Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  Lucinda rubbed hard and fast and I came, teeth digging into my lip until I could taste the copper of blood almost bursting through the skin. I grabbed her wrist when she kept going and the spasms were undercut with the roughness of my jeans grinding into my crotch.

  A man opened the door to the bar and light from inside expanded outward in a bright circle. We climbed into the truck and I let her take us to my apartment. She drove five miles under the speed limit, struggling over the clutch whenever she tried shifting higher than second gear. Hunched over the wheel, white-knuckling on the stick shift, she looked frail and small. Not the kind of person who could bring someone to orgasm in a public parking lot. There was danger in being around a person so malleable. She could be anything I wanted: sweet, shy, hard, careful. Loveable. Her layers were cracking open. I worried what I’d discover about myself if I dug into her too deeply.

  “You’re stripping the gears,” I said, laughing at her pinched expression. She drove like an old lady. She drove, I thought, like my mother. “Get a rhythm going. Sex rhythm. You know that, right?”

  Lucinda slapped my hand when I tried to shift for her. “Next time don’t drink so much, you can drive.”

  “Fine.” She was cute, weaving all over the road. Cute, but scary. “Speed up, we’re gonna get pulled over.”

  The truck lurched into third and I clutched the seat, hoping we wouldn’t stall out.

  Back at my apartment, Lucinda asked to see the cicada. I pulled a Tupperware from the back of my bedroom closet and found it shrouded in newspaper at the very bottom of the bin, buried beneath a couple of Brynn’s old T-shirts and stacks of Polaroids I couldn’t bear to look at. Us at birthday parties, sleepovers. Opening gifts at Christmas. Pictures of Brynn holding the kids, wearing only a nightgown. The two of us crunched together on a dirty, strange couch in purple and pink Halloween cat ears.

  The shell had disintegrated a little where my tongue had poked through, but the head was still completely intact. It sat cupped in my hand as Lucinda hovered over it, drinking the last cold beer from my fridge. Why was another woman always finishing my beers?

  “I should get you some art. For the apartment. It’s sparse in here.”

  “I’ve seen the kind of art you’re into. Pass.”

  She didn’t respond to my jab, just leaned over to examine the insect shell. Condensation dripped off the bottle and landed on my palm, squirreling down toward the carapace. I tilted my wrist so it dripped down my arm instead.

  “Fine, no art. Put up some photos, Jessa. Mementos.” Lucinda set the empty on the coffee table next to the others we’d killed. Her fingernail gently traced the translucent wings, tapped at its empty, bristled legs. “It’s incredible. Perfectly formed, but completely hollow.”

  Its eyes were milky spots that stood out like bits of bubble wrap. “I like how cicadas sound,” I admitted, rolling the shell back and forth in my hand. “They make me feel like the whole world’s about to go to sleep. Reminds me of being up late with my dad.”

  Lucinda took off her pants and shirt, opening the bedroom window in just her black underwear. Her breasts were high and small, so different from my own, which sagged like spent party balloons. My skin wrinkled up whenever she lifted a nipple to suck. It hurt a little, but it was a good kind of ache. When she came back to the bed and tried to kiss me, I pushed her away and kicked off my boots, my jeans. I thought about her roommate, a woman just like me, waiting at home for her, and then I kissed her to make myself forget. Forget all about it. Think only about the body—how it would open for me, be the thing that I needed.

  She lay back on my unmade covers, still rumpled from the night before. Had me set the carapace of the cicada on the plane of her stomach, in the fallen divot between her ribs. We watched each other through the open hole of its body. I could hear the live ones screaming again outside in the trees, high and shrill. When my mouth touched the opening to her body, her chest rose abruptly. The cicada rolled forward, ready for flight.

  Lucinda got up early the next morning. She pulled on one of my shirts and put her hair back into a ponytail that sat twisted to one side of her head. As she leaned over me in the bed, I could smell my own toothpaste on her breath.

