The monstrosity appears that night after twelve, his clangorous wings as large as they’ve ever been, laboriously scraping against the floor as he shuffles across their shared bedroom. This night, however, Glass Wings doesn’t stop at the dresser – he stops directly in front of Girl’s bed.
Boy pulls his knees to his chest when he realizes just how large the creature has become. He can smell the monster’s carrion breath; he can see the hollowness of his ghosty eye sockets. Decaying skin, menacing sneer. Glass Wings opens his mouth and jagged glass teeth sparkle in the dim light.
‘Get out of here!’ Boy hisses. He squeezes his knuckles together until they are white. Shallow breaths putter out of him. ‘G-g-go!’ He whisper-yells.
Glass Wings ignores him and removes the covers from Girl’s body with his sharp claws. ‘Stop!’ he pleads, seeing his sister’s exposed body. She’s curled in a ball, her arms around a stuffed giraffe she still sleeps with.
Glass Wings smacks his lips, lips covered in visible scars from consuming glass. The sound is loud and sickening, ravenous. His long serpent tongue flops out of his mouth. It drops onto the bed next to Girl’s legs. It rolls up her thin ankles, her bruised knees, and into her sleep shorts. It’s a quick gesture, it doesn’t take more than thirty seconds, and Boy is so stunned he can hardly blink.
Glass Wings finishes licking at the inside of her thighs and throws his head back. His tongue rolls up like a yo-yo into his salivating mouth, flickers out once more to clean his lips.
‘What the h-h-hell do you want!?’ Boy whisper-growls. He tosses his covers off. He’s ready to do something, a little late because the ghost has already done the unthinkable. He stands to confront Glass Wings. The creature turns away without making eye contact.
Boy bares his teeth and snarls, ‘Leave her alone you asshole!’
‘Who are you yelling at?’ Girl asks, yawning. The end of her yawn is a soft whistle.
Glass Wings has completely vanished.
‘No one!’ Boy sits forcefully down onto his bed. The slats under the bed give way and the mattress sinks inward. The metal frame comes apart and the bed collapses. Girl laughs.
‘Shut up! It’s not funny!’
‘You’re so strange,’ she says. ‘First you’re talking in the middle of the night to no one, and now you’re getting all embarrassed about it.’
Boy wants to tell her the truth; he wants to tell her a ghost with glass wings and picks for legs has just slipped its tongue under her sleep shorts. He wants to tell her about the Philly Ghost, and the others he’s seen, but he knows if he says that, he’ll be deemed crazy. She’ll tell Mom, and Mom will flip out. She’ll go on a long spiel about how he plays too many video games, or how he eats too much candy and reads too many comic books.
‘Go to sleep.’ He tries to fix his bed in the dark and gives up.
‘You can turn the light on,’ Girl says. ‘Fix your bed.’
‘I told you to go to sleep!’
‘You’re such a dick!’
Boy knows he shouldn’t say anything – confessions of spectral sightings have no place in a world of webcams and peer review. What’s the worst that could happen? The worst would be Mom making him see a therapist. Since Mom can’t afford a therapist, Mom would likely contact someone from Huntington. His school would assign a social worker to the case, the counselor, or ignore it all together. Mom would ask him at dinner if he’s seen any ghosts and Girl, even with his ammo-word halfie, would have something to hold over him for the rest of his life.
Boy settles into the lopsided mattress, half suspended in air by its frame. He pulls his blanket over his head and decides to make a test. He needs to wait for Glass Wings to come back; he needs to do something to stop the monster from ever touching his sister again.
₪₪₪
Girl wakes up the morning after she’d first cut herself feeling alien and cold. Her brother is asleep on the mattress near her. The mattress is still detached from the bed frame, making it appear as if he’s sleeping on the side of a hill covered in blankets.
She sticks her hand in her sleep shorts to rub her fingers along the puckered outlines of the two words she has carved, glass and halfie. She sits up and presses her heels together to get a better look. The words don’t look so good – they’re crooked and jagged around the edges, pink and inflamed. A razor would do better. She suddenly feels the urge to punish herself.
