Back to Issue 12.

The Hyena’s Voice and Victoria

Brianna Di Monda

Victoria didn’t pay the hyena too much attention until she heard its voice. The cold, curved tone, without vibrations, roused her awake. She stared into the dark inquisitively. Again, like the chorus of a tender song, it repeated her name. She sat up, her sleeping bag peeling off her shoulders like a chrysalis. She didn’t understand that intonation, so far from life, so far from the rest of the bodies sleeping beside her . . . what was it she had been dreaming about?

She unzipped the tent and opened the flap to reveal the night sky, the big dipper above her in the east, with Orion far to the west. The Southern Cross, often referred to as the Crux, could be used for navigation. By clenching your fist and aligning your first knuckle with the axis of the Cross, the tip of your thumb would indicate south. She headed north, under the thousands of stars separating these constellations she relied on for orientation, and tilted her head up. The white lights darkened, the moon had set hours ago. The dream was slipping away. What was it she had been dreaming about? She stubbed her toe and grabbed her cold foot in her hands. Victoria. The hyena called again. She walked on, following the voice, which must have recognized something in her that Victoria had yet to see in herself. Whatever it was, she would follow the source, steal its hypnotic knowledge, and leave quickly—before she was eaten. Her bare feet stepped delicately over the small succulents in the ground, not caring to stay on trail. The only way forward was the most direct path, the one that took her straight to the mouth of that low, curved intonation of her name. Victoria. 

She remembered how a few weeks ago, just after leaving her husband, she had turned to her sister to ask her if she wanted coffee. They were in the kitchen. And before she’d even finished her sentence, she had stopped, brows furrowed, eyes focused on the brown liquid pouring into the mug. Ah—she had realized—she’d just mimicked one of the voices she had heard so often when she was young, that of a woman who recognized her aging features, consumed by her lost beauty, and vaguely bitter. The voice of a woman with most of her life behind her, confronted with her mortality, her impossibility. Her speech empty, soaring upwards, with identical, unoriginal notes. Trying to scream, but stifled, suppressed. And the body: stuck into too-bright days, empty skies, sexless nights, a life heading for mild despair, each day the same as the next . . . a fragile history that went unnoticed to the untrained ear. And then, coffee all over the counter. Her sister handed her paper towels, asking where her mind had gone.

Victoria had always felt voices. She understood people intuitively through them. By their timbre, their inflection, the octave in which their words danced. She recognized their entire life up to the point at which they spoke to her. And she memorized each of these inflections in turn, absorbing their words, digesting them, recognizing how each revealed their needs, their wants. As a young girl, adults loved her for the attention she devoted to each of them as she twirled around the dinner table, head poking just above the wood, asking them about their favorite meals, their wine, their pleasures. She cultivated this attention like an art and used it alternately as a shield and a weapon for decades, until she met her husband, until they went on their honeymoon together, until she recognized that his dissatisfaction was insatiable, that Victoria could not cure his emptiness, or the way he lived between life and death, not understanding the liminal space he inhabited, or the way he suffered because he really had split himself in two by not really living, so that each part of him—one dead, one begging to live—faced the other, demanding things he could not provide. Things no one could provide.

She remembered the guide’s warning before they started the backpacking trip. How at the top of the canyon, he told their small group to be careful of the hyenas in this part of the desert. That they track backpackers during the day, listening to them speak in order to learn their names. Then, when the sun goes down, they separate someone by calling their name, pulling them away from the protection of camp. Amilcar. Yes, that was the guide’s name. His curly, brown hair, jutting nose, skin browned from years under the sun. And the voice, wet and cool, mildly clear and self-assured. He explained the danger and the beauty of the thirty-day loop they would take, all while running his eyes over the ground, the mountains, the plants, the shadows, without haste, with deep attention to the details, and genuine care for the people he would guide through the desert. He looked directly at her, at each of the four people in his care. There was Lily: a bright, wider woman with curly blond hair, bold eyes, and cheeks that sagged to reveal her age. And Isaac, with his wiry fingers and hair, square face, sagging stomach, next to his sister, Ophelia, who looked almost identical to him, and shared his hunched posture, but whose hair was pulled back in a tight, finely combed ponytail. Amilcar had told her not to do this precise thing. It was their only warning before their descent into the canyon, surrounded by cascading red rocks piled into a tall, endless maze. 

