Strange Creatures Read online

  “This is why you need to pay attention,” he said. “You’re not going to be an infielder if you can’t react.”

  “Marc!” Mom was exclaiming as she rushed down the steps. “He’s hurt!”

  “He’s fine,” my father said. Jamie turned to us, squinting, and I saw how his right brow had been split by the ball, and how much it was bleeding, directly into his eye.

  “I’m fine,” he agreed, but Mom grabbed him by the hand and whisked him away to the downstairs bathroom, where she could properly fret over his wounds.

  Later, we sat in his bedroom together, Jamie paging through my drawings like he was studying some ancient book. He turned to the one with a naked girl and stared at it for what felt like a long time. I think if it weren’t for the Pokémon Band-Aid on his eyebrow, he would have lifted it, like Mr. Spock.

  “This is really beautiful,” he told me, his voice full of a familiar gentleness.

  “Thanks,” I said, shrugging off his compliment like I always did. “But you still haven’t told me how you stopped yourself from crying today.”

  When we were little, almost anything could make Jamie cry. Not just boys like Neal. It might be skinned knees or sappy commercials about dogs. Someone would sling a small insult and then he’d run into Mom’s arms and bury his face in the crook of her neck and she would rock him like a much younger boy.

  At my question, Jamie set down the drawing. The corner of his mouth lifted, but it was a mysterious kind of smile.

  “It’s something that Mom told me,” he said. “A trick. I’ll show you later.”

  “Show me now,” I said. But Jamie only shook his head.

  “No, later.”

  I sat back in his bed, frowning. A secret, then. But my frown wasn’t very deep. Jamie never kept his secrets for very long. Not from me.

  Once, our backyard had been kingdom enough for me. But by the time Jamie made shortstop, we’d outgrown it. At the far edge of our property was a drainage creek, and beyond it, a few miles of overgrown, tangled forest. The woods out back were full of litter, mostly refuse from the teenagers who idled back there, too. Crushed beer cans. Crumpled wrappers. Wormy condoms, though I didn’t know what they were at the time. But lately we only ever saw their garbage, never the teenagers themselves. When we went back there, it was a universe that belonged to the two of us alone.

  Jamie had named this space Gumlea. It was a baby name. Meaningless. Embarrassing. But so familiar that we were never quite embarrassed by it. The day after Jamie’s accident, we hopped off the school bus and headed back there together, not even bothering to check in with Mom.

  We dumped our backpacks by the side of the drainage creek and launched ourselves over it, one after the other. Then we began to walk back.

  “Today, I’m a pirate!” I exclaimed, grabbing a nearby branch from the ground and brandishing it in one hand like a cutlass. Jamie had filched the idea of pirates from an old copy of Treasure Island that Dad had given him on our last birthday. We always played games that were variations of what we’d seen on TV or read in books. It didn’t feel like stealing back then, to say that lost children lived in Gumlea, just like they did in Neverland, or that there were hobbit holes in the ground, though we called them by other names. What did it matter if we pillaged other people’s stories when we told our own? We were only children, playing games.

  But not on that day. Jamie looked back over his shoulder at me and let out a wicked grin.

  “Do you want to learn the trick Mom taught me?”

  I stopped, resting my stick in the muddy ground. “Sure.”

  Then he did something odd. He gave a strange backward twist of his body, a bizarre flourish of his hands. Later, we’d refine this ritual. We’d make rules about it—the precise way you had to move your body over the drainage creek to open the portal to Gumlea and then, later, how you would reverse the movement to close it again. Right now, though? It was only the world’s strangest and most awkwardly choreographed dance.

  I giggled. Jamie didn’t.

  Because in that moment, the whole forest—full of litter and graffiti, mosquitoes and poison ivy and ticks—seemed to fill up with a gilded light. Just like that, it was transformed. The trash was gone, replaced by storybook toadstools and half-buried gold doubloons. The branches, shifting overhead, were no longer full of autumn’s browning leaves. They were tipped in bronze and copper, with tinkling jewels for cherries, dangling overhead.

