Behind me, Momma sleeps, and she dreams, and I drink of her. Those green whispers feed me until I can’t take any more, and I gasp and heave, a thin line of spittle falling from my lips.
The voices never told me why they bring me the dreams, and after awhile, I stopped wondering because I crunch down on them, and they dissolve between my teeth, and they taste so good.
In the morning, Momma gets out of bed slowly. Her skin looks gray, and my stomach hurts with how full it is of her.
“It was so beautiful. When you were born. Before we came here,” she says, and I can count her ribs through her shirt. “Be sure you take your pill.”
“I’ve always been here,” I whisper after her when she leaves. “Always.”
I don’t go out to see how the ring of red clay around the cabin has become so much smaller. Momma sits in the living room and watches that line of grass, but I don’t join her. Instead, I trace the hunch of her shoulders with my outstretched finger and wonder what she’ll taste like tonight. I hope that she’ll taste of something green.
I want for her to sleep in my bed again, but that night, she closes the door to her bedroom and leaves me alone in the dark. I listen to her cry and wait for her to sleep.
She stays awake for a long time. I can hear her breath staining the air. Exhaling and inhaling, she doesn’t sleep.
What lives in the grass screams. I do, too, but I don’t think Momma hears me.
The next morning she doesn’t get out of bed, and when I open her door, she doesn’t move. Her breath hitches, slow and even, and I close the door.
My footsteps sound like nothing as I move through the cabin, out the door, and onto the porch. I stop dead in my tracks and look at the grass. Three steps off of the bottom stair, and I would stand in the middle of it. Stand where everything is thick and green and soft. I take my foot on and off the top stair and then look back to the closed door where Momma sleeps.
“Let her come, too,” I whisper to the things inside of the grass, but it’s daytime, and they don’t answer.
All day long, Momma sleeps, and I starve. The grass can’t bring me her dreams during the day. I watch her as the shadows steal into the cabin, and the sun turns the sky to fire.
The moment the last bit of light fades, her eyes snap open. “Did you take your pill?” she says. I nod, and she watches me with eyes that seem to understand my lie.
My tears taste like the memory of something burnt.
All night, she sits in the front room, and I grip the edges of my bed and dig my fingernails into the soft wood of the headboard. Anything to keep from bolting into the room and prying her lips apart. Anything to keep me from breathing in the honeyed remnants of her dreams and draining her until what’s left is nothing more than a husk.
The things inside of the grass laugh and tap sharp fingers and teeth against the cabin. They are close enough to touch now. If I opened the door, would they come inside? Or would they wait out there in the shadow and the dark for me to place my foot back on that top stair?
I think they know what it is that Momma is doing. Sleeping when they sleep so that she can sit up and watch them move through the night.
Momma whispers, and I cannot hear what she says. The light coming through my window is green, and the color paints my arms and legs.
“Please,” I say, but I’m not sure what I’m asking for.
“Come here, baby girl,” Momma calls.
“I can’t,” I tell her, but she calls again and again, and my legs move on their own. I try to hold my breath so that I can’t smell her, can’t smell all of that green grass, but I have to breathe, and all of my air whooshes out of me. The smell of the dreams locked inside of her head makes me dizzy.
She stands when I come into the room. Her hands tremble, but she doesn’t reach for me.
Outside, the grass steals up and over the porch. I can feel it just outside of the door, and my mouth waters.
“My daddy brought me here when I was a little girl. Said this was his sanctuary. That nothing bad ever happened here. He told me that whenever the world came crashing down around him, he knew that he could come here, and everything would be okay.
“I believed him. Even when everything died, and there was nothing left except for your tiny hand inside of mine, I believed him.” She turns and looks out the window. “I was wrong.”
Outside of the window, green shadows crawl all over. Momma picks up one of the pill bottles and opens it up. “These were supposed to save us.” She puts the bottle to her lips and shakes it. Her throat clicks as she swallows until there is nothing left and then she throws the bottle against the wall. It clatters to the floor and the sound is so loud that I cover my ears.
