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  The woman spoke directly at Ann in a firm measured tone. She said in a throaty voice that her car had broken down at the top of the road and asked if she could use her phone to call someone for help. The woman wore an electronic bracelet on her wrist that flickered blue light as she languidly waved her hands in emphasis, almost as if she was bored. Ann noticed small, circular blue blotches on her right arm.

  Before Ann knew it, she was pulling the woman in from the cold and the heavily falling snow. Tall and lean, the woman shook snow off her boots, then trailed behind Ann into the sitting area where the fire blazed and a nearly empty bottle of scotch stood on the mantelpiece. She noticed Ann’s red-rimmed eyes, her tear streaked cheeks.

  “Bad timing?” she asked in a cool but empathic tone. “I won’t keep you.”

  The alcohol she’d consumed made Ann feel light-headed, although she was happy to have company.

  The woman tucked strands of hair behind her right ear. For the first time, Ann spotted a large birthmark that had been obscured by her hair. It was blue, lotus shaped. She’d never seen a blue scar before. She tried not to stare. The flaw made the woman appealing and somehow more approachable. Ann had always admired physical differences that gave people an air of uniqueness.

  “What’s brought you to Frederiksberg? What do you do? I make jams,” Ann said, slightly embarrassed at her eagerness for conversation.

  The stranger smiled patiently, rubbed her hands by the fire. “I procure unusual things for people, which means I travel extensively to all sorts of places. Have you always wanted to be in the cottage industry?” the woman asked.

  Ann held her gaze. There was a kindness there and genuine interest she had not expected. Ann was used to very few people paying her any attention.

  “I enjoy making jams. I’m good at it. And, it may not sound ambitious but I’ve always wanted to be a mother. I like children you see,” Ann answered.

  “Yes, I find that helps,” the woman quipped. They both laughed. This stranger had a way about her, a warmth that wasn’t immediately apparent.

  The woman blew her breath against her fingers. “Being a mother must be special. I say that because I never knew my mother. I have a feeling your child will know you well.”

  Ann flushed, pleased at the compliment. The stranger reached for a photograph of Ann and with an older woman on the mantelpiece.

  “Is this your mother?” she asked.

  Ann nodded.

  They had been canoeing that day. In the picture she and her mother stood by large rocks laughing, wet from the water, surrounded by rolling mountains shrouded in mist. A cabin sat on a mountain in the distance. Moments before, their canoe had tossed over sending them into thrashing waters. At the time, for a brief moment in the water, Ann had considered holding her mother down beneath the swirling surface, silencing her cruel taunts forever.

  “You’re just like your father,” her mother Begitta used to say. “You’re weak, there’s no place in the world for weaklings, Ann.” Ann imagined what it would be like to never hear those words again, briefly entering the rushing void in which only her mother’s silence remained. But then the moment passed.

  On the journey back home in the car, as her mother talked, all Ann could see was white water steadily cresting over her mother’s flapping pink tongue.

  The stranger did not comment on the photo, instead she smoothed her hair back, turned to Ann and asked, “Is there someone I can call?”

  “Oh! Of course. Let me ring Dieter,” Ann offered. “He has a truck. It rarely gives him trouble. He’s a mechanic you see.”

  The women drank ginger tea while they waited for Dieter. When he arrived, brusque and slightly irritated at having been dragged out of his home that late in the evening, the stranger held Ann’s hands, smiling crookedly. “Impossible things happen all the time, Ann,” she said. Then she swept out behind Dieter, her long legs disappearing through the front door, into the unforgiving weather.

  After she left all that Ann recalled was the woman’s long, slender fingers, as they had held Ann’s own hands; their coolness and yet their kindness. Stumbling a little by the fireplace, she noticed a plain white business card slipped into the photo frame on the mantle. Love Larry Inc. it read in unfussy black text. Sperm donor bank. Ann removed the card slowly, as if hypnotized. Her mouth went dry. Her heartbeat quickened.

