During the three years she had gone through therapy in her early twenties, her doctor had never touched her, had never come out from behind his desk. Hell, there were sessions where she wondered if he was even alive.
If Dr. Nunnelly wanted to hold hands, Birdie would give it a shot. She closed her eyes and reached out.
“Take a deep breath, Birdie. Focus on that breath. Notice the pattern of the air moving in and out of your body.”
Hypnosis? Was she trying to hypnotize her? Nothing on the website had mentioned that Dr. Nunnelly specialized in hypnotism. But she settled herself, noticed the air moving in and out of her lungs, imagined it swelling her from the inside. A rounded place where a seed should grow but couldn’t. She held onto that image, that empty place expanding with breath.
For long minutes, only the sound of her breathing filled the space, the pressure of skin on skin, the hands warming as they clasped together, and Birdie trying, as she had for the past year, to forget. To breathe.
“Birdie? Listen to my voice now. You said something earlier. Something I want you to think about now. That you felt that you heard and saw things that weren’t there. Can you tell me about that now? About a moment where you saw or heard something that your mother said hadn’t happened or didn’t exist?”
Somewhere underneath the swollen silence in the room, underneath her breath leaking in and out, something long dormant broke loose.
“She always told me it was a dream. That I was just a little girl, and that I had dreamed it. But everything about it felt so real.” Her breath came faster now.
“Vivid. I woke up one night, and something about the room just felt … wrong. And the smell. Like something dead but sweet at the same time. I sat up but didn’t swing my legs over. Afraid of something reaching for me, pulling me under. My mother was in the corner, facing the wall. She was completely naked. When I asked her what she was doing, she turned around, and her eyes were gone. Not blacked out or rolled back in her head or anything. Just gone.”
She didn’t want to talk about this, but the words tumbled out of her.
“She was chewing something. Her mouth looked wet. I can’t forget the sound. For years after, I would close my eyes and hear that sound of tongue on meat. It made me sick to my stomach, and if I puked, she came in and watched me clean it up, said that I was being ridiculous. She smiled, told me that I was dreaming, and to go back to sleep, and then walked out of the room. Only she went backwards, facing me the entire time. I was terrified she would come back. Stared at the ceiling all night listening for that sound, waiting for her to come. I had the thought that if she did, she would be on all fours. Crawling. Like an animal. The next morning she was completely normal. Didn’t mention anything about what had happened, and when I told her, she laughed. Said I must have eaten something that gave me crazy dreams. It never happened again, and I stopped talking about it.”
“But you remember it. You think about it. In small moments when everything is quiet. Maybe in those shadowed seconds between sleeping and waking. You remember. Don’t you?” Dr. Nunnelly’s fingers wrapped around her wrists, pressed against pulse points as if measuring her heartbeat. Taking note of the increased blood flow, the flush against the skin, the slight gasping as Birdie struggled to breathe.
“Yes.”
“Dreams are funny things. You peel back the surface, everything external, and you peer down, and you truly see. The things that live in the dark. It can be so, so beautiful,” Dr. Nunnelly’s voice dipped low, a distended, bloated imitation of the voice Birdie had heard when she entered the office.
“I don’t like this,” Birdie said. Eyes snapping open, she pulled her wrists backward, but Dr. Nunnelly dug her fingernails into the flesh there and stared back at Birdie.
“We plant seeds. We feed ourselves on their withering. Your mother did it. And you’ve done it, too. It’s just that some of us are hungrier than others. And you are so, so hungry. Aren’t you?”
“Let me go,” Birdie said and tried to tug at her arm, but all of her strength had leaked out of her like water. The room swam, Dr. Nunnelly’s face doubling. One with that soft smile, the other with lips pulled back to expose jagged teeth. Birdie tried to stand, but her knees buckled, and she grasped at the edge of her chair, the fingernail on her pinkie splitting as she fell. Blood dripping against the white shag rug, spreading like some obscene blossom. Behind her, Dr. Nunnelly licked her lips. That same, slow sound of suckling, of eating. She thought her head would collapse under the terrible pressure of that sound.
