Twisted 50 Volume 1

by Wessell, Stephanie

  Klara stared at him. He kept talking to Miss Parker.

  On Thursday night, Josh took her back to the side of the river. He put his hands inside her bra and she felt every tiny hair on her body stand up, straight as needles. Klara realised he couldn't see the words she’d embroidered for Richard there. They remained secret.

  On Friday, Richard handed her essay back with a plus next to the A. She waited after the lesson, but he simply left the room.

  *

  Saturday morning metamorphosis. She stood before the mirror holding a pair of scissors and began to cut her hair. Slashing a blunt fringe and a jaw-length flapper bob, she turned her face geometric, her scarlet lips curving in a U. Each eye was an X. Richard was her drug, and he had turned her eyes hollow.

  In the library, the book lay splayed on the floor, as though it had been reading itself. She knelt and checked for her note. Gone.

  Trembling, she found where she’d stopped the week previously and began to read. Alexander took a lover. His wife killed her, cut off her hands and made them into gloves. She ran her fingers over his body and said, "This is her skin, but it is my touch." In return, he carved his initials over her heart.

  Then, two-thirds of the way in, a note flew from the pages, landing in her hand like a butterfly. The typed words said: “Touch yourself. When you come, that second will belong to me.”

  She came, let her second be erased, and was glad it was gone.

  In return she wrote: “Your name is a scar on my heart.” Getting up shakily, she looked outside from the window. Josh stared back up.

  Josh’s parents’ house was a tall Victorian gentleman wearing pince-nez skylights. His attic bedroom looked through them. He left her there while he got beer. Looking under the bed, she discovered a box filled with objects like bottle tops and ticket stubs. They were all things she'd once touched. On his computer she found photos of herself, taken from below her bedroom window.

  Had Josh left the note? He’d clearly been following her.

  He brought the beer, and proceeded to sing a song he had written for her on his guitar.

  *

  Klara stayed in bed all week, feigning sickness. On Friday, she summoned the courage to go in. Richard was leaning against the wall outside the English department, talking to Miss Parker. Seeing Klara, he mouthed, "I'll catch up with you," to the boa constrictor.

  “You ill? Didn't see you in class.”

  “Yes. Ill.”

  “I. . . like the hair.”

  She touched her fringe and he noticed the red ribbon around her wrist. Feeling in his pocket, he flicked two cigarettes into his mouth from the packet. Lighting them both, he passed one to her. His fingers grazed hers. They were so blackened from marking essays that the tips seemed bloody with ink. Dragging on the cigarette, she tasted the ghost of his lips.

  “I need to know. . .What is the most beautiful sentence ever written?”

  He smiled. “Different for everyone, I guess. For me, it has a heartbeat, a rhythm that feels like it's always been written inside you.”

  Richard made his mouth into a zero and a ring of shuddering silver smoke floated into the air. Klara put her finger through it and was married. It dissipated, killed by her touch.

  He looked away, dropped the butt onto the floor and left. Klara felt sick. Picking up the stub, she pocketed it. That night she put it between her lips and touched herself, dropping it onto her chest when she came.

  *

  Saturday morning metamorphosis. She looked into the mirror. The real Klara looked back.

  She turned the timer on, illuminating the book on the shelf. Tearing through the pages, she searched for a note. Hers was gone. Nothing was in its place. A tear cracked her face.

  Klara began to read again. The couple found a seventeen-year-old boy and cut him to pieces with a set of silverware given to them by his mother. They made him into a roast and fed him to his parents, dripping his blood into their champagne to make it pink. After the party, they fucked on the floor. Kissing, they bit off the end of each other’s tongue and ate it.

  The light timer ticked down. The final words of the book were gripped by speech marks: “Klara, it is your name which is scarred on my heart.” The lightbulb detonated. She dropped the book. It opened onto the floor. Every page began to turn. Behind her, the novels on the shelves began to expand and contract like lungs. The book on the floor gasped for air, the pages breathing her name. Its paper began to fold, first creating an origami face, then a hand which dragged itself across the floor. A man broke free from the binding, cracking his spine as he went. Klara stood, pressing herself against the stacks, her heart punching her ears.

