Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  All three of them are in the living-room, where she finds them arrested in the ungainly attitudes of death: her husband with the neat wound in his forehead, its blood shadow not yet browning the wall; the children with their wounds still bleeding, as is the privilege of the freshly dead. At last, she understands that she’s looking at a tableau that has been arranged days ago. In the world next to hers, the bodies must have been taken away by now. Perhaps they are awaiting examination in some cool corner of a hospital. And she cannot join them because she is both here, in front of this scene imprinted on eternity, and underneath the water.

  You, Girls Without Hands

  KL Pereira

  • • ∞ • •

  I

  They never said your body was yours. Even if you called it by name, they had other names for it, other means of control. The axe, for example. The axe is in the business of cleaving, the slip of the blade unsewing knit flesh, unspooling the ink of your veins. There’s no other way to say this. Your father (not really your father) will say that the axe is about love, and love is about obedience, but this is a lie wrapped in a lie. The business of cutting is always the business of control, power. Carnage is the afterthought.

  II

  Your family tells the story this way: you had your hands cut off (the structure of the story erases blame, but you know who did this to you, every one of you knows exactly who did this to you. How could you ever forget?). Later, when you tell the story it is not about want but about ache, necessity, spell, survival.

  III

  Fathers who are not fathers, and daughters who are cut, tell different stories.

  In this story, the hand is a hand: becomes a pair of hands. Thumbs two. Fingers eight. The hands are power inching up creases of skin. The father-not-father cannot abide force that isn’t his. He believes he owns everything that he says he means to love, and here, love means devour, destroy. The devil doesn’t threaten him, gods don’t force him. You don’t step in, tender and white as sacrifice, to save him from ruin. You do not give yourself over to slaughter. What woman does?

  IV

  Things your father-not-father didn’t count on:

  1. Once a part of the body is removed, it belongs to itself.

  2. The hands have their own agenda, slick sticky lines of nerve and memory etched into skin, tough as tree bark.

  3. The duties for which your hands were created have always included murder, or to be more specific, the duties that were born from the cleaving of your hands from your wrists were destined to bring despair to the cleaver, to those who helped erase the cleaver, to enact the wringing of necks with fingers.

  4. Spells are sunk deep in the hearts of your palms.

  V

  You, a girl, a woman, know all the rules of removal and replacement and how they may occasionally be broken. After the cleaving, this knowledge rests, cupped in the creases, the tangles of life and love and money lines etched into the flat of your palms. The disembodied always know what came before, what led to what needs to happen next. Even when packed away in the darkest corners of sewing shops, ready to be reclaimed, body parts can listen. They dream, possess motives and plans. Your hands, once replaced, will do what you tell them.

  When you finally find your hands—those twin cradles of bone and sinew, nail and skin—box-sealed in an old sewing shop in a corner of the city that has never before appeared to you, you are finally ready to use them. What you did before you were ready doesn’t matter. You survived.

  You know exactly how to reattach them: you lick your stumps, which have never stopped weeping blood, and your once boxed hands grow from them, nails sprouting like sharp stalks of razor weed from strong gnarled finger joints, from wide wooly palms. You do not, I repeat, do not, set a sewing needle to flesh, any more than you ever spun gold for that imp of your father-not-father.

  VI

  Here are the final things you must understand:

  1. Your hands do not become birds of forgiveness.

  2. Sacrifice is a requirement, yes, but never again of yourself.

  3. After the deed is done, you will not remember what his eyes looked like, nor his fingers, toes, ground bones. You will only feel calm.

  4. After the deed is done, your nails turn black as plums and shiny as blood. Your limbs are yours now, as your soul is felled and reformed into that which is only your own. You are finally only your own.

  The Quiet Forms of Belonging

  Kristi DeMeester

  • • ∞ • •

  For years, I have drowned in everything but water. In oil. In petals. In the thick, golden coat of honey. In Helene’s coarse, almond-scented hair. In the scattering of her clipped fingernails she left on the bathroom counter as yellowed half-moons. Those shed parts she sloughed off and left for me to find when I cleaned; my hands gathering the dead portions of her body left behind.

  I collected her inside a jar. I painted the outside black. It is still not enough to contain the woman who is my sister.

  I wondered if she’s been bewitched. If the reason her eyes change from brown to gray is because a ghost has stepped into her skin. If her tongue has forgotten the incantations we fed each other as children because she’s drunk a potion that has locked the words behind her clenched teeth. If our father came to her in the night, speaking mumbled words over her inert body, before he finally vanished behind the door, meant only for him.

  Once, she told me what it was like to be haunted, but her mouth did not move, and I’ve forgotten the sounds she made. If anything possesses her, it is not in the imprint her fingers leave on my arm when she clutches it during a high wind, or in the cording of her throat when she swallows the water I bring her in the cut-crystal glasses our grandmother willed to us. It is the only glass I haven’t broken, my fingers uncontrolled and trembling as I take them down, unable to keep myself from dropping them. Every morning, I cut my feet on the shards, but I cannot find the broom, and my hands are so clumsy. My sister does not move to bandage my wounds, to hunt for peroxide, for a bandage, but her breath rattles out of her, and it is all the sorrow I need.