Again, her eyes fell on the picture, and the older woman’s face suddenly changed. The face of the crone—the one in the hand drawn picture Livia had shown her long ago—leered out at her, her fingers wrapped in the younger woman’s hair. Birdie would not look at the younger woman’s face. She would not.
She feared that if she did, it would be her own face staring back, the mouth twisted into a scream.
“So much empty space. All of those places inside of us that we try and try to fill up, with men, with women, with children. Each of them sinking teeth into the softer parts, but they all tear away and leave the hole behind,” Dr. Nunnelly brought a hand to the hollow in Birdie’s stomach, the place that should be swollen with child.
Birdie drew ragged breaths, tried to swat away the doctor’s hand. Everything inside of her burned, her blood, her lungs, her heart. All of the secret pieces of her laid bare.
“Stop.”
“You bleed at night. Everything you’ve planted seeping out of you. Feeding you. Sustaining you,” Dr. Nunnelly said.
Birdie bit down on the scream building in her throat and forced herself to her feet, veering for the door. Run. Hide. Run. HIDE. Find a hole in the earth and fill her nose, her mouth with cold, dank earth, and forget how to breathe. Cover her skin in mud and leaves until she vanished, became part of something older and darker than the warm blood beating inside of her.
Behind her, Dr. Nunelly laughed, and the door swung open into momentary darkness, and then the sun blazing hot and white, and Birdie couldn’t see and stumbled forward onto the sidewalk. Before her vision faded came her mother’s face hidden behind the veil, the red tongue pressed against the fabric.
* * *
§
* * *
Dylan came to collect her from the hospital, spoke in low tones with nurses and doctors as they moved to discharge her. She’d hit her head on the curb they said, skinned her palms and legs on the way down. Thank goodness Dr. Nunelly had seen her fall and called for the ambulance. Several times, she’d opened her mouth to tell them. Tell them what? The minute the words formed on her tongue, she forgot them, her head left heavy and aching. They continued to bustle around her, removing small bits of gravel from her shins, wrapping her hands in gauze.
Finally, she and Dylan were alone in the car, the radio whispering the Ben Harper song she’d heard that day at the park, the week after the third time the doctor had told her that the tiny seed in her womb had winked out. It was the one that had left her sobbing, collapsed on the trail as a small crowd gathered around her, but the melody sounded disjointed, and she couldn’t follow the words.
“Dr. Nunnelly,” she began, but she didn’t know what else to say. Her thoughts wisped away like shadows.
“I’m glad she was there. This could have been so much worse,” Dylan said. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and the dark hair on his chin only made his eyes look a deeper green. It had been the first thing she saw of him. Those green eyes looking back at her through the stacks at the Battle Hill University library. Three hours later, he told her that he already loved her, and she’d laughed at him. It took six months for her to realize she loved him, too. Livia had understood when Birdie told her about Dylan. They’d only fucked when they were drunk. It had never been anything serious, after all.
“I’ve been thinking. Let’s take some time off. Go somewhere warm with sand and water. Drink tequila. Sleep in. Hit the reset button,” he said, but his jaw
was tight, the neck muscles corded and strained under pale skin.
It was like listening to him through glass. Or water. His voice stretching endlessly, the syllables bloating before coming to her as something alien.
She nodded, and he grasped her hand and squeezed.
“I’ll wake you up every couple of hours tonight, okay? Doc said it was a mild concussion, but still. Better safe than sorry.”
Her voice stayed locked in her throat, and Dylan drove on into the growing night, the dotted lines on the road seeming to vanish. Birdie wondered if the world had come untethered, if the gravity that held the two of them to this world had evaporated, and they had floated into nothingness.
He turned right onto Crescent, then left onto Grandin, and then he was helping her up the stairs, making her a sandwich that she tore into small pieces but did not eat. Time blinked in and out, the seconds a transparent thread that pulled at her heart, her tongue, until she felt flattened out, paper skin stretched over hollow bone.
