Molting Season
Seven thirty in the morning, I find a girl passed out on the sofa, face buried in the cushions, one hand gripping the hilt of an abused long sword. The floor is littered with cold-weather gear, the carpet soggy with melted snow. I recognize her profile, the short, jagged cut of her black hair. Have seen her, sword slung over her shoulder, going to and from a rusted Bronco and the house next door countless times.
Wondering how she got in (and why), I step back out into the snow-flecked spring air, the white haze dispelled by flickering orange bursts of the sprawling refinery’s gas flares, beyond the neighborhood and a vast swath of industrial ruin.
Check the hidden key in the green glazed ceramic frog.
It’s there.
I peer over at the house next door and glimpse a skull at the window, half-concealed by the curtain, staring back at me. Catch a whiff of something rotten, like gassy compost.
Return inside and move quietly into the kitchen. It’s technically dinner for me. Following Fred’s disappearance, I’ve taken over the late shift at the Lakeside Inn and need to acclimatize myself to eating dinner foods in the a.m.
Steak and eggs feels like a nice compromise.
As I’m cooking, I notice a glass in the drainboard which wasn’t there when I left for work yesterday evening. Lipstick-stained. Smells of Smirnoff.
Set my food and coffee down on the kitchen table and find among the mass of mail a slim black book—ffyntlik Stories. Skull literature. Camel butts brim out of the ashtray—also stained in her color.
I flip through the book and find it contains a hundred or so vignettes, most of them no more than a page long.
As I eat, I randomly pick out a story—“Molting Season.”
molting season
annual excretion
post-excretory purification
sexual fugue of the female
fern forest
male train
rape and castration of the male train by the fugal female
laying a clutch
patriarch-selection ceremony
butchering of the rest of the father train
salting and spicing the father meat
maternal abandonment
vigilance
downpour
abscesses
seepage
cracks
the joyful pride of examining the slender spines of puggles post-hatching
consuming the spiced father meat to stimulate milk production
paternal breastfeeding
father-led puggle train
vigilance
reunion with the mother
premortem perseverative dream
suicide of the father
molting season
I puzzle over the meaning of this story or poem or whatever it is for some time. More of a list really—an inventory of scenes from some alien nature documentary. The perspective shifts make it especially difficult to follow, moving from the mother, to the fathers, then back again. From what I gather, a female travels on a fugue, attracting a number of suitors (the “male train”), she mates with one of them, kills the rest, and then leaves the father to mind the eggs. When they hatch, the father breastfeeds the puggles, leads them back to the mother, commits suicide, and then the cycle repeats.
I flip through a few more stories, but my mind is starting to fade, the steak only half-eaten.
Six hours later, I shuffle back into the living room, light a cigarette and flip on the television while I smoke—fields of static, fields of static, fields of static, looping infomercial of bygone days (slasher-flick knives, stain-remover [wine! marinara sauce! blood!]). I’m so temporally discombobulated it takes me a full minute to realize what’s amiss—no one is lying on the couch on the other side of the coffee table.
I stare at the emptiness, letting the smoke settle in my lungs for as long as possible, remembering how she filled out the space, the curves of her delicate face, the white-knuckled clamp on the sword.
I cobble together a light meal and sense from the awkward placement of food in the fridge that she made breakfast before leaving—hash browns, juice, pickles—or maybe I’m paranoid.
She didn’t leave a note—
(Neither did Mom.)
I would’ve left a note if I were her—if I’d done what she had done.
Try calling Lana for some reality testing, but she doesn’t answer—still screening my calls. A skull sympathizer with a resilient mind, she might offer some insight on the girl’s situation, whether she’s at risk.
I bundle up for a frigid jog, and lope out onto the icy road. The street zigzags with a growing jumble of cars—cracked windshields, tires in crises, a few tanks probably ripe for the siphoning.
Keep expecting something to leap out and attack me. I jump with each far-off gas flare eruption from Detroit Petroleum. Skulls study me from the windows of the tract housing.
Vigilance, I recall from ffyntlik’s “story.” I’d heard somewhere that only males crossed over onto Earth. An overwhelming train of them.
A mile or so later, I’m back home, hands shaking—haven’t freaked out like this in a long time.
Chill out, I tell myself. Chill out. Chill out.
That’s when the creaky screams erupt next door. Gooseflesh breaks out over my body. Much earlier in the day than usual. Impossible to focus or hear anything else. Could call the cops, but they’d just recommend an earpiece as they always do.
Spend thirty minutes salivating over the barrel of a gun before screaming and flinging it onto my bed and continue living until tomorrow’s noonday demon.