“There hasn’t been a time that we weren’t dying slow. The world just learned how to make it happen faster. While we weren’t looking,” Momma says.
Something reaches out from inside the grass and touches the window. It looks like a hand, but at the same time, it doesn’t.
My stomach clenches, and I bite down on my tongue hard enough to make it bleed. It’s hot and tastes nothing like my mother’s dreams, and I let it dribble out of my mouth and patter against the floor. A tendril of green reaches through the gaps between the floorboards, and pretty soon it’s stained the color of my blood. The color of the old world. The color of my mother’s nightmares.
“I’m afraid,” Momma says when the window cracks all the way across. I thought it would be loud when the grass finally came into the house, but it isn’t. It comes in soft and quiet, and still Momma turns to me, her eyes wet and her mouth stretched over her teeth. “I’m afraid.”
I want to ask the things flickering through the grass to let Momma stay, but I am so hungry and their voices are lifting, offering me a taste of what I want. I think of Momma smiling, the morning sun streaming behind her and lighting up her hair so that it looks like she’s made out of light. I think of her hands against mine the day that I cut my pinkie finger, the white bone gleaming underneath all of that darker meat, her voice calm and steady as she pulled a needle and thread through my skin. I think of the hitch in her voice when she pulls the covers tight against my chin and whispers that she loves me.
Momma takes me into her arms, and I can taste all of the things that I’ve never known on her skin: apples, and roses, and fresh bread. She cries and presses my body to her. “My baby. My girl. My little daughter,” she says, and I look again into that green void.
It is only that. A void. And I am so hungry.
“Don’t be afraid,” I tell Momma, and I open my mouth.
Daughters of Hecate
Birdie kept a lone cigarette in her bedside table drawer for nights like this. Her hands shook as she lit it, and the slow blue pull of smoke through her lungs eased her shaking but not the fear coiled in her belly. In the glow, the streaks against her fingers appeared darker, as if the blood there had turned black, a clotted, poisonous leaking.
“What happened?” Dylan mumbled and shifted, the down comforter pulled tight around his chin.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep,” she said and brought her tongue to her hand, traced it up and over her index finger and down into the soft flesh. There was none of the iron taste of blood but sweetness instead. Like an overripe date. Cloying and rotted.
Dylan rolled into her, his fingers grasping at her thighs, but she pushed him away. Within a minute, he was snoring again.
Three times now. She’d be dreaming of her mother’s funeral, her legs frozen as she stood before the casket. Someone had covered her mother’s face with a veil, all delicate bridal tulle and lace, and Birdie watched as the mouth opened, the red tongue darting forward and licking at the fabric. Searching. Hungry. She’d wake with a scream dying in the back of her throat and blood on her fingers. Each time she hunted for a cut, a prick, anything that would explain the blood, but her skin was unmarked.
She believed in the power of threes. Her college roommate senior year, Livia, a girl who’d borrowed Birdi
e’s toothbrush and taken large, groaning shits with the door blown open, had lent her a book titled Daughters of Hecate: Reclaiming the Crone. The book had gone on and on about the sacred nature of the female form and the power of the third embodiment of the goddess. How Hecate, the crone, personified the perfect feminine identity, how to tap into the power of threes through blood magick.
“There’s so much more. Underneath our skin. Living and breathing and drinking in what it can. Waiting to be born. Waiting for us to gobble it up. There’s power in that blood,” Livia said one night after two bottles of Merlot. They’d turned out the lights, lit every candle they could find, even the plain white tapers that didn’t smell like French vanilla or buttercream. Birdie had finished the book. Had wanted to talk about it, and this was how Livia insisted they do it.
“You’ve been going to that tarot reader again, haven’t you?”
Livia shook her head. “You know, I can’t wait to be pregnant. Get as fat as I want. I mean really fat. Big as a fucking house,” she said, and Birdie laughed.
“You’re so weird. You changed the subject,” she said, and Livia grinned, her teeth stained crimson.
