Where did you come from, he asked. She balled the wrapper in her fist and dropped it onto the floor. From the sea, she said. Like everybody does.
I mean, before you were in the water.
Imagine I was in a uterus, before, she said. Can I wash now?
Cedric’s eyes caught on the pristine edge of her collarbone. Not unless you want to shower with a dozen blokes. She raised one dark eyebrow and shook her head. Tonight, then, Cedric said. He stumped towards the door, then paused. I’m Cedric, by the way. She rolled her eyes up as if debating. Volkova. Cedric nodded, and let the door clank shut behind him.
That evening he brought her spaghetti Bolognese reheated in the kitchenette microwave, not chancing the stove, and two cans of Coke. When she opened the door he found she’d dressed herself more thoroughly, which squirmed him with relief and disappointment. The trousers were oversized but held by shoelace.
She ate slowly and grimly, like someone preparing for a long march, and Cedric asked no more questions, skimming Hans Christian Andersen instead. By eleven, he knew the showers were empty. I haven’t told anyone, he said, not sure if it mattered. But I don’t think you should be here, either.
Do you think I’m a mermaid, she asked, and gave a soft scornful laugh. Cedric draped two towels over his shoulder and led her quietly to the showers. Fluorescents flickered on over cold fractured puddles. Cedric pointed her to the furthest nozzle, difficult to see from the doorway, and felt a distant embarrassment about the grout creeping between the bathroom tiles.
He turned on his own shower, listening despite himself for the tell-tale slither of her borrowed clothes coming away. When steam started to billow, he stripped but kept his briefs, as he did in the presence of company, and stepped into the hot spray. Leaving those on, are you. Cedric didn’t turn his head to look at her, but he put a deliberate finger up to his lips. She was silent then, and for a moment he imagined she wasn’t there at all, that it was only him and the sweat and grime sliding off his skin in dirty tendrils.
Then she started to retch. Cedric stared straight ahead as long as possible, but the ragged sound was impossible to ignore. He turned and saw her jackknifed over, shivering, heaving, and the gleaming black vomit she’d left on the floor was unmistakeable. I live under the platform, she rasped, as if to explain. You need a hospital, Cedric said, blindly thrusting a towel towards her.
She insisted she didn’t, and a few minutes later they stole quickly and quietly back to the cabin. Cedric waited for a roughneck to slouch into the corridor with cigarette and lighter, but their path was empty, completely empty. I saw you one night, he said when they were back in the room. Didn’t I?
That’s why I decided to come up the ladder, she said. You looked so damn lonely. She trailed soft fingers along Cedric’s wrist; he felt his cock thicken against his thigh.
Not because you’re sick?
Maybe a bit of that, too. Tired of eating garbage. She peeled off the towel and slipped into the bottom bunk without another word, making herself a cocoon of his staled sheets. You’re not a mermaid, Cedric decided aloud, thumbing the light-switch, clambering past her. Something else. He tugged off silently as he could in the upper bunk.
She stayed. During the day she was holed up in the cabin—there wasn’t much in the way of diversion, since she didn’t seem to understand the laptop, but she did devour the thick dusty stack of maintenance manuals and guidebooks that had gone months untouched. Cedric, for his part, wolfed down wikis of Irish mythology. It led to one speed-fueled night spent gutting the cabin, searching high and low for an oil-slicked pelt, while she watched and laughed her soft contemptuous laugh that tingled like morphine.
Most nights they snuck to the showers, or up to the deck. She was happiest near water, where her eyes seemed blacker and her hands more like bony fins, though when Cedric brought her microwaved mahimahi she preferred the lasagne.
Every so often she would heave up the black vomit, and sometimes Cedric was there to hold back her hair and mutter small nothings the way he had back when Violet first had the morning sickness. Afterwards they would sit together, sometimes with a cloud of vapor between them, sometimes only words.
She asked him about the work, about the faulty water injector, the company man’s blow habit, and then one night about where he’d grown up, about New Zealand and about his family. I hated my father, he said around a hit, and she said, that’s original. He laughed, eyes pink and glassy, then showed her the Maori tattoos down his back. She showed him the no tattoos down her front, leaned in, kissed hard.
As they see-saw stumbled towards the bunk, her hand found the spiral ridge of scar tissue under his briefs. Oh. And then Cedric had to explain, as he had to Violet so long ago, about the boiling coffee he hadn’t watched, being glued to Action Man on the telly instead, and how when his father found the mess he turned the electric range back on and shucked off Cedric’s trousers.
He explained about standing there, wailing and snuffling, watching the rusty element turn slowly bright orange. He explained about the sizzle and the gut-sick smell. She still fucked him, fiercely, urgently. Their writhing shadow was aquatic.
Later, in the bruised hours of the night, Cedric’s heavy eyes opened on her rooting through his coverall. She had the Polaroid of Violet held between two fingers like a cigarette. She’s pretty. Cedric nodded. Still warm with post-coital chemicals, he told her about the move to Perth and the pregnancy and the way Violet sang to herself if she thought he was still asleep.
And that’s why you live here? To earn enough money for three, I mean.
