Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal

Brandy

I met Brandy during my second deployment to Iraq, just north of Baghdad in Diyala, where the Tigris branches off headfirst into palm groves and pomegranate trees in a stretch of farmland the intel guys used to call the Bread Basket. I’d just been moved to an infantry platoon composed of soldiers the rest of the company didn’t want, but I didn’t feel too offended. I knew it had to do with a soldier of my rank wanting to stay on the vehicles during our patrols through villages and absolutely nothing to do with me being a woman.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of mines or bullets or roadside bombs so much as I didn’t care for the chickens roaming free in the courtyards. I mean, have you ever seen a chicken farm? Dinosaurs petit running around, shitting all over themselves and each other. Disgusting. You couldn’t step foot off the vehicle without one of them little fuckers snapping at you or trying to crap on your boots. The lieutenant didn’t exactly help. Once, he thought it would be funny to chase me down while holding one in his hands. The wings flapped at me and the damn bird squawked, cursing me in its chicken language. It was uncalled for. Who knew what diseases the thing might have been carrying in its thorny little talons?

Anyway, I was cleaning my rifle after returning from patrol and watching a bootleg copy of Anchorman in my soldiers’ tent. It was important for me to spend time there because I felt the more time I spent in the women’s tent, the less my soldiers respected me. I was far more at home in the men’s quarters anyway. Something about the earthy musk of masculine armpits matched how I felt about my own. A few minutes into the movie, Private Jimmy Burgos ran inside waving his arms. Sergeant Flea, Sergeant Flea, he said, there’s a chupacabra running around outside the tent.

I reassembled my rifle, loaded a magazine, told everyone to stack their cots at the entrance of the tent. I ain’t letting that little goat sucker tear out my esophagus, I said to them, y’all best protect yourselves.

Next thing I know, Burgos started giggling, then burst into a full-blown howling sort of laughter. He touched his belly as it caved inward, then the laughter spread to the other soldiers, clueing me to the idea there may have been a joke I wasn’t in on.

Sergeant Flea, Burgos said, there’s no such thing as chupacabras. I was fuckin’ with ya.

I took in a deep breath, allowed my anger to vacate through the vibrating pores of my skin, then changed my mind. I wanted to get pissed. So I did. Raised my voice. Told everyone to return their cots to their assigned sleeping spaces. But not you, I said to Burgos, put on your gear and come outside with me. I took him outside the tent and chewed his ass out, made him do pushups and squats. Forced him to crawl back and forth through the mud caused by his sweat dripping into the dirt. I called him things I will not repeat here.

Of course, it was on the last syllable of a particularly offensive slur that the platoon sergeant decided to walk by.

What the hell is going on here? the platoon sergeant asked.

When I explained, the platoon sergeant laughed at me, told me I had no business running a squad of trained killers. That I was lucky the unit was so shorthanded he couldn’t fire me. That he really wanted to send me to listen to radios in the battalion headquarters. After all, that was a job more suited for a woman in a combat zone, he said. While the army didn’t care that I was a woman, a few old heads certainly did. He ordered me to walk around in the dark, get over my fear of what he considered mundane.

I strolled around the base for a bit, kept a finger close to the trigger of my rifle. I knew I wasn’t supposed to have it loaded on the base—hell, I’d even seen someone accidentally fire a round into another soldier’s calf—but I was afraid of the supernatural freaks my grandmother had told me about while growing up in the Tennessee countryside.

See, Diyala sat at the edge of the living world, shifting in and out of a veil broken by artillery shells, and I wasn’t about to find myself trapped in the horrific revenge plans of colonized specters. The platoon sergeant may have been oblivious of the hauntings which bombarded the desert in the dark like a recoilless rifle without aim, but I knew what waited out there. Ghosts. Zombies. Rougarous.

Chupacabras.

I decided it might be safe to take a nap in one of the concrete bunkers lining the edge of the twelve tents that composed our living area. As far as I knew, nobody had been killed by rockets or mortar shells while lying within their liminal spaces and no unnecessary deaths meant no hauntings, if my grandmother was to be believed.

There was a black, metal flashlight I kept in my pocket in case it got dark and I needed to see in a dark corner during a raid or read the coordinates off a map during a firefight. I turned it on and crawled into the bunker, checking for snakes, scorpions, camel spiders. I made it about halfway in when I decided to rotate on my back and take a nap.

I lay there listening to the gentle hum of generators powering the base, washing myself in their resonant waves. There was something relaxing to the consistency, as though those generators subsisted on my dependence and anchored me on this side of the veil. If I could hear these generators, no creature could haul me into an other-dimensional existence because I was leashed to something solid, even if that solidity was only metaphorical. I managed to fall asleep in spite of the sharp gravel chewing at my back.

