Chapter 7 Whispers in the Dust
Iexhale, and it sounds like a tiny tin whistle through my teeth. The scratching resumes immediately, as if the conversation was an intermission. It moves from behind my bookcase, to under the window, to the closet.
It wants in. I don’t know how I know that, but my skin knows.
I type into the search bar: mouse transformation curse.
The results are a slurry of creepypasta and a wiki entry for an old children’s book with line drawings of smiling rodents in clothes.
I click and scroll down to the picture of the doll.
Its eyes are glass. The stitches on its snout are tight, neat and serious.
The caption says “comfort object.” I laugh and the noise that comes out of me has a new edge to it, a trill under the huff.
I slap my hand over my mouth to silence it, and my palm is slick.
But what the sites don’t say is that your tongue will want the taste of wood.
Your ears will separate the hum of the refrigerator from the thin cry of a neon sign at the bodega three blocks away.
Your pupils will widen and hold, and you will see the dust motes in their slow orbit.
Your brain will begin to sort everything into two categories; safe or not safe. Outside. Inside. Sharp. Soft. Prey.
Prey.
The word lands and makes a small quiet crater,and everything in me leans toward it.
I shut the laptop gently so it doesn’t click.
The tea is still warm in the mug on the side.
I pick it up and sniff. Lemon. Honey. Flowers.
Under it all is the wet hair smell of my mother’s hands.
The mechanics of disgust and love overlap in me like lace and wire.
I put the mug down, untouched.
The scratching in the closet is steady and urgent now. My body begins to move to it without asking me. My feet find the soft spots in the carpet, then the boards that don’t creak.
My fingers—too thin, the knuckles now wrong—reach for the closet knob and linger there.
I should not. Every cell in my body says no. Every hair says yes. I open the door just enough to slide inside, and pull it closed.
Darkness greets me. The heartbeat of the house is in here; slow, deep. The smells are stacked like pancakes; old insulation, dried up wasps’ nests, the faint vinegar ghost of my mother’s cleaning. And the scratching is right behind me.
I turn slowly towards it, while my knees bend on their own.
Lower is safer. Lower is smart.
The boxes grab my attention. The shoebox with the label from sleepaway camp. The white dress bag is like a ghost. And under it, where it’s somehow made itself a home, is the mouse doll.
I told myself I’d thrown it away. I distinctly remember the gesture yesterday: arm, arc, trash.
I had a whole performance about it, an exorcism for nobody.
But here it is, its little pink dress tidy, the gray felt rubbed smooth along the snout.
It sits like someone posed it, and waited for me.
The glass eyes catch no light and return none, and yet I know where they are, what they are looking at.
Mine.
The word arrives without permission. It has weight.
It feels like that same pressure in the back of my mouth where my palate meets my teeth.
I scoop the doll up, and it fits into my hands like it was carved to my shape.
Heat bleeds into its fabric. My heartbeat picks up - or the doll’s does. The difference is less and less.
It is wrong to hold it, it is right, it is both at once.
My breath hitches. I think of Maya again, not because I regret anything, but because the memory of her movement is juicy.
Because when she startled, something in me clapped its hands in delight.
Because the way her shoulder jerked, made me want to see if it would jerk again if I applied just the right pressure.
Who am I? I put my face into the doll’s chest like a child, and the felt rubs my upper lip.
It catches, it tugs. The sensation is so precise that it gives me an electric shiver that’s hard to resist. I press harder.
The whiskers that shouldn’t be there—that cannot be there—bend and then spring back, whisper-fine rods transmitting every motion into the bones at my nose.
They tell me the air’s temperature.
They tell me the closet is too cramped.
They tell me there is a spider’s thread to my left, and the spider itself is three inches above my shoulder.
I reach up blindly and pinch the thread between finger and thumb and it snaps, wet and delicate.
The knowledge is pleasure. Information is pleasure. Food is information.
Hungry. I am all words and some of them sink. Hungry floats. The tea is wrong. Bread is right. Dry things that scratch at the place behind my teeth are right. I want walnuts. I want the baseboard.
Yes. God, please.
I need the steadiness of wood, the give of it.
I want to put something in my mouth and take it apart, piece by piece, until it is not a threat because it is inside me.
I slide out of the closet holding the doll. The scratching has moved into my veins. It’s in the backs of my knees. It has speed. The hallway is now a tunnel, a journey I have to endure.
I keep low—my hips want this—and my shoulder grazes the wall, and I can feel texture through the sweater as if I pressed my bare skin there.
I stop in the kitchen and stand very still until the refrigerator motor cycles off, and the house is briefly a bowl of quiet with a thin high thread through it.
Dawn traffic murmurs seven streets away.
The faucet drips every eight seconds. I can count it with my blood.
The fruit bowl stinks. The bananas are going off.
Under that though, is the good smell; cereal dust in the cupboard corners, the heel of bread in its bag, the wooden spoon in the drying rack.
