"Matriarchs" by Sarah Boudreau

Featured Art: "Reality" by Drea Vail

The auction was coming to a close: ten minutes left for one of the stones Virginia Woolf used to weigh down her pockets before she drowned. Alice sat propped up in bed with her laptop on her thighs and her cat, Daisy, curled up beside her. Alice often browsed eBay late at night—over the years, she had procured several bookplates and bric-a-brac.

The bid for the stone was seventy five dollars plus shipping, which seemed like a steal. In the description, the seller said that he had bought several of the Woolf stones from a rare bookstore in England in the seventies, but somewhere along the line, the certificate of authenticity was lost. Alice looked it up, and the bookstore was real, so she bid once more. How wonderful it was, she thought, that in buying this rock, she could connect to a person, even though they were separated by the Atlantic Ocean and some seventy-five years, and Alice didn’t have to leave the house or talk to anyone. She didn’t have to do anything but tap on her trackpad. 

When she got the notification saying she won the auction, she shut the laptop lid as Daisy bolted from the room. She was a young cat, only two, and prone to sudden bursts of energy.

Alice put the laptop on her nightstand, atop a tower of books. The books made her feel guilty, as if she owed them something. Reading always felt like too much commitment. She slid down beneath her covers and tried to sleep. She thought about cleaning out the second bedroom and calling her mother, and she pledged to do both the following morning.

Daisy head-butted her awake early the next morning, demanding breakfast. Alice  sleepily shuffled to the kitchen and deposited Fancy Feast into her bowl. With the cat placated, she slid on a pair of flip-flops, shrugged on a cardigan, and went to go get the mail that had been delivered the previous afternoon. This was her daily exercise. 

Alice walked outside. She lived far from a main road, and the outdoors were quiet. The trees whispered to one another in the wind and her flip-flops scraped the tarmac. As she shut the door behind her, she glimpsed four shapes fleeing into the shelter of the trees behind her house. They looked like dogs, maybe, but with odd gaits and weird, sloped shoulders. Too small to be bears, but they might be strays, she thought, and probably too skittish of people. Squinting, she could barely make out their movement through the trees, but they looked to be heading deeper into the woods, towards the crumbling stone wall that marked an old property line. 

This was an oddity, but as far as Alice was concerned, as soon as the animals moved into the cover of the forest, they were not her problem. Her exercise continued. 

She fetched the mail—all junk—and walked back up the long, winding driveway, shaded by tall trees. Her house was more of a cottage, with a flat facade and neat windows and only a chimney to break up the symmetry. The elms and oaks surrounded it like a fortress. Her father, the landlord, painted it a cheery purple after her grandmother left it to him, and it reminded Alice of a jewelry box. She had lived in the house alone long enough that it felt like her own, but sometimes, she would walk in the door and the house smelled different, just for a moment, and she thought of it as her grandmother’s house. 

She went inside and found Daisy hiding on top of one of the bookshelves, her tail puffed up. Daisy must have glimpsed the weird animals from her post on her multi-level cat tower. Alice peered out of her kitchen window and scanned the backyard. When her grandmother owned the house, there had been flower beds that marked the boundary of the yard, but Alice didn’t know how to take care of them, so they shriveled in the first winter and never grew back. In their absence, the forest had begun to encroach, sending roots and brush as scouts into Alice’s patchy, yellowed lawn. Looking at the neglected yard, Alice felt familiar guilt rising in her throat like stomach bile, so she turned away. 

It was Saturday, and since she had no other obligations, she spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon trying to clean out the upstairs bedroom. The bedroom was full of her grandmother’s old things, piled there when her father had the house renovated, and he hadn’t moved a thing since Alice began living there almost five years ago. 

The stairs were narrow and steep and she had fallen down them once as a child. Her grandmother had inspected Alice’s scraped elbow, tapped her knee twice briskly, and told her to stop fussing. Now Alice always treated them with caution. 