Hours later, my hands growing steadier, I don a pair of black slacks, white shirt, and black tie, and navigate my station wagon through the icy, broken streets to the hotel. Time of night I leave for work, the house next door is brimming with skulls and screaming, strobe lights and jack-hammering death metal—a scattering of them stand swaying in the snow, staring me down.
At work, Carol and I discuss Fred’s whereabouts. Well, it’s been a week already, so we discuss his corpse’s whereabouts. He’d had crinkled skin around the mouth, smoked menthols and had a beer gut. Joked that his real job was doing crosswords. He often joked. When I was working second shift, he would try to keep me from going home by flooding me with overlapping streams of jokes and anecdotes, each one stinking a little more of desperation, because once I left, it was just him dangling out over the night in this glass cube of a lobby, praying for the first band of eastern gold that meant he’d survived the night.
“Watch yourself, young stud,” Carol says. Silver-haired, heavy, the second-shifter lost two sons and a husband in the Lemming Craze, yet has somehow clung on to a sunny disposition. “Don’t travel down the road to Fred-dom.”
After she squeals out of the parking lot in her hotrod, I settle down behind the front desk and review a typed-up inventory of Fred’s duties (crosswords not included), elevator music oozing into my ears. Beyond the glass walls of the lobby, plumes of fire from the petroleum corporation light up the lake and highway.
Too much pressure building up in the works.
Monday morning I return to an empty living room. Make a salad and sandwich and screwdriver and discover that the girl left the ffyntlik book behind, concealed beneath a catalog offering insider deals at a defunct department store. Read another story, this one all definite articles—just the word the repeated for a page and a half, concluding as follows:
the the the the the the the the the the th—
Girl has strange taste in books.
My eyes stray to the kitchen window, surveying the unremarkable side of the skull house, which Arnold and Stella Crickenberger abandoned when they followed along behind the others during the Lemming Craze. Quiet now, but I can sense them in there, sardined together, gaping at each other.
Girl has strange taste in company too.
When I wake that afternoon, the screams have already ratcheted up next door.
It’s not until Tuesday before she shows up again.
Same scene as before, except she’s wearing red jeans and a striped shirt. In addition to the long sword, she’s fallen asleep with a finger stuck into ffyntlik Stories. I go about as before, trying not to make too much noise.
Eat in silence, then lie in bed listening, casting myself out into the rest of the house, ghosting through the walls, until I’m floating over her, withstanding the temptation to slip the book from her grasp with incorporeal hands. In this dream state, I can study her more freely, appreciate her long, willowy shape, her lashes fluttering like snared insects.
I fall asleep that way, and when I wake up, she’s gone.
Took the book with her.
When I arrive at work Tuesday night, Carol gives me the rundown—a short (ever-shortening) guest list of customers with local IDs, for each one of which Carol invents a sordid story free of charge, a story meant to distract from the reality of the situation.
“One more thing,” Carol says. “Room 115. Solitary male.”
“What about him?” I ask, opening the room file on the computer, bracing myself for the next speculative yarn.
“Not that kind of male.”
I glance up from the bizarre name in the registry.
She tugs on her earpiece, what the president urged we wear at all times for the sake of interspecies harmony. This was several hours before he succumbed, before blowing his brains out in the Oval Office.
I’d forgotten to bring mine to work. I tend to forget it.
“It’s alone?”
She nods. “And on that note, I’m out, young stud.”
Later that night, another guest checks in: white male, late fifties. The maids have disposed of enough bodies during their cleaning schedule for us to be wary of admitting guests with local IDs. I give him the corporate discount. Whether out of sympathy or as cynical enabler, I couldn’t really say.
Hours later on my early morning patrol of the grounds, I walk down to the water’s icy edge for a smoke. From down here, when the stacks explode, the motel lights up in miniature—an impressively detailed model.
As I return, I hear the distant summons of the phone and sprint the last stretch of the way, fumbling to unlock the lobby door, and reach the check-in counter after fifteen rings at least.
“Thanks for calling The Lake—”
“How are things?” Lana asks, cutting off the script.
“Good.” My mouth is sticky, voice disembodied. “Hold on a sec.” I drop the phone, sloppily hurtle over the counter, take a seat, and pluck it back up. “Go ahead.”
“Are you out of breath?”
“Yeah, I was … uh … exercising. I started exercising since you left.”
“I got your messages. Have they found Fred?”
“No.”
“God. I … was thinking about you. I’m writing. A memoir. My male train thought it might be interesting given my experience with both humans and skyylls. There’s a chapter called ‘Warren,’ what I’ve been working on this week. It made me want to call you. I needed to hear you speak, your cadence. You sounded so lifeless on the machine.”
