by Tim Curran
You’re imagining things.
Maybe, maybe not. The thing was to keep walking because the exercise would relax her. When your mind acted funny, sometimes good physical exercise was the only cure. It brought mind and body back together again. So, Bria walked. She saw no one, yet she could feel them in their houses. They had not gone anywhere. It was as if they were waiting for something.
“Awful quiet,” Sady said.
“Weird.”
“Whole neighborhood is weird. What did you think of Alice?”
“You saw her?”
“In her rocking chair? Sure. She was out of it. Then again, she’s been out of it a long time.”
Sady stuffed popcorn into her mouth. A few stray fragments were pasted to her lips, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. She kept eating.
The smell of it made Bria feel weak inside. She wanted to seize the bag and devour every last bit. If Sady knew what it was doing to her, she gave no indication of the same. She kept eating and eating, crunching popcorn and licking butter off her lips.
Bria refused to watch her anymore; now the sights and sounds were making her nauseous. She studied the neighborhood in detail as they walked…though all she could think of was the salty, buttery taste of popcorn.
They were almost to the end of the block when she saw Mr. Hammerberg leaning on his fence. He was, of course, older than the last time she had seen him face to face. His hair was whiter and there were more lines etched into his face. But for all this, his eyes were very intense, very alive. Maybe too alive. Like Alice’s, they seemed reflective, an eerie shine to them.
“Things now get weirder,” Sady said, smirking.
“Ssshh,” Bria told her.
“I was hoping to see you,” Mr. Hammerberg said.
And Bria didn’t know if it was the eyes, but he gave her the creeps. There was something strange about him. Like the nabe itself, he just seemed off somehow. You know what it is. You know exactly what it is. This person looks like him, but it’s not him. It’s like something else is wearing his skin. Oh, now that was really crazy, but this was most definitely the day for it.
“I was planning on stopping to say hi,” Bria told him, even though it was a flat-out lie. “You were on my list.”
He nodded. “Did I ever tell you how fond Joey was of you?” he asked.
“Oh boy,” Sady said under her breath.
Joey was his son who was killed in the first Gulf War. Bria just stared at him. He was losing it. She was born in 1995…and Joey died in like 1991. There was no way he could have been fond of someone who was born after he died.
She swallowed. “Oh…no.”
He grinned now, but it never touched his eyes which were like black smoke. Only his face smiled. “Yes, he liked you very much. I was talking to him the other night, and I mentioned you and he said what a nice girl you were.”
Bria felt a chill at her belly that spread up to her chest. She knew she should probably just ignore this. He was getting on in years; maybe he was starting to lose it. Even if he was not, she knew from experience that it was not a good idea to challenge someone’s delusions. It could not only confuse them but provoke a violent outburst.
But her mouth betrayed her. “But Mr. Hammerberg…your son, he’s—”
“Dead? Oh yes, but I still talk to him. Every night we have a chat. It soothes my soul, and it helps him cope in the afterlife.”
Bria said nothing. He was delusional, but she didn’t suppose there was any real danger in it.
Sady nibbled her popcorn, but kept out of it.
Mr. Hammerberg stared up at the sky as if he was looking for something. “Yes, Joey always liked you. But he thought it was a shame that your mother was such a cunt. But we can’t pick our parents, now, can we?”
Sady giggled, and he narrowed his eyes.
Bria was shocked beyond words. Mr. Hammerberg was a total asshole as a teacher back in the day. Nobody liked him. “Hammy,” as he was known, had a habit of tormenting his students and probably because he was miserable and misery loved company. Regardless, even this was out of character.
His eyes fixed on hers, he said, “I don’t imagine Donna would have picked me for a husband if she had to do it all over again. I was terrible to her. I drove her to take the pills, you know. I kept at her day in and day out until she killed herself.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Bria could say as she made her getaway.
Mr. Hammerberg did not try to stop her. He watched her closely and she could feel his awful eyes on her, but it was not with anything as pedestrian as lust.
