A Restitution

CONTENT WARNING: Story contains highly disturbing and taboo themes.

Image credit: Peter Kuprin

Anyone who does not resemble their parents exactly is already a monstrosity
Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals

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Tenebrae fugaces

In the angles of the afternoon there's a lurking. There's no other way to conceive of it. Gloria senses the hostility curled into the corners of the rooms, judging the correct moment to reveal itself to her. No amount of arranging vases, dusting shelves or reconfiguring the furniture can drive away that lurking.

The domestics are spooked, and they whisper ave marias and padre nuestros to themselves, ticking off interior rosaries as they go about the tasks she's assigned. Move this table. Rehang the curtains. Nothing works.

The presence of that something remains in the dead spaces, out of reach of the corner of her eye, and the middle-aged darkskinned Latina women in her employ know it’s there and just will not tell her what it really is. They go on with their whispered rosaries and won't meet her gaze as they shift the chairs around.

The boy is going to be coming back from school soon. Daniela the nanny has taken Gloria’s SUV and gone to fetch him from St Bartolph's Infant Academy. The day is bright and the palmtrees droop their fronds devout as sunworshippers out beyond the pool where you might even hear the waves shiver themselves onto the beach.

On a day like today, Gloria should be out getting some rays, SPF120 to protect her fine pale skin. In recent days while sunning, though, she’s sensed another sun beyond or inside the bright summer sun, a black sun of much greater power. She wants to gaze at it again until its blackness burns through, to see it even when her eyes are closed.

But she has no call to be out there in the light when so many dark angles of the house remain. If she could just get a handle on the way they cluster, she could do something. If those women would only break off from their Santa María madre de dios and just tell her where the darkness really is.

Bzz bzz. Another text, this time a WhatsApp:

Where you are is stoln property. Their must be A Restitution

Blocked, like the other, on the regular cellphone text, and the other, the one on Insta. That obscene picture, but that maybe had nothing to do with this. No mention of restitution on that post, the gaping mouth, the rags of toilet paper clinging to the lips. Blocked, blocked again, but it kept coming back. The clamping device, holding open the jaws. Maybe nothing to do with stolen property or restitution or clinging darknesses in the angles of evening. Maybe nothing at all.

Bzz bzz. Another text.

were on the way traffic heavy downtown

Daniela coming back with the boy.

Soon the graylonely stretch of the afternoon will wither away as the routine of after-school breaks back in. Gloria will wave to her clutch of domestics and bid them buenas tardes, to play mother to the boy, fussing with Daniela over sandwiches and glasses of milk, unpacking gym clothes, reviewing homework assignments. Meanwhile the true darkness outside will envelop first the east then the west, and will come to bring completion to those dark somethings in the corners and stairwells of the home. At that point lights will go on, homework will be done, and TV news switched on.

He will come home then and darkness will be completed outside just as all the lights switch on inside. New shadows cling to new angles, nobody now to even ask what they mean. She’ll tell him then of the news on the TV, they’ll lament the day and the nation, and dinner will be heated up and served.

Her phone rang for a voice call. Daniela. She takes the call but it is a man, maybe a man, a scratched voice rustling words like dead leaves with a dusting of dry beetles:

"Your place is on land that was stolen. Stolen. There must be a restitution. Rest-"

She hangs up and checks again. It is not "Daniela" marked on the call log, it's "Daniel". But she knows no Daniel, has never put that name on her contact list. Could she call the police to report this? She could, but then there'd be a thing, an exhausting thing. And she'd be lonelier than ever amid all the blue uniforms and the well-fed flesh, the ma'ams and the quizzical glances. And he would be here then and it would become more of a thing. For now, she's going to let it go. For now.

For a time she even tries to marshal the servants into another rearrangement of the blue living room, the salon as she calls it. They are resentful and sullen, but they do it, as ¿cómo que no lo van a hacer? Their lips seem to stumble on their muttered prayers now, the glances to the corners of the room grow furtive, and in the end Gloria gives up and tells them to leave the couch back where it was to start with.

Another call. Daniela. But this time really Daniela. Blocked ‘Daniel’ of the rustling scarabs has called twice but been blocked each time. Now permablocked.

"Ey, señora, we're on the way and -" crackle and rustle, then that voice again "- that was stolen -" hiss and pop "- accident on -" loud crackle "- boulevard, so we delayed ab - " silence and a soft breath "- must be a restitution. A rest-"

She yells out over the dry beetle voice: "Daniela! There's something, I mean someone, on the line! I can't hear you! I guess you're gonna be late, I'm waiting, text me when you can!" Then hangs up before the other voice, that Daniel, can come back on the line to seethe out more of these words, these mystifying bothersome hexes or threats or whatever the fuck they are.

