“Stay away!”
The ball of fireflies hummed in my face. I slapped it away and it exploded in a shower of light. The demon uttered a low whine.
I gathered the dead-thing dress in my hands and ran down the tunnel of trees.
She didn't pursue me, but there was something else in the woods that night. Something watching me. Its machinating heart bore down on me.
The dress started moving. The butterflies squirmed and fluttered, showering me with melanin dust. The beetles clicked. The spiders squirmed at my throat. The moths fluttered, heave with panic. I crouched in the dirt and groped for the laces on my back to untie myself, but I couldn’t reach.
The woods tilted, the grass and the dirt turned into a sky, bearing its weight down on me.
I grabbed for the collar of the dress and tore it away, showering the ground with thread, lace, and insects. They fluttered and flailed and scurried away.
Chapter Eleven
I DIDN’T SEE the demon for several years after that, and in those years, I went mad.
Part Three: The Artist
Chapter Twelve
WHEN I WAS TWENTY, I met the artist with electric lights in his hair and butcher shop blood on his clothes. Phaedra and I showed up at his house because a man promised her a carnivorous pitcher plant. A Sarracenia rubra plant with sweet-veined red skin and pretty black hair.
“He probably just wants to fuck me,” Phaedra said, “but I saw it on Facebook. The plant, I mean. It’s real. He even time-stamped it.”
We’d driven almost an hour out of town for the plant and found ourselves outside a broken house crushed by kudzu. Dance music from inside pulsed underneath the tires of Phaedra’s car. The artist sat on the front lawn with a mason jar full of port wine, his clothes frayed and splattered, surrounded by blood portraits of skinless women.
A blue-haired girl with bleeding wrists posed as his model in the wet grass. Light cords snaked down her throat, her wrists, and his wine glass. He tugged on the light cords, telling her to turn over on her back.
“Wait here,” Phaedra said as she walked up to the porch.
Boys sat on the darkened porch under a kitchen window lined with empty whiskey bottles. College boys, from the looks of it, skinny intellectuals who drank because it was the closest thing they could get to enlightenment. I overheard their words Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Typical. The longer I looked at them, the less human they became.
Phaedra disappeared inside the house.
The artist took another sip of wine. Flies stuck in the blood on his clothes.
“I know you,” he said to me, the lights straining against his face. “My sister went to school with you. You were the murderer.”
“You’d like that, I’m sure.”
“What was your name?”
I wanted to say Lily bloodsucker. Lily schizophrenia. Lily stay away from me because I’ll eat your head.
I shrugged and headed toward the house.
The boys’ silhouettes twisted and transformed out of proportion, like their heads should’ve snapped off of their necks. Their shadow hands shrunk into their sleeves. They ignored me when I climbed the porch steps and they continued speaking amongst themselves. Their voices were loud enough to penetrate through the music coming from the house.
“Just postulate for a minute, that there is a negative and positive balance to the world,” one of them said.
“Black and white thinking. That’s going to get you into trouble.”
“Postulate? Stop being so goddamn pompous.”
“Most of us have equal negative and positive aspects. But, what if someone enters the world, and their balance is all negative?”
“The entire world is thrown off.”
“Their lives become a hell, and they plunge the earth into hell.”
“Oh, please. Be original for once.”
I went inside and the door slammed shut behind me.
I expected to find a party, but I found only an empty living room. In the corner of the room, the speaker, partially hidden by a couch, blared music.
“Phaedra?” I called, but I couldn’t hear myself speak.
I walked across the room and ripped out the speaker cords. The house went silent. I couldn’t even hear the boys talking outside.
“Phaedra?” I called again.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
In the kitchen a teenage girl with dirty blonde dreadlocks hunched over glow-in-the-dark teacups, a glowing green bottle clasped between her knees.
“I’m looking for my friend,” I said.
“She already left.”
“She only came in here a moment ago.”
“She’ll be back soon.”
“Did she go down the hall?” I asked.
The girl held a teacup out toward me.
“I poured you some tea,” she said. “You should thank me. You know you aren’t supposed to be in here yet.”
“You said that already.”
“Wait with me, she’ll be back.”
She continued holding the teacup toward me, her arm unwavering. I sighed.
I crouched beside her and took the cup.
“What’s in this?”
“You like absinthe, don’t you?”
I didn’t know, but I drank all of it anyways. It tasted like acidic licorice, and I fought to keep from coughing.
The girl’s body warped like the boy’s shadows. Her dreadlocks rippled like water. Her pupils swelled, and I felt mine swelling as well.
She ran her hands across my neck, my collarbone. She kissed my temple.
“Will you tell me a story?” she asked. “The boys are so boring.”
“I don’t have any stories.”
I ran my fingers up and down her arms. Somehow, I couldn’t stop myself.
“Not everyone has a story, but I can tell by looking at you that you do.”
“What did you put in my drink?” I asked, kissing the palms of her hands.
“I just wanted some company. And a story.”
I was about to protest again. There were no stories inside of me. I wanted to say, “I’m a hollowed out girl, and I have to be in order to survive. I don’t even know a poem. My mother was a storyteller and it ruined her.” But, then the story came.
