“Listen,” Ms. Harrison says, smoothing down the back of her blond bob, “if you’re having second thoughts . . .”
“I’m not!” Michelle says too quickly. She knows she has no poker face. Her current roommate recently asked her, “Why do you always look so sour? Everyone can tell you hate them.” Michelle had heard similar comments before, so it hadn’t hurt her feelings too badly, plus her roommate was a total piece of shit, but she had wondered who everyone was. She’d made a game of it, listing people her roommate knew she knew: their mutual thesis advisor, the barista at the coffee shop across the street, the parade of lovers and friends the roommate brought back to their tiny, shared space.
“It won’t bother you,” Ms. Harrison said, lowering her voice so that the word “it” came out a whisper. “It’s been down there since we bought the house, and we barely think about it. Seriously.”
“Really, Ms. Harrison. I’m glad for the peace and quiet.”
“Oh good. Great. Please call me Helena. We can’t be that far apart in age, can we?”
Michelle was twenty-five and in graduate school, living in a shitty apartment with the aforementioned shitty roommate in a shitty part of town. They had roaches that were so small and fast that they didn’t bother to squish them. She was perpetually single and had never learned to drive a car. She knew how to study, sit in a library, teach a freshman comp class, but other than that, she was barely an adult. This woman, Ms. Helena Harrison, was light years ahead of Michelle.
They were seated across from each other in a large room with a marble floor and a long wooden table that Michelle knew she was likely to scuff or scratch. Even a slight depression of her fingers on its surface would leave a mark that would embarrass her. The house was a Victorian at the top of a steep hill in the oldest and richest part of the city. It was a regal thing from the outside. So many windows blinking in the sun. The inside smelled pointedly of the ocean, even though the water was miles away. The Harrison family had modernized it in every way possible, stripping the inside of all history. White walls, marble floors, all sharp angles that ran perfectly parallel to each other.
The chairs they sat in were little sculptures in and of themselves. The same slippery wood as the table. Michelle sat on the edge of the seat, keeping her spine straight and far from the bare rail of the back of the chair. Two vertical spindles to hold one singular, horizontal bar that Helena leaned against with ease. Michelle reminded herself that she wouldn’t ever have to sit in this chair again, nor would she have to occupy much of the house at all. Not if things went according to plan.
“You still look worried,” Helena says, scooting forward on her impossible chair. Little diamond studs in her earlobes.
“Oh, what? No. I’m not worried. Preoccupied, always, but it won’t impact my time here. I’m very organized. Super careful.” Her discomfort with this woman and the grand house must be obvious. Her face grows hot, flushing with a pink that she knows she can’t possibly hide, even as she untucks her hair from behind her ears. I’m so fucking dumb, she thinks about herself. Spineless and ugly and small.
In contrast to Michelle, Ms. Helena Harrison is tall, willowy, and blond, as perfectly hewn as that horizontal chair rail. It makes Michelle more aware of her own stature. Her small frame disturbed by disproportionally wide hips. Hair that is neither brown nor blond, elbows and ankle bones that stick too far out like little doorknobs and are the only parts of her unwieldy body that look like they belong to a skinny person. Even her clothes are ugly, so cheap they pill inexplicably at all the places where her larger body parts rub together.
“It’s our hope that you will feel at home here. Eat what pleases you. Pretend it’s your own. But no guests. You understand that, right?”
The our being the husband and two daughters who remain images in the singular picture frame on the marble mantel in the front living room. All three are impossibly handsome.
Helena rises from the table, touching its skin with her palms and Michelle watches, fascinated, as they meet the gorgeous wood and then peel away, no trace of them left behind. Michelle has already been given a tour of the whole house, all except one area, so she knows where they must be going now and her skin tingles with anticipation.
The kitchen floor is a bumpy stone. It has been carefully lacquered to appear wet, as if the floor were a riverbed, and Michelle thinks of that old game she played as a kid, pretending the floor in her bedroom was lava. She’d loved to throw out pillows, books, stuffed animals, and then hop from one to the other. She was an only child. Lonely. Lonelier still after her father’s death, so it was easy to convince herself that things that weren’t real might be real after all.
“So,” Ms. Harrison said, stopping to stand with her hands on the butcher block of the kitchen island, “if you take the job . . .”
