Margaret Miller Makes a Mookie

Margaret Miller set her bag of groceries on the counter and leaned against the kitchen sink on hands that were still trembling. She remembered leaving the doctor’s office, and she remembered pulling into the driveway. Everything in between though was a total blur.

She must have stopped by the supermarket on her way home because the bags of produce weren’t in her car when she set out this morning. Yet here they were, filling the kitchen with the pungent aroma of citrus and cilantro and recycled brown paper grocery sacks. She plugged the stopper into the sink and turned on the water, then opened the drawer and pulled out the potato brush. After rinsing the lemons and limes in the water, she set her brush against the yams to clear away the dirt packed between the narrow crevices.

Margaret couldn’t recall a time in the last fifty-eight years when she had ever liked yams. At Christmas gatherings, Grandma Dottie would mix them up with spoonfuls of melted butter and brown sugar and drizzle them in layers of fluffy marshmallow cream. “Tastes just like candy,” Grandma would say with a wink of her eye as she licked marshmallow off her thumb. To Margaret they were still just plain old potatoes. Dress them up in whatever you like, they were no more candy than Margaret was a ballerina just because she put on makeup and a tutu at Halloween. She would wait until mom and grandma were distracted with the dishes, then scrape her plate into the garbage.

Margaret finished cleaning the yams then tossed the potato brush back into the drawer. Doctor Menloe had told her they might help with her hot flashes and nightsweats. Margaret figured she would give them a try, especially when the only other alternative Doctor Menloe suggested for treating her menopause was a round of hormone replacement therapy. She’d pretend she was eating candy, at least for a little while. It was better than taking the hormones and sprouting hair on her chest or signing up to sing bass in the church choir.

She dried and put the produce away in a clean metal bowl on the counter, then rubbed lotion into her hands before sitting down to her writing desk. She opened a blank document and stared at the white space and thin blinking cursor switching on and off hypnotically.

“There’s no such thing as writer’s block,” she told herself. “There’s only the undiscovered landscape waiting to be mapped.” She closed her eyes and tried to imagine she was Sacagawea guiding Lewis and Clark through wild uncharted forest ranges. What did she see in the world of her imagination? She breathed in slowly, then out. She dropped her shoulders, stretched her neck, relaxed the muscles in her back. Then she opened up her all-seeing inner eye. With her outer eyes still closed, she began to type. It was slow at first, but she gradually gained speed as she got going. Letters sprang up like wild grass on a hillside, words clumping themselves together in neat hedgerows of sentences. The sentences layered atop one another until they solidified into mountains of paragraphs.

Margaret wrote for two hours with only a vague awareness of the tendrils of arthritis creeping into her fingers. Line after line scrolled past her computer screen and disappeared, forgotten almost as quickly as they were written. The images came into her mind almost faster than she could type. She was still Sacagawea, but instead of leading Lewis and Clark through a dark unknown wilderness, she was racing just to keep up with them before falling behind and getting lost.

At last Margaret leaned back in her chair, exhausted. She wiped her palm across her forehead and it came away slick with sweat. She stared at what she had written. The last two hours had passed like the trip back from Doctor Menloe’s this morning, with only a vague hazy memory of even sitting down to write. She scrolled through the six pages she had just written, and could not remember doing any of it. It was a total blur. She had no idea what was even there.

She rose stiffly from her desk and crossed the kitchen to the fridge for a glass of water. There was a part of her—curiosity, she supposed—that wanted to see what she had done. But the other part of her, the part that had closed itself off from the distractions of the real world so she could focus on her creation—that part needed a rest. Her brain was tired and her eyes were heavy. She needed a break. And some yams too, she decided.

Grandma Dottie’s candied yams didn’t sound appetizing at all, so Margaret turned to the internet and found a simple recipe for baked yams. She cubed them up and rubbed them with coconut oil, then sprinkled on a little salt and pepper and stuck them in the oven. They were delicious. I could get to like this, she thought as she rinsed the plate. Would they stop her hot flashes and night sweats? Only time would tell. She didn’t know how much time, but she wasn’t eager to try the hormones any time soon.

She passed her writing desk on her way to bed and her story seemed to call to her from inside the computer. Come and read me first, it said, and she did. Margaret read the story and recognized the voice as her own, but it was unlike any story she had ever written before. There were no damsels, no dashing young heirs to impress, no high society parties where a slip of discretion might break a debutante’s chances for a successful marriage.

