Burning Girls and Other Stories

by Veronica Schanoes

  I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I got lost, just like in the song, lost in the supermarket. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones always know what’s what and give it to you straight. I miss real music. I miss punk, musicals, reggae, opera, zydeco. All I have in here is Muzak of songs that I didn’t even like to begin with. Or Muzak of songs that I did like, and that’s even worse. Yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I heard a Muzak version of “Paint It Black.”

  But then again, my belief matters less and less these days, just like the rest of me. I can see through my skin, my muscles, my bones. All that’s left is my circulatory system, veins and arteries to capillaries so small that they’re little red blurs at my fingertips—little rosebuds and carnations floating beneath the surface of my invisible skin. And my heart, beating and fluttering in time to the music in my head.

  I think that for everybody else, I’ve faded away completely. Shoppers walk through me. I blend right into the 853 different kinds of cereal in aisle 206. Or I would, if I could find the cereal again. I found the cereal once, but then I went looking for the milk, and somebody swept away my trail of Rice Krispies, and I never found my way back.

  That’s when I knew I had well and truly vanished. I found the milk, and my mother came looking for me, and even she couldn’t see me. The speakers were Muzaking “Fairytale of New York” and I was contemplating the milk—organic, whole, 1%, 2%, skim, lactose-free, chocolate, Ferberized, 103%—and I heard somebody crying. It was my mother.

  She looked terrible. Her clothing was ripped and her makeup was melting off her face. She was calling my name and crying, and I was so happy that she’d come for me at last.

  I tried to throw my arms around her, but she couldn’t feel me. She kept crying. “Mama,” I said. “Mama, look at me! Mama, I’m here.” But I knew that I was lying even as I said it. I wasn’t there; I was fading under the radioactive lights, fading into the milk with antibiotics and growth hormones and the milk without, the milk in translucent plastic whose calcium has been all burned away by fluorescent light and the milk in waxed cardboard that still built strong bones twelve ways. I tried to grab her again, but the cloth of her coat passed right through my rosebud fingertips.

  “Mommy!” I yelled. “It’s me. I need you. I’m cold. And I’m hungry. My back hurts and I think I’m fading away. Please help me!”

  But she couldn’t feel me or see me or hear me and she walked away from me and the milk, still crying, and I know it was my own fault, anyway. I shouldn’t have eaten those Fruittles—they’re completely artificial, everyone knows that. I think they’ve turned me plastic, too, and now I belong here. Once I got almost to the registers—I could hear the rattling paper bags and the barcode scanners beeping and the credit-card machines spewing printouts, but just before I pushed my cart to the end of the aisle, the Queen of Hearts appeared right in front of me, young and lovely and only just seventeen, or maybe forty-seven, and I had to stop short to avoid running her over.

  She was wearing eyeliner in cat’s-eyes and black leather boots that laced up to her knees, the kind I always wanted but never fit me, and a red gingham sundress with a white cotton eyelet blouse, the kind I never wanted but always had to wear when I was a kid. She put her hand on my arm. “Don’t go,” she said. “There’s nothing out there. Stay with me. You promised. You promised to be my friend.” So I didn’t keep going, and she stroked my arm and led me deeper into the labyrinth and then she vanished. I shouldn’t have listened to her, but she’s the only one who can see me, and that makes it hard to refuse her. I wish my mother could see me. Or maybe Joe Strummer.

  I mean, I wish Joe Strummer could see me, not that my mother could see Joe Strummer, which I don’t think would be particularly helpful to anybody. I’m certain Joe Strummer could save me. He wouldn’t get confused by seventy-six different kinds of yogurt in aisle 3. He wouldn’t even notice them. But he was never in this supermarket in his whole life, I bet. I bet he wouldn’t have put up with it for one minute, not one damn minute, and I wish I’d never come here, not only this supermarket, but this pathetic excuse for a city. I’m not from here. I’m from the City—the real City, the only City that matters—and I miss it so much.

  I know Joe Strummer could have helped me, but I don’t know if he would have helped me. I’ve read my Lester Bangs and maybe he would’ve lost patience with me. Sometimes I lose patience with me.

