Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106 Read online

  “Your son might not know you, but you clearly don’t know him either.” We watched clouds, out the thin dusty windows. I wondered what she saw when she looked at them. For me they were cheese, vast walls of cold supermarket cheese. “What did you want to be when you grew up?” she asked.

  “My favorite subject was biology,” I said, willing to tolerate any digression that might eventually lead me where I wanted to go. “Followed closely by chemistry. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard?”

  “Why is that ridiculous?” she asked. “You never dreamed of doing something with that?”

  “I wanted to get married,” I said, the words coming easy from lots of practice. “I met someone wonderful, and I wanted to be his wife and support his dreams and have his kids. Speaking of whom. Where is Timmy?”

  Her voice, now, was weirdly gentle. “Tim and I broke up six months ago, Mrs. Wilde. If we were ever really a thing.”

  Spiders rattled against the glass of her boxy old television. I listened while the sound got louder.

  Whore Susan scooched closer. “Tim told me that you never defend him, when his father is screaming at him. When your husband hits him.”

  “That is most certainly not true,” I said, quick enough to keep from wondering whether it was true and what it meant.

  I longed to curse her out. Hiss That boy has shattered our domestic harmony, my husband is trying his make his son a good man the best way he knows how, shut your filthy mouth you Skank Whore Bitch. But this is why people with bad attitudes make a mess of everything. Because this wasn’t about me. It was about Timmy. My own hurt feelings at her attempt to wound me would have to wait.

  “I’m trying to help here,” she said, unhelpfully. “Tim said he’ll be damned if he ends up like you.”

  A word, perhaps, would be useful, here, about my son Timmy.

  My fellow congregants may remember him as the charming rapscallion seven-year-old who delighted in shredding hymnals. Or perhaps you recall the smiling scallywag twelve-year-old who got on the PA system and made farting noises after Sunday worship on more than one occasion. You probably remember very little after that, because he decided then that he Hated Church and God and Religion and Pastor Jerome and decided to settle for merely making our home lives miserable. Before you—my beloved husband, my wise Pastor Jerome—decided to stop ignoring Timmy’s harmless aggressions and engage him as an enemy combatant, matching each new hostility with one of your own, an arms race that never abated, and of course anyone who’s ever sat through one of Pastor Jerome’s sermons when he’s in a foul mood knows well enough how deep his dagger-tongue can stab. Pretty soon the Bible stayed on the dinner table, and every night brought a new lecture on the evil of rock and roll or idolatry or rap music or vegetarianism or socialism or feminism, and Timmy never, never failed to argue back, until the shouting became superlatively unkind on both sides. And the favorite subject of Timmy’s screaming was his parents’ marriage, the sham he believed it to be.

  So I didn’t doubt that he told her vicious things, spectacularly ridiculous absurd lies, preposterous suggestions no sane churchgoing Christian could have spent a half-second taking seriously. But who knew what this unbeliever believed. “God bless you,” I said, smiling to beat the devil, and fled that kitty-litter stinking house.

  A twelve-year-old boy sat on the bumper of my car. My son, but not. Identical to how Tim had looked, at that age, but something in his face told me at once that he was someone else. And that he was terrified.

  “Hi, mom,” he said, and got up to give me a hug. His arms clasped me below my breasts.

  “Hi, Matt,” I said, because I knew who this was, this perfect little boy I’d met inside my son’s mind. At twelve, Timmy wanted a twin brother more than anything else in the world. He’d had one for an imaginary friend, named him and given him all sorts of attributes (favorite color: blue, to Timmy’s red; favorite food: spaghetti, while Timmy’s was hamburgers), and now here he was, in the flesh, in the wonderful terrible world of my son’s head.

  “Where’s your brother?” I whispered, squatting to stroke the cheek of this marvelous creature, this fly stuck in amber, this last vestige of a beautiful happy boy I’d lost a long time ago—but why was he so pale, why did his lip tremble so? He was an emissary, this poor wretch, sent to me by my son’s subconscious, a harkening-back to the last safe place he’d known. Even before Matt answered my question, I knew what he was going to say.