  The man's face was a shifting page of words; the pupils of his eyes formed entirely from the letters K-L-A-R-A. He put his hand to her neck, slashing five paper cuts there. Putting her hand on his chest to push him away, she suddenly flinched. The letters “KR” were inscribed there. His kiss? Like a letter written in secret and never sent, whispering in her mouth. It cut her tongue to shreds. He fucked her against the book stacks, her lungs in time with the breathing volumes behind her.

  “Oh God, I'm going to – ”

  BLACK

  She let her lips part, the orgasm subsiding. Slowly, she opened her eyes. Richard? He had blood all over his mouth. Putting her fingers to her own, she felt blood streaming there. Across his chest, she saw her initials carved. They were in an oak-panelled dining room, the remnants of a meal around them. A set of silverware shimmered sharp on the table.

  And she realised she had fallen into fiction.

  *

  Richard looked at the book on the floor. He had seen it all, playing spy from a crack between two hardbacks. It was hypnotic, watching her with the version of himself he had created; the Richard of the page. Alexander – for that was Richard’s real name – had written the book some years before, pouring his desperate cravings into it, creating the perfect woman. In Klara, he had finally found her. The book itself was a grimoire; inherently magical. Each word her eyes had eaten had drugged her until she was his. She would never grow old now; locked into the second she had given up to him forever. She remained the perfect fantasy.

  He picked up the novel, gently stroking the cover. Finding Klara's name on the last page, he kissed it.

  *

  He found Josh smoking on the steps outside. “Is Klara in there? We were supposed to meet.”

  “Didn’t see her. Sorry.”

  “Shit.” Josh slumped, dejected. “I just don’t get her.”

  Alexander watched the smoke curling from between Josh’s lips and thought how it would feel to take him to bed with Klara. Then dismember him and suck the meat from his fingers.

  “If you really want to know what she needs, there's a book you could read. . .”

  Insects

  by Caroline Slocock

  “It might help if you talked about it.”

  The psychiatrist spoke softly, careful not to upset the girl.

  This was the third time they’d met in this white, windowless room. The third time they’d sat on plastic chairs, bolted to the floor, facing each other across a plastic table, also bolted to the floor.

  The girl had yet to utter a single word.

  “Maybe we could talk it through together,” she offered in a gentle tone.

  The girl kept her head down and picked at her fingernails, which were ragged and torn and sore-looking.

  The woman watched her steadily.

  “I know something terrible must have happened. Something that made you do this.”

  Pick. Pick. Pick. As if she were trying to remove a whole layer of skin.

  “I’m going to tell you what I think happened, and you can correct me when I’m wrong. Alright?”

  The girl shot her a quick look, her eyes wide and brown and fearful behind a black fringe, her face as white as her shapeless gown.

  “I think the woodshed was his special place. He kept his toy soldiers there in a tin. His spo
rts magazines were on the shelf. There was an old bottle of ginger beer.”

  Pick. Pick. Pick.

  “It was dirty though. The window was so filthy you couldn’t see through it. And the floor was just bare earth, no covering on it.”

  Pick. Pick. Pick.

  “I think he’d been taking you there for a long time.”

  Pick. Pick. Pick.

  “You were young when it started, no more than a child.”

  The girl’s nails were beginning to bleed now, the blood bright and startling against her pale skin.

  “I think you’d probably been planning this for some time.”

  The girl sucked the blood away. Kept on picking.

  “The thing I’m not clear about is, how did you do it? The wounds on his body were all the same. Small and ragged and very deep. At first the police thought you’d stabbed him with a skewer. But it looked like something had been… screwed in. And screwed out again.”

