Abominably Ever After
‘Yawp,’ Mr. Abominable (or Abe as his wife preferred to call him) grunted as he threw his hulk of a body into the worn armchair in the corner of the cabin. A pool of water formed at his feet as snow and ice melted from his fur. His wife sighed, could he not give himself even a little shake before coming inside, was it too much to ask? She walked towards him and wiped his face with a towel, remembering times when she’d had to clean bits of flesh and gristle stuck to the whiskers around his mouth. Those days were long gone. His head nestled into the groove of his favourite chair. His wife closed the door behind him shutting out the blizzard blowing down the mountain.
‘Darling,’ she ventured.
‘Yawp,’ he replied picking up a book.
‘Remember what we talked about yesterday, spicing things up a little bit?’
‘Yawp.’
‘Darling, remember?’ She twirled in front of him, her fingers toying with the straps of a negligee that hugged her body in most of the right places. She turned round, lifting it a little at the front to give him a hint of thigh. His eyes barely left the dog-eared paper-back he held between his enormous hands.
‘Darling!’ She grabbed it, snapped it shut and flung it down on the floor.
‘Look!’ she commanded, pointing towards herself.
His eyes surveyed her curves for a second.
‘Yawp.’ He pointed a hairy arm towards the book.
‘Ok,’ she relented, handing the darned thing back to him.
Her shoulders sagged, they weren’t old, although her husband could definitely be classified as long in the tooth, but not her! She watched his belly move up and down.
He nodded off to sleep ensconced in that moth eaten chair; the book fell to the floor, Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness!’ She rolled her eyes.
His nostrils flared as he breathed out. Where was that animal desire gone? The one that had made her not really complain at all when he’d swooped into her camp long ago and carried her off. She hadn’t even screamed! The whole world had been fascinated by tales of the hairy creature mentioned in Edmund Hilary’s book, racing each other up the Himalayas to try to find it. Her team got lucky, they hadn’t been anywhere near Everest at the time, but Abe had spotted them when he’d taken a night off from terrorizing locals. He came roaring into their camp, pounding his chest and sent them all scurrying off into the wilderness, all but her. She stood rooted to the ground, heart thumping and well – wet in an area that ladies weren’t supposed to mention. The wildness! The men in her expedition were so dull, babbling about careers in Oxford, all slope-shouldered, fleshy-palmed pedants who winked at her whenever the conversation turned saucy. She gave a shudder thinking of them.
Unlike Abe, when he came swinging into the camp, she’d jumped into his arms! His fur had smelled of sweat, pine and wood-smoke; she’d buried her face in it as they swept through the trees. When they reached their destination he put her down on the floor of a primitive cabin (thank goodness for DIY skills) and there she still was.
Back in the day, they spent hours rolling around in the hay in their love nest set amongst the trees. The energy! She felt that familiar stirring inside her. She approached her slumbering husband recalling the day he’d walked into the cabin holding that negligee like a trophy. He’d pilfered it from a hiker’s rucksack after a day’s terrorizing. (The things those people carried up mountains!) But oh, the fun they had! It was just the ticket to get his blood pumping once more. She hitched it up over her waist and threw a leg over his, straddling him as he slept. His eyes flickered open.
‘Darling,’ she murmured in her best come-to-bed-voice. ‘Darling,’ she cooed. He opened his lids and raised an eyebrow at her before promptly pushing her off him.
‘Darling,’ she repeated, exasperation entered her tone. She climbed on top of him again. Persistence sometimes paid off. ‘Darling,’ she purred taking his giant hands in hers.
‘Yawp,’ he growled, yanked them back and again cast her aside like an old napkin. He curled himself deeper into the armchair, his head rolled back, his tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth.
She remembered emerging into the sunshine of the mountainside after several days of lovemaking on their honeymoon. The local villagers had left little gifts for her: trinkets, cooking utensils, blankets. They’d always known about Abe. They welcomed the tourism he brought to the area. He helped them supplement their incomes; they worked as guides for the geographers and zoologists who traipsed the mountainside hoping to capture the abominable snowman, or the yeti as the locals called him. They had come to a tacit compromise with Abe. They turned a blind eye to his occasional theft of livestock and he in turn agreed to make the odd fleeting appearance or leave behind the occasional footprint ensuring enduring curiousity and extra income for the area.
Teaching him some table manners was the most challenging thing she’d ever done. Had he really expected her to eat chunks of almost raw meat with her hands? Gradually, she had taught him how to use a knife and fork, to use a cup when he drank water from the stream. He learnt proper etiquette such as sitting quietly at a table while listening to polite conversation. She’d done an amazing job really. She’d transformed him. He could stand upright now; he took much better care of his appearance; he trimmed his bushy eyebrows once a week. She taught him to read, he read all the classics, even the ones that most people only pretended to read like Joyce and Dostoevsky. She stared into the mirror above the sink, she was still attractive. Yet lately, he didn’t seem interested in her anymore. Her eyes narrowed as something niggled at her. No, she shook her head.