  Colby’s house. The last place on the planet I wanted to go.

  The place the tether of warmth had been tugging me all along.

  “Do you want to come with me?” I asked.

  “No,” Matt said. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  His face reddened, my little boy, my son who never was, precisely like my real son in the quick uncontrollable rush of his emotions. “Timmy doesn’t need me anymore.”

  “Okay,” I said, and sadness cut through something essential, one of the cords that kept the hot air balloon that is my soul anchored to the good and the positive. The world began to wobble. I kissed his forehead, grabbed both shoulders and shook, in that way that Timmy had liked, but did not like anymore.

  Matt grinned, a puppy after a belly rub, and then shivered, and looked away.

  Figment of my son’s imagination or not, I felt sorry for the little tyke.

  Matt was a cry for help. A demand to be rescued. Rescued from a monster. A vicious, cruel captor, determined to mold him into a man my son had no interest in becoming. Timmy’s boogeyman.

  And here, fellow congregant, I don’t mind saying, is where I started getting worried. Maybe it was the parked police cruiser I passed. Or the heavily-populated part of town where I was heading. But mostly it was this: the boogeyman was real. I knew who he was. Before my eyes the double-yellow line in the middle of the road stretched and bulged, a seam that barely held back a tidal surge of spiders.

  The sky darkened. I drove faster. Shut my eyes. But with my eyes shut I could hear them, scritching away, three fat gray furred spiders stuck under the sun visor. The warmth got warmer, the tether pulled tighter, and it was him, my son, my Timmy, the boy I abandoned, the boy whose heart I broke by siding with his father, his boogeyman.

  When I arrived, her car wasn’t there. That was one blessing. Carolina Bugtuttle was out, of course, working hard, neglecting her son and husband, keeping the books and preparing the pamphlets down at Christ the Healer, so focused on God’s reward for her in heaven she failed to see the one he gave her on earth, because God is merciful, God is kind even to the unkindest, lavishing largesse on selfish gossipy wenches.

  “Beth,” he said, opening the door.

  “Hi, Colby,” I said, to Brent’s dad, Carolina Bugtuttle’s husband.

  Colby, Pastor Jerome had said, the night they met, the night I’d been trying to prevent in the six months since we got married. What the hell kind of a man is named after a cheese? Then he gave me that chin-twitch that says Laugh At My Joke, which is what you sign up for when you say Til Death Do Us, so I laughed, but maybe not as much as I normally did, because then he gave the subtle head tilt that says You Have Disappointed Me—but to be honest I knew Colby before I ever heard such a cheese, and to this day when I taste it I think of him, and hold it in my mouth until it is gone.

  In the webworld, Colby Goldfarb stood before me precisely as he was when we were eighteen, in the parking lot outside Crossgates Mall, lit up by arc-sodium lights that turned him amber in that pelting rainstorm, right after I said the sentence I’d spent all week working up to, the one that broke his heart, and mine to boot, but mine didn’t matter, and he stood outside the car, looking in, at me, for so long. Thin, young, wide-eyed, all hipbones and elbows and nose and thick black hair. He was even soaking wet, here, now, although his skin was dry and warm as summer when he stuck out his hand and I shook it.

  “You’re looking for your son,” he said.

  “Is he here?”

&nbs
p; “I am under strict orders not to answer that question.”

  He grinned, and my mighty unbendable momma-bear knees buckled.

  “What the hell, Colby,” I said, pushing past him, hand hot on his shoulder. “I would have called you, if Brent was hiding out at my place.”

  “That’s because you’re a better person than me.”

  I wasn’t, and I wondered if I really would have called him. I had no idea what I’d do to keep my son’s trust, because I hadn’t had it in a long time. Because I didn’t deserve it. Because I’d left him to fight his boogeyman alone. I had failed him so utterly. The magnitude of it sent twitches down my arms, started spiders leaking from the door hinges.

