Molly’s first memory is of her father killing her. At the time, she thinks it is a dream. She sees her father in her room hitting her and she is on the floor with no clothes on. He keeps hitting until she stops moving, then Molly screams. It is as if she is both on the floor, bleeding and dying, and on the bed, watching her father breathing heavily, hands red. Molly struggles to get out of her mother’s grip. Her mother tells her she has had a nightmare. Her mother says the bad dream is because she lost a tooth that day. Molly tongues the gap in the front row of her teeth. Her mother sings a song from the old country, and Molly soon falls asleep. When she wakes up the next morning she immediately examines the carpeting, but there is nothing. It seems cleaner than it was, but otherwise it is the same. It will be years before she realizes that this really happened.
* * *
Age five, Molly has the run of Southbourne Farm. She is happy and knows all the animals by name—the names she has given them, at any rate. There are sheep, three horses, two dogs, chickens. She names them all, like a modern-day Eve. Many times she feels so alone, like she is the only one alive, the first and last human. She never leaves the farm. She sits under the largest tree and stares at the world beyond the gate. There are people out there, grown ones like Ma and Pa, little ones like Molly. She has seen them on television. There is also Trevor, who collects the milk, and Erin, who brings the post. They like Molly and bring her things from the outside, little toys and hard candy and homemade boiled sweets. Pile, the German shepherd, plops down next to her. He is old now. Pa says he is twelve, which is old for a dog. Molly loves Pile.
Her father’s combine harvester breaks the quiet of the morning. Her mother would be working numbers into columns that Molly did not understand. It is a hot day, and Molly dozes. She falls asleep and puts sudden weight against Pile’s forepaw and he bites her, drawing blood. Molly screams. Her mother comes and shoos away the dog, who looks confused. Pa does not hear the scream over the engine. Ma dresses Molly’s wound, but Pa takes his shotgun and leaves the house. Molly never sees Pile again. She misses him.
Two days later there is a little girl under the tree.
The farmland slopes gently toward the house, after which it descends again. Because of this, you can see the whole farm from the top floor, or the roof. Molly is on the second floor, and sees the girl from her window. The girl is in shadow, and not wearing any clothes. Molly squeals with surprise. She runs to her wardrobe and selects a dress, then flies out to the tree. She stops short when the girl turns to her. She looks exactly like Molly. It’s like seeing herself in the mirror after Ma bathes her. Molly checks where Pile bit her, but the girl does not have the same wound.
“Hello,” says Molly.
The girl breaks into a smile, and Molly decides she likes her. She offers the dress, and the girl puts it on.
“Who are you?” asks Molly.
There is a brief crease on the girl’s brow, then she says, “Molly.”
“Me too!”
For three days they live together in Molly’s room. She splits her food in half and takes it upstairs, where the other Molly eats it. They play with Molly’s toys and read her picture books as well as they can. She sleeps under the bed until Ma has gone, then they squish together under the covers.
They are playing by the tiny stream that seals the northern boundary of Southbourne Farm when the new girl stops smiling. Molly splashes her with water to try to get her to smile. The girl snatches up a rock and swings it at Molly, cracking her on the head. Molly screams, feels blood stream down the side of her head. She pushes at the girl ineffectually. She calls for her mother. The girl keeps hitting her with the rock.
Molly’s eyes close. She hears someone say, “Hey!” then an explosion that seems to come from far away. She opens her eyes briefly, only to see her mother standing there with a smoking handgun. Molly falls away and reemerges in her own bed.
“She’s awake,” says an unfamiliar voice. Her head feels tight. A woman in a nurse’s uniform comes into view.
“Hello there, Molly. How are we feeling? You took a nasty spill.”
“Where’s Molly?” asks Molly. She does not recognize her own voice. It sounds thick.
“You’re Molly, darling.”
“I know that. Where’s the other Molly?”
“I’m Alana, your nurse. I think you’re confused.”
Molly isn’t confused, but she knows grown-ups. At times they say things that are not true, and what they want is for you to agree with them. They especially like it when you nod.
Molly nods and says, “I’m confused.”
Alana smiles. “I’ll go get your parents.”
A doctor comes in to check on Molly. While he examines her he notices the tulips on the windowsill. He says that in Japan there is a custom of bringing potted plants to sick people instead of flowers, because flowers are dead or dying. Molly is unsure if this story is meant to be funny or comforting, so she smiles. Adults like that. The doctor tells her parents that he wants to take Molly in for a scan, but they refuse.
At night, Molly sometimes hears gunshots, and she has dreams, nightmares about the other Molly, but these fade with time.
They never talk about it, but Molly’s life changes. There are rules now. More rules than before, and stranger than eating with her mouth closed or keeping her elbows off the dining table.
“If you ever see a girl who looks like you, run. If you can’t run, fight. Your mother or I will take care of it as soon as we get there. But you run and you scream. Do you understand?”
“If I see another Molly, I run, scream, and fight.”
“Yes.”
“Daddy?”
“What?”
“I don’t know how to fight.”
“We will fix that.”
* * *
To run or fight is the most important rule, but there is also the blood rule. Don’t bleed. What that means is Be careful. No climbing trees, no running on concrete, no more playing with dogs. No shag rugs. The corridors and rooms are cleared of obstructions. No operating machinery. Soft toys. Good lighting everywhere. Most furniture with curved edges. Good shoes, heels checked every week for wear and replaced promptly.
If you do bleed, blot it all up and burn it. Go back to the spot and flood it with bleach.
“If you ever find a pit or a hole in the ground or in the trees or walls in the house, find me or your mom immediately.”
* * *
The rules are simple.
If you see a girl who looks like you, run and fight.
Don’t bleed.
If you bleed, blot, burn, and bleach.
If you find a hole, find your parents.
Molly recites the lines to herself many times. She finds herself repeating them without intending to when she is bored.
She learns about the different types of bleach, and how to make a flame from the simplest of materials, focusing on what burns hottest, not necessarily brightest.
“It’s a mistake to go for the spectacular flames, Molly,” her mother tells her. “Pyromaniac arsonists want spectacle, because they want the flame. We want the destruction. The hottest, most destructive flame is invisible. Visible flames are caused by incomplete combustion.”
Her mother knows a lot about fire.
* * *
Molly loves music, but all efforts at teaching her to play an instrument fail. She has an interest in listening, but no inclination to compose or create. There are enough musicians in the world, and uncountable hours of compositions; why should she add to this? Sometimes she imagines all the music in the world, since the dawn of time, playing at the same time in a magnificent cacophony, from the first primates who beat out sounds with sticks to the most exquisite Stravinsky. She thinks at the end of time there will be nuclear symphonies played out as radio signals bouncing around on immortal satellites sent out to an uncaring universe.
Her preferences run to Chopin and Fela Kuti, although the latter is one of her mother’s favorites, rather than something Molly picks up herself.
“Listen to the words, dorogoy. In Fela’s words you can divine the nature of intelligent discourse. Notice how he defines suegbe, then he defines pako. He defines terms, then he explains his thesis. Go forth and do likewise.”
Molly listens. The song is called “Suegbe na Pako.” She thinks Fela defines with examples. An example has aspects of a thing, but is that the thing itself? The mollys have aspects of Molly, but that doesn’t make them Molly, does it?
She does not tell her mother this, because adults like to be right all the time.
* * *
Molly is nine.
She and her father are in the barn. The air is full of blood and the smell of offal. Her father is holding a knife and a cleaver. There is a dead pig on a slab. An old pig, dead from some illness that gave it seizures. For Molly, a lesson.
“Make sure your tools are sharp and clean. Sharpen them after a single use.”
“Can I sharpen them now?”
“No. You’re not touching knives yet.”
He prepares the skin with boiling water. “This pig died without trauma, so we won’t get a lot of blood. It’s congealed within the veins and arteries and trapped in the muscles. First thing you want to do is cut the head off. Cut between the vertebrae, do not saw. This is normally a two-man job.”
“Two-person,” says Molly.
“Two-person.” Her father smiles. “But when you’re going to need to do this, you’ll be alone. You don’t need a second person, but it makes the work easier. We . . . you will not have any tools except knives. Once you’ve separated the head, take off the upper limbs. Do not hack through bone. Divide the cartilage at the joints. Slice through the skin and feel for the line of cleavage.”
