The Tears of Agnes
by James Callan
“Rumination” by Adam Hutchins
She sat in the bow, leaning forward over the water. I occupied the stern, watching her golden hair catch the waning sunlight, harvesting its amber glow. She was quiet, in the midst of a vow of silence. I had my thoughts but kept them to myself. The only sounds: a wooden paddle cutting the surface of the lake, its lapping water against the aluminum hull of the canoe, the occasional loon calling out, long and haunting, like a grieving specter.
Barbie joined me every year. Every time I roughed it in the wilderness, each time I made the trip out to Tears of Agnes. The lake was my second home, and Barbie was my tenth or twelfth or twentieth wife – frankly, I cannot remember how many have preceded her. They were all named Barbie, each one devout to their vow of silence. They were all beautiful, predominantly blonde, and made of plastic. I take them out to Agnes, but I never bring them back home.
It has never been my intention to leave my wives behind. I affirm that love is eternal, marriage a sacred vow, “till death do us part.” But that’s the part I can’t seem to avoid. The grim reality that stalks my many wives, the savage fate of my dear Barbie and her predecessors: death.
The first year had been fire. She edged too close to the flames. Her side of trout bubbled black as it fell into the bed of live embers, and her, holding onto the skewer, with it. Her polyvinyl strands of hair curled, blackened, smoldered into nothing. The smell of fish was decadent. The smell of my wife: horrific, a pollutant.
The next season, it was water, the lake itself. Out fishing, Barbie leaned over the edge of the boat to peer into the depths of Agnes’s tears. She should have floated, and did, but the propeller of our speedboat kissed her long limbs, stroked her impossibly slim waist, and made confetti out of my second wife. In several pieces, she dotted the silver sheen of the lake. After that year, I settled for the canoe, the ancient propulsion of arm and paddle.
The third year, Barbie went missing. Riding in my belt loop, I lost her along the trail. I retraced my steps and searched among the fallen leaves. Days and weeks I scoured the earth, the path we had travelled. Days and weeks I mourned, until my fourth wife alleviated my loss.
I lost my wives to storms, to axe, to fire, to water, and to ill-begotten luck. I lost Barbie, one or another, to pitfalls, chasms, and raging rivers. Sometimes, it was simple. Often, it was sudden.
One time, she was near – had just been by my side – but having set her down to take a piss, I could no longer find her. After I had peed her name yellow into the white, virgin snow, I turned to find I was alone. I called out her name, which carried on the wind in a ghostly vapor. I watched it rise, spread, and fade. Like my hopes, my sixth or seventh wife, it vanished. It simply disappeared. I knew she was near, but Barbie was stubborn; her conviction was solid, like molded plastic. She could have called back to me, but she held firm to her vow of silence.
Enough was enough, I had determined last year after losing my umpteenth wife. All it took was butterfingers on the side of the steep slope. We had stopped to admire the view, lost in the beauty of an untamed wilderness seen as glimpsed from a high mountain peak. Next, we became lost in each other’s warm gazes, a lustful spark resulting in flames. As I labored to remove her tiny clothing, my thumb slipped over the smooth, nipple-less mound of her chest and dropped her to the alpine floor six hundred meters below.
Barbie – the current Barbie – the eighteenth or twenty-fifth iteration of a long line of mute, plastic bombshells, remained safe within the aluminum husk of our steadfast canoe. At its base laid a trio of freshwater leviathans: bull trout, muskie, and whitefish – a good haul.
Across the western shore of the lake, the sun fondled the saw-toothed horizon of conifers. Long shadows reached out over the calm water to mark the day’s sudden end. Barbie admired the tranquility in silence. I rowed us to shore, towards camp.
*
I cleaned the fish by firelight, tossing their entrails into the flames. They hissed as they curled inward, blackened, writhing like tortured snakes. I thought of my ex, another Barbie, and made sure my present wife sat clear of the fire. She smiled, happy for the warmth in the night. I smiled too, happy to sit by her side.
