—I find myself in Dr. Shapiro’s office. She’s staring down at an MRI scan of somebody’s chest. The monochrome bones look strange, distorted.
“There’s definitely a mass behind your ribs and spine. It’s growing fast, but I can’t definitely say it’s cancer.”
I’m dizzy with terror. How did I get here? What mass? How long have I had a mass?
“What should we do?” I stammer.
She looks up at me with eyes as solidly black as Betty’s. “I think we should wait and see.”
I back away, turn, push through her office door—
—and I’m back in a rented room. But not the downtown dive with the dusty chandelier. It’s a suburban motel someplace. Have I been here before?
The green tarp on the king-sized bed is covered in blood and bits of skull. There’s a body wrapped in black trash bags, stuffed between the bed and the writing desk. Did I do that? What have I done?
Oh, God, please make this stop. I have to lean against the wall to keep myself from tumbling backward.
Betty comes out of the bathroom, dressed in a spattered silk negligee. I think it used to be white. There’s gore in her wig. Her eyes go wide.
“I told you not to come here!” She grabs me by my arm, surprising me with her strength. In the distance, I can hear sirens. “They’ll be here any minute—get away from here, fast as you can!”
She presses a set of rental car keys into my palm, hauls me to the door and pushes me out into the hallway—
—and I’m stepping into the elevator at work.
Handsome blond Devin is in there. A look of surprised fear crosses his face, and I know the very sight of me repels him. His hand goes to his jeans pocket. I see the outline of something that’s probably a canister of pepper spray. It’s too small to be a taser.
But then he pauses, smiles at me. “Hey, you going up to that training class?”
I nod mechanically, and try to say, “Sure,” but my lungs spasm and suddenly I’m doubled over, coughing into my hands. When did simply breathing start hurting this much?
“You okay?” Devin asks.
I try to nod, but there’s bright blood on my palms. A long-forgotten Bible verse surfaces in the swamp of my memory: Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.
I look up and see my reflection in the chromed elevator walls—my face is gaunt, but my body is grotesquely swollen. I’ve turned into some kind of hunchback. How long have I had the mass?
Instead of the pepper spray, Devin’s pulled his cell phone out. I can smell his mind. He’s torn between wanting to run away and wanting to help. “Should I call someone? Should I call 911?”
The elevator is filled with the scent of him. Despite my pain and sickness, the Want returns with a vengeance. Adrenaline rises along with my blood pressure. My tongue is twitching, and something in my back, too. I can feel it tearing my ribs away from my spine. It hurts more than I can remember anything ever hurting. Maybe childbirth would be like this.
Betty. I need Betty. How long has it been since I’ve seen her? Oh God.
“What can I do?” Devin touches my shoulder.
And the feel of his hand against my bony flesh is far too much for me to bear.
I rise up under him, grab him by the sides of his head, kissing him. My tongue goes straight down his throat, choking him. He hits me, trying to shake me off, but as strong as he is, my Want is stronger.
When he’s unconscious, I let him fall and hit the emergency stop button. The Want has me wrapped tightly in its ardor, burning away all my human qualms. The alarm is an annoyance, and I know I don’t have as much time as I want. Still. As I lift his left eyelid, I take a moment to admire his perfect bluebonnet iris.
And then I plunge my tongue into his eye. The ball squirts off to the side as my organ drills deeper, the tiny mouths rasping through the thin socket bone into his sweet frontal lobe. After the first wash of cerebral fluid I’m into the creamy white meat of him, and—
—Oh, God. This is more beautiful than I imagined.
I’m devouring his will. Devouring his memories. Living him, through and through. His first taste of wine. His first taste of a woman. The first time he stood onstage. He’s at the prime of his life, and oh, it’s been a wonderful life, and I am memorizing every second of it as I swallow down the contents of his lovely skull.
When he’s empty, I rise from his shell and feel my new wings break free from the cage of my back. As I spread them wide in the elevator, I realize I can hear the old gods whispering to me from their thrones in the dark spaces between the stars.
I smile at myself in the distorted chrome walls. Everything is clear to me now. I have been chosen. I have a purpose. Through the virus, the old gods tested me, and deemed me worthy of this holiest of duties. There are others like me; I can hear them gathering in the caves outside the city. Some died, yes, like the ragged man, but my Becoming is almost complete. Nothing as simple as a bullet will stop me then.
The Earth is ripe, human civilization at its peak. I and the other archivists will preserve the memories of the best and brightest as we devour them. We will use the blood of this world to write dark, beautiful poetry across the walls of the universe.
For the first time in my life, I don’t need faith. I know what I am supposed to do in every atom in every cell of my body. I will record thousands of souls before my masters allow me to join them in the star-shadows, and I will love every moment of my mission.
I can hear the SWAT team rush into the foyer three stories below. Angry ants. I can hear Betty and the others calling to me from the hollow hills. Smiling, I open the hatch in the top of the elevator and prepare to fly.
TIME TRAVEL
Theresa Gaffney
Some days you expect
to last longer than others;
I mean this in two ways. First:
you expect the hours to stroll
like honey down the bottle, like
you and her, hand in hand in
the park, meandering into afternoon
You want to bask in bright laughter,
watch the sun set but never go down.
