The Lonely

by Ainslie Hogarth

  I smiled and stood up and moved to the middle porch step. He moved to the middle porch step too. The road-map veins under his translucent skin turned my stomach a bit. He held his hand out for me to put mine in, knuckles down so I could see his toad-belly palms. And they felt as cold as toad bellies, too. But maybe it was nice. Because toad bellies are better than nothing.

  The June Room

  She remembered now what happened. What happened was that Seisyll came knocking on The Parents’ door with a plastic bag of dead cat in one hand and a familiar red ribbon in the other. She hid in the living room, under a woolly gray blanket that rarely moved from its casually tossed perch on the arm of the chair, but really, there was nothing casual about it. Its function was to hide a large, unfixable gash in the upholstery, and more importantly, to keep her and her sister from picking at the irresistibly fluffy guts spilling out, which they both had a tendency to do. The same went for rips in the wallpaper or snags in the carpet. The back of the couch was pushed against a wall of tall windows and if she lifted her head just a bit she could get a good peek at the front lawn.

  The night was a picture, smoothed tightly over stiff matting and framed by the cream-colored molding that accented their living room windows back then. A pattern of whining cats occupied the image; they decorated the grass and kneaded the oak tree and, like little bread crumbs, a trail of them led up the porch and stopped behind Seisyll’s crispy, exposed heels. Of course, she couldn’t see the heels, but she knew what they looked like. She knew what he was wearing without having to see him. She knew how his snarling face moved as he barked at The Mother, who had opened the door only as much as she had to; enough to hear him and let him see her face, but not enough to let his steam billow in and curl the wallpaper. Which she and her sister would only make worse with their incessant picking.

  After a few minutes The Mother closed the door and walked into the dark living room. She said, “Easter, honey, did you hear what Seis said?” And Easter nodded. And she nodded and she nodded and she nodded until she was sobbing and she wasn’t sure when the nodding turned into sobbing but it had and she’d buried her face into The Mother’s neck and The Mother rubbed her back, her palm up and down and up and down, moving Easter’s shirt around, squeezing her tight, and for some reason Easter opened her mouth and bit The Mother’s throat hard; a tendon slipped between her smooth teeth. The Mother screamed and pushed her away and grabbed her neck and shrieked, “Why on earth would you do that?” and Easter ran up the stairs and thought to herself “Because I’m evil, that’s why. I’m an evil monster, two at once all the time and both evil. That’s why.”

  And the betrayed faces of the little cats scrolled along the back of her closed eyelids this evening as she lay quietly in the June Room in Mrs. Bellows’ Apartment Building. The bugs hadn’t made it off the walls yet, but they were close. She had grown lazy, or curious maybe. What would happen if she let them touch her? Sometimes she let herself indulge in the craving for a long antennae flicking at her toes, which were as red as cranberries all winter. Maybe she craved the feeling of cold, dead heaviness writhing over her cemented thighs; her whole body benumbed with a fear, not of their presence, but that her movement might frighten them away.

  She opened her eyes and saw something in her window: cats, a shade left behind, printed momentarily onto the real world from the picture etched onto the backs of her eyelids.

  But as her vision adjusted, she realized her error. Those weren’t cats out the window, complementing her stars. They were bugs, crawling all over the sky as though it were made of nylon, filling up the window, invading her eyes. And once they were in there, she couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the bugs, so she was always watching and they would always be moving closer. And from her eyes, they began to invade other spots, too, empty spaces where memories had been, or should have been. Spots where Julia usually was. Where she’d wrenched things out and filled them up with her stories. Where she’d tinkered and adjusted and made things right. Where The Father might have been if he weren’t a black hole. The bugs, implants but not. Smoothing things over, rubbing them down. Brain etched into. Worn by scribbling feet. So that every implant went as unnoticed as a bone in the body.

