The Ghost Who Loved Cherry Cake is a simple ghost story with a neat twist involving snacks. Why does this particular ghost like cherry cake? You’ll have to read the story to find out, but I can tell you that this idea came from being postpartum and having my sense of smell still completely out-of-whack. At the time, I was also reading about how hauntings and especially alien abduction stories can involve distorted smells (often amonia and cinnamon). That sounded so gross, but one smell that sounded ideal to me during that time period was cherry.
And cake.
And especially cherry cake.
So this particular ghost was born.
I also wrote this as a children’s story. The main character is younger and the issues she’s tackling in the story are very kid-centric ideas. Her parents are getting a divorce; they’re having a last vacation as a nuclear family unit; and it’s fun and exciting, yet, of course, things are still weird. The adult world is hidden from her, and so, she seeks solace in the kid-world and supernatural elements of this location. The ghost of this vacation house, and the ever-present cake, is what gets her through this eerie time period.
The ghost is a good ghost–and so, this story ended up being utterly perfect for Crow Toes Quarterly, a literary magazine of the gothic for kids. I’m so sad this publication doesn’t exist anymore. When I got my contributor copy, I poured over it for hours. There were zany poems, monstrous and yet cute creatures, and even more photos and drawings that gave the magazine an element of an enchanted curio cabinet. The stories were quirky and weird and delightfully spooky, but not scary-scary. Perfect for the budding goth kid in us all.
Enjoy!
The Ghost Who Loved Cherry Cake
By Eve Morton
It took me about two weeks staying at the summer home my parents’ rented in the Outer Banks to understand that we didn’t have a housekeeper. Rather, Abigail Swanson, with her blue dress and brown eyes that sometimes turned golden in the afternoon light, was a ghost. And she absolutely loved cherry cake.
Our first day arriving, we had been late. It was a time before GPS, a time when a mother’s role in long car trips was to hold the book of maps as if she was a witch with a grimoire and to cast the right lot for the road they were to take. Needless to say, my mother was not one for the occult, let alone for reading maps. My father was better at it, and so he’d tried to memorize the remaining route through the surface streets and small towns leading up to the coastline when we’d stopped for lunch at a rest stop. His speculations on the fastest and shortest area, however, only led us to go around in circles in a place called Duck before we finally pulled into the right stretch of highway dotted with candy-colored houses in which we were to stay for the month of July. I had already fallen asleep by then, somewhere around thinking that the third or fourth time we passed through Duck it would change to Goose, and we’d play a game.
“Come now,” my father said, scooping me out of the backseat of the car. “We’re here.”
He carried me under the house, not through it, towards the roaring sound of the ocean. The night was so black, the sand so lumpy under my father’s feet, that it felt as if I was still dreaming. When I saw Abigail, though I didn’t know her name then, she was only a pair of eyes in that darkness. Golden and half-hidden under the stilts that kept the house above ground. I didn’t know it then, either, but those skittles were there to keep the house from flooding, to make sure a storm did not drag out bodies of small children towards the ocean.
My father set me down as we reached wooden stairs built into a hillside. He held my hand and told me we had to see the ocean before bed.
“What’s that?” I gasped, seeing part of the sand move.
“Ghost crabs.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry,” he added. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
“Even ghosts?”
“Even ghosts,” he confirmed.
“Not all ghosts are bad, anyway. Some just want to help.” A woman added that answer, the same woman belonging to those eyes I’d spotted before. She came out of the darkness, right beside me, and held my other hand as we walked towards the shoreline. She said nothing else, but her fingers’ firm grasp on me was a reassurance after being lost for so long and scared by the natural life by the shoreline. My mother was nowhere to be seen, and my father seemed to sense that I was looking for her.
“Your mom is tired. It was a long drive.”
His words were short and curt, but like everything with my father, they seemed to hint at so much more. I took his explanation–mom is tired–as the reason this other person was here with us, a person who tucked me into bed after my father had left the room, and told me her name was Abigail.
“You can call me Abby. I used to live here. Now I just make sure it’s nice for everyone. What do you want for breakfast in the morning?”
“Cake,” I said. It was my birthday the next day. All I could think about was cake.
“Silly goose,” she said. “That is not a breakfast food.”
I was so tired, the trip weighing on my eight-almost-nine-year-old body, that I didn’t bother to tell her my birthday was tomorrow. I only laughed at the goose remark; after so many ducks, finally a goose! Then I went to sleep.
In the morning, there was a cake on the counter. It was white frosted with red dots all around it. My mother sipped coffee from a cracked mug at the counter, and shook her head towards my father. He was hiding behind a newspaper, another chipped coffee mug in front of him.
“I saw another roach,” my mother said. “This place is filthy.”
“It’s the south,” he said. “It’s warm and so there are roaches. They’re just like spiders elsewhere. Normal. Don’t worry about it.”
Their conversation about bugs and cleanliness went on. I ignored it, but in the back of my mind, I’d log it away as yet another reason why Abigail was with us that month in the Outer Banks. My mother needed help with the cleaning, and my father wanted someone else to look after me. I always felt Abigail’s presence before she ever materialized, and so, I never truly saw my parents interact with her. It didn’t matter.
She appeared behind me that morning, wearing a blue dress and with a white apron over it. “It’s my birthday,” I told her.
“Well, happy birthday. I should have made a cake I knew you’d like, then!”
“What kind is this?” I pointed to the frosting that seemed impossibly thick. Even though it was only the morning, when the air was always cooler back home, it was still humid like the afternoon here. It would only get hotter and thicker as the weeks wore on. The frosting would not last long in this climate, and Abigail sensed this and pushed the cake towards me.
“What do you think? You can have a little bit now.”
I dragged my finger through the cake, the frosting stacking up against the pad of my finger like snow. Sweetness burst on my tongue when I held it to my mouth. “It’s like a sundae,” I said.
“It’s cherry. My favorite cake.” Her brown eyes became golden again. “What’s your favorite?”
It used to be chocolate. But all I could think at that moment was cherry, cherry, cherry. I reached for another dab of frosting when my mother cried out.
“Hey! Breakfast first,” she said.
“But Abigail–” I turned back to see that she was now gone. Probably cleaning, making my bed or doing laundry, or something else that my mother’s frequent headaches prevented her from doing.
My mother said nothing about Abigail. Only insisted that I eat some oatmeal before we went to the ocean that day. “And then, when you come back,” she said, smiling though it seemed to tire her, “you can have a birthday wish on your cake.”
I did as my mother asked. My father and I went to the ocean, which was much prettier now that it was daylight, and I walked with his hand in mine as I collected shells. Big ones, small ones, broken shards that sparkled in the light. “I want to make a necklace with these,” I told him. “Maybe Abigail will help.”
“Maybe,” he said. He, too, asked nothing further about Abigail. He looked off into the distance, glanced at his watch, and told me we were almost out of time. “We should head back to your cake.”
We did. Abigail waited behind the cake, the candles spelling out ten years–one bonus for good luck–on top of it. The frosting had been fixed. Since no one else mentioned her, I took Abigail’s presence to be obvious. As natural as the stilts that kept the house up from the floods and hurricane waters that sometimes cascaded up from the sand dunes. She remained in place as I blew out the candles, but it was only her smile that seemed genuine. My father’s was distracted and my mother was, as always, tired.
“What did you wish for?” my mother asked.
“You can’t tell,” Abigail said. “Or it won’t come true.”
I had wished for more and more time with her, an entire vacation with Abigail and I exploring the Outer Banks with one another. But I remained quiet, shaking my head to my mother. When my mother sliced open the cake, and it was red inside, she let out a gasp. “Oh. They messed up the order. It should have been chocolate. It should have been–“
“I love it,” I said. “It’s cherry.”
“It is. You sure?”
I nodded. My mother’s skeptical glance didn’t fade until I put a large hunk of the cake in my mouth. Sweetness burned against my tongue. Cherry. Something I’d never had before, something that I didn’t know existed until that trip. It was stunning, wonderful, a perfect birthday gift.
“Well, okay then. I guess you’ll get your wish.” My mother shrugged. She took a piece along with my father, but they didn’t finish theirs.
“Too sweet,” they later said. “You enjoy it. All for you.”
Abigail took their pieces into the kitchen, cleaned up the dishes, and then ate a big slice herself. I sat with her at the kitchen table, drawing on a piece of paper. “I hope you don’t mind sharing,” she said. “Cherry is my favorite.”
“Is it?”
She nodded, her dark eyes golden bright again. “The last time I was at this house, I had my little girl with me. Her name was Cherry. She sort of looked like you, except a little taller and with more freckles against her nose.” She touched my nose and I felt, for the first time ever since arriving in this hotter climate, a chill move through me. “She was a very pretty Cherry. My darling delight.”
“Where is she now?”
Abigail grew sad. She ran her finger along the frosting of the cake, though it was under a cover, and brought it to her lips. I didn’t question that she’d moved through plastic then; I only giggled at the deviousness of an adult flouting the rules.
“There was a hurricane here,” she said a moment later, all lightness of the moment gone. “A big storm came. Large waves crashed into the house. I thought we were safe. I was wrong. Cherry was swept out into the water.”
“The house wasn’t on stilts then?”
“No. That is something new here. That is a good thing. You will be safer than Cherry was.”
I didn’t know what to say, never having heard of much death, let alone a child’s death. I looked at the picture I was drawing, and it was the best thing I’d ever done. So I gave it to Abigail. It was of a sun with sunglasses shining down on a few kids from my school who I played with during recess time.
“Beautiful,” Abigail said. “Can you draw me a picture of Cherry?”
“I don’t know what she looks like,” I said, then remembered it was like me. So as Abigail watched, eerily silent–this was the only time I ever felt a ghostly presence from her–I drew myself. Then I added dots along my face, to transform me into Cherry. I gave it to Abigail with a smile. “Here you go.”
“Beautiful!” she praised again. “Stunning, stunning. It is my own gift. And on your birthday! Well, I’ll have to make you another cake. Do you want chocolate this time around?”
“No,” I said. “Cherry is good.”
For two weeks straight, there was always a piece of cherry cake for me in the morning on the counter to eat by the afternoon after I had swum in the ocean. I never saw Abigail make the cake or even frost it; it was just always there. My parents, still often arguing in the morning or speaking in hushed tones about something I would only realize was their divorce a month later, never mentioned the cakes aside from imploring me to not get crumbs everywhere.
“The roaches,” my mother chastised. “Don’t tempt them with more.”
“And don’t spoil your lunch,” my father might add. But even he, like my mother, soon forgot their own rules as they argued with one another. Each one probably assumed the other had made the cake for me, to keep me happy and amused during the vacation, to keep me fed and happy and a little spoiled on our last one as a true family.
Each afternoon, one parent would trade off an activity with me. My dad and I went swimming in the ocean again; my mother and I explored the dunes and then a fishing museum close by; my father took me out for a special dinner, all alone. When I asked him what Abigail was doing, he shook his head.
“Don’t know. Probably with your mother.”
“Is Abigail coming home with us?”
“No,” he said. “Probably for the best.”
“Right. She’d miss her daughter. She died here,” I added, and when my father still said nothing, only stared out the window of the restaurant at the dark clouds coming, I figured he was thinking about how she’d died in a storm.
“Don’t worry, dad,” I said. “The house is on stilts now. We’ll be safe.”
He nodded, but we still ate in a rush. When we arrived at home, my mother was on the porch, holding a book, but no longer reading. “Storm’s coming. We should leave.”
“It’s not hurricane season,” my father said, still shaking his head. “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand. We have the house for another month.”
“The storm’s coming in another day. Who cares about another month?”
I rushed past the two of them, speaking to one another in harsher and harsher tones, so much like the thunder underneath the clouds. I found Abigail in my room, packing my bags. She met my gaze and nodded with a firm smile. “Time for my second cherry to go before the water comes.”
“You’re not coming with us?”
“No, sweetheart. This is my house. I stay here.”
“It’s on stilts now,” I said. “You’ll be safe.”
“Yes, but you need to go with your parents.”
I surprised myself by screaming, “No, no, no!” and kicking my feet. I hadn’t had a temper tantrum–or a “fit” as my mother called them–in such a long time. I had genuinely begun to feel like a grown-up on this trip, with two separate worlds and a cherry cake always to myself. Now all I could do was cry and pout and not even let Abigail hug me to tell me everything was going to be all right.
“I’m not losing another little girl,” she said and left me with my bags in the bedroom. When she came back, I had stopped most of my crying. She handed me a thick wedge of the cherry cake, all that had remained in a plastic container. “Here. Take this for the road.”
“What will you eat?” I asked.
“I’m home. I don’t need food to remind me of it.”
Her words were so calm, so confident, I merely nodded. My parents were inside now, no longer fighting but their voices still tense from the storm and the sudden emergency set upon us all. The sky outside my window, once only a pale blue for two weeks straight, was grey and dark and ominous. The roar of the ocean was suddenly drowned out by a siren. A warning from the coast guard. Hurricane coming. Storm coming.
“Sweetheart,” my mother said, entering the room and pushing her body through Abigail’s specter in front of me. “Time to go.”
I gasped. It was the first time, the first true time, I understood what Abigail was. A ghost. Not our summer housekeeper, not my new best friend, not even a woman who loved cherry cake because it was her daughter’s name. These things were all still true, but they were also cloaked by the fact that she had died a long time ago, maybe with her daughter or another summer here, and she was a ghost.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” my mother said, wrapping me in a hug. “We will be all right. But we have to go. Vacation’s over.”
I looked over my mother’s shoulder and watched as Abigail nodded. She blew me a kiss and pointed to the cake in my suitcase, which she’d closed now. My mother grabbed the suitcase when she let go of me, and tugged me out the door.
The last time I saw Abigail was as we left the house. My father was driving, my mother in the front seat with a book of maps that were all but useless in her lap, and I was in the back. It was only the early evening, but it was as black as the night we’d first arrived. I looked at the house where I’d had my ninth birthday and one of the best vacations ever. When Abigail appeared on the wrap-around porch on the second floor, I knew she was a ghost.
But it was hard to be afraid. I had the cherry cake in my suitcase. I had the good memories. And her touch, as ghostly and cold as it had been, still rushed through me and comforted me as my parents fought again.
Abigail waved as the rain fell in heavy drops over the house and pounded like bullets against the roof of our rented car. She faded as we drove away, as the waves chased the houses on stilts along the shore, and the storm scared away the remaining tourists onto the now crowded highway. As I finished the cake in a Motel 6 that night, with my parents still bickering about directions, I thought of Abigail again and again. Even as we pulled into our home, which would no longer be shared between my parents in a months’ time, I still thought of Abigail.
I still think of her now, anytime someone mentions the ocean, hurricanes, or the Outer Banks. It’s hard to think of her as a haunting, as that summer vacation as being anything but delightful and sweet as the cake she served. Ghosts to me have never meant something to be afraid of, something to avoid. Ghosts have always been the people who know you the best, because they have lived through the worst, and know that in the end, the sweetest words are always the best. And life, too, can be a piece of cake.
Strange Creatures follows Emma, a YouTube investigator of all things ooky-spooky, when she actually finds something terrifying. The Turtle Lake Monster is real! And now she needs to document it for the world, or at the very least, for her followers.
But, of course, something doesn’t go quite as she plans.
I loved writing this story. I got to condense and throw all of my monster and cryptid lore at the wall and see what stuck around. I had also been going through a minor obsessive phase with the satirical author Chuck Tingle, so there may be a little of that energy in the story as well.
Either way, this is a horror story that is more on the silly, campy side of things. Hopefully no nightmares tonight!
Strange Creatures
Emma blinked once. When the purple skin, slit by gills, still remained in her line of sight, she set her binoculars down by her side. There was no way she was looking at what she thought she was. There was simply no way. First of all, The Turtle Lake Monster was a water-creature and this one was on land. Secondly, the skin was purple, and everyone knew that The Turtle Lake Monster was green, or at least, dark blue. Lastly—and most importantly—that creature was not real. It was an urban legend, a folklore perpetuated by townspeople and internet conspiracy boards. Even if she was a so-called cryptid hunter and spent the bulk of her life on those boards or spinning her own theories on YouTube, none of this was really real, right?
Right?
Emma took a deep breath and looked through her binoculars again. The creature was still there. The skin was still purple. Turtle Lake was twenty feet away from the body at most, making it nearly forty feet from her position behind a bush. She was pretty far, so maybe this body was just a doll or prop that fell off a boat. Maybe this was leftover from a movie shot in the wilderness, someone trying to make hoax footage like Patterson-Gimlin. She had convinced herself the body was a stock prop from Supernatural or a practical joke left behind—it was April 19th, after all—but by the time she closed ten feet of distance, her heart sunk.
The body of the creature was lifeless. The gills did not suck in water or air. A fetid, rotting smell hung around them. The creature was definitely dead—but that meant it had once been alive.
“This can’t be real,” she said, barely above a whisper. The dusk air seemed to whisper back a confirmation. Real, real, real. She suddenly became aware of her prone position, alone at the edge of the woods. The nearest town wasn’t for miles. Most of the cabins had tourists inside of them who minded their own business. No one would hear her scream. If something did happen, she’d be just another trans woman to add to a missing list and not investigate further.
But the feeling didn’t stay. Curiosity and the thrill of discovery replaced the fear and left her with the body of a creature she would have called the definitive Turtle Lake Monster on her YouTube channel. With its dead body in front of her, she didn’t want to default to genus or origin stories from folklore. She wanted to know who the creature had really been.
The investigator side of her personality, the one that had grown up watching The X-Files and Outer Limits and who disdained the melodramatic side that Supernatural had now taken, started to creep out. She hunched down by the body with her flashlight and shone against its skin. Most lore said the Turtle Lake Monster was like a large sea-horse with a curved body, scaly, and with a canine head. But this creature resembled the gill-man from the b-movie about the black lagoon. It was fish-like with humanoid features, such as arms and legs and the ability to walk on the shore, as well as swim in the water.
At least, she figured as much. She used her encyclopaedic knowledge of cryptids to decipher the creature’s life before its untimely end while also categorizing and updating her knowledge on the lore itself. The eyes of the creature were harder to place; they definitely seemed reptilian and not human or fish-like, since they were more on the side of its head. Perhaps it was a creature that migrated? Maybe it was evolving? She considered all of these possibilities without touching or moving the body; she had no idea what killed it, and if that thing itself was contagious. She saw no wounds—but then again, it was out of the water. Lack of air could have killed it, but if it had flipped to the surface, she would have thought it’d crawl right back in.
She raised her flashlight to the lake. The sun had set now. The wind was getting colder. She rose from the creature’s body and examined the area of grass from its body to the shoreline. It smelled like the damp part of her dad’s basement; the cleaning supply closest at the hospital where her dad finally died; and the stale smell of vitamins that her mother insisted she take when she was six or seven to make her a ‘strong boy.’
Emma walked towards the lake with her flashlight in one hand and her Swiss army knife in the other. She wasn’t exactly sure what she could fight off with a corkscrew or a small blade, but it made her feel better. Always be prepared was the Boy Scouts code, even if Canada didn’t exactly have the Boy Scouts, but some kind of No Name Brand imitation. Her training came back to her in a whirl, warped with the crypto-zoology and The X-Files episodes she kept on repeat.
The water lapped against the rocks on the shoreline. A few signs had been erected close by declaring the lake a part of Canadian National heritage. One smaller sign followed and apologized in a white-washed way for taking indigenous land. The park was located on a large swathe of land just outside of a reservation in rural Saskatchewan that had been repurposed into a tourist trap that held dozens of cabins for people looking to get away. Whenever Emma made the nearly two hour trek from Saskatoon to hunt for monsters here, she’d only end up finding adults making out like teenagers in the bushes. She’d stopped filming her trips altogether because of it.
“The one time I find a real monster. The one damn time…” she muttered under her breath under she heard a twig snap behind her. Emma turned around so fast she worried she’d knock off her own glasses.
Her flashlight barely illuminated in front of her. All she saw was a slick line of goop from the shoreline to where the body of the Lake Monster had been.
It’s gone.
A chill slammed down Emma’s back, lodging deep in her abdomen. Oh, God. The one time I find a monster and I don’t have a camera… and the monster gets up to leave.
Emma picked up her binoculars and scanned the area. It was too dark now. She should have left fifteen minutes ago. She saw nothing, only blackness, until purple glittered under twilight. Stars had come out, along with Venus, and directed light on what Emma thought was a moving creature. No, a dead creature being dragged. She remembered the way in which her father’s body had been limp yet stiff in death. Those jerky movements were unmistakable, even on a cryptid. The Lake Monster was now being dragged toward a rock-face several hundred feet in front of Emma. The rock wall seemed to shudder. Then all the purple scales, glittering in starlight, disappeared.
Emma put down the binoculars. The wind that had once seemed so comforting warned her. You are not alone here. All of this is real, real, real and you are in danger.
She stamped down her fear long enough to take a sample of the gloop on the grass. Then she ran, faster than she ever remembered, for her car.
*
Alana was home when she called, but Emma spoke so fast that she hung up. Emma called back within seconds and held her tongue between her teeth so she didn’t lose her mind.
“That was you?” Alana baulked. “I thought someone was crank calling me with your phone. Sorry.”
“You have no idea what I have discovered.” Each syllabus felt like a stone under her tongue, slowing her down. “The Turtle Lake Monster. It’s real. I found it tonight. It looks like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but it’s the Turtle Lake Monster. I swear.”
“Uh-huh. And who donned the gill-suit this time around?”
Emma huffed. “You know I never hire actors for my videos. I just don’t shake the tree of doubt.”
“And you capitalize on smudges.”
Emma huffed again, but didn’t argue. Her YouTube channel had gone viral when she claimed to have found Old Yellow Top on a trip to Niagara Falls. She’d taken a photo in the woods on a whim and soon noticed a strange shadow and blonde fuzz in the background. She’d then showcased the photo in a confessional YouTube video, embellishing her vision of the Sasquatch-like cryptid known to haunt Ontario—but only a little bit. Her photo was like a magic eye painting; some days, she saw it and believed her story so fully. Other days, it made her feel nauseated by stretching her eyes too long with no payoff.
Regardless, people believed her enough to frequent her channel and demand more from her. And Emma had coveted the attention. For once, internet fame had come to a trans person from something other than a before and after gender montage set to some sentimental song. Trans women could have other damn interests—like cryptozoology. Her trans identity was incidental to her belief in strange creatures. No one wanted to hear about hormone injections and surgery rejection letters; about transphobia in her workplace and getting sir’d at the bank. They craved Old Yellow Top, a dozen different versions of Igopogo, and her adventures in Saskatoon’s national parks, looking for other creatures not yet discovered. Her audience knew she was trans—she hated to say it was kind of obvious judging on her jawline and the cadence of her voice when she got excited—but it didn’t matter. For once, people actually didn’t care what was in her pants. They cared about what was in the damn woods.