Standing, she leans into the dresser mirror and notices six fresh pimples on her forehead. Using her tweezers, Girl pinches at the zits and watches white globs ooze out. The skin around each zit reddens and she squeezes harder. Her eyes water at the pain. She finishes, and is left with six bloody marks on her face. She’d never used tweezers before to pop a zit and is surprised at the pain. It’s a good pain though, a numbing pain like the burning between her legs last night in the shower.
Mom calls them from the kitchen.
‘Coming!’ Girl yells in reply.
‘Damn, too early,’ her brother grumbles from his bed.
‘Same time as always. Rest well?’ she asks in a derisive tone.
As soon as they sit down at the table, Mom starts in. ‘How’s your period?’ she asks. ‘Did you get the tampon in right?’
‘Barf,’ Boy says.
‘Mom, everything’s fine!’
‘And your face? What happened? It looks like a wasp stung you!’
Boy puts his headphones in. ‘I’ve heard enough,’ he says.
‘No headphones at the table unless it’s Christian music,’ Mom says. Boy rolls his eyes and drops his headphones to the table.
‘So? Are you going to tell me what happened to your face?’ she asks.
‘Nothing! Do we really need to talk about this right now?’
‘You know, popping our zits can lead to permanent scars. Is that what you want?’
‘Maybe,’ Girl says with a slight grin on her face. ‘Maybe.’
₪₪₪
A few days pass as they normally do – quickly, but slow enough to feel as if they are being dragged through a river of Vaseline. The words on her thighs heal and one evening, the urge to cut becomes unbearable. The desire strikes while Boy is tracing pictures out of comic books and Mom is in her bedroom sleeping. She’s been sleeping more and more lately, almost as if she is trying to whittle away her life through slumber.
Mom might be the saddest creature Girl has ever seen. Getting closer to fifty and she’s rail-thin, her hair a drab gray. The skin on her face is porous and leathery, shrunken from too much coffee consumption and not enough water. The years of worrying and disappointment have pressed the wrinkles on her forehead together like a stack of sagging pancakes. Her green olive eyes have become black olive eyes and despite the fact that she’s skinny, her jowls have started their inevitable decline towards her clavicle.
The Mexican blood in Girl, the same blood that dripped down her legs and pooled into the bathtub drain, has made her appearance rather different than that of her mother’s. Girl’s hair brownish-black. Her eyes wet wood brown. Her skin caramel in the winter and caramel with a splash of milk chocolate in the summer.
She looks quite different than her brother, who has mom’s blondish brown hair, green eyes and a Nordic paleness that sits loosely over his bones in the winter and turns slightly buttermilk in the warm months. He’s tall with flat cheeks and Girl is short with apple-cheeks. No idea where she got those and if she could sand them down, she would. Boy’s skin is flawless; she’s had zits since she was ten. Dark moles line her back like drops of ink from an alcoholic writer’s pen. The only thing she has in common with anyone in her family is her nose: long, thin and a little curved on the end.
Girl’s in their bedroom, looking at her collection of glass on their dresser. The pieces huddled together resemble skyscrapers in a ruined city. It would be nice to be a sugar ant and have the ability to crawl over the jagged pieces. Her collection looks especially beautiful when reflected back from the mirror. Two cities divided
by a river of reality.
The sliver she first cut herself with is sticking out of a Mexican coke bottle (she finds this most ironic) next to the piece of broken stained glass. She picks it up and sets it back down. Today she needs something sharper. It’s the best way to reopen the words between her thighs.
Girl slides past Boy on her way to the kitchen. He doesn’t look up at her as she passes, so concentrated he is on what he’s sketching. His tongue is out and he’s gorging the pencil into the paper. Too much pressure. He’ll learn finesse later; Girl can see it in his technique. He’s been sketching ever since she could remember. He was the best artist at Huntington, and has already displayed some pieces at a local art show for teenagers.
She opens the drawer where Mom keeps her coupons and miscellaneous kitchen utensils. An X-Acto knife sits on top of a stack of coupons for hair dye. Push those gray clouds away, it says. Girl pulls the knife out and pops the blade. She thumbs it to make sure it’s sharp enough.