When all the fish had been gutted, I stored them in the food cache, a covered, wooden box elevated five meters off the ground. I had built it at the far edge of my camp, hoping to avoid keen-nosed visitors: black bears, wolves, and other would-be marauders while I slept. I climbed the ladder that leaned against the tripod of spruce beams, stashing my fish safely among neat rows of smoked fillets. Here, overnight, the uncured fish would remain fresh, as the temperatures would likely dip below zero just before dawn.
I paused before climbing down, admiring the majestic vista. I sat on the edge of my raised cache while looking across the lake, the mountains beyond, the vast, endless wilderness where Barbie and I would remain until winter firmly settled in. At the shoreline, the stars and half moon reflected over the still water as if from a mirror. Near the fire, awash in an orange blaze: the love of my life, a twelve-inch, platinum blonde, my newly-minted wife.
I would have lingered to admire her petite charms and radiant beauty, but a blur of motion in my peripherals turned my head to the impenetrable darkness that lay just beyond the forest edge. I squinted where I thought I saw a pale shape dart between the trees and dense underbrush. I listened but heard nothing suspect; only the gentlest of wind, the crackle of fire at the edge of camp, the echo of wolves far, far away, the soft, silent tears of Agnes. I climbed down from the food cache and rejoined my wife by the fire.
Dinner was sparse. It often had to be when out in the wild. I ate a humble meal of smoked squirrel and juniper berries. Barbie ate nothing, content to go lean. I told her that I adored her, that I would continue to love her until fate conspired to wedge us apart. She answered me with bright eyes and a wide smile. Under the stars and silver moon, we cuddled into each other. Hand in hand, we gazed up into a sky as infinite as our undying, mutual affection.
*
Chilled to the bone, my very marrow, I awoke at some unknown depth into the evening. The sky revealed that hours had passed, the stars having shifted, the moon no longer in sight. I scrambled to my knees and rubbed my hands over the anemic embers of a dying fire. I must have nodded off, drifted to sleep beside the cooking pit, its warmth having lulled me into a state of deep comfort. The last thing I recall was laying upon my back, Barbie tucked into my armpit, the two of us pointing at constellations, necking, exchanging tongues but not words.
She tasted like bubblegum and cotton candy, cherry-flavored confectionery, lemon drops and peppermint sticks. Her kisses did wonders to alleviate the taste of smoked squirrel. Her smell, too, was sweet, intoxicating, and rich. I could still taste her on my tongue. I sniffed the chilled air and caught her aroma among the wisps of charred firewood. But the sight of my wife was sweetest of all, and no matter how many times my eyes circled the ring of the declining fire, the patch of cold earth where we had lain, I could not locate Barbie. She was nowhere in sight.
I entered our shelter, calling out her name into the dark, small space hemmed in by logs and thick swathes of needled spruce.
“Barbie, my love. Tell me, are you there?”
But then I remembered her vow, how she would not answer, even for me. I groped in the dark, hoping to find long, plastic legs attached to a waist as thin as an insect’s, a bust of disproportionate magnificence. Sadly, I found nothing. But as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I discovered my head torch, which I strapped to my forehead and wandered out into the night.
A return to the fire pit revealed nothing. Even so, as I scrutinized the soft glow of a crippled fire, I was, in the very least, relieved by the lack of one tiny, charred corpse. I had not wished to lose another wife – not by any means, but certainly not by fire. In that regard, once had been more than enough. One does not collect trauma like so many charms on a neck chain. So I rejoiced in finding nothing. I took that minor victory as I turned my back on the fire pit to head in the direction of the beach.
At the edge of the lake, among the sandy shore, I discovered large tracks that I thought might belong to a bear. Had it been daytime with adequate light, or had I been less panicked with adequate calm, I may have discovered I was wrong, that it was something different, if not less problematic. I traced the footprints that lead away from the Tears of Agnes, following them in the direction of the cooking fire where Barbie and I had dozed. As wide as my hand, they were easy to follow, but disappeared when they abandoned the sand to enter among the weeds.
