---

Chewing Through Wire

By Chris Kuriata

 

Each evening, Auntie Shanta washes her muddy feet in the same bowl she eats her dinner from. She keeps clean bowls stacked in her cupboard, but those are reserved for company only. Auntie Shanta needn’t say so, but it’s been painfully long since the bowls last served company. The deep, wooden basins rumble like empty bellies after a long journey.

“She’s a darling.”

Auntie Shanta’s ancient arms strain under Emery’s weight, but she finds a reserve of strength in her ailing body and hefts the baby over her head. Sunlight beams through a hole in the roof, warming Emery and making her smile.

Pucks of dried mud in the shape of boot heels litter the front hall. I locate a broom and sweep them out into the acreage’s breeze. “When do the neighbours visit?”

Auntie Shanta makes faces at the baby. “Every goddam day.”

---

Auntie Shanta welcomes us with tea. “Keep an eye on him,” she warns of the great lizard who lies basking on the stone window sill. He looks too lazy to take an interest in Emery, but given the circumstances under which he and Auntie Shanta met, he cannot be trusted around a baby.

More years ago than I’ve been alive, during a routine walk to the fences, Auntie Shanta kicked a pile of hot dust, wanting to see the individual grains sparkle in the red setting sun, unaware the lizard was sleeping within. As payback for her inconsiderate act, the lizard bit her ankle and would not let go, no matter how much Auntie Shanta sweet-talked him. She told her funniest jokes, but got not so much as a giggle. Only a switch to sad stories set the lizard’s jaw quivering until he finally released the grip on her ankle.

Instead of returning the bloody-lipped lizard to the ground, Auntie Shanta tucked him into the apron of her dress. If he wouldn’t apologize for biting her, she’d put his mouth to good use. Ignoring her swollen ankle, she made her way to the fences, where the neighbours had forbidden her to go. There, she used the lizard’s mighty jaw to snip through the wires dividing the land. Unfortunately, a lizard is too small a tool to take down those obscene barriers.

“After biting through a dozen wires his teeth bleed. I press milk out of the tall weeds to rub along his mouth, but who can tell if the balm provides relief or not. Lizards are notoriously secretive.”

Under Auntie Shanta’s care, the lizard has outlived its normal lifespan many times over, and grown to a size Auntie Shanta can barely lift — heavier than a newborn baby. The lizard looks to me like some breed of monitor, whose ancestors must have been carried a great distance to settle here. Invasive species is the official term.

The fences are tall and stretch farther across the land than Auntie Shanta can walk. She uses the lizard to chew gaps in the wires in the hope travellers may squeeze their way through. She ties bones to these openings so the wind whistling through the hollows will guide folks to where they can pass. Unfortunately, Auntie Shanta’s bone sirens also alert the neighbours to where she has snipped the fences, and they quickly assemble to repair her alterations — restringing the barbed wire as efficiently as spiders in a damaged web.

“If only you had a million lizards,” I say. “You could chew up all the fences.”

“If I had a million lizards there’d be no room on the acreage for anyone.”

---

The travellers are exhausted when they arrive at the fences. I can only imagine how long they’ve journeyed. I’m sure people are left behind: buried along the way or given up to the birds in the sky when the land is too rocky to dig graves.

Those who find Auntie Shanta’s gaps follow the light of her house, where she waits to feed them, filling her bowls which are reserved for company only.

In the morning, with fresh strength, the travellers always cook for her.

“It took time to understand my purpose out here,” she says. “When I was younger and stupid, I used to knock the pots and knives out of their hands. I’d yell in their faces, You don’t have to do this! In my selfish way of thinking, I assumed the travellers believed they owed me a debt and were cooking to repay my hospitality.”

Recalling those early years yelling at the travellers clearly pains Auntie Shanta. She keeps private about nothing. From her bowel movements to her glorious reminiscences of the handsome men who shared her bed, she speaks candidly. Too much sometimes, bragging. Only about yelling at the travellers does she feel shame. She would rather keep this past private, but feels it important I learn from her mistakes.

“Of course, they weren’t cooking for me, they were cooking for themselves. After travelling so long through those barren, chilly passages, the act of cooking is an affirmation of hope. Cooking proves, yes, we can survive here. We can provide for ourselves and our loved ones. There is some adaptation. I see them scouring the acreage for herbs and roots that most closely approximate their preferred ingredients, but they make it work. How joyful to cook for your family after such a long journey.”

Auntie Shanta turns dour. It has been ages since any travellers celebrated their arrival in her kitchen. Season after season, the bowls remain empty. The neighbours see to that.

