A Gentle Hell Read online

  She consented to staying in the house, though she took to spending all of her time up in the studio that she hadn’t touched in three years. Several times I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find she still hadn’t come to bed. I often rolled over and climbed up the attic ladder to find her at the canvas wearing her bloody sweater, head bent down to the brush, red hair alive,

  “It’s four in the morning,” I said, “you must be tired.”

  “Oh? I didn’t notice.”

  She kept painting, without looking back at me.

  Her subjects turned darker and more abstract. She stored away the flowers and children of three years ago and started to paint mechanical creatures, black spheres, spurts of red color that bubbled out of what appeared to be a crack in the universe. She painted amorphous shapes underneath a red moon. I saw her floating across space, and I was unable to follow.

  A few weeks later when we went back to the hospital to get x-rays, the doctors found her bones completely healed.

  “What god are you praying to?” the doctor with the cat birthmark asked June. “I think I need to switch religions.”

  June, sitting on the edge of the examining table in her paper gown, only smiled her cold smile.

  When we got home that night she followed me into the bedroom. When I started to undress she grasped my hips from behind and blew cool air into my ear. I found myself unable to move for a few moments, caught in her grip as if encased in a wild tree.

  “June?” I asked.

  “I feel so strong,” she said. “Like I could do anything.”

  “What’s happened to you?”

  She guided me to the bed and pulled my shirt up over my head.

  “Do you really want to know?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I want to know.”

  She straddled me and touched her face which was no longer a ruin, but a mass of pink scars quickly fading. Before she spoke she bent down and uttered a low, soft growl.

  “I don’t need you anymore,” she said.

  One night while drifting off to sleep June woke me by appearing by my side and whispering in my ear.

  “I’m going out,” she said.

  Half-asleep, thinking I was in a dream, I rolled over and kissed her on the cheek.

  “You don’t go out,” I said.

  “The person you used to know wasn’t me.”

  She left. I went to sleep but couldn’t break the cold. I dreamed of her when she was sixteen and nursing the owl that died in her backyard. She scooped it up in her arms and rocked it, whispered hush hush, whispered, “I don’t know how to help you.” She wore her white dress, but it was spattered with blood.

  Several hours later I awoke to a presence standing in the doorway of the bedroom. I sat up in bed and saw a silhouette standing in the gray light, three-quarter moonlight sweeping over the floor and soaking into her skin.

  “June?”

  Without speaking, she crawled into bed beside me and curled up to sleep. I put my arms around her and pressed my face into her hair. She smelled of something musty and thick that I couldn’t quite place.

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  In response she only stretched out her body and went to sleep in my arms. I stayed awake for a long time after that, overwhelmed by the smell that emanated from her.

  In the morning I found the bed covered in blood and bird feathers. June was gone.

  I gathered up the bed sheets to put in the wash, finding it difficult to breathe or swallow as I did so. I called June’s name, but there was no response. I went into the kitchen, stuffed the sheets into the washer trying not to gag, and turned the machine on. When I went into the living room to look for her I found the front door wide open.

  I found June on the porch, leaning against the railing with her hair wrapped around her wrists.

  “What happened last night?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Where did you go?” I said. “Why is there blood and feathers in our bed?”

  “I was looking for him,” she said.

  “Who’s him?”

  Though she didn’t turn around, I felt her smile. I felt its thin chill spread from her to me.

  “The dog that bit me.”

  “What were you planning on doing when you find him?”

  She turned around and strode toward me. She grabbed the back of my head and kissed me hard enough to bruise. Her eyes were about to swallow the world.

  “Bite him back,” she said.

  A thin line of drool ran down her chin. I watched it spill past the cusp of her lip and drip down onto her sweater. I grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back. She laughed as I did it, caught the balcony rail behind her and leaned backwards over the edge until her feet lifted off the ground.

  “So this is what you’re doing?” I asked her. “You’re trying to somehow personify the dog that bit you? You think that by changing into him you’ll somehow defeat him? Leave feathers and blood in our bed?”

  She leaned even further over the balcony, lifting her legs up in the air, and laughed and laughed.

  “I’m taking you to the doctor.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m better than I’ve ever been. If only you could see.”

  “You’re delusional.”

  Instantly she pulled herself up on the balcony, her face set into a sneer.

  “You would think that.”

  “What are you even talking about?” I said, “I just want to help you.”

  “You just want your scared little girl back,” June said, and she tossed her hair behind her shoulders. “You want quiet little June stiffening underneath the persimmon trees. Shivering, wings torn out. Waiting for you to come home. Your pet.”

  “June,” I whispered. I touched her shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said. She shrugged me off her and went back inside.

  For a long time I sat on the porch with my head on my hands. When I did go back inside, I heard June walking around in her studio upstairs. I made dinner for her that night, but she never came down to eat. At about one in the morning, I hauled myself off the kitchen chair, washed the dishes, and went to bed.

  At four in the morning she came into the bedroom and crawled on top of me. Her presence woke me up. I felt lucid, but my depth perception seemed off. The quality of the objects around me took on an extra dimension, as if I’d woken up from a dream into a deeper dream.