Alice began putting things into haphazard piles: trash, donate, keep. She found dried cat vomit on the carpet and told herself she would go downstairs and get cleaning supplies later. She sorted through one plastic tub of belongings before she got distracted, sitting on the floor, paging through a stack of ladies’ magazines from the late 60’s. Time slid past her. 

Hours later, she shut the door and carefully walked downstairs with the stack of magazines. The stairs winced. There was no room on her overflowing bookshelves, so she dropped the magazines on the ground by the coffee table. Alice worried for a moment about being able to find a good place to display the Woolf stone when it arrived, then she grabbed some lunch meat out of the fridge. Daisy usually begged for food, but she stayed in whatever hiding place she had found, and Alice felt too tired to search the house for her.

The trees protected the house against most of the sun, so the light that made it in did little to brighten the downstairs rooms where Alice spent her days. The blinds were drawn in the living room nonetheless. The chimney flue was open, though she hadn’t lit the fireplace in the past two winters. Wind shuddered through it, the racket of metal echoing down to the hearth. 

Alice sat on the couch. She chewed slices of ham and thought about calling her mother. Talking to her always felt odd. Alice had been an only child for twenty-two years, and then a week before her college graduation, her little brother David was born. Alice’s parents no longer seemed like her parents, but instead they became “people who have young kids;” they belonged to the same social classification as old high school classmates and people she knew from college. A phone call seemed like it would be an interruption at best.

Instead of picking up the phone, she got dressed and drove to Target, which she did whenever she felt restless. She walked laps around the shiny, clean store. She felt content here: the crossbeamed metal ceiling like a canopy, the shelves holding her in, no windows, nothing but the polite shuffling of faceless fellow customers. Outside, it began to storm. The rain tapped the roof faintly as she walked, safe in the belly of the store.

She left with a new floral shirt. The rain had stopped and the parking lot was quiet, dripping. When she reached her car, Alice saw four hyenas slinking around by the cart return, and she stopped to stare at them. They stared  back with hard, black eyes. Their rounded ears honed in on her like a satellite dish. Their heads were shaped like a pit bull’s—blocky, built for crushing, settled on muscular necks. Alice was not sure if she should be afraid. 

She watched as they moved aside for a man in a baseball cap who strolled up to return his cart. He walked over to stand beside Alice, watching in silence.

Two of them had found a half-eaten Big Mac on the ground and were sniffing at it with apprehension. A gust of wind bumped a cart against one of the larger hyenas, who jumped back and scampered over to the others, nudging them away from their food. They seemed to grow bored easily, and soon the four of them sat on their haunches and gazed at Alice. 

She kept watching the hyenas, but Alice could feel the man smiling and trying to make eye contact with her. He said, “Weird-lookin’ little buggers, huh?”

  Alice laughed politely along. 

“Hyenas in New Hampshire. Who’d think.”

“Mmm,” Alice agreed. One hyena licked a spot of mustard off the asphalt.

“My kid’s always watching those Discovery Channel shows about Africa and stuff,” he said. “All of those killer animals they’ve got out there. But they don’t look too scary up close, huh? Man. My wife’ll think I’m crazy when I tell her.” 

Alice glanced at him and smiled. Eventually, the man walked away, chuckling and shaking his head. The hyenas stared at her until she got into her car and left.

As she drove, she wondered if they were dangerous—but they didn’t look aggressive, just curious. She wondered if she should do something about them—but it was a Sunday, and she figured animal control wouldn’t answer the phones on a Sunday. The man in the baseball cap didn’t seem concerned. 

When she returned home, Daisy greeted her, complaining for food. 

As Alice walked to the kitchen, she turned the living room TV on and put on Pride & Prejudice, which she owned on DVD. It lived in the DVD player, because she watched it least once a week to keep her company. Even if she was in another room and the sound was muffled, she could measure her life through the familiar rhythms of the dialogue. She liked the fantasy world it created, a world where interesting or vexing people are always coming into town and where women are invited to parties. The men in period costume were also a bonus.

