The Beasts Are All Around

Glen is six when he first feels the cold splinter of fear in his chest. It’s a few weeks into the school year. The classroom has finally lost the freshly-waxed scent. Everything smells now like eraser pulp and dirty sock. Though the back wall of the classroom is made up of windows, any sunlight that slants in is completely washed out by the fluorescent bulbs overhead.

The class gathers on the rug for storytime. They’ve just come in from recess; the roots of Glen’s hair are damp with sweat. He sits up near the teacher, Mrs. Hammond. She’s wearing shoes with straps that make it look like her feet have been trapped and restrained. Glen imagines her feet as two hairless animals, pictures them scurrying across the floor all on their own. While he’s thinking of this, Mrs. Hammond stands up, tugs at the back of her skirt. Before she sits down, she reaches out to steady herself and her hand clamps onto Glen’s head. That’s when Glen feels it, the knifing cold that paralyzes his whole body. It’s a new sensation, but there’s something so familiar about it, as if the memory of this fear does not live in his brain, but in his blood. He doesn’t move.

Mrs. Hammond lets out a giggle. Glen can feel the sticky heat of her palm, the clumps of his wet hair flattened under the weight of her. “Whoops,” she says, releasing his skull and dropping into the teacher’s chair. Glen shudders. Even after she lets go, he can still feel the outline of her fingers on his scalp. For some reason Glen’s belly button feels like it has opened up into a tunnel.

Mrs. Hammond settles back into the chair. Glen examines her, trying to catch some sign that she too has felt something unusual. But Mrs. Hammond looks the same as she always looks—her chin is like a fist and she has great big billowing cheeks.

“Who can tell me what an illustrator does?” Mrs. Hammond asks. Kids thrust their hands into the air. Glen studies his classmates. He has the urge to warn them about something, but he cannot quite grasp what. As Glen peers around the room, he catches Caleb staring right at him. They hold each other’s gazes for a long beat; Glen senses some twinge of recognition in Caleb’s expression.

“Caleb,” Mrs. Hammond says.

Caleb’s gaze shifts from Glen to Mrs. Hammond. “An illustrator draws the pictures,” he says.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Hammond says. “An illustrator draws the pictures.” She holds up the book. On the cover is a spider with eight different style shoes.

Glen knows that he has touched something true, that there is some real reason he should be afraid of Mrs. Hammond. But still, as the terror burns away, he can feel the doubt slipping in. Already he cannot quite believe himself.

________

No one tells the boys that the women might eat them, but the boys sense it. A little marble of fear in their gut when a woman’s gaze rakes over them. They cannot put a name to the sensation, but as early as four years old, they begin to notice a slight recoil in their lizard brain when they reach for the jeaned thighs of their mothers and aunts and babysitters. The boys ignore the feeling as best they can. They lean into the fleshy warmth of legs, bellies, butts; they grab for the women’s hands. Always they are touching the women’s hands, running their thumbs over the meaty sections of the palm, the knuckles, the nails. The boys know without anyone telling them that although the hands are part of a woman, it’s not hands that make a woman dangerous.

________

Though many of Glen’s childish fears have begun to melt away—the fear of toilets flushing, of thunder, of the static pattern on the television—he can feel that this new one, this fear of Mrs. Hammond, is not the sort of...