by Karen Runge
I saw myself licking the skin above his swollen red lip. I wouldn’t look at him again after that. Not for a while. A day, a week. I don’t know. I don’t know what he thought. I know what he thought. What he must’ve thought. I think.
He walked with me. He talked with me. He gave me a cigarette. I tried to be nice. His skin was rubbery, turgid. He didn’t brush his teeth.
“You don’t like me,” he said, grinning at me like he didn’t believe it. Like he was saying what he thought was an opposite to get at what he thought was a truth.
Which was not.
“Yes I do,” I said.
But I did not.
“Prove it,” he said. Walking off the path, his back to me, and the sun behind me so my shadow tapered out ahead, long and loose and liquid, touching him where he stood. Like I was reaching for him.
But I was not.
“Come on,” he said, turning to face me. “Prove it.” Loosening his tie. A noose. Opening his shirt. A void.
I looked away. I looked again. He was so thin his ribs rolled up against his skin. He had three nipples. A mutant mole. He dropped his shirt into the long grass. It hung there like an abandoned flag, trembling in the wind that twitched the tips of the grass where it touched. A white flag. A call for surrender, thrown down in the field. He took off his pants. His hips were as bony as the rest of him, like blades jutting out, sliding under his skin when he moved.
“Now you,” he said. Grinning at me like I was such a sure thing. Yellow teeth, scarecrow fingers. I imagined his taste: mouldy, sour. I imagined that touch: scratching, sharp. I felt chill against the heat, with sweat sliding down my back, slipping down the cleft between my new A-cup breasts. My skin stippled with goose bumps. I didn’t move. Instead I stood with my shadow touching him, my shoes crushing thorns. Until he crossed back to the path toward me, kicking through the grass. Until he came for me.
He was taller than me. I told you that. So much taller. That’s why I bit my tongue when I hit the ground, slicing into it with my teeth. Crescent moon wound. A trickle of blood got caught in my throat. The taste of violence I’ve never spat out.
What are you doing? I asked myself. Fists clenched. Kicking my legs. What am I doing? Struggling to breathe.
I wanted the earth to open up beneath me, to create a hole I could fall into. But there was no hole. Not underneath. Only within. I fell down it anyway—fell laughing or crying, even now I’m not sure. Blood and broken grass and thorns in my back.
Alice and her holes.
You know something about falling. I saw in you the echo of a scream, caught. A blood-tone sound, voiceless. Only those who’ve swallowed it themselves can recognise it in others. Almost from the moment I first saw you, I heard it—that cry stuck in your throat. Our paths were different, but we came to this place together, I think. We fell together, I think.
Where’s Daniel? I want to try and say this to Daniel. He might hear me now, if you could bring him here. If you’d let him come. Please let him. Where’s Daniel?
It’s cold in here.
– THREE –
Their apartment block was in the heart of the city, a calm zone of historical sections and residential areas surrounded by a circling highway. The zone itself tranquil, the world beyond it frenzied. The narrow roads within traversed irregular blocks of battered stone walls and whitewashed store fronts like the thin, broken veins of an old heart. This heart beat slowly, steadily. The heart of a beast in hibernation, or a monk in a trance. This was what it felt like, living in that place. Like being lost in unreality, like growling in your sleep.
The city as a whole was vast and ugly, its long history razed to a whisper as most of the older buildings were torn down, replaced with cheap mock-ups or garish modern structures. Even in the calm centre, it was a city insane with contradictions. Rickshaws and Lamborghinis. Neon lights and dusty lanterns. Prada shoes and broken feet. Its beauty, when revealed, seemed sometimes almost accidental. Battered furniture abandoned in an alley, plush with morning dew. A splintered wooden door hanging off its hinges, its rich patina struck stark with age. A songbird in an ornate cage, hung in the eaves. Swinging. Singing.
Daniel and Ada’s building was one of several in a gated compound, all built in the 70s, all with broken steps and tricky plumbing and sound-activated lights flashing on and off in the stairwells. Their apartment was one of many in the area that had been “renewed.” Retiled, repainted, sinks replaced and cabinets installed. The gleaming interior a surprise to see against the building’s peeling paint and rain-stained face.