“Bria,” he called. “If you get hungry, I’ll share what I have with you.”
She had no idea what that meant and did not want to know.
Sady started giggling again. “Well, well, well,” she said. “Welcome home, Bree. Welcome back to Birch Street where all the nuts don’t necessarily come in jars.”
Bria didn’t know what to think. Mr. Hammerberg was delusional, possibly dangerously delusional. She supposed she should tell someone, but what could they do? Nobody really liked him. Nobody was really close to him. And nobody would really care.
Sady finished off her bag of popcorn. She stood there, watching Bria with a mocking smile on her face. Her lips and chin glistened with butter.
“It’s not just Alice,” she said.
And that was probably the most disturbing part of all.
37
Briacom: aiden u there? need 2 talk. world going crazee. i called u but u did not answer! this is vitally important! i mean it! and no i’m not being dramatic!!!
Briacom: k. u r formally pissing me off. i got sht 2 tell! alice is nuts. mr. h totally whacked. Sady scaring me. no deets for u.
Briacom: i formally disown yr ass.
Chapter One
Once upon a time in a place not so far away, there lived an Evil Queen who ruled in a teetering glass palace. She was a wicked, interfering creature who held the destinies of those in her sterile little kingdom tightly in her withered hands. She was fate and fortune, misery and discontent. She had buried two husbands and lorded over three children, whose names were Bad Girl, Good Boy, and Scary Girl. She watched over them. Studied them. Manipulated them. They were her marionettes, and she worked them as such, pulling their strings and jerking their reigns, making them dance and curtsy when the occasion was right, but mostly crawl on their knees and squat in the corner where they would neither be seen nor heard. She was dark royalty, and they were her serfs.
Now Good Boy was easily led, eager to please, and generally happy in any surroundings. Something the Evil Queen recognized right away and put to her own nefarious uses. Bad Girl was a bit of a problem child, of course, for she recognized the Evil Queen’s plans and went out of her way to interfere with their fruition. And Scary Girl…she was hard to know. She was either touched by God or cursed by the Devil. A peculiar child whose intellect and experience seemed far beyond her years. A shadow had been cast over her and she made many in the Evil Queen’s court uneasy.
This is the story of how the Queen was usurped, how the bloated black widow spider that sat astride her tangled web fell to earth, and how her children suffered for it. It is not a happy story. In fact, it is deranged, cold-blooded, and quite unpleasant.
Chapter Two
Long before she was held prisoner in the Dark Castle and her mind was sucked from her skull and replaced with a steel gray void that was equally as empty as her stomach, Bad Girl began to put a few things together. She linked a few rusty chains of logic, did some basic math, studied cause and effect, and ultimately analyzed what she had come up with. What she learned was this: her body was conspiring against her.
It was a perfectly mad hypothesis, pure lunacy at its core and pure paranoia at its roots. Yet, once she had conceived of the idea, she found it impossible to reject. Her body hated her. More so, it wanted her out. It despised her for the terrible things she had done to it. It wa
nted to punish her, show her pain and torment, and an everlasting hunger that was without bottom and could never be satisfied. It wanted her to hurt. For in agony there was purity, and in suffering, deliverance.
She was a demon that needed to be expelled, exorcized, and her body was willing to go to great lengths to make that happen.
Feeling this way was not as surprising as it should have been. There had always been things that did not add up, she knew, strange thoughts and impulses and obsessions she could not understand nor contain. She suppressed some and neutralized others, but, regardless, a few always slipped free. Sometimes they got her into trouble and sometimes they just festered in her mind, growing moss and blooming with rot.