  She heard the girl’s breathing quicken, saw her small chest rising and falling beneath the white gown.

  “And all the wounds had a neat circular mark around them. A ring. We’ve been trying to work out what kind of… tool you used.”

  The girl’s mouth was moving now, a strange snarling and slackening movement that revealed her small yellow teeth.

  “But most of all, I’d like to know why. Why did you make those 87 wounds?”

  “SO THEY WOULD GO BACK IN!”

  The sound of her voice was shocking, the dry rasping scratch of a soul in pain.

  “They?” asked the woman softly. “Who are they?”

  “THE INSECTS! The bugs and the maggots and the lice and the flies and… I tried to kill them but they were everywhere, these crawling piles of… legs and wings and eyes… in my mouth and my hair and my skin and… I tried to kill them but they just kept coming back!”

  She was becoming hysterical now, her eyes wild, her bloody fingers scrabbling at her arms. The door opened suddenly and two attendants rushed in.

  “I had to make the holes so the insects would go back inside him where they came from! 87 holes for the 87 times.”

  She saw the syringe then. Screamed. The cold needle pierced her skin and the liquid entered her body and she went limp.

  The woman stood, knocking her papers to the ground.

  “Is that really necessary?”

  But the attendants were already carrying the girl out.

  The woman stared helplessly at the door. She felt shocked. Guilty. Unsettled.

  She carried this feeling home with her like a lead weight. Stood for a long time gazing out at the black garden, trying to understand.

  Finally, she took a bottle of wine from the cupboard. A glass. Opened the drawer.

  The silver corkscrew lay there, the screw long and fine and deadly at the centre of its circular frame. The levers at the sides designed to withdraw the screw with the cork attached.

  Or the flesh.

  Itch

  by Karen Heard

  Everybody has experienced some level of infestation. It’s something we’re told to accept as part of our lives now. It pains me to remember how we acted when we first saw them. They started out as funny yellow caterpillars. We grew flowers that attracted them! You could buy pots: three for two at B&Q. Even when we learnt they were killing off spiders we didn’t care. Who thinks about spiders on a daily basis? The mutation was so slow we gave away our panic by microscopic degrees… until the blisters started to appear on our skin, and then, under our skin, the writhing started.

  They violate you secretly – that is their real horror. Their hairy bodies so slight you easily miss them against your skin, their anaesthetic-laced spikes so small they slip between the spaces in your nerve fibres, so that you can’t feel them inside you until it’s too late. You get an itch… just below your shoulder blades… on your scalp… on the fatty part of your thigh… trickling up your calf… sometimes you try to ignore it, knowing the other thirty times you scratched, there was nothing there, but this time you look to see something is moving up your calf, but moving up the wrong side: from the inside of your skin.

  They like the warm places – the nub of your neck, curve of your hip, under your breast – crawling into your sock, or worming their way through the material of your skirt whilst you’re busy rubbing at some other part of your body. Then they carry on burrowing inside you, whilst you sit and drink wine, worrying about the bills, or read a story, totally unaware you’re being invaded by the gnawing maggots.

  It’s only by week four that you can see the grubs growing below the surface of your skin, wriggling backwards and forwards like babies stuck in swaddling, as they dig their tunnels with thousands of tiny teeth. That’s the worst part: the itching of their tiny bites, the burning of the histamine in their spit, the caustic spikes of their bristled bodies scrubbing the inside of your skin, becomes a constant distraction, consuming everything. That and the fear you won’t catch them soon enough when they hatch.

  Everyone tries to cut them out too soon the first time, even when the doctors say you must wait – you just can’t help yourself – can’t bear to keep them inside you. You only do it once though. If they’re still in maggot form, when exposed to the air, they dig down instantly before you have a chance to grab their tails, like a needle piercing suddenly through your nerves, shooting to God knows where. If you wait too long after they hatch, however, their new razor sharp wings cut a hundred different ways out of your body on their own. That’s why you don’t want them deep inside you.