Their neighbourhood was composed of one-way streets locked in a cryptic grid only locals or long-time residents could comfortably navigate. Here the buildings were low, old, the eaves scalloped, the walls painted grey to disguise the dust. Fruit and vegetable shops crammed with produce did their commerce through open windows and narrow doorways. There were print shops, convenience stores, tearooms and noodle stands. In the narrow, zigzagging alleys that shot free of the one-way streets there were sometimes wardrobe-sized art exhibitions where lanky local men and svelte local girls smoked cigarettes and sipped table wine out of cheap glasses. This too was sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful. But mostly it was beautiful.
Locals and foreign residents rode scooters and bicycles to the nearby subway station, where locks and prayers kept their property, mostly, safe from the scruffy youths with tricky fingers who haunted the bicycle racks. Most of the residents worked in the new business districts that lay staggered around the city, far from the calm heart’s reach. They rode the trains into those outer places, into sections dense with sleek high-rises and wide streets where offices, duties and alter egos waited to claim them. There were fewer lanterns there and more neon. And always the rush and roar coming in from the streets outside the glass-walled offices. Traffic, sirens, raised voices and thousands and thousands of swift-stepping feet. This was the cacophony Ada hated most, worse every day, living within a gradually shrinking circumference, fighting to shut the world beyond it out. And so one day she went to the subway station and forgot she no longer carried her metro card.
Because a month after the wedding she’d quit her job, of course.
“I don’t need to work,” she said. “You’re making more than enough for the two of us.” And when Daniel’s eyes changed, she grinned.
“You want to be a…a housewife?”
She put a hand on his arm. A caress that dared to tighten. “I can think of worse things I could be. To you.”
“You’re brutal,” he said. But he laughed.
Her life slowed. Cleaning and cooking and kissing him goodbye, kissing him hello. The air in their apartment thick with her constant presence; scented soap and thin sweat, the incense she burned almost obsessively clinging to the curtains, the upholstery, her clothes. There were many women like her in their neighbourhood, foreign and local alike. Housewives. Fat thickening beneath their filmy dresses, hair clipped back in slovenly chic with tortoiseshell barrettes. Many of them went out pushing prams, holding tiny hands, rubbing swollen bellies with protective glee. They bought their fruit and vegetables from the same hole-in-the-wall store Ada did, their bread and meat from the same German bakery/butchery Ada did, sashayed down the same broken streets as her. Fat feet in ballet flats, frowning at Ada’s red leather jacket, her tousled hair, her blood-shock lipstick.
No, I am not you, she thought, glaring back at them. I am not like you. Not like you. I am. Not.
But she did, now, have a ring to flash around. Sometimes when she felt these women’s eyes on her, she rubbed her chin with her left hand—deliberately, conspicuously, like it made any difference. Like she didn’t feel small and petty for doing it. For even feeling the need.
It was only late at night as she lay sleepless beside her husband that her sense of smug satisfaction became palpable unease.
Housewife.
What was that? What did it mean? Or, what did it mean for her? She lay staring up at the ceiling, listening t
o the footfalls that echoed through the building’s thin walls as she pulled the word apart—finding anagrams that frightened her, telling herself they were not codes, not codes. That they were just coincidences, accidents of the English language, and not to be taken too seriously.
House Wife Wise How
Fuse She He
Who? Foes
Whose? His
He we of I us
Hew use of I
And on until her head ached and her jaw throbbed from clenching her teeth, and she woke with migraines so bad she came back to herself wondering if she’d gone blind in the night. Lying beside him with her hands over her eyes.
– FOUR –
People talk about trauma like it’s an excuse. Is it? I don’t know.
This thing Daniel and I did, those things we did before you, with you, without you. To you. Those things you did to us. I sometimes think it comes from somewhere else. There are hints of it embedded deeper in the fabric of our lives, in the things that came before. Look for yours. I’ve looked for mine.
