The Flayed Man

Chapter 5

THE NEXT FEW DAYS ARE A BLUR OF WORK AND WORRY and my mom’s entreaties.

I stop at the Colombian bakery and get the bread she likes.

Just one loaf, but my stomach sours as I get into my car, and I end up going back for a second.

She swallows her daily pills, a round one the color of Dijon mustard and an oblong one the color of cooked chicken breast, while I hold out a glass of water and feign disinterest. It humiliates her, any sign that I don’t trust her to manage it herself, even if we both know that I don’t.

I order takeout and we watch reruns of L.A.

Law. I sleep when I can. Someone’s grandfather comes into the hospital with a burst appendix.

A twenty-year-old in labor who didn’t know she was pregnant, a man with a bullet through his foot, ruined sneaker and ruined flesh so intermingled they became something new, no longer separate.

My mom seems all right, until she doesn’t.

A door slams, slicing through the whir of the dishwater. The pen flies out of my hand and rolls somewhere under the couch.

“Ellis.” Her voice is thick with sleep. The old T-shirt she sleeps in sags off one shoulder. “Someone’s in the house.”

I’m almost electrocuted with panic, until I see what she’s got in her hand: a bright pink Post-it. Even with her thumb covering the middle, I recognize my own handwriting. Hairbrush is in the second drawer to the right.

“I wrote that.” It comes out too harsh. My skin crawls in the electric current’s aftermath. “It’s for you. To help you.”

She frowns and pats at her hair. The frizzy halo goes lopsided. “You wrote it?”

“Yes, Mom.” Don’t say it too fast, or it’ll sound like an admission of guilt. Don’t say it too slow, or she’ll accuse me of talking down to her. “I write all of them.”

Her eye catches one of the Post-its stuck to the wall.

Keep the thermostat at 70. Her frown draws lines like railroad tracks between her features.

She scans the living area, where more Post-its scatter the coffee table—Green button = on, Red button = off—the TV—Don’t unplug!

—the side of the fridge, the counters, the walls.

“Why would you write these?” Her voice arcs up, high pitched and pitiful. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Of course not, it’s—”

Too slow. She rushes from note to note, crumpling them up and tossing them wildly. Post-its flutter around the room like a flurry of multicolored snow. “You do, don’t you. I’ve never been good enough for you. Does bossing me around make you feel good? Does it make you feel special?”

“I’m just trying to help.”

She snatches a cereal box off the counter and flings it to the ground. Cornflakes scatter like ashes. “I don’t need your help. I can take care of myself.”

“No, you can’t,” I snap. No, remember all the books, all the advice. Stay calm. Don’t argue. But it’s too late now. “You forget things. You’re going to hurt yourself or someone else if I don’t write the notes. I’m not—it’s not—I’m just trying to make sure you’re okay.”

Her mouth twists into a pout. “Everyone forgets things. Remember when you forgot your homework at that rest stop in Colorado and we had to drive an extra three hours to get it?”

She’s brought that up a hundred times, when we have this very same argument. Only for her, every time still feels like the first.

“This is different.”

“Different?” She kicks at the cereal carnage around her. “Different how?”

I open my mouth, but she’s back on the offense. “I’ll tell you how it’s different. It’s different because you want it to be different. He’s poisoning your mind. He’s trying to take you away from me. Just like he took my mother.”

In her worst moments, my mom is her sixteen-year-old self again, searching for meaning in her mother’s abandonment.

If her mother had been kidnapped, had been devoured by a monster, had been murdered and dumped on the side of the road, even, she might sleep better at night, because that would mean her mother hadn’t simply walked away.

“Mom, your mother—”

“I know what you’re going to say!” she screeches. “I know what you’re going to say, but that’s just what he makes you think!” She sweeps a deafening cascade of silverware from the dish rack to the floor. “The flayed man, he watches me! He’s waiting!”

