog goes back and forth between the living room and the office, unhappy that her pack isn’t in the same room. “When I finish the story,” I say to her, “just a little longer.” She licks my face and later I take her out back so she can patrol the fenced yard in the dark, protect us from what creatures she would make up in her own mind.

  We are caught in the rhythm of our workdays, there is something like peace, we watch our regular shows on TV. My skin doesn’t grow hot with panic at the office, and nothing dark trails behind me through the herd of cubicles or the parking-deck gloom. I begin to go long minutes without thinking of my heart, as it opens itself up to the future, locked in its steady voice: believe, believe, believe—

  But, of course, this must be a horror story. Halfway through Friday evening’s walk with the dog, the dark falling and the humidity reluctant to follow it, my heart stops beating. I stagger and count to what feels like three but can’t be that long, until my heart swerves back into rhythm, runs pounding up a flight of stairs to catch up with the rest of me.

  My partner asks what’s wrong, a note in her voice that tears at me. I don’t answer. “Was it a palpitation?” I tell her yes, I thought the exercise had helped, and she tells me precisely the thing I need to hear—that I have to give it time, a week of cardio isn’t going to be a miracle. She’s right, but ahead of us, in the overgrown lawn of the empty house where the road curves, I see the shape of my monster crouched in knee-high grass. A cloud of gnats writhes above it.

  And it comes to me tonight, for the first time, after my partner has fallen asleep. As though it, too, has forty-eight hours to finish the story. A click comes from the bedroom doorknob, then the soft whine of a creaking hinge as the air we have been breathing escapes into the rest of the house.

  I listen to it creep into the dark, until the beautiful face slides over the lower rim of my vision, staring down at me. Its expression could be mournful or studious. My heart trips beneath my chest, kick drums falling out of line, and the creature moves to my right, passing around my side of the bed. It is naked, with its appendages freed. Four of them unfold above its head, and I still won’t move my face to allow more of it into my sight.

  But the dog is not making a sound—I jerk my head away from the monster and there she is, her head on her paws, her eyes open with a hint of streetlight gleaming off them from the blinds. She hasn’t shot to her feet with a volley of barks. Her silence tells me the story isn’t real. Beside her, my partner turns toward me on her side, her face soft in sleep.

  I look to my right and the creature isn’t there. I wait to see if it is inside of me, twitching itself around the heart attack that has taunted me for months, long before I gave it a face. The dog stretches and puts a paw on my leg. Turning back to her, I see that she has closed her eyes. A weight lifts from me. I m
uddy the story further by sleeping without dreams.

  ~

  I have proven what Dr. Frankenstein knew—that the trickiest part is animating the flesh, the flickering of the brain stem into sentience. And I have realized that 4,200 words into this, the deadline quickening like its own heartbeat, I have no tangible agency as a storyteller. These machines—the heart, the brain—are stimulated by electricity. What current can I tap into to bring the monster off the page?

  My heartbeat has slipped three times today, and I am standing at a pine tree in the hills that crest up toward the mountains. I have pricked my right thumb and smeared blood on the dusty bark of the trunk, where a spigot might be driven in. But even if there were a spigot, it would have dried to a syrupy crust. My story is due tomorrow. The creature will return to our room tonight, and the final seizing of my heart feels like the only ending that’s left.

  My pulse judders a fourth time. A pressure builds near my left shoulder. I speak to the tree: “Heart enzymes good, electrolytes good, no clots, blood pressure OK, rhythms textbook strong, no atrial fibrillation or arrhythmia.” The words have gathered a sort of music into them these last few months, their constant striving toward the calm legato. They will keep me alive. The rough tongue of my dog will keep me alive. The arms of my warm partner will keep me alive. The old hum of the mountains will keep me alive. The deadline will pass, the story won’t end. Above me the sun burns through a sheer haze of clouds, its heat squeezing everything until it is forced under these green breakers again.