She Lies Twisted

by C. M. Stunich

  “He's at the funeral home across the street from the Lutheran Church in Solma,” she said. Her eyes grew wider as Danny's screaming cut through the shredded screens on the windows and bounced around the quiet trailer park. “We're supposed to pick up his ashes tomorrow, I guess.” She shuffled her feet and stepped back so that I could stand. I didn't bother to brush the debris off of my clothes, but I did put my hood back on. I felt naked without it. Exposed.

  “I want them,” I told her quietly. Her too-pretty-for-the-park face twitched in obvious anxiety. Prissy was a nice person. Too nice for Danny. Boyd had always said he'd felt lucky to have Priscilla next door. He'd said that since his real mom hadn't wanted him, the universe had sent him someone that did. Prissy always baked him a cupcake on Fridays with white frosting and a red B. She'd always given me one, too. Tears swelled again. I fisted my hands in my sweatshirt.

  “Okay,” she said simply. “I … ” Her eyes looked at everything but me. “We're kind of short on rent this month what with having to pay for … to pay for Boyd's … ” She began to cry. Her tiny shoulders shook and little squeals escaped her thin lips. I nodded.

  “Tomorrow, same time?” I asked. Her blonde curls bounced as she nodded, face buried in her hands.

  The last thing I needed to see was more sadness, so I turned away and left her there to cry.

  I walked back towards the school but ended up veering down a side street and sitting under the Morona County Memorial Bridge. I had climbed through one of the holes in the chain link fencing that the city put up to keep bums away and sat with my back against a stone wall. Steel support beams loomed above me like giants and shook with the passing of cars while a murder of crows pecked at one another and flapped around, fighting for the garbage that littered the pebble strewn path.

  I felt empty and full all at once. It was like there was this place in my heart where Boyd had been and when he'd died, he'd taken that piece of me with him. At the same time, all of my emotions and thoughts weighed down on my stooping shoulders, seeping into me and filling me with this unbearable sense of despair. Weighted and barren. Heavy and formless. The saddest part was, I was used to feeling like this. When Mom had died, I felt this way. Dad. Jason. Abe. Jessica.

  “I have nobody,” I said and jumped when my words echoed back at me. Nobody, nobody, nobody. The crows screamed back at me in protest.

  “Not nobody,” Boyd had said as he rubbed my back in little circles when I'd told him about my sister. “You've got me.” I punched the chain link fence and cursed when the snipped wires sliced open the soft skin between my knuckles. Drops of blood bloomed on the gashes and swelled before leaking down the sides of my hand and splattering across the stones. I couldn't stop myself from staring, from watching the blood drain from me the way it had drained from Boyd before. And he's not the only one. You've seen it before. Jessica's face pale and the yellow sink red and the way she draped across the toilet with her hair wet and tinged pink from the dark water that swirled like ink.

  I screamed and screamed and screamed until my voice went hoarse and the sounds of my despair played back at me from the stone walls like a curse.

  I slept under the bridge that night and dreamed about Boyd and Jessica. I was back in my bedroom and they were standing over me. Jessica was smiling, but Boyd's face was wrinkled with worry. I frowned at them.

  “You should've told me about your brothers,” Boyd chastised as Jessica moved silently away from us. I hadn't told Boyd about them. Sometimes I tried to pretend they never existed. I glared at Jessica's back. “Neil,” Boyd began glancing at my chest. I startled when I realized what he was looking at and jerked my covers up around my face to hide the fact that I was wearing the sweatshirt caked with his blood. He wouldn't call me weird. Boyd never called me weird. But he would tell me that I was living in the past and that the only way to get better was to make things better and that I should put on something else.

  “Yeah?” I asked with a sneer in my voice. “Why's that? You obviously didn't care enough about me to stick around.” Boyd glanced away, ashamed, and I realized with a start that I was angry at him. I was angry at them both. I looked over at Jessica again. She was staring at my taxidermy collection in horror. We might've looked the same, but after starting high school, we'd stopped sharing the same interests.

