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The sun bores bloodshot and vast through the curtains. I roll over and the springs beneath me creak. I pull my covers over my ears. Whatever happened last night, whatever I did, it hasn’t left.
My time between then and now slides like grease dripping down a bowl. The drippings collect into half-solid chunks of memory: my mother’s face, then someone familiar but unnamable. Somewhere between my waking and sleeping, I notice a closet facing my bed, the white doors like two front teeth. I have vague recollections of the doors rattling and growling, but they are still now. Someone wrapped electrical tape around the handles, spooling them shut. I wonder if it was me.
Downstairs, cutlery rattles. The garbage disposal shudders, the fridge door shuts, a can scrapes open. Then, silence like the snap of a hanging.
My lips are cracked and dry. There is an old glass of water on my nightstand. I tilt the last of it to my lips and try not to imagine the dead skin cells floating on top of it.
“Really? That’s what you’re worried about.”
I close my eyes and finish the glass. The face attached to the voice is foggy. My brain turns the information over through the thick bone of my skull, but my body knows already: don’t look. The voice croons again.
“You snort coke off of bar toilet seats, and all you can think of are dead skin cells?”
I ignore her and slide out of bed onto all fours to the hardwood, my blanket trail fanning out behind me like a cape. The gusto for whatever substances came my way the night before is in puddles on the floor. I consider lapping them back up like a dog to stop the shakes but instead I fumble through my nightstand drawer: rolling papers, condoms, empty wrappers, loose bits of food. The wood floor digs into my knees, but the pain is the first thing I’ve felt today that I know is mine.
I shove half a stale cracker into my mouth and chew. From my view of the floor, I notice something small and green beneath my dresser. I drop my chest to the ground and drag my hand through the dust bunnies until I pull out a half-sucked piece of hard candy. The sugar will help. I try to wipe the bits of lint and hairs off before popping it into my mouth. It melts on my tongue, and I work the candy from the back of my jaw to the tip of my teeth. Spitty froth oozes in the corner of my lips.
When I’m this strung out, I cannot recall my mother’s or father’s face. I have to stretch my mind like a piece of putty, working it between my ears until I have shapes I might recognize, but I do know this: the woman that I heard crawl under the bed and is now standing behind me is not her. She does smell similar to my mother: some kind of citrus perfume that stings the back of my nostrils, and an underlying musk, like the damp of a basement or deep dirt.
“It’s ant poison dear, spit it out.”
She’s straddling me and holding her hand down in front of my chin. I look past my nose and see long nails, sprouts of hair between the knuckles. My lips pull back into a foamy sneer. Bitch.
“Oh, don’t be so crass. I’ve saved you something downstairs that I think you’ll like more.” Her voice is deep and smooth by my ear. My stomach prickles. “Now, spit.”
I spit. My saliva is thick and gummy. I feel a sharp twisting in my stomach, a primal mourning for the paltry sustenance I’ve parted with. Or maybe it’s just the ant poison. But the last time I ate... the last time I ate? I don’t know. My cooking skills are rudimentary; pan-crisped eggs that smell like sulfuric flesh, blackened toast that leaves a dusty five o’clock shadow over my chin. I could eat cereal, if the milk isn’t lumpy. I’ll feel better if I eat.
“You will,” she says, and I am scared that I haven’t noticed myself speaking these thoughts out loud.
I hear her footsteps thump off behind me.
Memories come back to me in choppy lines: I think she showed up after the party I went to. A friend’s birthday. We did enough blow to kill a horse. I’d dosed before I left. We took shots. We danced, and the sweat running down my forehead had tasted so sweet that I slid my index finger across the sheen and sucked it off. When I drove home, I took the winding side roads that stretched out in front of my tires only as far as the headlights could illuminate.
As soon as I flicked on the light she was there, waiting for me on the kitchen counter. I didn’t think she was real. I just flicked on the kitchen light and there she was.
What first struck me was her nudity. She didn’t seem to care that I stared (also why I thought she wasn’t real). She kept a patient smile on her face while my greedy eyes took in their fill; if she was a figment of my imagination, after all, why couldn’t I stare? My gaze slid over her breasts, which were full and pointing down towards the floor. Her stomach folded over itself, her thighs spread over the counter with her weight. When I was done taking in all the exposed skin, my brain and my biology desperately fighting for their share of blood, I finally noticed her yellowing teeth and her black-hole eyes.
“Welcome home, baby” she’d said, and I’d looked away then.
