October’s Lightspeed short story is ‚Drosera regina‘ by A.L. Goldfuss, and it’s perfect Halloween reading.
io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Drosera regina” by A.L. Goldfuss. Enjoy!Drosera regina
The men knew before she did. Before this boy, before sophomore year, before even her twelfth birthday, they had jostled her on the sidewalk and hooted from cars, searching for something just past her skin. But now, with her panties stripped off and the boy’s eyes on her, Jackie felt a strange prickling. A warning pacing behind her ribs. A mouth about to drip.
The boy’s family had a single-wide, newer than her mother’s, and the carpet in his bedroom was soiled with crumbs. The thin pile bit into Jackie’s shoulders and spine as she thought how, inches below her, was fresh air and cool earth.
“Feels good, right?” the boy said, sliding a part of him along a part of her. It did feel good, at least in one place. Another place hurt, and that seemed to be where the boy was interested most.
On the other side of the door, his father watched television in the living room.
“Here I go,” the boy said, and Jackie bit her lip as he pressed into the place that didn’t feel good at all. He thrust once, twice, pimply face blocking out the inset ceiling light, then yelped in her ear and pulled out, leaving behind a hole.
“What did you do?” he said, clutching his crotch. Between his fingers the skin growled red and steamed with blisters. “What did you do to me?” Beyond the door, the television swelled louder.
Jackie sat up and her cami stuck to her chest with something thicker than sweat.
“It hurt me, too,” she said, thinking it was an experience they could share. Perhaps this was part of it.
“You’re diseased! Look what you did to me! Get out!”
She dragged on her shorts, denim sticking to her fingers, and plucked her sneakers from the kitchen on her way to the door. She might have said goodnight to the boy’s father—he didn’t respond—but all she remembered when she got home was the betrayal in the boy’s eyes, as though Nature itself had wronged him.
• • •
For two years, Jackie asked the wrong questions. She spent lunches hiding in the bathroom and ninth period on the bus to the county library, where she combed the card catalog for “STDs,” “acid,” “burns,” and “boys.” The answers she got all started off promising, but ended before her troubles truly began, as though she had wandered off the map of human reckoning.
The boys, meanwhile, got worse. They huddled outside the girls’ locker room and followed her onto the court. They inched their desks closer to hers in math class and punched each other by her locker. What friends she had—other girls—stopped inviting her to sleepovers and study nights. Jackie was knobby-kneed and freckled; none of it made sense.
One night she woke from an embarrassing dream to find her chest and arms slick with sticky sap and her mother arguing with a gruff voice at the trailer door. Jackie opened her bedroom door a crack, nightshirt clinging to her skin like wet leaves.
“Get out before I make you.” Her mother stood in her pink housecoat with a shotgun in her arms.
“There’s something in there,” the man said. “I want it.”
“I said get.” Her mother pressed the barrel into his chest, pushing him back out the door with effort and locking it behind him with a shaky sigh. They kept the shotgun by the door after that.
It was the librarian who saved her.
Jackie was hunched over cellophaned reference books again, one hand hovering over a notebook scrawled with dead ends. The librarian, shaped like a cookie jar, wandered by and took pity.
“Is it for a report? Perhaps I can help.”
Jackie chewed her pen and tried to formulate an explanation.
“A fluid that attracts?” She swallowed. “And then hurts.”
The librarian tipped her head at the cryptic description, then lit up like Christmas and went digging in the stacks, pulling out an encyclopedia of plants. There, a two-page spread detailed a verdant garden of unusual curves, streaked with red, and dotted with dew.
Dionaea, the flytrap. Nepenthes, the pitcher. Drosera, the sundew.
Plants that attracted and then hurt.
Jackie’s mother worked evening shifts at the Bluebird Diner off the highway, so Jackie was in charge of grocery shopping after school. This time, she took the envelope of cash to the other side of town, to the neighborhood where the grocery store also had a garden center. For the price of a TV dinner, she rescued a Cape sundew from the discount table, its three shriveled stalks dragging in the dirt.
Jackie put the sundew on her dresser in a Country Crock container filled with water from the rain barrel outside. Within a month, the stalks recovered and unfurled new leaves, each tipped with pinpricks of nectar. Whenever a leaf caught a gnat, it curled around its victim like a body in pleasure, and Jackie tallied each shivering meal. The little sundew became a graveyard of winged bodies and sent up taller and taller stalks, making her proud in a small, secret way.
• • •
After high school, Jackie worked alongside her mother at the diner. Ostensibly it was to save for college, but they both agreed it was nice to replace the transmission on the pickup and spring for takeout once a week.
At first Jackie waited tables, but that ended when a customer smashed the pie case lunging at her over the counter. She moved to the back, scraping dried yolks and meatloaf gravy off dishes on days when the woman fry cook was in. When Jackie ovulated, she filled the yellow dish gloves with dew that hung off her elbows in long, sticky strings. The owner, a pragmatic woman who had seen her share of oddities in the world, shook her head and bought more glove packs in bulk. Jackie tried to make up for it through sheer effort, and no one breathed a word to her mother.
Dish duty was only part of it; Jackie also took out the trash at night. The dumpsters huddled near the back of the cracked parking lot, and she had to carry the bags out one at a time, arching her back to the side for balance.