With a few well-aimed strokes the pig’s forelimbs seem to fall off. “Same thing for the lower limbs.”
A fly buzzes in and Molly chases it out. There is more blood than she expects. The pig is now a lump of meat. Her father cuts a line across the front of its belly and digs about in the wound. He widens the line down both sides under the rib cage, like a gigantic smile.
“The chest and belly are like a tube of flesh and bone. What you want to do is remove the organs in one piece so you don’t make a mess.” He reaches into the wound and pulls, emerges with the gullet in his hand, which he ties into a simple overhand knot. Then he reaches into the lower half and ties up the large intestine. Finally he lifts out the entire digestive system, which he plops into a bucket.
“From here on in, it’s easy. No blood, no shit.”
Molly giggles. “You said ‘shit.’”
He winks at her. “Let’s not tell Mommy.
“So now you have seven pieces and one bucket of viscera. No sharp edges because you haven’t chopped any bone, meaning you can dispose of the whole thing using polyethylene bags.” He stands with his arms spread out by his sides. “Did you get all that?”
Molly nods.
“Right. Let’s go over it again.”
* * *
At night Molly sees monsters sometimes. She no longer gets scared because it has been going on since as long as she can remember. She sees them only at night, hiding in the bushes. They have long black bodies and eyes that sometimes glint, although sometimes they have no eyes at all. Her father told her that they are just bushes shaped like monsters. Her mother taught her a word for it: pareidolia. It is true that in the daytime she does not see them, but what Molly does is she stands at her window at night and draws the outline of the monster she sees each night. Come daylight she compares the night shape against the shape of the grass or trees or bushes. They do not match. On a windy night when all the bushes are leaning westward, the monster moves east. It moves against the wind, and cannot be grass. But she stops telling her parents, because adults usually like you to agree with them, especially when they say you are being silly. Besides, the monsters have never harmed her, or even spoken to her.
In the day she runs through the house like an explorer, trying to find the monsters but instead coming across odd bits and bobs. A Corona typewriter with a severed ribbon and several keys missing. Sheaves of typewritten documents. A play called The Wisdom of Dead Clowns, no author.
FADE IN:
INT.—DAY
Inside Sean’s flat. A shot of Sean. He is dead with a spatter pattern on the wallpaper behind his head. His eyes are open. Some blood dribbles out of the left angle of his mouth.
Leigh comes into the shot, still holding the smoking gun. She flops down beside Sean and picks up his journal.
She opens a random page.
Leigh (reading)
“WHAT IS THERE TO LOVE BUT TIGHT FRIENDSHIP AND A BIT OF FUCKING?”
(turns to Sean’s corpse)
YOU ARE REALLY DAMAGED, MY FRIEND. I MEAN . . . BESIDES THE OBVIOUS, OF COURSE. I’LL BET YOU WEREN’T BREAST-FED.
She kisses him on the mouth, tongue around his, licking up the blood, breathing heavy as if aroused. When this is over her mouth is smeared with his blood. She picks up the pen and opens the journal to the last page.
She begins to giggle and write.
FADE OUT.
Molly does not understand or like it, but she finishes reading. She picks up another one, which lacks a title. It seems to be about a man with a strange portal in his belly. Aliens come out of it, killing him in the process of cutting their way out. Molly stops reading. There are other plays and screenplays, but she feels they are too gruesome or bizarre to be interesting. She whacks the keys of the Corona a few times, then she skips out.
* * *
Molly and her mother go for spas sometimes, to pamper themselves. Molly does not understand why they have to lie facedown in their birthday suits with warm stones on their backs, or spend hours in scented water. Her mother buries her under bubbles and says one day she will understand. The massage hurts, and Molly thinks of retaliating, but she feels her mother would frown on it. She retaliates in her mind. She will pick the index finger of the masseuse and bend it back till it hurts, then snaps. While she is bent over in agony, Molly will knee her in the nose. It would take less than a minute.
“I love you, Molly,” says her mother.
She knows adults usually want to hear the same words back. Instead she turns to her mother and asks, “What is there to love but tight friendship and a little fucking?”
Her mother and the masseuse both gasp, and Molly realizes she has said the Wrong Thing. Her mother speaks in a language Molly does not understand and frowns. She does that sometimes, lapses into a language that nobody else speaks. They complete the spa in silence.
A few days later, when Molly goes back into the room where the typewriter is, there are no plays in sight.
* * *
Five years pass before Molly sees another girl who looks like her, another molly.
One day blood starts to come out from between her legs. She has not hurt herself, she has been careful. If anything, she’s been safer than ever. She has been spending a lot of time in bed—headache and belly cramps.
Don’t bleed.
She feels shame and fear. She blots at the blood, but it keeps coming. She cannot tell her parents; they will think she has been bad.
Don’t bleed.
By the end of the first day she has a bundle of sheets and towels, not soaked, but smeared with blood. She has a hand-towel bundled in her underwear and she pretends to be sick. At night she creeps out and buries the bloodstained linen. The bleeding flows all night, seeping, continuous, fueling her fear. She locks her door, falls asleep, wakes up with her bedsheet soaked through. There is a knock at the door. She thinks it is her parents, but it is a molly. Molly has forgotten the one from before like a bad dream. It is a shock to see herself outside herself. She forgets to run.
“Let me in,” says the molly.
Run.
Fight.
Molly lets the molly in. She is torn. She has to tell her parents, but she doesn’t want to get in trouble. The molly seems docile and sits calmly on the bed, and Molly can’t help noticing that there is no blood between those thighs.
“Put some clothes on,” says Molly.
The molly knows where the clothes are, and exactly what to wear. They all fit perfectly, of course.
Run.
The molly stares with grey eyes, unblinking.
Fight.
“Do you know Systema too?”
“Yes.”
Molly knows this is not a twin, and that she is in danger, or will be, but the molly looks just like her. It will be like fighting herself. And the bleeding is just too much, she has to tell Ma.
Run.
Fight.
Blot, burn, bleach.
Molly first goes to where she buried the linen. There are five holes. Two mollys stand there, skin forming gooseflesh in the breeze.
Find your parents.
Now she runs. The two mollys follow her, slowly at first, but then with the same speed.
“Mother!”
Molly closes doors behind her, but she can hear the mollys opening them. They know what she knows. Her mother appears at the top of the stairs.
“Molly?”
“They’re coming,” says Molly. She does not have to say who.
Mother steps aside for Molly to pass and yells, “Connor!”
Molly hears banging from another part of the house, the other molly trying to get out of her room.
Her mother shoves her into her parents’ room and locks her in. Molly sits on the bed and listens to the sounds of conflict. No words, just smacking noises, feet on stairs and floorboards, exhalations, silence.
Molly feels waves of hot and cold come over her and she cannot sit still.
“Ma?”
“Stay where you are, Molly. Just don’t come out.”
“Listen to your mother,” says her father.
He sounds like he is crying. Later Molly smells a barbecue, but she knows it is the mollys burning.
* * *
Molly bleeds every month. Her mother says it is normal, all women do this.
“Why?” asks Molly.
“Slezy razocharovannoy matki. Tears of a disappointed womb.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you are a woman now. You can have children of your own if you aren’t careful.” Ma seems uncomfortable.
Molly is silent for a while, thinking. “You mean, like the mollys?”
Her mother seems stricken. “No, dorogoy. Not like the mollys.” She squeezes Molly tight, and in adult-talk, this means don’t ask any more questions. So she doesn’t.
* * *
Two years later, Molly still recites the rules to herself.
If you see yourself, run.
Don’t bleed.
Blot, burn, bleach.
Find a hole, find your parents.
She knows the rules and does not need to recite them, but they have a talismanic quality now.
She can do a hundred push-ups. She can run very fast, and she can make her way to any part of the house blindfolded. She knows how to disable or kill an opponent in three moves, but she has never killed a molly. She thinks her father does the bulk of the . . . disposal, but her mother has had to from time to time.
Her mother teaches her Systema and her father teaches her how to shoot. She is a middling marksman. She has a room full of books that her mother sends away for. Molly loves reading. Words used to be homework, a chore, but books make words do magic tricks. She loves that writers make words their servants and bend them to their will. She loves the poets, Blake and Shakespeare most of all.
