Tusk
written by: R. M. Greta
In a small brown house, tucked away between crop fields, sitting right up against a long stretch of highway in a desolate desert town, I lived with my parents. We lived far from the other neighborhoods, our house one among four houses in a two-mile stretch of highway.
As a child, I longed for the ease of walking down the pale gray sidewalk of a clean suburb, where every house looked the same and every floor plan inside every house looked the same. I longed to see more than just dirt, to feel more than just the hot sun baking my skin. I wanted grass, trees, flowers, lemonade stands, cul-de-sacs, swimming pools.
I envied children who played in the street, who walked to each other’s homes, who knew one another outside of school. I imagined endless games of hide-and-seek under late afternoon sunshine, running with the other children through sprinklers in the front lawn, smiling at each other from under big beach towels, popsicles in hand.
The only way out from where I lived was either by car or by taking a long, treacherous walk along the shoulder of the highway that was frequented by semi-trucks day in and day out. No sidewalks, no bike paths, no crosswalks. Trucks moved fast and never stopped. Often, I would daydream of braving the heat and hulking masses of metal speeding by, sneaking out, and making a run for it down that highway. Each step in the dry dirt was mapped out clearly in my mind. This was how I escaped when my body was trapped in that house.
Out on that country road, with no siblings or extended family, we were isolated. In all those years, it never occurred to me that there could be a reason for our isolation. No one would chance upon our house while out on an evening walk, no one would knock on our door selling cookies, no one would get too close – and that was by design.
Life in that house required being small and quiet. It required answering “yes” and “no” and not making eye contact for very long. It required playing by oneself and making oneself scarce. Never ask questions, only speak when spoken to, don’t complain, don’t raise your voice, and definitely don’t ever cry. There were times when I preferred the silent darkness of my closet for hours on end rather than be found and risk making the wrong move.
I was no stranger to the belt. Or rather, I was no stranger to the threat of the belt. While I was never hit with it, if I ever dared to say “no” or even hesitate before saying “yes,” my father’s first reaction was to theatrically remove his belt, promising a good lashing for my misbehavior.
Feverishly tearing at the buckle, his eyes wide, his lips pulled tightly over his teeth, his fingers would count down the seconds I had until the ultimate punishment would be doled out. The buckle would clumsily come apart, his hands rushing, as if he could not get it off fast enough to teach me a lesson. The tinkling of the metal parts would send chills down my spine.
If he got past the buckle and freed the remaining leather strap, he would tightly grasp the buckle and wrench his whole arm upward to free his belt from the loops on his pants with one swift motion, the leather making a slap-slap sound as it smacked against his hips on the way out. Then the belt would be folded in half in his right hand, a gratuitous whip-cracking of the leather sounding as he pulled it taut. Finally, the leather would be raised up in his fist, near his ear, as he came closer to me. The whole time, his face would be wearing a demon’s mask of rage, unrecognizable as my father.
Sometimes I froze. Sometimes I’d be up and running before his fingers touched his belt buckle. I never wasted time saying “sorry,” because apologies meant nothing in our house.
But always, there in the background, hovering, eyes hungry, a small smile on her lips, breathing heavily, was my mother. Her posture changed from her usual clumsy, bouncing stance on the balls of her feet to tense, ready to spring at any second. If I had ever sat still long enough to see the belt actually swing my way, she would have been on me in an instant, holding me down so I couldn’t escape the beating. Her eyes said I deserved it, her smile said she hoped I got it, and her heaving breast said she would enjoy it.
When I was younger, it was only a matter of following the rules and not being too loud or too silly. As I got older and reached middle school, it became more about suppressing my budding independence.
All of a sudden, everything I did was an offense: the way I carried myself, what I wore, my friends, my grades. The veil of childhood lifting away offered me an opportunity to see the world a little clearer, and this was a danger to them both.
The change to my body and my awareness was slow. I felt strange and out of place everywhere. The deep, uncontrollable processes had been set in motion. New cells were growing where they hadn’t been before. Pairs of nodes in my brain tissue were fully forming and connecting, sending out signals, pulsing into the space between me and everyone else. Between me and my mother.
At times, the change in the air was so palpable, it would interrupt my mother mid-task, reminding her that I needed to be put in my place. This time, she turned to me abruptly during dinner.
