Castles: A Fictional Memoir of a Girl with Scissors

by Benjamin X. Wretlind

  In one of those flashes, I saw myself pulled forward toward the cloud. The tumultuous vapor that fought against heat and humidity swallowed me like a giant dragon and spun me around in eddies of updrafts and downdrafts. Unfallen rain pelted my body as electric bursts from inside the cloud flashed around me one after the other so bright I had wanted to close my eyes, afraid to be blinded.

  It was then I saw them—the dust eels. They were no larger than tadpoles, no longer than my finger. They gnashed their teeth at each other and gnashed their teeth at the rain and gnashed their teeth at the vapor surrounding them. As I watched, they grew longer, their heads more bulbous, their teeth sharper. They didn't touch me, but they enveloped me. They hissed, but not at me. They gathered in the storm like a swarm of bees might gather after their nest had been disturbed by an outsider.

  I stared and I floated with them. I was no longer afraid of the lightning or the pelt of the unfallen rain on my body. The updrafts and downdrafts didn't push me around as much. The violence of nature had become a comfort, almost—and I still think this now—like Grandma's afghan wrapped tightly around me.

  One of the eels who had been gnashing his tail turned to face me. Although I couldn't tell from its horrid face, I registered sadness inside me, almost like the sadness you feel when rejected by someone you love. I know I'd felt that sadness a thousand times—with Mama, with Grandma, with Michael, with Steve. All the pain you feel is like a heavy weight inside, pulling your heart down to your stomach.

  The eel opened its mouth and screamed. It wasn't loud. It screamed more like a kitten might if you pulled its tail. It shrieked and wailed then turned back on itself and slashed into its tail, biting, tearing, grinding.

  In another flash of lightning, I found myself falling, falling toward the desert below, toward the ground, the cactus, the Bus. I wasn't afraid. I looked around me and saw them, the eels. They were large, like my arm, and fell with me. They bit at the air and they screamed, screamed a banshee-like scream. I suddenly felt their anger, their mission.

  And I knew.

  It was Steve they were coming for.

  It was my mess they wanted to clean up.

  What God had wrought in my dream was no longer a dream I could wake up from. They were as real as the paper I now scribble this story on, as real as the gravel that crunched under Mr. Pulman's feet, as real as the tongue I suddenly remembered squirming around inside Steve's mouth.

  In an instant, I fought the feeling as I fell toward the earth and my trailer. I fought against their hate and their mission. I fought against Grandma's words "Watch the tongue!" I fought and I fought and I fought . . .

  I opened my eyes as the trailer shook. The wind pushed hard against the siding. Glass shattered in the kitchen, just like it did on the night I hid under the cabinet between the Comet and the Windex.

  I turned to Steve. He was up on his elbows looking at the window. His tongue licked his lips. His eyes were groggy, wary, unsure of the violence that rocked the trailer.

  "What is that?" he said.

  I couldn't answer. I knew, but I couldn't say. Why did they want him? Why did they want to clean up my mess when I no longer believed it to be a mess at all?

  The window in the bedroom shattered. Glass flew inward toward the bed and I spun my body around to shield Steve. He curled into a fetal position and pulled the covers over his head, letting loose a cry of shock and disbelief. The glass clinked on the floor and against the wall. One of the shards landed on the bed and I felt the sharpness dig into my leg. I screamed both in pain and frustration.

  They weren't going to take him.

  Through the shattering of the glass and the gush of the wind through the open window, I heard the eels. They hissed at me. "He must be cleaned!"

  "No!" I screamed. My face was buried in Steve's neck as the assault continued. My words sounded muffled and distant. "No!"

  "Cut out his tongue!"

  "No!"

  "You will pay for this!"

  Fear the likes I have never felt before rushed through my body. My stomach tightened. My grip on the blanket over Steve's body became rigid steel. My head pounded. Tears streamed from my closed eyes.

  "You will pay!"

  4

  The morning after the storm, I was left with a mess to clean. Steve and I had moved to the couch in the living room and he had fallen back to sleep within minutes. I, on the other hand, shook and cried.