Prisons are built with stones of Law. Blake. Molly thinks she’s in a prison of her rules.
She realizes she is partly multilingual, because her mother’s words are mixed with Russian, Ukrainian, and some exotic others that even she does not remember.
“My work took me places,” Mykhaila says when Molly asks. She does not say what kind of work, but Molly surmises that it involved breaking an attacker’s little finger by bending it backward sharply, then kicking the person in the crotch.
The mollys grow as Molly does. Each one is her size and shape, although they do not have her scars. Their hair is wilder, as if it has not been cut, but it is the same pitch-black as Molly’s. They have grey-blue eyes that start out bland, but end steely with rage. Molly does not understand this. Why are they angry? Why do they go bad? They always go bad. Always. Usually within three days, but sometimes at shorter intervals. Molly has also noticed that the mollys’ blood does not grow other mollys. Like sterile drones. Do they have monthlies?
The smell of burning leaves comes through her open window, likely from another farm. Molly cannot see the smoke, but at least she knows it’s not from burning dead mollys.
Some people come from the Social to ask about Molly’s education. Her father sees them off with a shotgun broken across his forearm. He knows the law.
Molly has a knife. With the lowing of a cow in the background, she plunges the point into the pulp of her left index finger. It hurts more than she anticipated, and she drops the knife. The blood wells up, tips over the edge of her nail, and falls to the floor.
Blot, burn, bleach.
No.
Molly waits. At first the carpet buckles inward, as if a drain had formed that sucks in solid objects. Molly’s heart hammers. She has never deliberately caused herself to bleed before.
Molly watches as cracks form in the floorboards beneath the carpet. It is a small, slow vortex that sucks in anything around it. This is how the pits form, although she has never seen it. She wonders why and at the same time does not wonder why she has never done this before. She has been asking a lot of questions lately. Who is she? Why does this . . . happen to her? Are other children really like what she sees on television? Is she the only one of her kind? What is life like beyond the fence? Why does hair grow in her armpits?
It is night, and a glistening mass has formed in the pit. A transparent membrane of sorts covers it, and deep within something flexes and relaxes. It is the size of a football.
“Molly! Supper!” calls her mother.
“I’m not hungry,” she says.
“You never eat anymore,” her mother says in a lower register.
She sucks her finger, keeps her vigil, wondering if a molly can form from the blood she swallows. That would kill her—a molly bursting through her belly. Molly falls asleep.
When she wakes the molly is fully formed and standing by the bedside, watching her sleep. It is only just dawn, and the room is brighter. The floor is ruined, excavated almost through to the level below.
“Molly,” says Molly, “get dressed.”
* * *
To get on a bus you need money; Molly does not know exactly how much, but she has been stealing from her parents for six months now. She has planned this. When she steps over the fence it feels frightening but exhilarating. She is the Man in the Iron Mask escaping from her prison of Laws. She hikes for a mile, staying off the road but following it. She goes eastward. She comes to a small shelter that seems to be a bus stop. She feels exposed here. Her father or the mailman might drive past, although she is wearing a hood and has packed her long black hair into a bun.
A bus arrives. She takes out a denomination and surrenders it to the driver, who swears under his breath before rooting out change. Molly sits at the back. There is only one other person on the bus, a woman, who glances at Molly once before ignoring her for the rest of the ride.
The first sign of the town itself is the spire of some church that appears over the trees. It plays peekaboo as the bus negotiates a winding road. They cross a stone bridge and all of a sudden they are in the town.
“Last stop,” says the bus driver.
At first Molly does not move. It is the middle of the day, almost exactly noon. People are everywhere, and nothing has prepared Molly for the number, the variety, the vitality, of others. The varied skin shades, the smell of their bodies as they waft past, the sounds of their voices, the swish of their wheelchairs, the smoke of their automobiles.
Molly follows behind a group of elderly women, listening to their voices. It’s not like on TV. People speak without purpose, interrupt one another, and trail off. Neither of her parents is a big talker, so Molly drinks these spoken words in. There are tall people, short people, thin, fat, old, young, bland, colorful. There are cut flowers, though not as good as her mother’s. She walks past a shop window and sees herself. There is a smile on her face. A statue comes to life, and she squeals when she realizes it is a man coated, clothes and all, in metallic paint. A woman with flowers in her hair makes elongated bubbles in the breeze. Molly stops to talk to a homeless man who spends fifteen minutes showing her exactly how to insulate a coat using found materials, mostly crumpled-up newspapers. She wanders into a building that turns out to be a library. Under “Local Interest” she finds a chapbook that explains the founding of the town. The history turns out to be the same as that of most other places she has studied: war, peace, resources, and settlement. A boy around her age walks past, stares, smiles, then keeps walking. Molly’s throat tightens.
She likes the hush of the library, so she stays and reads for a while. She tries to get a library card, but she has no ID. Molly leaves when the librarian asks her what school she attends, not wanting the attention.
The sky has turned slightly grey and there are darker clouds gathering. Molly buys street food from a van and eats while she explores art shops and psychics and animal cruelty campaigners. She has her portrait done in charcoal by an art student.
Then she turns around, clutching the cylinder of cartridge paper, and there stands her father.
“Hello, Molly. Get in the truck.”
Molly doesn’t say anything, silenced by the disappointment on his face. It has a purity that frightens her.
“Seat belt,” he says. He fusses with the keys.
She pulls the belt into the catch, and when it clicks into place she senses movement. Too late she sees her father stab her with a needle and depress the plunger at the same time. She drives the heel of her palm into the angle of his jaw and feels it give—dislocated. She follows through with a slap to the front of his neck, but her hand seems like it is made of felt. She falls asleep.
She wakes up unable to move. Before she opens her eyes she can tell from the smell that she is in the barn on Southbourne Farm. She can smell blood too. On the ground in front of her, two dead mollys.
Molly’s arms are bound behind her with plastic ties. She is seated with her back against the wall. One of the lights is on, and her father stands there with a rifle in his hand and a bandage looping over the crown of his head, holding his jaw in place.
“I think,” says her father, “that you might be the real Molly. You don’t seem to have gone bad.”
“I’m sorry for hitting you, Daddy.”
“The police are coming to check on you. Two mollys made it to town. I had to find them and . . . The police want to make sure everything is okay, that we aren’t molesting you. Child Protection and all that. Your mother and I were very concerned—we put a missing person call out.”
“Untie me. I’ll explain to the police that I just ran away.”
“Molly, why did you run? We could have been hurt. We could have hurt you, or worse, killed you.”
“I wanted to see the town.”
“I told you it’s dangerous to—”
“It is also glorious! I love what I saw today, what I ate, the people I talked to. Living on this farm isn’t living at all if I can’t—”
“Two mollys were closing in on you, you wee shite. I got them off your back; you didn’t even know they were following you while you were basking in your glorious afternoon.”
Molly is dutifully polite to the police. They leave without incident.
* * *
A fortnight later she kills for the first time. This begins a period of difficult behavior. Molly allows the mollys to live, only to kill them for sport. She sometimes asks them questions before killing them.
“Where do you come from?”
“Why do you hate me?”
“Do you hate me?”
“Why?”
“What will you do if I set you free?”
“What do you remember before today?”
“Do you love me?”
“Do you love me?”
She perplexes her parents as she disposes of a vast number of mollys. In these teenage years she kills three mollys a week, sometimes as many as one a day. She discards the rules. She allows her monthlies to become a problem for her parents. She is angry and doesn’t know why. She begins to cut herself, at first for the purpose of generating mollys, but later because cutting her thighs gives her relief from the nameless pain inside her.
“Why do you find it so easy to kill me?” she asks her father. “You must hate me.”
“They are not you, darling.” But this is futile, she does not listen.
Her parents fear her too—she sees this in their hesitancy and the gingerly way their speech probes at her psyche. Her body develops under the influence of their training as well as pubertal hormones. Yes, her breasts appear and her hips widen, but she becomes wiry and rangy. She takes regular expeditions into town. She is sort of seeing a boy by the time she is fifteen.
The emotional turbulence, the cutting, and the sport killing die down almost overnight when she turns seventeen. She kills only when there are mollys made by mistake. She feels calm again, or resigned. She helps around the farm and talks to her parents again, actual conversations of more than three words.
