by Schow, Ryan
I flex and pump my cheeks, try scraping and squirming and rubbing the petrified mess off on the bottom of the box. It’s all I can think about. All the itches dying to be scratched.
On my side. My hips. Right there on my stomach, just below my breasts, these damn ticks. On the bottoms of my feet and in my crack and near my vaginaandunderarmsandonthetopofmyhead.
Gosh DAMN!
Pounding, squirming, wigglingandthrashing.
My brain hurts. It’s folding in two.
I need OUT!
The rationality of the past is officially outdated. The world is dry coated in spit. It’s the color of cruelty and it smells bloated with ruin. It is the toxic waste dump version of Alice in Wonderland. This place—this box, my inability to move or barely breathe or even take a proper dump—it’s not hell. It’s a perpetual existence far worse than any hell I can envision.
The screaming now happens almost on its own. My head threatens to crack in half from the back pressure of my rage. I let loose the kind of vile obscenities only a truly tortured mind can fathom. Even as I’m hearing these vile words spewing from my mouth, from these splitting lips and this sticky tongue, I’m thinking, this cursing is not me. I’m thinking, I don’t say words this foul.
I am officially possessed by demons.
Ribbons of blood line my throat, it’s that raw. I feel tears, warm as they drain down my face, as they trail down my cheeks and leave salted pools in the hollows of my ears. Screams become whimpers become sniffling become nothing. Exhausted, my heart defeated, my will completely broken, I shut my eyes and wonder if a person can usher themselves into death. If it would happen. If you could just shut your body off for good using willpower alone.
There are stories of old ladies with their old husbands and forty or fifty or sixty shared years of marriage between them. One of them dies. A week or a month or a year passes and the other dies, too. Of a broken heart. They just wake up one morning dead, hovering over their body, just a farted-out soul off to reunite in Whereverland with their one true love.
So I imagine everyone I know as dead.
All the ways a person could die, I murder everyone important to me. I see their injuries, their slack faces, their funerals and I cry. As much as I can, I break my heart over and over again, slam it relentlessly into concrete walls of despair in the hope that it will stop beating altogether.
My father is dead; my friends…dead.
Netty, raped and killed and tossed dead into a ditch to be feasted on by insects and night critters until her distended corpse is investigated by cops, then stuffed into a body bag and sent to the morgue for identification.
I dream of Damien dying in a car accident, smashed into the back of a big rig, pitched headfirst through the glass, face ripped open and crushed dead against the trucks massive tailgate.
And Jake. Dead. Flesh eating cancer.
I dream of Maggie and I think about how much it hurts the way she went.
Whatever it takes to destroy my heart, I feast upon the imagery, let it do the reverse of nourishing me. I want sorrow to be my last breath.
Brayden, dead. For some reason, killing him—of all the important people in my life—hurts the most. A sob catches me by surprise. Pretty soon I’m wailing, my face soaking wet with tears, my body kicking and punching and elbowing at the walls of my prison because I FREAKING WANT OUT!!!
Starved of happiness, exhausted, methodically I wade through this joyless mire in the hopes that thoughts become things and my death becomes something real. Hours pass like this, like days, with me in full blown fits of frenzy and exhaustion. And then I sleep.
And wake up.
And then I scream some more because the smell is worse and all the knobs on my shoulders and back and elbows and heels feel punched silly by hammers. More tears, more banging, more screaming. More and more, my brain feels like it’s prying itself away from itself. Like an oyster being scraped and peeled from its shell.
2
When your life is threatened, they say you see everything. Every person you’ve ever loved or hated. All the boys who broke your heart. All the shitty things you did and said to your parents. All the things you will never do because pretty soon you’re going to be dead and forsaken and dropped into a six foot deep hole in the ground beneath a patch of cut grass and a marble memorial stone.
My stomach gurgles, low in my belly. Part hunger. Part…oh God…part something else I care not to mention. I empty my bladder and the warmth feels good. The smell, however, stings my eyes. Still, the fullness is there. Not in my bladder. It’s a fullness inside my colon.
