Miscreations

by Michael Bailey

  “Mel?” she said. “Are you a part of Mel? Lark? Whose voice, whose vows are you?”

  Then, at last, the spider moved, a slip of misplaced dark in the moonlight. It fled into a corner, melted away into a pool of shadow.

  Vi tried to sleep again.

  ~

  The next morning, Vi set to work taming the mess that once passed for a garden.

  She weeded. She imagined herself perched on top of a giant dryad’s head, yanking out its hairs. Accordingly, she was not surprised at all to find things like a fine, matted plait of hair, dried flowers woven into it. She tried to pluck the flowers out of the weave, wondered if she could use them in her own garland, and whose head they had sat atop previously.

  Later, Vi moved on to the attic. Sorted through old relics. Looking for things she could use for her own ceremony.

  She opened a jewelry box and found a little bundle of soft white. A cocoon. She picked it apart, and the silk murmured and hummed as it unraveled—then became shrill. Sounds split apart and wound their way together again as a distinct voice.

  Little beads of spider flowered out of the cocoon and onto Vi’s fingertips and before she could stop herself, she yelped and dropped the cocoon into her lap and began brushing at her arms and the spiders dropped to the floor around her.

  They chattered darkly as they scattered.

  Vi returned her attention to the shreds of cocoon in her lap. And exhumed from within it: an ear. An ear with a little gold hoop in the lobe.

  Vi held onto it tightly while her vision and hearing went sideways.

  ~

  Vi had her scroll in hand and she passed down the grassy aisle. She stepped barefoot over bundles of lavender, her heels crunching on skeletal bits of blossom, fragrant punctuation left in her wake. Thorns and brambles tugged at her, the earth itself trying to hamper her progress—she had been gone so long and the garden was upset with her, it did not want her to become the Harpist’s next Bride.

  Vi stumbled. Her scroll toppled to the grass and she reached after it.

  And then the world groaned and black droplets bled out of the garden as the web underlying things tore apart; they swarmed together and crawled up Vi’s skirt, and she realized that she was not wearing lace but spider silk, she had gotten tangled up in cobwebs as the music broke and grew monstrous and it was screaming all around her and the dark dew drops of it were all over her arms, her shoulders, her neck—

  And then something bright ended it all.

  A distant siren knifed through the dream.

  ~

  Vi did something she knew she shouldn’t. She attacked her vows the wrong way around, tried to find the right words in the waking world so that she could take them into the dream with her.

  She sat at Mother Lark’s old desk and dragged a pen across blank paper and hoped that the line she was drawing would begin to waver up and down and form words of its own accord, but it did not. Vi stopped. She started again.

  May the Harpist accept these vows, she wrote.

  She stopped. Started again.

  How shall I describe my devotion?

  Again.

  How shall I describe my many failings?

  How to go on loving Mel when Vi needed so badly for her to be wrong?

  The more she worried at it over the years, the more the old story fell to pieces. Vi thought too often of Cacophony, more than she meant to. Her sympathy for harsh voices always reared up whether she wanted it to or not. She felt for crooked musicality. Sometimes, breaking the song felt better than singing.

  Vi’s first failing: falling for the wrong word.

  ~

  Vi stood out in the garden, which she had done a poor job of weeding. The ivy framing everything had gone foggy beneath a silver shroud of web.

  She decided that she would not let the heat of the day devour her. She would wait until after dark, when everything turned cool. The orange petals of birds of paradise nodded through the garden and remained bright as flame even as the color drained out of everything else.

  Little legged musical notes, dots of her sisters’ voices, surrounded her. They wavered up and down upon their strands of silk as the music mounted and mounted until Vi could hear nothing else, none of the noises of the outside world, none of the birds and traffic in the distance.

  She remembered sitting in the garden and listening to Mother Lark’s stories.

  She could hear Mother Lark calling her a strepitous child. Cacophonous.

  As the music built, Vi stepped barefoot across the grass, her scroll in hand. She made her way to the olive tree, the only thing that looked exactly as it had all those years ago, all twisting silver bark and attenuated leaf—no decay there. And Vi squinted, tried to see a harp-shaped absence standing before it.

  She stood between the tree’s roots and held out her scroll. There was nothing written upon it. She tore it to pieces. And she did not speak her vows, did not sing them. She screamed into the branches of the olive tree until she could almost hear its leaves rattle and fall. A net of spider and silk fell down upon her. A new bridal veil.

  Vi cried out:

  “I am not right for this and never was, but here I am and you have nothing better to do than listen, so hear me: I want to play Cacophony’s role instead of the Bride’s. I want to break and go on living, if only as a scrap of ragged sound. I want to make new songs.

  “I may be doing this all wrong but I’m all you’ve got.

  “Sing through me.”

  All around her, the world’s strings frayed. The spiders, full of familiar voices, sang. Everything was singing so loudly—or screaming, not singing, because everything, the world, it had all forgotten how to sing properly.

  There was music in it anyway.