She gazed at him again, sprawled out with his legs splayed on the carpet. All their evenings rolled into one, him snoring on his armchair, her wandering the cabin trying to find things to amuse herself with. It could give one far too much time to think. It was that darned doctor down in the foothills, she thought to herself. After a particularly bad case of gout in his right foot, the doctor had recommended that Abe change his diet. Who ever heard of a vegan yeti? Yes, that was it, that’s what started it, he turned from the wild beast she found so alluring to this, this what? What was he? And what had he done with her hairy wilder-man that couldn’t look at her without carrying her off to the bedroom? That niggling doubt bubbled up again, but she swept it out under the door like it was a fallen leaf blown in by the wind. She quite simply had too much time on her hands since the children left home. That was it. In turn, they had each climbed down the mountainside and left to terrorize more foreign pastures. Her eldest made it as far as Canada. She gazed at the photograph of him above the fireplace, he was striding behind some fir trees, eluding capture by trappers. Sasquatch, the locals called him. He kept a fairly low profile. Just like his father now, she realized. Her second child had travelled overland to Russia, he lived a quiet enough existence in the forests of Siberia. Her youngest travelled south to Bhutan, she was living quite the life over there, even appearing on local stamps. She toyed with an envelope on the mantelpiece containing a tiny portrait of her daughter; her children made her so proud.
She heard feet outside crunching on the fallen snow and pulled a fluffy dressing gown over herself. There was a knock on the cabin door. She opened it, Tyag, mayor of the nearest village stood outside wrapped in a thick sheep skin coat. She smiled; a pleasant surprise to break the monotony of the evening. He followed her into her warm home.
‘Mrs. A, how are you?’ he inquired looking up at her. She was a giant beside the locals. Big boned, her father had called her.
‘Call me Susan please, I’m fine, thank you Tyag.’ She waited for him to continue; he was shifting from one leg to the other.
‘And Mr. A, his foot is better?’
‘It seems to be.’
‘Very good, very good.’
‘Tyag, what is it?’ she asked, although the sinking feeling in her stomach already told her.
‘Well, Mrs. A, Susan, it seems the villagers … they’re a bit worried.’ He glanced over towards the huge sleeping Abe.
‘Still?’
‘Yes,’ he looked again at the sleeping beast.
‘Don’t worry he’s fast asleep, nothing wakes him.’ Nothing at all, she wanted to add, feeling the straps of the negligee cutting into her fleshy shoulder.
‘Mrs. A, Susan, last time we spoke, I told you the villagers were worried, the harvest was bad this year and tourism was down too, way down in fact, looking at our accounts, we made very little money,’ he explained.
‘That’s a shame, sorry to hear that.’ She loved all the villagers, they’d always been so kind to her.
‘No tourists mean no money and with a poor harvest too,’ he shook his head, ‘we may not have enough money to survive the winter up here.’
Her breath froze for a moment.
‘When you spoke to him last time, what did he say?’ Tyag asked.
She blushed; she’d tried several tactics. Role-plays, dress-up games, rescue fantasies, he’d turned his nose up at all of the them.
‘He was very understanding Tyag, he went straight back to work scaring climbers again.’ He had done that at least.
‘Mrs. A, it seems that some of the villagers think that his heart just isn’t in it anymore.’
‘Nonsense, Abe loves terrorizing the climbers.’
‘Mrs. A, Susan, last time he attacked a camp he stopped one man who was running away and asked him if he had ever read Nietzsche.’
Her shoulders slumped, there it was again, the niggling doubt. In her efforts to introduce him to culture, perhaps she’d given him a bit too much of it? Lately he’d taken to reciting the great philosophers and declaring that he didn’t think he was following his destiny.
He needed to find himself! She’d snorted at that, find himself? He was a yeti! But how could she hold it against him? It was her fault. She’d spent years trying to rid him of his monstrous habits and now she missed them.
‘Well, Tyag, I’ll keep trying to bring back the beast in him.’
‘Please do Mrs. A, otherwise the tourists will stop coming and who knows what’ll become of us! My wife heard a climber say that they think the yeti is really just a very hairy hippy who hangs out in the mountains.’
Hippy! Her husband was no hippy!
‘Leave it with me Tyag, I won’t let you down.’ She walked him out to the door and shut it firmly behind him. She approached her husband; an idea formed in her mind.
❦ ❦ ❦
Mrs. A flung herself into the cabin.
‘Abe,’ she yelled, ‘Abe!’
She caught her breath, taking deep gulps. Her heart pounded.
‘Oh Abe, it was just so, so… wild!’ she exclaimed, ‘I screamed, I charged, I beat my chest like this. I did my loudest ……YAAAAAWWWPPP ’ She demonstrated a yeti impression far more yeti-like than the actual yeti’s. Then she peeled off the fur that the villagers had helped her to put on. She’d enjoyed the hairy make-over immensely; they’d turned it into a party. ‘Well, I certainly convinced them.’ She pulled off the hair they’d stuck to her hands. ‘They were terrified…. It was amazing,’ she laughed.
Her husband stood there staring at her, all 9 ft of him covered in a thick brown pelt and with teeth as sharp as bear claws.
‘Yawp…’ he replied, a cloud of smoke billowed from his pipe, ‘as Aristotle himself once said, “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”’
Her heart sank, what kind of a monster had she created? Never mind, she thought, let him be a philosopher, if that’s what he wanted. She’d never intended to be a housewife. And she no longer was; she was Susan, Susan the yeti! And after that? She still needed some time to figure that out, and that was ok. But for the time being she’d relish every moment of behaving abominably.
Sinead Ryan holds Master of Creative Writing from University of Limerick. Her writing has been published in the Irish Independent, Silver Apples Magazine and Untethered Magazine.