But she leaned into the dark, pressing on, thankful she had gone on this trip because, on her own, she was freer to observe, to look back on her life and recognize how deeply she had sunk into incomprehension of herself. And yes, there was something unexpected without him there, without his sticky breath on her neck or his hawkish eyes analyzing her most minor movements. A possession that brought on paranoia, dulled her senses. Free of him, she observed the woman hiking before her. Lily. She didn’t even look back at Victoria—too focused on the trail, on not tripping on loose rocks. 

But her voice, an earthy one. Soft and faraway, as if it had traveled miles through her body, reverberating in her chest and climbing up her throat before releasing into the air and trickling into Victoria’s ear, where she recognized the woman’s strength, self-assurance.

“Are you married?” Victoria asked her.

“With two sons,” she responded, smoothing her voice to reveal her pleasure. “My youngest will be starting college next month.”

What was the woman doing here? Victoria wondered. Might she want to be with family if her son had so little time left at home?

“Are you alone?” Lily asked.

“Only recently,” Victoria told her, scrambling up the rocks. “I left my husband a couple months ago.”

“Ah, so you’ve come to the canyon to center yourself.”

“My sister recommended it. You know, take a backpacking trip, find yourself, return to civilization reborn,” she waved her hands to communicate the looniness of it all, though Lily couldn’t see her. “Maybe I’m hoping to find some answers. To be honest, I mostly just needed a change,” she lied, trying to give the conversation an intimate tone.

“Aren’t you afraid?” The voice came from behind her. She turned to see Isaac, his eyes on the ground as he hiked in her footsteps. She shook her head, surprised. He looked at her, his hard eyes peeking out from under his red hair, sweat stains growing under his arms. He adjusted his backpack, throwing it higher on his hips.

“Aren’t you afraid of leaving him? Don’t you know that if you leave him, he’ll find another lover,” he breathed heavily between his words.  “And you’ll just be a sorry divorcee . . . a woman who left her husband, and for what . . . to be a lonely thing . . . who thinks she can take the world on her own . . .”

“I’m not deluded,” she replied carefully, turning the texture of his words over in her mouth to determine the best way to reply. “I am afraid to divorce him.”

“Ah, so you admit—”

“But I will.”

“We all do what we must,” Lily said, changing the subject. “I was hoping my son would come with me on this trip. Hoped we’d get this time together, but he wanted to spend his last summer with his friends. I suppose I understand that. Still, it’s sad to be here without the men in my life.”

They hiked on in silence. Lily’s voice revealed a lifetime of knowledge of which Victoria could not fathom the burden, and even were she to live as long as this woman before her, could not imagine inhabiting such a grounded body. Her own life held such little history, with no children and a husband who had married her, and not the other way around. She took such little agency in her life, and the things that happened to her did not equate to her true existence. She had mastered the art of mirroring what others said without ever engaging in her own passions, once so quiet, now bursting to the surface, begging her to find her way out of the darkness. But why did she find herself, now, so far from her childhood, wanting more than what those around her expected? Had her tricks not brought her happiness in the past? Had she not learned to dominate and master others by living in detail? 

On their break, Ophelia let out a long laugh, her closed eyes shadowless. A beautiful woman, with full lips, as if they belonged to someone who wasn’t afraid of pleasure, who received it without remorse. Victoria’s observations only extended outside herself, restlessly weaving through the thoughts and behaviors of others, searching for life to grasp onto, desires to call her own, she continued to realize. In this way, her life had piled up without desire or hope. And when her hand was asked in marriage, of course it was what she wanted, because it was what he wanted. She never attempted an understanding inside her mind because she had always been afraid to find herself bursting with suffering, like the jolt of an orchestra’s first rehearsal.

