Nowhereville, p.8
Nowhereville, page 8
“I’m Chloe. It’s nice . . . to meet you. I’m Chloe.”
The girl looked up at Maria and groaned something that sounded like, “Herrrr.”
Maria answered, “Oh no, they’re just surprised. You did well,” and she gave her little friend a tea biscuit. “Elsa Lanchester would be proud. Okay, that’s enough excitement for today. Go home, and get a good night’s rest. Tomorrow we begin the next phase.”
With that, she gently guided the new girl away. Chloe fled for the ladies’ room.
Natasha followed, closing the door gently behind her. “Are you all right?”
Chloe sobbed out her newest frustration. “She’s some kind of sideshow freak! I know that’s a shitty thing to say, but fucking look at her! Can she even talk? Is this even legal? What the hell kind of production is this?”
Natasha merely shrugged. “Maria’s a genius. They do some foul things. She’s been obsessed with Francis Bacon lately. Both of them. And Tod Browning.”
“I don’t know who the hell Francis Bacon is. Some kind of Arctic explorer? Like in the novel?” She opened the tap at the sink and washed her face with the cool splash. She thought about her children, how she’d wash their faces when they were little and they’d throw tantrums.
Natasha didn’t correct her. “Do you spend a lot of time in bathrooms, pulling yourself together?”
Chloe laughed just for a second, sniffed, and grabbed a handful of paper towels. “It’s the only place around here I get close to privacy.” She ran the towels over her face.
Natasha hesitated and walked closer. She put her hand on Chloe’s elbow and said quietly, “Would you rather be alone?”
Her words still resonated across the ceramic tiles of the bathroom as Chloe grabbed her and slipped her tongue into Natasha’s mouth. They did not get the good night’s rest their director had prescribed.
2
Chloe had them all in stitches. In her heyday, critics lauded her comic timing. She felt that power again, real admiration.
“I mean, have all of you read the novel?” she said and took a swig of wine. “Victor Frankenstein is a textbook narcissist with a boner for corpses.”
Natasha put her arm around Chloe and said, “I love the way you say boner in that American accent.” Chloe leaned in and touched her forehead to Natasha’s.
Maria sat at the head of the table, presiding like a papess over the dinner party. To her left sat Chloe and then Natasha and Annie, the assistant director. Kent, head of costuming, sat at the foot of the table. Opposite Chloe sat Keisha, stage manager, and then Amy, a curiously butch casting choice for Elizabeth. One of Maria’s L.A. investors, Clementine, sat nearest Kent.
Clementine, for Christ’s sake. Chloe examined the woman’s fuchsia hair.
Maria smiled at her two stars but didn’t laugh. She’d prepared a Swiss-themed dinner, inspired by the locales of Frankenstein. Her verbal invitations emphasized, “Tell me beforehand what your food allergies may be, and I’ll tell you if you should simply stay home.”
Keisha twirled her fork and asked, “Have you thought about what’s next, Maria? If Frankenstein is a success—”
“It will be a success,” Maria cut off.
Amy brightened. “Ooh, would you do an all-female Little Shop of Horrors? I would kill to be in that! Can I be the S&M dentist?”
“Would you?” Maria replied, completely deadpan. “If I asked you too?”
Amy froze. The other guests looked at their plates or laughed uncomfortably.
Kent asked, “Maria, did you invite what’s-her-name? The bride? I had a hell of a time dressing her. I wish you would’ve warned me you were getting a . . . a special-needs actress.”
Maria narrowed her eyes and said, “She’s allergic to this sort of food.”
Natasha quipped, “I think all actors have special needs.”
“Could you imagine that, Kent?!” Chloe nearly shouted. “Staying in character the whole time at the table!” She laughed so hard she could barely choke the words out.
“Why is that funny?” Maria asked. “You see? This is why none of you are allowed to see her offstage. You’d ruin everything.”
Chloe took a sip of wine but giggled, and a trickle of it came down her chin and onto her shirt. “Oh, God! I’m sorry. Dammit. Where’s the—oh, what did you call it the other day?” She ran a fingertip down Natasha’s bicep. “The WC?”