  “I’m gonna go down the street and pick us up doughnuts,” she whispered, smoothing a hand along my cheek. “Then let’s talk about tonight. We should have a game plan for your mom’s house.” I grunted and rolled over, pretending to fall back asleep.

  When the door closed behind her, I sat up and let my hangover sit heavy in my head, dreading the fear and exhaustion that always came with morning sobriety. The cicada was on the nightstand. I held it up to the light, streaming bright through the broken vertical blinds. Its wings were translucent, body yellow stained glass.

  Brynn once asked me to make her a dragonfly costume for Halloween. It took me weeks, selecting shiny fabric scraps and molding shimmering wings, holding them up to her back, measuring her for something fluttery and fragile. It fit her perfectly.

  Jessa made this for me, isn’t it great?

  She told this to anyone who’d listen, spinning in circles in the middle of a party, flapping the sparkling wings. I’d dotted them with painstaking rows of tiny rhinestones. She liked the costume so much she’d worn it three years in a row. A beautiful, shining creature.

  I left before Lucinda got back and drove to the shop. I drank dank leftover coffee in the dark, broodily, until my stomach pitched and I switched to water.

  Everyone was meeting at my mother’s that evening for a preview of her showcase. She’d invited over some of our family friends: Vera and her husband, Travis and his wife. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I didn’t like the unknown aspect of what might be shoved in my face. I worked on some mounts, half-heartedly, then scrubbed down the already pristine counters with bleach. Milo called a couple of times and so did Lucinda. I set my phone to silent and tried to take a nap on the cot in the back, but my brain wouldn’t let me rest.

  The cot, wedged at the back of the shop, directly faced the gleaming metal station my father favored working at. Slitting my eyes, I could easily imagine him there. Images from the past layered over each other, two films running at the same time: him young and bearded, smiling, hacking into deer meat, and then the way I’d last seen him, splayed out and graying. Lifeless. What had he thought in those final moments? That the letter was explanation enough? Did he think I’d consider him another piece to stuff, something I could mount and set around the house? I fell into a fitful doze, dreaming of my father’s face stretched out eerily, as if the skin were ready to be tanned.

  I woke groggy and aggravated at twilight, neck cricked into a thousand tiny knots that would only get worse as the night progressed. I pulled on my boots and then drove the short distance to my mother’s house, singing along to the radio in an attempt to wake myself up. The lawn was high with Bahia grass and daisy weeds. It had rained for two weeks straight and no one had mowed. The sod, neon green with new life, towered damply over the yards at either side. Lucinda’s car wasn’t out front and I felt relief that quickly morphed into dread. Rather than talk about things, I’d manufactured a situation where Lucinda would be upset I’d bailed on our plans, plus I’d have to deal with my mother’s art at the same time. I hoped Milo had bought beer.

  Inside the house, Lolee sat on the floor in front of the television, scraping chipped polish off her nails and letting the flakes fall into the carpet. Milo and Bastien were on the couch, each holding plates full of roast and a cauliflower salad so saturated with mayonnaise it resembled pudding. By the sliding door, Travis Pritchard talked with Vera Leasey’s husband, Jay, who’d propped a boot up on an end table to show off a tiny hole near the heel.

  “Snake bit.” He tapped at it with one thick finger. “Nearly pierced the skin.”

  “What kinda snake?” Travis asked, leaning in close enough that his nose nearly bounced off the leather. “Rattler?”

  “Naw. Moccasin. Out near the south end of the
lake.”

  Vera was in the kitchen with my mother and Travis’s wife, Bizzie Lee, whose hair was pulled back with a large purple butterfly clip. Bizzie was a very thin woman with a long nose that kind of curled under at the end, witchlike, but her eyes were sweet. Milo used to say that if she covered the bottom half of her face with a scarf, she probably could have gotten somebody a lot better-looking than Travis, because Bizzie was pretty nice and always gave out double candy at Halloween.

  “What do you want in your coffee?” Vera held up the pot. She was wearing a bright blue dress that used to be my mother’s. They were friends that way, “girlfriends,” sharing clothes and trading recipes. Vera had been a fixture in our home since I was born.