  * * *

  In my neighborhood, there aren’t any of these ever-growing supermarkets. There isn’t room. When I was growing up we had butchers, bakers, cheese shops, greengrocers, delis—real delis—fishmongers, Indian restaurants, twenty-four-hour Ukrainian diners, the no-pork halal Chinese takeout, cheap sukiyaki for students, hardware stores, baby supply shops, killer bagels, smoked fish, dried fruit, dark chocolate, and real egg creams. Now my neighborhood is rather less humble and it has restaurants that I can’t afford and swank bars full of expensive brands of vodka, not bars like Alcatraz, which scared me so much when I was a little girl that I made my mother walk on the other side of the street. Two years ago Alcatraz shut down and was replaced by a very expensive sushi restaurant that only lasted a year.

  My mother couldn’t feel me.

  I thought we had supermarkets. We had a Key Food across the street and a Met food a few blocks away. Each one was about half a block square and they never bothered to play any music at all.

  Then I moved here. Not on purpose.

  A couple of friends drove me here for a treat. They said that things are cheaper here. There’s more room for your shopping cart. It was fun, at first. I ran down aisle 0 and then jumped onto my cart and rode the rest of the way. I thought it was odd when my cart started turning corners without any help from me, but I didn’t mind. It was like bumper cars and ice skating and falling all at once, and even vanishing feels good at first, like when you’re jumping around to punk rock and the part of your mind that’s always obsessively worried about airplanes crashing and being late and being a poser finally shuts up. But then it didn’t stop and now my mother can’t see me.

  The first problem was the bread. I’m picky about bread—if you’re gonna eat Wonder bread you might as well make your sandwiches on Styrofoam. At home you could go to the bakery and they’d slice a loaf for you on their juddering shuddering slicing machine. The Queen of Hearts would love that machine. Off with everything, every inch. I could find the Styrofoam bread but I couldn’t find the good bread no matter which aisle I whizzed up and down on my magic cart, turns and sticky axles, Muzaking “Walk on the Wild Side” blaring in my ears, turning my brain to oatmeal.

  I crashed right into a display of cake mix, which I don’t use. I closed my eyes at the last minute when the gingery vanilla-y floury powder was floating all around me and it stopped up my ears, my mouth, my nose, and I couldn’t feel anything but the powder. It slid into my eyes and stopped up my tear ducts and even when I opened my eyes I couldn’t tell the difference, and by the time my tears had washed away the powder, by the time I could breathe again, by the time those years had passed I was in aisle 30.536992 and going in an ever-tightening spiral until I came to a stop, right in front of the bread.

  This supermarket is a nautilus, a big Moebius strip, except that it’s all inside and it doesn’t connect to itself. I have never found the bread since then. Lucky for me I took a few loaves. It’s not bad and I hope I find the butter someday.

  But by the time I found the bread my head was spinning, or maybe the building was spinning. But I still needed kidney beans and there were so many different kinds. I need canned tomatoes and I couldn’t find them, and then they were all on the very bottom shelves and I had to dig a trench in the smooth faux marble floor of the supermarket, tearing it up with my fingernails and some cheap plastic spoons from aisle 920.

  At the very bottom of the trench I found the canned tomatoes, but they didn’t have the ones I wanted.

  It was the peanut butter that finally stopped me. I was almost done but I went to get pea
nut butter and I froze like a deer in headlights. It’s been so long since I’ve even seen headlights. Headlights, traffic lights, neon lights, green light, red light, red rover, red rover, let Delia come over. I couldn’t move and I felt like I was wrapped up in gauzy ginger powder again, but I was the powder, floating in air in a million pieces. I couldn’t remember how to choose peanut butter. There were so many different kinds: chunky and extra chunky and smooth, mixed with jelly and chocolate, made of plastic, natural and organic and unsalted and Valencia, and sometimes a jar looked like it was full of peanut butter but really it had in it something made of olives or almonds or something else. The shelves towered over me and I became afraid that the jar I wanted was the keystone to the whole store; if I took it everything would come crashing down on me, crushing my bones and swallowing up the world, my friends, my mom, Joe Strummer, and my little dog, too.

