Eden Green

by Fiona van Dahl

  Suddenly the ex is gone, having wrenched itself out of my shoulder. It stands over me, top ‘legs’ flailing, and I realize with painful slowness that it’s going to attack again.

  I can’t feel my entire left side, but I throw all my weight to the right, toward the open grass. I hear its stabbing leg hit the ground inches behind me, then pull out again.

  I stumble to my feet, right hand already reaching up for the butt of my gun. I have less than a second.

  The shotgun slides forward over my bloodied shoulder like a beautiful lightning bolt made solid and black.

  A round is already chambered, so I hold it pistol-style at my hip, swinging on its strap. I lurch around to face the ex even as my knuckle clicks the safety off, and I find the monster already spinning toward me, less than three feet aw—

  Point-blank,

  BLAM

  I blast it into leg segments.

  The gun is knocked clear from my hand and swings violently, then thunks against my chest. I drop to my knees, a wail of pain rising in my throat, and then shudder. The shimmer— the portal, I belatedly realize — is still open, and its doormat is a black puddle of my blood. Another ex, or an entire swarm of them, could be seconds away. My mind fills with images of being stabbed apart bit by bit by ten thousand of those things, never to escape.

  I climb to my feet, left arm hanging limp, and every movement is agony. The shotgun bumps against me in various places, bruising painfully. I trudge through trampled grass and kicked-up mud. When I reach the base of the ladder, I put the gun’s safety on and, groaning, sling it back over my shoulder. Then I begin to climb. Every heartbeat, every movement, every breath — my shoulder blooms anew, a red flower of piercing torment ripped open again and again.

  Going slow, one-armed, I make it to the top of the ladder and flop over the railing. I land hard on my back and the air is slammed from my lungs. I lie there staring up into cobwebs and dust and, beyond the edge of the roof, a few light-polluted stars. I fight for air.

  When air comes, I start screaming.

  I’m not just screaming in pain, though I clutch at my shoulder with my good hand as if I can crush the pain down into a tiny dot and control it somehow. I scream at this whole horrific situation, at Ron and Tedrin for getting me involved, at my life for leading up to this moment, and most of all, at myself for not being strong enough.

  Then I suck in a deep, long breath, and squeeze my eyes shut, and think of the deer stand.

  Really, what I forcefully bring to mind is an encapsulated little story from my life, a set of memories so well-worn from recollection that they’ve become a personal meme, a totem. They ‘start’, as closely as that can apply, on a Saturday morning several years ago. I was still intoxicated with the freedom of living on my own. I should have also been exhausted from the previous night — the aforementioned ‘Ron almost got arrested for nearly getting stabbed to death by her meth-cooking Juggalo boyfriend’ incident.

  Yet I awoke at 6 AM, wired in a way that only comes around on special, productive mornings. And, maybe as a result of the night’s misadventures, or maybe because of a dream I’d had, I was suddenly fixated on the idea of buying a gun. So I got dressed and marched myself down to the closest gun shop.

  I knew very little, mostly terminology I’d overheard my dad using. But the moment I saw that beautiful Remington 870 decommissioned police shotgun, we were inseparable.

  Over eighteen? Check. Never convicted of a felony or involuntarily committed to a mental institution? They ran a state background check that came back five minutes later and, obviously, was clean. Still, I was kind of disturbed by how quickly we got to ‘swipe your debit card and input your PIN’.

  I was still new to having ‘spending money’, so I didn’t bat an eye at the price. Some people tell this kind of story about adopting a pet, but where they mention searching for just the right collar, I point up at a shelf and ask, “Do you guys sell ammo in half-boxes, or do I have to buy the whole thing?”

  While I was there, I signed up for a hunting license. It seemed like the natural thing to do. If I’d been there to buy a fishing rod, I’d have gotten a fishing license. The man behind the counter suggested a firing range at which the proprietor would be happy to give me a crash course in gun safety. He also recommended a hunting ground way out of town that rented deer stands by the morning or afternoon.

