My feet canvassed the ground as I felt myself lean into the shadows. This was the place outside town, outside discernable reason. Down the main drag, past the newer buildings and away from the bars, past empty parking lots and big industrial apartments constructed without thinking of the pattern of the wind, I walked, the highrises staring at me with glassy eyes.
I crossed the bridge over the dark tail of water. Here there was a shift. Trees that held the stars or the light polluted ghosts of them protected the neighborhoods from the dark visions of nameless skies.
Hannah isn’t doing well, isn’t leaving our dorm tonight on her usual rampages through bars, passing out at one of her more affluent friend’s sorority houses. No, to my detriment she’s bundled up in the sheets, shrined by her blankets, nestled in her comforter. I want her gone.
I move along the shrouded streets and want to fall apart; approach the other side of the river and make a snap decision. The cold Halloween breeze chews at me a little bit, but the colder water soaks through my clothes as I jump off the side of the bluff. I feel a sense of dread as I’m dragged under the surface before coming back to it. Then I pull myself onto the bank and start to cry.
***
Ms. Marlene first told me the truth, when I sat on the kitchen bar and watched her cook, spoon mustard and honey over salmon and set it at 400 before working on the pastelillos.
“Guilt will turn you,” she said, as a push to make me go to confession, a ditch-deal effort to get me to cling to Catholic heritage.
Her voice, inflected with a thick Cuban accent, held the fear of God. I knew it well because I'd once felt the need to reiterate my beliefs, keep them clean and cold in the refrigerator of my mind.
Even still, she was nowhere near the eccentricity of her husband. I remember going on car rides with them and every time we passed a dead animal, him making the sign of the cross or saying a prayer, which I suppose made sense considering he was a third degree Franciscan and a truck driver.
***
I wish there was a word that I could use to explain how the mold inside me first started growing, how the feeling of guilt first permeated me so deeply.
It was something that grew in short increments, like plastic in the bloodstream or the length of forgiveness. It was black or white, my mom would say, but I think it’s a series of choices, ideas that flow together and then are resolved, like teasing your knotted tangly hair through the thin nubs of a hairbrush. I was never able to forgive myself for anything, though. I was always halfway, the dark threatening to take me but never advancing.
I was only ever promises I made to myself, promises that I would move past the ugliness of my soul.
I saw her on the way back from church. I went to church, despite my better judgment, maybe because I wanted some sense of familiarity against the cold college landscape. Her hair was the color of the pavement, her eyes the color of cherry coke. There was nothing inherently overwhelming about her, nothing unusually beautiful or rare. There was just the way her smile lit up the air that she breathed, how she took in the world like an albatross. She was a constellation of things, all good and beautiful and bright, and for a second, I imagined her branded into the stars.
I thought she could save me.
She reminded me of Lucia and the girls on the playground. After mass in the morning, it was a rare and tranquil feeling to go to the swing set, our bellies still hungry because the flesh and blood of Christ was not nearly enough. We could still partake of the land and swallow the sky, however. And at night I’d come back home, the guilt of what I was becoming festering like an open wound.
I felt the burning, the burning that crawled inside me when I would think about self-pleasure, feelings that were starting to grow, everything I wanted that was wrong to take. I burned in self-hatred as I examined the way Lucia’s hair fell over her shoulder, her gentle jawline.
But that has been a long time past; Lucia is now in the military clearing ammunition, and you are still yourself, your awful, terrifying self.
***
Afternoons that are tinged with sadness, cover your hands with clay and ink. Nights which chase the tail of the morning and mornings that are the flavor of vending machine coffee and red bull. Mornings that carry the promise of new things but only ever really feel like a bad idea. But that’s only the present, and I’m only huddling by a crackling creek, the feeling of exhaustion in my teeth.
But when I was younger the fervor of the day was never lost to me, even if I had stayed up till two or three or some other awful evil time. I used to get up covered in a black cloud. I would confess my sins, lay them out and let them vanish like the morning mist that sometimes chokes the valleys and the troughs which pervade the farmer’s fields and the liminal spaces near creeks. Sometimes you see animal shapes.
Father Henry was starting to get particularly annoying. I didn’t like him in the beginning, but I pretended to; he was overweight, tall, intimidating, late thirties. When he laughed it felt like the room shook. He wasn't the most comfortable man to confess my sins to in the place of God.
I looked at him not like the placeholder of divinity but as an obstacle that I had to overcome to reach some heavenly resolution. I'm ashamed to say now that I was quite judgmental. He was just a man, and I thought he was a glaive, a blade about to fall.
The worst confession I ever told was on the St. Frances de Sailles youth Confirmation retreat in an empty cabin. I told Father Henry about the flesh-thoughts that racked my child-mind. And then I panicked knowing how evil, deplorable I was. I feigned being okay and left, my emotions draining me like a vampire. I felt something overcome me, something deep and evil which teared at me and chewed like I was a piece of paper shoved into the printer wrong.
It started like this:
Me, not ready to confront myself, self-loathing and anger in my heart: “Forgive me father for I have sinned.”
Father Henry, his voice like the rolling thunderclouds which assault the hills and shake the earth: “How long has it been since your last confession?”
Me, my voice like a wounded doe: “It has been six months since I have sinned.” Then I paused, gathering myself. Father Henry was waiting, staringat me, the familiar scar by his eye reflecting the light. He always made it into a joke when people asked about it. He told me a dog did it, sank it’s teeth into the side of his face and tore. He told Ms. Darlene it was done by his brother in an accident with a jackknife.
My easy sins were all lined up in a neat little row. “I lied to people I cared about, and I deeply regret it. I cheated on a math test, wrote the answers on my desk before the class started.” I swallowed, too afraid to talk to him about my Real Sins.
“I was impure with myself.”
That retreat was a brooding source of my anxiety, confirming my polarization with the St. Frances youth group. It wasn’t my own fault that I had been spurned; the kids were mainly Hispanic, Mexican background and the white fleshiness of my body was a warning sign. I hated myself for looking like a flaccid pale ghost as much as I hated the sound of my voice or the way clothes fit my body.
