I could have suffered that fate. You could have, in that writer’s moment of poising fingers above a keyboard, finding out we don’t have the cash. But I didn’t. You didn’t. We were able to step off, turn a half circle, finally rise.

  WHEN WE ARE OPEN WIDE

  KRISTI DeMEESTER

  Momma tells me not to cry when my first period comes. There in the bathroom with my yellow duck shower curtain and my vanilla sugar body splash, she pulls my underwear to the floor and stares at the dark brown stain.

  “Oh, honey,” she says, and I bite down on my bottom lip.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and she frowns. The underwear disappears inside of her fist, and she looks at me. Her eyes are bright and her hair is falling out of her ponytail in little pieces. She looks the way she looked when Daddy would swat her with a kitchen towel and call her his girl. The way she looked when the babies who would have been my sisters were still inside of her.

  That was before. This is now.

  She leaves me in the bathroom, and I run the tap as hot as I can stand it and fill the tub. Around me, the water goes pink, and I try to ignore the thing building in the deepest, secret parts of me. Something with teeth and claws. Something that draws blood.

  I wait for the water to go cold, and then Momma is at the door.

  “Use these,” she says and holds out the little pink parcel I’ve seen so many other girls at school tuck into their purses, their faces clear and smiling. Like they know something I don’t know.

  Before I can hold out my hand, she tosses it on the floor along with a clean pair of underwear and is gone. I remember health class, remember the week they separated the girls and the boys, and so I pull myself out of the water and dry the parts of me that aren’t tender and aching.

  I do what the video explained and pull the underwear up my legs, but the terrible full ache in my belly doesn’t quit, and I think I might explode.

  My hands are on my abdomen, and I press down and down, but the pain doesn’t get any better, and I think I can feel the outline of something sharp. The hooked edge of a tooth. The beast that’s come to live inside of me.

  “Get out. Get the fuck out.” I mouth the cuss word, try it on to see how it feels, and the feeling of electricity shoots up my spine. The word feels good on my tongue. Heavy. I say it aloud, again and again, a never ending line of “get the fuck out” but the monster doesn’t listen.

  I spend the afternoon with my quilt pressed against that dull ache, and Momma leaves me alone. I can hear her in the kitchen. She makes small noises like an animal, and I realize she’s crying again. I should go to her, but everything inside of me twists, and I can’t move.

  We didn’t bury them when they died inside of Momma. My sisters.

  I was five the first time it happened, and I asked where they would go if they weren’t inside of her stomach any more. She looked at me for a long time, her tongue darting over her lips, and then she walked away.

  The second and then the third time it happened, I didn’t ask Momma anything. I stayed in my room like a good girl and tried not to hear her when she started screaming.

  When Dad found Momma in the backyard, digging through the dirt, her mouth a dark, smeared hole, he told her he couldn’t do it anymore. That he couldn’t pretend.

  I cried when he left, but after awhile it was the same as anything else you learn how to forget.

  I hope that’s what it’ll be like with the bleeding, but curled around my quilt, I cannot think of anything except this deep, gnawing thing that won’t stop. That whatever has come awake inside of me will always be watching from somewhere. Pale eyes peeking out from any hole it can.

  I don’t know when I fall asleep, but when I open my eyes, my room is dark. Between my legs is the feeling of something slick. I’ve bled through the pad and my pants.

  Moving slowly, I sit up, but as I do, I hear something shift. The sound of something holding its breath. The sound of something lifting a foot only to put it back down.

  I scan the room but see nothing. The chair in the corner piled with clean clothes Momma told me to hang up. My dresser with its collection of porcelain hearts Dad would give me on my birthday. Nothing strange. Nothing that could have made a sound.

  “I had to bury them. Bury them so it wouldn’t find them. Not ever.” The voice drifts up to me like smoke.

  Under my bed. My mother’s voice.

