She's Lost Control

  “You did this to me,” Fiona cries, “You did this to me.”

  A knock sounds off screen. A woman’s voice Fiona? Fiona lemme in. Fiona. Fiona come on. Fiona. Knocking, knocking, knocking. FIONA! Fi! Fi? Then: pushing until the door gives. A woman dashes into view. Shrieking like a blonde raven, she rips her shirt off and tries to hold it to Fiona’s ruined white wrists. Her acting is clunky, she over prepared for the part. She quickly fishes her phone out of a pocket and calls 911, shout-reporting what’s going on and throwing the phone down.

  Mercilessly, the webcam rolls on.

  EMTs show up, scoop Fiona onto a stretcher and load her into an ambulance. Her friend rides with her, broadcasting hopelessly until the moment Fiona’s pronounced DOA at the hospital.

  The end of the movie shows Fiona’s friends taking turns broadcasting from her funeral. It’s set to music and a cork board in the parlor foyer is pinned with photos of her. The camera moves unsteadily into the atrium of the funeral home, towards the open casket. It hovers over Fiona’s stodgily made-up face, her chin squished into her neck. The camera spins around to three of her friends, cheeks grey with mascara and tears. “Rest in Peace, Fi,” they say to the camera.

  The movie fades to black.

  “Jesus,” Mona mutters, “experimental indeed.” It takes Mona a minute to snap out of it, to return to reality. Her foot has fallen asleep and the room pulsates with the new silence. It’s so quiet that when Mona squints her eyes together, she can hear the wet clicking of her lids meeting. She considers the objects she will need for the various scenes when the movie comes to life again.

  Fiona is sitting in a nondescript room on a bench against a concrete wall. She is crying. Her wrists are unscathed.

  A man in a mask steps into the frame. It’s so cliché. “What is this?” Mona scoffs.

  Two professional shotgun microphones are cradled in stands to the left and right of Fiona. The masked man slips monitor headphones on and taps each mic in turn while he listens. He points at Fiona, blubbering, insane. “Say it!” He commands.

  “I am Fiona Minbrook and I faked my own death and,” she sobs, “and now I will die.”

  It’s all sort of chintzy and gross, thinks Mona. But the microphones. The microphones make her feel queasy.

  The stationary computer camera, probably set out on a table facing the scene, delivers a merciless brutality to the scene. Nothing swirls or is implied. The man has a blade. It all happens very quickly.

  With each lacerating moment of contact, a sound is released from Fiona’s skin. Mona realizes she has heard it before, when she was sixteen and didn’t want to die, but needed something to do with her fury. Swiping her mother’s sewing shears across the insides of her thighs the sonics were slightly different: the dragged scissor blades creates a tiny bit of friction, her tender epidermis puckering and gathering before giving. She only did it once or twice.

  Mona looks at the condenser microphones with their long and slender and highly directional heads like bird beaks. Fiona keens her own death cry and still the mic delivers clean, even sonics.

  Mona reaches over and presses the projector’s power button. The picture blips off, but the audio, recorded with two broadcast quality microphones, keeps telling.

  Mona hears air particles moving, and then something swift, like tofu splitting. It is like the release of a tiny suction cup but also not like that at all.

  The sound is not campy, because the real thing never is.

  It is a sound that cannot be unheard, the sound of nothing except the exact sound of the thing that is happening.

  ***

  Four years after foleying Fiona Fakes All Mona is sitting in a dark bar, her cocktail sweating onto a napkin as she waits for her date to show up. When he arrives they greet each other awkwardly, “Uh, Mo . . . Mona?” he questions. She winces, hoping no one can hear her confirming her identity because they have never seen each other in person before. She nods and stands up, he opens to a hug as she offers her hand. They reconcile into a silly half embrace.

  Mona lost the weight that plagued her when she first moved to LA and her body is clothed in a black turtleneck maxi dress accessorized only by jutting elbows and hipbones. Predictably boring, the date asks Mona what she does for a living. She answers by finishing her drink and ordering another one.