Margaret closed her laptop and turned off the kitchen light. Two words came to mind as she headed upstairs to bed: creature feature. As she climbed into bed, she thought her story would be the perfect screenplay for an episode of Twilight Zone, and the thought made her shiver. She closed her eyes and listened to the wind howling outside. Before she fell asleep, it occurred to her that she had created a gremlin, the kind from the 80’s where, if you threw water on them, they multiplied. Cuter than a gremlin, Margaret decided. I’ve made a . . . a mookie. Yes, that felt like the right word for it. Then she drifted off, making a mental note before she was all the way under that she really ought to get out the pruning shears and trim that maple tree tomorrow. Otherwise, the scraping of those branches against the bedroom window was apt to drive her mad.

Margaret awoke in the middle of the night, soaked with sweat, her bed clothes clinging to her body. Apparently the yams hadn’t done the trick. She hadn’t really expected them to, and really should have known better. The comforter was stifling. She threw it aside, then froze when she felt something underneath it move. Her first thought was that a bat had gotten into the room and she had just now trapped it under the comforter. That was perhaps a stroke of luck on her part; a moment later and it might have entangled itself in her hair. Then it moved again, and Margaret realized it was far too large for a bat. She picked up to the two pillows and threw them on top for good measure, then jumped out of bed and turned on the lamp. Whatever it was, it was making its way towards the edge of the bed and would soon be out from underneath the blanket. The size of the lump suggested a small dog—perhaps a cat—except that Margaret didn’t own any pets.

She unplugged her alarm clock from the wall and raised it overhead, preparing to smash it down on top of whatever was coming out. But what crawled out made her lower the alarm and replace it on the nightstand. It wasn’t a bat, or a dog, or a cat, or any type of animal anyone would recognize from Old MacDonald Farm book or Noah’s Ark. Margaret recognized it immediately by the doorknob-sized golden eyes and the long sock-like ears drooping down each side of its head. It was the mookie from her story.

“It’s the night sweats,” Margaret said to herself. Or the hot flashes. Some other unknown symptom of her menopause that had yet to manifest itself. Maybe the yams she got from the grocery store were bad. She even thought she might still be dreaming, then realized, no, she was wide awake. This was her mookie, the fictional creature she had created without even realizing she was doing it, like driving home without realizing it until she got there. Auto-pilot.

The mookie smiled at her and the gaps in its teeth were filled with something mashed and orange—the leftover yams Margaret had left sitting on top of the stove. “Should have put those away,” she said softly to herself, and the mookie cocked its head to one side, listening.

Margaret looked into the mookie’s big golden eyes, where bright squares of lamplight reflected across the oversized pupils, and she felt herself relax. Don’t relax, Margaret told herself, although she didn’t know why. The mookie’s head was still cocked to one side, ears hanging down—long velvety soft ears just begging to be stroked. Margaret reached out a tentative hand to touch the mookie’s fur, ignoring the warning bells going off inside her head. Don’t touch it, a voice at the back of her head said. Don’t put your fingers anywhere close to its mouth. But that was ridiculous. The eyes. The curious way it was looking at her with its little head cocked. It was her mookie after all.

Margaret stroked the mookie’s ears, soft as velvet, just as she had written them. The mookie pushed it’s head into the palm of her hand, nuzzling closer. Margaret wondered how that soft fur might feel against her cheek, and leaned her face in closer. The mookie sniffed the air, and Margaret realized she had forgotten to brush her teeth before climbing into bed. Her breath must still smell like baked yams. Yams the mookie had apparently just finished off from the baking dish left out downstairs.

The mookie pounced just then. It jumped into Margaret and landed on her chest, pinning her to the bed. It was much heavier than it had looked just sitting there on the bed a moment ago, and Margaret had a hard time catching her breath. She breathed out once and found she could not suck in another breath; the mookie was too heavy on her chest. The mookie sniffed Margaret’s mouth, picking up the scent of the yams. Then it began to lick, and Margaret felt her lips being scoured with a harsh sandpaper tongue. When the mookie began to bite, Margaret tried to scream, but she had no air left inside her lungs. In her final moments, Margaret Miller had just two remaining thoughts: yes, my little mookie is just like a gremlin, then, no, I won’t have to take those hormone treatments after all.

THE END