7 OFFERING TO THE OMNIPOTENT
7
O FFERING TO THE O MNIPOTENT
Saz’s Suburban was an industrial monster paid for with her parents’ credit card. She typically rented a new one upon arriving back at Rotham, after she’d gone home for Christmas or summer break to stay at her family home just outside of London, and she consistently chose a sleek, ursine SUV. It was the only car between the five of us that could hold our collective comfortably. Saz always looked miniature behind its wheel, but she was far more confident directing it down dirt roads than I could have ever been.
The path she followed after Moody’s class that day was pocked by years of tire tracks. Coming evening sucked the afternoon from the sky with a straw, and now all that remained were thin dregs of clouds and pockets of white-blue fading into a pinkened gray. Caroline sat in the passenger seat. Her phone was tethered to the stereo, one of our playlists depicted on the dash screen and reading: CINCINNATI BITCHES LOVE ME. It was a joke we made often about Saz—how the last four people she’d gone on a date with had all been from Ohio. The Suburban hit a pothole. The voice in the speakers gargled and writhed.
“You’re really not going to tell us what we’re doing out here in bumfuck nowhere?”
That was Finch, leaning forward and halfway across my lap, her fingers hooked around the seat next to Saz’s right shoulder. Her jeans were stained with alizarin, the paint so vivid it suggested synthetic blood where it met a tear in the fabric across her thigh. My gaze kept dragging to the place where the threads pressed lines against her skin.
In the mirror, Saz’s eyes were hidden behind chunky sunglasses. “I asked for patience and companionship. Chill out.”
Amrita was quiet beside me, her head tipped back and her eyes shut. She let out a deep exhale, as if she could feel me watching but was too tired to acknowledge it. Her pupils moved behind the lids, back and forth and back and forth.
Finch’s apprehension rubbed off on me. My palms were damp, pain prickling at my temples.
“How long do you think we’ll be gone?” I called from the back row as we rattled over another dip in the road. I had to shout to be heard over the music. “Kolesnik asked to see an outline for my artist statement tomorrow, and I haven’t started yet.”
“All in good time, Jo,” Saz sang.
There was something erratic about her, something godly and spellbinding about the fuzzing speakers and the inch of air Caroline’s window let in, woodsmoke and dry earth and dying leaves. The thickets framing the road had that dusky look of the end of the world. I wasn’t cold, but a shiver came over me anyway.
Saz pulled off where a cornfield began. Stalks stretched for what felt like miles, lush and higher than my head, and dense trees marked the distant boundaries of the farm. The SUV sat on a tilt where the dirt sloped down. We piled out after Saz, who slammed her door and circled to pop open the trunk.
“What’s all this?” Amrita asked.
A large cardboard box took up most of the trunk, along with a few bags lined up beside it. It looked like the kind of stuff you’d drop off at a thrift store—old clothes, a pair of shoes, and something thick and downy that appeared to be a fur coat.
“You said you wanted to do the ritual,” Saz declared, “so I prepared our sacrifice.”
Finch sputtered. “Wait, you didn’t tell us it was happening now .”
“Spontaneity breeds success,” Saz said brightly.
Caroline poked around in the box. Taper candles made a sound like a tongue popping against the roof of a mouth as they clacked together. She lifted a plastic baggie from the contents and held it between her index finger and thumb as if it were a used tissue—which made sense, considering it appeared to be stuffed with several used tissues, one crusty and brown with dried blood.
“Gag,” she said. “Is this someone’s snot? You were serious about all that ‘bodily material’ bullshit?”
Amrita leaned over the box, her eyes wide with horror. “Saz, you didn’t. Please tell me you didn’t.”
We huddled closer to see what had caught Amrita’s attention. Saz just grinned as Amrita lifted the fur coat. I could see, now that it was unobscured by the rest of the clothes in the box, that the hair was coarse as a mangy dog’s. There was a hood attached to it, and atop the hood were two papier-maché eyes. Below them sat a stuffed snout, thin where some of the fur had rubbed away to reveal painted-on nostrils. Protruding from the nose were two long tusks haphazardly glued to the fabric.
“The Boar King,” Caroline whispered, struck with awe. “You stole Kolesnik’s costume? You are so fucking cool. I could kiss you right now.”
Saz sketched a bow. Her smile was radiant as she waved a set of keys in the air. “I had to borrow these to get it out of the case. Sorry, Jo.”
She tossed the keys to me. I was so stunned that I almost didn’t catch them. “How the hell did you get my keys? You’re going to get me fired, Saz.”
“Or me,” Finch said, looking pale.
Saz just shrugged. I didn’t recognize the look in her eyes when she pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head—unconstrained glee, smug satisfaction, an all-knowing lilt to the lips. “You said it yourself,” she aimed at Finch. “Rotham security cameras are just props. What proof would they have?”