When she was twelve, for example, she developed a neurotic, manic fear of shadows, the dark, the attic, her neighbors, of going outside and, worse, of shutting herself up indoors. She alienated herself from her friends, got in trouble at school, smarted off to teachers and any fool stupid enough to get within striking distance. She took to studying the moon at night with rising suspicion, fearing it would open like a bloodshot eye and stare down at her, knowing she knew all about it, that it wasn’t a natural satellite at all. She drew detailed maps of the night sky because she had her concerns about that, too, that the stars routinely changed positions. Even the corners of her room were not to be trustedthe angles might change at any given moment (if she stared at them long enough, they frequently did).
Her mind was a whirlwind of chaos. She could trust nothing and no one. That was her first true taste of the anxiety disorder that would haunt her most of her life, manifesting itself in the form of panic attacks, irrational fears, and insomnia. Haunted by flashbacks to events she was uncertain of and morbidly self-conscious, she overcompensated with compulsive behavior and perfectionism. And that, of course, led to its own prison within the walls of the glass palace of the Evil Queen.
What Bad Girl hated most were her own looks. Her hair was the wrong color and her face was the wrong shape. Her thighs were too fat and her belly not as flat as it should have been. She spent hours before the mirror, scratching and pinching herself and very often punching and cutting herself. She hated the person in the mirror and after a while, she became certain that the person in the mirror hated her, too.
In her mind, she referred to the person in the mirror as “Piggy.” It seemed fitting in that there was something fleshy, pink, and porcine about her. Her cheeks were full, her belly rounded, her lips blubbery, and her fingers pudgy. Whenever Bad Girl studied her unwholesome nakedness in the mirror, Piggy would scowl and sneer at her. Quite often she would laugh at Bad Girl, wiggle her plump pink tongue at her obscenely, and quite often squeeze her breasts or shove oily fingers into herself.
Piggy was a monster. Every time Bad Girl saw her, Piggy would get closer and closer to the glass until her foul breath steamed the mirror itself. “One of these days, you fat little tripe,” she’d say in her gurgling voice, “I’m going to get out and then…then I’ll have you all to myself. I’ll make you eat. I’ll shove food down your throat and you’ll never throw it up. I’ll see to it that you become a bloated, lolling slug.”
Bad Girl, regardless of her attitude and mouth and repressed anger, was terrified of Piggy. Piggy was a greased and swollen pagan horror that demanded sacrifice. Piggy had devoured Bad Girl’s reflection and taken its place. The only way she could fight against it was to stand before the mirror and torture herself; whatever she did to her own flesh was done to Piggy. So, the pinching, scratching, cutting, and self-flagellation became a regular thing. It kept Piggy from getting too powerful. If Piggy got strong enough, she would sneak out of the mirror one moonlit night and that could never be allowed to happen. Piggy had already told her what she would do to her when and if that happened, so Bad Girl was very devoted to hurting herselfit was the only thing that weakened Piggy and kept her down.
Chapter Three
Somewhere during this, Bad Girl became cognizant of the fact that there was something beautiful inside her. On the outside she was flabby and plump perhaps, but deep under all that unappealing, grotesque flab there was morbid beautya skeleton. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? How had it not occurred to her? Down there deep under all that ugly meat and tissue, dwelled something beautiful and pure and white and shining.
That was the real her.
That was whom she had been trying to set free these many years. It wanted out. It wanted to show her how exquisitely lovely she was once divorced of all that unnecessary bulk. In her mind, she could well imagine it as she ran hands up and down her body, feeling it hiding in there. Hiding? No, it was not hidingit was trapped. Held prisoner in that disgusting carapace of flesh and blood and gooey, wet anatomy. Even now it strained to get free. The pristine white architecture of it haunted her and made her heart beat fast. It was tall and narrow, slender and immaculate, a living osseous sculpture, a willowy framework of bone with a grinning skull poised elegantly on top, offering the world a macabre and knowing grin.
There had to be a way to set her true self free and, of course, she thought of it as she drew chalk skeletons on the attic wallsdancing, leaping, jumping, lounging skeletons, so sophisticated and chic.
There really was only one way.
And that’s how it began.