Before she went to bed, she started the movie over again and turned the volume up so she could hear it from her bedroom. Daisy curled up on her stomach, and Alice lay awake, frozen so as not to disturb her. Alice’s obligations troubled her more than the hyenas did. She reminded herself to call her mother the next day. She thought about the boxes of clutter in the upstairs bedroom. Her thoughts cycled. Eventually, she could hear the credits roll. The clip on the menu repeated again and again until she could not keep count. Then, finally, she fell asleep. 

The next morning, she did not walk down to get the mail before she went to work. Though the loose hyenas seemed friendly, they could be dangerous, and though she was not particularly afraid of them, she felt she should act with caution. 

The drive to work was quiet. The office was in the next town over, but it took Alice twenty-five minutes to get there, winding through back roads. She wanted to keep working as a paralegal until she got the itch to go to law school herself, like she had planned as a teenager. Four and a half years into the job, she kept trudging through the same tasks. The monotony appealed to her. 

She gave a smile to the receptionist and sat down in her office. An email notified her that her item had shipped, and she smiled. She had written a paper on Virginia Woolf in college. Though now she struggled to remember the characters’ names, she remembered the writer fondly, took a liking to her. Alice would not have bought, say, Sylvia Plath’s oven mitts. 

Setting aside her personal email, she settled down to work. She ate her lunch at her desk, where she was joined by Kate, who occasionally came in to talk during lunch because, as she said, “You’re a really good listener.” 

She vented about her issues with their coworkers and her tennis elbow. Alice frowned sympathetically and nodded in all the right places. 

“Anyway, what’s going on with you? Do anything fun this weekend?” Kate asked after a while. 

Alice considered telling her about the hyenas, but decided that animals eating junk food in a parking lot probably didn’t qualify as fun. The woman nodded for a moment, remarked on the time, and returned to her own office. 

Alice stayed late, as she usually did, in order to avoid making a tricky left turn in traffic. She locked the door behind her when she left, and turned to see the four hyenas lurking beside her car. 

They were bathed in the dusk. Up close, they were larger than Alice thought; their heads could have brushed against her side mirror. The largest one lay on the ground, lazing near the passenger’s side door. The other three paced around, watching her. She stared at them now, studied the angle of their shoulders, their long necks, their uphill builds. Their rough, spotted coats looked fake, as if they were made of felt. One of them yawned, and its tongue lolled over yellowed fangs. They didn’t look angry, but she told herself to be cautious. 

Something in her memory stirred, something about scaring away coyotes or bears. She yelled and raised her arms to make herself look more imposing. The reclining hyena scrambled to its feet, but the pack stared at her, unimpressed. She briefly considered going back into the office and waiting for them to wander off, but she had the feeling that they had more patience than she did. She could run to the next building for help, she thought, but she was certain they could run faster.

In a moment of inspiration, she hit the panic button on her keys, and the four hyenas jumped and skittered away. They turned their eyes to her as she got into the car. Twilight melted to dusk, and she pulled onto the empty road. 

When she arrived home, she turned on Pride & Prejudice, fed Daisy, and settled down on the couch. While Mr. Darcy acted haughty in the background, she pulled out her laptop and watched YouTube videos about hyenas and poured over Wikipedia. She learned that they are matriarchal and that there are two species of hyena: the spotted and the striped hyena. The ones that kept following her were the spotted kind, who were predators rather than strictly scavengers, though they tended to hunt the weak. They were beautiful, really.

 She wondered if right then, they were trotting down the sequence of wooded roads to get to her house, tracing her path, tracking her scent. Maybe they kept to the shoulder, ducking into the bushes when they saw headlights or heard the rumble of a pickup truck. Maybe they only wanted to be seen by her. 

She thought about how they had caught her in the parking lot. They could have pounced then. It would have taken her a moment to fiddle with her key ring and get the door open. There was nobody else around to help her. They could have attacked her then, but they did not. They just stared up at her. She wondered what it might feel like to touch one. 

