Two Stories

Believe Me

When fairies are in the larval stage, they develop in leaf tubes glued closed with spit from their mamas. How do I know this? Cause I’ve gone out in the woods behind our house, pulled open these pods, and saw something growing in them. I also know that baby fairies flex open their little iridescent wings to let field mice lick away the birth mucus. Don’t believe me? Get this: because they’re part bug and part person, they can suck nectar from flowers, feed from their mamas’ titties, or quarter and finish fruit flies. Sometimes the leaf tubes don’t open and all the mamas shimmer with a sound like locusts, and maybe the forest smells like rotting meat.

Know what else I know? That the mermaids have taken up their song again. After my brother died in the grain silo last fall, me and mama drove for a long time over to Chincoteague to dump his ashes in the Atlantic, and I heard the mermaids because mama wasn’t much into talking and the radio was off. I’ve been told that the song can drag you into the ocean and drown you, that it’s because we try to bring our ears closer, but I was far enough and strong enough to resist. I think I found some green mermaid hair on the beach or at least some scales. Their scales look like fool’s gold in case you want to try and find your own. I plan to use mine to make a lampshade one of these days. I heard from my friend at school that three boys down in Florida drowned in their own swimming pools. I think the mermaids convinced them to do it.

Mama said that Benny drowned in a silo. That he was walking down the grain and sweeping it off the walls when he slipped through the top and was gone, which is kind of weird to think about drowning in not water. They took him out through the bottom. I already told her I’m planning a television show about important animals no one believes in and that I won’t have to do farm work because I can prove they’re real. She said I’m very creative. I mean, she might have to worry about me when I’m out on location or whatever, but she won’t have to worry about me being sucked down in a dry cyclone of corn. I figured I’d be like that Bear guy who eats bugs, but I wouldn’t eat anything gross. I think we’d go out and I’d catch sight of the yeti or something. My show would be called Believe Me.

When bone grows outside of the skin we call it “horn,” but when the two horns grow into one, we call it “unicorn.” Horses use to have horns just like some tigers used to have saber teeth, and sometimes the horns would just grow together meaning unicorns weren’t that big a deal. This is just science. Mama said we were going to take Benny to the water. Far away from the amber fucking waves of grain, she said. She said she wanted to take him to the place where ponies get to swim in the water. Where they run wild on islands of their own. Anyway, the unicorn stags used to fight for the right to mate with the mares. Did you know this? They would aim their sharpened horns at each others’ breasts and charge. I learned that if you touch the ear of a mare, you’ll faint. This happened to me once. Mama thinks it was from the combine engine. I woke up with heart-shaped blisters on my fingers, in the middle of a field, and a stag was melting into a pond. I laid down next to his body to stroke his tan flank before the water spread.

My first plan is to find the island where unicorns still live. Probably somewhere out on one of those far-away seas I learned about in school. You probably think you know a lot, but how can you know what’s actually real? A few days after touching the mare’s ear my blisters popped. Mama said my burns were weeping and they would heal pretty soon.

Symbiosis

The worm looked back fondly on his larval days buried in a room-temperature chunk of meat, back before the cardinal journey in the rivulets of a woman who ate the infected al pastor and washed it down with a Fanta as the hot Mexican sun was slowly swallowed by the tangled jungle. Now here he was, a pork tapeworm, wedged in her head among all these shiny white folds, making his way through her lobes of recall, and the woman, who returned back to Minneapolis from a trip that was supposed to help her push the crowd of anxieties and grievances deep into the undergrowth of a foreign land, found herself suffering from increasingly frequent tremors, odd moments of forced stillness, and incredible dreams about the after-world. So it went that the worm worked his way through the dark meat of the woman’s mind, eating the loss of her only son in the Afghan war, devouring the deserted husband who remarried a flight attendant and had three more kids, consuming the woman’s new tendency to hoard newspapers and mail, feasting on her fresh brush with ovarian cancer. And so on. There was no lack of memories worth chewing on. Meanwhile, the woman more and more forgot who and what she was, the tremors grabbing her more frequently, her mind blanking on all sense of loss. Instead she spent quiet mornings turning her teacup in her hands to marvel at the milky vortex inside, which she used to swallow the now necessary painkillers, or in the evenings she sat alone on her porch and counted fireflies in the overgrown grass of her front yard until she couldn’t remember how she got to that porch on that house in that part of town. The worm made tenacious progress as the woman’s mind filled with holes until she fell into a coma on the kind of snow-blown day in early spring that blots out the early crocuses, and the worm, tired and complete, worked his way to the stem of her brain where he made dessert of her involuntary functions at which point they each died: him, full and her, empty.