  “I’m a foley artist,” she finally says, “are you in the industry?”

  “Wow, I’ve always thought that would be a cool job!” He gives her a dopey smile and swigs his pale ale. “I’m in tech. It’s okay! How long have you been doing . . . foley?”

  “Four or five years now.”

  “Have you done any movies I would know?”

  “Do you like scary movies?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, that’s sort of my genre.”

  Mona doesn’t tell him that she’s the best in the field, booked for the next two years straight.

  ***

  She sticks around because the guy has nice teeth and cross-fit shoulders. She orders them another round even though he is only halfway through his first.

  A little later, a little drunker, Mona crunches an ice cube. The sound makes her shiver. “Want to come home with me?” she whispers across the dark table.

  In the Uber home she puts his hand up her dress. For once, she is not concerned about sound. Let the driver hear, she thinks.

  They stumble into her bedroom. He pulls his shirt off and steps towards Mona to help her do similarly. Mona pauses, considers turning the lights off, decides she doesn’t care, and lets him slide the dress up over her head.

  The dress is up around her neck, blocking her face, when she hears him gasp. She finishes the job for him, dropping the dress on the floor. He gapes at her body, at the mélange of scars lacing her stomach, arms, and legs.

  She walks to him, smiling, her arms open. “It’s okay,” she says. “It always sounds good at the time.”

  A LETTER FROM A SISTER TO HER BROTHER

  Michelle Sikorski

  I THINK FOR you to understand this, you need to know that when I was nine, I saw angels for the first time.

  Well, not really. What I actually saw was a visual hallucination common in ocular migraines: silver specks flying past me in my peripheral vision, bright and fast and, to my nine-year-old mind, obviously divine. I saw the “angels” several times after that, until I was thirteen and I heard mom’s eye doctor tell her about this bizarre, benign kind of migraine that causes people to see evaporation lines, or random flashes, or silver specks flying past their heads. No angels visited me after that. I mean, I still get the migraines, but they’ve lost their magic.

  Unfortunately, I’ve found little proof or evidence in anything divine since. But ever since I got possessed, I’ve started to wonder if devils need angels to exist.

  I know it may seem a little out-there of me to start off by saying I’m possessed, but trust me, I am. I didn’t know at first—I didn’t know for years—but that’s what I want to tell you about.

  In retrospect, it’s actually really obvious. I think it started when I was five or six: I was definitely young. And I can’t say for sure if this is the first time it happened, but I can remember being little, and getting in an argument with Mom, and I was so mad. And then I seemed to switch off: I was still there, I was still seeing and feeling and thinking, and my body was moving, but I wasn’t doing it. And I didn’t snap out until she burst into the room, hearing the thuds of my head against the wall over and over and over.

  Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud.

  And she yelled at me, but I could tell it wasn’t an in-trouble kind of yell. It was a primal sort of yell, the kind of yell that felt like bears and splitting earth.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “That’s never the right way to handle things; promise me you’ll never hurt yourself like that again.”

  And I promised. The fact that I hadn’t felt like I’d done it at all evaporated in the face of her fear, and I promised
to never do it again.

  When it happened a month later, I didn’t tell her. I haven’t told her about any of the times since, either.

  It was scary early on, but you’d be surprised by what you can get used to. It was at least fairly predictable. I’d get angry: at mom, at you, at a mean kid out on the street. I’d stew, I’d feel the anger bubble and froth and start to overflow, and then just when my body felt like it would burst from the pressure, it would happen. I’d take a back seat, something else would take over, and all that rage would flow right from my body, into my fists, and onto my head, my chest, my stomach, my legs. I’d watch as my hands pulled my hair, as they pummeled my shoulders and thighs, and I’d wait. Eventually they’d flop to my side, my own again.

