“You’re a warrior, baby,” she said. “I’ve always told you that.”
Only at night did she know the truth. I was dead meat, something to cart away.
I thought of stealing Momma’s car and driving to the artist’s house. I would walk past the blood portraits on the lawn, and the boys on the porch howling like wolves. I’d tear down that mirror-crusted hallway to get to him. I’d stick my hand through “The Hunter” and force him to paint another one.
I’d tell him, “I’ll haunt you forever. I’ll never let you go,”
I wanted him to kill me. I wanted him to blow glitter into my blood.
Anything but sitting on the couch with ice melting into my rum.
Then one night I tore the butcher paper away and found Phaedra and Cignus in my room. Cignus sat in the rocking chair with sunglasses on. He must’ve come from an art show, because he wore his stiff gray suit, his crisp tie.
Phaedra stood at the foot of my bed, my coat in her hands.
“Do you usually sleep like that?” she asked.
It was several moments before I managed to speak.
“Do you usually break in and watch people sleep?”
She threw my coat at me.
“We’re going on an adventure,” she said.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“What does it matter?” Phaedra asked.
While I dressed, Cignus got up and paced the room. He took off his sunglasses; broken blood vessels filled his eyes.
Pluto wound around Phaedra’s legs but Phaedra pushed her away.
“You still own that rat?” she asked.
“It’s just a cat, P,” I said. “I don’t know why it creeps you out so much.”
“It’s not a cat,” she said. “See those eyes? It’s a mountain.”
We snuck downstairs, past the kitchen where my mother sat at the table, sobbing. I opened the front door.
“I called the meat truck!” shouted Momma.
“Thanks Mom!” Phaedra responded.
I slammed the door behind us as we ran out.
Cignus had parked his truck in the driveway. Phaedra rolled down the window as we sped away from the neighborhood.
“You’re such a bitch,” I said to her.
Phaedra lit a cigarette. The wind sucked at the ends of her dark princess hair.
“You know, if you don’t go to sleep, you’ll go mad,” Cignus said.
“I’ve been mad for three days,” Phaedra said.
Cignus’ face was bruised a ferocious purple, his neck sick and yellowing.
“Cignus. Something bad is happening to you,” I said.
“It’s this artist suit. I can barely breathe,” Cignus said.
He grabbed his tie and tore it away. It burst into moths.
“Get out of here!” he said, coughing, and batting at the moths that filled the car.
Phaedra rolled down the window and swatted them out of the car.
“Is this a dream?” I asked.
“If it’s a dream,” Phaedra said, “then why don’t you wake up?”
She stuck her leg out the window of the truck. She bounced it up and down so that her foot seemed to skid across the white lines in the center of the road. I closed my eyes. Opened them up again.
The road did not melt away.
Cignus pulled up to his house and parked.
“We have to hurry,” Cignus said, “before the party.”
We got out of the car. I bent over, heaved, and coughed up moths.
“What have you done to me?” I asked. “This has to be a dream.”
Cignus grabbed me by the waist and spun me toward the backyard.
“Don’t you see what’s out there?” he said.
Beyond the backyard were the woods. That night, a light shone through the trees.
That crumbling house could’ve risen up to devour me. Everything in the dark took on an extra dimension. I felt as if the street stretched out to infinity and that I, in the middle, was shrinking.
Cignus and Phaedra dragged me into the backyard. I expected Saint Peter to be there shooting arrows, but I only found the target on the ground, torn to shreds. Propped up against the tree was the blood painting of me with mad eyes, lightning hair, and horns of yellowed ichor.
Cignus took the painting to the edge of the woods where Phaedra and he held it to the light. The light grew brighter and their faces appeared grim and bruised in the glow.
“Do you see it?” Cignus asked.
The light reflected a red line off the painting and into the woods.
It wasn’t an artist that pressed my blood into a canvas and painted horns and eyes with his thumbs. It was a diviner. He hadn’t created a painting for bored middle-class intellectuals to buy, but a guide to show the way.
To where? I didn’t know.
“You have to follow the light,” he said.
“Why me?” I asked. “And have you two been sleeping with each other?”
“It’s been haunting me all my life, but it was made for you.” Cignus said.
I couldn’t see anything in the woods except that red light, rushing past the darkness, like a beam that could penetrate solid matter.
“Why is this so important?” I asked.
“You’ll know when you get there.”
“Lily, listen to me. If you go in, you might be someone else when you come out,” Phaedra said.
“Don’t tell her that,” Cignus said.
“Somebody needs to.”
“What’s going to happen to me?” I asked.
“Child,” he said; and still holding up the painting, he spit in the grass. “I knew you would be too scared. You’re a little girl trying on a woman’s body, but it’ll never fit you right.”
“You’ve been wanting me to do this from the beginning,” I said. “From the moment you met me. You set me up for this.”
“Now she’s mad because you called her a child,” Phaedra said.
“Shut up,” Cignus said. “Neither of you know what you’re dealing with.”
“Then explain to me.”
“There’s no time.” He said. “The blood only lasts so long, then the light disappears, forever.”
“And after?”
“I’ll see you at the party,” he said. “I promise.”