I circled the fire, which was now little more than ash, compelled to discover what I had failed to twice before. On my hands and knees, I searched in vain. I lingered, flogging a dead horse, until my head torch flickered, waning to a dim, useless glow. I ripped it from my forehead and tossed it into the fire. Among the dead embers, the device landed without effect. Even my tantrum, it would seem, had yielded nothing.
The night advanced and the stars continued to crawl across the sky. Throughout it all, I struggled, blinded by darkness and emotion in equal turns. Head down, I toiled. I willed my eyes to penetrate the gloom and reveal something that would lead me to my dear Barbie. Then, as if from nowhere, from a patch of dirt I must have crossed half a dozen times throughout my search, I saw it again: a print that may have been left by a black bear, perhaps a very large wolf.
Soon, it was all too easy – the tracks, clear as day. And with that very thought, the ghost of predawn hovered across the lake to ambush the night. At once, the stars began to fade. The sky sharpened, slowly, then swiftly, from black to deep blue to luminous gray. Without delay, the tracks led me to an obvious spot I should have considered from the start. I followed them, without trouble, to the base of the towering food cache.
Wolves are fair jumpers, but they couldn’t climb to save their skins. Black bears, however, are excellent climbers. Even so, the light ladder that I fashioned from willow shouldn’t hold their weight. Mountain lion? Lynx? I stopped guessing and climbed the ladder, hoping the answer would reveal that the food cache remained unmolested, that this whole episode had been orchestrated by Barbie, an uncharacteristic practical joke.
From atop the cache, the worst awaited me. The meat and fish stores had been ransacked, each piece partially consumed, chewed, and sampled. The smoked squirrel sandwiches were gone, completely devoured. My juniper berries were scattered across the floor, trampled and smeared into the wood, like gore. My thoughts never left Barbie, my beloved wife, but this was salt in the wound. This was sustenance, spoiled – a survivalist’s nightmare. How, I wondered, could it get any worse?
Which, of course, it did. Promptly and precipitously.
Among the disheveled mess of raided provisions, I discovered a totem of woe. Caught within a sharp snag of wood, revealed in the corner, was a tangle of platinum blonde hair, a knot of soft polyvinyl. I wiggled it free and held it to my heart, then under my nose to inhale the remnants of its fruity fragrance. Considering the worst, I was left to wonder how and why my dear wife had crossed camp in the night to scale the food cache. Perhaps she had been plucked up in her sleep, from the safety of my arms, devoured by the beast that had invaded our camp. Or – brave little Barbie – she had stirred from sleep to witness the pirate enter our food cache and run to defend our stores.
Suddenly, as before, a familiar blur of motion streaked across the corner of my vision. Up in the cache, five meters off the ground, I commanded a full view of camp, the forest edge beyond. I turned to investigate the movement among the trees. Seeing nothing at first, I waited, probing the tree line and its murky shadows. Then, at my back, from across the lake, the morning sun rose up to break the ridgeline of a low mountain. Ablaze and radiant, as if some god or titan deigning to assist a mere mortal and improve his wretched fate, the sun’s early rays flashed a beacon over the water to reveal a masterly brigand, a wolverine with its prize, a Barbie doll clamped in its terrible jaws.
*
In terms of velocity, a wolverine cannot be outmatched by man. Within the arena of the beast’s own territory, this unfair distinction of momentum is exacerbated. So when I slid down the five meter ladder of the food cache, fireman-style, and hit the ground running as fast and hard as my legs allowed, I shouldn’t have been able to gain ground on the overlarge weasel, let alone keep up with the savage fucker. Still, I had not accounted for its odd behavior, its sporadic halts and casual demeanor that not only allowed me to keep the animal in my sights, but also keep pace with its trajectory into the forest.
