Compliance, by Alison Stine
Photo by Landis Brown on Unsplash
The device promised peace. For the price, Liz was willing to try it. Over the kitchen sink, she fiddled with the package. The device looked like the ankle monitor she had worn in high school, when she had gotten drunk on strawberry wine and crashed the neighbor’s ATV. This device was smaller than that, slim like a phone.
Kayleigh wore it without too much prodding at first. It was new, after all. Like a toy, except it didn’t do anything. All it did, when Liz snapped it into place around her eight-year-old’s leg, snaking the vinyl band below the knee and locking the square, was hum gently.
“Is it a phone?” Kayleigh asked.
“No,” Liz said.
“Where’s it from?”
“The doctor’s office. It monitors things.”
“Like where I am?”
“How you’re feeling. When I can help.”
“I don’t need your help,” Kayleigh said, and turned on her tablet. Soon, she complained the device was warm, but she had not thrown the tablet, as she usually did, or burst into tears, or told her momma she was going to hit her or run away.
Mother, Liz reminded herself. Mom.
Don’t use those country words, she told her daughter on the visits—Easter and Christmas—they went back to see Liz’s last remaining family: her mother, her great aunt who kept rabbits in hutches along the barn. Just because your folks use ‘ain’t’ doesn’t mean you should, she told Kayleigh.
Family. Not folks.
At night before Kayleigh’s bath, Liz unsnapped the device. It had left a pink mark. But Kayleigh did not complain. She got into the bath willingly. She never did that.
In the morning, Liz brought it into her room, on a breakfast tray with a plate of toaster waffles. The device coiled on a corner of the tray. Liz tried not to think of a belt when she lifted it, flopping toward her daughter. Or a snake.
“Again?” Kayleigh said.
But she let it be put on, like the instructions promised she would. Compliance will start to build up in your child. The more the child wears the device, the more they want to.
Elle King was singing from a video on Kayleigh’s tablet: a favorite, since she had lived close, just up the road from where Liz was raised, in Wellston. If a girl like that could get out, maybe we all could, people thought. Of course, the singer had things most people don’t: talent, beauty. And one thing many people did: an absent father who loomed large.
We all had bad dads, or no dads, but somehow, everyone forgot that when a child was shrieking in the aisle of a store, only a mother in sight. When a child refused to leave the playground when it was time to go, past time. When the calls from the school came. Pick her up. We can’t do anything with her.
Elle also had a baby, Liz knew that. A son. She had seen him on the singer’s hip on Instagram, being carted around backstage. The toddler frequently had thick earmuffs blocking him from his momma’s loud line of work. Liz couldn’t remember a dad. Maybe there was never a dad. Maybe children of the holler just appeared there like mushrooms in the moss. Still, there were so many people in photos of the famous singer, local girl done good. The entourage that surrounded a rockstar was also there for her child: hands to take him, laps to hold him.
What Liz wouldn’t give to have that help. To have any help.
She had the device.
At Easter, Liz was prepared to make up some excuse, why they couldn’t come back to the holler. But then the weekend arrived, cold and gray. Kayleigh could wear pants, hiding the device.
The child spent the long drive staring out the window. She didn’t ask to stop once. Liz almost missed her famous whine. It was familiar. It had seemed part of her. When the farmhouse loped into view, gray and tilting, she didn’t complain. After greeting Liz’s great aunt, Alba, and waving to her grandmother in her chair, Kayleigh went outside to the barn. Alba said she had some Reader’s Digests out there the girl might like to read, to practice her letters, and to Liz’s surprise, Kayleigh had agreed.
Nobody seemed alarmed at the change in the child.
Of course Liz’s mother didn’t notice much anymore and hadn’t for a long time. She stared at the TV, which was off. Liz and Alba made small talk. Magazines rotted in piles on the coffee table, too, mostly gossip rags. Liz read the headline on the top one in the stack. Elle King was pregnant again.
When the crash came, Liz and Alba rushed outside. One of the greenhouse panes had shattered, and Kayleigh lay in the dirt and snow, glass shards fanned around her like a sunflower blossom. Through a rip in the knee of the child’s pants, Liz could see a red streak.
“I just leaned on it,” Kayleigh said. She seemed sad about the accident, rather than angry.
“It’s all right,” Alba said. “Those panes are old. Gonna have to turn these into shorts, though.” She reached to tear the pants further, to check the wound.
Liz couldn’t stop her in time. Kayleigh’s knee was skinned: a clean cut, small, no glass in it. But the device below her knee was now exposed. Alba looked at Liz.
A panel on the device had popped open—exposing not gears and wires, or a digital display, as Liz had expected, but flowers. The crushed and pungent odor of earth. The flowers smelled so strong, Liz’s head ached.
And she remembered it. It was the smell of the kitchen at Alba’s house where they had lived since the strawberry wine incident. Pots bubbling, herbs drying. The smell of her mother. The smell of plants for calm, plants for sleep, plants for compliance.
Liz tore the plants out of the device. She threw them on the ground. They seemed to wilt the moment they touched the air, to wither and die. She started to rip the device off her child’s leg. She would find a rock, smash the device, burn it.
“Well, child,” her great aunt said. “Ain’t you come home.”
Alison Stine's new novel is DUST from Wednesday Books/St. Martin's. Her first novel ROAD OUT OF WINTER won the Philip K. Dick Award, and her second TRASHLANDS was longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. She lives with her son in Ohio.