Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.
I held my arms out, and she came to me.
“I’m dead,” I said.
Strips of skin hung down from my arms. I touched my face. It was a ruin of black blood, smoke, and gobbets of gore.
“No,” my demon said. “You’re glowing.”
She let Pluto go and climbed onto the dais next to me. I grasped the demon’s hand. She pressed her mouth against my bleeding thigh.
“Good. You feel good,” she said.
I proffered my wrists to her.
“Eat,” I said.
And she did.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE DEMON LAY in the pool of my skinless body, her lips against my lips, her fingers against my fingers.
The Nightcatcher sewed us together with a gleaming thread made of star shine and a needle made of bone. The thread dissolved inside our veins. The demon breathed into my mouth as The Nightcatcher sewed her cheek to my gazelle skull. She was cool in the hollow space of me. I didn’t feel the pain of the needle plunging into my skin, sewing into my muscle, sealing the poisonous flowers into my body. There’d been enough pain already.
“I’ve searched for you for so long,” I said.
“I’ve always been with you,” she said. “In you.”
“I was so afraid.”
“You should be.”
Our kiss sealed us together. She clasped my broken, bleeding wrists. I used her lungs to breathe.
This must be what falling in love felt like.
In my skin.
My shadow.
This was almost like the time we did MDMA together, sweetheart. My body slowly slid down into the stone, my brain lit up like a halogen bulb passing through a crystal. We must’ve shone bright enough to make a new kind of star.
The Nightcatcher plunged the needle into my eye and the thread that passed through my pupil glowed gold. She tugged and pulled. The demon’s kiss deepened. Her kiss said I want to make you happy, there’s nothing left to live for but your mouth.
I’ve missed you so much.
The Nightcatcher sewed the demon’s ribcage into my empty chest cavity. She braided the demon’s hair into my hair, deepening, swirling, snarled against my horns, transforming into a dark, rich red.
We always fit so well in bed sheets, our bodies tucked into each other almost like this. I should’ve known we fit deeper. How I ached for her, and until that moment never even knew the depths of my need.
She sank into my bone and into the flowers growing like a meadow inside me. The thread sewed our fingers and feet Her mouth dissolved into my mouth. She sighed, a soft sigh, and it reverberated through my skull.
Then we were whole, and I was alone.
For a long time I lay on the dais, moving my fingers and toes slowly, stretching my new skin. Constellations bloomed on my stomach. Cignus. Scorpio. Ursula. They were brilliant and wild, like neon cutouts on a velvet board. I moved my hand, and watched the shadow of my fingers pass across the stone. My blood and dead organs
Wisps of flowers blew past me. Bits of fluff fell on my mouth and I breathed them away. I didn’t think I would be able to stand, but my new skin was more resilient than the old one. It carried a new weight.
I stepped off the dais, and I walked a new path.
New grass bloomed underneath me. I’d never known colors could be like this. I’d been given new eyes. I couldn’t really see the world missing my shadow all those years.
The flowers jostled inside my head. My shadow walked the path in front of me, and she kissed the blue azaleas, kissed my bleeding hooves.
Pluto slipped in between my feet, mewling. Her wormwood eyes were a map of the woods. My woods. I followed her through trees. I drank from the water that formed, heavy and crystalline, on cupped leaves. Pluto sipped droplets from my fingers.
It was nighttime at the end of the path, star-time, glowing bright enough to leave a bruise. The woods dropped into deep space. Mercury with her burnt face rose above the trees, her eyes mad celestial marble, her lips made of hot-blooded craters. Mars stood behind her with a frozen crown of twin moons - Phobos and Deimos - vampire asteroids.
The demon promised me a palace of living jewels, but there was more out there than either of us imagined. I didn’t need a throne, I didn’t need to eat rubies that dripped like juice, or keep slaves that licked at my cuts. Not when I could be the first scientist to float to the edge of the cosmos, picking up planets in my gravity. Maybe beyond the trees I’d find Wormwood. I could chart a new course there and back. I would give its poison to every punk girl, loser, and child murderess, and its secrets could no longer harm us.