  Boyd opened his mouth to say something and then paused. When I glanced back at him, I realized that something was different. Boyd had hair. I pushed away my anger and reached up, running my hands through the short, red curls. I tried to smile at him. “Where did these come from?” I asked.

  “I'm dead, Neil,” he said sadly and when he looked up at me, his eyes were dark. “Anything is possible now.” The words were nice, but his tone was melancholy. I opened my mouth to ask what the matter was, but then decided against it. It was a stupid question to ask someone who'd just killed himself. Boyd took my hand in his and squeezed it. “You can't always trust the people you love,” he said. “And Neil … ” One of his shaggy brows rose to his hairline. “Don't do it. You're so good for this world, don't do it.”

  And then I woke up.

  I stayed in my crumpled clothing, ignoring the concerned stares that Prissy gave me as she handed over a heavy cardboard box. I gave her a stack of money. I didn't know how much since I hadn't bothered to count it. I'd gone home as soon as I'd woken up and stolen it straight from Grandma Willa's purse. She always left it on the nightstand in her bedroom. It hadn't taken much to steal from her. I probably could've done it in front of her face and she wouldn't have noticed.

  I had decided I was going to drive to the coast today. Give Boyd a proper burial. It was the least I could do.

  “Tate,” Prissy called out as I began to walk away. I paused but didn't turn back. “Have a good life.” And then I heard footsteps and the sound of a screen door slamming shut and I knew another chapter of my life was closing along with it. Tears threatened again and I dashed them away with my elbow. I didn't need this. Crying again wouldn't help Boyd's spirit. But honoring his memory would. Now all I had to do was steal a car and drive a hundred miles without a license.

  Perfect.

  Grandma Willa left her keys in a frosted glass bowl by the front door. It had been shattered a million times and glued back together because if she walked by and it wasn't there, she had a fit. I got the attachment to the bowl, it was the last gift my mother had given my grandma before she got sick but why she had to keep it on one of those stupid decorative tables by the front door was beyond me. It was just asking to be broken. I fished the keys from the bowl and flipped through them until I found the one to the Cadillac. It was a 1998 Seville but since my grandmother never drove it anywhere, it was still in pretty good shape. Boyd and I had borrowed it once or twice but he'd preferred his old black truck that was such a jumble of car parts that the guy who built it, Boyd's cousin Mac, had no idea what it had started out as. I smiled at the memory as I unlocked the door and then frowned.

  There would be no more riding in Boyd's truck with the busted up speakers, no more trips to the ocean, no more homemade chili with corn chips. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  “My life is nothing,” I said to myself as I climbed into the front seat of the car. “It's nothing and I am fucking nobody.” More tears spilled as I buckled Boyd's ashes into the front seat next to a blue-green vase I'd stolen from the living room. It still had the dusty remains of a hundred year old silk flowers in it. I snatched them out roughly and threw them into the grass beside the car before peeling out of the driveway with no seat belt and the door partially hanging open. It took me fifteen minutes to notice. I smiled at Boyd's box with my cheeks still wet. “Thanks for keeping the pigs off me.” He didn't respond. I pretended he did though, pretended I heard him laugh like a biker in bar. And then I imagined a conversation where he chastised me for using slang I didn't really understand and I berated him for wearing socks with holes.

  “I miss you Boyd,” I said. “And I always will.”


  I hate long drives. Always have. Boyd had usually been behind the wheel because, with the exception of the time he taught me how, I hated driving. I'd have rather been in the passenger seat reading a magazine or painting my nails lime green or tearing through a novel I'd read a hundred times. Boyd never cared. He let me be me and he liked me that way. Nobody else had liked me since my family had died. Nobody but Boyd.

  “I hate you,” I spat at him as I parked the car in the empty lot and eyed the gray sea. Then I felt guilty and apologized. I unbuckled Boyd and the vase and carried them to the edge where the grass stopped and the sky began. I paused a moment and tried to think about what I should say, if anything. I'd never been particularly religious and wasn't about to start now. Some people felt tragedy drew them closer to God or the Goddess or the Holy Spirit or whatever. It just drove me away, made me angry, made me doubt even more. No holy whatever that was worth worshipping would do what had been done to me.

