Midnight Echo 8

by AHWA

  Dominic, her perfect man, her idol, her love, had committed the worst sin, and she could not forgive him, could not let him. Must push him away before he could really leave her and the insatiable hole inside her consumed her and sucked her, howling for mercy, home to the Borderlands.

  She ran to the kitchen and snatched the largest knife from the block on the bench. It came loose with a metallic scream. She couldn’t wait, there was no time, the sounds and sensations of the Borderlands were rushing up to meet her, dragons and tygers and harpies screeching and laughing and lusting for her soul, and she must run, run, run. So she put the blade to her flesh and opened herself up, the unbearable feelings running out with her blood, the mess spattering dark on the wooden floorboards, like a warm hole you could step through to another place, like Alice’s rabbit hole, and it was true what the Hatter said: we’re all mad here.

  She felt something like peace, or at least distance from pain, spreading through her as her blood made more rabbit holes on the floor. She dropped the knife down one of them and walked unsteadily through the house, clenching and unclenching her fist, letting the blood drip and pool and tell the tale of her travels. He would find it, Dominic, her fallen knight, he would return home and see what happened when he dropped his white towel, when he left her.

  And he would be sorry.

  She went out the door, down the street, and onto the main road, looking for an anchor to hold her here. A wind not of this world toyed with her hair, tore at her clothes with filthy fingers, tried to pick her up and carry her away. She walked until a bar reared up beside her, wild with beer and sweat and sex and desperation, and it looked like just the thing. She went inside.

  “Hey,” said a tall man with dark curls that hugged his forehead, angel curls, “You ok? You look a bit unsteady.”

  She looked at him, her eyes bruises, her mouth an open wound, and screamed mutely. He didn’t hear her, but he saw the bloody trail she left in her wake.

  “Jesus!” And he grabbed a towel off the bar—not white, muddy green and sodden with beer—and wrapped it around her arm.

  “Dominic,” she murmured as he held her, his shoulders broad, his hands strong enough, maybe, to hold her forever.

  “That your boyfriend? He do this to you?” His eyes went black, the pupils dilating with anger. His lashes were curled tightly, like his hair. She nodded. After all, in a way, it was true. And what did any of it matter, anyway? Dominic had left her.

  Her beer-knight’s jaw clenched. “Let’s get you to hospital.” He picked her up and carried her out, and he moved so fast, the Borderlands lost its grip on her for a while, the wind and all the dark creatures within it stopped howling for her, and she found peace in his arms. Later, much later, after sutures and painkillers and an Indian meal eaten off a Formica counter as a bottle of red marked the space between them, he kissed her. She kissed him back, hungrily, his teeth firm behind the softness of his lips, his tongue hot. She plunged her hands into his curls and gripped him tight, pulling him closer, but never close enough.

  He mistook her need for passion. He responded, no doubt felt he’d earned it after this night. They went back to his place. His name was Julian, and maybe he would never leave her. Maybe he could close the door to the Borderlands. Maybe he would deserve his pedestal.

  But he never called her, after.

  And there was still Dominic to go home to, the Borderlands nipping at her heels with darning needle teeth as she ran the whole way.

  * * *

  One day I will break hearts.

  “I slept with someone.”

  Dominic sat hunched on the couch as she delivered the blow. His face seemed to deflate, to collapse in on itself. He looked smaller somehow, diminished. Pale. Broken. Everything the Borderlands touched ended up looking like that. She had always looked like that. He had never cared, had thought her beautiful, though she’d never believed him when he told her so.

  “But I love you,” he whispered. Confused. Lost. Even after eighteen months with her, he still didn’t know his way around her world.

  “No you don’t.” Part of her was dying, withering, in excruciating agony for every morsel of pain she inflicted on her white-towel knight. But part of her was enraged. He’d left, and now he’d pay! “You think you’re too good for me. You think I’m a burden. You wish you’d never met me.”