Maria said, “It’s in a redundant little alcove. Follow that hall, and it will be on your left.”
Chloe left the table and entered the hall. Damn, kiddo, you do spend a lot of time pulling yourself together in bathrooms. She pulled the stained section of shirt to her mouth and sucked on it, a trick her mother taught her to prevent stains from setting.
Several doors lined the passage but nothing recognizable as an alcove. She reached the end of the hallway and hadn’t seen the bathroom. She turned around, a bit drunker than she’d realized before standing up from the table.
She heard something, something like dripping water behind a door. Walking slowly up the hallway, she listened for it, traced it to a doorway that indeed nestled a bit recessed from the frame around it. I guess this passes for an alcove. She turned the knob and entering without knocking.
Stairs led down to a dim floor. It didn’t smell like a basement. Instead of musty odors, Chloe detected a more acidic scent, mellow and vinegary, like the kombucha Aaron and Madison learned to brew at home. As she descended, her eyes adjusted to the faint glow of several lighted tanks. Each seemed to contain some curious organic thing in torpor, aquatic and godforsaken. Here, a ribbony mass that may have been some sort of jellyfish. And here, a tank occupied by something with two slim, dark legs but no detectable arms or head.
The array of tubes and tanks and apparatuses felt like a set, but Chloe hadn’t seen these yet, and the show would open in a week. Would Maria pull these out so late in the game?
Then she saw the last tank. In it, what at first appeared to be a clustered tumor was actually four fetuses, all conjoined along their backs, their four skulls merged into a single bulb of many faces. It was too lifelike, too disgustingly perfect.
“Jesus Christ,” Chloe said aloud. “Maria . . . what the hell are you up to?”
To Chloe’s shock, Maria answered. “I call her the Blastocyst.”
Chloe whirled to face the director and let out a quick animal rasp.
“I almost got it that time.”
“Maria! What the fuck have you been doing in here?”
Maria looked around, the glow of the tanks bathing her in murky light. “Research.”
Chloe raised her arms as if to argue but dropped them.
A tear crossed Chloe’s cheek. “I’m sorry, I just . . . I don’t understand.”
“Oh no, I think you do,” Maria said. From the shadows emerged the misshapen girl, the nameless actress playing the nameless bride. She loped over to Maria and clung to the woman’s hip. Maria stroked the bulbous skull of the homunculus and said, “Shall we play out the scene in which you launch your futile arguments against what’s already been done?”
“This is sick.” Chloe pointed to the Blastocyst. “Sick, Maria. I don’t know if I can be part of this.” Her face burned.
“No,” Maria said, looking back to Chloe and cradling the bride’s chin in her fingers. “This isn’t sick. The world is sick. This is art. This is healthy and beautiful.”
“So what? You’re like a mad scientist now? The feminist alchemist?”
Maria lowered her eyes dramatically to her creation. “And this is my beautiful daughter. It’s all quite cliché really. But I’ve reinvented it. Skinned it for a new century.”
“Beautiful?” Chloe barked.
Maria snapped her gaze back to Chloe. “Will you lower your voice? The others needn’t know. This is just backstage business.”
Chloe looked back at the tank with the Blastocyst, the little faces. Tiny eyelashes.
“Chloe, I’m asking you to help me usher in a new age. Stop teaching children to fry eggs, and do something extravagant. This is alchemy—femme alchemy. We’ll turn ourselves into gold. We’re going to start an artistic revolution—the art of making people.”
At least the manipulation was blatant. “Nice, Maria. Why not just rub your palms together while you reveal your master plan. So was Natasha part of it, or does she actually care about me?”
Maria’s face softened. “Why not both? She’s been my biggest star, but imagine what a company we’d create. You and I and Natasha. And all the coming children.”
The bride dug snot from her nose and ate it.
Chloe knew the view from a corner. Any woman, Hollywood or not, knew it. “If I quit? Are you going to kill me? Threaten my children?”
