Authors: Cynthia Tottleben
But the more stir-crazy I became, the more attention I paid to all the little details.
For instance, the sideways chickens. Poised to strut up the wall. What was their purpose?
Tippy and I could sit at the end of the hall, backs to the linen closet, and watch them move. Up the side of the door to Mom’s room, over the top, down again. A parade that never progressed. Were they protecting her? Keeping an eye out for strangers who might enter her room? Waiting for me?
I named each one of them. Plucky, Picky, Pokey, Petals. Tippy played my game, if only to pass time, and selected E names for the ones on the west wall closest to Brandy’s room. Esther, Eliza, Eggy, Elaine. They pecked for food but did little else.
The headless gals were hardest to pinpoint, as Tippy and I didn’t know a lot of decapitated folks to name them after. But given time we came up with a list, and called them Anne, Margaret, Catherine, Ms. Antoinette, Lady Jane, and Beatrice.
We ignored the humans for days but eventually determined that if we were going to give the hens their own monikers, we’d better name the people, too. But we never said these out loud. I got the willies thinking about them chasing me with their bloody axes and didn’t want to rouse their attention with direct conversation. I even avoided eye contact. Which wasn’t hard, considering they didn’t have faces themselves.
Funny how headless sorts can see just fine when they need to. Like Sissy, finding my bed at night, or always sensing when I needed a hug.
“Holly, Barbie, Cathy, Betsy,” I yelled out the names of some of my favorite dolls, many of which were slumbering in our attic, finally noticing that most of the hens with heads were grouped together in fours.
“But I swear that last week there were six of them on this wall,” I pointed out to Tippy.
So we began to watch.
We got up in the mornings, did our bathroom chores, ate breakfast, performed any odd duty Mom assigned, then made our way into the hall.
I could read while we waited, but many days I found it too difficult to focus on the words. Instead I just sat on the hardwood floor, my dog in my lap, and waited for their world to come alive.
Hens over Mom’s door. The people by mine, stock still, never moving. But as the days unfolded, watching Mom’s artwork became as thrilling as a soap opera, the greatest entertainment Tippy and I had had in months.
Of course, I had to narrate it all to my dog. She had no desire to see the chickens, but once the story got rolling, she loved to listen to me talk.
The birds with beaks hated the headless bunch and would often chase them, forcing them into the less detailed land by the bathroom door. Lady Jane and Ms. Antoinette were inseparable and stood up to the other gals, but Eliza could run them off just by fluffing her feathers.
They had cliques and their own status within those cliques, just like the girls at school. Plucky played with Holly, but the others didn’t want her on their turf and would peck at her for coming near. Cathy chastised Holly every time she brought Plucky over, her wings spread and eyes blazing with fury.
The groups snuck around, stealing food. A few of them even laid eggs and tried desperately to hide them from the others, often beside the banister or in the corner by my room.
Mom preferred that we made no noise, and we moved around upstairs as quietly as falling leaves, watching our girls, checking on all the indicators that told us of the outside world.
Every night we checked the Hanley house for Christmas lights. About fifty times. Knowing December hadn’t passed kept Tippy sated. She loved getting gifts and felt elated at the whole idea of Mom faking Santa Claus for us this year, having a special day where we all got along and had endless piles of food and cookies to comfort us.
We monitored our water bottles. Collected odds-and-ends, snacks that we could hide away. Listened to Mom’s movements, her routines, the times she slid out of them, ruffling our feathers, as Tippy and I never knew what she kept up her sleeve.
I followed the moon, but Tippy claimed she could feel her pull in her every bone and didn’t need to witness her path through the sky. Sometimes I quizzed her on whether our friend was waning or waxing, but my dog would have none of that.
“That is so trivial. Why would you even ask?” Tippy often crawled up on her high horse, and sometimes it took days for her to come down.
I couldn’t fall asleep if my toothbrush was facing toward the toilet and got up about fifteen times to check it. Always moving around silently, on tippy toes, trying not to wake Mother.
Or put the farmyard on high alert. I couldn’t imagine the beating I would take if the chickens noted my presence and roused Mom with their vigilante clucking act.
Tippy refused to let our door be closed. I didn’t really blame her, but she pushed at it a hundred times a day, ensuring she had a path just the size of her body to squeeze through, that the latch never had the opportunity to find purchase, to lock us back in.
After meals I checked the refrigerator, just to make sure it was well stocked and that Mom hadn’t pulled any of our feathered friends out of the shed yet. I was getting too attached to our chickens to start gorging on them.
Not that I would ever turn my head at a good meal. Neither of us would do that. I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t feeding me my own friends. Random chickens from someone else’s house, yes.
My
chickens, no.
Although I knew that someday it would come to that.
Better the chickens than Tippy.
If she ever tried to hurt my dog, I’d have to kill her.
Evelyn
After warming my gullet with a hearty drink, I often found myself in whatever boarding room I’d taken, sitting in front of the mirror, analyzing myself. My totally unencumbered and rather bizarre life. How I’d spent my best years chasing a story that climaxed with my own transformation into the star of the ancient plot.
I couldn’t have cared less anymore about the long-lost idiot relative of mine who had somehow found her way to Japan, infected the world with her children, then suffered her own death at the hands of her middle daughter, the one destined to kill three of her neighbors while they slept at night. Or that wench in Maine who worked in an infirmary and sealed the fate of twenty-six patients, all dying of some lung ailment that would have taken them eventually, anyway.