  My memories are small: our father, this house, my own small rebellions. There has never been anything else. Helene never asked what existed beyond these walls, and I followed suit, but my body could not keep itself from its indiscretions. I committed them without thinking. Misplacing our father’s shoes; closing doors he told me never to close; eating the meat he carried into the house still raw and bloodied and wiping my mouth on the pale curtains hanging in the front room; scattering his papers, the geometric designs swirling at my feet as I passed smudged fingers over the marks and measurements he left there.

  Once, I asked Helene what came before. Before the house. Before us. She stared back at me, her eyes reflecting the moonlight in the darkness of our bedroom and told me it would be better if every question inside of me dropped away. There was never anything else. Nothing else mattered. My questions were banal. Pointless. Worthy of eating and vomiting up like so much waste. There was our father. His two daughters. This house that he commanded. There was nothing else. Even the trees that drowned the house in a dim, green light were like an illusion, and if we ever dared to push past them, we would find only pale mist. A never-ending numbness.

  Still, I found myself waking under the sky, the house looming behind me like some sleeping leviathan, the woods sighing around me as the wind pushed me backward. And I would return, too afraid to take more than two-hundred steps beyond the house and our father, too afraid to look for the things I didn’t understand. I was not strong enough to face whatever was beyond the house, to peer into any possibilities outside the lives our father had presented to us. Far easier to drift through those ever-shifting walls and pretend I didn’t want the meager love my father offered me because I was not Helene.

  I pricked myself with needles. Held my hands over candle flames until I could no longer bear it. Pushed a fist in the soft place under my ribs until the bruise was the size of a pear. T
here was no amount of violence I could enact on my body that would allow my father, allow Helene, to see me as anything more than a mistake covered by skin. For Helene to gather me to her, to press the heat of herself against me, melding and coming together into a body greater than our father. Our mouths and teeth becoming something monstrous.

  *

  For three months, seven days, thirteen hours, fifteen minutes, seven seconds, Helene has cupped her body into the corner of our father’s bedroom. Her forehead has left a dark smear of oil on the wall, and her skin is bruised and bloodied from the friction. I imagine she is trying to press herself into the house, into the walls, to find what our father has vanished into, but she stays silent whenever I ask. Her body or the house—I cannot tell which—has sprouted flowering vines. Jasmine or honeysuckle or roses. She keeps the blooms away from me, and when I go to touch the places where her skin has opened, she bares her teeth in the kind of smile that is dangerous, and I leave her standing, her lips formed around the noise she calls prayer.

  On some days, I cannot see the vines, and I wonder if I hallucinated it, or if Helene is conjuring them at will. Our father used to ask her to call things forth. Things he’d left behind. Things that would delight him. A single gardenia bloom. His hunting knife with the pearled handle. The large claw of an unrecognizable beast. And she would blink and tell him where to look. Under a rock outside by the elm tree. Hidden behind my left molar. And he would laugh and pull those items from their hiding places and call Helene his golden girl.

  Now, she is only entropy. A chaos of veins and bone. Discolored flesh. An altar for our father that has not been used in so long.

  Four months pass before she speaks. “Give me your mouth,” she whispers. Again and again until her voice grows hoarse. “Give me your mouth, and I will lay the spoils before him.”

  There is blood on my feet, on my hands, and it smears against the glass as I tip the water into her mouth. Her tongue takes in those scarlet, lost parts of me, and she sighs. “I could devour you,” she says.

  That night, I think about the act of allowance. How there is more surrender than demand in it. How I could allow Helene to gobble up every part of me until there was nothing left. Not even the stain of what I once was. Sometimes I think it would be better. That Helene be the only sister to remain. That she draw the flora, the earth, and damp, and rot into the house, and thrive in it while my corpse bloats, the blood cooled and settled to dribble out of me and feed her.

  But every morning, I draw breath. I carry the water. I bleed insubstantial amounts. I suppose I was never a hollow enough vessel for her. For our father. There was always too much of myself, too much of my own will.

  The vines reappear but do not flower. They are thorned but do not pierce Helene’s skin, and I know they are meant only for me. A defense mechanism against touch. A warning filled with silence.

  Around us, the house is growing smaller. At night, it draws breath in small sips. Pretending I can’t hear what it’s doing. Pretending I don’t know it’s whispering secrets to Helene.

  When we were young, our father winked at us whenever we would waken to new rooms in the house. Doors that opened on darkness or a verdant green so lush it made my mouth water. Floors gone so soft our feet sunk, our muscles aching from the effort to pull them out.

  “It does my will,” he told us over breakfast. “And one day, it will choose one of you. I wonder which?”

