Despite the blasé way she said it, there was fear in her words. I might not care much about being alone, about being friendless, but she did. I had a feeling it terrified her. Her clothes, her personality, everything about her screamed “look at me, pay attention to me.” I knew she wanted to see a kindred spirit in me, another spooky loner.
I wasn’t trying to be anyone. But Sabrina was different. Maybe she was so blinded by her own need to be part of a twosome, or a unit, that she was willfully ignorant of whatever strange membrane separated me from most people. Or maybe she was immune to it. Or—crazy thought—maybe there really wasn’t anything wrong with me besides being shy. It was strange how spending a few hours with this girl was already forcing me to question my identity.
Sabrina waited for a reply. A huge part of me, the coward, just wanted to dismiss her so I could go back to staring at the wall for the next twenty minutes. You asked for change just this morning, I reminded myself. And I felt a connection. I really did like this girl.
“You aren’t pestering me, and you’re welcome to sit with me. But if you’re looking for a good gateway person to help with settling into this school, I’m not your girl. You’ll be branded an outcast from now on.”
She surveyed the room and curled her lip in disgust.
“Fuck those guys. I can find jocks and mean girls anywhere; cool people are a much rarer breed.”
III.
The rest of the day was a blur. Sabrina wasn’t in any of my afternoon classes, which was kind of a relief, because I needed the peace. Her presence was confusing. Honestly, I think it scared me. I was so used to being perpetually alone.
The sky was steel gray as I stepped out of the school, and a frigid mist of rain blanketed the parking lot. I started walking home, hands in my coat pockets, wishing I’d remembered to bring an umbrella and gloves. The ground was mucky, and by the time I got to my sagging front porch, my shoes were squelching with the wet and I was shivering. The fire had gone out, obviously hours earlier, and the house was cold and stale. Sighing, I picked through the woodpile and dragged an armful of kindling inside and relit the fire, turning on a few lights as I went, Tommy winding around my ankles.
Although it was midafternoon, the house was very dark. I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, wearing her soup down the front of her nightgown again, dozing. It was practically a repeat performance of the day before, and the one before that. At least today I wasn’t as bone-weary as yesterday, so I tidied her up with a bit more energy. I even felt like talking, a side effect of Sabrina, I’m sure.
“I made a friend today,” I told her as I pulled off her nightgown and wiped her mouth and chest with a washcloth. I wanted to sound casual, but it came out rushed and excited.
She remained still as a statue; the only movement was the rapid spread of goose pimples along her heavily scarred, emaciated frame.
“She’s a bit annoying, but seems nice enough. Chatty, kind of crazy, and for some reason she wants to be my friend. It was nice having someone to talk to.”
I pulled a clean flannel nightgown over my mom’s head. Handing her a glass of water, I worked a soft brush through her hair. I watched her hand slowly, unsteadily, lift and she sipped some water. It was so rare for her to move in front of me that it was notable. I stared at the way her fingers clutched the glass like a claw. The sleeve of the oversized nightgown bunched up at her elbow revealing the scars, standing out brightly against her blue-veined forearm.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” I whispered to her, reaching out to touch one of the old scars.
The glass exploded. Her body, ramrod straight, hand still reaching out, fingers curled in. Glass jutted out of her palm, blood and water dripping pinkly down onto her lap, onto the floor, onto the chair. I gasped, surprised that she was physically strong enough to crush the glass in her hand. She turned and looked at me, her eyes wild, feral even. Her hand trembled terribly. I could hear the blood dripping onto the linoleum.
I bent to gather the larger pieces of glass in my shirt, but as I got to my feet, I couldn’t stop staring at her palm, the crystalline glass, glistening, embedded in the meat of her hand. The blood had welled up and was slowly overflowing, running down her wrist to drip off with a pat, pat, pat. I felt my body moving closer. My heart fluttered, my mouth dried. I was leaning in, reaching my hand out for hers when a wail sliced through the room. I stared at her, startled out of my fascination. She pulled the maimed hand to her breast, staining the flannel with splotches of vibrant red.
