A girl lies on a table in the basement of a stranger’s home and wonders why she feels so wrong. She’s hurt. She’s sick. But there’s something else. A hush inside her body, like all her cells are an audience awaiting some terrible show.
She searches for answers in her parents’ faces. They’re supposed to have them all. All her life, they’ve insisted they do. But the girl finds no clues in the sweaty furrows of their sagging flesh. Her mother looks sad and helpless. Her father looks angry and scared. But they always do.
The girl’s arm is missing a chunk of flesh. Under its thin layer of pale skin, her meat is bright red, like the roast her mother was preparing just a few hours ago. Her mother needed wine. Her father needed cigarettes. A quick trip to the store while the roast soaked in dark marinade.
* * *
“I’ll get your cigarettes, dear,” her mother says. “No need for us all to go.”
Her father stands up without looking away from the news broadcast on television. “I don’t like you out there alone,” he says, and snatches the keys from his wife. “The world’s gone crazy.”
This man. Da-da, Daddy, Dad. Barely forty but already ruined. Bald, stooped, crushed by his scowl, crumpled inward as if hiding from the air itself, an omnidirectional retreat. He says the same thing every time he watches the news. It doesn’t matter what it’s about—the war, the protests, the latest outrage in music or fashion—it’s always the same. The world’s gone crazy.
“Get your shoes on, baby,” the girl’s mother says.
“Can’t I stay here?”
“You’re not staying home by yourself,” her father says. “You’re only fourteen.”
The girl sighs and follows them to the car. The sun is almost down. It’s Friday night. She closes her eyes and imagines she’s going dancing.
* * *
She doesn’t know how long she’s been on the table. Time is taffy; it stretches and bends and dangles as she drifts in and out of dreams.
Last year’s school trip to New York, the bus like a scuba tank full of compressed excitement, seventy young people getting their first glimpse of the city. The girl pressing her face to the glass: the gleaming towers, the infinity of the place, the endless possibility. Movie star, stockbroker, dancer, singer, senator—she’ll need to live to three hundred to fit in all these lives.
“It’ll chew you up and spit you in the gutter,” her father says when she gets home. “You want to live in a leaky roach nest next to a bunch of thugs and perverts?”
“It’s boring here. It’s too small. I want to be out in the world.”
“Baby,” her mother says before her father can start yelling, “you don’t need to be thinking about all that yet. You’re just a little girl.”
She drifts out of memories and into shapeless fever dreams. Orange and black, hot and sticky, a gnawing hollowness in her belly, her mouth, her fingers and teeth—
* * *
“Take the boards off that door!”
“We are staying down here!”
The girl wakes up. They’re shouting again. All the old arguments amplified by terror. At home, it was just the sneering and sniping of a restrained but obvious loathing, a rich broth of unhappiness in which they seemed to enjoy simmering. Now, here in this basement, their misery has risen to a boil. Every time the girl surfaces, their voices scald her.
“I know what I’m doing!”
“How are we going to know what’s going on if we lock ourselves in this dungeon?”
The girl’s arm twitches. Her stomach knots. How long ago was dinnertime? Was it days ago? Years? Are the maggots and flies enjoying her mother’s roast?
* * *
They drive in silence to the grocery store. That long, straight stretch of Pennsylvania road, the daily commute to school, to church, to anywhere. The big rock, the broken tree, the same scenery over and over like the background of a cheap cartoon. Her father clicks on the radio. Something about exploding satellites, radiation from space, a string of murders; he opens his mouth to say it again, the world’s gone crazy, and his wife changes the station with a violent twist of the knob.
It lands on static. But the static is strange. Not the usual oceanic rush but a rhythmic pulse of low, abrasive noise, like a monstrous heart pounding in the dark.
“What is this?” the girl’s father says. He glances at her in the rearview mirror. “Is this what you kids are calling music?”
The girl does not know what this is. It is not what she calls music. It rises to a high, sour shriek and her mother clicks it off.
“It’s probably that radiation they were talking about.” Her tone is dismissive, but the girl sees the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. She feels her own doing the same. No one speaks until they arrive at the store and pull into the nearly empty parking lot. An overturned cart near the entrance. Groceries scattered and smashed. Red wine soaking the pavement.
* * *
The bite itself no longer hurts. Its searing heat has dissipated throughout her body and she feels the same thing all over. When she locks herself in the bathroom to read Rolling Stone and Cosmopolitan and other forbidden texts and her legs fall asleep on the edge of the toilet seat, she feels this. A black-and-white crackling like TV static in her nerves, a confused noise of numbness and pain. But not just in her legs now. Everywhere.
What is happening to her? She knows she’s sick, but there’s more. She feels something coming. Rising up from black caverns in the cores of her bones. She’s afraid. She’s excited. She doesn’t know why.
* * *
“It’s Friday night,” her mother says, glancing around the parking lot. “Where is everybody?”
