Wire & Cloth
3,421 Words
Georgia fussed at the cage’s lock and could hear the metallic clicks and rattles of its mechanism. Her grandmother asked her to stop because it always got the monkeys riled up. And like clockwork, the small capuchin monkey inside began to rattle at the bars, making the kind of noise that made the hair on Georgia’s arms stand. She stuck her finger in the cage and stroked at its fur. She rubbed its tiny belly which soothed it momentarily before it began to rattle again, this time more impatiently, like it wanted to come out and be held in her arms. It made Georgia think of her older cousin who always read her psychology class notes out loud. One time, she told Georgia about the Cloth Mother and the Wire Mother, and how the monkeys preferred the Cloth Mother even though she could offer them no food. She looked at all the monkeys around her grandmother’s house. They all sat in their metal cages which were sparsely decorated. There were no Cloth Mothers to be found.
On the drive home, like most drives home from Grandma’s house, her parents argued. Her dad did not like Grandma’s monkeys, or their cages, or the way Grandma talked to them like they were babies and carried them around like babies too. Georgia always felt like her dad was scooping out chunks of her heart when he spoke that way about her. Grandma was strange and a little silly, but she always sat Georgia in her lap and made her feel like she was the most important thing in the world. Her mom argued that Grandma was not sick, just eccentric, and that it wouldn’t be fair to keep her only granddaughter from her. But Mom became quiet when Dad brought up that the monkeys could break out at any moment, that he’d read countless articles about pet monkeys clawing at people’s faces. Georgia could never picture that happening, though, the monkeys just wanted to be loved.
The next time her parents went out for their date night, they didn’t take Georgia to Grandma’s house. Instead, they hired their neighbor, Katrina, as a babysitter. Katrina had no children of her own and spent most of her time alone. She handed Georgia the TV remote and let her flip through channels while Katrina took a long phone call in the other room. Georgia flipped through boring kid show after boring kid show. And she flipped faster when noisy commercials came on. At her grandmother’s house, they’d watch black-and-white reruns of The Twilight Zone. Sometimes they gave her nightmares that were narrated by Rod Sterling, but mostly they made her want to tell her own stories–stories about mothers giving birth to pigs and towns where no one ever stops smiling. Grandma gave her a piece of chocolate for every story finished. But at home, she couldn’t find the channel that played reruns and so, she settled for a cartoon movie about mermaids.
When Katrina came back from her call, she sprawled herself out on the couch. It only took half an hour for her breathing to become steadier, only interrupted now and then by her snoring. Georgia shut the TV off and tiptoed to the front door. She so badly wanted to be at Grandma’s house but she wasn’t sure how to get there. Her parents didn’t let her have a phone, though everyone else in her class did. She tried to retrace the steps in her mind. Her parents would drive straight through dark roads for a long time, only turning by the cemetery and then at the big banyan tree. If she could remember those landmarks, then it wouldn’t be too hard to get to Grandma’s, she decided. Before she could turn the knob at the front door, Katrina awoke and grabbed her wrist.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” She asked and Georgia’s eyes widened. She had only ever heard an adult say the word “fuck” once, when her dad burnt the food he had spent hours carefully preparing for Mom’s birthday dinner.
Katrina marched her to her room for bedtime and threatened to tell her parents about the incident if she so much as peeked outside her door. Georgia sat in her bed but couldn’t sleep. She stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling which she had arranged to form constellations both real and made up. If she was born on another planet, would she have loved her alien grandma just as much as she loved her grandma on Earth? Would the alien monkeys have preferred the Wire Mother because she could keep them fed?
In the morning, Dad piled pancakes onto Georgia’s plate. A thin black film rested on top of all of them. They all had the same slightly burnt flavor that everyone pretended not to notice. Georgia chugged orange juice and hid her grimace whenever her dad looked.
“How was it staying with Katrina, sweetie?” Mom asked.
