Chapter Text
The others were all so normal. They had youthful pimpled skin and homework deadlines and weekend plans. They suffered only growing pains and unfair curfews and parental expectations. Yes, some suffered cramps and dark alleys, and some a father’s belt or the mirror’s weight, but...
Empathy.
Empathy is what you wanted to feel. If not, then sympathy. Hell, you’d settle for apathy. Anything but the gnawing jealousy and constant migraine of loneliness.
You couldn’t take it anymore, retreating from the cafeteria out into the main building. The school was abuzz; end-of-year dances and graduation ceremonies had teenage hearts aflutter. And, if you could just keep your shit together for another month or so, you’d be joining your class in robes and diplomas.
Technically, it could have happened a lot sooner but with the way you and your mother moved around, some sacrifices had to be made. Real last names, for example. A legitimate learner’s permit. All normal adolescent rites of passage.
Through the hallways and into the library, there you sat. A twenty-year-old with someone else’s name, alone between the shelves of books.
A stack of paper slammed down in front of you suddenly.
“Are you a vampire or something?” Sherry asked as she sat on the floor opposite you.
“What?”
“Vampires hate having their photo taken. You’re not even in this, you know. Mr Essex kept telling you to go do it. Now it’s like you weren’t even here.”
You looked down at the papers, big red letters spelling out ‘yearbook – final draft’ on the top leaf.
“Yeah… sorry. Been busy,”
“Whatever. You’re coming tonight, right?”
“My mum will never let me,”
“So?” Sherry replied with a grin. “Just sneak out after she’s gone to bed.” She sensed your hesitation. “Just for a couple hours? Please? You’ve never come to a sleepover. We’re almost done with high school and I’ll be at Brown soon. This might be our last chance. Please?”
You looked at her. She smelled so good. Like the peaches she’d eaten at recess.
“Please,” she begged, stretching her hand out to take yours. So warm. Close.
“Yeah, okay,” you said quickly, taking your hand back and gathering your things. The faster you could leave, the better.
…
She’d never get used to it. The sight of you dazed and dripping blood down your shirt was forever etched into the darkness behind her eyelids.
“You didn’t… In the car in three minutes. Whatever you can take in three minutes,” your mother instructed, her voice a pained mix of panic and grief.
You walked to the bathroom and looked at your reflection. Blood.
Blood.
Blood.
Blood.
Your mother yelled your name, then, “Move! When the cops get here, we have to be good and gone.”
The sleepover had started well. Sneaking out was easy enough and Sheree’s friends were nice. It was comfortable. Normal. Nail polish and warm beer. Skirts made of tinsel and cheese pizza.
You had been laying on the shag rug in Sherry’s room. Kim, a Junior you hadn’t really met before, was next to you. She was kind, told you that her father had skipped out on her too.
“Try this,” Sherry said, painting Kim’s nails. “It’s called Copper Fever.”
Kim studied her hand. “It’s too orange,” she concluded, then stuck her hand in your face. “What do you think?”
Innocently, you’d held her hand and looked at the colour. It was too orange… or not orange enough. You breathed in the acidic smell of the polish, but it faded fast and all that was left was Kim.
You bit down so hard that when the other girls pulled you away, your teeth had degloved Kim’s finger entirely.
In the bathroom, your mother grabbed hold of your shoulders and shook you back into the moment. “Did you hear me? We have to go.”
…
The cockroach appeared from under the refrigerator. As it scurried around, you watched it. The hunger deep in you was a living creature, and even the small dirty thing mapping the kitchen floor made the creature growl.
It had been three days since your mother left you.
Two months after the sleepover, you thought everything was going okay. Then you woke to find yourself completely and utterly alone. She had not taken all her things, only the things that she loved most. And you had been left behind.
There was a folded piece of paper and an envelope on the kitchen table you had yet to open. The contents of the letter were predictable, as was the pain it would inflict. Instead, you had haunted the house. You had wailed and sobbed. You had broken glass and locks. You had sat motionless for hours on end.
When the cockroach made his kitchen debut, you were reminded of the hunger. You were reminded of who and what you were.
Picking up the envelope, you found it unsealed. Inside was cash and a certificate of live birth. The only piece of proof you were real and not an imaginary monster living in the storybooks of a child.
The letter began with your name.
You’re not going to see me again. I can’t help you anymore. I can’t turn you in to the cops. I can’t do anything someone like me would do in a situation like this. So, I have to go.
The first time it happened, you were three-years-old-
You stopped reading, folding the letter, and putting it in the envelope with the cash and birth certificate.
All your belongings fitted into one backpack. When it was full, you put on the jacket your mum left behind and headed out the door.
You had known the day would come when she would leave. There was only so much horror she could take. You knew she’d leave you a letter and some money. She wouldn’t say goodbye. The jacket was a surprise though. Your dad was its first owner, and your mother wore it like a widow’s veil. She was leaving you both behind, you thought. But you, you were moving forward. Toward your father.
…
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” the woman at the bus station asked.
“You’d think,” you replied dismissively.
“I don’t know what that means,”
“It means I’m twenty-years-old and I can buy a ticket if I want.”
The greyhound could take you part of the way, the rest would have to be hitching. The bus was old, cramped, and smelt stale. Sometimes prone to motion sickness, you felt queasy. To take your mind off it, you pulled the letter out and picked up where you left off.
Her name was Penny Wilson. I thought it must have been a satanic cult. All that gore. I was so scared they’d taken you and done unspeakable things. But then I found you in your crib, sound asleep. The blood was dried up on your face. I still didn’t see it though. I didn’t understand until I fished out of your mouth something you were chewing on. It was the hammer of Penny’s eardrum. It’s a small bone. The malleus. I looked it up. You were sucking on it like it was a pacifier. I knew then. I knew what you were.
