[Short Story] Letter to The Girl That Ate My Skin

Hello:
I heard you crawling through the walls. At first you tried to hide from me that you were there, but in the night when I tried to sleep you scratched and scrabbled behind my bed. In the morning you left dark hair in my sink and butterfly wings on the kitchen floor.
I probably should’ve worried about you more, but at the time I was working on a story about solipsist astronauts and losing my mind. I remembered my friend Hanna came over one morning to try and sell me Avon again and tell me that the lizards living on the moon would soon kill us all.
“God told me about it, they’re building a laser cannon. We’re going to wake up one day with our eyes melted right out of our heads,” she said, playing with the bangle bracelets on her wrist, “I have a new moisturizer that you’d love. You’re looking a little worn out lately. Oh, and I think you should try out this concealer, for the dark spots underneath your eyes. Do you even sleep anymore?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “sleeping isn’t really fun anymore.”
“Oh Addy,” Hanna said, and sighed.
I got up and went into the kitchen to pour myself another cup of coffee. I checked my reflection in the sink full of dirty water and pressed my fingers underneath my eyes.
“Addy,” Hanna said.
I said nothing, but continued to examine my face in the water.
“Addy!” Hanna said again.
“Jesus God, what is it?” I asked. I grabbed my cup of coffee, poured in a packet of sugar, and stirred it with a dirty spoon dredged up from the bottom of that dirty water. Then I rummaged in the refrigerator searching for the milk, which I found behind a half head of lettuce and a tub of yogurt. Of course, the milk was unusable, sour and yellowed. I shoved it into the back of the refrigerator.
“Hanna?” I asked, noticing she hadn’t spoken in a while.
I walked back into the living room and found Margo my cat, my fat black bad magic cat, sitting in her lap. Hanna’s arms had gone rigid and her face limp, and it was as if all the color leached out of her clothes and hair. Margo, still sitting in Hanna’s lap, turned her head toward me. Her eyes had been eaten out of her face, nothing left but two engorged holes.

Hanna left without trying to sell me the face cream. I picked up Margo and she whined when I touched the corners of her gouged out eyes. I fed her tuna and cream corn, her favorite, and then she ran off into a dark corner and wouldn’t come when I spoke her name. I meant to call the veterinarian, but then my ex-boyfriend called and then my unfinished story in the other room called, and I started looking at black lace dresses on Etsy, and I never got around to it.

You continued to skitter through the walls, keeping me awake. But at that point in my life I was used to the haze of insomnia, that plaster taste at the back of my tongue. Everything except the blank page like a snowstorm seemed inconsequential, even eyeless Margo, even when the hole appeared in the wall directly above my head.
I only half-remembered the night you came out of the walls and crawled down into bed beside me. You’d startled me out of a half dream where I’d been growing into a tree when your hair spilled into my eyes and mouth. Full, dark hair, glittering, and when you lay down on top of me that hair wrapped around your wrists and my throat, binding us together.
In the morning you scurried away like a bad dream, but the strands of hair remained. I thought about calling an exorcist, but then I remembered I didn’t believe in god. And I thought about possibly covering the hole in the wall with an Egon Schiele print, but then my friend Josie called and we went down to the bar to drink amaretto sours.
“I really should be writing,” I said after my third drink.
“Come on, have another drink,” she said, like everyone always said, her face smearing into the wall like a cartoon, “to be a writer you need to have experience, right? Well you’re experiencing this right now.”
So I ordered another drink, and I pressed the glass to my mouth and murmured, “I think I’m living with a demon.”
“What?” Josie said.
“I’m actually quite terrified right now. I guess I didn’t think of it. How much I was scared. Or needed to be scared.”
Josie hesitated for a moment, and then she laughed.
“Oh, Addy, I can never tell when you’re joking,” she said.

She took me home at two in the morning and held my hair as I threw up in the bathroom. Then she led me to the bedroom, took off my heels, and left me alone. You came out of the hole in the wall then, while I was fluttering nausea, and trying to keep my stomach from spilling out. I breathed out. Breathed in your hair.
Somehow after that it no longer seemed strange to have you there in bed with me.
I know this is going to sound strange to you, but please don’t laugh. I thought those were our most romantic times together, your hair gently asphyxiating me every time I tried to lift my head or move away. The two of us in half-sleep, choking like summer dream-pop.