Georgia ran through the list of things she could say to answer her mother’s question–Katrina didn’t seem to care about her, or she had cursed and grabbed her, or made her go to her room even though she didn’t want to. But she knew Mom would be unhappy with any of those answers, and the only answer that really mattered was that Georgia wished they had left her with Grandma instead. She shrugged in response and carried on eating the sad pancakes. Their taste was made all the worse by Georgia’s sour feelings.
* * *
Since Georgia was no longer allowed to stay with Grandma, she had taken up calling on Fridays after school. The call came in crackly and hollow-sounding. Georgia loved that Grandma still used a landline, loved the noises her phone made when the call was about to end and Grandma fiddled, trying to get the phone receiver back on the base just the way it was supposed to. Whenever Georgia spoke to one of her parents on their cellphones, the call ended so quietly like there had never been any call at all. Georgia asked Grandma about the monkeys and she brought the one called Betsy to the phone. The small creature sniffed and made huffing noises on the other end, which Georgia responded to with her best “oo-oo”s. But Betsy never responded with anything like a traditional monkey sound. She just seemed to get the phone away from Grandma, who yelled over the line and scolded Betsy while Georgia laughed and laughed and laughed. When Grandma got back on the line, she was as out of breath as Georgia was.
Before the call could end, Grandma asked, “When will you come see me, sweetie pie?”
And Georgia promised that she would soon, though she knew that wasn’t true. Her parents were resolute in their decision, and for the first time Georgia put a name to the fiery feeling that bubbled up in her stomach when she thought of her parents–resent. The call ended and all Georgia could think about was how she was going to get back to Grandma’s.
* * *
Katrina became Georgia’s go-to babysitter, and as a result, Georgia learned how to get on her good side. Katrina liked when Georgia complimented her nail color and when she put on the channel that aired true crime documentaries. Georgia listened to countless stories about murderers and crime scenes and DNA testing. Somehow, it scared her more than anything she ever saw on The Twilight Zone with Grandma. And yet, it didn’t deter her from her escape plans. When Katrina fell asleep on the couch to the tune of grizzly murder, Georgia knew which spots on the floor to avoid so they wouldn’t creak. She grabbed her backpack which she had packed with snacks, a flashlight, her water bottle, and her dad’s Swiss Army knife. He had gotten the knife for a camping trip that they never ended up going on, but it was going to be handy, now that Georgia was taking her own trip into the wilderness.
Having learned from her previous mistake, Georgia climbed out through a window in her room—the one that was decorated with trinkets and fairy lights. She carefully removed the tchotchkes one by one, carefully aligning them on her desk, and promised to be back though she wasn’t sure when. Outside, the air was thick and humid and made beads of sweat gather at the base of her ponytail. She was thankful the streetlights illuminated her neighborhood because although Georgia was probably a bit old for it, she was still scared of the dark.
Her cousin, Alex, who had told her about the Wire and Cloth Mothers had also once read aloud about elopement, and how some kids walk off from their parents without warning. But she had been talking to her parents less, ignoring them at breakfast and after school, and hoped that had been warning enough. They never actually bothered to ask her what was wrong, only asked why she was treating them the way she was. She would just have to give them a call whenever she got to Grandma’s.
It wasn’t too difficult to retrace her steps. She thought of all the different memories attached to her streets. At 54th, her friend, Lev, had found a snake that he swore was the most poisonous in the world but upon further research was just an ordinary garden snake. It slithered away from them any time they tried to get near. On the next block over, Alex had ridden her bike over a crack in the concrete that sent her flying. Since she hadn’t been wearing a helmet, the fall fractured a part of her skull. Georgia was only five at the time and had never seen that much blood in her life, though she suspected that a lot of blood had probably been involved in her birth too. Maybe that was why it was difficult to connect to Mom sometimes. Georgia imagined she’d have a hard time connecting to something that could make you lose all that blood.