---

Like cowards, the neighbours never visit Auntie Shanta one-on-one, but always in groups of seven, sometimes more. The ones who enter her house (always without knocking, naturally) wrap chains around their waists and lock the ends to the chassis of their trucks, so at the first sign of trouble their buddies can rev the engine and drag them outside to safety. Thick nettles sprout along Auntie Shanta’s lawn, so if that ever happens the bastards will be picking stingers out of their backsides for weeks.

Inside her house, they poke through the cupboards and peek under the bed, searching for clippers or axe heads, anything they suspect she might be using to cut wires. She knows better than to hide the lizard. During these inspections, he sits in plain sight, watching the intruders with his wizened eye. The neighbours never guess the lizard is the instrument Auntie Shanta uses to sabotage the fences, so they get real friendly and tickle beneath his scaly chin.

“What right do they have, acting like the big sheriffs of the acreage?” My outrage stirs sleeping Emery. “Are they afraid the travellers are going to rustle their cattle? They’ve been watching too much Bonanza.”

Auntie Shanta shows these bitter drunks far too much patience. Put me on the case and their shenanigans would end in a big hurry. Does she forget the army at her disposal? One letter from me will summon all my brothers. They’ll abandon their jobs, leave their wives and children in the lurch. I know for a fact they have an arsenal of shotguns buried out here. Let’s see how tough these men with chains around their waists walk when it’s my brothers standing on Auntie Shanta’s porch, loaded for bear.

“Love your brothers,” Auntie Shanta says. “But don’t mistake them for guardians of the acreage. Each of them is defending fences somewhere. They care not about the travellers, only the opportunity to shoot people.”

I tell Auntie Shanta I’ll learn to hold a gun. I’ll write my most trusted brother asking for a map to the buried weapons. I’m prepared to arm myself and threaten those varmints off her land.

“You’re allowed to cut all the wires you want. The neighbours’ days of taking things from you are over.”

Auntie Shanta chuckles as she lifts Emery and smells her cheeks, whispering, “Your silly mother. Talk about watching too much Bonanza.”

---

We share the bed. Emery sleeps beside me, away from Auntie Shanta, whose bones can be felt through her skin. They are both as fragile and cold as icicles. The baby would wake with a deathly chill sleeping beside Auntie Shanta. We pile cushions on the floor to keep her from rolling off the bed in the night.

In the dark, Auntie Shanta becomes confessional. “I think of packing up my little house and moving to the other side of the fences. Meeting the travellers and filling the bowls for them would be so much easier over there.”

I picture her slipping through the wires. She has grown so thin the lizard would barely have to chew to allow her passage.

“Selfish thoughts,” she says. “What are the travellers supposed to do then? Turn around and go back from where they came?”

Embarrassed, Auntie Shanta purges her bad thoughts by writing them down on a piece of paper, burning it, and inhaling all the smoke so no one can discover her faulty thinking.

Auntie Shanta’s letter inviting me to the acreage came after she discovered a cluster of bloodied travellers. They had not been dead long. They had made a desperate attempt to scale the obstacle, climbing higher than the acreage trees, but the metal had buckled, rolling over, crushing the travellers and imprisoning their bodies inside a tight, spiked coil. The fences were made treacherous by design; sturdy at the bottom but weak at the top.

“They died holding hands,” Auntie Shanta says. To cut the bodies down would mean separating their intertwined fingers, and Auntie Shanta didn’t want to do that. Better to leave them suspended. The birds will clean away the meat and the remaining bones will whistle a cautionary tale.

The neighbours grow frustrated with their inability to locate Auntie Shanta’s wire cutters, so they change their tactics. Now, they sink their hooks into her food supply, dragging her cured meat out into the dirt for the insects to infest. They smash jars of preserves against the rocks, and for fun they toss canned goods into the air like clay pigeons and take turns shooting them down. Most of the neighbours have embarrassing aim. Even with buckshot they can’t hit airborne cans. In the end, they have to shoot them set on the ground. Everything bleeds out into the dirt; soup, tomato sauce, even salmon oil and cake batter.

The neighbours pride themselves on their twisted benevolence. The sweatiest, smelliest of the louts puts his arm around Auntie Shanta and tells her not to worry, they won’t let her starve. Each day, they leave her a morsel of food: a bit of sweetmeat, a teaspoon of beans, and a square of bread pressed flat. Only enough food to feed an old woman; nothing for the travellers lucky enough to find their way through her snipped passages.

This new arrangement invigorates the neighbours. They feel they are making headway in their struggle to preserve the fences.

