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The Corner.
Even as her body stiffened, her son stayed still in her lap, breathing such that she was sure he was asleep. Her daughter’s head was on her shoulder, heavy and warm. Were they both sleeping? She hadn’t noticed, focused as she’d been on drawing all the possibilities for escape in her head. She didn’t dare move in case she roused them. Kept her eyes fixed on the thing outside the vent.
It’s nothing, it’s nothing. Stress. A trick of the light. There’s no Corner. Andpeople don’t have yellow eyes. It’s not him. It’s imagination. Nothing, nothing at all.
But it was something. After so long in the darkness her eyes could still discern little in the black of the hidden place, but outside the vent the tiny trickle of moonlight allowed her to make out a face with pale skin. A bald head with a few scraggly hairs. The bottom of the face, the mouth, the teeth, the chin and nose, receded into darkness.
The eyes blinked, massive andyellow.
12
When she was a child, her school made a fuss over fitness and survival of the outdoor type, every field trip a hike or a cross-country skiing ordeal.
As usual she was struggling to keep up with her classmates during one such hike in fourth grade. The others were always faster, as if made speedy by their shared lifelong intake of Wonder Bread and Jell-O. At each turn of the mountain trail she hoped to see other kids waiting for her, baking red under their white-blond hair as they downed handfuls of trail mix.
She sensed a vibration in the air and stopped walking. It was the exact same feeling as when she was in the car andbuzz, she’d turn her head and meet the eyes of someone staring at her from their car. That momentary catch, the certainty, that you’re being watched, able to sense it even at eighty miles an hour. It was a perception growing ever more attuned as she anticipated the curiosity over the newly whitened marks on her face; the ones that had begun appearing soon after her mother’s death as though she’d left the weight of them behind for her daughter to take up.
Struck still, she looked for the source of her disquiet, taking in the trail and forest around her until her eyes met the golden gaze of a mountain lion. It was about thirty feet away across a river.Drought lowered, the river ran at a medium-level rush around exposed boulders that would be easy for the lion to get through and over. The animal was shaded by the aspens, the light through the quaking leaves giving its yellow fur an underwater-green cast.
Despite never before seeing a living mountain lion, she knew this one wasn’t right. It was emaciated. Its rib bones pushed out prominently like it had swallowed a barrel. Bald patches in its fur were rimmed with matted blood. The ears were straight and pricked, but one was half-gone, the tear in it jagged. The long whiskers sagged on the lowered head, which moved slowly back and forth like a movie cobra dancing to a tune. The hips and shoulders jutted up sharp, pulling the skin of the thing taut.
All the more disorienting was the lion’s deformity. When the animal opened its jaws, its long pink tongue lolled out as though it were a yawning house cat. It drew its tongue back in with a lick of its own muzzle, a lick that swished over a whole set of extra teeth, bristling and uneven, protruding from the side of the lion’s face like a second, smaller mouth.
For the first time since the markings had begun to blanch her skin, she understood that strangeness, difference, could be immaterial. Because the only thing that mattered was the way the lion’s round yellow eyes were filled with pure starvation.
She remembered what she’d been taught. She pulled her backpack off and held it above her head. Tried to yell and whoop to frighten the animal, but the fear caught in her throat, and she found she couldn’t make a sound.
So instead she sang, which she discovered, inexplicably, was not nearly as difficult as trying to scream. She tweaked lyrics and filled in unremembered blanks as she began moving down the trail.
“One, two, three-four-five, you’re the prettiest cat alive!”
She thought such an unright creature—disfigured and cast out,and, she was sure, hurt by its own kind—might like these words. Might be happy to get a compliment for once. Might, just like she did, find itself longing for them.
“Six, seven, eight-nine-ten, please just let me go again.”
She backed down the trail as best she could, working hard not to fall, eyes trained on the lion, surprised at how clear and loud her voice was growing with her fear growing beside it.
“Why won’t you let me go?”
The cat loped along the opposite bank, following her so casually she understood with horror how simple it was for the creature to keep up. How easy it would be for the lion to overtake her.
Make yourself big. Don’t turn your back to it. Make noise. Don’t, don’t, don’t fall.
The animal’s hunger took away whatever was left of its beauty, its symmetry. Her voice quavered as she sang, “Do you want to eat me so?”
She pulled at her windbreaker so it would flap, make her look larger.
Don’t trip, don’t trip.
Her fear, her focus, was such that only when she came around a bend in the trail, singing at the top of her lungs, “Please, kitty, don’t you bite, this little finger on my—” and nearly stumbled over three of her classmates, who had stopped for a snack, eyes wide and mocking, did she realize how ridiculous she must seem.
“Oh my gosh, what are you doing?” a girl giggled.
The rush of heat to her face, the embarrassment, outweighed even the relief. After all, she was ten years old. She’d already felt gangly and awkward, and now her recent loss singled her out as either pitiable or cursed.
“There’s a mountain lion following me!”
“What? Where?”
