Everything That’s Underneath

by Kristi DeMeester

  My heart is in my throat, and I cannot speak. She comes into the stall with me and pats my back. I don’t want her there, want to tell her to get the fuck out, but everything I want to speak is buried inside of me, and so I sob and let her push my hair out of my face and hand me tissue after tissue.

  Inside of my throat, something fleshy scrapes and pokes at the lining there, and I choke, and she hands me another tissue, and I cough and cough until another bit of tongue tumbles out. I tuck the tiny piece of me into my fist, and the older lady rubs my back until I quiet, and then she smiles at me and asks if I’ll be okay.

  “Yes,” I say, and she stands, her large hips bumping against the stall door as she leaves.

  I ball the tissue up and put it in my pocket. When I go to sleep tonight, perhaps I will place that bit of tongue beneath my pillow. Perhaps the dream will change. Perhaps it won’t.

  The vestibule is empty when I leave the restroom. Everyone is still inside of the sanctuary, still shouting those terrible words into the sky, and I want to throw open the doors. “You aren’t saying anything. It means nothing,” I want to scream at them, but the door on the far left opens just a crack, just enough to let a sliver of light leak into the gloom.

  Alec slips through, and I think I see him shimmer, his arms and legs thin as smoke and then they are solid again, and he turns to face me and holds out his hand. “Can I see it?” he says.

  My fingers spider over the small, wet bit in my pocket. I don’t want to give it to him. It came from me. It’s mine.

  “No,” I tell him, and he drops his hand and nods. The air is thick and sluggish, and I need out of this room, out of this church. When I go, Alec follows me.

  I walk into the trees until all I can see is green. No bright sky, only the color of new things drowning out the world, and then Alec is behind me, and I am speaking to him in words that I don’t understand but I do understand, and his eyes are darker now, the color of a black moth, and he tells me about the dream. How it’s the same as mine. How he’s had it for as long as he can remember. How he used to believe, but now, he doesn’t. He can’t.

  “It isn’t God they are talking to. It isn’t,” he says, and I understand.

  When I kiss him, he doesn’t touch me, doesn’t run his hands through my hair or over my collarbone, but he traces his tongue over mine, and I press against him. He is hard in the way that the other boys have been, but I don’t tug at his zipper, don’t move my hand over that soft flesh in the way that I have before. Other boys with their insistent hands and their loud groaning that it isn’t right to get them so worked up, and can’t I just? Just a little? And I always did because I didn’t want the silence that has still somehow found me, this silence that my father laid at my feet like a jewel.

  But Alec doesn’t push against the back of my head or guide my hands further and further down. He only kisses me and bites at my lips, and there is the ancient taste of blood in my mouth.

  “Don’t,” I say when he pulls away. I keep my eyes closed and reach for him, but there is only the air, and I open my eyes.

  I am alone.

  One foot in front of the other, I walk back to the car where my father waits behind the wheel. Something different curls inside of his skin. Something that is not my father ruffles my hair and asks me in a voice older than the earth if I feel okay.

  I know these things because I tasted them on Alec’s tongue.

  “Take me home,” I say to the thing that is not my father, and he smiles a smile that has too many teeth. I won’t look at that smile. I refuse.

  Mom stops me when I come through the door. Her hands are feather light on my shoulders, and she grasps at my coat so that I can’t sneak past her and up to my room.

  “Are you sick?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “I swear, Brianne, if you’re sick and that asshole didn’t take you to the doctor.”

  “I’m not sick, Mom. Just tired.”

  She unclenches the fabric bound in her fingers, but she leaves her hands on my shoulders. “I wish you wouldn’t go over there.”

  “I have to.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “You don’t.”

  “Mom. I just want to go to bed. Okay?”

  “How …” She pauses and licks her lips. There is a sore in the right corner. “How do you not hate him?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, and it’s the truth. “Please. I’m tired.”