The next morning, she rose early; Daisy yowled for her breakfast. Alice placated her, then made herself some toast. She nibbled and looked out of the kitchen window.

The yard was bathed in blue, as the sun had not yet risen. The hyenas were out. Seemingly unaware that they were the ones being stalked, they rolled in the dewy grass. They had solid bodies, like barrels. Their paws, large paws with big toes, reminded Alice of Daisy’s snowshoe-like feet when she was a kitten. One of them chased after a cardinal, jaws snapping at air. She was sure the hyena could have caught it if it wanted to. It looked playful. 

Alice jammed her feet into her shoes. She took a deep breath, clutched her cell phone, and closed the front door quietly behind her. The wind rustled the leaves. The hyenas rounded the side of the house, and Alice’s breath caught with excitement. 

They stayed ten or more feet away, but they accompanied her as she walked down to the mailbox. Two of them bounded ahead, chasing each other. One pounced on the other and knocked it down, and it squealed and wriggled free. It rammed its shoulder into the aggressor and gnawed at its leg as it bowed its head in submission. The other two, perhaps older and more sensible, walked stoically, treading on the wet grass beside the driveway.

Alice fetched the mail—a bill and the local newspaper, full of ads—and walked back up the hill. She felt like she had bodyguards, and she smiled to herself. She tried to get closer to them, to touch them, but they loped away, wary, and then returned closer. She deposited her mail into the heap on the counter and tripped over the pile of her grandmother’s old magazines, and they toppled, slipping and scattering across the living room floor. Ignoring them, she rushed to the window, where she watched the hyenas until she had to drive to work.

By Thursday, she considered giving them names. She could tell them apart easily, even the two that were the same size: one had slightly more black on its face and maybe a larger nose. Of the taller ones, one had a small scar on the top of its head, just beside its ear. They all had dark eyes that glinted like river stones.

 She praised fate for placing the hyenas with her, for making companions appear so simply and suddenly. They loved her, watched her, followed, and she did not need to put in any effort. 

She knew you weren’t supposed to feed wild animals, but that night, she threw slices of ham to them from the kitchen window. They snapped the slices out of the air and muscled each other out of the way. They had a clear hierarchy, but Alice tried to distribute the ham evenly. 

Daisy protested, stretching up to lean her front paws on Alice’s leg. When Alice did not give her any ham, she dug her claws in. 

 That night, lying in bed, Alice thought about how she had to clean out the second bedroom and call her mother. The mess had been sprawling for years. Her mother hadn’t heard from Alice in over a month. A chalky layer of dust had settled on the upstairs bedroom like a sneeze-filled snowfall. Her little brother’s birthday was coming up, and she needed to get him something, but only her mother could tell her what. She thought about just boxing up everything and giving it away—not just her grandmother’s old things, but her things, too. She could donate to Goodwill, though she had friends from college who might want the books. The books might be happier in someone else’s home. 

When she couldn’t fall asleep, she sat on her front stoop. Mosquitoes gnawed on her. Even with a bright moon, the yard was dark. She could see the shapes of the hyenas snuffling around. She could hear some of their footfalls as they, nocturnal creatures, rooted about the yard. She leaned her head against the doorframe, and when she caught herself closing her eyes, floating in and out of the sounds, she went inside and curled up around Daisy. She lay awake until her alarm went off and the blue light of morning glowed in the window. 

On her walk down to the mailbox, the hyenas walked closer to her, perhaps five feet away. When she put her hand out to touch them, they bounded away, but with brightness in their eyes instead of apprehension. Though she couldn’t get too close, she felt included, somehow, part of the pack. 

In the mailbox was Virginia Woolf’s drowning stone, and she ripped open the packaging as she walked back up to the house. It was just a loose rock in a box. No letter and no bubble wrap, though she supposed it didn’t need it. It was larger than expected, about the length of her forearm. The exorbitant cost of shipping made sense to her now. 

