Fury
A
fter the rage gland removal surgery, I rested for a week. Twice a day I changed the bandages around my throat. The stitched-up four-inch incision on the left side of my neck emanated clear liquid.
When I completed the appointed recovery time, I didn’t have a job to go back to. Actually, that’s why I had to get my rage gland removed; it was that, or six months in prison, or a $60,000 fine, and I had Bridey to take care of. At least I had two weeks’ severance pay. Besides handing out resumes, I didn’t know what to do with this time. Without work, I became a different person, or just realized there was more of me to be. For the first time in years, I finished reading a book. Post-surgery, either to fill the time or due to the sudden lack of nightmares, I slept more. In my dreams it was spring all the time; Bridey and I rolled around joyfully in dewy grass.
Actually, that’s why I had to get my rage gland removed; it was that, or six months in prison, or a $60,000 fine,
At the time, I’d had Bridey for only just months. Bridey: sort of a baby minotaur, a lamblike creature, the body of a human infant except for her cloven hooves, a big-eyed bovid head. This local puppy mill burned down, and welfare officers rescued all sorts of strange creatures from the wreck, dressed only in collars with name tags. Among the creatures: six-legged fawns; bunnies with the faces of human babies, as if peeking out from Easter costumes; reptilian puppies that spoke like children; and Bridey.
I used to protest the mill, standing in the rain with a drooping cardboard sign among half a dozen strangers. Us protesters arrived to take in creatures when we heard what had happened. When the welfare officer handed Bridey over to me and had me sign her adoption papers, the world felt suddenly so dangerous, Bridey safe only in the new bassinet of my arms.
Bridey is covered entirely in short white and brown fur. She has opposable fingers not as dexterous as a person’s, a little muzzle, overlarge eyes, floppy dog ears, a short lamby tail. She couldn’t talk yet; I didn’t know if she ever would. Even without my rage gland, I would kill for her, die for her. It would be a simple choice of motion more than thought, like buttering toast. When I got Bridey, I cut off her collar but kept the name because I could not think of a better one. I fed her first, ate whatever she didn’t finish. We lived in this single-room apartment of bare, dark grey cement, the toilet and sink and claw-footed bathtub separated from the rest of the room by only a plastic curtain. The windows rattled when trains passed. I hung clothes to dry on my punching bag.
A week after the surgery, Niko from the apartment next door came by to tell me he was being evicted, so he could no longer babysit Bridey while I looked for jobs. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I leaned on the door with Bridey on one hip, her muzzle like a sprig of pussy willow against my arm. “What reason did they give?” I asked.
“Leaky pipes. Renoviction. Which is bullshit, since I’ve been trying to get them to fix those pipes for years.” He was sturdily handsome yet, soft-voiced and laced all over with vitiligo as he was, he always seemed delicate, more so since he’d sustained multiple chemical burns at his old factory job. The scars mapped him all over in brilliant green. “It’s gotta be the creams, really.”
Since his accident at the factory, Niko had made a living selling creams that smelled of mint and pine and, when rubbed on the skin, could make one experience various symptoms of love. Which symptoms depended on the cream. Before I got Bridey, I’d spend Friday evenings, sometimes Thursdays and weekends too, lying on my bed with the cream over my chest, writhing from all the false love. Not a bad substitute for kissing Niko, which I never tried. But I thought kissing him would be a type of writhing, as if we were two deep-sea anglers all tangled in each other’s light. I didn’t use the creams anymore. I didn’t even smoke cigarettes.
But I thought kissing him would be a type of writhing, as if we were two deep-sea anglers all tangled in each other’s light.
“I’ll miss you,” I said, which felt like getting naked in front of him. I adjusted Bridey to the other hip, and she batted at a strand of my hair.
Niko cupped my chin easily in one hand and kissed me on the tip of the nose. “Me, too.”
Instead of commiseration, we put Bridey to sleep on his couch, and then Niko and I went to bed together. He had a bedroom with a door. In place of anger, I needed a new vigorousness. Head between my thighs, Niko ribboned me with bright explosions. Three, then a fourth, later, inside me, kissing my temples—worship.
After he moved, he would be too shy to call. Before, I would have called him to tell him off for this. You have to keep in touch. I don’t care if you’re nervous. And maybe we’d make a family, the three of us. The new version of me let the phone go unrung.