The bottom half of it.
My life doesn’t exactly flash before my eyes. It drags. It punishes. And for some sorry reason, for hours, or perhaps entire days—I don’t know anymore—I keep thinking about Margaret. How in the end she tried to be my mother. Why did I punish her the way I did? At least she was trying. It almost didn’t matter that she only tried to love me when I was transformed. The smarter, less spiteful parts of me remind me that at least she made the effort.
For a long time there was only room for fear and panic in my heart, but then the smallest little space in the world opened up and in that place was the deepest, brightest pain. When you’re going to die, what you’ll miss most is the love of others. As much as I loathe Margaret, my mother, I will miss her, too. That little bit of love she tried to give me, right now it means everything. Right now I crave that the most.
If I ever get out of here, I promise myself I will stop being such a brat to her. That I’ll try to love her, too. And try to forgive her. Neither of us were perfect, but that’s not it. The act of loving a person, the act of accepting their love, that seems more important than my next breath.
God, why am I so stupid?
The gurgling in my lower abdomen becomes back pressure stuffed with agony. Damn. At some point in time, this worn out, dying body of mine is going to need to crap again.
In a feeble attempt to stop thinking about my bulging colon and its need to push, push, push out its load, I become philosophical. With everything hurting, with my mind unraveling, I think about how dark needs light, how time is only time if you can see the sunrises and the sunsets of the day, how when you have nothing to measure anything against, your mind has no choice but to turn in on itself. The way a dog nips and licks and chews on an open cut, that’s how my mind begins to feast upon itself.
Poop, it’s knocking on the other side of my butthole. It’s insistent. My God it really wants out! Sweat dampens my forehead. These are the pre-poop sweats, made worse by my determination to keep said fecal load locked in the muddy hallway of my body.
I clench my butt cheeks, cracking bits of the dried cake of last time. Back pressure compacts my colon. It has me crushed with pain. Like period cramps, only worse. Whatever happens, this poop isn’t coming out, I tell myself.
I freaking will it.
Ten minutes later, the cramps twist up in a lethal pinch. Like any minute they’re going to suck apart my life. We’re talking gut wrenching, palm slapping, feet stomping bad. Then it happens. Right in the box, in the damp heat, this little naked princess, she dumps out whatever she last ate. And there it sits, just squished out between my perfect cheeks: a muddy paste and the putrid, putrid stench of it.
The smell works its way into my throat.
Has me gagging.
Sobbing.
Then my stomach coils and sucks up high and all the sudden there are new things happening. This shitty smell, it’s warm and wet; it’s like a rag stuffed down my throat. Like black mold growing inside the walls of everything that allows me to breathe. Seconds later my body bucks, slamming my forehead into the top of the box. Hot vomit rushes up my throat and blasts out my mouth, all over my bare chest. The fetid stink makes me heave one, two, three more times.
And whatever bits of sanity still remain, these little clusters of hope wither and wilt against my body’s righteous indignity. My sanity is the dying cycle of a ros
e. My brain is shearing itself in half. Screams come with tears come with bawling and wailing. Instead of beating on the walls of this box, however, my pounding and thrashing goes internal. In my head. In my heart. With the soup of my guts. I want my mom. I want Brayden.
I want out.
3
Eyes raw. Body drifting from mind. I don’t care about anything anymore. Only death. That’s what I want. In my bleary state, my mind thinks it remembers dying before. How maybe at some point I had a choice. If this was true, if I wasn’t hovering in some sort of delusional alternate dimension brought on by starvation and delirium, I would want that choice again. I would opt out of life. Choose death.
My body is this distant thing, this numb, detached lifeless vessel. If all you have is agony, then agony isn’t painful. It just is. If all you have is hunger, hunger no longer makes you hungry. There is no more puke inside me. No more shit. Or pee. There’s only me disappearing inside me. I can’t tell if I’m even sleeping or not, that’s how not in touch with reality I am anymore.
