Wire Mesh Mothers

34

She dreamed.

The room was dim, small, and much too warm. There were rows of flat, black-topped tables with four chairs each, a classroom. On the walls were charts and posters of old men with beards and probing eyes. In the back of the classroom, cages filled with animals — birds, hamsters, mice, rats. Baby rhesus monkeys.

It was Old Cabel Hall at the University of Virginia on the far side of the lawn from the Rotunda, a building with small, stuffy halls and small, stuffy stairwells. The place smelled old, like students from two hundred years ago were still agonizing over exams and research papers.

Kate was at a table near the rear of the room, next to a small, closed window. She had forgotten to complete the reading for the day, and there was to be a quiz. The professor, a skeletal man in gray, stood in front discussing a brain diagram he had nailed to the wall. Kate couldn’t hear him, but she could see his mouth opening and closing, and could see the other students around her taking furious notes.

Donald was on the other side of the room, nearest the door. He was reading a book. Kate wanted to call out to him but knew the professor would fail her if she did.

“You have to get this class right,” said someone next to Kate, and she looked to her left to see Alice. “Psychology 101,” Alice continued. “Blow this, blow everything. That’s what Freud said.”

“It was Jung who said that, not Freud.” This was Bill. Alice was sitting in his lap. He had one arm around her waist, the other hand down the front of her embroidered jeans.

Kate said, “I didn’t study last night.”

“Too bad,” said Alice. “To the cage with you.”

Everyone in the class turned in their seats, mechanically, at the same moment and the same speed, like wind-up toys whirling about on stands.

“She didn’t study,” Alice repeated.

Then Kate saw she was indeed in a cage. It was a huge, filling nearly the entire classroom, the floor wet and soiled and scattered with bits of cotton and feces. Students stood outside the bars, looking in and whispering.

“Let me out,” said Kate.

The students smiled. Alice shook her head sympathetically. “Blow this, blow everything.”

A sudden panic exploded in Kate’s chest. Her lungs cramped, and she struggled to keep her trembling legs beneath her. She grabbed the bars and shook them. The people outside burst into laughter.

“Somebody, come on! Donald, let me out!”

Donald, whose face was just visible over the shoulders of those in front of him, said, “No. That is impossible. I made a plea bargain.”

“Show her the experiment,” said someone, a young woman with glasses.

“Yes, do, we should observe her.” It was Deidra Kirtley. She clutched a steno pad to her chest. “Where is Willie Harrold?”

A sliding noise. Above Kate’s head, the barred roof of the cage was opening. The ceiling of the room opened, too, and there was the sky, dark and brooding and promising rain. The smell came first. A stench of rotten fish, of dead things at the bottom of a lake, drifting from the sky and into the cage with Kate. It struck her with the force of a blow, and she was knocked to the floor of the cage.

Beside her fell the body of Willie Harrold. It hit and splattered, rancid flesh ripped free of the bones, shimmering brain matter oozing from cracks in the skull, black blood spurting from eyes and nose. The blue, long-dead lips parted and said, “Happy. Sunny. Snowy. Fucked.”

Kate screamed.

And it wasn’t Willie anymore. It was Mistie Henderson, a small, animated corpse in a filthy pink nightie. “Mama had a baby and its head popped off,” said the bloated lips.

Then it was Donnie, dead in a Ricketts-Heyden school jacket, saying nothing but staring at her with unblinking, yellow eyes.

Kate spun to run, and slammed into a huge, wire structure. It was a bizarre and horrible woman, a woman of mesh, her long metal arms outstretched, her single steel breast protruding viciously. Her face was nothing but a pair of enormous glass eyes. There was no mouth. No nose. No other features.

Kate backed away from the monstrosity but her heels slipped in the cotton and the filth on the floor. The wire eyes winked at her, the arms reached out, creaking with the effort, and closed in around Kate’s body. Kate struggled as the wire mesh mother dragged her up and into a cold, hideous embrace.

She threw back her head to scream and saw the glass eyes gazing down. There was no emotion in the eyes, just a void, a deep and cold void in which Kate saw her own reflection.

And she could not scream.