“Oh, I’m taking the job.” Michelle had not let Helena finish. The flush that had begun to vanish reignited. She could feel it in her neck now, and she knew from experience what it looked like. She’d watched it bloom in the mirror before. A bright red that left grotesque white blotches on her cheek bones, at her temple, and around the pop of her jugular vein at her throat.
“You’re sure?” Helen asks, and Michelle nods her emphatic yes. “Fantastic! You won’t regret it.” There was so much relief in her voice, so much joy that it brought up the first nervous feelings in Michelle. “It’s just that we’ve had trouble keeping house sitters in the past. I don’t know why. I tell them the exact routine to follow and everything seems fine, but then, the next time we need to travel, I call and they won’t even pick up to say no!”
Michelle sees Helena glance at the cracked door at the back of the kitchen and begin to flush a bit herself. It’s the first time it occurs to Michelle that Helena is embarrassed by the situation. That the animal living in the cellar is a point of shame.
“Have you taken care of one before?” Helena asks.
“No, never.”
“It’s honestly not a big deal. I know there is at least one other in the city. They are rare nowadays, but people have them. If you’ve house-sat with any frequency, you know other pets are much harder. Not that it’s a pet, but you know what I mean.”
“It’s what attracted me to the job,” Michelle offers. She hadn’t thought she’d share this bit of information. No point to it and it might make her seem creepy, like some sort of stalker, but now she had started, so she kept going. “I’m working on my thesis, so I won’t need to go out much. I just need a quiet space, and the thesis, well it’s a novel, historical fiction, and it reimagines the mass extermination. Like, what if they’d been allowed to live?”
“A dystopian book?” Helena asks with a nervous laugh.
“Utopian.”
Helena is staring at her now, and Michelle can’t tell if it is out of concern or disgust.
“Your entire thesis is about those things taking over and it’s happy?”
“Well, sort of. I’m not done yet. I’m interested in how humanity reacted to them. Our management of the problem. It seems metaphorical for a lot of other atrocities.”
“Isn’t that like getting a PhD in cockroaches?”
“An MFA. And, to be fair, people study entomology.”
“Right. And just to be clear,” Helena says, pausing, “am I part of the atrocity in your book?”
“Oh,” Michelle says quickly, realizing what she’s done and trying to buy herself time. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m so, so sorry. I’m just a curious person, a big imagination and all that, and well, I mean it’s interesting, your family’s choice to preserve one, and I have a lot of sympathy for that. Do I mean empathy? Empathy. My characters do the same. I am not here to judge. Not at all. Jesus. I’m sorry. I’m going to stop talking.”
“Preserve . . .” Ms. Harrison finally says. “Avoid might be a better word.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“It’s just down there in the root cellar and the girls were so young. They named it, at first. Wanted to interact with it a bit, but of course, as you know, that makes it grow which is, in fact, illegal. Anyway, we let them call it something for a while, and they fed it, and by the time they were bored of it, it was just habit. And they are expensive to terminate.” The last sentence is tacked on, an odd excuse considering the wealth around them. “Honestly, I wanted to kill it. I might still.”
“Well, if it helps at all, I think it’s great that it’s still here. There are so few left.”
“You aren’t planning to . . .” Helena looks suddenly horrified.
“No! I mean, no. I would never. I just want to be in the same house with it. Occupy space.”
“That’s fine,” Helena says, but Michelle can see it might not be fine. Luckily, Helena and family are meant to be on a plane the next morning. Michelle is their only option. “Anyhow, I’ll leave a list here that will remind you of when you need to offer food. I’ll leave some other notes too, but making sure to feed him on schedule is the main thing.”
“Him?”
“Well, we don’t actually know. The girls named him King Eric the Wicked and Heinously Hairy way back when, and so I think of him as male, but I also understand they don’t really have genders.”
“Not solid ones anyway,” Michelle offers.
“Anyway. The cellar door is at the back of the pantry and kept locked. We don’t even have keys for all the locks so no worries there. And we’ve found lunch meat fits under the door nicely. Doesn’t matter what kind, as long as it’s thin sliced. I’ll leave plenty.”
They move to the pantry, a surprisingly large room with shelves on both walls. The back wall is almost entirely the cellar door, an old door, original to the house, the varnish pickling. Its glass doorknob gleams. There are a disconcerting number of locks added to the top and side of the door: a sliding bolt, a chain, a small golden hook.
