Bewere the Night

SEVEN YEAR ITCH by Leah R. Cutter

Mama first put me in a cage when I was seven. I tried to get away, yanking and pulling on Mama’s hand, yelling how I didn’t wanna be going in there, how I’d be a good boy now. I stopped walking up the dirt path toward dark cave and the wooden bars, sitting back on my butt, but Mama dragged me forward, throwing me into the cage so hard I hit the back wall.

“Mama, why you doing this?” I kept asking as she put the biggest lock I’d ever seen through the loop in the door.

I expected a list of all the things I’d done wrong, like she did when she beat me. All I got was a glare and, “You’ll see.”

Truth was, that probably would have scared me into being good, at least for a while, if I’d had a chance.

Mama left me then, locked in a hollowed out cave on top of Zeke’s hill. I cried and cried, until my head hurt worse than that time Dwight hit me with a bat. I wiped off the tears and snot with my sleeve, then had a look around.

It wasn’t much of a cage, not fancy like with metal bars. It smelled of clean dirt, and was cooler than the hot August afternoon sunshine that I’d been playing in. I was pretty sure Pappy had made it: first dug out the hilltop, stolen the wooden slats from a hardware store or a neighbor, then pounded them deep into the ground. I got a splinter when I grabbed one and shook it. It weren’t going nowhere, and neither was I.

Mama had left me a loaf of Wonder bread, a jar of peanut butter, some apples and a jug of water. She’d also left me the old pot Grandpa had used to piss in when he’d gotten too old to get up on his own. Under it, I couldn’t believe that she’d also stashed two comic books. She didn’t approve of that “make-believe shit” as she called it. I’d already read them, of course, standing in the air conditioning of the Big K, but it was still something.

Time crawled. I ate and read and slept but Mama didn’t return, didn’t let me know how long I was being punished for. It was a strange punishment, here alone, with treats I didn’t normally get. I didn’t rightly know what she wanted.

I spent the rest of that long summer afternoon calling out to her, certain she was waiting just outside. I confessed to everything I’d ever done, whether she already knew or not, like letting Farmer Gray’s horses out of pasture and stealing candy bars from Bobby Holls’ lunch. I cried and said I was sorry and begged to please go home now.

My voice grew hoarse as I talked, deeper and gravelly, like Curly the janitor at school who was bald cause he had throat cancer. My hands started hurting and the ache spread to my arms and chest, like I’d taken a bad fall, head first, off Dwight’s bike.

“I’m sick Mama!” I cried. I shivered and couldn’t get warm one minute, then had to take my shirt off cause I’d sweat through it.

I don’t rightly recall what happened next. I think I dreamed, feverishly, ‘cause I saw my boy’s hands grow into a man’s, with strange dark hair, even on the knuckles. I scratched myself with the long yellowed nails, longer than the old hippy’s who lived in Evan’s Woods.

I woke up naked, curled on the dirt floor of the cage, cold. I looked worse than the time Bobby Holls and his brother Darren had beaten me up—bruises all up and down my ribs. Not round punch marks: straight lines, like from wooden slats. Sure enough, some of the bars of my cage had been broken through. I could have escaped, gone home, see if Mama had forgiven me yet, but I had no clothes.

I started crying again. The smell of shit was strong, though I was clean. I saw it now, smeared on the walls. My comic books looked like a dog had attacked them, full of claw and teeth marks.

“Drop that,” Mama told me when I picked it up. I did as I was told, mostly from being startled.

Mama held out one of Pappy’s old work shirts in her hands, big enough to go to my knees. At first I was scared, but then I dove into it, hoping it wasn’t a trap. Mama didn’t scold me or try to beat me. She turned my face up so she could see it better. “Not too bad,” she said, looking at my forehead. When she touched my cheek I realized it was bruised too.

“Mama, I was sick.”

She ran her fingers through my hair, smoothing it out. “Yes, you were. But you’re better. For now.”

I wanted to beg her not to ever put me in a cage again. I wanted to swear I’d be good from then on. However, her look and her words sent a chill through me, freezing everything inside.

I found out later I’d been sick a whole week. During that time, someone had gotten into Farmer Gray’s coup and killed all his chickens. His youngest, Mark, had gone out to see what was causing all the fuss, and had been attacked by some kind of wild animal that had torn off one of his calf muscles. He died the following week, never waking up.

We moved the next month, to the far side of town.

The summer I turned fourteen Pappy set me to rebuilding the cage, this time with concrete and bars stolen from the abandoned development down the road. I knew better what would happen: Pappy and I changed sometimes. Not like those stupid werewolves on T.V. We didn’t care about the moon and shit. We only changed once every seven years, for a whole week. Pappy’s time would be in a couple years. My time would come in August.

