THALIA WAS ALONE
This is where it started. A rumor.
“It’ll be cool,” the Boyfriend said. He wasn’t really her boyfriend but that’s what she called them, the boys who came over and in. They didn’t stay, of course. Thalia wasn’t that type of girl. Thalia wanted everyone to love her, she wanted people to look at her and need to be near her. She put on makeup as soon as she woke up, rarely in the morning, and then cried for a few minutes so it would run and she would look more like Marla from Fight Club even though she was brown sugar sweet skinned and looked nothing like Helena Bonham Carter. Still, she had hollows in her collarbones and she looked hungry, not for food, but for something else. It was all right. She knew that about herself too.
This Boyfriend, forgotten be his name with all the rest, had that certain look in his eye when he told her about the party. The hungry, wet look that told her what he really wanted, what would be really cool.
And maybe Thalia wanted it too. It was so hard to tell what she did and didn’t want when the Boyfriend told her what he wanted. And he wanted to get fucked up and swim in the sea of bodies, press himself into strange and watch strange press into her and that sounded good, that sounded fine to her. That’s what the rumors said would happen, how it would be.
The rumors were true, most rumors are. There were bottles. There were pills. Bright red ones that went down like candy. Thalia floated on a cloud as they, the other party goers, caressed and stroked. Hands, mouths, everywhere. Pulling at her, needing her. All under the softest blue light. She wanted to take the feeling in, drag it into herself from between her legs and open mouth, swallow it until the pit of her filled to bursting.
All night, kitten touches, thick tongues, strong fingers until the twilight light turned black and the pieces of her shattered into tiny specks of dust and she was gone, gone, gone.
Morning came. The Boyfriend was gone, really gone. The hands were gone. The mouths were gone. And Thalia was alone, wrapped in a worn blanket on top of a round bed, a castoff from some love hotel.
That first day she found clothes, not hers but wearable. A baggy men’s shirt and a pair of latex shorts that rode up her ass. Beat up jelly sandals half a size too big. She wandered through the house in her borrowed wardrobe, running her hands over the crown molding, the dusty furniture. The prints of other hands and other bodies left behind by people who had exited before the sun rose.
A small house, a two-story, single family home deep in a rundown part of a city that had moved on. Empty lots sat on both sides of it, the neighboring homes long since torn down and the world was quiet. The house seemed in good shape to her. The floors didn’t creak when she walked, the walls were white, not water stained. Good enough according to her two eyes.
She made her way into the kitchen and opened cabinets full of food with labels she didn’t recognize. They were almost right, but they weren’t any off-brand she had heard of. Spaghet-spheres, Ripping Chips, Peppy Cola. The only thing in the refrigerator was a glass bottle that held slightly blue milk. She sniffed it, determined it smelled alright, made herself a bowl of Cap’n Crux and ate it at the chipped kitchen table.
She ate alone, no one came down or in. Just her and her knock off cereal. Thalia noticed in that strange animal part of her that lived in the back of everyone’s head, she didn’t feel alone. The animal part of the brain was never wrong at least she hadn’t thought so before then because she saw nothing with her own two eyes, there was only that feeling and that wasn’t enough. Finished, she put her bowl and spoon in the sink. If she had thought about it, she would have noted, later, that the bowl and spoon were gone when she had lunch. But she was used to being cared for and she didn’t think about it.
She swept the house, searching for what weighed on her that felt so much like someone else in the empty building. A tired couch in the living room that faced a white wall. Up the stairs, a second bedroom that held a tired twin bed covered in a worn blanket. She tripped back down finding an empty coat closet and inside that a second door but when she pulled on the knob it stayed shut, keeping her out. She closed the door and thought nothing else of it. Thalia wasn’t the type to dwell.
The first day she sat on the couch and played on her phone which never seemed to die. She drank the bluish milk, ate the off brand food. She fell asleep in the love motel bed, buried under worn blankets. Blue light wrapped her dreams tight, and she sighed and sang in her sleep as it touched and teased her, like so many fingers, so many hands. But it was just the one blue light. She woke up happy but alone still. She repeated the process on the second day and night. On the third she left the house on Everton and returned to her apartment.
Her roommate poked her head out of her own room. “Rent’s due,” the woman said eyeing her slowly before asking, “You ok? You look different.”
“I’m not wearing makeup,” she mumbled in return, slipping into her room, shutting the door. A mattress shoved onto the floor, a pile of clothes sitting on the floor with it. She shoved the clothes in boxes, the shoes in a suitcase. Her makeup back in the bag. She called a cab and started walking her things back down the steps.
“You still owe rent!” her roommate yelled as she took the last bag down the steps. Thalia didn’t respond. Forty minutes later, she gave the last of her money to the driver and climbed out of the car at the house. The door swung open and it felt, when she stepped past the threshold, that the world sighed.
“I’m back,” she said to no one at all and took her boxes and bags up to the room with the love hotel bed.
