Relief floods my chest, and I turn to Sister.
“It’s a mannequin,” I say in a normal voice.
“It’s a joke,” she says, equally relieved.
“A lipstick smile,” I say.
“An ugly wig,” Sister says.
“What are you doing?” I ask. Sister slips from my grasp and jumps down to the lawn. She bends down close to the edge of the fence, then holds up a small rock, the malicious smile on her face as she steps back onto the chair.
“I want to see her without it.”
“Don’t,” I say.
“Why not?” she says.
“I don’t know.” I stare at the mannequin. “I don’t think we should.”
“It’s just a mannequin.”
“What if it’s not?”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“What’s gotten into you?” We stare at each other, our frustration mutual.
“I don’t want to fall.” Sister reaches out. I grab her hand, but there’s no enthusiasm in my touch. Sister pitches her right arm back and throws the rock. We always did have good aim. It bounces with a plink right against the woman’s forehead and lands at her feet. After a second, the wig slithers to the woman’s shoulders, exposing her marble round head.
I turn to Sister and smile. “Nice.”
Sister smiles. “Nice.”
“Niiiiiiicccccceeeeeee.” The woman’s mouth is open, and the word is pouring out, elongated in the familiar lawnmower drone, in the thick smell of gasoline and severed green grass and torn leaves. We scream. Sister pushes back from the fence, her chair tipping over, but I don’t let go of her hand. She falls against me, trying to pull away, but I throw my free arm over the top of the fence. I refuse to let go. The woman’s lips stretch apart, wider than wide, past the nubby ears and up and up, until her entire face disappears in the bear trap of her mouth. It comes to a stop only when her entire head is split in half, the oval crown of her bald head resting at the back of her neck. Small rows of jagged teeth line the mouth’s wet edges, rotating around and around like the blades of a circular saw.
“You wanted to be first,” I say, to neither of us, to both of us. “You wanted to see.”
“Let me go!” screams Sister. She pushes against me, but I’m wrapped tight against the fence, my feet hooked under the arms of the chair.
“No,” I clench my hand tighter around hers, and I feel our bones grind and shift. The lawnmower sound deepens, grows ragged and clogged as if the blades were running over rocks. Small emerald specks are rising out of the woman’s cavernous mouth, swarming about her head in a frothy cloud of bodies and wings. The smell is suffocating, and my body grows sleepy and numb. Sister feels like a thousand pounds of dead weight at my waist, but I can’t push her off. It’s not that we don’t want to move anymore. It’s that we can’t. And then: an explosion of green pours out of the mouth, thousands of jewel-bright, stinging bodies that shoot forward, slam against the wood slats, against my face in a hard rain. The woman’s body deflates, collapsing against the gravel in a shivering heap. I feel myself falling, finally. The sky is above me now, and the impossibly high tips of the trees, and Sister is somewhere beside me, grabbing at me with both hands. Everything grows hazy and beautiful and kitten-gray, even the screams. My right hand rests on my stomach, five fingers and one thumb clutching two objects, slender and soft and hard.
One of us is licking their lips and laughing. I’m pretty sure it’s me.
• • • •
Sister is crying. The mimicry tears, we call them. It’s the kind of crying we do when we don’t really want to cry but we have to, because everyone else is acting a certain way and we need to do the same. Her weeping sounds so far away and hollow, like she’s become one of those empty construction lots, the wind plucking her bones like the metal frames and threading the music back and forth across all the blocks.
My nose tickles. I think of tiny legs and wings crawling out of my nostrils. I sit up, eyes open, and rub at my face until the sensation is gone. Then I stare down at my hands. Ten fingers, two thumbs. Two more fingers sit in my lap. I pick them up. The nails are polished and shiny, with a faint rose sheen. The other ends are perfectly round. No torn flesh, no peek of bones, no blood. I have a terrible urge to lick them. I manage to tuck one in the waistband of my pants before she speaks.
“What did you do to me?”
I look up. Sister is standing before me, her arms outstretched. Each hand has four perfect fingers and one pretty little thumb. I hold up her extra pinky.
“I only have the one.”
“Well, where is the other?”
“I can’t keep track of your fingers for you.”
“I look all normal now.”
“Yes, like that’s so horrible.”
“It is!”
“I know how you really feel.”
