Tinfoil Butterfly

by Rachel Eve Moulton

  The room changes. The warmth, the earthen smell unsafe. The house above me creaking as it thinks about collapse. How could Earl want to stay here?

  There is a smaller space back behind the chimney. The walls are wet with mud. I trip over nothing but lose my balance anyway and dig the fingers of my right hand into the wall to keep from falling to the floor. Once balanced I pull my hand from the muck and wipe it on my bloodstained jeans.

  I should not be down here.

  I walk forward and touch the brick of the chimney. I hold my place while I point the beam beyond it into a dark cavern of a room. A wooden dining chair sits in the corner. The cane of the seating punctured through by years of people sitting in it. If I stay too long my brain will fill that chair.

  My mind stores bits of horror in places only it can call up to use against me. Bodies that have cracked open, skin that bubbles and churns. Liquids that ooze and morph, skitter and squirrel themselves back into human form and then sit themselves lumpy in a chair across from me in a dark, dark basement. There she is, looking just like me, Emma My Emma, belly gaping open, joints bent at the wrong angles, hairs wiggling along her arms like worms.

  “We are all of us made up of crazy,” Ray liked to say. “And madness in its simplest form is narcissism—a self stared at so long and so hard that any potential beauty in it becomes horrifying.”

  The flashlight beam captures gas cans in the far corner. Three of them. George was not lying. A blip of hope. It’s possible that life is a series of steps. You take one and then another and then another until you are on a journey. You have purpose. Control.

  I move toward the chair and the gas cans behind it, but I stop short. Maybe it’s the still empty chair facing me or the beer bottles at its base that make me turn around to see what I would see if I sat in the chair. And there she is, the body. The inevitable ghost in the ghost-town cellar.

  An unerasable thing.

  She’s been there a long time and if she still has a smell its indistinguishable from the damp rot of the cellar itself. She sits propped against the chimney. Her hands are in her lap. Her chin somehow still held high to look back at the chair. Defiant. Her skin is leathery, shrunken, her bones too large to be kept inside by what’s left of her outer layers. Cheekbones push through, a glaring white.

  The beam fades slowly, going from bright to nothing in the time it takes for me to realize how dark it will be without it right before it goes. I shake it, slap it on my thigh, but it stays stubbornly out. The chair behind me begins to fill. The softened wood of the collapsed cane seat working to hold someone up. The creak of the body nestling in. I drop the flashlight into the mud, it makes a soft sploosh and I dig through my pockets for my Zippo. I wrap my fingers around the metal and pull it out of my pocket. Flick it once, twice. It doesn’t light. The exhale of breath comes into the room. Alcohol. Hate. Secrets. The Zippo lights. I see him then in the chair. My daddy. Elbows on knees. Hands to face. In the weak light, he raises his face to me, and I see his eyelids black and leathery like a crow’s. He blinks rapidly in the faint light.

  “The train’s coming,” he says. “Choo choooo.”

  I step backward from his ridiculous grin. His impossible body leaning back in the chair so that it tilts on two legs. I step on her. On Earl’s mother and I fall backward. Land in her lap, my nose to her neck as if I want her to cradle me and she is soft, warm. Her flesh full. She smells good, like sandalwood and something softer, baby powder. For a second there is still light and so I imagine her arms rise up to wrap me in a hug. She holds on to me and I feel it all—the love she has left in her. We are there in it together before I feel it turn to sadness. It isn’t me she wants.

  “Get the baby. She’s in the corner.”

  I hear it crying before I know Ray is in the dark, holding her, our little nothing. Our never-real baby. Crying loud and clear and terrified. The room fills with Ray’s smell and his voice: “Emma, you were supposed to come with us.”

  And then there’s fear.

  The murk of the cellar floor lets the flame live for a second, maybe two. A cellar door slams. The flame is snuffed out. The second cellar door slams. It is pitch-black.

  I launch myself up as part of her loosens under my weight. Detaches. I hear skin, what’s left of it, separate from the whole of her. An arm, maybe. Some appendage she does not need. I’m around the chimney and finding the stairs with my feet in an instant. The miracle of adrenaline making me both fast and efficient.

