In Which You Are a Monster by Kahlo Smith

Rusalka, Volga River

You heave yourself out of the water. It clings to your skin like sweaty palms. Wet to your bones, you stumble up the bank. Your marrow is nothing but pond scum and velvet riverbed muck.

In the crop field you are a tsunami. Your hair drips past your feet and twines around roots. The humans in the hills do not deserve this blessing; the plants swollen and sweet with their breeding. You would gift them a drought if it were your place.

It is not your place.

When the loam is soaked with summer rain, you tumble down the bank into the river’s arms again. Cold shocks you. You remember the fear of drowning.

Your ivory comb waits at the bottom, snared by a skeletal finger. You drag it free and do not deny yourself the pleasure of snapping bone.

Ipupiara, Amazon

You are fifteen feet long and starving. Waves batter you from side to side. Hunt in the dark. Hug the coast searching for inlets. Hug warm meals with your body until they burst. Devour them slick with salt.

Churn like a whirlpool. Find no rest. Watch the people on the shore and wonder at their little pieces of steel.

They will drag you bleeding from the water to dry. They will not eat you even if they kill you. These are wasteful neighbors.

Let them drive you inland.

Rusalka

You feel the young man on the bank before you see him. His boots sink into the ground, cracking the reeds like finger bones.

Your fingers are long and soft in the moonlight. They drag a fishbone comb through your hair. Reflections off the water turn every grassy strand to burnished gold. By the time he sees you, you are the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

Across the lapping river, you smile at him.

He is transfixed. With halting steps, he skirts the water’s edge.

My lady, why must you swim so late? The moon likes to play tricks on beautiful maidens.

Laugh. Smile and laugh. Do not speak.

Will you not answer me?

You will not. You will comb your hair, and toss it so it covers your breasts like a shawl.

Join me on the shore and I will walk you safely home.

He would not.

Now is the time to slip off your rock, leaving your comb behind. You will need your long arms and strong fingers.

Closer. Take my hand, fair maiden.

Come only as close as you must. Let him see your bare breasts and stomach.

Now he steps into the water, sinking to his knees. You step back. He follows, smiling, one hand out to tame the skittish doe he sees in you. You take another step, and another, your feet floating far above the bottom.

He follows, as he must, and your hair twines around his ankles.

Fall back into the water’s grasping hands. Drag him with you, shouting and kicking, mouth open wide against the cold. His lungs will fill before you reach the bottom. Watch his eyes glaze over like a rotting fish.

When they do, kiss him. Press your lips to his as they lose their warmth. The last things he will know are your mouth and your fingers and the crushing water all around him.

Among Them, The Netherlands

Last night, you were the blacksmith’s dog. Today, you are the blacksmith. You dripped between their minds in the dark like water seeping through a thatched roof.

Through his eyes the world is dim, compared to the forge, and quiet, compared to the hammer. His hands have little feeling through the calluses, but you do feel through them, touching every object in his workshop.

His tongue still works. You eat all the meat in his ice chest. Curious, you open every jar in his cellar. Curious, you bite his arm and blood spills out. You seal it up with a long lick and wonder at the taste of copper.

Curious, you lick his dog, who pants, exhausted from carrying your consciousness. It tastes familiar.

On the street, you practice your two-legged gait. You wave at a shopkeeper in the way the blacksmith remembers waving. He smiles, and you look away so he will not see the clumsy stretch of your cheeks. The blacksmith was not much for smiling.

You are, though, and you hide your face as you stroll among people the blacksmith recognizes. Maybe next time you will be the shopkeeper, or the miller. Maybe next time you will be a cat.

Spirit, Moscow

A current of passengers runs along the tracks, waiting to board the next train. The sun has almost set. Already, the moon is bleeding twilight blue against the horizon.

Hands clasped flirtatiously behind your back; you whisper in a waiting ear. The poor commuter whips around. They scan the empty air.

What was that?

Nobody hears what they hear.

What was what?

You rest your hand on the back of their neck. They inch forwards, leaning towards the tracks.

Stop that! It’s not funny.

It is funny, though, at least to you. You’ll take what entertainment you can get. Nobody talks to you, and you’re the only one laughing at your jokes. Even the trains don’t come as often as they did when you were alive. The most you can do now is spread unease.

You blow on their neck like a train whistling by. They slap it, trying to ward off whatever force compels them closer to the tracks.

You’re making me angry!

They are getting strange looks now. Good. Soon the crowd will turn on them.

But the train runs early. It rushes into the station, brakes screeching along the rails. You give your new friend one hard push in the middle of the back.

They lurch, scream bursting from their lips. A gasp rushes through the crowd. They are held back by your other hand fisted in their collar. The train comes to a stop, their hair flying in the backdraft.

You aren’t a very good ghost, you think as you let them go. A really scary spirit would shove them in front of the train. You just like to feel them shudder.

Ipupiara

Eat sparingly. Humans carry sharp knives and this is a lesson you cannot afford to keep learning. You are not fifteen feet long anymore.

They are like scaleless fish. You live together. You are thankful for their sacrifice and sustenance. They fear you and try to squirm away when you embrace them.

Hold them under the water. Be gentle at first. Considerate in the way of the python. Hold them tighter. Feel the moment when something inside them explodes.

Eat sparingly and take only the best parts. Eat their noses and genitals and eyes and fingers. Feel their meat stringy in your mouth. Their blood floating out in clouds and mixing with the water under the moon.

Eat sparingly and they will hunt sparingly. They are your neighbors.

Rusalka

It should be no surprise that fish are dying, and the living swim with corpses’ glassy eyes. You should not be shocked by water burning down your throat or sheets of algae blotting out the moon. You knew what they were capable of.