I pulled her by the dreads and whispered.
“Once there was an ugly witch. She was so ugly that they cast her out of the village and made her live in the woods. She stole a child from a nursery and raised her as her own. She taught the child how to make her foul-smelling potions and how to kill animals, so together, they went mad. The child began to think she was a goddess, and that she could talk to trees. Why, she even killed a deer and wore its blood and bone because she thought it would give her magic powers. The townspeople were really quite concerned for this girl, living in filth. Once a boy came to the woods, asking the girl for her hand in marriage. He felt sorry for her, and wanted to cure her. In response she bit him and he ran away, never to bother her again.”
“When the girl came of age the authorities came after her for killing the livestock and being a general nuisance. ‘Mad, just like her mother, the witch,’ they said. ‘We’ll lock her away so she won’t bother us again.’ The ugly witch convinced the girl that a great and terrible monster was chasing her and, if it caught her, she would be devoured instantly. So the girl picked up her deer skull and her hunting bow and ran screaming through the woods. The authorities were in hot pursuit, their dogs yapping at her ankles. In order to protect herself, she cut off her arm with the hunting knife in her pocket. The dogs, yowling and yipping, grabbed it and carried it off.
“The girl crawled into a hole and hid. To this day she lives there, trembling and scared. She convinced herself she was a rabbit, and nibbles on berries and grass. Because there are sometimes just better things than facing the truth.”
The girl laughed, the sound refracting like light.
“You talk like an old person,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.
>
The music started blaring from the living room again. The girl grasped my hands, desperate, speaking fast, trying to tell me something important, but I couldn’t hear any of her words.
“I’m sorry,” I mouthed
Back in the living room the music chiseled holes into my cheeks. I tried unplugging the speaker, but I couldn’t find the cord. I went down the hallway. Broken pieces of mirror were glued to the walls. The ceiling was covered in mold and women’s underwear. I called again for Phaedra.
At the end of the hallway I came to a room. I went inside and shut the door. I fumbled for a light switch, and when I touched it, a soft red light flooded the room.
Paintings lined the walls, glowing red and gold, as if illuminated from within. They were deeply textured, crackled like skin. I held my hand out toward one of the paintings and my hand glowed red, the patterns swirling and dancing across my skin.
When the artist entered the room, I knew I hadn’t been searching for Phaedra, but for him.
“It’s blood,” he said, as if expecting to find me here.
He shut the door.
“Of course,” I said, feeling dizzy. “What else would it be?”
“My friend works at a butcher’s shop, he lets me take gallons of it.”
He tripped over a chair, nearly knocking over one of his paintings. Blood smeared the back of his shirt as well as the front. He’d been rolling in it. He pulled out a bottle of gin hidden underneath a red coat on his desk and drank.
“I heat it, mix it with metal. Whatever I can find. Sometimes copper, sometimes gold. Wholesale shops. That’s how I make them glow when the lights are turned on.”
He turned to me with eyes shining and drunk.
“But you’re not the kind of girl that cares about things like that,” he said.
“They wouldn’t let me be a scientist. So I dropped out of school.”
“I heard what you did to that Charlie kid.”
He pulled a switchblade out of his pocket. My body tensed. Maybe this would end in a cliché, him coming at me with the knife and splattering my blood across the canvas. Butcher shop; likely story.
Instead he pulled a bag of powder - drugs - out of his pocket.
“Have you ever done molly before?” he asked, setting the bottle of gin down.
“Of course,” I said, though, of course, I hadn’t.
I wasn’t about to admit that I was a drug neophyte to this hulking husk; admit that the most I’d ever done was bad weed and housewives’ pills.
He dipped his knife into the bag and snorted off the tip. He tilted his head back and squeezed his nose. He didn’t offer me any, only put the bag and knife away and started drinking again. When he lowered the bottle he was staring at me, eyes like stingers.
“Are you lost?” he asked me.
“I was looking for my friend.”
“Right. It’s obvious you don’t give a damn about anything important.”
“I never said that.”
“Oh, then you have an opinion? You like the paintings?”
“No "
He wheeled toward me with paint in his eyes, paint in his spit.
“Then get out! Get out of my house! I didn’t invite you here! I know girls like you. I’ve fucked a thousand girls like you. Little boring, punk girls with ratty hair who think they have everything figured out.”
His body sucked up the gravity of the room.
“So you killed a boy. Do you think I care? This isn’t middle school, sister. You’re going to have more to deal with than little lady teachers and prepubescent children. You think you’re tough? You’re nothing more than a spoiled child.”
He lurched toward me, splattering me with paint, blood, and gin.
“I can’t even imagine being that ignorant,” he said.
I spit in his face.
I expected him to lunge forward and hit me. His fingers quivered and his eyes twitched. I flinched, waiting for a blow.
He touched his chin and smeared blue paint across his face. His smile was toxic.
“I’m going to destroy you,” he said softly.
He pointed toward the door.
“Now get out,” he said.
