I reach across the table and pull her hand away. “You’re sick, too. You could stay home, too. With me.”
“It’s just a rash. I’ll put some ointment on it. I’ll be fine.” She pulls her lips back and grins. Teeth like an animal. Like Princess when we took her to the vet because she had to go to heaven. Like even though she was a dog, she knew something was wrong.
“Don’t you want to stay home?” she says, and I nod my head. Outside, the morning light is covered in dark, and fog creeps against the windows like little fingers tapping. Let me in, let me in.
When she leaves, I hold my breath. Quiet. Quiet. Wait for the house to do something, for it to show that it knows that she is gone, that I am alone. But there is only the sound of my heart whooshing the blood to my head and a dull pain building in my lungs.
Maybe the house sleeps during the day. I try to sleep, too, but the fog rolls against the windows, and I can’t settle down. It’s too quiet and too loud at the same time. Instead, I turn on the television, but the fog has knocked out the antenna, and white and black ants crawl all over everything. I shut it off, and write my name in the dust covering the screen.
For a long time, I stand at the window and watch the fog. Wave after wave of white smoke crushing against the house. I press my face to the glass and cup my hands around my eyes to block out the light, but I can’t see anything. It’s like the house is floating away, the fog lifting and carrying us somewhere not solid.
“Where are we going?” I whisper, but there is nothing there to answer me. I want to go out into the fog, to float in it the same way that the house does. To be cocooned and protected inside of its breath. To sleep. Maybe I would forget the look on Momma’s face when the police came to tell her about Daddy. Forget the worm crawling through the dirt I threw into the hole we put him in. Forget that he had been going to get ice cream for me. For my birthday. Forget that it was my fault.
Momma left the door unlocked when she left. I can’t think of a time when she has done that before. She’s always telling me stories about people who go around testing doors to see who’s stupid enough to roll out the welcome mat for intruders.
“There’s men out there just looking for juicy little girl bits like you, Mary. Looking for places to sneak in and find them and hurt them real bad,” she would say but now the door is unlocked, and I want to float, so I open it and go out onto the porch. The fog licks against my feet, and I take off my shoes, curl my toes against the wooden slats.
Behind me, the door closes. It won’t, I think, ever open again.
The smell lives in the fog now. Stronger than I ever, and I gasp against it, pull my shirt over my nose so that I won’t retch. It worms against my skin, tries to open me up, little razors seeking something soft. It hurts, and I back against the house, try to get away. But the door is closed, and I can’t go back.
The fog reaches grey fingers down my throat, twists inside of me until I gag, and I claw at the wood beneath my hands. Let me in. Please let me in.
The wood gives way, splinters into nothingness as I press harder, a hollow space yawning wide and warm. It’s nothing at all to make it bigger, the wood breaks easily under my fists, and there is a hole large enough to crawl into, a place to hide from the sharp teeth of the fog. From somewhere deep in the house, the heartbeat starts up.
I creep into the space, careful not to catch myself on the jagged edges of the hole. The air here is softer, the smell not as strong, but dull, the reminder of a smell instead of the smell all by itself.
I should be afraid. Should leave here. Find a way to open the door. Go back to sleep and hope that I wake up when Momma gets back home, listen to the sharp sounds of her cutting vegetables, pulling meat from bone. But it’s so nice here. So warm, and the heartbeat is like a lullaby.
Just like a little mouse, I think and giggle. Inside and outside at the same time. In the guts of the walls, under the floor. The hole tunnels forward, getting smaller as it goes on. I have to hunch my shoulders and duck my head, but the tunnel is just big enough for me to fit. I push myself forward.
My fingers brush against the edges of the tunnel, burrow into piles of something soft. It feels like fur, like petting Princess, only it’s longer and stringier. Like my hair when I haven’t washed it in a few days and Momma practically pushes me into the shower.