  I push the cellar doors open wide, one with each hand and hurl myself into the fading daylight.

  I throw up then. Vomit canned beans and stomach juices until nothing else comes up.

  On my hands and knees, I try to breathe. My abdomen sore, my throat burning. For a second, I think I’ll shit myself. I don’t. Then I hear the whistling. Long and low. Directed into a tune I can’t recognize. I raise my head and there is the lawn chair, righted so it sits facing the cellar. Empty. George is gone. The green twine I used to tie him up still tangled around the armrest of the chair.

  I rise. I need to get out. I run into the wood, wheezing in the cold air.

  In the distance, I hear a train. The click and clack of it on the tracks.

  SEVEN

  Everything looks familiar and nothing looks familiar. My heart continues to thump and I stumble forward, trip over roots, and reach out to catch myself on tree trunks that rub at my already raw palm. I need to slow down and think. The snow is falling again and starting to stick.

  I stop on flat ground. I bend at my knees and hang my head low.

  Breathe, Emma. I’m light-headed. Hyperventilating. In. Out. In. Out. It’s not so fucking bad, Emma.

  It starts to come back. Some breath. Some sense. Earl’s mother’s body is down there. She’s been dead awhile. Earl told me as much in his own way. At least George didn’t eat her or feed her to the crows or whatever. This is better, right? She’s just dead. Not chopped up. Not digested. Dead and underground where a good body should be. I stand up straight, press my back to a tall pine. I’m steadier, but I’m shivering. I can’t stop shaking and even trying to stop seems to make it worse. George killed her and he’ll kill you next, a little voice in my head is whispering. He shoved her down those stairs and shut the door. Maybe she wasn’t even dead when he shut the doors. Maybe it took days. Maybe Earl could have saved her and he didn’t.

  “Shut up,” I say to myself aloud. “The world is full of fucked-up shit. I just need to get to the end of it.”

  I shut my eyes and picture the Badlands the way Ray and I always did. Red and craggy. Stretching out before us. Our toes on the edge of a dusty cliff. Our arms out at our sides. Ready to fly.

  I open my eyes slowly to the wintry world right here. All around me things are beginning to change. The pines are preparing to carry more weight, puffing up their needles and shaking off their branches. Snow blankets the cold skin of the boulders that dot the landscape. A flake catches on my eyelashes, accidental, and another on my tongue, purposeful. They melt a cold softness. I blink to keep the flakes off of my eyeballs. They land burning kisses on my cheeks, my forehead, and my throat. The flakes gain an icy weight, turn into pebbles that push down to meet ground.

  I’m in a fairy tale: The Big-Breasted, Blood-Encrusted Princess.

  “Once upon a time there was a dark-haired girl who liked to eat snow and run away from dead bodies,” I say to no one.

  Think, Emma.

  Which direction is the diner? I walked uphill with Earl so I simply need to head down, but down no longer looks like one simple direction. Snow swirls through the gaps in the trees and a multitude of foggy white paths appear. Were there always so many ways to twist through these trees? Adrenaline takes ahold of the back of my neck and burns through the muscles in my shoulders. It doesn’t matter. I will find the diner and the parking lot when the land levels out. I tell myself this is true. I can’t have gone that far off the trail Earl led me up. I move, picking up my thick feet as quickly as
I can. The snow is falling fast and the terrain is unrecognizable. It’s disorienting, like I’ve been spinning myself dizzy, and yet every individual flake and tree and root remains in focus. All I can see is white, and the shaking is taking hold of my hands and teeth. My shoulder hits a tree trunk, stopping me in my tracks, and my feet slide ahead of me. My ass hits the ground. The wind is whipping at me and urging me to stop. It lashes around trees with that evil hint of a train whistle.

  The temperature is dropping. I peer past tree trunks to see something almost as tall as the trees, minus the bark.

  Where is George? Has he gone inside to sit out the storm or is he close by, following me?

  An old stone chimney juts up singularly phallic. The stones are snug, piled strong, and they lead down gracefully to an old foundation that’s laid out like a game of hopscotch. I could toss and skip single footed from room to room on a better, brighter day. I kneel down, creaky kneed, to touch the skeleton of the house.

