Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  Then I got the thought that it didn’t matter what I was feeling. That this was something I had begun, and I had to finish it, like a monument. My purpose was to make her come.

  I put two fingers inside and circled her walls methodically. She was shaking and tears were coming from her eyes. Good, I thought. It’s working.

  I sat up and she raised herself halfway to my mouth. I bowed down put my tongue against her, and moved my fingers inside of her. She got very wet till it was dripping down my wrist, which felt strange. She writhed and smashed herself against my face. This move completely overwhelmed me.

  It was as if a giant pink butterfly had landed in my mouth and was beating its wings frantically against my face. But it wasn’t just “as if” that were happening. I was tripping. It was happening. The pink butterfly’s giant bug body was in my mouth. Its giant wings were beating my face. It was a terrifying ecstasy. This must be the beginning, I thought. We are beginning to change, “to become.”

  The thing about acid is, your perception of what you’re doing and what you are actually doing are often two very different things. I thought I was kneeling in a field with my hand inside a plump yellow melon, a frantic butterfly in my mouth, and an Egyptian god watching over me.

  I was actually kneeling on the floor in front of her parents’ guest bed, motionless for the past minute, with my motionless fingers in my girlfriend, whose cunt was in my open, motionless mouth, and I had apparently begun humming in one loud steady “Ohmmm” tone. In short, she had kept having sex and I had begun meditating.

  “What the hell are you doing?” She pulled away from me and sat up.

  I opened my eyes. We were still in her parents’ guest bedroom. I shook my head and let it drop into my hands. She came over and held me. “Are you okay, baby? What’s going on? What are you thinking? What did you feel? You can tell me.”

  I tried to explain the haze. “I just thought,” I told her, “that if I made you come, you would turn into something. You know, whatever you really are, what best represents you. Like a monument.”

  Her face grew cold, grave. “And what exactly did you think I would turn into?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me,” she insisted very intently.

  “I guess I thought you would sprout wings or something. You know … like a gargoyle, or like … ” I searched for words, “a demon.”

  “A demon?” she squealed, angry and accusatory.

  “That’s not what I meant. No, never mind. Wrong choice.” She stood and started pacing. “So you think you know everything now, huh?”

  “What are you talking about? Just calm down.”

  “You think you know what I really am?”

  “Aw, come on. I didn’t mean demon, exactly. I mean, I guess it kind of is—”

  “What else did it tell you?” she shouted.

  “What else did what tell me?”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Who?” She pointed to the ceiling. “Him.” Then she said some Egyptian name I don’t remember and my hairs jumped off my body.

  The Egyptian god on the ceiling was my hallucination. I hadn’t shared it with her. I stared up at the Egyptian god and she stared at him too. We both saw him there, hovering above us, growling through angry brick teeth with a face that kept turning to sand and reconstructing itself. It’s very off-putting to share the same hallucination with someone. It makes you wonder whether it’s really a hallucination.

  “This is getting too crazy,” I said, collecting my clothes. I didn’t dare make eye contact with her. I just headed to the bathroom and locked myself in. It probably took me twenty minutes to get dressed. I splashed some water on my face and checked to see if I looked presentable. But there was really no way to tell, the way my face kept shifting and changing color like that. How long had we been up here? An hour? It felt like about an hour.

  *

  When I came out, she was seated in a chair in the hallway. She must have been waiting for me, but she didn’t turn when I came out. She just stared straight ahead at the wall, keeping her hands folded in her lap and her back upright, ridged, like she was in a trance. But she was whispering to something. I knelt beside her. “Baby, it’s gonna be all right. You just need to act fairly normal for the next ten minutes. We’re gonna get out of here and take a little walk. We’ll come down in a couple hours. Then we can go and eat cheese sandwiches.”

  She stopped whispering to whatever it was and tuned her head mechanically to face me. Her eyebrows twisted into a point reminiscent of Joan Crawford as she intoned “Cheese sandwiches? Cheese sandwiches!!!” like these two words together created the most hateful and absurd of concoctions.

  “All right. Here we go.” I lifted her by the shoulders, keeping my grip on her as we headed down the stairs. We’d have to pass through the kitchen, the dining room, and the hall before we were out. We’d also have to say goodbye to her mother, and for her part at least, I could blame any strange behavior on the medication her mother did not know she’d stopped taking. I was getting it all planned out. It seemed doable.

  We reached the bottom of the stairs. As we turned into the kitchen I felt her tiny arm begin to tremble under my grip. She set her pointed gaze at the far corner of the room like a hound spotting a rabbit.

  “You see her?” she whispered.

  But I tried to ignore her inquiry. “Just in one door, out the other, babe. Just say bye-bye to mom, and here we go.”

  She turned on me, tearing her arm loose from my clutch. “I’m not fucking tripping!” she said, sort of stage-whispering, like a whispering scream. “I have to live with this every day. Now you’re in my world, apparently. You can see it too, so try. She’s right there!” She pointed to the corner.