At the top of an incline, I paused to take in air, to catch my breath and cough out my very lungs. The wolverine stopped when I did, watching me struggle amidst its own laid-back ease. It stared at me, my sweet Barbie pinned between its predatory array of fangs, and did not move again until I did. It did not take a single step until I burst out into a renewed sprint in its direction. Untroubled, the brute carried off my wife at its own relaxed pace.
Farther up the forested slope, I fell to my hands and knees. Tripped up by a root, I freed my twisted ankle, annoyed to have fallen but grateful that I had not broken anything. Up ahead, the wolverine slowed to a standstill, even backtracking several paces until I rose back onto my feet. Slowly, I took one ginger step forward. So too did the animal. Next, out of curiosity, I stepped back once, twice, thrice, and like a dance partner, the wolverine mimicked my movements, once, twice, thrice. The thought occurred to me that this may have been mockery. I broke out into a full-blown dash. My quarry kept pace. A darker thought surfaced: that I was being bated.
Wolverines are known for their aggressive nature. Like all species in the weasel family, they punch above their weight. Their repute revolves around their savagery as hunters, their dominance of will, their tenacity to protect a kill, from wolves or even bears. Well equipped with razor fangs and well-honed claws, I have no doubt that if it came to a physical confrontation with the beast that I pursued, I would be swiftly murdered, probably eaten. There are no documented wolverine attacks on people, an interesting fact, yet a statistic that offers little comfort in the face of a formidable monster. Why, then, go on to walk into the fire? Why tread forward into an unknown plight? Why play the game and follow the beast? Because the ferocious little fuck had my Barbie, and I’d already lost too many damn wives.
The higher we climbed, the colder it became, and the more each inward breath singed my lungs. At that point, I had been stopping often, and each time I did, so too did the wolverine. More and more, it had seemed, I was involved in a game of cat and mouse. But oddly, I wasn’t sure who was the cat, who was the mouse. Frankly, I didn’t want to know.
As long as the wolverine mimicked my pauses, I may as well take my time, catch my ragged breath. So I did and took the liberty, also, to fashion a weapon. I removed the knife from my utility belt and whittled a crude spear from a sturdy, fallen branch. In one hand, I held it high and locked eyes with the furry bastard who had absconded with my bride. In my opposite hand, I took up the knife, raising it upward to intercept a glint of dappled light that cut through the thick, balsam canopy. With intended menace, I angled the blade, redirecting the sunlight into the wolverine’s beady eyes. It blinked and turned away. I severed the tranquility of the silent forest with my laughter. It was a warning to the beast, I told myself. An advertisement of my prowess, I had liked to think. But really, I wasn’t fooling anyone. Perhaps not even my wife, whose plastic beach body sprawled horizontal within the jaws of her captor.
With renewed purpose, I marched onward up the hill. As predicted, my wife’s abductor matched my tempo, stride for stride. I prayed for Barbie, who I knew must be scared yet was brave enough not to scream, strong enough not to cry. All my wives had faced the fire – some literally – yet none had allowed their dignity to go up in flames. What sort of a husband, I wondered, allows so many wives to come and go? What sort of man survives to watch so many loved ones get burned? And then it was me, in my shame, adding my own tears to Agnes’s prolific collection.
*
Two hours later, my legs felt made of lead. Yet still, I pressed on, ascending the mountain, guided by a deranged wolverine who condescended to my human pace. Earlier, one hundred meters downhill, a frost began to dot the black earth and infinite detritus of shed pine needles. Now, five hundred meters above the lake shore, dense snow packed wet around my ankles, slowing my pace from modest to apathetic. I used my spear for a walking stick – a crutch, more like – hauling my body up the incline. Inch by inch, I trudged along in the wake of a master mountaineer. By comparison to my quick-footed quarry, I felt like a tortoise, a snail, or perhaps, without embellishment, a man.