  She lets me go, and I don’t look back at her. In my bedroom, I pull the piece of tongue from my pocket. It feels larger in my palm. Heavier. I don’t unwrap it but place it under my pillow and curl on top of it like a cat. My room is too warm, but I’m too exhausted to get up and turn on the fan.

  Underneath my pillow, the tongue whispers.

  I don’t sleep.

  * * *

  I want to call her a bitch. I want to call her a whore and to grab her by the hair and drag her through the hallway until the strands rip away from her scalp.

  Instead, I do nothing, and she walks away and laughs at me with the bitch group of friends she has who were once my friends, too.

  In sixth period, Alec is absent, and I spend the hour staring at his empty desk. I trace the spots where his body should be, the places where I touched him only the day before.

  Mom isn’t home when I let myself into the house, but there is someone upstairs. Footsteps that pause and then start up again and the sound of something breathing.

  “Brianne?” a voice calls down to me, and it’s Alec’s voice.

  “How did you get in here?” I ask him when I open my bedroom door. He’s lying on my bed, his head pressed against the pillow, dark hair feathered out across the white fabric, and he has his eyes closed tight, tight, tight. Scrunched up so that he looks like he doesn’t have eyes at all, only eyebrows, and I sit on the bed next to him.

  “I woke up here. Went to sleep and then I was here.” He opens his eyes and brings his fingers to my lips. They taste of salt.

  He tucks his hands underneath my pillow, and he looks so young. Like a little boy waiting for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight. A little boy who should be frightened of the dark or of monsters in the closet.

  “I kept them everywhere when they first came. In my drawers. Under my mattress. I buried them next. Everywhere in my backyard are little graves. But it doesn’t matter. The dreams come anyway.”

  I crawl into bed with him, and he wraps his body around me, and he is warm, and I am cold, and I squeeze my eyes shut as tight as his were.

  Underneath my pillow, the tongue whispers, and we listen.

  When the time comes, we answer.

  * * *

  I don’t lift my pillow to check and see if the tongue—my tongue—has grown in the night. Instead, I go downstairs. Mom still isn’t home. Must have found someone interesting on the little app she’s always staring at.

  I could stay home. Mom isn’t there to keep me from skipping. I could sit on the couch all day and watch terrible daytime television and raid the refrigerator and maybe even steal one of the bottles of vodka Mom keeps in the freezer and get drunk off of my ass.

  But the tongue is upstairs, and I can hear the dark stain of its whispers, and so I grab my keys and drive to school.

  I’m early. The doors aren’t even open yet, and so I head back to the car, let the engine idle and turn the heat up so that it streams over my hands.

  I don’t remember leaning the seat back or closing my eyes, but when I open them the light coming through the window is the softer shade of afternoon sun, and I bolt upright. The clock on the dash reads 4:45, and the parking lot is as empty as it was this morning.

  Grabbing my phone, I pull up the text messages. Three from my mother. All telling me that she got a call from the school and that my ass had better have a good excuse because life as I know it is over.

  I try to turn the engine over, but the car sputters, and I look down at the gauges. Out of gas. Of course.

  I�
�m not looking at the parking lot but looking beyond it, trying to figure out what the hell I should do, when I see it. Something dark moving along the ground. At first, I think it’s a stray dog or cat, but the closer it gets, I realize that it’s too large to be an animal, and it isn’t moving the way that animals do.

  It’s jerky and stiff-legged and crawls on all fours as if it isn’t used to the skin that wraps it. As if it wants to outrun whatever holds it all together.

  And then it is close enough to see, and it is a man creeping along the ground. A man with long, tapered fingers covered with dirt, and he looks up at me, and I know his eyes, know the bend of his smile, know the sound of his voice.

  “Dad,” I say, and the sound echoes back to me all hollow. Like I’ve been emptied out. Like there is nothing at all left inside of me.

  He stares at me—his eyes a dark smear—and his mouth twists, words pouring out of him like water, his tongue bending around strange syllables, and I can hear him even though I shouldn’t be able to.