  I knew who she was talking about, the headless woman she always saw in kitchens. I glanced over quickly. Maybe I could have seen her too if I’d tried, but I really, really didn’t want to. I shook my head no. “No, I don’t see anything.”

  She tapped my arm. “She’s coming over here. She sees me too. Oh God. She’s never looked at me before.”

  “How can she be looking at you if she doesn’t have a head?”

  “She’s carrying her head!” she snapped, as if it were obvious.

  “Honey, this is just a bad fucking trip. Calm down. Remember what I told you. Use the drug, don’t let it use you.”

  “Don’t give me that raver shit. The headless woman can see me. This is fucking serious.” She grabbed her chest and gasped.

  “What?”

  “She’s right here in front of us, next to you. She’s talking.”

  At this point there was nothing I could do but watch her listen. I was absolutely tripping hard myself, but trying not to show it. I had my own problems, like the way the yellowish kitchen light was sliding down the walls and dripping from the cracks in the paint, and, as always, my melting feet. I guess

  I must have been pretty distracted by this sort of stuff, ’cause when I started paying attention again, my girlfriend was holding a butcher knife.

  There’s nothing like the sight of a person on acid holding a foot-long knife that brings you that sobering feeling one so often longs for just after their peak.

  I swear to god, I flew four feet to the opposite door, away from her. She was holding the knife up by her head like she was Elmer Fudd hunting rabbits.

  “Honey, whatcha doing?”

  She didn’t look at me. “She put her head back on her neck,” she told me. “She wants me to cut it off again, or wait, no, she’s shaking her head no. What’s that? What?”

  “No, honey. Don’t cut it off again. Just leave it on. That’s the nice thing to do,” I tried.

  “No, no. She’s speaking.”

  “What’s she saying?”

  She turned her black eyes to me and smiled like she was one of those women on a cooking show and she was about to show me how to bake a cake … made out of children. “She wants me to cut off someone else�
��s head,” she told me.

  *

  I took another step back, literally straddling the doorframe, ready to bolt. “You fucking ignore her, do you understand me?”

  She tilted her head like she was trying.

  “Good,” I continued. “Now one of two things is going to happen: either you are going to put down the knife, or you’re not going to put down the knife, but I’m gonna leave you alone here with your mom and your headless friend, and you are never, do you understand me, NEVER going to see me ever again.” That was the best I could do.

  She stood there pondering her options.

  “You have three seconds to put it down or I (pause) am (pause) gone (pause) forever!”

  She looked from me to the headless woman.

  “One.”

  She shook her head no in the direction of the headless woman.

  “Two.”

  She tilted her head at me again, like a puppy, and nodded.

  “Two and a half.”

  She laid the knife on the counter.

  “Walk over here, slowly. Don’t look at her.”

  She came over slowly like she was walking a tightrope. When she was finally within my reach, I grabbed her, tugged her out of the kitchen, and hugged her hard. She buried her head in my shoulder and breathed slowly, deeply. We stood there wrapped in each other like we’d just escaped from a horror movie, our eyes shut tight from whatever might be waiting for us.

  The terror wasn’t in any way gone from me. I couldn’t help wondering what exactly it was acid did to your brain, and wondering how she’d been able to see the same impossible thing I saw. Were these things really there? She said she could see them all the time, but acid just opened up the possibilities for normal people, like me.

  While I was thinking about all this, I became aware of another presence in the room. An invasive, cold, ominous presence. I opened my eyes. Her mother was standing in front of us sipping her wine and watching us like we were a bad stage performance, as we were deeply entangled, shaking and petting each other.

  “What is this, The Children’s Hour? What’s wrong with you?” She raised her right eyebrow at her daughter. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I thought you were upstairs.”

  “I’ve just been having a headache, Mom.”

  I realized that she must be used to her daughter’s bouts of … whatever, but she treated her daughter’s apparent disarray with nothing more than a little annoyance and feigned ignorance.

  “Well then, have a seltzer. You’re probably dehydrated. There are some bottles in the fridge.”

  “I’ll get it,” I said abruptly, and skipped back into the kitchen.

  I heard her mother through the door. “Pull yourself together. We’ve been planning a surprise for you. I mean, you don’t have to do it, even though we’ve been planning it all week. I mean, if you really don’t feel like it, dear.”

  “Planning what?” I stepped back in and handed her the seltzer. She unscrewed the lid, gulped down half the bottle, then burped.

  “There, that’s more like it,” her mother encouraged her. “Have a seat.” She walked her daughter over to the dining room table and dimmed the lights. Waving her hand in the air at no one, she hollered, “All right! She’s ready!”