  I couldn't sleep, didn't want to sleep.

  He left at the first light of morning without a glance in my direction. I don't know what he thought happened the night before—and I know he didn't hear the eels—but he was more distant from me than he'd ever been. He looked around the trailer at the broken glass and dust, grunted then headed for the door.

  I cleaned all morning, cutting myself a few times and stopping to bandage my leg and my feet. The trash can was filled with glass shards—some small, some large. There was dust on everything and in everything.

  I cried only once, though. I knew this was my fault and I deserved it. I didn't listen to the eels; I didn't do what they told me to do. I had ignored the storms, put Grandma out of my head and focused on making Steve happy.

  Such a fool.

  I'm sure my castle was in ruins. I could imagine the bricks I laid out toppled over, weeds swallowing them in vast green fields of decay.

  When I stepped outside that afternoon to breathe in some fresh air, I half expected to see another storm in the distance, brewing and bubbling and boiling, getting ready to consume what its predecessor hadn't.

  Instead of a storm, however, an image of Grandma sat in her chair on the porch, much like a mirage so common in the heat of the day. Her afghan was wrapped around her and she rocked back and forth. Her eyes were red and buried in the distance. She had been crying.

  "Did your mother tell you what happened to your father?" she asked. She didn't look at me, thankfully. I was more ashamed at my lack of trust in the voices in the wind than I'd ever been before.

  "No," I said. I sat down next to her and noticed the blood on my leg had soaked the bandage.

  "She left you with me, you know. She was disgraced by herself and by your father."

  "I thought Daddy died before I was born?"

  Grandma let a slight smile cross her face, but it lasted only a second. "Your mother couldn't clean up her own messes."

  "She said that." I let the memory of the last night I spoke with Mama flood over me. "She said she wasn't strong enough."

  "Your father was nice, but he wouldn't marry your mother, even after you were seeded and began to grow inside her."

  I swallowed. My throat was raspy with all the dust I must have inhaled cleaning up the trailer. From deep inside my memory, Mama spoke: "We all have skeletons in our closet, Maggie. Your grandmother did just as much as me. Live with them and don't let them out."

  "How did Daddy die?" I asked. I had to know, like you have to know a truth that may hurt or a truth you really didn't want to hear.

  Instead of answering, Grandma's mirage faded and left me with questions.

  In life, so she was in death.

  I still don't know what happened to my father.

  5

  Steve returned late that night violently drunk. His excuse—as if he needed to provide me one—was something about a work buddy leaving and a party afterward.

  I never had a reason to doubt Steve's faithfulness to me, but there were times I had to wonder. Was that the scent of another woman on his collar? Why was he distant at times and acted as if I wasn't there? If he really was cheating on me, did I even have the right to complain? After all, we weren't married and I don't even think I ever heard him say I was his "girlfriend." Looking back, I was likely someone he could fuck and chuck for all the emotion I dragged out of him.

  I sat on the couch in the living room, dressed in one of Grandma's nightgowns—something Steve detested for its age and smell, but something I couldn't part with no matter how hard I tried.
I had been distorting his return that late hour as a fling with another woman, and I really wanted to confront him about it.

  I knew I wouldn't, though.

  He struggled with the lock on the door, stumbled into the kitchen and managed to take out a beer from the refrigerator without tipping over the table in the process.

  I could tell Steve wasn't his usual self. He once told me that one beer calmed him, two made him calmer and after three he would be at his calmest. The fourth, fifth and sixth beers were merely chasers and—unlike Alfie and Mr. Pulman—they didn't anger him that often. Steve was a quiet drunk and grew socially more distant the more he drank. I don't know if I liked that in him, but I do know he wasn't prone to violent outbursts like so many other men.

  That night, with the broken windows mended with cardboard and duct tape and the dust almost gone throughout the house, the Steve I knew as quietly drunk was no more. Rather, the Steve that stumbled through the kitchen and grabbed another beer was in a rage, like he'd just been fired.

  "Fucking Mike," he slurred. "Had to go and get another job. Now what am I'm supposed to do with all the work we divided between us?"