Plates and bowls follow the silverware. My ears ring with bright flares of crashing melamine. My mom’s alone at night when I work, and most of the day while I sleep. The flayed man is imaginary, but what if someone is watching her?

Before I can collect myself, she shifts her attention to the fridge.

“I’m hungry,” she whines, tugging at the door. All of the rage bleeds out of her in a second. So fast that if I’m not careful, I’ll start to wonder if it was ever there at all.

“Mom.” I try to control the worry seeping into my voice. It might be nothing. She gets paranoid sometimes, and she was already agitated over the Post-its. “Has anyone but me and Joanne come into the apartment?”

Joanne is our upstairs neighbor, who drops by every so often to help scrub the shower or clean out the fridge. She’s the person my mom calls if she needs something while I’m at work.

“No.” She pulls the fridge door open, then slams it closed again with a dull thud. “Stop being dramatic.”

“But you said—”

My mom juts her lower lip out, childlike. “Well, I made that up.”

“You—” I can’t tell if my disbelief is real or just another form of frustration. “Why?”

“You were being a brat.”

Something in my gut untwists. We’re back on familiar ground now. We’ve played this game before, my mom and me.

“Okay.” I pick through the kitchen shrapnel scattered on the floor and stretch across her, reaching for the freezer. “Let me get you something to eat.”

She beats me to it, wrenching the freezer door open with all her strength.

Impact rings in my ears, and my vision shatters into a haze of sparks.

By the time I put together what’s happened—she opened the freezer door right into my face, fuck—I’m already sagging against the sink.

I brace myself on one elbow and shake my head to clear the explosion away.

A thump, and ice chips skitter across the kitchen floor. Another, heavier, the sodden cardboard of a microwave meal landing on its side. I catch a bag of frozen peas, toss them into the sink, but miss another bag of corn that hits the ground with a slap.

“Ellis?” My mom wavers. Under it I hear the clear command: Fix this.

I think of Uncle Bill, and the heartless way he urged me to live for myself. My mom can barely feel her way around a syringe some days, and cries in the shower because she confuses the hot and cold. What would she do without my Post-its, my reminders, my assurances, my sacrifices?

She’d be devoured by the curse in her heart, and no sacrifice, no patience, no love is enough to stop it once it’s jumped its chain.

So my mom will die quietly, her mind run out on her, and I’ll put a kitchen knife through her ribs to separate her from her hunger.

Until then, I’m tied to her. She needs me.

A shattering noise wrenches me back to the present. Then, the smell. Blood like nitrile gloves and rubber coating, like chemical heartburn, like loneliness.

Another vial rolls over the lip of the freezer and smashes on the linoleum.

It smells like hope, like need. My mom is on her knees, hands thrust into the leakage, lifting a ruddy mess of glass and ice to her mouth.

Red drips through her fingers, melting where it meets skin, splattering her pajama shirt.

“Mom.” I kneel next to her, wrap my arms around her wrists. I need to secure the remaining vials, but I need to help her first, before she swallows those slivers of glass into places I can’t fish them out. “Mom, put that down.”

She bucks against my grip. “Mom, listen to me. There’s glass in there. Put your hands down, and I’ll get you a fresh vial.”

Glass on plastic, rolling. Another one shatters. She twists, trying to snatch for it, and growls a sound that scrapes warning down my spine.

“Mom!” She whips around, and her lips are pulled back, canines glinting too large, the tongue behind them blackening and something primal and ghastly menacing me through her eyes.

Then it’s gone. She relaxes. She lets me maneuver her to the sink to shake the glass from her clenched fists and flush clean the lacerations made by that fistful of sharpened points.

My temple stings. It’s going to bruise. I’d better come up with something good to tell my supervisor about that, and about being late.

But if I hadn’t snapped at her, if I hadn’t imposed, if I hadn’t stacked the vials so precariously…

I know it’s not my fault. But it’s still my responsibility to fix it.