---

The lizard’s wheezing keeps me awake, his whistling louder than hollow bones in the wind. The neighbours’ food rationing leaves Auntie Shanta too weak to carry the lizard across the land. Without wires to chew through, his teeth grow thick and long until he can no longer close his mouth.

In the morning, Auntie Shanta cradles the lizard and I follow them outside to the flat rock.

“I offered my ankle, begging him to wear down his teeth on my bones, but he is tired now too. We’ve spent a long time together.”

Auntie Shanta lays the lizard down. She sings to him, and tickles his sides, and tells him all of her jokes, anything to make him smile. She succeeds. His tight skin crackles as his mouth curls into one of the biggest grins I’ve ever seen. Swiftly, Auntie Shanta scoops him up and bashes his head against the rock.

“I’m so thankful to have received such a useful companion. I’m glad to know he passed while smiling.”

We take the lizard to the kitchen and put him to good use. After Auntie Shanta places the body into boiling water, I hold him while she scrapes the scales and skin away. She does so gently, as though shaving a bedridden lover. Once the body is nude, she slits the belly and pulls the lungs free as gracefully as a magician slipping silk scarves from their sleeve. She sets the liver aside, and once the body is hollowed, she chops the meat into mouth-sized squares. I cringe at how close she swings the cleaver to her fingers. The amount of meat in the tail astonishes me.

From the garden, I fetch thyme and celery leaves. “The neighbours thought them weeds,” she tells me. “If they knew these had use in the kitchen they would have torn them out.”

The pot of lizard meat simmers. We tie tall grass together, cut the ends, and press the sweet milk into the pot. I don’t think we’ll have enough to make a proper sauce so I offer milk from my own breast, but Auntie Shanta assures me we have all the ingredients we need. There is no need to steal food from Emery. Years of observing the travellers has taught her how to adapt.

I carry Emery outside, taking a moment of respite from the sweltering kitchen just as the neighbours’ trucks rumble onto the acreage for today’s inspection. Auntie Shanta’s stories of the neighbours’ cruelty angers me, and I expect them to be skulking giants, but they look no different from our neighbours back home. Their monstrousness is not visible from the outside.

Auntie Shanta joins me on the porch. She welcomes the neighbours wearing a flowing dress that in its day would have been called scandalous. Standing on tiptoes, she holds her palms flat, displaying the lizard’s head. For a moment, she reminds me of the painting of the dancing girl and the prophet.

The neighbours drop from their trucks cautiously, assuming they are being set up for a trap. They take their time wrapping the chains around their waists, tugging on the rattling links, making sure they are secure before approaching.

“All this time it was the lizard,” she confesses. “That’s how I cut the wires.”

The neighbours crowd around, poking their fingers into the lizard’s mouth, prying the jaws apart. Their examination is rough. Disrespectful. Wire shavings are caught between the lizard’s teeth, evidence of visits to the fences. The neighbours wink at one another, congratulating themselves on finally putting an end to Auntie Shanta’s disobedience.

“You starved me out,” Auntie Shanta admits, her eyes tearful. She gestures to me and Emery. “Now that I’ve mouths of my own to feed, I can’t have you taking all my food away.”

The neighbours celebrate having broken her. Back in town, they’ll be heralded for finally securing the fences. At last, no more travellers. The acreage breeze pulls the smell of Auntie Shanta’s cooking onto the porch, and all of a sudden the neighbours aren’t in a hurry to leave.

“You will eat with us, and then we will have a truce. Yes?”

The bowls from the cupboard, which Auntie Shanta has saved especially for the travellers, are blown clean of dust and dead bugs so she may set them around the table. The neighbours’ chain tethers stretch just as far as their place settings. An inch farther and they would have to suck in their beer guts to reach.

When Auntie Shanta wrote asking me to help serve the neighbours dinner I felt excited to assist in their downfall. They deserved a gruesome final meal for all their meddling. Together, we’d wrap those chains around their necks and choke them to death. Make them die with their tongues bulging and eyes popped out, leaving behind corpses even less dignified than the crushed travellers on the fences. I wanted baby Emery to witness our retribution, and grow up knowing her mother was a woman of action.

“So bloodthirsty,” Auntie Shanta says of my fantasy, but without judgment, for in her younger days, Auntie Shanta also thirsted for blood. Throughout her life she found more than her share, until she nearly drowned in it.

“What do you plan to do?” I ask, disappointed not to see the life squeezed from the neighbours’ wretched bodies.

“Something I hope will be more effective.”

Auntie Shanta blooms all morning. She confides in me that cooking is the sole physical activity the aging process has not throttled.