“You don’t want kids?”
A deep hurt wrenched through her stomach, and she pushed a hand against her abdomen. Livia watched her, eyes rimmed in dark green eyeliner. In the muted light, her roommate looked dead.
“I did. When I was younger. But not anymore.”
The truth burned inside of her like acid, but she tamped it down, ignored the sharp teeth of memory.
She wanted children. Wanted a little girl whose hair she could braid in long plaits down her back. A little boy who would hug her too tightly, his love fierce and protective. But there was always the ghost of her mother, and the great fear that she would somehow fail those children. Leave them open and bleeding and raw and colossally fucked up. The way her mother had left her
“Did you see the pictures?” Livia said, and Birdie blinked, her wine soaked tongue moving slowly.
“What pictures?”
Livia was flipping through the book then, fingers moving impossibly fast until she stopped at a page Birdie was sure she hadn’t seen. She’d read the book from cover to cover. It wasn’t possible that she had missed a page, and yet, there it was.
In the back, in black ink, someone had scrawled out a series of drawings. A goat copulating with a bare-breasted woman, it’s tongue extended like a proboscis and wrapped around her right nipple. A great worm devouring a blobbed, asexual form, its face upturned and smiling. The third image, however, had disturbed her. A nude, lank haired crone crouched on bare earth, the palm of her right hand pressed against the thatch of hair at her crotch. The other hand plunged up to the wrist into the rounded belly of another woman, her mouth open and screaming. Under the torn skin, an infant lay still.
“What the fuck, Livia?” Birdie said, and her roommate laughed, her head thrown back and throat exposed.
“I drew them. You don’t like them?”
“No. That’s some seriously messed up shit. Who draws shit like that?”
“Never mind,” Livia said and tossed the book onto their faded orange coach. “Forget I showed it to you. It’s really not a big deal. Just something I drew the last time I got high.”
Even when Livia pulled her hair away from her neck, traced the curve of Birdie’s shoulder blade with her lips, she could not forget the pictures. It was only when Livia pressed her fingers against the heat building between Birdie’s legs that she lost herself and forgot.
The wine drew her under after they’d both come, sleep folding her into forgetfulness, and the next morning, the pictures were gone. When Birdie asked Livia about them, Livia looked confused. Told her that she didn’t know what Birdie was talking about and could she please borrow that black dress for her date with Tonia tomorrow night?
But even now, when she closed her eyes at night, she saw the crone’s eyes shining fever bright and the woman’s mouth opening impossibly wide, the scream worming inside Birdie’s skin.
She blew the smoke into the darkness of her bedroom, peered into it, looking for ghosts. If there was anything there, it didn’t show itself.
* * *
§
“I’ve been having dreams about my mother. The same ones. Night after night,” Birdie said. Dr. Nunnelly tucked an iron grey curl behind her ear and scratched something down on her notepad.
“Are they recurring? Different?”
“Kind of. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I know what’s coming. I know that I’m going to see her, know that the veil is going to be there, but it’s like I’m surprised every time, so it feels different. And I’m angry. Like really fucking pissed off that she’s wearing a veil. But then I’m terrified. That’s always the same.” Birdie paused, fixed her eyes on the painting above Dr. Nunnelly’s head. An older woman holding the hand of a younger woman. That’s what Dr. Nunnelly was all about. Leaning on the support of other females. Letting your sisters guide you through life’s thorny patches. All of that Sisterhood of Snatches Kumbaya bullshit. But her insurance paid, and after the fourth miscarriage, Dylan had thought it would be a good idea.
She’d found Dr. Nunnelly’s website at three a.m. The dream had wakened her, the blood slick on her palms, and she’d cleaned herself up, gone to the kitchen and drank three glasses of water before opening her laptop and typing “miscarriage and hallucination” into her search engine.
