Propelled by a voice equal parts alluring and repulsive, Sara Kachelman’s “Vermin” is a witty and winding portrait of the inner life of a woman performing the rituals of a decrepit bourgeois domesticity. The narrator’s customary objects of attachment—the rooms of her dilapidated manor, her stale badminton matches, her eccentric family heirlooms—fail to be as compelling as the assailants that have invaded, or otherwise been invited into, the narrowing boundaries of her domain. “Vermin” pries the intimacy of hate and desire as it undergirds the power of propriety, sexual repression, and birthright, allowing us, in the process, to glimpse them in their decadence and debacle. —The Editors and the Fiction Staff
Vermin
That thing is after my chestnuts. It has taken residence in my chestnut tree, spewing husks on the heads of the neighbor women, drooling sputum on the badminton court. I am playing badminton with the neighbor women, as is my custom. It is arranged for the benefit of my knees. My knees, two frowns of fat! One must not turn an ankle on the chestnut husks. One must not crack a hip on the badminton court. The neighbor women jog in place. Squinting, they hold their racquets high. They fear my shuttlecock. I feint with my wrist, I thwack with my racquet. The neighbor women have poor concentration. They challenge me to matches they are sure to lose. They know I play for my knees, not for their company. No one may question my dominance on the badminton court. All the while the shuttlecock flies, that thing is cracking chestnuts in its jaws, spewing chestnut shells. The neighbor women know what it is, that thing in the tree, half the size of their husbands. There is nothing to be ashamed of if it is disposed of in time. I have a vermin on my hands, and it is looking for loose heat. Seal your cracks, the neighbor women warn, close your holes! We have all heard of the woman who leaves her property untended, this untidy woman surprised by vermin. We have all heard tales of vermin claws scratching at loose boards, widening a hole for entrance, then creeping behind the bedstead. And the kind of woman who lets it! What kind of a woman is that?
I dispose of the neighbor women with a ten-point lead on the badminton court. I observe the feet of the vermin in the chestnut tree, the ten pale toes with ten patches of black hair. I observe the vermin claws sunk in the chestnut trunk. And down the trunk, the sputum streams from jaws that do not pause in their grinding of my chestnuts. Below, the three heads of the neighbor women peek through the fence to see how I will dispose of my vermin. They watch my fingers wrap around the racquet. There is nothing to be ashamed of if I thwack the vermin into submission. A thing of this size, so like a little man, cannot be left in the garden. It is no match for a hardy woman with a stern grip on the racquet. Already the spectators are formulating the story they will tell over tea. Already their muscles twitch to reenact my impending triumph! I turn and enter my house, astonishing all. I do not give notice of my leaving. Such mysteries fortify my dominance on the badminton court.
There are no cracks or holes in my house. I patrol nightly so that I may not be ashamed if the neighbor women get in and I cannot get them out again. My house is square and solid, each floor held up by the heedless accretions of my dead relatives. Their portraits lay buried in the hall. A path through the accretions leads to a single clearing, where I live with my pipe organ and my virginal and the fingers of Fanny Mendelssohn suspended in a jar. The pipe organ can no longer be played because its pipes are clogged with birds. There are birds in the attic, and because there are no holes in the house through which the birds could have gotten in, they must have been in the attic all along. Generations of birds. An isolated evolutionary chain. I did not mind ceding the pipe organ to the birds, because I knew that somewhere in the accretions lay my dead relatives’ virginal, which I had always been keen on playing. And I found the virginal straightaway by dint of my uncanny spatial memory, and I removed the accretions from it and carried it to my clearing, where it has since occupied my evenings. I thrill to play this virginal, to press the key into the mechanism and feel the string stretch and release through the plucking of the plectrum. The plucking of the plectrum is the one pleasure left me, alone in my clearing in my dead relatives’ house.
Outside, the weather has worsened on the badminton court. Odd spurts of hail. The neighbor women are forced to decamp. The storm is good for the disposal of the neighbor women, but it is poor for my virginal playing. As I press the keys, the accretions of my dead relatives quiver in their towers but do not topple, because I make certain they are secured on my nightly patrols. The hail will disperse the neighbor women from my fence and into their surrounding properties, where the sounds of my virginal may never be heard. They are unsatisfied. They want more. They want to see the vermin thwacked with my racquet. Instead, they are seeing the vermin thwacked with hail. They are surely surveilling from their windows my chestnut tree pitching in the storm, its branches clawing my attic. The vermin is surely clutching the trunk with its dung-covered tail. Nothing would please them more than to see the vermin bloodied under my racquet and rolling head over tail to rest at their feet. A supine vermin corpse for their gloved inspection. Indeed, the highest badminton trophy. But one must never satisfy the neighbor women. No, if I dispose of the vermin, it will be in private, so that no neighbor woman will be pleased from it. I make this decision, and there is a crash in the attic. It is not uncommon to hear a crash in the attic, as it is the residence of birds. Living alone in this house (I am the last of my dead relatives) with its towers of accretions, it is possible that I may fall victim to a crash. That is why I secure the towers on my nightly patrols. I am alert, and I have total concentration. These qualities allow me to dominate in life. I pause in my playing, just as the pipes of my organ are besieged by the pinging of small, hard objects. The birds in the pipes are now under attack from the spurting hail. There is no refuge for them in the pipe organ. They squawk in the attic, and their open, squawking mouths are clobbered. Hail and chestnuts scatter across the floorboards with the sound of a person pitching a jar of marbles into the attic. I am reminded of a jar of marbles I uncovered in the accretions many years ago, big, striped marbles I liked to suck as a girl. I know I can locate it if I concentrate. I breathe deeply. This is where my talent really lies. I will locate the marbles first, and then I will investigate the crash. I rise from the virginal bench, and then the pinging ceases. I hear a ten-toed thud on the boards above my head. I hear the dung-covered tail dragging along the floor. The vermin!