Time is nothing. Darkness is everything. For days I’ve been murdering people. All my friends. I’ve killed my mother a hundred times in my mind. Because I want her love so badly, it’s the one thing I’ve been taking from myself over and over and over again. And I kill Brayden. And Netty. If there are two people I care about more than anyone, it’s those two. I chainsaw off their heads, disembowel them, run them over with dump trucks, give them heart attacks and aneurisms. I shoot them with pistols, with sawed off shotguns, with flamethrowers. Pain is everything, though. And nothing.
If all you have is pain, then pain doesn’t hurt.
All I have is pain.
And I hurt.
At some point, I feel a tickle in the back of my brain. A sick niggling. The space in my head, it expands like the mouth of a black hole. It tunnels down. Like if I could just get to the edge of it, I could take one step and free-fall face first into the abyss.
I might never hit bottom.
Deep in my mind, I step to the edge, peer over. It’s so very deep, so very, very safe. Everyone I know is dead. They’re all gone.
I’m dead.
Then a distinctly female voice—so soft and sweet it could be made of woven silk, so soothing it feels hypnotic—it says, “It’s okay. You’ll be safe down there. I’ll take your body now. I’ll take it until you’re ready to come back.”
Staring over the edge, there is so much promise. Breathe deep, I tell myself.
Step into the abyss.
Virtuous
1
Abby woke next to Netty. Netty said hello. The Russian couldn’t take her eyes off her best friend. This version of her, anyway. She kept trying to feel the spirit of Abby inside that once stricken, once killed body, but she felt nothing. She couldn’t make that connection and it was disheartening. Netty couldn’t stop the feeling that her best friend was gone, the essence of her bled out that day on the hardened floor of Gerhard’s lab, her head blown open.
A knock on the door. Brayden asking if they were decent.
Netty said, “Yeah, we are.” Not that it mattered with what the two of them did last night. Him and her. A salacious shiver ran through her as she thought about losing her virginity. One that quickly flooded with shame. A shame that didn’t quite hold because what they did was fun and sexy and dirty and so impulsive.
Brayden came in, dressed and looking good, and said, “Are we going to breakfast or what?” He looked at Netty and his eyes gave nothing of their licentious behavior away. She pulled the blankets up to her neck. The room was still cool. Suddenly she couldn’t meet his eyes.
She looked at the clock on Abby’s nightstand. It read 10:32. Brayden was about to speak, but he stopped. Christian appeared beside him. The boy looked sideways at Abby’s father, froze for a second, then stepped in the room to give him the doorway.
“You’re eating here,” Christian said. “I’m making eggs Florentine, center cut bacon, toast and orange juice straight from the juicer.”
It wasn’t a question. Abby looked at the man with something like attraction in her eye that gave Netty the creeps. Guh. WTF is wrong with her?!
Not that she blamed the girl. Christian was so damn handsome Netty could hardly stand the low swirling in her stomach every time she saw him. But being attracted to your own father though? Eesh.
She would definitely have to speak to Abby about this.
“Brayden, you can help me while the girls get ready,” Christian said. Brayden nodded. He went with Abby’s dad and shut the door behind him. Netty dragged herself out of bed, padded barefoot to the bathroom, emptied her bladder then turned on the shower. She stepped in. Minutes later, she heard the bathroom door open. Someone sat on the toilet and went number one like she was a freaking racehorse. Abby. Then the curtain opened and a very naked Abby stepped in behind her. Netty fought the urge to cover herself. No one had really ever seen her like this before. Well, Brayden. But not in the light and not in the shower.
She wasn’t proud of her body. She was pale, and too skinny. Her small, pointed tits were too far apart with smaller than usual nipples, her ribs showed and she had more than a mole or two on her white skin. She really liked the size and shape of her butt, but her shoulder blades stuck out too far, and when she stared at her back in the mirror, she could practically count her vertebra. She had agreeable feet and nice hands, but guys were usually busy checking out your butt and your boobs long before they decided to focus on your hands and feet. Unless they were into that sort of thing…
Abby, on the other hand, was so perfect she seemed to draw out Netty’s every imperfection. She had perfect…everything. Seriously.