* * *
This is not a night that Molly can sleep through. She has her curtains pulled open, and the moon, full as it is, effortlessly lights up her room in a pale grey-blue.
She sits up in her bed, and her heart is not just going fast, it seems to be accelerating, which is impossible. Molly knows the parameters of the heart from her lessons. Under the covers she is fully dressed. Her shoes wait in formation for her feet to quicken them. The light changes, and Molly looks up. Clouds mute the lunar illumination.
When the first pebble hits her window she is out of bed and into her shoes. Outside, William stands poised to throw another pebble. Molly imagines she can see his smile from where she is. She closes the curtains and opens the bedroom door. Foresight is oiling the dead bolt, latch bolt, and hinges with WD-40 earlier in the day. She runs on tiptoes down the corridor, slides down the banister, and slips out the back door of the house. The moon lights her way. She beckons to William and he crushes against her for a few seconds, before they run down the slope at the back of the property to the banks of the stream.
Kissing first. Lots of kissing. Molly spends a lot of time with her eyes on the imposing silhouette of the farmhouse, waiting for a light to pop on and her father to yell her name, but then she gets properly into the moment. He is hesitant, but she explores everything that catches her fancy. She inhales his breath.
“Molly—” Voice heavy with lust.
“Tonight, William, now. A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know.”
It is cold, but they learn the secrets of love and pain, pleasure and blood. It both is and is not everything Molly expects. The books she studied in preparation don’t prove useful. The romance books are too metaphorical, the sex books too mechanical.
“You’re quiet,” says William. The gurgle of water over stones and the high-pitched complaint of a fox surround them.
“Just thinking.”
“Are you . . . sorry?”
“No.”
“Then what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I want to do it again. But not now.”
“You realize you talk funny, right?” says William.
“I haven’t been around many people and I grew up in a linguistically static environment. I understand what you mean. I watch TV to keep my idioms and colloquialisms up-to-date, but it obviously hasn’t worked.”
“You’ve been on the farm all your life?”
“Yes.”
“That’s insane. Listen to this.”
He places the left earbud of his headphones in her ear. The music is loud, grinding metal. She struggles to find the harmony at first, and uses the percussion as a key. Through all that power, a pattern emerges, and she likes it.
“Do you have more?” she asks.
William laughs. “You want more of everything.”
“We’re only alive for a short time. We should live while we’re alive.”
William starts to talk about the Ravenala palm he is trying to grow, but Molly stops listening. She is already thinking of disposal.
If you bleed, blot, burn, and bleach.
“Time to go, William.”
“When will I see you?”
“I’ll come to the library. Day after tomorrow.”
Molly waits while his shadow flits and disappears, then she soaks the linen she brought in bleach. It takes half an hour for her to be satisfied, then she goes back to bed with a throbbing soreness between her legs. She takes the time to write William a free verse poem before dozing off.
When she wakes there is a molly standing over her. It drips with water from the stream and it is muddy up to its ankles. Its hair is plastered to its skull.
Molly sighs. “What follows more she murders with a kiss.”
She gets out of bed.
* * *
Molly knocks at her mother’s door and peeps. Her mother is on the bed, seated.
“Dad said you wanted to see me?”
“Yes. Come. Sit.”
“What do you need?”
“Dad said he walked in on you the other day.”
“Oh . . .”
“He said you had a molly.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“He said you were touching its genitals.”
“I was only looking. I was curious.”
“I understand, dorogoy. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Then why are we having this conversation?”
“Baby, don’t play with the mollys. They are dangerous.”
“I know. Can I go now?”
* * *
Every week Molly and her mother take a one-day hike with a fully loaded backpack, regardless of the season. They take no food, and only a liter of water each, in canteens. The packs are weighted with rocks.
“When I was young, I was made to do this without a backpack or water.” She ruffles Molly’s hair before binding it in a silk scarf. “Entitled bitch.”
“Why were you made to?”
“Training.”
They begin their walk north. As usual, the first thing they do is hack branches off a tree for use as all-purpose sticks. They each have a hunting knife.
“Tell me about the training,” says Molly. She times her breathing with her stride. Usually her mother likes to be silent on the hikes, as if worried about alerting an enemy or stalker.
“They dropped us ten miles from a base camp with a compass and a hunting knife. My trainer said that in his day they weren’t even given a compass or knife. The first order of the day was to find flint or iron pyrite, or some material to make a stone knife.”
She talks of random things. How to seal a lean-to with mud, leaves, and dirt. How to make fire. How to leave food stores for your journey back. Edible insects. Trapping. How to purify water using the clothes off your back.
“In a tropical environment, if you are under a harsh sun, you can use banana leaves as sunglasses by puncturing them and looking through them. Tree bark also works for this. Same technique works for snow blindness.”
Molly takes note of all of this, memorizing it without giving outer indication. When they stop for lunch Molly kills and skins the rabbit they trap. Perhaps because of the information her mother shared, Molly tries to prove herself. She cuts herself by mistake. This is the first cut she has ever had on a hike, and when her mother tries to assist Molly shrugs her off. She feels angry at her mother’s lean muscles.
“Baby, dorogoy, do not rush these things. You cannot force enlightenment. The flower blooms when it is ready, not when you want it to, and that is why you bleed.”
They dispose of the blood together, mother and daughter. This far away from Southbourne Farm a molly would be lost, although secretly Molly wishes to find out if it can find its way home.
* * *
Ugh. Shaving.
Molly decides she will not be shaving her legs, armpits, or anywhere else blighted by puberty.
Her mother laughs at this notion, but does not disagree with her.
* * *
Molly sneezes. She feels misery to her core and she does not care. She hates having a cold. She feels so congested that she cannot be bothered with the rules. Her father stands vigil over her because of her tendency toward nosebleeds.
“Most people in the village think your mother is a mail-order bride, because of her accent. She isn’t. Mykhaila was born here, in this country, but moved abroad when she was very young.”
When her father talks of Mother is the only time Molly hears his voice soften. He seems made of and from the farm itself: hard, craggy, but nourishing. Always working.
A farm works even while it sleeps, dorogoy. The plants are pushing crops out of the ground, the hens are making eggs, the cows are lactating for imaginary offspring, the worms and insects and bacteria are churning the soil.
What Molly hates most about having a cold is that she cannot read. Her brain feels swollen and sluggish. Her eyes water and her nose drips more when she tries to read.
“Read to me, Daddy.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“The Comedy of Errors.”
As he reads, Molly gets drowsy and falls asleep.
* * *
Molly has her back to the bathroom door, her feet anchoring it shut. Her toes are splayed and her heels dug into the cold tiles. Outside, the mollys hit the door and the force is transmitted to her shoulders. Her feet move a fraction of an inch each time. A pool of blood spreads from the other side of the door and is advancing toward her feet. She is aware that when the puddle reaches her heels it will lubricate them, and she will no longer be able to brace the door.
She sighs.
She shivers with a fever and all her muscles ache. Her nose is only slightly congested, but her joints are pure agony. She cannot concentrate well, and has a headache—throbbing and true. She would surrender to death if only the mollys would stop banging on the fucking door. She just wants to catch her breath. She coughs, but her throat seems to tangle and she gags. Dry heave. No vomit. All fluids gone after seven days of her flu. It has made her careless, but she does not care. She wants to lie down and die. She looks around the bathroom for the first time, searching for a weapon. She could rip off the shower curtain and use the rod as a bo staff, but she doesn’t know if she can do it between leaving the door and them charging in. The toilet’s cistern cover is heavy ceramic, old-fashioned and thus heavy, but slow. Slow as the advance of blood from the other side of the door.
There is a cabinet. It might have noxious cleaning products for a makeshift pepper spray. Or pepper splash. Molly feels sixty percent sure that there is bleach in there. Her parents’ bathroom. Unfamiliar. Both of them out on a date—a date, no less! Who’d have thought? They took one look at her face and wished to cancel, but Molly forbade them. Then she vomited on her own bed and relocated to theirs, promptly falling asleep.
Then, then, then.
Surrounded by mollys, fuck knows where from, fight, fight, fight, aim for the bathroom en suite.
Bang, bang, bang!