I was supposed to like Juan. He could make the girls laugh and settled into the room like a cat curls up in a soft blanket at the end of the day. He was a member of the Knights of Columbus, reeked with an untouchable piousness. His teeth were white, brighter than the eggshell wallpaper. He would look at me sometimes. I would look at him but not with the same eyes.
But I would look at Alma.
Alma, with her loose raven hair and eyes that burned like fire. Alma, who drank a pitcher of holy water by accident, would tell raunchy jokes after the youth group leaders slept. Maybe I could sense her gentleness, the goodness of whatever fabric made her, something not from the fabric of lace and church veils but of spider silk.
Oh my God, I wanted her. And I kept this in. I kept this truth hidden in my soul even as I consummated myself with the church by taking communion, taking the flesh and blood of Christ in sin, trespassed the holy ritual and felt the wafer, as delicate as the fresh-fallen snow but as substantial as skin dissolve in the back of my throat.
I swallowed and I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.
There is a saint, her name lost to me, but Darlene, Marlene’s daughter and the youth group leader, would bring it up far too often for me not to think about.
The saint was a seer, someone who could visually understand the exact weight of sin a person held within their soul. And when she observed a sinner, a person who claimed contriteness of spirit but had not cleared the dry rot from their heart, she saw their body putrefy, corrupt as they took communion.
The cruelty of that; the very Flesh, the Body, the Blood of the Lord, spilled so that we may have eternal life, made sour. I wonder if this corruption is by design. I wonder if this is what a truly merciful god could want, the medium that was supposed to bring eternal life could also bring eternal damnation.
The night I took communion in sin I reeked of guilt. I hid under my sheets, spooning myself and shifting, trying not to think of the rows of the other girls, trying not to disturb their slumber. I hid in my bed and pretended that I enjoyed feeling smothered by my sheets when it broke through my skin.
I don’t know what happened that night, I couldn’t tell you.
All I could tell you was that when I woke up, the hair under my neck was coated in dried blood, my body decisively not in bed, stretched out by the lake in the winking spring dawn. I realized that everything was not at all well. I could feel it in my feet.
***
Back flash forward; back to here, the present. Or at least right after I met Ash, or saw her, or followed her for a short bit down the street, obeying something decisively unwell.
When I was growing up I wasn’t worried about the hair on my legs, the unkempt state of my matted hair, or the wounds up and down my body from where the mosquitos would feast and I would shamelessly scratch.
My mother was unbothered. It was one of my peers who alerted me that I was one of the gross ones, that no matter how I felt or how comfortable I was, unless I made myself palatable, I was still a stranger to the outside world and everything I held dear.
“My sister has something she needs to tell you that she told me to tell you,” Dina had said.
I looked at her. “What?” This conversation was obviously an intervention.
Dina frowned. “It’s about your legs. They’re hairy.” The shock hit my twelve year old body like a sheet of ice.
She was afraid for me, knew before me the ways in which a woman is perceived, the sort of derogatory stares and insults that came from being unkempt. She knew the Snares of the Devil and the Work of Human Hands instinctively, without having the words poured into her brain.
It was a lesson hard for me to learn, that Eve would bear the fall for the Garden of Paradise. Watching Ash took me back to the feeling I had before I knew about any sort of human origin story.
In any case I felt the overwhelming need to talk to her. I dropped my afternoon plans of sitting in the sun and followed her, kept at a distance back but watched her, only followed her for a little bit before I fell back and felt the late summer devour me in rays of light.
That could have been the last time I ever saw her, but it wasn’t.
***
I washed myself that dawn in the lake, forced my disgusting body into the putrid water and scrubbed, praying that the open wound was not mine and that I hadn’t invited some sort of parasite into myself, some flesh-eating monster that would soon make itself present. I thought about the open wound between my legs.
I think about that time several years back a girl got into a zipline accident, broke herself, and washed herself with hungry flesh-eating bacteria water. As a reward for her proactiveness they had to amputate her diseased leg. Guilt is inescapable, and whether she had washed her leg with creek water or she hadn’t, the paramedics were still going to measure her actions as they loaded her strawberry body into the ambulance. Guilt permeates every route.
I contemplated not leaving the lake that day. I thought about letting myself drown and dramatically being found, and the women at church would cry because of my reverence. But I dragged myself out of the warm murky water and snuck back into the cabin I shared with Marisela and Madison and Ayla, shuffling out of my gross pajamas before being the first one awake and the first one in the shower that day. I thanked God in a desperate sort of futility, a last plea effort to garner his favor and deliver me from the snares of the devil.
But he didn’t answer, and I was forced to imagine that he hadn’t forgiven me for last night.
Later that day, Darlene would talk about having to move dead squirrels from the Walk of Passion. And just like her father, she must have made the sign of the cross as she moved them off the trail, further into the Appalachian woods. I think she thought about monsters and their feeding habits, how she treads over the demons embedded in the disgusting fallen leaves who feed on the depraved and those who fall into sin.
Then later she would check the monstrance with the consecrated Eucharist, the blessed host, only to find it missing. A certain type of knot would form in her gut as she realized that overnight, the Flesh, the Body, the Soul, the Divinity, had vanished.
***
There was something about leaving my town which weighed heavy but familiar. It reminded me of the past three times we’d moved, although this time I was moving and my family stood still. My world was flaking, pulling apart. I sensed change and began to resist it, holding onto my summer youth like it still existed. I was terrified of the future but plunged my teeth into it without hesitance, a bitterness with every bite of the fruit that I took.
The universe had set me loose and I was floating in space.
I had decided to study art because I was terrified of the expanse, my own insignificance and have a burning desire to be known and I thought it silly but not silly enough not to ignore.
I had been sheltered, spared from the snares of the devil and then set forth into the world. I would go to Catholic Mass every Sunday per my mother’s insistence and perform the rites I always had. Things rolled by like normal. Things rolled by like a strange blur; My roommate was nice but also didn’t seem invested in any kind of friendship, at least not with me. Trying to appease her faded into indifference and I would try not to be around Hannah or tell her the least about my life.
To every piece of art you give your time, your physicality, your soul. You light a fire which permeates into your heart and comes out through your fingers and burns everything you touch and blurs the lines between what is real and divine.
Divinity comes at the cost of frustration, the feeling of insufficiency. Penance.