“I don’t need to have smudges anymore,” Emma insisted. “Not when I have the real thing.”
“Yeah, uh huh. Sure.” Alana’s bored voice was only half an act. Her role on Emma’s show had always been to play the sceptic to her true believer stance. In a way, they were the inverse Scully and Mulder in terms of the roles they played and who they looked like the most. Before Alana had transitioned, she’d been a tall and brooding boy who exchanged a dozen letters with pen-pals about monsters in the wilderness; sort of like a Red Shoe Diaries and Fox Mulder hybrid. Though Alana tried to play to Scully’s sceptic, she also wanted to believe so deeply. She just never wanted to let go until she saw the proof.
Until she saw the damn body in front of her—like Emma just found. In another burst of excited chatter, Emma tried to tell Alana the whole story from beginning to end. The whole truth. She emphasized that point several times before it finally seemed to sink in.
“Wait,” Alana said. “So you’re not reading from a script?”
“Again, I don’t have scripts or actors. Just talking points and smudges.”
“So you actually found something? And you weren’t fucking filming? You whore.”
“You bitch,” Emma said right back in a playful tone. Then she sighed. “But no. No filming.”
“Well, you have photos, right? With your phone?”
Emma’s silence made Alana huff. All the excitement that had once been in her voice was now drained. She didn’t even bother to trade spars back and forth. “So you still have nothing. This is still a wet dream, like us ever getting our licenses to match who we are?”
Emma laughed, though the joke was awful. It hit her in all her most vulnerable places. She grabbed the spare sheet of paper out from her jeans pockets. The goop was in the centre of the page. “I have a sample. From the body. There have got to be chemicals in it. My cell reception always goes wonky in this area. It’s part of why I was looking here earlier tonight. I figured it was going to be aliens if I found anything at all, but now we have a creature.”
“No, we literally have the creature’s wet dream. Ugh. I hate you so much right now.”
Emma smiled. Alana was this close to believing. Just one subtle push and—
“All right,” Alana said. “Take me to where you found the body. I have to see this for myself.”
*
As soon as Emma pulled the car into the lot, she felt like they were being watched. It was half passed midnight, and all the stars that had once been so bright seemed dimmed. Even Venus was no longer visible.
“I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Now you’re getting cold feet? You know,” Alana said, shaking her head, “I’m starting to think you’re a fake. Like the National Enquirer.”
“Hey now. Those magazines actually do report stuff. Serious political issues and cover-ups. They just bury it next to Batboy’s baby mamma so it’s not taken seriously.”
“And now you’re the Lone Gunmen. All in one.” Alana rolled her eyes. “Soon enough you’ll start talking to me about chemtrails. And then we’re going to have a serious issue.”
“First of all, how dare you.”
Emma and Alana locked eyes for a long, extended moment before bursting into laugher. Alana started to mimic the now famous InfoWars segment about frogs turning gay, tying it to their own transition. “If only the water really gave us boobs,” Alana said forlornly, “then wouldn’t need doctors at all.”
“But this conspiracy,” Emma said, feeling the gravity of the situation. “What if it is real?
What if what I’ve found is actually something that would have been buried in the National Enquirer? What if…?”
“You’re given a Pulitzer in crazy talk?” Alana laughed again. “Well, if that’s the case, then we’re sharing it because that snot bubble you trapped on paper is nothing. We’re getting more, okay? And then we’ll talk about, especially if that means we’re given the keys to the InfoWars castle. God, can you imagine?”
Alana continued to chuckle as she got out of the car. Emma opened the backseat and gathered the lap equipment they’d both lifted from Alana’s veterinarian’s office. She could test the sample there come morning, and be able to report back with some kind of definitive certainty what they’d found. Alana had already theorized that it could just be normal guck from lake life that had been warped through plastics and other chemicals. It didn’t have to be some new kind of animals; and even if it was, they were discovering new bacteria all the time. So perhaps they would get an award for all of this. It only depended on what audience they wanted the most.
“Ready?” Alana held her lab equipment. She gestured to Emma’s phone. “You better tape us this time.”
Emma nodded. Her binoculars were around her neck, her Swiss army knife, and back-up hand-crank flashlight in her belt loops. She used the flashlight on her phone to guide her. While Alana walked towards the lake with her own light, Emma flipped open the camera and started the intro shot.
“Hello Tubies. We’re on a secret mission. Alana is convinced that I’m wrong about finding a gill-man body tonight, which could be the infamous Turtle Lake Monster. In spite of her scepticism, and how my creature differs from the standard lore, I’m still pretty sure I’m right and what I found is real. It disappeared the moment I turned away, but who knows what still lingers in the water? Come on.”
She turned the phone away from her face and held it out as a guide. Her voice had taken on the cadence of a performance; part circus announcer and part confessional queen. A deep fear lingered behind her, something that Emma hadn’t quite faced. She didn’t tell Alana how the body had disappeared. Only that it did.
As Emma walked, Emma glanced towards the rock face several feet away. Nothing glittered. Nothing glinted. But the sensation of being watched was still so acute.
“Here?” Alana asked. She dropped down the kit she carried and examined the grass. “I think I see the purple goo. You getting’ this? I’m not doing this twice and I’m definitely not staging anything.”
“Hush now. We never stage.”
“Uh-huh. Just tell me I’m in the right place.”
“You are. That’s where I found the body.”
Emma filmed as Alana took out tweezers and plucked up some grass. She added them into baggies. When they reached the water, the purple goo had faded, most likely washed away. Rocks lingered at the edge, interspersed with what looked to be egg shells. When Emma pointed it out, Alana shot her a look.
“I saw them. It’s not my first rodeo.” She sighed with what Emma thought was fear as she knelt down to collect the shells. “This is probably nothing. So many people camp in this area it’s probably just leftover breakfast. But I’ll collect it, anyway. Anything to prove you wrong.”
Emma made a noise of feigned pain. She turned the camera to face herself once again. “Well, everyone, what do you think? Are those egg shells from omelettes or something else? Does The Turtle Lake Monster actually sleep out here? Will it come back and rescue its babies? Or will this video be too dark and I’ll be unable to upload it and have to scrap all this effort tonight?”
Alana laughed just as Emma cut the camera. She slipped the phone into her pocket before kneeling down to where Alana was. She examined the eggshells through the plastic baggie, her brows knit with confusion.
“Are you okay? You seemed… spooked. Or dare I say, like a believer.”
“This is really strange, Emma.” It was all Alana said for some time. She extended the bag over to Emma, who looked at the shells. They were striated with lines, faintly purple on the inside. Not familiar, not omelette eggs. Not even close. When Emma looked up, she swore she saw the same glitter of light by the rock face. There and then gone. The lapping of the water and wind was the only sound.
“It is strange,” Emma agreed. “But is it real?”
“I think…I think we may actually be onto something. For once, this may not actually be a hoax.”
*
After two weeks and testing the results twice, the results came back as inconclusive. Unfamiliar. Strange. Not even Alana’s boss understood what he was looking at, and he was an expert in tropical fish. He had no idea what the two of them were doing, but he wanted to publish whatever they found in an academic journal. More people were spiralling into this story, all without warning. Alana had been talking to her former pen-pals who were now email buddies about monsters once again, causing Emma’s channel to explode once more overnight. A new audience was already pre-emptively setting up to wait for the big reveal. The cryptid and conspiracy community beckoned her. The screeching mantle of InfoWars would be passed. Full acceptance. A captive audience. Everything she ever wanted. She had wanted to believe and now she could believe.
But the video remained on her phone, untouched and unedited. She didn’t want to upload the scene because it still felt lacking. She was the only living witness to the gill-man Lake Turtle Monster; everyone else was the friend of a friend, the second stage. They were the ones keeping the lore alive—even Alana. She claimed to have a front seat to the evidence, but she didn’t see the body. She only saw the goop.
As far as Emma was concerned, this was her cryptid. And her cryptid still seemed so distant to her, even though she had been so close to his death.
When Alana called for the sixth time in one night, Emma finally let her phone power down. She didn’t want to talk about the types of tours they’d do now; the books they could write; or even the podcasts they could do. Fuck being a cog in the conspiracy. She never wanted to be on a panel of experts or screech about what was in the water. When she was a kid, and she’d first heard about Bigfoot, she had wanted to go out and meet him. She’d been a scared boy on a Boy Scout trip, listening to the urban legends and fearing that she’d pee her pants. But when those campers finally delivered the punch line in the scary stories, the monsters seemed more like her friends. They were more like herself, in her strange creature form, waiting to emerge into daylight.
Emma got into her car and drove to Turtle Lake.
*
A well-worn pathway in the grass directed her to the rock-face, where another pathway, lined with small evergreens and black pebbles, led her to the top of a steep hill. When she felt along the rock for edges, her finger dipped into a crack. She squinted. The cracks lined up and led her fingers to a doorknob. She turned it and a sharp grating sound followed. Not a knob, but a bell. She stood in front of the fuzzy door and waited. Someone would come, she was sure of it. She needed to reveal herself in order to be revealed.
“My name is Emma,” she said after a moment. “Emma Bryant.”
The door quaked. It slid apart. An older woman with a sharp nose and thin lips appeared. Her hair was dyed a monochrome black and pulled back into a ponytail so tight it seemed more like a hood than hair. Lines around her mouth revealed her advanced age, along with the lines near her eyes that spoke wisdom. She smiled when she saw Emma.
“No friend tonight?”
“No. Just me.”
The woman ushered her inside. The steep hill had been hollowed out, making Emma think of the first plans for Mount Rushmore. On a road trip to see her cousins, her father had taken her to the monument and told her all about the crazy inventor who’d wanted to keep important records inside the Presidents’ heads. He died before it was complete, so the rocks stayed piled up and nothing was ever stored inside. Emma could sense, from the smell of decay and printed paper alone, that the woman had managed to succeed where one man had failed. Her records became evident once Emma’s eyes adjusted to the low light.
Each wall was covered in photographs, many of which were amber with age. Emma recognized many of them from her crypto-zoological studies. There was the original 1947 image of Caddy, a sea serpent in BC, a visual rendition of the Igopogo lake monster of Ontario, and a frame of the famous Bigfoot footage from the 1960s, mixed in with other cryptids from around the globe. She even saw her own photo of Old Yellow Top, the one from her YouTube channel that had been repeated on a dozen postcards in her online shop. Emma was about to ask the woman how she knew of these images, when she spotted a framed photo of the woman (years younger) standing next to Old Yellow Top himself. Emma paused, blinked several times, and then pressed her face close enough to the photo she could see lingering fingerprints on the glass. This was Old Yellow Top. Not a costume, but very real. The woman’s records weren’t just a wunderkammer of any crypto-scientists’ wet dream. They were her records, like her own family photos.
“Tea?”
“No thank you,” Emma said. She sat on the chair the woman offered to her. Her kitchen was also filled with photographs, along with knick-knacks and trinkets which took up every spare shelf and mantelpiece. A stuffed jackalope hung over where the tea mugs were placed. The woman brushed the head of the jackalope, as if for luck, before pouring herself some tea.
“I would appreciate it if you do not expose this place,” the woman said.
“Oh. Um.”
“I know you have a channel. And I know you take this seriously. But you can’t.”
Emma buckled under the criticism. She always hated it when people told her what she could and couldn’t do, especially with the occult. The only thing other prohibition that irked her this much was when people told her what to do with her gender.
“I…” In spite of her anger, the woman’s cool gaze made Emma bite back her tone to a more cordial disagreement. “I don’t see how that matters to you.”
“Not to me. But to the animals and creatures, it matters a lot.”
“What do you mean?”
Before the woman could answer, small hissing noises broke up the room. Emma thought it was the kettle, but the woman had already poured her tea. The woman rose from her seat and opened a door next to the kitchen. Several small purple creatures nestled together in a makeshift bed. They were small lizard-like creatures, but with humanoid arms and legs. Their skin looked gooey, almost like raw chicken, except that it was purple.
“Oh my God,” Emma said.
“Yes,” the woman answered. She opened a drawer and removed a plastic bag that seemed to skitter with life. She dropped some live beetles into the baby Turtle Monster’s nest. The creatures ate it up. “These are what remains of The Turtle Monster you found two weeks ago.”
“It… it can have babies?”
The woman smiled. “How else do you think they reproduce? They are not created through thought forms, like the tulpas. They must also breed like you or me.”
“Obviously. I mean. I just…”
“What you found on the grass was afterbirth. The mother laid her eggs, but she died in the process. It happens every so often.”
“Oh, okay.” Emma bit her lip, pretending to understand. In no textbook or strange small-fonted website on Angelfire had she ever seen this kind of information. Everything was familiar—yet brand fucking new. “I am glad her babies survived.”
“I am too. But you must respect them.” The woman placed the paper bag back into the shelf and shut the door to the babies’ room. A flash of light emitted before the door was shut, as if a hot lamp went on from a sensor once the door was closed. The hissing died down. “So I do not ask that you hold back your video for me, but for them. For the generations of cryptids like them.”
“Like Old Yellow Top? You have to make sure he gets busy and breeds, too?”
When the woman nodded, Emma held back a laugh. No way this was real. What was this woman, the cryptid whisperer? Was she proficient in Cryptid husbandry? It made no sense. It was like some strange erotica found on Amazon and written by a crank author. She was about to say as much when the woman held up her hand.
“You will find this foolish. But there is something dire happening here. When the land is destroyed, so is home of all wildlife. You take care of the caribou, the cougar, and the sea otter, while I’ve taken care of the cryptids. I’m not alone, but I’m the best.”
“I have no way of checking that citation.”
The woman smiled. She grabbed a worn leather book from a shelf behind her and extended it. The name Phoebe Cavanagh was written on the bottom. “That’s me. I’ve been doing this a long time. I started out as a doctor. Then I noticed that my patients kept getting ill in one area. So I went there. I realized they weren’t becoming ill, but being pushed out by a native species. The Thetis monster wanted its water back. It needed the reserve. So I gave it him.”
Emma opened the book. A photo of the a creature that looked oh-so similar to the purple one she’d seen was on the front page, followed by newspaper clipping from the 1920s at the first sighting of the Thetis Lake Monster, and the sickness which came after and killed seven people. The second newspaper clipping was from the 1950s, during a second wave of sickness. Phoebe was quoted in a newspaper article from the 1950s, and pictures in an image. She somehow maintained her stoic wisdom even back then, while also remaining youthful. Her hair dark and her eyes were bright. In the book, Phoebe detailed how to treat the Thetis’s water so it could still live and thrive, and the town would no longer need to steal, but share the resources.
“My patients got better soon after we implemented a better system,” she said. “And the land got better too, because the cryptids were happy.”
“And now you’re taking care of the woods?”
She nodded. “All of Canada has monster problems. I’ve been all over—but here, in Saskatoon, there seems to be an influx of creatures dying. I’m still trying to figure it out. Luanne wasn’t the first patient I’ve lost, but at least she laid eggs this time around. At least there is another generation to keep going.”
Luanne. Emma repeated the name inside her head. It was strange to think of that name fitting that creature—but it somehow did. Emma wanted to be like the monsters. She wanted to understand them. This was the best way to understand them—to learn their names and habits—and yet in spite of an overwhelming feeling to bond and learn, she looked at the scrapbook in front of her with scepticism like a shield.
“Let’s say all of this is true,” Emma started. “And that my silence helps these creatures maintain their privacy so they can go on reproducing, what’s stopping me, really, from taking this scrapbook back to town as proof? Sure, most people will call me crazy and walk away. But a handful will come. And a handful will destroy this place, but possibly make me rich. There is nothing stopping me from uploading that video.”
“Except a conscience.”
“Fancy word. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“But Luanne does. But names do. And you know them now.”
Emma shook her head. Phoebe may have been right, but that still didn’t stop Alana. Emma may be more sentimental, but Alana was now on a mission.
“I can help you, you know. With your predicament.”
“My predicament?” Emma had to laugh. She gestured to her body in a derisive manner. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m born this way. Haven’t you heard?”
“I’ve heard a lot of things. And I’ve learned a lot of things. Flip to the back of the book.”
With a curious head tilt, Emma examined photos from a mid-century circus with Lobster Boy and a The Fattest Man. Then of a woman and man hybrid called Donna/Donald. As the photographs continued, Donna disappeared and out emerged Donald. There were more sequences just like that, spanning from the early 1950s to modern times. Each image of a smiling face was familiar to Emma in spite of never knowing these trans people personally. She’d seen these before-and-after cascades so much on YouTube; all that was missing in Phoebe’s version was a Coldplay song.
Emma closed the book. “I don’t think you have what I want.”
“Are you sure?”
Emma wanted to get up. Leave the weird hollow stone and post her video for all the glory. But she stayed rooted to her chair. Phoebe noticed and went on.
“I ask and offer these services to you because I know we can only live in two worlds for so long. We either embrace the supernatural and let it consume us, until Lake Monster eggs are quotidian and we know the skin is purple and never was another colour, or we turn our backs on this world and never look a strangeness again. We forget what’s hidden and we become normal.”
“Being normal is overrated,” Emma said.
“Being normal is what’s been denied to you. So you embrace the odd. That’s fine. I embraced the odd. I wanted to help—but I’m helping creatures stay normal, too. To have babies. To repair broken bones or amputate limbs caught in bear traps. This is my normal. This is not a freak-show to me. You have to decide if you want to be normal with humans or if you want to be normal among cryptids. You can’t have both anymore, Emma. That’s reached an end now.”
Emma wanted to argue. She wanted to yell back like a child and complain that no one could ever tell her what to do. About gender. About the occult. The two most important things to her felt taken from her by an old witch—but they also felt finally explained. Emma had wanted to be a monster because she felt like a monster as a young boy. When she realized she didn’t have to be a scary boy eating vitamins to make him grow strong and following in his dad’s footsteps, she said fuck it. She left that world behind—only to be stuck in this one. Being trans without ID. Without a license. She did the YouTube stuff because the ad revenue from blurry photos paid her bills. She waited and waited and waited for surgery that would make her normal, while also knowing that it would never come. So she thought she’d just stay with monsters.
But these monsters were normal. It was different, but there was a normal here. They had photos on their walls. They posed with their friends and families. Their doctor. Phoebe was a doctor, just like the ones that acted as gatekeepers. Except that Phoebe provided her with a door to a normal life. Not one living as a freak in either realm—but she had to choose.
“Are you sure you can do this?”
Phoebe nodded. “It’s kind of my speciality.”
Emma didn’t want to ask how or why. It didn’t seem to matter. She closed the book and handed it over. “Okay, I won’t post.”
“Thank you.” Phoebe rose from the table. She set out another pot of water to boil and took down another jar filled with herbs. When she offered tea to Emma this time, she said yes.
The darkness came faster than she thought possible.
*
“Hey, Tubies,” Emma said into her phone. It was daylight. Her body ached, but she was alive. Her smile was wider, her mind clearer. And her license was brand new in her purse. She could do anything now. She climbed up the rock face across from Turtle Lake and made sure the door to Phoebe’s world was hidden in her video. “I wanted to let you all know that this will be my last update. Ever. Alana will be taking over, though, and she has some amazing things to tell you guys.”
Earlier in the week, Emma deleted the earlier footage. When Alana had asked why, she claimed it was too dark. Alana had been frustrated, especially since the vet’s had been broken into the night before. The sludge that was really after birth was now gone. No records of the strange lab experiments remained. Even Davis, Alana’s boss, somehow now had an explanation for what they’d seen that day, categorizing it as an obscure fish disease. He no longer wanted to publish.
But Alana couldn’t let it go.
That was okay, though. Phoebe had assured Emma as much. Alana had never seen the Lake Monster up close. She only saw the traces, the edges of the monster. She only had the lore. There was no face to face contact, no crossing into another world. Alana was always going to be skating close to that edge, but she would never get inside unless she was lucky. It was always a million and one chance to be that lucky.
Emma had used up all that luck. As a parting gift, handed over her YouTube Channel, now bursting with subscribers, to the person who would carry on the lore—but the lore only.
“So, I’m moving to Ontario,” Emma said, still looking into the camera. “Not just because of Old Yellow Topper, but because there’s a lot cool things in Toronto. Boring things for you guys, but cool for me. I really did have a blast doing this show, guys. Probably more than you can even imagine.”
Emma’s smile hurt. Her heart swelled. When she signed off, she gave her standard peace symbol with her fingers, but for the last time. She closed the camera on her phone. She would upload it when she had a signal again. She wouldn’t even need to edit it.
Then she would move. Her life would start over, utterly normal.
She rose and stood next to the door. It would not open for her again. But when she pressed her ear against it, she heard the sounds of life on the other side. Hissing and the fussing. Baby cryptids, and a mother that would keep them safe.
A minute later, Emma walked towards her car and headed for home.
From urban legend to legends on stage, the tone shift from Magda Mayfly to We Will Survive is–to me–a wonderful form of whiplash.
And the premise for We Will Survive was even better. It was also one of those few instances when I write a story specifically for an anthology, and it gets in!! First try!!
“We Will Survive” was written for the Vinyl Cuts Anthology by Scary Dairy Press. Make a scary story but also have a tie in to some form of class rock music in some way. Oh, but don’t reproduce lyrics!
Challenge accepted.
Throw in some drag queens lip syncing their way to Gloria Gaynor and rescuing kids from a gay conversation camp and you pretty much have the whole story. It was a BLAST to write while my first kiddo was napping and I was experiencing a reprieve from the morning sickness of my second.
I truly hope you enjoy it (and survive) too!
We Will Survive
By Eve Morton
“How long has it been?” said Jan.
I glanced at my watch, then at the clock on the idling car’s dashboard. I wanted the times to be different, but they weren’t. “At least a half hour.”
“Shit. We’re screwed. We’re—”
I put a hand on Jan’s shoulder, but Jan brushed me away, so I turned down the radio instead. As much as I wanted to keep listening to the sultry stylings of Gloria Gaynor, the song only reminded me of what Jan already knew and what I had refused to acknowledge for the past thirty-five minutes. We really were fucked.
Only three days before, we’d all been getting ready to perform our latest number in the Haven Bar, a place for queers, freaks, and all those in between. Jan was in the Miss Terri get-up, transforming Jan’s current buzz cut into something more dazzling with a blond wig and a dress that cascaded down slim and ever so delicate shoulders. Markus, or Miss Mary Quite Contrary, had been in her fur number, the one with the thick collar and long sleeves to disguise the big footballer’s shoulders. Though Markus had not played the game in years, he often acted as the bouncer for Haven, so he had to cover up the muscles when he played his alter ego of Miss Mary. She was a stunning woman whenever she took the stage; a strong soprano with a show person’s charm. Last year, when she’d sung “Happy Birthday” to Haven’s owner, she’d done the Marilyn Monroe version. Just stunning, just wonderful.
