By Kaitlin Lavinder
I went to Portugal this summer. There was mercury in the water, and I was unhinged. I met a man thirty years older than my husband. I wanted to devour him.
I’m back in Portland now. I’m looking out my window at Forest Park, a phantasmagoric woodland where the Douglas firs stare at you with pointed tongues and giggle as you pass by. I often walk through their undulating branches that pierce me, unexpected, and I always feel watched—either protected or hunted. The sword ferns are duplicitous.
My husband calls my name, and I want to lacerate him. Not consume, only cut. Only nick his ear like a crow punctures a mouse before the rodent scurries back underground. It’s a warning to leave me alone, for I am watching a Douglas fir grove as the trees thrash in the wind. They look like centipedes, overturned on their backs, a trillion tiny legs flailing. And I imagine the tongue of my Portuguese almost-lover.
His name was Afonso. He wore a tight, black T-shirt with tight, dark jeans that curved around his sinuous muscles. His hair was grey but not fully, his beard a possessive and vulnerable silver. Afonso picked up my shawl off the Michelin-starred restaurant floor and draped it sensually back over my shoulders. He whispered a single word in my ear—here—and I fought not to squeal. I was a crow in heat suppressing my caw because the others watched.
Afonso turned away and I resumed eating salted cod with my friend from college, chewing each piece slowly so the flesh sunk in between my teeth, so I had to use my tongue to violently flick the fragments of skin free, to then lick my lips and swallow with brutality. I am vegetarian and had never been to such an expensive restaurant. My husband and I live in a one-bedroom apartment in an aboveground basement. We can barely afford it. I am a reporter at a small newspaper, and my husband is depressed and on unemployment insurance. It’s been six months since we last had sex. Once, enraged, I screamed, “Just fuck me!” So he left the room promptly and I masturbated angrily. My friend paid for this trip.
A giant branch breaks off the giant Douglas fir who sits so close to the house she could crush us. But the branch plummets to the ground and lands on her own roots. She sinks into the soil, down into the humus layer, and farther still she falls until she reaches the molten lava core, where the earth is bubbling and oozing and burning, and the branch is burning and wailing and disintegrating, and all the forest creatures, including the mouse who emerges from her burrow, stop to listen. Except the crows, the crows are still eating.
Afonso and I met up on the beach after my friend fell asleep. We stood with bare feet on the salty sand of Praia da Arrifana as the Atlantic waves broke on the shore. It was peaceful and we were at war. Afonso, like me, wore a thin wedding band. I felt it on his hand when our knuckles touched. I asked where his wife was. He said on a retreat. He said they lived nearby and their house was one long window on the cliffside and the glass erased the separation between the ocean and them.
I am straining to hear fully the temperamental winds: My window subdues them. My husband continues calling but I’ve locked the door to our bedroom and through my window I’m immersed in the following: The chipmunks poke their heads out of the ground, like fir cones strewn across the forest floor. The fir cones are erect, standing on their tips, like grenades ready to explode. The grenades are the bursts of wind that break the firs’ branches. The mouse turns her nose to her hole, her home, but her tail lies on the open earth like a worm. The crow dives, the crow seizes, the crow squeezes. The crow eats her.
I am hungry and I want to leave, but I don’t want my husband to see me. I haven’t told him about Afonso because nothing happened. Under a moon so bright she threatened to lash my eyes, Afonso kissed my cheek and whispered goodnight and there was a pause, a brief beat, where I yearned so badly to bring him closer to me, to wrap myself in his silver beard, in his hard body, in his I’m sure very expensive silky sheets, but a cold wave impaled our feet and we both jumped apart, not expecting the sudden sting, and I knew that with Afonso I would burn and did I want to burn or did I want to be warm but before I could throw myself into the rupturing volcano, into the orgasmic lava of all that was Afonso, Afonso retreated, back to his window, where he safely gazed upon me touching myself on the beach.
My husband now bangs on the door, and the winds howl, and the centipede branches reach frantically for the ground, and my husband breaks the door handle and runs into the room and stops before me as he shouts: Are you okay? Sometimes I wish he would just take me—force me into the heat so we both feel something because in hesitation the world collapses into nothing, and I too am guilty of equivocation.
My husband loves me, unwavering. Whereas I, I am a Douglas fir uprooted and become sword fern. I live in the understory in the moist and the dark, my leaves are sharp. I love my husband and I fantasize Afonso, his silver beard scratching my vagina. This is because I am greedy and want both. To be a crow who devours like the rageful winds, and to be the mouse the crows are eating.