“Why do you think this is happening to you?” my professor said, as I fucked up putting the aquatint gun onto the spray nozzle; it had flown off in such a way that it had managed to add a layer of the blue solution to the ceiling, unnoticed. Alien Jugular, I think but do not say.
“Do you think it’s because you’re an awful, terrible person?” He said this seriously and then his face twisted into a grin. He was joking, of course, in the boyish way that dads get away with, the cruelty behind their words replaced with good intent. And I laughed, broke some sort of tension I was carrying, some sort of frantic energy that flew through me like a river. I felt the bite in me subside.
The weather became colder and noticeably chilled my heart. The sound in my skull became audible and everyone within a ten mile radius would weep for days although they would not know why.
***
I don’t know if their conversation went like this, but I have a good imagination.
Darlene probably sat in the confessional. Father Henry would be forgiving. It was in his job title, his white collar. But she was afraid. She figured it was Satan’s way of warding the good and the just from the mercy and the purity of the Lord.
Father Henry grunted; he knew that she was there. He’s waiting for me, Darlene realized. She had done this many, many, many times. It didn’t make it any easier, though.
But I’ve already told you what this is about, told you the guilt that permeated her about losing the consecrated flesh of the lord. It was the monstrance, she told herself at first. The thing was janky, the metal device had to lay sideways and with a tilt to prevent the Host from falling onto the floor of the car on the way to the retreat. It was by the power of duct tape that the consecrated host was held in gold and glass, allowed to be seen and perceived for the glory that it was. And so she told father Henry, and she cried. And Father Henry resented her a little bit more than he did previously after that, but he said nothing. God would accept the confession that he couldn’t
Darlene felt shame, and perhaps she even felt very afraid. Maybe she knew her own sadness in the way her eyes felt heavy when she tried to keep them open, tried to drown her face when nobody was around. Maybe it was the peach pit feeling in her stomach.
The task she was given as penance I would know later.
***
When I got home from the St. George confirmation retreat, I felt a sizzling sensation between my legs, like someone lit a small fire in my underwear and hadn’t put it out properly.
The fear that struck me was irrational, I knew. Women had gynecologists, women had doctors who attended to the bloody slit in between the legs, who would understand what was wrong with me. But I’d never been to one before.
I remember when I had first begun to bleed, many months ago. I was in my parent’s bathroom, and I called my mother into the room in a mixture of fear and panic. But I had no shame. I had no sense of predistilled right or wrongness regarding what my body was doing. And so I showed my mother, showed her the russet mark.
She retreated to the realm under the sink to bring me a pad. “Don’t tell anyone about this.” There was hostility in her voice, caution which I did not understand.
It was only years later that I realized she was afraid, afraid for her daughter who started menstruating so young, bleeding out and coloring the world with femininity she was too little to embrace. It didn’t stop me from feeling ashamed of myself, ashamed of how I would bleed, how I felt ahead of my peers because I lived outside Eden in a camper.
To be a woman in this world is to feel shame for that which you cannot control.
The night before my Confirmation, my coming into the church as a woman, the pain climaxed. There was a foul smell coming from me, a gross and detestable smell like rotting meat. I pilfered some of my mom’s perfume, soaked myself in what I could find to mask the smell of rot.
I decided the best course of action was to examine myself. At night when my family was sleeping, I stood in the bathroom and gently removed my underwear. I sat on the toilet because I thought it weird if I was to do this in front of the mirror. My fingers brushed my labia, which felt fine. The burning, the inflammation felt like it was coming from somewhere deeper. I swallowed and put my pointer finger inwards and gently pushed my finger upwards, into my body. I imagined my finger as a worm, thought about boring, channeling into myself. And then my finger touched something hard and unusual. I felt a shock run through me, of fear then panic and then resolve. Cautiously, I slid my middle finger in and attempted to pull the foreign object, and I discovered the object was not foreign at all. I was the rotten fruit, and whatever insect within me refused. It didn’t want to leave. It clung to my tunnel like a leech and if it was not for the inherent sense of wrong in my lungs, I would have assumed it was the vagina itself, that if I pulled, I would pull out my reproductive system and the nerves attached to my spine. Something was obvious. I could feel it in the recesses of my body, the bottom of my ribcage.
I had a flashback, the time I tied a bandana around my neck and tied it so tightly that the only logical path forward seemed to be using the kitchen scissors and cutting myself free from my silken prison; but I couldn’t cut free from the prison of my body. I was not willing to insert a knife into myself and tear.
Sleep came slow. Sleep was like fighting madness, trying to reconcile with my own paranoia as the smell of death emanated from my own body. Sleep was rationalizing to myself that if I laid down and tried to stay still and think as little as possible maybe I was staving off the sleep deprivation. At any rate, I fell asleep that night and woke up to the cries of my mother as she knocked on the door, calling me to get ready, to get dressed.
I don’t remember much of that morning, but I do remember sitting in the adoration chapel with Bethlehem and Mary Lauren and Romina and Vicky and Diana, coated in glitter, swaddled in gauzy lace. The boys were presumably in some sort of classroom, serrated from us. I remember feeling sick, the dull ache, the strange object still inside me perceivably tainting my blood.
The early morning light streamed through the stained glass window, and I peered out. The white dress which smothered my body made me feel like a bride, and I looked outside into the parking lot for anybody I might know. I imagined myself like a cloistered nun, trapped.
“If he asks me about the Gifts of the Spirit, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Bethlehem was talking about meeting Bishop Z.
Mary Lauren and Romina both launched themselves into a series of “Oh my gosh I agrees,” and then the conversation turned swiftly to Diana recounting a funny story from her family’s restaurant. I was not in the mood for festivities. I clung to the sides of the mini-sanctuary, feeling my body throbbing, pulsing with pain. I excused myself from the room, drawn to the flickering light of the fluorescent bathroom like a giant ungainly moth, and I locked the door and stumbled onto the toilet. I pulled back my dress, anticipating something horrible. I slipped my fingers inside my body and pulled.