“Well, here it is. Here I am.”
“Tell me what’s new.”
“Nothing much.”
“No girlfriend?”
It takes me a moment to answer. “There’s a girl in my life, but I’m not sure she knows what I look like.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
She laughs.
“Don’t put this in your book, okay? I found her asleep on my couch a couple of times. Just entered in the middle of the night while I was at work.”
“Well, what did you do?” Lana asks.
“Nothing. I just eat and go to bed without waking her. I don’t know how to behave anymore. Not without the script.”
Without suggesting a solution or even attempting to conclude the topic, she jumps into asking about some common acquaintances, the neighborhood, etc. She really is just listening to my voice in the beginning, but then we reminisce about life pre-skulls—colorful, mnemonic gas flares, each one dissipating into darkness. I notice the textures of my own voice as we speak, the way all of my body vibrates in sympathy with the deep, scratchy sound. I’m a real drag, she tells me.
Finally she says, “I’m being summoned. Thanks for talking to me. I know you must hate me.”
“A little. Wait a minute, though. I need to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“How is it living with skulls?”
“It’s pronounced skyylls.”
“Point taken.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Dunno. Could be pertinent.”
She lowers her voice. “They don’t like us talking about them.”
“Well, you’ll be talking about them in your book, right?”
I look up and almost gasp at the sight of the guest—the skull—standing out by the empty pool, swaying, staring in at me through its enormous eye cavities.
“I really can’t talk to you about this.”
It’s nothing but moonlit nerves and elaborate bone structure, frilled, horned, gangly—the meticulous handiwork of a psychotic paleontologist.
“Out of loyalty to your skull-friends? Or … is it fear?”
“Goodnight, Warren.”
Click.
“’Night,” I say, the handgun heavy in my inner coat pocket.
The next time it happens is Thursday morning. Spring has finally lived up to its name. The thawing neighborhood smells of dogwood blossoms. The pool is back in service, chlorine wafting into the lobby every time the doors swing open.
This time she’s wearing stockings and a skirt riding up high. Out of a sense of decorum, I throw a blanket over her, and she mumbles somnolently. Her mascara has run, lipstick smeared. I go to the kitchen and pan fry tilapia. Wrap it in tortillas with cabbage and onion and lime juice. Finish off the dregs of the Smirnoff. Think about what to do.
Should talk to her at least, see if I can help in some way.
My shoulders slump with indecision.
Thursday melts slowly into Sunday night.
Carol gives me the rundown. Our skull friend has retained its room.
At work I do the usual. Read a book. Watch a movie. Take slap shots at the freezer in the kitchen. Nap at my desk. The lobby dissolves to the surface of a moon circling a gas giant—ten of me tromp through a silvery desert and after weeks of marching, we reach a fern forest, discover in a clearing a gigantic, arachnid girl-on-the-couch, who devours us one by one post-copulation, when a staccato ring echoes across the moon’s surface, the sound flattening and crumpling my doubles and the spider girl—I realize I’m clutching papers on the desk and the staccato ring means an in-house call. I pick up the receiver, zoomed back into reality.
“Good evening, this is Warren, how can—”
A voice creaks on the other end.
I remove the receiver from my ear, stare at it, then glance down at the display—room 115.
“Please insert a modulator, sir,” I say, voice shaking.
The creaking continues, each pulse lasting a second or so, a few seconds of silence, then another pulse.
I hang up, a chill running through me, my eyes straying to the glass wall of the lobby, out over the pool, and across to room 115.
I light a cigarette and pick the phone back up. I fight the instinct to ring Lana, and dial home instead.
It takes nine rings before someone picks up. A languorous grunt.
“Hello?” I say.
“Yeah,” the 3:30 a.m. voice says, deeper, richer than in my imagination.
“You don’t know me, but you’re sleeping on my couch.”
She clears her throat. “I’m awake.”
“I wasn’t sure who else to call about this.”
I hear her shifting position, a long silence, the flick and crackle of igniting a cigarette. She exhales. “What can I do for you, Warren?”
“You know my name.”
“Didn’t take too much snooping. Left your mail on the kitchen table. I think you have hoarding tendencies.”
“You have wheels, right?”
“Yup.”
“Do you know where I work?”
“The five-star on the other side of the fireworks?”
Takes me a beat to decipher this. “Yeah.”
“What do you want exactly, Warren?”
“Can you bring me my earpiece? Or are you drunk?”
“Only had a few beers tonight. You’re out of vodka, by the way. Where is it?”