I should’ve run. I probably could’ve fallen onto the ground with my eyes closed and forced myself to wake up. Instead I looked at Cignus, covered in bruises and blood, as he held up the painting. His eyes begged me, with a look I’d never seen from him.
“You need me to do this,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Tell me then,” I said, and my cheeks flushed, my heart beating like an insect. “Tell me you need me.”
“Oh please,” Phaedra said. “What are we, in grade school?”
He hesitated. His entire body shook with fatigue; his muscles must’ve been burning from lack of sleep. When he spoke, he spoke haltingly, slowly.
“I’ve always needed you,” he said.
I followed the red light into the woods.
I pushed through trees draped with low vines, misted and wet. Stormwater, night water, lay in pools on the ground and in those pools lay stars. I crushed them underneath my shoes.
I looked behind, but couldn’t see Phaedra or Cignus anymore, only the red light that shot out from the painting.
Someone cut the low hanging branches from the trees, recently it appeared. Their wounds were like wooden eyes. There was a human-made path cleared through the woods. The weeds and grass were hacked away, the stones cleared.
I saw no animal tracks. There were no birds in the trees, no rustling of foxes, no deer in the grass. Only the sounds of my breath and my steps.
Little blue flowers grew on the ground, like the ones I’d once seen crushed underneath a spider child.
The red light flickered in and out. Cignus was right. Soon it would be gone, and if I didn’t hurry I’d be trapped, lost here.
I ran
. The vines attacked my face and cut at my exposed face. I fell several times, scraping my knees against the hard ground. I thought I might be run until my heart gave out, or until I bled out. But as I ran further, the darkness disintegrated. Warm sunlight emanated from deep within the woods.
I entered a meadow where the sun hung high in the air.
The red light disappeared.
The meadow’s grass was dead and brown. The air was full of oil, so thick I tasted it at the back of my throat – a childhood smell, a reminder of cyanide and steel.
Machine oil.
In the middle of the clearing, in a patch of dirt, I found a woven basket of freshly dead wrens. Someone had tied a red ribbon around each of their necks.
“Who’s here?” I called out.
God, that cloying smell of oil could knock me unconscious if I wasn’t careful. It was what I smelled the night the demon took me to her dining table in the woods.
“Demon?” I whispered.
I crouched in front of the basket. Whoever had brought these wrens, got them from somewhere else, as there were no birds left here.
Or it had killed everything in the forest.
“Nightcatcher?” I whispered again.
Momma, momma, I need you to tell me the right way to go crazy so my heart doesn’t burst. You made it look so easy.
I reached toward the basket. It tipped over, and the wrens spilled into the dirt. Their tiny mouths gaped, as if opening wide for food. I tugged at one of the red ribbons and it unraveled from the wren’s neck.
“What am I supposed to do?” I called out.
Across the clearing Saint Peter emerged, her blue hair sticking to the sun, her hunter’s bow drawn.
“Who brought you here?” she asked as she approached me.
I rose.
“Was it Cignus?” she said. “You're not supposed to be here.”
“Is something after me?” I asked. “Again?”
“She has your scent now,” she said. “We need to go.”
The sun plunged down as starlight burst across the dead meadow. I heard a rustling. We both turned, and a fawn, its skin shining with moonlight, emerged from the grass.
“Oh, it’s just a ”
Saint Peter shot the fawn in the neck.
She grabbed my arm.
“Don’t run,” she said. “Just walk with me.”
It seemed important not to look behind me as we walked away. Like Lot’s wife, I might turn into a pillar of salt. Like Orpheus escaping out of the underworld, I’d lose something I could never recover.
There was something in the woods looking for us, foaming with anger, and I felt it. Anybody would’ve been able to feel that kind of presence. Its shadow could’ve broken bones.
The fawn screamed and screamed.
I took a slow, careful breath with each step to keep myself from bolting.
Keep walking. Saint Peter kept her hand on my arm. Keep walking.
That something barreled out of the woods behind us. Saint Peter tightened her grip. Its colossal shadow skimmed over the treetops, and it brought cold with it.
I heard it tear into the wounded fawn behind us, ripping into its muscle and flesh; the fawn stopped screaming. I stopped breathing.
We reached the tree line and ran.
I’d been into these woods before, years ago, trailing a dead-thing’s dress behind me. Maybe the location changed, but the soil remained the same. In the years when the demon left, I thought I would be safe, but, with or without her, the shadows and their woods would follow me. One day I would awake to find little blue flowers sprouting out of my arms, my feet buried in the side of a mountain.
If I got out of here alive.
Saint Peter and I emerged from the trees into the backyard. Cignus and Phaedra were gone.
“Where did they go?” I asked Saint Peter, but she was gone as well.
The house lay empty. The street beyond the house lay empty.
I took a step forward and something broke underneath me. It was the blood painting of me, now cracked in two.
Chapter Sixteen
I WENT INTO THE artist’s house, but everyone had already left. Empty bottles of beer and liquor lay strewn across the floor.
The couch and the stereo were gone. The broken mirrors on the floor were swept away. Someone even removed the light bulbs from their fixtures.
I burst into the artist’s studio.