  There is a chance that real families exist. One might have lived inside these walls. Newborn babies and second-floor nursery moments. Hot meals around a table. A group of people who choose each other over and over again.

  I remember how angry my mom was with me after she married Frank and I wouldn’t speak to him. Literally did not utter a word to him for nearly a year. She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t grateful. She was right to be mad. I know that now and I knew it then. She was handing me something that maybe wasn’t perfect, maybe wasn’t what I’d asked for, but it was a fresh start. Trying it out would not have done harm.

  “Damn it, Emma. I know you miss your father, but he’s gone. And honestly, he wasn’t that great a dad when he was alive,” she said. She shushed me when I began to protest and continued. “I don’t know what you’ve made him into in your head, but he was always drinking. Never really present. He loved you. Please know that, but I loved you too. Still do.”

  She was right about some of what she said. I didn’t want a new dad. Frank was boring. He watched football and went to the gym and aspired to nothing more than the purchase of a new camcorder. He bought us a house that looked like every other house. And, somehow worst of all, he loved my mom too much. More than she loved him. I could see that she was stuffing it all down to make a good choice. The right choice. So much so that she failed to notice how I was already like my father, sneaking into the kitchen to drink the last of whatever was in their glasses. I did it to impress Ray at first, but kept doing it because it felt warm and fuzzy, because it blurred the world around me into something less dangerous.

  A branch snaps in the woods. The sound is sharp but the fall of it heavy, muffled by the wind and the snow already thick enough to make the ground a cushion. The falling snow is thick now too. I can see no farther than my own outstretched hands.

  “Who’s there?” I ask.

  My mind is going to make something up. Pull the Sasquatch out of the shadows if given a chance so I look at the foundation again. There’s nothing human left here. This house should never have been. The hills ate it up as fast as they could and what about the family? Settlers, surely, who never belonged here.

  Our plan, Ray’s and mine once we found out about Pea Baby, was “never settle.” We were going to keep moving. To give what we could, but never claim. “This country does not belong to us,” Ray would say and I’d agree, nod my head yes, but knowing that everywhere I went, everywhere I looked, I was always looking for a home. As I found out about Pea Baby or thought I did anyway, I became one of those people Ray hated, who simply wanted a front porch and a rocking chair and someone to love them and only them. I became my mom. Pathetic.

  “Earl!” I yell into the snow. “Where are you?”

  I hug my jacket tighter. It isn’t warm enough. The sweat I worked up in my panic is cooling, and I’m shaking more than ever. The snow pelts down, little white pills that melt before I can swallow them. George is out there somewhere. Free to find me. Free to find Earl.

  “Earl!” The wind takes the name and bashes it into nearby pines.

  I’ll walk back, away from the ghost-root house, and I’ll find the diner. I shield my eyes with my hand from the snow that’s clinking against my forehead and cheeks. The sky is up there somewhere, tightened and swollen. Angry as fuck.

  “Earl!” I shout. My hands are cupped around my mouth to amplify.

  The dead-winter woods do nothing to answer me. I’ve lost feeling in my fingers and toes. The world is changing too fast, flipbook animation style all around me. My fairy tale is shifting: Once upon a time there was a princess who slept neck-deep in a snowstorm.

  When I was Earl’s age, I took in a stray cat. Fur matted and tangled. Someone had cut off all of his whiskers, leaving him to weave and bob unsure of his limitations and boundaries. I found him at the Dairy Queen and named him Avalanche. One night, I sneaked into the laundry room to dig mint-chocolate-chip ice cream out of the freezer. The next morning, no Avalanche. No purr for breakfast. No fuzzy hug. Later, I went in search of a Popsicle and found him. Peaceful, snowball curled in our freezer. I reached into cold air, fingers brushing frozen dinners and ice bags. Dead. A perfect little sculpture. He must have gone in to lick old ice cream off the side of the carton and I locked him in. My mom helped me bury him the next day. A shallow grave in the backyard that my father never noticed.

  I didn’t know I could set to sweating in the middle of a snowstorm, but here I am, sweating and shaking. Hypothermia or withdrawal. The only thing to do is keep walking, move my heavy feet, one, then the other. Avalanche looked so calm. So ignorant of death. My eyes keep tearing up and freezing to my lashes. I stumble forward. Trees.

