Everything That’s Underneath

by Kristi DeMeester

  “Fuck you, motherfuckers!” she screamed, and Aaron pumped his fingers toward the window before leaping on the bed, jumping up and down.

  “Fuck you!” Aaron threw back his head and screamed, a raw, bloodied howl that sounded more animal than human. The exhaustion, the anger, the fear all poured into this single sound. Once, it would have set her nerves on edge. Now, the cold that lived inside of her stirred—a sleek, velvet movement—and she licked her lips.

  Night had completely fallen. She could feel it moving inside of her, the cold barely contained by the scant light of the room. Hungry. Searching. Daylight was better. It moved easily in the dark, slipping among the shadowed places where people either didn’t or were too afraid to look. Rory had looked too long. She always had. There was too much space in her head, too much silence and stillness to lose herself in. Maybe that was why she had filled it with books, complex ideas that filled the emptiness. It was always in the night, in the quiet that she lost the thread that tethered her to this world. Whatever it was, it had seen her, felt her. All that void asking to be filled.

  Aaron sat down on the edge of the bed, his fingers clenched around the quilt. Dirty fingernails digging against the thin material.

  “You can feel it now. Inside,” he said, and she nodded.

  She moved across the room, sat beside him, and he flinched at the closeness. The desire to scramble away from her, to hurl himself across the room was tangible, a raw, bleeding thing suspended between the two of them. She could feel it. But he stayed, reached a hand across the quilt to grasp hers, and she squeezed his fingers. He was real, the living, breathing thing that connected her to this world, and he would help her fight.

  “I miss Mom,” he said.

  “Me too,” she said. He dropped her hand then, the warmth of his fingers suddenly absent, and she hated the cold that flooded through her, always probing, always searching.

  “If we hadn’t left, do you think you would have …”

  “No,” she said, but he glanced up at her, his eyes unblinking, and they both knew that what she had spoken was a lie. She hated herself a little bit more.

  “I don’t know, Aaron,” she whispered, and he nodded.

  “I’m fighting. So hard. But I lose myself. It’s like falling into a hole, only you can’t see the bottom. There’s just cold and dark, and the edges of the world bleed away, and all that’s left is that thing peeling you open, eating its way into you,” she said.

  “You read too many books, nerd,” he said and smiled. It was a small, broken thing, but she loved him for it.

  A cold wind howled, and the lamps flickered, blinked out once, twice.

  In the quick flashes of dark, Rory saw Aaron sprawled before her, his skin peeled open, a wide, grinning mouth carved against his stomach. Once more, her tongue darted across her lips, and the cold gathered just beneath her skin. Sleeping, but not dead.

  “No,” she said through clenched teeth. Not here. Not now. Under flesh and bone, the thing stirred, but she pushed it away, willed it to sleep, to be silent.

  “What?” Aaron said, but she shook her head.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing,” she said. He stood then, walked to the door, placed his palm flat against it.

  “Do you remember when we were kids, and you used to get so mad because I’d sneak in your room at night if I got scared?” he said.

  “You wet the bed a couple of times. I’d have a dream that I was swimming and wake up with piss up to my neck.”

  “But you never kicked me out,” he said and turned to her. Again she saw him as a child, like the boy he had been. Once, she had protected him from the things hiding in the dark. She wished she still could.

  “We should sleep,” he said.

  “Yeah. I’ll take the floor,” she said and grabbed a pillow.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “No, Aaron,” she said, but he came back to her, placed a firm hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Rory.”

  He waited as she curled her body against his as she had when they were nightmare-plagued children. She watched the light as his breath grew longer, heavier. It did not flicker but blazed out strong and resolute. She smiled into her brother’s shoulder. And she slept.

  There was no light when she woke. Only the cold creeping throughout the room and all of those hidden spaces opening like little mouths stretched wide. She stood, opened the door, the window. Behind her, Aaron did not move.

  Split Tongues

  The dreams start up the week after my father spoke in tongues for the first time.

