the jackals

by Finnegan James McBride

Sand crunched under Sharon’s feet as she approached the tent. The lake shimmered in her peripheral vision. Her hands were cold. In the woods, the jackals wailed like they were pleading for something.

“Ash?” She unzipped the entrance to his tent and pushed her head through the flap.

He was sitting on his sleeping bag, completely nude. A nest of crunchy, animal hair took root in each armpit, and his skin was like clear ice cubes, like swans, like cream cheese, like fresh snow before footprints. His mouth was a little pink o. His muddy brown eyes widened.

“Sorry.”

It was nothing she hadn’t seen before. All the camp counselors at Lake Anza were used to this kind of thing. Plus, she was thirty-seven, him thirteen—it wasn’t as awkward as if a girl his age had walked in. She forgot about it almost as soon as it happened.

She walked the beach and checked a few more tents, then came a tap on her lower back.

She turned around and the light breeze lifted her hair. It was Ash, in an embroidered pajama shirt and plaid bottoms swiveled an eighth of a rotation from the orientation of his hips. His eyes were big. He was shivering.

“The jackals,” he said, a tremble in his voice.

Sharon sighed. “They won’t hurt us.” She pulled him into a hug. He pancaked his face against her wool jacket and his breath was quick and small against her. His hands grasped each other behind her back. He smelled like mothballs. Or maybe it was her.

As she held him he began to quiver. His ear and cheek vibrated against her stomach. His hands clasped and unclasped repeatedly behind her back. His knee shook against her shin.

He looked up and his eyes seemed bigger.

“Can I kiss you?”

“No.” That was for his mom to do, not a camp counselor.

He looked down, then looked back up.

“Can I sleep with the light on?”

“Yes.”

She led him back to his tent, then checked the rest. All the kids were there. She called for lights out and the beach went dark. Lit from inside, Ash’s tent glowed like a bioluminescent jelly.

The children laughed like glass chimes singing in the wind. A group of them were crowded around a tidepool. Sharon dipped her finger into the cloudy water. It was bacterial-colony warm. Through the ripples she could see a crunchy mesh of rocks and pebbles, populated by blooming, wriggling anemones and chunky, musclebound starfish with skin the texture of plastic teethers. The children leaned, eyes wide.

“Touch lightly,” she said.

Further up the shore kids were stripping to their bathing suits. Their space heater-sized torsos gleamed as their spindly legs stumbled, and she saw Ash further off, head down, drawing something in the sand. She stood up and walked down the beach, sandals sinking into the warm beach.

“Not coming to swim with us?”

It was like he didn’t hear her.

“Come on, it will be fun.” 

She could see his lips harden into a line. His finger dragged little hills of accumulated sand to and fro, to and fro.

“Suit yourself.”

The rest of the children were stumbling into the water now, talking and yelling and giggling and screaming. She stripped to her bathing suit and the sunlight on her skin felt wrong. She was flabby and tightly wound all at once, skinny in all the wrong places. It was like little bits of vital flesh had been stolen off her body in the night.

But the sky blared electric blue and the children squealed and the sun and wind shot up coins of light on the cold water. The lake swallowed her greedily, and it was a joy to swim.

     It was twenty minutes past six when Sharon realized she had completely forgotten to go to dinner. She put on her wool jacket and shuffled out of her dark room. Everyone was in the mess hall. She elbowed the push bar and exited the staff building, cold air pushing past her face. It was already dark out.

Crickets chirped. The wind howled and tugged at the hem of her coat. The lake was impossibly dark and silent. She wrapped her arms around herself to fight off the chill, and past the tents the mess hall shone like a great talisman, light streaming out of its windows like juice from the sides of a stomped-on orange. The tents were ghosts, hovering and drifting in somber silence, making pilgrimage.

As she neared the hall she heard the children yelling and laughing. She pulled open the door and the warm air rushed to soften her. Inside, things were practically exploding. Children screamed and spooned mashed potatoes into their mouths at breakneck speed. She grabbed a plate and lined up behind a few kids who were getting seconds, scraping green beans and shepherd’s pie from hot metal containers. She ended up with half a scoop of mashed potatoes and half a scoop of shepherd’s pie, and the bottom of her plate was hot against her hand as she went to find a seat. She drifted toward the staff table, the adults table, but then her gaze shot across the hall and there was Ash, all alone, a quarter-eaten slice of shepherd’s pie on his plate. He was looking at his lap.

She walked over and sat across from him, her plate clattering on the table as she put it down.

“Hey Ash.”

He looked up this time, and held her gaze for a long time, his eyes like spinning tops that had come to a stop. Then he looked down. He shoveled a spoonful of pie into his mouth. Sharon did too, and it was hot on her tongue.

“Wasn’t today a fun day?” she asked while she chewed.

He seemed to be examining a spot on the table. He put another spoonful of pie into his mouth, kept examining.

She sat with him for a while more but he clearly didn’t want to talk. She grabbed her plate, got up, and made her way back to the adults table.