“I can no longer dance on the points of my toes, or climb to the highest bough of a tree, or make passionate love to a darling young man.” Yet her weak back, stripped throat, and lowered libido have done nothing to inhibit her culinary skills. While her other talents fell away, Auntie Shanta’s cooking only improved. “In the kitchen, I feel like a mighty ship whose crew is dumping their cargo into the ocean so I may travel lighter and faster.”

I ladle generous portions of steaming lizard into the dishes. To prove there is nothing sadistic in the meal, I lick the ladle after each serving, tasting sweet milk and stray scales. Feeling victorious, the neighbours josh and chortle, dipping their fingers into the bowls to scoop up chunks of lizard meat. Auntie Shanta has placed linen serviettes on the table, but none of the neighbours wipe their hands, preferring to suck the hot juice from their fingers.

Auntie Shanta dips her spoon into the same bowl in which she washes her dusty feet, and begins to eat.

At the start of the meal, Auntie Shanta’s kitchen sounds like a beer hall — rowdy laughter and the singing of old songs — but as the neighbours get closer to the bottom of their bowls they grow quiet. There is no more joking and back-slapping. The only sound is the rapid clanking of their spoons. I watch fascinated as the neighbours lift the bowls to lick the insides clean, the bottoms covering their faces like masks.

The tongue is one of the most sensitive spots on the body, capable of finding a single grain of sand tracked into the mouth. The neighbours have toughened their tongues with years of unfiltered cigarettes and bitter words, yet the tips remain delicate enough to read the names carved into the bottoms of the bowls.

Auntie Shanta has fed the travellers for longer than anyone is capable of remembering, and in return each traveller has scratched their name into a bowl. The history of all travellers is stacked within her cupboard, always waiting to be added to. There is room for more names than Auntie Shanta will ever know. The bowls rumble louder than ever before, shaking dust from the ceiling. They are angry, and demand to know why they’ve been starved for so long.

The neighbours leap away from the table and clamp their hands over their mouths. Their tongues recognize many of the names carved into the wood; names that stretch all the way back to the early pioneer days of the acreage, names claimed with great pride nowadays. Many of the neighbours’ tongues find their own family name, written decades, perhaps hundreds of years, before by weary travellers thankful to be fed after crossing one of the ugly barricades that have long excluded people from the land.

Muttering excuses, the neighbours rise from the table. Early day tomorrow. Must get going. They file outside keeping their heads down, rattling the chains in which they’ve shackled themselves. Satisfied, Auntie Shanta collects the bowls and stacks them in the cupboard, pleased she could see them used one final time after so much idleness.

“Do you think they’ll be too ashamed to come back?” I ask.

Auntie Shanta holds her arm over the fireplace embers before crawling into bed. She pulls her tattered blankets over herself with such finality they may as well be the lid of her coffin.

“Perhaps not those neighbours, but eventually, their children will come. Someone will always be here to preserve the fences.” She sniffs the air, desiring a comforting whiff of Emery’s baby skin as she prepares for a sleep that is growing closer and closer to permanent.

“When they do come back,” Auntie Shanta says, “Don’t be so quick to dig up your guns. Teach Emery there are other ways to keep the neighbours disarmed.”

---

While Auntie Shanta and the baby sleep, I strap on her old boots and go for a walk, tearing my jeans on the brambles whose thorns curve like fangs on a cobra. The acreage ground is uneven, full of dips. I marvel at Auntie Shanta’s persistence and stamina, amazed by how long she made the long and arduous trip to the fences — in the dark, no less.

Structures like these (which Auntie Shanta has spent her life battling) don’t stand this long without learning to be devious. More travellers will crash upon their barbs. The duty Auntie Shanta passes on to me is difficult. I will fail more often than I will succeed.

In the distance, where the dawn meets the earth, the travellers are already approaching. I kick off my boots and use my bare ankle to fish for a lizard, but there is no one crawling along the ground who will help me tear an opening through the imposing barrier. I panic at the thought of soon being face-to-face with the new arrivals, forced to look them in the eye through twisted metal as I apologize for letting them down.

My remaining years are too great in number to spend in despair. Inspired by Auntie Shanta’s lizard, I lean forward and bite my first wire. Painful vibrations stab my jaw, but I persist. I grind my molars back and forth, encouraged when the wire begins to slacken, on the verge of breaking. At last, I’ve found my proper place in this world.

The wire snaps, and I wave my arm, encouraging the travellers to hurry, confident by the time they arrive I’ll be prepared to welcome them to Auntie Shanta’s kitchen.