I felt a tear slide down my cheek now, just thinking about it. Markus had left to get us gas when we’d run out on the side of the road in Arkansas, and it was now clear he was not coming back.
“Why are we doing this?” Jan asked me, running a delicate hand through his short hair. “I mean, we hardly know this kid. We could just turn around right now. Go back.”
“And do what?” I asked. “File a missing person’s report for Markus, which will just be ignored because he’s a big guy, or a faggy queen, and no one cares about us? Not to mention the other kid.”
Jan looked down at his lap in shame. He’d looked the same when he’d called his father last Easter to wish him a happy holiday and a happy birthday, and his father pretended to not know who he was. I have no son, the stereotypical answer from all homophobic dads. Jan had been upset, but put on a stunning, cathartic performance of Miss Terri that night, as if to channel his father’s pronouncement. He was not his son anymore. Damn right, Miss Terri was a vixen queen who helped the less fortunate.
I reminded Jan of that day now. “Your dad left you. My family left me. And we know Markus never really had a family to begin with. This kid—”
“Barry,” he corrected me, and I knew he hadn’t forgotten his heart.
“Right. Barry. He’s just like us. He’s come to watch us every single Saturday night for the past six months. Then he up and disappears. We know what’s happened to him. It’s what almost happened to all of us, what would have happened to us had there been such a thing as conversion therapy when we were his age.”
“But there wasn’t. We just ended up homeless.”
“And fabulous.” I tried to grin, but it was hard. The Arkansas woods around us, and the fact that Markus was still missing, got under my skin. The feeling seemed to have a life of its own. The moment we truly crossed into the Deep South, passed the freshness of Georgia’s peach stands and into the swamps of Louisiana, I felt as if we were surrounded by ghosts. Civil War soldiers; slaves; and of course the missing men and women who lay stranded like us, trying to channel Blanche Dubois and depend on the kindness of strangers, only to be taken off the earth.
I shook my head and tried to focus. Panicking was going to get us nowhere fast. “We have to keep going.”
“But how?” Jan’s eyes were deep blue and utterly desperate. “Markus was bigger than both of us. And if he’s gone—”
“Then we need to rely on what we’ve always been good at.” I looked into the backseat, where our bags had been tossed. Once we realized Barry was gone, and that his parents had sent him to one of those horrible rehabilitation camps that ran ads in the back of religious magazines, we had set off on our mission. There had been almost no discussion, just utter understanding between the three of us that we had to do this for the inner, abandoned child inside all of us. So we threw all of our clothing in a bag, plus some cash we had lying around and a map of the South that we found in the Haven’s lost and found.
It’ll be a fun road trip, Markus had said. If nothing else.
Oh, we’d been so naive. Three days ago, all that worried us was whether we’d be able to break a kid who was not related to us out of a camp his parents had probably paid good money for. We had some half-baked notion of walking in, claiming to be his cousins and that there was a family emergency he needed to attend to. Since Barry often worshipped us from afar at the bar and asked us for advice between sets—advice that mostly amounted to finding the right shoes in a man’s size ten, not how to escape zealot family members—we were hoping that he’d recognize us out of makeup. If he didn’t, we were planning on humming a few songs to prime his memory pump. And then he’d go with us, and we’d introduce him to being a newly independent queer kid, and everything would be hunky-dory.
Everything was not going hunky-dory. And without our strongest member, I had no idea what to do next.
Except to get dressed.
“I think we need a disguise,” I said, and then shook my head. “No, no. I think we need to become who we really are. That’s the only way we can fight this place. That’s why Markus is missing—this would have never happened to Miss Mary. The land swallows you whole. You may as well be in a good skirt while it happens.”
Jan looked at me as if I was crazy. Then as if I was a genius. He opened the passenger side door and, after a careful look around the woods where we were stuck, began looking through our travelling wardrobe in the backseat. “What are you waiting for, Miss Robin?”
Power pulsed through me at my stage name. Oh, I missed her. The badass girl who could leap over tall buildings, a better Dick Grayson than the real Robin. And now we’re crime fighters, too. We looked through our clothing at the back, found the best outfits, and began to get dressed.
The entire time, I swore the woods were watching us. Be it ghosts or hicks or even Markus, lingering on the sidelines and waiting for us to emerge as our true selves, I could feel eyes on me.
And I thought, we may as well give them a final show.
*
Once we were dressed up, it was easier to find gas. We still had to walk from our broken-down car back towards the gas station we’d spotted off the interstate but when we did it together it was less scary. We were also dressed in a toned-down version of our typical garb. We weren’t performers right now; we were just women out for a walk because our car had broken down.
No one at the gas station looked too closely at either one of us. We were lucky, in a way. Jan’s hands were small and delicate, and though his voice was deeper, I’d sung for years in a choir and had better control over my cadence in the everyday waking world; we could mix between the genders, an array of masculine and feminine, and no one would look too closely. I asked softly for gas, holding a scarf over my Adam’s apple, and then asked the kid behind the counter if he remembered a big burly man coming through here and asking for gas an hour earlier.
“That queer?” he said. He twisted his pockmarked face in disgust. “Yeah, I sold him gas.”
“He’s a little funny, but that’s just because he’s from New York,” I said, and hoped that the explanation made sense. The kid just shrugged, reiterated that he’d sold him gas, but nothing else.
“So, he left here?” I asked.
“Yes’m.”
The rest of the conversation was like talking to a brick wall, and I felt as if we were already risking so much. We walked back to the car, arm in arm, as the sun was setting.
“It’s supposed to be summer,” Miss Terri, Jan’s alter ego, complained. “What happened to the sun staying out all night and beach parties and fun things?”
“We’ll get them, my love,” I told her, gripping her arm hard. “We just have to survive.”
When Miss Terri began to hum the beginning bars of Miss Gloria Gaynor’s hit, I thought it was the best idea we’d had so far. We hummed together, repeating the chorus like a call that would get us through this night. Because once there was gas in the car, and no other sign of Markus, we had to keep going forward.
Our plan pretending to be Barry’s cousins had now also changed. Our clothing made us feel powerful, and since we’d managed to get out of the Arkansas woods with them once, we didn’t want to take any further chances.
“We have to go in as women,” I said, once we were only a few miles from the camp. We’d been passing billboards as we turned deeper in Arkansas, each one proclaiming a line from the Bible about damnation and salvation or broadcasting an alert about another missing kid with a black and white photo. None of them were Barry, but so many looked the same: wispy hair, a genuine smile, and a fae presence that left me with a faint stirring of recognition. Oh, these boys. These were my boys and they were in trouble.
Miss Terri had been quiet, but when I met her gaze, she nodded. She reached down into her purse and grabbed more makeup and started to put it on using the car’s mirrors for guidance.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’re going in as ladies of the night,” she said as if it was obvious. “We’re someone’s dates now. Someone in the camp, or someone working at the camp. Doesn’t matter. But they’ve called for us, so we gotta get in somehow.”
I debated the merits of this. Either they’d see through the thin disguises we had on now, call us the faggots and queers and sinners we were to them, or they’d see us tarted up like Jezebels and try to get us. Or maybe we’d dazzle them. Maybe there would be just enough ambiguity that we could slip in while the confusion was still fresh, and pluck Barry to go home with us.
Along with any other boy who wanted to come along.
“You think there are lesbians there, too?” I asked.
“Of course. These people make no distinction. Probably make ’em play house together, too. Like some sick Norman Bates nonsense.”
We both shuddered. I hated Psycho. Just gave dressing up a bad rap. As Jan continued to put on more makeup, fully becoming the elegant Miss Terri in the flesh, I continued to drive. The road changed from paved to dirt. She was done with her eyes by then, so the shaking didn’t rattle her around too much. But the lights that I had once relied on for the road, and the lingering sun, were now almost completely blotted out. The trees surrounding the dirt road became thicker and thicker. I slowed down on impulse, feeling as if I was going into a jungle.
And that feeling of being watched came back. Ghosts or goblins or hicks, but definitely not the eager eyes of the audience I was used to. “Miss Terri,” I whispered. “I need to put on makeup.”
She handed me her purse, her makeup, without caring. She could feel the eyes, the strange gazes from the woods, too.
“Maybe we should—”
“We’re not turning back,” I said.
“No. But I think that’s the camp. And we can’t drive up like this. We need to keep our car as a getaway vehicle.” She gestured into the distance. I was convinced she was crazy, that her vision was going, but the orb that I thought had been the moon rising on the horizon wasn’t that at all. There was no moon in the sky that night, I would later look up. Just blackness, just stars—and this single lamp outside the camp.
We pulled the car into thick brush between two trees. I finished a quick slather of my makeup, hands shaking as I did, and then we walked towards the light. We held hands, arms and elbows interlocking with each step forward. Each crunch of the dirt and rocks under our feet made us jump. Each snap of the trees in the woods filled my stomach with dread. I wanted to go back. Desperately so. But each time I remembered that look on Barry’s young face when we performed, longing and despair mixed into one, and I crept forward. I wished someone had done this for me. I wished someone had done this for all the missing boys I’d seen on those billboards as we came in.
“Hello?” called a man’s voice from our left.
We turned to see a shadowy figure wearing thick army coveralls and a camouflage jacket. He was clean-cut, and something gold glimmered around his neck. A cross, maybe. He was part of the camp.
“Can I help you ladies?” he asked.
“Yes. We’re a present for one of your guests.” Miss Terri smiled and leaned close to him. She was acting brilliantly; only I saw that her hands shook as she made up our cover story. “Is Bobby inside?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The man seemed baffled by our presence, but he was also polite. And when asked a direct question by a lady, or someone who seemed like a lady, you answered. “I didn’t know it was his birthday.”
“It’s a bit early, yes. But we’ve been called in as special entertainment.”
The man looked from Miss Terri to me, and then back again. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“No?”
“No.” He reached for something in the side of his pants, and in that split second, Miss Terri jumped on him. She wrestled his hand away from whatever was in his holster, and then used her much more massive body weight to pin him to the ground. When he struggled, she reached behind herself, grabbed a high heel, and gouged it deep into his stomach. He cried out in pain and released his hand from his pocket.
“It’s a fucking walkie-talkie!” Miss Terri threw the device away with her free hand and huffed. He struggled underneath her as she tried to feel him up and down for weapons. There were none. “What do I do now?”
I grabbed the walkie-talkie instead of answering. I pressed the button to listen and heard murmurs of conversations, then I let it go and addressed the man we had pinned. “How many of you are touring the base?”
“What?”
“How many of you?” I got close to his face. “You have this walkie-talkie to talk to someone. So, how many someones?”
He struggled under Terri. He spat at us. Miss Terri held his head against a rock, threatening him in muffled gasped, until he finally mumbled, “Three.”
“Three?” Miss Terri repeated, but he was silent. She threatened him with the rock again, but he said nothing else.
So she knocked him out.
“Okay,” she said, looking to me. “Don’t worry, he’s not dead. But let’s take care of these brutes before we go inside.”
We did the smart thing and stuck together, walking clockwise around the perimeter until we stumbled on two more men just like the one we’d found earlier. Miss Terri distracted the closest man, while I approached the other one from behind. On a silent count of three, we knocked them out, but didn’t kill either one, because we did not want to be murderers. It was tough work, though, and both of our knees were bloody and parts of our dresses were torn by the end of it.
“We have three now.” Miss Terri gestured with her head, her hair only slightly out of place, towards the front gate of the camp. We could see three main cabins now, and the one with the light on was the largest. “Let’s subdue whoever’s there, then move on to free all the troops. I sort of like the idea of the woods being filled with free gays and lesbians.”
I chuckled, feeling the adrenaline pumping through me. But I also looked over my shoulder. I still felt like we were being watched. The men we’d knocked out, we’d also tied up with zip ties we’d found on their persons, but there was something else. Something more.
“Hey, wait,” I said to Miss Terri, hurrying to catch up as she took the lead. “Did that guy mean three including him, or three—”
I didn’t get a chance to finish my question. Only paces in front of me, Miss Terri stepped into the light of the main cabin, and a different shadowy figure ran out of the dark and tackled her from the waist and into a thatch of trees. I froze and saw nothing, only heard grunts and screams of a struggle. My bladder seized with fear as I heard the piteous cries of someone losing a fight.
I backed away from the cabin’s light and ran towards the woods. I was all fear, all animal instincts. I ran and ran, twigs and branches scraping against my dress and my face. My heels broke off, nearly tripping me, so I was running in flats and then in bare feet. I was almost shirtless, shoeless, and bleeding from both knees and one cheek by the time I reached our car. I got behind the wheel, only to realize that Miss Terri had the keys. Her dress was the only one with pockets. And it had seemed like a good idea at the time for her to carry them, like this whole thing seemed like a good idea only three days ago.
“Oh no, no, no.” I sobbed onto the wheel, shuddering and shaking with fear. I kicked the floor, the dashboard, and then the radio. Something blinked in the car’s engine, and for a brief second, the car came to life. A snippet of the Gloria Gaynor song came on the air. It left just as quickly, and no matter how many times I kicked the car again, it did not return. Only her voice in my head lingered, the memories I had of performing it with my two other darling ladies.
Markus was gone. Jan was gone.
It was only me now.
And I was determined to survive.
*
I dressed all in black, the outfit I usually wore to weddings and funerals. And baptisms, had I ever been invited. I thought of it as my “birth and death” dress, the little black number that all girls needed whether they were bio-girls or something else. I’d packed it on a whim, as if this new adventure would have ended in Barry’s eventual christening into a new life. I shimmied my way into it under the starlight of the Arkansas woods. I trembled as I slipped on new shoes, sneakers that did not go with the dress, but would help me as I went back into the woods and took back the only thing I could: Barry.
And hopefully some dignity, too.
When I returned to the camp, I made sure to take a different pathway. I walked through the woods with careful footfalls and over fallen logs; I waited and listened and hunted like my father tried to teach me when I was younger. I was almost grateful for my violent, alcoholic father in that moment, though hunting anything still left me feeling weak. But the one thing he had given me before he kicked me out was the patience to wait for whatever you wanted, be it doe or buck or to save the queer kid from a life of horrible repression.
I soon saw the men with walkie-talkies. Four of them. Damn. Each one we’d tied was now untied. I verified their numbers at least six times before I followed them with the grace that I still had from years of performing.
“What should we do with the prisoners?” one of them said.
“Didn’t one get away?” another spoke up.
“Damn. We’ll need to canvass the woods.”
“With who? We need to watch the freak we still have. How are we supposed to find the other?”
“That girly man is gone. Scared.”
“Right. But the other one, the big one that got away. How do we get that back?”
“Hmm. Maybe if we use the campers?”
The four of them looked at one another and let out a laugh. “Of course,” one of them said. “Make them do the dirty work. I’ll wake them.”
I waited on the edge of the forest, not moving from my position, as the four guards scattered into the base camp again. Lights flicked on in each one of the cabins that had once been shrouded in darkness. A whistle sounded, followed by a bell. And then masses and masses of boys and girls, none no more than seventeen years old and some seeming as young as twelve or thirteen, spilled out of the cabins. They all gathered in pajamas—drab and grey—in front of the base camp. The four men—boys, really, they had been so young–in army jackets with walkie-talkies took a secondary position while a man, tall and bone-thin, stepped out of the main cabin to address all of them. He wore a preacher’s outfit, sleek and dark and accented with a golden crucifix. When he spoke, he swayed from side to side as if this was a congregation.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have intruders on the base,” he proclaimed with high theatrics and in a Southern drawl. “We have caught some of the miscreants, but I am afraid their power of sin is no match for us. We need your help to scatter the evil that has laid waste to this camp and tried to turn it into a den of iniquity. You know your missions here.”
The crowd tittered. Everyone seemed too tired and yet utterly afraid to move. The preacher man leaned towards the crowd, cupping a hand by his ear. “What do you say?”
“We are here to live clear and righteous,” the crowd said in a dull, flat voice. “We will fight for the light of the Lord.”
“Very good. Now go!”
The four boys walked through the crowd and gave them large sticks to use as weapons. At first I thought they were merely walking sticks, or the type of poles you’d give teams in Capture the Flag, but one teenager slammed it into the ground. It stuck up out of the dirt like a bitter knife.
“I’m not using this,” the boy said. “I won’t kill anyone.”
Barry. I knew that voice. That was Barry. I wanted to run to him, put my arms around him, but my joy was cut from me by a powerful slap. One of the guards had hit him, and then lectured him on the use of force. “You will protect the camp. You will protect your right to live a just life. Say it now.”
“I will protect the right to live a just life,” Barry said, though the words were clouded by tears.
I wanted to vomit and cry along with him. But I forced myself to slink closer to the tree I was watching from, trying to blend into the night. The rest of the cabin’s inhabitants scattered into the woods. The movement sounded like a harsh echo, a wave of violence and sighs from the mouths of babes who did not want to do this, but only wanted, like we all wanted, to survive.
Barry moved slowly with his weapon. He was half-hearted in all his actions until the guard disappeared into the base camp with the preacher. They truly were letting the young ones do their dirty work. Maybe they were calling in reinforcements or doing something sinister behind closed doors—but it was here, as the main antagonist ostensibly went to bed, that I thought I had a chance.
I tiptoed to Barry. He was skimming close to the edge of the forest, looking more at the flora and fauna around him than truly in search of intruders. I had to be careful to not scare him, so instead of calling his name, I hummed.
He froze, holding his back rigid, utterly afraid. When he recognized the song with a shoulder sway, I braved to say his name. “Barry.”
He turned towards the sound but made no other movement. I emerged from the forest and hoped I didn’t look too beat up. He needed to recognize me for this to work. He needed—
Barry ran into my arms, tossing his stick on the ground as he did. I embraced him easily, and when I thought of all I had lost to get here, I held him even tighter. “Come on,” I said, though my voice trembled. “We do not have a lot of time to waste.”
Before we ran deeper and deeper into the woods, he grabbed his stick. Good boy, I thought. Thank you for that. I had no idea how we were going to escape beyond the woods. All I knew was that we had to run. Whenever we couldn’t run anymore, we were going to have to fight. As I repeated the words to “I Will Survive” in my head, I used it like a chant to spur myself forward. Like these small soldiers and the young men who trained them probably used Bible verses to convince themselves that what they were doing was right and just and true.
Only, I was right. I may not survive this, I thought as we reached the edge of the woods and the world became darker all around me, but I know we are right. I regretted nothing of this strange errand. Except maybe that I definitely tore my dress.
“What do we do?” said Barry as we burst out of the woods. He was out of breath, like me, and I had stopped us where the car was parked.
But the car wasn’t there.
“No, no, no,” I moaned. Damn. We were so close. We were … I got on my knees, my wounds stinging as I did, because there were tire tracks. The car had been here. I wasn’t lost.
“I don’t understand.” Barry stabbed his stick in the dirt, frustrated. “What do we do?”
I wanted to scream at him that I was out of fucking ideas. This was it. I had nothing else, other than to embrace our death with dignity. And as I saw bright headlights come towards us, I knew that was the next step.
I was ready, world, to be taken into the arms of whoever was on the other side. Maybe I’d see Marilyn and Judy and the other queens I’d loved. I remained on the dirt road, my arms open in supplication.
“Oh Mary,” I cried. “I’m ready to come home.”
The car stopped in front of me. And Markus stuck his head out of the driver’s side window. “I’m not Mary right now, but it would definitely please me if you got in this car right fucking now.”
I gasped, touching the headlights in front of me as if they truly were a heavenly vision. The car was back. The car was running. Miss Terri was in the passenger seat—looking a little worse for wear, as did Markus—but they were there. My Miss Mary and my Miss Terri, back in my life. Alive!
A door slammed. Barry had already gotten in the backseat while I was still on my knees. Oh, that was ironic. I rose quickly and got into the other side. We’d left the stick behind, an abandoned flag for an unconquered land, but it didn’t matter. Not even as swarms and swarms of other kids came out of the woods with their sticks, along with the preacher and his minions, and surrounded the car with a violent aggressive swarm. We had gas. We had a vehicle.
And we had Miss Gloria Gaynor on the stereo.
“You ready?” Markus asked, though he was already driving. “Better put on your seatbelts. We’re gonna need to go fast and rough.”
“My middle name. All of them,” I said just as Markus floored it. I hit my head on the back window, seeing stars, but I didn’t care. Hours later, with the camp behind us, we would figure out what to do next, where to go next, and who to perform as next since our drag names were now discoverable. We’d bandage ourselves and sleep the restful sleep of the free.
Until then, though, I was going to enjoy the music.
“Magda Mayfly” was one of my first stories involving trans characters and trans experience–so reading it over now, almost ten years later, is very jarring. There are stylistic elements I wouldn’t reproduce anymore, other stuff that is no longer relevant in trans experience, and just things that don’t work anymore.
But I still love this story.
And since it was one of my first published stories (in the Lost & Found issue of Literary Eclectic), it would be disengenuous to not include it, even if there are parts I dislike now. There are still lots of things that I do like about it, and lots that I can see would become fixations in future stories. It was also a longer story I wrote, one that should/could have been the beginning of a gritty noir, rather than a creature-feature (or Candyman like villain origin story).
The idea was simple: what if there was a figure like Bloody Mary that teens tried to evoke with a coming-of-age-ritual, but the figure was based on the life and death of a murdered trans woman? And what if, instead of harming kids, she actually helped them–especially trans kids–with their transition?
That’s where X, the lead character of this story, begins. X redefines a murder as a saintification, and brings Magda out into the light–but not without paying a heavy cost inside the community.
I hope you enjoy & I hope you’re kind to the rougher edges of this tale.
Magda Mayfly
They had to talk about surgery today. That’s what Thursday’s group therapy session was for at the Sherbourne Health Centre. The sign-up sheet was passed around the semi-circle of orange plastic chairs. Each member was to fill in their preferred names and pronouns for attendance, take a name card off the sheet, and talk about what they all wanted to escape.
Michael Donald, as written on his birth certificate that he had not changed yet, wrote down his name as X. He debated the neutral pronouns of they/them/their, but went for the masculine set of he/him/his. People would default to calling him a “he” anyway. He may as well jump ahead of the curve.
“I know that some of you have had your interviews,” Julia, the group leader, stated. “Do you want to talk about how they all went?”