“Does it try to get out?” Michelle asks.
“What? Oh, lord no. Those are from the previous homeowners. Most of them anyway. I think they were afraid of it. They were older and probably remember how bad it got. Back when you could make a living killing the things and delivering the husks. I’ve always heard they dry up right away when dead.”
“Yes, it was hard for people to really report how many they’d exterminated for proper payment. They’d turn to dust in transportation. People would varnish them in advance so that they wouldn’t get undersold. That’s why we have so many in museums. I’m told they look very different alive. Like guinea pigs with spider legs.”
“So anyway, you need to put food right under the door with a little still peeking out, in case it doesn’t get eaten and you have to pull it back. The smell of rotten lunch meat does not go away quickly. Hold on. Let me get a slice.” Ms. Harrison slides past Michelle back into the kitchen, their hips touching briefly.
Michelle is left in the pantry alone. She moves closer to the door, squats down. Feels air pushing out from the crack. Interaction makes them grow. She knows that. Touch. Eye contact. Emotion. The largest recorded had grown to the size of a crocodile; its legs, when unfolded, the length of a city bus. They weren’t violent. Not by nature. Just so numerous. So large. Michelle moves her fingers closer to the door, slides them under the wood and into the dark, yanking them back as Helena reenters the pantry.
“Here,” Helena says, shoving a piece of meat in Michelle’s face. “It’s about that time anyway. Give it a go.”
Michelle slides the piece of salami under the door. Waits. Nothing.
“He doesn’t always eat it right away and that’s fine. What you’re trying to actively avoid is the screaming.”
“Screaming?”
“Yes, it’s awful. One time the car broke down when we were coming back from Big Sur, and we were out of cell range so we couldn’t tell the sitter to stay on. Anyway, when we got home, it was louder than the house alarm. We knew he’d been screaming for a long time because his voice was almost hoarse. The neighbors haven’t talked to us since.” Helena shudders.
“I’ll keep on schedule, it won’t be a problem.”
Michelle squats down again. They watch the crack. Helena and Michelle. The round red slice against the stone floor. The dark behind the door quiet.
Nothing happens.
The family is gone by the time Michelle arrives with her stuff the next day. She texts Ms. Helena Harrison to let her know she’s settled, and then sets about making herself at home.
She drops her duffel and sleeping bag in the pantry, and walks the three floors of the house, starting at the top. She shuts the door of each room as she comes upon them, wandering only into the eldest girl’s room, where an old-fashioned dictionary lays open, spine wide. The word “precious” has been aggressively scratched out with a pencil and Michelle touches the angry spot, feels how the pencil has dug ruts into the page, almost broken through. Michelle takes an eraser from the desk drawer and rubs at the gray scratching. She finds what she knows to be true—“of great value or high price; highly esteemed or cherished”—and, seeing it there, under the smudge of the blacked-out marking, feels like a revelation.
Michelle makes her way back to the kitchen, continuing to shut every door she passes.
She rolls out her sleeping bag under the lowest food shelf. Her pillow fits neatly at the top, nearest the cellar door. In the kitchen, she fixes herself a sandwich and takes extra slices of meat back with her.
When Michelle was a toddler, she’d lived in an apartment complex that broke out with a rash of the creatures, and they’d had to move to a hotel for a few days. Michelle didn’t remember this, but her father claimed that when he’d gone back to quickly grab her favorite pacifier, the dumpster had been open. A soft series of keening wails coming out of the dim, dark of the metal. He’d walked up to it only to see that it was full up with the creatures. Stinking and stuck to traps that didn’t kill them, but instead, kept them still until they died. He said they seemed to sense him when he walked up, opened their dark mouths to scream for help, growing louder and louder. He tried to save a few. Reached in to pull them free, but all that came loose were bits of the creatures. Legs. Clumps of fur. Unrecognizable bits of flesh that stuck to his fingers and palms. Her father had died of cancer when she was five. Some of her first memories were of his body in a hospital bed, so tightly tucked and riddled with tubes and machines that he too was glued down, stuck. She’d spent her whole young adult life conflating those two images, mixing them up in her dreams; her father caught inside dumpsters, screaming for her to pull him free.
The next day, she opened the toolbox she’d brought with her. She didn’t have much, but she had screwdrivers, a hammer, a crowbar. The locks on the cellar door were numerous but old. She was able to remove most of them without too much difficulty. She piled them on the floor. Their screws and chains and other sundry bits in individual piles so, even without their designated space on a door, they kept their shape.
