The Lonely

by Ainslie Hogarth

  “Is that really better, though?”

  She shook her head and looked at me, making a face like she was amazed at my stupidity. I tucked the covers under my chin and snuggled closer to her. I could feel her words move along her body before I heard them.

  “Remember when you killed Salty?”

  “You killed Salty.”

  “You don’t really believe that, Easter.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Then who did?”

  “You.”

  Salty was a cat that belonged to Seisyll, our unfriendly neighborhood cat man. He chewed tobacco and spit into a brown bottle and was always trailed by as many as eight cats at a time, meowing and spitting and stinking. His house sat at the crux of our gaping cul-de-sac, a feast for ivy and weeds and a creeping stench.

  One afternoon Salty strayed from Seisyll and sidled his way up to Julia. She’d been making a game of pulling off never-ending strings of ivy stems that had suctioned themselves to the red brick steps of The Tooth House.

  He performed a little pre-sit ritual, three full circles, and then plopped his butt down next to her. His tail stuck out straight as an arrow, hiding that nasty balloon end that other cats always seem so eager to show off, and it made him seem more respectable somehow. His modest butthole, coupled with a little piece of frayed grass that hung from his lip like a cigar, made him one of the most distinguished little gentlemen she’d ever met. Then he got up and slid down the steps and smelled her sandaled feet and grated her toes with his rough little tongue. She pulled a red ribbon from her hair, tied it around his neck, and coaxed him easily to the lawn, where she pulled up dandelions and bopped his nose with them, sending him into a tizzy of jumping and batting. By the time she decided it was time to take him home, his nose was almost completely yellow.

  When night came and it was time to go inside, she felt awful to leave him all alone. She wanted to return him to Seisyll’s house but didn’t want to walk up and knock on Seisyll’s door. So instead she lifted the plastic lid of Seisyll’s garbage can at the end of his long driveway, which lolled like a tongue from his open garage, and poured Salty in. He hit the bottom with two gentle thuds, looked up at her, the ribbon still in a perfect bow. The shadow of the lid in her hand sliced little Salty in half vertically and one of his eyes flashed like a crystal ball.

  “You left him in that garbage pail, Easter.”

  “No.”

  “You let him bake like a turkey in that August heat wave.”

  “I did NOT!” I screamed, and imagined pulling the pillow out from beneath her head, shoving it over her face, and feeling the life spill in violent glugs from her body like a tipped bottle.

  Easter Story

  Through two doors, The Mother sat and the girls watched. Easter’s door was pushed open just a sliver, peeled from the frame as quietly as an eyelid opens. Light broke into their room and the burnt orange of a heavy lampshade painted their faces, stacked one on the other like a totem pole.

  Easter was trying very hard to make herself invisible. Not only from The Mother, who couldn’t see them from where she sat anyway, but also from Julia. She wanted to be as inconspicuous to Julia as a mint in her pocket. An accessory hanging from her ear or neck or wrist. A ghost. So that Julia would invite her to tag along again on another of these most secret excursions. Excursions she usually took alone, leaving Easter to mope in silent pretend sleep in their cold bed.

  The pulled-back hairs on Julia’s head felt as thick as wire along Easter’s pulsating throat; nervous warmth billowed between them. Julia was as anxious as Easter was, to be spying so seriously in the dark.

  Through two doors and across the width of the hall, The Mother looked stiff. Her legs were stuck together at the knees and she’d burrowed her hands flat beneath her thighs against the wood chair, which sat without any real use against the wall of The Parents’ bedroom. Her feet hung by their heels on a round rung between the legs of the chair and her long, gray nightshirt looked damp and pulled around the neck. She stared at the spot where the girls knew that the bed was but couldn’t quite see because the staggered placement of the two door frames only gave them that chair. But they knew she was looking at the bed. And they knew that the source of the dim, orange light was a ceramic table lamp with a woman’s face painted onto it. Created by The Mother when she took up painting, then put the hobby in a box and shoved it under the bed with the rest of her neatly compartmentalized, barely realized interests.