  Mom doesn’t like it that he takes me to church, but she isn’t there to nag at him anymore, not since the divorce papers finally came through, and so I drag my happy ass out of bed every other Sunday and straighten my hair so that he can cart us to the His Holiness Church of New Hope.

  I don’t mind it that much. It’s boring, don’t get me wrong, but Alec Mitchell sits in the third pew, and my dad sits in the fourth, so I pass the service mouthing the hymns and wondering what it would be like trace my tongue along the hard line of his jaw or to tug my fingers through that shock of black hair and kiss him long and hard.

  Alec never turns around, and he never notices me standing there in the pew at the end of the service, my fingers tugging at the scooped collar of my dress so that he can see that I actually have some cleavage. Once I thought he would at least smile at me, but his mother called to him, and he hurried past without even looking up.

  Pastor Fuller smiles at me every time he sees me. “Sister Brianne,” he says, and I don’t like the sound of my name in his mouth or the way he touches me, the bony fingers massaging my shoulder. It makes me feel like an insect caught in a web.

  Still every other weekend, Dad comes to pick me up, and I spend Saturday pretending to listen to him pray and read his verses from the Bible while tears stream down his cheeks. I almost feel sorry for him, but then I remember the afternoon that I came home and found him on the couch with Kelley Browning—who was on the cheerleading squad with me—his face buried against her crotch.

  Kelley was already eighteen, so no one could press any charges, but Mom threw all of Dad’s shit out onto the lawn, and it didn’t matter how much he begged or hollered that he’d found Jesus because Mom was done with his bullshit, and now he has partial custody. At least until I’m eighteen. Six more months, and I’m out of this hell hole forever.

  Alec Mitchell doesn’t notice me in school either, and I pretend that I’m not looking at him in AP Lit. The teacher doesn’t give a shit what we do, so I just put in my ear buds and watch him out of the corner of my eye.

  He has this way of licking his lips while he’s reading. Like a nervous tic, but he doesn’t have a reason to be nervous, and I imagine what it would be like to bite at his lower lip, to draw it into my mouth. He’s probably never even kissed anyone before, and more than anything, I want to be his first.

  In the dark quiet of the sanctuary, with dust and dead prayers in my lungs, I want to kiss him. I want to make him forget that he’s supposed to think it’s wrong. Make him forget that he’s supposed to save himself for some pure, beautiful girl who doesn’t exist. I want to be the thing that guides him forward into the shadows, and I want him to open his mouth and say yes.

  I watch him and doodle in my notebook and think about the dream. Ever since Dad stood up in the middle of a service, his eyes rolled back so that only the whites showed, a garbled yammering streaming out him while he swayed, unsteady on his feet, the dream comes every night.

  I’m always in the church, but it isn’t the church, not really, and I’m alone, and it’s dark. There is something caught in my throat, and I choke on it, gag as I try to bring it up, and something dark and viscous dribbles from my mouth and stains the white dress that I’m wearing.

  I wake up, and I can’t breathe, and it feels like there is something sitting on my chest, something with transparent lips pressed to my neck before a tongue I cannot see circles my n
ipple, and I think of Alec until it feels like all the air in the room hasn’t been sucked out.

  “Brianne?” Ms. Yardley stands over me, her face a mask of concern, and I sit up. “The bell rang.”

  “Right. Sorry,” I mumble and gather my things and hurry out of the classroom. Thank God it’s Friday and the last class of the day, or I’d be in some major shit with Mom. One more unexcused tardy, and no graduation trip to Cancun.

  The hallways are already empty, and I pull my keys out of my purse and check my phone. No messages. Figures. Ever since Dad’s little escapade, no one talks to me.

  “You’re Brianne, right?” The voice is soft. A voice I’ve heard only once or twice in class but imagined saying my name more times than I can count.

  “Yeah,” I say and look up at Alec. His eyes are the color of wet moss, and there are dark circles beneath them, but he is beautiful, and I try to think of something else to say, something to ask him, anything to keep him standing in front of me.