It was a Host. A bleeding bloated blessed sacrament, swollen from the time in my body, the skin of the unleavened flesh torn, like it had merged itself with me before I had pulled. I stared at the blood, body, soul and divinity of my Lord and wanted to cry, but the makeup which choked my face told me that as a woman, I wasn’t allowed to privately grieve. I choked and held the Host in my hand before placing it in the sink and turning on the water. I returned to the cage with all the other pretty birds, the horror in my veins making me run as red as the sun.
***
I went to an artist talk and she, the artist, rattled on and on about the oceans and how they are accumulating more and more and more plastic and how we are all eventually fucked. She showed videos where she explores beach caves which were only just sheets of plastic pretending to be stone and images of baby birds dying from eating indestructable materials. Then, she pointed her finger at the audience and chastised us for not using reusable straws.
We are all eventually fucked.
She showed us images of beach plastic that looked like ancient artifacts, and I couldn’t help but think that I will be my own demise. I wonder if my thoughts are plastic that compiles like beach trash and my physicality is a body of water, seemingly infinite and wonderful but really just formless fragility.
***
I would see Ash by the bus-stops in the early morning mists, before I woke up in the corner of my room. I would see her in the way the sky encompasses everything, she was a vision. She occupied the expanse in the back of my mind, she was like the cars that pass me by as I lament by the creek and try to calm down and clean my hair and find a sense of normalcy in the dizzying dark water.
I hadn’t looked for her after church. I had watched her and lamented over her and mourned what we could have been. Of course she went down the road and I was left to consume the Catholic Center’s church dinner, big tin trays full of shepherd’s pie, meat potatoes and peas. I usually didn’t have anyone I’d sit with; I’d plant myself on the little awning by the parish offices and eat from the potluck, savoring the difference from the dining hall. And I’d feel very terribly lonely.
I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life in which I haven’t had the cloak of pariah around me. I remember for the longest time feeling absent, forgotten. I remember the time I walked too far, let my feet take me along an old unused railroad track on a bleak winter day, feeling both like a knife and absent of emotion.
I’d made it as far as the underbelly of a highway and the roar of cars who pushed their big metal bodies along the roads over my head gave me the feeling of existential dread, a panic to a degree which I had never felt before. And on the ground, amid trash and glass and cement blobs was an old keyboard, laying there confused and resilient, the plastic refusing to balk under the noise and abuse from falling rubble. And I understood my own mortality, left as quickly as I could, retraced my steps the way I came.
I felt the emptiness where my hips connected with my abdomen, like someone scooped out what made me human. Hollow.
***
Sometime after our Confirmation but before I went to college I was talking with Mary Lauren. It was that weird time when you’re a high school senior, trapped by a thin layer of saran wrap, the future laid out before me seeming boundless.
“Bethlehem?” Mary Lauren's eyes clouded. “I saw Beth a few months ago near downtown. She’s different now. Her hair is dyed, and she told me about her girlfriend.” Mary Lauren paused, her blue eyes flicking back and forth. “She said she wanted to hang out.”
A lump in my throat, like a golf ball where it didn’t belong. Mary Lauren continued. “I said yeah but I didn’t mean it.” And of course. Belen had abandoned what Mary Lauren held as standard, she had stripped herself from the church and had been bitten by the gay snake. And I understood Mary Lauren, felt an undeniable amount of shame for agreeing with her, holding the values of my religion over what I instinctually knew was true and right. I did not listen to the call of my own morality.
“Yeah,” I felt myself say. “She doesn’t sound like the same person.” I felt self-loathing in the crook of my neck, right where the spine meets the skull.
***
I have told you so much about myself because I am a terrible, shivering, coward. Because I know myself and I know the ways I work and no matter how disgusted I am with myself it is easier for me to understand the space Ash took in my life rather than who she was. This story is about Ash but I don’t want to tell you about her. I fear calling the storm, calling a new fit of my rage and discomfort down from the sky and electrocuting what I hold dear.
Butterflies, small, adorned. Insects as taxidermy which hung limp from the wall, transforming her living room into a quilt of natural colors and textures. An old sofa that must have come with the place, a blanket draped over it. An assortment of boxes like she’d just moved in and a couple lamps, each looking like it had lived a different life. Ash’s apartment was homey, homey in the way that few places are.
I’ve been told by people far wiser than me that nothing is a coincidence. I’ve been told by people far wiser than me that everything is a coincidence, that we are lost in the atmosphere holding onto the escaping air from our lungs, suspended, at mercy from the formless uncaring universe. Right then, I wanted to believe that everything that led me to that place with Ash was nothing short of a preordained gift from God, that I was supposed to carve my way through the liminal space of her doorway. Now I believe I was simply between the cosmos and earth, plummeting towards the Atlantic Ocean.
And everything was made manifest.
It had been a two minute conversation at most; I saw her in the drawing classroom and we fell into rapid conversation. She complimented my eyes and I complimented her hair, and she asked if she knew me from somewhere and I said no because I knew she hadn’t, but I was secretly pleased because she must have looked at me at some point and found me interesting enough to stare at.
Oh, are you an art major too? I’d asked, and she told me that she was ecology and just taking this course to get rid of some arts elective but that the creativity the class required made her ravenous for self-expression. And from a two minute conversation a friendship bloomed, and I felt, for the first time since I’d laid eyes on her, a feeling of desperation as I grappled for ways to stay in her life.
We would talk in small everyday sorts of ways and there was a part of me which felt like I’d always known her and another part of me which recognized my own incredulity, the fact that I’d barely known her and maybe never would.
“Hey,” she’d say, and she would be close enough that I could see her freckles, like someone took a very fine paintbrush and individually demarcated them in a shade below coffee and marked her with stars. She’d look hard at my charcoal scribbles and resolve herself with the flick of her neck and a comment, “I like how you drew the music sheet there,” or “the texture on the skull looks fantastic”. I’d smile back and point out something she hadn’t noticed, like how I intentionally steered the lines of the birdhouse so that the viewer would be led to the focal point.
Ash was in a music sorority; she liked to talk about her work rehabilitating snakes. I told her about what I wanted and my pipe dream of being famous although I knew myself well enough to know my dreams would only lead to frustration and confusion. I let her into me, and our conversations could quickly turn into what felt like a confession. But I gave myself freely, and my only form of contrition was my hunger for more.
