The Lonely

Woodbury, Minnesota

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The Lonely
© 2014 by Ainslie Hogarth.

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E-book ISBN: 9780738744179

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For my Grandma and my Auntie Phyllis,

who are both wonderful people and
not fucking bitches at all.

The End

Just to warn you, I die at the end of all of this. So don't get too attached to me or anything. I bleed to death, and it's gruesome. So if you're squeamish or don't like to see bad stuff happen to kids, then you should probably just stop now. Because what happens is that I bleed slowly all day long. I get pale and desperate and cry and throw up. And I'm just a kid so I don't deserve any of it. I'm “too young to die.” Even though I'm just as susceptible to being crushed by a giant rock as anyone.

Some people, though, they can't handle that kind of thing. Because kids are pure and innocent, full of rarest unicorn blood, and their guts are like pearls or diamonds or some other naturally occurring treasure sliced from Mother Nature.

The bleeding is kind of fun though. As it drains from your brain and out through the place where your legs used to be, you start to feel like you're floating on a million silvery needles, prickling. Like nothing matters anymore because it doesn't because you're stuck under a rock and you're going to die. Which is more of a relief than you're comfortable admitting. So you don't admit it. Instead you carry on to no one about how much you want to live, despite your crushed legs.

Of course you have your low/honest points. Points where you try to hide yourself with leaves, dig yourself deeper into the forest floor with the rotation of your shoulders, smear blood all over your face so you look worse off than you really are, try to convince the cigarette-smoking squirrels to do you in entirely before anyone has the chance to come and find you. But eventually you relax because you know you've got to. Know you've got to let the rock do its work, whatever that work may be. It'll kill you soon enough. Or not. Just a matter of time, says one of the squirrels as it strokes a rope of matted hair off your face, leaving a clean line on your forehead where it's dragged a tiny fingernail.

But maybe none of that really happened. Because you know that there's something not quite right with the way you see things anyway. Even before you started losing all the blood.

Before I moved into the June Room, me and The Mother and The Father and Julia lived in The House together for a very long time and if there's one family on the planet that's truly not worth knowing about, it's us. We're a Real, Live, Genuine Waste of Time. In fact, you could put that in lights above our front door. Soda pop and cotton candy and every face you've never noticed.

So let's see, if you don't like wasting your time and you don't like bad things happening to innocent, unicorn-blooded kids then you should really stop now, I mean it.

Though there is one thing. One juicy piece of family lore worth knowing about. My mom's niece is the kid who threw her fetus in a garbage pail at her high school prom. Her name is Denise and she has no memory of doing it. She doesn't even remember the prom. But some very hungry thing inside her obviously hasn't forgotten. She weighs 700 pounds and counting. She eats and eats and eats, all the time. Last year she officially ate herself immobile and now she's working on eating herself out of her own skin.

So we've got Denise in our family, and I guess she's worth knowing about. That's slightly before my time though. Denise had already embarked on the slowest suicide attempt in history before I was even born. And maybe that was the last interesting thing that would ever happen on The Mother's side of the family. That means The Father's side might be due for something soon.

The Beginning of the Story

I woke up this morning in dawn's fuzzy in-between. So the June Room was too quiet and paused and gray. Waking up into that still hour felt significant. As though something had fought the sleep drugs Mrs. Bellows insisted I swallow last night, and urged me to get out of bed, get dressed, and escape from her apartment building. So I did.

The lobby cat watched me tiptoe through one open eye, his fat face resting squished between scooped paws. He watched but didn't move, didn't do anything to blow my cover. His compliance in my escape made me feel even more sure that something wanted me to leave this place today. He was usually such a dickhead.

I walked toward The House, where The Mother and Father still lived but I didn't. Because now I lived in the June Room in Mrs. Bellows' Apartment Building with four other girls who'd done things to make their parents think they were a danger; who were deemed unfit to live at home. Four other girls who were having The Lonely or something like it extracted somehow, through hot dinners and crafting and fresh air and vitamins and the same sleep drugs I got last night.

My old key in the lock; the inside of The House bluish and deep-sleep quiet so my every step was a shotgun blast. I opened cupboards and pawed through junk drawers. I took a box of cookies from the pantry and munched and examined how little had changed since I'd left.

Then I crept upstairs, opened the door to my favorite room, and found The Terrible Thing.

The Terrible Thing that was probably my fault that I didn't want to talk about or think about ever again. I wanted to be gone, away from The Terrible Thing. I wanted to erase this morning completely, hit reverse and watch it unravel, re-do it: instead of waking up at dawn I sleep till ten or later, go downstairs for breakfast with the other girls, or actually maybe I don't do that considering what happened last night in the Craft Room. The reason Mrs. Bellows made me take the pills.