Something she was supposed to remember. Something about Dr. Nunnelly. Something she had told her before she fell, but each time she caught at the edge of the memory it floated away, and she felt tired and told Dylan she wanted to go to bed.
Birdie watched the man she had known for eleven years flutter around her, pulling panties over inert legs, draping a worn Pixies t-shirt over her head and guiding her arms through. He did this silently, carefully. His fingers a series of light brush strokes against the numbness boiling under her skin.
He pulled the duvet over her, tucked it beneath her chin. A father putting his daughter to sleep. Tears pricked the corner of her eyes, and she blinked them away, settled into the quiet sneaking over her muscles. He didn’t notice her silence. Turned out the light. Kissed her forehead.
She drew him to her then, her mouth seeking his. Her body suddenly consumed with some awakened, fiery need, and his fingers dug into the cleft between her legs, pushing her open as he fumbled with his zipper. He pressed his hardness into her, and it hurt and burned. His tongue languished in her mouth. A dead thing worth only its burial. And he pumped himself into her, everything she’d once hoped for spilled into something putrid and rotted.
“I’ll wake you in a few hours,” he said and kissed her forehead.
As he settled beside her, she waited for the dream. The afternoon disappeared behind a hazed film of memory, but the vision of her mother opened before her like a hungry mouth. Teeth snapping at meat. She closed her eyes and smiled. Her head weighted against the pillow, arms and legs leaden and immobile. Somewhere in the dark, a tongue extended, a slow suckling that she remembered from the dark of her childhood.
Her stomach heaved, and she took the shadows of the room into her, breathed deeply until there was nothing left. Her mother would be here soon. The veil would drop, and her mother would rise, her arms strong and fluid, and gather her daughter to her bosom. Flesh begetting flesh.
“We all plant seeds.” Her mother’s voice, rising from the dark.
“You took everything I had. Everything. Give me this one thing, Mother. Please.”
“I always knew you were hungry. My girl. My little daughter. You eat them up. Pull their blood into you until there’s nothing left. Our children.”
“Stop,” Birdie said, but her mother’s voice floated to her, strong and clear.
“We’ve always watched you. Knew that as you fed yourself, you would feed us. Make us whole. Make us strong. We have waited for you. All three of us. For so long.”
The sound of nails against wood as Birdie looked up, watched as her mother crawled on all fours across the ceiling, her mouth drawn into a smile, her eyes missing. Then her mother’s face morphing into Livia’s. Then, Dr. Nunnelly descending, drawing her teeth along Birdie’s throat, her belly. Planting her seed. All the same. One body. One thought. The blood between her fingers. So sweet. So clean.
Birdie brought her palm to her abdomen, pressed against the small, squirming thing pushing outward. She drank her tears down and whispered her lie into the dark.
“Shhh,” she told her unborn daughter. “It’s alright. It will be alright.”
Birthright
My sister was the second. I was the first, but I never told Mina that. She would have been angry even though she didn’t understand.
“A woman. Skin the color of the night. Her eyes and lips cut out of stars. You saw her, too, yeah?” she said, and I sighed and rolled onto my side, the pale yellow comforter tucked under my chin.
“You think you’re a poet or some shit?”
“No. I just saw her. That’s all.”
Mina was two years younger than I was but already looked older. Breasts swelled under the T-shirts she wore and her eyes were a pair of dark irises without spark set inside a darker face. I’m not sure when it happened. When her face became like a dead thing made animate so similar to my own.
“Didn’t you see her, too?” she said, and I didn’t want to tell her yes; didn’t want to tell her how Momma had come to me more times than I could count, dead lips pressed to my ear, feather light, as she whispered the secrets she’d gathered like flowers from the place beyond.
“Go to sleep,” I said, and I listened as she rustled under her sheets and sighed. If Momma wanted me to tell her, she would have said something.
“Can you sing? For just a little bit?” she said, and because I was tired and because I knew she wouldn’t let me sleep if I didn’t, I sang into the darkness, the notes melding into damp, summer air. When Mina began to snore, I dropped off.