  I knelt down in the grass and peeled the tape off of the box. Inside was a plastic bag filled with ashes. I pulled the bag out by its knotted top and stared at it. Last week, it had been Boyd. Today, it was dirt. I grimaced.

  “I'm really gonna miss you,” I said as I untied the plastic and attempted to pour Boyd's ashes into the vase. The top was so narrow that I ended up with as much on my hands and the grass as there was inside. I started to cry again. I tried not to but there was really nobody to be strong for. It was just me and the screech of the ocean against the rocks. I shook off the ashes from my sweater, scooped as much as I could from the ground, and brushed my hands against the side of the glass. It would have to do. It wasn't perfect but it was all I had in me.

  I crushed the cardboard box and folded up the plastic bag before putting them back in the car and then approached the metal railing with the vase clutched between my hands. I stepped over the danger sign that warned tourists away from the edge until I was standing as close as I could to the sea.

  “Boyd,” I choked out and then paused. “Johnathan David Boyd.” Yes, that was better. That felt right. “I, Tatum Ruby O'Neil, promise to miss you everyday for the rest of my life.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “And I'll love you until the day I die.”

  As I released the vase into the air, as it became silhouetted against the darkening sky, I thought I felt a pressure at my back, like a warning, a familiar hand guiding me away from the edge. But when I snapped my eyes open, the sensation and the vase were gone and the cliff was crumbling beneath my feet.

  I was falling.

  She lies twist'd, twist'd, twist'd,

  On the edge of gray cliffs mist'd.

  Bruised and broken, bloodied red,

  Temper'd by demons, souls of the dead.

  Her eyes and lips have gone to seed,

  Her twist'd body no longer breathes.

  Wrong'd and ruin'd, broken down,

  Our twist'd gatekeep, we have found.

  When you pass out and come to, there's this feeling of loss. Like time has passed you by and you've somehow been cheated out of a part of your life. When I found my sister, Jessica, dead, I passed out and when I woke up, her body was gone. The blood was gone. She was gone. There was this piece missing from my mental jigsaw puzzle. A family portrait with a missing head. When I woke up on the beach that day, it was nothing like that. It wasn't like I had missed a part of my life. It was as if it had never been.

  I sat up, salty and wet, coated in a fine layer of sand and pebbles and bits of dried kelp and tried to remember how I had gotten there. The ashes, the cliff, falling like Alice down the rabbit hole. I rubbed my temples in tight circles. Blood, blood, blood. Every significant moment in my life was covered in it, drenched, soaked, consumed by it. The sea still held its quiet menace, the air still hung in gray sheets, but something was different and it wasn't the scenery.

  “What is wrong with me?”

  As soon as the words left my throat, I could feel it. There was something different in my voice, my words, the way my tongue crept across my lips. I brushed my hands down the front of my sweatshirt. A huge gash sliced across the gray fabric from hip to shoulder. I dug my fingers into the rend and peeled it away from my skin. My nails met rough lines but no pain. I lifted the hem and examined my belly. Dark X's crisscrossed my pale skin in a diagonal line from the bottom of my ribcage to the top of my belly button.

  Stitches.

  “What the-” I picked at the black thread with one of my fingernails. It was stiff and rigid but not painful and underneath it, there was only a white scar and no wound. “How long have I been here?” The wind snatched my words in cold hands and whipped them away from me. Had I been lying here for hours? Days? Weeks? “Impossible.” I dropped my sweater over the bizarre medical experiment my midsection had become and pushed myself to my feet. Gaping wounds didn't just disappear. Maybe I was dreaming? But no...I shook my head and reached a hand up to my hair. Dreams didn't hurt this much. I felt around my scalp for injuries and came across another coarse line of stitches.

  “This is fucked,” I whispered to myself, feeling the first surges of panic. I tried to retrace my steps but could only remember the cliff crumbling then...nothing. I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my fists against my shuttered lids. I knelt down in the sand and let the cacophony of crashing waves and howling wind wash over me. Pain, heat, a face with dark eyes and a sad smile, rocks, my hair brushing across my cheeks as I... I rose from my crouch and whirled to face the staircase of cliffs behind me. One after another they stepped down from the grassy coast and dipped into the water until the smallest of the five outcroppings was mostly submerged by white foam.

