19. Sunday, October 29, 2023
Polly
Polly can feel something growing inside of her, squirming and scratching deep down in her gut.
Somehow, she’s able to see down her own throat and into her belly.
Nestled against the pink walls of her womb, she can make out a small patch of thick black-and-gray fur.
While she watches, it starts growing bigger.
Claws unfurl from the mass of fur, stretching upward, then dragging down the inside of Polly’s gut, leaving trails of bloody, pulpy flesh.
A long snout lifts out of the black fur, and Polly sees two yellow eyes looking up at her from her own depths.
She’s sure it’s going to split her apart but instead it begins to devour her from the inside.
She feels herself being sucked down the wet throat of the creature, her screams becoming muffled, the sense of her own body disappearing, until she’s the one looking up from the depths of its belly.
Polly wakes with a start, the back of her neck slick with sweat. Her covers are twisted around her legs, and she kicks furiously to free herself.
She used to crawl into bed with her sister whenever she had a bad dream.
Her sister never said anything, just pulled back the covers and made room for her.
All Polly needed was the warmth of her sister’s body next to hers, the sound of her breathing and the sugar-cookie smell of her to soothe the nightmare away.
“Hey,” she whispers into the dark. “Can you hear me?” She hasn’t heard her sister’s voice since the night in the cave. It makes her wonder if she wasn’t imagining it all along. Some kind of hallucination to help her deal with the grief.
Lying there, awake in the dark, her mind inevitably travels to Gray.
What started as a harmless flirtation with a boy has turned into something more like a dark fairy tale.
One that has her obsessed and full of longing.
It’s like he’s cast a spell over her. Wanting to escape thoughts of him, and the lingering images from her nightmare, she gets out of bed and goes out to the kitchen.
“Polly?” her mom calls out softly from the living room. She’s sitting on the couch in the dark, wrapped in a blanket. Polly glances at the clock on the stove. It reads 3:04 a.m.
“What are you doing up?” Polly whispers back, going into the room to sit down beside her on the couch, pulling on the blanket to cover her bare legs.
“I couldn’t sleep. Again.” Her mom tries to be subtle about wiping tears from her cheeks, but Polly can tell that she’s been crying. “One of the perils of being a middle-aged woman.” She laughs, but the emotion is so thick in her throat it sounds like she’s gagging.
Polly shifts so that she’s farther under the blanket and leans against her mom’s body. “Are you feeling sad because of Lucy?” She hears a catch in her mom’s breath. That’s her answer.
“I was too,” she says. She wishes she could tell her mom everything.
About Gray. About the night her sister died.
She wishes she could unload everything into her mom’s lap and ask her what she should do, but that would mean telling her mom about smoking weed at the side of the house, having a boy in her room without permission, doing mushrooms, and having sex in a cave when she said she was sleeping over at Natalie’s.
She’s gotten used to keeping secrets. It’s easier than one would think, which makes her imagine that everyone in the family probably has them. That maybe family members don’t know each other as well as they may think. That they’re all imposters in some way.
Polly rests her head on her mom’s shoulder, soaking in the warmth and familiarity of it, even reaching out to take one of her hands. “Do you think it will ever stop hurting?”
“I can’t imagine it will,” her mom answers with a sigh. “But if I figure out how it can, you’ll be the first one I tell.”
“Mom?” Polly says, lifting her head and shifting so that she can see the outline of her mother’s face in the dark.
“What is it?” her mom answers, sounding scared.
“Do you think the strange things that have happened since we moved here are just weird coincidences, or is something not right about this place?” She nods toward the trees outside the window.
Her mom looks away from her and out the same window.
She’s silent for a while, as though really considering what Polly is asking.
Then she moves so that she can put an arm around her and pull her in closer.
“It’s just taking some time to settle in, that’s all.
” She rubs Polly’s arm. “The house is great, and the woods are too. Exactly what we all needed. Not a thing to worry about.”
There’s not a whole lot of confidence in her mom’s voice, and it seems like she’s trying to convince herself as much as she is Polly, but she doesn’t push it. She’s tired. They’re both quiet then, thinking their own thoughts, staring out the window at the deep, dark woods.