  “That’s not true! I love you! I’ve always loved you! And I thought you loved me. Why are you doing this?”

  One day I will break hearts.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. I love you, she screamed inside her mind. I do. Whatever there is in me that is ‘I’, you have all of it. It’s me who knows I’m not good enough for you. Someone like you was never meant for someone like me. Yet here we are, and how I love you! Please don’t leave me. Please. It’ll take me if you do. Once and for all, I will be lost.

  He gave her a look bright with tears and hate—the deepest kind, the one that comes from love—and stood up, and walked out of the room.

  “Don’t go,” she yelled, chasing him down the hall, tugging at his sleeves and even, at the final moment, dropping to the ground and wrapping herself around his calves so he had to drag her along. The humiliation. “Please don’t!”

  But he did, and this time, she knew he wasn’t coming back.

  She lay curled on the floor, her fingernails gouging furrows in her cheeks, her body convulsing, and she cried until she passed out.

  One day I will break hearts.

  * * *

  A dream followed, as real as those of her childhood, realer than Dominic and Julian and her father and all the other men of this world. Realer, even, than her mother—dead so long now—and her brothers, gone all the years they’d known her. Realer than she, the girl from the Borderlands.

  Not a knife this time, for that brought relief, and might trick her into staying. No, it was time to rest, time to go home, time to stop fighting. For that, boxes of pills, a bottle of white wine, and a plastic bag to make sure.

  She lay on the bed, for that was where dreamers belonged. The pills went down hard after the first dozen or so, her throat resisting, but she washed them on their way with wine, and eventually they were all inside her. She’d always felt more whole with something inside her, but this was different, this time it wasn’t to plug up the hole that led to the Borderlands; this time it was to weigh her down so she sank through it forever.

  “We’re all mad here,” she whispered, and felt the room sigh its agreement. An empty room, an empty house, just like her.

  She felt heavy; her eyelids wanted to close, and her brain buzzed. Time, then. She fumbled the bag over her head and breathed deeply, quickly exhausting her oxygen. The plastic kissed her lips each time she inhaled. Little stars began to blaze behind her eyes. Her head was an island, floating atop the sea of her body. The Borderlands sang to her. She listened.

  She went home.

  Purple rabbits soared through skies thick with dancing skeletons. She watched them. Hands stroked her, grabbed her nose and mouth, held her as hot breath blasted in her ears. She let them. A woman draped in red cradled her. She was rocked.

  And rocked, and rocked. And rocked. The plastic bag was torn off her head.

  “Beth!” Dominic shook her, slapped her, wrenched her mouth open and shoved his fingers down her throat. She retched as he dialled an ambulance with his other hand. He babbled their address down the phone, then wiped her mouth with a white towel, keeping her upright, keeping her vomiting, keeping her with one foot in this world and one in the Borderlands. As he had for eighteen months now.

  “I won’t let you,” he said as he settled her head in his lap—turned sideways so she could keep vomiting—and stroked her hair. “I won’t let you go there. I won’t let them take you. God, sometimes at night, when you’re sleeping, I even think I can hear them. W
hatever you are, you’re inside me now, Beth, and they can’t have you! They show you darkness, but all you show me is light, and I want you to see it, too.”

  “Don’t give up on me,” she sobbed.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  “I love you, and I want you to love you, too. You’re here. Be here. Stay.”

  “I will,” she said.

  And she did.

  Thank God, she did, and after that, things got better. Because sometimes they can, and sometimes they do. Sometimes you just have to survive to see what happens next. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Blink, and blink, and blink again, and then, for no apparent reason, on the millionth blink, or the billionth, you’ll finally, finally be able to see.