Daylight peeked into the end of my concrete tunnel. I turned over, figured I had another hour to nap before I needed to prepare for the next patrol. I rolled over a ball of flesh, which promptly yelped before jumping onto four legs.

As my eyes came into focus, I figured it might have been one of the stray dogs who had taken refuge on our base. The commander hated them, but most of the soldiers turned to them for comfort when they came off patrol. When I reached to pet the creature, I noticed the teeth were sharper than a puppy’s and the skin was hairless, almost scaly. She stared at me with tiny eyes like Red Hots embedded in her sagittal skull.

A chupacabra. Maybe I hadn’t been so batshit crazy after all.

I grabbed my rifle, backed away in a sort of crab walk in the direction of the entrance. My ass dragged along the gravel, rocks spilling into my pants and scraping my skin. Then she stretched out her front paws and began to wag her tail. This chupe wanted to play. She chased after me and jumped on my chest before I could bring my weapon up to pull the trigger, and as she licked my face, I could smell the sulfur on her breath. Mixed with something sweet, like my grandfather after drinking too much schnapps.

I decided I loved her. I scooped her in my arms and took her to my tent.

People are often afraid of what they don’t understand. At least, that’s what I’ve so often observed. For example, I’ve learned my own fear of chickens existed because I did not understand what they brought to the world, what their purpose was. As I came to understand them, that disgust faded into an acceptance of chickens as an important source of lean protein.

Most of the platoon evaded Brandy, kept a quantifiable distance from the sharp teeth they’d come to judge her for. They didn’t recognize the need for her to exist. Nor did they understand my acceptance of something I’d been afraid of only moments before. They couldn’t see it was Brandy’s innocence which drew me to her. She wasn’t the blood-siphoning pest of urban legend. Besides, even if she was, the crimes attributed to her kind didn’t convey such a negative impression in the context of the aggressive war we were executing at the time.

But they simply couldn’t see it like that. They called her names, refused to give her sanctuary in the alternating stale and dry-fanned air of the tent, generally looked at her with suspicious eyes. Eventually I set up a smaller tent outside where I could spend time alone with her away from the plotting gazes of ignorant soldiers. Our own little safe space.

And a safe space it was.

Brandy proved to be excellent pest control. She didn’t seem to have any preference for goat’s blood as claimed by the articles I read on the internet. I began to wonder what I might need to feed her, but I noticed we weren’t finding spiders and scorpions in our boots and sleeping bags anymore. I once caught her sucking the blood from a snake who’d slithered into the main tent, but I excused this because poisonous snakes were the worst kinds of pests. And I didn’t have to clean up the mess because Brandy just slurped up all the droplets that had spilled on the ground.

When our tour in Iraq came to an end, I bribed the transportation personnel to find a pet-friendly carrier for Brandy to ride in without alerting the customs officials who may not have been so thrilled about a chupacabra coming into the United States. I don’t know why they should have been concerned—chupes had been sighted all over the US the previous decade—but I didn’t want to risk the inevitable shrieks and conversations that would accompany and alarm Brandy.

I left the Army a few months after we returned stateside and moved back home to Tennessee with my chupacabra in tow.

Brandy adjusted well to the Tennessee countryside. I found myself comforted by the gleam of joy in her vermilion eyes whenever I came home from work. She would wag her hairless tail and smile her knife-sharp smile. Sometimes, she placed a small field mouse drained of blood on the porch as a gift, as a reminder of her usefulness.

When I went to work, she whined and followed me all the way to my pickup truck, greeted me every time I returned from the Nissan plant in town, sniffed my clothes to see who’d I’d been in contact with.

No one ever bothered us. The closest anyone came to the house was the postal worker who delivered our mail. She would drive up the wheel tracks to the mailbox, drop off whatever we’d been sent, and head off down the road, never sensing the tensed talons of the chupacabra watching her from the window behind the porch.

Brandy would patrol the porch at night as though we were still in Iraq. She kept me secure, safe, protected me as I slept in my bed. I could sip my whiskey and smoke my weed without the night terrors that plagued so many of my war buddies.

She carried the burdens that should have collapsed my knees.

There was a day, about six months after we moved in, when I was very high and ordered a box of toilet paper. I don’t exactly know why. There was plenty in the bathroom. I must have gotten paranoid about an apocalypse or something because I ordered a pack of forty-eight rolls.