This never works. She’s the type it hurts
to smile too much.
The second way I mean this:
when you expect not to cry at your desk
but you well up, grey and wet, in your cubicle
kick holes into boxes in the closet before lunch
crawl under the table to count the almonds
and their solar systems of almond dust. Leave
early and by the time you arrive home,
your layers are peeled back, rotten.
WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPY
J.A.W. McCarthy
I DIDN’T BELIEVE my sister until I watched her cough up our mother into the bathroom sink. There, surrounded by pale pink tile, she hovered over the basin as a pearlescent form, bruise-grey and burst-veined like a diseased organ, slithered from her mouth. No bigger than my fist, it shuddered in the sink before bursting open and releasing what looked like a puff of smoke that swirled around our heads then raced out the open window. After wiping the oily bile from her mouth, my sister said she felt much better.
Before our mother died, June had been the optimistic one. When Mother called me a whore for wanting to attend a school dance, June told me she hoped I got kissed that night so I could tell her what it was like. When Mother locked her in the broom closet for laughing during church television, June said she was relieved because she would rather be reading the back of the Clorox bottle. When our mother pinned her across her lap and spanked her at age sixteen for stealing her cigarettes, June never cried as I whispered that I was sorry. June was the first to call our wounds battle scars. Throughout our childhood she came up with
the most outrageous, elaborate plans to murder our mother, describing iced-over porch steps and unstable shelves laden with dog shit and raccoon carcasses (“The shelf would knock her out and then she would smother in the dog shit, Edie. The raccoons are just there because she hates them.”) until I was blind and doubled-over from laughter. Even under our mother’s judgmental eye, June found joy in what we could one day have.
June had just finished high school when our mother took a tumble down the stairs. In her will she left us the house and the burden of planning a funeral that no one would attend. We didn’t care, though; we lounged around the house in our new party dresses, singing along with Stevie Nicks on the radio and gorging ourselves on cinnamon coffee cake and vanilla fudge during the body-less wake we had so carefully arranged. We stayed up all night watching movies where people kissed and took off their clothes and sometimes got murdered by madmen in the woods. We dug up our records from the backyard and played them so loud that the windows rattled. For the first time June talked about college and maybe becoming an architect or a graphic designer or a veterinarian. It wasn’t until we saw our mother lowered into the ground that June started to change.
“It’s a waste of money,” she said one day after I found the college brochures in the garbage. “No point in squandering what little we have on something so prideful.”
She started complaining about how her clothes touched her body and said we could have nicer things if I got a better job than bakery cashier. She stopped listening to our records and took up humming instead, these strange, strangled dirges that I had at first mistaken for grumbling under her breath. Often, I would awaken to find her sitting at the kitchen table smoking our mother’s Virginia Slims, the ashtray already overflowing as if she’d been up since before dawn. When I stayed out late on the weekends, she waited at the window for me, telling me I should be charging if I was going to spread my legs all over town.
At first I thought June was having a delayed reaction to Mother’s death, perhaps some lingering guilt from our celebration. Her eyes weighed on me every moment I was in that house and her voice followed me out. I yelled, I shook her hard, I begged her to be my little sister again. I took extra shifts at the bakery even though it hurt to be there. I started dating a man who encouraged me to move to the city with him.
One night, in a rare moment of clarity, June came to my bed in tears, sweat rolling from her hair line and beading along her collarbones. The heat coming off her was so intense that I thought our palms would sear together when she grasped my hand. This was when she first said it.
“Mother’s in me, Edie. I see her sometimes when I look in the mirror. She’s suffocating me. I can feel her in my chest. I can’t breathe.”
This is why, after I finally believed her, after I saw her cough up our mother into the bathroom sink, that I try to stay out of her lungs, even though it really is the best place to be.
***
I died six months after moving to the city, though I wasn’t left for dead in an alley with my panties around my ankles as Mother had predicted. It was after the funeral that I slipped in through June’s left nostril, when the casket was being lowered into the ground and I realized I didn’t want to go down with it. Outside of my body I was a rush of air, a ghost without a form blindly searching for soft walls to contain me. My sister June was a magnet, all velvet and steam and the irresistible comfort of familiarity. I remember wondering if our mother had felt the same when she chose June, when she gladly let June pull her in.
It wasn’t the lure of getting to live again inside a human body that gets to taste and touch and dance and sing. The truth is, I had been abruptly expelled into the stinging cold, and I needed warmth again, like when you first step out of a bath. I knew what our mother had done to June, and I didn’t want to be that thing that wormed its way through my sister’s heart and lungs, smothering and overtaking until June herself was nothing more than a tiny knot in the back of her own mind. Racing around in my sister’s throat, I whispered apologies and promised that we could coexist.