“Where were you at lunch today,” she demanded through gritted teeth.
Her face was set in hard, unbreakable lines. Her eyes were cold, and she was daring me to misstep. If I so much as blinked the wrong way, she could interpret it as disrespect and begin her tirade. Her breathing became labored, stirring the strands of hair around her face as she began to pant.
It was a stupid question. I never went anywhere at lunch. Some kids were allowed to go off-campus to purchase food, but I wasn’t. I understood that the devil would come right out of my mother’s ass if she ever found out I’d left school by any means other than their car.
I glanced at her just long enough to show that I had heard her. I looked down and said “at school” with the least amount of inflection in my tone as possible, while being careful to speak at a moderate pace. Too fast meant I was lying, too slow meant I was giving her “attitude.”
My answer was good enough. Her eyes stayed on me as she nodded once and hissed, “I’d better NEVER catch you off-campus at any time. I drove by the school today and saw some kids walking around for lunch. You are NEVER to leave the school until we COME GET YOU.”
The word “never” felt like cold nails piercing my skull. Finishing her sentence with a hard grunt, forcing out her words between sprays of spittle, her pronouncement became a boot stomping on my back. I didn’t say anything but glanced sideways as she went back to her meal.
Watching her briefly, I wondered if she had always been such a sloppy eater? Her fork barely made it to her open maw before she was closing her mouth around it and slapping her lips together in an attempt to consume the food that had been shoveled in. Her tongue darted in and out of her mouth, while all the fleshy, soft bits of her face continued to smack. Sauce dribbled onto her chin, and she stopped to wipe it up, emitting a low growl as she did so. The smacking, wet sounds continued, and I momentarily forgot to mask my disgust.
Remembering where I was, my eyes darted toward my father, and I froze. He was watching me with dark, stony eyes, waiting for me to indicate that I had any issue with my mother’s newly developed beastly eating habits. I looked away quickly, and began poking at my food with my fork, trying to calm my stomach as the slapping and growling and slurping continued next to me.
Over the next months, my unique “self” continued to form, light expanding into dark corners around me and illuminating parts of my life I had previously not known existed. As each crevice, crack, and fissure in my world came into view, revealing its secrets to me, my mother became all too aware that she was running out of shadows to blind me with. This created tension in the house that could be felt daily.
One evening, after a small confrontation when I got home from school, I was working very hard at going unnoticed and trying to sneak back to my room from the kitchen. I passed the doorway to the living area just in time to look in and see my mother stop my father, appraising the sandwich he held in his hand. A seductive grin came to her face, lined with pure pleasure.
“Mmm, let me have a bite of that,” she purred from between her thin lips, pulled back in what I can only describe as half smile, half snarl. Her chin thrust forward, and her round brown eyes became small slits in her face.
My father hesitated, a moment of weakness that she didn’t catch, her attention focused on his sandwich. He cleared his throat and managed to sound normal as he said, “Sure, babe.” He reached out his hand slowly, offering the food awkwardly. She sat fully upright, tucking her feet underneath her in a childlike manner, obviously excited. Her smile deepened, and her eyes glowed as she bent forward, extending her hands out to grab the sandwich at both sides. She brought it to her face steadily, her fingers making round indents in the soft bread, and opened her mouth mechanically to receive the food. Her jaws were a funhouse tunnel, and the sandwich was a car on a track, unable to steer away.
The end of the bread disappeared between her lips, and then kept going. I watched in shock as she forced more than half the meal into her mouth. She began to close her trap around the bread with a moist, dense noise. Her teeth protruded from her skull, spring-loaded, clamping down and cutting through the contents of the sandwich with ease. Pulling her face away from the sandwich, she set about working her jaws to mash up the contents. The cracking, snapping, soggy sounds made my stomach turn. I could hear the pieces of food swishing around in her mouth, side to side, as her molars ground and minced the bits of lunch meat, tomato, cheese, and lettuce. Her jaw moved in a continuous circle as she mashed the food into a sludge, then her throat expanded as she gulped it down.
“Mmm,” she breathed. “That’s good.”
She sighed deeply, let out a low moan, and handed what was left of the sandwich back to my father, who looked down at the measly remains of his snack in silent defeat. She sat back and ignored him.