  “Momma?” I say because even though I know it’s her, I don’t want it to be her. If it’s her, everything is like it was before. The way it was when Dad left, and I don’t want to think of her like that, her belly still swollen as she crawled through the dirt muttering.

  A hand snakes up from beneath the bed and grasps my ankle. I can’t help it. I scream.

  “Hush,” Momma says, and her fingernails are sharp. “Listen. Can you hear it moving? It’s inside of you. Isn’t it? You can feel it? I never gave it a name.”

  “Don’t,” I say, but her nails dig into my calf, and I don’t wipe away the tears tracing a path to my mouth.

  “If I could put them back, I would. Pull them out of the dirt and swallow them down and down like a handful of seeds.”

  When the hand disappears, I close my eyes tight. If I’m very quiet, if I wait, she’ll leave. Take herself back to her bedroom and sleep late, and then it’ll be like it never happened. In the morning, the sun will light up all of those places where no one should look, and we can go back to pretending everything is fine.

  The door clicks when she leaves, and I spend the rest of the night listening to the monster who has come to live in my belly.

  Sometimes, I think I hear it whisper.

  I close my eyes, but I do not sleep, and I wonder if this razor sharp pain is the thing that stole my sisters.

  If it was always inside Momma. If it was always inside of me.

  ***

  I’m sixteen when Mom finally meets someone else. “Someone nice. Not like your father,” she says when she turns her cell phone to me. The picture on the screen is of some fat, balding fuck who looks like he coaches girls soccer to get his rocks off. I wrinkle my nose and shrug at her.

  “He’s very funny, Brianne.”

  “Sure,” I tell her.

  “He never had kids,” she says, and I put my ear buds in. The very last thing I want to hear about is the possibility my mother might get laid again. Especially by that heaving sack of flab. She rolls her eyes and grabs her keys.

  “Back at six,” she shouts at me. I turn up my volume, and Nine Inch Nails drowns her out. I wait for her to back out of the driveway, for her car to turn left onto Yorkshire, for the headlights to disappear.

  Gone. We have three hours. I stare at the text message, my finger hovering over the little green button. It’s stupid to think about it. Stupid to hesitate. I send the message. Ian responds in under a minute. On my way. Be there in fifteen.

  I arrange and then rearrange the pillows on my bed, trace another line of perfume down my wrist, behind my ears, down my neck and between my breasts. All of the places I think I want Ian’s fingers and tongue to touch.

  Sit, then stand. Drift to the window and wrap my fingers through the curtains as I watch the road. Pull the ever-present bottle of wine out of the refrigerator door and take three massive pulls. Brush my teeth for the third time. Change my bra into something with lace. Something thin.

  He doesn’t knock when he comes in. “You just keep your door unlocked like that?” he says. His skin is dark, and his eyes are the color of a storm.

  “I knew it was you.”

  “What if it wasn’t me? What if it was someone else?” he says, and then his lips are against my throat, his teeth tracing my collarbone, and I forget everything that came before.

  When he asks me, when his body presses me down so every inch of me is weighted by his skin, I cannot breathe. I nod my head. It’s enough.

  I know it will hurt, know there will be blood, but all I can think of is the salt taste of his skin.

  When he pushes himself inside of me, the pain is quick and sharp. Like a bee sting. Like a shot at the doctor. But more than the pain is a strangeness. The feeling of something that doesn’t belong to me moving inside of my body. A wriggling, squirming thing.

  I thought I understood. No, I want to tell him. Stop. But there’s a part of me that’s built a bridge between the pain and something that almost feels better than anything I’ve ever known.

  I can feel it building somewhere I can’t see, and I hold my breath, but he is finished and moving away from me, and I want to wrap my arms around him and tell him to wait. My hands flutter against his back, and then there is only damp air above me.

  He kisses my shoulder. “It’ll be better next time,” he says, and I believe him because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Even though he never touched the tender, throbbing spot between my legs. Even though he didn’t look at me – not even once – while he was inside of me.