I didn’t know why we changed. Were we cursed? Or was it just something Fuller men did? Pappy said it had just been him and his brother who’d changed, not Grandpa. His Mama had known what to do, though, so maybe it came from her.

I remember holding a rusting pole while Pappy poured concrete, sweat falling out of my bangs into my eyes. The cicada cycled up and down in the grass above the cave. I didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be breaking my back or licking the sweet blood off my knuckles when I scraped them again on the packed dirt. When Pappy cuffed me, telling me to hold the pole still, I finally snapped.

“Don’t know why we’re building this thing. I ain’t going in it.”

I knew it was a stupid thing to say before I said it. Still said it.

Pappy was at the end of his rope too. “You will,” he said, growling.

I glared at him. His eyes changed to a strange gold, with long pupils, his forehead grew ridged and his fingernails turned into claws.

I looked down, shaken. Pappy could be mean, hell, the whole damn county was mean. He’d only beat me when I deserved it, though, and never more than I could take. He’d never been a monster to me.

We finished off the afternoon in silence, only cursing the dirt or bars, never each other.

As we walked back to the doublewide, Pappy told me, “After August I’ll show you more. Your change is too close, now, to learn any control.”

I grunted at him, too tired to reply, but also because I couldn’t talk around the rush of joy I felt. Down in my gut I knew a hint of control would mean the difference between being stuck in the Buena Vista Estates trailer park and breaking free.

Pappy was shot the last week of August, while I was still recovering from the bruises of my change. A robbery gone wrong at one of the abandoned houses Pappy “recycled” from. The sheriff said a wild dog had attacked his deputy and he’d accidentally shot my dad. No dog was ever found.

I was going to have to teach myself control, and learn it better than everyone around me.

Mama got remarried and we moved to the city with Stephen, my step-dad. He worked as an engineer for a German software company: Mama reminded him of home and the country.

Turned out I had an aptitude for computers, hacking, more specifically. Just a fancy way of stealing, I told Mama. Just following Pappy’s lead.

The summer I turned twenty-one Mama grew more and more nervous. For the first time I felt the beast stirring restlessly under my skin. I gleefully pillaged security sites, laughing at the rumors of an FBI sting. Let them take me. The monster was near.

Mama talked Stephen into building one of those panic rooms, with reinforced steel walls and an electronic lock. She never got around to stocking it though—it stayed an empty room with bare drywall and a door a monster couldn’t open.

Just before my change, Mama and Stephen went on vacation. All Mama said was, “Do the right thing.”

I spent hours standing on the threshold of my cage. The beast was desperate to run. It remembered the fresh taste of blood, the sudden rush of death.

In the end I walked in, closed and locked the door, hoping the keypad would survive. Because any control was always up to me.

By the time I was twenty-eight I had the best of everything. I lived with Jaslene, feasted on caviar and fine wines, slept on softer than silk sheets. Life was sweet and satisfying, full of sunshine and delights I’d never known existed as a child.

Nights I trolled the internet highways for insecure ports and selfish corporations who put making a buck before building better firewalls. I’d grown rich selling credit cards to other sharks.

Jaslene didn’t know what I did, not really. She was willing to believe it was too technical for her, just happy for the cash flowing into her greedy hands. And who could blame her? I wasn’t the best catch, unsophisticated and hard edged. But I was rich, and that made up for a lot.

That year, though, that seven-year-itch year, I’d started taking stupid risks. The FBI was on my tail again. I needed to lay low, keep to the shadows, only spend what I already had, but I couldn’t stop myself from ravaging yet another system. My famous control was shaky, at best.

Jaslene accused me of being cruel, exposing the soft underbelly of her insecurities, telling secrets not mine to share. She left the week before my change.

Was it me? Or was it the beast? Maybe I’d reached my limit on small talk with Jaslene’s friends and smiles hiding sharp teeth. Maybe the monster was hungry for recognition.

Still. Jaslene shouldn’t have left. She was my first, my only love, after Mama had died. I didn’t have anything soft from the beautiful Buena Vista Estates: everything kind had been sweated out between the heat and the bugs, the broken promises and the dirt. Jaslene had seen that steel and not been afraid to carve out a place between the bars, upwind from the sewer of my heart.

She belonged with me. To me. And now she was gone.

The door to my own panic room stood open. The change was upon me. And she will be here, any moment now. She’d begged me for the truth of my life, accused me of hiding behind my scars.

Come my love. See me. All of me. Be with me forever, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, a sweet taste on my tongue and a full belly at the end of my tenure in my room.

Because at the end, the only one I can control is me.