  The June Room

  One evening, Mrs. Bellows knocked on her door. It was time to go to the Craft Room where three other girls would be, ready to stitch things and paint things and watch things dry. They sat in the same spots each time, a pair on either side of a long wooden table, each perched on a spinning stool that seemed to sprout from the ground like a toadstool. Easter didn’t want to go. She’d spent the whole morning trying to come up with excuses, but Mrs. Bellows knew everything she did, knew that she’d be lying. There was no getting out of it. Mrs. Bellows seemed to detect the anxiety creeping from Easter like an odor.

  She said, “You can be the scissor boss, Easter.”

  As though that would make her feel better.

  When she walked in, they all looked up at her. Three other girls, pale skin, long hair, eyes wide. They each spun slightly on their stools, left and right and left and right and left and right, and wadded thread into heaped nests in front of them; the spools rattled, loud as door stoppers. Impaled and spinning on well-placed nails, as deeply rooted as totem poles into the pocked crafts table.

  The spools generated an endless hum, a mindless buzz to smother the quiet. Fingers worked quickly at bits of quilt, moving against each other like puppies after a teat: untangling, pulling, threading, nourishing themselves with busy purpose, organizing the thread into things identifiable. Things with names: ducks, roses, cherries, leaves, sailboats, a small hive of buzzing worker bees; producing new things for the world from a set of widely distributed instructions. They pierced and picked and dug and tightened and stitched their new things to life.

  The Craft Room walls were covered in old quilts made by faraway, presumably cured, ex-tenants. Images of health: a Thanksgiving-themed quilt hung heavy on the north wall: families at a table, the backs of their heads a furious, concentrated zigzag of brown and yellow thread; a steaming turkey excreting stuffing from its crisp rectum; a bowl of mashed potatoes as blindingly white as a diaper. On the south wall hung an army of coarse, felted faces, patrolling the room, peeking over shoulders, alerting Mrs. Bellows when the girls were acting up. Each face looked like a character from “Guess Who?” A fat, yellow-haired policeman, face dimpled and boyish; a red-headed lady with big blue glasses and a straw hat with a cornucopia spilling out on top of it.

  These displayed creations were supposed to be inspiration for the girls: become healthy, want it, produce, produce, produce! The ability and desire to produce copies, to reproduce, makes you a healthy young thing. And they all wanted to be healthy young things. Otherwise they wouldn’t be there.

  Easter sat down. Mrs. Bellows handed her the scissors carefully and she held them tight in her hands, clasping their jaws shut. Apparently it was a great honor to be trusted with such a dangerous instrument, trusted to do all of the snipping for the entire day. And it was an honor, too, for the scissors, as they were pretty sure that no other pair of scissors in the world were as highly coveted as they were, represented such an enormous responsibility. How many other pairs of scissors could claim to be a tool toward recovery? Well, maybe lots, but none that these scissors knew.

  “Could you cut this thread for me?” one girl asked.

  She had a small gummy smile and red cheeks. Another girl walked up and held a string to be severed in front of her face, too jealous to formulate a polite request. Easter preferred this. The thought of people being so jealous of her made her guts tickle. She would stick her fingers slowly through the scissor’s holes and spread them wide open, proud like a peacock tail. Then with a rehearsed casualness, she would snip the thread or the yarn or the fabric that had been held before her. It was fun to be the scissor boss.

  She looked at each of the girls. Hunched over, their thin
, restless fingers became as long and sharp as needles, probing and diving over and under the vast stretches of cream-colored fabric. When did it happen that their fingers became needles? Needles of bone. She’d heard that somewhere before. Read it in a book that made her cry. Long, sharp, white, tapered needles. Filled with marrow, or tooth pulp.

  Had her fingers become needles as well? She looked at her own dry-knuckled hand, splayed out and flattened on the table. Just a hand, with regular, pliable fingers. But theirs weren’t. And now their eyes looked like buttons, smooth and blank behind hair that hung in front of their poreless plastic faces like yarn from their soft skulls, pooling on the table in swirls like sleeping snakes. This must be what the world looked like with no Julia. This must be normal.