  On her face a Lonely expression was lacquered.

  Through two doors, everything was silent except for the sound of The Mother’s finger joints nervously bending and flattening with a thud against wood, trapped between the chair and her enveloping thighs. It was hard to tell whether or not The Father was on the bed; hard because on her face that Lonely expression was lacquered and because Julia said she sat like this most nights whether he was there or not. Quietly in the chair, legs as stiff as bent drinking straws, back as straight as she could make it, looking at the bed, her eyes cavernous: like two empty rooms, side by side, made up for viewing and not living. Vacant suites and dinette sets prepared for “The Price is Right” showcase showdowns.

  Just as Julia began to indicate that they should head back to bed, The Mother stood up, smoothed the gray nightshirt down over her underwear, and walked to where the girls knew a dresser existed. The faint squeal of a drawer pulled out. Shuffling through things worn soft. Then The Mother returned to the chair with a cigarette and a holographic hula girl lighter in her hand. She opened the window, a fraction of which was visible to the girls across the hall and between the door frames; sat down again; and proceeded to operate the lighter very strangely: the holographic hula girl standing up straight in her cupped hand, wedged into her palm with the wheel under her middle finger. Then she pulled down and ignited it, and it looked as though the flame was coming straight from her first two fingers like magic.

  As far as the girls knew, The Mother didn’t smoke. Perhaps they’d seen her once or twice with a cigarette in her hand, at a party or some other function where it might look interesting to be the kind of person who sometimes smoked, but in real life never. This must have been a cigarette from one of The Father’s secret stashes.

  The Mother took two purposeful-looking drags from it, just to get the thing going, not really enjoying it. She pulled a leg up onto the chair and rested her arm over her knee, soft side up. One foot remained clipped to the chair rung beneath and the white underwear she’d made an effort to hide when she’d first stood up was now fully exposed to us. The warmed, private part of the underwear, scooped into with leg holes. A small embroidered bell in front.

  She took another hungry drag and let the smoke slip from between her lips slowly, crawling up her face toward the ceiling, obscuring it for a second almost completely. Another drag she blew out gently against the inside of her arm. It moved along the soft inner parts like gentle, tickling fingers. Her skin must have rippled, hairs standing on end, because when she proceeded to move the burning end of the cigarette as close as she could along her arm, just barely above the skin along the pit of her elbow, the girls could smell burning hair.

  Easter became frantic. What if she put the cigarette too close, buried the burning orange end into her most tender flesh, let herself eat up and put out the straight white cigarette with her doughy insides? The Mother’s head rolled back, her throat as exposed as a fish on land, not looking at where she was moving the cigarette, just letting it hover above her skin. Easter began to tremble and Julia, who could feel the tremble ripple through her own body, shot an angry look up at her. This angry look made Easter shake even more. Julia wasn’t going to stop her. Julia was just going to let her burn. And Julia wasn’t going to let Easter stop her, either. A whimper escaped from Easter’s until-now-vigilantly-monitored throat and Julia stood up like a shot, knocking Easter backward. She grabbed her by the wrist and d
ragged her back to bed without a word.

  Easter secretly hoped that The Mother had heard them and that it knocked her out of it. She hoped that The Mother would throw the cigarette out the window and go to sleep whether The Father was there or not. Regardless of what The Mother did with that cigarette, Easter would never be invited on a secret excursion again.

  In their room, Julia paced.

  “Easter,” she said, “do you mind telling me what’s wrong with you? What makes you so, so annoying?”

  Easter sat on the bed, looking at a section of Care Bear sheet through her crossed legs. Numb fingers, dry throat, fear and sadness and strangeness all vibrating through her, just beneath the skin. The small light in the room reflected a slick of tears across her cheeks.

  “Hello?” Julia waved a hand in her face.

  “I can’t believe we just left her there,” Easter said quietly.

  “We didn’t just leave her there, Easter, you made a noise. Now she knows we were watching. She’s stopped.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I do.”

  “I hope so.”