A few people put their hands up. X noticed Cayden across from him in the semi-circle, his small hands immobile at his sides. The two of them had joked about the gender assignment interviews before. They treated the whole affair like a Beckett play, waiting for something that would never come but still forced to stay on the stage and perform. Cayden was assigned female at birth (FAAB), wanted to transition to a man, but he also liked to dress in female drag at bars on the weekend. Cayden was a Russian doll of identities and he was acutely aware that this would put him on the chopping block for the interviews that were part of sex reassignment surgery.
And X—well, X was nothing at all. He had no identity that he would much rather embrace, but the biology he found himself tangled in was often too tiring to bear. He came to the gender clinic, and wanted gender reassignment surgery, because he had hopes that some kind of physical change would ease his mental anguish. But as for his identity, he felt as if his gender may as well have been called Godot. It was never going to show up.
But the audience still waited.
Natalie, a tall trans woman with pink lips, spoke first. She had had her gender interview on Monday. From her spot in the circle, the rest of the group would shuffle around and rehash their own experiences, which often felt like first dates complete with 1950 gender roles and Betty Crocker aprons.
“I figure I have to play into the committee’s idea of what a ‘real woman’ is,” Natalie said. “So I wore a skirt. I laughed a lot. I had to appear competent, but not too competent or they wouldn’t help me. You know? So I did my make-up well, but I made sure I didn’t cover all of my stubble. A cry for help, but a reasonable one.”
A few other trans women nodded. The trans man that followed Natalie reiterated a similar story. He dressed as butch as he could, but he didn’t bind so the committee would be reminded of what he needed to remove. The group leader, Julia, a trans woman who had successfully completed her transition in the early nineties, now turned to X as part of the circle. He laid his hands over his lap, his mind distracted.
“And how did you interview go, X?”
X sighed. He knew his had gone terribly. But there was no use admitting defeat yet.
“I went. I did the song and dance. But I’m not holding my breath.”
“Why not?”
“It’s hard when you don’t identify as either. Agender is not a concept to the committee. They want to mark you down as one or the other. I can’t lie… not like that. But I also don’t want to wait for the inevitable ‘nothing’ to come.”
“I wasn’t lying in my interview,” Natalie said. “I was just…playing into expectations.”
“I know. But you have an expectation to play with. There is no expectation for me. I’m sitting on the fence to them. Undecided. Always.”
“And how do you feel about all of this?” Julia asked.
“I’m ambivalent,” X said with a laugh. “I think that’s kind of the point, though.”
“Can you elaborate at all?”
“I don’t identify as either sex or gender or whatever you want to call it. I want my name to be X because that’s the only chromosome that almost everyone has. Ambivalent means being in between, right? It means I don’t have to choose. Quite frankly, I don’t exactly like my options.”
Julia glanced around at the group and then back at X. X could tell that she was worried, awkwardly assessing her position in relation to people like X and Cayden who conformed and rebelled to notions of gender. That was the problem with most of these therapy groups for X. Trans people wanted to be one or the other. Some wanted to be both, which still kind of worked in their favour. They usually just lied on the forms and embraced the other side of the spectrum, so they could get the pills and leniency they needed.
But X didn’t want pills. He didn’t even really want to dress as anything else; now he wore jeans and a black t-shirt, his normal attire. He wanted to be nothing, but in a world that measured things with either/or boxes, he knew he was going to have to pick sides.
“Do you ever feel like something?” Julia asked.
“I feel like things that don’t have genders,” X said. “A rock. An arrow head. Insects.”
“But insects do have a sex. They have to for reproduction. And we still gender them when we speak about them. Black widows, ladybugs, queen bees. There’s a lot there.”
“But they’re not gendered in the same way we are,” X explained. “Many insects go through stages. Not to harp on the whole butterfly metaphor, but I like the notion that we don’t stay one thing very long. Identity for insects is always short-lived.”
Julia nodded, but she still looked uncomfortable. It was a testament, really, to her limits. She could sit through therapy sessions where every last negative thing was said about someone’s self-worth and the t-word was used in excess and not bat an eye. But to give Julia nothing to hold onto, no panic to calm or oppression to work through, and suddenly she was at a loss for words.
“I have heard of eunuchs,” X added.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Online. There is a group of eunuchs, or people who identify as such. They were born male, like me, I suppose – and then wanted to get rid of anything that made their voices change.”
“You can’t get rid of that,” Natalie said, leaning forward. She whispered as she spoke. “Testosterone is a damaging hormone. It makes the vocals chords change permanently.”
“I know,” X said. “Trust me, I know. Some of these eunuchs have fixed their problem before that happened or too much of it did.”
Julia raised her eyebrows. “What are you saying, X?”
“They performed surgery. They did it themselves—totally punk, don’t you think?” X said with a laugh. He was joking. He knew that it was a dangerous procedure. Each member of the online eunuch group had warned that anyone who attempted the procedure to do it within walking distance of a hospital. There would be massive blood loss as soon as that area was cut. This was the online plan: Find a bathroom. Make sure it’s clean. Tie off your testicles with an elastic, and then, using a knife or scalpel, slice them off. Hide them, thrown them in a garbage, or just get rid of them so no one can entertain the idea of sewing them back on. Walk to the ER as fast as you can. From there, they will treat you. They have to. And voilà, a brand new you.
X didn’t dare say any of the details out loud. No way Julia, let alone some of the tender-hearted trans people, could hear the utter brutality and desperation. Most of these group meetings were held for people who could afford the support network. They had doctors and family members who supported them, more or less. They had no idea the visceral violence that lay underneath the skin and knives of truly desperate people.
“You guys have seen Cruel and Unusual Punishment, right?” X asked. “The documentary? Trans women sent to men’s prison do this all the time. They perform surgery on themselves so they can finally crack open the person that’s trapped inside. It’s all fairly standard rhetoric, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Julia said. “I understand that. We understand that. But those women are put into a dangerous position. We want to petition prisons to release trans women from men’s facilities so they don’t harm themselves. We don’t want to force anyone into such a barbaric ritual. It’s mutilation—in the most drastic form.”
Some of the group tittered. They had heard the world mutilation to describe the surgeries they wanted for themselves a million times over and rejected every single one. At least those surgeries (the mastectomies, the vaginoplasties, and everything in between) were done under anaesthetic by a trained doctor. The real thing that was true mutilation for X was the fact that they were all forced into this room and told to pull out the most personal parts of themselves. If being transgender meant that they had to try and access the person that was trapped inside, there was going to be some rib cracking.
And definitely some blood.
“I don’t think it’s mutilation,” X said. “However you end up doing it.”
“Of course not,” Julia said curtly. “The surgery is part of who you are. It’s good, necessary, and needed. But to be forced into a corner like that, like a scared animal…”
“I still don’t think it’s mutilation. No matter the circumstances. I mean, all of this is about perspective and interpretation, right? Surgery is supposed to help our bodies match our minds. No matter how it’s done, the end results always matter.”
Julia’s lips formed a thin frown. This wasn’t supposed to be part of her job description. She looked out at her audience and the clock on the wall.
“Maybe, X, I can see your point of view. But I still think we should focus on what we can do in our positions. The safest and healthy ways. We’re in Canada; we’re lucky that the Canadian government recognizes this as a legitimate illness—one that they will try to help fix—”
“But only if you pass their test,” Cayden cut in. X nodded to him, relieved he had finally spoken.
The crowd murmured. X knew that not everyone agreed with Julia’s stance, but even if they wanted to disagree, it didn’t matter. They would still have to stay here and talk about their pain. These were the rules. At the Sherbourne Centre, the first rule about your gender reassignment was that you absolutely must talk about your gender reassignment.
“But what about me?” X asked again. “I’m in the middle. On the fence. The committee will always make me choose a side.”
“Well, what do you want?” Natalie asked. “You clearly went to the interviews asking for something. At the end of the day, who do you want to come home as? How do you want your body to look?”
Like a eunuch without the singing, X thought. He wanted his testicles gone. He wanted to have testosterone no longer coursing through his veins. But he didn’t want to be known as a woman. He already lamented the fact that neutral pronouns tripped everyone up, so he was forced to use “he.” It was easier to settle for “he” than to get used to “they/them” in group and then to come home and be barraged with “he” all over again. He had already given up hearing X as a name as soon as he stepped foot inside his parents’ place. Not because they were transphobic, but because of a very typical human foible: no one liked change. X would always be his birth name to his parents, because they remembered that birth.
“The committee will make me choose,” X said. “When I want to be nothing.”
“You can’t be nothing,” Natalie said. There was a hint of petulance to her voice, as if X hadn’t been listening during the trans 101 seminar. “You need hormones. They’re important for bone growth. If you don’t have anything, your bones will start to hollow and break at the simplest touch. That’s why even old women going through menopause start HRT. Hormones are just… natural.”
“I know all of this logically,” X said. “I just don’t want to choose. I don’t think it’s that hard to grasp.”
“Well,” Julia said. She stood up, holding a chart to her chest. “I think that’s all the time we have for now. Thank you all for coming. Those who have had their interviews, we will keep you in our thoughts.”
X stayed seated as the group began to leave. He scanned the room, eyeing the many men and women fulfilling their gender destiny. He knew that most of them would be approved for surgery. They had done all the right things and said the right words to form the narrative the doctors all wanted to hear. If they didn’t pass, someone would step up and find them a doctor who could take care of them. But X saw himself in the middle of a field, the grass never greener on either side.
At least there was Cayden, he thought. But even Cayden could play the field. He passed as a man now and only came out in drag at night along Church Street. Even Cayden could remove his breasts and continue to take testosterone to overwrite his former selves.
“Do you need anything, X?” Julia asked him. The room was almost empty now. She looked at him with her sad eyes, the lines around her face growing deeper. She put a hand on his shoulder; X shrugged it off.
“No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Are you sure? When you said you wanted to be nothing, I get worried.”
Right. Nothing was nihilism. It was suicidal. To want to be nothing meant a negation of real life. But space could be seen as a nothing; a big black void. Even in the depths of the ocean where it was so black it was a nothing, fish and other creatures lived. Being nothing was not a death sentence, X knew. Not always.
“I’m fine, Julia. Don’t worry about me. I’m just… anxious to see the interview results. Like everyone here.”
She nodded. “Well, okay. I’m here if you need me. See you next week.”
“Sure,” X said. “Something like that.”
***
“Michael! Oh, good. So glad you’re home now.”
X closed the door. His birth name was so innocuous—Michael was one of the most common baby boy names for 1988. He heard it all the time growing up in elementary school, to the point where he often referred to himself as Michael D. to distinguish himself from the crowd. It wasn’t until high school, when he stumbled down the wormhole of the online eunuch community, that he started to go by X.
X didn’t correct his mother. He walked over to the fridge and took out a drink.
“Honey?” His mother turned around. She stood in the middle of the living room she was cleaning, her hair a mess. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just not feeling that well.” His mother frowned and X ignored it. “Where’s dad?”
“At work. Where else?”
X’s father was a police officer. Toronto was a big city, but not nearly as bad as some metropolitan areas in the states. His father mostly worked on breaking up bar fights and small drug busts. It was a good living, and he was respected for it.
“Do you mind if I go to his study for a while?”
His mother narrowed her eyes. “Only if you vacuum it first.”
X shrugged. He had been living with his parents ever since he graduated from university and had yet to find a job. The gender clinic on Thursday was the only structured thing in his life.
“Any luck on the job front?” his mother asked after he grabbed the vacuum from the closet.
X shook his head. The last resume he sent out was six months ago. He could never figure out how to explain his therapy sessions to his bosses and why he needed time off. It was a lot easier to just not work until everything, gender-wise, calmed down.
His mother frowned again. “You should apply more. It will help you.”
“I know. Money is good.”
“But it will also get you out of the house.”
“What’s wrong with the house?” X asked. “I’m cleaning it, aren’t I?”
His mother’s soft blue eyes looked worried. She walked over to him and tried to adjust his bangs. X moved away from her hand, knowing that his hair was longer than she would have liked it.
“Oh, Michael. I’m sorry. I just worry about you.”
“Well, I’m fine.”
“Are you?”
I’m nothing, he thought. Nothing at all. “Can I just do this chore and forget about things for a while?”
His mother nodded. At first, she had thought the gender-thing had been X’s coming out as gay. Or bisexual. Really, either wouldn’t have been so bad. Toronto had pride, after all. His mother was used to seeing half-naked gay men parading down the street. His mother had watched Will & Grace. She was accepting and “open-minded.” But having a son that claimed to not be her son—or her daughter—threw her.
“Okay. Your sister is coming home this weekend.”
“Oh?” X asked.
“And your brother should be back from school any minute now.”
“I’ll be quick, then. Cleaning, I mean.”
X moved into his father’s study, closing the door behind him. He kept the vacuum on loudly as he sunk into the desk chair and tried to disappear among the dust.
***
When X’s father came home, X was still in his office. He heard the heavy footsteps from the other end of the house.
“I was interviewed on the news,” X’s father declared, then moving to kiss his wife.
“That’s great, dear. About what?”
“Magda,” he said. “Again. I know. It’s been so long.”
X appeared by the crack in the doorway then, his skin tense. He knew exactly who his father was talking about, because he had looked over Magda’s case file—now over thirty years old—that afternoon.
“It’s nothing, really,” X’s father said. “A small DNA strand that we were able to match to a couple other open cases. No killer yet, but we have something, Jill. We may be able to show a pattern soon.”
“So what did you say on the news?”
“Nothing much. Just reminded people of the case and the other it’s linked to now. I don’t want to forget Magda. So others shouldn’t, either.”
X moved away from the door. He didn’t want to hear any more of this. His father was a hardworking man, but he sometimes got blinded by his own accomplishments. X picked up the old case file, tucked it under his arm, and slipped out of the office.
His father caught him as he walked across the hallway. “Hey, you! How’s it going?”
“Okay,” X said.
“Just okay?”
X nodded. He tried to angle his body so his father didn’t see him with the file.
“You hear my big news?”
“Here and there. Yeah. Good for you.”
His father smiled again. “Anyway, I’ll tell you more at dinner. You used to show such promise as a detective, Michael. I wanted to tell you again that the door was still open. Still a possibility for your future.”
X nodded. His father’s expectations, while not a lot in comparison to other people he knew his own age, felt like a heavy weight. “I’m going to go now.”
X slipped into his bedroom after his father nodded. At his desk, he opened up the file and stared at the pictures, the reports, and his dad’s handwritten notes without a word.
In the early 1980s, before X was even born, a body had been found inside a field around the Scarborough bluffs. The woman had been identified through her clothing only. She was a drag queen singer at a local gay bar, performing under the stage name of Magda. That was it. No “real” first name, last name, bank account, or address. She had been paid in cash under the table and there was no record of where she had lived. No photograph or video of her performance out of the actual make-up and her knee-length blue dress to help provide insight to her life.
Her body had been found wearing the same dress, though the blue fabric was torn and stained with blood around her waist. Magda had been mutilated when the local cops stumbled upon her body after a noise complaint nearby. At first, they thought she was a dog or something else that had died and attracted insect life. As soon as they saw the blue fabric, they knew they were wrong.
The first photo of Magda inside the file, dated May of 1982, showed a body that was absolutely covered in mayflies. The next image showed Magda’s face, pale and sallow after being left out during a rainstorm. A small mayfly, with its odd hooked wings, positioned itself on her left cheek. If not for her eerily pale skin, X would have thought she was alive and posing with the creature, as if the mayfly was her butterfly and this was the last stop before metamorphosis.
Magda had always been around for X. He knew she was a woman – even if her “frank and beans” had been cut off and lost into oblivion, and no one referred to her in female pronouns – X still did. He thought it was his duty to, in the same way people lit candles for saints, though surely saints must have better things to do than answer mundane prayers.
When X was older and figuring out more about himself, he drew closer to Magda. He thought of her, covered by a myriad of insects with eyes that seemed to see into a million different ways at once, and he wondered about her life. He saw her slashed throat and the blood that soaked her blue dress from where her genitals had been cut off. There was just so much blood. If not for the jagged neck wound, X would have thought she’d bled out from between her legs alone. And if not for the vicious way men often attack transgender women, X would have thought Magda had done all of this herself. That she had lied down in the middle of a field, cut off the parts she no longer wanted to keep, and then gathered the insects so she could transform.
But something had gone wrong. Magda had stood in front of the wrong audience and said the wrong line. She was sliced across the neck to silence her and then the rains came as her attacker left her for dead. Instead of butterflies, she got mayflies, and the whole thing was all really too short-lived.
X sighed. He knew that his father was a trope. Each cop, no matter where they were, had an unsolved case that they kept at the bottom of their drawers and brought out during slow news days. X realized Magda’s legacy beyond death now was even larger than what had existed when she was alive. He was glad his father was keeping her image in the press, even if it did have a high cost. X thought of the new DNA strand in her case and the chance of solving one of Toronto’s oldest—but forgotten—murder cases.
Would it be good or bad? To solve something like this and have no one pay attention seemed like it would hurt more. And X knew that pain; the pain of finally revealing something honest and true, only to have everyone misinterpret its meaning. He could imagine his father speaking on the news, saying the t-word, using male pronouns, and making an accidental mockery of a woman’s final legacy.
X slid the photo back into the case file. He lay down on his bed and stared up at the ceiling, until he was called to dinner by his old name.
***
“Do you remember the game?” X’s father, Jack, asked at the dinner table. He had dominated the conversation right away with his most recent accomplishment. Shelly and Jesse, X’s siblings, had needed to be caught up on the case. They were younger than X and didn’t remember the woman’s death. When he had reiterated the facts and gotten no reaction, X’s father had resorted to bringing up the childish game school kids had thought up for the few years surrounding Magda’s death.
X swallowed hard, remembering the chants like his own heartbeat.
“You know,” Jack went on. “Some of the kids used to toy around. It was kind of like that Bloody Mary mirror-game.”
Shelly held her hand over her mouth. “Oh, man! I remember playing that. You just stood in front of a mirror and said ‘Magda Mayfly’ seven times and then she was supposed to appear.”
“And kill you?” Jesse asked.
“No, that was Bloody Mary,” Jack said. “Magda just took your balls.”
“Or breasts,” Shelly added. “Come on now, we can’t all talk about our balls.”
X’s eyes went over his plate. His mother noticed and made a small noise of disapproval. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this at the table. It’s not the right company.”
“It’s fine,” X said. “It’s one of those stories that stick with you. They never found her killer, right?”
Jack shook his head. “Even with this new evidence, it will be quite hard to prove or find anyone.”
“Maybe she didn’t have a killer,” Jesse added. “Freak like that could have done it alone.”
“Yeah and the throat cut was just an added benefit?” X scoffed.
Jesse shrugged. “Don’t know. Not exactly my department.”
“We should play,” Shelly suggested eagerly.
“What? No, we can’t!” Jesse said, twisting his face into a frown. “I want to keep my balls, thanks.”
“Oh, come on! They can’t have even descended yet,” Shelly quipped. Their father tried to stifle a laugh while their mother merely looked horrified.
“Kids, come on. Let’s just have a nice family dinner.”
“I apologize, Jill. This is my fault. I brought it up. With a new lead I figured…”
“Okay,” Jill said, holding up a hand. “Jack, that’s enough. No talking shop at the table.”
Everyone’s eyes went down to their plates. X blinked slowly as he worked on cutting up the rest of his steak. He kept seeing the image of Magda’s body, bloody and blue, her face pristine as the mayfly landed on her cheek. He didn’t want to think of the childish game that made her into a figure who wanted to tear little kids apart.
But, X thought, what if it wasn’t like that at all? He thought of St. Sebastian being pierced by a dozen arrows. He was at peace as he was being mutilated. He gave himself over to God even though it meant piercing through flesh, muscles, tendons, and blood flowing from his wounds. The people in the eunuch forum tried to make the same connections to themselves when they cut off their testicles. They wanted to become holier than their bodies – modern saints in their own regard. While X appreciated their method, he didn’t always buy into the reasoning. Even if X knew that he was going to be rejected from surgery, and he would be back at square one, he didn’t want to cut off his own balls. He wanted to be honoured, in a way he hadn’t been honoured before. He supposed that was why he thought of Magda a lot. What if Magda’s fury could be transformed into something better?
X shifted in his seat. He felt a slow burn in the base of his stomach.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I think I’m done now.”
His parents didn’t argue. As he walked to his room, he felt everyone’s eyes on his back the entire way.
***
Shelly knocked on his door after dessert.
“You missed cake,” she said. “It was chocolate and full of nuts. I mean… Oh God. How do I already ruin this?”
X sighed. “You haven’t ruined anything. You don’t need to walk around me like I’m a landmine.”
Shelly folded her arms across her chest. “Do you want to talk? You seem like you want to talk.”
“I talk all the time. It’s a lack of talking that I appreciate at home.”
Shelly laughed. She stepped inside his room and then sat on the chair opposite his bed. “How are you holding up, really, though? How are jobs, girls…and boys?”
X shrugged. “Non-existent. It’s hard to explain to people how I feel about my own body, let alone how they should feel about it.”
“I get that. I mean, I hate telling some guys I’ve been with women. Because it feels like I’m a show to them sometimes. I suppose that’s like the same?”
“Similar,” X said. “But not the same. I’m not so much trapped in my body as people’s perceptions of it. That’s where the trans stuff gets lost. I’m not hacking away at my skin to get at something deeper. I’m hacking away at people’s language that tries to break me down.”
“I like that,” Shelly said. “You should write a book, then.”
“All trans people write books. I don’t want to add to the noise.”
Shelly frowned. She looked at X’s desk and spotted the file with a groan. “He’s going to need that back, you know. Especially now that the case is evolving.”
“I know.”
“You trying to help him solve it?”
“There’s nothing to solve. Another trans woman murdered. It’s the easiest case in the book.”
“So who killed her?”
“Everyone. She probably knew she was in danger before this happened. We want to think it’s some supreme evil that killed her, when it’s really a chain event. Someone doesn’t take her seriously when she reports a threat. They convince her she’s going to be fine. Then a guy appears from behind a corner. She calls out, no one listens. Cut and die. Simple and horrible.”
There was an icy silence between them. Shelly opened up the case file and hissed slightly at the first image. “So many bugs. I would get the heebie jeebies just looking at this stuff. Thank God I didn’t do criminology.”
X remained quiet. He tried to battle away the idea of Magda dying the way St. Sebastian had. There was nothing honourable, X knew, from all the stats he had read about trans women and murder. But there was that small bit of hope that Magda was not a statistic, but a saint, that still lingered.
Though X tried to ignore Shelly, hoping that maybe she’d go away, she flipped her blonde hair out of her eyes and smiled at him again.
“What’s up? More than just the usual shit is upsetting you tonight. Mom and dad are fairly good constants in that they’re always dense and don’t always get the gender stuff. So there has to be more.”
