I’m here in the middle of nowhere around Tuscaloosa, and night’s coming.
My mother refused to recognize me. I called, and she hung up. I texted. Nothing. When I told her Charlie and I were getting married, she said, “Are you pregnant?” She never met him, never will.
I’m walking along Sharpe Lake Road, not thinking about much except Bella and Charlie. Men should not matter at all, but he does, somehow.
Twilight’s that color when you realize the sky’s not blue. It’s not anything. Maybe crepuscular. I learned that from the nuns. Crepuscular. Good and evil have gone under the trees like red foxes, vanishing, like unborn children.
Charlie told me friends of his from the university filmed a series about a monster, Slenderman, around here. Charlie’s a film major. The creature’s faceless, tears the air with static, rips the spectrum, reaches spiderlike, incomprehensible, elemental as a solar flare, kills. Children near him vanish. It all seemed so Southern Gothic when I heard it from him.
Night’s eating the woods. Frogs in invisible pools sing, high pitched, with two-world cries.
Bella lives in a house near here, a white ranch house, with wisteria. Charlie left me for her.
“Are you pregnant?”
There are pools under the trees beside the Sharpe Lake Road deep enough to drown in. Branches of the trees tangle, sweetgum, hickory, holly, kudzu. A faceless figure in the twilight under the trees, under the tangle of bud and branch, wears a suit, has many hands, like a Hindu god. Is this Slenderman? Are they filming another episode?I hear whistles of some bird that does not fear the dark.
Charlie’s voice is muffled in the unlighted house. I hear Bella’s reply, wooly voices in the twilight under the honeysuckle that’s not sweet, under wisteria that will never bloom. “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.” I know his voice like that, in my ear, his hands on me, his body on mine, sweat slicked, hot.
Under the humid air that piles between the trees like a monster softly walking, little Southern girls stabbed a victim, believing in the monster Slenderman. Was that here on this road? Was it even in the South? There are monsters everywhere.
They say jealousy is hot like fury. That’s not true. Jealousy’s like a monster in the forest, reaching out; betrayal’s like this forest near the river, full of voices, things, sweetgum, red oak, hickory, full of pool sprites, kudzu, death.
My mother vanished like a stone in deep water. Charlie’s in the twilight house with Bella. I hear her laugh.
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©2015 Janet Shell Anderson
I have been published by Vestal Review, decomP, FRIGG, Cease Cows, Disentralled, 365 Tomorrows, Black Heart, Gemini, Convergence and many others and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2011. I am an attorney.