“Hand me the soap, please,” Abby said.
“Um, we don’t shower together,” Netty said, finally covering her chest.
“I used to shower with my friends growing up,” Abby said nonchalantly. “It’s no biggie, Netty. Really.”
“I was your only friend growing up,” Netty said, covering her vagina, too. Suspicion rode every accusatory syllable.
“I know,” she said, standing up straight, aware of what she said. “It’s just, if I had friends when I was growing up, I wouldn’t make a big deal over something like that.”
“It’s not normal,” Netty said. She hated feeling this exposed.
“How many friends do you have?” Abby asked.
“That’s not the point.”
“Well, stop covering yourself,” Abby said, like she was offended, “it’s embarrassing me.”
“You forget I used to be the pretty one,” Netty said.
“I was never pretty.”
“True.”
“Well, I think you’re beautiful,” Abby said. Reaching out her hand, palm up, she said, “C’mon, seriously, hand me the soap.”
After showering, getting dressed and doing their makeup and hair, they went into the kitchen to wait for breakfast. Netty watched Abby, who spent a lot of time studying Brayden while trying hard to keep her eyes off her father.
Netty couldn’t help wondering how messed up her brain was anyway.
Netty finally got tired of Abby staring so she gave her a shoulder knock. Abby threw her a look and Netty harshly mouthed the words, “He’s your dad!”
Christian turned around and looked at the girls glaring at each other, their unspoken conversation finally hitting home for Abby.
“What are you two doing?” Christian said. He was unusually uptight. After his transformation, the guy was sort of…cool all the time. Not like when he was Atticus Van Duyn. But now? Something more than Abby’s resurrection was going on, and it had him acting…different. Not himself.
“She isn’t right in the head, Mr. Swann,” Netty replied, glaring at the girl.
Abby sat up straight and retorted: “I’m fine. You don’t have to be a bitch about it.” This bristled Netty. Being called a bitch really raked her nerves.
“Jesus, you two,” Brayden said. “You’re best friends. Lay off eac
h other.”
Just then Abby’s cell phone rang. It was sitting on the counter. Abby picked it up, answered it. She said hello, then listened it a bit. Finally: “Who is this?”—pause—“I’m sorry, Damien, I’m afraid I don’t remember you.”
Out loud, sounding irritated that she even had to say this, Netty said, “You were crushing on him your first semester at Astor Academy.”
“Oh, yes,” Abby said, recovering. “What can I do for you Damien?” Pause. Listen. She sniffed the air, smiled, then said, “Those eggs smell divine.” Back on the phone. “No Damien, I’m listening. You said you’re sorry for calling me the things you did, for treating me without respect, and for kissing me when you weren’t ready to do anything more than that. Got it. Anything else? Alrighty then.” She stabbed the END button and said, “When’s the bacon going to be ready?”
Everyone was looking at her like she had just grown a penis on her forehead. The only one not sitting there with his mouth hanging wide open was Brayden, who was smiling. Just as she was settling with the fact that they slept together and were pretending it didn’t happen, Netty saw in his eyes how he still adored Abby. God, that bugged her. Why would he do what he did with her while feeling the way he did about Abby?
“That guy’s always been super selfish,” Brayden said. “And obsessed with his step-sister.”
Then his cell phone rang and, like Abby, Brayden answered it. No one had manners anymore. Netty heard the sounds of a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. The woman on the other end wanted to know how Brayden was doing.
“Everything is more interesting than you could imagine,” he replied, “but I’m about to sit down and eat breakfast with friends, can I call you back? After breakfast?” Before hanging up, he turned and quietly said, “I miss you, too,” then hung up.
Heart stomping around her chest with something like rage, or insecurity, or even jealousy, Netty waited a beat, steadied her voice, then said, “Who was that?”