  He pointed his finger at me. "Tell me, woman. What am I supposed to do?"

  I didn't know what he was supposed to do, nor did I care. The fact he went to work at all was good enough for me. Money was there to pay for groceries and the few bills that were stacked on the countertop like a fallen deck of cards. I don't think I ever heard Steve talk about his job before that night. I really didn't like it.

  "Piece of shit. Do you think I'm going to—" His words trailed off or were swallowed in mid-thought as he brought the beer bottle to his lips and whipped his head back. For a few seconds, his protruding Adam's apple bobbed up and down, his throat made sounds like a toilet makes when it's being plumbed, and before I could look away in disgust, the bottle was empty.

  "—get a raise?" he finished. He wiped a stream of beer from his stubble. "No!"

  Between my indiscretion when I cried over Mama, my days long refusal to apologize for my actions and the broken windows from the storm the night before, I don't think the man had said as much to me. Then again, it really wasn't to me, but at me. I felt a twinge of nervousness in my stomach, just enough to make me shift in my nightgown and sit up straighter.

  "You should go lie down," I said. As the last word left my mouth, the background nervousness in my stomach leapt to the forefront of my body, and I cursed myself for even suggesting such a thing. A man needs to vent, does he not? Who am I to say he shouldn't?

  Steve threw the empty beer bottle into the kitchen sink with a crack of glass against metal. He said something I couldn't hear then opened the refrigerator once more.

  "Please stop," I whispered. I didn't mean for him to hear my plea, and I don't know why I didn't keep my mouth shut. I was a woman—meant to clean the house and bear the kids, not question the actions of the man who supported me.

  That's what I thought at the time, anyway.

  "Shut up, bitch!" Steve screamed. His voice echoed in the trailer and seemed to shake the foundation. He turned toward me and in one horrifying second I saw the glint in his eye I had seen in Mr. Pulman as he stood in the same spot with Mama's blood on the knife in his hand. I shivered and quaked and reflexively pushed my back into the couch as if it were the wall in my bedroom and Mama was bearing down on me with her wooden spoon.

  What had I done?

  "You just sit there and do nothing," he said, his voice quieter but filled with venom. "You ruined my night's sleep. You didn't even clean all the dust off the floor, and I come home to find you sprawled out on the couch in your Grandma's shit clothes, wasting away. You think you're a princess? You think I owe you something?"

  He took a step toward me.

  "I don't owe you anything, Maggie." He pointed at his chest. "You owe me."

  I didn't know what to say or whether I should say anything at all. I'd seen that glazed look of burnt umber in a man's eyes before. I'd heard words of poison spray from their mouths. I'd imagined I could fight back, take a stand like I did when I was nine, but this wasn't a game of find the body in the Bus—it was real life and I was vulnerable to the words and the actions of a man more so than I'd ever been before. Grandma wasn't there and even if Mama would have raised a finger—which I sometimes think she might have in her last days—she was dead, too.

  I was defenseless.

  I was alone with my own mess to clean up.

  Steve took another step toward me and licked his lips. It was then that I saw it. The tongue. I watched it split in two and slither out between his lips like a snake. It curled in on itself, rubbery yet dripping wet with malevolence.

  "Cut it out!" I heard Grandma cry.

  "Cut it out!" I heard the dust eels scream.

  I jumped up from the couch, meaning to head for the back of the trailer, but my clumsiness pushed my body against an end table, knocked over a lamp and forced me to the floor.

  Without having the chance to raise my arms in defense, Steve was on top of me. He hit me with greasy fists, pummeled my face, my shoulders, my neck, my ribs. He screamed a litany of curses and regrets and threats, all jumbled together in a hateful distortion of words that dribbled from his forked tongue like burning saliva.

  As I tried to cover my face, I saw in the corner of the room a glass shard I had missed. It glinted in the light of the lamp I'd knocked over.

  I don't know why I saw it at that moment—perhaps fate or just plain coincidence—but that image was forever etched into my memory.

  I see it now.

