Mud Vein - Fisher Tarryn - Страница 46

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I return to the books. Eye each one. My hand lingers over Knotted briefly, before settling on the unnamed pile. I’ll start right here.

I read the book. Without the pages numbered, I am forced to read pell-mell. It’s like jumping backwards into a snowdrift and not knowing how deeply you’re going to sink. My life has always been filled with order, until I was taken and set aside to rot in this place. This place is chaos, and reading with no order is chaos. I hate it and yet I am too enslaved by the words to desist.

The book is about a girl named Ophelia. On the very first page I read, which could be 5 or 500, Ophelia has been forced to give her premature baby up for adoption. Not by her parents, as most stories go, but by her controlling, schizophrenic husband. Her husband is a musician who writes what the voices tell him to write. So, when the voices tell him to give his five-pound baby girl away, he strong-arms Ophelia by threatening both her and her baby’s life.

On the next page I pick up, Ophelia is a girl of twelve. She is eating a meal with her parents. It appears to be a normal family meal, but Ophelia’s inner dialogue is riddled with the kind of markers that herald a girl both strange and strangely old. She is angry with her parents for existing, for being such simple contributors to society. She compares them to her mashed potatoes then goes on to talk about their failed attempts to replace her with another baby. My mother has had four miscarriages. I’d take that as God’s way of saying you aren’t supposed to fuck up any more kids.

I cringe at this part, wanting to know more about Carol Blithe’s broken uterus, but my page has come to an end, and I am forced to pick up a new one. It goes like this for hours, as I gather bursts of information about Ophelia, who almost seems like the anti-heroine. Ophelia is a narcissist; Ophelia has a superiority complex; Ophelia can’t stick with anything for too long before becoming bored. Ophelia marries a man who is the antithesis of boring, and she pays for it. She leaves him eventually, and marries someone else, but then she leaves him, too. I find a page where she speaks about a china doll that she had to leave behind after divorcing her second husband. She laments the loss of the china doll in the most peculiar way. I gather these details until my brain is hurting. I am trying to sort through all of it, put it in order, when I come across the last page. She is self- actuating on the last page of the book. When I reach the final line, my eyes cross. You will feel me in the fall

I vomit.

Isaac finds me lying on my back on the floor. He stands over me with a leg on each side of my body, and hauls me to my feet. His eyes briefly explore the puddle of vomit beside me before he reaches up and feels my forehead. When he finds it cool, he asks me, “What did you read?”

I turn my face away.

“Nick’s book?”

I shake my head.

He looks at the pile closest to where I was lying.

“Do you know who wrote it?”

I can’t look at him, so I close my eyes and nod.

“My mother,” I say. I hear his breath catch.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

I hobble into the kitchen. I need water to wash out my mouth. Isaac follows behind me.

“How do I know it wasn’t you who did this?” He takes a threatening step toward me. I back into a bag of rice. It falls over. I watch, horrified, as the grains spill across the floor, flowing around my bare foot.

“I brought you here? You think I brought us here to starve and freeze? For what?”

“It was convenient that you were the one to cut me free. Why weren’t you the one tied up and gagged?”

“Listen to yourself,” I say. “It wasn’t me who did this!”

“How do I know that?” His words are sharp, but he says them slowly.

I shift my feet and rice fills the spaces between my toes.

My chin trembles. I can feel my bottom lip shaking with it. I clutch it between my teeth.

“I guess you have to trust me.”

He points to the living room where the chest is, where the books lay in piles.

“Your book, Nick’s book, and now your mother’s book? Why?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even know my mother wrote a book. I haven’t seen her since I was a kid!”

“You know who did this,” he says. “Deep down, you know.”

I shake my head. How can he possibly believe that? I have searched—wracked—my brain for answers.

He backs up, covering his eyes with his palms. His back hits the wall and he bends at the waist with his hands on his knees. It looks like he can’t breathe. I reach a hand out to him, and then drop it to my side. It’s no use. No matter what I say, I took his wife and baby away. I birthed this psycho’s obsession.

Three weeks later, Isaac removes my cast. He uses a kitchen knife to cut it off. It’s the same knife he carried around on our first day here. We are both wide-eyed and short of breath as the fiberglass falls away. What will we see? How much more broken will I be? In the end there is just a hairy, skinny leg that looks a little off. It reminds me of blood in a cup, a sweater in a bathtub, a rock in a mouth. It’s just visually off and I can’t tell why.

I still have to use my crutch, but I like the freedom I feel after all those weeks lying in bed. Isaac still won’t speak to me. But the sun has returned. It rises again. We stop using the lights to save the generator from burning gas. I read all of Knotted, but surprisingly it doesn’t hurt as much as the nameless book my mother wrote. I see Nick a little differently; less glimmer. It’s his best work, but I’m left unimpressed with his love note.

Isaac carries the rest of the supplies up from the well at the bottom of the table. He fills the cupboards and the fridge and the wood closet. So we don’t have to climb down there anymore, he tells me. It takes him all day. Then he puts the table back together. When he goes to his room I come down from the carousel room and creep into the kitchen. I’m still in my robe and my legs are cold. I feel naked without my cast. I press the back of my legs to the lip of the table, and hop up. I scoot back until I’m sitting, my legs hanging over the side. My runner’s legs look spindly and weak. A scar runs like a seam across my shin. I trace it lightly with the tip of my finger. I’m starting to look like a stitched-up Emo doll. All I need are the button eyes. I reach up, slipping my hand into the opening at the top of my robe, running my fingers across the skin on my chest. There are scars there too. Ugly ones. I’m used to being disfigured. It feels like parts of me keep being taken; eaten by disease, hacked off, snapped in two. I wonder when my body will become tired of it and just give up.

I’ll never be able to run like I used to. I walk with a limp. I haven’t told Isaac, but my leg aches constantly. I like it.

It’s dark in the kitchen. I don’t want to put the light on and risk Isaac knowing I was in here. If he is trying to avoid me, I’ll help him. But when I look up he’s standing in the doorway watching me. We stare at each other for the longest time. I feel anxious. It looks like he has something to say. I think he’s come to fight some more, but then I see something else in his eyes.

He takes the steps to reach me. One … two … three … four.

He’s standing in front of my knees. My hair is wild and unruly. I can’t remember the last time I brushed it. It’s grown past where my breasts used to be. Now it’s sort of a shawl across my upper body, so that even when I’m naked I don’t have to see myself. I don’t even bother to hide my white streak behind my ear like I usually do when Isaac is around. It curls in front of my eye, partly obscuring my vision.

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