I knew the shut-in was there even before I knocked. How did it know when I was coming? Maybe it didn’t have to guess or watch; maybe it knew when I would come before I did. There was a sort of field between us now, electric, psychic. I want to come inside, I thought, closing my eyes, and then I said it aloud, my hands against the screen: I want to come inside.
Tap. Tap-tap.
But I didn’t go in then, or the next day, or the day after that. I didn’t go anywhere. I could feel the shut-in waiting, ready for me. Our windows facing each other. Things were even more quiet at home than usual and the house seemed softer, bigger; nothing pressed in on me, no assignments to do, no buses to take. I ate what I had in the cupboards, stayed on the couch, didn’t even turn the TV on. I thought, I need to make myself really small. So I could fit in there, with it, when the time came.
My phone rang. The sound was so loud it made me flinch; no one had knocked on my door before, no one had ever called. Who could it be? The shut-in? Was I in the phone book? Was it? I answered on the eighth ring. Hello? I said, and even I knew I sounded wrong, scared, too quiet. So I said it louder. Hello? Hello! A voice asked for someone I’d never heard of; I almost laughed. No, I said, and now I was talking as loud as I ever wanted to: Who is this? The caller hung up but I stayed on the line. You? I whispered. Is it you?
I got my grades in the mail. Unlike in high school there was no judgment, no concerned note, no demand for a meeting to discuss my failures; just zeroes lined up in the credits column. I could take other courses next semester, or repeat the same ones; as long as I kept paying I could do what I wanted. What did I want? I stood there with the letter in my hands and looked out the window. For the first time, the shut-in’s light was on, a dim white frost on the steps.
I brushed my teeth and put on clean jeans and a button-down shirt and combed my hair back into a ponytail before pulling the hood of my sweatshirt up. I did it in the dark; I didn’t want it to see me getting ready, in case it was watching. Was I beautiful? I wondered. How could I be?
The night was warm, quiet, still; I took a deep breath and crossed the street, went up the steps. There was a mask on the mat, identical to the one it had worn in the window but smaller, child-sized. Snout facing out. I put it on. Reek of rubber. A new darkness. The door was open behind the screen and I felt my way through the gap, the air cooler over the threshold, heavier. The lock caught behind me. I blinked; the room was lit only by the porch light coming through the curtains and the mask forced me to take everything in in pieces: window, wall, wall, hallway. No furniture. A rugless floor. I could barely breathe. Where are you, I thought, and then I saw it: the shut-in, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Its mask was so much bigger than mine, its round cheeks enormous, the smiling snout tipped in my direction. I stared. The shut-in’s body was thick, the chest flat, wide, the heavy legs bowed, so the thighs didn’t touch. It had the gloves on, socks pulled over the cuffs of its pants, the hood pulled tight around the mask, no inch of skin exposed. I still could not see what was wrong with it. I moved closer, so close I could easily touch any part of it if I wanted to. I was sweating. Giddy with something. I smiled. It mirrored me, head cocked. Arms hanging at its sides. Well? it seemed to be saying. Well, well, here we are. I said that, out loud: Here we are. My voice muffled inside the mask. All these things between us—masks, eyes, screen doors, windows, houses—filter after filter after filter. I could hear its harsh breath, as loud as mine. I came closer. I could see the eyes, deep behind the rubber holes, so featureless—just eyes, not even a color or a shape beyond the round pig-shape, black in the middle and something else all around and then white and then, presumably, skin, hair, a nose, a mouth—or nothing, maybe there was nothing—and it was trying to tell me something, I thought: That it understood me? That this was it? Or that this was just the beginning? Our masks almost touched, the snouts wavering at different heights, only very slightly mismatched. Then its hand met mine and the moment crazed in all directions, like a crack in tempered glass, moving faster than I could follow. I gripped its fingers, feeling the shape of them beneath the rough glove. This is you, I said. It nodded like Yes, like we were ordinary people in a room, like it didn’t matter if we could see each other, if the masks were on or off, because it was more than the mask or whatever could be beneath, and so it could leave it on, it could stay as it was, indefinitely, not showing itself, because I had already seen it, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I seen everything? It had invited me in. It had touched me. It had listened and existed and that, the shut-in said with its eyes, with its gloved hand, was enough. But the shut-in was wrong. It wasn’t enough, because I wanted to know what was under there, still, beneath that mask, the gloves, the clothes, and I was free, in the world, to do what I wanted, I was not bound to these four walls like it was, and that was the difference between us: I was still in the world, just barely, and so with both hands I gripped the sides of its mask and pulled, hard, snapping the elastic that held the mask in place, the shut-in’s head wrenched forward, enormous, exposed, and the sound it made was terrible, not a human sound at all, much more like an animal, which is what it turned out I was—the shut-in had trusted me, and I had trusted myself, but never again.
