The First Girls

Six months later, the first girls grew their antlers. Like everything, they started small. They were just imperceptible mounds under tousled hair or careful quaffs, little pieces of downy fuzz and bone. No one noticed them at first, and they went all winter tucked safely under caps or scarves, out of sight and unremarked upon. It was in the Spring, with the coming of the warm weather, that they began to grow beyond their prisons of hair. When that happened, the girls stopped hiding them.

Slowly, their antlers spread and split, branching out forever into the air. Some girls wore them unadorned, others tied ribbons into theirs, little things that would flutter and catch the light. They bent over and their hair came tumbling through in waves. When they sat reading in the shade of a tree, birds would light on them. The sun shone behind them and made tangled spiderwebs of shadow in the grass. How long those shadows were, how far their reach.

Our mothers surveyed them carefully, searching for a first cause: sin, stupidity, intransigence, all were acceptable. When they had decided, their judgement was irrefutable. “They were practicing bulimia what caused it,” they told us and then turned away as to signal that there would be no more conversation on the subject. Yeah, sure, we had said but that didn’t stop us from talking. After all, when had it ever happened like this—normal American girls, defying their biology so openly?

In bars and kitchens, in bedrooms and laundromats, in breakrooms and multiple-occupancy restrooms, in all places we bent our heads together to discuss the girls. Some people thought that there was something in the food or the water. Rumors went around about a new step in evolution, or some kind of divine intervention (why then, went the rebuttal, did the antlers reach up—wouldn’t God simply reach down? When posed the question, our pastors turned themselves away and would not answer). Still others insisted that it was the direct result of rituals: Satanic, surreptitious, obscene. Our parents looked out of their windows at the girls in their summer clothes, walking by and talking about anything at all, and shut the blinds.

They weren’t many, if you want the truth. Six girls, all told. But they were hard to ignore with their antlers reaching up into the air, marking their location at a distance. They started to keep only to themselves, to move together in a pack. For the girls who had not been altered, the girls with the antlers provided a complication. They would make their remarks, but to each other, and kept their distance. Perhaps they feared them, or perhaps they admired them. No one could say. The boys’ cruelty required more proximity, but less imagination.

The girls, admirably, were not phased. When confronted, they would look around at the boys and say, “These are antlers. Maybe next time you could make the sound of an animal that has antlers?”

“Like what?” the boys would ask.

“Deer.”

“What does a deer sound like?”

And the girls would smile and move off together. We loved them, or some of us loved them and the further away they got the more we found ourselves drawn to them. Soon it was like they were their own species, a visiting colony from some other place. When they spoke, their language came out jumbled and ragged, a collection of stolen sounds on an alien radio station. We tried so hard to understand them, but they were beyond us. Those of us that loved them watched them feebly, clicking on their heels through the center of town, their breath rising and tangling around their antlers in the cool evening air. Even those of us who suspected them of some devious intent found them, in those rare moments, irresistible.

No town, despite its dedication to quietude, can ever be free of tragedy. So thus, we found ourselves stricken. Margot was shot while she was walking alone in the woods. A hunter had mistaken her for a real deer. The bullet that pierced her heart had killed her before she even hit the ground.

He had begged, the way murderers do, innocence. What had the girl been doing so far outside of town? In the woods? And with those antlers no less? And the town had admitted that these were fair and salient points but the man would have to be punished anyway. He had killed something that had belonged to us, something that was not his to destroy.

Margot had been beloved, despite her curious growth. Her death sent people into apoplexy. The other five girls were taken home, locked up in bedrooms and parlors, fed a diet of pills and cigarettes and cheap liquor, anything to keep them quiet, anything to prevent them from crying out about the injustice of it all, that we could not keep them locked up, away from the world and, more importantly, from each other.

Lise Daddario’s father, in fear and rage, had held his only daughter down and sawed the antlers off her head with a jigsaw. Their struggle began at dinner and ended at dawn. When he was finally finished he slept, thumbs bloody from inexact strokes, the ragged scraps of horn lying across their kitchen floor. After it was over, his daughter could only sit and weep, a deep, abiding sound that we knew because the other girls made it too, like they had become linked on some invisible, psychic level. They wept in sync, in perfect harmony, at the moment and time each of the others did. It was only then that we realized we had tapped into some dark power we could not understand or appreciate. Their mothers stood on the lawns beneath their windows, looking up, smoking furtively.