I turned and walked briskly to my room, pushing the image of her eating from my head, but unable to rid myself of the churning, crunching, and roiling I’d heard.
That night, I tossed and turned in my bed, sweating, as visions of the tooth-framed orifice in the center of my mother’s face descending on that sandwich visited my dreams over and over: the unsticking of the dry flesh of her lips as they parted, the soft click of her tongue as it released from the roof of her mouth and extended fully to wrap like a coil around the bread and meat before retracting quickly back between her mandibles. Every time the motions of her snatching the sandwich repeated, her teeth became elongated, sharper, glistening pearly white. A glint of light bounced off her fangs, blinding me and sending a metallic ringing through my nerves. The sound of the food being swished around between her cheeks became an unbearable, deafening static in my brain.
In the morning, I woke without feeling rested. My head and body ached as if I’d spent all night running for my life. My skin was salty and sticky from sweating, and my throat felt coated in grit. I got up and went down the hall to the kitchen to get a glass of water.
The sound of my parents’ murmuring at the end of the hall reached me, and I slowed my step. My mother was standing in the dark kitchen, and my father was on the other side of the kitchen counter, both hands pressed on the countertop, leaning forward. Her eyes glowed with an intensity I hadn’t seen before. As I exited the hallway, her eyes shifted sideways to me, and the corners of her mouth drooped slightly into a frown. My father turned his face toward me and sighed, seemingly fed up with me already. He turned back to my mother, and they remained silent.
I walked around the corner of the wall that separated the kitchen and dining room from the hallway and crossed to the cupboard for a glass. I said nothing as I approached the sink, hoping she would inch away so I could reach the faucet. She did not. Reaching as politely as I could for the tap, careful not to touch her, I noted the tension in the room. After the long seconds it took to fill my glass, I made to leave when suddenly my mother stiffened, her back straightening and her hands gripping the edge of the sink.
Her voice was a command, telling me I’d better stop and listen to her.
“Did you hear all that noise last night?”
A heartbeat passed. Two. I stood half turned to her and half turned to the doorway, wishing I could bolt through it. The fear that somehow my dreams had manifested themselves for all to see rippled through me. I took a deep breath, keeping my eyes down, and prepared myself for anything.
“No.” My reply was flat, monotone.
She relaxed a little and let out a soft laugh. Slowly, breathlessly, she went on.
“Our neighbor’s horses got loose.” I could hear small scraping, popping sounds as she dragged her lips over her teeth in the beginning of a grin.
She continued, “Two horses ran right into the highway in the middle of the night. A semi-truck plowed right into one of them. There’s bits of horse all over the road. Can’t tell it was ever a horse.”
An icy rush cascaded from the top of my head down my neck and shoulders. My blood felt cold while the air grew hot and damp, pushing down against my chest. The light from the open windows burned my eyes, and my head reeled, while the subtle sound of the skin stretching tighter over my mother’s knuckles filled me with a sickening dread.
She went on after a brief pause, her voice strange and disconnected.
“Blood everywhere. The semi-truck almost crashed. Had to pull to the side of the road. The other horse got hit in the leg and is useless now. Big mess.”
I could see in my periphery that she hadn’t moved at all, but I could tell she was smiling while she spoke.
I shuddered, closed my eyes, and said quietly, “That’s horrible.”
I heard her exhale, and my father shifted from one foot to the other. No one spoke for a few seconds, so I took that as a signal to leave. I turned and walked back to my room, holding myself rigid, focused on each step, expecting a hand to clamp down on my shoulder at any moment, until I could slip into my room, close the door, and breathe again. One breath, then two, until my heart stopped pounding.
My eyes crept to my bedroom window. Static white noise filled my head as I wondered what was behind the closed blinds. Was it true? Without giving myself time to think, I rushed to my window and opened the blinds. There it was. The truck was still parked off the side of the highway, impossibly huge in front of our house. Terrible blood stains decorated the front grille and sides. I turned my head and rested my cheek against the cold glass to peer down the length of the highway. Heaps of dark red, drying entrails and piles of meat sat in the roadway. Pieces of horse. I gagged, remembering the dark abyss of my mother’s mouth slowly encroaching upon the jiggling slices of lunch meat poking out between the bread in my dream. I shut the blinds and held my head between my hands, wishing I could crush it and reach into the cavity of my skull to pluck out what I’d just seen.