“Check the bookshelf in the hall. Also, the drawer beneath the knife block in the kitchen.”
“Will do, Warren.” There’s something flirtatious in the way she repeats my name. Or it could be my imagination.
“And lock the door on the way out. Thanks.”
While I wait for her, I prepare an industrial-sized pot of coffee in the kitchen, then I hear the welcoming jingle of the lobby door opening and rush back to the front desk, straightening my tie, tucking my hair behind my ears. Find her there in her boots and dark coat, tapping her black fingernails on the counter, sizing up the place with pale jade eyes. I feel a rush of embarrassment about the seediness of the décor, the explosions from Detroit Petroleum, the oversaturation of chlorine.
She hands me the earpiece. “What’s a room cost here anyway?”
She’s taller than I thought—close to six feet—with a narrow nose, pierced septum, and a slender neck emerging from a thick, checkered scarf. I misjudged her height, I realize, because I’d always seen her standing near a skull, who tower around eight feet off the ground.
I fit the seashell-like device around my ear. “Double or king?”
She shrugs. “King.”
“Deluxe?”
“Sure.”
“How many guests?”
“Does that matter?”
“Yes.”
“Just me.”
“And you’re local?”
“Yeah.”
“Well”—I pick up the phone—“depends on who’s working when you check in.”
She smiles. “Let’s say you’re working, Warren.”
I dial room 115. Wait for an answer. “I could get you a deal.”
She leans on the counter, chin in hand. “Strange pricing system you guys have here.”
“It’s not answering.” I hang up the phone and grab the skeleton key from its hanger beneath the counter, hidden behind the computer tower. She pokes her nose over the counter to see what I’m doing, but when I flash her a reproving look, she backs off, smirking, leaving me with the lingering, citrusy notes of her perfume or her shampoo—or just her. “I need to go check up on the guest. You can make yourself comfortable here. Guess you don’t need to be told that.”
She laughs. “Let me come. You’ve piqued my curiosity.”
We exit the lobby into a desiccated jungle sprouting up between the contours of poolside concrete, everything a luminous, wavering blue. We walk in silence as she takes in all the details—ripped sun loungers, ice-decimated pavement, cardboard-patched windows of rooms 107 and 113. Room 115 draws near, and we can hear the skull’s creaking voice in the darkness on the other side of the door, faint beneath the lapping of the pool water.
I knock. “Sir?”
No response.
The girl fits in her own earpiece.
Another knock. “Sir?”
“Allow me. ixd?”
We wait. I knock a few more times, then unlock the door.
The skewed light of the pool illuminates the giant looming in the corner, its head frill grazing the ceiling. The creature stands stock-still, save for the micro movements of its nerve-webbed skull.
I flick on the lights, scan the room. King-sized bed still made, carpet discolored but clean, bulky TV turned off.
Place doesn’t look used, though it reeks of rotten vegetables.
The girl enters, approaches the skull and attempts to communicate, but the creature is unresponsive. I tune my earpiece, which up-bends its utterances into intonations less skin-crawling, but to no avail—it’s speaking jskyyll.
“You understand what it’s saying?” I ask her.
She nods. “‘Puggle train.’”
“Sorry?”
“He’s dreaming about children. They call it a premortem perseverative dream.”
“It’s dying?”
“Yes. In ideal circumstances skyylls engage with the afterlife several days before they give up living. Their language acts as prayer, willing the afterlife into existence. It can go wrong, of course. They can become trapped in nightmares, in Hell, but this one … he’s dreaming of children he’ll never birth.”
“ffyntlik,” I murmur.
“What was that?” she asks, turning back toward me.
“A story from the book you had with you. I totally missed the point at the time—”
“‘the’?”
I nod. “This”—I gesture toward the skull—“is what ‘the’ was about?”
“Yes. A tragedy about a skyyll who becomes trapped in absurdity while invoking his own version of Paradise. In any case, that’s how I interpreted it. For them, repetition is taboo, due to its association with death.”
“Why do you think it called the front desk?”
“Sense of politeness. So you’d know to expect a corpse in a day or two.”
“Maybe we should lay it down on the bed.”
“I wouldn’t.” Her voice has dwindled to a whisper. “They prefer to die standing.”
“Who is this ffyntlik?” I ask back in the lobby, finding the girl on one of the worn leather couches. I offer her a giant Styrofoam cup of coffee and go hunting for an ashtray. I don’t even know her name, but it seems we’ve moved past the stage where asking would be appropriate.