I press my palm into the bed. The springs sink down beneath my weight as I stand. The room spins—closetwindowbeddoorclosetwindowbeddoor—until it doesn’t. I keep my hand on the mattress and hobble over to the window. Throw the curtains back. The sun lolls like a big red tongue in the sky. I can feel the heat on my face magnified through the glass.
When I step away from the window, I blink the burning blue afterimage out the sun of my eyes. A beautiful, golden light shines towards the door like a pathway to heaven. I’ve never known God, but I follow.
I remember more as I wake: shitty pastries, grease and jam soaking into the paper plate in my lap. Weak coffee and cigarettes. Beige walls and cold metal chairs and circles of people with smeared mascara and frantic eyes and yellow fingers. Do the next right thing. Do the next right thing.
I breathe heavily. The closet shakes and hisses at me when I walk past, but the electrical tape around the handles holds. I lean in close and peel my lips back with my fingers and snarl at it, but the doors only shake harder.
I stutter back and rescind my reckless display of dominance. My heel slides through a puddle of my vomit on the floor, slick and viscous like melted butter. The closet teeth bulge and there is something inside snarling back. My brain is somewhere between fight and freeze, but my body knows to launch itself into the hallway and slam the door to the bedroom behind me.
I leave my trembling fingers on the doorknob. My other hand floats away from the door to the switch next to me. I flick it on, washing the gold path I was following into a jaundiced yellow. There is a flight of stairs going down to the kitchen, where the fading checkered linoleum floor stretches further away from me the longer I stare at it.
If I go downstairs like she told me, I could eat. That could be the next right thing.
The stairs are uneven and not up to code. My family built the house, but we were not builders. Their faces are entombed in black and white frames lining the entire wall above the bannisters all the way down to the kitchen. I hate to look at them. I know how they died.
The photo I am staring at now is an old, thin-lipped man with wiry eyebrows. He has age spots and eyes that show too much of the whites. His cheekbones stick out from beneath papery skin.
I take my first step down the stairs, my right heel leaving a sticky imprint behind. My leg trembles. I am sure it is my body turning on itself to devour the little muscle I have left. I pause. A slip in this condition would be catastrophic. I need to eat.
A few more steps down and I stop again. The old man from the photographs is aging backwards, now in his fifties or sixties, with a woman on his arm. Someone younger, a mixture of both faces, squints at the camera. The longer I look at his eyes, the darker they get. A whine spills out of my lips before I know what has caused it, and my knees threaten to buckle, so I bring my butt to the steps to scoot down.
The family becomes younger as I move down the stairs. The old man’s face has filled out, age spots vanished. His child is smaller now, his wife thinner. Dark circles under her eyes. One baby, toothless and bald, clutched to the wife’s swollen chest. A curdling infant scream trapped in grayscale silence. Me.
Don’t look, I hear her whisper from the landing. I thought I was further down, but I swear I can smell her breath behind me. You’ll never get down if you keep looking. I duck my chin into my chest and scoot three more steps down, dangling my foot over each stair as if it might disappear underneath me. I don’t know how long it takes before my toes find the kitchen floor, cool linoleum relief.
My stomach burns with hunger, which makes me forget the photos. I need to eat. I have to eat, because it’s the next right thing and that’s how I know I’ll fix whatever I’ve gotten myself into. I navigate the dimly lit kitchen until my hand finds the wood counter, then the light switch beneath the overhang. Click.
“Jesus Christ!” is what I want to yell (not the next right thing), but instead it comes out in a gravelly screech that sounds more like JEEuh RIce.
“What’s wrong, baby? I’m just trying to help you.” The woman looks at me like a kicked puppy and puts a hand on her bare hip. My gaze follows the dip of her pelvis to the middle of her thighs where a plume of TV static curls grow up towards her navel. “Oh? Unless you wanted to eat something else...” Her voice turns into a silky purr.
I can’t answer so I let a shaky noise come out of me like some kind of wounded animal. I turn my head side to side, no no fuck no.
She rolls her eyes and opens up the fridge. “Oh, stop it. I’m giving you a hard time. You’re no fun, anymore.” The white light illuminates every fertile curve on her body. Her breast stretches upward with her arm, the sharp peak of her nipple pointing at a faded container of orange juice.
She closes the fridge and slides a plastic baggie across the counter. It smacks into my hand. “Here. I saved you half.”
My fingers tremble and tear the bag open and pull the sandwich out. Fish smell wafts over me and makes my lips curl but I sink my teeth in. The bread is cold and wet, a gummy wheat coating on top of mayo-heavy tuna salad. The acid and salt make my tongue ache. I swallow heavily. Another memory.
