by Mona Awad
Until all my words had spilled to the floor. I was too drunk to pick them up. So leave them there.
I recall staring down at his polished floor, my head full of blood, my heart beating in my ears, silence now roaring unbearably around me.
And then, embarrassingly, I began to cry. Tell him everything. Embarrassing things. Shameful things. Anything to change how silent it was and the kind of silent it was. How much I hated the Bunnies. How much they hated me. My loneliness all winter. My worry that I’d disappointed him somehow. How blocked I was. My shifting, lonely life before I came here, my father falling off the map, even my mother. I sobbed like a child except I was a grown woman slurring these words into her lace thighs. Expecting at any moment for his silence to lift, the room to stand still, lighten, and right itself, a hand to reach out, a voice to offer some words of comfort and kindness. But he just kept drinking, kept watching. Didn’t speak, didn’t touch. No arm around my shoulder. No hand on my knee. No cock against my thigh. No mouth on my neck or breath in my ear. The absence of his voice and touch so palpable it acquired physical weight.
I scan the Cave again now for his silhouette. Still nothing, nothing but black, nothing-black.
“Here, Samantha. Right here.” Alan’s brogue again, growing impatient.
“I’m sorry, I . . . can’t really see. . . .”
In the stories I tried to write about that night later, something happens in that silence. Rather than us getting up, walking down his dark hallway, him turning to go up the stairs, me stumbling out his front door. I fill it with something. Something like sex. An insinuation of violence. A pass made. A line crossed. Something, not nothing. Definitely not nothing. Because it’s the only way to explain how neither of us could look one another in the eye for the remaining weeks of the year. The weird shame and hurt that would well up in me whenever I saw him pretend not to see me, or even worse, when he would just curtly nod. How we never hung out after that in a room with a closed door. How I left that night. Wondering what the hell just happened. Knowing nothing happened, knowing too that everything had changed. How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words. I never meant to give this to you. How alone now. Truly alone I was, making my shuffling way through the dark, the ground seeming to give beneath my feet, the dark of the street and the dark of the sky, one big dark. So lost I somehow wound up at the pond instead of home. Where you met me, Ava reminds me. See, Smackie? Sometimes being lost is a fucking wonderful thing.
“Are you lost, Samantha?” Alan says, softly now. “We’re right here.”
We?
“Yes, Samantha,” says another voice. Female this time. Familiar too. “Right here.” Fosco.
“Ursula? I didn’t expect—”
“Samantha, just walk toward our mouth sounds, please,” says Fosco.
Mouth sounds?
“Yes, precisely,” says Alan. “Or, um, keep talking and we’ll find you.”
Run, says a voice inside my head. Right now. Run as fast as you—
Then I feel a hand cup my mouth in the dark. Gloved. Leather. I am suffocated by the sweet smell of muffin mix on fire. Like a baking project gone terribly wrong. I try to scream, but the hand holds me fast. A suited arm wraps around my chest like a snake and another hand cups the nape of my neck. Now I scream through the leather hand. Bite the fingers hard. A high-pitched wail behind me like a shrieking girl. And then the hand cupping the back of my neck tightens its grip. And suddenly all is bright darkness forever and ever.
* * *
—
A figure before me. Two figures. Because of how the light is or the dark is, I can’t see their faces, I can’t see their bodies. Only their shapes. Both large. One stocky, one slim. Stocky and Slim. Who are you? I want to ask them but my mouth doesn’t work, it seems. Focus. Focusfocusfocusfocusfocus. But keeping my eyes open is such heavy, hard work, why? Because of drugs. The knowledge courses through me like heavy, sweet syrup. Drip. Drip.
The figures are seated. Smiling even, I think. At me. That’s nice. Maybe they’re nice. They are waiting, it seems. Waiting so patiently. For what, I wonder? And then I grow afraid. Uh-oh. Scary, says my brain. I had better leave. Bye-bye time. I am about to wave to the figures and say bye-bye it was so nice to meet you, figures, but I find I cannot lift my hand, I cannot move. I am seated too. Tied to a hard chair. Bound. Bound, bound, bound. Though I am terrified, the thought is pleasant, like a buoyant red balloon sailing through a bright blue sky. I watch it sail dreamily through the cloudless air thinking, I have been here before in my mind, watching this red balloon, and then somewhere in the air there is screaming. My screaming. A voice inside saying, Fucking run.
“What was that, Samantha? I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite make that out,” says one of the figures. Stocky. Wild hair sprouting from his head like mange. His voice says Trust me.
Who are you? I want to ask, but my lips aren’t moving right. Nothing but gurgling comes out.
“Samantha, I’m afraid that’s unacceptable. You’ll have to speak more clearly.” This from Slim, who I see now has long silver-and-black hair like the scary lady from fairy tales, what’s she called again? The witch. I know that voice. I know both voices. Where? Where do I know them?
“This is your committee meeting, Samantha, after all, and we have much to discuss.”
“So much to discuss, Samantha.”
Committee meeting! Discuss! Relief floods me. Alan and Ursula. I could weep.
