by Amy Lukavics
When it was over, both girls were panting. Eleanor moved back up the bed and plopped down beside June, her bangs sticking to her sweaty forehead. “I love you,” Eleanor whispered, “June the Heroine.” They fell back asleep smiling.
They woke in the morning to the news that Adie was dead.
days past
June quickly became very accustomed to living solely in her bedroom and had no idea why her parents had thought it could ever be more punishing than being forced to be around them all day every day. When the sun rose each morning, June was always already awake and there to see it, sitting at her window seat and hugging her legs to her chest as she observed the birth of each new day.
She’d sit in that same position for hours, a gargoyle watching over her street, listening to morning sounds come from downstairs as everybody got up and moving. Soon, Dad would appear, walking to his car below June’s window, briefcase in his hand. He never looked up though, not once.
At about seven thirty every morning, there would come a sharp knock on the bedroom door, and when June opened it there would be a tray of breakfast on the floor. She purposefully waited a minute or two before answering the knock, to ensure that she wouldn’t come face-to-face with her mother. When June was finished eating, she’d set the dirty dishes just outside the door again, just as Mom had told her to.
For the first time in her life, June made an effort to keep her bedroom tidy, which surprised her a bit. She figured it was because she was cleaning it for her own benefit and not to simply meet Mom’s suffocating standards. She spent her first few days in confinement straightening up and re-arranging all of the furniture, except for her desk, which she kept facing the window.
Things felt normal enough at first, but then whenever she tried to take a break from all the moving and organizing, June found that her heart would race in deeply unsettled anticipation until she went back to work.
When it was done and everything had a new place, June looked over the room, pleased, and realized that she’d been preparing a very important space: the space where she’d finally finish the story she’d been working so hard on for the past months. But she couldn’t write during the day. It didn’t feel right. The days were for preparing the area, and looking out the window, and writing in the diary she kept inside her left snow boot in the closet. Her handwriting was very neat.
Day four of total isolation and so far it’s going swell. If I have to stay home from New York after all, at least I don’t have to look at any of their stupid faces. I have decided to reclaim this space as my own. I’m playing a little game where I pretend that this is my apartment, that I live in a big city somewhere, like Chicago or San Francisco or Manhattan. It’s actually quite fun. Sometimes I can go for hours and hours without remembering the truth. I didn’t know how I was going to live through this last night, for instance. But now I think maybe I’ll be all right.
The nights were for the story. Even if she was tired from cleaning or reading or diary writing or simply doing nothing all day, June found that she wasn’t able to go sleep when she wanted, even if she’d just spent four hours straight working on the story. Her typewriter would call out for her in the dark, demanding that she come place her fingers on its keys once again. So she worked into the night without any concern for whether the machine was loud enough to wake up her family. Based on the fact that nobody ever came knocking and demanding silence, it must not have been an issue like she’d previously assumed.
Only once during her time locked away, and for a brief moment, did she wonder why her parents hadn’t taken away her typewriter, and her story, too, if they’d really wanted to ruin her. Maybe it was because, deep down, they knew what would happen to June if they did.
After going many days without seeing or hearing from the creatures, the girl woke up one morning back on the operating table, surrounded by six of them, only two of which were humanoid. They were communicating and gesturing around her face, which was held in place by a heavy metal vice that made her skull feel like it was about to be crushed.
June felt her eyes burn as she typed and realized she hadn’t blinked in far too long. It hurt when she finally did.
She wanted to scream, her throat felt pinched and dry, and that was when she realized there was something long and metal embedded in the front of her neck, pinning her down, making it excruciatingly painful to try to move even in the slightest degree.
June wished that someone would have mercy and let her get herself some coffee. Going without it was causing headaches more awful than she would have thought possible from caffeine withdrawal. She licked her parched lips as she went on, not pausing between sentences, just letting it flow out of her like vomit on to the page.
Then she noticed that the creature closest to her, the one with long fingers that looked and moved like fleshy spaghetti noodles, was holding a shining metal tool that looked like a pointed spoon. The moment she saw it, the creature leaned over her and plunged it into the side of her eye socket.
The silence was almost as bad as the pain. Despite feeling it all, the girl was unable to scream, or thrash, or protect herself. One by one, her eyeballs were removed, again being set to rest on her cheeks as the roots were still intact. Then came the feeling, and the sound, of the other tools being used to poke around inside. Scrape. Scrape. Scraaaaaape. She was forced to lie there, still as a statue, her nose filling with the smell of warm sea water and formaldehyde as she heard the other creatures moving excitedly around her.
How many times are they going to do this to me? she wondered in her agony, wishing with all her heart that she was dead. And why? Why? Why?
Every night, June wrote until she was unable to lift her hands without wincing. The typewriter mechanisms were heavy and demanding, and no matter how quickly or how accurately she typed, it felt like her story was running further and further ahead without her. Wait for me! she’d think as her wrists screamed in pain, plunking out her last few words like an engine sputtering dead.