“All right!” she says. “All right.”
Molly takes a breath, coughs, and leaps away from the door, slips, and falls face first. She sees stars and can feel blood trickling down her nostrils. She can hear them scrambling behind her and feels a hand circle her ankle. She is a foot from the cabinet. She looks around—three naked mollys, climbing over one another to get to her. Blood drenched, one has shat herself for some reason, eyes widened, mouths open in a kind of soundless scream. With her other leg, she kicks the one who has hold of her, then she lunges forward, pulling herself to the cabinet. She flings the door open just as she feels a jolt of white heat in her back—the bitch bit her! The inside of the cabinet is dark, but Molly reaches and her hand wraps around her salvation.
She flips over and pistol-whips the closest molly—impact on the temple—then she checks the safety and shoots the molly’s face off. In the close quarters it almost punctures her eardrums. She shoots the second in the chest and the third in the thigh. Thigh wounds can be mortal because of the femoral artery. Two more head shots and Molly allows herself to fall to the floor. She feels the blood trickle down her back from the bite.
Don’t bleed.
If you bleed, blot, burn, and bleach.
If you find a hole, find your parents.
Molly returns to the cabinet for bleach.
There are twelve dead mollys in different death poses all around the bedroom. Plus the three in the bathroom, that makes fifteen. Molly splashes bleach over all of them and wishes them a happy hereafter, a perverse libation.
When her parents arrive she is lying on a pile of corpses she’d been trying to clean. The flu and her exertion have left her weak beyond her own imaginings. She can barely move her eyeballs to track her horrified parents. Her mother, resolute, gives her a thick, black liquid she calls ASD, which stands for “antiseptic dorogova.” Molly hates it, and senses that it is a source of tension between her parents, because her father has this disapproving look on his face all the while her mother prepares it.
Later, they give her ice cream, chocolate first, then strawberry, because that is all she can keep down. She sleeps between them, like when she was much younger, and wakes up in her own bed, clean and dry, with no pain in her muscles or joints.
* * *
Molly hides behind a tree and watches her father. She watches the dogs play around him as he moves from task to task. She sees him crouch, clutch the soil in both hands, and spend minutes staring at it in the morning sun, then raise the clump to his nose as if smelling it. What is he doing? Every day, his actions seem like he is experiencing life anew. When he comes in for lunch it is the same. He eats the stroganoff like he has never tasted it before, and he stares at Molly’s mother like he has never seen her before, like he loves her with the love in poems.
“You aren’t eating,” says her mother.
Ma isn’t any better than her father, and seems to find poetry in bookkeeping. She starts the day with Molly, teaching her how to make her punch more effective. Keeps talking about the second knuckle, about keeping her wrist and elbow aligned, even when punching in a curve. “One of my Chinese instructors told me every punch is part of a circle,” she says.
Molly is practicing short jabs in the air. “What about straight punches?”
“Dorogoy, a straight line is the curve from a circle of infinite radius.”
Molly does not fully understand, but keeps her jabs short and snappy, like her mother instructs.
After an hour and a half of practice she assigns Molly schoolwork and retreats to her study to do farm accounts. Molly, by this time, finds the work so easy that she finishes in half the time, then creeps up on her mother, staring at her from corners and door cracks, or listening to her. She is just like her father. Too much joy, too much pleasure from the banal.
Molly starts an elaborate diary documenting her parents’ every action and word. At first she does not know why, but after some weeks she becomes convinced they are not her parents. They look exactly like them, down to their scars, and they wear the same clothing, but the more Molly observes them, the more she believes that they are duplicates, like the mollys. She takes her time looking for her real parents. She systematically digs up the fallow side of the farm using a grid system, looking for graves. On one such excursion she finds the bones of three children—mollys, no doubt—and she is spooked. She continues her search. She cannot find her parents, and because she is worried, she arms herself. She feels she can either subdue or at least delay her father, but her mother is too skilled. Molly has never been able to best her in sparring, and she knows her mother usually holds back.
“It’s like chess. You improve more when your opponent is slightly better than you. Only slightly.”
Molly carries a small steak knife on her person, to even the odds. Her mother keeps the hunting knives locked up until the hike days, so that isn’t an option.
At night, Molly feels she can hear them talking about her. One winter morning she is convinced that her father plans to stab her with a butter knife. It’s in the way he holds it while talking Molly through her history lessons. She is determined that he will not get her first. She pulls her knife from the waistband of her shorts and stabs her father in the forearm. The butter knife clatters to the floor. Her father looks more shocked than hurt. Molly remembers her training. When you stab someone, pull the knife free, otherwise you are unarmed, plus you’ve given your enemy a weapon.
Her mother is very still. “Is she one of the . . . ?”
“I don’t know. I thought she looked tense.” Her father covers the wound with a dishcloth. A sheen of sweat appears on his forehead, but he does not cry out.
“Where are my parents?” screams Molly.
“What?” asks her father.
Molly lunges for him. She bounces off a force field. She is confused until she realizes her mother is between them, and has kicked her in the chest. Her mother’s copy. She subdues Molly and ties her up using strips of the tablecloth.
Her father leaves the room and returns with Molly’s diary. “Listen to this: The fetch, double, wraith, or doppelgänger are related concepts of human duplication in English, Irish, or German folklore. Seeing one usually means the death of the original. What if I am the wraith, the fetch, or the doppelgänger? I kill all the mollys I see.” He reads out the surveillance logs.
“Oh, sweetheart,” says her mother.
* * *
Weeks of drugs. Medication. No hospitalization, but a doctor is brought to the farm.
“Capgras Syndrome,” says the doctor. “The unshakable belief that people around you have been replaced by doubles.”
Molly believes him, after the medication. She is better in six weeks, and begins to trust her parents again.
Her mother says she is impressed with the level of detail Molly included in the logs.
* * *
“You should write a book about this,” says her father.
Molly listens to her parents talking to each other, kidding, giggling. She is lying on the roof on a hot, balmy summer night. She cannot sleep for the sweat and humidity, and neither can her parents. They have thrown open the windows and are content. Theirs is the talk of lovers, full of shorthand, snorted laughter, and sentences completed by the other. Some of it Molly cannot understand, but she is happy just hearing them so. She is satisfied that everything is right and good.
She is mostly surrounded by darkness. Her back is cooled by the roofing slats and the sky is made of ink, with an untamed spray of glitter, the Milky Way. At times a blinking light will crawl across, a high-altitude airplane, a satellite, a UFO, or the heart of Molly’s true love. The wind rustles her hair, blows it into her face. She brushes it away and tucks it under her head.
Her parents are talking about how they met. The story comes in stops and starts, and Molly has to piece it together in her head.
Her father is already a farmer. The land is passed to him from his own father, and he has grown up learning how to work the land. After a brief flirtation with the humanities, Connor is resigned to his role. One day a car pulls up when none is expected. It is her mother. She stands in the driveway, shouting, “Hello?” Either one or both of the dogs they have at the time run up, but instead of barking they lick her hands. Her father appears, covered in mud. He has been tinkering with a tractor—replaced before Molly is born. Mykhaila starts to speak in what she thinks is English, but her father cannot understand because of her thick accent. He thinks she is complaining about something. She is actually saying she has noticed that a lot of the fresh produce in the town is from Southbourne Farm and she would like to come directly to the source. He asks if she would like a cup of tea, and she nods.
He washes himself and meets her in the house. He notices the absence of a wedding ring. Such things mattered back then. He says she uses eyeliner in a manner different from that of the local girls. It makes her eyes stand out, and he stares. He does not speak much, and when he does it is direct and without hesitation. He establishes what she wants over the course of four cups of tea. She lives in a rented room in a cottage and when he asks about a partner she demurs. When he says he would like to call on her like in the nineteenth-century novels, she smiles. Their romance begins a month after the meeting.
An owl hoots somewhere, and there is a flurry of movement that makes Molly think it is hunting.
Molly is born in the house, with help from a visiting midwife and doula. By this time her mother lives on Southbourne, and her parents are so much in love. They do not speak of the time after the birth, and they both seem to go quiet, enveloped by one of those silences that develop between them, a telepathic moment from which Molly is excluded. When their sounds change to something she knows she should not be privy to, she makes her way across the roof and works herself over the edge, onto the pipe that brought her up.