Sister looks frightened, but she stops pretending to cry. I roll my eyes and turn back to the fence. Between the slats, I catch glimpses of flesh, folds of grayish white dotted with emerald specks, and the shimmer of sharp teeth catching the midday sun. A thin breeze pushes through the fence. It smells like rotting fruit, sour-sweet.
“That was not a mannequin,” I say.
“Give me my finger back.”
“What were those flying things?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sister says.
“I think it matters quite a lot,” I say, standing up. “Show me your hands again.”
Sister holds them out. I place the end of the pinky next to the red bump where it used to hang. “It’s like it just fell off,” she says. “It doesn’t even hurt.”
“You’re relieved, aren’t you.”
“I don’t know how I feel.”
“We’re not the same anymore,” I say. “We’re not the same person.”
“Is that all you care about?” she says. “We never were.”
I place her pinky next to mine, touching the end to my skin. A sharp pain spikes through my hands, and my left extra pinky trembles, then unfurls. It isn’t curled up in sleep anymore. It’s strong and straight, and the nail is long and steel-sharp. I wiggle it back and forth. I’ve never been able to do that before. We stand on the lawn in silence, staring at it. Across the fence, crows are gathering on the rooftops, waiting for the right moment to attack the woman’s remains. I press Sister’s pinky hard against my skin, taking my hand away only when the ache subsides. It doesn’t fall off.
“What did you do?”
I wiggle the fingers on my left hand. All six of them, and a thumb.
“That was my finger!” Sister steps forward, but I step forward, too, my sharp-nailed finger extended. She pulls back.
“Finders, keepers.” I reach down into my waistband and pull out her other finger. “Losers, weepers.”
Sister lunges. I open my mouth wide. A soft, low, metallic buzz emerges from the back of my throat, and the drowsy scent of gasoline fills the air. Sister’s pupils widen, and her body grows slack. “Two can play, Sister,” she murmurs, and sticks out her emerald-flecked tongue. My knees buckle at the scent—fresh-cut grass and crushed leaves, all the ripe green distress of dying flora. I sigh, and my breath comingles with hers. We drop to our knees.
“Give me my fingers back!”
“They’re our fingers.”
“We’re not the same.”
“Not yet.” I make the words rattle like a saw.
Sister grabs my hand and puts my index finger in her mouth. I slap her face, and when she raises her other hand, I grab it and catch her wriggling thumb with my teeth. We fall against the fence and slide sideways onto the ground, our noses almost touching.
“You’re only hurting yourself.” Her hot tongue pushes the words around my flesh.
“You love it.”
She smiles the delicious smile.
We both bite down.
Behind the fence, the crows have landed, fighting over the woman’s festering remains. Sister lies on the grass
with her head at my shoulder, examining my severed finger. It didn’t even hurt a bit. And her thumb—it was like nipping off cookie dough from the roll. Other than several small teeth marks that quickly faded away, you couldn’t tell what was gone. She’s placed it in the middle of her palm, and now it waves back and forth, around and around. I take her thumb and place it between my breasts, then slide it down to the open zipper of my pants.
“Absolutely not,” Sister says.
“Absolutely yes,” I say.
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s practical. It leaves my hands free for the other things.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
I roll over so that our noses are touching again, our foreheads, our lips. “If you don’t like what I’m saying, then why don’t you bite off my tongue.”
She does. In our petroleum haze, we shed our clothes, adjusting and arranging our new parts. Insects float in and out of our now-empty mouths, catch in our long hair, crown our heads like emerald halos. Sister signals me, her long fingers waving me forward, and we move as one across the sun-dappled yard to a far corner, to a bed of beauty bark under the heavy needled branches of stiff evergreens. The afternoon sun lowers and the moon rises, bright and clear in the hot summer night. Our limbs come together, fall apart, and weave together again, tongues and toes and scent directing our exploration. And with the break of day, we grow bold with our new single mouth and bite down harder, further within, until we are inside-out, until our hearts are one. Black birds gather on the overhead branches, chattering at the sight of so many organs, so much sinew and broken bone. They wait in vain. We are fast and quick and sure, and not a drop of blood is spilled or misspent.
And night falls again. We rise from our corner, stretch our double-length torso and our many slender, double-jointed limbs, raise the eyes of our single-mouthed head to a star-studded sky as we step into the center of the lawn. The wind is low, and the birds are quiet. All about us, small backyards pool behind hedges and fences, small oases of suburban repose. And across the concrete patio, yellow light wells from the kitchen window, and two familiar figures move like shadow puppets in a box. With two sets of eyes, we watch as one.