Victoria. The voice called again, this time silky, beckoning her further on. For so long, her cowardice had provided lukewarm solace, and she had resigned herself to it, to laying down and offering her body as a sacrifice to the lives of others. Thirty-four years of living, thirty-four years of listening, and this was what it had afforded her. Under cover of night, she heard the life inside her for the first time. Her methodic heartbeat, her breath heavy, her chest lifting with such assurance she herself had never bothered to possess. Her hair whipped in the wind, tickled her cheek, got caught in her mouth. She was like a newly-born cactus, sprouting from the dry desert dirt for the first time, looking up at the expansive world and waiting for more sun, more water to replenish her, to help her grow, continue to nourish this little life she suddenly found inside her, restless and enormously happy despite the sadness that covered her past like a wool blanket. She was, for once, the end of life and all its being and wishing.

No one, not even her sister, had known she’d been so enormously unhappy that she had needed to go looking for life itself, that when she had left her husband, she still did not find it in the world, and so went farther, her feet taking her to the desert, to the earth where the hyenas preyed on the people brave enough, stupid enough to walk alone. Because Amilcar’s speech had not been her introduction to the hyenas—she had read about them in a magazine when she stayed at her sister’s house, in an article detailing how they lured people into the wild with their voice, and she recognized in them her talent at its apex. She knew, whatever their instincts, they could only lure people like that by observing and echoing their deepest needs. What was it she had been dreaming about?

Victoria. The howl pounded through the night, stopping just as it reached her body, seeming to call out just for her, all sound pointed in one direction, slamming into her throat like it was a foam panel. The dark outline of a boulder blocked her view of the skyline, so faint under the night sky. And on that boulder, climbing to its apex, the hyena. Larger than life, than her life, it let out a shrieking laugh. This time its voice split her chest wide open, froze her in place, hypnotized her with fear. The pack stepped into her field of vision, and all at once, a small hoard surrounded her. She glanced anxiously from one side to the other. These were the hyenas she had been dying to meet, the ones who manipulated others’ need for recognition better than even her. They hissed her name again, Victoria, in unison, and gurgled, deformed syllables bubbled up from the back of their salivating throats. She had come out here to learn from them what she herself could not admit, even after all this time: that even with her daring changes, everything was still as it had been. She closed her eyes. Of all her thoughts, all her ideas and their consequences, this was the most terrifying. Her resolve had been firm, to move out, to make a new life for herself, she had even moved in with her sister, gone on this trip . . . all to avoid the real decision, the one that took true rebirth: to take agency, always. What was it she had been dreaming about? Ah, that her death would allow her to renounce womanhood. And this thought, so small, had emerged from the hyenas whispering her name—humming her true desires into her ears, waking her up as if with distant music—and formed tiny roots inside her, and these roots branched out to form a complex web that grew thicker until they were part of her, an extension of her, and the thought could not be forgotten or taken back.

How many more times would she resolve to merge with what existed until she actually did it? She could only know if she kept living. She closed her eyes and concentrated on twisting her voice as a last-ditch effort to call upon her quiet power. Her words emerged icy, hissing, winding their way back to the pack’s ears, telling them to leave her alone. The pack faltered, her command strong, cultivated by years of practice. But they continued forward, intent on their kill.

She turned to run back to the camp, towards the Southern Cross, unsure if she would find the tents in this darkness. But immediately before her, a figure stood. Lily. A flashlight in one hand, a long stick in the other, and behind her the other hikers: Amilcar, Isaac, Ophelia. Their eyes shone, but from fear or mysterious determination, Victoria couldn’t tell. 

“I am afraid,” she whispered.