Soon she is asleep in her bed.
* * *
“This is a bad idea,” says her mother.
“Why? You went to college,” says Molly.
“I did not have your condition.”
“You did not have my parents, either,” says Molly. They touch noses and smile. Love.
“What do you want to study?”
“I don’t know. Literature? Genetics?”
Her mother smiles.
“What’s funny?”
“I was just remembering myself in college, that’s all. How will you protect yourself?”
“The way you have taught me.”
* * *
Molly’s scores on the interviews are good enough to get her into the best three universities in the country. The one she chooses was established a thousand years prior by a religious secret society intent on directing the path of the nation through a small pool of elite families and a smattering of commoners who showed uncommon intellectual spark. The institution prides itself on having produced scores of heads of state and international prizewinners. None of this features in Molly’s decision making. She chooses this particular place because the entire town rests on catacombs full of ancient and modern books, a fact she finds magical. On the day her parents drop her off there is a violent clash between the police and student protesters over a demonstration about one of the more prestigious scholarships being named after a known racist and supporter of genocide.
“I don’t like this,” says her father. “We should turn back.”
“We’re not turning back. We just drove four hours. Let’s just find the hall of residence and unpack,” says Molly from the backseat.
“Tear gas and water cannon. It’s good to be back,” says her mother.
She has a room to herself because of a negotiated position with the administration due to a fabricated medical condition. Molly is amused that her mother knows how to forge documents to prove the presence of hemophilia. By the time she has unpacked, the violence has fizzled out and the sun is barely visible on the horizon. It is colder, and watching her parents’ taillights recede makes her realize she is truly happy only when they are around. “The tumult and the shouting dies; / The Captains and the Kings depart . . .” She murmurs this without thinking, homesick already.
* * *
Molly finds her first exposure to formal education underwhelming, and many of her co-students lazy. Perhaps a third of them do the reading before the lectures, while she had read most of the recommended texts prior to the first day. Her questions are the most convoluted, but engage and interest the professors. She enjoys her studies, but not her academic interactions with the students.
There is a student across the hall from Molly called Adele. She has said exactly one sentence to Molly.
“Oh, you’re the hemophilia girl.” Adele walks away after this.
On the weekend, Molly notices a lot of voices coming from Adele’s room. She opens the door and looks out. There is a man in the corridor waiting while Adele hugs a little human. It makes Molly uncomfortable. Just before she can escape back into her room Adele’s eyes fly open, and she shrieks, “Molly! Come meet my son, Brian!”
Molly panics and slams her door shut.
She cannot stand children. They remind her of the mollys, with their innocence and their half-formed personalities, and she expects them to burst into violence any minute. They never do, but they might. Her nightmares are always about children in some way. Every time she finds herself in the presence of a child she has to suppress the urge for a preemptive strike. She has previsualized this so many times, and it frightens her.
She hears the child laugh, among peals of delight from the adults. The child being fetishized is not a surprise given its rarity. With falling fertility rates, any baby is a cause for celebration. And yet Adele calls over Molly, a woman she barely knows, to demonstrate her fecundity. Show-off.
Fuck Adele and fuck children for being creepy.
She has the mollys, and they are not rare. She does not fetishize them. They do not grow. Are the mollys her children? Is she capable of having children the normal way? Can she get pregnant? She has always been careful, but now she wonders if each molly that she kills depletes her ovaries. Will she even want children?
Hemophilia girl can’t breed because she has a blood disease.
* * *
“Can I see your notes for Crewe?”
Molly looks up. There’s a guy hovering over her with raised eyebrows. He’s got a boring sweater on, but the chill has brought color to his cheeks. He is not unpleasant to look at, and Molly likes his voice.
“You weren’t in Crewe,” she says. She knows every face in her lectures. Her mother has taught her to quickly scan crowds and recognize the unfamiliar.
“That’s why I need the notes.”
“You have never been in Professor Crewe’s lectures.”
“Again, that’s why I always need notes.”
“Can you get them back to me in four hours?”
“Why four hours?”
“My review pattern. I reread the notes immediately after a lecture, six hours later, and twenty-four hours after that. Retention reinforcement.”
“Interesting technique. I’ll need to try it.”
“Not if you don’t attend lectures.”
She lets him take her notebook from the table. While he flips through the leaves she finishes her coffee.
“Lavinia as property? I thought Crewe forbade feminist readings of Titus Andronicus.”
“He does. This isn’t a feminist reading. She was property, first claimed by Bassianus like a sack of flour, suum cuique. Before that she existed for the benefit of Titus, for him to bestow upon whichever ruler would benefit him the most.”
“Crewe thinks it’s of its time.”
“And we are of ours. We should read it as such. What’s your name?”
“Leon.”
“Will you bring my notes back on time, Leon?”
“Give me your address.”
* * *
He comes on time and drops off the book. He has not torn the pages or left coffee rings on it. After he leaves, Adele comes by.
“Be careful of that guy. He’s not enrolled here,” she says. The incident of the baby lies unmentioned between them like a family secret.
“Where does he study?”
“He doesn’t. He’s a townie. He targets freshmen every year. Watch out.”
* * *
Molly thinks of Lavinia, husband killed, claimed as spoils, raped by two Goths, hands cut off, tongue cut out so she cannot speak, and finally killed by her own father. Molly does not understand how honor works for men, but she has wanted to murder Titus Andronicus since she first read the play when she was twelve. Not metaphorically: she remembers wishing he were a real, live human so she could kill him. Professor Crewe is daft; she can barely concentrate in his class.
Leon has left his number in her notes.
* * *
Molly surprises Leon at his home address. At first he does not let her in, but she pushes past. There is a girl in his front room.
“Get out,” Molly says.
“Hey,” says Leon.
“You want to fuck freshers? We can fuck as much as you want, as often as you want. Get rid of her, she’s not going to sleep with you.”
Later, while they are moving against each other, she fantasizes about cutting off his hands and tongue.
After some weeks, Leon says, “I love you, Molly.”
“No, you don’t, you silly sausage. You think you’re in love because I’m emotionally unavailable. You’ll get over it.”
* * *
Surprisingly, her father writes to her first. Up until the moment she rips open the envelope postmarked from her hometown, she thinks it is from her mother.
Dear Molly,
It is unusual not hearing you root about in the house. I did not know how comforting that sound was until your mother and I returned home. We still did the same things, I the heavy lifting and your mother the paperwork, but it wasn’t the same. Last night we had our first argument in years. It was about nothing, but I suspect it is residue from the emotional backwash of dropping you off. Empty nest, maybe. We don’t know what to do with your room. Clean it? Tidy it? Both? Neither? Your mother’s ambivalence shows in everything.
I miss you so much. I have seen you every day for so long.
I shall have to get a hobby to take my mind off all of this. Any suggestions?
With love
Your father
She writes back, describing her room, talking about Adele and her accursed spawn, skipping Leon, discussing her lectures and the eccentricities of her lecturers. Her letter runs to seven pages. She rereads his letter every night, which surprises her. She is not usually given to sentimentality.
* * *
James Down is a professor of physiology and anatomy. He knows everything in his field. Molly has never seen him falter when a student asks a question. She checks the answer each time, and Down is always right. He is the international authority on renal blood flow patterns. His paper on variations in arterial blood flow to the head of the femur is seminal. He is animated when talking about the lateral circumflex femoral artery. Molly notes that his eyes are wider at these times.
Dorogoy, always look at the eyes. This is the best way to anticipate attacks.
When she queues up behind other students to ask a question whose answer she knows, she realizes she wants him.
With Leon, she imagines fucking James Down, and she comes so violently that she flexes her thighs too powerfully. Leon is hurt, although he assures her that nothing is broken. She can tell from his strutting afterward that he feels responsible for her pleasure. She does not disabuse him of this notion.
She makes her own way back to her dorm, slips into the darkness of her suite. She is locking the door when a shove to the back of her head smacks her face into the wood panel. She sees stars, feels her nose broken, kicks behind her, misses, and turns.
The molly is just beyond kicking distance. It has tied its hair into a fucking bun. How long has it been—
A fist slams into Molly’s chin. She raises her forearms just in time to weather the further punches. This molly is fast.