Before that day in the field. Long before, when I was still a child. Before my body began its natural shape-shift and turned me into something else. Once a year we stayed at my uncle’s farm, so he and my father could go trout fishing. They did this every year, and I’m told I always went with. But I don’t remember the other times. The times before this. Or after. Memories like dreams, too muted to be real.
But this I know. I remember this.
My uncle was younger than my father. He was handsome—I knew that even then. Dark hair, dark eyes. Off-centre smile. He was cheeky and gregarious and sometimes a little dangerous. I knew that, too. He liked to sit me on his lap and pinch my knees. He’d jiggle his own knee with me astride it and say we were “riding horsey.” It made me laugh. It made my father and uncle laugh, too. My laughter bright and free, my uncle’s thick and deep and too loud in my ear until my father said, “Enough now, hand her back to me.” Smiling, trying to smile. Picking me up, high in his arms. Holding me against him. Turning away.
Then.
I think I was six. Seven, maybe. They went out early in the morning dressed in waterproof jackets and gum boots. They left carrying rods and cooler boxes and tidy little bags filled with neatly arranged hooks. Beautiful hooks. Fly-fishing hooks. Feathered, threaded. Made to look like brightly coloured water insects—designed as tricks, traps, lures. They were called nymph hooks, my uncle told me the night before. And told me not to touch them, not to play with them. When he left the room I did it anyway. Running my fingertips along the tight-wound threading and bits of bird feathers. Brown, green and brightest electric blue. It seemed obvious to me that no fish would fall for this. Fantastical food too dazzling to be real. Alluring colours dancing along deadly metal arcs. They wouldn’t believe the colours, I thought. They wouldn’t bite down on those barbs.
Nymphs.
I pressed my finger to the end of a hook, testing its sharpness. Focus-point of pain. I pressed a little harder. The tip popped into the soft cushion of my thumb and called up a drop of blood. I put my finger in my mouth. I tasted it. Sweet metal, bright on my tongue.
Nymph. A word I didn’t understand, then. But understood that it was a kind of death trap, presented in dazzling disguise.
My uncle and my father got back in the early afternoon with a cooler box full of fish. Trout. Rainbow trout. Sleek and fat and shining, with pretty colours painted along their sides. But no blood. I didn’t see any blood. My uncle opened the cooler box to show me the catch and all I saw were twitching bodies and wide, translucent eyes.
“They’re still moving,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he smiled, drawing me close to him at the waist. “They’re dead.”
“Then why are they still moving?”
“They do that even after they’re dead.”
I stared into the box, sick with wonder. Dead? I thought. Dead things don’t move.
“You want to watch me descale them?” he asked, his fingers tightening, almost hard enough to hurt. “Gut them?”
Off-centre smile.
Descale means peel. Removing the tough outer layer of sharp, shiny little flakes that would slice our tongues and the insides of our cheeks. And gut means eviscerate. Slitting bellies, releasing blood. Pulling the entrails out in their slippery stream of connected knots. Emptying the fish out. Cleaving holes. Leaving them hollow.
“While they’re still alive?” I asked.
His fingers tightened on my waist. “They’re dead.”
Can dead things move? Can live things lie still?
We went to the courtyard, out the kitchen door. He opened the box and took the fish out. And this time they didn’t just twitch, they jumped. Sleek silver bodies flashing in the air as they flopped and turned and spun. Fell. Lay still on the rough concrete. Gasped. Then thrashed, then leapt. Again. He grabbed them one at a time, hunched over them, holding them against his knees, scraping a blade along their bodies as they squirmed and jerked in his hands. Gasping mouths. Rainbow scales falling like fairy confetti, catching the light at my feet.
“They’re still alive,” I said. Said standing very still, my hands over my mouth, my heart skittering, leaping. Just like the fish.
“They’re dead.”
And he cut them open, throat to tail, their insides slipping out of them in pink ribbons, looped and frilled, organs drooping like bunches of quivering flowers.
They’re dead, I told myself. They’re dead.
But they moved.