Okay, never mind, unravel that too. I eat breakfast in my room. Alone, quietly dragging my elbows along the table's sharp corners, then sitting with Mrs. Bellows while she talks about loving myself, finding peace in this world. Later I put on my Sunday Dinner clothes, wave goodbye to Mrs. Bellows and she lets me go, hop on the side-of-the-house-bike, and ride it to The Parents' house. I hear the monotonous hum of the early news when I walk through the door. I see The Mother in the kitchen making dinner but she doesn't know I'm here yet. She glances at the clock and mutters, “Where is that girl” and I tuck myself further behind the doorframe. She presses her knuckles into her eye sockets and then walks to the basement door, knocks quietly, and whispers through the crack that dinner's nearly ready. The Father would have to emerge from the basement, which he hates to do. And she would feel like a disgusting nuisance, keeping her chin down, smiling, a rehearsed face, still wondering where I might be.

She liked to watch the news while she cooked. Associate all of the murders and rapes with the sensation of her hands heeling into a wad of premature pizza dough, feeling safe and warm and protected over our electric hearth as she knuckled into the edges of the undeveloped crust against the pan. Red tomato sauce ladled on top, slices of meat arranged neatly.

The Mother does care about me in her own selfish, over the top way. She told me once that God brought me to her. “God brought you to me” she said. “He wrapped you up in peach skin, inside out so the fuzzy stuff was touching you and the slimy stuff was on the outside. He delivered you personally, Easter. That's how special you are.” Before, I had been immersed in my doughy little room; soft, wet, warm. Arms in legs up. Then he evicted me to life. Snatched me up and stuck a long, ruddy finger in my mouth, scooping the things out that would keep me from breathing and not bothering to close me up when he left. I wonder if he brought his flat hands down onto my chest, forearms stiff, pounding, pounding, pounding life into me. I wonder if I resisted—limp in his arms, splayed out in the unpredictable pattern of a burst water balloon. I excel at withholding. Resisting. Denying satisfaction. I bet it felt good.

Anyway.

After I saw The Terrible Thing all I wanted was Julia.

So I went into The Woods and started looking.

By anyone else's standards, The Woods wasn't really a woods at all. More like a leftover nail or nut or hinge that was supposed to have fit somewhere but never really did; it was
a scrap that might have been snipped off like a bit of extra paper hanging over the perforated line.

Shaved on one side by a long, lazy highway and thinned out along the other into the backyards of neighboring houses, it was always filled with launched baseballs, the odd tire, bits of fast food garbage tossed from roaring cars.

It disturbed the neighbors that no one could really do anything with The Woods: buy it, dig up the trees and put a fence around the bare property. The neighbor told me that it was “a waste of space for anyone who wasn't looking to do nasty things like have sex or hide a body.” Then I asked her if any bodies had actually been discovered there and she waved her thin-fingered hand in my face and told me not to be morbid.

I'd developed some of my own theories: buried treasure or a tunnel to Eloi. Perhaps it contained a pocket of earth in which a rare species of daffodil or insect or rodent had made its home. An endangered type of very sensitive squirrel that could only tolerate the excruciatingly bland conditions of the not-too-anything midsection of North America.

I hoped no one ever bought these woods, or turned them into anything other than what they were. Because to me they were precious. One spot, one little moment, a slice in the universe just big enough for a girl my age to slip soundlessly into. A scar, a sliver, a sore, an accident. A blip. An extra bit of world where a person could hide from everything, including parts of their own head. And the trees made everything quiet down there. Like padding or insulation, carved into the shape of woods.

The creek path ran straight through The Woods, seared into it like a brand, presumably from end to end though I'd only really explored a length of the middle. It swelled in nice places and the pulse of the water rubbed a miniature sprawl of cliffs into the earth, good places to sit and look out over the water. Some sections of the creek were bright, quiet, warm places, where sunlight bounced off shallow rocks, furried in places with nearly invisible moss like baby body hair slickened by just-born gooeyness or soapy water. Other parts of the creek were darker, cold, wrapped up by trees all through the leafy months, the rocks as thoroughly chilled as frozen dinner rolls.

As I walked along the creek, I removed a green lighter from my pocket with a holographic hula girl on it jerking from side to side like a malfunctioning robot. Knowing how to smoke without looking like a jerk was a skill I had yet to master. And I had to master it before I saw Lev again, otherwise he might not think I was wonderful anymore. Lev is a boy who's got film over his eyes, milky and swirling; he's a sheer-skinned cave dweller, a subterranean humanoid who told me I was wonderful. He's also a smoker.

I told him that I smoked too. So I had to practice. Otherwise those frosted eyes would locate some other wonderful thing to harass at work instead of me.

I lit one of my stolen cigarettes. Nothing to it.

The smoke seemed to pry into my posture, lengthening my spine, straightening my back, moving my head up the way an elderly aunt might, trapping your chin in a cold finger and thumb, pushing her knobbled fist into your lower back. Elderly aunts find poor posture as offensive and disgusting as I might find a smear of snot in an old man's beard.

I found myself momentarily entranced, either by the smoke or the gushing of the creek, lulling me from myself, from thoughts of The Terrible Thing. I made my way through a few thin branches to a smooth patch of shaded rock along the very edge of the water.

Across the creek, the sun seared branched patterns of light onto the forest floor, forcing its way through in the shape of solid beams all filled with the magic of reflected dust, throwing unprepared patches of land on display. One particular section had a pair of boots on it, which I quickly realized were attached to a body, standing kitty-corner from me across the creek. Julia. Twenty feet away. Staring at me.