  I looked at my brother, eyes wide. And in that moment, he wasn’t only my brother. He was a prince, ermine draping his shoulders, ruby rings weighing his fingertips down. He was as beautiful and fine as ever, and when he spoke, bells seemed to ring through the underbrush. Or maybe it was a chorus of fairies calling out to us like peepers on a summer’s night. I couldn’t be sure.

  “Mom told me that I’m different than the other kids,” he said to me. “Because I have an imagination. When something is hard or weird—when it hurts so bad you think you’re going to puke—you just need to go inside it. To the other place.”

  “Gumlea?” I asked. I was still holding the stick in my hand, and though part of me was willing it and willing it to become a cutlass, it was simply a half-rotten stick with a bunch of ants crawling on it.

  But then my brother took it from me and held it in his hands. I saw then that it wasn’t a stick, or even a cutlass. It was a dagger, with a scalloped blade and a fiery stone embedded in the hilt. Images were carved into it, but he was flashing it so swiftly in the light that I couldn’t catch what they were.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. Gumlea. C’mon. Let’s find the princess. I think a dragon’s got her.”

  He turned and walked deeper into the sparkling forest. I did the only thing I could. I followed.

  4

  EMPERATA ANNIT’S ROUNDHOUSE WAS BIGGER than the rest, full of gifts from adoring children: real slingshots made of rubber bands and forked sticks, a bow and quiver that someone had brought with them from home, eyeless dolls and hairless dolls. The boy kicked his way through the cruft. Sitting in the middle of it all was Annit, perched on a throne of harpy bones.

  “What have you brought me, Ijah?” she asked. Her most faithful soldier knelt low in front of her, indicating the boy.

  “A new arrival. He says he has no name.”

  “No name?” The boy’s expression remained even. “Well, we have to call you something. We’ll call you . . . Boy.”

  He didn’t answer.

  It was all Gumlea after that, for both of us. Jamie was the one who told the stories; because I was the better artist, I was the one who drew the maps. But it was both of us, working magic together, who created the world, and all the creatures in it. There was a vast, salty ocean that covered the entire planet, and a ring of continents that punctured it. In the middle was the Island of the Feral Children, shaped like a hand spread out into the water. Against its southern palm was the mermaids’ lagoon, a ragged heart between two fingers. To the north was the land of the Winter Mountains, which sparkled white even in summer, hunched up like an old woman’s back. If you traveled eastward, you’d find the King’s domain, where towns and cities of ordinary people—grown-ups, families—were ensconced behind endless walls.

  I drew these places over and over again on Dad’s computer paper and in the fairy notebook Mom got me at the Dollar Tree and on the back of my standardized test booklets and in the margins of my language arts reader. Then Jamie helped me make copies on Dad’s scanner so we could have two of each page. One for the walls of his room, one for mine. At night, as the sharp edges of my vision faded and my mind filled up with something cottony and gray, I watched the rivers move, the mountains tremble, the walls crumble like teeth and the mirror over my dresser open, like a mouth gaping, waiting, welcoming me.

  After school, and on breaks, we’d climb into the woods together, hungry for its magic. We were alone, but we were never alone. We were chased by harpies, harassed by mermaids. Clever foxes and delicate fawns moved thro
ugh the woods beside us, calling out to us in low tones. We called back.

  Deep in the heart of Gumlea, past the tree houses of the Feral Children, beyond the mermaids’ lagoon, we always came to rest in the same place. The King’s tower. It was a gray rectangle of unassuming stone that stood with its door open in a sunny glen. The space inside was a chilly black that makes me shiver, even now, to remember it. Older and braver, Jamie always went in first. I’d hesitate on the precipice just a moment before I pulled myself inside, too.

  The air inside was cool, ever-fragrant with incense. Not the kind our mother burned when she sometimes overcooked dinner, but something sweeter. Jasmine, maybe, or freesia, and a damp smell beneath that. Hidden, sacred magic. A red carpet pooled in the shadows at the base of a very long, winding staircase. My footsteps echoed on the stairs.