I made my way up on wobbly legs for the first aid kit. Again. In the bathroom I splashed some water onto my face, hoping the chill would wake me up. It took a moment to recognize my reflection—my cheeks were so gaunt, my eyes dark, wild looking. My lips were chalky, nearly colorless; I scowled and poked at my whitish gums, vaguely remembering a health class anecdote about anemia. Maybe I needed vitamins, maybe the well water was poisoned, maybe mother was infectious, maybe it was genetic. Sighing, I dragged myself back upstairs to her room to fetch yet another change of clothes.
I found myself staring at a picture of her hanging on the wall of the second-floor hallway: Mother’s coppery hair thick and lustrous, eyes bright, her smile infectious. She had on a leopard-print dress, with red platform shoes, and sparkly eyeshadow.
“I was a club kid,” she’d explained when a younger me asked about her wild outfit. I wish I’d known that woman. With her crazy looks, interesting friends, and overflowing creativity, I wanted her for a mother.
Among the many topics we’d never talked about back when she was talking was my father. She never mentioned him once. As far as I knew, I was a test tube baby or an immaculate conception.
Mooning over her and the mystery of her past wasn’t improving my own health or my mood. My head throbbed, another migraine rearing up and clawing at my eyes. I’d had headaches as long as I could remember. Real head-splitters. And they were getting worse. So bad recently that my fingers would go numb and my stomach would knot up.
I was losing weight too. Long and lanky to begin with, I needed all the meat I could get. My ribs and hipbones were poking out. A voice in my head had started whispering cancer. As my complexion grew waxier and I got weaker, I had to admit this wasn’t just some flu.
What if cancer ran through my father’s family as well? For sure, early death was in mom’s genes. Both of her parents had died in their late fifties. I’d be absolutely blown away if my mother made it to that age.
God, if she made it to fifty, I’d be twenty-seven. I wondered what was more horrible: wishing that she would die sooner or wishing that she’d live on for years in a state of perpetual decay?
If I put her in a home, I’d lose the house. I’d end up in foster care for at least a year and I’d have no money. My mom’s paltry disability check and the remainder of some dwindling trust were the only things that kept us in bread and hot dogs as it was. No white knight was coming to save us. This was no clichéd fairy tale. Or if it was, it was a pretty damned bleak one.
For a random second, I pictured the smiling happy faces of my classmates on the school buses. Trundling away to their clean homes and normal parents who might not really care but could at least pretend. They’d never know the fear that lived inside of me, of coming home to my mother dead. Or my house burning. Or being taken away from her, forced to live with strangers.
Mother still sat, rigid, with her bleeding hand clutched like a baby bird to her chest. Her eyes were lucid though, and tracked me into the room. Frustrated, I dropped to my knees and reached for her hand. She didn’t want to give it, so finally I yanked it free. She keened, and I glared at her. The urge to yell “shut up” was heavy on my lips. My withering stare was enough to finally quiet her.
Swallowing my anger, I slowly picked the glass out of her hand. My mother stayed very still through the process. Once done, I swabbed the area with alcohol, watching her face for any reaction. There was only a quivering in her mouth, but she didn’t pull her
hand away. I spread iodine over the cuts and wrapped gauze, then a bandage around her hand. I yanked off the now soiled nightgown, revealing her scrawny shivering frame for the second time, and quickly tugged on another.
“The whole load of laundry is going to be bloody nightgowns if you keep this up,” I muttered.
Now that she was dressed and tidied, I quickly, if a bit roughly, finished brushing her hair, then plaited it down her back. I settled her in her parlor chair, placed a clean blanket on her lap, and turned the television on. The sound and brightness was jarring in the dark room. It was sad that there was more life in the syndicated game show than in this entire house.