Lise’s horns did not grow back, so she filed the nubs and shaved off her hair. A thin scar ran down the side of her head where her father’s saw had missed and left its mark. Even though she was not like the other girls, she was still of them. Only she was allowed into their homes, their rooms, their confidences. Together they sat and spoke in riddles and secrets, whispered secrets and affirmations, pulled cards from Tarot decks and muddled over their predictions.

Then, just before the first day of school, Lise disappeared. We looked everywhere for her. The police even got down on their hands and knees in the church to see if she had wedged herself beneath the pews. She was simply gone. Her mother cried for the newspapers and her father stood in their backyard with his arms out, as if he expected God to deliver his daughter back to him from the sky.

The other girls remained silent and withdrawn. Their numbers had dwindled, and we began to fear that more losses were imminent. We stood in vigils outside their houses, holding candles, speaking in low tones to each other or just out loud with the expectation that someone would hear us. We looked up into their windows waiting for signs of life. Now and again a shadow would pass beyond the curtain, pausing for a moment before moving on. We never really saw them in those moments. They never appeared to us again as anything more than shadows. It was enough for them to remain forever obscured from our vision. In our imaginations they had started to become something else, both ethereal and monstrous.

Lise had been one of the first to appear, the first to be maimed, the first to disappear. This gave her a special place in our cosmology. We considered her primary amongst the girls, the first and the best. People claimed to dream about her. Children said that she appeared to them on the playground or in the fields beyond the school where the grass was ratty from ill-care. Some said she seemed stern, others loving. Still more said that she appeared thin and covered her head and wept. When this happened, it was considered an ill omen.

Lise’s house became itself a kind of temple, a living sepulcher to the first girl amongst the first girls. No vigils were held but food was left, flowers and notebooks full up with prayers or letters begging for forgiveness. Her father became a peculiar kind of town pariah. We took him night after night into our homes and listened to his story, to his excuses, let him cry into our centerpieces, and drink from our liquor cabinets.

“I just wanted her to be safe,” he would say to us, breaking his bread into little pieces, and scattering the crumbs everywhere.

“I only wanted her to be—” he would say and trail off, weeping, leaving us a private moment with which to chew and swallow our food in silence.

Eventually, after he had plied a version of this story with every family in town, he left us for good. His wife kept the house and burned a candle in the window every night to let us know she had not forgotten, would never forget.

Our fever dimmed after that, but never went out. We lapsed Catholic and Presbyterian, Jewish and Sikh. We gave ourselves over to the girls in the high windows, took turns holding vigil and looking up eagerly for any signs of life. But they were not girls any longer, were they? They were women, fully developed, with their own opinions on film and sex—what were we to them? Still we looked up, wondered what it was we wanted, how much of that they would allow us to have.

Then one night the girls disappeared. Their houses were abandoned, their doors left open. The girls and their mothers had all vanished into the same ether. Some of us went up to their rooms but found only branches and dirty leaves. A lone, mournful siren called across the town and we knew it was time to go home. We shut the places up against the elements and went there no longer.

Sometimes, when we were alone, we thought we saw fires in the woods, or heard voices in the dark. If we approached them, they shifted and moved a little further off. When this happened, we didn’t tell anyone about it. We considered it a private madness, one that would cure itself. It was too obscene to be talked about in public, so we put it away in the back of our minds and waited for it to end.

And then one night we woke and found our rooms bathed in milky blue light. It crept in from everywhere: the walls, the windows, from under doors and rugs. We turned on lamps and hallway lights and still the blue light prevailed. Outside we could see something burning, or perhaps just luminescing. Each of us, unaware of the others, left our homes and began to walk. We travelled through a night that was darker somehow for the light all around us. In the park, near the center of town, we found ten girls waiting for us, girls we had known, girls we thought we had known. None of them previously had seemed capable of this kind of deviousness. We should have known, should have learned. We were about to.

They kept their eyes permanently fixed on the fire before them. They did not condescend to acknowledge us. Everyone in town had been called; everyone had come. None of us had been able to stay away. Even the hunter that had killed Margot was there, blinking uncomprehendingly. We looked over this tableau, hypnotized by the pillar of flame, reaching up forever into the night sky, flowing out and bathing us, caressing us, pulling us in, entrapping us. And it was there, in the glow of that tremulous firelight, that the girls stripped naked and began to peel back their skin.