“The last female skyyll.” She has a sip. “From what I’ve gathered, she’s ancient and enormous, far too massive to travel on a fugue and far too old to lay a clutch. She fomented a sexual revolution on their planet. It began with ffyntlik Stories, which she narrated to her male train in lieu of killing them. As a female, she was in the unique position to communicate the barbaric acts surrounding reproduction to the males before they experienced it firsthand (and perished). More and more males flocked to her, the entire male population eventually housed beneath the complex archways of her legs and within the folds of her flesh.”
Illustration by Daniel Bitton
I return, ashtray in hand, set it on the glass coffee table, and sit down on the couch opposite hers. Her long sword is laid out on the table, drinking in the light of the faux crystal chandelier.
“With more sexual attention, she grew larger and larger, and the power of her prayers reached unprecedented levels.” I offer a cigarette, light it. “Thanks. Her prayers summoned a comet to crash down on her, and among the ruins of her brains, the males found a portal, a winding staircase down through the rot of her body, leading up into the bowels of the refinery.” She nods toward a burst of flame.
That was several years ago. When the world changed, and the acedia spread virus-like from human mind to human mind. I wonder …
As if reading my mind, or maybe just following my line of sight to the window, to the path leading down to the water’s edge, the girl goes on, “ffyntlik’s final prayer was twofold—the destruction of their world, and passage to a world where they would be accepted. But it seems most of us humans weren’t prepared to accept creatures as bizarre as skyylls.”
I light my own cigarette, sip my coffee, and sink into the squeaky leather.
“My boyfriend”—she draws up the sword—“jousted at Renaissance fairs. He wasn’t built for this. Threw himself off Ambassador Bridge while armored in full regalia. Mom, Dad, my brother, my sister, they flowed out into Erie during the Lemming Craze. Afterwards, I was still holding on somehow, attending classes without a professor, with barely any students left on campus. Maybe I was immune to this disease or disorder spreading around or maybe I’m …”
“Resilient?” I suggest.
She nods. “Anyway, that was when I began attracting a male train. At first, it freaked me out. They were always there. Just a handful in the beginning, but their numbers always growing. Staring, swaying, creaking. Then I took their presence as a sign”—she runs a finger down the sword’s edge—“and I scouted out an abandoned house, led them inside, hacked them to pieces, and dumped their jittering body parts into the cellar. It was strange how they accepted my rages, almost craved death. Wasn’t until I began learning about them (originally with the purpose of more effectively dispatching them) that I realized I was simply acting out a stage in skyyll reproduction, where the female destroys her suitors. Despite the prayers and attempts at liberation, males are trapped by their biology, hardwired to be brutalized by females.”
She yawns deeply, pausing while the early morning sounds creep back in.
“And guilt set in. Set in months ago, but I was too locked into the revenge machinery to stop. In just a few months it had become my life, and with no one else to turn to, I was afraid that stopping would—” She yawns again.
Doesn’t finish the thought.
The sky has paled. An overcast day, but no snow. Warm weather ahead.
“One night, blood-drunk I pried open the wrong ceramic frog containing the wrong key to the wrong house. It was like stepping onto the surface of another planet, my home planet. The arrangement of furniture, the horror movies on the VCR, the lived-in comfort—it was a smelling salt, yanking me out of the strange existential funk I’d fallen into, giving me the soundest night’s sleep I’d experienced in years, reawakened the grief from those early post-Lemming years.”
The story ends abruptly as if her thoughts have snagged on a mental branch, and she looks over at me, waiting for my contribution.
“Speaking of sleep, why don’t we pause, pick it up later? I need to get a little work done before first shift. How about a room?”
She stretches. “I should get back.”
I nod.
“Do you mind? Just a night or two more?”
Before sunrise, I amble down to the lake during my final patrol of the grounds and smoke. Smells foul down here.
In the predawn gray, I can see every snaking detail of the petroleum corporation repeated in the smooth, metallic sheen of the water. I skirt along the shore, hopping over logs, the girl’s voice echoing in my head.
A few years ago, when we all lost people dear to us, it wasn’t uncommon to find a body washed up on the shore of this and every other body of water across America, but it’s been so long, that when my shoe bursts through the bubble of rancid, icy jelly—human, no mistaking—an alien sound escapes my jaded mouth.
Even after spending a week beneath the ice, mangled by fish, Fred has maintained his Fred-ness. Now he’s filling up my shoe, sluicing in between my toes.
I kick myself free of his corpse, then pull the gun out of my jacket, pausing a moment to consider this object that has consumed my thoughts for so long, whose hour has finally come.
Adrenaline surges through me and with it a newfound and uncanny sense of agency. I cock back and hurl the gun out into the morning air, shattering the impenetrable steel of my own premortem perseverative nightmare.