  Colby’s smile made my head hurt, ushering me in, the smile of a man who loved his son, who didn’t believe they were mortal enemies and his mission in life was to crush the child’s spirit.

  “Sit,” Colby said, gesturing to the kitchen table, turning to the Keurig machine to make me a coffee. Spiders swam in the thing’s water tank. At any moment now the burst would shatter my brain and my son’s.

  “Where is he?”

  “In the basement.”

  “With Brent?”

  “Do you have any secrets from your husband?” Colby asked, and his freckled face was so earnest and sad I knew he wasn’t talking about him and me. The fridge shook, rumbled, packed with spiders to the point it could not keep closed.

  “Of course not,” I said, because no other answer could be admitted, let alone uttered aloud.

  “Could you keep one? A big one?”

  Stuck to the fridge was a gorgeous drawing, in colored pencils, of a blue-and-red feathered ceratosaur. Colby’s son was an incredible artist. “Brent’s favorite dinosaur,” I whispered. “I saw one of those this morning. It led me here.”

  Colby raised an eyebrow, leaned in, scanned the white of my eyes. Laughed out loud, the magnificent heaven’s-trumpet sound I’d given up on ever hearing again. “Bethesda Wilde, are you webslinging?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  He laughed harder. “Is it fun? I confess there’s a part of me that’s always—”

  “I’m not doing this for fun,” I said, standing up, getting angry on purpose because anger was safe, anger was armor, against the spiders, against what Colby was doing to my gut; anger was the weapon my husband used whenever he didn’t know what to do, and there had to be something other than my son that I had to show for all the time I’d spent with Pastor Jerome. I headed for the basement.

  “No no no,” Colby said, genuinely afraid, actually running, but I had a head start and for all my size I can move fast when I need to, and I got to the basement and wrenched open the door and slammed it behind me and locked it, and stomped down into the laundry-and-mildew smell of Carolina Bugtuttle’s underground nest.

  “Beth, stop,” he said, pounding on the door. “Listen to me. You can’t. Okay? Respect their privacy. You’ll only—”

  A cocoon, I guess, is the best I can do when it comes to describing what I found in the basement. A globe of densely-wrapped spiderwebs the size of a small car, lit up slightly from within, and I felt him in there, smelled him, my son, and I put my hands against it, felt its heat, felt the warm safe world it contained, and slowly seized fists full of spiderweb and ripped, tore it open, watched thickened water slosh out in a rush that reminded me of giving birth. Upstairs, I heard Colby unscrewing the lock to take off the doorknob.

  “Timmy!” I screamed.

  Two shapes churned out of the web cocoon—dolphins, I thought, but then not, because fast as blinking they were boys, young men, drenched, hands clasped.

  “Mom?” my son said, and let go of Brent’s hand like it had suddenly caught fire. “What the hell, mom!”

  “Where were you?” I asked. “What’s in there?”

  “In . . . there?” Timmy said, and turned to take in the ruined cocoon. “Wait—you can see this? You’re here? You’re in the web with us?”

  “Now, look,” I said, stammering for the explanation I’d practiced, back when this was all seemed like a good idea.

  Timmy laughed out loud. “Look, Brent! A ceratosaurus. We’ve been trying for months to make one.”

  The dinosaur stood between me and Colby, who had just arrived, disemboweled doorknob in hand. Father and son exchanged a glance that said let’s keep quiet, let’s let them say what they need to say, and I ached for that, for the kind of trust that lets parents communicate wordlessly with their kids.

  “I want you to come home with me, Timmy. We’ll get you help. One of your father’s friends runs a Christian rehabilitation clinic—”

  “You think I’m a drug addict, mom?” He started laughing again. “I told you guys. I told you my parents work so hard to not see the truth that they don’t know how to stop.”

  Brent started to say something, then decided against it. They watched me put the pieces together. These boys, these men, my teenage son, my teenage lover, his teenage son who was my teenage son’s lover; they dripped with blue-green amniotic fluid and watched the truth widen my eyes, watched me fight it all the way.

