Grim and Darling

CHAPTER SIX

Dear Self,

You wake up in Mrs. Sherman’s flower bed with your mouth tasting of metal.

You are cold, and shivering, and slimey. In the damp light from the window, you can see a speckle of wet across your arms and hands, and when you wipe your face, your palms come back glistening. Inky black, but you know it’s not ink. For all you know, you are the blood-battered hostage of a war. The gutted victim of a homicide. The bystander to a triple takedown.

But you don’t know anything.

All you know is your mouth tastes horrible, and you need to get home.

There are roses around your ears and violets between your fingers, and you’ve crushed her peonies beneath your feet. You can hear her from the house, the off-key singing she does because she’s still stuck in a youth spent chasing a Broadway dream that died somewhere in the Midwest with a positive pregnancy test and a bad case of deadbeat dad. She was probably wearing that see-through robe and smoking those black cigarettes, indulging her drinking problem with a mixture of gin and whiskey She was probably inspecting every wrinkle in the mirror, pulling her temples back, and her chin up, and her lips tight over her teeth.

She was probably going to come outside in the morning and flip her shit over her ruined flower bed.

You duck through the darkened yard, avoiding the glow from the windows like some dark nocturnal creature. Mrs. Sherman lived on the complete opposite side of town, and it’s kind of amazing that you made it this far without getting picked up by the cops. Thank god for that, because you’re only wearing a bra and a pair of sweatpants, and you’re fucking freezing. You hop fences and run down alleyways to get home, hiding behind some especially smelly trash cans when one of those cop cars rolls slowly by. You scare a cat that screeches beneath someone’s porch and fling yourself into the dark when the living room light bursts on. You get caught up in a wild morning-glory bush that’s eating up a fence you scrambled over, and you end up trailing flowers all the way back to your house.

You should have known something was wrong.

You should have known.

Even from the end of the driveway, the house felt hollow. Like the space in a bowl waiting to be filled, like the see-through squares of a window, suddenly empty, and nothing more. You should have known the moment you stepped through the door, but you don’t. You don’t notice anything out of place until you make it to the kitchen, and you slip. Your feet go out from underneath you, and you land knees and palms in a puddle of something wet and warm and thick. You stand, unsteady, feet still slipping, and reach for the lightswitch.

The kitchen floods with a weak yellow glow from the ancient overhead light, and you can’t move. You can’t blink. Can’t breathe. Can’t feel your heart, or your skin, or your eyes. Can’t cry, or swallow, or sob. You can’t even scream. You drop your eyes to your feet, and you don’t look up. Reaching blindly for the old rotary phone on the wall with the long curly cord, you press the phone to your ear as the panic starts to rise. You wait with something concrete blooming in your throat and weight like a hurricane sitting on your breastbone, and when the line clicks on and his gruff voice comes through the speaker, you lose your shit entirely.

You can only whisper even though you feel like screaming.

“Dad?”

Sincerely,

Me

NEXT

AN:

*falls down at the alter of Hadley Hemingway*