I scrub the floor and stack the dishes and return the frozen vegetables to their rightful places.

I change out of my blood-soaked pants, settle my mom in front of the couch, and turn on The Golden Girls.

I call my supervisor as I fumble with my car keys and explain in a breathless rush, unable to pause even as she talks over me, assuring me it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

It’s not okay. It’s getting worse every day.

I call Uncle Bill as I drive, the highway howling outside my cracked-open window. Tell him I need to come by again, that something’s happened. I can’t bring myself to explain the specifics, but I think he guesses.

“Sure, Ellie.” He hacks out a cough. Maybe hard living’s finally catching up to him. “Want to come by now?”

“I’m late for work. Can I come in the morning?”

“Sure thing. If I’m out, you know how to get into the garage.”

“Thanks.”

“Anytime. Don’t work too hard.”

I laugh, but it sounds fake. Feels fake too. Maybe he hears it, because he says, suddenly, “You can’t put it off forever, you know.”

“Put what off?” I don’t feel like laughing anymore.

“I don’t know.” But he does, and I do too. He means stirring some Xanax into her tea and letting her fall asleep forever. Driving her out to the desert and ripping her throat out with my fangs. “Life’s a bitch.”

Yeah, or maybe bitterness is just the cost of living like we do. Just because he’s family doesn’t mean he knows me, what I’m capable of, what I can do or what I can stand.

“See you in the morning, Uncle Bill.” I hang up, resisting the urge to hurl my phone out of the window to blow away into the desert’s waiting maw like just another tumbleweed.

A long night of busted noses and sliced-off fingers cools my frustration.

By the time I pull into Uncle Bill’s driveway, I’m almost hoping he’s awake early again, that he’ll offer me a cup of his nasty instant coffee, that he’ll apologize or commiserate or, I don’t know.

It’s a little disappointing to find the door locked and all the lights off.

The garage is cold, like always.

His truck is gone, so he must be out. Everything looks normal, cables and power tools and paint buckets, but the smell is wrong.

Subtly, at first, an unexpected sterile edge to the air.

The closer I get to the freezer, the more it presses in on me, the sense that something’s off. Something’s missing.

I flip the heavy lid up. A pale tundra of ice chips and humming insulation stares back. The freezer’s empty.

“Fuck.” Uncle Bill really couldn’t be bothered to restock the freezer before he left? Or at least tell me to come by later? Is this some kind of sick punishment for disagreeing with him about my mom?

There’s a dark stain in the corner. The remnants of a smashed vial, slivers of glass stabbing up through the tattered label like glittering teeth through black-and-white gums. I drop the lid, and the slam of foam on plastic rings fuzzy in my ears.

I press my thumbs into the space between my eyeballs and brow bones until my vision doubles, then quadruples, then goes black.

When I open my eyes next, the walls are dripping blood. Red runs from the seams in the wood, foams up from the cracks in the cement, dotted with twisting white worms.

Then I blink, and the walls are clean.

God, Ellis. Get it together. A trick of the half-dead fluorescent bulbs, or an afterimage of pressing my thumbs into my eyes.

Uncle Bill probably tripped over one of the stupid coiling cables and broke some vials.

That’s so like him, to say he’s got my back and then forget to follow through.

So what? That’s why the truck is gone, he left early for work to replace the blood he ruined.

But when I try to swallow, a pebble of uncertainty rattles through my esophagus, past my stomach, my intestines, and settles like a lead weight in my feet.

Hey man, I text him before pulling out of the driveway, you could have told me the freezer was empty. Then I feel guilty and add, Is tomorrow morning okay? I can bring takeout or something.

My mom’s asleep on the couch when I get home. I take an extra-long shower and unload the dishwasher, then crawl into bed, set my alarm, and try not to be too pissed at Uncle Bill for letting me down.

I dream about a faceless ghost in a medic jacket, and the smell of lemons. I wake up to screaming.