And when I opened my mouth, I could swallow the world, cover continents in my saliva. I'd breathe new colors onto the dirty, polluted waters.
I smiled, and the demon inside me smiled.
I kept going.
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Read on for a short story I’ve written exclusively for the novel.
Phaedra: A Short Story
IN MY STRANGE GARDEN lives a man-eating tree with limbs of snakes. When I take my midnight walks through the garden, it rears its writhing head above the walls, an oscillating hissing mass of fanged mouths and veined muscles. The tree calls my name in fourteen languages, one for each head.
Phaedra.
Phaedra, let me tell you the things I’ve devoured today.
I open my arms and the snakes come to me, slithering through dust, through the air, through fuchsia roses I planted years ago that never wither. They sniff my arms and my neck. I throw my head back. Some of them rest their heads on my chest and warm themselves. Their bodies are cool and black, like the membranous bark of a tree’s trunk. Others wrap around my legs, my thighs. They embrace me tightly and lift me off the ground. They rock me in the soft cradle.
She is the great Madagascar Tree, the hungry Ya-te-veo of the Mdoko tribe. Ya-te-veo means “I see you already,” and she once lived as a goddess in the jungle, thirstier than bloody Kali. Now she lives with me.
Phaedra, you’ve never known love like this.
I was born in Georgia, but Mama taught me to say I was born in Paris. Mama was thin and always shaking. She listened to French tapes but never learned to say anything except Bonsoir, and Comment allez-vous? And anorexie. The last one means, of course, anorexia.
“Beauty in sickness. You’ll understand when you’re older,” she said, “real beauty is a reptile.”
She told me she was a fashion designer in Paris. She nursed me while she fitted children with dresses made of razor blades, crystals, and lace. They were girls as young as twelve, recruited from poor villages in such places as the Ukraine and Estonia. Easier to control that way. Once healthy, now anemic and starved from pressure. When they bent over so Mama could tie them into their dresses, their bones pushed against their skin like angry faces.
“Mama, none of this is true,” I said.
“Does it need to be?” she said, and collapsed onto the couch, “bring me another headache pill, my baby.”
Headache pill meant codeine. Mama loved her drugs. For a while she even did cocaine with her therapist as some sort of “experimental therapy.” She’d come home laughing and sniffing and grinding her teeth together. She talked so fast that I couldn’t understand anything she said, except “breakthrough”. Another breakthrough. Half an hour later she’d lock herself in the bathroom and start screaming. She sat on the floor and kicked at the bathtub until the plaster broke.
That didn’t last long, because experimental therapy is expensive and the alimony ran out. Back to codeine and klonopin. Downers suited my mother better anyways. She wrapped herself in a towel from the dryer and lay down in front of the television for hours. She looked so warm.
The most important thing Mama taught me was this:
You don’t have to be the stupid girl born in dust-choked Georgia. Born in the backseat of a broken-down Chrysler twenty miles away from the city while your father, or what was left of him, is trying to wave down passing vehicles. You don’t have to be the girl who came out of the womb under the eyes of a man who drove up in a tractor. The only man who stopped for you, a redneck with tobacco spit dribbling down into his beard, wearing coveralls coated in dust and grime, chipped fingernails, cancer-spots on his tongue.
He never had to say, “That’s going to be an ugly girl someday,” when I came out, crying and wheezing.
So when I went to school for the first time, I became the girl from Paris. I didn’t know the first thing about Paris, except that it meant elegance - haute couture and coffee shop beignets. It meant I’d slipped into the pulsing center of something significant. I could be a writer, like Hemingway or Gertrude Stein or Sartre. I could model in cold dresses underneath cold cameras, thinning into a sick, scale-flecked beauty. I could be homeless on a street corner, wearing the same thin cotton dress for five years, begging for change so that I could buy a bottle of wine. I could be the wife who sat in the corner of a living room, holding my cat, Miss Margot, knitting sweaters for children that never came. Whatever I chose, I would be safe from the factory smoke of this small town.