  I don’t know how long I stood like that, but eventually one of my friends came back to look for me. I could hear him in the next aisle, calling my name, saying that Cass and Julie had sent him back from the cashiers to get me, where was I? I didn’t know and I tried to answer him but I couldn’t—I couldn’t remember how to start my voice, and my jaw wouldn’t move. Finally he gave up and wandered away and then I couldn’t hear anything except a Muzak “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” I don’t know what happened to him, if he ever found his way back to the cashier, and I don’t know how long ago that was. Maybe years.

  Now I’m sitting in aisle 3⅖ eating raw spaghetti while trying not to listen to “Thunder Road” when something black and furry clatters down the aisle and cannons into me, ricocheting off and continuing on without stopping, murmuring nervously. I guess I should be more excited, because it’s the first thing that could feel me in so long, but honestly, I don’t care. I don’t care about anything much anymore. But I get up and run after it anyway, because there’s this banging, pounding, drilling part of me in my teeth that thinks I should. Maybe it’s just a cavity from all the Fruittles I’ve been eating, but maybe if I do what it wants the banging pounding drilling will stop and I’ll be able to curl up and go to sleep, which is all I really want to do, close my eyes and go to sleep forever and ever.

  As the furry thing skids around a turn I catch a glimpse of its face. It’s a black dog running with its feet caught in disposable aluminum baking dishes that I knocked down by accident yesterday or last year or an hour ago. I follow it, because I know I should apologize and help it get the tins off its feet. They look like steel-toed boots, or maybe silver slippers, and I’m pretty sure that if I can just catch this dog everything will be all right in the end.

  It picks up speed and becomes a black blur but I follow it and I’m running and skidding and the carnation blurs in my fingertips are bubbling. It climbs up the shelves, still clattering like cheap radio thunder, and I’m right behind it, climbing just the way my mother said would pull over the bookcases and crush me flat, back when I was four and she caught me trying it in the living room. I reach out and grab warm squirmy fur before the creature yelps and bounds away and we’re off again. I think the black dog is laughing, at least its tin feet are cackling.

  We’re not looking where we’re running anymore and we’re running together, weaving across and around each other’s paths like maniacs, careening around like drunken teenagers and we don’t even notice where we’re going and we find ourselves behind the meat counter when a hand reaches down and grabs the dog by the scruff of its neck and chops its head off while its mouth is still open and its throat and its feet are still laughing and I stand stock-still staring at the person who has done this.

  It is, of course, the Queen of Hearts.

  When I first got here I saw her out of the corner of my eye several times, but she just looked like a regular girl somewhere between seven and thirty with dark straight hair in a ponytail. Okay, she was dressed all in red with hearts all over, and I guess that could have been a clue, but I didn’t really notice her until I found out she could see me. I was in the fruit aisle. The Muzak was playing “Trouble in Mind.” She came toward me and I expected her to walk right through me. But she stopped in front of me and held out a packet of Fruittles, shiny plastic candies like poisoned jewels. She looked into my eyes and I gasped with delight because she could see me. She looked about nineteen, or maybe fifty-nine.

  “Have some,” she said.

  “Um,” I said. “No.” I’d heard stories.

  “Please. I want a friend. I’m so lonely and I do like you.”

  I said nothing.

  “Please. I do so need a friend.” And then she looked about six years old.

  I said nothing, but I let her put the Fruittles in my mouth.

  But immediately after that she vanished, and I didn’t see her again until I tried to leave. And Jack couldn’t find me and neither could my mother and Joe Strummer would probably write me off as a waste of time.

  And now she’s here, a cleaver in one hand and the dog’s corpse in the other, looking right at me. I try to hide below the counter. She guts and skins the dog, pulling its soft furry hide off with gusto while the Muzak plays “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.” She chops the body up, skewers the pieces, and sets them to roast over an open fire.

