Thirsty - M. T. Anderson [21]
One night I am watching the news with my mother. She has an afghan over her lap.
On the news, a woman is being tried for manslaughter. She thought that the faeries had snatched away her twin babies and put elfin changelings in their place. You are supposed to throw changelings in the fire after you say prayers and chants. She did that. She threw the twins in the fire. She was right about one: it was a changeling and scurried up the chimney, stretching like a mantis, wheezing and whining. The other was not a changeling. It burned.
My mother, watching, holds her hand to her mouth so the fingers are limp and touch the top lip. She says, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’d throw her baby on the fire.”
“There were two,” I point out. “Two babies.”
“One of them wasn’t even hers,” my mother says. “It wasn’t even human.”
It wasn’t even human. I get up and go into the den. I sit there, looking out the window for a minute. What would she do, my mother, if she found out a son of hers was not human? Then I go and get out the photo album. I look at photos of me when I was small. There I am, walking by the reservoir. I have made a Tinkertoy ray gun and have shot my mother as part of my plan to invade the earth. She is laughing and falling backward, clutching her heart. She is laughing so hard, and I’m laughing, too, holding my ray gun, invading her world.
I am walking to school through one of the abandoned mills. It’s a shortcut from home. The parking lot is chipped and breaking out in stubbly dead grass.
The factory buildings loom over me like a canyon. Rows of empty, dark windows in abandoned sweatshop galleries hang above me in the sky. There are sagging slate roofs and broken glass and wide doors covered in plywood and nailed shut. On the brick wall someone has sprayed green words reading “Sheila loves Mike for a while.” I walk between the buildings slowly, listening to the sound of my sneakers on the gravel.
One of these mills was closed after a big fire. There weren’t enough exits, and fourteen women were trapped upstairs and burned to death. The rumor is that on some nights you can see them still, those fourteen women, shrieking as they work at flaming looms, producing strange garments for an inhuman overseer. It’s a desolate place.
Suddenly I hear something.
Footsteps.
Who would be here at this abandoned place at this hour of the morning?
I look up at the empty angles of the brick walls against the sky. I look the other way, across the broken pavement.
Someone is walking slowly, surely, toward me.
I don’t know why, but this figure outlined against the sky frightens me. It is obviously staring at me. It is obviously coming right toward me. It walks mechanically, relentlessly.
That is when I start running.
I scamper up some concrete steps. I pivot on the rusty handrail and run off to the left between broken factory buildings. I throw myself down the alley. Only a few more turns and I’ll be back out on a main street.
From around the corner, I can hear that the figure is gaining at an inhuman pace. It couldn’t have gone up the steps with feet.
I burst out onto the street. Cars are whipping past. Birds are shooting through hedges. A motorcycle revs.
I move away from the alley and up the road, glancing backward. I wait to see who’s coming after me.
I stand there.
No one comes.
The unglassed windows of the factory are blackened with ancient soot, dark carbon licks of women who sewed petticoats. The walls face blankly on the street.
No one comes.
There is no sign that anyone was with me in the factory at all.
I continue cautiously on my way to school. I walk up the hill past the town green. Up a steep lane past the house of a man who owns sixteen old cars, all of them without wheels. By the time I reach the first of the streets in my school’s neighborhood,