Yeah, said Cedric, then, to change subjects: Why did you live under the rig for all those years? She gave that morphine-yellow laugh. Stubborn, I imagine, she said. Figured to find nothing better. His eyes were closed again when she draped herself over him like a long-coat, breathed secrets into the skin of his neck.
Things became different. She was always restless now, jittery. She’d worked out how to use the cracked Kindle and Cedric found Kierkegaard and Ibsen on its screen. In the night she took his card and slipped out of the cabin; he knew by the wet footprints and damp kisses. He dreamed of her slicing through the black water, diving and turning somersaults through metal struts. She smiled less often and too widely.
One night, with her head against his ribcage, she told him she was leaving. Cedric was unsurprised in a hollow way, reminded of another night, of Violet’s cigarette-scorched table and rolls of gauze.
It wasn’t because I was stubborn, she said. I lived down there in the muck because I knew it well, and I was scared of cleaner things.
Cedric clenched and unclenched his teeth. I’m not here because of the money, he said. Not anymore. He told her, then, about the night before he left. Six, seven bottles of Swan deep, and Violet had been looking for an argument, needing one last one, but instead of arguing how he usually did he shoved her and her scalp split on the edge of the table. A baby’s head is soft for months, he said. Because of the brain growing.
She put her hand down to his hidden scar. You’ll be nothing like him, she said. Oh, Cedric. The air we breathe is stormy, stormy. Isn’t it?
He tried and tried but couldn’t remember her name. At 1:53 AM she kissed his chin, and at 1:55 AM she was leading the way up the iron stairs one last time. The starless sky was sea-colored, the inky sea was sky-colored. She stripped naked before she descended the ladder. Come for a swim, she suggested through chattering teeth, raising one webbed hand. Cedric raised a brow and shook his head.
She laughed, first soft and low, then shrill and barking. At the support strut Cedric watched her untie a floating garbage bag and pull something slick and heavy over her head. There was a rending sound of flesh and bone finding new places, or maybe old ones, and then she was a dark shape cutting through dark water, away from the rig, away from the running lights. And then, she was nothing at all. Cedric calculated the time difference. He went back to his cabin and called, called, called.
The next
day, the water injector quit working completely. Cedric wrote and rewrote his emails. The day after that, compressor problems. Cedric tried her number until the Skype dial-tone was ricocheting through his skull. Pumps stalled, electronics bugged; everyone agreed it was suspect. Cedric’s key-card had been many places it shouldn’t have, but so had a dozen others that had gone mysteriously missing.
The day Violet answered was the day the rig evacuated, mutters of permanent shutdown following the second electrical fire. She picked up furious, how couldn’t she be furious, but by the time the boats were loading she promised to let Cedric call again, and before the line cut he heard the small voice that would carry him over the Baltic waves.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
–
The Husband Stitch
(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:
Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.
The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.
My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.
My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.
All other women: interchangeable with my own.)
IN THE BEGINNING, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a neighbour’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen. Though my father didn’t notice, I drank half a glass of white wine in the kitchen a few minutes ago, with the neighbour’s teenage daughter. Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.
The boy is not facing me. I see the muscles of his neck and upper back, how he fairly strains out of his button-down shirts. I run slick. It isn’t that I don’t have choices. I am beautiful. I have a pretty mouth. I have a breast that heaves out of my dresses in a way that seems innocent and perverse all at the same time. I am a good girl, from a good family. But he is a little craggy, in that way that men sometimes are, and I want.
I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled off to a sanitarium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?
The boy notices me. He seems sweet, flustered. He says, hello. He asks my name.
I have always wanted to choose my moment, and this is the moment I choose.
On the deck, I kiss him. He kisses me back, gently at first, but then harder, and even pushes open my mouth a little with his tongue. When he pulls away, he seems startled. His eyes dart around for a moment, and then settles on my throat.
—What’s that? he asks.
—Oh, this? I touch my ribbon at the back of my neck. It’s just my ribbon. I run my fingers halfway around its green and glossy length, and bring them to rest on the tight bow that sits in the front. He reaches out his hand, and I seize it and push it away.
—You shouldn’t touch it, I say. You can’t touch it.
Before we go inside, he asks if he can see me again. I tell him I would like that. That night, before I sleep, I imagine him again, his tongue pushing open my mouth, and my fingers slide over myself and I imagine him there, all muscle and desire to please, and I know that we are going to marry.
We do. I mean, we will. But first, he takes me in his car, in the dark, to a lake with a marshy edge. He kisses me and clasps his hand around my breast, my nipple knotting beneath his fingers.
I am not truly sure what he is going to do before he does it. He is hard and hot and dry and smells like bread, and when he breaks me I scream and cling to him like I am lost at sea. His body locks onto mine and he is pushing, pushing, and before the end he pulls himself out and finishes with my blood slicking him down. I am fascinated and aroused by the rhythm, the concrete sense of his need, the clarity of his release. Afterwards, he slumps in the seat, and I can hear the sounds of the pond: loons and crickets, and something that sounds like a banjo being plucked. The wind picks up off the water and cools my body down.