  6

  In a week I was out of bed, able to hold down a glass of water and a few crackers. My right eye was no longer swollen shut and I could, with effort, do menial housework. The pain in my chest from the broken rib was less a stabbing reminder of that night, but it still throbbed when I slept on my side or tried to sit down. It wasn't a handicap, though, and a glass or two of whiskey would make me forget.

  A few days after my eye no longer looked like a blue golf ball, Steve came home with a dozen roses.

  POKER NIGHTS

  1

  I brought home my first book of anatomy on the same day Steve brought home three of his drunk friends to play poker. He was never one to skip out on a social event, especially one that didn't include me. Normally, however, he always left the house to go someplace else and the fact he didn't bring anyone over to our trailer didn't really cause much consternation. Maybe he just didn't like how it looked or felt it wasn't comfortable.

  Nevertheless, they came. Three boys all about Steve's age, which is to say not quite at the legal drinking age but old enough to vote. As I looked them over, I sensed they were not the political type, however.

  I sat on the couch with my book of guts and gore and pictures of nerve clusters and muscles and bones. I was fascinated. I'd never considered the orderly neatness of the human body; my only experience with anatomy before had been with the dust eels chewing away flesh and bone. The differences were astounding, like that not-so-subtle difference between a clean skyscraper and the dirty hovel next to it that was slated to be demolished to make way for a parking garage.

  I didn't pay much attention to the boys as I sat with my legs crossed, the book in my lap and a glass of water in one hand. It never crossed my mind that these boys might be the bullies who accosted me right before Dusty was murdered. Aside from Steve, I couldn't remember any of their names, let alone their faces. Memories are like that, I suppose: they leave snippets of fact and blur out the rest.

  The night wore on as I turned each page of my book gingerly and studied the hidden wonders of the detailed human body. The boys played cards and laughed and drank and made obscene gestures to each other like all boys do. None of them—Steve included—paid me any attention. It was almost as if I wasn't there, and, in a way, I wasn't. At least, I don't think my thoughts were there.

  My thoughts had drifted out into the desert, to the Bus, where I saw the
eels feasting on each body part that was artfully drawn in the book in front of me. The longer I stared at organs inked in vibrant reds and browns and fatty greens and yellows, the more I envisioned the eels taking a bite, slobbering like ravenous dogs thrown a piece of meat from the backdoor of a restaurant.

  I hadn't considered the smile on my face.

  "What are you smiling about?" one of the boys asked. I looked up and let my thoughts run back to the present. The boy was disgustingly lanky, almost anorexic if such a thing could be possible in a boy who sucked on bottle of beer like a thirsty giraffe at a waterhole. Red spots marked his face—so many constellations of red dwarf suns hanging in a pale space. He smiled crookedly and let yellow and brown stains smile back at me.

  "Nothing," I said. I realized I had just spat the word out in disgust at the pimpled giraffe-face in front of me. It was rather rude, but then again, I'd been interrupted.

  The boy's smile turned to a leer and I watched his tongue come out of his mouth like a moray eel poking its head out of a coral reef. He held it out for me to see in that childish gesture of distaste and revulsion. I was suddenly elated when he turned and resumed playing with the other boys.

  I continued my study of anatomy by quickly turning to a page that displayed a fattened tongue, clinging to the mouth with that very thin oral mucosa underlain by a plexus of veins. I forced my thoughts back to the Bus, picked up an imaginary dust eel and affixed it to that tongue. Then I stuck the tongue back in the giraffe boy's mouth and listened to his imaginary screams echo through my mind.

  It was pleasantly satisfying, and yet a memory crept in to replace that image. It was a dream I'd had when I was fourteen, where I'd stood over Steve, his body strapped to the kitchen table with duct tape.

  The dream image was faint at first, but like a clearing picture of static on a television set, it slowly materialized. There was that glass on the kitchen floor, the scissors I took from the kitchen, the pliers I held the tongue with, the blood pooled in his mouth, the eyes that opened with fright. And then there was the man's whimper, his gurgle, his faint cry as he struggled to swallow all the blood that poured from his wound. Finally, I remembered the feeling of stimulation and how my juices flowed and lips trembled with excitement and ecstasy.