The Woman in the Wall
There is a woman who lives in my shower. Not in the bathtub. But in the wall. She has thick black hair that protrudes from her head in an erratic bob and truncates at the end of her pointy chin. The first time I saw her, I promised not to tell a soul. She is sad, I think. Maybe angry. Maybe a bit scared. Her mouth turns down in a scowl while her cheek bones rest high on her face, and it gives the impression of something tragic and menacing. Her eyes are weary. One is black—either a hole or permanently closed—and the other is open wide but sags like a wet bag. A month ago, I touched the black hole, and I swear I saw her squint. Though when I took a step back (and almost slipped) she looked exactly the same: unmoving.
It was the month before last the first time she appeared. I was crying. I think Barry had just yelled at me, for overcooking the eggs or something. I was curled up in a fetal position on the shower floor, sobbing, and remembering when I was in water. It was sometime long ago, before the mammal was born, and I was thinking maybe I was water. Maybe I was the sea, undulating rhythmically, flowing continuously, reaching and then receding and then spiraling and then ballooning, a giant wave crashing, fragments retracting, and yet, all blending, and never ever ending. But then I opened my eyes and looked at my body. It was plump and wrinkling, pale and sagging. I was decaying. All that was left of that vast, ceaseless sea was a singular, withering body.
“Paul!”
Ugh. It’s Barry. He’s always interrupting me.
“Hey, Pauline, can I come in?”
“Sure, hon,” I say. What else am I supposed to say?
Barry lets a stream of cold air scurry into the shower, where I am sitting on the floor naked and hunched, though with my neck craned up, watching the woman. I swear the woman shivers when the cold air hits her. But I rub the water out of my eyes and when I look again, she’s completely stoic.
“Babe, you’ve been in here for almost an hour,” Barry remarks, as he draws back the shower curtain and looks down at my dimpled, pruned body.
I don’t look at Barry. I look at the woman. She doesn’t judge me.
“You okay, babe?” Barry asks, but I know he’s not genuine. What he really means is, “What’s wrong with you, babe? Where did you go? Where did your body go? Why do you sit there, flabby and drowning in water? Why don’t we fuck anymore?”
Barry won’t leave, so I say, “I’m fine,” and that, for now, satisfies. Barry lets the curtain fall and closes the door, a little harder than he needed to. I wink at the woman, and I swear she winks back, though maybe that’s just her black eye.
Later that day, I am walking home from the grocery store, when I feel a presence behind me. I turn my head. I pray I don’t end up dead. I laugh when I see no one’s there. Later that evening, I am cooking dinner for Barry and me, when I feel an energy consuming the kitchen. I twirl around—our kitchen is tiny, so I can see the whole space clearly—and I laugh again. Nobody here. Nobody there. Nobody anywhere. Still, I continue spinning.
Barry walks in the front door and sees my head twisting off my body. “Are you okay?” he exclaims.
I shrug. What am I supposed to say?
Barry and I sit across from each other on the hard cherry chairs that adorn our dining room table. Barry doesn’t say much, as usual, but he licks his lips like a demon. I talk a little, telling him about my day, about buying the bread and eggs. I say nothing about the strange energy.
Barry thinks it’s my fault we haven’t had sex in two years. And, yes, I guess, in some ways I’m to blame. I’m the one who started saying, “Don’t touch me.” But it’s not because I didn’t yearn for his hands. I just wanted them to be different. I wanted his touch to be soft and warm. I wanted to melt upon contact. But I couldn’t melt because his fingertips were freezing, and we couldn’t meld because his stomach was hard like a jagged stone. My stomach was soft, had grown softer with time, and the stone would impale the flesh, so I said, “Don’t touch me,” but I didn’t explain, for how could I say our elements were no longer matching?
After Barry goes to bed, I take another shower. I’m showering all the time these days just to be with her. I’ve become enamored by her, in these two months we’ve spent together. I want to know more. I want to dive into the wall and feel her pores. Sometimes, especially when I close one eye, she looks dead. Like a skeleton with only a head. For there’s nothing below her collarbone. It’s like her body has dissolved into the shower’s tan tiles, and so all that’s left of her is this mysterious, tragic face.
