“It wasn’t a mistake,” he said. “I think there really was a girl there. And maybe I was the only one who saw her, if only for a moment.”
He’d told that story like he’d rehearsed it. The lines too smooth, the pauses like paragraphs. He knew I’d come. He knew, and had the story waiting for me.
“What’s your game?” I asked him.
He pressed closer to me. I gripped a cracked wooden post that broke underneath my fingernails, and I dropped my cigarette in the grass.
“I didn’t ask you to come here,” he said.
I tilted my head back to look him in the eyes, my throat tightening.
“Surprise,” I whispered.
He finished his cigarette.
“Come back inside,” he said.
We went back into the bar. The blue-haired girl from the lawn sat by herself, drinking from a large, blue mug. She pushed her sweater to her elbows, revealing fresh scars, dirty and purple, all up and down her arms.
“Your girlfriend?” I asked.
“My sister,” Cignus said.
“Most people call me Elm,” she said, and she held out her hand for me to take, “but my real name is Saint Peter.”
“Saint Peter,” I said, gripping her hand, “like the prophet.”
“Not like,” she said. “Am. I am the prophet.”
Cignus pressed his hand against the small of my back. Little sparks ran up my spine, and I wish they hadn’t.
“I’m taking her home,” he said.
Saint Peter drove us in an ancient, rust-colored van. Cignus and I sat in the back seat, staring at each other, our backs pressed against the windows. I drew my knees up. He drew his knees up.
He unrolled the window and lit another cigarette. He tried to hide the fact he coughed blood onto his sleeve.
Saint Peter could’ve been driving us into the sea, I wouldn’t have noticed.
“That picture in the wine bar?” he said. “’The Hunted?’ I painted it after that night I found the dead girl in the woods.”
“You’re lying.”
“Why would I waste my energy lying to you?”
“It wasn’t me,” I whispered to him. “The girl in the woods wasn’t me.”
“I know what I saw.”
“I’m not dead. I’m right here.”
He reached across the van and took my hand. He touched my fingers one by one.
“Are you really?” he asked.
Saint Peter stopped in front of their house. It was the same one Phaedra and I went to only a week before. Someone removed the blood paintings from the grass, and the porch stood empty and quiet.
I stepped out of the car. Before I could follow Cignus into the house, Saint Peter pulled me back.
“Be careful,” she said. “You know he has a reputation.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Maybe you only think that because people have been hiding the truth from you.”
“Who are you?”
“Saint Peter,” she said. “Do you know who you are?”
I pulled my hand away.
“I don’t think about it.”
I went into the house, not looking behind me to see if she followed. I passed the empty living room and the sterile kitchen. Every room appeared hollowed out, cast into grey light. The speaker was gone. The mirrors on the walls had been ripped off and scattered across the floor.
Cignus waited for me. Not at the door of his studio, but at the door of his bedroom. As I walked toward him broken glass crunched underneath me.
The house sighed as he took me into his room and shut the door. It sighed as I slipped into cool red sheets.
We were fulfilling some unspoken contract between us. A primordial agreement older than dark and stars. Once you invade someone’s dreams you’re a part of them forever. For the rest of their life they’ll be spitting out little pieces of you.
I knelt in front of him and he pressed molly into one of my nostrils. Cocaine into the other.
“Don’t kiss me,” he said as my throat and mouth buzzed.
In the dark, I saw the photographs of women taped to the walls, their eyes shining in camera flash. A thousand dirty punk girls.
“Would you like to go on my wall?” he asked me.
I leaned my head back and the room tilted. I squeezed red sheets between my fists and the colors dripped onto me.
“Not yet,” he said. “You’ll give me a picture when you leave me.”
He was rough, all angles and sandpaper. He burned away the palm of his hands with chemicals and, though the drugs made me want to kiss and kiss, his mouth was a stone.
He pushed my thighs apart with his knees. I fell halfway off the bed and grabbed fistfuls of carpet. I spit out flies.
“Lily, can you hear me?” He asked.
He spoke to me from dimensions away. I was lost in textures, burnt and soft, lost between his trembling knees.
“God, everything’s so soft,” I whispered.
“I used to talk to God,” Cignus said. “I thought he could hear me.”
I rubbed my cheek against the carpet.
“Only an expression,” I murmured, my mouth being tickled by fibers I never even knew existed.
“Be careful how you use your words,” he said. “Maybe I’m a devil waiting to curse you.”
“You don’t want to meet a real devil.”
He fucked me as I lay with my head pressed into the carpet, my toes gripping the bed sheets. He fucked me because that’s how you leech the magic out of someone. I may be young, but I’m not an idiot.
I could have gouged his eyes out with my jutting chest, my jutting hips. I wanted to rear up and bite his head off, but the carpet underneath me was so soft. I breathed it in even as I lay twisted, my organs bursting inside of me.
I wouldn’t tell him I hadn’t done drugs before, and he wouldn’t believe me if I told him I was a virgin so I lay quiet even though I scarred the inside of my mouth with teeth marks and my thighs clenched and shook.
Blood stained my legs and the color faded into red sheets.