  Umbra Sum

  Kristi DeMeester

  My mother plaited my hair the night the river swelled over its banks. “There are so many who see only an end in water,” she said. She tied a ribbon the color of dying sunlight at the bottom before turning to face Thomas, who had not spoken since the rain began the week prior. “Some would call it a cleansing,” my mother said, but Thomas’ face was still, his mouth a sloped mound of reddened flesh that had long forgotten the shape it once knew.

  As quickly as she had done it, my mother undid the braid, her fingers slashing through my hair so that my scalp smarted, but I knew there was no use in my weak urge to cry out, to ask her to please stop. Above us, the light flickered, the power giving in momentarily to the swaying winds of the storm.

  Thomas’ face was so like my own in that blinking darkness that it was hard to tell if he was even there at all, if his body was nothing more than a mirrored image of my own, mute and staring at whatever he’d found behind his silence. At school, our teachers saw the oblong shape of our faces, the muddied green of our eyes, the slight tint of our skins and believed we’d emerged from the womb tangled up together, our breaths coming in that same instant and tying us into some larger existence that transcended the simple connection of blood. They saw it in the tilt of our heads when we grew bored with the lesson, heard it in our voices when we pretended to answer their questions, but we were not born on the same day. “When I dreamed of you, when I called you to me, it was the same face I saw,” our mother said, but the years stretched between us. We were not tied in the traditional ways of those born on the same day.

  “Three years apart?” our teachers would say and cluck their tongues as if we had betrayed them while they weren’t looking.

  There were a handful of times—Thomas had told me it happened to him, too—when our teachers seemed to forget we were there. They would stare past our raised hands or mark us absent or would start—a small, strangled scream dying in their bellies—when they realized we were standing beside them, our lips wrapped around a question. “It makes me feel like a ghost,” I told him, and he would hold his ha
nds out before him and moan until I hit him hard enough in the chest to make him stop.

  I stared at him, but his face was his own again, and my mouth tasted of something bitter, and I blinked, my hands twitching toward him because my mother—our mother—had turned away and would not see me when I traced my fingers over his hands, the bare, smooth skin of his forearms, to spell out the words I imagined would pull him back to me. Conjure, I wrote. Come back. You fucker.

  His hands remained limp against his lap, and the rain beat out a pattern above us that sounded like mourning, and I imagined what it would be like for no other words to pass between us. What kind of death it would be to acknowledge there were no more nights where he came into my room without knocking and slipped beneath the thin sheet I draped over myself, not because I was cold but because it felt unnatural to sleep bare, and press wet lips to my ear, my hair, and tell me of what it had been like to be here before I had come, always knowing there was a part of him missing.

  Instead of touching him again, I traced my fingers over pieces of me that were hollowed out: the dip in my throat where my collarbone met; the space between my breasts; the angled slash of my hipbones; the singular spaces between my ribs. All of these secret spaces I had found when Thomas stopped speaking. So many nights of swallowed air so I could learn of these new places inside of me that belonged to neither of us. Our mother hadn’t noticed yet how thin I’d gotten.

  “He should drink something. It’s been so long since he’s had anything to drink,” our mother said, but Thomas’ mouth stayed sealed. Even when she tried to force the glass to his lips—the water dribbling down his chin to drop against his lap—he did not swallow, and I thought of what it would mean to pull him outside into the storm, what it would mean to force that water into him before it came and drowned us all.

  Our mother mumbled something about “our plight” and went stumbling out of the room again. I pinched the tops of Thomas’ hands, but he still did not move, did not turn to look at me, and I wished the water would come crashing against the house, fill up our lungs with brown silt, our choking, gibbering bodies twisted into a beautiful tableau. Maybe then all of those years of feeling that Thomas and I had swallowed each other, had vanished into the other’s body, would actually mean something.

  Our mother baked bread and apples with cinnamon and set out the plates, but there was no one to eat the things she made. The rain was too heavy overhead and sounded like an accusation. Or maybe it was prayer.

  That night I stood outside Thomas’ bedroom door, my lips pressed to the wood, but I could not bring myself to ask the questions bursting in my throat. Instead, I waited. I listened for the sound of his breath, which I had learned to know as well as my own. I heard nothing except the steady beat of my own heart and turned away, my own room like a hollowed out reminder of what had once been. There was no place for sleep, so I sneaked into the kitchen and sank a spoon into what remained of the apples and swallowed the slices without chewing, my lips coated in a sweetness I could not taste.

  I hoped for suffocation.

  Inside her room, our mother prayed, but her words were garbled imitations of what Thomas and I had learned in Sunday School when we were children. I laid another piece of apple across my tongue and watched the windows. Outside, the grass was painted in silver, but it was not moonlight. I closed my eyes.

  “Is this what you saw?” I whispered, but Thomas was not in his room. He was not in the house. Whatever sat behind my brother’s door no longer had the same heartbeat. I could hear the wrongness of it, how it bent and stretched around the emptiness and grew into the hammering of the rain on the roof.

  The apples sank into my stomach like small stones, and I tried to keep them, tried to hold them inside of me, but my body had forgotten what it was to eat, and so I leaned over the sink and gagged as my body purged itself.