No matter how she felt though, she was alone, anyone with eyes could see that and Thalia did not like to be alone. The house on Everton was lonely and she was alone and that just wouldn’t abide.
She started a rumor. A text message to someone that could almost be called a friend, a few comments that dripped of unsaid promises that were just waiting to be filled in. Gold poured into the cracks of her rumor as they spread, making them shine with imagined possibilities for people like her. The people who didn’t like to be alone but were so, so lonely.
She slept and waking found the house filled with bodies, bottles passed carelessly between them, red pills traveling from fingers to lips. Smiling she joined the fray.
She danced and howled until stumbling she went to her room to find the press of bodies, the soft blue light that had held her that first night, then release and deep, content darkness. In the morning, no matter how good and soft she had been, she woke alone. Just her and the house. She drank the milk, ate the food, stared at her phone until the time came and she started another rumor.
A stream of Boyfriends and Girlfriends and none of them touched what she dreamed that blue light, soft as anything, could be if it just kept stretching, filling, reaching. But still she wanted them, needed them. Needed to not be alone.
In its emptiness the house hummed and vibrated. It’s trying, she thought in the empty hall. Thought it strange but thought it anyway. The water came from the faucet the perfect temperature when she wanted a bath. Just the right things were in freezer, in the cabinets when she was hungry. A blanket just in reach when she felt cold. But she was alone and that she couldn’t stand.
“You’re different,” her friends who weren’t her friends commented on her latest photo. “We never see you out anymore.”
Her skin was clear and taut, she glowed. Her hair, usually a dry bush was thick and full, the tight curls springy to pull on. Her eyes were bright and big in her face. Everything about her looked full and she wanted to dive in and swim in herself. She didn’t look like Marla from Fight Club. She looked like something darker and fiercer and she liked it. Liked the look of herself. “I don’t go out anymore, come to my next party,” she wrote back.
She wanted to bring them all to the house. Wanted them to share the love hotel bed. All the little faces on the phone screen. She dreamed her bed stretched beyond space and they all crawled inside of it, everyone that ever was and they all loved her in the way she wanted to be loved.
She fell asleep daydreaming on the couch and felt the ripple of fingers against her in her deep dreams. She woke to a knock on the door and the world covered blue in twilight.
She stood, pulling on her sleeves, staring at the door curiously. There had never been a knock on the door. Slowly she opened it and he stood there, smiling, showing off teeth that needed a dentist but didn’t make her shy away. Something about him held her, door open, waiting.
“I heard,” he said slowly, “that there’s supposed to be a party here.”
She nodded and stepped back, letting him pass, no reason to stop him. He had come on the tails of her rumor. He had come because she called but he didn’t look like anything that she had called. He looked like something that had blown in from the desert, all dry and hard. Nothing like the soft souls of the city that usually filled the house, nothing like her.
He stalked through the rooms, sniffing, and she followed meekly.
“This your house?” he asked slowly, opening the fridge.
“No, I just stay here,” she answered, fighting the urge to close the door, push him out.
“They let you?” he asked, a lilt of surprise in desert wind.
“Nobody’s said anything yet,” she mumbled, unsettled.
He nodded and shut the door, turning and smiling widely at her. “That’s just perfect then. Just fine.”
The press of his lips felt like sand on her, his every touch on her skin felt like sand pressing against her. His hands under her shirt, the knee that pressed between her thighs. There and solid but not. Like he would cover her, press all the air from her lungs, replace it with himself. “Take me upstairs, I’m your new boyfriend.”
She found, as soon as the words spilled from his lips, dusty and as dry as her mouth after his kiss, that he wasn’t wrong and that going upstairs to the round bed and all its worn blankets was exactly what she wanted to do.
Different and new, that animal part of her recognized something dangerous about him. Something that was off in her world but she couldn’t stop, she marched up the steps, his heat following and showed him right into the bedroom she slept in.
“Nice tits,” he said when she slipped off her top. She laid under him, the world heavy but the color all wrong, not the blue, no, something more like gold.
It’s fine, she told herself her eyes fluttering closed under that strange golden press of him, the way he seemed to sink into the cracks of her, dry and wrong. He’ll be gone in the morning. He’s not like the others though, maybe he’ll stay. She didn’t know if she wanted that or not. She couldn’t tell, with the Boyfriend, her thoughts felt fuzzy. Just like all the others before him.
She found him tangled in the blankets when she woke again. She wasn’t alone.
She slipped out of the bed and found more bodies. Their breath heavy in sleep, slumped against the wall, strung over the couch. The party, she reasoned, brushing her curls back. People stayed. The animal part of her brain growled and bucked sending electric ice down her back that twisted her guts but she ignored it, pushing it away because he had stayed. They had stayed. The air felt dry.
Thalia was not alone. And even as that animal part of her screamed that she had missed something important, she didn’t care. She could see, with her own two eyes, that she had exactly what she wanted.