  Helene would smirk because she already knew. She was the one born with hair the color of moonlight. The one with the birthmark in the shape of a willow between her breasts. The one whose heart beat like music no human throat should ever sing.

  I am not sure I ever believed him. That the house responded to his desires. I think he liked to imagine it did, that when he woke to anything new, anything changed, he told himself he’d dreamed it into existence. I believe the house has always been separate from him, his body a conduit for some greater force he could only pretend to understand.

  Since Helene tucked herself away, the house does not move in the day, and it hides itself from me. Like it doesn’t know me. Like I haven’t grown up here beside Helene, day in and day out, waiting for whatever occupied the liminal spaces to notice there was breath inside of me, too.

  The windows are dark, and I cannot bring myself to go outside. To see if the sun has winked out, or if something has moved before it, shrouding us, the world our father created for us, in shadow. Is it possible there are other people, other girls who share blood, moving somewhere that is not this house? Another Helene? Another me? Would they clasp one another and whisper secrets that carried the weight of the entire world? I am not sure if the thought is a comfort or a terror. Even in the light, it’s difficult to discern what wears an evil face.

  “I have ground you into dust. You are a seed. You are the dry bottom of an evaporated lake. You are the cold, deep of marrow, and I have drawn you out and wet my mouth with your insubstantial, trembling matter.” Helene has places on her body that are the color of a moonless night. The color of a plum. But they are not bruises. My sister is never the one to stumble. To fall. Once, I saw her floating. Her bare feet above the ground, her hands slack at her sides, the fingers twitching as if they could take apart the bones of the house. Of me. Of our father.

  My sister does not sleep. Not since our father found the final door that swallowed him. The one we had never seen. The one painted in crimson. When he vanished behind it, I think he imagined he would finally find whatever reward he felt the house had promised him.

  Whatever passed over us took only our father, and Helene’s heart beat wetly, and if there was a pattern in it, a melody, I imagine it might be one of despair. Of a longing for return.

  But the house eats portions of what is offered. Our father taught us that. To be careful of our words. To hold them within because the walls were listening, holding their breath, and waiting for a single offering. Our father’s body transubstantiated when he crossed the door’s threshold but without the victorious return. Our father has not become a god crowned in glory. He’s only another thing the house taken into itself.

  If Helene is prostrating herself, if her body has become holy ground, the house has turned its back. It doesn’t matter that it should belong to her now that our father is gone. My sister who has my hands, my arms. In these ways, I have melded myself with her like a vine. Like a root. She will have to cut me out, and I will follow her as Ruth followed Naomi.

  Her skin loosens around her bones, and she folds into her own body as if it was something she could eat, something she could eliminate. I do not think our father is dead. Wherever the door led him, it was not into death.

  “I dreamed I slipped you inside out. There was no key swimming in the loose coils of your body. But I could hear him. Behind the door.” Helene sways on her feet, her body heavy with this quest she’s fashioned for herself, but she cannot move. To move would be a kind of betrayal. She cannot forsake her role. She can only be Helene. The chosen daughter. The heiress to a house that should not exist in the living world.

  There is a hole in the plaster where Helene has raked her teeth over the surface. She is taking the house into herself, hoping, I’m certain, that by ingesting what she can the house will see her as sister, as mother, as blood. It settles sourly in her stomach and coats her mouth in a thick, white paste.

  “Is it you?” she asks me, and I shake my head, hair flying, insistent that I am a master of nothing in our family, in this house. I do not know how to form the words, how to shape the syllables of what I’ve begun to believe about our father and his betrayal and of my own resistance to whatever he has set in motion.

  Only when Helene seems to sleep do I dare to whisper this new truth I carry. “He never left.” I picture him laughing at me. At Helene. Silly to imagine it would be so simple. Silly to imagine his daughters could harness the ghosts of his house.

  It was particularly cruel, but there was never any softness in Father. Like the vines, the thor
ns curl further around us every morning, meant to choke, to prick, to draw blood. Helene watches their progression with the kind of passive energy reserved for saints or martyrs. Those who watch their own bloodletting, knowing their oppressors leach only their own holiness from their bodies. There cannot be any pain in that.

  In the night, when Helene lets her eyes drift closed but does not sleep, I hunt for the door. The one our father took. But none of these doors bleed. None of the doors I find in the dark lead to any answers; only more rooms, the furniture draped in thin white cloth like slumbering phantasms. For long moments, I sit in the center of those rooms, waiting for the furniture to shake into life and creep toward me, but nothing moves, and I close the doors and check on Helene and lie beside her, my back pressed firmly against the hardwood until I feel numb—my limbs deadened and tingling.

  I sing to her, to the vines, to the door, to our father; my voice shakes, the notes settling over our skins. Halfway through, I realize I have forgotten the words, and the melody dies in my throat. I close my eyes because I have already memorized the bend and shape of this room, of my sister, of the emptiness of this house, and there is no need to see our deaths laid out so simply for us in wood, in fabric, in the sighs that come from the walls.