“Tell me secrets,” you whispered in a gritty, glass voice.
So I lifted up my shirt and I showed you the scars on my hips, the pale pink strips.
“Where did you get those?” you asked,I tried to think back to a day when I didn’t have those scars, some summer memory maybe, where I lifted up my dress up to let the moths out, to find my hips warm and untouched. I grew hot. I couldn’t remember anything at all.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Tell me more,” you said.
“Once my mother tried to kill me,” I said, “she put her hands around my throat and squeezed and squeezed, and I couldn’t breathe.
“Tell me more,” you said.
I did, though you wouldn’t even tell me your name.

And in those times I still tried to ask your name, if you remember. One night you said "Call me Madeline," and then another night you said you were never anyone but Andy. Or Flora. Or Saint Catherine. Like that would hide what you were, though I saw it through the tangle of hair, that diseased and calibrated skin. Sexless, hipless, the body of a hungry child.
"What do you want me to call you tonight?" I said, "This is getting boring."
"Call me momma," you said, and you smiled with those black, threaded lips. You tugged and drew my mouth to your breast, said, "are you hungry, baby?"
I bit down hard. I wanted you to scream, you see. I wanted you to scream and scream, and I'm sure if you had I would've kept clenching down until I'd bitten your nipple right off. But instead you laughed and cradled my head close, as if to urge me to bite harder, and whispered, “shhh.”
I let go of you and wiped the blood from my chin. I shook as you held me. I thrashed as you held me. But you kept whispering, “shhh,” until my limbs ceased.

In the morning when you disappeared I wandered out into the backyard with a cup of coffee. The flowers were dying. The grass withered, razor-cut, a miserable sea. Even the dogwood tree that bloomed every year with its acidwashed pink flowers looked. Then the neighbor’s cat wandered into the yard, the orange tabby. It oozed up to me, whining, with its face hollowed out. Blood dripped down its whiskers. I picked up the tabby and wiped at the blood with my sleeve, and that familiar nausea returned. That’s the first time I realized these things around me had been dying for quite a long time.
Maybe you understand, things sneak up on you, you lose focus, or you’re too focused. That’s the problem. There’s no room for this sort of thing. I wanted to lose my mind on my terms, with my own hallucinations and delusions. Sleeplessness. Not the dead thing slipping under my bed. Girl in the walls. Skittering.

I know this is taking away from the story, but I wanted to tell you something I never told you before. I was dating this artist r when I became interested in the idea of destruction as creation. Like in Hindu mythology there is a holy trinity. Brahma, the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. Brahma is the one with the three blue hands, sitting on a pink lotus expanding into fractals. Vishnu, the one with infinite heads and infinite arms. Shiva looks almost benign compared to the two of them, Shiva with the soft face and soft smile, meditating with one palm outward. What you learn soon enough is that Shiva and Brahma perform the same function - that of movement through empty space.
Or think of the Christian god if that’s an easier way to understand. God, creating Eden and Adam and Eve. They were created in His own image, that’s what the bible says. Perfect in every way. But God was like the mousy sixteen year old girl who painted in too-heavy acrylics and wore black to hide,who had to wake up the next morning and realize that her thighs were too big and the lights too bright and everything was sort of horrible in this bloated, tired way, especially art. So the sixteen year old girl would put the acrylic paintings out in her driveway and burn them. God cast Adam and Eve out of the garden and ended the world. But it was the same response. Destruction as creation. This, he said, was the most difficult concept to grasp. The last lesson of the artist.

But he wasn’t even close.

The next night when you crawled down into my bed you whispered in my ear, “I want to tell you something.”
You didn’t speak for a long time after that. I huddled close to you with my eyes closed and listened to your breath. It was the sound of clouds fighting with teeth.
“Before I was a demon I thought I was a boy,” she said, “I went to Catholic school and I fell in love with a blond haired girl, the kind of girl that looks good in sunshine. I asked her to marry me. I loved that girl.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
In response she pressed closer and the soft weight of her hair choked me.
“Because they told me wrong. They told me I was a boy but when I looked in the mirror I saw a demon. And I tried to be a boy but you know that mirrors never lie. The girl I loved, she laughed at me when I told her, but it was this hateful laugh, like she was hoping I’d die for saying such a thing. So I scratched and scratched at my skin until I found my real skin.”
“And what happened to her?” I asked, “the girl?”
I expected you to say, “I ate her whole,” or, “she never existed,” or, “I scratched out her eyes,” but instead you said, in this quiet, hissing voice,
“She didn’t love me anymore.”
You tried to pull away. I felt your hair uncurling, but I grabbed you and pulled you close. For a long time I lay like that, with our faces pressed together, my mouth on your neck. Do you remember that moment? I can’t stop thinking of it, because all I wanted to say is, “I’ll love you better. I want to learn how to love better.”

