Chapter 1 #2
A few feet to the left of my sister Sage’s blue rose, there lies the pitchfork, halfway tucked into some bushes.
I grab its wooden handle and find the nearest patch of grass I can and stick it right in there.
Luckily it’s rained recently, and so the clay beneath the sod is soft enough that the prongs go in with only a little bit of effort.
I clap my hands together once when I release the handle and it stays perfectly upright.
“Okay,” I announce to the fox who has reached my side.
This little guy, I like to call Coffee. His eyes look just like Nadia’s Turkish brew that she pours into the dirt for the old gods every morning—one shade between the deepest brown and black.
He cocks his head up at me. “It’s time for orgasms. Do foxes even have those?
” I frown thoughtfully. “I guess I could google it later. But wouldn’t that look kind of suspicious in my search history?
People don’t like me enough as it is…and if they thought I was…
” I shake my head as I get a glimpse of my elderly neighbor, Janie, spying on me from between her curtains.
“Go hide,” I tell Coffee, and he rushes into the pine trees.
I stare Janie down, but she doesn’t slap the curtains shut until I give her a little wave involving only one of my middle fingers.
I rush back in the house, kicking off my slippers at the entrance, and begin to run upstairs.
When I hear Grayson’s voice, however, I pause.
What the hell is he talking for? He’s not chatting with Nadia, is he?
She’s supposed to be at church literally all day.
I didn’t see her car up front, did I? God, that would be so incredibly awkward.
I tiptoe up, praying I don’t hear my great-aunt’s voice echoing from my bedroom, where there are no less than three extra-large multipacks of ribbed, super-ribbed, and tropical-flavored condoms piled up in the middle of my dresser.
She would have to be incredibly drunk in order to miss that, highly unlikely on a Sunday morning after church.
But as I creep up the stairs—as soundless as Coffee when he stalks chipmunks and squirrels—another male-sounding voice echoes toward me. It’s someone he’s talking to on speakerphone. The muffled and electronic tone of the other side of this conversation gives it away.
My first thought is Grayson has answered a call from his dad or tío or something.
A distant part of me realizes how badly I’m clinging to the idea that Grayson is a Nice Guy.
I even come up with a wholesome scenario in seconds.
His family member was worried when Grayson didn’t show up to brunch and was just calling to check in.
Grayson just answered to reassure them that he was fine, and then he’d hang up and soon I would be having multiple orgasms before kissing him on the cheek goodbye, then getting on with my day.
But then the disembodied voice asks, “So have you bagged the freak yet?”
Grayson laughs. It’s a much different laugh than the one he’d used when we’d met up for an early breakfast at a sandwich spot nearby, before he followed me back here, to Nadia’s, and I offered him water or tea or coffee before I pulled him into my bedroom, ripped off his shirt, and pushed him onto my mattress.
That laugh was polite and restrained. This laugh is cruel. Its edges are as sharp as the thorns of pinecones protecting its tiny seeds from those who would devour them.
Only I don’t think Grayson is protecting anything precious. Because his next words are “Not yet. But I’m about to. Then we’ll find out if she’s got antlers growing out of her pussy.”
This time the cruel laugh bursts from his phone’s speaker. “Dude. I bet you anything she doesn’t shave, either. I bet she’s like a bearded collie down there.”
Grayson snorts. “I bet she barks when she’s getting pounded.”
It’s strange how the pain of this situation doesn’t hit me until the voice adds next, “Well, we’ll have to head to Lost Souls tonight, man. I’ll get you a beer or two for taking one for the team.”
It’s not the commentary about antlers…or barking…
or dog hair that makes my heart and stomach feel like they’ve been split in half with a cleaver.
It’s “team.” It’s that the word team indicates more.
More people in on this joke. More people laughing and snorting as they muse about whether there are antlers reaching out of my vagina as though I were perpetually birthing a stag.
I imagine all of Cranberry, all of Virginia even, in on this endless joke that Sky Flores, town freak, is worthy of this level of unkindness. Simply because she’s strange.
Which, yes. I disappeared for eight years and no one believes the truth of my story, of where I had been and why.
Yes, I currently spend nearly all my time in the woods, talking to my only friends—the wild turkeys and the coyotes and the wrens.
Yes, I’m also really socially awkward and understand so little about this world that has changed to a nearly unrecognizable state since I’ve been gone.
But I’m still a human being. A woman who has never hurt anyone.
I don’t deserve this.
I burst through the open door—as this idiot didn’t even have the sense to close it—and catch him giving the man on his phone a virtual tour of my bedroom.
The decorative paper I had so carefully pressed into the walls, the furniture I’d scoured thrift stores for, the books from my work piled high on my bedside table.
When I was asleep in the woods…I had nothing.
I could touch nothing. The only person who could hear me, on rare occasion, was my eldest sister Sage.
So I took Sage’s old room in the attic and spent ages and lots of money making it mine. Making it sacred. It was another thing I felt I deserved from the universe—a place filled with my most cherished belongings where I could feel truly, sincerely safe.
And now Grayson’s in it, desecrating it with a debate about how much my genitalia resembles a dog breed.
“Oh shit,” he says, his eyes widening as he slams the end call button on his phone. “I was just—”
I don’t let him finish as I stomp toward him. “You said I was hot. You said you liked my ass as you were grabbing it,” I interrupt, breathing hard and throwing my hands to and fro to emphasize every word.
As stupid as it may be, those comments are the only compliments I have heard from someone who is not my relative in a decade. So, okay. They weren’t poetry. But they made me feel special when he said them. I felt wanted.
Is that why women often sleep with men they know they shouldn’t? To feel wanted, even for only two and a half minutes?