Low to the ground, with powerful muscles, the wolverine scaled the mountainside with ease. I surveyed the animal from below, envious of its nonchalance, watching its bushy tail disappear over the lip of the lowest ridge of Mount Agnes. For the first time in hours, since dawn had cloven the darkness to reveal the marauder at my camp, the wolverine wandered out of my sight. For the first time since last season, and the season before that, and that, and that, Barbie, my wife, was unaccounted for. I climbed the remaining thirty meters of Agnes’s bent back, wondering if I had done it yet again. Wondering, with dread, if I had lost another wife.
The last leg of the slope turned out to be one mean sonofabitch. It was so steep that I felt I could almost fall backwards. I used my arms as much as my legs, pulling my weight upward by the trunks of the stunted trees and their low-hanging branches. As my hand groped for purchase around a moss-covered log, my knuckles gently brushed against something soft as silk, something familiar. I grabbed whatever it was and held it up to the light so that I might take a closer look. Between thumb and forefinger, I pinched down on a strand of polyvinyl – chestnut brown – a former Barbie’s lock of hair.
I recalled my several brunette ex-wives, versions of Disney princesses or ladies from the Inspiring Women series. I sniffed the curl of hair that I had wrapped around my finger. Helen Keller? Amelia Earhart? Or was it Belle? Perhaps Mulan? I sniffed again but could only smell pine. After all, I had the nose of a mere human. I’m no wolverine. I tossed the coil of hair aside and continued to climb, only then considering how or why another one of my wives may have ended up here on this godforsaken slope.
Up I went, inch by miserable inch. I clawed at the rocky soil and felt something smooth in places, pockmarked in others. I winced to find dismembered limbs, long and lithe and mangled like a dog’s favorite bone. The legs, they could have been Snow White’s. The arms, maybe Rosa Parks’s. Whoever the scattered body parts had once belonged to, intact and graceful, they were now badly chewed, sun bleached, and covered in dark mold. Whether they were Cinderella’s legs or Ella Fitzgerald’s arms, they looked like they had been here a long while – months, or even years.
Ahead, a two-inch, neon pink bikini top dangled from a frost-strewn spruce.
“Barbie,” I whimpered, recognizing my most recent ex-wife’s swimwear.
Last year, she had gone missing, as sometimes they did. No fire, no axe, no storm, no deep tears of Agnes to claim her. I had turned my back to inspect the shoreline, the sunrise pale and pink on the water beyond.
“Ain’t Agnes beautiful?” I had asked my wife. But it wasn’t just her vow of silence that kept her from answering me. When I turned to kiss Barbie, she was nowhere in sight.
Had the wolverine stolen my many wives? Had the monster plucked them from under my nose, stashed them away in some dire, spider-infested hole in the mountain? Then what? Had the villainous weasel eaten my lovers? Had that wretched, overgrown mustelid robbed me of my bombshell brides by the dozen? I cringed with rage, with sorrow, with boundless anxiety. I ignited with longing for revenge.
Not long to go until I reached the top of the slope, I heard a sudden struggle erupt from above me, a definitive yelp that indicated a swift and horrific demise.
“Barbie?” I cried out, pushing myself over the last few meters of incline.
And it was, in fact, Barbie. Many Barbies. All the Barbies. There they stood or laid or crawled, in no way resembling the wives I had known and loved.
In various states of disrepair, be they burned or hacked or bent or whole, all the Barbies, all my wives, be they platinum blonde, brunette, or copper, be they beach babe, Disney princess, or inspiring women of historical merit, there they all gathered in a cave in the side of the mountain. There they all raged in the festering heart of Mount Agnes.
I noticed my first wife among the horde of plastic, miniature women. Her scars were horrific, covering her twelve-inch length from head to toe. Her hair was gone, blackened stubble sprouting from a half-melted scalp. Her exterior had warped in waves and bubbles in places where her devastated body had cooled to congeal after being removed from the fire. Among her entirety, only her eyes remained keen, alive, and smoldering with rage, like hot flames.