The toilet paper was delivered on a Saturday while I sat on the couch watching an episode of Supernatural. Thanks to Brandy, I’d grown so far past my fear of the unknown that I’d begun to seek out cryptids in every bit of media I consumed—movies, book, television, a VHS recording of a high school Frankenstein play I’d found at a garage sale for $2.50. Brandy lay on the couch with me, her head on my lap, breathing her sweet, sulfurous breath while I scratched behind her ears.

At some point, I felt Brandy tense up, the sinew of her muscles squeezing in anticipation. When the postal worker knocked on the door, Brandy jumped up and darted out the dog door I’d installed in the back. I managed to open the door just before she attacked the postal worker and wrapped my arms around Brandy’s hairless neck. I pulled her to the wood planks of the porch, whispered at her to calm down.

The postal worker screamed at the sight of a full-grown chupacabra wrestling with a woman on the porch. She dropped the package and ran to her truck. Brandy escaped my arms and chased after the mail truck until it disappeared down the driveway.

Animal control showed up the next day. I figured they might come by, so I’d given Brandy a few Valiums that morning to keep her from making noise. The two men from animal control walked up to the door with snares in hand. Excuse us, ma’am, do you have some kind of red-eyed, hairless dog living here? the taller of the two asked.

I do, but she’s harmless, I said.

Well, the post office says she attacked one of their delivery drivers and we need to take your dog in a few days.

The post office is mistaken.

I get it, ma’am. You don’t want us to take your dog, the shorter man said, but you gotta let us have a look.

I led the two men into the house, where Brandy was sprawled out on the living room floor. They stopped in their tracks when they saw her and walked back outside.

Do you know what that is? the shorter man asked.

I know it ain’t no dog, the taller man replied.

She’s a chupacabra, I said. Does the city have any ordinances about chupacabras going to the shelter? It certainly seems like a bad idea. Wouldn’t want Brandy to eat a cat.

The tall man scratched his head. That’s a good point, he said. I haven’t ever seen anything in the city code about chupacabras. Have you? he asked his partner, who shook his head no. Well, he said, we’re getting the hell out of here. But you better keep that whatever it is on a leash. If we find out it’s the thing that’s been attacking goats around here, we’re going to have to destroy it.

The two men loaded up in their truck and left.

I saw the first headline about Brandy a few days later. Some farmer in town claimed expertise on her kind and wrote an op-ed in the paper about how the local chupacabra was sucking the blood from goats like a common lamia. I was indignant someone would make such an accusation without evidence, but I knew the person was just frightened of what they didn’t understand. I pulled out pen and paper and wrote back.

To the town of Murfreesboro,

Some of y’all seem awfully concerned with my wonderful chupacabra companion, Brandy. I assure you she is a peace-loving pet who only looks after me when I sleep and cuddles me while I watch TV. As a veteran of the current wars, I understand security when I see and feel it, and I am entitled to an emotional support chupacabra. She is no danger, and you can’t claim causation in relation to goats dying when it’s really just a correlation and a coincidence that the goats were attacked at the same time Brandy arrived in your neck of Tennessee. Don’t turn this into something it is not. Brandy is a sweet chupe—not the dangerous killer you make her out to be. Don’t let your fear be guided by a lack of understanding. This darkness you claim is only your own perspective failing to account for something you haven’t seen for yourself.

With Genuine Human Compassion,

Felicia Gardner

I dropped my pen on the table and mailed the letter to the Murfreesboro Post.

The response to my letter was urgent and vicious. Farmers in the area bombarded my mailbox and email with angry letters, accusing Brandy of all sorts of heinous acts from fornicating with mutton to eating dog shit on front lawns. A local liquor store claimed Brandy had broken in and stolen all their whiskey. The neighborhood high school even defamed Brandy’s kind nature by blaming her for the painting of lewd graffiti on the side of its gym. Plus, a few of the palest protestors claimed that, because I was a woman, I couldn’t have seen any combat, much less enough to warrant any kind of emotional support animal, certainly not a chupacabra.

The outrage multiplied upon itself and folded into protests outside City Hall. Farmers with literal pitchforks screamed at my pickup in barely literate syllables as I drove to work—that is until I was fired because the protestors prevented any trucks from leaving the plant with the vehicles we had built. At least that was what my supervisor stated. I heard from an office worker who was drunk off the clock that Nissan’s corporate headquarters was worried about stock plummeting from the bad publicity I’d brought with me.

The protests expanded to the house Brandy and I had turned into a home. I started drinking more and more and I smoked more and more to ignore the shouts and bonfires outside the front gate. Fortunately, all these people were too scared of Brandy to step over the invisible demarcation she’d established between her and them, just beyond the cedar skeleton of an old fenceline.