  Then he is gone, loping off again into the woods that line the parking lot, and I’m shaking and crying too hard to even pick up my phone, but finally, I do.

  “Mom,” I say when she picks up, and I hear her sharp intake of breath. “Come get me. Please come and get me.”

  “Brianne? Are you hurt? Did someone hurt you?”

  “No,” I say, and my fingers fumble with the automatic locks, and I wait for the click, but none comes. I’ll have to do it myself—one by one—but I can’t move. Can’t breathe.

  “Where are you? I’m coming. Right now,” she says, and I choke and I gag, and I don’t look when that bit of tongue comes up.

  “Please. The school,” I say, and then I cannot speak.

  * * *

  I keep watching the tree line, keep waiting for my father to re-appear, his body rushing along the ground and his mouth spilling words of holy fire.

  “Open the door,” my mother says over and over. A prayer. A litany for the dead.

  When I do, she pulls me out of the car and into her arms, but I don’t feel safe. I watch the tree line.

  “Let’s go, sweetie,” she says, and I let her put me into her car. She drives, and I try not to think of the feeling of my tongue in my throat. “Brianne, you have to tell me what happened. Okay? You have to tell me.”

  “I fell asleep. I had a bad dream,” I say, and she pulls the car over to the shoulder.

  “If someone hurt you, I swear to fucking Christ …”

  “No.” It’s all that I can give her.

  She looks at me, and her mouth is drawn up into a hard line. “I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

  I don’t fight her or tell her that I’m fine. That I saw something I couldn’t have possibly seen, heard something that wasn’t there.

  When the doctor comes into the room, he and Mom talk, and I catch a few words here and there. Trauma. Catatonic. Shock.

  The doctor is old enough to fart dust, and he is talking to me, but it’s like I’m deep, deep underwater, and his words are bloated, fleshy things. “An exam. Just to be sure. It won’t hurt at all,” he says, and I nod.

  When the nurse comes in, she smiles at me with a mouth frosted in baby pink, and she asks me what happened, tells me that if it’s okay, they need for me to take everything off so they can be sure I’m not hurt.

  I do what they ask me. I lift my arms and my legs and let them look at the smooth, unbroken skin, and I let them swab between my legs, and I whisper over and over, “Nothing happened.”

  But it’s a lie because I squeeze my eyes shut, and the tiny hospital room disappears, and I see my father crawling along the ground like a spider as he speaks the language of his God, and I am afraid.

  “Brianne? I’m going to look inside of your mouth now. Is that okay?” the nurse asks.

  I open my mouth. She presses against my tongue and looks. Whatever she’s searching for isn’t there, and so she sighs and pats my shoulder. Tells me that I’m a good girl and that I’ve done very well.

  My mother sits in a straight-backed leather chair in the far corner and watches the nurse and the doctor flutter around me. She doesn’t move except to pick at her sweater.

  Two hours later, the doctor is satisfied, and they send me home, tell my mother that I may be overtired. That I need rest and liquids. “There’s nothing wrong with her,” they say and give me a prescription for a sleeping pill and the phone number for a therapist. Mom thanks them, and she takes me home.

  “We’ll talk in the morning,” Mom says after she’s watched me take the sleeping pill; after she’s pulled my sheets against my chin. She pauses, and I think she’s going to kiss me. The way she used to when I was little. The way she used to when Dad was still here. But she’s gone, and I’m alone, and everywhere is dark.

  The tongue isn’t under my pillow anymore, and I run my hands against the cool, empty space. I close my eyes.

  It doesn’t take long for the whispers to start up. The pill has left me woozy, but I manage to sit up. Propped against my pillow, I listen for my father’s prayers, for him to speak in tongues.

  “Brianne,” he says, and his voice comes from beneath me.

  He’s under my bed. I picture him lying there, his back pressed into the floor and dust on his cheeks.

  “I’m so tired, Dad.”