Somewhere within the collective grotesquery, I spotted my second wife. I remembered the day that I lost her, my relief after she fell from the boat into the water, how she floated and I thought that misfortune had been avoided. I recalled my dread, then, when her buoyancy hadn’t been enough to save her from the merciless propeller which left her gravely disfigured. I looked at her now, many years later, somehow alive, yet delimbed from her shoulder and hip. She hobbled like the hunchback witch of Mount Agnes, like Quasimodo, which was ironic considering she had once been Esmeralda.
Amidst the crowd, I recognized wife number three, Barbie numbers four, five, six, and seven. I counted them, or tried to, as they scurried among the bones and refuse of a filthy cave. How many wives had I gone through in this one, single life? I could be wrong, but I think it was upwards of twenty-five, maybe closer to thirty.
They were all here. All my ex-wives, which, I suppose, discovered to be alive, were no longer exes, but simply wives, active and numerous. Among them lay copious bones and half-rotted corpses, presumably the various old kills brought in from the wolverine. But then I noticed the wolverine itself, its limp, furry mass motionless on the cave floor, the dark puddle of blood that seeped out in profusion from under its injured body. In horror, I noted the small spears punctured deep into its eye sockets, the Barbie-sized stone axes that jutted from its spine. Then I remembered that godawful sound, that single, sudden note of torture that I heard from above while nearing the ridgeline of the slope.
It hit me hard, the sickening realization of what had happened here in this heinous cave. How my many wives had lived on, true survivalists, throughout the passing seasons and years, scavenging off a giant weasel in a defiled cavity within Mount Agnes. And now, how the demented commune of Barbie survivors had killed their pet wolverine – probably their bewitched familiar – each one a spell caster under the teachings of The Wizard of Oz Fantasy Glamour Wicked Witch of the West Barbie, my eleventh wife.
I scanned their angry eyes and mocking smiles. They did not need to say a single word. Their silence spoke volumes. They approached me, tiny spears in hand. Others, with no hands, no limbs to speak of, had sharpened animal bones or chiseled rock prosthetics, as good as any weapon. Pocahontas, who was at home in the wilds, bore her flint axes and marched beside Mulan, a warrior at heart. My own spear shaking in my hands seemed so inadequate, so pointless in the face of all those scorned ex-wives. I dropped it to the cave floor, noting the warm trickle of piss cascading down my thigh. I turned to face the downward slope of Mount Agnes. Weariness no longer on my mind; I ran like the fucking wind.
The slope was far too steep to sprint, but my fear drove me to recklessness, which led to a heavy fall, a broken wrist and badly sprained ankle. I got up, crying, and hobbled like Quasimodo. Slow and ineffectual, I descended the mountain like a tortoise, like a snail, or without embellishment, a defeated man.
From behind me, growing nearer, I heard what I had never heard before in all my time spent up in the northern wilderness. I heard twenty-odd Barbies raising their sing-song voices. I heard dozens of unhappy lovers screaming a collective war cry. I heard the sum of my many wives’ molten rage, deep sorrow, and biting pain. I heard in the nuance of their frenzied shrieks a blatant demand to see blood. I heard them all, as one, break their vow of silence.
A resident of Western NC since 1999, coming from Florida by way of Louisiana, Adam Hutchins has 3 children. They have a great love of all this region has to offer in nature, the food, the people, and of course the arts. Art has always been a part of his life but the competing priorities superseded it for a time. After a hiatus of 15 years from serious work while concentrating on another career path, Adam returned to making art, now painting instead of his previous concentration on sculpture. He has studied under S. Tucker Cooke, Dan Millspaugh, Diane Cable, Robert Tynes, and Virginia Derrybery,
James Callan is the author of the novel A Transcendental Habit (Queer Space, 2023). His fiction has appeared in Carte Blanche, Bridge Eight, The Gateway Review, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. He lives on the Kāpiti Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand. Find him at jamescallanauthor.com