He slammed the door shut behind me. Dark shadows of creatures seemed to flit through the mirrors glued to the wall. Recorded thunder replaced the sound of dance music. I ran out of the house with my eyes closed, past the now empty porch, onto the lawn, weaving through the blood portraits.
They were like women that had lain down to die after being ripped away from their hair, teeth, and faces. I imagined them trying to move without skin, their exposed muscles grasping at the weeds.
I couldn’t see the house. I couldn’t see the sidewalk. I could be lost in the lawn forever. I only saw the grass smoking like coals and the women trying to pull themselves out of electric lights. What the hell had been in that absinthe?
The blue-haired girl with bleeding wrists writhed in the grass, lights in her hair, lights on her wrists.
“I know you,” I said, “but I don’t know from where.”
From behind Phaedra snapped her fingers as if beckoning a dog.
“Where the hell have you been?” she said. “Come on.”
“Where’s your plant?” I asked.
“Just a two dollar Venus and a four inch dick. Let’s go.”
There were crosses etched into the blue-haired girl’s throat.
“Lily!”
Phaedra dragged me to her car.
As we drove away, the blue-haired girl stood up, holding the lights in front of her body, lights swelling in the rearview mirror, until her body disappeared.
That night I dreamed of Charlie jumping into the river. I knew how this dream ended, yet I couldn’t stop myself from running to the edge of the bridge and looking down.
But this time, when I turned away from the water I did not find the demon in her wet white dress. I found the artist doused in blood, rotting meat hanging from his hair, his face covered in flies.
I ran to him and he caught me in his arms. He pulled me into his hissing, rotting embrace.
I tried to cry, but what came out of my mouth was an insect noise.
“Shh,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay. I am a sick man. Everything’s going to be okay.”
I clung to him.
Chapter Thirteen
I SOUGHT HIM out because of a dream. Because of a stupid fucking dream. I found out his name was Cignus like the northern constellation. Cignus like the swan. I showed up at his art show in a wine bar downtown and found he’d imprisoned my likeness in one of his blood paintings. He’d exaggerated all of my features. My eyes were like those of a mad crow, my hair dark and struck through with electricity.
He appeared at my side, no longer in his blood-spattered dream suit, spitting out flies. He wore a neat gray jacket and, except for his bloodshot eyes and the darkened circles on his face, he looked the part of the gentleman. Like a Cignus, not The Artist.
“Sort of a resemblance, isn’t there?” he said, indicating the painting.
He headed toward the wine bar.
I shouldn’t have come, but my head didn’t know it yet. I was sicker than anyone knew. It would have been better for my mental health to stay home with Momma as she gathered wood for a Viking ship. For months she went to the scrapyard in the morning and came back carrying twisted boards, her fingernails bloodied and filled with splinters.
Better to see that every morning, than see myself trapped in grit and blood, framed and mounted above a bar, with a $500 price tag and a title of “The Hunted.”
Maybe the demon visited the artist like she visited Charlie, dressed up in my skirts and sweaters to disguise herself. I hadn’t seen her since the night she took me to the entrance of the ancient woods, yet I knew she still followed me everywhere. She whispered glossolalia underneath party noise. I saw her in Pluto’s eyes. And here, she’d shown up in a painting to taunt me. Silly bitch. I’m sure that, in hell, that could b
e called a kind of romance. I imagined her draped over red velvet cloth, pale thighs opened, spider for a cunt, as the artist pressed her face into butcher shop blood.
Cignus came back from the bar and held out a glass of wine.
I hesitated. I expected him to haul me out of the bar, screaming, not offer me a drink.
“Take it,” he said. “Don’t romance it.”
I took the glass. Took a careful sip.
“Good?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I figured you would like it, it’s a Riesling. It’s what the girls with unsophisticated palates drink.”
He motioned toward the back door.
“Come,” he said. “I need a smoke.”
On the back porch we lit cigarettes together. He inhaled like he couldn’t catch his breath.
He’d just insulted me, and then commanded me to follow him outside like he owned me. And all I could think was, he looked better in blood and dead flies, than primped for galleries and wine. Those crazy eyes couldn’t be buttoned up in a clean gray suit. I sat on the railing and leaned my head back, gazing at constellations. Maybe Cignus the swan lived up there, but Momma never taught me to find any stars but Wormwood.
He spoke my name like a curse.
“Lily, that painting. Do you think it flatters you?”
“I don’t think your paintings could flatter anyone.”
He continued speaking as if he hadn’t heard me.
“I’m going to tell you a story. My sister and I have hunted the woods behind our house our whole lives. On one of the few nights I went out hunting by myself, I came across a deer with its throat slit and tied upside down in a tree. I cut the deer down from the tree, but it wasn’t a deer at all.”
He crushed his cigarette between his fingers.
“I closed my eyes for only a moment, and when I opened them once more, I saw it wasn’t a deer, but a girl. When I blinked, and it transformed back into the deer. How does someone make that mistake? How does someone mistake a deer for a girl?”
I didn’t know how to respond. The story he told was the first thing he’d said that wasn’t a thinly veiled insult. And the intensity with which he spoke, biting the inside of his cheek, his Adam’s apple petrified in his throat, left me paralyzed.
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