January 2014 Short Story of the Month

ETTA AND THE MONSTER

The road to Machias got longer every year. And in truth, Etta Clarendon wanted to go there a little less each year. There was a period, of course, of nostalgia but that had more or less passed. Everything had its cycles, even old age. Now it was gone. Nearly all of it. The memories were fading, and that was scary, but the place was fading and that was scarier. People were never going to know the place like she knew it. A place so small, yet could somehow convince you that it was the entire world. In her youth, she believed that. Very often since, she wished that she had been right. Machias was the center of Down East Maine; not geographically, of course, but in its heart. Once upon a time, it had been exactly what you thought of when you thought of Maine. Every season had its color: yellow, green, orange and pure, pristine white. The buildings and the land seemed almost natural extensions of each other and everyone, absolutely everyone treated you like family. That was the Machias of her youth. That was what Etta clung to and how she chose to remember it.
Now… well, she couldn’t quite say. When she talked about “now” she was really talking about the last time she had been, and that had been fifteen years back, at least. Felt shorter, sometimes, and sometimes it felt a whole lot longer. But she had seen enough. It was a different place now, she knew that much for certain. Like all of Maine, it had been built up. Every small town had its MacDonald’s now. Some had one on every street corner. And even pure, perfect Machias had never been immune. The center of Down East Maine had tried to go bigger, and now it looked like it had made an attempt to turn itself into Bangor, but had gotten tired and given up halfway through. She did not want to remember it that way. Painful memories would do her no good, not now, when memories were what she had.
Of course, she had the boys, three sons and all of them wonderful and all of them had made her proud. But Etta knew well that children made you a different person. Your life in one sense began with them, and it got so easy to forget what had come before. That time before adulthood, slipping away piece by piece, little by little. She didn’t want to forget, and she didn’t know why, and that scared her. She also knew full well that she would forget, whether she wanted to or not, and that scared her too.
Here, sitting at the window in her room at Seabrook Retirement Community (they always found new things to call them, she had noticed. Retirement community. Assisted Living. Never “Old Folks Home” because that just didn’t look as pleasant on the sign) she tried to piece together a memory. A memory from the time before, before the boys; the husband and the wonderful sons. It seemed important. She didn’t know why. She also knew that she did not need to know why. She only needed to remember.
There had been an old bridge, and she had been very young, and while Etta could not be entirely sure of this next part, she thought there had been a monster. Adulthood taught you that there were no monsters, of course, but living a full life made you think twice about the truth in that. Monsters didn’t seem so imaginary anymore. Maybe she was senile, maybe she was finally drifting away, but she was trying so hard to remember that for all she knew half her own life—or what she could remember of it—was imagined. It was all fairy tale to her.
This story came in fragments. The little girl. Maybe there were other children there. The old bridge. And the monster. That was all she had. It was like finding a single page ripped out of a novel. However exciting or terrifying this fragment may be, there was a much larger story she would never recover. This was all she had to work with, so she tried her best to dust it off.
Etta didn’t know why she had been out there on her own at such a young age, or what her parents were doing that was so much more important than keeping an eye on their child. Hell, she couldn’t even remember what they looked like. But they always called her by her first name, Henrietta. Whether she was good or bad, it didn’t matter. She had always been Henrietta to them, and never to herself. Etta thought maybe she had wandered off for some reason. Probably not a fight. She never remembered herself to fight with her parents much, at least not—she hoped—at that age. But kids tended to wander, no matter well-disciplined, you couldn’t take a child’s nature away from them.
The monster, whatever it had been, could very well have led her astray. Monsters had been known to do that, after all. She remembered her father reading her Little Red Riding Hood before bedtime, but she did not remember him doing it, or even much of the story at all. Like so many things, it was remembered as something someone had told her secondhand. But still, for whatever reason, she clung to it.