“I don’t know,” I started.
But she just hauled a bag out of the trunk and gestured toward the field. “Grab something and follow me. I’ll explain when we reach the center.”
“Wait. Wait a second, no way,” Finch said, holding her hands up. “You guys can go all Children of the Corn on each other, but I’m not going in there. We need to take this shit back before they expel us. I don’t care if they don’t have you on camera. Jo and I will be so fucked if you don’t—”
“Why don’t you wait in the car, then?” Caroline snapped.
We stood in nervous silence. Finch wouldn’t meet Caroline’s eyes, her jaw clenched. Caroline hoisted the cardboard box and propped it on her hip. It was hilariously out of place against her delicate bracelets and pristine white sweater. She was taunting Finch. She wanted her to know that turning away now would make her weak. That it would separate her from the rest of us and leave her stranded.
“Fine,” Finch said at last. “Let’s get this over with.”
A wooden pole rose above the maze of maize, barren and sun-bleached. Saz led us to it as if she had a compass behind her eyes, pushing stalks aside, flies buzzing between the ears. When we reached the center, she instructed us to drop the materials. She rifled around in the bags and the box and laid her findings out in the dirt—the Boar King’s coat, a pair of men’s pants and leather oxfords, the bag of tissues, three burlap sacks, paint markers, a pair of scissors, a soggy package of ground beef, and a needle in a pincushion threaded through with red embroidery floss.
“We’re making a scarecrow,” Saz announced, smoothing her hands down the front of her skirt. “Or, like, a poppet, I guess. Like I said before, the ritual requires a sacrifice. It’s called sympathetic magic. We ask for spiritual awakening and the height of our creativity. And in return, we offer the downfall of another. So we’re creating an effigy of Kolesnik, and we’re hexing him.”
“What’s the meat for?” Amrita asked, looking ill.
“We needed something to represent his heart. You’d be surprised to learn how fuckin’ hard it is to track down animal organs for sale in rural Indiana,” Saz sighed. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. I called a few butchers, and they acted like I was the weird one for asking. I mean, come on, don’t be selfish. What else are you gonna do with it?”
I stared down at the Boar King’s coat. Splayed in the dirt like that, it looked like something’s shed skin. I could imagine it animated again with Kolesnik inside of it, the hood pulled over his skull and the tusks settling on either of his cheekbones. It was a sight I’d seen every year since I came to Rotham—a visual impossible to erase. In the Boar King’s suit he was a feral creature, staked out high on his plinth at the Grotesque, the fur nearly obscuring everything but the grisly shadow of his beard. When I looked up again, Caroline had already begun to shuck leaves from the stalks of corn and drop them on the coat, stuffing them down the sleeves and into the scarecrow’s torso until it was a plump animal in the dirt.
“Is this ... morally right?” Amrita asked. “I know Kolesnik is awful, but aren’t we just as bad if we curse him?”
“He deserves this and a whole lot more,” I said, mostly to convince myself and quell the way my pulse pounded. “Especially after what he did to Caroline.”
Caroline didn’t respond, just continued filling out the pinstriped pants with grass and leaves. Her hair was a curtain, obscuring her expression.
The reminder kicked the rest of them into gear. I helped Amrita prop the shoes up at the ankles of the scarecrow’s pants, stitching the pants to the shoes by shoving the needle through a few of the shoelace holes. Saz crafted a head out of a burlap sack. It was a ghoulish thing with marked indents where she placed two black stones for eyes. Beetles crawled over the face as she tore open the package of meat and dumped the contents into Kolesnik’s new heart. Flies came like they’d been called. Saz peeled open the plastic baggie of tissues and shook them atop the wet, red matter.
Saz caught me staring at the napkins, stiff with snot and gore. “I had to dig through the trash,” she admitted, making a face. “I told you, the ritual said we had to have bodily material.”
“This is so fucked,” Amrita muttered, but she tenderly fitted the burlap head into the hood and adjusted the tusks until they were just right.
Lying there in his completion, our Kolesnik scarecrow was a nightmare. His body was long—taller than any of us if we had stood him up on his ungainly legs. The Boar King’s coat made him look like taxidermy, and the pinstriped pants gave him a kind of ridiculousness that had me smiling to myself, trying to contain the joke. His hooded head was unnerving. The tusks jutted skyward. The arms were splayed wide, black fur dusty with dirt.
Saz zipped up the coat around its new heart and straddled the bloated corpse. Kolesnik’s husk-stuffed stomach swelled beneath her thighs, the boar’s painted eyes staring up at the darkening sky. Her fingers disappeared into her bra cup and plucked a metal rectangle free from the lump it had made under the fabric—she kissed it in her fist, raised it before her, and flicked out a blade.
The box cutter sliced through the sack of the scarecrow’s jaw with one smooth drag. Dry grass burst free beneath the tusks, right where the mouth would sit.