 

---

Host Commentary

I spoke last week about our first ever end-of-year fundraiser, and the context that PodCastle operates in with our publisher Escape Artists and its new-fangled, shiny spangly non-profit status. We’ve always been donation-funded, but now those donations can go further than ever and give us the stability we need to build towards the future—a rare and precious thing in the short fiction field. As well as donating directly, as you all have for years, there’s some new options for you now with our new status:

· You could ask your employer if they have a matching gift or workplace giving program and make your donation to Escape Artists go even farther.

· We can now accept stock donations and gifts from Donor Advised Funds, foundations, corporate philanthropy, and matching gift programs.

· If you live in the US, your donation may be a tax-deductible gift

And all of those are fantastic—every donation makes a difference, sincerely. But what’s even better than donations are subscriptions—because more than just money, what a subscription gives us is stability, reliability, and dependability. Subscribers give us the capacity to plan ahead and think about how Escape Artists could be even better. They enable us to focus on bringing the world amazing stories, read by fantastic narrators, hosted with insightful commentary, and contributing to the growing Escape Artists’ library and community. A subscription, in short, lets us off the hamster-wheel of fundraising for a little bit longer, and means we can invest that time and energy into what we’re actually here to do—one story, told well. Sign up to support us regularly, at whatever level you can afford, at

And now pay attention, for our tale is about to begin, and there are better ways to achieve your ends than you might think…

---

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Chewing Through Wire” by Chris Kuriata, and if you enjoyed that, check out episode 545 THE AUNTIES RETURN THE OCEAN, or hop on over to PseudoPod for episodes 473 SACK RACE TO THE RIVER and the flash episode 563, including his story THE CORPSE CHILD.

This is, very obviously, grounded in Native American culture and talking about the American approach to borders as culminated in a certain recent, racist President of that benighted country. I am, very obviously, British, and thus not particularly qualified to talk about the specific implications and references here. But this rotten, sodden isle is no less racist than those United States, and no less obsessed with its borders—may I never again hear the phrase “small boats” bleated from the lips of a right-wing commentator with an even smaller brain—and it is an island that is rank with similar hypocrisy on those migratory grounds, invaded by and integrating with new cultures and peoples since before the Roman Empire, and an island that—with not a wit of self-awareness in the current conversation—celebrates its history of ignoring other countries’ borders to invade and impose our own culture and steal from their very ground. “Every accusation is projection” is so obvious a statement at this point as to be tired cliché, but the imagined threat from asylum seekers so reliably drummed up by a biased media is almost entirely grounded in terminology that would be better applied to the imperial history they decline to teach us honestly.

Which is to say that, frankly, borders are bullshit, and the only way in which I feel they make sense is as administrative units in the vein of counties and local districts, because the world is a big old place and the tasks needed to keep it running are as frequently best tackled at the local scale by people close to the problem as they are from distant governments on high. But the idea that certain people shouldn’t be able to put their feet on certain patches of land on this earth that was bequeathed to us all as a common good? That the planet we are spinning through space on can in any way be claimed or restricted by people who will live no more than ten decades against a history of four and a half billion years? If the concern is that opening up the borders will see people flood from less fortunate areas to fill those nations traditionally referred to as the first world, well then, perhaps we should work to make the rest of the world a more pleasant and plausible place to live! Perhaps justice and equality for all is the true underlying problem here, not migration!

For too long we have treated the planet as a zero sum game, that “I want” means “you can’t have”, even when the population of the world was less than a billion people, as when the US was founded and the settlers were murderously driving out people of the First Nations. And yet here we are now, at 8 billion people, somehow still falling for the lie that we’re running out of room, that our resources are limited and cannot be shared. Well, friends, our room is capacious, and our resources are far greater and more sustainable than we realise, except that they are being hoarded by the few. The world is a big place, and we should all share in it equally, and welcome each other as siblings on this impossible, incomprehensible dream we call life. Let’s dream bigger than imaginary lines.

---

As part of our 15th anniversary celebrations, we’re asking you to send in your favourite stories from our archive. This week, we’ve got recommendations for two stories from one author, Daniel Abraham. Catherine Hill is recommending his story THE MEANING OF LOVE from episode 316, saying: “The tone and the setting, it should be bleak but it’s funny. The way the main character is a great trickster of others, but also fools themselves due to love, despite the cynicism of their life and where they live. The gender confusion of the main character which kinda tricked the Podcastle staff at the time. M K Hobson’s reading of it is wonderful.”

Then we have an anonymous tipster recommending THE CURANDERO AND THE SWEDE, a PodCastle Giant episode from back in 2009, saying “The story moved along and then surprised me at the end with the significance of its message. I had this story saved for many years.” Thank you both for the recommendations!