It’s wonderful to be inside the house, to squirm along just behind the walls, snug and safe where no one can see me. I have to hurry. Momma will be home, and she won’t want me here. Will say it’s strange to be inside the walls, and I don’t want her to know that I found this place. She’ll roll her eyes again; tell me that I’m imagining things. Like she did when I told her about the blood, about the smell. Like she always does.
She never believes me.
My hands are wet and sticky, but I don’t know how they got that way, and when I push a clump of hair out of my eyes, something gets all gummed up in the strands. It’s too dark to see what it is.
There’s light coming from up ahead. Probably an opening into the house. Behind me, the tunnel is all closed up, and the fur stuff pulses and moves. I don’t like it. I don’t like that it’s wet and looks like it’s reaching out for me. I don’t want it to touch me, to smear its damp fingers across my arms, my legs.
A round pinprick of light shines into the tunnel, and I stop my burrowing, stand before it, look out and out and out. I blink, shake the stars from my eyes, wet my lips with my tongue.
Momma’s home. I can’t see her from my spot inside the wall, but I can hear her humming. I don’t know the song, and the notes don’t sound right together. They’re all jumbled up and screechy, and her voice slides over them like oil.
I’m inside the wall of her bedroom and can see her bed, the corners tucked tight and pillows propped just so. The dress she put on this morning is draped across the mattress, the shoulders placed across her pillow, as if she laid down and the bed swallowed her skin and bones and left the dress behind.
“Mary,” I think I hear her say, but the words slip into something else, something that sounds like another language. The warm air in the tunnel has turned cold, and I shiver. The humming stops. Starts again. But it is different this time. Ghosts of words dance in the air, and I strain against the house to hear them. Underneath everything, the beating grows louder, and the fur stuff twitches.
When Momma steps into view, I scream. She is naked. Her legs bend impossibly, the joints crooking the opposite way, and she walks with slow, jerking steps. The scab on her forehead covers her face now. She’s scratched at it, torn open the flesh, and blood drips across her neck and chest. Her mouth is open, a wide O, the tongue a fat, wet piece of meat, and her teeth are pointed and sharp.
She turns slowly, stares at the wall. Surely, she can see me hiding here, just behind the plaster. A small, quaking animal waiting to be gobbled up. She cocks her head and watches the wall, eyes flickering back and forth, nostrils flaring.
“Little pig,” she says and grunts, reaches her hand toward my hiding place in the wall. I push away from the hole, but the tunnel has closed up even more, and the fur stuff snatches at me. Cold fear clenches my stomach, a grasping, hungry thing.
“Can you hear it, Mary? You were able to hear it before. Can you hear it now?” she says. From the other side of the wall comes the sound of her raking her fingernails across the plaster.
“The blood, Mary. I’ve always heard it. Come and see. Come and see,” she says.
“Please, Momma. You’re scaring me.”
“Nothing’s wrong, love. Come and see what I’ve brought you.”
My face is wet when I press my eye to the hole again. Momma stands before me cradling a squirming bundle. She resumes her humming, and a tiny reddened hand reaches out, the fingers flexing.
“See what it’s given back to me? To us? After all this time, Mary. A daddy. Just like you wanted. A daddy to fix things and to make everything better,” she coos. A gurgling rises from the blankets she clutches to her
chest. The sound of drowning. The sound of blood leaking from a cut throat.
“It’s not a daddy. It’s not. It’s wrong,” I say, and she bares her teeth.
“What do you know about it, girl? What do you know about the places daddies go? How they rut against you, their stinking meat between your legs? They all come in and go out the same way. Pushed out with the shit and the blood into the dirt, and they always leave. One way or the other. But not this time. It heard me. Heard us. Heard what we wanted, what we needed. And the blood gave back. Everything I’ve poured into this world, it finally gave back. Aren’t you happy?”
The fur stuff has wrapped itself around my arms, my legs, and it pushes upward, envelopes me like a second skin. I don’t mind any more. It’s like velvet, soft and smooth, and I run my hand over the flesh sprouted new.