Dr. Nunnelly’s was not the first site listed but on the third page. She couldn’t be sure why she bypassed the others, but the website name had caught her attention. ThirdGoddess.net. Something about Dr. Nunnelly’s photo on the main page, her grey hair a mass of wild curls, her mouth set in a smile had felt comforting. Now, sitting in the office, her skin crawled, and she thought of running, but she stayed seated, picked at her cuticles instead.
“I hate that fucking painting,” she said, pointing with her chin to the two women on the wall.
“The painting?” Dr. Nunnelly turned.
“Gives me the creeps.”
“Tell me about that,” Dr. Nunnelly said.
“I don’t know. Just something about it feels off.” Birdie knew that she was avoiding everything she had come here to discuss. She kept waiting for Dr. Nunelly to bring it up, to ask her the questions she expected. How did you feel after the miscarriages? Were you sad? Angry? Did you ever think about hurting yourself? Someone else? But Dr. Nunnelly let her continue to sit there and babble like an asshole.
“You mentioned your mother. Can you tell me more about her? Your relationship?” Dr. Nunnelly smiled, slow and encouraging. Birdie wondered if there was some special class where psychiatrists learned to smile like that. Soft lips, a brief flash of teeth.
Birdie barked out a laugh.
“I loved her. For a long time, I loved her. Because I didn’t know any better. Because she didn’t give me a choice.” Her fingers twined through her hair, pulled the strands into small knots.
“But little girls grow up and realize that all of the things their mothers did as children, all of the things they thought were normal, were quiet forms of manipulation, of abuse. You see, doctor,” Birdie leaned forward, placed her fingertips against the edge of the mahogany desk, “I’ve done all of this before. Talked to another doctor in another office. Learned all of the jargon that goes into classifying a narcissist. Gas-lighting. Triangulation. The Golden Child. The Scapegoat. Parentification and Infantilisation. My mother was a self-absorbed, manipulative, bitch who denied everything she had ever done wrong, and I was glad when I put her in the dirt.”
“Give me an example.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Birdie pushed her right temple. Behind bone, a migraine threatened to manifest, and she clenched her teeth.
“When I was seven, she told me she was divorcing my father. Told me that he was abusive, that he hit her. That she caught him one night in my bedroom trying to take off my panties. She cashed in the savings bonds my grandparents
gave me when I was born. Five thousand dollars. Not much in the long run, but it was supposed to be mine. For college, they said. We moved away. Some shit hole that I never learned the address for. She went out a lot. We were alone. Me and my brother.” Birdie paused. The re-telling of all of those old sins falling out of her like hard, wet stones.
“I found out later that it was my father who had left her. That she was fucking our pastor. One of the deacons. The youth minister. She ended up marrying the youth minister. Kevin. My stepdad. When I asked her about the affairs, she denied them.” She wished she had another cigarette, but she had left her only pack in the car.
“She sent me to school without lunch. Figured I was smart enough to figure it out on my own. Wouldn’t come to pick me up either. When I was a freshman in high school, I rode home with a senior boy who tried to get me to suck his dick. She told me it was because he liked me, and I should be flattered. My brother got the nice clothes. The attention. She went to his baseball games, his wrestling matches, his track meets. She missed my graduation. She made me feel guilty. Constantly reminded me how much she had sacrificed. Told me that I wouldn’t survive on my own. She would do something and then deny doing it. She made me feel like I was crazy. Like I was seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Should I keep going or will that do it?”
Dr. Nunnelly pursed her lips, the pink edges of her lipstick crinkling, the line bleeding past her mouth. Whatever she was about to say, Birdie wished she wouldn’t.
“I want to try something here, Birdie, if you’re okay with it.”
“Sure.”
The older woman stood and moved out from behind her desk. Her legs slim and toned under a snug black skirt, an emerald green blouse artfully unbuttoned to reveal tasteful cleavage. The body of a twenty-five year old housing the mind of a fifty-five year old. Birdie wondered how much the good doctor had paid for her figure.
Folding herself into the opposite chair, Dr. Nunnelly extended her hands. “If you don’t mind closing your eyes as well.”
Everything That’s Underneath Page 10