I don’t know what to do now. I can feel my heart beating between my legs. It hurts, but I imagine it could feel good. I run my hand over myself and feel strains of pleasure from somewhere far off. His breathing becomes quieter and I realize that he is watching me. My skin is glowing beneath the moonlight coming through the window. When I see him looking, I know I can seize that pleasure like my fingertips tickling the end of a balloon’s string that has almost drifted out of reach. I pull and moan and ride out the crest of sensation slowly and evenly, biting my tongue all the while.
—I need more, he says, but he does not rise to do anything.
He looks out the window, and so do I. Anything could move out there in the darkness, I think. A hook-handed man. A ghostly hitch-hiker repeating her journey. An old woman summoned from the rest of her mirror by the chants of children. Everyone knows these stories—that is, everyone tells them—but no one ever believes them.
His eyes drift over the water, and then land on my neck.
—Tell me about your ribbon, he says.
—There is nothing to tell. It’s my ribbon.
—May I touch it?
—I want to touch it, he says.
—No.
Something in the lake muscles and writhes out of the water, and then lands with a splash. He turns at the sound.
—A fish, he says.
—Sometime, I tell him, I will tell you the stories about this lake and her creatures.
He smiles at me, and rubs his jaw. A little of my blood smears across his skin, but he doesn’t notice, and I don’t say anything.
—I would like that very much, he says.
—Take me home, I tell him.
And like a gentleman, he does.
That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been.
*
My parents are very fond of him. He is a nice boy, they say. He will be a good man. They ask him about his occupation, his hobbies, his family. He comes around twice a week, sometimes thrice. My mother invites him in for supper, and while we eat I dig my nails into the meat of his leg. After the ice cream puddles in the bowl, I tell my parents that I am going to walk with him down the lane. We strike off through the night, holding hands sweetly until we are out of sight of the house. I pull him through the trees, and when we find a patch of clear ground I shimmy off my pantyhose, and on my hands and knees offer myself up to him.
I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them. There are two rules: he cannot finish inside of me, and he cannot touch my green ribbon. He spends into the dirt, pat-pat-patting like the beginning of rain. I go to touch myself, but my fingers, which had been curling in the dirt beneath me, are filthy. I pull up my underwear and stockings. He makes a sound and points, and I realize that beneath the nylon, my knees are also caked in dirt. I pull them down and brush, and then up again. I smooth my skirt and repin my hair. A single lock has escaped his slicked-back curls, and I tuck it up with the others. We walk down to the stream and I run my hands in the current until they are clean again.
We stroll back to the house, arms linked chastely. Inside, my mother has made coffee, and we all sit around while my father asks him about business.
(If you read this story out loud, the sounds of the clearing can be best reproduced by taking a deep breath and holding it for a long moment. Then release the air all at once, permitting your chest to collapse like a block tower knocked to the ground. Do this again, and again, shortening the time between the held breath and the release.)
*
I have always been a teller of stories. When I was a young girl, my mother carried me out of a grocery store as I screamed about toes in the produce aisle. Concerned women turned and watched as I kicked the air and pounded my mother’s sl
ender back.
—Potatoes! she corrected when we got back to the house. Not toes!
She told me to sit in my chair—a child-sized thing, only built for me—until my father returned. But no, I had seen the toes, pale and bloody stumps, mixed in among those russet tubers. One of them, the one that I had poked with the tip of my index finger, was cold as ice, and yielded beneath my touch the way a blister did. When I repeated this detail to my mother, the liquid of her eyes shifted quick as a startled cat.
—You stay right there, she said.
My father returned from work that evening and listened to my story, each detail.
—You’ve met Mr Barns, have you not? he asked me, referring to the elderly man who ran this particular market.
I had met him once, and I said so. He had hair white as a sky before snow, and a wife who drew the signs for the store windows.
—Why would Mr Barns sell toes? my father asked. Where would he get them?
Being young, and having no understanding of graveyards or mortuaries, I could not answer.
—And even if he got them somewhere, my father continued, what would he have to gain by selling them among the potatoes?
They had been there. I had seen them with my own eyes. But beneath the sunbeams of my father’s logic, I felt my doubt unfurling.
—Most importantly, my father said, arriving triumphantly at his final piece of evidence, why did no one notice the toes except for you?
As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world only observed by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the story, and laughed when he scooped me from the chair to kiss me and send me on my way.
*
It is not normal that a girl teaches her boy, but I am only showing him what I want, what plays on the insides of my eyelids as I fall asleep. He comes to know the flicker of my expression as a desire passes through me, and I hold nothing back from him. When he tells me that he wants my mouth, the length of my throat, I teach myself not to gag and take all of him into me, moaning around the saltiness. When he asks me my worst secret, I tell him about the teacher who hid me in the closet until the others were gone and made me hold him there, and how afterwards I went home and scrubbed my hands with a steel wool pad until they bled, even though after I share this I have nightmares for a month. And when he asks me to marry him, days shy of my eighteenth birthday, I say yes, yes, please, and then on that park bench I sit on his lap and fan my skirt around us so that a passerby would not realize what was happening beneath it.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Page 15