She has no idea what that even means, stolen property. They purchased this house for $5.3 million ten years ago, bought and paid for. Paid off the mortgage by now too, so the land and the house and all the property is rightfully theirs, free and clear. His, but also hers, if he should ever be gone, hers alone.

She breathes deep, tries to clear her mind of anxiety just as they've cleared their home of debt. Free and clear. Calmer now, she thinks: grifter. Chancer. Restitution is only a fancy word for a scam. Preying on the weak and the frightened. Victimizing the defenseless.

She calls out for Siri to play some Japanese jazz and tells the domestics they can go home early today. She'll be alone for a while, until Daniela gets back with the boy or until he comes home from work. The women seem eager enough, and bustle through the kitchen door and out the pool gate as the rose-and-orange tones of sunset gather in the western ocean. They never gave her even the smallest hint of what the shadows in the angles want or need from her.

A short time. Five minutes, ten, or forty? Looking at the vase on the counter.

Bzz bzz. A text from Daniela, but nothing else.

we held up brb farewell

Smooth tones of Japanese jazz on rich speakers, high, lilting erasure of some zen something of easy-listening, speaking of heights reached by jazzy Japanese, soothed some.

After a time he comes home. He passes into the kitchen, takes a beer from the fridge, then takes his work upstairs to the study. The door closes softly on the first floor.

Out tones blast brass, the bzz bzz of the phone won't cease, ignore, the beat is beaten, no more, ceasing then floating, the bzz bzz, bless that blare, then tune out.

After a time he comes down and switches off the music. He comes close to her and asks quietly if the boy is back. She shakes her head, eyes closed and breathing soft, contained.

Her mood lost by him, so long, hear the shallow gasp, not backbeat sleepy caress of popbebop, cares slip back as he grasps her shoulder, at long last her doom with him.

"She's held up somewhere. Be right back. All's well."

Checks her texts but there's nothing else.

Around nine o'clock her SUV pulls up in the driveway and parks. Daniela is back with the boy. They clatter into the house like it’s a normal homecoming.

But he wasn't the boy she knew. He was changed for some other. He was not even a boy. An it.

It was changed.

Image credit: Jon T

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Massa carnis

It's not the boy, it's a meat puppet, a thing made of flesh that isn't even really like him. It can’t fool anyone. Look at the eyes: there's nothing there. Gloria can see it, see it so clearly, why can't they? Daniela takes it into the kitchen and gets it a sandwich. It devours greedily, spilling milk and demanding another sandwich with extra mayo. Listen to that voice: husky with falseness, not a boy but a hulking thing coiled in a small body. Words brazen with the luster of the false.

He, meanwhile, has settled down with the TV and the game. Gloria, reining in her frantic desire to tear its flesh and scream in its face, asks Daniela what held them up.

"I dunno señora, like, you know, the thick...  was real thick on the streets, like ¿viscoso? Moving real slow like slug. That was a problem, other was the... choque, like shock?"
"Anything happen at the school?"
"Just, you know, change. They change him."
"What?"
"Change hes pants. He make caca like baby. They give me caca pants in plastic bag? You want that I wash?"
"No... Yes, but let me look at it first. Leave the pants over on the counter."
"Leave caca pants in the kitchen, señora?"
"Leave caca pants in kitchen, thank you, Daniela."

It spills more milk on the counter, sits there mashing the sandwich with its mouth opening and closing like a machine. Milk dribbles on its chin and drips onto the floor like beads of white sweat.

No use talking to him. He's lost in the game and belching call-outs to the players, relaxing after a hard day. Daniela puts it to bed, and as she leads it up the stairs Gloria scrutinizes her closely for signs of complicity. She must know about it, that's why she's hinting with her babble about change and shock and viscosity.

It's not what it should be, that boy. It's no boy, no boy at all, that's all there is to say about that. Now the meaning of the gathering darkness in the angles between two walls is clear.