“Therapy sucked.”
“Therapy always sucks. Therapists are terrible. You know I won’t go anywhere near any profession that has the word rapist hidden inside of it. It’s a trap.”
“I don’t really have a choice, though. I have to go. They may give me what I want.”
“Okay, fine. We all have to make tough choices. So why does it still upset you?”
“Because I know they won’t give me what I really want.”
Shelly nodded slowly. “You think you’ll be denied for surgery.”
“I won’t pick a side. So they can’t pick it for me. I’ll just look like a crazy kid, going through a phase.”
“Well, are you?”
X sighed. “Isn’t everything a phase? Our life is made up of a series of phases, changing from one thing to the next. We must go through phases in order to survive. It’s not a valid reason to deny me surgery.”
“Okay, okay,” Shelly said, holding up her hands. “So why do you want something as permanent as surgery? It’s a huge decision M—X. I’m sorry. But that’s true. You can’t just go backwards and undo it.”
“You can, though. More or less. That’s what HRT is for. Maybe I’ll want hormones. But I know right now, I don’t want this.”
X didn’t gesture or specify what “this” was. Shelly didn’t ask. X shifted and spoke the next part quietly.
“Show me a permanent part of the self—that’s all I’m asking for. Show me a permanent anything. We all grow and change. So why can’t I?”
“I don’t think our eyes change size,” Shelly said after a pause. “That’s the only part of us from when we were born that stays the absolute same. Just the eyes.”
“Okay then. I won’t change my eyes,” X said. “But everything else? Yes.”
“You should ask Magda then,” Shelly suggested with a smile.
“Don’t you think I’ve already tried?”
“Oh, man!” Shelly gasped, her eyes wide. “Have you? What happened?”
X was quiet. In truth, he hadn’t asked Magda for anything. He had forgotten about the childish game until his father brought it up at dinner. X caught a glance of the crime scene photos in front of Shelly, who also followed his gaze. They both considered the image for a moment. X felt the overwhelming aura of being pierced by something greater than himself – while Shelly just shuddered.
“That’s so painful though. I can’t believe anyone would be suckered into doing that. It seems worse than dying.”
“It’s not,” X tried to say. “It’s not mutilation. It’s… honour. Like St. Sebastian.”
“Huh. I guess I can get that. But while I understand it, X, I don’t support it.”
“What do you mean?” X demanded. He had felt so close to Shelly not five minutes ago. Out of anyone in this house, she was the closest to a friend. Now she was setting up a limit to her sympathy.
“You’re not a saint, X. Don’t even try. You’ll only end up getting hurt.”
X laughed lightly under his breath. He was already hurt. He was already trying to be something he wasn’t and whenever he didn’t measure up, each group he visited had their own interpretations on who that person should have been. X suddenly thought of the bugs covering Magda’s skin again, leering out at the people who had once leered back at her. At least her death had allowed for some kind of poetic justice.
“I don’t want to be a saint, Shelly,” X said. “I want to stop being a specimen.”
“So get a job. Move on. You’d be quite surprised at how quickly your life changes once you make the first step.”
X’s smile was harsh on his face. He walked over to open his door and then extended his hand out. “I’ll keep that in mind, Shelly. Thanks so much for you input.”
“Good! Can I get you some cake then?”
“Sure,” X said. “Why not?”
***
As the days went on, X’s thoughts of Magda grew in frequency and ferocity. The news report Jack Donald was on aired, and suddenly, everyone else seemed to remember the game kids played from years ago. Like Bloody Mary and Candyman, kids were staring into their mirrors again, tempting fate by repeating a name, and then turning around to see what lurked in the shadows. X thought it was all harmless at first. People were living in the rumours of killers and victims, playing good and evil for a while.
But when X walked to group a week later, he saw the ambulance outside of one of the local apartments. He knew it was Cayden’s place. He approached the complex, weaving in between the small crowd that had begun to form behind the police line.
“What happened?” X asked.
“A kid was stabbed or something,” a woman answered without taking her eyes away.
“Is he all right?”
“I don’t know. At first someone said that a person had been shot. I didn’t hear any gunshot so I wanted to be sure. But now people are saying it’s arrows? I don’t even know. None of it makes much sense.”
X felt a chill pass through him. If this really was Cayden, then X knew it was far more likely that someone had found out he was trans and stabbed him. That was the most likely horror, even in Canada. But the hum of the crowd turned into a million little insect wings inside X’s ear. He heard in the back of his mind a small child chant, “Magda Mayfly.”
X looked at the entranceway of the building. Paramedics in blue walked back and forth, trying to make a pathway. X strained his eyes to see beyond the front door. When he glanced up to find Cayden’s second floor apartment, he could have sworn he saw a faint reflection of a woman in the window. A woman with long black hair and a blue dress. Someone he had seen before.
“Who was hurt?” X asked. “Does anyone know their name?”
“No, but I see him – or her?—all the time at the bus stop. They look odd.”
X nodded. He knew it was Cayden then. Even as the paramedics brought down the stretcher and kept his face covered, the green shirt gave him away. And the seeping blood stains over his chest.
“I don’t see any arrows,” another woman said.
“That’s because they probably took it out,” the first woman said. “But I know what I heard.”
X kept his eyes fixated on the front hall. Kicked into a corner, he saw a brown package with a stamp on the side. The gender clinic. X held onto his backpack strap tightly. Cayden had gotten his response from the interview. And if things had ended the way they seemed to, the answer must not have been good.
The ambulance pulled down the driveway and into the street. The lights flashed blue and red, siren piercing. When it disappeared, so did the crowd. X moved towards the door and grabbed the brown package.
CAYDEN MARSHALL was displayed on the top. Inside was the form-letter they sent for denied patients. Dear Cayden Marshall, we are sorry to inform you… X stopped reading. Buried deep inside the envelope, hidden in the corner, was the empty shell of an exoskeleton.
X ran down the next street, away from therapy, and towards his parent’s house.
***
Dear Michael Donald,
The letter set X’s teeth on edge. He could sense the form-letter of denial that followed. He thought of Natalie and wondered if her song-and-dance routine had worked for the committee. He wondered if he should have lied in his interview—just to get what he wanted. What was so important about honesty if it never got you what you wanted? If it only ended in blood?
We are sorry to inform you, but we are denying your request for surgery. Due to the limitations…
X didn’t want to read anymore. He crumbled the letter in his hand and then tore it in two. His skin was hot as anger flowed through his veins. He knew this was not necessarily the be-all or end-all of his life. This was the first deny he got. He could reapply again. And even if they kept rejecting him, he could always pay for the surgery himself. He would find a doctor, one that would take the money, and do what he wanted without questions or qualms, without autobiography or mythology of his own gender.
That was it, wasn’t? The committee wanted a story they could tell. They wanted an inspirational tale of hope and redemption after X found his true self and went towards it. But he had no true self. All he had was a body he was forced into and perceptions that didn’t make sense.
Maybe Shelly’s right. Maybe he should just get a job and move on with his life. Pay for the things he wanted. Try to find a different name, other than X. Move from one phase of life into the next. Grow up instead of transform.
X turned over these ideas in his mind. No one was in the house. He was relieved, for at least something was going his way. The more he thought about his life in the future, the more it didn’t look like a Lifetime movie, but something dreary. A horror film, a surgical spectacle. He didn’t want to become like the people in cages, tearing themselves apart just to become whole. That was what happened to Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, wasn’t it? Bill didn’t skin his humps; he made a woman suit because no one took him seriously. The times may have changed, X thought. We may have Laverne Cox and World Pride in Toronto, but X knew he was still living at the margins. He was a horror story, etched and stitched onto his body, for everyone to see.
Alone in the house, X debated in sheer moments of blinding panic, what he could do. He logged onto the eunuch forum and read the instructions for self-surgery again. Find a bathroom. Make sure it’s clean…. The whole thing made him gag—but it also gave him a faint flicker of hope.
Then he heard the buzzing. Soft and insistent, like a fly caught inside the blinds desperately trying to get out. X walked around the house and touched each window, trying to set free whatever had gotten inside. He found nothing by the time he got to his father’s study, where the file for Magda sat in the centre of the desk. For a brief moment, he smiled.
Not a multination, he thought. But honour.
He moved into the bathroom and closed the door. When X looked into the mirror, he didn’t see himself, the way so many trans kids do in transgender fiction. Instead he saw his future laid out before him, finally within his grasp. He counted backwards from three, before he began to speak.
“Magda Mayfly.” It rolled off his tongue like larva and landed into the air like the flutter of wings. “Magda Mayfly. Magda Mayfly.”
This would eradicate himself. This would remove the testosterone from his body. It was not irreversible, but it was a huge change. Did he want this?
“Magda Mayfly.”
He thought of the therapy groups and the surgical lines. The money and the time. He had already spent so much of his life waiting. Waiting to be solved, waiting to be called next, waiting to be interviewed. He could be closer than ever before by just saying a name.
“Magda Mayfly.”
He thought of the actual mayfly now. The final moult of the naiad is not the adult form, but instead a winged subimago that resembles the adult form. Some species only last a couple minutes in this stage before rocketing towards adulthood. The mayfly’s short life span is imperative to its survival.
“Magda Mayfly.” Six times said. X waited on the balls of his feet. He said the last words like a sigh, “Magda Mayfly.”
His eyes closed. He waited.
Nothing.
No sound, no light, no nothing. He opened his eyes and looked into the mirror. He expected to jump, seeing the dead-eyed expression of a murdered trans woman looking back at him. But there was nothing—the kind of nothing that bred nihilism and suicide. The kind of desperation he didn’t want to tread on in case it bruised his skin.
“Fuck,” X said aloud. He walked out of the bathroom, his skin heavier on his body. He had dared himself to think of a better life. Now that everything remained the same, his disappointment was infinite. He wasn’t quite sure what to do.
He lay down on his bed. Staring at the ceiling, his lungs suddenly felt heavy. His stomach was upset. Something between a sob and a scream come out of his mouth. When he opened his eyes, a single fly moved between his lips and out towards the ceiling. The subimago mayfly did a quick loop above his bedroom and then landed on his cheek. The wings grow larger against him, its lifespan almost complete.
X smiled. He imagined the bugs covering his body, before he fell into a fitful sleep.
***
X woke up in the emergency room. Pain like a pressure point throbbed at the centre of his body, expanding lower towards his legs and back. He couldn’t hear anything distinct, only buzzing and beeping of machines. Lights danced on his eyelids; red, and then blinding white, before it was dark again. The smell was harsh, antiseptic and copper; a patina of thirst coated his mouth.
But he smiled in spite of it all, because he knew it had finally happened.
“Don’t – no, don’t try to sit up in bed,” someone called to him. A heavy hand on his shoulder, pressing him back down. “You’re been through quite an ordeal, Michael.”
“X,” he coughed. “I’m X.”
“Right.” His mother’s voice now. “He wants to be called X. I thought it was a phase. I thought…”
“It’s okay.” His father’s voice now. Strong and stoic, probably gripping his wife’s hand. “We didn’t know. We shouldn’t have left him alone.”
X opened one of his eyes. Shelly and Jesse were by his side. Jesse looked bored, but Shelly’s blue eyes were wide with awe.
“I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I had some help.”
“Who?” his father asked. His mouth was hard, the lines deep around his eyes. His cop-face. “Who?”
X smiled again. He lay his head down on the pillow instead of answering.
“You know, you’ll have to take hormones. You will have to decide,” Shelly said.
“Maybe,” X said. “But not now.”
He looked back up at his family. He thought he saw Julia in the corner, speaking in hurried tones to some of the nurses, along with a few other people from group. There was light behind them, like an aura.
“Where’s Cayden?” X asked suddenly. He tried to sit up in bed again, but the nurse held him down.
“I think he’s at a different hospital, not at St. Michael’s.”
“Okay,” X said. “So long as he’s all right.”
There was more chatter around him. X felt the sudden release of pain as morphine kicked in.
“I think you should leave him alone,” the nurse said. “He needs to sleep for now.”
His parents looked at him with concerned eyes. They eventually nodded and followed Jesse out the door. Shelly’s gaze lingered, half in exalted joy and half in horror. When she exited, Julia followed without another word. The nurses left, too.
“Is that it?” X asked. Though it was difficult, he gazed around the hospital room. When he saw a familiar body with a blue dress and dark hair step forward, X smiled again.
“Thank you.”
“Not at all.”
She left without another word, her voice and image always short-lived.
Hello! We are almost halfway through spooky season and I’m already having so much fun.
This next story–much like “Rings”–was inspired by two main events: postpartum with my sons, and the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the first depictions of what we would come to know as postpartum depression. In the story, a woman is locked away after having a baby, and without any company, she hallucinates that the wallpaper in the room is talking to her (amongst other things). Her husband and child remain on the other side of the room, perfectly healthy and thriving, as she fades away into madness.
A horrifying story without a ghost at all!
I had a great amount of respect for Perkins-Gilman before I would walk into my own postpartum hellscape, but she became a lifeline once I was able to recognize what was going on. It’s partly because I was able to recognize it that my story has a more-or-less happy ending. Instead of being institutionalized, or made to feel incurably crazy, I got help and medication (and a divorce, too, if I’m being honest).
And then I decided to write about my own experiences.
In my own version of The Yellow Wallpaper, I follow a lesbian couple as they try to decide what colour to paint their nursery. Then the chaos unfolds, and instead of isolation and misery, these two parents get something else altogether.
You’ll have to read to find out!
Or listen, since this story was adapted into a podcast by the Creepy Podcast, and can be found on their patreon here.
The Yellow Painted Room
by Eve Morton
Of course, Sasha knew that having a new baby would mean exhaustion. She’d been told by a handful of her friends–at least, those who had kids–that she should stock up on sleep, as if it were onesies in the 0-3 months range or newborn diapers. She’d done her best to nap whenever she could while pregnant, but Sebastian insisted on kicking her bladder or ribs whenever she lay down. Then in the last trimester, perinatal insomnia plus a nesting instinct took over, and she spent most of the time when she should have been sleeping painting the nursery a yellow color that had compelled her from the moment she regarded the hardware store samples.
“It looks like mustard,” her partner, Dayna, said when she brought home the paint cans and cracked them open at eleven at night. She curled her nose and then gestured to one of the many Our Body, Ourselves type of brochures the midwives had given them on their soon-to-be-son’s nursery shelf. “It looks like the color his poop will be at day four.”
“Then it won’t matter if he has explosive diarrhea across the wall.” Sasha remembered a story her college roommate Jenny had told her about her baby doing just that; Sasha told Dayna, who only yawned and combed a hand through her curly black hair. “You sure you don’t want to come to bed?”
“I’m fine.”
Dayna lingered, her gaze piercing. It wasn’t until Dayna finally left, and Sasha finished painting the rest of the room into the early morning, that she felt the first contraction. She hadn’t slept that night. She didn’t want to sleep now.
By the time Sebastian arrived, thirty-six hours later, she hadn’t slept in over two days.
“Rest,” the nurse said after she’d cleaned both her and Sebastian up. “You will need it.”
But the midwife, a crunchy woman named Jenny yet again, insisted she breastfeed. Then again in another two hours. It wasn’t long before the departure slip from the hospital came with Sebastian’s clean bill of health, and Sasha was shuffled out the revolving doors and into the yellow room she’d painted only days before.
And if Sasha was honest, that’s when the visions started too.
The first one was a snake, so plain and simple that she didn’t think it was anything to be concerned about. On entering the room to feed Sebastian, she watched as it bent itself off the wall the moment she crossed the threshold. It then slithered against the carpet, danced between her legs as if she was a charmer, and darted back into the wall on the other side of the room.
Sasha picked up Sebastian, cooed to him, and placed him down once his cries ceased. The room was dark, the only light from the white noise machine plugged into the wall outlet. But the snakes were still visible: the walls split into ribbons of yellow and black scales, yellow and gold, yellow and brown. The snakes were always some kind of yellow, the same shade as the hardware store sample. They all slithered and danced across the room, coming and going as if this was a station stop.
Sasha remained immobile, not in fear, but in a perplexing delight.
“I saw a snake the day you arrived.” She told Sebastian in a stilted whisper about the hike that she and Dayna had taken to distract themselves from the reality of the date and the treatments they were both undergoing for fertility. A cat had darted out in their path, followed by a garter snake, and the two creatures fought in the low grass without leaving wounds. They seemed to dance around one another. Like a sperm and egg, Sasha had said aloud. “Then I knew. I was pregnant. With you. And you were a boy.”
She sat on the floor of her boy’s room and let the snakes come to her. One wrapped around her wrist, then turned to stone. A bracelet. Another, around her neck. Three became rings on her left hand, two on the right. She was covered in yellow, just like the wall, and it lasted until morning when Dayna turned on the light.
“Have you been sitting in his room alone all night?”
“He’s here.” Sebastian cried out. “And he needs me.”
Dayna said nothing as Sasha rose and fed her child. He cooed, even as more snakes came down from the wall, and slithered up both of their bodies. He was impervious to any fear, unlike Dayna. Her face was pale as she watched her wife and son, and all those damn snakes that were made of yellow and nothing but now.
“Jenny’s coming today,” Dayna said. “Maybe you should talk to her.”
Sasha did, and the midwife told her all the same things that the brochures said, like she needed to sleep and eat, and make sure she asked for help. “Self-care is important as much as baby care,” Jenny said, just before her face melted into a pot of boiling water before Sasha’s eyes, leaving nothing but a skeleton hollowed out by bones.
Then Jenny was gone, and Dayna slipped her shoes on by the front door so she could get them both dinner. “I’d like to bring Sebastian with me,” she said. “So you can nap while I’m gone.”
“I don’t need a nap.”
“That’s a lie.”
“I don’t lie,” Sasha said defensively.
Dayna became transparent. Her skin was like rice paper, like the kind they had on their first date. Through thin lips which revealed every single blood vessel in her body, Dayna insisted again. “Nap, please.”
Sebastian cried and the sound turned into ants flying into the air. Ants had always scared Sasha, ever since her aunt’s house had been invaded by them as a child, and so she finally relented. “Okay. Take him with you.”
“Good.” Dayna kissed her forehead. She held Sebastian close, his diaper bag at her side, along with her purse. There was more inside her purse than simple errand gear. There was an entire story there, an entire mission kept secret but given away through Dayna’s transparent skin as it flushed red.
“You’re jealous, yeah?” Sasha said. “I could have the babies, and you couldn’t. That’s what the doctor said. You’ve wanted this whole motherhood trip since you were little. And now you can’t have it, only me. Is that why you’re so mad?”
Dayna didn’t answer. She’d turned into a statue before Sasha. She reached out to touch the cold stone. Cracks appeared. She sighed and Dayna’s stone facade blew away. She was gone.
So was Sebastian.
There really was nothing left for Sasha to do but sleep.
Her body felt hollowed out, scooped like the ends of an ice cream carton. She grasped her stomach and folded over onto the front hallway floor. The floor became lava, became fire, became hot against her skin.
But the snakes soon came and brought her, as if she was the patron saint of postpartum psychosis, into her child’s room. Yellow bathed her. It surrounded her. And when the walls parted, revealing a life without children, a life without a wife, a life without anything serious on the other side, Sasha stepped forward and through the yellow paint. She left her life, her body a husk on the floor, and she entered another world of sleep. Dreaming. Relief.
Finally.
Then a baby cried.
Dayna had returned.
The world righted itself. Waves of confusion and irrational anger receded. The snakes were gone, along with stones and the sharp thoughts inside her head.
But they would come back, Sasha knew. They would always come back.
“Hey,” Dayna said from the doorway. “Are you okay? Did you sleep on the floor?”
“Yes. And yes, I’m fine now. For now.”
Sasha wobbled on her feet as she stood. Pain rioted in her body, but so did a tight feeling of healing and regeneration. Her womb contracted. Her baby cried in front of her, and with a smile that Dayna shared, they took care of his dirty diaper and his hunger together.
“I think you’re right, though,” Sasha added once they’d put him back into his bassinet, happy and content, their son their son all the way through. “I think we need to repaint.”
This is yet another story I wrote while postpartum and directly influenced by my experiences of postpartum depression. Birth is scary! And so is how you feel for a good chunk afterwards as everything heals and your life adjusts. Death’s Door represents that space between the worlds of life and death, birth and rebirth, parent and child, and all other categories of the in between. Why wouldn’t something spooky try to slip through that liminal field and wreak havoc?
So, when I felt like crap, I wrote about monsters. Very fitting!
This is also an extremely short story for all that it tries to do. In under a 1000 words, and in between naps, I managed to write this and feel better.
I hope you feel better after reading it, too!
Death’s Door
By Eve Morton
After Adelaide was born, I had trouble sleeping. Not surprising, given that my little girl was a crier.
“A good set of lungs on her,” my mother-in-law Marta said. “This will serve you well. But you must still be careful.”
“Careful for what?” my husband, Derek, asked.
Marta sang something in return, something that sounded like an ancient song from another era. I was so doped up and exhausted from the over twenty-four hours of labor, I thought I was dreaming on my feet. Someone handed me the baby, I put her to my breast, and didn’t even register that she had begun to nurse.
“Good signs all around.” Marta nodded. “Just three more days of this.”
“I think it’s more like eighteen years,” Derek said.
Marta ignored him; she looked through my pale skin and grasped Adelaide from my arms. “I’ve got her for a while. You should rest. Your husband will get you steak. And liver.”
“Liver?” he repeated, but his voice was soon quiet. His mother had given him that look, a stern one that quieted anyone, and had always felt like magic. I wanted her to tell me how to do that now that I was a mother. How could I make my children still with a single glance? When Adelaide started to cry again, I wanted to sob.
“Go,” Marta said, and held my baby to her chest. She wailed, but Marta didn’t blink once. “Go rest.”
Derek took me by my arm and laid me in the bed. He kissed my forehead, said that no one ever ate liver, and he’d get me something good instead. My body hummed for that meat. I opened my mouth, but only more crying came out. Raspy cries, death-cries. “Oh no. Is she okay?”
“Yes,” Derek said. “Sleep.”
He left. I didn’t sleep. Each time my body gave into that blissful oblivion, I was jolted awake by crying. I blinked and time disappeared. I blinked and she cried again. When I finally gave up and stepped out into our hallway, the house was dark.
I found Marta in a recliner, the baby in her arms, still crying out. “This is normal, don’t worry. Though she does want to nurse.”
I took Adelaide to the couch; she was quiet as she suckled, yet in the back of my mind, I still heard the crying. Like a song in my head, a never-ending repeating line from a movie. “Oh, God,” I moaned, a sudden swelling sadness taking me over. “What have I done? When will this be over?”