I anxiously waited a few business days for best results and texted her that I’d like to hang out with her out of class. Sure, she responded and gave me an address.
Ash’s apartment, and by extension, her, smelled kind of like summer rain which falls onto the ground and brings up memories of the earth, condensed into a feeling of impatience and petrichor, moss and fallen leaves mixed with turmeric. You would have to be there to understand what I mean.
“Enter,” she said, propping the door open. I kicked off my shoes to the side as not to be rude. I surveyed my situation and Ash caught me, refusing to look away as my eyes met hers.
“Oh,” she said, setting an electric kettle on boil. “You don’t have to, I usually leave them on.” She gave me a slight smile and motioned for me to sit.
Ash hovered in the kitchen, riffling through the cupboard while looking out at me every so often. Her eyes were sharp, and her hair was tied back. She looked comfortable. I felt precarious, like a tower of blades, each one apt to fall at any given second.
Ash brought out two ceramic mugs and poured a golden liquid in with twin teabags. In a fluid motion she brought me the tea, extending the mug like it was a reliquary.
I took it from her and drank, surprised to notice that it tasted of alcohol, and she looked at me wryly. “Rum,” she said like it was an explanation. I drank and felt the warmth soak into my ankles. It wasn’t even a question.
It wasn’t even a question.
***
I don’t know if their conversation went like this, but my imagination is healthy.
Father Henry and Darlene sat in the back office of a church, discussing what to do about me.
Darlene was unsurprised when Father Henry called her into his office on a bright and cheerful fall day. She had been waiting for a little while. She was nervous. I would have been nervous too and I’ve been to confession for what feels like hundreds of times. This wasn’t confession, no, it was something far more sinister.
Father Henry didn’t smile. His face was devoid of emotion, couldn’t be read. Looking into Father’s eyes was like looking into the face of the unsmiling sad void. “Hello,” he would say, his voice sounding like a lone fault line. “It seems we have something outside our parish to discuss.” Now imagine him tracing the scar on his cheek with a heavy finger, so weighty it indented the thick rind of his cheek.
Darlene must have raised her eyebrow. “I went to her school. I saw her the other day.” Darlene’s eyes were like stark black beetles, her hair smooth, chemically treated, her body hungry. She had not had communion for a few months at this point. She felt the desperation in her lungs, the feeling that she couldn’t take a whole complete breath. “She seems well.” It had been a while. A couple of months that she’d been out in the world.
Father Henry probably leaned over his shoulder and looked past the bins holding Vacation Bible School program materials, ancient manilla folders with retreat information, financials. He pulled out a leathery box which at first glance looked like the kind where a chalice or a Host could be taken, distributed. Darlene likely held her breath, mentally prepared herself for the worst.
Father Henry set the box on the table. “Sorry that this took so long. I had to go through the paperwork to get this from the archbishop.”
Darlene most definitely frowned. She must have looked like a deer in the headlights, her eyes all wide and glassy. She pulled the box closer to her, gently feeling the stoic black velvet of the container and touching it gently like a mother touches her child’s cheek. Then she opened the box, expecting to see something normal like a prayer candle or incense or a Church Missal. Instead, the item that laid in front of her was a knife, dark as glassy water on the pavement, fluid like metal, transparent like glass, a material which she couldn’t even understand how to describe. Or maybe it was as simple as silver, carved from soulless steel meant to pare into monsters.
Father Henry must have stared at Darlene stoically, his eyes fading into a terrible intensity. “Did I ever tell you how I got my scar?”
Darlene was no longer sure this was going to be a complete contrition. She said something along the lines of, “you want me to kill her?” And Father Henry probably didn’t say yes or no but the look in his eyes told her that who she was targeting was beyond saving and had been whored by the devil and that it was now her responsibility to do this horribly heinous act so that she could be allowed back into her Death Cult.
Their conversation went something like that.
***
I creep by the creek, my last shreds of dignity hanging from me like snow holds on to shrieking tin roofs. I let out a beastly cry and shattered the surface of the water, afraid to perceive myself for what I am. My voice doesn’t even sound human anymore, the womanly tones muddled by harsh noises, like the sound of ripping paper or the gasps of the wind.
Memories are painful. Sometimes reminiscing is acknowledging there is a small hole, unpatched in the heart, which is always open to infection and always leaking, staining sheets and shirts and blouses with blood and preventing the illusion of comfort. And then I remember my burden as a woman, remember the bleeding canyon between my legs and the throbbing of my body which refuses to sleep.
My ceramics professor had explained to me that even clay has memory, which is to say, it remembers the shapes it has held in the past. He explained his logic for beating the shit out of the clay with a tool which looked like a misshapen wooden shoe, which gives the clay a new life. Clay has trauma which shapes the work, warps it long after it has been molded.
We had kissed, briefly, after I had drunk so much liquor I could barely move, only ragdoll onto her couch and look up at the ceiling. It started with her pressing her nose into my neck and breathing up it and then she was right next to my face and then we were looking into each other’s eyes, and she was no longer the stars and all the lonely floating bodies of light in the sky. Instead she was the moon, bold and pale, commanding in a way which I didn’t understand. She called to me, the sea, and I reeled into her arms like a fish.
And as a shrub she rooted her hand around my belly and held me like that, breathing into my ear and leaning into me, she held me and asked to be cradled. And for what felt like five or maybe twenty minutes there was a buzzed tranquility as I felt calm, afraid that if I moved slightly, I would disturb the tenderness of this moment. I don’t know when I laid down. I just remember the feeling of warmth as I drifted off, flew from this world into the shrouded realms where dreams are generated, acrylic woman lips pressed into the soft skin of my neck.
The feeling of your eyes hurting, when you close them and start to feel tears forming.
***
My dream was violent and confused. I was myself but with silver hair and I lived with an old woman who made dolls out of skin. She loved me, I think, and I loved her. We shared the same bed next to the ones with the dolls, the ones who looked like ruddy Frankensteins or apple puppets. It was a lifetime I spent with her, and she cared for me deeply; we lived in a one room apartment with the lights always half off with the awful dolls but there was no fear or boredom, just understanding and no happiness but no sadness. We lived together in the light of dull lamps and closed window blinds, perpetual morning after midnight.
