Wretches

TW: brief mention of self-harm

Throw a handful of loose dirt into six empty feet and full box. Full of receding skin and melting eyeballs and Sunday best.

We sing. Bagpipe accompaniment. Except the bagpipes are all in my head. Pulsing against the arc of my skull.

Or maybe there are bagpipes. Behind me. Moaning the vague notes to Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound.

Wretch.

Wretch like me.

Wrenched.

Wretch.

My tongue weighs on floor of my mouth. Tripping over chains. And mercy.

Skin flaking off in a rotting box and I call it mercy. To stand at the edge with clumps of dirt tumbling in but not tumbling in myself. Mercy. Veins frozen. The scent of formaldehyde.

What do we bury with her??? A snot-soaked blankie that dragged on the ground and a C on a spelling test and half of a college degree and an old nightmare and Saturday morning cartoons and a baseball and ballet shoes and keys to an apartment and then a condo and nanna’s recipe for brioche and the scent of nanna’s perfume after kindergarten and 10,000 in life insurance and the secret always destined for 6 feet under and swimming lessons and rough ocean waves and daffodils wilting on the kitchen counter.

Mercy for the wretches.

Eraser squeaking across lined paper.

Where do all the secrets go?

If I slipped down the slope. Smudging the mud on the knees of my pantyhose. And if I pry off the wood.

I’ll stare into shame and shadows. Sunken cheeks, or not sunken. Artificially plump. Pinned to cotton balls and dusted with overripe blush. And I’ll wait for her chest to rise and fall or her eyes to flutter. And then I’ll wait for her dissolve into dirt. Because without breath she should be nothing. But she isn’t. Just the papery husk of ripened corn.

I blink.

No bagpipes wail. The last note has ended. They will cover her in dirt. And maybe when they do... the breath will reenter her and she’ll pry at the wooden slats above her and scratch until her fingernails peel and splinters shred her hands.

But she won’t. No breath. Just formaldehyde.

When we were girls together we played in the autumn leaves. We pretended to be sprites who could interpret the squirrels and make flowers bloom and our enemies hurt. Once, she found a sharp stick and plunged into the earth, leaning on it with all her weight. “Leigh! This is the mark of my kingdom. And I’m queen of the sprites and it’s my house anyway and so I get to make up the rules.” And I did a curtsy. Bow to Queen Wren in her house with her yard and her dogs’ waste turning the grass yellow. Her stick and her flag. It wasn’t my house. It wasn’t my stick. I curtsy.

And when we were not quite women we’d play together still. In a different game of tears and petty betrayals. Wren once spent an hour curling waist-length ringlets and brushing glitter on the corner of her eyes while I laid on her bed, finding patterns in the popcorn ceiling. She wanted to dance that night instead of wilting in the suburban doldrums like we did every Friday, browsing infinite channels and stealing sips of old whiskey from the cabinet. She wanted to flirt and wake up in someone else’s bed instead of hers, where I was, with the pink paisley quilt and pillows trimmed in white lace.

“Wren,” I said, “it won’t work and you’ll end up hurt or punished or arrested.”

She laughed with faux naïveté, “You’re at my house though. That means I’m curling your hair next.”

Always at her house because her parents were never home. Only Nanna, who puttered around the kitchen and read Jane Austen and vacuumed. My parents haunted their own house. The drapes never opened, the garbage always seemed to smell. They wouldn’t talk or fight, only grumble in the shadows, their faces lit by dull computer light until they faded into sleep. It wasn’t my house. It was theirs. And they chose to never dust the bookshelves and watch me jealously while I skulked through the halls.

That night we did dance. And I stumbled back to Wren’s house unaccompanied and felt for the spare key hidden under the loose brick on the left. I bruised my fingernail when it fell back into place. I slept under Wren’s paisley covers while she dozed under the navy blue ones that belonged to a college boy from Detroit.

Nanna looked more dead than her granddaughter her casket. Her hair seemed wispy and her lips seemed thin. A handful of dirt into 6 empty feet and a full box. Wren vomiting on a final resting place. My pale hands holding back her hair. Bile staining my formal winter coat. A chilly haze turning the sky grey.

I saw her first apartment, with a little shrine to Nanna on a dark-stained end table her boyfriend found on the street. Nanna’s scrawled brioche recipe sat behind glass, like the corpse of a butterfly pinned through its heart.

Do butterflies have hearts?