  When he brings his lips to my ear, I freeze. He smells of cinnamon and something older. Something rotted. Like a pool of rainwater clotted with dead leaves.

  “You’re having the dream, too. Aren’t you?” he whispers. My throat clicks when I swallow, but he doesn’t wait for me to respond and before I can open my mouth, he’s gone.

  I drive home with his smell on my skin. My mother complains when I tell her that I want to go to Dad’s this weekend, but she doesn’t tell me that I can’t.

  “I’ll never understand how you can stand to even be around him. Not after …” she says, and I shrug my shoulders and drag my fork through the salad she made us for dinner. She’s trying to find a new boyfriend, and so it’s salads and chicken breast with no oil and steamed vegetables all of the damn time.

  I don’t want to tell her that he’s different now. Quieter. I don’t want to tell her about his Bible verses or how I can hear him in the middle of the night speaking in tongues, the words leaking out of him like blood. I don’t want to tell her how the small sound of his words makes me afraid or how I think that if I rose and walked down the hallway to his room, he would be gone. The only thing left of him that voice spewing nothing into the room.

  That night, the dream is different. Alec sits in his pew, and I can see the back of his head, his hair like raven’s feathers. I try to call to him, but more of that dark liquid dribbles from between my lips, and I choke, the words a tangled mess.

  It sounds like I am speaking in tongues.

  When I wake up in the morning, my sheets are gone. I search the room but can’t find them.

  I don’t eat breakfast, and Mom doesn’t say anything because she’s too busy swiping right or some dumb shit on her phone to notice.

  “Did you call your father?” she says, not looking up.

  “I texted him. He’ll be here at ten. I’ll just leave my car here.”

  “Fine,” she says and stands and brushes a stray lock of hair from her face. After the divorce, she dyed it platinum and cut it short. Like Jamie Lee Curtis without the bone structure to make it work. Whatever. As long as she’s happy, I guess.

  “Did you take my sheets?”

  “What?”

  “My sheets. To wash them or something. Did you take them?” I say, and she stares back at me.

  “No. You’re old enough to wash your own sheets, Brianne,” she says, and then she is gone.

  Dad picks me up right at ten, and we don’t speak as the roads bleed past in a haze of dull, monotone color. Everything is painted in Georgia December drab. I think of the acceptance letter to the University of Michigan that I haven’t shown Mom or Dad. I want to see snow, want to see and feel more than this nothingness that I understand better than the feeling of my own skin wrapped around this miserable cage of bones.

  The drive goes on and on, and I lean my head against the cool window and think about Alec and the dream and the way his whisper settled somewhere deep in my stomach. I think about how this Sunday will be different than all of the other Sundays, and I think of my father kneeling at the altar, his voice lifted high and quaking over all of the other voices as he speaks in tongues.

  Dad doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the afternoon, and that’s fine by me. He doesn’t have a TV—says that it’s a portal to the world of sin—so I doodle in my notebook and ignore the silence of my cellphone. Mom texts me around five, but it’s just to say that she’s going out that night, and that she’ll see me tomorrow afternoon and to be sure to finish whatever homework I have. I go back to my notebook.

  Ink stains my fingertips, and I trace my pen over the page again and again. The marks dip and converge, a bloated series of lines that intersect haphazardly and then zoom off again before curling into themselves.

  My hand is tired, so I stop and crack my knuckles one by one. The pinkies and the thumbs, too. Dad locked himself in his bedroom the minute we came home. Praying or reading his Bible, I guess.

  When everything first happened, he tried to talk to me. Tried to apologize and cried and snotted all over while he told me how sorry he was, that he’d just been so unhappy, that he was sick of himself and would never do anything like that again. Once he found Jesus, he stopped apologizing.

  He doesn’t come out of his room that night, and I heat myself up a can of tomato soup and check my phone again. Nothing.

