Endlings

A story by Carmen Maria Machado from the new issue of Conjunctions. Machado is the author of the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties.

I started watching the Warrens’ children because my mother’s dead sister was hanging around, giving everyone a hard time. That was how I met the Warrens: my mother’s letter made its way across town to Ed’s desk. Between her many digressions and charmingly articulated grievances, Ed seemed to have discerned its truth: that we were a family troubled, and in desperate need of assistance.

He arrived with Lorraine on a Tuesday in November, in a silk shirt and a brocade-patterned scarf knotted tightly around his throat, and did the entirety of the house walk-through in his sunglasses. Lorraine recorded our conversations with a thoughtful expression, asking my parents probing questions I wished she were asking me. My mother took to her immediately, clinging to her arm and wailing about the situation. We had been respectable, ordinary people until the comet, she said. Now her dead sister was fiddling with the plumbing, spooking the cat, spoiling the canned goods.

My father followed the parade of us silently. I could, with practice, sense his thoughts about my mother’s emotional excesses, and that of women in general. He was embarrassed. Lorraine patted my mother’s arm and assured her that she believed her. The comet had been rustling up quite a lot of supernatural activity where you least expected it. Major cosmic events did that: lifted old patterns like long-sunk bodies from the swamp that’d swallowed them. Distorted time. Made people and animals and, yes, even ghosts act on their strangest impulses. It was possible, she said, that the dead woman didn’t even know she was dead. My mother sobbed at this news. Lorraine took her to the kitchen and made her tea. My mother asked me to follow them, to the room with the women, but I refused; I loved Lorraine’s perfume but my mother never went anywhere interesting. Instead I followed Ed, and my father, deeper into the house.

When we arrived at the most haunted room—mine, nestled in the northwestern corner—Ed removed his sunglasses and examined the furniture in great detail. He searched for my aunt in drawers and shoeboxes. He uncovered my diary and took in a few pages to understand what it was, but quickly hid it again, to prevent my mother from seeing it. He set up a device to measure the many qualities of the room. He also sat down at my desk and interviewed me about the situation. Had I seen my aunt? he asked. The chair creaked under his weight.

I had. I knew when she would arrive; her presence was preceded by a bitter tang on the air, like a fine perfume that had gone rancid in the heat. And I knew she was in the room because she would set up next to my ear and whisper to me all the ways in which I was awful. (I was prideful and arrogant, smug and self-satisfied, pleased with my own intelligence, certain of what I knew.) She sat there, I said, like a frog on a toadstool, telling me that I was a wretched daughter and worse niece; that my parents’ marriage was sinking like a poorly maintained skiff in moderately difficult weather; that my own insufficiencies were like mice chewing at the boat’s infrastructure, not the cause of the sinking but an undeniable factor in the loss. And then she would throw a fit: hurling my underthings into the air, jerking books off my shelves, shocking me whenever I touched the telephone.

“Your mother didn’t mention any of this,” Ed said.

“Well,” I replied, “she’s also killed the hydrangeas.”

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