  She leaned over and stole a snip of yarn from one of the girl’s heads. The girl shrieked, her mouth a flat, oblong section of black velvet. She pointed a needled finger at Easter and began manipulating her black velvet mouth, screaming something about the culprit being dangerous. Easter tried to understand, but she couldn’t hear the voice all smothered in black velvet.

  But that girl’s finger, pointing. How nice it would be to have that finger, that needle finger, sneak it back to her room to keep, to cross-stitch a little picture of a bug into her own skin. Easter leapt up onto the table and grabbed the girl’s arm, pinning her hand down beneath her knee while the girl screamed louder and flailed about with the rest of her body. Easter drove her knee harder into the girl’s palm, said “SHUT UP!” and tried to position the scissors to cut the needle finger right off. She was suddenly grabbed by the wrist and pulled to the ground and made to eat sleeping pills and lie in bed.

  But even with the sleeping pills she couldn’t sleep. Not with all these bugs around. She’d been staring at them since they’d forced their way onto her sky. Eyes closed crawling bugs, eyes open crawling bugs. She would let her eyes bury themselves, become wedged between their muscular bodies, roll around like marbles as the bugs grazed against one another. She stared until they didn’t even look like bugs anymore, they became the shapes of anything she wanted, like mashed potato clouds emblazoned by sunny days.

  The bell, louder than it had ever been before, appeared in her mind. Her face reflected on the smooth, silver bell. The reflection small, contained, not at all like on the back of a spoon, over which it spread like a creamy infection.

  On the bell, her face was a freckle, a tiny spot, a blister on a bud, a throbbing sac of larvae that ached to burst.

  She stuck out her pink tongue and the little imperfection mimicked. It was just like her but smaller, rounder; the world on the bell is a world without corners. Her lips spread apart, an opening the size of a pencil eraser.

  She breathed a cloud of hot breath onto the bell; bleach, powder, paint; a fog to hide her imperfection reflection. It tingled barely, a wind chime just gripped still by the thick of summer.

  And she was gone, hidden behind a picture of her breath. With her smallest finger she pressed a circle into the fog, a clear moment for her tiny face. The imperfection. A boil, a pimple, something to be treated, dried up, picked off, burned and buffed out. A smooth, pure bud. Once again, she slowly coated the bell in breath and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. But she couldn’t seem to get to her face again. She wished she’d said good-bye.

  It rang so clear, so loud, unceasing. Once an implant, a foreign object, placed there in her brain and over the doors by The Mother, but now as organic as the bugs had become.

  Two warm tears squeezed out of the corners of her tightly compressed eyelids, riding along a particularly prominent crease in the pillowcase. A warm, wet patch of white fabric. She squeezed her eyes even tighter, as tight as they could be, and rolled her cheek into the wetness, the sound of the ocean in a seashell crashing against her ear drums. This was stupid. She couldn’t bear this all night. She let her left eye crack open just a bit and she looked out the window. A clear night. The stars looked like a thousand pinpricks in a stretch of black fabric, snags in a pair of hearty tights. She remembered borrowing her mother’s too-long nylons: they hung over her toes like elf shoes, got caught on nails in the hardwood floor at the party. They were garbage after that. The Father pulled them off, rolled them up, and threw them in the trash. She wanted to find a loose thread in the twilight. Pull it. See what shined so brightly behind it, through the snags. She shut her eyes tight again and a word drifted onto the backs of her eyelids:

  Lonely.

  The bugs ebbed around her bed, creaming against the skirt.

  Lonely.

  She felt weight tugging down at the edges of her sheets, pulling down tight over her body.

  The waves churned in her ears.

  The loneliest girl.

  Heaviness on top of her, the gentle thud of fingers keeping time on a blanket.

  But you don’t have to be lonely.

  A million tiny feet tapping, little bodies scraping against her crisp sheets.

  You’ve got a million friends.

  She opened her eyes and crawling over the corners of her bed were thousands and thousands of bugs. And the bell rang so loud, so constant that it became like traffic in a city, like the crackle of a record, a ceiling fan lub-dubbing; there and meant to be there and even strange without it.

  They can live inside you and make you not alone.