  As I climbed, the world got brighter. Clearer, too. At last, at the top, I’d find my brother, his body silhouetted against an enormous stained-glass window. It would take a moment for my eyes to adjust to the sight. Jamie, on a tarnished throne set with a thousand opals. Jamie, with a bronze ring on every finger, a scepter in his hand. Jamie, who loved beautiful things, who was a beautiful thing himself, his long velvet robe like silver moonlight, trailing on the steps below. I would kneel before him, touching my forehead to my knee. Sometimes I would peek at the embroidery inside his open gown, which told a thousand stories. There were birds. Kings. Queens. Traps. Blood tithes and flesh tithes and flowers growing up through bone.

  “Sister,” he’d say softly. I found myself blushing at his voice. At myself. Here I was, my freckled face smeared with mud and cookie crumbs. If I were anything, it was a wild creature. In our first expeditions into Gumlea and every trip thereafter, I never wore velvet or silver but rather the hides of animals I’d killed and sometimes scavenged. My dirty shoelaces bloated like a clat of earthworms. But none of this bothered Jamie. His voice was gentle. The voice of a poet-sage, a true prince. “Why have you come?”

  “Only to see you,” I’d tell him, then add, blushing more, “Sire.”

  It was true. I looked up and saw my own face, twinned there. My perfect opposite. Fine where I was coarse. Polished where I was gnarled. But the same freckles. The same earlobes, detached. The same heart beating inside. Our bodies had different shapes, but those differences didn’t matter. We would always understand each other, the way the ocean understands the moon.

  He’d come close. Link his fingers in mine. Jamie saw me as no one else saw me, and not just that. He found me worthy, too.

  “If I’m a prince today, then you rule us all,” he’d say. My brother pressed a kiss to my forehead, and I breathed in his perfumed scent. He smelled like sacred oil. Still, we giggled, both of us. At the exact same time.

  I remember all of this. Our hiccuping laughter; our sticky children’s hands; the light scattered through the dust motes; the light in all its myriad colors, coming in through the stained glass. I remember it just as clearly as I can recall the crow’s-feet at the corners of my mother’s eyes, or the steady, tuneless way he hummed when he raked the lawn. It felt real to me at the time, and it feels real now.

  Did it happen? I couldn’t tell you. Not while I lived inside it, nor years later, either. There are days when I tell myself that there is a line in childhood, one we hadn’t crossed yet, where a million absurd possibilities might as well be true. Flying reindeer. Tooth-stealing fae. Universal peace. A future without death or loneliness or despair.

  There are other days when I remember the way the afternoon sunshine came through the bubbled stained glass, pink as hibiscus tea, and I know that Gumlea is out there, somewhere, still. That somewhere, if I could just figure out how to open the doorway, there is a world where no one could touch us, where there are dragons, harpies, and walls of stone. And that inside it, a brother and a sister are linked and precious, safe in their secret world.

  We discovered Gumlea just in time. Because the next year would be a hard one, as I turned six and Jamie seven. That was the first year we needed Gumlea. The first year we needed the escape.

  That was the year the boys in the neighborhood took an interest in Jamie again, and not just for an afternoon. There was Neal Harriman from across the street, the one who owned a skateboard and a slingshot and a paintball gun—all the proper accoutrements of boyhood. And also Neal’s older brother, Calvin, who was unspeakably cool and who therefore rarely tolerated the gaggle of younger boys who followed him and his buddies around. There was Geoff Ryman, whose parents were divorced. And Asher Kent, who had a palate expander and subsequent lisp, and introduced “jizz face” as a general term of endearment to the neighborhood pack.

  And there was Jamie, my brother, in the middle of it all, charming and smooth. Learning not to cry, learning not to show his fear—that had been the golden ticket that he’d needed to join their club. He’d become the kind of boy who would make friends for the day at the playground or the county pool, and now he slipped in with the rest of them as if he really, truly belonged.

  We both knew better. But I kept his secrets as well as I kept my own.

  In the forest that was also Gumlea, the boys would play manhunt, or capture the flag. Jamie was skilled at their games—slick and confident. Never invited, I’d watch from a far-off cluster of trees to see how my brother performed. With them, he was always a winner. Easygoing. Unperturbed. He never cried when he got hurt now like Geoff still did. He never got angry and broke things or called the other kids names. If anything, he was too good—too calm, too. When in the normal course of a game he tackled Neal to the ground for the fourth or fifth time and Neal turned red like a turnip and shoved Jamie away, howling, “Get off me, you faggot!” my brother only rolled away from him, frowning at the insult.