“Okay,” Saz exhaled, gesturing to me with the knife a few times until I finally realized she was asking me to hold it. I did so gingerly. “Alright. Okay. Now, Caroline—hit me as hard as you can.”
Caroline’s eyes went wide. “Are you kidding me? I’m not going to do that.”
“I will,” Finch interrupted.
“I asked Caroline,” Saz said, cutting her eyes at Finch. “Your rings would hurt too much.”
“I’ll take them off.”
“Caroline,” Saz pleaded, her smile slipping a bit. “Come on. We need to bleed on him, and I’m too squeamish to use the knife.”
“This is ridiculous,” Amrita said, but Caroline scooted forward until her knees were nearly framing the scarecrow’s head. She touched her unblemished knuckles reverently.
“Come on, Saz, I don’t wanna hit you.”
Saz scoffed. “Of course you do. You called me a bitch yesterday.”
“I was joking.”
“Keep it up, funny guy, and hit me,” Saz provoked, grinning.
Caroline grimaced. “Oh, shut the fuck up. You can’t be mad, okay? You asked me to do this.”
Saz’s mouth fell open to answer, but Caroline’s punch connected before she could speak. Her head cracked back. A wave of black hair bobbed with Saz’s skull, and her hands flew up to her nose, cradling it, gasping in shock, her body rearing as if caught in the gravity of a crash. “Shit!” Caroline cried, immediately shaking out her hand. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
“Do it again!”
They didn’t hesitate. Saz’s hands fell away and gripped her knees, and Caroline swung, harder, knuckles landing with a resounding crunch. This time, the blood flow was immediate. It ran in fat rivers over Saz’s lips as she careened forward, red spattering all over Kolesnik’s fur and his burlap mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” Finch whispered, heavy with horror.
Saz’s cackle was high and delighted and red. “That’s what I’m talking about. That is what I’m talking about!”
Beside me, Amrita was a clenched fist, half-risen to her knees to put an end to the whole mess. There was a dangerous nest inside of me where something horrible perched and festered, fed by their eagerness for violence and the lines they were willing to cross. I was afraid they would hit me next. I was afraid to be left out entirely unbeaten. Saz swiped a hand under her nose, smearing blood all over the lower half of her face.
“Gimme that,” Caroline said to me, gesturing to the knife in my hands. I obeyed after a beat when she repeated herself. She thumbed out the blade again and slit it across her palm until a fast line formed and dribbled into the grass. She squeezed her fist over the effigy’s mouth and let the drips land there.
Saz’s teeth were rimmed with crimson along the gums when she grinned. Caroline dropped the knife and nursed her knuckles, cursing under her breath until the words dissolved into laughter, until she couldn’t contain the sound any longer.
“This is so beyond fucked,” Amrita said. “Next time I’m staying home.” But to my shock she took the knife from its place beside Caroline’s thigh and, after a sharp inhale, tore it across her palm. The skin split easily. She shuffled forward on her knees and bled onto the doll, and then the knife went to Finch. She hesitated, looking at the box cutter in her hands, and then turned to me as if asking for someone to remain on her side.
“I don’t ...,” she started, trailing off, her brow furrowing. “Come on, Jo. We are not doing this.”
Pain was not a feeling I’d ever been able to wrangle. As a kid, my grandparents had banned me from going into the garage, where my granddad collected decades of parts and antiques in rows of metal shelving. But it was a maze made perfect for my wonder. On the day he left the garage door just slightly hinged open—only about a foot’s width between the corrugated metal and the cement floor—I hunkered down and slipped inside, pacing past the precarious shelves with my body angled sideways to better shuffle between stacks. At the end of one row, he’d propped up a mirror—the sheet of unframed glass was splintered somewhere down the middle, and a large shard was missing from the bottom where it cut a jagged diagonal. In the dark mirror I was a ghoul, short hair curling with sweat around the temples, my teeth too big for my mouth, the collar of my tank top stained where my dirty hands had tugged it away to seek relief from the heat.
A creak had startled me coltish—I twisted to watch the garage door slide the rest of the way shut and hit the concrete with a bang, the room packed with close black, and in my stumble my bare foot darted back to catch me and slid down the sharpened edge of the mirror. The cut it left there was a perfect gory cleave all the way past my Achilles. I panted with pain and screamed until my grandma finally came to see what all the fuss was about. When she flicked the light on, there was a puddle already growing sticky beneath my heel.
Now I looked into Kolesnik’s red mouth, where the grass soaked up their blood and melted it into one. All I could feel was that anticipation of a void—the valley the knife would make, the halves of my heart that wanted them to love me and wanted to remain untouched by their willingness.
I could say no. I could lean away from the intertwined thing they had become—Saz in the effigy’s lap, Caroline at its helm, Amrita beside her with one hand pressed over the pulsing cut on the other, Finch hesitating at my side. If I asked to be left alone, they would clown me forever. But they would allow it. They would look at the space I had put between us, and they would not cross the moat of my heart.