The neighbor women will surely have their faces to their windows to view the vermin invading my collapsed attic on the trunk of the fallen chestnut tree. It was a mature tree, shrugging against the west-facing balcony. It supported the balcony entirely. Though I cannot see it from my clearing, I am certain that balcony and tree are lying derelict in the yard, impaling the soft peaks of my box hedge. I am not concerned about the attic. The attic belongs to the birds. The entrance to the attic has long been blocked with accretions, and it is of no use to me. I cannot have a vermin inside my home, though it is true I live with birds inside my attic, and I cannot bear contradiction. A vermin is a different thing. The removal of the vermin from the attic would require me to drop my hands from the virginal, where they are engaged in playing a frenzied sonata. Not only would my sonata be ruined, but I would have to go through the entire business of clearing the accretions from the attic door and charging the vermin with such sure dominance that my racquet will not miss its target. And then, the matter of disposal.
I decide that it is acceptable to cohabitate with a vermin in my attic, if it remains in my attic. The attic is hardly in my possession, having been a roost for birds in all of living memory. But at the slightest indication that the vermin has entered the lower floors, I will thwack it with my racquet and wrap it in the arras, to be buried under the accretions in my dead relatives’ house. I cannot give the neighbor women the pleasure of viewing the thwacked vermin on my steps, knowing that I fulfilled their request to dispose of the vermin at once, who is rightfully mine to dispose of at my convenience. This decision allows me to continue playing with no immediate consequence. As I tap the keys of my virginal, I listen to the vermin move around the attic. There can be no doubt about it: the vermin is eating the birds. The birds have no chance against the vermin, with its long cuspids and dung-covered claws. The chestnuts no longer satisfy the vermin. Only birds will satisfy. If a zoologist would ever happen to take an interest in my attic, with its rare and sequestered colony of birds, she has now lost her chance. The biodiversity of the attic has been decimated by a single predator.
Sure enough, the birds stop squawking. They are now wheezing. The birds have lost their vitality. Now I can play my sonata without interruption. The vermin stalks the full length of the attic. It stops directly above my head. I hold the racquet in one hand and play the virginal with the other hand. Owing to the skill, the virtuosity with which I play the virginal, I finish the composition with my treble hand and I start anew with the bass, transferring the racquet to the treble hand. It hovers, poised to thwack, because I hear the vermin’s claws pricking toward the attic door, and its long cuspids gnawing at the jamb of the door that separates the attic from my clearing. Its wet gnawing does not confuse my timing, does not accelerate my expert bass. I could inhabit a more watchful posture considering the vermin’s progress, but I cannot leave a composition half-finished, even if it is played at halftone. The marbles are now a distant memory. I will finish the sonata first, and then I will investigate the crash.
The tower of accretions near the attic door quivers. I have not secured it well enough on my patrols. I did not anticipate a gnawing attack! The gnawing upsets the bottom of the tower, and the chifforobe at the top crashes down, breaking other furniture into smaller pieces that roll along the floor. That crash upsets the other towers, and the accretions topple one by one. The walls vibrate with the disturbances, threatening to fall in without their support. The flood encroaches onto my clearing, toppling me from the virginal bench. It will happen this way, I think to myself, this is how the accretions will crush me. I hold onto the legs of the virginal until the rumbling stops.
The accretions have settled. There are no longer any paths. There is no longer any order. My uncanny spatial memory is useless. All I know is the location of the virginal, half buried in unfamiliar objects. My head peeks out of the rubble. Every now and then, there is a little crash when the vermin, unaccustomed to its surroundings, disturbs a stack, which alerts me to its whereabouts. A vermin may be weaker bodied than a mature woman, but it is much more adept at navigating small spaces. I grip the badminton racquet with both hands. I crouch and rotate in a tight circle, swinging the racquet in the darkness. I am waiting for the vermin to come near. I will rotate this way until I smell its vermin breath. I will rotate until I can thwack the crown of its fidgeting head.
I swing hard at a rustling behind me. The accretions spill out in all directions. There are a few rustlings, and then it is still. Underneath the mass, twenty pale claws curl together. I drag the vermin out by the ankles to be sure I have felled it. Such delicate ankles, covered in black hair! I recoil from the uncovered vermin’s musk. I kneel down to grasp its neck, peeling away the bloodied feathers of the attic birds. When I lessen my grip, my enemy comes alive with a swipe at my cheek. I pounce and straddle it, pinning each set of claws on the floor. In this posture, the vermin and I observe each other. Its lips part, revealing a soiled tongue, and its little heart races under my sternum. A strange thought comes to me then: decades have passed since a guest entered my house. I brace the vermin on the floor until its body goes slack and a pleasant heat rises underneath.