When, at the factory, my coworker Elaine’s hand tore off between gears, I worked through lunch to pull her flesh and bone fragments out with a pair of tongs—rusted, as if they’d been used for this before. Just as I stepped back from the machine, my supervisor, Amis, switched it on again. The gears slammed to life just a whisper away from my rubber-gloved hands, and I whirled and punched him in the nose. Blood on my blue gloves, blood on the warehouse floor, blood in the bucket where we’d stashed Elaine’s bits.
The police report said that his nose bone missed his brain by millimetres. But he lived, my pro-bono argued. My client did not kill him, nor did she intend to.
But he almost didn’t, the company lawyer said. And for what? The defendant would not have been harmed. It was very clearly a prank.
Almost means nothing. Almost is an imaginary world, my pro-bono pointed out. My client worked unpaid overtime, through lunch and dinner, four days out of five. My client was terrified and reacted on instinct.
Instinct is for animals, said the company lawyer.
Even the best dogs get angry, said my pro-bono.
Yes. Then put down for that anger.
Before the surgery. Before the surgery, I was just a girl. After hours, I dismantled mousetraps by hand. Washed the mice free from the glue. Released them. Reprimands at work. Docked pay. Bridey unable to sleep from the hunger. Bridey threw what meals I did give her, and I’d scream at the smeared walls, and she’d wail.
The morning the seamstress’ girls turned up mangled by the river, I wrapped my hands in boxing wraps so tight they bruised, walked an hour to the bar where the seamstress’ ex drank. Did what he used to do to the seamstress ‘til one of his retinas detached. The bar girls talked the cops down to a night at the drunk tank, though I was sober. Didn’t get my one call. Did ask for it. Got home to Bridey having cried so much she threw up on herself. Got home and hugged her so hard that she crawled free, her calf face and infant arms slick with bile.
The police never found whoever committed the mangling.
I got a job speaking soothingly into the phone to customers. In raised and breaking voices, the customers said things like, “I know it’s not your fault, you just work there, but do you really think that’s reasonable?” and, “How can you hide something that serious ten pages into fine print! Does anyone read that? No, I’m asking. Has anyone ever told you they’ve read it?”
My role was to explain that they had no case, regardless of whether they did.
Only two other women worked at the company. They were both tall and slender with ash blonde hair, smooth foreheads, and blue eyes. They wore different outfits every day. I alternated the same two pinstripe vests and the same two pencil skirts. I washed all my clothes by hand in the sink and hanged them to dry out the window, which meant they smelled of damp or of smokestack. I had a mantis face overwhelmed by black curls. I’d long ago sold my straightener—a tool of supremacy—but this job made me wish I hadn’t. When I went to work, the seamstress let Bridey stay with her—“just like my daughters back then.” By the end of the day, all three of us—me, the seamstress, Bridey—looked haggard. I’d make stew or dumplings, and we’d eat on my rusty fire escape.
I washed all my clothes by hand in the sink and hanged them to dry out the window, which meant they smelled of damp or of smokestack.
At lunch, I ate with the other two women at my company, though we had nothing in common. One of them had family money, but everywhere else she’d worked had more than three floors and windows that opened too far, and she couldn’t be trusted. The other had to let the CFO touch her chest in the bathroom. She said it that way: “had to.”
I began to experience a new emotion: a sort of acute fragility, as if being repeatedly broken open, relief and pain and vulnerability at once.
As more and more of us had our rage glands removed, there were fewer and fewer riots. I still went to protests because of that guilty feeling I got: that every bad thing happened because I had failed to prevent it. Even roof leaks and other people’s divorces felt like my fault.
I met the Grogans, Delaney and Rhett, at an animal testing protest. Rhett held an umbrella over Delaney’s head, and she leaned into him. Around them, rain turned to vapor as it hit the hot pavement. Delaney had massive, pink-lined eyes and tiny features, like an old-timey doll or an albino mouse. Rhett was a large man with dark facial hair that almost hid how pretty he was. Their jackets and umbrella were both branded with the logo of a competing pharmaceutical brand, which, off the top of my head, I did not think animal tested. Delaney handed out beignets from a bag. On a foldout table next to them, steam rose from boxes of hot coffee.
I accepted one of the paper-wrapped beignets and went to get a cup of coffee, and Delaney stopped me, introduced herself. We don’t introduce ourselves at protests—safety, privacy—so I knew she did not belong.
“Hi,” I said, pulling my kerchief down enough to take a bite of the beignet.
Rhett introduced himself too. “It’s you. I recognize you,” he said.
