by Mona Awad
* * *
—
Forever. Forever is how long I’ve been standing here in the cruddy snow outside her house, the frozen knob of her front door in my hand. Staring up at her vacant windows. Watching, waiting for any signs of life or light. But all is dark and dead within. Like she doesn’t live here. Never lived here. Like maybe no one has in a long, long time.
No sign of the man anywhere, as though I dreamed him. Nothing but empty dark all around.
Give up, the dark says. Give up, give up, give up. Go away. Go away and be a bunny, Bunny. Hop, hop, hop along. Isn’t that what you wanted?
I didn’t know what I wanted.
Too late, the dark says. Too late now.
I hear a scratching sound from above and look up. Raccoons regarding me curiously from the roof—my priests, Ava called them. I’ve confessed everything to them. Not that I want to burden them. But raccoons, you know, they can handle it. They love trash, rot, all the bottom things. You should try them sometime, Smackie.
I watch them scatter and disappear. All but the little one we used to cheer on in the hour between the dog and the wolf as he made his careful way down the drainpipe. The small raccoon is standing still in the snowy eaves gutter. Looking down at me.
Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I should have never left. I fucked up. I miss her. So much.
I watch him turn and disappear down the side of the house. Shut my eyes.
* * *
—
“Smackie, is that you?”
A small yellow square that lights up the whole night. Her feathery-haired silhouette standing there like it’s been standing there the whole time.
“Jesus. How long have you been standing out here?”
Forever and ever. But I say, Oh, just like a minute or so.
“Loser. Didn’t I give you a key ages ago?”
Part Three
28.
In some ways it’s as though I never left. As though I was always here, lying on her dark silk cushions, staring up at the tapestry of one-eyed birds perched among the twisting vines, holding her Drink Me flask filled with mulled wine in honor of the season. My feet sinking into the faux-fur rug that caresses my heels like so many soft grasses. In this living room that smells like a thousand old frankincense sticks, always a new one burning. The scent of her rain perfume lingering in the rooms like a thread I can’t help but follow. The turntable playing tango or some weird French sixties stuff that sounds exactly like the music you dream of but can never find. The lady-shaped lamps lit all around us—more than ever before, it seems, were there always this many? The red velvet curtains parted. In the window, the serious moonlight shines in a way that it never shines where I live.
That’s because the moon hates where you live.
We lie by a fireplace that I don’t remember being here before. Strung with Christmas lights. Taller than both of us. A great mouth full of high, leaping flames. Was this always here?
Shhh. Come closer. You’re freezing for fuck’s sake.
She takes my hands in hers, still gloved in black mesh like it’s a gothic prom in 1985. Her pale hair surrounded by flames like live snakes.
“I thought you left,” I say.
“I thought you left.”
“Me? But you were the one who—”
“Actually, I thought you were dead.”
“Dead?”
“Your soul anyway. Murdered. By that little-girl cult. I even lit a candle for you.” She gestures toward the windowsill. I stare at the tall, blue flickery candle all bleedy with wax, then at her face. Dead serious under her fishnet veil. She hates me.
“How could I fucking hate you?”
She reaches across and strokes my cheek with her hand, rubbing the pad of her index finger against the tip of my nose. Shows me her gloved fingers covered in glitter sparkles. And I remember him. Smiling at me in the blue light of the bus. The glitter on the whorls of his finger pads. How I followed him here. Watched him walk right up to her house, then disappear into the dark.
I try to ask Ava if she knows him but she just says, “Shhh. Go to sleep now.”
When she says this, I feel the immense heaviness of my limbs. How long I have been dragging them. My eyes close and close and close.
* * *
—
So then Ava says I sleep for like a thousand years. Sleeping Beauty among her briars has nothing on me. But I do not sleep peacefully, my eyelids prettily fluttering, my lips parted but silent, the soft yielding O of my mouth awaiting the lips of my blandly heroic prince. Instead, I wake up damp and sweating, the Bunny braids that still restrain my hair strangling me, my throat raw from what I will later find out were my own night screams. I wake to a white window, snow falling like bright, quick fish. A woman in a red dragon robe sits at the foot of my bed. She’s holding a tall glass of coffee like a vase and a cigarette, which she’s ashing into the crotch of a crystal mermaid. She looks concerned.
“How did you sleep?” she asks me.
“Good, I think.”
“You were screaming a lot.”
“I was?”
“The neighbors must have thought I was taking a chainsaw to someone. Or else having the most wondrous fuck of my life.” She grins. Then looks worried. Really worried. “What the fuck did those girls do to you, anyway? Never mind. Let’s not talk about it right now. I’m just glad you’re home.”
“Home,” I repeat, and the word is like the fresh Chinese sweet buns we will eat at her rickety table, the green tea we will drink. It is the table and the chairs and us sitting in them together, smoking and tipping our ashes into the same crumb-crusted plate. “Me too.”
* * *
—
And just like that, we go back. To how it was before. A winter like last summer. The days, weeks, months stretching out endlessly before us. Her drawing her beautifully monstrous worlds. Me writing, finally writing, I don’t know how it’s happening but—
“Don’t overthink it, Smackie.”
