The Solace of Monsters by Laurie Blauner

Author:Laurie Blauner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2016-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

On the way home that afternoon, as I walked through the woods, I relished the various shades of green, the touches of yellow or red on leaves and flowers, the brown of logs or tree trunks. Under my feet the smell of crushed greenery, fresh and growing, lifted toward my nostrils. Weeds, long grass, and ferns tickled my pant legs and shoes. Sunlight jeweled the trees, made patterns on the bark. I enjoyed the way evergreens hoisted up the sky, opening into all that blue. I detected the scent of cows, their digestions and excrement, the slow way they scraped against and shifted within their fences. I smelled horses, and thought of the way they penetrated everything with their hooves, tearing up the landscape as they ran through it. Those horses, with their large, expressive eyes, swished at flies with their lovely manes and tails. How they could run in all different directions at the same time. I liked all the animals, all the plants, maybe even better than people.

I neared Theresa’s house. My load did not feel very heavy. But I put it down near a small rock. I heard the uncomfortable squealing of a mouse, claws digging at dirt. I didn’t understand the sound. A spider surprised me by swinging near my face, then alighting again on its thinly woven web. I missed the companionship of mice. I grew closer to the noise and spied Kat sitting on the ground pulling something elastic and gray in her hands. Then she threw it against a tree. I saw a tail.

“Ouch,” she cried and began sucking on her fingers.

A twig crackled under my feet and her head with its boisterous hair snapped upward, in my direction.

“Who’s there? Peter? Who’s watching me?” She scowled in my direction.

“It’s me, Mara.” I emerged from my hiding place. “What are you doing there? Didn’t your mother find you?”

“I’m playing and my mother knows I’m out here.” She grimaced, her hand reaching toward the unmoving gray mass.

I moved closer, saw the dead mouse. “What did you do to it?” My voice was growing louder and louder.

“It bit me. I made it fly away.”

“You’re a monster,” I screamed at her. She did it on purpose. “Do you think you’re a god?” I yelled.

“Animals and people die too easily,” she said, touching what was left of the companion mouse’s body. “I don’t know where they go. They just don’t move anymore.”

“You’ve done this before?” Was she different than Father even though she was a child?

She didn’t answer me. “You’re the monster,” she yelled back at me as she rose, seemed sure of her way back to the house. She didn’t need to use her hands much. “And we don’t want you here.”

I sat on a rotting log. Ants crawled near me with their frantic processions. I aligned my bones, tried to feel normal. I breathed steadily. Light penetrated the trees in pieces, arrived at my feet in various shapes. I wondered if I gathered all

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