  He is speaking now, the words tumbling one after the other, and I am the only one to hear him.

  When I finally fall asleep, my father’s voice leaks into my dreams. I sit on our church pew, and bits of my tongue fall from my lips, and I cannot wake. I cannot.

  Alec is there. He holds my hand and watches as I choke up piece after piece of myself.

  “This is my body,” he says, and he opens his mouth, places my tongue inside of his teeth. “This is my blood.”

  He swallows me down, and I curl inside of him, wrap myself in his warmth, and his lips are on mine, and he feeds me. I drink him down, and it’s like drinking the sky, like taking the stars inside of myself, and he burns everything away.

  “Who are they talking to?” I ask him, and he brushes my hair back from my face.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and I shiver. It’s winter inside of the church, and the white dress I wear is so thin.

  “Why is this happening?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No,” I say, and then his teeth are on my neck, and his hands are on me, and all around us come the voices as they speak in tongues.

  When he presses himself into the cleft between my legs, I open my mouth and the tongues spill out of me. Beautiful and terrible, the sound beats against us with the strength of many wings, and we bend beneath it. We stretch and break, and the sound fills up all of the broken pieces, and we come together and come apart, sparking like shards of flint. Our cheeks are wet. I’m not sure if it’s with tears or blood.

  Somewhere in my bedroom, my father creeps in the dark. His words spill into the shadows, and I think that I must be drowning inside of them.

  Alec pulls back and looks down as he moves above me. All around is my father’s voice. Shadows steal through the church as if some great hole has opened and all of the things that move in the world beyond have come through. Things we aren’t supposed to see.

  “Is that what they pray to?” I say and point, but Alec does not turn to look.

  “I’ve always known them,” he says. “It’s no use looking.”

  I try to watch for the shadows, but they slip away, and Alec’s body is pumping against me, and it is too much to bear, this feeling. Everything inside of me is ripping apart, and my back arches, and there is a sweetness in the back of my throat as he brings his mouth to mine. It is something like sugar, something like honey, when I bite down on his tongue.

  It is something beautiful when it splits in my throat. A tiny seed taking root.

  A lovely thing to spill from between my lips in words that only Alec and I can understand.

  We will whisper our love in tongue
s of fire.

  “Yes,” I open my mouth and tell them.

  “Yes.”

  To Sleep in the Dust of the Earth

  Lea and I met Beth when we were thirteen. That was the year Lea had legs that wouldn’t fill out her shorts. The year I started sneaking Marlboro Lights from my mother’s purse to share with Lea in the back corner of Benjamin Harper’s abandoned lot.

  “He was going to build on it. A house for his wife. But she died, and he just …” Lea made a fluttering motion with her fingers, scattered the smoke streaming from her lips.

  “Jesus. We’ve only heard the story about a million times. Give it a rest.”

  “I just think it’s sad is all. You don’t have to be such a bitch about it, Willa,” Lea said and flicked her butt into the grass.

  There were rumors that the lot was haunted. Little kids would dare each other to sneak out there at night. Sit right where the front door should have gone and stay until morning. For the older kids, it was place to do all of the things our parents said we shouldn’t. Even still, we hung at the periphery of the land, far from the heart of the house Harper would have built.

  “You don’t feel something when we come out here? It’s so quiet. My hair gets all prickly,” Lea said.

  “Like something big is about to happen. Like right before a door opens. When you don’t know who’s on the other side.” She looked somewhere just over my shoulder.

  “Someone’s here,” she said and let out a deep groan. Her eyes fluttered into her skull, and she began to twitch, her fingers going rigid, and her back arching.

  “Stop it,” I said, and she let out two more guttural grunts before dissolving into giggles.

  “Seriously, Lea. It’s not fucking funny,” I said and pushed her. She tumbled backward, and then, for what couldn’t have been more than two maybe three seconds, I couldn’t see her. Dark hair and eyes caught in the act of falling suddenly vanished among grass grown tall.