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The disorder called Capgras delusion is one of the rarest and most colourful syndromes in neurology (Capgras, 1923). The most striking feature of this disorder is that the subject comes to regard close acquaintances, typically parents, children, spouse, or siblings, as 'impostors'.
V.S. Ramachandran, "Consciousness and body image"

Changelings are put in the place of legitimate children by Satan in order to plague mankind. Such a changeling child is only a piece of flesh, a massa carnis, because it has no soul. I, Dr Martin Luther, saw and touched a changeling. It was twelve years old, and from its eyes and the fact that it had all of its senses, one could have thought that it was a real child. It did nothing but eat; in fact, it ate, shit, and pissed. When bad things happened in the house, it laughed and was happy; but when things went well, it cried. Therefore, I said: "You should have all Christians repeat the Lord's Prayer in church so that God may exorcise it." They did this daily, and the changeling child died the following year...
Martin Luther, "Changelings from the Devil"

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She can't sleep but she does sleep, or maybe doesn't. There's a long graydeep hole where she falls in, while he snores next to her. A hole where she's deep inside and her small voice could never reach up and out to the world. That could be a sleep, or just what it appears to be, a deep engulfing hole.

The breathing becomes irregular and then regular again. Clocks halt and then go, heartbeats falter and pulse. All the shadows that gathered during the evening come to inhabit the night like skittering mice, tiny soft claws on the pine floor.

During that time it comes to her. The thing that replaced the boy. Its bubble head, its slobbering mouth. It creeps like apes on forest floors. It clambers up onto the bed and lifts the sheet. She cannot move and does not breathe. It lifts her cotton nightgown, bordered in pink primroses.

Gloria falls into a graydeep hole where its fingers and its tongue and its thing cause no harm to her and does not do anything to her. It's not the boy, this much is clear. Even clearer now in the dead night as he snores beside them. Young boys just don't do things like those.

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They solemnly devote themselves in body and soul to abomination, offer babies not yet born to the Evil One, and persistently engage in the Devil’s filthy deeds through carnal acts with incubus and succubus demons
Heinrich Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum

Philomathes: It is not the thing which we call the Night-Mare, which takes folkes sleeping in their bedds, a kinde of these evill spirits?
Epistemon: No, that is but a naturall sickness, which the Mediciners hath given that name of Incubus, it being a thicke phlegm falling into our breast upon the harte, while we are sleeping, intercludes so our vitall spirits, and takes all power from us, as makes us think of some unnaturall burden or spirit, lying upon us and holding us downe.
King James VI of Scotland, Daemonologie

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In excelsis deo

All these things happened in the time before, high summer with the black sun’s intensity behind the bright. Now Gloria spends whole days staring at flower arrangements made by Susana and Luisa in the kitchen. If she thinks anything, it's that flowers cannot possibly be allowed to exist in the same world as that thing that has taken the boy's place. Some days she just thinks it, other days she tears them out of the vase and stomps on them, lilies and orchids, and smashes the vase and cuts her hands and her wrists on the shards of it. and splashes blood all over the floor.

And then she looks again and they're still in place, those lilies and orchids, sitting on the kitchen counter in the creamy white vase with the hourglass body of a virgin. Nothing has been touched. She stands there and stares and stares while the domestics slip past her and fuss in the kitchen.

In July Susana gives her notice, and then leaves before her time. She's gone before the end of the month. Sara stays, though. It's important that she stays because in her home village once she killed a mountain lion. Sara keeps arranging the flowers. There is no shattered vase, no torn bouquet, no blood on the floor. There's no blood from Gloria at all this month, nor the month before. She's pregnant.

When she tells him, he thinks it's his and congratulates her. He doesn't even notice the creases of shame on her forehead, her dry tears that never come. He sees nothing. He goes to his room and he drinks his beer. Sports picks and transfer markets. Crypto and porno. Hentai and bukkake and barely. He thinks she doesn't know how to check a browser history. Such contempt. Such greedy greedy eyes.

He thinks the thing growing in her is his. He imagines some night among the snoring he did it to her. Dreamed of a sweet marital scene while the other thing was happening just inches from his open mouth. The belches of beer. Taking a well-earned rest. Greedy dreamer. Beads of white dribbling and dripping.

So much for what he knows.

It knows, though, that thing. It grins and smirks at her in idiot triumph. Daniela strokes its head while they get ready for school and it burbles content. Daniela scowls at Gloria, what a bad mother you are, but Gloria is no mother to this thing, and has given it what a mother cannot. Rather, it has taken what it must not take, should never have taken. At times she wonders what happened to the real boy, where they took him after the change. Then she remembers the voice crawling with dry beetles. Restitution. Then she prefers not to know.

Now come the grayempty days. The graypanic stalling of inaction. Days pass in low saturation, low contrast. Off-center, like the framing is wrong. The flowers are set in the vase on the kitchen countertop every day. The vase remains unbroken, swelling like a virgin mother.