  “And that’s why you’re not coming out with me again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t handle it, Easter. It’s not right for you to see. Only I can, got it? From now on, you’ve got to never leave your room at night, all right? Even if you hear the bells or you wake up and see that I’m not there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you promise me?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  “I’ll protect you from them.”

  “I know.”

  Footage

  I used to be very mad at The Parents for never taking any home videos of me. There are a few pictures, but not many, and certainly none of all of us together. I wasn’t mad because I particularly wanted to look at them or have them to show to my own kids or anything; I was mad because I took it as a sign that I would probably never be famous. Famous people always seem more worthy of documentation, even when they’re little and packing wet sand into buckets at the beach, or in the high school band, hidden beneath a layer of greasy hormones. People around want to trap that specialness in a picture like a firefly cupped between two excited hands, peeking at it through the cracks in their fingers as the light begins to weaken.

  And when the news wants to do a story on the girl who bled to death under a rock in the local woods, they won’t have any good footage or pictures to use for the segment. This made me mad. They’ll probably have to put my goddamn yearbook picture up there, full-faced too-freckly Richard Nixon, appearing in a little box to the left of the newscaster’s head. People will squint and wonder if it’s a boy.

  I began to seethe at the thought of it.

  Until I remembered that everyone who dies young is remembered as beautiful and I’ll be more popular as a corpse than I ever was alive. All of this blood spilled out over The Woods will soak everyone’s memory, absorbed like a cotton ball until thoughts of me can only be recognized by my death. I won’t be that weirdo who used to sit behind you in math. I’ll be that lovely girl who died in The Woods with all of those wonderful troubles. And Lev will never get the chance to find out how truly un-wonderful I am.

  The ground grew warm around me as the sun rose over the rock, for a split second a searing white thumbnail, brightness too much to bear. I squeezed my eyes shut. And they had to stay that way for a while. The ground simmered, leaves and twigs and pebbles as alive as droplets on a hot pan. Little bugs burrowing to the top, fat bees pollinating low flowers, all heavy and drunk with fertility. My bare skin roasting. The Mother would hate to see all of this sun on my face. Wrinkles and freckles seemed to terrify her in a way that drug addiction and teen pregnancy terrified other mothers. She had no reason to worry in that department, and she knew it. No one at school would have ever offered me drugs or sex.

  I felt nervous with my eyes closed beneath the rock. Nervous that the scribble of invisible things surely collecting in the odor of my rotting legs would start to lay eggs in and around them before I was all the way dead. The air surrounding me was all excited and foaming with the microscopic matter that thrived on that sort of thing, a signal for bigger critters and feeders and parasites, nighttime creatures who had probably already smelled a bleeding body in The Woods, had already been watching anxiously from their shadowy hiding spots. With my eyes closed, they could begin to fantasize about the ways in which they would devour me when the sun finally went under. Rubbing their claws together hungrily, slouching slightly closer. Perhaps they’re what scared the squirrel. Perhaps they’re only waiting until dark to start feasting.

  And the whole woods transformed behind my closed eyelids. The trees were stretching their limbs, arching their trunks, cracking their twigs, preparing for another length of stillness. The Woods filled with the sound and smell of their resounding exhalation, their warm, musky tree-breath invading my lungs: bronchiole branches, alveoli buds.

  I heard a rustling of leaves behind me, somewhere behind the creek, the sound of feet sloughing off a layer of forest floor. A careless pair of feet from the sounds of it. Phyllis the Fucking Bitch always insisted that we raise our feet when we walked, so Julia and I had a good ear for shuffling.

  With my eyes closed I heard the feet shuffle and shuffle, growing louder and louder until they suddenly stopped, as though they had caught a whiff of being heard. And their nervous stillness was even louder than their shuffling. My heart began to pound. I wanted desperately to open my eyes but it was still too bright to bear; my sockets were becoming little ovens, eyeballs broiling. I heard the sound of sniffing; erratic sniffing, the way that dogs do it.

  I think even the trees stopped breathing.