The only reason I kept researching was the cloak travel offered. Who would suspect a woman brave enough to voyage the world—alone even, a scholar whose purse knew no dearth? Who would look at my handsome face and make any comparison to the monsters that inhabited my extended bloodline?
What freedom came with my lack of address. My ability to jump onto a train, a boat, or simply toot my horn and pull back onto the road that lead further into the countryside, through the wilderness, to the edge of the world where the days were skirted by nothing but ice and the darkness of the forever sea?
The familiar black eternity that hardened into the volcanic stone I called my heart.
No, even if I were caught blood-covered with my talons out, people would not point fingers. They were the same in every city I dropped my dimes, filthy with their hands held out in expectation, a mob rendered silent by their stupidity and stunned by the fact that I carried my own books. I at once hated the humans that shared my earth and envied their pain, the sultriness of their tears, that I could take them to an entirely different plane with the use of my straight razor, a lick of fire, or by simply draining all of the fluid from their eyes.
Which I was wont to do.
I devoured a child in Hong Kong, five hours after I had slaughtered her in my bathtub.
Plied the fingernails out of an old man’s hands while he wept his apologies for touching me earlier in the bar. No one ever discovered his remains.
In east Texas I purchased a young woman and kept her with me for three weeks but tired of her whining and left her scalp on a fence post when I drove out of town.
The other women in my family were pathetic. Weaklings. Amateurs. The only ones I held the slightest respect for were those who had felt him like I had. The ones consumed by the devil. Those that had risen to the occasion and experienced the lust brought on by a fresh kill.
He and I had grown quite close. I could feel him grow inside me, take over my skin, empower me to collect souls without any weapon other than my own hands, and turn to him for conversation while I did so. That he could reside within me and stare at me from his own body at the same time struck me as incredibly profound, so overwhelming it left me breathless, almost ashamed of my human vulnerabilities, my inability to perform such amazing feats without his assistance.
Like my father, this entity joined me late at night. I had sworn off men after my discovery of female flesh, but he was like no other. I would wake to his hands, heavy on my thighs, fall victim to the lure of his teeth, his heat, the shared experience of having just peeled the skin off the innkeeper’s wife’s face.
What intoxication. How I craved him, his passion, the way my entire body ached when he had finished with me.
I watched myself in mirrors. When I stood before one, the first few minutes I was still Evelyn, the tall, drab stranger who walked like a man, braid curled around my head, collar tight around my neck.
Then the change began. My dress diminished, exposing my curves, the bite marks covering my skin, the bruises my lover had left in the darkest of places. My hair fell to my hips, as thick as in my youth, back when my father wrapped it around his hand like rope after we had ridden the back acreage of our farm.
Thoughts of Dad led straight to my present-day partner, his hands tearing at my body, his thrusts so powerful that I never knew if I would survive his lust or if I would bleed to death after he had shredded me with his need.
The mirror told all. I could see myself, the degradation my devil imposed on me, and I loved myself, that wickedness, that power, the horror I welcomed with open arms. My eyes reflected back a woman with her own dark spot, the birthmark, the indicator that I was one of his chosen few. A woman cursed.
A woman in love.
My mother was the first to notice. On my yearly trip home, after the trivial hellos and hugs from the group that had gathered, she came to my room just after midnight.
“Who is he?” She crossed her arms, already judgmental.
“He who?” I played coy, but quite frankly she had caught me off guard.
“The man you’re seeing. I can tell by the way you walk it’s a bit more than just
sight
now, isn’t it, Evie?”
I cringed at the name. I was so far removed from that child that I almost threw the bedside lamp at Mother.
“I would say that that is none of your business.” I turned away, furious. How dare she?
“You can say that all you want, but I am your mother. And you’ve never exactly been…well, wise with your decisions. As they regard the men in your life.”
We had a stare-down. I understood her implications and was astonished that she knew how my relationship with the husband she all but ignored had flourished during my childhood.
“Shut the door on your way out,” I ordered, knowing I would not stay long at home.
Nor would I return for Mother’s funeral, six weeks later, when she passed after being struck by lightning during a freak late-February storm.
My lover and I were too busy for me to take a holiday back to the old farmhouse. We were exploring. Thinking of different ways to feed our hungers, physical and sexual. Together we travelled the jungle, wearing thick fur and vicious fangs, making late night visits to the natives that hunted there. We swam out of the ocean and onto passenger ships, found ourselves savaging the vile street vendors of Russia, entering farm houses in the remote lands of Montana and feasting on entire families in one night.
He pushed my every boundary. Just when I was about to collapse from his touch, three of his friends would appear and ravage me for days on end. While my lover commanded my every move, held me down when needed, took my very own belt and welted my skin with it.
I couldn’t bear his absence. What was I, alone, but just another wretched female, another copy of my sister, waiting for him to arrive, willing to do anything to make him return faster, to stay by my side, to never leave again? How I hated myself. For being weak.
For being a woman.
But those moments of loneliness, of utter raving desperation, were when I started my own book. If I couldn’t be beside him, then I could relive our adventures on page, document our destruction, let the world know that this woman they called frumpy could satisfy the ultimate male hunger.
I sat. In front of mirrors. Wearing my scholar’s skin. Divulging my greatest secrets. Waiting for him to return to me. Writing. Realizing.
I was the oldest specimen of the family curse. The last one living, my eye-inside-an-eye visible only to myself, and here we were, not too far from the next millennium. My atrocities far exceeded any committed by the family members before me. The devil himself had taken a personal interest in the development of my more salacious interests.
No crystal ball was needed here.
I
was the woman poised to take over his role.