  I called Ron to find out if she’d be interested in shooting my new gun and going hunting, but she begged off. In contrast to my cheerful energy, she was absolutely exhausted and wanted to sleep in. However, as thanks for my assistance the previous evening, she told me to stop by for a present.

  I put in some time at the range, mostly practicing switching the safety on and off and loading and unloading. That was when I began developing good mental habits like always being aware of how many rounds were loaded, and of where the barrel was pointed. I fired only a few rounds, but was amazed by the kickback and noise my new pet could produce.

  I called the hunting grounds from the parking lot and reserved a deer stand for the afternoon; they apparently had more stands than they knew what to do with. Then I stopped in at the grocery store and loaded up on about $30 in snacks and drinks.

  Finally, I pulled up to Ron’s apartment building and ran upstairs. She met me on the porch and handed me a little cloth pouch. “You deserve a few hours to just be ‘you’,” she murmured.

  Trying not to look at her black eye, I pulled open the drawstring and found a glass pipe, a lighter, and a nugget of weed. “Um. I’ve never smoked alone before, only with you.”

  She leaned against the railing and stared into the middle distance. “Remember when we were kids, and I helped you fit in? Sometimes I feel like I took something from you. Like, you had this ‘lone poet’ thing going.”

  “I hate poetry.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I really don’t.”

  She shook her head a little, hugged me, and went back inside.

  About twenty minutes out of town, I realized that my trip to a deer hunting ground might involve shooting deer. Of course, I’d be alone, so nobody would call me a ‘princess’ if I didn’t. And anyway, maybe I would shoot a deer. Maybe I was a born hunter.

  I reached the hunting grounds just before lunch; the entrance was a high gate with a little guard station. There was a good ol’ boy inside, reading a magazine; he took my ID and debit card and waved me through with quick directions to my reserved deer stand.

  It took about twenty minutes of driving over increasingly bumpy dirt road, past little side-tracks that twisted off into the woods. But finally, I saw a signpost stenciled with the number on my ticket, so I pulled off to the side of the road. No way my car would make it down the hunting track; I would have to walk. I closed up the car and set off down the overgrown ditch they tried to call a side track, grocery bags of snacks in one hand and my new gun in the other.

  I rounded a turn in the track and the deer stand loomed ahead. It was roughly three stories tall, a roofed box on stilts with a ladder going up the side. I had to make two trips up — one with the gun, another with the bags.

  After a minute or two of settling in and getting everything just-so, I sat with my legs dangling over the ladder and looked out over what would be my domain for the next several hours. To my left was an open field; in the distance, I could see a brown speck against the edge of the far woods, another deer stand. To my right was the forest through which I had walked. I was near the top of the trees but couldn’t see far through their branches. It was the last warm day of November, crisp and dry.

  Since I wanted to be sober by the time I drove home, I lit up first-thing. It was so strange to smoke alone, without Ron lecturing about fiction tropes or snuggling up against me during the sad bits of whatever we were watching. I turned half a bowl into ash and then lay down on my back, my arm for a pillow, and stared out over the field.

  And the afternoon just . . . went on.

  I was neve
r bored for a single fraction of a second. In fact, my mind was in a very productive mood, pulling out stuffed drawers and emptying them across the floor of the deer stand, sorting, forming neat piles, drawing connections, musing.

  I realized that Ron was right. And to arrive at the point of this story, I have to tell you another.

  My parents were boring-nice (“All happy families are the same . . .”). My earliest memories are of dirt-biking, riding horses, and reading under shade trees in pastures. So when my dad moved us to Gothic and I started my first year of middle school, I got lost searching for that peaceful quiet. I was too distracted by my own anxiety to try making friends, and I hadn’t yet decided if I wanted to learn how. So I kept to myself, hanging around in the less-traveled areas of the school grounds.

