Bad Girl in the Box

by Tim Curran

Days were uncomfortable keeping away from food and those who kept trying to feed her. Try this, they’d say. Have a little of that. Just a taste. At school, it was easy to wriggle free, but not so at home where the Evil Queen laid a sumptuous table night after night because she certainly could not conceive of doing less. Roast beef. Baked chicken. Glazed ham. Smoked chops. Fresh bread and homemade rolls. Vegetables she grew in her very own garden. Fruit pies and chocolate cakes. Appetizers of deviled eggs, Asian beef skewers, and bruschetta.

  The Evil Queen was hardly stupid. You didn’t ascend to the throne of bones by mere chanceyou clawed your way up over the carcasses of friends and family.

  She began to comment on the fact that Bad Girl was getting very thin and only picking at her food. Maybe Good Boy and Scary Girl didn’t pay much attention, nor even the second husband (who was as yet alive), but the Evil Queen knew something was amiss. She began watching Bad Girl, making her eat. In fact, making her stuff herself. Agitated, Bad Girl would slip off to the upstairs bathroom to throw up and sometimes, even that wasn’t enough, so she’d sneak off to the apothecary for vomit-inducing syrup of ipecac and laxatives, lots of laxatives. She’d drink the entire bottle of the former and swallow handfuls of the latter, slipping into some patch of unfrequented woods for a marathon regurgitation session, barely making it home before her bowels turned to water. The blood came from both ends eventually and this made her happy.

  At school, downtown, at the mall, even in the glass palace, Bad Girl would have frightening episodes of dizziness that would make everything rotate around her as if she was the center of the universe. She would lean up against walls, too weak to stand, falling on her face and tripping over her feet. Her heart would speed up, slow down, skip beats, seize painfully in her chest. She would find herself on her hands and knees, crawling, creeping about like a broken spider, her body covered in foul-smelling cold sweat, her eyesight blurring. But it would pass. It would always pass. A bit of broth would help. But just a bit.

  As vile as throwing up was, it made Bad Girl feel clean inside, purified, cleansed of not just awful fattening food but of bad thoughts and bad impulses, both of which were getting to be quite common. As discipline, formality, and pretense brought order to the world of the Evil Queen, so vomiting brought order to the world of Bad Girl. It was her thing. Her vice. Her secret. The Evil Queen suspected and was watching, but she was far-too self-involved and delusional to guess the truth.

  It was around this time that Bad Girl and Good Boy joined forces. They hung out and played games and told each other secrets, mostly concerning the Evil Queen and her hold on them. They plotted and planned, and this unified them in a common cause. Bad Girl invited Scary Girl to be part of it all, too, but Scary Girl kept her own counselshe preferred to hide in the shadows, to watch and wait.

  As her relationship with Good Boy became more complex and their scheming more involved, she would sometimes wake in the dead of night needing to throw up even though there was nothing in her belly. Regardless, the need to cleanse and purge became more pronounced.

  Hunger, hunger, hunger. Sometimes it was a joy, pure denial and ecstasy. Other times an agony beyond imagination. It sliced up from her abdomen like a straight razor, cutting through her soft white underbelly, laying it open, slicing deep into the marrow of her being until she bled. It made her smile because she controlled the hunger; it did not control her. It was delicious and exciting in its own way and part of hera very large partthought she deserved it. So she embraced the evil of starvation, grinning as it cut deeper and deeper, slowly, inexorable punishing the Bad Girl who was a plump, fleshy morsel with no right to live and, at the same time, bringing her morbidly beautiful skeleton that much closer to the surface, closer to birth.

  You and I, it would whisper to her at night as she lay in her bed, shaking and delusional. Together we will win and be set free.