It is.
‘Where you going?’ Boy asks as she walks by.
She veers to the right with her back away from him, concealing the blade. ‘Bathroom,’ she says.
‘Number one or number two?’ he asks, not looking up from his drawing. He is tracing a picture of a disproportionate comic book character with a mask pulled tight across her face.
‘Number it’s-none-of-your-business,’ she says. ‘Anyway, I’m taking a shower. Is that ok with you?’
‘Fine by me.’
₪₪₪
Glass Wings is lumbering over to his sister. He’s a predator, a nightmarish freak, a gnarled being. His shoulders are heaving up and down, his breath is gargled and whispery. The moment Boy has been waiting for is at hand. Under his blankets, pressed cold against his body, is an aluminum baseball bat.
Boy was never one for sports, could never understand their appeal or the mob mentality. He remembers Mom’s boyfriend from a few years back when they lived in Tennessee. The man would be reduced to tears if the Volunteers didn’t win a game. He’d wear his two jerseys for good luck, his orange Vols hat for good luck, his knee-high Vols socks for good luck, his gold Vols necklace he had specially made for good luck. He tried to get Boy into all sorts of sports, and he is the one who bought him the aluminum bat.
Mom tried to keep up with her boyfriend, tried to follow the team alongside him, but the type of obsession exhibited by men and women who have nothing else to live for aside from a sports team they have absolutely no control over is deep. Eventually, Mom too fell to the wayside, and then like always, they moved. Easier to move than accept one’s fate. Same thing Girl’s father, Santiago, did.
In a way, Boy was no different than the sports fanatic boyfriend. He’d made the decision at the start of seventh grade that he would pursue his art at all costs. He had seen how Mom lived, working her fingers to the bone for pennies sprinkled into her greasy palms like piss into a urinal. He’d seen how she blamed her poverty on those more or less impoverished than her. Scapegoats are a dime a dozen.
‘Last chance, asshole,’ Boy hisses at Glass Wings. He’s trying not to recoil from the monster’s sickening form, trying to focus, trying to get a good grip on his baseball bat.
Glass Wings ignores him. He shuffles closer to Girl, his massive wings scraping against the floor. He reaches his curled fingernails out and latches on to the blanket covering Girl’s body.
The time is now or never.
The creature’s tongue flaps out of his scarred lips. It cascades down his chin, his neck and falls onto Girl’s reedy legs. His foul tongue travels up her thin brown legs and into the opening of her sleep shorts.
Blood returns to Boy’s hands and he finally manages to get a good grip on the baseball bat. He squeezes it tightly, gradually taking his blanket off with his other hand.
Glass Wings finishes.
His spoiled, blood-dipped tongue crawls back into his marred lips and the fucked monster turns from the bed. Boy steadies himself on the floor behind him.
Boy’s knees are wobbly, his breath short and staccato. Glass Wings pauses, seemingly aware that someone is standing directly behind him. Too late. Boy takes one last look at his target, and leaps forward with a swing.
The bat connects with the grotesque creature’s wings. Hurled over, Glass Wings shrieks on the floor in front of the two beds. He begins to lift his massive body weight off the ground. Boy steps around his throbbing wings, to his left side.
Glass Wings tilts his head slightly to look up at Boy. His pupils have condensed into fine red slits. He’s seething, furious at Boy. His huge black tongue starts to press its way out of his lips and his brow folds into an angry V shape. His eyes flash white.
Summoning all the courage he may ever have, Boy taps Glass Wings on the cheek with his bat.
The disfigured creature snorts and a low growl emits from his throat. Boy pulls back and swings with all his might, connecting with his jaw and sprinkling his glass teeth onto the floor. The creature gargles, tries to right himself. A stream of saliva and black blood dribbles out of his mouth.
Glass Wings lies in a heap, his broken wings shaking spastically. In one fell swoop, Boy brings the bat down onto the creature’s mangy head.
Glass explodes onto the floor.