At least until Bobby Tiller showed up.

Bobby Tiller had been a goat farmer his entire life. His family had been among the first breeders of Tennessee Meat Goats when that particular breed had arrived in Murfreesboro. They were all he’d ever known and all he’d ever cared about. That’s why he dropped out of high school. He said the only education he ever needed was located on the farm where he’d grown up. Plus, he might have been a touch heartbroken when I told him I wasn’t exactly into men.

Bobby Tiller didn’t read newspapers or pay attention to anything happening outside his farm unless it impacted the market for goats or the corn feed he bought for his livestock. So, he was late to the conversation about a local chupacabra. When he lost a pen full of goats, their bodies shriveling into bloodless arils, he began asking around to see if anyone knew what kind of creature was capable of such a thing. That’s how he found out about Brandy.

And he sure as hell wasn’t afraid of her.

Bobby Tiller showed up to a protest outside my house with a shovel and a shotgun. I watched him walk through the crowd with the shotgun hitched to his shoulder and a look I’d seen on the faces of too many soldiers in Diyala. He was there to kill.

Brandy’s ears were perked up and rigid against the Tennessee wind as she stood on the front porch. Her eyes tracked Bobby Tiller as he crossed the yard and her skin grew taut against finely frazzled muscles. I could feel her bloodthirst growing as Bobby moved closer.

I called out to Bobby. Hey man, you’re trespassing, I said. His finger inched towards the trigger of his shotgun.  

Your monster trespassed first, Felicia Ann, Bobby Tiller said. Now I’m gonna kill it.

I was angry that he remembered my middle name and I felt my index finger twitch with the memory of combat as my own barbaric savagery returned for a moment. Then a pang of guilt.

Just don’t do it, Bobby, I said. She hasn’t hurt any goats. She doesn’t do any of that vampire stuff.

No, Felicia, it’s a monster that needs to be put down. He raised his shotgun, rage blazing and beaming from his eyes, but before he could pull the trigger, Brandy pounced, covering the length of the yard in a half-second. She gripped the barrel of the shotgun with her teeth and pulled it from Bobby’s hand then planted her front paws onto his chest and pushed him to the ground. She sniffed at his throat for an artery to latch on to. There was such elegance in her movements, as though she were a bloodthirsty ballet dancer I’d seen on TV once with feet planted, preparing for a releve.

I yelled at her to stop and tried running toward her so I could calm her down, but she simply stared at me in one of those moments where time and space cease to function according to the rules of the universe, when atoms stop vibrating and for an eternal nanosecond nothing can move. Then she ran off. I saw her leap the old cedar fenceline next to the protestors, scattering them into a screaming stampede, before she took off into the trees.

When this happened, I felt nothing.

Which is so dangerous. To not feel fear is unnatural; it spirals you down dangerous pathways filled with tripwire, excavated by concussions. Perhaps that is why I confronted Bobby Tiller like I did. It wasn’t any sort of training, so much as it was the absence of anything else. In that moment, I became the animal they claimed Brandy was, othered into a state of fearlessness because anything that could hurt me already had and the only thing that made sense was lashing out because I didn’t feel any reason not to.

I grabbed Bobby Tiller’s shotgun off the ground and pointed it at him. Get up, Bobby, I said. Get out of here.

He stood up, a trace of blood trickling from his neck where Brandy had pricked him. Felicia Ann, he said, your monster is dangerous.

Naw, she’s petrified, Bobby. You better hope she comes back. I unloaded the shotgun and tossed it in the direction of the old cedar fenceline.

The world melted around me like paint dripping from a can as I gained an awareness of how my vulnerability had suddenly become public. I wasn’t somehow strong for standing up to Bobby Tiller. I was weak, emotional, everything they accused women of being. I walked into the house and locked the door behind me.

The incident was on the front page of the paper the next day. They’d even interviewed Bobby Tiller, who accused Brandy of being too dangerous to stay in town. He dubbed her a bloodsucker, a clear example of the satanic evils that needed to be put down before any more goats died.

I was devastated, but I didn’t know what I could do. If I tried tracking Brandy myself, someone like Bobby Tiller might try putting me down with her. If I didn’t, I would fail to return the protection she’d given me for so long. Ultimately, I trusted my instincts and remembered my training. I hopped in the truck as dusk set in and started driving down the roads to look for her. When the sun started coming up in the early morning, I gave up for the night and returned home to sleep for the day.

I repeated this process for weeks. The newspaper initiated a column on chupe sightings through town—a section that sometimes felt more like a collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction that anything offering a legitimate lead on her whereabouts. I swear I read one article shipping Brandy and Cordelia Chase, which I have to admit would be a brilliant pairing.