I pressed a paper lid onto my coffee, shoved the beignet in my pocket, and glanced around for the best direction to run. I shouldn’t have let him see my whole face.
“Not like that,” he said. “You’re the one who took Bridey in.”
“We’re just glad she’s okay,” said Delaney.
When the puppy mill closed, a few of the protesters got interviewed in the paper. I didn’t want to talk, but I had been in the background in the photo, holding Bridey. Since it was our only picture together, I had cut out the group picture—the protesters and our new charges—and pinned it to my bedframe. “Her name wasn’t in the article,” I said.
Delaney said: “We’re the ones who named her.”
“But those breeding policies they were using—we didn’t know about those, of course; so cruel—voided everything. All the adoptions, even the ones in process.
“I really wanted a baby,” said Delaney. “I didn’t even care about how she looked. I mean, it’s sweet, how she looks. But I didn’t care.”
“That’s why we recognized you,” said Rhett. “I’m sorry to scare you.”
I stood near them for the rest of the protest, either to keep an eye on them or to see what Bridey’s life would have been like with them or to finally eat my fill. When the rain rose to a downpour through which we could barely hear each other, we all started to pack up. Coffee ran in rivers over the plastic table. Delaney invited us—me and Bridey—over for tea the following week. Full for the first time in months, I said yes.
For tea with the Grogans, I wore my work clothes, and I dressed Bridey in her best hand-me-down gingham dress. We had to take three busses to get to Delaney and Rhett’s place, and two hours in, I wasn’t sure the trip was worth it. Bridey sat on my lap with her hooves in crocheted booties the seamstress had made for her, her hands in crocheted gloves to match.
When I saw the Grogans’ place—a white stone building, gated and set back from the road by a tangle of zoological topiaries—I thought of how much could happen here. Maybe they would ask me to fill in for their gardener or recommend me to their friends for odd jobs. Walking across the lawn, I cuddled Bridey closer, feeling somehow colder here than in the city.
We gathered in the Grogans’ second dining room. “Better light,” said Delaney. Inside, the house was all pastels and framed posters, yellow light and clean surfaces.
“Is that why you have two?” I said—in true curiosity, but they both laughed.
“She’s precious,” said Delaney, reaching into my arms and adjusting Bridey’s bonnet to show more of her face, revealing the broken-heart-shaped splotch on her muzzle. Bridey murmured, turned toward me, gripped at my vest, and I had to adjust my clothes so that a nipple didn’t show.
“Thank you for having me,” I said.
“Anything for a friend of Bridey’s,” said Rhett, with a wink directed more at her than at me. He tweaked Bridey’s felty little ear, and I instinctively rubbed it once he’d pulled his hand away, as if to cleanse her.
A girl who looked around fourteen emerged from the kitchen, placed a bowl of clotted cream and a tower of scones on the table, brushed her apron nervously, and disappeared again. I had hoped for meat, fresh fruit, roasted vegetables, gravy—things Bridey and I didn’t get much. I subsisted mostly on coffee and her leftovers. Before Bridey, I would take crabapples from neighborhood trees, steal bread from the market, shoplift tinned beans, but now I did not want to risk this.
I sat with Bridey on my knee; she was still too young to sit on her own. The Grogans arranged on either side of me, so we were all on one side of the table. They seemed unable to look away from Bridey, even as Delaney spooned jam over my plate of cream and scones. Back when I still went to bars, couples would sometimes sit with me like this, but usually at least one of them would put a hand on my thigh. Suddenly, my clothes felt too tight. I cupped the top of Bridey’s head. “It’ll take us a few hours to get home, so we can’t stay late.”
Back when I still went to bars, couples would sometimes sit with me like this, but usually at least one of them would put a hand on my thigh.
“I’ll drive you,” said Rhett.
“Oh, thank you, no. I’ll need the time on the bus to…. Bridey likes the bus,” I said. She didn’t, but I didn’t want Rhett knowing where I lived.
“It wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Thank you. No.”
“Really.”
I fed Bridey a spoonful of cream and jam and shook my head.
Rhett leaned closer. His cologne smelled exactly how I expected cologne to smell. “We did want to ask about something.”
“She’s just sat down!” said Delaney. She refilled my tea and said, “Could I feed her?” I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to say no, so I handed Bridey over, and Delaney kissed both of her cheeks. Bridey squirmed.
Rhett said, “We thought we could put her through university. Get you a car, maybe, if it would help take her places. Private school, or at least violin lessons.”