I was too afraid to sleep at night because every time I started to drift off, hallucinations of exploding bellies, ripping muscles, flying hooves, crunching teeth, full cheeks, lapping tongues, bulging eyes danced a horrible dance in my head, always set to the sound of screaming horses and a sharp, metallic static. By the third day, I was beginning to feel weak, lightheaded, and slow.
Awake in my bed, I watched the deep blue of night fade away into the lighter blue of dawn. I heard movement in the hallway and decided to get up before anyone poked their head into my room to roughly announce the need to get up and get ready for school.
My feet touched the carpet, and my bed creaked as I lifted my weight from it. Here we go. Another day. Groaning, I padded softly across the room toward the door. My hand closed around the gold-colored doorknob, and I pulled the door open and stepped onto the cold tile of the hallway. The morning was cool, but the day would heat up soon, the kind of heat that killed old people and young children every summer.
Across the short hallway, the bathroom I was allowed to use waited, the door slightly ajar. My feet shuffled forward.
Before I could make it to the door, my father’s voice whipped through the air.
“JANINE,” he boomed. I stopped, turned to look at him down the hall.
“COME HERE.” The words landed like a mallet on my ears.
My gut flipped, fluttered. My hands started to tingle, and my head felt like a balloon attached to my neck by a flimsy string as I somehow walked down the length of the hall to the living room. Sweat began to invade my underarms, around my neck, along my hairline. Lights flashed at the edges of my vision with each violent beat of my heart.
He stood looming over me, tall, lean, light-skinned with dark hair and sharp features. Then I noticed my mother behind him. She swayed from side to side: short, stout, straight light hair against bronze skin, like mine. It would have been comical to see her peeking out from behind him, first on one side and then the other, if not for the fear that vibrated under my flesh, causing my teeth to chatter.
Her deep brown eyes glared at me, unmoving, despite her swaying. They rolled in their sockets, independent from the motion of the rest of her head, disappearing behind one of my father’s elbows and reappearing again next to the other one.
“Why are you up so early?” came my father’s demand. His voice was gruff, punching through the air.
I paused, unsure what to say. My mouth opened, but no words came out. A long moment passed while they watched. I gave up and did the worst thing I could have ever done. I shrugged.
My father’s eyes widened, showing perfect white circles all the way around his irises. He leaned forward, into my face, while my mother let out a choked gasp and wrapped her fingers around one of his biceps, making small impressions in the fabric of his shirt.
“What does that mean?” His scream was furious, high-pitched, and shaky. His fingers twitched, ready to reach for his belt buckle.
I slumped. I was tired, so tired.
“I don’t know.” It was almost a whisper.
“I’m just up. I have school. I’m just trying to go to school.” My voice betrayed my exasperation and took on a bit of a whine.
My mother released her grip and nudged my father hard in the back. He yelled sharply while she stepped away from him to pace back and forth, with loud, lumbering footsteps that shook the floor.
“You think we don’t KNOW you have school? Don’t you be smart with me! I’ll kick your ass!”
With that, his fingers sprang forward, bursting forth toward his belt buckle like blood thirsty dogs let off the leash.
Normally, I would have crumpled, but I was engrossed in my mother’s subtle movements behind him. Her head had lowered, and she looked upward at me past her eyebrows. Her breathing came out in snorts, puffing out her cheeks in flabby waves, like they were bedsheets being shaken out. Her lower jaw had begun to protrude forward, and her bottom teeth were visible, just barely grazing her top lip. There was no trace of the usual sneer on her face, only an animal rage. She stomped her feet and opened and closed her fists between angry huffs.
My father’s voice brought me back.
“DID YOU HEAR ME?!”
He shouted now with his whole chest puffed up, indignant at my lack of a reaction to his rant. I hadn’t noticed the jingling of the buckle as it came undone. The whoosh of the leather strap had sounded as it freed from his belt loops, but I had not heard it as I stood mesmerized by my mother’s impossibly long jaw.
My eyes flew to his face, and I registered a slight panic there. He jolted forward from another hard shove in the back from my mother, urging him on. His mask dropped for an instant before he quickly recovered his anger.