  *

  What ensued was the strangest and dorkiest ritual I have ever been privy to, live or on video, ever. Ten Mensans marched in slowly, in single file, singing the philosophers drinking song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus at the speed and tone of a druidic hymn. It was creepy. They then found their places standing around Kali, who was seated at the table. She was smiling her overwide smile and laughing a silent laugh that looked like little convulsions. When they had all made their way in, they stopped singing and declared happily, three times in unison, “One of us! One of us! One of us!” before placing the twenty-page IQ test on the table in front of her. This IQ test would decide if she could become an official member of Mensa or not, and I knew this was the single most important thing in the world to her: to be acknowledged as a fellow genius by her parents’ friends. I just didn’t think this was something she should undergo while peaking on acid.

  Liz handed her a pen. Her mother nodded approvingly. “I don’t think you should do this right now,” I tried. “You’re not feeling well.” Her dilated eyes smiled up at the Mensans. Totally ignoring my comment, she tore open the paper that kept the sides of the booklet sealed, then beamed up at them, shaking with apparent joy and surprise. “Of course I’ll do it,” she said. “I am. I’m one of you.”

  *

  I’m still circling this East St. Louis strip. I’ve taken to waving back at the whores. They are very polite. This is my last time around, though. I’m gonna go ahead and drive to my hometown for the night. To hell with this.

  She failed the test, of course. And the rest, it’s hard to explain. She just sat there quietly in the car as we drove away from the house and the scene of her worst embarrassment. When they tallied the results and announced them, her mother just quietly excused herself from the party. She started trembling, and the other guests comforted her, saying that she could try again soon, that she just wasn’t feeling well. But she bombed. Of course she did. She was tripping. I drove her home in a drug haze, finally starting to come down, and she didn’t say a word until we got into the apartment, and then, well, I finally got to meet Rose, the person she becomes who does things she doesn’t remember doing.

  The apartment is destroyed. Most of her breakable things are broken, in pieces. There is a golf-ball-sized welt on her head (her own doing, not mine) and I have a swollen jaw, and she is sleeping now, as a result of many anti-anxiety medications I insisted she take so she would stop ramming herself headfirst into the walls and tearing her things to pieces. I am driving this disgusting strip of a road, over and over again, trying to figure where to go for the rest of the night … for the rest of my life.

  There’s that fucking song playing on the radio, the one that always made me think of her, even when I was with her. I should have noticed this as a sign before tonight—“Where all the bodies hang on the air”—that’s not a sweet song at all. The fact that this is the song I most associate with my romantic relationship, there is definitely something very wrong with that. She’s gonna miss me. She destroyed everything else. She’s gonna tell me she can’t go on without me. And she probably can’t. Pretty soon now, though, I won’t really care. I crossed the waters. I’m gonna go home through the town. I’ll pass the shadows that fell down from when we met. But I’m gone from there.

  CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

  Eight Bites

  As they put me to sleep, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon. I expect to choke on the silt but instead it slides in and out, and in and out, and I am, impossibly, breathing.

  I have dreamt of inhaling underneath water and this is what it feels like: panic, and then acceptance, and then elation: I am going to die, I am not dying, I am doing a thing I never thought I could do.

  Back on Earth, Dr. U is inside me. Her hands are in my torso, her fingers searching for something. She is loosening flesh from its casing, slipping around where she’s been welcomed, talking to a nurse about her vacation to Chile. “We were going to fly to Antarctica,” she says,

  “but it was too expensive.”

  “But the penguins,” the nurse says. “Next time,” Dr. U responds.

  *

  Before this, it was January, a new year. I waded through two feet of snow on a silent street, and came to a shop where wind chimes hung silently on the other side of the glass, mermaid-shaped baubles and bits of driftwood and too-shiny seashells strung through with fishing line and unruffled by any wind.

  The town was deep dead, a great distance from the late-season smattering of open shops that serve the day-trippers and the money-savers. Owners had fled to Boston or New York, or if they were lucky, further south. Businesses had shuttered for the season, leaving their wares in the windows like a tease. Underneath, a se
cond town had opened up, familiar and alien at the same time. It’s the same every year. Bars and restaurants made secret hours for locals, the rock-solid Cape Codders who’ve lived though dozens of winters. On any given night you could look up from your plate to see a round bundle stomp through the doorway; only when they peeled their outsides away could you see who was beneath. Even the ones you knew from the summer are more or less strangers in this perfunctory daylight; everyone was alone, even when they were with each other.

  *

  On this street, though, I might as well have been on another planet. The beach bunnies and art dealers would never see the town like this, I thought, when the streets are dark and liquid chill roils through the gaps and alleys. Silences and sound bumped up against each other but never intermingled; the jolly chaos of warm summer nights was as far away as it could be. It was hard to stop moving between doorways in this weather, but if you did you could hear life pricking the stillness: a rumble of voices from a local tavern, wind livening the buildings, sometimes even a muffled animal encounter in an alley: pleasure or fear, it was all the same noise.

  Foxes wove through the streets at night. There was a white one among them, sleek and fast, and she looked like the ghost of the others.