 She walked inside, stepping over the slew of magazines on the ground, and examined the rock, as if it would tell her secrets. But it was just a rock, slightly rough, not particularly interesting aside from its history, and for a moment her attention drifted to the view of the hyenas out of her back window. The young hyenas had treed a squirrel, and they took turns trying to climb the tree, their claws not enough to gain purchase on the bark. The squirrel, unconcerned, leaped to another tree, and the hyenas followed it until they grew bored. They began to scuffle with one another and try to pick on one of the larger hyenas. The one with the bigger nose, Alice decided, was her favorite. It never won any of the fights, but it tried anyway.  

When the hyenas settled down, her attention shifted back to the stone, which she had to carry in both hands. She wondered how Virginia Woolf could have fit it into a pocket, but she figured that women’s clothing had bigger pockets back then. Perhaps Woolf had been wearing a coat. Alice had an overcoat that had pockets big enough to fit the Woolf stone, so she rummaged through her closet to pull it out. 

The wool coat looked silly worn over her pajamas. She pushed the stone into the right pocket with difficulty, its irregular edges fighting containment. The stone tugged at the fabric and weighed on her shoulder, and she felt the skin of her lips tighten with a smile. 

She strode over to the mirror to admire herself, and she twirled like a little girl. The coat billowed slightly. Alice twirled again, then swayed, the Woolf stone rocking back and forth like a pendulum. It collided with her hip and then swung around to catch the small of her back. She kept twisting her body, the stone swinging and smacking into her again and again until she could see a look of warm contentment on her reflection’s face.

After stopping to catch her breath, she looked at the time and hurried to get dressed for work. In her rushing, she still made time to pull the stone from her pocket and find a comfortable place for it on one of her bookshelves, resting it in front of her marked-up college paperback of Mrs. Dalloway. 

She swore softly at herself for being so childish and wasting time. Lollygagging, her grandmother would have called it. She said goodbye to Daisy, left the house, locked the door, hopped into her car, and immediately put it into reverse. 

The car pitched, and a hyena screamed. 

Her brain flooded with dread. Slamming it into drive, she pulled the car off the hyena, and she thought she could feel a snap. Her mind flashed to the thought of a billboard she once saw for an emergency veterinarian. She unbuckled her seatbelt and launched out of the car. 

The largest hyena lay on the ground, its rib cage deflated, caved in. It had daggers for ribs now, piercing and crushing the soft tissues of its belly. Its breathing was ragged and shallow and it wheezed thick strings of blood.

Alice threw herself on the ground and scooped the body into her lap. Its heavy head rested on her thigh, its mouth agape, its teeth pressing flat against the fabric of her slacks. She could feel blood drip to her skin with each desperate exhale. She realized she was already crying. Despair collected in her chest: she hadn’t looked because she was in a rush, and she was in a rush because she loved the hyenas and loved her new stone, and it was not fair that she was punished for loving. 

The hyena squirmed before laying still—perhaps in submission to Alice, perhaps in submission to its fate. Blood began to flow from its mouth steadily, and Alice knew that its end was soon.

As the tailpipe of her car belched exhaust into her face, she curled her fingers into the hyena’s short coat and sobbed into its mane. Its fur was rough and waxy, and it smelled like dust and urine. She held the body close to her chest, as if her warmth could save it. Her breath shuddered along with the hyena’s until they were a single, quaking mass. 

She sobbed while her car idled, and Daisy watched with concern from the window. Alice pulled out her cell phone, as if she could call for help. After a moment, she put the phone back in her pocket and new tears mingled with the sweat on her face. Eventually, she ran out of energy to cry. The rush of panic and dread was replaced by numbness and weariness. The body lay heavy in her arms. 

She slid out from under the corpse, stood up, and felt dizzy. One of her legs had fallen asleep. She pulled out her phone and emailed work to say she was taking a sick day. If she had called, her voice would be cracked and she would begin crying again.

The remaining three hyenas kept a greater distance now. When she looked up at them, they ran into the protection of the trees. From there, they stared at her as she turned the car off. At least they had each other for comfort, she thought, and her throat tightened. She wished she had held the hyenas before this. 