  “Black,” I said, already anticipating her response.

  “Have a little of this cream, I got it out at the dairy today.”

  It was no use telling Vera I didn’t want anything in my coffee. She heard only what she wanted, which was why she and my mother had been friends for so long. I wondered if Vera knew anything about the work my mother was doing. It seemed unlikely. She was conservative and drove around with one of those yellow CHOOSE LIFE license plates on the back of her car. I couldn’t see her getting into my mother’s gruesome animal porn.

  “Grab a plate, everybody’s already eaten.” My mother pulled a couple of pies from the fridge. A big, gelatinous strawberry one sat on top of the stack, covered with a layer of blue cling wrap.

  “Your mom seems like she’s doing so much better,” Vera whispered in my ear. “This art stuff has been good for her, huh? I know she’s always had such a creative way about her. So talented. What’s she doing, watercolors? They have that now over at the senior center. Got a class taught by this young guy with a ponytail. Wears jeans so tight you can see everything.”

  I couldn’t think of something I’d like to hear less than what was in the male art instructor’s pants. I picked up a plate just to give myself something to do with my hands. “Her art’s a little more . . . sculptural,” I said, digging into a pot of mashed potatoes. Sculptural was one word for it. “Contemporary stuff.”

  Vera groaned and leaned against the counter. “God help us, I hope it’s not some of those flowers that look like vaginas. Women get a certain age and they just fixate on that crap.”

  It was going to be a lot more than that, but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell Vera. “Do we have any more gravy?”

  “Lemme get it for you.” Vera dug the boat out from behind an open loaf of white bread. “She seems less sad. About your dad, I mean. She would just cry and cry all the time before. Now she looks better. Happier.”

  I’d seen my mother cry only at the funeral. I remembered her leaking a little, like me. Milo had sobbed through the whole thing, burying his face in her neck like a little kid. She’d sat upright and I’d done the same. Both of us stoic. Disbelieving.

  “Let me do that, honey.” Bizzie Lee took the scrubber from my mother’s hands when she went to tackle the roasting pan. “You’re gonna get your dress all filthy.”

  My mother was wearing a strapless red dress that looked as if it had been made for someone Lolee’s age. Tight around the hips and chest. She’d slipped a silky scarf over her bare head. It had some kind of a paisley pattern, knotted at the base of her neck. If I’d seen her from behind, I wouldn’t have recognized her.

  Someone knocked at the front door. It had to be Lucinda; anyone else who knew our family would’ve barged right in. I wasn’t sure how she’d gotten my mother’s art over to the house. I doubted the large-scale pieces would fit inside her tiny sedan, but then I remembered she’d asked me if she could borrow the truck the night before, right when I was drunk enough to say yes. Now I could count on her being upset with me for abandoning her and also her outrage over the fact that I’d left her no way to transport the art.

  Thank you so much, this means a lot to me, she’d said, snuggling naked into my side. I’d run a hand across her stomach, flatter than Brynn’s, without the bumps and divots of childbirth to mar the flesh. Did she want kids? Was it something she’d talked about with her roommate, the woman she lived with in her condo? Her wife? There would never be kids for me. Never love. I’d rolled over to face the wall, trying to physically squash the ache in my chest. What a way to think of another human being. That they would love another person so much that there would only ever be scraps left for me.

  More knocking. Louder, pointed. It was Lucinda, all right. “I’ll get it,” I said, dumping my plate on the counter. I’d eaten only two bites, but I was done with food for the night.

  When I got down the hall, she was already inside, dragging a big cardboard box behind her. She stood up and huffed a swath of curly hair out of her face, reaching up under her armpits to yank at her bra beneath her suit coat. Turning, she saw me and made a sour face.

  “Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  Kicking it the rest of the way down the hall, she stopped and fixed her hair again. “Just remember, I could have made this better. Whatever happens now, it’s on you.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know. Unsettled by the rage in her voice, I followed her into the living room, where everyone else had already gathered.

