Fiction Honorable Mention, 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Contest
“A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.”
— Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection” in Powers of Horror
“No offense but there is this sacred something inside you that is perfect and clean and safe and untouchable and maybe you haven’t even found it yet but it’s in there, it’s yours, and no one can ever take it away from you.”
— Sung Yim, author of What About the Rest of Your Life
She woke with the first breath her body had taken in hours. The unfiltered morning light stung as it always did. She never hung curtains. She liked to wake knowing she was uncovered, exposed to the world, and so knowing she had made a safe return. That first breath was delicious, reminding her how good and necessary it was. Gulping it up now, she willed the sensation back into her hollow limbs. With each breath blue turned red, blooming at the surface of her. And on feeling came: eyes searching around their sockets, the soft pull of hairs inside her nose, taste buds scouring the cut of her tooth. She began to fold back into herself with each lungful, the edges becoming distinct against the world. The polyblend sheet, the still air, the clean gray sky, a home, a place, a name, pressing up against her. More people were beyond this place, walking about above and below her, with their own names and homes and places. She opened her eyes and caught them on the lip of peeling wallpaper, the site of a stray black hair. Her toes curled into the balls of her feet.
When she was small, being shown cartoons of penises and fallopian tubes on a wheeled-in television, she stared ahead, eyes committed. The boys looked down and clamped their teeth on their knees to make the laughter stop. Teachers patrolled the room like swine, surveilling for scraps of hysteria. She sat in anticipation for the part on night walking. She was sure that like every other aspect of becoming a grown person they had left its explanation to a tape from the 1970s. But the credits rolled before the subject arose. She remained calm. Logical. They can’t overwhelm us, she thought. Maybe I’m just mature, like they tell me. So grown up, they say.
A year later she fainted in the PE changing rooms at school. The girls hung over her like she were something rotting in the yard. In the toilet cubicle she peered over the rim into the red pulp streaking cords in the soup. This was her first encounter, indeed her first nonanimated, noncinematic sighting of the phenomenon. But she was unafraid. She knew what was up because she’d seen Carrie at her cousin’s house a few years ago—eyes nearly bursting from their little skulls. She knew from the film, and suspected of herself, that she had bigger things to be excited about. And really, she was glad for its arrival. It was this private drama. A true and tangible gore that belonged to her, and confirmed her fleshliness, confirmed that there was indeed blood and guts beneath all this surface. She hovered over a single clot and needled it with her fingernail, examining its texture. With a hair of force, it disintegrated.
Later that day she discussed the event with a friend and resorted to one of the school computers, pilfering the depths of what the internet had to offer on menstruation and associated bodily dramas. When Mr. Jones rose up behind them without a sound, his face distorted into a gaping mask. He kept them behind after school and performed the most hysterical fit of rage they would ever witness. Once in the safety of the toilet cubicle, the girls were sick with laughter.
The problem with finding an explanation for night walking was that she had no thread to start pulling. The name for it was her own, and describing it was impossible. Words didn’t do what her body did. She held on to that, though, as she knew unspeakable things happened all the time.
She thought the moment of truth might come with the next installment of revelations: birth. In its unmatched horror, she had hoped this was it, where all the other unsaids would slop out with the afterbirth. And she was ready, she’d already seen this. Fallen down Google’s rabbit hole too many times to count to witness the incredible spectacle. She stared in knowing serenity into the gaping hole, and the purple head of the thing tearing out of it. Humans are just lumps and holes, she thought. Surface and dip. She felt her first pang of genuine concern as the bell rang and the performatively disgusted cohort evacuated the room. She clung to the cold metal stool and thought, calmly, certainly: I’m going to throw up. Excuse me! Mr. Beckett yelped—Wake up! She looked up and vomited all over her pencil drawing of a uterus. That night she wept fat, honking tears in the bath until the water turned her skin blue.
For the next few years, she chose to add it to the list of bizarre things that bodies did without mention from anyone who’d had one for any significant amount of time. Maybe some things were too difficult to articulate, too unreal to capture on film. But in time she began to wonder if perhaps they genuinely didn’t know, hadn’t figured it out yet. Just as she had no real knowledge of her own bodily goings on before she was told about them—that she (supposedly) had a womb, lots of throbbing organs in fact, capillaries spilling into layers of tissue, unseeable chromosomes, and microscopic beetles shifting through her eyebrows. They just weren’t aware of this happening. Or else found it utterly mundane. Or unspeakably horrifying.
She couldn’t remember the first time it happened, it just came and kept coming. Along with being in her body, knowing it and trusting it without choosing so. She came to know the act and the word for the thing that triggered it all—wanking, masturbating, touching yourself. All shapes of which she found redundant—too mechanical, too clinical, too tautological. She had always thought of it as night walking. When she did it her body wouldn’t stop where it should. It kept feeling out beyond the edge of her, feeling inward too, until the space around her collapsed and her body wove itself anew. And then she was a different shape for a while—something smaller, harder, encased in a different skin—until she fell asleep again. This, she had since deduced, was something close to a louse.
Night after night the space awoke in the darkness and pressed against her body, filling up the well of her ear canal, kissing against her fingers with such force that their shape began to bleed into the dark. She would feel one of her legs unfurl. And another, and another, until fourteen of them were trembling in the moonlight, and the beast that once rested its head upon the pillow had become a distant and dormant thing. Undoubtedly, she loved the feeling of becoming louse. Shedding the tight screen upon which she played out like film, slipping beneath the wallpaper, and tunnelling outwards. Amongst the garden mulch, knowing the beings about her by the space they breathed in, she felt a simple drive to gently plough through the earth. Darning leaf to gristle as she crawled.
