Tales for the Spooky Season
God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna is Kellie Wells’s second collection of short stories and won the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. These stories give lyrical voice to the world’s castoffs, cranks, and inveterate oddballs, the deeply aggrieved, the ontologically challenged; the misunderstood mopes that haunt the shadowy wings of the world’s main stage.
Just before the girl fell from the tree, she thought about her English teacher, Mrs. Stashwick, who wore orange lipstick, had a Himalayan Siamese cat named Sherpa, made recently thin by chemo, and whose favorite poem featured a woman whose death had been interrupted by the buzzing of a fly. The girl felt it was a little unprofessional of a soon-to-be-corpse to be noticing flies in its final seconds rather than thumbing through a mental photo album of its life, but she didn’t mention this to Mrs. Stashwick, whose nose ran chronically. The girl made a note in the margin, however, for she wished to know the correct protocol for any situation that might arise. Eric Cotsonas, who frequently sat next to her, believed himself to be a comic genius, and always eyeballed her notes like a raptor tracking a vole, leaned over and whispered, Yeah, flies seem like the last thing that should be on a dead person’s mind, then he laughed through his nose, and Mrs. Stashwick glared at him with such palpable scorn he began to swallow audibly.
After the fly poem, Mrs. Stashwick talked about abstraction and then she asked the class to define love. “If love were an animal,” said Mrs. Stashwick, “what animal would it be? If love were a breakfast food…if love were a musical instrument….” Teachers were always making assignments like this. The girl admired the teachers’ thick-skinned resolve when it came to ignoring, in such moments, the snorting derision of the students. That night, at home, the girl stared at the assignment until she got the hiccups, and then she drank a glass of water upside-down. Back at her desk, she wrote, Love is an extinction that eats the fertilized eggs of ostriches and plays accordion with its gnarled feet. She got up, looked in the mirror, colored her lips blue with her pen, and pressed them to the page. People were always going on and on about love, as if anyone knew the first thing about it. She thought it was like teleportation, something that might happen in the future if the right scientists were given high quality equipment and free reign to be a little diabolical, something that would likely dismember the bodies of the first few volunteers.
The girl’s mother was no longer alive, but if she had been, she would have forbidden the girl from climbing a tree ever again. She might even have given the offending tree a good whack in its trunk with an axe, just to let the tree know the girl would not be nature’s idle patsy, not if she could help it. The girl’s father said one nasty spill needn’t put an end to her climbing days forever—get back up on that horse!—and then he whinnied and laughed and cuffed the girl on the good shoulder, told her she was a valuable human being with or without the use of her arm. Her father frequently mixed metaphors or used improbable analogies, and he suffered from insomnia. The girl tried to imagine the shape of the permanent crook the doctor said she’d now have in her forearm, her body the victim of a new geometry. Sometimes she found herself wishing her father would slip into the river and never resurface. Later, on a spring morning, a person jogging along the path that flanked the river might hear ghostly encouragements bubble up through the water, and when the jogger got home and soaped off the sweat in the shower, he’d feel a good deal better about himself and this feeling would be further confirmed by the kind of vital and effortless day he would have, but forever after he would try, fruitlessly, to recapture what he thought was the endorphin-induced buoyancy of that day, and eventually he would have to have knee replacements, the first one at the age of forty-five. The girl thought she, too, would like to have her knees replaced, though with what she wasn’t certain. Ornamental cabbages perhaps, small television sets, the skulls of famous animals, something that would make her the focus of a tabloid talk show. She thought her life might be more interesting if she lived it in such a way as to cause people to hurl accusations at her.
(excerpted from A Unified Theory of Human Behavior)