Wild Life

Laura sighed and pulled her robe tighter against her. She was bone-weary, tired to her very soul, and every atom in her body hurt – so it seemed to her, anyway, looking at the house before her, now tidy and clean, until tomorrow at least, hands raw from scrubbing away at the kind of grime that never seemed to be fully gone. Everything was in its place, the couch cushions fluffed out, the toys hidden out of sight, the shelves dusted and organised. It looked peaceful and cosy, the faint scent of lavender drifting in from the kitchen where the tile floor was still wet from mopping.

How she hated it all.

Hated this house that had her enslaved, day after day demanding sacrifice like a capricious old god who enjoyed its blood in drips and drops, wanted her life drained slowly and painfully. She didn’t resent the children, her own little demons, too wild to ever slow down or think to tidy the smallest of things. She couldn’t hold it against Ted, who worked such long hours and got home so drained he resembled nothing more than a warmed-up zombie, shuffling from the dinner table to bed without so much as a thank you.

No, it was the house, this dreadful building they had made into a home, this den of hidden snakes, except the snakes were the housework constantly sneaking up and biting her, the poison flooding her system again and again until she dreamed she dissolved into dust particles, to rest upon the carpet waiting to be vacuumed up.

Not that anyone else would vacuum around here, so she would sink into the carpet and there stay, maybe forever.

It was how never-ending, eternally regenerating, the work was that made it so hateful, so soul-draining. It would never be done. Every night she looked upon a finally-clean house and knew that, in the morning, it would all start again. Jam-covered hands grabbing at things, dishes left unwashed on the table, toothpaste marks on the bathroom sinks. This is a hell Lucifer would be proud of: an inhabited house you’re required to keep clean, day in and day out, all on your own.

She had no time or energy left, after the day was done. She had a bath, her one indulgence, required to ease the ache from her muscles and clean the grime that had transferred onto her skin throughout the day.

The house was still, spent for the time being. The children were asleep, tucked into freshly laundered sheets. Ted was likewise already snoring, the clothes he’d discarded carelessly on the floor meticulously picked up and put away. Laura could imagine the house itself sleeping, its breath deepening until it floated away into its own dreamland. She would like to tiptoe to the house’s sleeping form and lay a pillow upon its head, hold it down while it struggled.

She shook her head to clear it of the absurd vision. It was late now, and tomorrow would start much too early yet again. Time for bed, blessed sleep and rest. A few hours of respite.

She checked that the doors were locked before heading upstairs and checking on the children one last time. They slept peacefully, showing no signs of the monstruous levels of energy they each managed to maintain during every waking hour.

Back in her bedroom, she tiptoed so as to not wake Ted, though she knew a tree could fall on the house and he’d sleep right through it. She lit the bedside table lamp, watched her husband’s quiet turned back for a second, before taking her usual peak out the window – a nervous habit, maybe, something she did with only half of her awareness, as if to check the world was still there, or that there was no visible band of criminals just parking outside their door. Everything was the same – the streetlights shinning on empty sidewalks, all the neighbourhood houses with their blinds drawn, the inky darkness of the night like a hand holding the world loosely. Everything was the same except for the lion walking the road.

It was huge, almost the size of the parked cars along the road. It moved slowly and gracefully, with the languid ease and grace of a big cat. That, more than anything, was what made the sight seem so incongruous – this out-of-place jungle dweller showed no signs of being distressed or confused as it walked the city streets. It seemed in no hurry to go anywhere, nor did it look as though it was running from anything.

The nearest zoo was several towns and many miles away, Laura thought. She didn’t know how fast or far lions could run, but surely not this far, not without being stopped or raising an alarm. The lion itself showed no visible sign of exertion. It looked as though it was on a nightly stroll around its own neighbourhood.

A small sound escaped Laura’s throat before she was aware of it. She looked towards Ted instinctively, as she would if she was worried she might have disturbed him. But he lay peacefully, and Laura looked back out again, half expecting the lion to have vanished from view. A kind of night-time exhaustion-triggered hallucination. Yet the lion was still there, making its way slowly down the street. It was now right outside their house, it would only take a few strides or a couple of leaps for it to cross their front yard and ring their doorbell.

She shivered, its closeness igniting all her primitive fears, her internal alarms all going off at full blast, urging her to run. She wondered if lions could break windows, if the one prowling outside could, for some reason, launch itself through the large bay windows in the living room and climb up the stairs.

She leaned back without realising it, afraid that the movement might catch its attention and make it curious. Lions were really just big cats after all – hadn’t she watched that YouTube video of a lion batting at a car’s side-view mirror, knocking it out, so much like a bored cat pushing things off high shelves? Big cats that could eat you alive.

The impulse to check on the children again was strong, despite knowing nothing had happened, could have happened, without her noticing, not in the few minutes since she’d last been to their room. Besides, to go check on them she would have to move away from the window, lose sight of the lion, and the idea of not seeing it, not knowing where it was except somewhere out in the dark, made her skin crawl.