I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought you were gone, so I went into my office and got out my laptop and lit a cigarette. You came out of the wall and stood behind me for a long while. I couldn’t write with you standing over my shoulder like that, so I watched the blank page and smoked the cigarette and tried to keep from moving.
“Addy,” you said.
“I’m writing,” I said, “please, I’m writing.”
Though what I wanted to say was, you’re a demon who eats cat eyes. You never went to Catholic school.
“Addy, I scare you.”
You pressed your hands against my neck, those cold, rough-worn hands.
“But you like that. Being scared.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, and the cigarette in my mouth turned into a flume and my mouth felt like a cave stretching out past my head. That was the thing about being around you, I seemed to be living this constant amalgamation of shifting parts. Flowers bent into used condoms. My body broken apart into a sewing machine.
“You’re writing about me, aren’t you?’ you asked.
In response I shut my laptop and whirred around in my chair. The cigarette dropped in my lap, burning my thigh. I grabbed it and threw it onto the carpet, crushed it between my toes. You laughed, and I shrunk away when you reached for my leg. I thought you were going to hit me, something about the way you moved, perhaps, like a slow poison. But instead you pressed your hands over the red cigarette burn on my leg and kissed my cheek.
I turned away. Pushed you away. You fled, so quiet, that I only heard the rustle of the wallpaper as you crawled up back into the hole in the wall. I looked down at my thigh and it was black from where you touched me.
I went into the kitchen with your words beating me on the back of the head. “She didn’t love me anymore.” “She didn’t love me anymore.” I turned on the water faucet. Eyes floated up from the dredges of the sink, cat eyes with the shredded nerve fibers, drooping eyes with tiger irises.
I scooped the eyes out of the water and cradled them close. Behind me, Margo whined. I looked back at her, and she had her head craned up, toward the window. I looked at the window and there was the chalky imprint of a dead bird against the glass. Someone tampered with the sky - it was brown and muddy, the color of dead leaves, and the dogwood tree turned black and burnt.
I dropped the eyeballs onto the floor and stepped over them to get to my laptop in the other room, only to find that you’d smashed it apart and scattered the pieces on the carpet. I reached for another cigarette, but your hair shot out of the crevices and air vents and wrapped around my wrists, my waist, trapping me there.

The artist was wrong. Destruction is not a form of creation, it’s the only creation there ever was. If I set my fingers to a keyboard and type, I must tip a needle back into my head and suck out the best part of hell. When I slept with the demon, I was knotting my fingers back until they broke, dripping with the cat eyes in the sink. That’s all it ever was: tearing down to search for the way in.

You pressed your hands against my hips, against those pale pink strips of scars, and your hands fit perfectly against the impression. Those forgotten scars
Well, not scars, they’d never been scars, but imprints of your hands.
“Let me go,” I whispered, voice weak. Muddied. My voice the color of dead autumn leaves.
You pressed your mouth to shoulder and bit down. My body shook and threatened to collapse, the soft parts dissolving. I screamed when you tore the skin from bone and swallowed it whole. I’d never screamed like that before, you know, that kind of screaming was only for the movies until now. Until you made me scream for you.
I struggled and tried to pull away, but then you bent down with your black hair winding its way through my head, and you whispered:
“It’s kind of fun to be damaged, don’t you think?”
That’s when I knew the reason why you’d laughed the night I bit down on your nipple, ready to bite it right off. I knew why you held me close and whispered “shhh,” as I drew blood.
You pushed my head down into the carpet and ate the back of my neck, while I pressed my hands and knees into the carpet, trembling, and I smiled.

Hey, demon, are you still reading this? It’s so dark in this room that I can’t see anymore, even when I take my hands away from my eyes.I’m not sure how long I’ve been here waiting for you to come back, though I know soon you’ll crawl down from the walls and pull me into you. I’m still thinking of all the things we’re going to do together, all the things that we could do. Let’s push over bookcases in the Library of Alexandria, chase each other through the woods with machetes, feed Jesus to the lions in the Colosseum.
So dark, and I can’t find the door or the windows. But I can feel the place where you burned me, right on my hips. I think I’ll just lay here, head against the wall, with my fingers pressed against the scars you gave me, listening to Margo whine at me from the other side of the wall.
Too tired to write anymore, and it’s strange, how it doesn’t seem to matter right now.

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Stock photo from Pixabay
Self portrait by me canon t51

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[Short Story] Job Requirements For The Destroyer of Worlds
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