Now I mostly alternate between her ear, her eyes, her right hand, and her belly. Curled in the cool tunnel of her ear I can talk to her and know that she understands me. I slide down into her right hand whenever she touches bathwater or kitten fur. When she visits the bakery where I used to work, I linger in her eyes so I can watch Louisa’s round hips sway and dip as she bends to take the perfect cupcake from the front of the case. For just a moment I’m back in June’s ear as Louisa says she’s sorry about Edie—about me—and I hope she means more than my death. Later, at home, I pool in June’s belly so I can remember what it felt like to lay my head there and be comforted by the gurgling of her stomach like we used to do as children.
We’ve been listening to T. Rex and The Pretenders and Leonard Cohen, indulging in sporadic jumping and slow glides around the living room like right after Mother died. I wrap myself around June’s tongue whenever she licks the salt off the French fries from our favorite diner in town. She’s started wearing my old clothes, taking in the waist a touch and shortening hems, slipping into the lacy things I kept well-hidden when our mother was alive. She preens and poses in front of the mirror in our room, making me gasp when she rips a skirt’s seam all the way up her thigh. I can see myself in her reflection, a softly diffused form roughly in the shape I used to hold, crackling and smoking like live flames along the lines of my sister’s body. I know she sees me too: she smiles and says, “Your favorite, Edie” as she steps into my green silk dress.
There’s lipstick and the tiny gold hoops I used to keep in an envelope under my mattress, then the heels from my apartment in the city. She dabs perfume in the places I thought only I knew: the back of her neck, between her breasts, along her thighs where her stockings clutch her skin. I don’t have to ask; I know where she is going because I was in her right hand when she dialed my husband.
***
I can tell that he misses me: boxes of half-eaten pizzas litter every surface of the living room; every ashtray is overflowing, my lipstick-coated butts still lining the bottom of each dish; my purse is still where I left it on the kitchen counter; my plants are all dead; and he looks like shit. He’s still buttoning his shirt when he opens the front door, and I can feel my sister’s disappointment as she peers over his shoulder to see that he hasn’t bothered to clean up for her.
“You look good, Adam,” she says, stepping inside.
He’s too dampened from the whiskey and last night’s pills to be taken aback. I know June isn’t being sarcastic, though. My husband was always sexiest to me when he was wearing three days of stubble and begging for a haircut, and the smell of stale cigarettes and congealed cheese isn’t enough to cool the heat I feel spreading through June’s lower belly and down her thighs. She makes him coffee and tells him to eat the cake she brought, all the while making flustered little noises about how thin he’s gotten and how he’s got to start taking care of himself and how Edie wouldn’t want to see you like this, Adam. She sits too close to him on the couch, and I race to her nose so I can smell him, so I can burrow through the musk of dried sweat and three-day-old soap and the salt still on his skin from the nights when the whiskey ran out.
“I haven’t finished boxing up her stuff yet, but I can do it now,” he offers, tensing as he starts to rise.
I rush into June’s hand and guide it over his, relishing the familiar roughness of his knuckles, his once constant restless energy tame under what’s left of me, so grateful to my sister for letting me linger here. “There’s no rush. I really just wanted to see how you’re doing,” June says.
“Shitty, obviously,” Adam chuckles, taking back his hand and pushing it through his dark, grease-clumped hair.
It was always easy for me. From the first time I saw him sitting alone in the far corner of the pub, hunched over a tattered paperback and losing his place every time he took a drink, I knew I wanted him, and I made sure he wanted me too. I acted like I didn’t enjoy being pu
shed up against the backs of couches and bathroom stalls, like I was embarrassed by his hand up my skirt under restaurant tables and when our dinner party hosts left the room, but he knew the thrill it gave me and we both loved the game. We kept our hands and our minds busy, and he didn’t ever have to swear that he wasn’t thinking of anyone else when he was with me. Now I see the spark of recognition in my husband’s eyes as June flips her skirt above her knee and guides his hand there. I feel the moisture transfer from his skin to hers, her pulse quickening with his, both their chests seizing in a held breath. I know that look. It’s easy for my sister too.
I can’t stay out of her lungs. They’re exactly where I want to be, riding every quick and heavy breath as she unzips his jeans and slips her hand inside. I’m in her fingers again as she pulls her black lace panties off and presses them into his fist. On my sister’s tongue I taste the flesh I never thought I’d know again. I roll inside her chest and slide down her throat and am propelled throughout her body by her racing heart, touching on fingers, filling her lips, alighting for just a moment in her ear. As she straddles him, I spread myself along her thighs, pouring back into her chest at the end so that I can feel his heart speed against hers.
After, while Adam is zipping up and June is smoothing my green silk dress over her knees, a darkness unfurls inside her head, a thick choking haze like city smog that makes it difficult to see through her eyes. She picks up her panties from where they have fallen between the couch cushions and regards them as if they are the stray cats our mother used to shoo away with rocks from the yard. When she next speaks, Adam can barely look at her.
“I know all about it,” June says, rising to her feet, towering over my husband as he sits splayed on the brown leather. I am still flushed and pleasantly electric along her limbs, but her words pinch and constrict me. “I know what you did with her and you know it’s why she’s dead,” she continues, the haze between us thickening. “You took my Edie away.”
Adam picks up one of the many beer cans from the coffee table, shakes it, then polishes off its stale contents in one sloppy gulp. “You can show yourself out,” he says.