  “Find a seat.” My mother cradled two pies in one arm, her coffee mug and a fistful of forks in the other. She looked like a domestic cocktail waitress. “Vera, can you get the plates?”

  More chairs had been brought in, including the mildewed ones we kept on the back patio. I sat on a metal folding chair nearest the end of the couch, by Milo, who took one of the pies from my mother and put it on the coffee table. There was strawberry and an egg custard, my father’s favorite. Milo cut me a big hunk of the custard, also my favorite, and handed it to me on a plate. I knew whatever was coming would be very bad.

  “Welcome, everybody. Make sure you get some pie; the strawberry is Bizzie’s and you know how good those are.” My mother gestured strangely around the room with a sweep of her arm, as if the strapless dress made her feel compelled to act like Vanna White unveiling the letters to the final puzzle.

  Lolee scooted back by my feet, messing with the laces on my boots until I kicked at her to stop. She turned around, smiled, and bit my knee through my jeans. Lucinda stood against the wall beside my father’s cape-eared owl, one of his earliest pieces, a real showstopper. He’d rendered it mid-flight, clutching a taxidermied mouse in its talons. He’d won a prize for it, some contest. Lucinda’s eyes darted between me and Lolee. I put a hand on my niece’s neck and spun her back around.

  “If we’re all settled?”

  “Oh, go on and show us, Libby. Stop screwing around.” Vera sat in one of the dining room chairs, pie plate tipping sideways on her lap until strawberry juice threatened to spill on her dress. I prayed it would spill and we’d have to take thirty minutes to find a stain remover stick. Then we could forget this whole train wreck of a night and get on with our lives.

  “Lucinda, could you assist me?”

  Scooting around the owl’s outstretched wing, Lucinda looked at me one last time before she disappeared down the hall. She mouthed something that looked like the word sorry. My fingers tightened on Lolee’s neck until she let out a squawk and swatted at me.

  My mother stepped to the side and flicked on the light switch next to the standing lamp. The hall lit up, profiling a large animal, moving forward jaggedly. Bizzie Lee screamed and pressed a hand to her throat, snagging her husband’s arm. Vera’s plate finally tipped all the way over. A puddle of strawberry juice pooled in the middle of her skirt.

  It was a water buffalo, or it had been at one point in its miserable life. The beast sat on a wheeled platform pushed by Lucinda, who stared resolutely down at the floor and refused to make eye contact with me. My mother cleared her throat and unearthed a stack of index cards from the top of her dress. She read from them and gestured, pointing at va
rious parts of the animal.

  “Now, this is just a teaser. The show opens in two weeks. It highlights similarities between sex acts in the animal kingdom and those in modern suburbia. Grief and anger. Specifically correlations to myself and my late husband, Prentice.”

  Milo was stabbing at his pie like he wanted to murder it. I set my plate down on the floor and then picked it up again, not sure what to do with my hands. No one else was eating.

  My mother continued, smiling. Shuffling through her index cards. “I want to use his taxidermy to illustrate the repressive nature of relationships and sexuality. There’s a strong connection between sadomasochism and how modern domestic marriages set us up for cyclical punishment. These works explore that.”

  She stuffed the cards back into her top and grabbed a rope attached to a ring in the water buffalo’s snout. She yanked hard. It stuck for a moment, dragging through the shag carpet we’d had since before I was born, then trundled the rest of the way into the room. There it sat, dumb and mutilated, between Jay and the coffee table full of pies.

  “What have you done, Libby?” Vera pointed and then quickly retracted her finger, as if the thing in front of her might contaminate it. “What is this?”

  The buffalo’s body was festooned with whips and paddles of various sizes. Chain mail and leather gear were sewn over its torso. Between its horns sat a ludicrously tiny studded leather cap. The buffalo’s mouth hung open in a snarl, tongue dangling lasciviously.

  Lolee leaned forward to get a better look and I pulled her back against me, trapping her in place with my knees.

  “Mom.” Milo rubbed his face until I could hear the scratching of his beard under his palms. “Please tell me that’s not who I think it is.”