“Sister,” I say.
“Our parents are home,” I say.
“Do we show them?” I ask. “Do we embrace them?”
“How can we not?” I say
“They will scream,” I say.
“And then they will love it,” I say.
“Or they will die,” I say.
“Unless we die, as the woman did,” I say.
“She gave us a gift,” I say.
“And where is she now,” I say.
We grow silent.
After a time, we lower our haunches onto the dew-speckled grass. One long, multi-fingered arm picks up a sandal, discarded from two days ago. It seems so small. Our parents move back and forth deep within the house, talking, drinking, making dinner. They look happy. We think of the woman, immobile in a barren landscape, staring with empty eyes past our fence, dreaming of the lush, forbidden world of another backyard.
© 2014 by Livia Llewellyn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and erotica. A graduate of Clarion 2006, her fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Sybil's Garage, PseudoPod, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and numerous anthologies. Her first collection of short fiction, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011 by Lethe Press, and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
REPRINT SHORT FICTION
Martyrdom
Joyce Carol Oates
1
A sleek tiny baby he was, palpitating with life and appetite as he emerged out of his mother’s birth canal, and perfectly formed: twenty miniature pink toes intact, and the near-microscopic nails already sharp; pink-whorled tiny ears; the tiny nose quivering, already vigilant against danger. The eyes were relatively weak, in the service of detecting motion rather than figures, textures, or subtleties of color. (In fact, he may have been color blind. And since this deficiency was never to be pointed out to him, he was arguably “blind” in a secondary, metaphysical sense.) His baby’s jaws, lower and upper, were hinged with muscle, and unexpectedly strong. And the miniature teeth set in those jaws—needle-sharp, and perfectly formed. (More of these teeth, soon.) And the quizzical curve of the tail, pink, hairless, thin as a mere thread. And the whiskers, no more than a tenth of an inch long, yet quivering, and stiff too, like the bristles of a tiny tiny brush.
2
What a beautiful baby she was, Babygirl the loving parents called her, conceived in the heat of the most tender yet the most erotic love, fated to be smothered with love, devoured with love, an American Babygirl placed with reverent fingers in her incubator. Periwinkle blue eyes, fair silk-soft blond hair, perfect rosebud lips, tiny pug nose, uniform smoothness of the Caucasian skin. A call went out to nursing mothers in ghetto neighborhoods requesting milk from their sweet heavy balloon-breasts, mother’s milk for pay, since Babygirl’s own mother failed to provide milk of the required richness. Her incubator filtered our contaminated air and pumped pure oxygen into her lungs. She had no reason to wail like other infants, whose sorrow is so audible and distracting. In her incubator air humid and warm as a tropical rainforest Babygirl thrived, glowed, prospered, grew.
3
And how he grew, though nameless even to his mother! How he doubled, trebled, quadrupled his weight, within days! Amid a swarm of siblings he fended his way, shrewd and driven, ravenous with hunger. Whether he was in the habit of gnawing ceaselessly during his waking hours, not only edible materials but such seemingly inedible materials as paper, wood, bone, metal of certain types and degrees of thinness, etc., because he was ravenously hungry or because he simply liked to gnaw, who can say? It is a fact that his incisors grew at the rate of between four and five inches a year, so he had to grind them down to prevent their pushing up into his brain and killing him. Granted the higher cognitive powers generated by the cerebral cortex, he might have speculated upon his generic predicament: is such behavior voluntary, or involuntary; where survival is an issue, what is compulsion; under the spell of Nature, who can behave unnaturally?
4
Babygirl never tormented herself with such questions. In her glass-topped incubator she grew ounce by ounce, pound by pound, feeding, dozing, feeding, dozing—no time at all before her dimpled knees pressed against the glass, her breath misted the glass opaque. Her parents were beginning to be troubled by her rapid growth, yet proud too of her rosy female beauty, small pointed breasts, curving hips, dimpled belly and buttocks and crisp cinnamon-colored pubic hair, lovely thick-lashed eyes with no pupil. Babygirl had a bad habit of sucking her thumb so they painted her thumb with a foul-tasting fluorescent-orange iodine mixture and observed with satisfaction how she spat, and gagged, and writhed in misery, tasting it. One mild April day, a winey-red trail of clotted blood was detected in the incubator, issuing from between Babygirl’s plump thighs, we were all quite astonished and disapproving but what’s to be done? Babygirl’s father said, Nature cannot be overcome, nor even postponed.