Maria scoffed. “How insulting. No. If you quit, your hungry little understudy steps up, and I do what I can to talk the executive producers out of suing you blind. Natasha will be fine. She always is. As for all this, it’s just a set. Like every room you walk into. And I wanted you to see it. I think you’re ready.”
Chloe squatted, careful not to touch the laboratory floor, moist with God knew what, and put her head into her hands. After a moment, she stood up again. “No one gets hurt?”
Maria dipped a finger into the Blastocyst’s tank and rubbed the liquid against her thumb. “I haven’t killed anyone, you realize. The opposite if anything.” Maria reached out a clean hand. So did the created girl.
Chloe joined hands with each of them. What else was there to do?
Maria admired her work. “I’m counting on you.”
2
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
VICTORIA FRANKENSTEIN
Foolhardy scientist & chirurgeon
Chloe Clinkscales / Natasha Burton
THE CREATURE
First woman created through science
Natasha Burton / Chloe Clinkscales
ELIZABETH
Victoria’s fiancée and adopted cousin
Amy Treadway
THE BRIDE
Frankenstein’s second creation
???
2
Natasha sat in the makeup chair, the prosthetics team applying her burns and scars and stitches. They stayed well away from her mouth. Maria insisted that her Creature speak with eloquence, not clumsiness. Her mouth is the only part of her that’s lovely.
Chloe, stage-ready in her shirtsleeves and blood-dewed leather apron, crossed to the chair and laid her hands on Natasha’s shoulders. “Looking good, kiddo.”
Natasha kept her eyes closed as the makeup man and woman continued to corrupt her skin but said, “May I have a moment with Chloe?”
The prosthetics team applied a few more daubs of gore and left her to set. Natasha opened her left eye, the right partially eclipsed by latex. “You’re interrupting me getting into character, you minx. Should I come bother you when you’re in this chair tomorrow night?”
Chloe leaned in and kissed the elegant mouth, careful not to smear the freshly faked wounds. “Yes. You should.”
2
The misshapen trinity of Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion presided over the public debut of the bride. The homunculus girl floated in the cloudy liquid of the tank, amphibious and atavistic, breathing through gills.
Madison and Aaron sat second row center. Chloe tried not to make eye contact with them as she delivered her lines.
“She will decide when her healing and coagulation are complete. She’s too precious now, like a map sewn from chrysanthemums.”
The bride twitched and began to pound on the lid.
Natasha, as the Creature, shouted, “No! She is already perfect!” She tore Chloe away from the tank, flipped the lid, and brought the howling bride into the air.
The audience gasped. Hundreds of eyes took in the marvelous naked body, its three breasts, its flaring gill slits.
“She is magnificent!” exclaimed Victoria Frankenstein.
It took no effort at all to believe it now.
{}
Evan J. Peterson is the author of Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag RPG, as well as The PrEP Diaries: A Safe(r) Sex Memoir (Lethe Press). He is a Clarion West alum and author of the horror poetry chapbooks Skin Job and The Midnight Channel as well as editor of the Lambda Literary finalist Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. His writing has also appeared on Boing Boing and in Weird Tales, Unspeakable Horror 2, Queers Destroy Horror, and Best Gay Stories 2015. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.
Patio Wing Monsters
S.P. Miskowski
The physician told her the tingling—a gradually receding numbness followed by random pinpricks of nerves coming back to life—might continue for a long time. If she stuck with her regimen and if she committed to the counseling, group sessions, yoga, recreational therapy, and PT, she could be back home in a couple of months. But the prickly sensation in her arms might go on for years.
1
Patio Wing was designed to imitate home life. Six casually decorated rooms were arranged in a semicircle around a palm tree court. Next to the exit gate, a nurse’s station faced the center of the court, its sliding glass windows and fluorescent lighting a stark contrast and a reminder of reality behind the suburban veneer.
The ranch house atmosphere was intended to soothe and reassure. All of it was created according to a long forgotten theory. Nothing about it fooled the teenagers assigned to Patio Wing. Beyond the open-air setting, beyond the wrought iron gates and the kidney-shaped swimming pool, the cinder-block fences stood ten feet tall. On the other side, the desert ran for miles in all directions. Not an inescapable hellhole but enough to give the residents pause.