  Outside, gates rattled. She could hear the crunch of tires in snow, a whistle trapped in a keyhole somewhere that belonged to her. Standing there alone, drunk and feeling pathetic, she thought about her mother Begitta, reliving the car accident that had killed her. She imagined walking out into the road and leaping through someone’s windscreen, reaching for her mother’s talking, battered head through the glass.

  She held the card up to the light. Love Larry Inc. How bizarre. She cried softly thinking of Begitta and of the stranger’s red mouth, plump like ripe fruit and all the secrets it took with it into the crevices of winter.

  Ann heard about the town’s Neighbourhood Watch gathering through a customer. She had not received the invitation in the usual way; a folded sheaf of printed eggshell-coloured paper slipped into her letter box. It was only on the night, arriving soaked from the heavy rain and loitering at the back of the main playhouse room which doubled as a venue for local activities that she realised the meeting was about Henri. Her son had become the main item on their agenda. One by one, people she knew as neighbours and customers stood in the half-filled space to air their concerns, emboldened by their numbers and common small mindedness. Their palpable fear took the shape of a virus.

  “What about our children? I don’t want that… that thing to turn on any of my girls one day,” Gustav said. A man she had gone to school with and comforted when his wife Elaina had died from leukemia.

  “We have a right to know where he came from, what he is. Ann is too secretive. I don’t trust her. She doesn’t have our best interests at heart; if she did they’d leave,” Marie, the town seamstress, interjected. She carried a needle beneath her tongue. Her hands fluttered nervously, ready to depart, to catch the things she disapproved of in angles of light.

  “What if it… he’s carrying diseases?” Paulina asked. A painter who had lost part of her memory several years back, she could walk into a scene from her past mid-conversation. “Maybe he needs to be quarantined,” she continued.

  Enraged, Ann’s voice took over. “You’re the ones who need to be quarantined!” Ann spat. “He’s just a boy. He’s innocent.”

  Murmurs shot through the crowd sucking the air out of the room. Each adjusted their bodies to look at her.

  “This is our home,” Ann said. “We’re not going anywhere.” Her voice trembled. The thin needle beneath Marie’s tongue pricked holes in the quiet that followed. Ann left.

  Back out in the rain, she molded their betrayal with small movements. Ugly pulped features fighting for a reassembling governed the night. Ann felt hollow, as though they’d eaten her defenses to grow back the skin on their faces. She shrieked in anger, frustration. The only response was the squish of water in her boots.

  Walking back, her mind fixated on the eight-limbed baby in India and the extremely hairy circus man from Peru. She thought about this man all the way home, wondering what had become of him.

  Ann decided to take Henri to the cabin in Mons Klint for his eighth birthday, as her mother had done for her. It was a rite of passage that had been in their family for generations. Her hands fidgeted at the wheel. She took deep breaths starting the engine, checking the side mirrors nervously. She’d packed enough for three days, including two Dr. Seuss books and a copy of Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales, which Henri loved. Once, he’d told her he wished he could enter those worlds and discover other people like him. There, he didn’t think he’d be asked why he was dressed for Halloween early.

  Henri had never left Frederiksberg. The trip excited him. As he entered their little blue car a part of him worried who they may meet. What if they didn’
t like him or his mother? What if his tail frightened them? He had gotten used to the looks people gave him back home; curiousity, wonder, fear and sometimes outright dismay. There were a few kind people who were nice to him, several of Ann’s customers gave him sweets, asked how he was. Some of the older ones had kindness in their eyes.

  He enjoyed accompanying his mother on her rounds but he didn’t tell Ann that sometimes he wondered what it was like to not have his tail, to be like other boys who appeared carefree, who didn’t have to cut holes in their trousers to make room for a tail. It seemed he wasn’t only making room for his tail, but other unknown things. He felt guilty having these thoughts. Ann would often say, “You’re extraordinary, why would you want to be like everybody else?”