She fetched a tarp and a shovel from the shed. Under the three hyenas’ gaze, she pushed the stiff body onto the tarp and pulled it across the yard. Placing the head of the shovel in the spot where she first saw the hyenas, she stood on it with her full weight until it bit into the turf. She did not realize how long it would take her to dig a hole that big and deep. But she, in her bloodstained slacks and flimsy ballet flats, dug it all, until the sun was high in the sky and the dewy grass turned to humidity. Low branches brushed against her shoulders. As she stood at the edge of her yard, the canopies of the straight, tall trees kept the sunlight from reaching her, the limbs trapping her inside. 

The body was beginning to bloat. She pulled the tarp to the edge of the hole and moved around to pull up on one side of it. The body toppled stiffly in, and when it landed, Alice winced at the sound. She quickly piled the dirt on to the body and tried not to look. The other hyenas stood in the brush. She wondered if they mourn their dead. 

She went into the dark house and kicked off her shoes. She traced the outline of the cell phone in her pocket. The crying part of her wanted to call someone and tell them about the terrible thing she had done, but she realized that even if she had somebody to call, they wouldn’t understand. She could still feel the jolt of the car, her foot on the gas.

She patted Daisy, who sniffed her hand with suspicion but accepted the attention, purring. Alice searched for the remote to turn on her DVD player: a distraction from the weight she felt in her lungs, something to stabilize the guilt that spiked in her brain. Standing there in her bloody clothes, her muscles were sore—she was not accustomed to physical labor—but the low sing of pain felt refreshing. She turned on the movie and stared at the menu options for a moment. Pride & Prejudice do little for her now, she realized, her fingers curling tight around the remote. With each stale repetition of dialogue and musical swell, she felt herself disgusted with her own escapism. 

She shut the TV off. Her eyes came to rest on Virginia Woolf’s rock, looking down at her from its position on her bookshelf. She took it down, weighing the rock in her hand, feeling the muscle in her shoulder tug like a string. The soreness in her muscles felt good, productive, as if she had earned something. The stone in her hand felt heavy and plain. It was not magical. It was just a large, expensive rock. She could not feel Virginia Woolf in it. 

 She held it to her chest and walked back outside in her bare feet. The living hyenas were gone, and Alice was alone. 

Beneath the boughs in the hazy boundary of the forest, she walked out to the grave and settled the stone in the dirt. She rested it like a headstone in the place she felt her property should begin. Eventually, she thought, she could line the whole yard. This would be a start. To anyone else, the Woolf stone would look just like the others, but Alice would know the truth.

In the silence of midday, she put back the tarp and the shovel. She went inside. Weariness settled on her eyelids, but Alice stooped and collected her grandmother’s old magazines from their toppled pile in her living room and threw them in the recycling. 

She called her mother and tried not to take it personally when it went to voicemail. 

“Hey, Mum. I, uh, was just calling to ask about David’s birthday,” she said. Her throat was dry; she could feel each word grate as she spoke. “Thinking about a present for him--would he like a trip to the aquarium? I thought we could drive into Haverhill and take the train in—he might like that, too. I don’t know.”

A breath.

“I’m having kind of a weird day. So just call me back. Tonight, maybe? No hurry. Bye.” 

She fed Daisy her dinner early, before she even began begging for it. She shed her sweat-soaked clothes. The brown bloodstains hardened and stuck the fabric to her thighs. She took a hot shower. The sunlight struggled through the trees to warm her bedroom, and, at last, she slept. 

Sarah Boudreau is a fabulist and short story writer. She earned her MFA in fiction from Virginia Tech, and her work has been published in places like Fractured Lit, Little Fiction, Longleaf Review, and Columbia Journal Online. She lives in Massachusetts. She can be found on Twitter @alesserwriter

Drea Vail is a disabled artist who uses design to create without the boundaries she experience in her reality. You can find her work at dregroovy.design and on Instagram at @dregrooovy.