Even afterward, sleep didn’t come. She’d lie there obsessing about what would come next on the page. “I need her to go through the procedure again,” June whispered to herself, finally coming to terms with the fact that she was missing yet another night’s sleep, crawling to the window seat to perch like the neighborhood gargoyle and watch the morning come to be.
Before her shower, June stood naked in front of the mirror and inspected every last inch of herself with careful and thorough eyes. She discovered a series of long red scratches on her arms and neck, nothing deep, but they were certainly noticeable. The thing was, she didn’t remember scratching at herself, not while she was writing or lying awake in bed or sitting at the window. It was very peculiar indeed.
The days went on, and June’s sleep-deprived condition worsened. She began to wonder how going without human contact for days would affect her. Whenever she tried to picture her family, the images her mind produced were elongated, melted portraits with gaping eyes and wide mouths, too exaggerated to be real. She dug through her closet for old photos to remind herself of their true appearances and came across an older album that she’d unearthed while cleaning. Before, she’d had no interest in looking through it, reliving her formative years. Now, in her nearly drunken state of exhaustion, it was suddenly very interesting to her.
The pictures inside the album felt like they couldn’t possibly be real, even though logically June knew that she was indeed the chubby little girl in all the photos. She looked in amazement at herself licking an ice cream cone, or sitting with her feet dangling off the side of a piano bench, or standing beside Fred in matching holiday outfits that were as ridiculous as they were festive.
June realized as she was flipping through the pages that she’d been fixating on her own face. She was studying the photos to search for lines beneath her eyes. If they were there and she could see the proof before her eyes, it would mean there was no way the lines
were wrinkles, unless she’d had wrinkles at age five. As if wrinkles of that size at age seventeen are any more normal.
Either way, the photos were too old to show any real level of detail. She could hardly tell what color her eyes were in the photos, let alone see something as subtle as the lines beneath her eyes.
What would it mean if they weren’t wrinkles? she asked herself as she snapped the album shut and went over to her bed, turning off the light. Pondering the answer was far too much for her to bear, so instead she cleared her mind by once again falling into her game of pretending that the bedroom was really a studio apartment somewhere far away. She pretended it was the sound of distant sirens and people yelling joyfully in the street below that kept her awake, her eyes burning, her wrists aching terribly. Her head hurt.
She’d have her heroine go through one more procedure, gruesome enough that she would be praying and begging for death. Then, once all of her humanity was stripped away, June would have the creatures return the girl to Earth, to the exact spot where they’d abducted her, on the hill in the woods that overlooked the town. The heroine would look down upon the glittering lights of the homes below, her mouth slacked open, her eyes disbelieving what they were seeing—they’d returned her, they’d really returned her. She would take a deep breath, inhale the night air, feel the soft earth beneath her bare feet.
And then, she’d walk back to her old life, soon to become her new life. And then, June thought as a blissful smile crossed her face, sleep coming for her at last, at last, at last, then she will finally be able to fulfill her true destiny.
Finally, June slept. She dreamed that she was little again, like in the photos she’d pored over, her hair all short curls, her socks with frills. She dreamed that she was running through the woods behind her backyard, breathing heavily, running either from something or for something. Suddenly, she was up high, surrounded by pines, standing in the spot where she and Robert had parked the night of her failed breakup attempt.
June looked down, and she wasn’t wearing a fancy dress with frilly socks anymore, she was wearing pajamas, the very same ones she used to wear obsessively when she was ten years old. She was also barefoot, and her feet hurt from being scraped open from running around outside. There came an overwhelming feeling that she should be looking for something. She looked to the sky to find it.
There, in the distance but not as far away as a high-flying airplane, hovered a strange, glowing orb. June’s chest swelled at the sight of it, with both fear and the unmeasurable urge to reach out and touch it. She waved at it, and instantly the light started blinking, as if waving back. They see me! she thought with raw excitement. My friends!
But then there was a sound from somewhere in the woods beside her, a sound of wet crunching and ripping and tearing, a sound that reminded June an awful lot of somebody shucking corn. She looked toward the sound, squinting to see better, and was able to make out some sort of enormous animal in the bushes nearby, shuddering and jolting as it ripped apart whatever was in front of it.
June didn’t know what the huge animal in the woods was exactly, but it was too big to be a bear, and she had no idea what sort of animal around here would be bigger than a bear. She knew that if it saw her, it’d rip her to pieces, too. Helpless and nearly paralyzed with terror, June looked quietly back to the blinking light, reaching her hands toward it. Please save me! she begged it in her mind, desperate not to get killed by the big animal. Please take me away from here and help me to never be afraid for myself again.
The crunching sound stopped, as if the thing could hear June’s thoughts. She tore her eyes away from the blinking light only to see the creature making its way toward her, slowly, as if on the prowl. When it stepped into the moonlight, she saw that it was not an animal at all.