Molly’s brain is so rattled, she cannot think of a defense or fighting strategy. The molly kicks her in the right knee, then pulls her hair. Molly is ready for the punch coming from the other side, but it is a feint. The molly leaves the hair and sticks a finger into Molly’s eye, then, when Molly is blind, smashes her in the ribs with what might be an elbow strike.
Need to get out of this. Cornered. Open this fight up. Ignore pain. Ignore blindness. Do something unexpected.
She drop-kicks the molly. Her feet connect. Hope. She hears the clatter across the room. She opens her watery eyes and sees the molly rise and charge again. Molly sidesteps and slams the molly into the door. She kicks it between the legs from behind. It has its fucking chin tucked in, even when hurting. Molly kicks it in the lower back, then spins, kicking its head. It’s not unconscious, but it’s slowed and incapacitated. Molly grabs it by the right arm and twists in the wrong direction until it dislocates. She does the same for the left. She gets a knife from the kitchen and runs into another molly.
* * *
The mantra doesn’t work here. She is bleeding, there is not enough bleach, and she cannot call her parents.
It takes four hours to clean up. Molly has never had to fight this hard. The mollys seem to be more intense, more focused. Does that have to do with being at the university? Does thinking hard make mollys more acute? She found a third one under the bed. Cunning too?
She cleans herself up as much as possible, wraps the bodies in sheets, and waits until dark for disposal.
She knows she is not well. It hurts to breathe, and she feels on the verge of blacking out. She manages to lock her room, stagger to Adele’s door, and knock.
“Help me,” she says.
* * *
As she lies in the hospital bed, she knows the mollys will come for her. She has bled too much, and has no control over where the multiple dressings go. Most will be destroyed as biohazardous, but she counts on the incompetence of others. Mollys always grow. They always find a fucking way to surprise her.
All these years. How have I survived?
Why have I survived? This cycle will repeat itself.
There are levels of pain that preclude conscious thought. Pain so pure that the world falls away and your primal caveperson self calls out to primordial gods for relief or death.
Slaves in pre-colonial Congo were once used for ritual sacrifices in which all their bones were broken, and they were left to die. Imagine their pain, yours is not so bad. Abstracting the pain helps, but not much.
The despair evaporates when she hears the pounding on the door of her room.
She wraps one end of a chair leg in a bedsheet.
* * *
Afterward, all Molly can do is crawl to the nurses’ station, trailing blood. She smears the counter as she drags herself up and pulls the first phone she finds over the protests of the ward nurse. It has no outside line. Alarms are going off like the mating calls of robotic insects. The second phone has a dial tone, and Molly calls the number tattooed on her arm.
“Name,” says the voice on the line.
“Molly Southbourne.”
“Location?”
Molly states the hospital and ward. The handset is slick with body fluids.
“Say nothing. We will be there shortly.”
Click.
Molly hangs on to the cord till the nurse takes it from her.
“Good Lord, your . . . your fingers are broken,” the nurse says.
“You . . . should see the other girl,” says Molly.
* * *
About a month later, Molly appears at the local police station. She meets a Detective Cooper. She does not have a lawyer with her, but has been assured this visit is a formality. The interview room is close, about ten by ten, with two cameras on the ceiling. There is a twenty-four-inch TV with an inbuilt cassette slot. Two wall-mounted microphones and a recording device that flashes green while a tape spools inside. There is a three-digit counter that rolls and clicks every second. Cooper is on the other side of the desk, closest to the door.
“Thank you for coming, Miss Southbourne. Am I correct in stating for the record that you are aware of your rights and waive the right to an attorney?”
“That is correct.”
“Thank you.” He spews some more legalese, but Molly tunes it out. He mentions a date.
“What can you tell me about the events of that date?”
“No comment.”
“You were brought in injured, after a vicious assault. Who attacked you?”
“No comment.”
“You were further attacked in the hospital. Who attacked you?”
“No comment.”
“How many attackers were there?”
“No comment.”
“Why was your blood found in copious amounts in your room, the corridor, and three floors down the nearest stairwell?”
“No comment.”
“Whose brain tissue was on the chair leg found just outside your room?”
“No comment.”
“Surgeons extracted a tooth from your right knuckle. Whose was it?”
“No comment.”
“We found an arm ripped or torn or otherwise detached from its owner. The fingerprints are identical to yours. Do you have a twin?”
“No comment.”
This goes on for forty minutes, and Molly has frequent flashbacks to the episode, but says nothing. Cooper switches the tape off.
“Miss Southbourne? I’ve already been told by my superiors that this case is going nowhere and that the evidence is getting lost. You know this, and I know this. Closed file. I just . . . could you tell me what happened here?”
He has an open face. Cut himself shaving, wedding ring, slight waist thickening, looks honest, has not dropped his gaze to her breasts. Yet.
“DC Cooper? No comment. Can I go?”
“You are free to go, ma’am.”
* * *
Molly is back to classes five weeks before Leon finds her. She is cutting into an osteosarcoma when he makes his way into the lab.
“Molly, what the fuck?” His fists are clenched and he’s breathing like he ran a marathon.
“You’re not allowed in here. This room is for students of anatomy.”
“One day you can explain how it makes sense, you studying literature and anatomy. And what the fuck, Molly?”
“What’s wrong?”
“The police. They arrested me for assaulting you. They photographed me, questioned me. They thought I was some kind of serial killer or something.”
“Don’t be dramatic. I didn’t know. I’ll get you off the hook.”
“I’m already off the hook. You haven’t called. You haven’t studied my anatomy in months.”
Ugh. “All these years of associating with freshmen and you can’t think of a better line than that? I’ve been ill, Leon. I’ve been beaten up. It was not sexy.”
“By who?”
“Whom. And it’s none of your business.”
“What’s wrong with whose business?” Professor Down is now in the lab. It’s six thirty in the evening, and he should not be there.
“Professor, I’m just catching up,” says Molly. Then, sotto voce to Leon, “Leave now, most tedious neighbor.”
Exit Leon.
Molly and Down stare at each other.
“Are you busy right now?” Down asks.
“Well . . .”
“I need to dissect a body. It’s research. I’m dissecting a thousand bodies to demonstrate the frequency of mutations in the celiac plexus.”
“How many have you done?”
“Three hundred and thirty-two. I’m starting three hundred and thirty-three tonight. Care to assist?”
Molly thinks of three hundred cadavers. She sees hundreds of dead mollys of all ages, but younger than her. Then, like those reincarnation paintings, she sees mollys extending into the future, all ages, old, older. Cancerous mollys, with osteosarcomata.
“Hello? Are you there?” says Down.
“Yes. I do. Care to assist. I care to assist,” says Molly.
* * *
Dear Molly,
I am happy to hear you are making friends. We have always been worried about your social development, being an only child who was homeschooled. Maybe they can come down to the farm for a meal sometime.
Your mother and I are thinking of taking a cruise. We have never been abroad together because of your hemophilia. Now that you have taken flight, I’m ready to see the world. We’ve hired some people to look after the farm while we are gone.
We found the soakaway of an old outhouse at the back of the property. I’m going to fill it in one of these days. Your mother says we should build a new outhouse instead, more like an art project. . . .
* * *
After a while, you don’t smell the formaldehyde anymore.
Molly finds Down to be deft with a scalpel and she learns what she can from watching him. He keeps up a monologue detailing the history of anatomy, punctuated with questions about a particular nerve or blood supply. He speaks of early resurrectionists as pioneering men on whose shoulders later anatomists stood.
“And women,” says Molly.
“What?”
“Some of the ‘men’ were women pretending to be men.” She lists some.
“You are, of course, prepared to provide citations.”
“Of course.” Molly smiles.
With time Molly comes to handle the scalpel.
“You are comfortable around the dead.”
“I grew up on a farm. My father taught me about bodies.”
* * *
The bus stops five miles from Southbourne Farm. Molly jogs cross-country the rest of the way. A good day for running—cool, bright, with motes in the air and the crisp smell of new blooms. An autumn day that aspires to be summer. Even the flies on the turdstools are beautiful.