But I had to go. I was at the door and the warm light of the bedroom which I had stayed with her all my life invited me back in but I said my goodbyes. She gave me a small tear drop pendant which she also wore, out of a metal which might have been as simple as silver or liquid star dust churned into jewelry; and I headed out into the night of sin and despair which somehow looked familiar, like a Georgia forest with tall pine trees that looked over me like disappointed family members; they tried to catch my glare but I was a night creature and refused to look at them. My raccoon eyes glowed like embers, I saw through everything and saw nothing.
I met a woman and a man, and I recognized them from somewhere but they also faded into the back of my mind like new faces. I immediately was wary of them. They led me to an ocean or a very big lake with moody hills which crumbled into sand that faded into the calm water. And on the beach I saw my lover and she was sad. She held the teardrop pendant from her hand and held it above the water, and when the fluid pendant touched the water, the ripples elapsed like waves until the entire lake was damaged and reeling from her sadness.
And when the girl handed me the device, like a gun but with a shaft meant to poke through bones I knew what to do. I punctuated my lover, thrusting the machine against her rotten peach head and draining her saccharine blood into a clean mason jar.
And when I turned around the boy and the girl were gone and I was left alone with her rotting skin body and I pulled at her head, tried to dismantle the machine and put her back together but she fell apart into squirrels and rabbits and my hands were teeth which only could tear and there was the feeling of déjà vu like I’d hurt this way before, and I’d do so again, surely.
I awoke, alone; the moon which had waxed next to me had waned into nothing but a loose blanket and a pillow. It was dark out, dangerous. There was no light in the apartment, just the feeling of emptiness that is provided by shadows in the corners of every space and the dim orange light pooling through the window. Somewhere, outside, a cat yowled, and the thin hum of the old TV left an oxidized patina inside my skull.
I pulled the thin sheet over my body and began to shiver; question the things I hold dear. I felt itchy and bad, thin prickles covered my skin and I began to sweat and twist into the sheets. I felt the places that Ash had kissed my neck like hot brands in my body and I sat up and saw my reflection on the blue screen of the TV.
I had been denying my true nature to myself all this time, I realized as I studied the contours of my face and the weather in my eyes. What I saw was a monstrosity, all teeth and fur and long nails and I was forced to confront that I was what I saw in my dream. I pulled myself up from Ash’s sofa and sprinted to the door and then out into the darkness, my vision blurring as I gave into myself.
***
I was a girl once.
I was a human girl, a cub who wore short shorts and would make little leashes for the bumblebees and pick bouquets of flowers and wade through thin creeks made by drainage pipes and fish for leaves. I was a girl who would play with her sister and soak my socks with mud and remain, untethered by the ideas of presentation, unbound from sexuality or womanhood.
The old man looked down at me as I played in the field near the retreat center. My mother made it a frequent thing to go on religious voyages and I was often swept out to sea. I was by a soft-spoken stream, the sun berating my child-face as I looked for grasshoppers in the too-tall grass, which bit at me with it’s tiny razor teeth.
He watched me. After a second, he spoke.
“Your shorts are too short,” he said, looking at me then looking through me and eventually not realizing I was there at all as my mother covered me in a picnic blanket so that I would be invisible to the eyes of man.
And then I was no longer anything.
***
Darlene is a character within my head who can only be paraphrased.
Darlene is both real and fictional.
Darlene is a drawing of herself, a rough approximation of everyone who has ever wanted to hurt me.
Darlene rested her hands in her pockets, and they touched the cool metal blade. Darlene shivered, an inhuman feeling crawling down her spine and she looked up from the Catholic Information Table. And when Darlene saw me, she only felt sick relief.
Look at her, Darlene thought, taking in the girlish frame. There was nothing evil about how the young woman presented, her unalarming shoulder length hair or the jeans and shirt that she put together. Darlene bit her painted lips. Darlene knew I would recognize her, that as much as she was a ghost in my fake life she always made an impact, her presence would be repeated like a vesper. And when she came closer to her ministry, Darlene yelled, hollered like the angry wind.
Darlene smiled, baring her teeth into a friendly fire.
Darlene felt so much guilt she wanted to vomit. She held the knife firmly, now, it was no longer fluid in her hand but hard machinated metal, ready to take and end things. Darlene held the helm of the Catholic information table with her other hand, holding on for dear life. And I can’t emphasize enough the dread Darlene felt crawling through her as she prepared to escape the dark knots binding her soul.
***
“How are you?” Darlene asked, her voice shrill and enthusiastic. I felt dread in my stomach, leveled disgust and fear. I usually made an attempt to steer clear from the Catholic Truth table, a choice I made when I chose atheism.
“Good,” I answered, trying to mirror her energy. It wasn’t working. I felt drained. I felt like a shade of myself standing on the sidewalk talking to a ghost of my past who looked at me with her ember-eyes and raven hair. She looked hungry, I thought. Also sad. “How’s Marlene?”
“Good,” Darlene said. “She’s working at the high school again.” I looked behind her. I looked at the horizon, looked at the sky and looked at the distant academic buildings. I looked around, I tried to look everywhere but her. “Well,” she said, ripping me out of my mind. “What have you been up to?”
And I didn’t know what to say. I’ve been fine. I’ve quit church, I’m no longer faithful or good or anything, really. But she could smell my decomposure like a blood-sniffing dog. I don’t know how she knew but she knew what I was going to say before I said, “I’ve been busy. My classes don’t give me a break.”
“Oh,” she said. She knows. “I talked to Father Bill about you.”
“Father Bill?” I asked, racking my brain, trying to figure out where that name was from. Darlene leaned over the table at me. She was holding something in her right hand, tight. I felt tension build in myself and I wanted to run.
“Father Bill, over at the Catholic Center,” she explained. “He said he hasn’t heard of or met you.” Her eyes, wide doey and concerned, her lips in a shrewd frown. She was waiting for an explanation. I was held by her gaze.
“W-what are you going to do,” I said, my voice tight.
Darlene looked sad now and held out her right hand. In her grasp, in her clutches, she held a miraculous medal with the image of St. Christopher, clutching a chubby baby Jesus while wading through a river, a balden head and his ankles deep in the swaying current. I felt myself release a breath of relief, ashamed at myself for imagining she might be here to slay me.
Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, whose faith saved him from the fear of dog-headedness, cynocephaly, and left him painfully human.
I felt my chin tremble. All I was was ashamed.
***
Ash’s twenty-second birthday party, I think, fundamentally changed everything. We hadn’t talked since the night I had left Ash’s apartment with the fear of God in my heart, a monster. I’d slunk through the sleepless streets, not lucid enough to remember what I did but I woke up in tears, my face pressed against the ground in the stairwell of the music school. I smelled like the night air, the color of concrete and dirt, rain and misery.
Ash wouldn’t even look at me. She didn’t say hello in class and I didn’t look at or smile at her. But I remembered the way she held me and she must have remembered the way I leaned into her. She must have remembered how I was to kiss.
If I could have had it my way I would cry like a baby and the wailing shrill of my voice would send the mother deer into defense. They would come from the woods and take me with them and I would never see the true light of day again, living only in those crepuscular shadows between living and dead. But if I cried, my human voice would surely sound decrepid. The deerlike noises that I make would be the reason that they hold a rifle to my forehead and press down.
I felt used. I felt like I had been a warm body for Ash to feed off of that night, she l tore into my side like the way mosquitos do in mid-July. But even though It was late, midway through October, when Ash silently tapped my shoulders and slipped me an invitation to her Halloween party, I didn’t say anything. I burned furiously under my skin and the feeling of fire ignited my heart but my mouth didn’t say STOP TOUCHING ME NOW.
“Sorry,” she said but I didn’t say anything and the scenes that played behind my eyes were only embarrassing flickers of summer reds and greens like the replaying of the sun over the hills through an instagram filter.. “Anyway. I just wanted you to know and want to know if you forgive me.” She was wearing a smile but it looked more like a grimace and just as stitched together as she was.
I forgive you,” I said, but that stuck in my throat and the guilt that rebounded into my heart bore into me like the roots of a sweetgum. And I told her I forgave her but I didn’t know if I could ever move past what had happened that night. When she stuck an invitation into my hand I didn’t throw it away, but I held it tight until my sweat bled through the paper and I could barely make out the words.
***
I didn’t have uber, I didn’t have a ride. But I was resolute. The start of the walk was simple enough. After all, even though the edges of town were seldom still well lit, they lacked the spookiness that came with the drunk college kids going out at night, stumbling around and laughing in preordained little groups. It was after a bit, walking past old historic and sleepy looking storefronts that I came to a low slung church in front of the mouth of the road, a fork twisting into the dark. The scratchy trees hanging over the decaying street and the road tunneling into the dark trees didn’t dissuade me, the dimly lit lights hanging over the road were like angler lights, luring me deeper. And every step I took with the night clawing at my heels didn’t slow me. I walked faster and further into the awful Autumn light.
I walked past a house of young adults who sat on their porch drinking, a tall hedge shrouding it.
I walked by a low strung place, in the state of falling apart, a barbed-wire face and a KEEP OUT sign holding me back.
The house I was looking for belonged to someone who knew Ash, maybe a friend of a brother; the invite didn’t make things clear, it was just an adress. House numbers were lost to the constantly shifting shadows. And then I saw one, pink light emanating from the belly of it, young college punk looking kids watching me as I walked up to the liminal entry way. Here we go, I thought, savoring the pulsing noises from the inside like they were a peaty whiskey before pushing open the door
People swarmed through the house like insects, people unbound to morality and manifesting deprivation. The table in the foyer was covered in red plastic cups and several tall men played beer pong against a short shrubby looking woman. The kitchen glowed with an eerie blue light. Before I could wander towards there I was intercepted.
“Hi,” a tall guy with curly dark hair and brackish eyes looked down at me. I didn’t like him but I didn’t know how to get away.
“I -uh,” I stammered. My eyes darted towards the next room where I saw the kitchen than the living room like a channel into the hearth of a fire. I siddled away from him, moved fluidly into the room which burned with pink fairy lights and feminine intentions, people, genderless shapes shrouded in the smog from a smoke machine put somewhere in the corner.
Hands that grabbed mine; they were cold and felt unreal like a corpse. A girl with blue makeup smeared across her face so that she looked undead, and I realized with disgust the dark marks of her veins like worms peering through fruit-flesh. I yanked free, twisted into the living room.
Ash.
Ash in the corner of the room, tucked next to another girl.
Ash, fake blood down her cheek, plastic fangs sloppily poking out of her mouth.
Ash and her, drinking something dark and poisonous, they’re wine-flushed and giggling about something but their voices sound like jackals and I can’t, absolutely cannot reconcile with this, or the way Ash’s hand is around her shoulders, or the sweet smiles they exchange under the pink flush of the ceran wrap over the lamp light. It is horrible. Absolutely horrible to behold, to take in. I wanted her to look at me that way, and then never look at anyone ever again.
Fuck, I thought, Fuck. I surveyed the kitchen bar and found an acidthemed punch, some sort of margarita with jelly eyeballs floating in it, sitting in the corner next to ambient whiteclaws and a bottle of rum.
I drink. I drink more than I should, I start with one cup of punch which quickly tripples before I drink a whiteclaw. And then on top of my unsettled stomach I choose a Bud Light from the pile and drink that, feeling worse by the minute.
Absolutely capricious.
I turn and stagger back to Ash in the living room. And before anyone can say anything, I release my guts on the carpet, the stomach acid and alcohol making the room smell depraved.
“Fuck you,” I yelled. “I don’t fucking forgive you.” I stormed through the foyer into the night.
***
I sat in the church pew. I waited, feeling empty, feeling numb. The church is full of song, full of God’s children with voices rejoicing the induction of new souls into the dance as twelve young adults underwent one sacrament before receiving another. I can almost read the advertisement in my mind.
Oh God. Communion. I felt sick, the feeling of removing the host from my body just to have it implanted back inside me. There was no refusing the Host today, there was no avoiding receiving the sacrament in front of my family. I imagined my mother watching me, full of pride. I felt fear rise in my chest and sat, hating myself.