Gillian shared a room with a captured runaway named Sid whose regimen included emotional reprogramming instead of yoga. Sid’s mom had hired a private detective to track her down. After she was located in a compound in Wyoming, her mom brought her home and had the family doctor perform an abortion. As a safety measure, Sid got six months on Patio Ward in the company of eleven other teens with similar problems, all part of a process to “reestablish her baseline identity.”
“As what?” Gillian asked. “A prisoner of boredom?” She was paired with her roommate because both were fourteen and their actions were deemed self-destructive rather than antisocial.
“If my mother took a good look at herself for even one minute, she would die,” Sid told Gillian when they had been sharing the room for a week. “She’s a size twelve at least. Unbelievable! She’s been taking fertility drugs ever since she married her fourth husband. The hormones are making her crazy. One time, I found her in the backyard, staring over the barbecue pit at the desert. Not moving or anything. Frozen like a fucking statue or like she was waiting for something to come slithering out of the rocks and call her name.”
“Why did she make you come back from Wyoming?” Gillian asked. “If all she wants is a new baby, why doesn’t she leave you alone?”
“Jealousy, of course. She hates the fact that I can have a baby and she can’t. You wait and see. Rory’s coming for me, and when he finds out where I am and what that bitch did to me, he’s going to split her head open with an axe. Then you know what I’ll do when she screams and wets herself and begs me to save her life? I’m going to laugh! I’m going to put my head back, like this, and laugh all fucking day!”
Gillian was pretty sure Sid had plucked this idea from a movie. It sounded like one of the gruesome horror flicks the teens gathered to watch and make fun of on Friday nights in the rec room. The angle of Sid’s head, her valentine-shaped face surrounded by blond dreadlocks, made Gillian wonder if the girl’s middle-aged boyfriend would risk everything to rescue her.
“So what’s your mom like?” Sid exhaled a stream of smoke with a sputtering sound.
This was the question everyone asked. Everyone had to answer it.
. . . my name is Danny. I’m a kleptomaniac Mormon, homeschooled. What’s YOUR mom like?
The one point on which all twelve Patio Wing residents agreed was that their mothers ought to be here in their place. Their mothers were monsters who couldn’t make children the right way. Somehow they left out crucial parts or managed to break the engine. Most of the teens hated their dads too, but it was a lot more satisfying to hate their moms. It was more fucked up. Someone said it was Freudian. Anyway, comparing mother notes made them laugh while they waited out their time on Patio Wing.
“Mine is classic,” said Gillian. “Middle-class, well groomed, obedient.”
“She sounds like a poodle,” Sid told her.
“Pretty much. Poodle monster.”
They were sitting on the concrete walkway outside their room with their backs against the outer wall. Adjacent to Patio Wing, two more buildings offered adult patients either “minimal supervision” (Sunrise Wing) or “higher security care” (Cactus Wing). Higher security patients were not supposed to interact with the residents of Patio Wing. Because it was forbidden, the two groups were understandably curious about one another. Every sighting of an adult from the “rubber room” in Cactus Wing caused the teens to whisper behind their hands and snicker while a glimpse of young people taking their turn in the swimming pool was enough to trigger a Cactus Wing rash of undressing, ranting, and escape attempts. None of these actions were directed at the teens. They didn’t seem to be an object of desire but merely a reminder of something lost, forgotten, or never attained.
Interactions between Patio Wing residents and the minimal supervision adults of Sunrise Wing occurred only during an optional workshop in drama therapy. Sid refused to sign up because she said she had enough drama coping with her mother. So Gillian and two other teens accompanied a nurse through the gate every Tuesday and Thursday morning, navigated the sparkling clean halls of the central building, and joined ten sheepish grown-ups in a series of exercises intended to excavate and relieve trapped emotions. They did this through roleplaying games and stretching, and they ended each session with a “trust reassurance.” The person whose life had been played out in tearful, excruciating scenes was cradled by the entire group, touched gently and non-threateningly, and lifted into the air to be rocked for a few minutes in a safe and loving environment.