When she spots her destination she accelerates to a sprint, and there’s a light sweat on her by the time she reaches the fence. She stops, catches her breath, peers through the bushes. Silence. The farm is never silent. Some bird trills, but the farm animals are not crying. The house is undamaged, and the front door looks shut, but Molly spots a light on through a second-floor window. Her father would never allow that during the daytime.
Shit. Shit. Mommy. Papa.
Molly feels the panic, but does not go in. The house is on a hill. The tactical advantage will be with whoever is in there. Nothing more foolish than rushing into gunfire when she doesn’t have to. She is patient. She sits down behind a yew tree, eats a chocolate bar, and waits for nightfall.
Treat the yew with respect, Molly. It is the oldest tree in the country and fucking poisonous to boot. It’s associated with legends of both death and immortality.
She does not think of her parents while waiting. She knows how difficult it is to empty your mind, unless you think of some other thing actively, so she does. She tries to read the novel she brought for the trip, but cannot concentrate on it. She tries to do sums in her head. She recites soliloquies that she can remember. She wishes she could fall asleep, but she has too much nervous energy.
When darkness comes, Molly is over the fence and darting from cover to cover, the way her mother has taught her. Feet light. Short sprints. Conserve energy. The front door is ajar, but she ignores it and goes for the back. It is locked, but she has her keys. She can hear static from a TV set and the refrigerator running. Some creaking of the house settling. The light is on upstairs and Molly heads for it. Every sense is alert, as if even the hairs of her skin have grown as antennae to sense movement.
She passes the kitchen, then doubles back. The fridge is open. All the food wrappers are torn, empty. No food left. She knows then what has happened. She hears the thumping of someone moving upstairs and she goes to meet the molly. She flicks on the corridor light.
At the landing, the molly stops. It is probably three or four years younger than Molly, which means it is an old one that they missed. Its belly is concave and its ribs are prominent, more so with each breath.
“Where are my parents?” asks Molly. No answer.
It comes for her, but it is starved and weak, and Molly punches it in the chest, cracking the sternum and several ribs. She shoves it down the stairs and goes up to look for her parents.
And finds them.
* * *
The fucking outhouse.
Maybe Father was going to fill it in or make it into the art project her mother wanted. Either way, he had started digging. The molly was in the hole, must have been there for years, maybe injured. Either Molly or her parents must have thought it dead after a fight. It was there all this time, steadily eating dirt and bugs and grass and petrified shit. Papa set it free and it killed him first. He must have become less vigilant because Molly was at the university. The mess in her mother’s room tells Molly she went harder. But she went all the same.
Both bodies have decomposed. Her father’s has been partially eaten, though not by the molly. Foxes, stray dogs, something canine.
She buries them both in a plot in town. Certain arrangements are already in play once she calls the number on her arm, and selling the farm is easy. She has long since made the link between these suited people and the “monsters” she used to see as a child. She thinks they might be extra protection arranged for by her parents. Molly has no room to mourn or feel. There is so much to do. The lawyers drop a truckload of papers on her.
She finds a small house on Hogarth Avenue in the city.
* * *
The house on Hogarth feels right to her. Two floors and a basement. Quiet street, pleasant neighbors who mind their own business. Garden. She hemophiliac-proofs it herself. She spends weeks just sitting in the front room reading a pile of books she has wanted to read forever. She does not mind that she cannot feel anything—she is not ready to deal with her heart yet. Better the lives of fictional people, and the tortuosity of philosophy books. She has sex with a few strangers, but it does not distract her or calm her churning mind, so she stops.
When she finally does feel something, it is not emotional, but physical. She falls sick.
She feels the illness coming on, warned by a nonspecific prodrome. When the vomiting starts, she is not surprised. Her back and muscles ache. Nothing stays in her belly, so she chews ice cubes compulsively. Her bed has no linen—she has just moved in. In a few days the vomiting is accompanied by diarrhea. She sees visions of her parents in her delirium. Her mother, more often. Molly screams her despair and rage at her mother’s specter. “You should have killed me. I’m the abnormal one, not them. You’d still be alive.”
Molly does not wish to go back to the hospital, so she stays still, waiting to die, floating in and out of consciousness. Then, without warning, it is over. Molly feels hunger pangs. She showers and cleans the house. She eats oats raw and washes them down with water. Slowly, she gets her strength back, but her parents are still dead. She reads her father’s letters and her mother’s writings over and over. So many pages from her mother, but mostly mundane farm accounting shit. Still, it’s comforting to read her handwriting.
What next? What do I do?
Molly wants to die, but she knows her mother would not have wanted it. If Mykhaila Southbourne had one religion, it was survival. From before Molly could talk, all she has been told was how to survive.
She scratches herself, but does not break skin. Stay alive. Why? Everyone Molly cares about is dead. She killed them. But she cannot kill herself because of everything her mother had done to get her here.
She gets a steak knife from the kitchen and stabs herself in the forearm. She barely feels it. She floods the wound and floor with thick bleach. Kill it before it grows. She wonders if there are one or two mollys out there, alive, waiting. She stabs herself again, a different spot, still no pain. She should go along the hiking trail, just to be sure. She thinks of ten-, fifteen-year-old mollys, stuck, searching for her, gunning to kill her. Or falling victim to predators—pedophiles, serial killers, careless drivers, pestilence. This does not fill her with pleasure, surprisingly. It is still her, still her body. If anyone is to kill mollys it will be her. She stabs herself again and it hurts. The blood spilling overwhelms the bleach.
She gets more.
* * *
Professor Down is at the door. How the fuck does he know where Molly lives? He rings the bell again, so Molly draws back the curtain, puts on a housecoat, and goes downstairs. She sniffs both armpits. Not too pungent.
“Professor?” She opens the door only an inch or so.
“Your doorbell is really silent. I couldn’t tell if it rang or not.”
“I could. Professor—”
“James.”
“James, why are you here? How did you know where I live?”
“You haven’t been in class. You haven’t helped me in our collaboration on celiac plexus mutations. I got curious, asked my secretary to get your address and number. Then forwarding address. Then . . . you know.”
“I dropped out, James.”
“Good, does that mean I can ask you out for coffee? I still need an assistant, and you’re one of the better ones.”
“What? What are you talking about? I’m sick, so no metaphors, please.”
James leans in, talks slowly. “I wish to pay you to assist me. I wish to have coffee with you now to discuss the terms.”
“I don’t want coffee.”
“Well, I do. It’s cold out here, but I’m a patient god. I’ll wait for you to get dressed.”
* * *
“Frankenstein.” James says this while chewing on a biscuit. He has tea, not coffee.
“You got into anatomy and physiology because of a movie?”
“Book. Yes, because of Victor Frankenstein.”
“When did you read it?”
“I was twelve. I just liked the idea of someone mastering his subject so well that he could take it a step further than anyone else in the field.”
“You want to make life?”
“Frankenstein just reanimated body parts he cobbled together from corpses. He did not make life.”
“Says you. Shelley of the miscarriages and child death disagrees with you. What do you want to do?” says Molly.
“I want to know more than my peers.” He sips his tea, starts on the last biscuit. “I’ll do the work to be that one. I want to know bodies better than anyone else.”
“And what will you do with this knowledge?” Molly stares at his stubble, the curve of his Cupid’s bow.
“I don’t know. I was thinking of sitting on it like a dragon on a pile of gold. I’d wait for questing medical students and postdocs, ambushing them with obscure questions.”
“Have you ever opened a cadaver and been surprised?”
James thinks. “Some years ago, in Enugu, I did an autopsy on a guy who died of bowel obstruction. Cut him open, and there, staring back at me, was a red length of cloth tied around his gut.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m telling you. Just at the splenic flexure. Turns out he’d had surgery before, but offended this surgeon or something, slept with his wife. So the guy ties up his bowel. Takes out the appendix first, though. Very professional purse-string sutures.”
Molly does not know whether to believe him or not. “How long ago was this?”
“I was a year out of university. Haven’t been surprised since.”
He walks her back and hesitates the way guys do when they want to kiss you, but don’t know if they should or if you’re attracted. Molly does not make it easy for him.
“I did notice,” he says.
“Notice what?”
“You let me talk. You said nothing about yourself.”
“My parents just died,” she says.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He seems so earnest, it unnerves her.
“I have to go.” She opens the door.
“Work for me,” he says. It sounds like Wait for me.
“Okay.”