Sitting across from one another at her kitchen table. Each with our own black notebook. Sharing an endless cigarette, an ever-smoking cup of gunpowder tea. The oven, which we keep feeding random bakeable objects—sweet potatoes, avocados, bananas—like sticks to a fire to keep warm in her frozen kitchen. When it gets very cold, we just open the oven door.
“Are we poisoning ourselves?”
“Probably.”
At night, we cook dinner together drunk on whatever’s in her Drink Me flask, careening through her kitchen like it’s a tossing ship. How she affords alcohol and food when she doesn’t seem to be working these days is a mystery to me, but she just says, I have my ways. After dinner, we dance together on her lake-colored rug. Swaying to our own inner tango music, what we can remember from class. We learned so many dance moves.
Do you remember any of them?
Not really.
Me neither.
But we practice the ones we remember until we collapse. Her mesh palms pressed hard into my cheeks so I have no choice but to stare right into her different-colored eyes.
She’s saying, Are you sure you’re not dead? Are you sure, are you sure, are you sure?
I nod. Yes. I’m not dead. Although the truth is I am not entirely sure. Today was so wonderful. Probably this is heaven. The night is a waterfall of music and lights. The night is a rabbit hole into which we enter, hand in mesh hand. The night is a dark earth I could dig my hands into forever. The night becomes a page of literature that I would, at sixteen, press against my heart. The night is a—
But she isn’t listening. She’s telling me once again about how she thought they stole my soul. Tore it apart with their little bonobo hands. Fumigated my heart with their grassy perfume. Braided my hair so tightly my skull nearly exploded from the pressure. She thought I was lying in an alley somewhere in a
sparkling heap, my face painted like a fairy kitty, my limbs covered in gold stars, that they’d sewn bunny ears or a tiara or both into my infected scalp. Rubbed out my memory of her with a cupcake eraser. Not just my memory of her but of myself, all the things she loved.
She paints this picture until I start drunk-crying.
Well. This is what she pictured. “Do you know how that was for me?”
I shake my head. It feels so light now without the braids, I could shake it forever. She unbraided it the day after I arrived like she was dismantling a bomb. All those elaborate knots and twists I had somehow become numb to. We did it in front of her bathroom mirror, her unleashing one impossibly tight braid after another, while I drowned my pain in Drink Me.
My hair still stands suspended all around my head, like a dark kinked cloud.
Fuck clouds, Ava says. What you have now is a fierce black mane.
Now she lets go of my face, slumps against the wall next to me, and slides down. I slide down with her until we’re both sitting with our backs against the warm, oozing brick beside her fireplace. Spray-painted on the wall before us are pleas for Cthulhu to come back, come back, please! And in the same hand, but different paint Lonely I am so lonely. Ava guesses it’s from the previous tenants, probably misfit art school dropouts like her. She didn’t have the heart to paint over it.
Outside, a light snow is falling.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For everything.”
She reaches a hand toward me, and I think she’s going to stroke my shoulder, tell me it’s okay. Instead, she holds up a long, thin braid that was apparently hiding in my hair cloud, that she must have missed in her dismantling. It looks like the tail of a rat. It’s long lost whatever ribbon or bow or glittery ouchless elastic they used to secure it.
“I blame Them, she says. And that school.” She turns to me. “We just should go blow it up.”
“We should,” I agree.
She looks at me drunkenly.
“We should? Really? Do you really want to, though?”
She worries I’m still under mind control from the bonobos. Bunnies. Whatever. Same difference. Anyway, it’s important that I exercise agency, free will. All day she makes me practice with even the littlest things. At the zoo, at the thrift store, in the anarchy bookstore, in the tunnels and cafés. I, Samantha Heather Mackey, want to stare for hours at the island fox in his sad, synthetic zoo tree. I do not want to see the monkey exhibit. I want to see the penguin parade that starts at noon, once I am assured yet again that their participation is entirely voluntary. I want her to steal for me that silver skull ring. I prefer green tea today. The Chinese sweet bun I want from the bakery is red bean.
But when I tried on a black coat I’d picked out for myself at the thrift store—because it’s fucking cold and you need a coat, Ava said—came out from behind the curtain in it, looked at myself in the mirror, at Ava waiting expectantly behind me, I said, Looks great, Love it, only to satisfy her. The truth is I saw nothing. The tall watery form of a stranger with a black cloud for hair. A woman blurred around the edges. The Dead.
29.
January, February, March. The winter is a torrent of snow. Falling slow and fat. Falling quick and bright. The sun if it rises at all is a weak white flame. Ava says she’s never seen a winter like this. It’s fucking insane but sort of nice. Now that I don’t have to go to class, Warren becomes a faraway country where I can’t believe I ever lived. The Bunnies a distant memory. My phone is dead silent and for once I love the sound. Like we’re dead, you’re right, Ava smiles. And this is the afterlife. She clinks her glass of Scotch against mine.