The letter was rich with information. Succulent and filling. You could only read it a paragraph at a time before you felt too full, verging on ill.
The town you’d arrived in that morning was new to you, but the address circled on the torn-out page of a phone book was seared into your memory. Years ago, your mother got sloppy and left a Christmas card from her parents out on the kitchen table. It had a return address and you’d never forgotten it. She hurried to rip up the envelope and throw it away before you could get your grubby hands on it but it was too late.
You sat on the curb behind a car down the street a little. It was the right place because your mum’s car was parked out front. When she couldn’t parent, she returned to hers. Tears rolled down your cheeks and you burned with shame. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t ask to birth a creature like you. She wanted to be like the other mothers, playing with their children and cooking wholesome meals. But it wasn’t a dinner she served you each night, it was a sacrifice.
The walk back to the bus stop was lonely, but part of you felt relieved. If you couldn’t do it – be out on your own – you could always go back there and beg to be loved.
The Lord of the Rings kept you company while you waited. It would be hours before the next greyhound came through. If you finished Tolkien for the hundredth time, there were other adventures awaiting in your backpack.
“Well hello, little missy,” a strange voice announced themselves.
You startled, couldn’t place the sound until a figure emerged from the shadow of the building next to you. The man wasn’t smiling, but he looked at you with familiarity.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he offered.
“Do I know you?” you asked although you knew the answer.
“I guess not in the way you mean… I smelled you…”
He wore a suit jacket covered in pins, badges, and other things tacked to it. The top of his hair was neatly cut, but a long rat’s tail of a braid curled around his neck. His left ear looked mangled, the top entirely gone, which reminded you of an alley cat scrapping with the others to get his feed.
“You hungry?”
Before you could think, you were nodding. The stranger turned and began to walk up the road, throwing a look over his shoulder to see you apprehensively following him.
“I got rules. One, number one: never, never eat an eater… Think you can do the same?”
You nodded and took his invitation into a grand old house, marked 400 by a sign out front. Inside it was dark but homely. Floral wallpaper and a sign that read ‘bless this house and everyone in it.’
The stranger began to pull things from the fridge and cupboards in the kitchen. Sitting at the small kitchen table, you watched.
“You got a name, missy? I’m Sully. Life’s never dully with Sully!”
His accent was strange. It wasn’t that you’d not heard someone like him, maybe from rural West Virginia, it was that he spoke about himself like he was two people.
“You don’t got to worry about Sully. He never eats ‘em live,” he told you.
“I thought I was the only one,” you admitted.
“Not lots. More than you think…”
Sully told you that you’d probably come across other eaters. They would have given you a funny look or earned a double-take from you. Maybe you’d misread them as being creepy. He also warned you from seeking them out, though. When you commented on the hypocrisy of him inviting you into house number 400, he shot you a look that was equal parts disturbed and lonely.
“Tell me about your first time,” Sully requested.
You realised then that you remembered more about Penny Wilson than you had thought. Sully saw the guilt on your face, telling you, “Can’t help what you are, miss.”
That’s when he retrieved his satchel bag and pulled something wrapped in muslin cloth. You stayed silent as he presented a rope made of braids of hair. It was a rainbow of human life and death. Sully told you it’s how he honoured the eaten. You didn’t know something could be so grotesque and so beautiful at the same time.
You were touching the rope when you asked, “You said you could smell me?”
Eaters can smell eaters. And Sully, well he was extra special. He said he could smell dying. That’s how he avoided killing. He stalked people with numbered days. Your blood ran cold.
“Sully… Whose house is this?”
Suddenly details came into focus. The photographs on the wall. The homemade carrot cake sitting in a Tupperware container.
“Lydia Harmon,” he said with definity. “Can’t you smell her?”
Upstairs, after a fucked up game of hotter-colder, the smell of cooked vinegar and tangy mud lead you to Lydia. She was old, well into her late 80s. She laid on the floor of her bedroom, shallow breaths ready to cease at any moment. Thankfully, she was beyond consciousness.
“We have to help her,” you said.
“It’s gone by, that point… And whatever you and I got, it’s gotta be fed. And if the circumstances are good and if they’re safe… then eat!”
You didn’t move.
“Sully don’t eat the livin’… That just leaves this…” he told you.
You took the spare room and waited for Lydia Harmon to die. Sully told you that you’d be able to smell it happen. You were horrified to discover he was right.
Sully had stripped down to his dirty white underpants. His head was deep in Lydia’s belly and her head was almost entirely gone already. The sounds. Did you make those sounds? Is this what you looked like in the daylight?
You ate and ate and ate until all that was left of her was a pile of bones, some chewed on. Sully said he always ate the hair and nails and bones if he could. Said it was a sign of respect. He put the leftovers in a plastic bag as you licked the floorboards clean.
…
Sully made coffee and began to consume the carrot cake left in the kitchen. Flies had found their way inside the house and were sticking to the blood and gore that covered your faces and chests.
“It’s not hard once someone teaches you,” Sully told you about being out in the world. “You don’t need to be alone.”
That was the thing though. Maybe it was self-punishment. Maybe even a form of self-harm. You deserved to be alone. Deserved to suffer hunger and cold and isolation. You were a monster.
The flies that crawled over Sully’s face, forcing their way into his nostrils and mouth, didn’t seem to annoy him. There was a deadly stillness deep in the man. Lydia’s hair became part of the braided rope and you felt the danger screaming at you.
As soon as Sully excused himself to shower, you cleaned off in the powder room’s sink and fled the house.
On the next greyhound out of town, you went over all the information Sully had given you. How much of it was truth and how much fiction? Maybe that’s how stories start though. We tell them about ourselves like they aren’t the truth because that’s the only way anybody is going to believe them.