But all I’d ever wanted was to be like them.
“Jo,” Finch pleaded again. “Seriously.”
Sweaty strands of hair stuck to her forehead. She pointed the knife away from her, as if afraid to look at it. Three sets of eyes flickered between the two of us. I knew what she wanted to say. I knew how she would scold me, the way disappointment would coat her tongue, how she always placed herself just beyond our boundaries.
But it was surprisingly easy to let her down. I took her hand and plied the knife from her grip. I gave it a swipe in the grass to clean the blade, and cut my heart line into two new lives. The feeling pounded all the way up to my teeth. I was immediately lightheaded as the blood welled. I tossed the knife back to Finch, and when it landed beside her knee again, she flinched. “Your turn,” I said, and I splayed my shaking hand above the scarecrow’s head, droplets spattering his mouth.
Finch’s knuckles were white when she finally made the slice in her palm, hissing through her teeth. The accusing look she gave me cut deeper than the blade, which landed with a dead thump in the dirt beside her knee as she held her fist between the Boar King’s tusks.
“ Yes ,” Saz said, and I could hear how proud we’d made her even with my eyes shut.
When my eyes opened again, she was beaming down at Kolesnik, the bridge of her nose already swelling and reddened. She would have a black eye in a day or two. She would have to explain herself and what we had done.
But she wouldn’t. She’d invent a story. We all would, and we would settle on the same page, and this moment would belong to us alone. The sun behind the trees leaving the world a crepuscular blue. The corn nodding in the breeze. The dirt beneath us so thirsty for rain. The pole jutting up from the corn as if waiting for us to erect Kolesnik’s stuffed form atop it. The wound on my hand pulsing with its own heartbeat, cruor drying in the fine cracks. The blade tucked into Saz’s bra again. Our mutual blood drying in his mouth, like a swear, like a pact, like a promise.
“What do we do now?” Caroline asked, her voice a little shaky, though it was hard to tell if it was from fear or barely concealed excitement.
Saz shrugged. “Maybe we should say something? The ritual had a whole section about incantations. You’re supposed to make your intentions super clear.”
Amrita waved her hand at the body in the dirt. “What, this isn’t clear enough?”
“Nah, fuck it, I’m out of here,” Finch said, getting to her feet and swiping her bloody hand just above the paint stains across her jeans. Amrita rose after her as Finch pushed through the corn, back in the direction of the car.
“Wait!” Saz called, then, “Finch! You’re going to get lost!” She scrambled to her feet and disappeared between the stalks, calling for them to wait up. I started to rise, but Caroline stopped me with a hand on my forearm. Her wet palm slid down until it met mine, wound to wound.
“What would you say?” she asked.
“Me? Oh, I don’t know.” I blanked, flushing. “What do they say in that movie Saz loves?”
She paused to think, and then lifted my hand to her mouth.
“I drink of my sister,” Caroline said.
I watched, horrified, as she licked across my weeping cut. Her cheeks hollowed. Then, with our hands still linked, she sloshed my blood around in her mouth and spat into the cavern of the effigy’s chest. It landed frothy and pink amid the disgusting mass. She brought our hands to my mouth and fixed me with a stare.
There was so much coaxing in that look. I could feel my heart everywhere, pulse straining against my skin as if I’d been turned inside out, veins on display.
I said, “I drink of my sister.”
I pulled her palm to my lips. Ran my tongue along the cut and felt my nostrils flare with the immediate salty tang of her blood in my mouth. I pushed saliva between my teeth, then followed suit, spitting where Caroline had a moment before.
“May you wither and rot and succumb. May you spoil and decay. May you fucking fester. So mote it be, or whatever,” Caroline said in a low, terrible voice. Then she gave me an urgent nod.
“May you fester,” I repeated, voice wavering. “So mote it be.”
“Eat shit, you disgusting bastard,” Caroline finished, zipping the fur coat the rest of the way up until the dead brush and our creation disappeared inside the Boar King’s suit, then sat back on her heels. She offered the injured hand to me again. When I took it, she hauled us to our feet, shoulders bumping, and gave my fingers a squeeze.
“Thanks for not letting it slide,” Caroline whispered, and the warmest hint of a smile bloomed before she wiped her mouth clean with the back of the hand she’d used to hit Saz. I couldn’t help it. I beamed back at her and answered the squeeze with one of my own.
We left Kolesnik behind and found Amrita and Saz waiting outside of the Suburban. Finch was already in the back seat with the door hanging open, shadowed by the car’s interior.
“There you are,” Saz called as she leaned against the Suburban’s passenger door. She licked her teeth clean and gave her car keys a playful shake. “I want Taco Bell. Who wants to drive?”