  At home we don’t have a meat counter. We have a Ukrainian butcher, though. Once when I was little he gave me a salami stick to chew on. I haven’t had meat in so long, and the smell coming from the cooking dog is reaching right down to my ovaries and twisting them. I feel so guilty, but it’s driving me crazy with hunger. The Queen pulls one of the skewers off the fire and advances. I stand up and back away until I’m right up against the counter.

  She thrusts the skewer at me and I’m so faint with long-suppressed cravings that I almost pass out.

  “Eat.”

  I shake my head without opening my mouth and try hard to hold on to the feeling of euphoria I had when I was skittering around with the dog. This is your playmate, I tell myself. Don’t eat your friends. It’s rude.

  She doesn’t say anything, just stands there looking at me. Her eyebrows are raised and her foot is tapping. I study her wrinkled forehead. She’s reasonably patient because etched in every line is the knowledge that I will eventually give in. She can see me and I can’t refuse her. The dog could see me, too, and feel me and hear me, but it’s dead now and she’s alive. She’s here. She knows it’s only a matter of time. Time has no matter, though, especially here.

  I know it, too, and what the hell, if later why not now, and I close my eyes and take a bite. I pretend to myself that this lady is my mother and that the meat is not the cooked body of a friend but instead one of those half-charred, half-fat unidentified shish kabobs she used to get me on the street. It’s warm and good. When I was little my mother used to pour the juice from steak, juice made of mixed blood and fat, into a bottle or a cup so I could drink it, so it could give me strength, and that’s what the dog meat gives me, strength, but it doesn’t taste half so good as my mother’s blood.

  I open my eyes and notice two things. One is that my bones are visible, and as I watch, my muscles, nerves, and my skin start to come back as well. I wonder whether I’m really becoming visible or if only I can see me.

  The meat that is all lovely and warm, cooked and seasoned on the outside, is raw and bloody on the inside. All the blood reminds me that I can’t remember the last time I got my period and how much I miss it. There’s no blood between my legs now, but there’s blood running down my face, over my chin, and dripping onto the sterile shiny floor. The Queen of Hearts takes out a linen handkerchief, spits on it, and cleans off my face. She pats me on the head.

  I eat the rest of the dog and go off to hide before the automated moppers come to clean the blood from the floor. I spend several hours admiring my newly visible body in the glass of the frozen vegetables section in aisle 4. Look at the color in my cheeks! My ripped cuticles! My legs, unshaven for who knows how long, my white hairs, my long eyelashes, my bushy eyebrows! Look
at the way my skin covers up my heart-lungs-ribs-muscles so completely! I’m perfect, and I even bump into a few people on purpose for the thrill of it. I bark my shins against grocery carts and spend hours admiring the developing and receding bruises, caressing my legs in an ecstasy of wonder at the way my skin obscures the broken blood vessels so that the blue-and-purple mottle gradually fades into green and yellow and is overlaid with the pasty peach pink of my impenetrable, irreproachable skin. I’m in love with the smudges of dirt and dust on my fingers.

  I go over to people and I see them taking in the full shopping cart I always lug around and my shattered face (I’m pretty sure I still have dried blood on my mouth) and my ratty clothing. I ask, “Do you know the way out?” and instead I spout nonsense words, I speak in tongues. Panicking, I grab at my mouth, trying to push my tongue into the right shapes, but my jaw moves by itself, it bites my hand so hard that it draws blood that fills my throat—I start to choke because still, still! I’m making these nonsense noises. I’ve lost my words.

  I shut up because it takes all my concentration to keep my thoughts from degenerating, devolving into the gibberish that comes out of my mouth whenever I speak.

  I’ve lost my words and I can’t find my way back to them. Sometimes you lose words, you get rid of them when they’re useless—they’re just sacks for holding meaning, just containers and shapes, and sometimes you can just burn right through them because you don’t need them anymore, the meaning is raw and bleeding, electric shockers, fire, a cheese grater shredding your throat, and you don’t need words to shape the sounds anymore because that would just be some kind of finesse, something to take the edges off when what you have is pure ripping slashing edge, anger and rage and self-loathing and spitting live-wire third-rail energy and words just blister and shrivel away.