I turn on the faucet, all the way hot. I breathe a long exhale. I step into the shower and prepare myself to greet her, but she is no longer there. BUT HOW!? BUT WHY!? I must find her. Into the tan tiles I dive.
Barry was always a singular entity. He never wanted to return to water. Or maybe he wasn’t aware there was a sea to disperse through, that you could, indeed, go into tiles. Maybe if Barry had spent more time in the shower, he wouldn’t have been so cold.
“Paul! Pauline?” Barry opens the bathroom door gently and a waft of steam escapes. “Pauline, why don’t you come to bed? It’s late.”
The shower water drips and drips and drips. Barry receives no reply. Barry sighs and shuts the door, quietly this time. Barry goes back to bed and softly cries.
The next day, when Barry rolls over to turn off his 5:00 a.m. alarm, put on his gym shorts, and iron his suit, he will turn to look at me with desperate black eyes, wondering what happened with time to create this gaping space of air, this gaseous solid that keeps him here and me there, but he will scream, because I won’t be there. I will have disappeared into the wall. I will stay there for fifteen years searching for her. I will find nothing but tan tile after tan tile and the occasional anonymous face. I will ask these faces if they’ve seen a woman with thick black hair and one black eye and all of them will shrug their shoulders and sigh. I will not ask what they are doing in the wall. I will not care, because all I want is her. When I reemerge, defeated, I will be sixty-five and Barry will have moved on with his life. The shower will be a storage closet in a convenience store, and I won’t recognize the surrounding area anymore. I will wander aimlessly. I will pass by a motel sitting in a puddle of overgrown yellow grass next to a sign that reads “One Hour – 25 Cents” and I will rummage the lawn for a quarter and when I find it I will give it to the old crusty man at the front counter and he will lead me into a room not much bigger than the convenience store closet and in it there will be a shower. I will tear off my clothes and turn the shower all the way hot and scrub and scrub and scrub until my skin begins to rot. I will examine every inch of every tile in that shower. I will not find her. The crusty man will knock on the door and yell “TIME’S UP!” and I will wonder if I shouldn’t fill the tub up and let myself drown. Then, the man will shout “SOMEONE’S HERE TO SEE YA,” and I will wonder if I’ve been found. I’ll get out. I’ll clothe myself. I’ll throw open the door in anticipation. The man will say “jus kiddin, I jus needed ya OUT.” I will leave the motel in despair. I will go back to the convenience store and try to call Barry, but his number will have been disconnected. I will be disconnected. I will wonder where she is. I will spend the rest of my life wandering, every now and then feeling a cool breeze that makes me believe, and I will turn around, but I will see nothing. I will eventually stop feeling her energy. When I die, Barry will return to bury me. My gravestone will read “Rest in Peace Pauline.” I will rest in agony.
Ghost
I see legs walking.
I hear voices talking.
But I can’t decipher the sounds.
I am down, way down, like I am underground.
The rings of bells reverberate through my brain.
Ding, dong, ding, dong, ding.
They stop. Thank god.
Oh god. They start again.
I look around. Can the others hear?
Or is this only in my head?
Where are we? A church? A cemetery? A grave?
Who are we visiting?
I think I’m going insane.
“Sophia!” It’s Mother’s voice—the first sound I understand through this cacophony of noise. “Sophia, why are you here?”
My soul aches. Why doesn’t Mother want me here? Then again, she never treated me well. I am a hollowed-out shell. She devoured me from the inside out. Still, I am hers. Still, when she says ‘let’s go’ I will follow.
“Let’s go,” Mother sighs.
I walk behind. I accidentally step on Mother’s calloused heel. She does not notice. She does not squeal. I watch her wide hips swing from side to side. I marvel at the fact that my life began in between her thighs. Her thighs touch now. They didn’t before. Her right hip drops lower than the left. She limps. The limp becomes a waddle, and I imagine her quacking all the way home. But she whips her sharp head toward me and says in a human tone, “No.”
“No what?” I ask. Confused. Curious.
“Get away!” she shrieks. “Stop following me!”
I drop my head to the ground. Before my eyes meet the earth, I see the ends of my long brown hair grazing the top of my vagina. Mother’s hair is short and black, like my sister Madeline’s. Mother sometimes jokes I’m not hers. She always liked Madeline more. A tear drops. It somersaults the length of my body and lands on my big toe. I am not wearing shoes. The ground is cold.