My dad, passed out on the recliner, hands cupping a brown glass bottle. Sour air. The television blaring grey and white pieces of fuzz. Half-eaten microwave meal sitting next to him on the fold out table, I’m slopping down the remaining wet chicken breast as he sleeps, swiping it through the cold gravy, curling my fingers into the mashed potatoes, pressing their mass onto my tongue, the salt making my mouth cramp.
My mouth is hurting now in the same way. Water. I need water. I drag myself over to the sink, the blob of sandwich stalled behind my Adam’s apple. My hands crank at the creaking faucet handles, but nothing comes out. I twist them as far as they can go, clamping my lips around the metal spout and sucking my cheeks in as if I could nurse the water from it. I get a few droplets and a mineral taste on my tongue. The sandwich lurches into a slow peristalsis again.
She clicks her tongue. “Looks like someone forgot to pay the water bill.”
My mouth can form no words, so it is fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou in my head as I fling the curtains covering the kitchen window open. Let the light burn her away. She hisses and then she is gone. In her place, the gold path, like heaven. It leads me to the basement door.
My parents were fearful people with two different gods. My mom would cup her hands together and mutter prayers under her breath, over my head at night, across the table to my father, who cupped his hands around whatever was on sale at the liquor store. He went first, heart attack. My mother’s body never betrayed her, but she had worms in her brain; she went for a walk and just never came back.
I am ragged with thirst and the bites of sandwich make my stomach churn. I take a step towards the basement door, my thoughts choppy.
If I wasn’t around, my dad would drive my mom to the store. She didn’t have a license, and when she’d ride along she kept her eyes straight ahead on the road while white-knuckling a cross and praying. My father was deaf in his right ear, so it didn’t bother him much. When I had to ride along in the back with the two of them, though, I’d lean forward to crank up the radio until I couldn’t hear her over NPR.
The day before he died, my mother asked me to take her to the store because she wanted to buy supplies for the end of the world. I didn’t live with them anymore, but I was low on groceries, and knew I’d be able to take home a few packs of beef jerky and canned soups without her noticing. I didn’t bother trying to change her mind, but I also couldn’t help myself from asking her ma, why the hell do you think the world is ending?
“Eyes on the road, Sam,” she’d said.
There would be drinking water in the basement, collecting dust next to the stacks of canned vegetables and dried rice and beans she’d bought for the end of the world.
I wrap my fingers around the handrail like a prayer, the sun warm on my back, and begin my descent into the basement. When I press my foot to the first step, the wood groans. I keep going until I feel cold concrete underneath my feet, then I shuffle to a string hanging from the ceiling and tug.
Weak light bathes the top of the freezer. A bottle of water and a small orange pill sit on top. I nearly trip as I heave in the direction of it, scramble for the bottle in my hands, push it against my lips, gulp frantically. I drain the bottle and look down, mouth agape and cheeks wet. I see that someone drew a heart in pen around the little orange pill.
Often, I struggle with my body when choosing the next right thing. Sometimes my brain knows best, but my body moves mechanically, automatically. It is such a violently earnest reaction that I wonder, in these moments: who is more right? Is the natural inclination of my body worth fighting? Shouldn’t I trust my body?
My fingers fumble to get the pill to my mouth.
Two weeks after my father’s funeral, my mother called me and told me she’d found a portal to hell in the house. I asked her where it was, and she pointed between her ears. She told me she had sealed the portal shut, but it was only a matter of time. She had to leave.
They found her down near the side road, the one I’d drive when I was too fucked up to be driving. It was winter. Her extremities had turned black with the cold.
I sit down against the basement wall. The shelves of stored food for the end of the world shimmer like heat waves. Behind me, the concrete is damp. I crane my neck to look and see little red droplets forming against the gray. They cluster together like liquid rubies, start to drip down to the floor. I smear some across my finger, lift it to my nose and inhale earth and iron. My forehead is damp, but I’m afraid to wipe my brow in case I pull my hand away and it comes off red.
I think that the next right thing is to leave, but my body is heavier now than when I first started down the stairs. The railings feel taller. My body wants to stay, but I need to fight it and so I reach and find the lip of the stairs and pull myself up. My knees dig into the wooden steps and I feel splinters lodge themselves in my shins. I drag my body up and out of the basement and back onto the kitchen floor.
