The only thing to do was to let him go. Perhaps if he were back in the forest he would be as he was, as I wanted him to be. When I cut his leash with Mother’s knife and threw the door open the damn thing just sat there staring at the greenery beyond the door like something he once might have known, which was now foreign to him, and strange.
When he would not leave, I took the rifle Mother had given Gran-ma-ma and shot him.
The Romantic Agony
of Lemon Head
She lived among an orchard of lemon trees with her father. At spring’s beginning she would pick unripe fruit from the branches and squeeze the juice of five hundred and seven lemons—it always had to be five hundred and seven, carefully picked and carefully counted out—into her hair and skin so that she shined and lost all color and was almost translucent. In the summer she smelled of sweet rot, and everywhere she went all who smelled her would stop and stare and want.
At first, her father thought it wonderful for his daughter to smell so sweet and have skin so smooth and burned away; it was fine as paper silk. All the village boys—and maybe some of the less hoity-toity dandies—would come on bended knee before him and ask for her hand. Though all the boys had entered her room with their nostrils flared and their lungs rapidly inflating, they would get near her pale form and their faces would fall, their noses would close up, and they’d say thank you kindly but no thank you and be on their way.
Her father began to worry that she might never get married, and her mother was dead so there was no asking her. Instead he dusted off the old texts, Raising Lilith into Eve, Overcoming Ophelia, and Girls Will Be Girls—Uh Oh! According to these books she was practically an old spinster already—almost sixteen!—and it was not as if she could do any sort of lucrative craft like weaving or playing the harp or keeping the toilet clean since she spent so much time among the orchard picking lemons and hand squeezing them into her morning, midday, after-dinner, and midnight baths. The books were very particular about lucratively attracting men.
So he began to spy on her to see what was wrong that turned so many men away. He cut a bite-sized hole in the bathroom wall and followed her with his eye, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, though when she squeezed the lemons in her dainty hands the juice would sometimes spray into his exposed eye and he would cry all night.
Wouldn’t you like a husband? he would ask, holding her pale hand in his own while she soaked in lemony bubbles. He showed her pictures of girls with young men from the books. The girls in the pictures seemed to float wherever they went when their hands were held by a young man.
She looked at him as if she could not fathom what he was talking about, but she nodded and said, I suppose, in an airy way, and when he looked sad she said, OK.
But he wanted the help of an expert, so he called on Yadda Gaga, the old witch doctor who lived in the black forest. She was a small, hunchbacked woman with greasy, stringy hair and only two black teeth she used for chewing and spitting bitter tobacco. She came with a white, lit candle in one hand and a pencil holding what little hair she had in a bun. She rolled her eyes at the father when he explained how his daughter was not attracting a man and used the candle to look up the girl’s nostrils.
My, said Yadda Gaga, what a tasty little girl you’d have if she wasn’t so sour.
Then she pulled out the pencil and poked the girl’s arm with the eraser. Where her skin was touched it broke apart and bled. Yadda Gaga spat on the floor.
Take the lemons away, Yadda Gaga said. You can see the sick. Once they’re away her skin will toughen up.
She wafted her hand over the girls’ hair and retched. Then she let the father look up the girl’s nostrils with the white candle, but all he could see was pink skin and hair.
But the daughter cried and said, Oh no, Daddy, don’t take your lemons away! I think they are helping me. I might be worse without them. Her father stared at the black cud on the floor and said, Lemons are my life. Haven’t you tasted my lemonade? I’ve won blue ribbons. Piss water, said Yadda Gaga and took her leave but not before spitting on the front door.
When she was gone the daughter took her father’s hand in her own and said, Daddy, your lemonade is my favorite. Then she said, Ow, when her father squeezed her hand in thanks, and when he looked down his palm was covered in blood.
Because his daughter wept and thrashed and spilled lemon bathwater on the ground when he tried to take them away, he called in the local array of doctors, all of whom had degrees. They were all tall, thin men with moustaches and they towered over the father and his bathing offspring. When they saw the girl they sneered and put clothespins over their noses.
She smells like rotting disinfectant, they said. We smell that quite enough, thank you.
They prodded her arms and legs and took blood in small clear vials and put tubes down her throat, long ones, the kind that made her choke. The felt her breasts for lumps and looked inside her with a shiny new speculum. The father protested, Are you sure it’s necessary? but they assured him it was.
Two weeks later they mailed him the results: She needs a man. Get her one. Now. Young girls her age should be in love. See page eighty-seven of Overcoming Ophelia for proof. That’ll fix her right up. It’ll toughen her thin skin if he breaks her heart. It’ll toughen her skin if he loves her back. All the other young ladies will be jealous. Jealous young ladies bite.
Also, here’s the bill.
p.s. Take care of the bill ASAP.
p.p.s. If that doesn’t work try aspirin.
The father wrung his hands and covered his face and said, Oh, where can I find a young man who will love the easily bruised fruit of my loins? He sat on the edge of her bath and asked what sort of man she could easily love the best: Brunette or blond? Tall or short? Fat or thin? What was her opinion on facial hair? Should his nose be aquiline? And what eye color would she like? Are brown irises ugly? To each question she gave a small shrug and said whatever he thought was best certainly was best.