Mother keeps walking as I stand tethered to the land. About a dozen horizontal human bodies ahead of me, father joins her and holds her hand. This is a shock, since they are divorced, and the proceedings did not go well. Mother had had an affair with our mailman, and father had had his heart broken, and in the courtroom, both had said they wanted custody of the children. We didn’t want that—my sister and me. She was thirteen and I was fifteen and all we wanted was to be free.
When the judge pounded his gavel, my sister was declared property of father, while I was given the power to choose. I chose Mother, to make her love me. I felt guilty for leaving my sister on her own. But now she’s twenty-one, and she’s in college having lots of fun, and her smile dissolves all pain.
“I forgive myself,” I say.
I can’t see Mother and father anymore, and I haven’t seen my sister all day. Utterly alone, I whisper, “When will I be able to claim my grave?”
“Sophia!” A joyful call interrupts my thoughts. “Sophia, is that you?”
“Yes,” I say as I spin around searching for the source of sound.
Jacqueline, my best friend when we were 10, emerges from behind a gray stone, a gravestone, or just a rock, I can’t tell. She embraces me and cries.
“I know,” I say. “It’s been a long time.”
“I didn’t think you would show.”
“I know. I know.”
I do not know.
Jacqueline and I meander hip-to-hip through the stones, the gravestones, I am now sure. My long brown locks and her cascading black waves intertwine like braids. We stop at each mammoth oak tree, admiring each being’s beauty. In one tree, a robin sings, and Jacqueline and I talk about that time we—she, my sister, and me—sang in the church choir in downtown Washington, DC. We didn’t believe in god. We joined because Bobby Monroe was the lead male vocalist and when his vibrato bellowed, our underwear got soaked.
“Do you believe in god now?” Jacqueline asks.
“No,” I reply. “But I believe in Bobby.”
Jaqueline tells me she has to go but it was so good seeing me, she didn’t expect to see me, she’s so glad she sees me, and all I can say is why, why, why? I receive no reply. Jacqueline vanishes, though I’m the one who dissolves. My bones become brittle. My flesh is thin. The world passes through me, like I am nothing but wind.
Suddenly, I see my sister. She is crouched down next to the widest oak tree in the cemetery. The tree is actually two: two oaks who share the same trunk, the same roots. They only diverge about thirty feet into the sky, where the trunk abruptly splits into a V and the branches contort themselves to continue touching. My sister’s knees are pulled tight to her chest. Her long fingers and arms keep her compact. She rocks gently back and forth, hitting the oak’s trunk with each stroke. Her hair shivers in the breeze. Is she crying?
I approach cautiously. “Madeline,” I whisper. “Madeline,” I say louder. “Are you okay?”
She looks at me with glossy eyes. “Why are you here?” she stutters through sobs.
I place my hand on her shoulder and say, “Same reason as you.”
There’s a spark when we touch. No, a jolt. Or, a pain? My hand is burning. What is happening!?
Madeline’s body shakes, and she scoots farther away.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says. “This is my day.”
As Madeline speaks, the flesh on her face melts away. I see cartilage and eye sockets and blood and veins. Then: bones, bones, bones. A skeleton only.
I step back. I’m nauseous. I throw up at my sister’s feet.
I remember when I was fifteen. When freedom was without parents. When freedom was without pain. What Madeline and I really meant, though never said, was freedom was death. Am I dead?
Madeline’s bones chuckle. “My silly Sophia. Look at me. Look at you. Who do you think is dead? Who?”
I take another step back. The waves roll in and crush me flat. She had said it was a bad night, that she was drunk and wanted to be with me and Mother. Hell with our father. She had said, “Please, come get me Sophia.”
And I had replied, “It will be fine.” For Mother was mine.
Madeline stole father’s car keys and left. She made it thirty miles to my and Mother’s house before the wreck. It wasn’t even her fault. She had already parked the car when a sixteen-wheeler tuck barreled down on her.
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. “I can’t breathe!” I scream. Alone, in the cemetery, next to an oak and a ghost, I whisper to no one, “I am not free.” Never was. Never will be.
Kaitlin Lavinder is a fiction author based in Colorado. She has published in Jabber Literary and BlazeVOX and has been awarded fiction writing residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Washington Island Writers’ Retreat, and the Himalayan Writing Retreat. She holds an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Journalism from Temple University, and she was previously a foreign affairs journalist in Washington, DC. She enjoys coniferous forests, western grisette mushrooms, the moon, and cats.