I move to hug them but my hands are tied. Seeing me attempt this, they lean forward, I presume to untie me so that we can all hug. But no, they just lean in so that I may see their faces in the dim red light. Their warped features. Their zombie skin. Their lips twisted and ripped on one side only. Jutting from their heads, the beginnings of a pair of long, gray, twitching ears.
I try to scream, but nothing comes. No sound from my dead mouth.
They look at me curiously with their wrong-color eyes, and I feel the wild black animal gaze of the Duchess upon me. Hello there, Samantha.
“Are you ready to discuss or not, Samantha? Can we begin, please?” Bunny Lion says with his ripped lips. His hands encased in the all too familiar black leather gloves because hands are hard, Bunny. His lumpy body shrouded in a dark blue suit cut to hide all his deformities and imperfections in design. Because bodies are hard too. He looks like they made him in five minutes.
More silent screaming comes out of me. I am deep in the eye of the Bunny drug I know too well.
“Samantha, perhaps you would like to get us started.” This from Bunny Fosco. Ensconced in hissing scarves. Eyes like violet voids behind which loom the anime glare of Caroline, looking like she wants to eat me and yet I am not cooked entirely to her liking, oh, dear. She holds a small ax lightly in her hands as if it’s a bundle of burning sage. Here to purify the room.
“No? Then I suppose I will start even though this is YOUR meeting, Samantha. Are you ready?”
I watch her open a black book that reads My Sad Girl Novel by Samantha Mackey on the cover.
Under the title is a picture of a female stick figure frown-pouting and crossing her stick arms.
“I’ve been perusing your work, Samantha. And I must say, Samantha, I’m so disappointed.”
“Me too. So disappointed. So,” Bunny Lion says. “I mean, I was like ‘intrigued’ at first.” He air quotes with his gloved fingers.
“Oh, we were all ‘intrigued’ at first. Maybe even dazzled. Smitten by a certain grittiness, a certain dark charm.”
“Sure, all of that,” Bunny Lion agrees. “But now?” He shrugs his misshapen shoulders. “Ew. Is what I think.” He looks at Bunny Fosco, who nods gravely.
They both turn their hideous heads to me. Gray faces pensive,
probing.
“Samantha, it isn’t giving itself to us. It’s being . . . coy,” she spits.
“Willfully withholding,” Bunny Lion says. “Unnecessarily inaccessible. Not delivering on its premise.”
“And it was a dazzling premise. Who could deny that?”
“Not me.”
They both look at me hungrily. I think of Rob Valencia gazing at my corsage like he wanted to eat it. His mouth full of orchid. They’re looking at me like my face is an orchid.
They move in closer, licking their lips.
“Samantha, I must say I’m so concerned about your heroine,” says Bunny Fosco.
“So concerned. So,” adds Bunny Lion.
“Although we could hardly call her a heroine, could we? I mean, could we even call her that, Samantha?” Her bunny ear stumps twitch like antennae. “She’s quite passive, Samantha, isn’t she?” She tilts her hideous gray head.
I try to protest but I feel something soft filling my mouth. The same softness binding my hands. A gag. Has it been there all along?
“Things just happen to her, don’t they, Samantha?”
My lips make a burbling noise around the soft gag, which seems to be growing larger and larger in my mouth. It feels alive, this softness filling my mouth, binding my wrists. Animal. There is the scent of decomposing animal all around me. Cloaked in a muffiny sweetness that barely conceals the rot.
I feel all eight of their eyes upon me as the drug spreads through my body. The velvet swaddling of the brain, of all motor function, the syrupy heaviness coursing through my limbs. Why can’t I think my way out of this? But my brain has been overrun by prancing pink ponies baring their teeth.
“When is she going to be empowered, Samantha? Hmm? Exercise agency? When is she going to assume responsibility for all the shit she’s stirred up?”
“When,” he growls, “is she going to stop having her warped little threesome where she doesn’t even get to fuck anyone is what I want to know.”
Bunny Fosco nods sadly, like yes, oh, yes, that’s right. “Her ‘friend’ or whatever. Ada, isn’t it? Whatever.”
“Whatever,” Bunny Lion says, rolling his eyes.
Fosco leans forward, her warped face so close to mine I can feel her zombie breath on my skin.
“Still,” she murmurs. “It’s sad, I suppose. What happens to her in the end.”
What happens? What happens to her in the end?
She comes closer still, searching my face with something like tender hunger. I sense her turning Kira’s ax in her gloved hands while the soft alive thing fills and fills my mouth, pushing against the roof, pressing down on my tongue.
“Samantha, do you know what a book should be? Every Great Book, that is? Certainly a thesis at Warren?”
She holds up the ax to my throat. Brushes the blade gently against my sweating neck, like a kitten scratching.
“Well, Samantha?”
Let me go. Stop it. Please, I burble-drool.
“Very good, Samantha, an ax. A book should be like an ax.”
“For the frozen sea within us,” finishes Bunny Lion.
She presses the blade a little deeper into my neck. No, I sigh through the velvet swaddle. I try to untie my hands but I can’t find them to untie them, they’re gone. Hands are hard, Bunny.