In adolescence, as the regulated and catalogued horrors of the body were gradually revealed to her, she began to consider that she might in fact be alone in this louseness, and alone in the pleasure she found in it. That she might be a sort of demon, something despicable meant for loneliness. When she was small her desire had no route. It would turn her on to distract herself, to read the limpest husk of a book, the esoteric language twisting her insides like a curling tongue. So she decided to cut it out at the root, by refusing desire in all its forms. Until her world lost its pulse. And when the pleasure in everything ran dry, she hoped she would have nothing to reach out for, alone in her bed at night. Pleasure sprung forth pleasure, she was sure, and she couldn’t risk the blood. No fat or salt would pass her lips, no eyes were met, not even her own, and no act of care was dealt or received by her. She felt more feral this way than she ever had. And it bore a pleasure all too familiar.
After vast periods of asceticism, when she thought she could feel no longer, a seed of corruption would blink inside of her and on desire came. When anxiety swelled, that she might violate her contract, a balm of refusal would slow the pulse right down, slow the world down too. She’d linger there—eyes shut, mouth sealed, bones tight, for unknowable lengths of time before the eye blinked again, and pleasure unravelled before her. She came to understand that this wasn’t punishment at all but rather an elaborate form of edging. The depths of stillness, of deprivation, felt akin to anticipation. That every breath could be the last sure thing before she risked her boundedness, produced a fine thrill.
With age she adopted drinking as a proxy. It seemed safer, made her feel normal but felt so close to night walking, like slipping and falling. Being louse was falling without end, without form. Cadere. When she drank, she stalked the night in heat, her senses tipping out into the air before her. Heat, breath, flesh pushed hungrily against her night by night. She only retained fragments of these encounters but they were so precious to her. They filled her with unlocatable reveries that spoke with each new caress. A thousand palms, lips, cheeks traced the life of her own. In time she found that these encounters made her no more bound than being louse. They had no safety of their own, whatever that meant.
The urgency to align herself with the parameters of being in this kind of body, was gutless. Since there was no evidence, no sign or mark of knowing, as we know it, what she was, she decided to let it go. Let the words fall silent. She found peace in this inarticulation and sought it out as much as she could.
She loved the bath. The water filling up her holes. The night before, when she was fucking someone, she felt a rogue limb brush against her right leg, and she came, in hysterical bliss, thinking that she had changed into the louse. She smiled now in the safety of the wetness. What would they think, she thought, if they saw me in all my legged glory? Maybe it would turn them on.
That night she looked down and felt nothing but desire, coveting her silvery paw. She drew it close to her left eye and uncurled its segments one by one. Thick hairs protruding from the leg could taste the texture of the air surrounding it and fed the sensation to her eager limbs. Slipping onto her front she found herself as she had many times before in the soft peaks of her bedsheets. Though she could no longer see except for dull shapes, a sense of the rhythm emanating from the earth told her to move towards it. The polished kernel of her body rolled in infinite cycles towards the windowsill, tilling through vast fibrous fields as she went. Her body knew its pace and moved doubtlessly onward. At the window, she slipped her legs beneath the loose edge of wallpaper and wove through the well-kissed tunnels towards the night. These tunnels were soft as chalk and the residue tasted of powdered milk. When the louse reached the earth, it felt like holding a lover.
Settling feet into ground, her body swayed like a ship, sensing beast and plant through murmurs in the soil. She moved onward. Leaf became loam under her. She laboured in service of that which loomed over them all. A thing close to Mother. The silver birch broke out of the earth and lit up the night with its skin, calling forth its disciples. The hordes moved in rhythms that called out further still. She knew that rain had come, for the earth was saturated with beings writhing in its noxious smells. Rot and green were torn away by things limping blissful towards their gentle graves. Folding bone to crumb. At any moment their flesh might slip permanently into the dirt where it longed to be. There was little distinction now, between flesh and soil and fellow. At moments all was surface and dip dissolving toward the birch. When they reached it, slithering under the blanket of the earth they felt returned.
At once a perfume of rotting flesh hit the louse—the deepest bitter, the ooze from a neglected wound. The rhythm of the horde rose a tone in lust. Chewing through bodies she moved, greedily this time. Though she was blind, the garden was bathed in red. The color beat up through her legs, churning her guts with desire.
As her limbs searched on, she found herself stuck, and paused to read the earth beneath her. A corpse had captured her leg in its stomach, intestine looped around her foot. And she knew she was touching self, as she would be soon. She pulled and it released her from its grip. As foot fell over foot, she entered a thicker atmosphere. The smell solid like a wall around her. She leaned into it, pushing against its damning form, laying herself low in the dirt. A juddering heat pulled her into its embrace. She felt a tight coil within her begin to unfurl and knew this was the place she had been moving towards. Her palm rested on polished enamel, encased within a fleshy pocket. This was the source of the bitterness. She leaned further still, feeling gum and lip, and the sublime wetness of a tongue. Her belly pressed against the soft palate, her body made turgid with the pressure. And as the teeth shattered her form, it felt clean. Her fineness returning to fragments.
A security light stunned the garden. The fox held its breath. Blinked toward the house. A pale figure haloed in darkness looked out from the upstairs window. The fox swallowed. For a time the two animals gazed at one another, breathing in tandem. They blinked. And turned back to the rhythm of their hordes.
Kit Edwards is a writer and curator based in Cardiff and London. She writes fiction, essays, reviews, and experimental texts on art. She recently completed the MA in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, UoL.
“Louse” originally appeared in the limited edition print journal FDBNHLLLTTFHORROR (Sticky Fingers Publishing, May 2021).
SPOT IMAGE CREATED BY WARINGA HUNJA
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