Girl wakes to find Boy standing in front of their dresser, her collection of glass smashed to tiny pieces. She watches with panic-stricken eyes as her brother slivers back into his bed, burying his head deep under the blankets as he sobs.
Chapter 2: Ghosts and STDs
Boy’s Age: 20
Boy is one of those unlucky souls who gets an STD after the first time he has sex and happens to be visited by a ghost (again) within the same twenty-four hour time frame. Damn if it isn’t true. Things like this shouldn’t happen to normal people, but they do.
Ghost is a chatterbox. Thin wispy late night visitor rambling tweaker. The princess seams of her blouse are faded and frayed. Her jeans hang loosely over her bare ankles. When she speaks, she starts up in a whisper and trails off into nothing at the end of each sentence. She’s annoying and he wishes he couldn’t see her. She doesn’t float, she walks.
Her facial features change frequently. Sometimes Ghost is young, her skin fair and her lips flushed. Other times she’s older, almost brittle, gray like sorrowful clouds before a thunderstorm, gray like dried shark skin, almost to the point of a blur. Always the same clothes, though.
Add to this his newly discovered STD: Boy needs to go to the clinic to get the warts removed, but he keeps having to reschedule due to various problems that keep coming up, problems such as the disappearance of Girl, his younger sister.
‘Hi Mom,’ Boy says late one night into his cell phone. He sits up, yawns and turns the lamp on. He stands and looks over at Ghost. She’s sitting in a folding chair near the door.
Her eyes follow Boy as he moves past her.
‘She’s gone then?’ he asks. He pours himself a glass of orange juice and listens as Mom sobs. Outside marmalade haze. ‘Did she say where? Arizona? Who does she know in Arizona? Oh… him.’
Girl’s older boyfriend, Clint. A recent high school dropout with a piece of land in Arizona. A mother’s dream.
Boy sits down on the old sofa he bought at Goodwill which stinks of socks and licorice. A collection of gouache tubes sits on top of an old easel. They are halfway squeezed, covered in colorful fingerprints. The extra glycerine added to gouaches gave them their thickness and vibrancy. Flame Red, Winsor Green, Lemon Yellow.
‘Things could be worse,’ he says into the phone, looking up at his ceiling. ‘No, I’m not joking. They really could be. She’ll be back, Mom, once she realizes that she made a huge mistake. What’s in Arizona anyway, besides guns and desert?’
He listens for a moment. ‘Well call the cops. I know you don’t know where she is exactly, it may help.’
Ghost walks into the living room. He wonders sometimes why she doesn’t float. Twitchy damn spectral haunt. Her lips move up and d
own as the words flow from her lips.
‘...It wasn’t difficult…just past the ridge over near…buy some candy…so she usually ate carrots from then…I didn’t really think about it…in the truck and put Lucy back in…kissed on the driveway and he slipped on a puddle …’
‘Hey can you hear this?’
He approaches Ghost.
‘Can’t hear it? Oh, it’s nothing,’ Boy says.
He thinks sometimes about touching Ghost, just reaching out and grazing his hand against her arm, but regardless of how used to her he becomes, he is still frightened by her. Who wouldn’t be? He has a feeling that touching her might do more damage than good so he leaves her be.
‘So, is there anything I can do?’ he asks. Ghost watches him sit back down. ‘E-mail her? Ok. Do you have Clint’s number? Well, maybe I can get a number from one of her friends. All right, I’ll call them in a few hours. I know she’s my only sister. Of course I care.’
Boy yawns again and crawls back into his bed. Tonight he’ll begin his first overnight shift at Plentiful Prints and he needs his rest. He hears Ghost sit down in her usual spot.
‘…Never have anyone to talk…you can see…form the words...always though we did it proper…’
‘Goodnight,’ Boy says to Ghost.
₪₪₪
‘Looks like it’s just you and me,’ Friend says. ‘Good thing too, this overnight shift can get lonely. The basics: we catch up on what they do during the day, which takes about half the shift, then we just chill.’
Boy spent the tail end of his evening consoling Mom and trying to track down Girl. He’s also made an appointment to go to the STD clinic. Goodbye warts, you little pink bastards.
Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller) Page 2