“Most girls would cry,” my uncle said after, washing off his hands. And I knew I’d impressed him somehow. “You’re like a tough little boy trapped in a pretty little body, aren’t you?” He ran a still-wet hand through my hair. And he called me that name. He said, “Nymph.”
Fish blood and drops of water sparkled on my cheeks. I said it to myself: Dead things move. Said it over and over again, still struggling to believe.
We had those fish for dinner. Roasted in the oven, dressed with olive oil and garlic and a mess of bright green herbs.
I hate trout. It tastes like mud, like river dregs, like waterweeds and soiled tissues. I doused mine in mayonnaise and ate it anyway. Tangy murk soft between my teeth, sliding down my throat.
“Have some more,” my uncle said.
And I did. Chewing slowly, carefully. Waiting for the feel of flesh twitching in my mouth. Wanting it, not wanting it. Dreading it, hoping for it.
Dead things moving. Live things lying still.
That night I had nightmares about the fish in my belly. Rainbow scales skittering through my guts in paper-thin shards, sharp as shattered glass. Ripping me open. I felt the fish jumping inside of me, pushing at the walls of my body. Scales and fins and hooks through mouths. A hook in my own mouth, stopping my screams.
When I woke the next morning I was dizzy, damp with sweat. The taste of river water dark in the back of my mouth.
Trauma, this wasn’t. I don’t think so. Do you?
– FIVE –
“Come and meet Cassandra,” Daniel said. “Ada, this is Cassandra. Cassandra, this is my wife, Ada. She’s an artist.”
She’s an artist.
Not housewife. This word he couldn’t quite yet use in relation to the woman he’d married.
The girl smiled up at Ada, a pint of beer in her hand. Swallowing. Smiling. “Hey! Daniel’s told me so much about you.”
Ada tossed her handbag onto the empty seat beside Cassandra. It landed with a thump that made the girl jump, then laugh.
Ada smiled. She sat.
“Cass is a freelance graphic designer,” Daniel said. “She just finished up a project with us. She’s good. We might use her again.”
“Really?” The girl jerked up in her seat, almost slopping her beer.
How many has she already had? Ada wondered. She scanned the table for condensation marks. She assessed the state of the coasters. They were cardboard, soaked, the edges peeled. Daniel didn’t do that—pee
l, pick. So this girl was the culprit. Peeling, picking. But why? Nerves? Probably. Getting drunk with a man in a bar can be an exercise in tension.
And then he announces his wife is on the way.
Daniel was drinking his usual predatory afternoon mix of soda water and mint leaves. Leaving out the gin and calling it a mojito, which the girl probably didn’t think to disbelieve. He would drink later, and too much. But not for a while yet.
Ada ordered a Campari on ice. Her own predatory afternoon drink. Thick and tart and just sweet enough.
“I’m good,” the girl said, pre-empting Ada’s question and holding up her glass to show it was still half-full. With her free hand she flicked at the edges of a coaster, splitting the layers of paper at the rim.
Yes, you’re still good. Peeling. Unpeeled.
The girl had dark hair, thick and tangled. Her eyes, circled with thick black lines, were round, ogling. She reminded Ada of a Tibetan terrier one of her and Daniel’s neighbours used to have. Also dark-haired, that hair also thick and tangled, its coat perpetually unkempt. Whenever they came across it in the stairwell it had rolled around at their feet in lunatic self-deprecation, greasy knots of fur falling in its eyes, pink tongue flapping.
And her lipstick is the same shade of pink its tongue was, Ada thought. Too vivid, too bright against the black. I don’t think it matches her labia. It can’t.
She had a sense that Daniel may have wondered about the same thing.
Well, we should find out soon enough.
Unlike the dog, the hair that hung over this girl’s eyes was cut. It lay flat across her forehead in a harsh edge. Hiding bad skin, or just giving her something to hide behind. She touched it often, brushing her fingers through it as though it were thick with knots. Another nervous tic. The girl’s bra set her cleavage in clear, perfect arcs. Ada could almost make out the faint impressions of the girl’s nipples.