  They crawled over each other, under each other, moved together like thick, black oil, about to envelop her.

  Should let them stay.

  They were all over her, covered her like a quilt. She tried to scream but as soon as she opened her mouth, they moved together like liquid and filled it up, scurried down her throat, tickling her from the inside out, touching her all over. She could barely breathe. All over her face the cold ripple of their segmented bodies moved up and down. They rubbed at her as though she were a piece of beach glass, made opaque, smooth, numb, wearing away all of her edges. In the bell, a world without corners.

  Time to Leave The Woods

  It was 7:30. The Mother would have been doing the thing that worried mothers do on TV—sitting at the table with her hands wrapped around a mug. She’d have poured herself a cup of warm something, groping at it without drinking, wearing something loose, seemingly thrown on in a fit of terror but still flattering. She would wonder if I’d told her about a place I’d go on a warm June night. Wonder and wonder and then feel guilty that she couldn’t remember.

  I was ready for someone to come and find me. Quite ready in fact. Gray dusk was fast becoming black night. Half of the planet behind a closed eyelid. I couldn’t escape the things coming for me. Creatures crawling out of real, woodsy dark to feast on the dead; or in my case, what they wrongfully believed to be dead.

  I am dead. I died a few hours ago, my body as still as any other corpse, but I just didn’t realize it. That’s why it’s been so hard for me to look around. My whole body held still by a big, cold hand closed tight around me, white and smooth, skin hanging over tendons like a wet towel over a rack, nails long and crisp as corn flakes. This hand held me still and quiet and I couldn’t fight it. I am a figurine and I am trapped inside. Finally, after all of these hours, I’m completely made of wood.

  While all around me the dark world had devoured everything. Finished off The Woods as I knew them, about to enter my whole body the way that it enters a sleeping hand. Filling me up with stillness. The trees around me began to quiver, losing their drive to remain inanimate. The darkness licked its lips, tasting up the forest floor, drinking from my pool of blood. Shadows growing, spreading like a disease, and the things that had been restricted by their borders would be able to move freely.

  The occasional headlight brought a distorted wave of illumination into my world. It was different out there. Things would know that I was dead. New sounds bounced off the trees; owls, heavy winds forcing their way loudly between branches, increasingly aggressive bugs burrowing their way t
oward me, picking at me too eagerly, a squabbling sound below. I hope I’m still alive. I hope I haven’t been feasted on yet. Footsteps crunched somewhere near. The Something Coming.

  A car went by, momentarily illuminating everything. I thought I saw them grab Something with their light. Those eyes again, peeking from between trees. Closer this time. Then complete darkness.

  “Hello? Hello? If someone is out there, please help me, my legs are stuck under this rock. I’ve been bleeding for hours and hours, please. I don’t want to be here anymore!”

  It was The Something Coming. It was finally here. Now that the dark world had enveloped me entirely, The Something Coming felt safe enough to show itself. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care. Be whatever you want, Something Coming, I need a change anyway.

  Another car went by and I screamed at the top of my lungs, thinking that someone inside might hear me. They must not have. Because they didn’t stop. Maybe I really was already dead. Maybe I wasn’t making a sound at all. Were my lips moving? Were they? I moved them around, stuck my tongue out, made loud, bizarre squeaks, growled. Was I making a sound? I couldn’t tell anymore. Then everything seemed to go silent. Nothing rustled or chirped. I became deaf, blind, trapped in the smooth white hand that had become like a box, the exact size and shape of my body. I pounded and squirmed and clawed at the box. Scratched and tore until I’d left my fingernails somewhere along the gouges. The silence was decimating me.

  But then I wasn’t blind. And I wasn’t in any box either. My fingernails were still intact. Another pair of headlights definitely illuminated a flash of red in the trees. Hair, perhaps? A bright, unnatural red. Someone was out there.

  “Hello, hello, HELLO! I know you’re there. I know you’re there, I saw you! Now help me with this stupid rock or there’ll be trouble. I’ll tell everyone that I was dying under a rock and you didn’t help me.”