From crying during every Father’s day.
From becoming my mother.
I drew the outline of who I wanted to be over my door and I forced my body to grow into its shape.
Let me tell you the things I’ve devoured today.
Once, in middle school, I was applying my mascara in the bathroom when Samantha Hall charged in, slamming the bathroom door.
She was a dark-haired cheerleader. She was a lightning factory, always charged, bursting in and out of rooms and breaking doors. She slipped across the floor in her hurry to get to me and point her finger, with its nail-bitten cinnamon red polish, in my face.
“Stay away from my boyfriend, you fucking Jezebel.”
Until that moment, I hadn’t given Samantha Hall’s boyfriend a second thought. I put down the mascara, but before I could respond, she whirled around and charged for the bathroom exit. Slam. The door swung shut. I heard her stomping down the hallway. I turned back to the mirror and touched my cheek, accidentally smearing mascara on my skin.
I imagined myself a Jezebel. I wondered if I owned the face of a Jezebel - dark skin, rouge cheekbones. I wondered if I could be a princess of Baal, a slut, a whore who danced on the decapitated heads of men. I wondered if I had the eyes for a whore. The lips, pursed. Then slightly parted. Maybe with a vampy lipstick, smoky eyes. I could drift in and out of opium dens and the bedrooms of kings - laughing. Yes. A Jezebel.
The smell of cigarette smoke drifted out from one of the stalls.
“Lily,” I said, “give me one or I’m telling.”
“Fuck,” she said.
I’d known her since we were in preschool - she lived across the street in the haunted house. I used to wish we could trade places, because her mother wore a velvet cloak like a queen and talked to me like an adult. Then her mother went crazy and ended up in the hospital, thought a monster followed her. She tore her cloak apart and grew blisters on her tongue. Lily grew into a dirty kid who smoked too much and hung out with the neighborhood weirdoes.
She started fucking the school janitor too. Or, at least that’s what I heard.
She passed me a cigarette underneath the stall. I slipped it into my purse and left.
Later at a house party, I found Samantha Hall’s boyfriend, drunk on blue Mad Dog. Amateur move. A football player, if you can get any more cliché. Kind of skinny, but with broad shoulders and a broad chest. He had a Georgia peach kind of smile. He stood by the stereo and a broken houseplant, surrounded by his football team friends.
When he went to the bathroom, I waited a few moments and slipped in after him. He was trying to piss, his hand against the wall to steady himself. He left grimy, soaked handprints against the wallpaper.
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. I took out the cigarette Lily gave me a few hours ago.
“Do you have a lighter?” I asked.
In the mirror I caught his reflection. His eyes rolled back in his head, trying to escape. Strange, how drunken men resembled sick dogs.
“Hey,” I said, “I asked you a question.”
“I know what you’re doing,” he said, “I have a girlfriend”
“We’re only fifteen,” I said. “Do you want to be dead before we’re alive?”
It sounded like something a Jezebel would say. In truth I stole the line from Sartre.
He finished pissing. He stumbled a bit, knocking over the soap holder on the counter. Some poor girl’s parents were going to ground her for the rest of her life after this party.
“Lighter?” I said.
He moved toward me, trying to zip up his pants.
“So what you’re telling me is that this wouldn’t be cheating.”
“I’m saying you shouldn’t care.”
“About Samantha?”
“Who?”
The cigarette broke against his chest and pieces of tobacco crumbled and fell down my shirt.
I leaned back to check my reflection in the mirror. Yes, that lipstick would do fine.
Up close his Georgia fuzziness melted away. He was a sharp mass of limbs, all bony elbows and bony knees. He was a bad kisser.
The next day, Samantha Hall came screaming into the bathroom with the rest of her cheerleader friends. She could’ve knocked over a radio tower with her frequency. She slapped me, and my ears started to ring. A taste, like salt, rushed into my mouth. I fell backwards into the bathroom sink and grabbed the faucet to try and steady myself.