  “Hey,” she said.

  She stretched her body out over mine. Nuzzled my neck. She smelled the same as she did the night before, that heavy, musty smell.

  “June,” I said, “you need help.”

  In response she pulled my shirt above my head.

  “June,” I said.

  She kissed my stomach, her red hair hiding her face. Each movement was jagged.

  “Please stop,” I said, “we need to talk about this.”

  I grasped her chin and pulled her head up toward mine. I couldn’t see any features of her face except for that smile. I recoiled from it, and found myself with my hands out and away from her, my back flat against the headboard. She moved forward and trapped me against the headboard by grabbing it with both hands on either side of my head. She growled and ground her hips against me.

  I turned my face away from her. Almost gently, she dug her nails into my chin and tried to pull me toward her. She kissed me on the cheek. Then the side of my mouth. When I didn’t respond, she growled again, pressed our bodies closer. Her sweater clung to my throat.

  I tried to speak her name, but when I opened my mouth there was only the heat of her lips, her tongue trying to push its way in. Her limbs were like a cage. When she breathed, the gridiron tightened around me. When I continued to resist, she used her other hand to squeeze my throat.

  I gasped and couldn’t get any air. The room danced with spots of exploding color. I grabbed the hand choking me, but couldn’t peel it away.

  I did the o
nly thing I could think of to do - I parted my lips and let her inside.

  She loosened her grip on my throat, but didn’t completely relinquish it. I inhaled a rush of air and she kissed me again, deeper. I wanted to attempt to pull away again, but the reminder of her hand still on my throat made me go limp. She drew me into her, and I responded, choking softly in the back of my throat, tasting the blood on her tongue.

  After a moment, she drew back.

  “Oh,” she said, and laughed low, “you’re hard.”

  She snapped her head toward the window. I flinched.

  “Wow, it’s so bright outside. Can’t you see that moon? It’s beautiful.”

  She let go of my throat, jumped off the bed, and ran out into the hallway. A few seconds later I heard the back door open and slam shut.

  “June!”

  I scrambled out of bed and chased her. I ran into the kitchen and wrenched the door open, and though I couldn’t see the fence out in the dark I knew where it was. I vaulted myself over it and dropped down into the field on the other side.

  “June! Where are you?”

  I ran blindly out into the field, the dark thick on my eyes, my limbs, turning my heart into sludge. I couldn’t see anything, much less where June went, but I almost thought that I could smell her, blood and feathers, thick on the still, winter air. I ran with the night beating on my back and my head, the night slurring on my shoulder like a drunk. I knew when I passed the place where the dog first attacked June, because I touched down barefoot on the impression his head made when I bashed it into the ground. Or so I thought. Perhaps I’d run past that place long ago. I no longer knew where my feet started and the ground ended. In the dark everything transformed into a single, solid mass.

  Sometimes I asked myself if I truly loved the girl in the white dress standing outside my window, or if instead I loved the quiet cool place that occupied the space of her, still enough to see my own reflection. That is the curse many of us carry, I think: we wander the earth looking for ourselves and instead we find the quiet girls, the looking-for-love girls, and we fill the blank spaces with who we think they should be.

  I don’t know why I thought about this while I ran. Maybe because in the dark there were no blank spots to fill, only this boiling night, scar-tissue night, and for the first time I could strip away the lunatic sculptures that June and I constructed in those years together, now leaving nothing but space.

  But like I said before, I was never good at thinking about things like that.

  As I continued to run my eyes adjusted to the darkness and the gray shapes of trees loomed at me from the distance. Then the moon flared from behind their heavy branches. That was the first time I’d truly noticed it - the moon. How could I have not seen it? The full moon, bearing its weight down on the trees, bursting bright. A maniacal eye.

  “June!”

  I collapsed beneath the tree line. My ribs burned with the strain. My lungs beat at my bones as if to escape. I grasped chunks of dirt and grass between my hands and I wanted to stand up but the terrible pressure of the moon kept me low. The moon spilled out of my mouth and the moon spilled out over my back, striking and biting and chewing and dripping. I crawled to get away. I reached for anything that I could think of - roots, poison white mushrooms, rye, more dirt, as if they were relics that would protect me.

  That’s when she screamed.

  Underneath my breath I whispered, “Not again.”

  The moon lifted its paralyzing hands off of me, and I jumped up off the ground and ran in the direction of her scream. Not far. Somewhere in these trees. This time I didn’t have a wrench. I gritted my teeth as I ran. I’d use my bare hands. I’d drive my thumbs straight through that rabid dog’s eyes until I touched the brainstem.

  But when I found her, there was no dog to be seen.

  She crouched in the grass in the fetal position, head buried and her hands clutching fistfuls of her hair. The moon sank its teeth into her. Even the trees turned insidious. Their limbs were like knives. I moved toward her.

  “June?” I said. “What’s happening to you?”

  “Don’t,” she said when I got close, “go away.”

  “You know I love you,” I said, “tell me what’s going on.”

  She screamed again. Her hands shook. She held onto her head like it might burst and rocked herself in the dirt. I moved a little closer.