That’s how she acquired power over the Evil Queen that was her mother and Piggy that lived in the mirror. Starvation was the key. Eating sometimes, yes, then purging immediately. That was the trick.
After school when the Evil Queen was away, Bad Girl would stand before the open refrigerator after days of starving herself, bingeing on cheese and salami, fruit and cold apple pie, gnawing on broasted chicken legs and shoving creamy white globs of Cool Whip into her mouth until she fell to her knees, sick to her stomach. But still the emptiness within remained, so she’d eat chips and candy bars, plates of pizza rolls and Hot Pockets. Stuffing, stuffing, stuffing herself until she was not just physically ill but trapped in a cage of self-loathing.
Then, disgusted and filled with poison, she’d crawl down the hallway to the bathroom, close the door, lock it, and shove two fingers down her throat until she found the gag spot, and vomit happily until the dry heaves came and there was blood in her mouth. Maybe not with pleasure, but with satisfaction because all her fears and anxieties had been swallowed and then retched into the toilet. Maybe it didn’t make her feel good about herself, but it made her whole. And the skeleton within, her secret desire, was that much closer to the surface.
Ever since she was a child, the Evil Queen teased Bad Girl about her appetite. As she devoured a second piece of chocolate cake at the dinner table, the Queen would say, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” As she ate the last piece of pizza, saying there was no sense in it going to waste, the Queen, of course, would say, “Better to waste than to waist.” And, later when Bad Girl thought about it, it was the Evil Queen that had first taken to calling her Piggy when she was seven or eight years old.
There was something extremely wrong about that, but Bad Girl did not know this, not until she was imprisoned in the Dark Castle.
Year after year, the Evil Queen kept her palace in order and those that dwelled in her kingdom had best know their places and act accordingly. It was important to maintain the proper façade and practice the proper etiquette. This was drummed into Bad Girl’s head again and again. The familytheir familymust appear stable and happy. They needed to appear as the perfect family to all who saw them. Nothing was more important than this. The Evil Queen had a checklistperhaps written upon the parchment skin of one of her victimsand she checked off all the things that must be in place item by item. When all was well, she was happy, she was content and jubilant; when something was amiss, she would tear your heart from its cage of bone and eat its bloody well-muscled mass before your shocked eyes.
By the time Bad Girl turned thirteen, the Evil Queen made sure she understood a few things. She would not put up with any teenag
e melodrama, mood swings, rebelliousness, temper tantrums, mouth, or childish outbursts. That was for other girls. The daughter of the Evil Queen must by all means practice a certain restraint and show the world a decorum born of rigid self-discipline and proper breeding. Nothing less was acceptable.
When Bad Girl discovered the skeleton inside her and the awful thing in the mirror that watched her, she began to draw great pleasure from breaking the Evil Queen’s rules one after the other. Maybe, in this way, she kept the Evil Queen from learning about her eating disorder, her melancholia, her aberrant urge to set her own skeleton free.
There, of course, were punishments.
The majority were psychological. Very often the Evil Queen would confine Bad Girl to her room or forbid any leisure activities and sometimes (tee-hee) she would not let Bad Girl have supper. Now and again, the Evil Queen would ramp things up by slapping her or pulling her hair, twisting it painfully in her fists, much as she had pinched and poked Bad Girl as a child when she did not follow the rules. But, of course, by that time, Bad Girl had become so very good at punishing herself in order to weaken Piggy in the mirror, that there was little the Evil Queen could do to her that she didn’t do to herself on a daily basis.
Chapter Four
Nights were an awful time for Bad Girl. The bingeing and purging was taking its toll. Whenever she laid down, her head would pound mercilessly and her stomach would flip-flop in queasy waves. Her throat was puffy and sore from the vomiting. Her back and belly and arms hurt from being lashed with a belt and cut with razors and poked by needles. No part of her body really felt good, maybe just a small warm space in the back of her mind where she often retreated to (and planned out her vengeance against the Evil Queen).