  And always in the dark kingdom of the Evil Queen there was the awful thing Bad Girl saw in the mirror, the bloated, flabby horror that was Piggy. The image she detested. The image she had to torment and punish because the sight of it made something in her soul sick. She would stare at it and it would stare back with beady black eyes, its flaccid pink mouth grinning and saying, You better not eat. You better not have so much as a taste or a single tidbit or you will look like mea pink rolling mass of blubber. You better starve yourself to death until you are nothing but bones or I will own you and I’ll never let your skeleton run free.

  Yes, yes, yes!

  She knew her enemy by that pointit was her body, herself, the terrible thing in the mirror, all of which seemed to be joined in some awful communion, some danse macabre, whose ultimate goal was her destruction. Piggy wanted to drown her in fat, and her body wanted to expel her at all costs. But she could play at that game. The race was on and they’d just see who reached the graveyard first.

  Day Two

  1

  The weirdness did not stop rolling. In fact, it escalated.

  The next morning just before eleven, Bria decided to go down to the basement and look through some of her childhood things which she knew were boxed down there. Old books, magazines, clothes, awards and trophies, CDs—it was all down there. A nice diverting trip down memory lane. It would pass the time. Give her something else to think about besides how weird Alice had become.

  This was her intention…except the door was locked. Bria tried it several times before she was satisfied. She stood at the bottom of the steps, trying to come up with some very good (and plausible) reason why it might be locked and completely drew a blank.

  It’s never been locked before and it shouldn’t be locked now, she thought, the very idea worrying her. Not unless…not unless there’s something down here Alice doesn’t want me to see.

  But the idea of that made Bria smile. Alice was a vicious, petty automaton who was fabricated to be dull and would die dull with nothing but a lot of monotony and tedious OCD theatrics in-between. She wouldn’t be hiding anything. She couldn’t be hiding anything.

  This is what Bria thought in the front of her mind, but in the back where the shadows were thicker and the cobwebs strung from the rafters, she wasn’t so sure. From long experience, she knew there was nothing in the basement but the washer and dryer, the furnace and water heater, a pantry with shelves of dry goods and canned soup (arranged alphabetically, of course), and a large storage room where everything from boxes of mason jars to stacks of old board games accumulated.

  There was nothing else.

  But what if there was?

  She was remembering Alice sitting in the rocking chair last night, how weird she had been. She had approached that particular memory from a dozen vantage points while lying in bed last night and had not been able to come up with anything reasonable that would explain it.

  She’s by herself a lot and sometimes people like that develop habits that might seem eccentric or downright disturbing to outsiders.

  True, true.

  Bria sighed. She was making too much of this and she knew it. She would ask Alice about it and it would turn out the basement door was locked for some silly reason.

  But you will not laugh at her nor show any derision, got it?

  Smiling, Bria turned and Alice was standing at the top of the steps. Bria gasped. Alice simply stood there, staring down at her, head cocked curiously to the side.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Bria said, “I…I was coming down here to get some of my old stuff, but the door is locked. Since when do we lock the basement door?”

  “We don’t.”

  “Then…”

  Mother Alice licked her lips with a very wet, unpleasant sound. “It was the furnace guy. He locked it when he cleaned the furnace. He thought we wanted it locked.”

  Bria nodded. That seemed reasonable. “Do you have the key?”

  “No, I lost it.”

  She’s lying, Bria thought. She’s flat-out lying.

 
Alice never lost anything. It wasn’t her way. She was far too manic for something like that. She’d never lost anything in her life save her virginity (and Bria was not convinced of that). She still had her report cards from grade school protected in plastic archival sleeves. She had rose petals from her senior prom pressed in a book. Her wedding corsage was in the freezer wrapped up like some ancient relic. Good God, she had Girl Scout badges stored in manila envelopes, a Good Penmanship Award from fifth grade, a set of Nancy Drew mysteries from junior high, and a seating chart from her wedding reception.

  This woman did not lose things.

  The very idea was unthinkable.

  “Have you called a locksmith?” Bria asked her because she had to say something.

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I’ll get around to it.”

  With that, Alice turned and went away. Bria waited there another moment or two, frightened but not sure why, then she practically ran up the steps.

