Three Stories on Monsters, on Grieving in the Gulf South by Adam Gnuse

Clark Creek

You try to keep your kids safe. You try to keep them from the things that scared you most as a child, even if those things were only imaginary. I don’t remember who gave me the book as a girl, but I would have never let my own kids read it, even though it had been written for children. It was one of those books that catalogues all the different monsters you’ll encounter when your parents are away. Made-up things, fictions—but ones that, for whatever reason, a child’s mind could obsess over. The monster that frightened me most was in the middle of the book. The Banshee.

The illustration was of an old woman with gray skin and brown rags. She was drawn hunched over, and a shawl covered all her face except the jaw, which was grotesquely unhinged and hanging down to her breasts. She was perched atop roots of a tree, as if waiting for something.

But the book said she was known most by her sound, by her scream. She was to come to you, and when she screamed—the next day you would die.

It didn’t say whether she came to foretell your death, or cause it. For a long time as a girl, I thought about her, that thing. I worried I would look out the windows of my parents’ house to the creek and see her out there, her rags a dark blot upon the afternoon, resting on a cypress knee, looking up at me.

It’s strange how these memories could return so abruptly, years later, miles away from that house by the creek where I could hardly sleep once I had read that book. When I finally heard that scream, the one the book described, I was an adult. It was the night before my Lizzie took her life, and when I heard that scream it was as though I was back, a little girl at my parents’ house, again. Too afraid to go to my window to look, too afraid to even move in my bed, to breathe too deeply.

My husband snored beside me, but I heard it, and continued to hear it: that wail, like a baby’s cry from the lungs of a grown woman, sounding thin through the window pane but so close. It was in our front yard.

Eventually it stopped, but I lay awake until morning.

I’ve often wondered how I did nothing. What mother thinks only of herself in a moment like that? What kind of mother forgets her two children in their bedrooms down the hall?

I wonder sometimes if I was punished for it. That my daughter had been punished because of me, instead of me. Because how do we know these things are not connected? Those fears at night, ones we disregard the moment the morning light cuts through the window blinds—how do we know they’re not somehow real?

We had known for some time that Lizzie was at risk. We had asked if she was thinking of hurting herself, if she had a plan. Made sure she was never home alone. We listened. She did therapy, and we talked to her friends. We took her seriously.

We found her half-submerged in the bathtub. I often think that if she could have made it a little longer, grown to be a little older, she would have realized that teenage years are things you leave behind. Now, each year is a milestone she’ll never meet. She’ll never graduate school, or one day have her own children. Her brother will grow into an old man and never again have his sister.

Each night is different now, though I still listen for the sound of that woman like a far-off siren. I am still scared, but I am something else, too.

I wait until I hear it, sad and ceaseless, wailing in our front yard, far from the streetlights of the road, with a canopy of trees that blots out the moonlight and stars. I wait to hear it, because I know when I do, I will stand up from my bed and leave my husband asleep. I will pass my son’s bedroom and what used to be my daughter’s, and I will go alone downstairs. For a short while I will listen through the front door to the sound of it, of her. And as small as I’ll feel, and as big as the dark is out there, I will turn the deadbolt and throw open the door.

In that moment, I’ll turn all the love I hold within me into fury. My bare feet pressing against the grass, and my arms reaching to what I can’t see. I will follow the sound of that scream. And when I find it, I will make it stop.

Tickfaw Animal Park

Our zoo, near the Tickfaw swamps outside Baton Rouge, seemed half-drowned with its mud trails and weather-bent branches, with humidity dense enough to make every breath feel labored. Between rains, guests would pull back the hoods of their ponchos and wave down through the metal bars at the black bear as it lumbered to a sunny patch of straw, in hopes of drying its fur before the next, inevitable Gulf shower. My parents used to take me there as a kid.

Years later, as an employee, I still recognized many of the workers—the same ticket-sellers in the leaky welcome booth, and that same old ice cream vendor who labored her cart through the zoo in knee-highs. Each of them had since gone gray as the morning fog. If anyone ever asked them, they’d say the zoo had become their second home. They’d swear they no longer even smelled it, that thick musk and moldering earth that permeated the place, as if they’d grown as accustomed to it as the animals themselves.

My first week in animal control, I learned the threat each species posed if they were to escape. They were ranked on a chart in our back office according to their danger. Venomous snakes—the cottonmouths, rattlers—were stacked below the large predators like the black bear or the mountain lion, whose entry carried an addendum on how its mind had cracked (pacing, insomnia, it had mauled a mate), as the big cats often do in small enclosures. At the top of the list were the chimps, who were smart, human-like. There were notes referencing news stories of what they’d done with their teeth and nails to handlers that had tried to treat them as pets, scolding and spanking them like children.

Escaped chimpanzees would be a crisis, it was said, but I couldn’t see any of that happening from her, from Angie. Not considering how she would be when I’d find her in the mornings—still curled from sleep, on top of the concession stand outside her cage, smacking her lips and blinking down at me.

I first found her not long after I got the job, during one of those times I drove in so early it was still nearly night. I couldn’t sleep, so I walked the exhibits, pacing the length of the place, listening to the garbled calls the birds made in their cages. I can’t forget how strange those walks would be, with the dark obscuring the chain links of the animals’ pens, with how the live oak branches seemed like massive, reaching hands. I’d hear the sound of the mountain lion’s paws tramping the mud, its breath like something from a childhood nightmare. Sometimes I’d catch the glint of an animal’s eyes in the dark, and I’d realize it had been watching me.  