She hummed and went to the cabinets to find them full, as always. She opened the fridge to find the milk, still cold but slightly yellow. She sniffed and wrinkled her nose. The milk had gone off.
He didn’t leave and neither did they. Not that day, not the next. Or the one after that. More people came. They filed into the house and stayed, covering the floors and she held a frantic court. They sang her praises, they did mad dances to be close to her. The walls turned greasy with their touch, the air smelled of waste. He sat on the couch, her king blown in with the wind that finally, finally stayed, and she sat next to him. They drank, they swallowed pills, little yellow ones now, and it took her days and days to realize that it was not a party.
When he went to bed, she went to bed, and when she woke, they were all still there, cluttering the floors. The cabinets emptied, the garbage and dishes piled up, the milk spoiled.
Thalia’s hair fell out, long strands shed all over the floor. Her hips and breast lost their fullness. Her eyes sunk into the sockets. Her makeup ran and she looked like Marla again, better than before since the brown sugar sweetness of her skin paled and faded. If the Boyfriend noticed, he didn’t say anything. He just fucked her and showed her to his friends. It was fine. This was what she wanted. To not be alone.
She found the door in the closet, the one she had forgotten about, all splintered and broken a month after he had come. A heavy wet scent wafted up from it. “There’s a leak. I’ll fix it,” the Boyfriend told her without asking, dragged her up and away from it. Kissed her too hard and she didn’t think anymore of it. Later, when she saw the open door again, the air that came through was hot and dry like a fever.
No one ever left. The Boyfriend that felt like the desert, like the sun, never left. His friends never left but Thalia felt alone. She missed the blue press and the kitten-tongued girls and boys of her parties. She missed the quiet press of the house. She missed the warm, wet blue of her dreams that didn’t come anymore in the dry too hot space of what the house had become. She stood in the living room, staring at the bodies draped all over, the once white wall all dirty with their prints. Her eyes settled on the Boyfriend. A king in his court.
She made a choice.
She turned, marching back up to the room that held the round bed and he followed. He always followed as if he had to be stuck to her in the house, couldn’t be away from her. He scratched his bare chest and sat on the bed.
“You’re destroying my house and I want you to leave.” The words tumbled out of her mouth and the animal part of her knew they were exactly the truth. Howled with the rightness of it.
He chuckled. “This isn’t your house, honey. Come here, I’m feeling a little dry.”
She shook her head. “This is my house and I don’t want you here. I don’t want any of you here!”
He looked at her strangely. She had never said no. Could never say no. She wasn’t that type of girl. She hadn’t been.
The house shifted.
Like an earthquake but instead of moving the furniture, all of reality stepped slightly to the left and now she saw what was and wasn’t the house on Everton. What had always been a house and had never not even once been a house. The world turned blue.
The bed split under the Boyfriend, showing sharp lines of teeth for a moment before they came crashing down on him. In two chomps he was gone, his little blood red pills on her face. The thing that had been the bed lifted and twisted itself before Thalia in its full glory.
She stared at its fat, luminous body, a part of its total being. She understood in that animal part of her that the blue of the world was the thing before her, that the thing before her was this world. Around her the house collapsed, the sound of wood and plaster restructuring itself came from just beyond the door. There were people screaming. All the sounds that she had dreamed through, wrapped in blankets that weren’t blankets, enveloped in the blue of the house. The flesh of the house. The house that was this thing.
It shuddered and the light changed, the blue turning more gold for a moment and then a sick seaweed color, mottled and off. What it had swallowed was not something it could survive. But it had, for her. Because she wanted the Boyfriend gone and it had made it so.
But she understood then that it had let the Boyfriend stay. To make her happy. Because she did not want to be alone.
Because it did not want to be alone either and if the Boyfriend stayed, she would to.
It had no limbs, only short, pucker-less, tentacles that lined its body, hiding the part of it that had swallowed the Boyfriend. It looked like jelly, glistening and wet.
It inched towards her, holding out its tentacles, searching, needing.
The animal part of her reacted before she could and she reached back. It’ll be alright, she would have said if it had not happened so quickly. One blue tentacle wrapped itself around her arm and it, the house, pulled her in.
The blue surrounded her, she floated as those short tentacles probed her, searching for something. This is what she wanted. It pulled gently at her skin, before finding entry into her. As she floated in it, it pushed into her. Its tentacles slipped inside, past both sets of her lips reaching towards the center. The animal part of her hummed, only pleasure, endless pleasure and that feeling. That thing she had wanted more than anything at all.
And it could not survive, not after what it had done, not without her. And she pulsed need and desire in return.
Oh yes, they thought, together as one, I’m not alone.
Thalia woke up slowly inside of herself, breathing contently in the parts of her that were empty. She had become they and they were full. They dug out Thalia’s phone from the nest of blankets and started a rumor.
They were full, yes.
And together. Not alone.
They meant to stay that way. §