  “Let me take you home. It’ll be okay. We’ll go to a doctor.”

  “No!” she said.

  She started to change.

  Only a bad dream, I thought, when her skin unraveled itself from her fingers and her bloodied sweater burst in two at the back. Any moment I would find myself back in my room at the age of sixteen, and when I heard the rapping at my window and looked out the window there would be nothing but my own reflection. I wouldn’t need a girl in white to justify myself. I wouldn’t need to pretend-

  -But oh, how vividly I saw the bristling black fur emerging from her skin. How tangible the elongating of her limbs, her skull splitting in two and the rabid bones, snout and muzzle and sleek new animal casement . I almost tasted the claws that kicked out of her fingers and feet and scrabbled at the dirt. My small June, growing bigger and bigger and bigger.

  I found myself taking several steps back. But before I could move far, June, or what used to be June, hurled herself across the distance and shoved me against a nearby tree. The force of it threw my neck back, and when I hit the trunk of the tree sharp pain flooded into my spine. She opened her mouth, now large enough to stick my head inside and I saw the sharp rows of dog teeth with the canines glittering in spit.

  “Oh June,” I whispered.

  She lifted her head up and howled. I shrank against the tree. Inside of her I could not see the girl with the white dress, the girl with desperate sex holding her hand outstretched across the threshold of the door. There was only this enormous body with the rabies spittle - no, not rabies, her own special virus - flying out of her mouth and her limbs swinging outwards growing larger, crushing the girl skeleton beneath its bulk.

  I could do nothing but go limp as she encircled my waist with one clawed hand and squeezed. I thought I might burst out of my skin. Nothing left of me but what she wanted, not the man who wanted to push her away a hundred times, a thousand, the one who muttered “go away” underneath his breath while she rocked on top of me in her lulling need. Not the one who built her an elaborate cage full of paints up in the attic to keep her away, told her “you need something else besides me in your life.” There was only the me of this moment - ribcage about to pop, chest a landing pad for her teeth, wondering where the gentle scared girl went, missing something about who she used to be but not quite sure what.

  God, how strong she was now. Nobody I ever knew. In my ear she growled a low growl. Spit dripped onto my face.

  “June.”

  She squeezed tighter and her claws dug into my skin, puncturing. I coughed, barely able to breathe. I grabbed one of June’s enormous claws, and sucked in enough air to speak.

  “Why are you mad at me?” I asked, my voice a rasp. “You know I couldn’t have done anything for you.”

  When I closed my eyes red phosphenes exploded on my eyelids. The moonlight slithered down through the trees and tattooed itself on the back of my brain. I felt the thing that used to be June release me from her grip. My eyes snapped open and she lumbered several steps back. Her eyes, pale and cloudy, wrestled with my face. Wrestled with the moon.

  She ran.

  “Hey! Come back!” I called out, but there was no response except for the crashing of the trees and her lonely howl, echoing from half a mile away.

  I didn’t know what else to do - I walked back through the darkened field, climbed over the fence and went back into the house. When I came back, I found myself shaking uncontrollably and unable to stop, like someone had stuck a live wire through my head from ear to ear. I couldn’t swallow. Could hardly breathe. I went into the bathroom and pulled off my shi
rt and found the ragged, red claw marks. Only then did the sharp pain strike me, and I grabbed a bottle of iodine and splashed it across my ribs. As I burned I paced the living room floor. I peered out the curtains. I kept picking up the phone to call the police, but then I’d laugh and shake my head and put the phone down, only to come back several moments later and pick it up once more.

  The night clamped down on the house and maybe in that moment I felt what she felt, trapped inside the house with a rabid dog in every periphery. Trapped inside her head in the white dress unable to breathe, training her hips to be a hypnotist’s pendulum, pulling off the bloody sweater to look back in the mirror at the wings she lost and perhaps never had.

  I climbed up into her attic studio and I looked out the window. I looked for her but I could only see the dark field and the moon and the tops of trees and the reflection of my head pressing against the glass stirring sinking spit on my chin, claw marks and kisses leaving burns on the glass.

  I went to sleep curled up on the floor of the attic and I dreamed of winter storms, but what fell from the storm clouds wasn’t rain, but dead owls. They littered the lawn and the field and the roof, all facing up, necks broken, eyes open. My eyes.

  And I dreamed of her.

  I woke to the hazy morning and a dog barking. I glanced toward the window and I saw sunlight streaming through. Suddenly last night seemed unreal, but when I moved I felt the ache in my bones and the cuts from her claw marks. With slow, deliberate motions I got up off the floor and climbed down the attic stairs. I went into the kitchen, the dog still barking outside. Then I went into the living room, crossed the floor, and peeled back the curtains.

  I found her outside lying on the porch. I ran to the front door, yanked it open, and ran out toward her. June lay on her back, naked. Gore streaked her hair and fingernails and mouth. I bent down to check her breath. When I did so, she coughed and her eyes fluttered open.

  “June, what happened?”

  “I bit him back,” she said. “I got him good.”

  She touched her hair and left red streaks on her hands. Quivering, she lay her hands back down and turned her head toward the wooden porch floor. A smile splayed across her face.