Soon the cellar was free of its locks, littered instead with dozens of spiral holes that she imagined into seashells, pressing her ear to the door to listen for the beast as if it were the sea.
When she was done, she went back into the kitchen and filled the cooler she’d brought with ice and food. She filled jugs of water. Food for a month will have to be enough, she told herself.
Next, she moved the locks one at a time to the pantry door, shutting herself in. She mirrored where they’d been on the cellar door; ritual felt somehow important. When she was done, she could feel it was late, so she slid lunch meat under the cellar door without opening it and fell asleep on her sleeping bag, deciding that when she woke up it would be the beginning.
Her body jolted awake. She sat up suddenly, hitting her head on the bottom pantry shelf. She listened to the quiet of the little room and the house beyond before standing up to pull on the light. If she did not know better, she’d think she was all alone. The idea of this made her catch her breath. What if all of this was made up? If she’d kept her own thoughts so closed and so private, no one had the opportunity to tell her she was crazy. The stone floor beneath her feet began to rumble, glow red. She squinched her eyes shut against the lava. What if there was nothing beyond the cellar door? No story. No next step. No purpose. She kept her eyes squeezed shut and deepened her breathing. Pictured the lava flowing out the pantry door.
When she opened her eyes, the pantry was just a pantry. The door to the cellar was just a door, and before she could give her imagination too much time to ponder, her hand rushed for the doorknob, twisting it easily. The old wood pulled smoothly from its frame. The smell came next. Damp. Moldy. Earth kept dark and soft. The edges gone moldy.
“Hello,” she said down into the pit of earth.
For years, since she was a kid really, she’d imagined how she’d speak to one, making up imaginary conversations. She’d landed long ago on the decision to speak to it as she would a child or perhaps a sad friend. “Don’t be afraid,” she said down into the dark. “I’ve come to get to know you.”
Michelle knew what it felt like to be locked inside a place, her own skull such a whirling torture chamber at times that she felt she understood now something that her father didn’t. It was worth losing a few limbs to escape.
For a long time, Michelle sat silent and cross-legged on the floor at the top of the cellar stairs, the stone floor making her sit bones ache in a way she found pleasing, a mark of her patience. Eventually, she began talking. She talked and talked in a way she hadn’t in a long time, or maybe ever.
Michelle talked about her novel. How the protagonist looked too much like her no matter how hard she tried to change her, and so it was horrible to hear about her unlikability as a character, when she knew, they all knew, it was her. She shared how her mother left her voicemails. Long voicemails about her own activities. What she’d eaten. If she’d been exercising. What she liked best on TV. Long anxious messages that made Michelle’s stomach hurt, primarily because Michelle knew she wouldn’t ever return them. The guilt had gotten so great that she no longer pressed play.
She didn’t know exactly when it had begun to feel like each day was wading through the dark. Maybe it had always felt like that. Maybe in the crib she’d felt stale air on her face. The mud of the world heavy on her kicking feet. Maybe it was after her father died. Maybe it was when she hit puberty. Maybe it was when she realized she was never going to finish her book or, therefore, her degree. And maybe it wasn’t about finding the moment it had become so hard, but instead about the moment she realized this wasn’t how everyone else felt. There were people all around her, every day of the damn week, living a life of peace. Laughing because they thought something was funny. Smiling because the sun felt good on their skin. Holding hands with another human because they felt love. Some people could turn their thoughts off whenever they chose to. Not everyone was an animal chasing their own uncatchable tails. She understood too that life was a costume one could put on, fake it for a bit and then fall into a pattern, but the problem was, she said into the dark, that she’d never understood how to piece together that outfit, let alone plaster it on her body. She was all innards in the world. All pokey emotions and ever-apparent feelings. She had lost her guardrails, if she’d ever had them.
The nature of her introspection, the volume of it, meant that when the creature first emerged on its eight spidery legs, Michelle did not immediately notice. She was too deep in her own thoughts. The rhythm of her voice had done something accidental. It had soothed her mind and body.
When she looked down at the first step, she saw a fat caterpillar. Its eight legs stretching out from its torso like car antennas. It was absurd, really, the little hairy body, no eyes or mouth or nose to mark one end from the other. The legs shown in the light, long and thin and sharp at the ends. It made her laugh. The sight of it.