  If I’m being entirely honest, I didn’t hate It back then. Before It started escalating, back when the possessions were a relatively infrequent thing, there was something kind of nice about it. I’ve never liked being angry, although it’s always come easily to me. I can remember watching you play video games on the hardest setting, dying over and over and screaming and punching holes in your walls and thinking, Why doesn’t he just turn down the difficulty? Why doesn’t he just turn off the game?

  And when I’d ask, you’d say: “Well, getting pissed off is part of the fun.”

  I couldn’t relate to that. Still, I have to admit that when I took my body back from whatever made it hurt me, there was always an immense feeling of relief. My hands could be sore, my legs bruised, my head spinning, but at least I wasn’t mad anymore.

  It took a darker turn when I started high school. I met a girl with scars on her skin, and I discovered we shared a secret. Her monster used weapons instead of fists. Mine got ideas, but they didn’t last long. See, some things get noticed more than others. I guess my monster didn’t want to get noticed because after the first time someone asked how I managed to get a cut like that so high up on my leg, it went back to hitting. Everyone gets weird bruises sometimes.

  I know I sound crazy. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I am crazy. Being possessed makes you crazy. And I have evidence for the possession. I’m getting there.

  Have you ever looked in the mirror and seen someone else’s face? I have. I was at school, and I’d forgotten an assignment for class, one that was worth about a forth of the semester’s grade. I could barely hear the teacher’s lecture on irresponsibility, because I was ten times angrier with myself than she was. And after she was done offering me a portion of credit if I brought it in before homeroom the next day, I slipped away to a bathroom and It took over.

  It was the first time it happened near a mirror, and so it was the first time I ever got the full view of what I actually looked like, my fists smashing against various parts of me. I wasn’t too surprised by the hitting, I mean, I could always see that. It was my face that caught me off guard.

  It was twisted, and cruel, and entirely unlike the face I was used to seeing when I looked in a mirror. My features were there, but it wasn’t an expression I knew I could even make. But worst of all, when the jolt of horror ran through my body, everything stopped. My arms fell to the side, and my face turned toward the mirror, suddenly expressionless. Thinking it was over, I lifted my hands to fix my hair, except they didn’t go. I watched my legs move me forward, so that I was no more than an inch away from the mirror.

  There’s a distinct kind of dread that comes from looking into your own eyes and seeing something else. I watched my lips curl into a smile, and I saw my hand wave, and then I was alone.

  I went home early that day.

  Something about seeing it, and seeing It see me, made me ready to fight. After Mom dropped me off and headed back to work, I got on the internet and started researching what the hell was happening to me. I found this guru’s website, which included a self-guided exorcism. It was specifically for exorcising “emotional demons” which, based on the description, was what I was dealing with. The site said that some people were vulnerable to possession when feeling a particularly strong emotion, but if you could stay in control of what you were feeling, you could build up a wall that would keep whatever was possessing you out.

  “Own your emotions,” the blog post said. “Don’t let the demons take over. Feel what you’re feeling.”

  Of course, I couldn’t just conjure up being angry, so it had to wait until the next time something happened worth getting riled up about.

  It took a long time, almost a year. I’d memorized the instructions at that point, having read them maybe two to three times a week, waiting for the moment I’d get a chance to fight. Maybe something about knowing the battle was on the horizon made me avoid getting angry, or maybe I developed a coping mechanism, or maybe people just sucked less for a while, but for whatever reason I didn’t have to try to fight it until I discovered my boyfriend had cheated on me.

  That did the trick.

  It was just like it had been when I was little. I was mad and bursting and I felt like my chest would explode and I tried to hold it there, in that space. I recited my mantra in my head, one taken from the suggested list of mantras on the guru’s website:

  This is my anger. I decide what to do with it.

  For the first time, I felt it try to take over, but I was able to push back. My fists clenched: I unclenched them. My open hands swung back to land blows on my face, but the blows stopped before they made contact.

  This is my anger. I decide what to do with it.