  I’ve been lucky. All I have is a hole in my arm, plugged up with gauze, where I cut too soon; a few slashes up my leg, where I was diligent; and one tiny, worrying dot I’ve recently found on my cheek.

  I don’t even remember where the bite came from, as is often the way. I suspect it was from staying out a few minutes after dusk last week. One tiny slip is all it takes. You can take the same risks ten times without harm, and then when it all goes bad, you can’t explain why you did it…. until next time you’re out…

  I keep concentrating on the inside of my neck… my jaw… my ears… like I’m listening out for pain… twinges, or anything. Maybe it’s just a mosquito bite on my cheek? When something like this happens you forget you’re still vulnerable to other things, like spots, ant bites, heat rash… Mr Richards still has cancer… the girl down the road got meningitis last week and we had to move streets, but somehow a regular disease doesn’t seem as bad as what’s going on with the weevils.

  *

  I went to the drop in centre yesterday. I’m only allowed one more false alarm, but the gnawing worry got too much. I had to hold onto the arms of the waiting room chair to keep myself from rushing out… sitting near people writhing in their seats, the rasping sound of them scratching whilst eyeing me with the same caution I was them. Some of them had rubbed through the layers of their skin, and were now scouring their nails unconsciously over raw scabs.

  They say the paranoids all end up giving themselves blood poisoning. I tried to ignore them, fight off the instinct for empathetic scratching, but the man next to me had the real infection all over his arms. I could see the livid yellow creatures scurrying about under the surface of his skin as he clenched his jaw and stared at the floor. Even though his maggots looked nowhere near bursting, I didn’t want to sit next to him. He smelled sour – like yoghurt. I got up to leave, but then they called me in.

  The nurse felt my spot, clucked and told she’d be more impressed if there was movement beneath the skin.

  Impressed!

  She took X-rays but said monitored exits on the face were rarely successful, so it might not be worth it – I’m not sure if she meant the procedure or sending the X-rays to the experts. Then I was out on the streets again, trying to remember everything she had said. I wish I’d asked more questions now… or that she’d said less. I’m sure she thought I was paranoid. I hope so.

  *

  Six weeks now since I noticed the mark an
d still no signs of movement. Maybe I’m wrong and am okay, but I feel phantom itches all over my body now. My skin is raw through my anxiety.

  Yesterday my results were due, I phoned, but it rang three times so I quickly hung up. I haven’t yet called again.

  We’re going to try to get away tonight. Just a few of us. As previous carriers, there’s nowhere sterile we can go outside the cordon, but we can go further inside, to where everyone first fled from. It sounds counterproductive, but we figure if we go to where the worst has already happened, the weevils will have nothing left to feed on. We try not to mention our plan to others, we can’t all go to the same place… or the creatures will follow the food supply.

  The leader, John, has them all over his back, I haven’t seen them, but his shirt writhes in the most hideous fashion as he walks in front of me. I can’t bear to look at it, it reminds me too much of what could be going on somewhere inside my cheek. I don’t know why he’s coming with us in his current state, but he says he has to do something. I’m told that the creatures eat twice their own body weight each day. That’s like a person eating 300 pounds of raw mince. The temptation for him to cut them out must be massive. He asked me if I would help when the time came. I said yes, but have been thinking about leaving the group ever since. I still have time to decide.

  I haven’t said this to anyone yet – I don’t want to make it more real – but I can sometimes hear the sound of scratching in my right ear. I’ve tried to look inside it with mirrors but there’s nothing there. I poured water in, just to be sure, and when my hearing muffles, the scraping actually gets louder. I am afraid that… I do not want to say.

  *

  Things are less in control here towards the centre. People no longer go about their normal business; you only see them on the streets when they are running to get somewhere. Most of the people here are covered in bandages; many limp or are missing limbs. You can see lesions where they have held hot knives to their skin to relieve the itching where they could not cut.