  He’d learned from our parents to turn his feelings off, to go somewhere else—but his pain had to come out eventually. And it always did. With me.

  Later, after dinner, in my bedroom, while I was preoccupied drawing maps, my brother came through my half-open door, interrupting me from my cartography. “Did you hear what Neal said to me today?” he asked, wringing his hands. He’d been holding this in for hours, and I could see how it was wearing on him—how close he already was to tears.

  I shook my head, even though I remembered.

  “He called me a faggot,” he said, and he winced at the word. “I’m not a faggot.”

  I stared at my brother, who was sniffling, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand. Then I got up and went to my desk, getting out one of our notebooks.

  “What are you going to do about it?” I asked, because we’d done this before, dozens of times. Some variation of this. Something would hurt Jamie, and he’d squish his feelings down just long enough to get me alone with a notebook and a pen.

  “I’ve—I’ve decided,” Jamie began uncertainly, “that in Gumlea, I don’t have any name. I’m not the prince anymore. I’m going to be the Nameless Boy. And the Feral Children think the Nameless Boy is like them, but he’s not. He’s—he’s different. Do you understand, Annie?”

  I bit my lip. I didn’t understand, not completely. But one thing was clear: Jamie needed me. Instead of asking questions, I began to scribble frantically. I drew my brother, clad in the animal skins and ragged clothes of the Feral Children. It looked just like him, but one of his eyes was missing. In its place, a gemstone. I drew beams of light ricocheting out of it, jagged lightning bolts in three different colors.

  Magic. It was meant to be magic. Pouring out of my brother. Shining and delicate and powerful and strange.

  When I was finished, he sat down next to me on the bed. Surveyed my work. Nodded, satisfied—and exhausted, too. He put his head on my shoulder, and I felt a sort of warmth flicker inside me. This was how it always worked between us. He’d save the feelings for me, for a story, for Gumlea. I’d write it down, or I’d draw it. I’d give him a way out.

  That year, I needed an escape, too.

  It was the year our mother had a ba
by. Before it happened, while she was still pregnant, I could pretend our lives would proceed unchanged. Even though most nights, Dad would rest his ear on Mom’s belly on the sofa and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to the child who they hoped would be a girl, it was still only me and Jamie then, together, in the silence of our house. Telling stories. Building magic. Untouched by outside intrusions.

  Mom had wanted another daughter. Someone of her own, who belonged to her. My brother and I mostly belonged only to each other, no matter how much attention she’d tried to heap on Jamie. And even in the moments when I was alone with Mom, when she tried to show me how her grandmother’s sewing machine worked or take me shopping or demonstrate how to fold Dad’s work shirts, when she tried to share stories with me of her great-grandfather’s crossing to Ellis Island, I was always distractible. Squirmy. Somewhere else. Someone else. Not the mirror she had hoped a daughter would always be.

  Mom had no one. It was me and Jamie, and then Mom and Dad, separate, even when they were together. They loved one another, of course. I knew that from the way that they’d flirt and giggle on the way out to their dates, while Gram, who’d come by to babysit, rolled her eyes at them. I knew from the way that they kissed after Jamie’s parent-teacher conferences, when Mom was alive and glowing from the praise his teachers gave him. The way that their hips smashed together, their hands roving—obvious and mortifying. But Mom and Dad were nothing alike, really. They loved each other, but it never felt like they were friends, even then.

  Our father was ordinary, hiding the things that made him special—the banjo he’d played in college, the book of dirty limericks he worked on sometimes after he’d had a beer with dinner—away in his office, presenting the perfect front of a healthy, normal American dad. Mom, on the other hand, had her own wild magic. She was funny and weird and hard and mean, and she followed new music even when the other grown-ups seemed to have given up on it, and her jeans were always cut to the latest style, and she wanted us to be like her—me and Jamie—but we weren’t. So, she decided she needed to try again, with another kid.