My hair starts to feel like my hair again. Loses its tight kinks. Falls in my face uncombed. All around me, what she calls the old bitch curtain. My scalp no longer screams from being pulled in absurd twists. Hold still, Bunny, Cupcake would say. If it’s in your eyes all the time, then we can’t see your face. My fingernails, upon which they painted countless little warped flowers and rainbows, are bare but for the odd mint- or sky-blue-colored chip. The remaining bits of permanent glitter whisker leave my face at last. I’m still screaming in my dreams, according to Ava. Odd things. About cupcakes. Twisted lips. About an ax. Don’t tell me, she says. I don’t want to know.
And when I wake up her name leaves my lips in a cold, vaporous cloud. I panic. Run through the cold hallway of her apartment, calling her name. Sometimes I can’t find her right away, and my heart starts to pound, I get breathless. But she’s always there. Lying curled on the carpet, her head curled into her chest, her limbs folded into themselves like an origami crane. I’ve never cared for beds. Or else she’s awake, putting a sweet potato in the oven. Making Vietnamese coffee, which drips from the little metal hat into long glass mugs. Sitting at the table, drawing a picture of us battling our many enemies. She looks up at me and smiles.
“Morning, Sunshine.”
“Morning.”
I don’t ask her, what about your job? She doesn’t ask me, shouldn’t you be at school? Not that she would. And anyway, final thesis semester. Though we do expect you girls to check in now and then, be visible, attend events, Demitasses, readings, be active citizens of the rich Warren community because the learning doesn’t stop in the classroom. Fuck that. Instead, I join Ava at the table. I write. And for the first time in so long, it comes. It not only comes, it’s easy. I can’t believe how easy. As easy as being here with her. It’s joyous. It’s frightening. It might very well be terrible. I don’t care. At least it’s back, the thing that I thought I lost or killed or that left me in disgust. Not gone or dead after all but here, just like she is now. Right here with me across the table.
We work and fuck around and eat and dance all day until at last we drop before the fire. We close our eyes and listen to the folk singer woman sing about loneliness and squirrels. The one who disappeared one afternoon, just walked right out of her own life, and never came back. We listen like her lonesome dove voice is a bath in which we are sinking.
* * *
—
No sign of him. The man from the bus. My bunny? I start to think I dreamed him. Maybe took one of Jonah’s pills when I left Fosco’s. Conjured my own white rabbit to lead me back to her. There are moments when I’m tempted to ask her, Have you ever seen a man with a tattoo of an ax on his neck hanging around? Tall? In a black trench coat? Bearing a bouquet of twigs? But something stops me. I open my mouth and close it again. I look around this room, this house, this world of just her and me, and lean my head against her shoulder. Close my eyes. Let the night become the dawn. Let the snow outside fall and fall like it will bury us. Please bury us. It would be totally fine by me.
Then one night, there’s a creaking sound above our heads. Coming from the ceiling.
What was that noise?
I look over at Ava. Who shrugs. I expect her to tease me and say it’s Cthulhu, but she says, “Oh. Probably just Max.”
“Max?”
“My lodger. He moved upstairs after you left.”
“Upstairs? Here? Why haven’t I—?”
“He’s gone all day and comes home late. Hope we haven’t been too loud.”
“Loud?” What kind of loud?
“Speak of the devil,” Ava says.
* * *
—
And then. And then he’s standing in the living room doorframe like he was always here. Grinning at me just like he did in the blue light of the bus. His ax tattoo gleaming blackly at me from his neck tendon. His hair a dark, dapper chaos. His eyes like smoke.
So it wasn’t a dream.
Nope, his eyes say. Not a dream. Definitely not a dream. As if to prove it, Ava goes to him and he kisses her. Deeply. Intimately. In a way that tells me they’ve kissed before. At last, he pulls away and looks at me. His unscarred mouth slashed by her Lady Danger lipstick. His long arms loosely holding her body like he’s oh so famil
iar with its contours.
“Hello, Samantha.”
30.
I really don’t know what my face is conveying as I stare at him. Leaning against the doorframe like he is not at all the spawn of my wildly wavering emotions and one furred little fist. But a human man, always was. And not just any human man, a cool one. Sexy. Scary-sexy. Whose name apparently is Max. A cool, sexy man named Max who, with his smoky eyes and his tall, slouching grace and his ripped-up black clothes full of pins, makes leaning against a doorframe his own. His army-coated arm still around Ava who is saying, “Oh, do you two know each other?”
“No,” I say quickly just as he says, “Yes.”
Ava looks at me. Then at him. Then at me. Well, which is it?
“We’ve seen each other around,” he says. Casually, oh so casually. I notice his fingernails are painted silver. Filed into sharp points. “Haven’t we, Samantha?”
Suddenly I feel my phone begin to buzz in my pocket. For the first time in weeks.
He smiles at me.
“You,” is all I can bring myself to say.
Ava’s looking at me like, what the fuck is wrong with you?
“Don’t mind Smackie. She’s been through a rough time. Sort of a long story.”
He nods sympathetically, like he understands. Then he walks toward me, growing taller and taller as he comes closer. His long, thorny shadow falling over my body. Darkening the entire corner where I am sitting with my hands pressed against the floor.
He crouches down before me so we are eye to smoke-encircled eye. Rib cage opening. A buzzing all through my body. He takes my hand. Brings it to his human lips. Kisses it. Lightly, so lightly.