“Shh. You have made it through the first day. Give it two more.”
My own sobs matched Adelaide’s as she disconnected from my breast. I leaked milk and tears; Adelaide had none in her eyes. Babies wouldn’t get true tears until after three months, I recalled. I had no idea what was supposed to happen in three days; I could barely function, barely move to ask her, and before I knew it, she was singing again. The same strange tune as before, something so familiar yet distant.
“Did you sing that to Derek?”
“For all my babies. For the first three days.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s nice.” Marta’s face was stoic, almost like a coin that had been cut into the dark blue light of dawn coming in through the window. Adelaide had been born at dawn just twenty-four hours ago. I had been sleeping since the afternoon. Time was a mystery to me then, like that song, like Adelaide, who was now quiet with nursing.
When Marta asked for the child, and told me to sleep even if I didn’t dream, I followed her advice.
The next two days, I ate liver and steak. I licked the blood from the plate. I fed Adelaide between her bursts of sobs. Each time she fell asleep against me, Marta took her, told me to rest, and then sat in the same chair. I didn’t see Derek; he kept going out for more meat, and this time, he followed his mother’s orders for liver no matter what his tastes were.
On the morning of the third day, something had changed. When I closed my eyes, I dreamed again. I was sleeping again. Not the strange, half-animated state like before. I was growing stronger in my muscles and bones. My breasts ached now like a clock, waking me without an alarm with milk, and the house was quiet.
“She’s not crying,” I said to Marta as I entered the living room. “She’s just awake.”
Marta nodded from the chair, clearly exhausted. “Death’s door is closed now.”
I nursed Adelaide with ease, staring into her dark eyes so much like my own. I only realized what Marta had said when she rose to leave. “Death’s Door?”
“A woman and child pass through Death’s Door more than once when they separate through birth. They move back and forth for at least three days until they find their souls again. Sleep is dangerous, since it is yet another place where the soul goes missing. But she has cried enough to keep the demons and ghosts away that linger on the threshold. She has good, strong lungs. And you, dear mother,” Marta said, and clutched my chin as if it was ivory. “You have called your soul back from the brink. You are a mother now.”
I thought Marta to be like I’d once been, ravaged by lack of sleep.
Yet when I set Adelaide in her crib, I glimpsed shadows by our window. Dark men and women, frail bodies covered in pale skin like bed sheets. Ghosts. Lost souls. They were everywhere now, outside our front door, on our porch, begging and waiting and longing to get inside.
I blinked and they were gone.
And so I sat in Adelaide’s room, singing the song Marta had been teaching me all along, and became a mother, a true mother, by the time morning came.
I’ve really been enjoying going through my old stories to compile this list. It has reminded me how much my stories have changed–but also remained the same.
One key theme that’s come out is my resistance to, or fear of, institutions, doctors, and the psychological industry. It can be so easy to declare someone unfit or unrecognizable in some way, and then have them turn into monsters on paper. So often that leads to a self-fufiling prophecy, and people who are declared monsters may as well become them.
Or become haunted by them.
The next story is one of many stories I wrote on those themes, but exploring them through the lens of gender transgression, transition, and trans identity. My PhD dealt with these themes, too–but I never got to truly express how horrible some of these scenarios were, or the lingering haunted feeling that stayed with me long after penning my research papers.
“Skeleton Key” is a story that explores what is left behind when you are not recognized in a medical system–and then in a death industry–where your birth name and birth identity is the only thing that is ‘real.’ Be warned that this story–and many more invovling trans protagonists–confront the realities of being a minority. Sexism, racism, and many other -isms are the ‘monsters’ in these stories–but there are also literal monsters lurking around the corner. Because why not have both?
Skeleton Key
The last time I heard from Sally was in the ER the night I broke my wrist. We spent two hours waiting before a doctor saw me. Then, when my sex marker (F) didn’t match how I currently looked (M) or my name (Ryan), it was another two hours before the doctor came back with x-rays.
Sally made a jerk off motion behind the doctor’s back when he left for the second time and refused to meet our eyes. When we were alone, she made the jerk-off motion to me, too.
“I bet that’s how you broke it. Too aggressive with your sex toys. I know you’re all about sex positivity, but you positively snapped that wrist.”
I laughed. Sally and I were quite the pair. I looked like a twelve year old boy before the testosterone shots made my chin sprout fuzz and my body bulk out. Her hormones made her face heart-shaped and gave her breasts. She was thirty-seven, but still dressing like she was in tenth grade and wanted to get the footballer’s attention.
I couldn’t blame her. I had broken my wrist trying to impress the local jock at my gym, only to slam backwards and snap against a wall.
“You know, you’re right,” I told her. “I was jerking off when I broke this.”
“Told ya.”
I already knew the procedure for broken bones in the Ontario ER system. After my x-rays, I was supposed to get a cast, but at this rate, I’d be there all night.
“You don’t have to stay, you know,” I told Sally. “Thanks for driving me, but I know you have a date.”
“I do. A pretty date.”
“The guy with the red car again?”
“And the scar on his chin. The scar and the car,” she said and laughed. She was dressed in two inch heels and a pink top that matched the highlight of her eyes. When I’d met her in group, she said pink was her favourite colour. No one let her say that before she was thirty five, so she was catching up for lost time. Her nails glittered as she went through the file the doctor left in my stall. She held up my x-ray towards the light, her nails still shimmering.
“Goddamn. It looks like you fractured this.”
“Nope. Just a lot of little breaks,” I repeated the doctor’s words. “One of the most common injuries in adults. Not a big deal.”
“Yeah, but if you’re not careful, your bones will be all you have. So you gotta take care of ’em. That’s why you always gotta be on hormones. If you ever get your uterus out, you know to take them forever and ever, yeah? Don’t be like me. Don’t cut your balls and run.”
I didn’t laugh at her joke this time. Her harsh lesson in biology had been her follow up to her favourite colour story in group. She’d gotten an orchiectomy, thinking it was the smart way to rid her body of testosterone. As it turned out, hormones are good for bone growth. And not just menopausal women break their hips. Sally had shattered her hip pelvis when she was thirty-four, three years after removing her nuts without actually transitioning. So when everything was all repaired, metal holding her skeleton together, she figured it was better late than never to start liking the colour pink.
“And if, you know, God Forbid we ever die,” she added, her tone just the same as when she asked if I had jerked myself off into this broken wrist, “our bones are gonna be the only things that identify us. So always make sure to check with your dentist. Change your name there first. And everything else, well, die in the proper clothing. And hope to God gender doesn’t’ exist in the goddamn afterlife.”
“Stop,” I said.
“Too dark?”
“Yeah, kind of. And my head hurts.”
“You’re probably hungry. I’ll get you a snack.” She dropped the file back down on the counter and came back with a package of chips. We both ate them until the doctor came back and I was casted up.
“I have to go, love,” she said. “I have that big date.”
I waved with my other hand, not in a cast. Sally raised a brow and grabbed a Sharpie from the counter. “Let me leave you with a last laugh,” she said. She wrote something on the back of my cast, something I could barely see without twisting my body all around.
“There you are,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”
“Have a good night.”
The next day, she was gone.
*
I had theories about what happened to Sally. Most of the happier ones ended up with her living it up with the scar in a brand new car, him paying for her surgeries, and purchasing a mansion in Tahiti.
But I knew it was far more likely that the guy had shattered her skull instead.
When my cast came off six weeks later, I read about a body found in a local park. The doctor called me in from the waiting room before I could finish the article, so I tucked it under my hoodie and took it with me.
“Do you want to keep it?” the technician asked me, holding up my cast. “Sometimes people want to keep it.”
I was about to say no, when I saw Sally’s writing. She’d signed the cast before leaving.
I held open my backpack and the technician gave me the remnants of my cast. On the bus home, I read the newspaper about the dead body in the park. No head. No hands. No clothing.
“It’s her,” I told my roommate. I put the newspaper down on our table, but he barely looked up from his video game. “It’s Sally. The body they found in the park.”
“How do you know for sure?”
Because bones were all we had. I didn’t say it aloud. I continued reading the article. The entire body hadn’t been found, and at the rapid rate of decomposition, it wasn’t likely they’d find any other pieces due to scavengers. Her pelvis, the one that she’d shattered and that doctors had to piece back together with metal and screws, must not have been found because there was no mention of tracing the serial numbers.
“DNA testing,” a reporter said, “noted that the skeleton belong to a man.”
My heart sunk. This was Sally, I was sure of it now. I still had a toothbrush from when she’d stayed over and we talked all night. But if I came forward with her DNA, her body would be released back into her family. They would give her back her old name, bury her in a family plot, and call her their Darling Son.
So I stayed quiet. I wrapped my cast with her last words on it with the newspaper that announced her death and hid it under my bed.
Six weeks after that, I walked by the local commentary and saw them burying a bunch of bodies in pine boxes. Unnamed, unclaimed by family, and given a pauper’s funeral
My wrist ached for her again.
*
“You know, you have more masculinity in your pinky finger than most guys I know,” Sally told me in group. This had been after I reiterated the story of my broken home in front of everyone without shedding a tear. Absent father, daddy issues. The standard stuff that therapists wanted to hear about transgender men.
And I nailed it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You know, that’s not a compliment. Masculinity will be the death of this planet. So fragile. It snaps off like it’s nothing and then we’re left picking up the pieces.”
I paused. My binder cut deep into my chest and I could barely move an inch without pain ricocheting through my body. My D-breasts were sandwiched across me, never moving. And that pain remained me of why I was here. “Masculinity is what I want, though. It’s what I need to pass.”
“What you want is a body,” Sally said. “New skin. More hair in places you didn’t have it before. A voice. A little less fat off your chest. You don’t want masculinity. Most cis men don’t want masculinity. It’s something thrust upon you.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t really talk with my binder so tight, anyway. I hoped my silence counted as a response. In most conversations with men, I had learned that it did.
“You want to get breakfast?” she asked. “I’m feeling like eggs. I think eggs would be good right now.”
It was four in the afternoon, but I said yes. We talked all night and into the morning. I laughed harder than I had in weeks. The next day, when I woke up and saw bruises across my chest, I went to the emergency room.
“What have you been doing, Rachel?”
“It’s… Ryan. My name is Ryan.”
“What have you been doing?” The doctor asked without looking up from the x-rays. “You have four fractured ribs. Has someone been hurting you?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve just been having fun.”
*
“When the hyoid bone, located in the throat,” the medical examiner from TV said, “breaks, it means the cause of death is usually strangulation.”
I shut off the TV. Another crime drama had paraded out transgender women as set design when talking about a prostitute’s death. Every single episode was the same, all the medical and legal information a rehashed version of the previous episode. When I was twelve, I used to find these shows comforting. Someone was killed. Medical science and detective work found the killer. And they were put away.
Now, at twenty-seven, everything seemed to ring hollow. Sally had been dead for months. There was no way anyone would ever find the scar with the car. Even if I came forward, I could barely make a dent in Sally’s case file given what I knew. So I went to bed instead of watching TV.
I slept with a hand around my throat. Sick fever dreams that pinned me to the bed. Pressure on my chest, like someone was weighing my breasts down with sandbags. When the bone in my throat–hyoid, hyoid I repeated, named after the Greek word for U–snapped, my body shot awake.
And Sally stood in front of me.
Her bare feet didn’t touch the floor. She was made up of light and gossamer, so thin I could see through her body and to the next wall. She wasn’t wearing loud colours or sequins or pink eyeliner. Her hair was short, too brown, and cropped close to her head. She wore a jean collared shirt over jeans. One of the worst cardinal sins of fashion.
“Sally?”
“Ryan. You’ve gotta help me.” Her voice was soft, but dry. She sounded far away; like she was trapped under glass or underwater. “I’m dead.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Shut up. Sympathy is for the weak. I need you to do something.”
“What?”
“You have to make me the Skeleton Key.”
“What?”
“Skeleton Key,” she repeated, voice softer. Her silhouetted outline disappeared against my bedroom wall.
She was gone. Again.
I touched my throat and looked at it in the mirror, expecting to find bruises. There was nothing. I stared up at the ceiling, repeating the words in my mind over and over again. Her blue demined madness splashed in front of me.
We have genders in the afterlife, I realized. What a cruel, stupid fate.
I made the jerk off motion with my hand. My wrist smarted from where I’d broken it. My ribs hurt from my binder earlier that day. And my hyoid bone still ached as if it had been snapped in two.
Had Sally been choked? I didn’t know. I shouldn’t care how she ended, only how she lived. That had been the motto at group when she disappeared. No one had had a funeral, excerpt for private eulogies we all had in our minds. To everyone else, Sally wasn’t dead. Just gone.
A ghost.
I saw her–except not her–in front of me again. How do you get rid of ghosts? I Googled all the options on my phone and only came up with burning the bones, burying the body. None of which seemed to work for her. It wasn’t that Sally was a ghost; it was that she wasn’t the right ghost.
Make me the Skeleton Key. That was what she wanted. So I searched up that next. A skeleton key was a master key that could open any door, usually part of a hotel. It was also a novel by Stephen King, who Sally read voraciously.
“I’m always in waiting rooms for treatments,” she’d say. “So you need a couple hundred thousand words of nonsense from King to keep you going.”
Her voice was so clear in my mind I started to laugh again. Then I nearly cried when I remembered her rant about Carrie, the girl with telekinetic powers who went to prom. It was evidence that Stephen King was a little bit trans.
“What other apparent middle aged man writes a revenge fantasy using period blood and prom as the main M.O.? Come, on,” Sally said. “That’s total Venus envy.”
Everything we touched, everything we read, became a little bit trans because we wanted it to be. Before Sally was a ghost, she was always haunting things.
So of course our bones were haunted. Of course they were already cursed. If a skeleton key opened all doors, could it also put her soul back together? If I found all of her bones, could I put Sally back together?
The thought kept me up until morning. Then I went for a drive.
*
I found a metal detector, the kind that beach combers use, from a pawn shop. I brought it to the local park where her body had been found. There were indentations in the grass from the spokes the crime scene unit must have used to put up barriers from the public. When nothing but bottle caps came up in this area, I expanded my search.
And found tire tracks. From the scar with the car? I wasn’t sure and certainly didn’t know enough about cars to be able to trace the treads. I followed them from a picnic area into the back woods. Months had passed, I told myself. I was unlikely to find anything more but bottle caps again. But the beach comber went off.
A screw. Metal, industrial strength. From her pelvis. I followed the beeping and came up with another pile of bones. Her pelvis was shaped like the hyoid bone, only bigger. U-shaped and caked with dirt and metal that kept it intact. Next to the pelvis, I saw scattered bones from a hand. I picked up her pinky and slipped it into my pocket. Warmth flooded me.
“Hi, Sally,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I put what remained of her hands and other small bones that looked no more than stones into my backpack. Her pelvis slipped from my hands, shattering like it must have done years before. The bone shards fell down into a pattern, then rearranged themselves. They spelled out an address.
135 Stevenson Drive.
I looked it up on Google Maps. It was a hotel at the edge of town.
*
My car was the only one in the lot. A black man sat at the front desk, a thick red-covered book in front of him. He raised his eyes from the words as soon as I stepped inside. “Hello.”
“Hi,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m in the right place.”
“What do you need?”
“A skeleton key.”
“Well, I need a skeleton.”
“A whole one?”
“A piece of one will do. But your favourite piece.”
“I’m… I’m very confused.” The pinky finger in my pocket warmed again. The shards of her pelvis now were too dangerous to handle; I’d barely been able to put them in my backpack without cutting my thumbs to ruins.
The man behind the counter, teeth wide like china bowls, smiled. “You need to open a door and deliver a wandering soul, I’m guessing?”
I nodded.
“Good. Find that person’s body. Bring me a little bit o’ bone and I will give you the key to get to the other side. Deliver the rest of the bones to the portal–the door to the next world. Then your person will make it through.”
“And she’ll be better there?”
“What is she like right now?”
“Angry,” I said. I touched my neck and he didn’t seem fazed by it, like it happened all the time. “She’s also not who she died as.”
“Hmmm.” He pondered this a moment. When he set the book he’d been reading down in front of him, I realized it was all blank pages. Nothing there but tiny pin pricks like Braille, expect that the man could see. He looked passed me, through me, down to my very bones themselves.
“How did the ghost appear to you?” he asked.
“As a man. But she’s a woman.”
“Her bones–“
“Her bones lied. She is a woman. I know her as one. She knows me as a man.”
“Are you the only person who knows she’s dead?”
“I think. Now. But someone found her body and they labeled her wrong.”
“There you go. Our ghosts are only memories reread too many times until they manifest. So you need to counter the rumours with your facts. You need to bring her back to life.”
“Can’t I do that by pushing her through the portal? Bringing all of her bones here?” I asked, exhaustion seeping into my tone. I ached and wanted to sleep. I hadn’t gone to my job in two days, and I had no sick days to draw from. “I just want her to rest.”
“You need to counter with a memory. One that will last. That’s why there are headstones. People read the name. Name stays alive. Right now she’s anonymous. So you need to bring her back.”
“Do I do this before or after I send her bones through the portal?”
“Either will do. But within twenty-four hours.”
I glanced at the clock in his office. It said three PM, but it seemed so much later than that. “Okay. I can do that.”
“Good. Now give me a bone.”
I took the pinky out of my pocket and handed it over to him. He sniffed it and smashed it into dust. It fell into the book and dissolved into the pages. His eyes turned to black orbs.
“Thank you. You can go.”
“But the key–you haven’t given me anything.”
“You need her skeleton. She is the key.” He drew his pen and wrote down several words. “Here is the address. Bring her bones there and give her a headstone. Then she will be free.”
*
When I was nine, my father threw me down the stairs. I broke my first two toes and fractured my shin. As I waited with my mother in the ER, I started to see spots. We learned that he’d also cracked my skull, like he’d cracked my mother’s years before.
The doctor who saw me was kind and spoke in an even voice. He told me random facts about this hospital, about the X-Men when he noticed my T-shirt, and then random facts about bones. Anything he could think of to keep me awake, so I didn’t fall asleep and never wake up.
“You know,” he said. “When you’re born, you have almost three hundred bones. As you grow up, you get fewer, right down to two hundred and six. “
As I waited out my concussion, I also waited for my body to get bigger so I could break less. Instead, Social Services were finally called and my father was locked up.
I became the man of the house, then.
“Your father was awful,” Sally said when I told her my version of the story. “You don’t deserve to think of awful people. They’ll shrink and shrink and shrink out of your life if you don’t think about them. The good times will grow and grow and grow.”
My shins ached again, like they had when I was nine, as I dug up Sally’s body. Her grave was in the corner of the cemetery with little lightning and virtually no presence. It was dark enough, and warm enough at night now, so I could do this and not be caught.
At around midnight, I cracked open her casket and took out all the bones. I still had her hands from the park and her pelvis in a thousand pieces. The pinky had been used to pay her way. I had everything I needed… except for her head.
I ached as if it’d been split open. Could I get away without having her skull? Surely I had enough. As I stacked her bones up in my backpack, I worried that she’d be forced to live her life as a headless horseman, haunting the playground and warning little children about the dangers of gender.
The address the man at the hotel had given me was an hour away in the middle of a lake. When no boat rental place was open, I hacked the locks, grabbed a boat, and sped out into the middle of the lake.
I dropped each one down and counted them up. The din of the mosquitoes sounded inside my head, but none of them bit me, as if I was protected by something. By the time I’d reached the end of the backpack, I tilted it open and scattered her bone dust on the surface. It dissolved. The water was blacker than the night around me. Nothing happened for a long time as I waited for the crushing feeling of my chest to disappear.
The lake started to bubble. White mixed with the black surface. And Sally’s bones rose to the top. Her femur, her ribcage, and sections of her hands. They all floated.
“Oh no,” I cried out.
Sally’s jokes about her osteoporosis and how she was like a flightless bird thanks to her hollow bones rolled around in my mind. “Call me ostrich. Call me emu. If I keep eroding, maybe one day I’ll fly away.”
I started to sob.
“Sink, sink. Please go away. Please sink down.”
I paddled back to the shoreline and found rocks, flat black ones used to skip across the surface. I dug through the sand, ravenous and desperate for something heavy to weight her body down and get her to the portal. The more I dug, the more I felt something take over my body. Dirt clung to my nails. My skin split on the rocks. I uncovered a stone so white, so pristine I thought it wasn’t real.
I pulled out a skull from the sand on the shore. A skull with a small bullet hole in its centre, like the plug of a basin that let life slip through. I held Sally’s skull in my hand and sighed.
“I have all of you now.”
I filled her skull with rocks to weigh it down and got back into the boat. In the centre of the lake, I dropped her into the water. The skull cracked. More bones, tiny and numerous like a baby’s, flew everywhere.
But she started to go down. Down and down and down into the water, Sally disappeared.
The lake was black again and still. The humming of mosquitoes turned to the humming of music.
I still had one last piece to solve.
*
“You know,” Sally said. “I don’t think I want surgery anymore.”
We lay back on the car from the scar she was dating. Cherry red, hood long and flat. The two had had sex on it, but she still thought it was better for lounging than fucking.
“So why go to group?” I asked. “Therapy is only there so you can talk out your demons before the knife cuts you open and repurposes the flesh.”
“Oh, creative. Since when did you become the Adam from clay?”
“Since the doctors promised to make me but forgot to breathe life into me.”
“You see, that’s why I don’t want surgery. I already have a life. I’m full of it.” Sally grinned and nudged my shoulder. “And I really think I have found someone who likes my body the way it is.”
“A fuck on the hood of the car is hardly a vow.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to be a wife.”
“What do you want to be?” I asked. “I mean who. Who do you want to be?”
“Sally. That’s it. I don’t ask for much.”
All I thought of was how hard it was for me to be Ryan. Sally could forgo surgery, but she had an option. I could only have a penis crafted out of the skin of my thigh, called a franken-dick by most other trans men in group. I could only ever dream of having something I could reject. I always had to take whatever was handed to me.
“But you know,” Sally went on, “I also go to group for you. Where else would I get such cutting commentary about the state of men?”
“The scar doesn’t talk?”
“Oh, God no. Why would he? Masculinity makes them silent. Please learn from those mistakes.”
I told her I would try. I knew those mistakes were the ones that had knocked me down stairs and broke my toes. Crushed my ribs and left me with purple bruises everywhere. Two weeks after the conversation on the scar’s car, I’d be in the hospital with a broken arm.
I’d always break myself to make myself feel whole.
And Sally would be dead.
Both of us never fucking learned.
*
When Sally’s body was under the water, I rowed to the shore. I picked up the piece of paper the man at the hotel had given me and a pen from the bottom of my backpack. I wrote down Sally’s name. Her date of birth (give or take) and added that her favourite colour was pink. Hot pink.