She wanted to call Ted, wake him and make him see this, both so he could worry and plan and figure things out with her and so he could confirm it for her, validate it. In the back of her head, though, the nagging feeling, the doubt, the fear. To wake him from sleep for nothing frightened her, in a different way than the lion did, but with a tighter grip. There was such distance between them now. The man lying there in their bed, sleeping like the dead, whom she knew so well yet not at all, had grown into a sort of stranger, wearing her husband’s clothes, kissing her with his lips, but hollowed out, a flesh and bone robot going through the motions. He worked so hard, so much, that his world had become nothing but work, and Laura feared to tread upon it. She imagined waking him, his face groggy at first and then annoyed, making his way to the window with a frown etched into his forehead, glancing outside before giving her a look and dismissing her, going back to bed. It was that look that held her in place and stopped her from calling out: the image of disdain and dismissal she could so readily see on his face. No, she could not wake him, not even for a lion.

Outside, the lion was almost to the end of the stretch of the road she could see now. A hint of movement had her squinting, trying to distinguish something from the intersecting side street, though she had a limited view of it. From the shadows, and onto the pool of light from the streetlamps, came another lion. A lioness, no fiery mane bouncing with its movement. It seemed to be heading towards the lion. Mates, perhaps. Jointly escaped from somewhere. But where?

They were slowly making their way just out of frame and Laura felt a mixed sense of panic and relief. Perhaps they would keep walking the whole night and go terrorize some other city, some other sleepless people standing watch at the window. Or perhaps they would stick around, patrol their streets like some twisted neighbourhood watch. Would Ted wake in the morning and walk to the car to find a lion waiting and ready to pounce? Would an early morning jogger run straight into open jaws? Had she left any windows open in the house?

Once the thought arrived in her mind, as though landed there like a bird upon a tree branch, it would not leave.

Though she did not want to take her eyes away from the lions, she forced herself to turn back and check every window and double-check every door (as though the lions couch reach and, with their opposable thumbs, turn the doorknobs). She checked the children, both still asleep, the nightlight painting them with a faint luminous glow, and crept down the stairs trying to keep quiet. Whether she was being silent so as to not disturb the sleepers, or whether she feared lion hearing could pierce through walls, she did not know.

She started with the windows and the door at the back of the house, not allowing herself to glance outside, too scared of what she might see or what her mind might conjure from the darkness. She was more cautious when checking the front door, goosebumps covering her arms at the sudden thought there might be one of them right on the other side of the door. The house that held her prisoner was now holding her safe – could it do that, could it hold the lions at bay, greedy for the life ticking inside it, unwilling to share it?

She paused at the bay windows, steeling herself before moving the curtain aside. A single glance was enough to see the windows were all closed, but it was also enough to see that they had multiplied, filling the streets now, lying by the neighbour’s front lawn, ambling as though without direction. There were so many of them, she dared not count.

She held her breath, trying to recall what kind of barriers there were between the humans and the lions the one time they took the kids to the zoo. It had been too long ago, and she had been too frazzled, carrying a toddler in her arms, dragging another by the hand, their impatient screams ringing in her ears – she could not recall, and couldn’t know whether these were tame zoo lions or not either. Was there such a thing as a tame lion?

There was a majestic wonder to them, undoubtedly. She stood at the window, mostly hidden behind the curtain peeking out at them. There was something of the absurd about seeing them on the paved street, reclining on freshly mowed lawns, pacing next to parked cars. It lent the scene an air of unreality. So many of them together dimmed her fear, as though her brain could more easily accept one lone lion roaming her city streets, but a whole pride of them was too much. She watched them flick their tails, yawn, stretching their mouths wide open, their sharp teeth on full display.

 She felt fortunate that the children had never wanted a pet, couldn’t fathom adding fur to the mix of her day, but when she was young  her family had kept a cat, a large tabby with the softest fur. She couldn’t recall its name, but she remembered how it curled up around her stomach when she went to sleep – not every night, only when she was feeling lonely or upset for some reason. Like it knew, like it could smell her need and came sneaking in through her door.

The lion that laid prone on the neighbour’s lawn, directly opposite their house, caught sight of her and blinked lazily. He seemed otherworldly, a visitor from a different plane of existence, unbothered by the humans it stumbled upon.

Laura couldn’t understand, in that moment, how the entire neighbourhood could sleep through this, how there wasn’t an innate dormant instinct that detected the presence of predators in mass, now ticking awake. She held the lion’s stare for a long stretch. Her skin broke out in goosebumps again, anew, though her system by now was surely in a state of constant shock. She had the strangest of urges to open the front door, to go pet a lion. She wondered how their fur would feel under her hands. Behind her, the house was quiet and still, and Laura half-expected a loud roar from outside to break this spell she was under. But all she could hear was the thumping of her heartbeat, the loud sound of her own need, the dust particles resettling over the furniture.

Slowly, without breaking eye contact, the lion rose and headed towards her.