5
So many brothers and sisters he had, an alley awash with their wriggling bodies, a warehouse cellar writhing and squeaking with them, he sensed himself multiplied endlessly in the world, thus not likely to die out. For of all creaturely fears it is believed the greatest is the fear of, not merely dying, but dying out. Hundreds of thousands of brothers and sisters related to him by blood which was a solace, yes but also a source of infinite anxiety for all were ravenous with hunger, the squeak! squeak! squeak! of hunger multiplied beyond accounting. He learned, on his frantic clicking toenails, to scramble up sheer verticals, to run to the limits of his endurance, to
tear out the throats of his enemies, to leap, to fly—to throw himself, for instance, as far as eleven feet into space, from one city rooftop to an adjacent rooftop—thus thwarting his pursuers. He learned to devour, when necessary, the living palpitating flesh of prey while on the run. The snap! of bones radiated pleasure through his jaws, his small brain thrummed with happiness. He never slept. His heartbeat was fever-rapid at all times. He knew not to back himself into a corner, nor to hide in any space from which there was no way out. He was going to live forever!—then one day his enemies set a trap for him, the crudest sort of trap, and sniffing and squeaking and quivering with hunger he lunged for the moldy bread-bait and a spring was triggered and a bar slammed down across the nape of his neck snapping the delicate vertebrae and near severing his poor astonished head.
6
They lied to her, telling her it was just a birthday party—for the family. First came the ritual bath, then the anointing of the flesh, the shaving and plucking of certain undesirable hairs, the curling and crimping of certain desirable hairs, she fasted for forty-eight hours, she was made to gorge herself for forty-eight hours, they scrubbed her tender flesh with a wire brush, they rubbed pungent herbs into the wounds, the little clitoris was sliced off and tossed to the clucking hens in the yard, the now-shaven labia were sewed shut, the gushing blood was collected in a golden chalice, her buckteeth were forcibly straightened with a pliers, her big hooked nose was broken by a quick skilled blow from the palm of a hand, the bone and cartilage grew back into more desirable contours, then came the girdle-brassiere to cinch in Babygirl’s pudgy twenty-eight-inch waist to a more desirable seventeen-inch-waist, so her creamy hips and thighs billowed out, so her gorgeous balloon-breasts billowed out, her innards were squeezed up into her chest cavity, she had difficulty breathing at first, and moist pink-tinted bubbles issued from her lips, then she got the knack of it, reveling in her classic “hour-glass” figure and new-found power over men’s inflammable imaginations. Her dress was something fetching and antique, unless it was something sly and silky-slinky, a provocative bustline, a snug-fitting skirt, she was charmingly hobbled as she walked her dimpled knees chafing together and her slender ankles quivering with the strain, she wore a black lace garter belt holding up her gossamer-transparent silk stockings with straight black seams, in her spike-heeled pointed-toed white satin shoes she winced a bit initially until she got the knack and very soon she got the knack, the shameless slut. Giggling and brushing and making little fluttery motions with her hands, wriggling her fat ass, her nipples hard and erect as peanuts inside the sequined bosom of her dress, her eyes glistened like doll’s eyes of the kind that shut when the doll’s head is thrust back, the periwinkle-blue had no pupils to distract, Babygirl was not one of those bitches always thinking plotting calculating how to take advantage of some poor jerk, she came from finer stock, you could check her pedigree, there were numerals tattooed into her flesh (the inside of the left thigh), she could be neither lost nor mislaid, nor could the cunt run away, and lose herself in America the way so many have done, you read about it all the time. They misted her in the most exquisite perfume—one whiff of it, if you were a man, a normal man, there’s a fever in your blood only one act can satisfy, they passed out copies of the examining physician’s report, she was clean of all disease venereal or otherwise, she was a virgin, no doubt of that though tripping in her high heels and grinning and blushing peering through her fingers at her suitors she sometimes gave the wrong impression, poor Babygirl: those lush crimson lips of such fleshy contours they suggested, even to the most gentlemanly and austere among us, the fleshy vaginal labia.
Nightmare Magazine Issue 25, Women Destroy Horror! Special Issue Page 8