I floated the paper into the water. Watched it dissolve. I checked the black water.
Nothing moved.
When it wasn’t enough, I picked up my phone and called Sally’s answering machine. There was still enough space. I listed off all the bones that I had broken and what I had learned from each one. Shin, toes, skull, ribcage, wrist, hyoid (if only in a dream). I was still talking when an orb of white light appeared in the middle of the pond. The light constituted itself, piece by piece, until Sally was formed.
She wore the same sequined top in bright pink she had on when she disappeared. Her hair was the same shade of bottled-blonde and down to her shoulders. She had no shoes, but her toes were painted in pink.
She waved at me. I waved at her. The wave turned into the jerking off motion, and I finally hung up the phone.
“Thank you,” she said. “What a fucking relief.”
“I hate that the after world has genders. This is the worse lottery I’ve ever seen.”
She laughed, loud and throaty. It made the water ripple towards me.
“It sucks, but you do what you can. Remember what I said, right?”
I nodded.
“Good. ‘Cause I gotta go,” she said. “Never fall in love with men and their cars. And always speak up. Something else, too. Make my last words good, bro.”
I waited until she disappeared under the water again. When I couldn’t breathe, I thought I’d been choked again. Tears stung my face instead. I reached into my bag and pulled out the cast from my arm.
I left it in the hollow from where I’d dug up her skull. Her signature faced the dawn as it crept up over the trees along the lake. Water lapped at its surface, dissolving into nothing but dust.
What’s a better way to celebrate the start of the week than a horror story about institutions and the way we can sometimes eat each other alive to get out of the four walls we spend the bulk of our time inside?
That’s what “The Institute” is more or less about; instead of dreading a 9-5, our narrator dreads the eating disorder program she’s forced to spend her life inside as she purportedly gets better. Whereas most places that claim to heal are inspiring–or at the very least, boring–this narrator is forced to reckon with a callous system, neglectful counsellors, and a horrible ritual that will allow her to be free–but only if she can swallow it.
I wrote this story back in 2015 and had it published in 2016. It was a tough time for me personally. The television show Hannibal, oddly enough, was my main comfort show around then. A lot of my academic writing was about it–and I suppose, this short story is yet another Hannibal-inspired tale. It’s also inspired by my own experiences in a similar program, though of course, I got out without the horrifying ritual.
(Or did I?)
If you hate hospitals, or are easily upset by discussions around eating disorders, I would recommend skipping this one. Tomorrow, I assure you, there will be a different kind of story with a new and spooky monster. I can’t wait!
The Institute
By Eve Morton
They called us shadow women. Trinket girls. When we checked into the hospital, the nurses whispered about us and our small bodies. Only a thin layer of skin separated us from our bones. As we stepped on the scales, we were weighed in double-digits. The staff wanted to know our secret formula, our magical cure for fat. But then the doctors diagnosed us all with anorexia nervosa and the nurses stopped asking questions. They stopped speaking to us all together.
From the hospital, we were sent to the institute – a large treatment facility just outside of a busy highway. We were to spend our days here, eating all our meals on campus, so we could return to normal life – and normal weight – all over again. We would have therapy. We would get better. Our parents dropped us off on the institute’s doorsteps after our electrolytes were balanced and our family GPs had written our condition down on prescription paper.
“Your daughter is sick. I can’t help. These people can.”
“Anorexia Nervosa is a tricky illness. It affects the body, but also the mind. It has the highest mortality rate out of any mental illness.”
“Anorexia nervosa is a permanent condition. You only cope. You cannot hope for a cure. These people will help your daughter to cope.”
The doctors talked about us like we were not inside the room, like we really were the shadow women the nurses saw. Everyone had had about enough of us, anyway. We were too visible to forget about, but not present enough to treat inside our homes anymore. So the institute welcomed us inside.
I was the last to arrive.
“Good afternoon,” a tall, blonde woman greeted me. She shook the hands of my parents first, before she looked down at me. Her eyes x-rayed my body, sensing all the bones under my clothing. She sighed, sadly, and then turned back to my parents. “We will take good care of her.”
My parents drove away without worry, as the woman, named Rhonda, and I walked around.
“I’m one of your counsellors. You will be given the best treatment here. Lots of therapy, lots of group discussions. You’re one of many, here. You won’t be alone.”
She said the last part more like a threat than a comfort.
“What will you do?”
“Me?” Rhonda smiled. “I help you eat.”
“How do you do that?”
“Don’t get too far ahead. You need to rest here.”
We walked through the sterile doorway of the institute. Black writing on all the doors marked rooms for therapy, rooms for examination, and rooms for eating. I felt as if I was walking into a fairy tale. The oak doors looked vaguely like gingerbread.
“The first case of anorexia nervosa was a girl who wanted to be a saint,” Rhonda began. “She starved herself because she thought it would take her closer to God.”
Rhonda opened the door at the end of the hall. We walked into a small kitchen with a long, rectangular table in the centre. The girls sat on the sides of the table, all of their eyes down. A different counsellor, one with red hair, sat at the head. Her name was Kellie.
“You’ve got to eat,” Kellie stated. She looked directly at me as she spoke. “The doctor told the first anorexic girl that she could honour God by eating. God is all around, even in our food.”
“We do not need divine light,” Rhonda stated. She moved towards the curtains over the windows, and closed them tightly. “Any more than anyone else. Please. Sit now.”
I sat next to a small girl with sharp bones protruding from her wrists. There were eleven of us at the table. We were missing our last apostle, our Judas. With the counsellors watching us, there were almost thirteen people in the room.
“You need your humanity back,” Kellie said. “Humans are hungry. They will always need to eat. Show us you are human. Thinking about the Divine is okay, but human – that is what you all are.”
“And what exactly are we to eat?” another girl, a patient with sallow hips, snapped.
The two counsellors looked at one another. They smiled.
“You will see,” Rhonda said.
“Just give it time,” Kellie echoed.
The next day, the first man went missing.
***
In psychiatry, many doctors believe that patients are forced to repeat their traumas, until they find what they are and face them. This is why confession is important. You must confess your indiscretions so you stop repeating them. Binging and purging was one of the many symptoms of an eating disorder. But, if you purged your anxieties, your family history, and your nightmares, then you weren’t sick anymore. You were ahead of the curve, ready to get better and face your fears.
As the days went on in the institute, the meals we all shared became our new traumas. They were our new rituals that we were all forced to repeat.
Meal times were half an hour. All food must be consumed during those times. Then, for half an hour after the meal, no one was allowed to leave the table. Even when we were lucky enough to go to the bathroom, someone would remain on the other side of the door, listening in to make sure the only thing we purged was our psychic revelations.
Our group therapy sessions were an hour long, with a break in between for snacks.
Three girls in group therapy claimed abuse when they were younger. Two were real, I thought. Another was a false memory produced from the ether, so the counsellors would stop asking questions.
Melanie, the first girl-victim, was abused by a man with dark hair. On Tuesday, during lunch, a man with dark hair was presented on the table. His thighs were cut, his skin peeled back to the bone, so the flank could be cooked inside the small kitchen in the institute. He was made into a victim, into a piece of meat.
Kellie set up the timer for the meal. “Three minutes, everyone. Then we can begin.”
As soon as the buzzer went, Melanie picked up her knife and fork. She ate the man so she was not a victim anymore.
The rest of us had our standard meals, issued by the institute’s dietician. Applesauce and egg sandwiches. Normal, bland food. Only Melanie, with her sandwich full of human meat, got to indulge in order to heal.
“How did you choose him?” I asked. “If we’re not God, then how are you playing his game?”
“He got too close to school children,” Rhonda stated. “He was bad news from the start.”
I nodded, considering this. Melanie grabbed another piece of bread, adding mustard to it, before she ate more of him. Her dark eyes turned blue. The colour came back to her skin. She was getting better – and we all despised her for it.
“In some parts of the world, some people believe that when you eat your enemy, you gain their strength,” Kellie said. “You are getting his strength, Melanie. You are becoming something different than before. No longer a shadow or a trinket. But real.”
She nodded and smiled. The clock ticked on, another three minutes to go before the meal was over. Melanie ate in a sudden fury, cleaning her entire plate as the buzzer rang.
We were no longer Gods, I thought between the sounds. But monsters.
***
There was a rose garden around the institute. I was always dropped off too early for therapy, so I followed foot trails made by other people, who often dragged their IVs behind them and left marks in the dirt. This morning, I followed a trail to the back of the garden, near the woods.
In between two pine trees, I saw a man with dark skin. His eyes were black and his legs were large, like the back haunches of a wolf. I stepped closer. We were too close to a highway for it to be a real wolf. The skin was too dark and the bones were too prominent. He looked like a dishevelled man with oil over his body, as if he had been tarred and feathered. As if he had been shamed.
“Hello?” I asked.
He extended one of his long fingers, pointing towards a hill. Fresh dirt lined the area. I walked closer to him, only to watch as he disappeared in sunlight. The creature was a shadow too.
I began digging where he had pointed me to. I got down on my knees, feeling the dirt against my skin. I found a finger bone first. Then, I found a jawline with teeth, rearranged and out of order. I kept digging, knowing that I would be late for therapy.
Was this skeleton of the man? I asked myself. Was he an old patient, one who had refused treatment, until his body had folded in on itself and starved to death? I didn’t know, but I grabbed the clavicle from the dirt.
“I will be back,” I told the bones. “I promise.”
Inside the institute’s examining room, I kept the bone under my arm, as if he were a part of me. When Kellie came into the room to weigh me, I asked, “Have you ever had men at the institute?”
“Anorexia nervosa primarily affects women. Young women.”
“But there are outliers, right?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “You need to be weighed today. Don’t worry about the past patients.”
“Has anyone ever failed? What happens then?”
“Anorexia has the highest mortality rate for any mental illness. I suggest you not test its limits.”
“But—”
“Take off your clothing,” Kellie demanded. “Put on the gown. Get on the scale. You should know the drill by now. We need to see how much you’ve improved. No weighing yourself down.”
“Okay, okay.”
Kellie came closer to me, her green eyes inflamed. “You are to wear nothing. You know what happens if you lie, right?”
I nodded. Even as she left me alone, I still held the bone close, under the stiff gown they gave me. When she came back in, I tipped the scales.
“What are you doing? What are you hiding?”
Kellie found the bone right away. She held it up to the light and then began to search through my stuff. I was pulled into a new room like a child, cornered like a dog, and treated like a criminal.
“I told you not to lie to me,” Kellie said. “Why didn’t you listen to us?”
“Is this where you want your life to go?” Rhonda asked. “Why are you preventing your own therapy? Do you want to die?”
“Or maybe you just like being thin. You like your bones, don’t you? You think you look good? You’re signing your own death certificate with this type of behaviour.”
“This condition is permanent. But it does not have to be deadly. We are only trying to help.”
“What else was I supposed to do in the mornings?” I asked, snapping out of the interrogation. “I’m bored. I wanted to be alone, so I went for a walk. And then I found him – I found his bone. I was walking because I wanted to leave, but I knew I would never get very far.”
Rhonda and Kellie exchanged looks. They questioned me more, but I refused to tell them where the rest of his body was. They called my parents instead.
“Her behaviour must stop. This excessive exercise, the secrecy… She will never get better at this rate.”
I stood in the corner of the room as they talked. They acted as if I was the one who killed him. As if I was the one who put the bones in the ground, instead of discovering them. I had uncovered atrocities, and they could only focus on the steps I had taken, the exercise I was trying to sneak in.
“It’s part of her condition. She must walk and walk and walk, as if she’ll run away from problems.”
“But I carried the bones back,” I argued. “I told you what I found. I kept them safe, under my arms.”
No one heard.
“What is wrong?” Kellie asked me after she hung up the phone. “What are you keeping hidden? What are you running away from?”
I held my breath. I had no memories to bring forth, no confession hidden under my skin. Not like Melanie or the other girl-victims. Not like anyone else here.
“I have nothing to confess,” I said. “I have done nothing wrong.”
Kellie only shook her head. She wrote something down in my file and then slid it away.
“We can talk about this later,” she said. “For now, there is more work to do.”
As Kellie led me out of the room, I saw Rhonda devour the bone from the corner of my eye. When I looked back, she only smiled.
***
Every Thursday, we had something called “food desense.” Short for food desensitization. We would gather around and pick a forbidden food to eat. Not apples, not usually. According to the counsellors, we were all afraid of cake and soda and unhealthy things. So, to counter to most doctors’ orders, we were set out on a mission to gather junk food.
On an April afternoon, we were sent out beyond the institute’s walls. We held hands like wandering children, with Kellie at the front and Rhonda at the back. There was traffic all around us and a concrete bridge to the left – no escape possible. We couldn’t run even if we wanted to.
There were only eight of us now. After Melanie, two more girls had eaten their final meal to pass the test. Gained the weight to hide their bones. They were called cured and sent on their way home.
“Here we are,” Kellie stated. We stopped in front of a McDonald’s in a mall. Some girls groaned, but most had learned to be quiet about their food preferences this far along. We were only allowed two “dislikes” for the institute’s menu. Most people had used their “dislikes” for chocolate or milk; butter and gravy; sometimes brussel sprouts and green beans. Valentina, a small girl with dark hair, had used her two dislikes for chicken and beef. She was the only person in the McDonald’s without a burger. She ate ice cream and fries, as the rest of us were given Big Macs and told to stay together.
We sat at another long table, stretched out, facing the jungle gym. We all ate sad beef and greasy fries and called it therapy for the eating disordered.
“Be normal,” Rhonda said. “This is how normal people eat. Not all the time, but every so often.”
“Shouldn’t we be worried about death?” one girl, Ashley, asked.
“The cows are fine. Don’t worry about them,” Kellie said. “All life must come from death. If you want, you can thank the cows for their sacrifice. You deserve to live too.”
“No, I mean the workers. The corporations,” Ashley said. She was a hippy. She had gone too vegan, eating nothing but salads before she came into the hospital walls. It was a simple mistake, really. Most of the girls that sat at the table were nothing but simple mistakes, spelled out with poor food choices and too few calories.
Rhonda and Kellie shrugged. “One life leads into another. Don’t worry. Just eat.”
“Even sacrificial cows should be worshipped,” Valentina said, sipping her milkshake. “When you sacrifice an animal, it must be well. You cannot use one that’s sick, or else it’s a bad omen. It becomes the conscience of the tribe or the group it represents. This is one of the reasons I can’t eat meat. I just can’t.”
“Why?” I asked.
She looked at me, almost begging. “Because my conscience won’t let me.”
“Girls,” Kellie said. She narrowed her eyes at us. Rhonda tapped her fingers, beating a tattoo like the time from the institute. “You only have an intrinsic responsibility for your own life. No one else’s. And we are almost out of time.”
We ate the rest of our meal in silence. We walked back into the mall and towards the elevator that would take us outside again. A woman with blonde hair approached us, staring intently, as she shook her head.
“The stairs are right there, you know.”
“We know,” Kellie said. “Thanks.”
“Why don’t you use them?” she asked.
Kellie stared daggers at the woman. I knew that stare. It was the same one I had been given in the examination room, the same one that felt like x-rays. I looked away.
“I told you: we don’t need the stairs. We need the elevator.”
“But you all look fine,” the woman argued.
“You don’t know these girls,” Rhonda said. “You don’t know their stories.”
The woman sneered at us like we were leapers, as if we had grown a skin with disease over our shadows.
“It’s good to be healthy so easily,” Kellie said, staring at the woman. “Appreciate it while you can.”
I felt the hair on my neck stand up. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what I knew was coming from inside Kellie’s threat. The woman muttered under her breath. Her flip-flops smacked against the tile floor as she walked down the stairs, just as our elevator came.
“Let that be a lesson to you, girls,” Kellie said when we were inside. “Never let anyone tell you you’re not sick. You all are. And you must follow us in order to be well.”
On our way outside, we formed a line. The woman who had called us out before moved ahead of us on the sidewalk, her eyes on us. Disgust evident. As she stepped out onto the road, she was struck by a car.
We kept walking. No one said a word.
That night, Valentina ate the woman’s brains, finally breaking her vow of not touching meat.
And the next day, she was allowed to go.
***
I had dreams of food often. Real food – not what they gave us wheeled in on carts day in and day out. Not the fast food places or overly sweet cakes they gave to us. Not even the men that they put on the table as therapy. I wanted food, like the kind I ate before I got here. The kind my parents gave me for lunch every day. But the institute kept us starving near the end, knowing that it would cause desperation. No matter how much I said I wanted to eat, they would put it off.
“A calorie is a calorie is a calorie,” Kellie said with a wide grin. “If you can’t eat what we tell you to eat, then how can we expect you to survive in the real world?”
Because I want to eat that food, I thought. I remained silent. She sat down next to me, placing a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“Eat the meal. Then you can go. We will know you’re loyal, then.”
“Loyal to what?”
“Your recovery. Yourself.”
I sighed. I thought I was loyal. I thought that was what turning up every day meant and ignoring the bodies and bones on the front stops. I wanted to get out so badly. I tried to be a model patient. But the rules they gave me made no logical sense. When I followed them, they changed. The only way I could leave was eat, but there were too many forbidden foods, too many meals repeated until they were traumas. Everything became divided. The food always had two sides, two stories. In order to get past all the trauma, all the things that had turned me into their patient with anorexia nervosa, I had to break the final taboo.
Alive and dead. Flesh and bone. Life and death. Monster and God. Even if I was still human.
“Anorexia nervosa is a permanent condition,” Kellie reminded me. “But not if you eat where you came from. Not if you eat someone healthy.”
“You are what you eat,” Rhonda said. She strummed her fingertips again.
The rest of the girls – there were only four now – stared at me from the table, their faces sunken in. They waited for my response, to see if they could get free too. We all needed one another, but not for comfort – for sustenance. We all needed to eat. We all needed to survive.
“Let me survive,” I said, turning to Kellie. “I want to eat. Please.”
“We need to confer with others. We need to see what the doctors would say.”
“Why don’t you trust me? I’ll eat.”
“You got yourself this way,” Kellie said. “You’ll get yourself right back if we are not careful. We have already worked so hard, we don’t want it all falling apart.”
“I am not a bridge or a building,” I said. “I don’t require an architect.”
“You are damaged.”
“I am not a car, either,” I demanded. “I am a person. And I want to eat.”
Rhonda and Kellie looked at one another. They looked back at the fridge.
“Okay,” Rhonda said. “You’re next.”
***
On Tuesday, the table was set. They brought out the body from the back cellar. The man was older, one of the oldest bodies yet. His skin was pale and his hair was grey. I heard the scratching of the counsellors’ pens as they wrote their field notes, judging my response like all the others.
“She has come so far.”
“She has gained twenty pounds since treatment began.”
“She can go home soon. Almost. She is so close.”
I looked away from the man’s eyes and his navy tattoos. I tried not to think about his backstory as I cracked open his ribcage. The noise was so sickening and yet so full of pleasure, like cracking knuckles. The counsellors smiled at me, proud of my accomplishment. The four girls looked at me with wide eyes, horrified and hungry, as I slipped my hands under the man’s skin.
I took out his heart. This was my designated piece to eat. The heart was one of the largest muscles, yet still a delicate organ meat. It looked too small, too light – and like it was still beating. I placed down on my plate as Kellie passed me a napkin.
“Go on,” she encouraged. “Eat up.”
I stared. I took another breath, fear gripping me.
“Are you okay? Do you need the tube?”
I blinked. The tube – no, I thought, shaking my head. Too many other girls had had the gastro-intestinal tube shoved down their throat like an amoral organ, where their liquid meals were fed into them before they were forced to swallow. I closed my eyes.
In my mind, I saw a creature from the woods. I saw the skinny body leftover from the program, a patient who had refused to become a monster and had died instead and was now buried like a bad omen. I saw the boy that had been tarred and feathered and forgotten about. He hovered over me like my conscience, reminding me not to become a monster.
“Are you going to eat?” Rhonda asked. “Or are you wasting our time?”
I looked up. The buzzer clicked on, the seconds passing by.
The black creature from the woods shook his head. He said no. But he was the thing to fear, wasn’t he? He was a totem of my death and permanent destruction if I didn’t do what I was told, right? I saw the boy covered as a shadow, a former self lost inside bones and under dirt. I turned away from the creature and looked down at my plate.
I raised my knife and fork in my hand – and then ate the heart of the stranger. I thanked the man I didn’t know for giving me life again, closing my eyes in a silent prayer. I tasted iron and rot, my nose filled with the smell of blood.
When I was done, I looked up at Kellie and Rhonda with blood around my mouth. I wanted to move onto them next, to tear them apart limb from limb. They were the ones who had made me into a monster, who had taken the very thing I thought made me who I was. But my stomach heaved.
Now, for the first time in a long time, I was full.
“Wonderful,” Kellie said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve done a great job.”
“Yes,” Rhonda agreed. She rose from her chair. The girls’ eyes followed her as she moved around the table and placed another hand on me. “I think you’re ready to go.”
I was silent. I worried my voice would never come back again, and if it did, I would speak in a language that was not my own.
When the bell rang on the buzzer, Rhonda and Kellie allowed me to rise. I gathered my coat and clothing that I had worn when I came into the institute. They gave me my discharge papers and called my parents. Finally, they took me out through the institute’s door, crossing over a small pond and bridge by the front parking lot where my parents would soon come.
“It’s okay,” Kellie said. “You don’t need to say goodbye.”
When they left me there, I turned around, back towards the glass. No one was there watching me. They had truly let me go.
I walked towards the rose garden and found the bones of the body I had left behind. He was incomplete now, because they had taken the bone I carried with me. All of my bones were gone, too, now hidden by layers and layers of flesh.
It was okay, I figured. I didn’t need to see them anymore to know that they were there.
When I looked up, I saw the black creature. He moved towards me slowly, his eyes dark and judgemental. I had eaten the thing I promised I would not.
But I had done it to survive.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
The creature merely stared at me, like my own former shadow. I raised my hand, hoping he would touch it. He lifted his dark fingers, twisted like tree branches, just as a car pulled up. I blinked as a horn honked. Then he was gone.
“Hey, Emma,” my parents greeted. Their car engine idled. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Would you like to go home?”
“Yes,” I said. I raised my eyes. “I would.”
“Who were you talking to before?” my mom asked once I was inside. I looked out at the woods, from the backseat of the car, and saw the creature wave me a goodbye.
I’ll be at the Homer Watson Gallery today giving readings for the start of my spooky season markets–and since Homer Watson is a famous spiritualist (at least in Canada), I wanted to share one of my historical ghost stories.