Her coworkers were all younger than her. They didn’t scream like the children, but they teased and jeered and giggled and tried to impress each other. They were mostly done with their food, just talking, their cheeks rising and falling, their hands and arms moving to accentuate what they were saying, their lips wet from occasional contact with their glasses of water or orange juice or milk or coffee.

 Sharon felt a pinch in her stomach. There was something wrong with the pie. A queasiness grew in her as the hall clamored around her. She hoped she wasn’t about to get another stomach bug—the last one had kept her in bed for four days, throwing up her guts every few hours.

She excused herself and slid the rest of her food into the trash. Outside the tents shivered and a biting wind cut grooves in the lakewater. The pinch in her lower abdomen got tighter. She poured sand from her flats, scanned her card at the entrance to the staff building, stumbled down the halls, and foundered on her bed.

She took the last aspirin from the container on her desk. Fully clothed on top of her covers, it was like she had been dinged in the solar plexus with a big metal hammer but was too anesthetized to really feel it. Woozy was the word. She spun into rest.

When Sharon opened her eyes it was eleven p.m. The light was still on in her room. There was drool on her pillow. Coworkers were talking and laughing outside the door in the common area.

She rolled over and found her wallet, where she kept extra aspirin. She took another. In the wallet, behind cloudy, crinky plastic, was a photo of her and her mother at the Grand Canyon. Behind the camera was dad. Gone now. The Sharon in the photo was just a kid, eyes gleaming, limbs trembling with excitement. Her mom had high cheekbones, big ears, and exhausted eyes. She looked more brittle than Sharon remembered.

They hadn’t talked the way mothers and daughters were supposed to, never had the kind of secret, incestuous emotional intimacy Sharon had the vague intuition was normal. The only time Sharon’s mom really paid attention to her was when she was in danger. One time as a child she had been standing by the curb and an eighteen-wheeler had rolled by, sending chokeblack exhaust through her hair. Her mom had grabbed her by the ear and pinched so hard hot tears had come to her eyes. “You never stand so close to the road!” she had said. “Never!”

Sharon put the wallet on her nightstand, but her head was really hurting, so she soon fished another aspirin from it. By the time it was in her mouth the black tendrils of sleep were already pulling her down.

People were moving outside. The light was still on. More light came in through her window. She batted away sensory proofs of reality like gnats. She knew she was supposed to be helping, but she didn’t care. The campers were going home now. They were hugging their parents and waving goodbye to their favorite counselor and being driven away in SUVs. Someone probably wondered where Sharon was, but not enough to bang on her door, so she stayed in. It was like there was something else in bed with her, something cold and putrid and floral. Something that pulled her down and whispered sweet nothings in her ear when she thought about getting up.

The day passed and she kept waiting for someone to come knock on her door, but it never happened. She got texts but she didn’t read them. Occasionally she eyed her medication. Between her bed and the desk was an elephantine chasm, the kind dragons fly out of. Reaching with her arm wouldn’t be enough. She would have to get up, but the thing in bed with her wouldn’t like that. It was all too complicated.

Sharon woke up again later. She dressed and took her medication. She peeked outside the door.

There was no one in the hallway or the common area. The doors to the rooms were open, everyone’s stuff gone. It seemed she was the last counselor to leave. There were a few days before the end of one camp session and the start of the next one, and you weren’t allowed to stay in the staff building during the interim.

It didn’t make sense that no one had come to check on her.

She walked outside and the sun stung her eyes. To her relief, there were some people milling around the mess hall. Her boss was there. She walked over and apologized for not helping the kids pack up and leave. It was a medical thing, she said. He looked disappointed but all he said was that she had to be out by tomorrow morning.

That night Sharon went for a walk.

She took off her shoes and socks and the cold sand between her toes was a kind of ecstasy. The tents were still there. Behind them, the mess hall lay dark and colossal like an alien remnant. The wind whistled and the black lakewater gleamed.

She walked faster, then ran. Little rocks bit the bottoms of her feet. She was breathing faster now, her heart motoring.

When she got there and turned on her phone’s flashlight she saw that they had already done what she had feared they had done: washed and folded his camp-property sleeping bag. Soon it would be another kid’s for a week. She pressed it to her face. She wrapped her arms around it and squeezed and kneaded. She pulled it tight to her abdomen. Her face was wet and her hands were warm.

She felt like something great and ancient and crucial was rolling slowly into the distance. She felt like the dancing lights of her childhood soul had been locked and bolted into a mammoth starship and shot to the icy ends of interstellar space, where she would never see them again.

She didn’t care about Ash. She didn’t know him. It could have been any kid’s sleeping bag.

All the same, she squeezed. And kneaded. And wept.

All that night the jackals wailed in the woods.

Photo of Finnegan James McBride

BIO: Finnegan James McBride is a writer, musician, and student based in Vancouver, British Columbia. His love of writing started when he read Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt" as a child. You can find him on Instagram at @finneganjmcbride