  After several minutes of this back and forth, my mantra on repeat in my mind, it stopped. I hadn’t hit myself once, and I was entirely in control.

  I felt relieved for about ten seconds before a guttural sound burst from my throat. Suddenly, my legs catapulted me toward the nearby window and my fist made contact with the glass, shards slicing my skin open and tinkling as they fell to the ground beneath me.

  “If you do that again,” I heard my voice say, “I’ll make you regret it.”

  Again, some things get noticed more than others, and breaking a window gets noticed a lot. When I couldn’t properly explain why I’d punched a hole in the glass, you all got worried, and Mom sent me to that therapist. And that just made everything worse.

  Dr. Russ’s office was scattered with toys and colorful books. An oil diffuser filled the room with a strong-but-pleasant scent of lavender. We talked about her first: She told me she’d helped plenty of people overcome impulsive behaviors and self-harm, and she had “all the confidence in the world” that we could navigate this together.

  I wanted to tell her about my possession suspicions, but I knew how it sounded. That’s a level of nuts I wasn’t ready to identify with, and I didn’t want to give her any reason to put me away.

  So I told her the truth as well as I could: How the self-harm always seemed so out of my control. And she gave me a word, dissociation, and I held that word to my chest like an amulet. We talked about coping mechanisms and deep breathing, and she said that, if I wanted, we could look toward medicating if things didn’t improve.

  For the first time in a long time, I started to feel optimistic. Maybe I was just sick, and if there was a cure, why shouldn’t I take it?

  Later that night, though, when I was sitting alone in my room, all that optimism faded away. I felt a sudden pain in my hand and looked down to see my fingernails digging so hard into my palm I’d drawn blood. My jaw dropped as I looked down at the red dot, which grew, grew, grew, then rolled down onto my wrist. My voice said, “If that bitch gives you meds, I’ll make you flush them. Or take them all. We’ll see.”

  It left, and dread filled every inch of me. I hadn’t even been upset.

  A few times after that, I thought about telling my therapist what was going on. I even tried, once, but when I’d open my mouth to say it, my lips would close back up again. Instead of getting help, I got a very gentle lecture on how important it is to say what you’re thinking in therapy. I wanted to scream, but my vocal chords wouldn’t let me, and the hand in my sweatshirt pocket pinched t
he skin of my stomach hard through the fabric as I nodded, silent.

  I didn’t need to be angry anymore for It to happen. It would catch me off guard, while I was doing homework or getting the dog ready for a walk. I think the dog could tell. Whenever it would happen in front of her, she would growl low and bare her teeth at me. She never bit me, even though it seemed like she wanted to. I guess she knew I was in there, too.

  I even tried a church. It had been a long time since I’d believed in the kind of angels that would fly past your eyes in ethereal specks, but I still believed in something, and the something I’d witnessed made me hopeful there was something else that could fight it.

  It was a bust. The priest told me possession wasn’t real, and even if it were real, it wasn’t something he could handle. He told me to pray more, and he suggested therapy. I’d have sworn at him if I wasn’t already thinking of doing this, but it’s not as if I need more marks on my record.

  I think I’m most afraid that there is a hell, and that I’m going there now. On the other hand though, I’m being tortured by a demon so, you know, six of one and all. I think ideally it’ll just stop. I know I should think heaven is ideal but I’m just not . . . if I had that kind of optimism, I wouldn’t be writing this.

  I keep thinking about that scene in the first Avengers movie with Bruce Banner. He talks about trying to shoot himself but then: “He spat out the bullet.” I don’t think my thing has that kind of power, but I don’t really know. It doesn’t seem particularly interested in protecting me, though.

  Tell mom I’m sorry I lied for so long about this. But I just don’t know how else to end this. Let her read this if you think it will help. Don’t if you think it won’t. But I really am sorry. To both of you.

  LOKI’S DAUGHTER

  Rachel Anne Parsons

  Half of her is such a pretty girl,

  stand just this way, don’t face it head on,