Inside the house, the new daddy cries, and Momma shushes him, brings him to her breast.
“Hush now. It’ll all be all right. Everything will be all right,” she says. I want to scream at her, to tell her to throw it away, to burn it, to cut it open and pour the blood back into the earth. But the house is in my throat now, the fur pushing further and further down, and I’m so tired.
Beneath me, the world opens its teeth, stretches its mouth wide as my body splits open, empties itself into the dirt.
The new daddy sings to me. His voice merging with the heartbeat of the house. The light fades. Blinks out. And I sleep.
The Tying of Tongues
When the hooded woman came to our village, her bloodied skirts trailing behind her, the old mothers whispered behind chapped hands, and the animals found their holes and hid.
“Shameful,” my mother hissed and crooked her fingers against the woman’s silent, creeping form.
“Witch,” my mother called her and spat at the reddened twigs and grass she left behind. “Evil One. This is why she bleeds into the Earth. A curse for selling her soul, Anya.”
I won’t let Mother catch me watching. The woman’s arms and neck are pale and smooth like the stripped flesh of trees. I want to take her fingers in my mouth like ice, like snow, let her skin melt against my tongue. But I cannot speak of this.
It is two days after she first appeared, and my brothers have taken me to the river. I tell Mother I am going to wash, but I love to watch my brothers fish, their fingers dipping in and out of the meat, their hands shimmering like starlight as they scratch away the scales.
We are alone this morning, and my brothers move about their nets carefully, their voices low. I watch the mist rise from the river and imagine stripping myself bare and walking into the water, the mist cupping my breasts, the waves lapping against my calves.
I drowse, lulled by the soft hum of dragonflies. My brothers notice her first; their stooping forms suddenly straightening, their murmurs falling into silence. They watch the woman in the same way that I do, try not to lick their lips when they see her figure moving through the trees. But they are caught up in their own visions and do not notice me.
“What would your wives say?” I say, teasing them. They smile without teeth, turn their eyes away but not their bodies. As she draws closer, our gazes land on her once more, all of us bewitched by the languid movements of her body. She moves like water, like wind.
I am not yet a wife, and my brothers see only what they want to see. I try not to smile as we follow the movement of her hips together.
“Where does she come from?” I ask, but they only shake their heads. Their wives have tied their tongues as Mother has my own.
“Perhaps if you looked like her, Anya—hair as black as the raven’s feather, body like a ripe pear, you would not waste away in Father’s house,” Jacob the eldest chides me, and I try to blush, force the heat and color to my cheeks. It isn’t so difficult with the woman standing near me, and heat crawls up my thighs, my neck.
My brothers laugh as I flush, assuming it is the fault of some toward village boy with wandering hands, but when they turn away, distracted by the possibility of biting fish, I glance again at the woman.
She is looking at me, her eyes so dark they almost blend against her pupils. Like looking into a night without stars. Unnatural, I think, but she appears amused, her lips lifting in the briefest of smiles before she turns her back and begins to move away.
I want to call after her, tell her not to go, but my blood has frozen, and I cannot.
But she is turning back, glancing at me once more, before moving into the trees, her skirts flashing crimson in the sunlight before vanishing.
My brothers have lost themselves again in the capture and kill, have turned their backs, and before they can notice, I slip away, the shadows swallowing me, sweet and cool.
She is waiting, and when I find her, she brings a finger to her lips and reaches her hand for mine. I hesitate. “Witch” my mother called her, but I want to know the feeling of her fingers in mine, so I wrap my hand around hers, and my mother’s voice shimmers, falls away.
It is like touching glass. Like the sky has torn open above us, raining down fire and ice, and there is beauty laced with pain, and my skin stretches, full to the brim with her touch. I cannot bear it.
“I know you, Anya,” she says and her voice is like birds singing into the gray morning, like wolves sending their midnight chorus toward the moon.
“Like honey. Like a flower. Something to be tasted. No doubt the men have come hunting for you, for that sweetness you carry between your legs?”