  “Sure,” I say, but he doesn’t hear. He’s pulling on his jeans, and I’m watching the muscles in his back flex like a snake moving across bare earth.

  “I’m meeting Kevin and Gerry for a pick up game. Want to come along and watch?”

  I turn my back to him and extend my arm across the place where his body was only moments before. It’s already cooled. Like he was never even there. If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine he wasn’t. Maybe it would have been better that way. Maybe this was a mistake.

  “Hey,” he says and sits next to me, places a hand in the curve between my hips and my rib cage. “Don’t be mad. I promised them I would come.”

  I paste a smile on my lips. “Go. Have fun. I have a paper due Monday anyway.”

  “Next weekend, okay? We’ll go somewhere special. I promise.”

  “Sure,” I say again, and he winks at me and is gone.

  He doesn’t lock the door behind him – I don’t hear the click – and I don’t get up to fix his mistake. If someone does get into the house, does come into my bedroom and carve me up into tiny bits, it’ll be his fault.

  My legs feel heavy, and everything aches. The monster I have come to know, come to understand, is slowly coming awake, reaching out claws and baring teeth from the deep place where I tucked it away.

  I ball my sheets up as tightly as I can. If Mom asks about the stain, I’ll tell her I got my period and slept too heavy. She doesn’t even know about Ian. At least she doesn’t know about the text messages or the pictures. She still thinks he was my lab partner last semester. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  And maybe that’s what we are. Less. Less than, like in math class with that little mouth that points away like it’s running from all of the bullshit behind it.

  In the shower, I don’t look down at the blood at my feet. If I pretend there’s nothing inside of me, that I’m clean and empty and nothing more than a thin casing of skin holding in my breath, it doesn’t hurt as much.

  I count backwards from ten. “Get the fuck out,” I say again – like I did when I was younger – but the thing inside of me doesn’t listen. It never listens.

  The blood pools at my feet, and the teeth that live inside of me are stained crimson.

  ***

  “We’re pregnant! Eighteen weeks!” My mother is standing in the kitchen in bare feet. Her toenails are painted a bright, glittering pink. A color for a twenty-five-year-old, not a forty-eight-year-old.

  Damien stands behind her with his hands on her shoulders. He glances at me and then away, shifts his mass from one foot to the other.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Watch your language, Brianne.”

  I clamp my teeth together. “Fine. Are you fucking joking me?”

  She closes her eyes and rubs them. Her mascara smears, but I don’t tell her.

  Damien opens his mouth. Closes it when he sees me glaring at him, and I want to tell him it was smart of him to keep his idiot trap closed.

  “I’m happy, Brianne. Really happy. You of all people should understand how much I’ve wanted this.”

  I stare at her but don’t say anything. Her grin is shit-eating, and I want to shake her. Shake her until she remembers all of the times before. You’re too old. It’s not safe, I want to tell her, but she is still smiling ear to ear, and I can’t bring myself to do it.

  Instead, I open my arms to her, and she pulls me in tight, tight, tight like the way she used to when I was a little girl. Like she used to before she put all of those babies into the ground.

  “It’ll be different this time. Not like before. I haven’t heard it, haven’t felt it for so long now.” Her whisper is heavy and wet in my ear, and I try not to flinch, try not to pull back from her, and then she has moved away and is turning back to Damien and wrapping her arms around him.

  “A baby. Can you believe it?” she tells him, and his smile is soft, tentative. Almost as if he can’t believe it himself.

  I turn away from them and walk down the hallway of this house I barely know; this house Mom and Damien decided to build. A fresh start.

  Framed pictures of them line the hallways. My mother in her wedding dress, ivory and lace and tight against her body. Damien smiling with some sugary cocktail in his hand and watching a steel drum band. Their honeymoon.

  There are no pictures of me.

  Once upon a time, in another house, there were pictures like these hanging on the walls. My father holding me for the first time, his face tired but smiling. Me at three dressed as a witch for Halloween and crying because I dropped my orange pumpkin shaped bucket. My mother holding sparklers in each hand as my father chased her across the front lawn.