  He knew if he mentioned these feelings she would worry. She’d start doing the thing that set his teeth on edge, pulling out clumps of hair in frustration. He never knew what the right response was when she got like that. He’d sit in his room running a hand over the length of his tail, eyes watering, trying to calculate the weight of it, imagining it spinning in the sky over the buildings of the town before landing unceremoniously on doorsteps.

  He watched his tail in mirrors around the house, while it floated slick and wet in the bath. He trimmed a little fur off it; spread the thick hairs on his white sheet, where they lay grey against the starkness. He took to secretly flicking through newspapers and magazines to see if there was anybody like him. Ann wouldn’t let him watch TV, claiming it corrupted the mind, that once it was set in motion, it couldn’t be undone. He looked up the word undone in Ann’s dictionary. It meant incomplete, not tied or fastened. The word flashed in his mind.

  He’d have to attend school soon. The thought brought a stone of dread to his throat. Suddenly the car stalled. Ann fumbled with the keys. A feeling of sickness and resentment crept into his chest. His stomach lurched.

  They drove for a few hours under a grey sky. Ann had forgotten parts of the route so they got lost now and again, stopping on remote roads to ask passing drivers for directions. Henri played his part, flagging cars down using his bright, orange drawing book. Back on their way again, he busied himself sketching a father figure with a tail and an injured blue deer. He drew the father in detail; wearing a dapper tweed jacket, holding a passport to wander hidden worlds, to see things the average eye would miss. The father pointed at the deer, instructing it. Above the picture, Henri scribbled the word Speak.

  Their first day there, Ann taught Henri how to pitch a tent. The wind knocked it over so they pitched it again, laughing. She took him fishing, amused as he held his tongue up to the bait. On the second day they climbed the cliffs slowly, steadily towards the blue man Ann had promised was waiting with a gift but who turned out to be just an engraving on one damp wall.

  She was glad they were away from the eyes of others just for a little while, happy to teach him things she was scared she might one day lose the will to do. Finally, she took him to the waters where the shape of a tossed canoe still lingered. Some would have found it alarming that Ann spent several hours in the same spot where she’d considered drowning her own mother, teaching her son how to hold his breath underwater.

  Shivering, she watched his little legs kicking, arms and head breaking the surface gasping, “How long do we have to do this for?”

  They kept at it together. She held his hand underwater, in the cold blue even when she felt the brush of something inside tugging them. She wondered if they’d become sacrifices to the undertow, if her ghosts would swap their irises for blind eyes. Even when all the eels and fish wielded red mouths, swimming aggressively towards them, they practiced until Henri could hold his breath counting to thirty. Afterwards on the bank, holding him tightly, she promised to buy him a telescope. She told him that she’d taught him that lesson because he would need it. The drive home was one of quiet comfort.

  Henri’s first day at school had been stressful for Ann. That morning, he stood before her in his black trousers and the white shirt she’d ironed three times. His shoes were polished to a high shine and his tail was tucked inside his trousers.

  When they arrived at the large black school gates, she ushered him in firmly. On the steps, surrounded by excited, yapping children whom Ann imagined carried soft rag toys in their small rucksacks, he tentatively turned to look at her one last time, searching for something in her expression. She waved enthusiastically, feeling fresh tears emerging, rubbing the car keys with shaking fingers.

  By late afternoon, she received a call from the secretary whose tone was brisk and impersonal asking her to come to the school. Arriving back at the school, she found Henri in the lobby, kicking the shiny floor with restrained anger, a pained expression on his face. The hours had been unkind; ripping buttons from his pristine, thrice-ironed shirt, sullying it with food and dirt. There were scratches on his forehead, a small bruise on his right cheek. His hair smelled of urine, the back of his trousers was ripped open and his tail stuck out, exposed once and for all to see.

  “What happened?” she sank down, grabbing his shoulders. “Who did this to you?”

  He shook his head and begged urgently, “Please let’s go home.”

  Henri was convinced something was wrong with his mother. He began to notice small clumps of hair dotted around the house. The middle part of her head was now almost completely bald. He found himself measuring it with small internal fingers, tracing the growing pale patch, watching it suspiciously as though it was an entry point to frightening things she couldn’t bring herself to tell him.