Please note: this story deals directly with suicide. Nothing on the page, but the entire premise–about spirits at a crossroad–is related to people who have passed on via suicide, and how the church handles (or doesn’t handle) their spirits in the afterlife.
This story was written as a prompt for a friend who wanted something “Ambrose Bierce-y” to read. Bierce is one of America’s most heavily anthologized authors, an early supernatural writer, and his stories influenced the later works of HP Lovecraft. My friend said I delivered with my request–and so did the horror publication Scare Street. They accepted this story for one of their many anthologies, and it was so nice to give this story a second life via them. Now, hopefully, there is a third life this Spirit Season.
Enjoy!
***
Crossroads
By Eve Morton
Father Brown awoke to the sound of terrible scraping. The church was drafty. Surely, the strained shrieks were nothing more than the wind against the brick church.
Yet, as he awoke, he grew certain that the deathly scraping was something unearthly, something that required more attention than a prayer in the dead of night.
Father Brown rose and dressed hastily. The sound of scraping had continued, along with the sickening thud of something heavy.
Footsteps? Thunder? Perhaps.
The wind was still strong, and the trees were still lashing the windows, but Father Brown could feel something else deep inside—a presence. He’d only felt something like this once before, on the eve of Easter inside the rectory, and then, he’d hidden away in his room and prayed until he had fallen asleep.
As he glimpsed out the window with his oil lamp, he saw a shadow on the horizon. Where the main road crossed with the dirt road to St. Paul’s Church, a man stood hunched over. He seemed to sway with the wind, a stick of a willow tree or something else in his hands, which he plunged deep into the dirt.
“He is digging,” Father Brown said aloud. His voice echoed off his sparse room. He donned a jacket over his clothing and set out for the crossroads.
The man was still digging when he arrived. His silhouette was clearer, no more than a youth of eighteen, someone who should have been drafted into the army, surely. As Father Brown approached, he noticed the man’s loping gait and the slight tremor in how he held the shovel, beyond what would have been simple fatigue from the digging in the middle of the night. Perhaps he was a cripple, stricken with palsy.
Or, perhaps, he was just a drunk one.
“Evening,” Father Brown said. The wind cut through and shrieked at the moment he spoke. He cleared his throat, pulled his coat around him tighter, and spoke again. “What are you doing, young man?”
The youth jumped. He had not noticed Father Brown approaching, and he almost raised the shovel in his hand to strike a blow.
Father Brown stepped back, his shoes becoming caked in the mud that had formed from the boy’s shoveling efforts.
“What are you doing, young man?” Father Brown repeated. “There is no need for violence. This is St. Paul Church’s property. However, I, the father of this parish, would like to know what it is you seek.”
“I’m sorry, Father,” the boy said. He truly was a boy. Father Brown could hear it in his soft voice, hardly broken by the chains of puberty. “I don’t mean you or anyone else any harm.”
“I find it hard to be convinced of this fact. It is the middle of the night, and you bear your shovel like a weapon. Please, tell me. What is it you seek?”
The boy leaned against the shovel, both hands over it like a thinking post, as his face became ashen with sadness. “I… my uncle, you see, he is here.”
“Buried here? Or over there?” Father Brown gestured over his shoulder to the cemetery gates on the other side of the church, directly opposite his personal study and bedroom. “That is where our congregation meets their end on the other side. Even if you were in search of your uncle’s grave, you should not be digging it up. You should show respect to the dead.”
Father Brown’s voice boomed, each syllable causing his cadence to rise and fall as if he was at the pulpit.
The horror of the boy’s words—digging up his uncle!—struck fear into him in a way no specter or vision of the afterlife ever could. This boy was a grave robber, a ghoul, nothing but the deepest darkest sinner he’d ever faced.
“Are you not fearful for your own soul, my lad?” Father Brown asked, some of his theatrical cadence descending into the personal. “Are you not fearful of the task you take on? Digging up a grave! And in the wrong spot. Who are you? Have we met before?”
The youth had been staring at his hands and the overturned earth for the majority of the priest’s speech. Now, he met his gaze, his blue eyes suddenly bright orbs in the darkened night.
Father Brown stepped back. A demon? He wondered, yet he felt the gaze as he would an angel, bright and feverish with hope.
The boy began to cry, wetness like the fresh spattering rain staining his cheeks. “I saw my uncle here, Father, forgive me, three weeks ago. My sister goes to your church. I came to visit her. I attended the afternoon service. You surely do not remember me, but maybe you remember Rebeccah. She was large with child.”
Father Brown had several women as part of his congregation who were large with child, but there was no need to hunt through those names in his mind. He knew Rebeccah Northrop. He knew of the entire Northrop family and the tragedy after tragedy that had befallen each member.
If Father Brown had any notion to believe in curses, the Northrop family would be the basis of such belief. Rebeccah’s father had died in the Boar War from a gangrenous wound he should have survived. He’d left a wife with five children, one with a crippled leg, to raise and no money to do it on. Her brother, Peter, this child’s uncle surely, had moved to their small New England village to help. That winter, three of the children had died of rheumatic fever.
During the worst of the illnesses, the mother had found out she was with child once again, her husband’s last brood. But the boy had been born still, a stone in the hand of the midwife. The mother had gone mad with grief and ended her life in the local sanitarium. Then, the uncle had lost his own life, stricken by heartbreak and madness at the terrible hand his family had been given.
“Your uncle was Peter; am I correct?”
“Yes,” he said and nodded. “I am also Peter. Named after him. I saw him a few days ago. Right here.” The youth tapped his shovel into the muddy dirt. “I saw him here, and he was lost.”
Father Brown could not help but feel a chill, even as his words came out with a cool precision. “Son, there is no such thing as specters and spirits.”
“Then, what was Mary visited by? Then, what was Job stricken with? I must believe in what I see with my eyes and touch with my hands during the day. There must be more to the physical world. There must—”
“Yes, dear Peter. There is more than what we see. There simply must be, or I shall be a fool spending my life as I am.” Father Brown took in a deep breath, feeling far too vulnerable—and too cold, much too cold as if this boy was dead in front of him—at that moment. “But we must face the living. We must go on with our daily waking worlds. The dead have been buried. Your uncle included, and—”
“That is the thing,” Peter interrupted. His hand was shaking, but Father Brown noted it was not with palsy but fear. “I know my uncle is dead and buried, so why did I see him here? It must be because his death is not truly his death. I am missing a piece.”
“What sort of piece could there be?” Father Brown asked. He thought of the cursed family and wanted to truly be there for the boy. “So much tragedy can happen, and it can feel as if the Lord is testing us, like Job indeed. We must let it go and endure those trials. You have done all you can for your uncle. You have—”
“He died in an unsanctioned way,” Peter cut him off yet again. His young face became older at that moment, his lips hard and firm. “We covered it up, Rebeccah and I. He wanted to die, not being able to face the terrible consequences of his own life, his own struggle. That baby…”
“Your mother’s child, your lost sibling. It is sad—”
“The child was his too.”
Father Brown gasped. This was not the first accusation of evil within a family that he had witnessed, and he’d read many tales within the Bible of men and women within the same bloodline lying together. But those were stories, necessary parables for something greater at their core. Seeing the consequence in the flesh maddened him on the youth’s behalf.
“He killed himself,” Peter confessed. “He died at his own hand. And we could not bear the shame of that. So, we covered it up. We shouldn’t have because he does not deserve those lies. He made our mother crazy and then took her only solace. He is the sinner, not us. And now he has come back to prove it. He will not rest.”
“What do you mean he has come back?”
Peter stood a long time, hands on his shovel, and gazed into the dirt. A twig snapped in the distance, seemingly impossible given the mud and wet air all around the two of them, yet both men heard it. Their gazes followed the sound.
On the main dirt road, a man’s shadow was present. He walked back and forth, a terribly maddening pacing ritual, before he simply disappeared into the ether.
Father Brown met Peter’s blue eyes. He pleaded with the man without words.
“I refuse,” Father Brown said, turning away. “That was not real.”
“Yet you saw it. I saw it. That is my uncle, trapped between worlds. I heard a legend long ago that all suicides remain at crossroads. They cannot go to heaven. They cannot go to hell. Something draws them here.” Peter began to dig again. “If I find whatever has brought him here, I can then place his spirit underground again where he will stay. I can bury what I have lost.”
“No,” Father Brown proclaimed in fear, trembling from the night’s events. He did not want to believe anything that had occurred, yet his shivers told him that even if his mind refused to label it in language, it had happened. He shuddered beyond the cold as if an invisible hand of the otherworld was reaching for him from that pitiable hole. “No, my dear child. I will not allow you to dig here.”
“You cannot do anything.” Peter continued to toss dirt over his shoulder.
The hole was deep, up to his knees. Water from the rain and spring runoff cascaded into the hole, covering his shoes and surely setting the boy up for a fever. Perhaps he didn’t care. Yes, Father Brown could clearly see now that this boy didn’t care about a thing. His blue eyes had become affixed, almost possessed, with his mission of finding his uncle at the crossroads and putting his spirit back to rest.
“What are you hoping to find in the dirt?” Father Brown asked. “He was not buried here.”
“But I see him here. There must be something.”
“No,” Father Brown said once again. “You are a simple boy, and this is far beyond your capabilities. I forbid it. You must leave now, or I will call the authorities.”
The youth continued to dig. Even as Father Brown repeated the threat—arrest, imprisonment, insults at his mental ability—Peter continued on his mission. Father Brown understood the boy was motivated by a higher calling, as he’d once been.
So, Father Brown evoked the only thing he could. “Peter, this will damn you. This act is barbaric and against the Lord. I will not stand for it. I will not allow you to dig at the crossroads because it will put your soul in mortal jeopardy.”
“It already is, Father. You don’t understand that. I’m already damned.”
“I do understand. I have ministered to your family. And if you continue on in this way, you will only pass the curse on to the next generation. Your sister’s child, Rebeccah’s brood. Surely, you do not want that child to meet the same fate as your lost sibling? Do not damn someone already so innocent.”
Peter halted. His shovel was in the dirt, but his face was now crestfallen. Father Brown knew that he had struck a note. He had saved the boy. He extended his hand for him to take, to help lift him out of the hole, which he grasped with a chill.
Under the oil lamp, Peter was filthy and covered in mud. The only thing clean on him were his blue eyes. Peter opened his mouth to say something, but every time, he seemed to fold in on himself and not utter a word.
“It is all right,” Father Brown said. “You have done your very best. Go home now. Stay warm. I will see you and Rebeccah on Sunday.”
Peter nodded. He regarded the shovel as if it was a foreign object and then handed it to the priest. His actions and facial expressions said, I won’t need this any longer, but no words came from his mouth. He slumped up the main road, past where his uncle’s specter had emerged, and then kept going.
Father Brown waited at the crossroads until the youth disappeared into the night. Then, he waited for another five minutes to be sure that the ghost did not return as well. When the night seemed empty of spirits and hauntings, he returned to his room, washed as much of the mud and dirt from himself, and then lay under the covers.
The terrible feeling persisted until the morning, and he knew he could no longer fool himself that it was the chill.
***
Father Brown did not see Peter or Rebeccah on Sunday. He’d prepared a sermon on the nature of the afterlife and the sins men have inherited from their fathers, but the homily fell flat on his tongue. Those he needed to administer to the most were not present. What was the point? Though he went through his sermon and the congregation was respectful and kind, he could tell they were not listening. They did not need to hear about breaking family curses and respecting the dead, God-fearing as they were already.
After the service, Father Brown shook hands, spoke to people about their small issues, and shared some food with others, and his faith was restored in little gestures.
Once he retired to his room, however, the noises returned. A subtle scraping of metal against rock, the sound of earth over his shoulder, a digging chorus of more than just Peter, but a line of gravediggers at their post, as if unearthing the entire Northrop line.
Father Brown had been hearing the noises since that night with Peter. And he’d been ignoring them, calling them bad dreams and lingering guilt at his harsh treatment of the youth. But until this Sunday, these spectral noises had only ever visited him at night.
Now, it was daylight, and he heard the ghost. He’d once been surrounded by the power of his congregation, the living souls of those he could save, and yet he heard the distinct sounds of a man who had not been buried in the proper place, a man who had lain with the wrong woman, and a man who had continued to curse his own brood when he should have been protecting them.
“Peter Shunn,” Father Brown whispered inside his bedroom. “I see you and hear you. What do you want?”
There was no answer. Only more noises of scraping, of pacing against soft earth. Father Brown left his room and walked across the stone floors until he was on the other side, at one of the windows facing the cemetery. The grave markers were a hodgepodge of design and prominence. Some of the wealthier families had large stones, while others opted to be modest in death though they could afford angels and carvings like the biggest pieces.
Father Brown gathered the birth and death records he kept on the shelf in this room. He located Peter Shunn in his roster,; his death listed as a heart attack at age fifty-five, and struck it out. He didn’t add anything in, but he’d hoped that correcting the register would make the sounds disappear.
I am telling the truth now, his actions spoke. Please leave us alone.
The sounds continued. He sighed and returned to the window. A man was there—spectral, not literal—and he paced the gravestones. He wore a gray outfit, the working-class gear of those who owned a shop but still did all their own repairs, and it was barely visible in the gray mist. He hunched over some of the stones, touching them like they were a child.
His child.
Father Brown found the listing for the stillborn baby. He had no name, but there was a gender listed. Baby Boy Northrop. He was buried in the cemetery right next to his father, who was not listed on the birth certificate but would join him months later.
Father Brown left the registry books on the desk in the room. He gathered a thick coat as he stepped outside. The shovel that the younger Peter had left behind leaned against the back door of the church. He took it now, merely to use it as a walking stick. Or as a weapon, in case these ghosts were violent like the demons in the Bible.
He walked through the gate of the cemetery, his heart hammering. I have been here any number of times, administering a number of different but no less sacred rites. Yet now I am afraid. “God help us all,” he said as his shoes became caked in mud.
The specter turned. The face of the elder Peter was evident, even through the mist and distance. He locked eyes with the priest, his face caught in a rictus grin, and then disappeared. He did not run or hide; he was simply gone.
Father Brown regarded the earth where the specter had stood. Footprints, deep into the earth, were present in front of the flat stone where his child was buried. He’d been buried next to the stillborn and next to his mother and father after that. A nice little family plot, usually bought all at once when the head of the household passed, so the family could be together in death.
Father Brown stood there for some time, considering his options. His soul, the soul of Peter, and the likelihood of eternal damnation. Then, with another prayer for forgiveness on his lips, he began to dig.
***
Hours later, as the sun set on the New England horizon, Father Brown walked to Rebeccah’s house and knocked three times. A woman he did not recognize came to the door, her hair gray at the temples and her dress simple yet professional.
“Yes, Father?” she asked, but before either one could say anything, a scream came from inside the house. The woman blinked, though she did not falter. “Rebeccah is having her baby tonight.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. It is not the best time to come and bless, but I assure you we may need you in the morning.”
“Is everything all right? I know—”
The midwife gathered his hands with hers. She smiled warmly, so much like the smiles he gave newlyweds and those who brought their babies into St. Paul’s for the baptismal waters. She was like him; he saw that so clearly at that moment. She dealt with life and death at the beginning, while he seemed to be playing eternal catch-up at the end. “Things are going as they should go,” the midwife said as she let his hands go. “Do not worry about her.”
“I’m here for Peter,” Father Brown said, remembering his mission with stark clarity.
Though he’d dressed again and done his best to wash the dirt off of his face before making the house call, he could see that his nails were ringed with half-moons of dirt. He had not been eating and was thinner in his vestments. He did not look well, not even for the midwife’s typical standards.
“Is everything all right?” the midwife asked cautiously. “Peter has been a big help to his sister thus far, though I’m sure some of the older children could take his place.”
“I’d like that. I need to speak with him. It is a private matter.”
The midwife nodded. She did not invite him inside—not as another scream erupted through the small house—but she bid him wait on the doorstep as she fetched Peter.
He came out moments later, his dark hair askew and dark rings under his eyes. He regarded the priest with a polite smile reserved for guests, though it quickly fell away as memories of their last meeting clouded his blue eyes. “What would you like, Father Brown?”
The midwife closed the door, leaving Peter on the porch. He had grown stronger from her presence, and the boy now crossed his arms over his chest and repeated his question.
“I’m afraid I am here to ask for your forgiveness on the matter of your uncle,” Father Brown began. “I believe that you were right. He has been haunting the rectory ever since you left.”
Peter stood up straighter. “He has? You have seen him?”
Father Brown nodded and rehashed many of the details that had kept him up at night. The scraping, the terrible howls, and his uncle’s forlorn pacing. “I’m afraid that you were right. Suicides haunt the crossroads, and the church is at a crossroads. This means that there is only one way to rid your uncle’s spirit. We must move him from consecrated ground back to the hole you were digging for him. I am… very sorry it is coming to this. I am also very sorry to your family.”
Peter held up his hands, silencing the priest. Then, he grew ashamed, having spoken so out of turn. “I am sorry myself. I should have sought council first. I should have—”
“Hold the apologies. We will need them for God after we get through tonight.” Father Brown drew a deep breath. He plunged his hands into his pockets, only to realize that some of the dirt and silt that he thought he’d rid himself of by changing was now back. He took out a small stone, only to find that it was a finger bone. He held it between the two of them, Peter’s gaze affixed there.
“May God forgive us,” Peter said.
Father Brown nodded. He could not have said it better himself.
***
They left the house of birth and walked into the night towards the house of death. Once his home, St. Paul’s Church had begun to feel unreal as Father Brown dug up the corpse of Peter Northrop and brought it inside piece by piece.
The man’s clothing hung off of him in tatters, having been disintegrated by the worms and other bugs after being in the ground for the past year and a half. His skin had mummified in some parts but decayed away to the bone in others. It was a horrible sight truly, one that Father Brown knew he would not rid from himself for years and years if his soul ever recovered.
The groundskeeper had filled in the hole by the crossroads the morning after Father Brown had discovered it. No grass grew on the patch, and Father Brown knew that no grass ever would grow there again. It was a worthy sacrifice as long as it meant that they could rid the rectory and the roads of this spirit.
“I need you to dig again,” Father Brown said. “My back aches after retrieving your uncle.”
Peter nodded and went to work right away. He grasped the shovel as if it was an extension of his own arm. He dug without relenting, without stopping for a break, and without his leg smarting in pain. Meanwhile, Father Brown transferred the body piece by piece from the rectory hallway to the darkened night. Each time he lay down a new part, Peter regarded it with muted horror. He nodded sometimes as if saying hello to his uncle, while other times, he turned away as if he could hide from what they were doing.
Or what his uncle has done, Father Brown reminded himself. They were not the bad men, the true sinners in this equation. They were doing the Lord’s work, rather dirty work, but they would be setting the scales of justice right again.
And there would be no more ghosts. Father Brown kept reminding him of that fact, over and over again, until the last piece of the body was brought out. He rested the skull, devoid of skin and possessing only a few wisps of hair, on top of the rest of the body. A beetle, black as the night, crawled out of the mouth and scampered away.
Both Father Brown and Peter shuddered.
“Well,” Father said, “shall we lay him to rest?”
Now, it was Peter’s job to transfer the body, piece by piece, into the grave that he had dug. He worked slowly, carefully, but soon his hands became a blur of white bone and mud, desperate to get it all underground and behind them both.
A driving wind shot up out of nowhere, and the clouds that had been hovering in the sky all day, turning the afternoon gray, now parted in the night sky and showered them with rain. The hole for the body was not as deep as six feet, only three or four at most.
But as the rain came, the dirt around them became a mudslide. Peter slipped as he transferred the legs of the corpse, and the rest of his uncle’s body cascaded into the hole, along with Peter.
“Help!” he cried out, his voice half under the muddy water. He slipped onto the floor of the grave with his face next to his uncle’s skull, which had fallen in during the short mudslide. He screamed for help again. The bones crunched under his feet and added to the horror. Another beetle came out of the mouth of the skull and ran between Peter’s lips as he yelled for help again.
Peter shot up, spitting, spluttering. His fingers crawled and scraped against the mouth of the grave, pulling more and more dirt over himself as he tried to escape. “Help! Father, help!”
Father Brown was silent as stone, watching it all in a lunatic’s trance. The wind and rain had frozen him and made his limbs stiff with fear. Peter reached out for him, desperate to grab onto life again. Father Brown wanted to grasp for him, longed to do so, but he held his position on the side.
“Father!” Peter called out, his gasps becoming gurgles. “Please help me! He has me!”
“The Devil,” Father Brown said, whispering. He drew in a deep breath against the harsh wind and crossed himself awkwardly as if the action was foreign.
He tried to get onto his knees, bracing himself against the pain that had never been there before in his joints, and offered a hand to Peter. He grabbed him. He slipped. The sequence was repeated threefold. It seemed they could not hold one another, their fingers transparent as ghosts.
“We have done the Devil’s work,” Father Brown said. He repeated the words like a chant. He could feel his own soul leaving his body, down into the hole with Peter and the boy’s eternal soul.
Father Brown had been forsaken the moment he’d woken up and heard the terrible noise. The moment he’d let the Northrop family into his congregation. The moment he had become a priest. It had all led to this moment, this fearful ruin of a life ended in suicide and two lives, two souls who were desperate enough to end a family line of pain and hurt with the sacrifice of their own souls.
“We are dying,” Father Brown said. He held onto Peter’s hand tighter and brought him out of the grave, though he knew Peter was damned along with him, had been damned the moment he was born a cripple, a Northrop. “We are dying, dear Peter. We are already dead.”
Peter let out a low, almost animal scream as he scrambled up the rest of the grave. He grasped onto Father Brown’s leg, tearing his pants as he finally emerged from the slippery mouth. Peter stood, gasping for air and spitting out dirt. The rest of the grave filled in suddenly, the rain and mud and wind completing the rest of their horrid task.
Peter held onto Father Brown’s thin body in a tight embrace. He hugged him tight, tighter than the father had ever been held by family or friend alike. When he finally drew enough strength to hold the youth in return, he felt something slide into place. Not the soul that he lost—he was sure that his eternal life was now in the grave with Peter’s uncle and would remain there until the end of time—but something more primal and freeing. He and Peter had completed a deadly task together. The Devil’s task.
But they had done it in the right name.
“Thank you, dear Father,” Peter said as he ended the hug and grasped the priest’s hands in his own. “Thank you. You do not know what this has meant for me.”
“I do. I do,” Father Brown said.
Over the youth’s shoulder, he spotted the place where the main road crested a hill, leaving the rest of it invisible from their position in front of St. Paul’s Church. A man was there, dressed like Peter’s uncle had been dressed in the grave. He paced from side to side, and then he walked down the road.
Eve Morton 