“Hello,” Michelle said, pleased by the cheer in her own voice. The creature said nothing back, but a million tiny, indiscernible hairs rippled, as if she’d made its skin crawl. For a moment, she thought it might turn and disappear back into the dark, but then its sharp, spindly legs disappeared into its body and it curled roly-poly style and rolled into the pantry to rest its tight little body against Michelle’s calf.
Her heart raced. Her eyes widened. She reached out her cupped palms and scooped up the creature. It stayed curled, and she held it up to her face, the brown hairs bristly, the legs entirely tucked inside of it. Michelle held it to her nose and inhaled. The smell of it was delicious, like popcorn, and repelling, like dirty feet. She moved cautiously to her sleeping bag and placed it on the softest patch, and then turned off the pantry light and shut the cellar door.
Michelle lay on her side, curling herself around it, two spiraling bodies beating in the dark.
The Harrison family returned early from their trip. Michelle would have known this if she hadn’t turned her phone off, but it didn’t matter. They banged on the pantry door. They pleaded. They threatened to call the police. They grew angrier and angrier, but the locks held and behind the anger was, Michelle guessed, fear. Shame. And she was right. She knew they would stop eventually and so, when they did, it was no sooner or later than Michelle had hoped.
The creature grew. Slower than Michelle thought it might, but it grew all the same. Its fur longer too, dragging out under its body—its legs remaining sucked in, like a ball of hair plucked from a hairbrush. Michelle and the creature grew more alike in this way. Hair growing into tangles. Bodies merging in scent. Eating together in the soft dark.
In the fourth week, Michelle realized the creature had grown eyes. A long blinking line of them in the part of his hair all along his spine. They shone like the glass doorknob did in the pantry light and no matter how many times she counted them, she got a different number, like counting the rays of light reflecting off a prism. In the sixth week, it smiled at Michelle. A big slash of a mouth that ran along its midsection on the right side.
In the eighth week on the fifth day, the legs appeared again. Four on each side. Silver and sharp as knives at the tips. Like tent poles that held its body high above the ground, so that it could rise above Michelle, bonk its many eyes on the light bulb.
“What now?” Michelle asks. And the creature purses its long lips before opening its mouth wide. An invitation.
“Will it hurt?” she asks.
The creature does not answer, but Michelle understands that it won’t be painful. It will feel the same as climbing into her sleeping bag.
The monster opens its mouth wider. It stretches long on its side. Toothless and surprisingly bright. The opposite of the cellar or of the inside of Michelle’s head. Its interior sparkles with brightness, a disco ball of a heart. Michelle lays down on the floor and the creature retracts its legs in order to be on the ground next to her. Michelle lets the bright white take over, rolling into the joy of it. Her mind is quiet and her eyes open. She peers up through the creature’s spinal eye sockets at the pantry ceiling. Its white, bumpy plaster suddenly seems ancient and beautiful, stalactites in a cave she might never see again.
Michelle lay still inside the creature, telling it how to undo the locks on the door with its legs. It works smoothly, one lock at a time, until all hang loose and the door swings open. They lumber out together. The noises of the Harrison family all around them. Screaming and hollering and making a fuss, but Michelle remains calm, wondering only if they could see her beautiful form inside the creature. The bumps of her wide hips, the curve of her thighs, the smooth back of her skull shaping the creature from the inside out.
The chaos of the world outside the pantry filters through, but it hardly matters. The only direction Michelle can see is up. The back door bangs open. Soon they are outside, the cumulus clouds above them, large, beautiful puffs in the blue, blue sky. The sun big and bright and, beyond it, the endless universe. A world full of light that she’s never allowed herself to see, so busy was she looking down.
Michelle basks in it. The never-ending clarity; a sky opening to everything she’s never fully seen. 
Rachel Eve Moulton earned her MFA from Emerson College. Her work has appeared in Beacon Street Review, Bellowing Ark, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Bryant Literary Review, Narrative, New Ohio Review, and Button-Eye Review, among others. Her debut novel, Tinfoil Butterfly, was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and nominated for both a Shirley Jackson Award and a Bram Stoker. She’s spent most of her life as an educator and writing coach. She lives with her husband and two daughters in the mountains east of Albuquerque.
Illustration: Calum Heath