I feel like a stranger in my own skin, in my own life, all over again. I have to stop myself from pressing my fingers into my arms, into my warm brown skin, to make sure I’m still awake.
Because how could this scenario be anything but a nightmare?
That feeling of being wanted by Grayson has evaporated now, naturally. I feel the exact opposite of wanted—disgusting, undesirable, hated even—and it fills me with an intense sense of magic and rage, one I don’t know if I can control. One I don’t even care if I can control.
I let my voice get even louder. “Why would you insinuate my ass was attractive if you thought I was half-canine? Why would you even get hard for me if you thought you were going to fuck a vaginally antlered woman?” I put my hands on my hips to keep them from shaking with the anger that feels as hot as a thick Virginia summer day in the humid, windless woods.
“Why would you take me on four and a half dates and sit through multiple-course meals with me if you thought I was repulsive underneath my clothes?”
Grayson doesn’t feel the living magic coursing through me.
He doesn’t notice the restless crows gathering on the roof next door, within my sight through my bedroom window, each one black and shimmering like an ancient spirit of vengeance.
He’s gotten his ego back from the shock of my catching him bullying me, and he swaggers across the room and smirks.
“Every single guy gets hard over anything vaguely round. Tits, ass. It doesn’t matter. It means nothing.”
A rustle sounds at the windows, the ones Sage used to grow basil in little pots on, the ones I’d opened well before Grayson arrived in case he turned out to be a disaster and I needed divine, feral help.
Like, for instance, right now.
I close my eyes briefly before I can ask him the next question. “How many people are in on this ‘fuck the freak’ prank?”
He shrugs and holds out his hand to count with his fingers. He has no shame. I can’t believe I’d thought he was nice. “Me, and the guy I was just talking to, Jake…”
“Jake Cunningworth? That’s who was on the phone?” Jake Cunningworth is the man who delivers the mail at my workplace. My mailman was just musing about my pubes. How am I supposed to look him directly in the eyes ever again?
“Uh-huh. And oh, some buddies from work, and my brother and his buddies from his crew…” Really, Grayson is just bragging now. He’s not getting laid, so he’s attempting to get his own revenge by humiliating me as much as he can.
I shake my head and allow a slight, wry smile to adorn my lips over the Anastasia Beverly Hills matte lipstick in Sugar Plum I’d applied earlier. It was a Christmas gift from my amazing boss, since she knew I was getting into makeup.
It’s really too bad for him—and his ego—that I am the Witch of Wild Creatures.
He’s still naming people when I murmur toward the window, “All right, babes. Now’s a good time as any.”
He interrupts himself with a harsh, frightened “What the fuck?” as the first crow flies in, the tips of her wings grazing his head on her way to land on my shoulder.
“Did you just see that?” he asks me, his voice shrill as he stares just to my left, into the black-bead eyes of the bird hanging out next to my face.
Ignoring him, I say the next words slow and firm. “I need you to make me a promise.” Another crow swoops in, circling the room, his wingspan so wide and strong that he brings a brush of strong wind with every flap.
“There are fucking birds in here!” Grayson shrieks from where he’s now retreated: the corner of the bed, holding a Laura Ashley embroidered throw pillow over his head.
Another crow flies in, its shrieks so loud that Grayson and I both wince. “Geez Louise, Harriet,” I murmur, and she lands on my other shoulder, grumbling over my admonishment. “I know, love. You’re powerful and can’t be contained.”
“Are you—” Grayson’s pillow is lowered, his eye peeking over its edge in disbelief. “Are you seriously talking to—”
He can’t finish his sentence, because the rest of this murder of crows flies in. I stretch out my arm where a couple more land. The others swoop all around his head, their caws muffling his screams. “Make it stop!” he finally begs me.
“You haven’t promised me yet.” I pout a little and put one of my hands on my hip and stick it out.
“Promised you what? No, fuck it. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want, I promise. Just make these things go away.” His voice is choked. “I’ll do anything. God.”
He’s folded so quickly. Boring, really. “Okay, yeah. So, tell your team—the one you’re taking one for by planning on sleeping with me, which isn’t happening by the way, in case you needed that clarified—that if anyone tries to trick me, or prank me, or fuck with me ever again, these crows will eat them alive at my command. ”
It’s not true. I’d never command such a thing, and moreover, that’s not how my powers work.
No animal is my servant. They are their own creatures, just like I am my own creature.
The crows are here not because I called them, but because we are friends, and they sensed my distress.
(And also, crows really like fucking things up and freaking humans out. Even, and maybe especially even, me.)
But the truth didn’t matter when he and all his little asshole bully friends made their plans to humiliate me. So the truth doesn’t matter now.
“I promise!” he yells under the rain of long, ink-black feathers as the crows swirl around and around like a spiral of wraiths.
As soon as his words are out, I nod at my friends, their black eyes as furious as I feel. One by one, they fly out the window, returning to the neighbor’s roof in a clatter of claws and caws.
It takes Grayson a good eight seconds to dress and fifteen more to run down the stairs. I sigh when the slam of the front door makes my own bedroom door rattle on its hinge.
When I look out my window, there is a single crow—Leonora, I’ve named her—swooping down at his face one last time as he wails and jumps inside his Tesla.
The tires squeal as he backs out and races away.
The slithering smoke from the rubber burning against the asphalt is now the only sign that he was ever here to start with.
I close my eyes, lie back in bed, and sigh, the iridescent teal and purple feathers now surrounding me as though I’d sewn them across my comforter.
I think again of pinecones and their thorns. In order to protect myself—protect my sensitive and aching heart—I must be sharper. Thornier.
If I’m always going to be the town freak, no matter what?
Well. I better just lean into it.