The neighborhood was strange at night even though it was familiar. The tree lined streets carried echoes from nearby houses—adult voices laughing, or arguing. She snuck herself behind a bush when a car with bright lights drove by. The white lights felt so violent compared to the warm yellow glow of her mom’s headlights whenever they went on late drives. She hoped no one would spot her because surely, they’d drag her back home. She could picture the way her parents’ faces would scrunch up in fury. Her dad’s cheeks always flushed when he was mad. But whatever punishment they’d have in store for her, could not be worse than the one they had already inflicted upon her.
She walked for a long time, for hours it seemed, but really had only been 32 minutes according to her watch. She didn’t dare glance at it for too long for fear that it would run out of battery. Its off-brand Apple Watch screen stared back at her, a picture of Georgia with her grandmother, both of them smiling. Their faces were obscured by the time but it gave Georgia a warm feeling in her chest that reminded her why she had been walking for so long in the first place. The first gloomy shapes of the cemetery began to take form further up the road.
It took her another five minutes before she was actually at the cemetery. She held her breath while walking past, but only managed a few moments before her lungs asked for some more air. She couldn’t remember where she had heard it, but she knew that breathing around cemeteries could let ghosts in. She didn’t want to be a vessel for some lonely spirit so she was relieved to discover that she was still very much herself after sucking in the night air.
Being so close to the cemetery made Georgia feel a heaviness in her heart. Someday everyone she loved would be buried in one, or maybe they’d be cremated. One day she’d be dead too, a thought that often wormed its way into her head when she tried to fall asleep at night, watching the ceiling fan spin and spin. She’d bury her head under the covers, hoping the sheets could ward off the vast void if only for some short while. Though, maybe death would be like an episode of The Twilight Zone—the one where astronauts land in a cemetery world where the dead live out their wildest dreams. If it was anything like that then it wouldn’t be so bad. She looked forward to running a zoo with Grandma. Before moving on, she made a wish for the dead, or maybe more for herself, that her vision of the afterlife was the real deal.
She made a left at the cemetery, leaving all the dead behind and allowed herself to check the time again. Her parents would be home soon which meant that Katrina would be in trouble. Or worse, maybe she’d already woken up and had called her parents, bright red nails clattering against her phone while her shaky fingers dialed her dad’s number. Georgia picked up her pace and kept an eye out for the family car. But the streets remained empty as if she’d been granted some blessing. Time moved ever so slightly faster.
On a field trip to the botanical garden when she was in the third grade, Georgia had seen a Banyan Tree for the first time. It scared her, standing on its own, far bigger than the other trees around it. It was covered in snarling limbs and roots that hung spindly and infinite-seeming. The guide talked about it reverentially, and Georgia figured a Banyan Tree was the kind of thing you showed respect to or risk angering it, like gods who’d smite their subjects for being too prideful. The guide talked about how birds spread the Banyan’s seeds, and drop them on top of other trees as they fly. The seeds sprout and take their time growing out roots that suffocate the trees they grow on. Eventually, the Banyan sucks up all the water in the ground until the tree that had served as its host dehydrates and withers away.
All Georgia could think of as the massive Banyan tree that marked the final leg of her journey towered over her, was what it had done to come into being. On her school trip she had felt some anger towards the giant thing, but so far from home, she respected its resilience. She approached the tree and ran her hands over its many roots, all overlapping and furling against one another. She thought of the monkeys’ tails at her grandmother’s house, the way they’d curl together and bunch up much like the Banyan’s roots. She’d be there soon, her fingers intertwining against their soft fur. The tree was solid and unsmooth instead. She held herself there, against the tree for long minutes, committing the strange feeling to memory. She imagined tiny monkeys in a Wire Mother’s embrace.