  She had lost interest in cooking, so Henri made her jam sandwiches, simple meals from cold cuts of meat and whatever else he found rummaging through the kitchen cupboards. She listened to her radio obsessively. Now and again, he caught her dancing wildly in the evenings. Blasting the radio, she flung her body around, as if wanting to disappear through its movements. Other occasions, she sat up quietly in her bed, the radio low, the lamplight on, a thumbed novel on her dresser, listening intensely for something.

  Henri felt scared, sad and alone. He felt responsible somehow for Ann’s behaviour but he didn’t know what to do. Most people in the town kept away from them. He knew it was because of his tail. Ann had no real friends. He realised this was what people meant by being lonely. He looked the word up in the pocket dictionary Ann kept on her bedroom bookshelf.

  Loneliness: the quality of being unfrequented and remote; forsakenness, abandonment, rejection.

  Henri thought loneliness was possibly the worst thing in the world.

  One morning, Ann had set two glasses on the mantle piece, lit the fire and changed out of her dressing gown. Pacing before the fireplace, she muttered, “I’m waiting for someone” while anxiously wringing her hands. “She never told me this could happen. She never warned me!” Her voice was sharp, accusatory. It froze his insides.

  Hours later, the second glass was still untouched. The woman, whoever she was to his mother, never came.

  Henri began walking to school by himself. Ann had become tired all the time, preferring to lie down in her room. En route to school that morning, the feeling of drowning, of doom was overwhelming. Ann appeared to him randomly along the way, a hologram in the cold, frantically tugging out clumps of hair, dropping them on the ground. They twitched, small hairy animals in the snow.

  At lunch time, Henri hid in the last toilet cubicle as the afternoon bell rang. He’d run on instinct, tripping along the way. Passing a white sink with a crack in it, he scrambled for safety behind the grey toilet door. He sat with his back against the wall, knees up, trying to hold himself still. He imagined disappearing through the crack in the sink, emerging through the other side with a small scar on his chest and without his tail which had been carefully hidden inside his trousers, tucked and flattened.

  He heard the sound of car tires pulling away in the snow, children laughing, scattering out into the playground. Other children laughed, played, were happy. These things felt foreign to Henri. The p
anic rose inside him. His breaths became short and fast. His heart raced. A burning sensation spread in his throat as he realised he’d forgotten to lock the cubicle door. He reached out to slide the lock into the catch, hand trembling. It was jammed, damaged from the door being kicked in.

  Oh God, Henri thought as footsteps approached in the hall, please don’t let them come in. Please let them pass.

  His arm sank to the ground. The lock caught on his tongue mockingly. He pulled his small, brown school bag closer as if getting comfort from it, clinging to the strap. There was nothing inside it he could use to defend himself, except a fork he’d grabbed from the kitchen counter at home, sticky with maple syrup.

  He closed his eyes unable to move, to scream, fear thick in his mouth. He saw the fork spinning at the bottom of the bag, caught in the moments his heart sank and died each day before swelling and beating again. A sharp pain shot through his chest to his tail. He wished he had a father, a brother. They would know what to do. Why didn’t he know what to do? He opened the bag, grabbing the fork. He closed his eyes.

  The main toilet door swung open followed by a high laugh he recognised, that somehow seemed disembodied from the small frame it belonged to, reaching him ahead of the pack. His grip on the fork tightened. Cold sweat ran down his back. The footsteps were so close he could trace them with the fork, his silvery inadequate weapon. The cubicle door swung open slowly, sending a shiver through him. His fork clattered pathetically to the floor. Somebody flushed another toilet before leaving quickly. His tormentor Christoff stood in the doorway; blonde, cherubic, cruel. He held an opened tin can in his hands, flanked by two other boys sharing an energy that crackled, grinning at each other excitedly. Christoff held the can to him as though it was a peace offering. The smell from it was rotten, acrid.