Where were you on that night, little demon, when the artist came across the deer? Did I disguise myself to hide from you? Maybe I thought I could disappear between thick muscle and fawn skin, a slit throat, mud caked on the back of my ears.
Or were you the one who killed me and dragged me up there in the first place?
I don’t know how much time passed before Cignus released me and I fell off the bed, shivering. I couldn’t move. He tore the red curtains off his wall and wrapped me in them.
“Want me to draw you?” he asked, while I lay inert on the floor.
“Go away.”
“I need a cigarette,” he said, and left me.
I’m glad you weren’t here to see me grow into an adult, demon. Though I think we both knew it would always be like this. No fairytale cherry popping for girls like me, not with my firework scars and Schizophrenia curse. Knights do not rescue mad girls, because our crowns are invisible and made of dirt. I did not deserve the palatial, golden bed of the man in polished armor.
And if he offered it to me, I would have laughed and laughed.
I dragged myself across the floor, shivering, trailing red curtains like the train of a dress. I crawled underneath his desk, near the radiator.
Cignus came back into the room and found me sitting underneath his desk.
“I’m so cold,” I said.
He reached out for me.
“Come here,” he said, the last sweet thing he ever said to me.
He laid me on the bed and rocked me to him, to his weak heart and thin chest, until I fell asleep.
***
I awoke to a thud outside of Cignus' window, the sound of wood splintering. I sat up with a start, gasping.
Another thud, followed by a CRACK, as of a tree splitting in two. I reached for Cignus in the dark, but he was gone. I crawled off the bed and searched for my clothes on the floor.
>
In the backyard I found Saint Peter shooting arrows with a hunter’s bow. – An expensive thing, smooth draw, black liquid metal and fiberglass. It was a bow to kill bears and boars with.
She notched another arrow and drew the string.
It shot into the trunk of the tree, dead center, into a yellowing paper target.
She lowered the bow and brushed the hair from her face. Blood dripped down her wrist. On the back of her hand was a braised scar in the shape of a cross.
"You're bleeding," I said.
“So are you.”
I looked down and saw the blood smeared across my thighs. It glowed blue in the moonlight, and when I touched it I found it dried and cool.
She turned back to the tree, drew another arrow, and released.
Chapter Fourteen
WE’VE BEEN HERE before. The artist and me locked in the back room, his teeth bared and his tongue clicking. I’ve sat on this floor, just like this, with my knees clenched together and the red curtain draped around my shoulders. He held the back of my neck like a mother wolf as I bent and snorted cocaine from a piece of broken mirror.
The walls and the air glistened with grease; my skin was dirty, my thighs ached, and I was rotting from the inside, but my eyes were wide open.
Cignus turned toward his empty canvas. I thought I heard his bones cracking, his skin too thin to contain him. I wondered how many nights he spent here in the studio with the door locked, nothing but drugs and a red light to guide him. Enough hours and his fingers started shaking, the painting before him blurred. Maybe at the end of the night he couldn’t tell the difference between the butcher shop blood, the light, his own hands.
As for me: my head was ready to pop and my eyes were stretched a mile wide.
He threw the cover off his desk and revealed a small refrigerator underneath. He stored bags of blood inside.
He ripped open a bag and spilled it into a tray, some splashing across his hands.
I blinked, and the earth shifted underneath me. Cignus no longer stood at the canvas, but back at his desk. He mixed paint and blood with molten silver. He wiped his mouth as silver tinged his lips. When he spoke, flecks of it dropped to the floor.
"I could transform you into anything I wanted," he said, and I laughed.
He pressed silver and blood into my palms. He squeezed, and the silver ran down my arms.
It spread cool through my blood. I tasted his words traveling on spit particles in the air.
“I will remake you,” he said.
He squeezed harder, and the silver turned into rot. It travelled fast through my bones, sprouting like fungi on the surface of my bones. I tasted it on my tongue. If I breathed into someone’s mouth, I’d kill them with the poison in me. I was transforming, yes, into something terribly wrong.
He bent down and snorted another line. He reared back up like he’d been underwater for years, then returned to his work in progress.
We’ve been here before. Me and the artist.
But I’ve said that already.
He painted with his fingers. I rolled on the floor choking. I asked for a glass of water, maybe some orange juice, anything to soothe away the drip in the back of my throat. He gave me a piece of gum to keep me from grinding my teeth together. I stuck it, chewed up, in the center of one of his canvases.
"So disrespectful," he said. "Would you stick gum on the Sistine chapel?"
"You're no Michelangelo," I said.
The rot slid through my stomach like a fat, diseased worm. It pushed at my belly button where it formed its center, like a pulsating jugular.
I grabbed the piece of broken mirror, cocaine-encrusted, jagged on the edges, and I cut a hole into the center of me.
I dropped the mirror and wrapped the red curtains around me. I crawled across the floor.
“Touch me. I’m changing colors. Touch me.”
Please, say that I’m still here. Say that I’m still human, or I might be lost.
He peeled back my red curtain cocoon. Underneath I lay naked, burning, and bleeding.
“Do you remember when we first met? What I promised you?” he asked.