The final stretch of Georgia’s walk was excruciatingly long. The closer she got to Grandma’s, the further away it seemed from her. She picked up her pace but flinched any time a car drove by. She looked strange—small, alone, carrying around a backpack. She worried that at any moment red and blue lights would flash and carry her home. Or that some stranger would appear in a car like the ones in Katrina’s true crime shows. She had only ever earned her green belt in karate before she asked her parents to quit. Though she figured she could make use of her nails and teeth if she really needed to. But no car stopped her. No mom or dad showed up. No one tried to spirit her away. She watched possums cross lonely streets, their ugly-cute babies clinging desperately to their backs. She dodged sprinklers by a bright blue house that all went off in perfect synchronization, watering overgrown grass and stone sculptures of sweet cherubs.
At last, Grandma’s house stood dimly lit by the flickering streetlight. The light went on with each one of Georgia’s inhales, and off with her exhales. She took in the chipped yellow paint of the house’s exterior, bleached a pale approximation of its original form from years of sunny weather. Rocking chairs sat untouched on the porch. Her grandma had never sat on a single one because they triggered her vertigo, but Georgia would rock herself back and forth forever and ever if she could. She checked her watch one more time before knocking. Her journey had taken a total of 54 minutes. The time read “10:10” and created perfect peepholes for Grandma and Georgia’s face to poke through each zero. She knocked with the same hand her watch was on and waited impatiently for Grandma’s beautiful, delicate hands to open the door.
Grandma’s brows were furrowed when she came to the door but the sight of Georgia soothed them back into place. She pulled Georgia into a tight hug, almost too tight but Georgia was happy to bury her face into her grandmother’s chest, to breathe in deeply the scent of the stuffy perfume she used to mask the smell of cigarettes. Grandma looked around, searching for something and pulled Georgia in quickly when she didn’t find it. Georgia was relieved to finally be in the one place in the world she had ever wanted to be.
“Where are your parents, Georgie? How did you get here?” Her grandmother’s voice was heavy with sleep and concern.
Something like pride built up in Georgia’s chest. She felt a warmth and excitement at the opportunity to tell her grandmother the lengths she had endured to be reunited. The monkeys rattled around in their cages, their soft “oo-oo”s building up as in preparation for her good news. But Grandma’s eyebrows returned to the concerned place on her face when she learned that Georgia had walked so far all alone in the night.
“You could have gotten yourself killed, Georgia. Your parents must be worried sick,” her grandmother’s breath quickened, the same way Georgia’s did when she was about to cry. She reached for the phone and tapped in numbers in the order Georgia knew meant she was calling her mom.
“But I came here for you,” she told Grandma desperately, hoping that knowledge would encourage her to stop.
Georgia sat miserably through the phone call between her mother and grandmother. The rattling of cages became louder in Georgia’s mind the longer the call went on for. Her mother’s voice crescendoed in noisy sobs, sounding like something between anger and relief. Grandma clicked the phone back into its base when she was done. She pulled Georgia into her lap and brushed through Georgia’s long hair with her fingers. Angry tears rolled down Georgia’s face in thick streams, and reluctantly she leaned back into her grandmother. Her fifty minute walk would be just a fifteen minute drive for her parents. She clung to the moment and to her grandmother and thought about how fifteen minutes could be a lifetime to a mayfly.
Georgia and Grandma sat quietly together until the hum of her mother’s car became clearer in the driveway. A few monkeys screeched and shook angrily at their cages but Georgia paid them no mind. Grandma asked Georgia to sit while she had a conversation with her parents outside. She caught a glimpse of her mom’s high heels and her dad’s angry posture when Grandma opened the door. She watched them shake their heads and gesture in wild ways through the curtains. Georgia wondered if she’d ever see Grandma again.
Despite her grandmother’s betrayal, the idea of never seeing her again filled Georgia with the same desperation as all of Grandma’s monkeys stuck in their cages. She felt a wildness when she found herself in Grandma’s living room, slipping every cage lock out of its place. It was easy enough to knock every tiny door open, and each capuchin monkey broke free, ecstatic and wild. She opened the door to Grandma’s backyard which was unfenced and watched each monkey run out into the night. They let out howls and shrieks, and pulled at each other's tails as they became smaller and smaller the further away they got. And then, before they could get too far, Georgia ran out after them.