I returned to the kitchen to finish cleaning up and to calm down. My mom’s nearness made me tense, my spine in traction, pulling me tighter, straighter, creaking. I swept up the remaining bits of glass in a towel, and shook them over the trash. A few pieces were tangled in the weave of the cloth and I pulled them out, staring at my mother’s blood covering my fingertips.
Without thinking, I put my fingers to my mouth.
The metallic, briny taste was strange on my palate. Almost smoky. I ran my tongue over the ridges at the top of my mouth, and over my teeth to catch the last of it before it was swallowed. All my senses receded to the background, only my mouth existed.
I snapped out of it and looked around. Horrified, I dropped the soiled towel into the sink as if it were covered in bugs and stepped back, rubbing my hands along my thighs. I looked back at the parlor, to where my mother sat, and couldn’t bring myself to go near her.
I fled to my bedroom and tried to focus on my homework. The words were hard to read. They swam across the page like microorganisms under a lens. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tossed the book aside.
The room felt small and tight suddenly, so I walked into the hall. The house itself had shrunk in my duress; I needed to get outside, get fresh air. Get out. Unsure of where I was going, I ended up throwing on my coat and walking out the front door. By the end of the driveway I’d committed to going to the general store, I glanced back to see Tommy’s feline outline in the window, the only sign of life in the big old house.
IV.
Hob’s Valley felt like a forgotten town. Barely more than a smudge on a map. A few roads that led nowhere and then vanished back up into the hills. I’d lived here for my entire life and hated it for just about as long.
It seemed like it was always dark. The old trees were tall, the forests dense, and it was hard for sunlight to make its way in. The town was cold, raw, and achingly quiet—barely a thousand people lived here. Main Street boasted a school, a town hall, and a general store. An entire life could be lived here in three or four tired old buildings. The town hall was also the police station, the town clerk, the mayor’s office, the library, and the fire station. The general store was also the liquor store, the pharmacy, the gas station, and carried dusty DVDs that no one rented.
I always pictured the town nestled like an egg in the center of a mountain range, the horizon a craggy black outline of mountains and tall sentry pines in all directions, isolating us from anything else. It didn’t seem like there were any roads leading out, just paths deeper into the woods. It seemed almost impossible that someone like Sabrina had found her way in here.
The seasons were the only thing that ever changed. I loved those scant few weeks of fall, of explosive color and crisp weather, a time when the Colonial homes seemed not oppressive but quaint, decorated with corn husks and pumpkins.
Fall was like life, though; it ended quickly. The leaves flipped to golds and reds and then they were gone. Off the trees, brown and dead, waiting for snow to blanket the valley for months.
Mercifully, my mother received that small disability check each month, which she started collecting four or five years ago when she’d still had the wherewithal to worry about such mundane things as food and money.
My grandparents died before I was born, and she was their only child. They’d been quite old when they had her and hadn’t been particularly healthy. She’d moved away to attend art school and had lived in the city for years before coming back here. As she’d told me bitterly on numerous occasions, she’d had a good and vibrant life in the city. She’d been a painter. Up and coming.
“I could have been one of the greats,” she said frequently. She liked to remind me she’d been Someone in the city, an artist on the rise, and she’d sacrificed that great life to raise me in the sticks.
Now my mother’s dusty canvases filled every available space in the house not already occupied by my grandmother’s accumulated hoard: a hodgepodge collection of precariously stacked old furniture, towers of moldering books, and discolored boxes of old clothes. The only space free of the clutter was the attic, which had been converted into my mother’s painting studio. It was the only part of the house I was expressly forbidden from entering, and its door was always locked.
Years back, I’d found a flyer that advertised a gallery show of hers tucked away and forgotten inside a book, the show’s dates from a year before my birth. I’d kept the flyer in my nightstand, and looked at it often. I’d wanted to ask her about it, but then lost the nerve.
