Grendel Read Free

sense I understood without her speaking it. I was her creation. We were one thing, like the wall and the rock growing out from it.—Or so I ardently, desperately affirmed. When her strange eyes burned into me, it did not seem quite sure. I was intensely aware of where I sat, the volume of darkness I displaced, the shiny-smooth span of packed dirt between us, and the shocking separateness from me in my mama’s eyes. I would feel, all at once, alone and ugly, almost—as if I’d dirtied myself—obscene. The cavern river rumbled far below us. Being young, unable to face these things, I would bawl and hurl myself at my mother and she would reach out her claws and seize me, though I could see I alarmed her (I had teeth like a saw), and she would smash me to her fat, limp breast as if to make me a part of her flesh again. After that, comforted, I would gradually ease back out into my games. Crafty-eyed, wicked as an elderly wolf, I would scheme with or stalk my imaginary friends, projecting the self I meant to become into every dark corner of the cave and the woods above.
    Then all at once there they’d be again, the indifferent, burning eyes of the strangers. Or my mother’s eyes. Again my world would be suddenly transformed, fixed like arose with a nail through it, space hurtling coldly out from me in all directions. But I didn’t understand.
    One morning I caught my foot in the crack where two old treetrunks joined. “Owp!” I yelled. “Mama! Waa!” I was out much later than I’d meant to be. As a rule I was back in the cave by dawn, but that day I’d been lured out farther than usual by the heavenly scent of newborn calf—ah, sweeter than flowers, as sweet as my mama’s milk. I looked at the foot in anger and disbelief. It was wedged deep, as if the two oak trees were eating it. Black sawdust—squirreldust—was spattered up the leg almost to the thigh. I’m not sure now how the accident happened. I must have pushed the two boles apart as I stepped up into the place where they joined, and then when I stupidly let go again they closed on my foot like a trap. Blood gushed from my ankle and shin, and pain flew up through me like fire up the flue of a mountain. I lost my head. I bellowed for help, so loudly it made the ground shake. “Mama! Waa! Waaa!” I bellowed to the sky, the forest, the cliffs, until I was so weak from loss of blood I could barely wave my arms. “I’m going to die,” I wailed. “Poor Grendel! Poor old Mama!” I wept and sobbed. “Poor Grendel will hang here and starve to death,” I told myself, “and no one will ever even miss him!” The thought enraged me. I hooted. I thought of my mother’s foreign eyes, staring at me from across the room: I thought of thecool, indifferent eyes of the others. I shrieked in fear; still no one came.
    The sun was up now, and even filtered as it was through the lacy young leaves, it made my head hurt. I twisted around as far as I could, hunting wildly for her shape on the cliffs, but there was nothing, or, rather, there was everything but my mother. Thing after thing tried, cynical and cruel, to foist itself off as my mama’s shape—a black rock balanced at the edge of the cliff, a dead tree casting a long-armed shadow, a running stag, a cave entrance—each thing trying to detach itself, lift itself out of the general meaningless scramble of objects, but falling back, melting to the blank, infuriating clutter of not-my-mother. My heart began to race. I seemed to see the whole universe, even the sun and sky, leaping forward, then sinking away again, decomposing. Everything was wreckage, putrefaction. If she were there, the cliffs, the brightening sky, the trees, the stag, the waterfall would suddenly snap into position around her, sane again, well organized; but she was not, and the morning was crazy. Its green brilliance jabbed at me, live needles.
    “Please, Mama!” I sobbed as if heartbroken.
    Then, some thirty feet away, there was a bull. He