Bobby Tiller took out an ad offering $50,000 to anyone who killed Brandy and brought the body to him. I guess he thought he was some kind of modern-day marshal in a dust-bin territory. I tried pressing charges over him trespassing, but the desk sergeant at the police station just laughed at me.

Brandy’s trail stayed cold. I couldn’t find her and didn’t see any blood-drained skins from snakes or rodents lying around, so I grew worried. She hadn’t ever been on her own before, and I didn’t know if her survival skills had grown soft living in a house built for rednecks.

Life without my chupe hurt. There were nights I couldn’t sleep without something anchoring me to the life I’d built. I searched for Brandy less and less. Started working in a hardware store. Hung out at the bar next to work when I got off, never driving home until Teresa announced last call over the loudspeaker and the rest of the regulars were too shitfaced to hit on me.

I bought a new gun too. An AR-15 similar to the carbine I’d carried in Iraq. I didn’t have Brandy to protect me anymore, so I worried about Bobby Tiller coming to my house again. For the first time since I’d come home, I was comfortable with a rifle in my hands. And when I couldn’t sleep, visions of AK-47s shaking in high-pitched whines rattling through my head, I cleaned it while bourbon seeped out of my skin. On Saturdays, I set up targets out back and practiced my aim. It all felt right and regimented, as though I hadn’t skipped a beat since I left the Army.

I drank a little more than normal one night. There was no moon, and the sky was the same shade of dark as my last patrol in Diyala. I’d gotten home a couple hours after midnight and rolled a little joint to wind down from the evening. There was a little bourbon left in the bottle on the shelf. I drank it straight.

I don’t know if I was hallucinating or not, but I swear Burgos was sitting on the front porch with me, blood covering his uniform in the same splattered pattern as on that last patrol when he stepped on a mine and triggered two hundred pounds of homemade explosive.

On the other side of me was the pregnant woman who’d answered the door a moment too late on another of our patrols. Her belly oozed with black carbon and coagulated blood, the result of a shotgun not dissimilar to the one I held on Bobby Tiller. I’d fired into the door to break the locking mechanism just as she reached for the knob.

We sat in silence, in fear, in recognition of our collective pain. Burgos rocked back-and-forth in his chair so hard, a scowl on his face as though he was angry about being dead, which he had every right to be, while the woman sat upright and unmoving. I sipped my bourbon and smoked my joint, thinking about turning the gun on myself until I fell asleep because life without Brandy didn’t feel much like life at all.

I woke up the next morning to sunlight and shame, loaded rifle in my hand.

Around midnight on a particularly luminescent evening, I caught a flash of white crossing the road through my headlights. I stopped and walked a few feet into the trees, calling out Brandy’s name. I could smell the sweet sulfur of her breath lingering in the cool, stagnant night. I followed the smell through the woods to a barbed wire fence at the edge of one of the farms.

Brandy sat silently just inside the fencing, huddled over something small. I crept closer, saw the hooves of a small goat beneath her. She was feeding on its blood, fangs firmly embedded in the goat’s throat. I sat cross-legged on the ground and waited for her to finish.

It didn’t take long. She was swift and silent, the charming creature of nightmares for a brief, sugary moment. The rumors were accurate. Brandy had been unable to avoid her true self.

When she’d quietly slurped every last platelet from the goat, she walked over to me and began licking my face.

I tried to be angry at her, but Brandy’s kindness was as much a part of her as the inherent brutality embedded in the way she responded to the world. She’d just been hungry because I never considered her wants and needs and desires. You see, I brought her to Tennessee and never thought to feed her. So I resolved to buying Brandy a goat every week even though I knew it would be just a thinly applied band-aid to the gaping wound of a larger problem. It’s not like goats no longer go missing somewhere in the county, especially on those nights when I am suspended in alcohol as though under a microscope.

I scratched behind Brandy’s ears and led her back to the truck. She climbed into the cab, lay her head between my lap and the steering wheel, and, in the air around my face, I could feel the condensation from her sweet, sulfurous breath.

Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) is a queer, previously unhoused veteran, a 2024 MASS MoCA Fellow, and an alum of the Vermont Studio Center. Their fiction can be found in Story, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, and other journals; has won the Plaza Short Story Prize; has been a finalist for the IHLR/TTUP First Book Prize, the Kinder-Crump Award for Short Fiction, and the Saints + Sinners LGBTQ Short Fiction Prize; and has been longlisted for the W.S. Porter Prize. They teach at the University of Cincinnati-Blue Ash and are the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review.