  What could this shuffling something be? Is it something coming to save me? Or something coming to finish me off? Or maybe I’m already dead, eyes as still as marbles on a carpet, and the something shuffling, The Something Coming, is a big dirty vulture coming to pierce my bloated belly with its beak, squawking the dinner bell to everything else in The Woods. I hope The Something Coming doesn’t turn out to be me, walking along a path like I was this morning and somehow this whole thing turns into a story about time travel. That probably won’t happen. I’ve never really understood time travel anyway. Not even when there are ridiculous instruments like flux capacitors involved to bridge the gaps between science and magic.

  Maybe The Something Coming is a hooded, gliding ghoul with a scythe and a skeletal claw hanging out the front of his robe. He’s the bouncer of this universe, coming to kick me out for breaking one of the rules: “Do Not Get Crushed by Rock” or maybe “Do Not Bleed to Death.” People have been kicked out for less.

  This could be my eternity: to lie beneath this rock and wait until another girl makes her way down here, so I can plant something shiny like Elizabeth’s bridle somewhere deep in The Woods to lure her over to be crushed. Maybe these whole woods are haunted with crushed girl ghosts and that’s what I’m hearing. They’re coming to check me out, make sure I’m cool. Which I’m not, so they’ll be disappointed.

  Perhaps this is how I’m being punished for wandering. Girls can be lost, but they can never purposely wander, and I knew that, learned it from years of caution embedded in everything I saw and read, but I did it anyway. When boys wander alone they grow into men; they learn things about themselves, discover that they’re strong and independent. When girls wander alone they’re lured by witches to eat poison apples or get caught and ravaged by bandits.

  Maybe The Something Coming is Lev, having sensed somehow that his gal was in trouble. He’s hunting for me, ready to be my hero, sun and sky and wind ravaging his thin skin as he comes to save me.

  And as the gusts of wind wheezed to a halt, the sun comfortable in the sky above me, a simmering afternoon took hold of The Woods. And the world felt small around me. I pumped blood at its center. I am the only
I. Everything is Easter.

  Early Our Town

  One night after Mr. Ungula had already left, the front door opened. It was Lev. Long-necked Lev. His ears looked bigger. And red. It must be cold outside. His feet beneath his cuffed jeans reminded me of shoes peeking from behind a curtain, someone hiding. I imagined him hiding in our bedroom all those years, watching Julia and me do the things we did in there. Seeing me like that and still thinking I was wonderful. Watching. The still, smiling face of a friendly reptile.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “How’s your night?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Where’s your boss?”

  “He’s out for the night.”

  “On a date?”

  “Probably not.”

  And he squeezed the fingers of one hand with the other, grouping them tightly together like the stems of a bouquet. He seemed nervous, which made me nervous, so I felt it was best to fill the air with questions.

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Down the street from here.”

  “What street?”

  “Princess.”

  “That’s not down the street.”

  And the long-necked Lev laughed and the inside of his mouth was the soft pink of a lizard’s.

  “I know. I guess I didn’t want you to know how far I walk to get here.”

  “Do you live with both your parents?” I asked.

  He nodded. “My dad sells insurance and my mom works at the car dealership. And I go to school.”

  “Do you have a lot of friends?”

  “Not really.” He looked down at his feet before he said the next thing: “Can you take me through this place?”

  “For free?”

  “Yeah, sure. You said your boss isn’t around.”

  “Okay.”

  In the first room, Early Our Town, I flicked on the light and it shorted. Well, not exactly a short. Sometimes the lights just needed a minute to warm up. Luckily Mr. Ungula kept a flashlight at reception. I used it to illuminate my favorite bits and pieces of the model for Lev. The layers of Early Our Town began with Styrofoam, carefully scalloped to look like cobblestone, topped with a misting of real soot that Mr. Ungula had scraped from his barbeque at home, where I imagined him to cook all kinds of socially unacceptable meats. Maybe that’s what always went wrong with his dates. He offered them plates of horsemeat and bulbous grilled Chihuahua eyeballs on kebab sticks.