  “I...I fell.” My lips trembled, my knees shook, and like the day I discovered Boyd's body, I found myself on my knees. “I fell, I hit the rocks, my head...” I tore my sweatshirt off and threw it in a soggy mass on the wet sand. My hip, just above my jeans, my chest, just below my breasts, both of my arms above the elbow.

  More stitches.

  I began to unbutton my jeans.

  “I would not do that, if I were you,” said a voice from behind me. I turned around in slow motion, like a heroine in a horror movie, arms crossed over my chest. A woman sat on the edge of a kelp covered rock, the navy and white spray of the sea soaking her from feathered head to taloned toe. Wings spread out behind her like a cloak, fluttering in the breeze and twitching with the same amusement that was pulling her black lips away from her teeth. “You never know who might be watching.” And then her wings spread even wider, blocking out the gray sky, and she launched herself into the air. I stumbled back, expecting her to dive at me, to reach for me with those gleaming claws, but she caught a current of air and began to rise in the sky above me until she was nothing but a speck among the clouds.

  I rescued my sweatshirt from the sand with quivering hands.

  “I am fucking losing it,” I whispered to myself, blaming the fall and the cold for what had obviously been a figment of my imagination.

  I forced my shaking legs up the single trail that wound back and forth along the cliff's edge. I couldn't believe what I'd seen but yet, when I glanced down at my wrists, there was no denying that something had happened to me.

  I tried to search my brain for missing pieces that I knew weren't there. When I had seen Jessica, I had passed out. I'd forgotten. But then I'd remembered, despite my own wishes, I'd remembered every detail. The way the tips of her hair hung across her frozen face, the shiny pool of black against the white tile, the soft flannel folds of her nightgown. With my most current nightmare, there was nothing. No nagging bits of memory, no insistent pounding, no whispered, unwanted thoughts.

  “Get it together, Neil,” I said, feeling a surge of relief at the sight of the Seville. It sat untouched in the parking lot, just the way I had left it. I dug around in my sweater pocket for the keys. “Oh shit.” They weren't there. I pulled the pockets out and checked my jeans. Nothing. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” I ran back down the cliff, nearly fell off (again), and forced my q
uivering legs to a walk. “Please be there,” I whispered to myself. “Please, please, please be there.” What was I going to tell my grandma? Hell, what was I going to tell the cops? How was I even going to get home?

  A glint of silver caught my eye. I sucked in a breath. That had to be them.

  I jogged across the sand, ignoring the strange itch in my belly where the stitches tugged at my flesh. I reached down and plucked the key from the sand without really looking at it. The chain snagged as if it were caught on something. I tugged at it harder and then realized with a shock that it wasn't my key. This was a rusted skeleton key on an equally rusted chain and it was attached to something. Something that was groaning.

  I jerked my hand away from the jostling movement that was beginning beneath the sand and stepped back. I slammed into someone, hard, and felt a cold hand clasp over my mouth. “Don't panic.” The mound reared up like a tidal wave, sand splashing against my skin, while the rest fell away in wet clumps. I screamed against the waxy skin that was covering my lips as the thing turned and smiled at me. It smiled and it wasn't even alive and probably hadn't been for a very long time. “Stay here and I'll take care of it,” the person said and dropped me to my knees. I reached my hand back to my imaginary Glock. The sand monster looked nothing short of Dawn of the Dead fierce and if this wasn't the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, I was seriously beginning to doubt my own sanity.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted against the pull of the wind. The person with the cold hand was really just a boy and it was no wonder he was cold, he was as soaked as I was, dressed in nothing but a ratty shirt and holey jeans. I guess it never occurred to me to wonder why he was out there on the beach in the cold and why I hadn't seen him before. I was definitely losing it. “Don't touch it!” I yelled as I forced myself into a standing position and tackled him.