The others ran forward, their bodies vibrating wildly in an effort to contain themselves. Victoria watched these people turn savage, turn saviors, as Amilcar flailed his arms and charged the leader, Isaac threw rocks at the hyenas on high ground, Ophelia and Lily swung sticks at those closes. All around her, the hyenas were backing off, unprepared for this onslaught. Each of them asserted their instincts in order to save her, one of their pack. Victoria stared for several moments until she was no longer afraid, but a distinct happiness, more intense than her previous terror, flooded her body. She felt that phrase “take agency, always” had waited inside her, for this moment. For her to have strength. She faced the nearest hyena without breathing, expecting it to hypnotize her or make a calculated lunge she wouldn’t expect. Its lips curled for a moment. Then, barely freeing itself from Victoria’s gaze, fleeing her like a madman, ran into the dark night, with the rest of the pack following suit. Victoria chased them to the boulder she had seen the first hyena mount, and climbed it, screamed her name with her chest pointed at Orion’s belt, in the direction the hyenas had run. She inaugurated herself in this new terrain, breathing the air as if for the first time.

Lily’s hand touched her shoulder and then embraced her, and in this woman’s arms, Victoria felt herself burst with life. She was not sure how they had known to save her. When Lily guided her down the boulder, and Victoria planted her feet back on the cold desert ground, she found herself humiliated and perplexed by her bare feet. She stared at them, and the others allowed her to process her discomfort quietly. Bright red from the cold, shoes and socks forgotten in her tent. Is this how she dressed to meet her maker?

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up, all pretenses abandoned.

“You’re not the first,” Amilcar told her. “But you’re lucky.” He looked like a sand cat, his eyes burning over his dirt-streaked face.

“Let’s get you back to camp.” Ophelia’s voice this time. Victoria looked at her, her usually perfect hair in knots, and smiled.

“Thank you. I couldn’t have faced them alone.”

Isaac put an arm around her and guided her back carefully, telling her she was one of the bravest people he knew, that she would be fine without a husband, that he had spoken before only out of bitterness. His words were loose, warm syllables that flowed and merged with her, only to break off and soar outwards immediately afterward, breathing life of their own. Her eyes welled with soft gratitude.

The girls got their sleeping bags back in order. In the light of the tent, Victoria saw that Ophelia and Lily were pallid, and their excess tiredness made their features sharper. It had taken a toll on them, too, to tap into that ability to fight the hyenas off. Victoria was folding her fleece jacket to use as a pillow when Lily interrupted, grabbing her hand. “This, here,” she told her, "this is life.” Ophelia looked at them from where she lay in her sleeping bag, her eyes half-closed with sleep, yet blazing with an intent to listen, to understand.

“You avenge yourself by staying here, not by dying. By promising that when you speak, it will be slow and not full of yearning for acceptance or corrupted by the past, but strong, like the soul of a wild animal.”

Silence between them, then, and the stillness of the desert overwhelmed Victoria, and she found her mouth had gone dry. The silence stretched out between the three girls, waiting for what Victoria might say. But she could not unearth in her the beginning of a word, could not turn these spinning thoughts into language. She twisted the cap off her water bottle and took a long sip before climbing into her sleeping bag. Once cocooned, an unexpected thought dilated her eyes, stilled her mind, and she perceived her body immersed in quiet happiness, breathing like a person who had passed through a great danger, who had proved to herself that there was nothing to fear. This was not suffering, so how did she get here? And she fell asleep to the rhythm of her heartbeat, the tiny creature relishing its permission to speak for the first time in its life.

Writer’s Notebook

The story follows Victoria as she comes to terms with the meaninglessness of her experience up to the point at which we meet her. She knows, for the first time, what she is experiencing as it happens, what the frailty is, what the fear is that she harbors inside her. The fear is for what is lost, and what is still to be lost. But she is worried that as she tries to reach herself, she fades from her own touch.

I’ve been reading a lot of feminist texts (Naomi Wolf, Sarah Rose Etter), so the ideas behind Hyena definitely came out of those. In a sense, the underlying theme of the story is a cautionary tale, in that if you work through the emotions in it, then it won’t happen to you.

about the writer

Brianna Di Monda is the Assistant Managing Editor at MAYDAY. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in The Summerset Review, The Cleveland Review, and Thin Air, among others. She was nominated for the 2021 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.