  My body melts first, a big gooey Emma pile falling forward through snow only because the wind is on my back. Knees hit ground, head slides forward and hits metal. Even numb fingers can tell that by some miracle I’ve found the diner. A mew escapes my throat as I hoist myself up.

  The air inside is warm, and my throat burns as I take my first deep breath. I stamp my boots to the floor and lightning shoots up through my knees and into my thighs. I move into the kitchen and try to light the stove but my hands are shaking. I smell gas. I try to light one match. Another. Finally, one catches and the stove puffs bright. I sink to the floor. The shaking is spreading from my hands to my arms, to my knees, even into my neck.

  I let go, lie down. My clothes snow-melting to soak into the pores of my skin. I’ll rest. Calm, done. The tiredness sweeps over me. Through me. The black feels so good, like velvet. I dream of Ray. His warm body is covering mine.

  “I love you, Emma My Emma. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  “Why didn’t we stick together?” I ask. “I should have come with you.”

  He is running his fingers through my hair. A habit of his. He will braid it next, turn the long dark strands into puzzles and mazes. It puts me to sleep every time, this braiding game.

  “It just didn’t work. That’s all, Emma.”

  “I can’t remember what was supposed to happen.”

  “You can.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You wanted to prove to me it was a baby.”

  A last-minute drug-induced revelation. My body and brain numbed by all we’d ingested. The sick, simple thought—a small incision to the belly, an opening up of the uterus. If I were to cut myself open and cup Ray’s hands around the little bundle inside of me, it would swim to life.

  “That’s crazy,” I say to Ray.

  “You wanted to live. I wanted to die. It doesn’t have to make more sense than that.”

  And then a different voice, “Shhhh.”

  Ray fades.

  Through the darkness, I hear a series of caws and then a rattling that makes me think of a snake’s long shimmer of a body, but the soft feathers that brush my skin tell me it is a crow. One of Earl’s crows, I think. Talons rest on my skin, sharp needles connected by leathery toes.

  “Emma,” the crow says. “Emma.” A bark of a nam
e and the smooth sides of its beak brush my cheeks as if to soothe.

  A wave of air that smells like cedar sweeps over me and then the crow is pulling at my limbs, taking off my wet jacket, my shoes. For a moment in my fog, I know Ray has returned just as much as I know that I am the kitten. And that’s how I’d rewrite it, if I could do such a thing. I’d go back and Ray would find me in the freezer. He’d pull me out and hold me in his cupped palms, and even as I think this, I know I am confused. My mind is not right. That was before Ray. When Daddy was still alive and sleeping on the couch. In the morning, I’d change the sheets and flip the cushions so Mommy wouldn’t know he’d pissed himself again.

  “Daddy,” I say. “Wake up.” He sleeps on his side with his back to the room. His rib cage lifting toward the ceiling. His snores make him sound like he is drowning.

  I shove him hard with both hands.

  “Get up,” I say.

  “Shhhh,” he says. “I have to get you warm.” This is not what Daddy would say, but he’s saying it as he wakes from sleep, turning toward me on the couch with his sloppy morning drool face, only his bottom half isn’t turning. His torso twists separate from his pelvis, the skin stretching like Silly Putty and then the blood, oozing out of his middle.

  “I’ll fix it, Daddy. Just get up. I’ll fix it.”

  “Shhhh,” he says again but his face doesn’t move. It’s not him. I see that now. It’s someone else. My father died before my ninth birthday.

  “There is a body in the cellar,” I say, and I see Earl’s mother again. Leaning there. Her swollen skin shifts, plumping up. Her long hair turning silky. She smiles. Soft. Stands. Moves to the chair across the cellar and takes a seat. Rests her arms on her knees and leans in toward me. I fall back, rag doll on the floor. I become the body.

  “I’m not good for other people,” I say, but she only smiles at me with more kindness.

  It comes in waves. Rolls of sick, and I retch until my body can’t and then I vomit nothing. Air and regret and the memory of past consumption. I don’t think it will ever stop, but then it does.