Persevere, the voice in my mind said. I want to cry, I answered, The area between my legs still felt raw and broken.
The Ritual began, the Good and the Faithful around me awoke from their sleep and became invigorated by the light of Our Lord. The bishop followed by the priest came down the aisle and the ritual of the Mass began.
If you truly are faithful to the church and a good Catholic and believe what you are supposed to believe you know that the Mass is a sacrifice unlike any other, understand that the curtain which serrates divinity from the laity is briefly broken and Jesus and the Heavenly Host of Angels descend, or the altar is elevated, and a portal of heaven is called down so that the humble, the ones who God loves can experience the full experience of heaven and earth, merging by the flesh and blood and the ultimate sacrifice of Our Lord. I trembled in fear and exaltation.
Marelene was my confirmation sponsor. I chose Saint Christopher, for the reason the sky chooses the color blue or the pot calls the kettle black, which is to say I tried to convince myself that the kinship I felt to the Lord through the bitter taste of guilt is comparable to faith. By choosing him I could cloister my heart and do something right. It was Marlene who held me in her hands, always rough and raw from scrubbing dishes and other womanly affairs, offering me to the Bishop. When he applied the Chrism to my face and I felt the grease on my forehead, I expected some feeling of holiness. Nothing, nothing. Pizzaface. The Gifts of the Spirit once again alluded me. In a second my transformation had begun and then ended and I felt no different.
Adulthood was lost on me, clearly.
The second time they paraded me down the aisle. And the priest opened my mouth and fed me, placing the Host on my tongue. I sat alone, in the pew. I sat, afraid to swallow, afraid to do anything. I quietly chewed and let the Host take me, feeling grief queitly kill me.
***
Her eyes were narrow; they were red too, and I’m almost sure she was crying. I was crying, too. And I wanted her to speak more than anything and when she actually did start to speak I wanted her to shut up, to staple her lips together with a cruel resentment I didn’t know it was possible to feel.
She only watched as I left, puffing on a vape flanked with the girl she had been holding and the boy with the dark and scary eyes. They watched me like ghosts, their costumes making them look ethereal in the dark night. In my mind they did not blink, did not cease staring, did not cease, would not cease.
I held all my grief and felt it within my neck, spanning down every vertebra and filling into my chest. A deep unrest settled into my body like a swelling storm. I felt the feeling between my legs and then into my chest and into my arms and I held myself back and waned. I tried to cry but nothing in me allowed release. So I walked, the feeling of rain in my nose and wind that blew through my knotty hair, a hurricane trapped in my heart.
I wanted everyone who saw me to be filled with my pain, my grief, my messy understanding of the world.
I wished for one time too many that everyone in a ten mile radius would weep for days and fall apart and become inconsolable and then maybe I could join them, join the chorus of bent broken voices as abstract as when dogs cry in cold nights, cry to be held and talked to sweetly.
Mostly, I just missed her.
I missed my sense of faith, the love and the peace that came with the dull sense of repitition that pounded inside me as a heartbeat. I missed it, the warmth inside the church that glowed with phantom pride and called to me sweetly in the voice of the Apostle’s Creed, the ritual words, repeated and intimate and familiar.
And I sit by the creek now, but soon I will go home, or to the place which I call home but will never be as home as what I had.
It’s funny how it was all uphill, taking my body back to my dorm room with Hannah to confront a life I had never wanted. I will feel vulnerable. I will move along the shrouded streets and only want to disappear.
***
The canvas lays outstretched before me like a white-tailed ocean, like the tail of a doe who flies through the woods.
I reach out my hands. I touched the snowy valley, the gessoed sea, and began to paint and shed my blood on the canvas.
I saw a visiting artist the other day, with a voice and ideas that appeared more ephemeral and intangible than he was. He appeared like a man. I’d imagined him, before he came, like his work. I’d imagined him looking like the wind or a mountain or slightly unkempt or off, but he had the face of millions of old men before him, and it was only when he talked that I recognized him.
He talked about his phallic paintings, and the ones that looked a bit like clouds, and the ones which looked like ice cream cones but also like storms. He told us about how once he completed his paintings, he no longer saw them and they just faded into his mind and disappeared. And I wished that my concept of art wasn’t tied to my personal identity, that my own work could stand as an ephemeral body who I didn’t know and never would.
As I used a knife to mix phthalo green and quinacridone red into chromatic black, I wished for closure. Without thinking I applied it to the canvas and spread the dry-rot over the skin of the painting. The color juxtaposed the cadmium red, the salmon of lethal shapes. I begin to add some ultramarine onto my palate to mix midnight blue.
Outside it is snowing. Outside it is impossibly cold and vicious and monsters hide in their caves, dormant for the weather. I felt like my dormancy was short lived.
“Tea?” Hannah says, and I accept it, letting the warmth flow through my neck and into my chest, savoring the liquid. I leaned back into the desk chair, feeling things under my skin like phantom heartbeats.
I’ve seen Father Henry one last time.
I laid my sins out for him. I told him everything I’ve ever done wrong and listed it out in terrifying little rows until it filled up the entire sheets in excruciating black static, insects of words infest the page and chewed little holes into my heart until I was sure my shirt was soaked in blood and I smelled like shredded pennies.
I sat in front of Father, clutching my chest, my teeth barred in incredible pain. He didn’t notice.
Me, my voice hollow like the night wind, drained of blood and life: “Do you forgive me father?” I offered it up to him then, laid my sins down. I sniffled and snot came down my face and fell into my lap and I could only do what I could to wipe it up with my shirt sleeve.
Father’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t think I can.” My peace pended and withered. I bit my tongue. “And I’m sorry you’re hurt by this,” he said.
I reached my hands out. I pulled at the partition between us, the one that shields my face from his. I reached my hands out and lifted the veil. Father Henry’s eyes met mine and that’s when I noticed his monstrous face, his sagging eyes and ephemeral body which looked like black static and mirrored my own.
His scar was a dark leech clinging to his cheek. And I wondered what it had felt like when he had tried to butcher himself under the sharp hilt of the sinner-paring-knife, trying to separate all the wrong he did from himself with the futile stroke of cold metal.
I collected myself, wrapped up the fragments of my broken mirror body, and left.
I went home.