  Ron, despite being relatively popular and busy with a huge circle of friends, noticed me, sought me out in my secluded places, and gently asked if I’d like to be brought into the fold. And I allowed it, though only as far as I was comfortable. Thanks to that tender help over months, I started spring break with actual friends and parties to attend. More than that, I was excited to be around people — something I had never experienced before and have since lost interest in.

  The truth is, I had a weird friend-crush on Ron those first few months, maybe because I’d been received so thoughtfully. So one afternoon, we went fishing in a brook that runs through the south side of the city, between suburb neighborhoods near the school. The entire walk there, Ron’s borrowed rod cast a long shadow, and I fantasized about kissing. After all, friendship was something from TV, and I’d found it. What about being someone’s girlfriend?

  We’d been sitting in the shade for several minutes, staring at the red-and-white bobber on the surface of the water. I turned to Ron and said, “You know, I really admire how you fit in so well. I’ll never understand it, but I’m jealous. I think I’d be a better person if I were more like you.”

  That was too much. Ron started crying. I started to panic.

  So Ron told me The Secret.

  The truth, as I regularly remind myself, is that I never once thought less of Ron for what I learned that day. I was shocked, and felt stupid, and my crush instantly disappeared — but my sympathy for this colorful human being only deepened.

  I swore on the spot to be supportive, and I carried through. Even when school resumed in the fall and everyone found out, even when the majority of the student body only mouthed words of encouragement, I was the one behind Ron’s shoulder — the quiet, intimidating country bumpkin whom some people thought might shoot up the school. And I still think I protected her from the worst of it, even if only with my presence.

  By the time high school began and we were in a new student body, Ron had blended back in, and at the time I thought she was blooming. I don’t know what went wrong at that point; maybe her new-found confidence was a sham. She started hanging out with the crowd who knew where the juvenile detention center was, who were one more suspension away from being shipped to military school, who got called out of class because their parents were drunk in the parking lot.

  I was so focused on what Ron became, and what she began to put herself through, that until that afternoon in the deer stand, I forgot to pay attention to who I was.

  It’s a powerful thing, to lie down in the quiet of nature with a gun across your lap, mind winched open to the cool breeze, and . . . I’ve never told anyone about this, so I’m not practiced with putting it into words, but the phrase that comes up first is ‘ . . . and be a person you admire’. I didn’t feel shy, or easily overwhelmed; I felt cool, rational, stable, unimpressed by horror. I felt ready.

  I come awake on that balcony and my shoulder is healed. I don’t know how much time has passed. It’s still night. Slowly, feeling every aching joint, I sit up. The yard below is empty, though the ladder has been knocked over. I stare and stare at the wall beside the dumpster, but there’s no shimmer. The portal is gone.

  I climb back down the ladder and, shotgun in hands, walk home.

  I come awake in bed with no covers, and I’m burning hot, and I’m so dizzy. I curl into a ball and moan softly. I think I might vomit.

  I push myself out of bed and crawl through the bathroom door. The walls tip and shudder and start to spin around me. My mind is screaming through a million possibilities — a virus? have I eaten? the needles? after-effect of the attack? poison? the roar of a giraffe nearby while I slept?

  I get my head over the lip of the tub just in time. I haven’t eaten, but my body scrapes the bottom and comes up with stomach acid.

  I can’t stop.

  The spinning slows and my shuddering eases.

  Another wave of nausea rushes over me. I retch again.

  I cry out wordlessly, creating as pure a sound of distress as I can, but I’m alone in the apartment. My head pounds between breaths. I feel like I’m drowning.

  At last, hands shaking, I wrench on the faucet until cold water is pouring into the bathtub. With cupped hands, I take great, chest-freezing gulps, trying to wash away the burning in my throat. Retch, gulp, small retch, gulp, gulp.

  I lean my head against the wall and close my eyes to rest.

  I blink awake on the bathroom floor. It’s dark.

  Slowly, I sit up. The nausea is gone, and the walls look still and stable. Already I wonder if my sickness was a dream — and if not, how long it’s been. I glance in the bathtub and see nothing, but my vomit might have already gone down the drain. I must have shut the faucet at some point, though I don’t remember.