It occurred to me then that they knew today was the day that I would be pushed too far. They had planned on firing me up and stamping me out. This was to be my coming of age.
Internally, I begged myself not to look back at my mother, but the more I strained to keep eye contact with my father, the more my eyes stung and my head filled with metallic static. The static grew into a piercing shriek, sharp tendrils digging into the very threads that held me together. I was forced to look at her again.
Her clothes were pulled tightly over her growing form, her limbs throbbing and expanding with each beat of her heart. Her posture had become hunched over, her back curving as I watched, and soon the bones of her spine became visible from behind her head. Her hair started to spring out of her head, like a wild, shaggy mane. Coarse, straight hair like bristles erupted on her fingers, arms, and cheeks.
Her bottom teeth were now fully covering her top lip, and the two teeth on the sides were getting longer and pointier as she continued to huff and snort and pace. The teeth became dagger-like, ivory white tusks whose girth rivaled that of her thick fingers, which were gradually morphing into hideous claws. The new tusks pointed out at incredible angles away from her jowls, catching the late afternoon light. Two sickly yellow eyes peered out from under a huge fur-covered brow, all the way down a long snout.
Before anyone could say anything, she tipped her head back and let out a thunderous roar. My mother was unrecognizable now, a horrible four-legged beast pacing on its hind legs. Saliva dripped from her muzzle, and her eyes darted in a mad frenzy. Her nostrils flared, trembled with each breath blasting through them.
My father had jumped and turned to look at her when she roared. He didn’t have time to react to her monstrous shape. She reached forward and grabbed him, placing one monstrous claw around his ribs and one around his thigh. He screamed as she effortlessly ripped him apart and threw his mangled halves against a far wall. A thick, wet slap sounded as they hit the wall, and a horrifying sucking sound followed as they slid to the tile floor. All that could be heard in the room now was the heavy snorting of the beast.
She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. Her tusks seemed impossibly large now, too large for her head. From somewhere behind them, her old voice reached me: hollow, distant, like a phone call with bad reception. The words were low, thick, croaking.
“What a useless man. Good for nothing except getting us into trouble. Have to keep him away from everyone, he’s so damn weak.”
The beast’s bottom lip quivered, and I saw the pink tongue undulating inside its mouth. The pointed ears flipped forward to focus on me. She stepped forward.
“And you.”
She made a gurgling sound as saliva flowed out of her mouth, splashing onto the floor. Her haunches flexed, and her hooves clicked, clapped on the tile as she trudged forward. One massive claw encircled my waist and drew me closer to her face. The stench of rotten meat and mildew reached my nostrils. I pulled my face back but couldn’t look away from her tusks. Her yellow eyes squinted at me, and she began to growl.
“You’re not at all what I wanted. You’re his daughter. You’re disgusting. You’re a whore. You’re just a reminder of everything I gave up for that rotting piece of garbage.”
The words choked her, getting caught here and there in her throat.
Her throat. I was now staring down into her black throat as her putrid breath blew over my face, an empty wind from somewhere terribly evil.
The darkness that had been receding as I came to understand my surroundings, the darkness she wanted to hold on to so desperately, was now reaching out to me from inside her mouth. It seduced me, beckoned me. I felt it wrap around my arms and tug me forward. The cold silence promised relief from the sleepless nights and incessant static rattling my bones, and I was so very tired.
The gloom spread over and across me as I slipped down in one piece, past the tusks, my feet hitting them on the way. Gliding over the rough tongue, I felt the hard ridges of her gums on my back. I fell down and down into the black hole, warm and cold all at once.
Before everything disappeared, I saw myself one more time, running down that highway – not a truck or car in sight, no roar of traffic. All was numb and quiet as my feet traced every step I had memorized over the years, at the edge of dreaming and waking. I passed the telephone pole, I passed the ditch with the metal tube spitting water out of it, I passed the speed limit sign, kicking up dust as I ran, a reddish cloud forming around me, the sound of my footsteps thudding, echoing for miles. Around the bend in the road, toward the cookie-cut houses with perfect green lawns, acting as brightly lit stages for kids laughing and playing raucously, front doors softly opening and closing, letting in people walking up from shiny white driveways. I made it out one last time.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
Tusk is a very personal story to me, created from real-life experiences and given a darker twist in the retelling.