Alice
Geoff bringing her Sunday-morning coffee in bed has turned into Geoff getting back in bed with her naked, pulling her T-shirt over her head, and doing things that make her forget that she has morning breath and needs to pee.
By the time he moves on top of her, she is already wrapping her legs around his hips and pushing him in deeper.
He looks down at her with a smile, loving the effect he has on her now, and that’s when she sees it.
His eyes flash all black and then back to normal again.
She puts both hands on his chest and shoves him off her. “Something is wrong with your eyes!” She pushes herself up to sitting, clutching the sheets to her chest.
He comes up on his knees to face her, looking as confused and alarmed as she is. “What’s the matter?”
“Your eyes, they went all black for a second.” She points at his now perfectly normal eyes. “Did you feel anything?”
He shakes his head and laughs. “Oh my God, Alice. It was probably just a shadow reflected or something.”
“No, I saw it. It was like ink covered your entire eyeball. Then it went back to normal.”
He widens his eyes and leans toward her. “Look now.”
Perfectly normal. “But I saw it,” she insists, feeling less sure of herself. He moves in closer and tries to nuzzle her neck, but she pushes him away.
“What’s the matter?” he asks, wearing that wounded look that he always gets when she rejects his advances.
“I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood anymore.”
He slides away from her and starts searching for his boxer shorts. “That’s fine,” he says unconvincingly. “But I’m worried about you, Alice. You seem, I don’t know…” He stands up to pull on his underwear and turns to face her. “Paranoid? On edge?”
She leans over the bed to retrieve her T-shirt. Her nakedness suddenly makes her feel vulnerable. “Do you ever wonder if we did the right thing, moving here?”
He huffs and throws his hands up in the air. “I can’t believe you even need to ask that question. As far as I’m concerned, our family has never been happier.”
“Except for when Lucy was alive,” she’s quick to reply.
She pulls the T-shirt on. When she pops her head out, Geoff is looking back at her in total confusion.
“Your daughter Lucy,” she snaps. “We can’t possibly be happier than when she was alive.
I mean, it’s literally impossible to be happier than ever, because none of us will ever be happier than when she was alive.
That’s just a fact of our lives now. There will only ever be a certain degree of happiness we can achieve without her.
” Alice’s voice escalates with each sentence, but she can’t help it.
Even contemplating greater happiness feels like a betrayal.
Geoff nods. “I understand what you’re saying,” he replies calmly, as though to counter her heightened emotions. “We all miss Lucy, but at some point, we have to focus on the family that we have left. Be grateful for that and let everything else go.”
Alice isn’t sure if she’s being overly sensitive, but it feels as though Geoff is trying to convince her to forget about Lucy. “I will never let Lucy go,” she says through gritted teeth, wondering how the conversation has taken such a turn.
“I’m only saying it for your sake, Alice,” he says, looking right at her. “All I want is for you to be as happy as I am.” Before she can respond, he goes over to the work bag she’d dumped beside the dresser when she got home on Friday. He reaches in and pulls out a folded paper.
“This fell out of your bag the other day,” he says, passing her the pamphlet the doctor had given her on the symptoms of perimenopause.
“I put it back and wasn’t going to say anything, but…
well. I know it may be hard to accept, but I think there could be more going on with you than you’re ready to admit. ”
Holding the pamphlet up she asks, “What does this have to do with anything? It was your eyes that turned black. Not mine.”
He reaches down and rubs her shin poking out from under the sheet.
Staring down at her with what might possibly be pity.
“What I was saying before,” he explains.
“The paranoia, being on edge, imagining things about the woods and this house. Maybe it can all be explained. Just consider it. Maybe go back to the doctor. See if there are any drugs that could help.” He gives her leg a quick squeeze.
“Now, I’m going to go make us a nice big breakfast.” He flashes her a wide smile, like he’s already forgotten their disagreement and flipped back to his default setting of happy, compliant, vacant husband.
He leaves the room, and she stares down at the pamphlet in her hand.
There it is, paranoia, listed along with jittery feeling, hot flashes, stress, fast heartbeat, irritability, and restlessness.
It pretty much perfectly describes how she’s been feeling lately.
She hears the doctor’s words in her head again: Often the simplest answer is the correct explanation.