  * * *

  I still see her often, that girl from the Borderlands. I saw her on the street, just the other day. You wouldn’t recognise her. She’s got a little more meat on her bones now, a little more colour in her skin. Her inner wrists are tattooed—on the left, a skeleton, smiling, perhaps even dancing; on the right, a purple rabbit. Reminders of where she came from, and reminders that where you come from doesn’t always dictate where you go. She was coming out of her shrink’s office, rummaging in her purse, not looking where she was going, and I bumped into her on purpose, just to talk to her, even though it can’t have been more than a couple of days since we last spoke. She has that effect on me, even now.

  “Shit, sorry,” she began, and then she looked up and saw me. “Dominic.” I love hearing her say my name.

  “Hi Beth. How are you?”

  She smiled at me. I’ve always loved her crooked smile. “I’m good, Dom. Really good. And you?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “Well …” She looked at her watch. “I’ve kinda gotta be somewhere.”

  “Sure, you gotta be somewhere, ok,” I echoed, and she was gone. Not home to the Borderlands, just to the tram. She lives without a man these days, and she’s content to do so. It didn’t work out for us, but it worked out for her. Work being the operative word, because she has to work every damn day of her life to stay here, to let the Borderlands go, and work she does.

  She stopped as she reached the tram stop, turned, called over her shoulder to me: “Could you come early to pick up Jilly on Friday? I’ve got a work thing. Say, 4pm?”

  “Sure.” I’d love the extra time with our daughter. The weather had been nice; maybe we’d go to the beach, sit on a white towel, watch the surf, and talk about her mummy. We did that sometimes. Often.

  “Thanks, Dominic,” she said, flashing her smile again, and then the tram swallowed her, and bore her away from me. I felt the stab of pain that separation from her had always brought me, probably always would bring me. I knew she had an emptiness within her, but I also knew where it came from. She emptied, time and again, because, time and again, she filled up everyone around her. She filled up me. Something huge flowed through her, and it took something—someone—special to remain a whole person while conducting that colossal force. If I’d done even one thing while I knew her to keep her here, then I had done a great thing—but I doubted it was ever about me. She, always she, it was always her. She wasn’t made of the same stuff as you or I. She was … something else, and she could never be mine.

  But I’d see her again. Soon. And we had a daughter, a beautiful ethereal creature who just last week told me she’d seen her stuffed frog move from the floor to her pillow by itself—and I believed her.

  And we had loved, that Borderlands girl and I. Despite the demons that rode on our shoulders—especially hers—we loved, deep and hard and fast; once, maybe even still.

  And that was true, and that was enough. Reality is a matter of opinion, but love? That’s the same in every world, and it has no borderline.

  Blissful Ignorance

  Matt Wedge

  Mama loves the Baby Jesus. She always says it ain’t nothin’ ‘gainst me and my sister Lily Jane, but there just ain’t no way she could have as much love for us as she does for the Baby Jesus and his daddy, God. And for the most part, I don’t mind that none. How can I? God had let Jesus be nailed to a cross so that we could be free to live without sin. That kinda love beats out most any kinda love you can find here on Earth. That’s what Mama says anyway. No, I don’t mind playin’ second fiddle to God and his kin. What rubs me raw is how much more Mama loves Lily Jane than she loves me.

  Now, I know that it sounds like I’m nothin’ but a whiney brat, but it’s true, Mama loves Lily Jane more than she’ll ever love me. Mama buys special pieces of fabric to make her dresses. I have to make do with what she stitches together out of old quilts. She’s more patient with Lily Jane ‘bout her Bible lessons than she is with me. I understood ‘bout the evils of men that the Bible preached ‘bout by the time I was only seven. Lily Jane’s almost ten and she still don’t understand the meanin’ of what Mama calls The Warnings. Like if Adam hadn’t been so selfish and told God that he was lonely, God woulda never took his rib and made Eve. If she hadn’t been around, then Adam woulda never betrayed God and the world would still be Paradise.