To her right, a trucker descended from his cab, bouncing off the last step onto the ancient asphalt.
“Hey, baby. You wanna feel good?”
“No, thanks.” But she couldn’t run. The trash bag was glued to her hands.
He yanked it away, unperturbed by the sticky mess shining under the lot’s lone halogen bulb. It was the two of them alone in the dark.
“There’s something about you,” he said, and Jackie pushed his face away, worried about her mother waiting at home. He screamed under her hand, so she covered his mouth, cementing it shut, and he clawed at her arms as his skin blistered. The dew drenched her, ruining her uniform and squelching in her shoes as she dragged him behind the diner, to the field they used for holiday parking. She stumbled and sobbed, moaned a prayer to the night, but the rest came regardless, had been inevitable from the start.
There in the tall grass, between gopher burrows and beneath the stars, Jackie ate him bit by bit.
She didn’t use her mouth. She didn’t need to: The dew coated her and she feasted with her whole body, sipping through her pores. He tasted of chewing tobacco, burnt coffee, a shot at the state championship, a bum arm, an ex-wife, and a sleeve of stale Rolos. The more she ate the more aroused she became, and heat knotted in her groin like red wires. The orgasm clenched her arms into him, lifting him up, but he was much lighter now.
Digestion took hours, and she emerged from her haze right as dawn blushed over the hills. The man was an armful of leather and bones and looked like old sticks when scattered around the field. She had just enough time to finish with the trash and lock up the diner before the owner arrived to open.
The man’s cab was still in the lot.
Jackie knew how to drive it.
The door swung heavy under her weight as she climbed up and onto seats smooth and plush. The keys were in the console—she knew that, too—and she fished them out with one hand while the other adjusted the mirrors. The cab wasn’t attached to any trailer, and the highway called from pavement frosted with mist.
She drove for hours, the semi cab a fortress around her, and she punched the clutch with the confidence of someone taller, stronger, and smug. At first she didn’t have a plan, then she did. The tank was full with thousands of potential miles, and the cab had a bed twice as nice as her own. Add that to the cash under the mattress and a few nighttime meal stops and she could make North Carolina no problem.
Days later she arrived at sunset and parked the cab down a forest service road. There were no signs confirming her destination, and her palms itched for a map. But she was rewarded once she stalked between the tall trees and her flashlight found the ruby-mouthed florets in the dark.
Dionaea muscipula, the Venus flytrap, grew in sandy bogs in the American southeast.
She sat among the toothy traps, the largest no longer than the pad of her thumb, and studied their process. They didn’t drip with dew, but once a fly or wasp triggered the hairs in their clamshell mouths, they snapped shut and got to work. And the plants were so small, easily missed unless you knew where to look.
The pine bark scratched through her now-stiff uniform, but the katydids croaked a pleasing refrain, and the mosquitos, ironically, left her alone. In the heat and the dark, with the flytraps and the bog, she had time to think.
She could use a beer. One of the convenience store specials that used to accompany her to the boy’s football games, until he went off to college and got too big for that town and her house. She scratched a ghost beard on her chin and froze at the motion. In the distance, a pickup with dirty disc brakes squealed down the road, a sound she would not have recognized yesterday. The world pressed in on her, now filtered through two sets of eyes, and the extra dimensions tickled her stomach. She clamped her eyes shut and swallowed until the ground under her felt solid again.
Later, Jackie drove the cab over state lines, wiped it clean, and hopped a bus back home.
• • •
Within a week of being home, it was obvious Jackie had changed. She was fidgety and impatient, snapping at her mother over the yellowing plastic of their bathroom fixtures and the worn edges of her bedsheets. Her mother pushed back at first, then simply listened, folding into old dreams on the sofa.
Early one morning, Jackie left with a knapsack and her latest paycheck stuffed into her bra. She imagined her mother being relieved.
Those were the good, lonely years. Men opened their cars and wallets at rest stops, coffee shops, and bars. She sweet-talked, motel hopped, moved up, and broke down. She learned how to dress for her body type—tucked shirts into trousers to cheat her waist and wore A-line skirts to hide her knees—and smothered her freckles with expensive foundation.
She learned it didn’t happen with every man. Never with the men who listened to their sisters or chose to be in the room when their wives gave birth. Never the men who volunteered at Little League games, bought tampons without flinching, or tried new foods with interest. Those men never touched Jackie, never wanted her at all.
It was their shadowy brothers who found her. The loud men, the rough ones, the broken stairs everyone stepped over on their way out the door. Every bar had one, and every woman was glad when he ignored her for the gangly nobody who had just walked in. Sometimes they announced themselves from across the street, but other times Jackie didn’t know what her night would be until a strange hand traced her hip.
Once they found her, the rest was the same. Jackie fed and woke up different. By the time she turned twenty-six she could descale a boat motor, give a stick-and-poke, write BASIC, read Japanese, cook a gumbo so thick and spicy it coated the throat like soft fire, tune a hearing aid, bind a chest, take a punch, run a sawmill, do an ollie, play bass clarinet, blue a revolver, plane a table, shape a baguette, and hustle a game of pool. Sometimes Jackie woke from feeding to a field of stars overhead, and she wondered if her mother got the cash she sent.
She tried to get clean, following every sign the universe gave her right to the neon-soaked steps of a lesbian club.