After all, you were pregnant with his child. Seventeen years old and pregnant with his child. He led you to the river to watch the sunrise, and you followed because you had to.

You remember the heat of his hand on your neck. You remember the shock of cold and the fear of drowning. Sometimes, those are the only things you can remember, and you bury yourself in silt and scream like a crane.

You have forgotten your death. Flaring nostrils, thrashing limbs, eyes open wide and sightless. The first inhale of river water. You know what must have happened, because you have seen countless young men choke and flail in your verdant net.

When you try to remember, there is only his hand and your fear and waking in the water, held aloft by many slick palms, your teeth sharp enough to pierce your bloodless gums. The moon above you like a worried face.

You knew all this, and still.

They cannot drown you now. This is a different kind of fear.

Ipupiara

There are invaders in the swamp. Their faces are pale like dawning skies above the water. They cut through lagoon grass in their loud boat. They bother the village and chatter like a horde of tukana. Science myth creature savage beast, they chitter.

They burn their tracks into the jungle floor.

Pluck their guides from their tents while they sleep. Return them to their village far downriver. Do not eat their guides. Not even sparingly. They are your neighbors.

Take the dawn woman and the rest will follow. They will follow because they are men. Because they see only the surface of the water.

Do what you must. Drown what you can. Bite what you can’t. 

Make the ship bright with their own burning.

Drive them back into the light.

Spirit

It’s nice out here between the tracks. You still like it, you tell yourself. You like the trash itching at the trestle legs, and the crumbling brick, and the vines that grow along the ties. You tell yourself the vines have fed on your blood. You tell yourself you are a part of this place, and not just a shadow cast by the rising sun that gilds the station’s shattered windows.

Still, you don’t trust the trains. They are new with angry engines and shining axles. You lie down on the sleepers and watch railcars trundling overhead. No passengers get on or off.

These new lines do not stop at the station where you died. They are leaving you behind.

You sit up in the middle of a freight car. There are shining metal rods on racks you do not recognize. They lie like creatures holding their breath, and they bother you. The freight car’s walls are papered with the same poster over and over: Осторожность! Взрывчатка! Caution! Explosives!

You lie back on your bed of sleepers. You shut your eyes tight, as if headlights were bearing down on you again, and wish you could disappear.

Among Them

Last night, you were a little girl’s cat. This morning, you are a little girl. You are leaving the cat you were behind. Your parents tell you cats make too much noise. Your parents have written a note to your neighbor, asking him to find the cat a better home.

When you were a cat, the world was dim, cast in hazy blues and yellows. You ran among their feet and they cursed you or called for you or ran their hands over your fur in waves.

As a little girl, the world is quieter. Curious, you listen. You do not hear things moving in the walls. Your parents insist that you be quieter. No one can hear you on the stairs.

Leaving your home on the Merwedeplein behind, your parents lead you through dim pre-dawn streets. Scattered strangers pace the cobblestones. You hate the way those people look at you. You wonder if they know you are not the little girl.

Curious, you smile up at your parents. They smile back, but their lips are thin.

The little girl you are this morning wants to be a writer. She has been worried for her marble collection, which she gave to the girl who was her neighbor. You pedal her legs. Using her human brain, you think up a cloud of worry for this little girl whose life you are borrowing.

Maybe next time you will be a writer. Maybe next time you will be safe.

You notice people looking at your parents like they, too, are somehow inhuman. You wish you were a cat again.

Rusalka

You grasp at any pressure on the bank, these days. You cannot drown them all, but you can try. You have to try. No one is left to warn children away from the river. Soldiers’ heavy boots sink into the ground, cracking the cattails like spines.

You do not breathe, but you are choking constantly. The water is too turbid to watch your prey struggle. Make it quick, as painless as you can. This has gone from vengeance to a kind of mercy.

You hear screaming on the wind and heavy footfalls in the sky. As the sirens sing, you think of your baby.

While you lived, it was a curse that bound him to hold your head under the water. Now, you realize, you love it. You cannot stop loving it.

You drown all the children you can reach, loving them all the time.

Mission Command, Wünsdorf

You loved the Volga, once. Your aunt and uncle brought you to their home on the river the year your voice finally dropped. When your Russian started sounding right.

You thought you’d return to it, and to the girls who swam along the bank in Samara, their long hair dripping down their shoulders like duck feathers. Sun sparkling on their backs and dancing across the water. But your uncle died in the November revolution and you never went back to Russia. You remember the Volga’s ducks better than you remember its girls.

You say a prayer for the ducks, although you ate one last Sunday. You say a prayer for the girls in Samara who were once your neighbors.

The orders come, and you hand them down like your aunt would hand a towel over the balcony. Come inside. You’ll catch a cold!

Come inside, you think for the girls in the Volga river. You’ll catch a cold.

In the field, your orders are received. Your hands go limp on the back of your chair.

Rusalka

You press yourself into the mud. The river’s soft hands caress your back like a mother’s, and in this moment, you finally remember your mother’s hands. You grip the small decaying fingers poking from the riverbed.

Sleep, you tell them. You are safe. I will walk you home. You barely have the breath to lie.

The air screams like a flock of cranes.

One breaks the surface of the water. It rests for a moment, cradled in the river’s palm, and you reach for it. It’s the size of a young man, and it is shining silver.

When it detonates, the riverbed lights up like the surface of the sun.

Kahlo R. F. Smith

Kahlo R. F. Smith (she/it) was born in the redwoods of Felton, CA and is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at UNR. Her research in Monster Studies has shocked and horrified at the PCA National Conference and the UCSC Festival of Monsters. When not hunting Bigfoot or navigating catacombs, she can be found at kahlosmith.wordpress.com or on Instagram @vellumgarden.