When my grandfather died, he’d left my mom a small amount of money. Though it wasn’t a lot, it had held up through the years and kept her from working. Though I doubted she’d ever had a real job. When she stopped driving, she also sold the car. But all that money was long gone. The disability checks barely covered the basics: utilities and food. I really only left the house to go to two places: school and the store. Both I could walk to, though the walk would grow increasingly unpleasant as the fall ran into winter. I often wondered what it would be like to have a family that wasn’t so poor, to be able to buy new clothes and fancy foods, guilt free.
It was dark, the few sporadic streetlights providing islands of orange light. I stumbled over the rocks on the side of the road, walking as fast as I could between one patch of light and the next. The general store was a little over two miles walk from my house, with the high school as a midway point. At this time of night there was little traffic and it felt like the town was holding its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Unseen eyes peeped out from behind the curtained windows. The houses looked vacant except for the smoke wisps escaping the chimneys. There was a prevailing sense of fear and foreboding. Isolated people living sealed-up lives.
It was a strange sensation to be unwelcome in your own town. Like a force field separated me from everyone else. I imagined it was how ghosts felt.
Finally, I arrived, tired, cold, and uncomfortable, stepping into the bright halogen light of the general store parking lot. There was more activity here than in the rest of the town combined. Cars getting fuel, a few kids sitting on a picnic table out front, dressed in school sport uniforms under puffer coats. Locals returning from work in neighboring towns, grabbing last minute things for dinner and the requisite six-packs.
My attention went straight to the kids. They were classmates of mine. Their conversation ceased as I passed, the silence so abrupt I felt as if I’d gone deaf. In a moment of bravado, I spun back and faced them, challenging them. There were three total, two sitting on the bench, one standing beside. The standing guy was Brent, tall with shaved blond hair. He laughed, but wouldn’t meet my eyes. I glared at him, at all of them. Cowards. Bullies. They had everything but that wasn’t enough, they needed to make sure you knew. I marched up the worn wooden steps to the store.
With my back to them, they started talking again, either thinking I was out of earshot, or not caring.
“God, she’s freaky. I swear I almost pissed myself!” said Brent.
“I know, right? I heard she’s like a witch or something. Always thought it was bullshit, but up close . . .”
“Yeah, it’s her eyes . . .”
Frowning, I pushed into the store. A part of me, the part that was being suffocated by this tiny town and its tiny people was tempted to walk back out to them and yell, “Why?
Why are you scared of me? Why do you avoid me? I haven’t done anything to anyone. And what the hell’s wrong with my eyes?”
A blast of food-scented warmth scattered my thoughts, helping me remember why I was here. I took a basket from the stack at the door and started my rounds of the shelves. It was the exact same list, always the same: adult diapers, cat food, toilet paper. The cans of soup, the loaves of cheap white bread, tuna fish, pasta, rice. Milk. Processed cheese slices. The food of poor people, the food of vouchers, subsistence. Barely enough nutrition to sustain us, packed with enough sodium and preservatives to last in bunkers through an apocalypse.
I was nearly finished when I decided to stop at the butcher’s counter. The butcher, a heavyset older man with bulldog jowls, turned to me. His jovial expression chilled, but his customer service skills trumped his dislike of me.
“Do you have liver today?” I asked.
“Sure, what kind are you looking for?”
“Beef.”
“You gonna do a liver and onions or something?”
“Yes, I, uh . . . My mother likes it.”
“It’s good, an acquired taste, but good. And good for you, packed with nutrients.”
“Yes.”
He puttered around and produced a bloody dark brown mass wrapped in plastic. We barely had enough money for the basics but at least twice a month for as long as I could remember, my mother insisted on us having liver for dinner. I didn’t care for it, but I still bought it when we could afford it. I smiled, thanked the man, and headed for the cash register.
The small DVD rental section was to the right of the butcher counter, and as I passed it I noticed a familiar dark shape slinking around. I was surprised to see it was Sabrina. When she looked up and saw me watching, she smiled wide and came toward me.
Parasite Life Page 3