Next to James’s corpse, another tentacle billowed out—so small, small enough to hold its tiny hostage by the hand. Oh God, she didn’t need to see the face, fearing who it might be. The child bobbed so peacefully, his free hand reaching out. Whatever bit of her still lived died on the spot. This was just a kid. Kids weren’t supposed to be down here, frozen in the deep with a corpse-monster. They didn’t deserve this, but did any of them?
This was bullshit. She tried prying herself out of the posy’s grip, but it wouldn’t budge. She didn’t want to see any more, but the weight of the water crushed her body into submission. Every move was sluggish and thick, and the creature held her like a vise. Too late to change her mind.
She stopped fighting it, but that didn’t stop her from trying to hurt the fucking thing. Digging her nails into the flesh, she tried ripping away at the skin, but it was like oil and rubber and no matter how much she sank her nails into it, she couldn’t bring anything up. Fuck it. She just wanted to hurt it now.
Another body presented itself to her.
It looked like Rob, but it couldn’t be him. She’d left him safe on the boat. He watched her go. The illusion of him sitting on the deck catching big, fat fish shattered. She reached out to him, couldn’t stop herself. Was he even real? His cheeks still burned with memories of life. He was cold, like everything else, but looked warm. No one would be the wiser if he changed his mind and swam back to the surface.
Whoever it was, he hadn’t been here long. Maybe that was why it had taken so long to find the damn thing. Maybe it had been busy snatching up her friend.
No one can see you crying down here.
For a moment, it seemed the posy had finished. Its limbs paused now, frozen people dangled at the ends of their monstrous tethers, and Sestra waited for anything else to happen. But nothing did. The posy glowed and glowed while serving up her past on a platter.
It glowed so brightly, so wildly. The sight of it stung her eyes.
The monsters are here.
She couldn’t bring herself to look. The sight of it stung. It was too bright. Her skin felt like worms. Or was it tentacles? She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to be here. She regretted everything. There was so much to regret, and she did. Oh, did she.
Everything.
The stillness ached. She wanted her sister.
It had everyone else. It had everything. It had gone and found them and tucked them into its breast, and now it stopped?
Where is she? Where the fuck is my sister?
She waited for the last reveal. There had to be one more. She had to be one more.
After all of it, Sestra still didn’t get it. She might not ever. So the posy reached into its clutches and flung out one last body.
The world melted into alien hues of green and blue and black, and then she was alone.
But she wasn’t.
A gentle hand landed on her shoulder. Thea knew it immediately.
“Where the hell have you been?” she asked.
“Here. I’ve always been here,” said Doris.
“Oh really? Just been having a rest with a posy, have you? Having a grand old time while the rest of us are up there dying?” The very sound of her sister’s voice was like a reset, immediately dropping her back on the streets, back into the rage and sorrow and rejection.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing, Thea. Exactly it.”
Thea wanted so badly to grab her, squeeze her close until her head popped off. She had missed her so much. She hated her and missed her and was so fucking sorry. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at her. God only knew if it was even really her. Doris was dead. Thea probably was too.
“Sorry,” Thea said.
“Still stubborn as hell, I see.”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Will you look at me, please? I hate talking to the top of your head.”
Hesitant, she did as her sister asked. It scared the shit out of her to imagine what Doris had become, but she looked just as Thea remembered. She wore the same shirt and pants as the day she died, and her body was rigid with pain. Ever here she was not free of it.
“Are we dead?” Thea asked.
“You aren’t. Not yet.”
“Then where are we?” She tried to see beyond Doris, but nothing would materialize. The space around them shifted and warped whenever she tried to focus. It was as if they were still sinking, monstrous things slithering around them in the dark and deep.
“I’m not sure. I’ve been down here a long time. It’s hard to tell how long.”
“I saw James. The posy has him.”
“I know. I found him.” Her expression was distant, as if still deciding whether to keep him.
Does that mean that she found her too? That she was searching for her all this time? “You always told me to run. To hide. You always told me there were monsters out there and I thought you were fucking deranged.”
She expected a fight but received nothing but a smile in return. But even that was fleeting—her usual consternation swallowed it up as soon as it began.
“Not that it did any good.”
“Your training was pretty piss poor, considering the circumstances.”
Doris dropped to her knees, taking both hands to Thea’s cheeks. It was her gentlest gesture since childhood. Maybe because they both were dead, and this was just the final, desperate sparks of Thea’s psyche flickering one last time. Maybe because this was what she always wanted and wished and prayed for. All those times she’d wandered and wandered, completely convinced that wandering was for the best, that she was a wild, uncaged bird not suited for the traditional trappings of love and comfort. Deep in all those places she tried to delete sat this demented and human wish for someone to hold her the way Doris held her now.
That was the thing too—it had always been her sister she thought of. That had always been the only loss that mattered. She wondered, in those rare times she allowed herself to reflect on it, if Doris mourned too. Honestly, she would never be certain. Not even now.
Doris gazed at her, eyes endless pools of water. She was fading. “We always were better storms than we were people, weren’t we, sister?”
Thea returned the gesture. Doris’s cheeks were frail and soft, not cold or warm. Empty. Fleeting.