“Good riddance,” her father says. “Checkout will be quick.”
The girl watches the rivulets of wine creep across the pavement. “Maybe the store’s closed,” she says.
“They’re not closed, the lights are on.”
The girl looks through the windows. Pale fluorescent bulbs flickering faintly. Amorphous figures behind the dirty glass. “Can I stay in the car?” she asks.
“Of course not,” her father says.
“Come on, baby,” her mother says. “I’ll buy you a treat.”
The girl gets out and follows them to the entrance. She watches the shapes moving behind the windows. She sees heads and shoulders, blurry silhouettes in the pale light. The way they move is wrong …
“What a dump,” her father says, stepping over the mess of the overturned cart. “Cleanup!” he shouts as the doors slide open. And then he stops talking.
Hinzman’s Grocery is a clean, quiet store in a clean, quiet town, and the girl hates coming here. Everything is always the same. The same music on the speaker. The same boy mopping the floors. The same man running the register and making the same small talk to every customer, as if the ones next in line can’t hear his robotic repetition. How are you today? How are you today? How are you today? The store carries no books, no magazines, not even newspapers—nothing that changes. The store is static.
So maybe it’s just surprise that triggers the girl’s laughter when she sees the bodies. A giddy yelp like someone has goosed her. Harder to explain is the thrill that rushes down her spine, not fear but exhilaration, almost arousal. Like she’s stumbled through a secret door and discovered a secret world.
The bodies are like the cart outside, flabby arms sprawled on the gleaming white tiles, organs spread out like ruined groceries—smashed tomatoes and sausage links and of course the wine, the wine everywhere. But she spares only a glance for these gruesome heaps. She is more interested in the gray people hunched over them, tearing at their meat, gnawing at their bones. They look up at her. Their eyes are empty in a way she’s never seen before: no tight politeness, no stern purpose, no pained restraint or bitter resignation. Just pure, effortless, unapologetic existence, like lukewarm water flowing freely.
They stand up and move toward her and she has a wild urge to greet them. Hello, who are you? Where did you come from? What are you here to show us?
Then she feels pain in her arm. Her father’s big fingers digging into her flesh, dragging her back to the car. She hears her mother screaming. She hears her father cursing as he fumbles with the keys. The gray people are shuffling out of the store and spreading through the parking lot. Her father shoves her into the car and starts it and the tires squeal. She rolls around and bounces off the windows as the car swerves left and right—how strange, to be in motion without being belted tight!—and then her father utters a curse he rarely uses and there’s a crunching sound and the girl slams against the front seats.
She hears the engine hissing. The car is rocking back and forth. Gray faces peer in at her through the windows, expressionless, a rioting mob with the serenity of a church congregation, and then the girl is upside down, and hands are reaching through the shattered windows, big fingers clamping onto her arm, the wetness of lips—
* * *
The voices are muffled now, drifting down to her from somewhere overhead. She wonders how deep underground this basement is. She feels the weight of earth around her, cool and thick, alive with crawling things. She feels herself sinking.
A burst of static jabs her ears, startling her back to the surface—her eyes snap open wide, terrified, then sag shut again. She can’t hold them. The static pulses with a few hideous heartbeats, then fades into voices. Not her parents’ acrid whining but big, booming television voices. Voices that have the answers. The girl tries to listen, but she finds them hard to understand. They seem to be speaking a foreign language, one she’s studied a little but never mastered. The words blur and drift out of sequence as they filter down through the earth.
Rising. Killing. No time for funerals. Burn your family.
The girl writhes on the table. She clenches her fists, trying to squeeze this dream out of her head.
Outer space. Venus. Burn your family.
A spasm of pain rattles through her body. She’s so hungry. Dinnertime was so long ago. That thick hunk of raw meat dripping in its marinade, ripping in her fingers, her teeth—
“Baby. It’s Mommy.”
The girl opens her eyes to escape what’s in her head. She sees her mother’s face hovering over her like a vast planet. That cloying, cradling smile, like she’s just given birth to her, like the girl still fits in her hands. “She’s all I have,” the woman tells someone somewhere in this dim basement, a truth more grotesque than she seems to realize—it’s a surrender, a suicide, and she will suck the breath out of her daughter as she dies. The girl hates her mother, the girl hates this woman, the girl wants to hurt her, she wants to—
No.
No she doesn’t.
Tears trickle into her eyelashes. Why are these thoughts in her head? How long have they been there?
She wants to warn her mother that she wants to hurt her. She wants to make her get away, but all her words are melting, concepts crumbling, memories blackening. With a final flicker of will, she drags her voice up from the silent pit inside her and she whispers, “I hurt.”
* * *
When the girl was a baby, she touched an electric fence. It is her only memory from those years, a jolt that cut through the fog of her prehistory and burned itself into permanence. It hurt. She has felt worse pain in the years since—bloody knees from biking too fast, broken limbs from falling out of trees—but at the time she touched the fence the pain shot right off her scale. She had never felt anything like that crackling in her nerves. Her infant brain hadn’t known such pain was possible.