I am off to find you a strapping young boyfriend, her father said. But before I go, can I do anything for you?
Just leave me a bucket of the best lemons, please, she said. I wouldn’t ask you, only….
She raised her arms out of the water. She had no more fingers, just small stumps, like she had been born without.
Her father wept and kissed her stumps and asked what had happened but she said she did not know, only she thought more lemons might help. So he brought her three bushel baskets of lemons and cursed his luck—marrying away a daughter without fingers would probably be very hard. Then, before he left, he laid out three aspirins and a glass of lemonade on the porcelain edge of the bath.
When he left his doorway he saw Yadda Gaga standing among his lemons, smoking a large pipe and sniffing one of his fruits that had been left unattended on the tree, pale yellow and white with rot. When he approached her, she asked, is your daughter still whole, or does she look like this? Then she curled her withered fingers around the fruit until its insides easily spilled out.
The father shuddered and said, I thank you for the help you have given me and my daughter. If I pay you, will you go away? But Yadda Gaga only said, All bills are eventually paid, have no fear.
The father walked past the edges of his village—none of those boys had wanted his daughter anyhow—and went into the great pastures to find a simple boy who did not care if his girlfriend was whole or not. He talked to every shepherd he came across but they were only interested in women who knew every detail of a sheep’s hoof, from the keratin content to guessing its exact diameter from a glance. What use, they asked, was a woman who only cared for lemons? It seemed very narrow minded to them.
He wrote his daughter a letter asking her how she was and if she had her heart set on a shepherd, and she wrote back saying, I suppose. OK. Daddy, my feet have gone. I had to pick five hundred and seven lemons on my knees with my teeth.
That old witch stood in the orchard and watched me the entire time. Why won’t she go away? I’m writing this letter with the pen between my molars. Won’t you come home soon?
So, with little time left to find a man, he went to the stables and approached each stable hand, but they too were only interested in women who knew about horses, or at least could do useful things, like braiding a horse’s long tail or tying bows into their manes before shows. The father shook his head and clenched his hand and cursed her missing fingers, for certainly she could have learned how to braid. Even he knew how to do that.
He wrote and asked if she had her heart set on a stable hand, thinking he could glue some twigs to her stumps and she could manage that way. He received a letter that did not say anything at all, but inside was a crushed lemon peel and citrus tears.
Immediately he returned home. He had only been gone a week, but there were two letters from the doctors about the bill in his mailbox, one polite, the other not so.
He walked into his house with his heavy head sagging on his chest. He called out his daughter’s name and her reply was so faint and tremulous that he took the stairs three at a time. But in his bathroom he did not see his daughter, only lemon bathwater with two yellow peels floating next to one another, and Yadda Gaga sitting in a chair with her feet propped up on the edge of the tub, smoking her heavy pipe. He called his daughter’s name again and asked what the old hag did to his little girl. Yadda Gaga spit and rolled her eyes.
You let her marinate too long, said Yadda Gaga, tapping the edge of her pipe with a crooked finger. She pointed to the lemon peels and said, There, there is your little girl.
The father realized that those were not lemon peels floating in the water, but two bright yellow thick and bumpy human lips. They gathered together in the water and he watched them say, Sorry, Daddy. Five hundred and seven lemons, Daddy. I need five hundred and seven lemons.
Yadda Gaga reached down and plucked the lemon lips from the sour water and placed them between her withered gums and black teeth. She chewed, once, and the father watched his daughter slide down the old throat.
Mermaid
Why should you want to escape us, your sisters who love you more than you know? Why should you want to twist your torso and your long, shimmering scales and dash away, making ripples in your wake? Away. Away. You want to be on their land. You want to breathe their harsh air, hear the screech of their voices, like electric eels in your ear. It burns, sister. How does it not burn you as well?
We have felt your beloved dry sand against our fins, inside the curves of our long fingers. Do you know how it rips our delicate bodies, softened by a lifetime saturated in water and salt? You will rip apart like anemone in the storm. We will find your new body, transformed from the quick, slick fish scales into the ugly feet of a man, lying on that rough sand, the water grazing your still knees. We will not be able to pull you back to us.
Recall when we were young, just after our eyes opened, and we went to the surface and saw the thick, blue body of the mother whale on their beach? Do you remember her tail making its feeble rise—so different from the powerful strokes its muscle could thunder—before it fell into our water and splashed our eyes? We thought it was the sea, but you were making your own salt. You made salt for so long after that day, and we could not comfort you. This is what you want, sister, this air that makes our kind weak?
All this suffering for a man you barely know.
You look so much like us, he does not know it is not your dark hair floating on the surface like a corpse, does not know it is not your lips reaching toward his, not your hands digging into his shoulders. It is for you we do this. We are made of the same stuff, sister. Your passion was born at the moment of our spawning, and we carry, each of us, a little bit of it inside.