  I memorized the edges of those frozen images, but now, far away from the ghost of the little girl I once was, I’ve begun to forget. Sometimes I wonder if that life even existed. The one before the babies. The one before my mother lost herself.

  I close my bedroom door on the sounds of my mother’s laughter and stare at the bare walls. I should put something on them – posters or artwork or pictures of the friends I left behind when we moved. Maybe then this place wouldn’t feel like it wanted to push me out.

  My phone glows from the spot I left it on my bed. Ian. Miss you, it says.

  I guess he might. I’m still not sure if what I feel when I think of him means I miss him, too.

  I spend the rest of the afternoon in my bedroom reading Jane Austen for school, and Mom doesn’t come in to talk to me. Once I think she might. I hear her footsteps in the hallway, but then she calls to Damien, asks doesn’t he think the back bedroom would be the best for a nursery with all of the natural light?

  When my phone buzzes again, I don’t check the message. I need to get out. Out of this room, out of this house. There’s no way Mom will let me borrow the car, or if she did, she’d want to know where I was going and how long I would be there, and right now, I have no fucking idea where I’m going to go. I just need out.

  I pull on my worn out Chucks and grab my phone, my house keys, and ear buds. Mom and Damien are in the back bedroom talking paint colors. They don’t hear me leave.

  Tori Amos sings to me about crucifixions, and I watch the sidewalk – one foot in front of the other. Cross the street when I hit Cumberland and then a right onto Greene.

  I’m not sure how long I’ve been walking when I get to the park. I’ve never seen it before, but there it is. Ancient metal swing sets and a slide rotted out at the bottom. A playground for kids begging for a tetanus shot.

  There’s a little girl on the swings, and she’s leaning backwards, her body and legs extended straight as a board, her face turned up to the sky. Her hair is dark and long enough to trail over the ground as she swings back and forth. She’s wearing a white T-shirt with a kitten on the front, but it’s obviously too small for her. Her stomach is bare, and the shirt hitches each time she shifts.

  Other than the little girl, the playground is empty. No mom, no dad watching her from the set of rickety benches facing the swing sets. Once and then twice I sweep my eyes over the playground. No one. There’s no one. Watching her swing back and forth, her exposed skin pale and smooth, a coldness creeps under my skin. Anyone could come along, anyone could be standing in the place I’m standing. Watching her. Waiting to lead her away and into a nightmare.

  “Hey,” I call to her. I can tell I’ve frightened her because she jerks upright, her dark hair flying, and she turns to look at me.

  “Hey,” she says back and smiles. She’s missing a tooth.

  “Is anyone here with you?”

  She shakes her head. “No.”

  “Do you live near her? Does your Mom or your Dad know you’re here?”

  “My sister knows,” she tells me, and she hops off the swing and comes to stand in front of me.

  “Does she know you’re alone?”

  “I’m not alone,” she says and takes my hand. Her hands are hot. Feverish.

  Something about her, about the way she tilts her head up at me, a smile playing at the edges of her lips, reminds me of someone. Someone I would have known when I was younger. An old classmate. An old best friend.

  “You shouldn’t be here by yourself. Anything could happen,” I say. I don’t know why I should feel afraid when she laces her fingers through mine, but I do.

  “There’s a monster inside of me,” she says. “There’s one inside of you, too.”

  I try to let go of her fingers, try to take a step back, but she squeezes tight and pulls me forward. A rush of pain floods through my hand, and I wince.

  She whispers low, and at first I cannot hear her, but then her voice grows louder, clear and lilting through the trees. A song for the sky. A song for the dead things that crawl through the ground.

  “When mother swallowed me down, she fed me to the monster. Big sister knew but never spoke; a lamb led to the slaughter.”

  My skin creeps into gooseflesh, and I yank at my hand caught in her insistent grip. She drops it but smiles up at me. A crooked smile that makes me think of an animal. Of something hungry.

 

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