When Peter, her oldest, was sick she had read it to him. That was something that Etta proudly remembered very well. The monster, the Big Bad Wolf or whatever he had been, he had led her away from home that day. He had led her away with a smile and a flash of his eyes. Thinking about it now, she got two images, and they did not exactly fit together. One was an image of bright, shining blue eyes. The most beautiful she had ever seen. The other, gnashing carnivorous teeth, like the teeth of a cougar. Or a wolf. Maybe she was misremembering, or taking bits from all over her childhood and piecing them together into one, but Etta didn’t want to think about that. If she thought about that too hard now, she knew she would trip over her own head and lose the whole thing. No questions. Just the story. Remember the damn story, she thought. Read that page, even if it’s the only one you have.
The monster had led her down to the stream and the stream was beautiful. It seemed almost as if everything she could think of from her adolescent development had happened at that stream—of course, for the life of her, she couldn’t ring up its name. It was where she had met the best friends she would ever have in her whole life. It was where she had her first kiss. Where Marty had proposed, and she had said yes, because people didn’t think about it the way they do now. There had been blissfully few variables to consider. Etta married at sixteen. The regrets did not come until decades later, and even then they had been fleeting.
Somehow it seemed that the monster knew all these things about the stream when it had taken her down there, even though most of them had not yet happened. The monster didn’t care. The monster caught her then and told her things she didn’t want to hear. Its eyes were enticing, even attractive (God yes weren’t they just) but its mouth was cruel. It told her all the things her parents skirted around. All of those special, adult secrets, ones Etta had always wanted to discover on her own, in private, as if she could simply sneak them out from behind the cookie jar.
The monster told her all of these things, all at once. It told her that not even her parents knew what they were doing all the time. It told her that they had been young once and, yes, had even been children. The monster told her that it was possible they did not even plan for a marriage or even a child but she would never really know the answer to that. It told her that Santa Claus was not real, and that the church group at Machias Church of Christ hid those eggs every Easter. It told her that babies were made not by short-order storks, but by SEX. Etta was much too young then to even know the meaning of the word, but the word itself was enough, it terrified her the moment she heard it and she wished she could take it back. The monster told her so many things, but most of all it told her that she was going to die someday.
Suddenly, Etta understood the moment. She understood it perfectly. This moment, whatever had come before or after it, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. This was the moment. Standing there as an innocent little girl by the stream, this was the moment she first learned that she was one day going to die. She knew death, of course, she understood that, but what it meant had never quite sunk in. This was the moment that it hit her, and it hit her like a speeding truck. Once there, on the other side of understanding, there was no turning back. And she had spent a lot of time wishing that there was. Not as an adolescent. As a teenager you forget all the things that you learn as a child, as an adult, you’re too busy to think about them. Only now did she have time to deal with all of these thoughts she had spent a lifetime pushing away.
There had been no smiling monster, no Big Bad Wolf that day. There had only been little Etta and the Ugly Truth. In the eighty years since that day by the stream, Truth had only gotten uglier. A little bit more each year. But somehow she didn’t mind. It was possible that even that one moment was completely fabricated, and it was just as likely that something terrible might have happened to her by the stream that day to lead her to that realization. The day was simply a page torn out of a book. The book was gone and she would never get it back and that was truth. Pure and simple truth. Somehow it looked a little less ugly from here, but her eyes were going too. Whatever was there was gone now and Etta did not mourn it. She had taken away from it a couple of things that had led her to understanding, and that was more than enough. These days, Etta didn’t ask for much. People spent their whole lives asking for things they could never have back, and to her, now, in her room she barely left because the pain was too great, all of that just seemed small.
Of that time, and most of her life, Etta had only a page. But she understood, and that was more than enough. In her youth, Etta had fought a monster. It had the most beautiful eyes you would ever see, and the most terrible, gnashing teeth. The monster was called Life. It was big and scary and it ate everything. Everything. It fed on strength as much as weakness, and still she went on. Still, she had fought.
And Goddamn it, she had won.