  They watched me grasp the magnitude of my son’s sin. The unthinkable, unimaginable crime he had committed. Where did it come from? How did he learn it? How did he fly in the face of my husband’s efforts and my own, our lifetime of accumulated craven cowardice? How did he find the courage to commit the sin of choosing love, the bravery of going for what your heart wants instead of the path a parent chose for you?

  People fear spiderwebbing for all the wrong reasons. Going mad, having a breakdown, seeing inside your own soul—none of those should scare you. The most frightening side effect is also the one people crave it for: empathy. To truly feel what someone else is feeling, to see the other as yourself, to watch your ego obliterated in the face of universality—that’s a trauma you may never recover from.

  “Tim,” I said, but could say no more. Not yet. He had never turned into something else. He was what he always was. His father couldn’t handle that—hell, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. But I had done him wrong, had sided with his father, because it was easier. And what irony: I took the drug to bring my son back to me, and instead the drug brought me back to my son.

  Colby came closer, put one hand on my shoulder. “Beth,” he whispered, “I think you and Tim should talk.”

  “Okay,” I said, at last, furious, miserable, delirious, hurt at how little I knew my son, frightened by what he was, how much I had to atone for, how long it might take for him to forgive me, how long it might take me to forgive him, sad at all the paths I hadn’t chosen, but ready, for whatever would come, and I said Okay again, letting it encompass so much more than the sentence he’d said, letting it settle like an unfurled bedsheet onto the hard new decisions I finally felt strong enough to make. Like choosing my son over my husband.

  This, then, all of this, is part of that okay. Print this blog post if you dare, Jerome, but since I know you won’t I’ll let it stand as a message from me to you. The Story of Where Things Stand. The hard-earned blood-soaked spiderweb-wrapped shreds of insight I earned by descending into the underworld for the sake of love. My gift to you. My one scrap of true wisdom. What to do when your child strays from God.

  So. When your child strays from God you should praise Him, for putting a mirror in your hand so you can hold it up to yourself—if you have the stomach for it. When your child strays from God you should thank Him, for giving us the freedom to make our own mistakes, and the strength to maybe one day find our way back.

  About the Author

  Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction is in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, The Minnesota Review, and The Rumpus, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. He lives in New York City.

  Further North

  Kay Chronister


  In Turkey, we loved the animals we tended; in Alaska, we hope they won’t wake when we ride past them. Asleep, with their bodies buried in the snow and their eyes frozen shut, the helminths look more like landforms than hookworms. But if temperatures rise too much, if they wake up—

  We siphon a lot of blood from their bodies, trying to cure the disease they spread. They wake up hungry and anemic and furious.

  Halfway between Juneau and Circlet, the route I take home, there’s this pile of stones stacked up beside the road. A graveyard for mammoths, according to local legend. In truth, a graveyard for Russian trappers who froze trying to push further north than anyone had before. The monument spooks Alaskans, the descendants of those few Russians who survived the tundra, but I am not Alaskan and I am cold wherever I go and I’m always relieved to see the stones. Up in Circlet, where we built the homestead, the helminths almost never thaw out.

  When I come home, untack my pony, and stomp the snow from my boots, my sister Aliye has a hot bath and a pot of spiced coffee waiting for me: her way of saying sorry that I have to ride out and check the enclosures alone. The first thing she does when I come inside, after she shoves a towel into the crack beneath the doorframe, is check all of my fingertips for frostbite. “Remember that blood-buyer in Anchorage with six-and-a-half fingers?” she says if I argue.

  “I remember,” I say, and spread my tingling fingertips out to the heat of the stove.

  “If you ever feel like you need me with you,” she says, “tell me, and I’ll go.”

  We both know that Aliye will never go. Before we left Turkey, when we lived among our goats like they were family, the hook stole her legs and half of the muscles in her face. Now she tends the homestead and I look after the animals. We have no other choice. But she has to say it, and I have to act like I believe her.

  “I know,” I say. “I promise.”

  While we tuck into our coffee, a rich dark brew that Aliye makes with cinnamon and cardamom, she tells me, “We had a letter this morning.”