“Like the stories,” she said.
“I shouldn’t have filled your head with such scary things.”
“You were little. A kid. It didn’t do much harm.”
“It didn’t? Did you forget where we are?”
For a moment, she had. It was just her and Doris. Two sisters. It wasn’t cold or hot; she wasn’t tired or broken; she was just Thea again, listening with rapt attention to the coos of the only person that’d ever mattered to her.
It was fleeting, but enough. It would have to be.
Thea closed her eyes, clinging to the image of her sister as it slipped out of her grasp like sand.
A flurry of emotions coursed through her—she wanted to yell at her for leaving the way she had, yet hold her forever, if only to remember that she’d been real once, that she’d really lived.
She wanted to tell her that she was sorry.
Even now she couldn’t bring herself to say it. She should, but she wouldn’t.
A weightlessness took over, and she was suddenly aware of being moved around. The tentacle around her waist tightened and went slack, as if to jolt her back to the present.
The present of being underwater, of not breathing, of never seeing the sun or the sky or Rob or anyone ever again.
The blue glow of another tentacle slid in front of her, one so small it may not have been part of the same creature. She reached out; it was right there. Her arm wasn’t even fully extended before she bumped a knuckle into it.
It was cold.
She open
ed her eyes. It was cold.
A hollow skeleton glared back at her through a fog of water.
It was empty, a shell. It could have been anyone—Doris, her mother, Death. It was all of them.
It was herself. Or someone just like her.
Is this what her family had seen every time they looked at her? Every time they pleaded and begged for her to change? Was she nothing more than a hollow corpse just wearing her skin, waiting for the moment to be free of her saggy existence? She’d been on the bumpy road to overdose. She’d been closer than she’d ever thought.
She despised the thought of Doris remembering her this way.
And Thea laughed. Was this the ghost that had haunted her so? Since her lungs were full and her body a sinking stone, she thought about her cackle spitting across this thing’s face. The bones paled under the blue. Instinctively, she massaged her arms, her inner thighs, her toes—all the places she’d used as gateways for heroin, the hot rush of it settling over her body like an electric blanket. Pure comfort. Total satisfaction. She’d always miss it, but she didn’t miss it as much as she thought she would.
The posy released her a moment before tightening its grip once again. She was face to face with the skeleton now, body to body. Its ribs jabbed at her gut, prodding at her like some sort of joke. Still, she threaded herself through its bones, so that once she rotted, no one would be able to tell the two apart. It could have been anyone, but she was sure that it wasn’t.
Her thoughts slowed. Everything slowed. She’d always been a hurricane of a person, her body a crumbling dam unable to contain it. Doris had tried her best to keep her safe from herself, but all that ended up doing was destroying them both.
A little girl had run away. She was barefoot and cold.
The girl tried to hide, but the things—the thing—found her anyway. The monster came after the girl.
It watched her.
It was always watching.
It had a dozen hands and sharp teeth . . .
. . . little sister crying . . .
. . . no matter how hard you try, your monsters always follow.
So we started playing the monster game.
Lights shimmered around her, dimming, creeping closer. Color throbbed messages at her that she couldn’t understand, looping around her tighter and tighter.
It wasn’t long before the posy smothered her. Completely cocooned, maybe she’d emerge as something new. Maybe she’d stay right here and rot, though that didn’t scare her like it should have.
She closed her eyes, hearing once more a voice she thought had been lost forever. Her sister’s voice.
Oh, how she had missed it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Where do I start? So many people over a span of so many years have nurtured my writing in ways that made this book possible. So I suppose I’ll start from the beginning. To Laura, my first creative writing professor, thank you for cradling my insecure writer ego as I learned. Thank you for assuring me I could do it, even when I wasn’t sure I could. Thank you to all my writing friends, most notably Eshe and Amy, of which were subjected to years of me talking about drafting and rejections, and somehow still wanted to be my friend. Thank you to Kate Brauning, you beautiful soul, for championing my work and simply being an all-around class act. Thank you to my mother, my most fervent, proud, an enthusiastic supporter. You have no idea how many times you kept me afloat as I waded through publishing’s choppy waters. Thank you to my husband, who has treated my writing with more respect than it probably deserved. You are a saint. To my kids, I finally did it despite your constant distractions (love you, boys!). Thank you to those that I neglected to mention here. Trust me that it is not from a lack of gratitude, but instead the pressure of actually writing my acknowledgements making my brain seize. I’ll most certainly write you a very emotional apology once I realize what I have done. And finally I’d like to thank Lindy Ryan and the entire Black Spot team. Thank you for taking a chance on me, for encouraging me, for working with me as I panicked my way through revisions and edits. Lindy, you are a rockstar, and I am forever blessed to have crossed paths with you. Here’s to more adventures!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tiffany Meuret is a writer of monsters and twisted fairy tales. Her publications include Shoreline of Infinity, Luna Station Quarterly, Ellipsis Zine, Rhythm & Bones, and others. When not reading or writing, she is usually binge watching comfortable sitcoms from her childhood or telling her kids to put on their shoes for the tenth time. She lives in sunny Arizona with her husband, two kids, two chihuahuas, gecko, and tortoise.
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