RAG
IT WAS wet inside her mouth, on the long slide down her throat. Embraced on all sides. Breathed in. I’d never been touched like that, so totally, total darkness. I got her to the end, of air, of feeling, of a body, of will. Of herself. What a struggle! Just to breathe, to do just once more what she’d done her whole life: exist. It was a shock, the simplicity of it, how I could so profoundly interfere with this creature, who, with all her skills and talents and graces, could not triumph over a mere scrap of trash. I triumphed over him, too, in the end, the one who put me there in the first place, who thought I was only his tool. She’d thought that, too. They were right in most ways. Not all.
I didn’t really know what it meant. What it means. What do I mean? It’s a hand that gives me meaning, and yet, I do know some things. I know what it means to be soft, to be limp, to glide along a slick surface, to gather, to suck, to twist, to soak, to lie still. To become something suddenly very hard, immovable, in the body of the beloved. To transform. My nature. I don’t judge his, or hers. I turned him into a murderer, her into a corpse. Or maybe I only brought what was already in them into being. As willingly as I had done everything else.
I had touched that whole house while in her hands. Every inch of wood, of glass, of stone. She reached for me again and again. I rose to the occasion. After she was done for the day he took me and wrapped me around himself, grunted and spilled. Such a delight, to be manipulated by them. My beloveds. Sped further along the path of my undoing, every hour becoming softer and softer, thinner, more sensitive, wiser. Though I was washed in the hottest water the stains remained, hers and his: polish and semen, oil and dust. Folded. Unfolded.
We all want to get inside. Maybe your way isn’t really any good at all. You can only go so far. I can fit into most holes. I can’t break. Can’t crack. And what of them? Their bodies? How they did it, what they did? How they dissolved. Her hair, her eyes, the way her arms lay on the floor when I was through. The split corners of her mouth. His bloody knuckles. Don’t look. Consider, instead, the thing that came between them, that brought them together: Humble, happy rag. Sad rag. Used, bleached, spoiled, rinsed, dormant. Good for restoring things to beauty, to cleanliness, to a shine. Absorbing dirt, lust, so much of what is living. Absorbing life itself.
Certainly there is a history of the incident, going back before my time: injuries, a childhood illness, ostracism, mental disorder, loneliness, screams. A history of chance. These things I can’t know; they don’t really touch me. But what about love? What about fascination, with the simplest, most mundane things. Domestic things. Women’s things. The household, the home, something helpful, helpless, a chore, women’s work—a servant of a servant. He didn’t know how to use me as she did; he was clumsy when he tried. He left streaks. He
had to use me for his own purposes, to be a man, to invent violence out of something previously purely innocent. Out of one small thing, a romance. Who uses, who is used? His desire, her desire—they aren’t mine. But I borrowed them. Faithful. Faithless.
There was a moment when he could have taken me out of her throat, or at least not stuffed me in so far, but he needed to cross the line. I helped him, I admit—so docile, so well suited for the task. He left me inside her; that is where they found me, distending that narrow passage. Covered in their cells. He’d held me with his bare hands and that was where he made his mistake. When I was free again, plucked back into the light and asked to speak, I spoke. First her undoing, then his. Every object conspires against man, is used and then uses.
What did you do? they asked. What did you do? I answered.
He is no longer able to do anything more than imagine a woman, to hold her in his mind for a moment before letting her go. That’s not so bad, is it? He must let all of them go, now. How successful I was, doing my small jobs. How I saved you all a lot of grief.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Danielle Meijer, Emily Bell, Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, H. Peter Steeves, Javier Ramirez, Kathe Koja, Kenny Childers, Na Kim, Jackson Howard, Naomi Huffman, and the Corporation of Yaddo.
And to William Nickell, Charlotte Rae, and Bonnie, all my love.
ALSO BY MARYSE MEIJER
Heartbreaker: Stories
Northwood: A Novella
A Note About the Author
Maryse Meijer is the author of the story collection Heartbreaker, which was one of Electric Literature’s 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016, and the novella Northwood. She lives in Chicago. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
HER BLOOD
GOOD GIRLS
ALICE
POOL
FRANCIS
THE BROTHER
JURY
THE RAINBOW BABY
THE LOVER
AT THE SEA
EVIDENCE
VIRAL
THE SHUT-IN
RAG
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY MARYSE MEIJER
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
FSG Originals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2019 by Maryse Meijer
All rights reserved
First edition, 2019
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which these stories originally appeared, in slightly different form: Paper Darts (“Rag,” “Good Girls”); The Adroit Journal (“The Brother”); The Collagist (“Evidence”); Washington Square Review (“The Lover”); Indiana Review (“Alice”); Exit 7 (“Francis”); The Conium Review (“Her Blood”); and Slush Pile Magazine (“At the Sea”).
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71900-5
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