I tear open the bread bag and cram the heel into my mouth whole. My teeth want to meet through it with a nice crunch, only they don’t.
I spit it into the sink, and the lump sits there like a small dead thing.
I grab the spoon, put the bulbed end between my incisors and bite. The wood gives with a perfect, clean complaint. The pressure spreads through my skull like a hand smoothing my hair. Relief floods everything.
I bite again, deeper this time. A flake of wood breaks loose and slides down my throat, scratch-scratching and that is ecstasy. I close my eyes, and I am not in a kitchen. I am in a tunnel mouth the exact shape of my body.
“Briar?” My mother’s voice from the living room turns my insides into needles.
I freeze. The doll in my arms is a small weight that pulls me back into the dark. My tongue flattens.
Quiet. I am quiet.
She goes on talking to my father, blathering on about something like vacation days. Silently I creep back to my room, knowing she does not see me.
My smell lifts and braids itself around the banister. I will deal with that later. Later is not real. Now is just the tunnel.
In my room, I close the door with the kind of care that takes over everything else. The laptop sits on my bed like a square of cold daylight. The mug of tea is an open throat. The closet door leans open a fraction, expecting me, inviting me.
I lie down on the floor. The carpet makes a sound. The doll is against my chest, and my heartbeat makes its glass eyes tick lightly against its skull. I press its head up under my chin, and the seam there rubs the underside of my jaw.
It is too much, too neat a feeling, like someone built the world for this exact friction.
I could call someone. I could send one picture—my forearm, the run of fur, the way the light catches the new cut of my teeth - and ask, do you see me? But the idea of showing anyone makes acid bloom under my tongue.
What if they come?
What if they open the door and flood the room with their light, their breath, and their big slow ignorance?
I would have to move in ways too fast for them to see, I would have to hide, I would have to bite.
Besides, it isn’t medical. The thought arrives with such certainty.
It sits there and does not ask whether I agree.
Nothing on the internet covers the way my ears can tell when my father changes channels with the remote.
Nothing explains how the scratching in my walls speeds up when my mind speeds, how it slows when I slow, how it answers me.
This is not anxiety gnawing its tail. This is teeth, this is fur with a direction, this is a map unfolding under my skin and the only way through is to follow it.
I curl around the doll, and my knees draw up without my input.
My spine rearranges into a curve that feels like a word my body knows, and my brain has never learned.
The smell of cotton stuffed with old sawdust fills my nose and through it, I can smell other things; a field, rain five days ago, a basement that flooded and dried and left a ring, a cold hand that picked this doll up and put it down in a different space almost two decades ago, practicing the same careful tenderness I am pretending isn’t happening now.
My thoughts run like prey animals.
They break apart when I chase them.
If I try to think about school tomorrow, I can only get to the part where the hallway is crowded and everyone’s ankles are soft.
I want to be under the benches where drops of soda dry into nice sugar crystals on the concrete.
I want to wait and then go. The mean part of me wakes and stretches, and it is no longer the calculus of humiliation or the clean edge of a whispered comment; it is simpler, warmer, and wetter than that.
Make them jump.
Make them make the sound.
Make them know I am here.
I am here. I am… I press my tongue to the back of my teeth, and the name I have been using for years catches. Briar. Bri. Rrrr. The r turns raw in my throat, and becomes a rattle that vibrates through my skull.
The scratching is continuous now. Not in the wall, but in my bones. Or maybe the doll. Or the wall. It does not matter. Detail is less. Category is more. Light is wrong. I reach up, turn off the lamp and the room drops into soft darkness, the kind that folds over you if you let it.
I breathe. In. Out.
The scents reorder.
The doll’s breath—no, my breath—puffs against the fabric, and bounces back faint. I feel it in the wires now rooted in my face. They speak to me in a grammar that doesn’t need words.
Do this. Still. Wait. Go.
My parents laugh at something on TV downstairs.
My mother’s laugh has a little hitch at the end that I never noticed before.
My father coughs and doesn’t finish it, so the phlegm sits in the back of his throat.
The distance between us is full of the house’s delicious wood.
The wood is full of messages, an archive of pressure, scratches and the paths of small things going about their business.
I understand them now.
Or my body understands them. My mind tries to catch up and fails, and is not offended.
If I rub the back of my knuckles against the carpet, it makes a whispering rasp and my chest fills with small fireworks. My mouth waters. I put the hem of the doll’s pink gingham dress between my teeth. The thread bite gives, the thread sings. The sound is an answer to a question I forgot I asked.
I hold the doll as I listen to the house, and the scratching becomes my heart. Words go dim and short.
Warm.
Dark.
Safe.
Food later.
Hide now.
I breathe through my nose. If I reach for it, I can still claim those parts of me that are human. My fingers snatch out, grasping, and some part of me scurries away.
I hold tighter.
I am very still. I am almost ready.