I smiled automatically. “You’d want to?”
“Aren’t you a sweet girl,” said Delaney under her breath, and for a second I thought she was talking to me.
“Well, we’d want to see her,” said Rhett. “Evenings or weekends. Something like that.” He reached across me —arm brushing my collarbone with a familial level of comfort—and chucked Bridey under the chin. She blinked rapidly.
I chewed slowly. Did zoo animals feel this way—declawed, sluggish, unhungry, their wings or night vision or hunting instincts as obsolete as wisdom teeth? Delaney and Rhett they must have gotten their lawyers involved when I got Bridey instead. They had lawyer money. This attempt had to be a last resort after all legal routes failed. And they’d chosen her name. Not a common one—and that word, “bride,” right at the start.
In Delaney’s arms, Bridey cried her kitteny cry. I stood up so fast that I nearly knocked dishes off the table.
“We have to go,” I said. Delaney tugged back as I reached for Bridey. She stood up too, Bridey’s chubby stomach puckering around her grip. Bridey’s cry heightened into a wail. Rhett reached as if to pull me into my chair. I clawed Bridey out of Delaney’s arms and braced her to my chest.
“What is it?” said Delaney.
“She’s tired,” I said. “Too much sugar.” I felt hollowed out. Holding Bridey away from them, I grabbed two scones with my other hand, spilling crumbs from between my fingers. I walked with nightmarish slowness to the door.
Delaney ran after me. “Don’t you have a jacket or anything?”
Rhett followed, saying, “I apologize if the mention of money was an insult. I don’t mean to offend you. We just need her in our lives.”
The door wouldn’t open. I fumbled my scones onto the floor.
Delaney had to undo the latch for me. “It’s stiff,” she said. “Let’s do an earlier tea next time, so you don’t have to go so soon. We can pick you up. You live by the old firehall, don’t you?”
I did. I hadn’t said so.
It took me the bus ride home and the rest of the evening to calm down from dinner with the Grogans. The morning after, smoking a cigarette on the fire escape while Bridey slept inside, I saw a van parked across the street. This was usual, except I had noticed the same van the past several days. I got up and leaned over the railing to see if I could make out a logo, but it was unmarked, no one inside. I lit a second cigarette off the first. Around me on the fire escape grew the plants I’d tended for years, cacti, mint, and tomatoes, as if to prove that some sunlight existed here.
That summer, four-eyed otters were crawling from the river and dying in the streets. The smog made us hallucinatory, dizzy, exhausted. Everything gave me déjà vu: hunger, power outages, gropings on the subway. In early July, the seamstress said Bridey was giving her flashbacks, so I had to start working from home to stay with her. All day, the phone rang, and the ringing made Bridey tantrum. Righteously angry customers yelled at me, and I read platitudes from a laminated sheet. There was always something left to do; even the easy tasks felt difficult.
After work, I carried Bridey on my back and walked the muggy streets aimlessly. Rain, lengthening shadows. I didn’t know if I had given up graffiti due to risk of arrest or because I didn’t have anything to say anymore. If I found abandoned wooden flats or plywood, I would bring it home and spray paint it with angular yellow shapes. I went to bed early, Bridey on my chest for comfort, and slept as late as I could. In my nightmares, I hadn’t been there to take Bridey from the mill, and she’d gone elsewhere—sometimes to the Grogans and sometimes to a faceless stranger.
Occasionally, I’d see a figure entering and exiting the van, and this became the stranger in my dreams. I cycled through increasingly implausible possibilities of who it could be—Delaney or Rhett Grogan; Niko; the seamstress; the feds. A new neighbor wouldn’t need a black van with tinted windows and park in the same public spot every day without ever getting a ticket. Whenever I got home, I’d watch the van, watch Bridey, watch the van, watch Bridey. Bridey alone was not a faceless stranger.
I got home one night in August to find, simple as a water bill, impersonal as plague, the paper pinned to my door: court summons. RE: custody. RE: Bridey.
Understand that I could afford maybe a sixteenth the price of a lawyer. Understand that I’d used my yearly allotment of free legal help at the pro-bono service, used even the under-the-table hours they’d managed to slip me. Understand that I tried to think of other options the entire walk to that sterile butcher shop backroom, especially as I handed Bridey to the surgeon’s assistant, not knowing if I would wake up again. I thought I’d be able to walk home, but I had to spend part of the tightly-clutched envelope of cash to get us a cab. My body hurt like fishhooks everywhere, not just where my kidney used to be.