I found Angie up there dozing with her arms across her chest, lying on her side towards the pink light of the sun rising up over the canopy. From the look of her, I figured she gotten out of her pen so she could catch a spot of light to warm herself, or a breeze to dry the night’s dew from her shoulders. I knew the protocol if they found out she had escaped: how they’d renovate the whole enclosure, reshape it, drape netting across the canopy. They’d keep her down in one of those damp, basement holding cages until they were done.

So, I chatted at her for a bit. I talked, with her just an arm’s reach away on the awning, saying nothing in particular, until finally she rubbed her face with an open palm and hopped back along the long, overhead branches to her home. I didn’t see the need to tell anyone else.

But then I’d find her out there again, on other walks, always early in the morning, perched on that same awning, until the thing became a kind of ritual of ours. Each night, I’d go to bed early enough so I could wake up in time before the handlers came in, so I could wake Angie up outside her cage. I’d even do it on my off-days, because there was no knowing which nights she would choose to escape. But I never minded any of it.

I remember thinking, during that time, how proud I would have been as a child, standing on the exhibit railings, to know that I’d grow up to care for an ape like Angie. My job in animal control kept us in an office. We waited with our charts, with command poles, with our rifles, waiting for something to go wrong. An escape. A child falling into an exhibit. And for teeth to tear down upon the softness of a neck and face. It was nice to have something more.

All it took was one time waking up late, staring at the digits of my bedroom clock in disbelief. I raced along I-55, passing as much of the traffic along the shoulder as I could, because I knew, somehow, that even though Angie didn’t go out every morning, she had that day. Because it had rained the night before. Because lately she had been coming out more. Because she liked meeting me out there, and I had never let her know that it wasn’t okay.

The zoo’s front gates were still closed. Inside, I found them circled around the concessions booth, around her, with their tranquillizer guns and their long, noosed command poles—one handler holding his rifle, trained up at her. Angie looked down from her perch, dazed from sleep, as if she hadn’t yet realized these men weren’t part of a dream.

It wasn’t her fault. I don’t know why I got so mad at her. She didn’t know what it meant if someone else were to find her—what would happen if she wasn’t careful. I wasn’t thinking when I snatched a command pole from one of the handlers and looped its noose around Angie’s neck.

I tightened it too much around her throat, but I tugged on Angie anyway. I forced her from the awning, making her hoot out in pain each time I yanked. I didn’t think—forcing her to descend with one arm on the drainpipe, one hand pawing at the cord around her neck. Before they took the pole from me—wresting it away, loosening it so as to give her air—she looked up at me.

Even as she was—panting and so small, balled up before me on the concrete—I don’t think I’d ever been so frightened by her.

By seeing her there, so close.

Because I think, in the end, those differences aren’t so big between us—people and animals. When we communicate from the eyes, it looks the same.

Port Sulphur

As boys, my brother and I would pull on our waders and set out into the swamp during the long hours after we had finished our homework. We squelched through the mud, laughing at the way our teachers mispronounced words, saying moun-taints and evac-u-nation. The dark, musky water at our waists, and the cottonmouths curled between the cypress knees, their faces furious and their fat bodies unmoving as if petrified—it was all almost enough to entertain us, like it did our Daddy and his Papa before him. We snapped the sharp palmetto leaves at their stems and tossed them into the stand-still bayou, like how we imagined Yankee students might skip rocks on the lakes by their brick-and-ivy prep schools. Eventually, our leaves would fade from sight, though we couldn’t tell if it was the current that had taken them from us, or the darkness swelling beneath the branches of the cypress trees.

On our way back home, feeling our way through the trees, hearing that dense chorus of bullfrogs in the dark, we would see them—the Will o’ the Wisps. I hear at universities they reconcile those pale, floating lights as phosphorus oxidizing from the dead life of the swamp. If that’s all, then it’s a bulb of glowing gas that can follow alongside a person, looking like hope, keeping pace. Always ten or twenty yards away, always out of reach. There’s a long history of people who have followed their glow, thinking it the porch light of a home on the edge of the city, or the lamp of a neighbor who will lead them out, only to find themselves lost and drifting out where the water is deepest.

Once, as we passed a Wisp, like a pale flower’s bloom, flickering at us behind a growth of cattails, my brother turned to me and asked whether someday I’d pick up and leave. Go north, somewhere far from moss-bent trees and the humidity, where there wouldn’t be the smell of wet decay that clung each day to our clothes and skin. I didn’t know what to say to him, though I know he wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t feel that same pull. Maybe I was tempted, but we both knew there never was any leaving. There’s no following lights.

Since that day, we’ve grown old and bald, curled like snakes. The underwater mud sucks hard under our heavy boots. And now, even as we’ve seen the hurricanes grow stronger, watched them topple the cypresses, leaving them broken, floating husks; even after the Gulf rose up, relentless over the seasons like an unebbing tide, paving smooth our swamp and bayou, our old walking trails and our school, the house our father built— we’re still here.

Those strange lights we knew, that drifted around us, have all since dissipated. At night our hands reach for landmarks that no longer exist, and I can’t even find the place we buried our mother. Though the waves make our lips salty, and the black water laps upon the stilts of our homes, we’re here. We’re here where the darkness swells until we can’t see the horizon.

Adam Gnuse is a New Orleans native, currently attaining an MFA in fiction at UNC Wilmington. His fiction has appeared in Bodega, Guernica, New South, The Wisconsin Review, and other magazines. More of his writing can be found at adamgnuse.com.