The sun had her fully by the feet, the rest of her body brushed over with leopard spots: a distorted, shadowy reflection of the twittering leaves overhead. She wore a black-and-red flannel shirt that she'd buttoned almost all the way to the top and didn't bother tucking into her stiff blue jeans. Julia the older sister is seventeen, and she got The Mother's genes. The long face, the delicate features, the nose squared at the end and small like a dice. Her skin glows, her limbs move edgeless like cooked green beans, and her hair is long and thick and red and beautiful. Her lips are full and pink and whenever we were apart I dreamed about spreading them on toast and eating them.

Her eyes were narrow and angry and I knew why. She'd been stuck in The Woods since The Fire and I was the one who'd done it. Abandoned her, scared and alone. All so that everything could just be normal and uncomplicated for me.

I knew I probably should have come down to see her, at least explain myself a little better, and a few times I almost did. But I just couldn't bear to see the look on her face, to see what being stuck in The Woods had done to her, to risk her following me back out and making me weird all over again.

That is, until I found The Terrible Thing. Once I found The Terrible Thing it was all I could do to stop myself from running into
these woods, my woods, praying that she'd let me find her. Hers was the only face I could see right now, the only voice I could bear to hear.

“Hi Julia,” I said.

I held the cigarette behind my back. I wanted to spring across the creek and grab her and never let go.

“Easter. Well. What a surprise. Sorry the place is such a mess, didn't get a chance to spruce it up before you came. Get it? Spruce? Because I live in The Woods now. You've banished me to The Woods.”

“Oh stop, Julia.”

“You stop! You stick me in these woods, you don't tell me how long I'll be here, you leave me alone with the strange sounds and the freezing cold with only the squirrels to keep me company—”
She cut herself off, swallowed a mouthful of calm, and continued.
“I didn't want to explode on you like that right away. I was really planning on giving you the cold shoulder until you cried. That would have been so much better.”

“You must be pretty mad. The cold shoulder is your specialty.”

“I am pretty mad, Easter.”

I rolled my eyes and rubbed a sneaker against the rock as lightly as I could. I thought I could feel every individual grain of dirt rolling around beneath my sole.

Julia squinted at me.

“What's the matter?” she said.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Can you just tell me what's wrong? It's obviously something.”

And she took a step toward me, crushing a big berry with her foot. It spattered into the creek. I don't know why I was being so annoying. I wanted very badly to tell her everything; sharing with her used to be the only thing that made me happy. But somehow I was scared to tell her. Like to say The Terrible Thing out loud would be to make it undeniable. So instead I shook my head “no” and sniffed loudly.

“Well it looks like Mrs. Bellows has done wonders for you. You look great, really. Much better than when I was around.”

“Don't be mean,” I muttered.

“No really.” She made a little box with her fingers, centered it on me, and said, “You're the picture of sanity.”

I could see how I must have looked between her squared fingers, hunched shoulders and droop-faced. I wouldn't speak until she put them away. After another long moment she finally took her fingers down.

“When did you start smoking?”

“I'm not smoking.”

“Easter, I can see the smoke behind you. If you're not smoking then you should be more concerned about your pants being on fire.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Is this because of Lev? Does the wonderful Lev smoke?”

And I turned quiet again, and tried to put my face into an expression of The Terrible Thing, so she could read it there without my having to breathe the words to life. But instead she looked confused and more annoyed.

“Easter, would you just tell me what's wrong? This is so irritating!”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Well then why did you come down here? Why did you even bother! Get out of here Easter! Scram! You're nothing but an intruder. A germ. A piece of sand agitating my oyster. But you're not a pearl; you're a tumor or a wart or a cyst. Get out!”

And just then, the glowing red cigarette that had been burning down behind my back seared my thumb, causing me to react: jump back and look down at my freshly reddened appendage. As soon as I looked back up, Julia was gone. The creek gushed cold and lonely in front of me.

The Terrible Thing, The Terrible Thing, The Terrible Thing. There it was. In the bathroom. In The Tooth House. Just waiting for me. The Father wouldn't find it. He might not notice for days because he never,
ever
used
our
bathroom. Our cluttered, too-warm torture chamber.

“Julia?”

I knew she wouldn't respond.

“Julia, it was terrible. A terrible, terrible thing.”

But she was gone.

I maneuvered my way back onto the path, brushed a few burrs off my sweater, and let the branches close up behind me. After a few minutes walking I wouldn't even know where to find that sunny spot again.

Before I could move much further, another distraction caught my eye, the sun reflecting off a glimmering something lodged between two rocks, deeper into the highway side of The Woods. I left the path and moved closer and saw that the glimmering something was a piece of metal, attached to a strip of leather wedged between two giant boulders. As I pulled and I gouged and I scraped around the intriguing item, the rocks which had seemed as stuck still as tiles shifted suddenly with a growl. I jumped and let out a little yelp, then looked around hotly. Julia probably heard that.