  “Dad?” I say and knock on his door. I can hear him murmuring, hurried whispers seeping out of the bottom of the door, but he doesn’t respond, so I flip the closed door the bird and walk back to the second bedroom he keeps for me. An air mattress with a thin blanket lies on the floor, and I flop onto it, my ribcage grazing the hardwood beneath. Dad didn’t inflate it all the way, and I have no idea where the pump is, so I grab the blanket and head back out into the living room to sleep on the sofa.

  The sofa is lumpy in all of the wrong places, but in minutes I know that I’m asleep because I’m in the dream. My throat clogs with the thing I cannot see, and I gag and choke, but nothing comes up.

  “Open your mouth,” the voice comes from my right. Alec’s voice, but I can’t see him. “Open your mouth,” he says again, and then his fingers tap against my teeth, and I swallow them down, and they are long and smooth and taste of strawberries.

  He pulls and tugs and then the thing is sliding from my throat and falls with a wet plop against my lap. I still can’t see Alec, but I look down at the thing staining my dress.

  It’s a piece of my tongue.

  * * *

  He grabs his keys, and I follow him outside where the air tastes of ice, but there is only rain.

  “Dad,” I start, and he turns to me, but I don’t finish. I’m not even sure what I wanted to say. Mom thinks I should be angry at him, but every time I look at him all of the anger I’ve stored up leaks out of me, and I just feel sorry for him.

  We turn off of the highway and onto the gravel road that leads to the church. It’s a small building, tucked away behind a curving drive lined with cypress trees.

  He cuts the engine but doesn’t open his door; he just sits and looks out at the trees, and his skin looks as if its soaked in all of the pale morning light, and I realize that he’s going to die one day. This man who used to hold the back of my bicycle until I learned to push the pedals on my own. This man who checked under my bed and inside of my closet when there were monsters that needed chasing away.

  When he turns to face me, his eyes glint, and for a moment, I think that I see a different color, not the deep blue I’ve always known, but a bleached out gray, and he blinks, and everything is as I’ve always known it. “I’m sorry, Brianne,” he says, and then he is opening his door, and the air swirls into the car and lifts my hair, and I am alone.

  Through the window I watch him walk into the church, his shoulders lifted and straight, nothing at all like the hunched man who used to haunt the rooms of our old house.

  The heavy wood door opens, and my father passes through into the dim vestibule. In those suspended seconds, a
s my eyes focus and re-focus on the shadows that flit through the space, I see Alec standing just beyond the door, and he is watching me, and his hands are open.

  I get out of the car. Cocooned inside of the winter air and white sky, I count the spaces between my heartbeats.

  I go into the church.

  * * *

  Alec has spent the service next to his mother, his face trained on Pastor Fuller as he rained down spittle and God’s judgment, but now, as Pastor Fuller leans against my father, Alec turns to me, and he looks at me.

  The voices of the congregation rise, their tongues spilling words intended for their God, and I think that the sound will break the world wide open.

  No one notices when I begin to choke. No one notices when I cough the wriggling pink bit of flesh into my hand. No one notices when I run.

  Behind me, Alec’s voice strains and breaks high and clear above everyone’s. It sounds like a scream.

  In the restroom, I wrap the bit of tongue in toilet paper and flush it. Sweat beads against my lower back and between my thighs, and I breathe through my mouth and tell myself that I’m not going to be sick.

  When the door opens, I go still, hold my breath so that I can listen for footsteps, and I pull myself onto the toilet and draw up my feet.

  The sound that comes from outside the stall door is the clattering of hard nails against the tiled floor. It’s the sound of an animal creeping.

  Beneath the door, there are no feet, no high-heeled shoes that could be the sound, no claws, but the sound still comes, and I close my eyes tight, tight, tight and push my face into my shoulder and bite at the muscle there so that I won’t scream.

  Outside of the door, the sound pauses, and the lock shakes, and I whimper. “Please,” I say, but the lock slides back, and the door opens, and all I can do is swallow my tears.

  “You okay, sweetie?” An older woman dressed in a denim jumper, her hair piled atop her head in an elaborate braided bun stands in front of me. Her lips cave in on her mouth, and I realize that she has no teeth.