Other Minds

My daughter drew an interesting and strange creature a few weeks ago, and I started asking her questions about it, trying to draw a story out of her…because if I had drawn such a bizarre animal as a child, I would definitely have a complete story to go with it.

Instead, she gave me a rudimentary taxonomy, an explanation of where the thing was in the food chain, and what its habitat was like. I never did get a story, but I did get a glimpse into a mind very unlike my own. It made me think about how much we assume that people see the world like we do, and this story is a product of those thoughts:

The Uber ride appeared much sooner than Alma Bixon expected—quite surprisingly fast, since she had only just requested one. She frowned, tucking her book into the crook of her elbow and fishing in her purse to check the app. But as usual, she’d forgotten her phone inside.

For a moment she waffled over whether to get it, but she hated to make the driver wait, and perhaps it was normal for a ride to appear ten seconds after requesting it. Alma was one of those people who are so intelligent that they end up doing things that less intelligent people would instantly recognize as foolish.

“I need to get to the Trust building downtown,” she said to the driver tucking her skirt around her knees as she slid into the back seat, and then she added, “And, um how are you?”

Alma was painfully shy but she worried that all the apps and phones in the world were reducing human communication to zeroes and ones, so she tried her best to make human connections. She blinked owlishly out of her glasses at the woman in the front seat, an expectant smile on her face. Alma was the epitome of a pleasant, bookish lady in her sixties; floral jacket, khaki skirt, and neatly brushed grey hair, and the driver was an older woman as well.

But instead of responding to this friendly advance, the driver only grunted and said, “Enjoying your book?” as if she found Alma enjoying her book to be personally offensive.

Alma looked in surprise at the book in her hand: A Child’s Guide to North American Insects and Their Habits. “Yes…it was actually written by a friend of mine. I know some experts in his field, so I put in a good word for him and he got it all the way to publication!”

There was a chilly silence from the front seat. Then the driver grunted again and started off. Alma shrugged off the interaction, opened her book and was immediately engrossed.

So engrossed that she didn’t notice they weren’t going downtown until she’d stepped out of the car. It roared away, tires squealing.

She was standing on the edge of a potholed road. There were dandelions growing out of the cracks in the sidewalks, and the houses had their blinds drawn and rusted bits of cars in the lawn. The evening sky cast a purple haze over the entire scene. Fireflies winked in and out of the grass, and a single light shone out of one window just down the street.

Confused and uneasy, Alma hurried towards the light in the hopes of finding a phone. She walked up the sidewalk of a slantwise white house with green mildew on the siding. The door was open. Alma knocked, peered inside. There was an elderly flowered sofa, a wooden entertainment center, blue carpet, and a couple recliners. “Hello? Anybody home?”

In the dim light, something moved along the back wall, a sliding, shifting of shadows. Alma squinted at it, and then her face brightened.

“Is that…?” She stepped inside. “It’s a Rosy Boa! How interesting! I thought that color pattern was mostly only found on the west coast!” She crouched down to get a better look at the long, marbled snake sliding behind the furniture.

Behind her, the door made a tiny “snick” as it closed. The light in the kitchen flicked off. Alma was on her knees, making pss-pss sounds at the snake like other people do for cats. Suddenly there was a high pitched squeaking, and a rush of wings and then the room was filled with bats.

“OH!” exclaimed Alma in delight. Forgetting the snake, she sat there in the floor like a little girl, criss-cross-applesauce, looking up at the fluttering, cheeping mass swarming above her. The streetlight outside let in just enough light to show her ear to ear smile.

“What a treat! But how unsafe! The poor things—people really should be more careful with their attic spaces. That’s probably why the house is empty—the poor homeowner has temporarily moved somewhere else while the pups grow up….Where has the light gone? I do hope they didn’t cancel the electric when they moved out…”

She got up, ducking the bats, and opened the curtains to let in more light. As she reached out to shove the curtain aside, her hand brushed something soft. She paused—and looked at the palm-sized tarantula clinging to the curtain, its massive hairy legs stretched out like a stain on the fabric, its eyes glinting at her.

“Aw, aren’t you beautiful?!” She crooned. “Somebody let you out of your cage, sweetheart! You’ll get yourself eaten if we don’t get you back inside! Here, will you climb onto my hand? We’ll find your home, don’t worry—”

A screech of microphone feedback cut through the hissing wings of the bats, and in fresh panic, they flew en masse out of the room, leaving Alma standing, surprised and alone, in the middle of the room. The lights blinked back on, and a voice, amplified and spluttering with rage spoke over the sound system.

“Why can’t you behave like a normal woman?! I put you in a house of horrors, I do everything that should terrify you—that’s not beautiful! It’s a spider! SPIDERS ARE GROSS AND SO ARE YOU!”

Alma stepped back, holding the tarantula closer to herself. “They are not! I am not! Why are you doing this?!”

The voice crackled over the microphone, too loud. “People should read nice books about nice things, not about gross bugs! I WANTED TO BE PUBLISHED! And instead your Mr. Cosling gets his book about bugs published! It’s not fair! I write nice stories about nice children and his book pushed mine out!”

Alma, as soon as the voice halted to cough on its own rage, meekly offered: “I never intended to keep anybody from being published. Neither did Mr. Cosling! This is all a misunderstanding…but…” She frowned. “Bugs are interesting. And snakes. And bats.”

The voice barked: “They are not! You unnatural woman! You were supposed to be frightened! You were supposed to beg to be let out and I’d grant it on one condition—but nooo, you had to wreck everything—”

Alma held up a hand, her face suddenly stern. “Now hold up one minute. You planned all this? Where did you get those bats? Moving an entire colony of bats like that—bats are very important to the local ecosystem, and you could have done irreparable damage—”

The frustrated children’s book author and kidnapper shrieked in rage, now obviously crying. “Forget it! Forget it! You’re insane!” There was a clatter of footsteps off the porch, something crashed, and she was gone.

Alma blinked. She looked at the tarantula still sitting her hand and said, “I …suppose I can keep the spider?”