“No,” I spit out.
"Lie to me again."
We fucked on the floor. I hadn’t washed myself since the last time, but he didn’t ask about the blood. Not that he could tell the difference between my blood and that from the butchers. He touched me like I was a dream. I was tearing. I was splitting apart.
I didn’t make a sound.
He withdrew from me without coming. A wide swathe of blood and silver spread across his waist.
“You hurt yourself,” Cignus said.
“No,” I said softly, “you did.”
I found the hole I cut into myself, as if for the first time. I touched the rim of the wound but couldn’t feel anything at all.
“I’m scared.”
“Come here,” he said.
I held my arms out to him and he picked me up. I smelled the toxic rot bubbling out of the hole. My blood gurgled and spilled out silver.
“How long has it been since you’ve been able to admit that you were afraid?”
He carried me to his canvas.
“No,” I said.
“Don’t you dare turn away.”
“No.”
“I need this.”
The blood spilling out of me was no longer silver, but yellow.
“You’re scared too,” I said. “Aren’t you? I can feel it.”
He gathered my hair in between his fists.
“Take a deep breath.”
He pressed the gaping hole of me into the center of his canvas.
He threw me backwards and I collapsed on the floor. He painted with his thumbs in my yellowed blood. He cursed underneath his breath. His hands drug-trembled. I crawled headfirst into the red curtains and waited to die. They’d find me with cocaine in my mouth and heated gore underneath my fingernails.
The artist shook me from unconsciousness.
“Open your eyes.”
He tilted my head toward the canvas.
I saw my eyes dripping toxic silver. He framed my head with a yellow crown. Streaks of black gore rose from my forehead. Horns.
The Hunter, not the Hunted.
We’ve been here before.
I pressed my hands against my wound.
“I was right. You’re more scared than I am,” I said.
“Don’t talk anymore. You’ll hurt yourself,” he said.
We’ve been here before.
He helped me into the hallway. I walked with him over broken glass and cigarette butts into the living room. It was storming outside. Someone had opened all the windows, and rain blew through the room. It pelted my naked skin, my hair, my stomach. I turned into him to escape the cold, but he stiffened and wouldn’t hold me.
He pushed me onto the couch and left. When he came back with my clothes I was curled up with my face pressed down into the cushion and my skin turning blue.
“I can’t breathe," I said.
“Stop panicking."
He pulled my sweater over my head and pushed my skirt up over my knees as I sat with a storm dripping in my mouth.
“You won’t see me again,” he said. “Because I’ll be someone else entirely.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Later he’d carry me out to the car because I refused to move. He’d drive me home as I lay huddled against the car door. We’d be chased by a storm, lightning bursting on the side of the road, dodging traffic accidents. I’d see a burnt black hand on the side of the road, but say nothing. I wouldn’t feel the pain until hours later, after I should’ve gone to the hospital, but I was scared of stitches, so I’d pour iodine over the wound and tape several bandages over it. Instead of sleeping I’d lay in bed, crying from the comedown, crying quietly so that Momma wouldn’t hear me.
He took my hands into his own, those acid-burned hands, and he spoke.
“I’m already gone.”
Chapter Fifteen
EVERY NIGHT FOR two weeks I woke to Mother’s crying. I found myself wrapped in butcher paper with a red bow around my ankles and a red bow around my throat. I tore myself out of the paper, gasping, and ran downstairs.
“I’m not dead.”
She sat at the kitchen table in her gazelle skull and wept.
“My baby girl, they’re going to truck you away for meat.”
I sat beside her at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette.
“Can the dead do this?” I asked, and I blew smoke in her face.
Still, she wept.
I’d dropped out of high school years ago. I had no car and no job. My reputation as a boy killer was fading fast and demons no longer haunted me. I had nothing but a broken hymen and bad dreams. So my mother thought I was dead. It was a mistake anyone could make, right?
“Tell me something before they take you away,” my mother said.
She grabbed my wrists. Tears welled up underneath the gazelle skull.
“What’s so goddamn important?” I asked.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
She asked the same question the night I came back from Cignus’ house, shaking from the cocaine, spit in my hair. I tried to sneak up the stairs but she stood at the threshold of her bedroom with butcher paper in her hands.
I knew she saw the dried blood on my thighs and on my sweater, that she saw my knees shaking.
“Do I look like I want a boyfriend?” I asked, and jerked my hand away.
I stubbed the cigarette out on the kitchen table, and left.
Pluto waited for me in the bedroom. I grabbed her and threw myself into bed. Her purring lulled me into sleep.
The next night, I woke up in the same way. The butcher paper wrapped around me, the color of dead scraped skin. My mother crying.
“I’m not dead.”
“Just you wait for the meat truck, baby.”
And the next night.
And the next.
During the day I smoked cigarettes on the back porch. I stole my mother’s ID, bought some rum, and drank it with sugar and melted ice cubes. I fell asleep, hanging halfway off the couch, watching the Cosmos television series on DVD. I was useless incarnate. Momma suggested I go back to school, get my GED, get a job, maybe give Birth to a savior from a fallen star. I could do anything I wanted to.
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