  Mama ‘splained how some folks in the town would see them gettin’ kicked outta the Garden of Eden as bein’ Eve’s fault by temptin’ Adam with an apple. But accordin’ to Mama, if Eve hadn’t been around to tempt Adam, things woulda never changed and even though we wouldn’t be here on Earth in a solid form, our souls’d be in the Garden of Eden, enjoyin’ everlastin’ happiness. And like Mama says, that makes more sense than blamin’ everything on the woman. She says you just have to look at the way men behave nowadays to know that Adam was the one at fault. Men go around drinkin’, whorin’ and make loud noises when they pass wind. Could you just ‘magine what Eve had to put up with ‘fore she offered him that apple in blissful ignorance?

  ‘Blissful ignorance’ is a favorite sayin’ of Mama’s. She says that’s when you do something bad or have bad thoughts but don’t know ‘nuff to realise it’s bad. She says that someone who does somethin’ outta blissful ignorance is still pure in the eyes of God. That’s why she keeps Lily Jane and me in blissful ignorance. That way, even if we do somethin’ wrong, we don’t know no better and God still loves us. I think it’s good that Mama looks out for us like that, but I still wonder ‘bout stuff that I don’t know. I wonder what it’d be like to go into town.

  I went into town once, but I was only a baby, not even a year old, so I don’t remember what it was like. Mama says there’s nothin’ but whores and gamblin’ and things called televisions that tell people to sin. I know I don’t want none of that, but I’d like to see some people other than Mama or Lily Jane. I’d like to help the people there to see what they’re doin’ is wrong and that God would forgive them and love them again if they’d just forget all those sinful things they done and live in blissful ignorance like us. I wouldn’t try to help the men, ‘cause they like to sin and there ain’t no helpin’ someone who likes to sin. ‘Sides, Mama says that if a man sees me, they’d try to know me Biblically. I didn’t think that sounded like a bad thing, but Mama told me it was the worst sin of all. I asked her to ‘splain what it was, but she said that she’d done already told me too much and I was riskin’ my blissful ignorance.

  Lily Jane ain’t allowed to go into town neither. I guess that’s the one place where Mama loves us equal. But I don’t think it’s ‘cause she’s tryin’ to be fair. It’s ‘cause Mama says that folks in town wouldn’t understand Lily Jane and me. What we are, I guess. Mama says we’re diff’rent. ‘Special’ is what she says. She says we’re … shoot, how does it go? We’re special ‘cause we’re her miracle girls.

  She don’t mean that we’re ‘maculate like the Baby Jesus. I know we had a daddy, but I don’t remember much ‘bout him. Mama said he run of
f with some whore after Mama had Lily Jane in her belly. When Mama says we was miracles, she means that she handled all the health stuff that new babies need herself. She says most of the people in town let doctors take care of the health stuff of babies, just like they let other people teach their children and some of ‘em even let other people take care of their children while they go off and work or do selfish things for themselves. Mama takes care of Lily Jane and me in all those ways. She taught us how to read and write usin’ the Bible. She taught us how to add and subtract usin’ dried pinto beans. She taught us how most people hate people like us ‘cause we’re pure and God loves us more than them. But that’s okay ‘cause they’re gonna be the ones who go to Hell when they die, while Mama, Lily Jane and me will go to Heaven.

  But Mama’s proudest of makin’ us ‘miracle girls’ ‘cause most folks take their little girls to the doctor to dock their tails. But not Mama, she did mine all by herself. And while she says that I was a big help when it came to cuttin’ Lily Jane’s, I didn’t do much more than watch. I was just a baby when she docked mine, so I don’t remember what it was like. But I hope that I didn’t holler and squirt tears like Lily Jane did. But I can’t say as I blame her. It looked like it really did hurt as Mama went to cuttin’ with her gardenin’ clippers. The funny thing is, it didn’t look that much like a tail. Oh sure, there was a part of it that kind of did, but there was this little pouch under it. Mama said that was part of the tail that had to come off, but I’m not so sure. It was also weird ‘cause the tail was in the front and not the back, but Mama said that’s how it is with humans. We’re different from the other animals with tails.