It was a monster.
June opened her eyes. She was on her back in bed, and the room was flooded with daylight. She’d slept through the night, at last, although now there was a pressing, guilty panic that she hadn’t written anything. She’d try this afternoon, perhaps, rather than waiting until night. The only deadline was her own, but at the same time, it was important to meet it. June had the feeling that as soon as she finished her book, her real story could begin, the story of whatever it was in this life that she was meant to do.
She didn’t know why she felt so sure that something big was coming, but she did, as much as she felt sure that she’d find a way to escape this place someday, to somewhere better and more productive.
June opened the bedroom door, and the plate of food that was waiting for her looked as though it’d been there for at least a few hours. She ate it eagerly anyway, the cold sausages, the cold toast. When she was finished, she went to her closet to retrieve her diary from the left snow boot.
I had a nightmare last night, she wrote after filling in the date. It felt more real than almost any dream I’ve ever had. My heart still races at the thought of it. Thoughtful, she bit at the end of her pen, before adding in a shaky hand, Thank goodness monsters aren’t real.
She closed the diary and rehid it, refusing to add what she suspected to be the truth: that, even though monsters weren’t real, deep down in the depths of her most powerful instincts, she felt like the entire point of the dream was to let her know that yes, in fact, they were.
days past
On the ninth day of her confinement, Dad came into June’s bedroom without knocking and sat on the bed, which June had just made. She saw him look around, taking in the newly arranged furniture, and dared to wonder if he would compliment her on her cleanliness.
“It smells in here,” he said, his lip curling, and June went to open the window. “Like something metallic, some sort of chemical.”
June resisted the urge to put her nose to her underarm. “I don’t smell anything,” she said.
“You wouldn’t. You’re in here all the time,” Dad said, then seemed to remember what he was doing in his disappointing daughter’s room. “Listen, there’s something we need to go over. And before I even start, don’t be interrupting me with your crying or your eye rolling. Believe me when I say that I’ve had enough of that shit from you, June. I have had enough, and I will not stand for it any longer. All of that from before, it ends now. You are here, and you have a duty to become a responsible young woman like your mother and I taught you to be.”
June said nothing.
“Well?” Dad barked. “Is that understood, little lady?”
“What is it you were going to tell me?” June answered, her insides devoid of any emotion. With all the dreams she’d been having the last few nights, she hardly even understood that this was reality. How could she get so much sleep at night lately but wake up feeling even more exhausted? She didn’t understand it. June was scared by how the world felt—nothing felt how it was supposed to.
“Robert took me out for a drink after work the other day,” Dad started, and June’s fingers curled into her palms, the deadness inside warming painfully to life. “He was decent enough to ask me for my blessing, to ask for your hand in marriage.”
June stared, unblinking. “Marriage,” she repeated without meaning to. Robert, that little prick. He’d promised June not to bring that up again until she was ready. How could he think she’d go for this?
“What did you say?” June asked, fearing the answer.
Dad looked at her as if she were dim. “I told him that you had confided in me that you were waiting for him to ask,” he said, and rage filled her like hot air. “What could you ever hope to have in a husband that Robert doesn’t have? He’s got a good job, June. He’ll take care of you and your children. And of course Stewart—”
“I don’t care at all what Stewart thinks,” June yelled, surprised at herself. “I don’t want to marry Robert!”
Dad rose and stood over her and crossed his arms. “You listen to me very carefully,” he said. “You have shown us tha
t you have absolutely no right to make your own decisions. You need to learn that your mom and I want what’s best for you.”
“You want what’s best for you!” June interjected, and the pulsing vein on his neck made her lower her voice. “You want what’s best for the business.”
“I want what’s best for everybody,” Dad said, and paced back and forth in front of June. “I thought all this time alone in here would help you come around. Maybe you need some more.”
“Please,” she said, a little too drily. “Let me live in here forever if you’re not going to let me do anything worthwhile with my life.”
“How dare you imply that starting a family isn’t worthwhile?” Dad cried out. “How would your mother feel if she heard you talk so poorly of her life? You wouldn’t be around in the first place to whine and complain if we hadn’t decided to make you, to bring you into our family.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” she said, and while Dad didn’t slap her, he did stop pacing and, with a dangerous silence, reached forward to grab her chin and tilt it up so she was looking at him in the face.
“You’re going to do this,” Dad said. “You’ve lost the privilege of making your own choices. You’ll thank me when you’re older and happy as a clam with your husband and children, in a nice big house that has all the modern appliances a housewife could ever want. Hell, June! You’ll probably even be able to afford for someone else to keep the place clean for you, since we all know how limited your skills are in that area.”
June thought she should cry and scream, but she was horrified at how still she was on the inside once again. It scared her. She wondered if she’d died sometime during her grounding and just didn’t know it yet.