As she lies on her back in the upside-down car, covered in glass like a blanket of diamonds, a gray-faced man bites her arm, and she experiences this transcendence again.
The pain is impossible. Absurd. Vastly disproportionate to the severity of the wound. The man’s teeth pierce barely an inch but they are electrified and poisoned and searing white hot. The pain burrows through her body, cracks her bones and splits open her muscles, yanks her nerves taut and strums them hard, a hideous chord jangling in her brain.
She screams so high no sound comes out. For maybe five seconds she screams, eyes bulging, throat straining—and then the pain stops. It rushes out from the wound and dissipates throughout her body, fading to a dull ache as her parents drag her away from the gray-faced mob.
They don’t notice she’s hurt until she collapses on a stranger’s lawn, facedown in the grass. She feels dirt in her mouth. A worm wriggles on her tongue. Her stomach rumbles.
* * *
Time is taffy. It sticks in her teeth and dangles down her throat, past and present twisting all through her, but it is not sweet. She hears shouts and screams up there on the surface, a man who isn’t her father shouting to a woman who isn’t her mother. She tries to imagine their faces, lit first by daylight, then by moonlight, then lost in darkness. She hears shattering glass and rushing fire, and a spike of terror stabs into her brain, but she doesn’t cry out. She doesn’t ask for her mother. Such soft filial instincts are charring in the heat.
Another crack of glass. Another burst of flame. She shudders on the table.
Why should fire terrify her? She has never been burned. It’s one of the few common injuries she hasn’t experienced. But while she feels these rational thoughts buzzing near the surface of her brain, she feels the fear somewhere deeper. Down in that dark, wordless place where the urge to run bumps into the urge to fight and the urge to eat and fuck and have babies, those primal marrow caverns where she feels that other thing. Reaching up. Rising.
A loud noise outside. An explosion—fire. That terrible bright god that kills flesh and forests and worlds. Her fear surges to a shriek, but beneath it she hears something soft. A small, sad voice. The voice of a young girl, alone in the seething jungle that’s creeping into her head:
Am I dying?
She hears shouting and scuffling upstairs, snarled curses and hammers against wood.
Is this all I get?
She hears a gunshot. A scream. A nightmare of disjointed noise as she writhes on the table.
Is this all they let me have?
She hears groans from outside. Not her parents. Not the handful of frightened strangers who joined them. Dozens of people. Perhaps hundreds. Their groans drown out the fire and her fear. She stops writhing. She goes still. A profound calm washes over her body like a cool bath for a fever.
She lies there for a while. She hears nothing. Thinks nothing. As the gray gloaming in her mind fades to full black, she watches the stars come out. Bright, hungry pinpricks fill her head by the billions. There’s no moon, but she sees Mars. She sees Venus. She feels their strange music humming in her limbs, filling her empty body with power and purpose.
She hears footsteps on the stairs, and she imagines that they’re hers. But she’s climbing up, not down. She’s rising, carried aloft by that thing that rises with her.
She sits up.
There’s a man on the floor, a heaping portion of life just lying there unused. She takes it. She feels it slide into her growling belly and spread through her thrumming bones. She feels strength. She feels clarity. She feels hunger—not just in her belly but in her feet and hands and teeth, in her chest and groin and in every organ, a relentless desire free of doubt and fear.
A woman wanders down the stairs. She moves toward the girl, tilting her head from side to side, simpering, whimpering—“baby, poor baby,” over and over—and some distant part of the girl throbs with loathing. What is this quivering mass of confusion and conflict? Why did she do whatever she did to get here? Why did she make choices she didn’t want and slacken at the thought of undoing them? Why does she stagger toward the girl with her arms outstretched, begging to be consumed?
Something is wrong with this woman. The life in her meat is tainted. The girl’s hunger twists into rage and disgust.
She kills the woman. She has to. But she doesn’t eat her. She leaves her intact, and somewhere in the jungle that has filled every crease of her mind, that tiny voice calls this a kindness. A chance to become something else. To finally become strong.
The girl climbs the stairs.
There is a man she’s never seen before waiting at the top. She approaches him and he runs from her. He hides in the basement. But there are others. So many others. She can sense them out there—smell them, hear them, feel them, that thing lurking in everyone’s bones, waiting for its chance to rise.
She stops pounding on the basement door and slowly turns around. She is surrounded by strangers. She is a girl in a crowd, unsupervised, unprotected, unafraid. She listens to their groans and hears her own among them. The whole universe is groaning: the atonal choir of the planets, the rumbling bass of the blackness behind them, the howling of the jungle in her head. She looks into the eyes of these people and sees what she saw before: pure, honest, unbridled existence. A primal truth older than life. And now she knows what it is.
The girl and her new family wander out of the house. Into the streets. Into the world.