  Inside her bedroom, my mother believed that the end of the world had come, that the water would continue to fall from the sky, would turn yellow and sulfurous, the kind of thing that burned exposed skin or made small children ill from the deep stink of it. Tomorrow, she would braid my hair in the same way she had because it was the only thing left she could do with her hands that was not slapping Thomas again and again, and she would believe she was doing some right by me.

  “It’s only rain,” I said. Outside, the light shifted from silver to a putrid yellow, and I turned away. Thomas’ room was silent as I shuffled past, and I pressed my hand to his door as I went. I thought my palm would burn, but it didn’t. I left my clothes on and lay down and draped the sheet over my face and pretended I was dead and wondered if it would feel as delicate as this to be put into the earth.

  In the corners of my bedroom, I imagined I saw movement, the shadows jerking back and forth like a machination breathed into life. I flipped on the lamp beside my bed, but there was nothing there, no strange forms crouched against the floor, fingers spread outward as if in supplication. “Thomas,” I said, but whatever was there was not Thomas. It had been stupid to say his name. What shadows had found me did not belong to him.

  There should be no ghosts at the end of the world.

  I slept too lightly, the sheet tangling over my face, my neck, so that there were moments when I woke gasping as if there were hands against my throat instead of thin fabric. The fifth or maybe the twentieth time I jerked out of sleep, Thomas was standing over me, his face a mask I could not read. “Hey,” I said because I could not be sure his presence was not a dream. He looked back at me with eyes the color I had seen painted over the grass, and I sat up and pulled my hair away from my face. “What are you doing?”

  He lifted his hand to his face and then let it drop. “Mother is wrong. Thinking that this is the end of the world. You know that.”

  “Yes.” I paused because there were so many other things to say. “Where did you go?” I did not know how to be angry with him even though I had been before. What remained of my need to scream at him, to drag my fingernails across his face for leaving, drained away.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” A patter of darkness danced across his face, one of the shadows let loose from its moorings, and he sank onto the floor. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” I shifted to sit beside him, but he held up a hand. “Don’t,” he said, and this small death held me in place, an ache forming in the center of my brain.

  I bit at the corner of a cuticle, but no blood flowed back into my mouth. “Why not?”

  “There’s something here.” He touched his face again and then brought his fingers to the center of his chest and pulled his hand into a fist. “You can’t hear it?”

  “I can’t hear anything. Not anymore. Not like it used to be.”

  Thomas shook his head, and the color of his eyes shifted from silver to yellow. “When we were the same. When I could lie in my bed with my eyes closed and know your heart was beating the same as mine, and I would come in here and lie next to you because it reminded me there was something real. That my heartbeat wasn’t something I had imagined.”

  “I can’t eat anymore.”

  “I know. It’s the only way.”

  “For what?”

  “Transfiguration.”

  My skin went warm, and I kicked the sheet away. I did not hear it when it fell to the floor. “When will the rain stop?”

  “Tomorrow. Never. We can learn to float.” In the past, he would have laughed—a sarcastic, choking noise that was too loud—but Thomas did not laugh.

  “What are you? Now?” I asked. I couldn’t see his eyes anymore. I brought my hands together and apart, my skin sticky and bones sharp in their hidden places.

  In another part of the house, our mother sighed. It was the sound of someone looking for something. The sound of what it meant to not understand the thing in front of you.

  “A need. An ache.”r />
  “Come up here. Please,” I said, but Thomas fell silent, and when I pushed myself up to look down on him, he was gone. I did not go to look for him. He was not something to be found.

  The next day, there was no sun, only clouds the color of something dead, and our mother made soup and watched from her chair beside the window and mumbled in a voice that sounded like worry but was actually panic. Thomas stayed locked inside his room, and our mother set a bowl of the soup outside his door. It went untouched and when it went dark once more, insects had dropped to their deaths in the broth, and our mother collected the bowl, her mouth set in a thin line.

  “He’ll die,” she said. I did not tell her I thought he already was. I did not tell her that I was finding my own way into death through starvation.

  That night, I taught myself to hold my breath until the closed off rooms of the house I’d known my entire life looked different. I waited for my mother’s sigh or Thomas’ voice to tell me again the things I couldn’t understand, but there was only rain and the smell of sweat as I tried to sleep. In the morning, Thomas was already awake and sitting in our mother’s chair by the window, his breath fogging the glass. I crossed to him and dragged a finger over the window. Drew a star and then my name before drawing my fist across the glass to wipe it clean, and my hand came away as if slicked in oil. I could not bring myself to look and see if it was blood.

  “Has it stopped? The rain?” I asked, and Thomas rolled his eyes back so that I could see only the whites. Still I somehow knew he was looking at me. He opened his mouth, but our mother came into the room then, and I winced to hear his teeth clamp together.

  When our mother kneeled before Thomas and laid her head on his lap, I stole away, determined not to watch her beg her only son for something that could not return, her tears as useless as the tears Mary Magdalene had used to bathe the feet of Christ. There were some things that could not be saved with sorrow, and my mother had the weight of her grief that tethered her to this house, to us.