My head spins, the trees blur, become like some wide, yawning mouth. I fear I will tumble into them, be forever lost, but there is her hand pulling me back, holding me to this world.
“But I see your secret, Anya. It is written across your eyelids, it drips from your fingers, your lips. It takes no witch to see it,” she pulls me close to her, her breath cold and wet. She smells of cloves and ocean water.
“Soon enough the men will begin to suspect. They will wonder why you turn them away, why they cannot lure you into their warm bed. And the town will whisper, will throw their barbed words against your back. You will bleed before it is done.
“I loved a woman once. But that was before the men came, before they took us to the forest, filled us with sticks, rocks, their fingers. They pulled our insides into the night. So soft, so soft they said, and I held my love until she went still. Her mouth was full of leaves.”
Her pupils dilate, all darkness and midnight. I think she will cry black, oily tears, but she does not. I weep for her instead, and she brings her tongue to my cheek. I wonder if I taste of salt or of something sweeter.
“They left us there. Food for worms. The vultures waiting to take the soft bits. But there were things moving in the spaces between the darkness and moonlight. Faces, hands reaching from under the trees, pale fingers full of death and magic. I let them take me, and they gave me back to the world. And it trembled beneath my feet like we had trembled beneath the muscled arms of those reeking men.
“They called me witch until I took their tongues, their children, pulled their bones from them one by one. Their blood rained over me, and I called it love.”
I want her to press her mouth against mine, want to feel her moving against me as a husband moves against a wife, but she steps backward. The darkness seems to snake out from the hidden places in the earth. It swallows her, and I am alone.
I feel that I can taste her, the sharp tang of muscadine. I think of screaming into the sky or raking my hands across my belly, spilling my blood against the dirt. But it would not bring her back.
So I turn back to the river, to my brothers and their fish. As I walk, the birds drop out of the sky like stones and small woodland creatures lay down before me, their breath coming no more. I am not afraid.
* * *
Mother asks me to fetch water, so I return to the river. How the man follows me, I do not know, but he appears, his hand covering the place his wife should touch. I do not know him. He is not from our village.
He grins. His mouth is all w
etness, and a deep fear flutters then settles in my stomach. I don’t want him to touch me, but he is handsome, his shoulders broad, his eyes a clear blue, and I wonder if it will be easier since he is beautiful.
Because I understand what he has come for.
I could almost laugh at the absurdity of it all.
I try to run, but he is quick, his arms strong, and he captures me, presses me against the dirt. His smile is lovely, teeth like pearls glinting against the afternoon sunlight, and he brings them to my throat, traces his tongue against my collarbone, writes out his horrors against my skin.
I try to scream, but my mouth is full of leaves. I choke against them, and he laughs, smashes his fists against my teeth. My bones snap under his fingers, my blood caking under his clean, trimmed nails. He breaks me into pieces, uses the parts, the holes that he can.
He finishes, oh please let him be finished, and the sky is the color of blood. He kicks me twice, sharp blows against the ribs, before leaving, stumbling into the dusk.
Ravens and crows fling themselves toward the ground, and they fall around me, their feathers pointing toward the sky in rakish angles. Small creatures find their way to where I lie. They curl against my legs, my hands, sigh before they draw last breaths. I close my eyes.
I do not notice the hooded woman until she is above me. Her form blinks in and out, wavers between shadow and light. I think for a moment that I see dark wings behind her, the feathers deep and glossy against her bloodied skirts.
If she speaks, I do not hear, but the earth shudders under me, and she rips at what is left of my dress. Her mouth moves over me slowly, her tongue dipping in and out of the cuts he left. She moves down my abdomen, lingering in the hollows of my hip bones. Then she is breathing her secrets into me, filling my womb with words I do not understand. Curses or prayers to ancient gods swell under muscle, under bone. She speaks the language of trees, of wind, the humming truths of the river, and I am full, full of her.
“I’m dying,” I whisper.
Everything That’s Underneath Page 6