They no longer sit down to dinner. If she attempts to eat, she sees her plate of food crawling with grubs and maggots, the relucence of phosphor-glow corruption shining out from the pulsing greycream matter of the meat.

When she vomits, he thinks it’s charming, the helpless expectant mother and her little sicknesses. He doesn’t help at all, but he looks on in complacent condescension, offering his quiet blessing. Uncomfortable for him, nevertheless, and better to take a TV dinner in the den and catch up on the day’s sports.

Texts come from the school. Disturbing behavior. Days-long absences with carer Daniela offering badly-spelled notes of excuse. Signed in Gloria’s name. She assents then, if they call her. Yeah I wrote it. She blocks their texts, blocks out the school. They still get the check from him, though. It's enough.

Things she hears, things she reads, things she dreams. All changed in the greytime.

But then one day she has the courage for it. Calls that place, goes for a consultation. Termination, mid-term, no complications expected –  but is she sure? She's sure. Does the fa– does her partner not wish to be here for the consultation? He's busy. He's away on a work trip.

But he sees the credit card bill from the consultation. That's enough of that. He cancels the card, brings in his beer for a heart-to-heart with her in the kitchen, staring at the countertop. Don't you want our baby?

She is told then she does want it, and so she does, logically speaking. The graydays pass by then without any trace.

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There is growing clinical evidence that dissociative fugue may occur especially as a defense during trauma, as an attempt to maintain mental control at the very moment when physical control has been lost. One patient with dissociative identity disorder reported "going to a mountain meadow full of wildflowers" while being sexually assaulted. She would concentrate on how pleasant and beautiful this imaginary scene was, as a way of detaching herself from the immediate experience of terror, pain and helplessness.
José R. Maldonado and David Spiegel "Dissociative Disorders", American Psychiatric Association Textbook of Psychiatry

Whereas it is oft seene that a person possess'd by the deville is thereupon render'd thoughtstruck and confused, for it formeth parte of the devilles workings that he should worke confusion so as to facilitate his designs more fully.
Dr John Dee, Secret Booke of Witchcrafte and Daemonologie

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De generatione animalium

Sara and the new one are hanging the decorations. Stars and merry Santas. Skulls on the Christmas tree. Garlands of briars with sharp thorns that draw blood and drip onto the creamy carpet. Hard to get out. The lights blink but are unsaturated and lack hue. Tinsel bleached out silver gray. Mistletoe berries like white liquid beads dripping.

Gloria stands in the living room this holidaytime, all the days and nights gone resting on her like so many stones, and feels the shadows in the corners gather up their several darknesses for a final assault.

She's six months gone, but the thing inside her has swollen to the size of a full-term fetus. She's been to ob-gyn with him and in the clinic the grinning fool of a doctor smiled and said all was well, pretended to herself and to them that the ultrasound was normal. But she saw it, and it was not normal. Son of its father. Beyond shock and beyond panic now, she looked with pure indifference on the thing that was growing in her, its involutions and its parodies of flesh. Its leering face visible in the shifting blur of the grayblur screen, knowing its time was coming soon.

Exhausted. All the options are exhausted, the permutations of this or that action she could take, she should take, in order to escape her fate. The restitution that's due. But that's why it's called fate. It means it's fated. Sara, who killed a puma in her homeland, tore out its heart with a daggerblade, agrees with her that the boy is not a boy, that her swelling belly contains an atrocity, but she says that el destino es el destino, no hay nada que hacer.

She is becoming like Sara. She knows what's happening. The thing that appears to be the boy has puffed out her belly but at the same time it has squeezed her soul, compressed it. Now her little tiny Gloria self is compressed within her to the size and density of a singularity point, like those things inside the centers of black holes on the TV documentaries. Her mind compressed to a teeny tiny atom of self while her belly swells with a thing that she has seen and cannot forget. It will expand to claim the universe when it is born.

The house too, once so expansive and open, its clean white lines and marble fireplace and kitchen tops, the white crisp angularity of it all, has lost its joy to her and crowded in upon itself. It's shrunk to the size of a doll's house, with Gloria and Sara as little dolls roaming round during the day. When night falls, and he comes home, and Daniela feeds and bathes the - when Daniela is here - then the house expands again to accommodate the ones with selves and lives outside. Only in the graydark night does it close in again, the shadow close in around the bedroom like the grip of a fist in a killer's black glove.