They watch me wriggle uselessly. Sigh fake-sadly.
“Samantha, after reading this, we’re starting to worry you’re not Warren material.”
“And we should know, Samantha. I mean, we teach here.”
“We should never have let you in, Samantha. You weren’t ready.”
“So not ready.”
“But even though you’re an asshole,” Bunny Fosco starts in, “we still want to help you. We really do. So we’re giving you a gift, Samantha. Because we’re so nice. Something to look at and ponder and consider.”
“A token. A writing prompt. A surprise,” Bunny Lion says. “It’ll be waiting for you when you get home.”
“If she gets home. I mean . . . should we even let her go home?”
They appear to consider this. Hmm.
They’re going to kill me. They’re going to fucking kill me.
No. I shake and shake and shake my head, which is nodding, nodding.
Bunny Fosco gets up from her chair; so does Bunny Lion. She holds up the ax while his leather hand reaches out and grazes the side of my face. Gently, so gently. He reaches around to the back of my neck. He’s going to kiss me now. He’s going to kill me now. Instead he finds that place on the nape and squeezes and all is darkness again.
36.
Hey.” I open my eyes to bright overhead lights. I’m lying bound and gagged on the floor of the Cave in a turned-over chair. My soul empty of prancing ponies, my brain no longer giggling mulch. A janitor is standing over me with a giant broom in his hand, looking bored. He blinks at my ribbon restraints like he’s seen this sort of thing before.
“All right. Time to move it along, miss.”
He nudges my side with the handle of his broom.
“Please untie me,” I try to shout through the gag. White feathers spill from my mouth like snow.
He watches them fall from my lips, unphased. “What’s that now?”
“Can you untie me, please?” I try again.
He shrugs. Reaches down and mutteringly unties the ribbons around my wrists and ankles, which slip off pretty easily, lady.
“Thank you,” I gasp, releasing more white feathers. “You saved me. They were trying to kill me.”
He shakes his head. “You kids and your conceptual art.”
“No, you don’t understand, they were really trying to . . .”
One last feather bit floats from my mouth and hangs in the air between us. He looks at the feather with boredom. Watches it float down to the ground along with the other feathers, the pile of ribbons, which he will now have to sweep up. He sighs.
“The real world, lady. It’s out there. Do you even know that? You’re going to have to get back to it sometime.”
* * *
—
A low red moon shining down on me. Ran all the way from Warren. Faster and faster as the Bunny drugs left my body. Believing I was followed. Taking side and roundabout streets. Dodging my invisible yet inevitable pursuers. A sick feeling inside, like a panicked black animal scurrying around in my gut.
We’re giving you a gift, Samantha. Because we’re so nice.
It’ll be waiting for you when you get home.
As I approach Ava’s, I see the front window’s wide open. Not unusual. She likes a breeze. The breeze is my lover, Smackie, she tells me all the time. Meet my lover, the breeze. It speaks to me with a Scottish accent. It cools my legs and feet. A rosy glow from inside, music faintly playing. I catch her scent of wet leaf, green tea hanging here and there in the sweet spring air.
Relief floods through me. She’s still here. Of course she’s still here.
Where would I even go?
“Ava,” I say as I come in.
Inside, all the lady-shaped lamps are lit. Ditto her candles and Christmas lights. A record playing “La Vie en Rose.” The smell of a thousand long-burned-away incense sticks. A new one burning somewhere. Birds in the tapestry above her bed, each regarding me with its one eye.
I call her name as I walk through the rooms, as I climb the stairs.
“Max? Ava? Max?”
I reach the top of the stairs. And then I freeze.
* * *
—
You’ve read books that say things like “Time stood still”? I always thought it was bullshit. But it does. It can. It can stand as still as I am standing, here in the kicked-down doorway. It can stand as still as the blood-spattered walls and the broken window. It can be as still as the giant dead swan with the ax in its back lying in the
middle of the room, its white wings extended as though poised for flight, a pool of dark blood oozing from its giant body. As still as Max sitting beside it in the blood pool that seems to be spreading. As still as my own lips, which do not scream even as my body fills with something dark and fluid and burning.
I stare at the long, lifeless white neck. The glinty blade cleaving the white feathers. It’s a dream, I tell myself, the ground beneath my feet swelling and sinking, as I float on the dark red water.
“Max,” I say and I hear the great crack in my voice, right down the middle of his name. “What is this? What happened?” But he doesn’t answer me. His whole body is turned away, hunched over the swan, oblivious. His head hangs. Hair in his eyes. He is absolutely still.
I look back at the white bird, the blood spreading around my feet. Feel myself sink to my knees. The blood is dark and so terribly warm around my legs.
“Max.” I reach out and shake him by his shoulders. Was he always this frail? Were his shoulders always this thin, this insubstantial?
“What is this? What have you done?” I say, the great crack in my voice spreading like a crack in a mirror.
His head still hangs down, his neck slack.
This has to be a dream. Surely, just a dream. Ava will wake me any minute and tell me so. But Ava isn’t here. Somehow I know this.