“Fucking slut,” Samantha Hall said. “Whore.”
“So what? At least I wouldn’t be caught dead in that stupid dress you’re wearing.”
She spit on me. Her friends, like a carousel of skinny, teeth-bared animals, spit on me. They pulled my hair until it tore. I slapped Samantha Hall in the face, leaving a blushing red mark. Another round of curses. Slut. Whore. Like a Hindu mantra, calming almost, as the words lost all meaning.
“We’re only fifteen,” I kept repeating. “We’re only fifteen.”
Samantha Hall hit me across the nose. Blood spattered her knuckles. They ran.
I leaned against the sink and spit blood. I avoided looking at my reflection, afraid they’d wiped off my lipstick and mascara, afraid I’d look and see a monster,
Lily came out of a bathroom stall, smelling like weed.
“Wow. That’s going to leave a bruise,” she said.
I leaned my head against the sink. Cool.
“Is that all you can say?” I said, gritting my teeth, “and you stink. You’re not subtle, at all.”
I wouldn’t cry because I was from Paris. I was the other woman, the dark half thief who could disappear into mirrors, boudoirs. Look at this mouth; I’ll eat you alive.
“Let’s skip fourth period,” Lily said, “I’ll take you home.”
I wiped the blood off my face with a wet tissue, and we snuck out the side entrance, behind the buses, where the hall monitors wouldn’t be waiting. We ran across the street and climbed over barbed wire, into the woods, to take the shortcut home.
We went into my kitchen. I warmed a towel with hot water and pressed it to my face.
“Want any help?” Lily asked.
“No.”
“Want any weed?”
“No.”
Mama came out of her bedroom, one towel wrapped around her head and one around her body. Her eyes might as well have been Percocet pills.
“Oh hello, Lily,” Mama said.
Mama did not notice the bruise welling up on my face, or my nose crusted with blood.
Miss Margot slunk through the kitchen. She scratched at the door, and before I could speak, Lily opened the door.
“Don’t let her out.”
&nb
sp; Miss Margot dashed out into the garden.
“Oh, stupid. Sorry,” Lily said.
I wanted to lash out at her, but I couldn’t speak because a blinding pain crushed the bones in my face. I thought that, if I opened my mouth, my jaw might swell and burst my teeth. I went into Mama’s bedroom and stole one of her Percocet pills. I swallowed it without water.
While I waited for the Percocet to kick in I went back into the kitchen. Lily pulled a frozen blueberry pie out of the fridge.
“Can I eat this?” she asked my mama.
Without waiting for an answer, Lily sat down at the table and started eating it with her fingers. Her grimy, dirt stained fingers with her encrusted nails. Stupid punk kid, she’d probably go to hell and back and refuse to wash her hands before her next meal.
“Want a glass of milk, baby?” my Mama asked Lily.
The Percocet must’ve started to kick in. I felt trapped behind a warm, rippling mirror. I didn’t belong in my life anymore, if I ever did. I could not be the redneck from Georgia, and I could not be the socialite from Paris. I’d built myself up from a simulacrum. I did not know my favorite color or my favorite food. I only knew what people expected me to be. How easily anyone could tear me apart, because I had never really existed.
Mama ran her fingers through Lily’s hair.
“Darker,” she said, “I think you should go darker.”
I went into my bedroom. I slipped off my clothes and climbed into my pajamas. The warm mirror reached up from below and enshrouded me. Every part of my body splintered off into fragments. I not only had one hand, I had six, each one with different coloring, different weight.
I was not a person but a splintering of possibilities. I lost my body and am living as a reflection.
I collapsed into bed. I could see Lily and Mama through the doorway.
Mama started making Lily Pop-Tarts. She wrapped Lily in a soft blue towel. They could have each other. I would be here in the back room, unable to move my head, watching my limbs multiply through waves of distorted time.
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