The paintings were gone. The lights were gone. The desk, the paints, the refrigerator of blood, and the stain from my spit dripping on the floor were gone and gone and gone. Nothing left but bare, peeling walls.
Saint Peter stood behind me in the doorway.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“The party is over. It’s been over for a long time.”
“He promised he’d be here.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
For the first time I noticed how tall she was, taller than her brother. She wore a faux fur jacket and platform boots, her hair dirty and hacked away in various places. She hardly looked the part of the disciple that once chased after Jesus like a dog. The boy with ragged shoes and ragged fingertips who demanded that he be crucified upside down because he wasn’t worthy to die the same way as his god.
“Where do I know you from?” I asked.
“It was a long time ago.”
“One person shouldn’t have to bear this much.”
“And yet you do.”
“Where is Cignus?”
“He has done a terrible thing, and he is hiding,” Saint Peter said.
“I wasn’t supposed to go into those woods. Is that what you mean?”
“If I had known he was taking you there, I would have stopped him,” she said.
“I’m such an idiot,” I said.
“Maybe,” Saint Peter said.
I felt heaviness in my throat, a dark hole in my stomach.
“But you’re looking better every day,” she said. “More like your old self.”
She touched my stomach. It was bleeding again from that dirty cocaine glass, spreading through my shirt, but she wasn’t looking down.
“Your eyes, they’re so bright. Like stars,” she said.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What happened to the fearless girl I used to know?” she asked.
I pried her fingers away.
“Ask your brother.”
She pushed me against the wall. She covered my mouth with her mouth. She thrust her bloodied tongue inside me. She ran her fingers through my hair, smearing blood against my forehead. It dripped down my eyelids, and pooled underneath the cusp of my collarbone.
I shoved her away. The mad saint reeled back, her eyes laughing.
“You don’t remember when we used to kiss?” she asked. “You used to love me.”
She pulled her fingers apart, blood peeling on her fingernails.
“Let me take you away,” she said. “It’s not safe for you here anymore.”
I pushed past her and into Cignus’s room. There too, everything was gone; the bed, the red curtains he wrapped me in, the desk I hid underneath.
I pried at the boards on the floor. I scratched at the nails, trying to pull them apart. There had to be a secret entrance somewhere. Or a button, disguised to look like the wood or the wallpaper. If I could find it, then Cignus would be revealed. The house would give up its secrets and this cruel game would be over. Was it my birthday? I couldn’t remember. Maybe it was my birthday.
Surprise, Lily! Surprise! We were all hiding from you, but we’re here now. And we brought cake.
I scratched at the floorboards until I sunk, frustrated, onto the floor, my fingers bleeding and sore.
I knew Saint Peter stood behind me, watching.
“Where is he?” I whispered.
“I’d give you the world if I could.”
“Just give me this.”
Cignus, it’s not right to do this to a girl. You can’t just fuck
her and paint a picture with her blood and send her out into the woods and then never call again.
You can’t leave me here.
“He promised me,” I said. “He said he needed me.”
“My brother promises a lot of things.”
Tears dripped onto my wrists.
“You don’t understand. He has to come back. I don’t ever cry like this,” I said.
“Let me take you home.”
I couldn’t pretend to resist as she pulled me off the floor. She took led me outside. I shook so badly I could barely walk. She strapped me to the back of her van, and drove me home.
That's how this all ended, wasn’t it? The best kind of story is a tragedy. Everyone in my life must’ve been cursed to die or disappear. Like Daddy. Like Charlie. Like Cignus. God knows where Phaedra went. If I stuck around long enough, soon Saint Peter would disappear. Time for me to crawl back home and suck up some of that mother’s milk, spend some quality time with Momma in purgatorial madness before we both fell backwards into a Viking ship, howling toward the abyss. At least my mother and I could be at peace in our insane loneliness, rocking and howling together on deck, polishing our weapons, plucking all the hairs off our bodies in cohabited Trichotillomania.
Yet, when we pulled up to my house, I knew my mother was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
I ALWAYS KNEW when my mother was gone. Maybe it’s a kind of sixth sense I developed after years of being left behind in her whirlwind, of sleeping in the house alone, night after night, while she saved the world. Maybe it came with learning to drive a car at the age of eight so I could get to school on time, or maybe it was learning to run and hide from police and social workers who’d take me away, or being forced to eat cold peanut butter and ketchup because my mother hadn’t bought groceries in weeks. I used to stand outside, on the neighborhood cul-de-sac, as the other families cooked dinner, hoping to be invited in to eat. I rarely was though I stood on the sidewalk until they cleared the tables away.
After Saint Peter dropped me off, I flung the front door open so hard it slammed against the wall.
“Where are you?” I asked.
I went upstairs to her bedroom.
I pulled apart her made bed, as if she’d be hiding underneath the unwrinkled coverlets and spread pillows. I yanked open her closet door, nearly falling as I did so. I threw her clothes to the ground, ripped her senior high school prom dress apart at the seams, and showered sequins across the entire closet. I went to her vanity, grabbed handfuls of her lipsticks and compacts, and threw them against the wall. I smashed her vanity mirror with my elbow.
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