Then it comes as it always has, but it knows better than to damage the fetus she carries in her swelling belly, full-term girth though just seven months in. It requires other acts, things that make use of other spaces and orifices, gesturing to her what it wants. Now she is sure that he watches too, the proud father. The obscenity of it is not something that repels him, far from it. He knows it means something transcendent, something beyond the office and beer and the game. It excites him, though he pretends to be asleep as he watches.

Suddenly the way of escape occurs to her. She considers. It makes perfect sense. It can be done. But certain things must be made to get out of her way.

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The subject then gives birth to themself by fantasizing their own bowels as the precious fetus of which they are to be delivered; and yet it is an abject fetus, they have no other idea of the bowels than one of abomination, which links them to the mother who is devouring and intolerable.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

It is said that witches are able to impede the power of procreation, so that a woman does not conceive, or if she does, she has a miscarriage; or if she does not have a miscarriage, they kill the children after birth. If these things were true, the sorceresses would certainly be able to destroy the entire world.
Heinrich Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum

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Parvulus enim natus est nobis

Once it’s decided, in the run-up to Christmas, then it’s easily enough arranged. He is planning for them to go to his parents’ place up the coast for Christmas lunch. So it must be before then.

She never considered before now how simple it would be. That’s because she was blind to what connected her and what separated her. Back then, before the change, she considered that her house and her wealth set her apart from them. Without thought, she considered it so. And so her true place was stolen.

Now it’s very different. Now she is connected in different ways, the wiring rewired, the black sun shining in different corners of the house and casting different shadows. She sees the darkness they see, her long-lost sisters.

All the rest is easy enough. Sara killed a puma in her home village. She thinks nothing of the task. Her brother Diego is a fisherman, hunting the big fish out in the channel. He has a boat and makes meat chum with his machete.

He is considering winding up his business because the authorities are sniffing round the worksite and menacing action over the employment of undocumented workers, unlicensed premises, unsafe practices. He moans regularly about it, over his beers and nuggets.

She hears dimly and takes note. It’s easy then to persuade him to close down the firm a few weeks early and book a long Christmas vacation. Reap the benefits of all the hard work. He quits at the start of December, starts hitting the booze hard.

Stupefied, it’ll be painless for him when it comes. He doesn’t deserve any special agony, he is an obstacle not a villain, so this is for the best.

The key thing is the home. It will be hers then. She can open it to Sara, to Diego, to Daniela and their families. It will be a restitution of sorts. Perhaps then the black sun will shine brighter on all of them.

On Christmas Eve night the curandera, a friend of Sara’s, comes quietly to the house. An ancient woman called Dolores – meaning pains, appropriately enough. She’s gone through pains and knows how they are inflicted and relieved.

He snores, Jack Daniels bottle tipping over in the bedroom. A few drips only on the carpet, all of it nearly drunk away. Sleep in heavenly peace. Dolores leads Gloria into the bathroom and spreads plastic sheeting on the tiled floor.

The extraction of Gloria’s near-term fetus is as harsh and excruciating as could be expected. The curandera’s medicines help a little, but the pain surges and flays its way through their numbness, a clarifying force that unfogs Gloria’s mind even as her body thrashes to expel this unwanted thing.

Once it’s out, it struggles in its grim oppositional way, a strong and healthy one sin duda. No matter - it’s drowned in the bathtub by Dolores, who chants a breathy rosary to its dark nativity and swift passing. Blood swirls from birthcaul then, and drifts in the tub. The afterbirth follows. A bucket for what remains. Then the plastic sheeting is cleared away.

The changeling is next. Woken by Daniela in the night for a midnight dip in the backyard pool, it shivers but is happy enough to splash under the moon. It struggles less than the other, this meat puppet, perhaps welcoming its quick escape from voidself. From her bedroom window, Gloria watches it burble and sink. Not happy, not sorry; when you know you’ve done what’s necessary.

The blister moon looks down and gleams in satisfaction. Daniela in her swimsuit splashes into the pool and fishes it out. A second bucket, somewhat larger, and the preparations are done. Dolores and Daniela take their buckets to the beach where Diego’s boat awaits a final voyage to the feeding grounds.

Now it’s midnight. Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. He snores on, dreams of nothing at all, remaining whisky breaths counted now in mere dozens. Sara is there to give her strength. She grips her hand and says hermana, te voy a dar mi mano. Tú me vas a dar tu casa. Será un intercambio justo. Por fin, todos estaremos en paz.

Then Daniela will take her SUV and go to fetch the missing guest. The boy. Their family will be reunited, Gloria and the missing one. Mother and true child.

There’s so much to do this Christmas Day. The boy will be coming back home to her. After the work is done.

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