  It’s dawn. I stand at my living room windows and stare out over my dead neighborhood. I must be the only one left. Somewhere inside me, I’m screaming.

  I still have electricity and running water, but internet and cell reception are gone. For all I know, the world beyond my neighborhood has been replaced with white fog. For all I know, I’m the last human left.

  Zzzsszzsszzz behind my ear. I shriek and spin around—

  Nothing but my living room.

  Standing in front of my closet mirror — having smashed the one in the bathroom — I carefully strip off my blood-soaked shirt. My left shoulder is a mass of flesh-colored needles. I notice that the wound on my wrist has faded to a pockmark. The new cells seem to paint themselves in with broad strokes and then gradually rearrange themselves into an attractive form. My shoulder should look like normal within a few days.

  I wonder what Tedrin’s head looked like after he put a bullet through it, and how long it took to heal into the shape we see now.

  The last human left.

  I check my housekeeping to-do list, on which I’m several days behind despite having no job. Laundry. I dump my blood-stained clothes into the trash, not even bothering to bag them up anymore. Then I haul my mostly-full hamper to the washing machine and begin sorting.

  With hands occupied, my mind begins to whirl, and it upsets me. I sit on the cold linoleum floor of my kitchen, separating whites from coloreds, weeping silently.

  Post-traumatic stress disorder. Must be. Night terrors, vivid flashbacks, uncontrollable emotional outbursts — I’ve been traumatized. I need to find some coping mechanisms, that’s all.

  That’s all.

  I suck in a sharp breath. I’ve been staring at my left wrist for several minutes, running my eyes over the flesh-colored needles.

  Slowly, I rise to my feet and move to the silverware drawer. My right hand, my human hand, draws forth the largest blade I own — a high-quality butcher knife my father bought me as a moving-out present. “This will cut through anything,” he bragged. “It had better, anyway, for how much extra it cost.”

  I place the edge against my wrist, just above the pockmark.

  I stand that way for several minutes, staring down, building myself up.

  It’s pointless, I realize. My shoulder is needles, too. I raise my left arm and hold the edge of the blade to my armpit, tracing my eyes over the musculature, planning out how I will carve inward and then up
ward, butcher the entire structure away, leaving only human flesh.

  My mouth is moving but no sound is coming out. There are still tears in my eyes.

  I don’t want to be this way.

  I set the knife down hard on the countertop and back away from it. My gaze swings up to the ceiling, up up up up up

  The back of my head hits the floor and I gasp hard. I’m fighting for breath.

  I don’t want this. I want to go back to how I was. I would rather have a broken neck and a gaping wound in my shoulder than endure one more second of these thorns inside me. I want medicine, I want a cure, I want to amputate, I want to d—

  My mouth screams as hard as it can, one long wail of denial. My back arches, and I squeeze my eyes shut, and I feel my jaw hinges straining.

  Slowly, painfully, I come down. I find myself curled up against the washing machine, my lap full of dirty laundry. I clutch it to myself, squeeze it hard against my chest, desperate for anything soft and safe and mine. The shirt on top is soaked from my crying.

  Say it. Bring it into the open.

  I want to d— No, not quite right. Bring it out, but be specific.

  I want to . . . to be able . . . to decide? no, control, the . . . circumstances? . . . of my death.

  My breath shudders in and out of my lungs, but that rabbit-terror is going down.

  What frightened me to my core the previous night wasn’t the ex attack, the wound it gave me, the blood I lost, the pain I endured. It was the knowledge that if it had kept on mindlessly attacking me, and if more of its friends had shown up to overpower me, I would have been trapped, at their mercy, forever. Not for the rest of a delicate human life — anywhere from ten minutes to eighty years — but forever—

  I could be crushed under a collapsing building, unable to move, injuries ever-healing. I could sink to the bottom of the ocean. I could survive through the destruction of civilization, the reddening of the sun, and the heat death of the universe.