  2

  Alice did not relax until she was upstairs with the door to her bedroom closed and locked, then her entire body went limp.

  She barely made it to the bed.

  When she did, she sat there, her head spinning, sweat running down her face. She licked her lips again and again as if she was searching for a taste she could not find.

  How long could she go on like this? Bria was complicating things. Making what should have been simple and perfect by design unbearably complicated. The door to the basement was locked because that’s where the meat was. It had to be stored behind lock and key so no one else would get it, but Bria was getting suspicious.

  That would be trouble.

  Alice heard voices. She stepped over to the door, sliding down to her knees and placing an ear against it. Bria was talking on the phone, but it was impossible to hear just what she was saying.

  She’s plotting, she’s plotting against you.

  Maybe Bria was calling the neighbors, those hippy Geroys or that insufferable snoop Mr. Bagmore. Alice thought it was certainly possible. Probably telling them about the locked basement door. She could hear Bria’s voice in her head, That’s where she keeps it! She says she lost the key to the door, but I know better!

  Alice opened the door and sniffed the air.

  She was sniffing for the meat. If Bria had gotten it, then she would smell it. Not just on her lips and on her breath, but inside her, deep inside her.

  Alice went down to all fours as a convulsion of pain rolled through her. The world spun. The hunger was like steel blades laying her open. She bit down on her fist so she would not cry out. She couldn’t afford that. If she did that, then Bria would know. She would sense her hunger.

  As more convulsions rolled through her, Alice bit down on her fist again, this time until she drew blood. Saliva oozed from her mouth. Her eyeballs rotated drunkenly in their sockets.

  Oh, the hunger, the hunger…

  On her belly, she slid along the carpet to the stairs, drool hanging from her mouth. Her eyes were bleary and unfocused. Her teeth gnashed together.

  Bria wasn’t talking now.

  What was she up to?

  Then Alice heard the back door slam shut. She was going out, out to meet her friends so they could plot how to get the meat. Nearly incapacitated by hunger pangs in her belly, Alice raced for the basement to satisfy her inner demons.

  3

  Bria was pretty sure Aiden thought she was overreacting to Alice’s behavior. But he was in a hurry and had to get over to Sicilian Kitchen for his shift knocking out pizzas for the college crowd. He was distracted. He didn’t have time to think it through.

  This was what she kept telling herself, because she did not like the idea that maybe she was just being paranoid.

  But what if she was?

  No, she refused to accept that. Alice had been weird last night, weirder than usual. And certainly, no better today. Bria sensed something was going on beneath the surface of not only Alice but the neighborhood at large. It was just a feeling, but it persisted the way bad, and often correct, intuitions did.

  She decided what she needed to do was to talk to someone. But who? Who could she discuss something like this with? Surely not Mr. Bagmore or even Pammy Geroy. She liked them, but this was not for them. She had hoped to hash it out with Aiden. So much for that.

  She walked on, feeling that same uncanny sense of emptiness she had felt last night. The stillness was nearly unbearable. The nabe gave her the same feeling you got in little towns that rolled up the sidewalks after 8:00 p.m.—an eerie, crawling sense of vacancy.

  But she knew Birch Street was not deserted.

  Then why does it feel like nobody lives here?

  That was the question. There was nobody around. Nobody out. No lawn zombies watering and seeding and pruning. No kids in the yards. No women tending to their flowers. No men washing their cars. Nada, nada, nada.

  She was certain it couldn’t be her imagination.

  She leaned against Mr. Bagmore’s fence and lit a cigarette. It was something she had not planned on doing in public, not on Birch Street. She didn’t want everyone to know she had picked up the filthy habit in college (even though, truth be told, both Autumn Geroy and she had smoked in high school, thinking it gave them an edgy, dangerous appearance) because it would go straight back to Mother Alice.

  Now, leaning there, sunglasses on, the sun warm against her legs, she lit up and casually smoked, as if daring someone to mention the fact.