He sighs and parts his arid lips and sinks below our water. We wrap ourselves around him and make a home of our bodies. We are not unkind. You may visit his bones, preserved forever between us, drifting in our waves, a little forgotten thing in our kingdom below the sea.
Bloody Mary
Salter first saw her at the school library, after hours. The new girl. Small-town folk like Salter could always tell when there was something fresh brought in, like ripe apples. She was a mousy girl with big brown hair and bright eyes. She looked lost but cheerful for being so. Attractive, but young, perhaps too young. Salter gave her one last up and down and slid into the stacks, walking the familiar route. Not too many students went through the library; there were few books anyway, and the ones they did have were so old they had as much dust on their covers as they were filled with words. They knew that the back stacks were a forbidden place, not legally, but their parents would slap their faces if they brought home one of those books, the ones with monsters on the covers, the ones about the old forests and their ancient residents. The ones the library had to carry, because it was a library, but no one approved of.
Salter chose the book because its spine was uncracked. There was something special about a book that had never been opened except, of course, for the removal of its dust jacket, which Salter considered a kind of stripping, an honest laying bare of the insides. She was honored to be the first to touch it, to really look inside.
The folklore section was small, populated with texts with frightening titles like The Dangers of the Occult and The Devil Inside. If Daddy caught her, she’d have to recite passages of the Bible until her throat was raw, as if the memorization of those words could erase what she had seen.
The new girl followed her, maybe intentionally, maybe by accident, but she was there, staring at her with an open curiosity, not unkind, but the sort of earnestness that was born from loneliness. Salter sneered at the girl until she lowered her eyes and walked off. Salter peered around the stacks to make sure no one was looking. She put the book in her bag and looked around again.
“Find anything interesting?” the librarian asked when Salter dutifully rooted around her pockets for her library card.
“Just this,” she said, tapping on the cover of a thick book she had grabbed randomly off the shelf. The Lives of the Saints.
“Heavy reading for a young girl.”
“My dad said it was a good one.”
“He’s right.”
* * *
There was an oft-told joke among the girls that Indiana was known as the crossroads state because there was not anything worth stopping for. One only traveled its roads to get somewhere better, like Chicago or Cincinnati or, if they had enough gas, all the way to New York City. There was a magic to those places, and they would whisper the names of those cities before they went to bed each night, hoping to wake up there. They were disappointed to always wake up in Madison, Indiana, a city that was not a city, not as they understood a city, in a state that was hardly a state. Yet they made the best of living in a space where there was, as far as they were concerned, very little living to do beyond loitering outside of the gas station while Morrow promised undelivered blowjobs for loosies to the pimple-faced attendant. If there was no living to do where they were born, they would make the best of what they were given. On days when the weather was clear, they linked arms and walked South to Utica, a place as miserable and cold as where they had been born, but for one special place rooted in the woods.
Later, they learned that it was called the Witches Castle, a place where those with pure hearts had burned nine women to death and sang and danced and pissed on their ashes. A stone building, covered in graffiti and moss, a place that the witch from the story their parents told them when they were but tiny little things would have appreciated, once she gave up that candy-child-killer thing. The girls brought folding chairs and blankets and pillows and small mirrors so they could practice putting on the makeup they were disallowed at school, except for ChapStick, which they always slathered on to make their lips shine.
There was a ceremony to their arrival. They would dump their b
ags and share equally the spoils of what they had taken: sandwiches from home, the cheap, bright red lipstick from the store they’d pocketed when the attendant was looking the other way, eggs from farms and flowers from fields, cigars and, when they were particularly lucky, father’s throat-searing gin. Almond, all wicked grins and rolled eyes, had a habit of stealing hunting knives from her brothers, and these she laid out reverently in a small row from smallest to largest. She sharpened them on the edges of the door and would run them up and down her legs to slice off the fine hairs that had begun to grow three years ago and which she was continuously disgusted by. Morrow passed out the loosies and bellowed with laughter when she recounted how hopeful the attendant had looked, standing outside in the alley, waiting for her to pucker her lips around him.
“Fucker’ll be waiting a long time,” she told them, running her hand through her short hair. The girls laughed with her.
“You’ll have to pay up eventually. He’ll catch on,” Almond said.
Helene, the beautiful, shiny-haired, thick-lipped one, brought candles and a lighter (Fuck, fancy, they’d said in admiration) and a waggle to her eyebrows. “They never catch on. Tell him your mother saw you and made you go home. Cry a little. He’ll think you’re in love.”
“Gross,” Morrow said.
Salter always shared last. She, better than any of them, had a sense of the theatrical and knew patience. She upended her bag once they had turned their attention to eye shadow.
“You brought a book?” Almond said, scrunching her nose. “School’s over today.”
“Fuck you,” Salter said. “Just because you can’t read doesn’t mean the rest of us are bores.”
“What is it?” asked Helene, turning it over so she could see the cover. She whistled low.
“I can read,” Almond said.
Magic for Unlucky Girls Page 13