She thought I wouldn’t notice dark bruises on her hips at the pool that afternoon. Or maybe she wanted me to see them. Who suggests swimming in March? And the thin white lines, jagged across brown skin. She let her feet dangle in the chlorine. Silence pressed between us, tightening my chest and quickening my heart.

I knew others with lines. Maybe we cut ourselves hoping to bleed roses and bruise ourselves trying to paint irises on our skin. Maybe we destroy ourselves hoping to find beauty in the rubble, but finding only more pain. Maybe our brains just get sick. Like catching a cold. An invasive bacteria hurting us behind closed bathroom doors.

“Leigh, I dropped out of college.”

I guessed as much. That life belonged to someone else.

“Carl has been asking about marriage. He wants a kid. A little version of himself to run around in the world.”

Self-absorbed prick.

“Will you say yes?”

“I don’t know. I’m not feeling well. I want to move to the desert and live in the sun and never be cold again.”

“Don’t say yes.”

She laughed with her throat but her eyes stayed dull.

Dull eyes. To be eaten by hungry maggots now. Forever hidden under cold eyelids.

When she lived in the dorms she didn’t have the lines on her hips. I came in one day, hair dripping from an October downpour that drenched me on my walk from the train station. She greeted me at the glass doors, leaving a handprint smudge on the glass as she pushed it open. She wanted to play billiards with the boys down the hall.

“Don has this great hair and he plays for the soccer team. And his friends Zach and Carl are okay too. Nice. They smuggled in some vodka. Zach has a fake. Which is good because some asshole bouncer took mine. You’re soaking. You can borrow my blow dryer and some clothes. We’ve always been the same size.”

Don did have good hair. He chuckled at mine, not quite dry, and passed me a plastic cup. He liked the shirt I was wearing— yellow, falling just below my ribs with lace at the edges— and I said I liked his tee even though it seemed faded and the band name was foreign to me.

Zach kept trying to show Wren how to hold the pole, pulling her hips into his and maneuvering them— a thinly veiled craving for the touch of her skin. Wren swatted him away laughing and stumbling into Don, though I’d seen her steady after many more drinks.

We all slept in one room that night— Wren and me entwined on Zach’s bed. Don tucked snugly in his own sheets. The other two on the floor, the firmness and grit of cheap carpet keeping them up.

Zach emailed me when Wren left for Arizona. He asked if I had heard from her or Carl. He knew we were still in touch. "In touch" meaning quarterly well-meaning messages and an annual afternoon coffee in her apartment.

“Just wondering. Sorry I haven’t reached out sooner.”

I sent it to the spam folder.

Wren mailed me a post card a week before from a town named Jerome, illustrated as a cluster of western buildings clinging to a shrubbed hillside. A dusty film blanketed the crooked shingles. Wren always had poor penmanship. She had me write her letters to Santa so he wouldn’t know she hadn’t been practicing school work.

“Leigh,

It isn’t even hot here. It snows in the winter because this place is way up in the mountains between Sedona and Prescott. I’m waitressing at a cafe. They say it’s haunted out here because the old hotel used to be an asylum and it burned to ground or something and a lot of people died. I’m hoping to move down the hill, get some shitty desk job, buy some property. Don’t tell Carl where I went. Or my mom. Take care.”

If there are ghosts wherever anyone’s died the whole world is haunted.

Wren’s ghost would hover over the bathtub in Sedona.

Bleached of the blood that once stained it. Disinfectant covering the smell of rot.

Perhaps her skin cells linger on the bathroom walls. Lifeless but glued to the eggshell paint by humidity. Or the lonely edge of a split end clings to the caulking near the toilet.

Don found the body quickly. The obituary said that they had lived in the condo for three years together. They owned a cat named Henry and a set of luxury pans.

“Wren was a selfless partner, daughter and friend. We ask for anyone with any information related to her death to come forward. A service celebrating her life will be held this Sunday.”

They had obviously put concealer over the lone thin line across her throat. Don insisted on an open casket.

A lie. The peaceful expression. A lie. Her face should be contorted under that box wincing with every thump of dirt, lips twisted into a grimace.

The shadows in the box must be soupy with her secrets. The ones she kept buried in the dirt of her backyard and hidden in the coat closet of the condo and in nanna’s own box and in a boy’s blue bed and under 5 feet of chlorinated water and 6 feet of dirt.

I’ll fall in and smudge my pantyhose with the mud and let them cover me too. It was only ever her world. I curtsied. Time only moved at the pace of quarterly emails bringing news from the desert.

I’ll inhale the soil. Until I drown in it.

But I walk away. Wondering what’s in the box with her.

No small grace for the wretched.