The checkered linoleum is safe and cool under my cheek. While I rest, I look around the kitchen. The curtains are drawn shut again, but the light is still on. The tuna sandwich from before has tripled in size, like a small laptop sitting on the counter. I try to cover my nose with my hand but it’s no use against the oceanic, mineral rank in the air, and I gag anyways.
If I can make it back up the stairs to my room, my bed, I can rest. Then I can try again tomorrow to get it right. The next right thing.
I use the countertops to help me drag my body over to the stairs, my arms devolving into something simian. The journey devastates my lungs, my blood roaring in my ears and my mouth sucking air like a fish.
When I finally stand, I am eye level with the photo closest to me.
I recognize the photo of the mother and her baby, but this time I see that her nails are dug so fiercely into the child’s flesh that the skin dents beneath her fingers. A wail begins, far away at first but gaining volume the longer I stare.
Panic flares in the bottom of my stomach. I scramble for the next step, brain and body finally working together. I slip and hit the front of my shin on the wooden outcropping. The pain lags behind the sound. I feel the photographs pulling my eyes up, saying here, Sam, look up here.
There are faceless photos too. Abstract pieces that stand out among the portraits. They beg the eye to search, beg the brain to fumble the pieces together. The first photo is a nature scene, a cluster of trees illuminated by the camera flash at nighttime. The second photo is of ice frozen over the yellow strips in the middle of the road.
“The longer you look, the worse it gets,” she says from the top of the landing, but I can’t help myself now.
The third photograph is a purpled human toe on a bright white backdrop. The toe is so distended that I have to get close to it and squint to recognize it. My vision blurs and I look to the last of the abstract quartet.
A hand. The gold wedding band cutting into the swollen digit, discolored skin threatening to burst away from the metal. The tips of the fingers look like they’ve been dipped in black paint, the nails shrunken and jagged. The palm has bloated to a grotesque size.
I try to stand, try to move quickly, but gravity has loosened the muscle from my bones. I grit my teeth and stumble up one step but something hard and small digs into the pad of my foot. A tooth. My tongue swipes my gums and finds an empty spot.
With every step, more teeth loosen and fall. A molar clatters to the floor with the sound of a marble dropping and lodges into the ball of my foot when I take my next step. I stop to brush it off and look at the wall again.
I’m at the top of the stairs, staring at the same old man with the age spots and worn features, but now his mouth is twisted into a Munch-like ‘O.’ The whites of his eyes bulge, his gums are pink and inflamed, his lips sink back into his face without his teeth. I close my mouth and he does, too, the shock plain on his face. Bile rises in my throat.
“Me,” I say, but the word comes out wet and shapeless.
I drag my wasting body into my room. Whatever is behind the closet door says something in a dry voice and laughs. I crawl past.
“What did she smell like, Sam, when she thawed out? What did you tell them, Sam, when they asked why?”
With the last ounce of fight I have left, I manage to slam my palm into the closet doors.
“Shouldn’t have looked, should you? Shouldn’t have looked, should you? Shouldn’t have looked, shou—”
I crawl further and vomit: first from the raw taste of my gums in my mouth, second from fear, then third from vomiting the first two times. My bed is close. I lurch and fall onto a mattress that sags under me. My spine sinks into the springs, my arms spread and heavy by my sides.
As soon as I am settled on my back, the room stills.
I hear her footsteps.
“What did you find down there, Sam?” She approaches me like one might approach a skittish horse, putting her hand on the mattress and dragging it along until she is standing by my side.
I shake my head, the space between my brows creasing, feeling the resolve I had before waver. I reach out to touch her horrid face. Her skin is rough under my hands, but warm. My lower lip trembles.
“I know, love. I tried to tell you not to look,” she says, her voice thick. “If you just close your eyes, now, you can try again tomorrow.”
I shake my head again, fighting the urge to sleep. I know if I do, I’ll forget everything that happened.
“Just fall asleep and tomorrow will come again,” she continues, cupping my chin in her palm to soothe me. I try to push her off, but my eyelids are drooping. I feel my vision slipping and my ears ringing, and over that I hear her voice as I drift off. Her voice twists gleefully with each repetition.
“And again. And again. And again. And again.”
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Dakayla Walters is an Alaskan transplant in a small fishing town in the Pacific Northwest, where she lives with her lovely girlfriend. When she isn't writing unsettling short stories, you can find her tending to her sourdough or sharing the town gossip with her cat. She writes for a local monthly paper, and has received an MFA from Oregon State University-Cascades. @dakdoesbooks