Of course, the Grogans did not have a case. I didn’t even have to set foot in a court room. The lawyer said it was a common tactic—assuming I would have to self-represent, thus lose. Thus lose my Bridey, my baby.
I can’t talk about bureaucracy without talking about innards. How I returned to the butcher shop to sell a piece of liver—that is, Bridey’s meager college fund. Otherwise, so selfish – to do all this to keep her, then not be able to provide. This time, I asked the butcher to set aside any leftover bits: blood and organ parts and strips of fat, from my own surgery or another’s or from butchering animals – all of it.
Hours later, evening, I arrived on the sidewalk outside the Grogans’ house with a kerchief drawn across my face, Bridey sleeping fitfully in a papoose on my back. All the Grogans’ lights were on, but no cars in the drive. Just a waste of light. In my hand, a greasy garbage bag of entrails, some of them my own. So: hurled the bag as hard as I could at the door. Explosion of viscera. Scream from inside—the maid? The cook? And I limped for the last bus home as fast as I could with my surgeoned parts all jagged inside me, Bridey thumping against my spine, hiccupping in surprise.
Before summer’s end, we got lucky, though a bitter kind of luck, nothing bootstrap about it. A class-action lawsuit—one of many I’d been part of—finally went through at a chemical plant I’d worked at in my early teens. In the two decades since I’d worked there, almost everyone from the class action had died, so the other clerk and I, with our unafflicted bones, along with the families of the workers, collected the cheques. The photos in the news, even in black and white, were grisly: skulls with the eye sockets melted huge, ribcages peeled back.
With the money, I got a tiny cottage on what was otherwise farmland: our own square kilometre of clearing surrounded by fir and oaks. We had a little pond with a bridge over it, where Bridey, as she got older, would sit and paint with watercolours I could now afford to buy for her. The grass and cobbles around the house were dappled with shadow and sunlight, so our little home seemed almost underwater. I got on a debt payment schedule. The school bus passed close enough that Bridey could walk to it. The farm employed me, and Bridey too once she was old enough for a job; we fed the sheep and goats, guided them from pasture to pasture. We got wool for cheap. I learned to knit, sold whatever sweaters we didn’t keep.
The grass and cobbles around the house were dappled with shadow and sunlight, so our little home seemed almost underwater.
I still thought about protests, but the bus to the city took hours, and the smell of smog made me sick now. Maybe it always had. Sometimes, brushing the sheepdogs or dusting sugar over a peach cobbler, I would sob dizzily for no reason I could discern.
Bridey grew up quiet, independent, rambunctious, running through the fields with a picnic blanket as a cape, reading in the crook of a tree, napping with the lambs. The only friend she seemed to need was Anjelica, a girl with a delicate, sophisticated temperament who lived on the next farm over. Anjelica, unlike many babies born now, was unmutated in almost every way, besides the huge navy birthmarks blooming like tears beneath both eyes.
When Bridey turned sixteen, the girls had a two-person party in the yard. The only gift Bridey asked for was a parasol, which I got her, and the two of them lay under it by the brook stitching the finishing beads onto the matching cardigans they’d spent months knitting. When I brought out their lunch—brown bread and goat cheese and strawberries, and a little scotch for a treat—I saw the fresh bandage on the left side of Anjelica’s neck.
“What happened there?” I said, gesturing at my own neck, and put the lunch tray down between the girls.
“Gland surgery,” Bridey explained for her, without looking up from her knitting.
My limbs went cold. “Oh?”
“Rage gland, like you,” said Bridey.
Anjelica’s white lace sunhat flopped over her face as she nodded.
“Who did it?” I said.
“Surgeon,” said Bridey.
“But why’d you have to?”
Anjelica tapped at her throat like a singer on vocal rest, but cleared her throat and said softly, “I didn’t want to be angry anymore. It’s just exhausting.”
A lot of people, Bridey explained neutrally, were opting for this now. Celebrities. Activists.
I put the lunch tray down between them so carefully the dishes seemed glued on. My hands shook. “You don’t think you need your rage gland?” I sounded like I had a cold.
“I mean, you know, the function’s outdated; I’m more peaceful without it. It’s like the tailbone,” Anjelica said. “It’s like the appendix. Bridey was thinking about it too. Weren’t you, Bride?”
Bridey did a shrug-nod-shake motion, avoiding eye contact. “Just thinking.”
I didn’t feel anything, then.
Like a tailbone.
Like an appendix.