“Momma,” I said even though Mina called her the Dark Lady, but Mina was so little when Momma died, and she didn’t recognize her when she came. Even if Mina remembered her face, she wouldn’t have known her. That terrible thing that had come to nest in her lungs had metastasized, had eaten her up from the inside out, and then her skin couldn’t hold all of the rot in anymore, and she died.
I should have known better than to call for Momma. She never came when I wanted her, so I leaned back into my pillows and thought about how I could get Shane Connelly to notice me during second period and how to get Mina to think that it was an angel come to watch over us and not the thing I thought it was.
I watched the ceiling, dark shadows elongated and bloated into strange shapes, and listened to my sister shift and moan underneath the weight of the nightmare, and I could taste the edges of it. The dark stains that seeped into waking. The ones I recognized from the patterns traced on my closed eyes. For the hundredth time, I considered that it wasn’t Momma who came to us, her tongue tied up by silence, but some darker thing that found a hole and crept through.
I slept. My dreams unfolded like petals, delicate and pink, and Momma came to me and touched my face and hands, and her touch was soft as moss, but her eyes were bloodied and her skin had gone slack and pulled away from bone. A body long hidden under earth. I wanted to shrink from her, wanted to moan and curl away from the cup of her touch, but she was my mother, and her hands on me were gentle, and I could feel my sister sleeping in the bed next to mine.
In the morning, there were dark circles under Mina’s eyes, and she didn’t look at me as we dressed for school, and we ate our bowls of cereal in silence. Dad was already gone, rising in the dark to dress. Some mornings he’d come in and stand beside our beds, his feet shuffling so he wouldn’t wake us. I’d pretend to be asleep. Sometimes, I could hear him crying.
Mina pushed her cereal to the edges of the bowl and drew her spoon through the pale milk. “I heard you last night. Moving around in my dream. Like a click-clack, click-clack. And the Dark Lady ran away when she heard it,” she said.
“It was just a dream. We’re going to be late. Finish your cereal,” I said, and she looked up at me, and something moved behind her eyes. A shadow or a dark unfurled wing or antennae. An insect like crawling that skittered across the surface and then vanished.
“Little pieces. She took little pieces. Gobbled them up and swallowed me down,” Mina whis
pered, but I pushed her words away, and ignored the aching in my lungs and belly. Fear come to nest inside all of those soft organs and meat.
“Hurry up,” I said and placed my own bowl in the sink and headed outside. By the time the bus finally pulled to the curb, my shirt clung to my back, and my hair had begun to frizz. I slicked it to my scalp, but it didn’t help. Mina didn’t sit with me like she normally did but moved to the last seat in the back of the bus and leaned against the window.
I took our normal seat and kept my palms pressed against the foul smelling, brown leather, my teeth clamped against my tongue, as I thought of my sister’s words. The dream had changed. The nightmare had taken a new shape, and I didn’t recognize it, and there was a burning inside of me because it had changed for Mina but not for me. I imagined the feel of Momma’s mouth against my skin, how it would feel to have her tear away at this useless skin. To grow into something else.
“It isn’t fair. I was the first,” I said, but the sound of shouted voices drowned me out, so instead I bit my thumbnail and forced myself to not turn around to look for Mina. No one sat with me, and so I spent a few minutes pulling at the bits of skin around my thumb until the skin went raw and bloodied, and I stuck my finger into my mouth and sucked.
I couldn’t help it. I turned around. Mina sat with her face pressed to the window, and again I thought I saw something reach out from her hair. A proboscis extended and hunting for soft flesh, but the sun flashed through the glass, and I winced and then there was only Mina, her hair pulled back from her face as she stared out the window at the early September Georgia bleeding past. A riotous death rattle with teeth choked in green and on the precipice of rot.
Mina didn’t look at me when the bus pulled up to school but rushed past, her head tucked down, and I waited for everyone else to leave before I stood up. The driver watched me in the rearview mirror, his face weary. Like he just wanted me to get off the bus so he could have some quiet.
Everything That’s Underneath Page 11