  No one did.

  No one passed and no one approached her from any of the houses. Yet, for all that, she felt watched. She turned around, trying to get a feel for it, casting like a dog for scent. It was there, but it was hard to say where it was coming from. She tried to dismiss it as imagination, but the sensation was so strong it nearly sucked the wind from her lungs.

  Feeling a chill, Bria tossed her cigarette and walked straight to the house of Lara Stromm. As she did so, she noticed with rising anxiety the ghost town feel of the nabe once again. It made her throat feel dry, her palms sweat. Take it easy or you’re going to have a panic attack. But she could not take it easy, because that feeling of emptiness was not only rising, it was spiking. She noticed lawns that were half-mown, bikes and Big Wheels abandoned on the sidewalks, Weed Eaters and hedge trimmers dropped in yards. And at some houses, overflowing garbage bags on porches and trash in driveways.

  This is not Birch Street, she told herself. This is not how things are done on Birch Street.

  And if she needed more proof of that, it came in spades. As she made her way to the Stromm house, she looked across the way and nearly fell over. Mrs. Standish was watching her from the hedges, peering through leafy branches.

  What the fuck?

  But that wasn’t what made Bria nearly fall over, it was the fact that when Mrs. Standish realized she’d been seen, she jumped out of the hedges and ran around the side of the house.

  And she was stark naked.

  By the time Bria reached Lara’s house, she was practically running herself.

  4

  Mr. Hammerberg watched the girl out on the sidewalk and wondered for some time who she was. Her face was familiar, but he just couldn’t place her. Funny. Sometimes his mind got like that, where he could not remember the most obvious things. It was age. That’s what it had to be. When he told himself that it had been markedly worse since he tasted the meat, he shook his head vehemently from side to side because such a thing could not be possible. The meat brought only goodness, and he refused to accept anything else. But that girl. That…girl. Then it came to him. Oh yes, that was Bria Candliss whose mother was Alice and whose father was dead. Stepfather was dead, too, now that he thought about it

  Wait.

  Oh yes, now things were coming back to him. He had seen her last night, invited her to share his meat. She had not taken him up on it. Not yet. But she would. If he could just get her in the house and
get her to taste it, then she would obey him forever. The meat would do that to you. It could give you great power and give you a great weakness at the same time.

  Mr. Hammerberg turned from the window. On the kitchen table was a magazine he’d been reading. He leafed through it, but none of it made any sense to him. He tossed it to the floor.

  On the stovetop was a pan of chicken and rice he was going to eat yesterday, before the meat fell.

  He brought his nose down and sniffed it. Quickly, he turned away. He had never smelled anything so perfectly awful in his life. Like garbage. Garbage rotting to slime.

  He went over to the counter. There was a shank of bloody meat on a cutting board. He licked his lips, slicing it into thin fillets, trembling with desire for it. He placed one in his mouth, and it melted on his tongue like butter. He grabbed another, finally stuffing them all into his mouth and savagely chewing them. Delicious. Salty and coppery with blood, sweet and seasoned and unbelievable.

  Pink juice running down his chin, still chewing, he said, “She’ll choose us sooner or later, Joey. She really won’t have a choice.”

  Across the room, there was the moist sound of a tongue licking lips. “Of course, she will, Dad,” a voice said.

  5

  When Lara finally answered the doorbell, she just stared through the screen door as if she had no idea who Bria was. She did not smile, did not emote. In fact, she did nothing. Her lips were pulled into a severe line and her eyes did not blink.

  “Lara?”

  Still nothing. Her eyes were shiny, almost translucent. Very much like Alice’s, only maybe worse. When Bria was in grade school, she had a rock tumbler. With it, you could polish agates and jaspers to a lustrous gleam. Rocks looked nice like that, but not eyes.

  Bria found that she was shaking inside. “I’ve come at a bad time,” she said, stepping back and down the steps. “I’ll stop by another time.”