exquisite damage a midwest gothic
Kristy Bowen
EXQUISITE DAMAGE a midwest gothic
______of 50
PROLOGUE Every good writer writes to sell you something. I offer you dandelions, delirium, imaginary monsters in your pantry. You can either marry, fuck or kill this thing between us and I am calling the first. The fretwork of my words a glimpse that strains, that stains the page like ink or coffee. The ecstasy of that which looks like an animal, seems like an animal, but isn't exactly. Not quite. It's a particular kind of loneliness, where I wear dead women's lingerie and hold seances with my cats. But I can barely see you there, outside the page, your fingers all over me. The kind of loneliness that fills with whiskey and wrought iron. The words legless, armless. Missing some other very important appendage that implies flight. Dear reader, I give you your loneliness and take back this book that isn't a book, but looks and acts like a book. This sorry mess. I see you there on the museum steps, holding your latte and just about to deny that it exists. This thing between us. This beautiful bite. But wait, my limbs shimmer just for you. This animal. If I can kill it, I can make it mine.
I write you a small bird in a box. I write you a box with only feathers inside. I write thrashing and wild with hoarfrost and heavy cream. At the beginning, the dream of foxes. The scream of rabbits in the middle of the night forming out of silence. I was born in a time of transams and black velvet paintings. Of kidnappings and nightly suicides. The world was drunk with hope, all the drawers emptied and the house swept clean. Clean enough to eat an egg off the floor and swallow it whole. Clean enough to take a bar of soap to your mouth and polish you til you shone bright like a god.
At 14, I get off regularly to the sex scenes in horror novels. Nothing like ghosts or monsters to rev the heart or loins. I hide in the basement on a filthy yellow couch and count my indiscretions. Fashion frenzy with my fingers out of fear. In the dentists office, I find the doctor probing my mouth erotic. Everything sexy involving just a little bit of discomfort. Sometimes, I imagine the phantom hobo in the woods near the bus stop, forcing me to ground and taking me on a dirty mattress in the rain.. Sores fester the side of his face and his hands hold my wrists until they bruise. Sometimes, I'm swimming and there's a body, floating bloated in the water. I scream and the man that saves me gets to have me. Which is pretty much the plot to everything.
Like all writers, I love all the wrong men. Beautiful, but damaged in their infastructure. They fill novels with their brooding. Their dark brows furrowing over the price of sushi or car rentals. In the woods, he makes a perfect o with his discontent, large enough for me to live inside for weeks Feeding on acorns and the granola bars I packed just in case. At home, he skulks through dinner, loses his keys in the garage. Finds them behind box of garage sale romance novels from the 1970's, where everything comes close, but not quite. A little kissing, a dash of heavy petting, but the heroine arrives virginal at the altar. The princess kidnapped and held for ransom in the stone tower, until the prince unlocks her with his tongue.
This is not a horror novel, but the drainage ditches are thick with dead girls. The girls I killed to get from there to here. Poor dumb Sallie with her charm bracelet tangled in the fence. The blond girl with the fake southern accent. Lisa, who smokes too much and cries a lot. They float, jean jacketed, through every town I ever lived in. All it took was one girl gone missing when I was ten, shoved rough into the back of her car, and we all kept dying a little bit one by one. Each of us something to be broken then fixed like a busted trunk latch. Only one key, one way in or out.
I trade you a happy childhood and give you a summer dusk, filled with fireflies and headlights skimming the asphalt. The salt that gathers at the back of your neck is the same salt licked by horses in the meadow. The shadow of their bodies moving heavily in the dark. A killer waits in the garage, in the ditch, in the back of the van. We are moving through summer and the death of it clogs the gutters like rotten leaves. At the drive-in across town, bodies rub themselves against each other until they explode like stars. But in the car, a woman’s head thumps the backseat. When he drives her home and leaves her at the curb, the night swerves against her. The expanse of midwest sky curving til it breaks open with black.
These days, I carry my terror with me like a pair of scissors in my book bag. It cuts through houses and trees, the paved driveways lit by streetlights. Through the body of a woman watering her roses on the lawn. Through the house where a girl brushes her hair in a mirror. The boy in the next room, loading a 12 guage. The realization that everything we thought was scary wasn't, not really. Our bodies placed carefully, like dolls in the tiny house. Our monsters big, but without any teeth. The backroads, the backyards of fear large and rambling. The real danger in the way we lined up for the killer willingly. Then lay down, playing dead.
In the grocery store, chicken sweats under flourescent lights. The bright white of Styrofoam puddled with blood. The flood of identical boxes placed in identical stacks. The line of cake mixes and corn flakes stretching as far as the eye can see. A woman lingers in the produce aisle, her fingers touching every tomato for just the right softness. Fills her cart with red—boxes of toothpaste and cans of coffee. Licorice whips and packs of sparklers, lit one by one, in the glow of the broken soda machine outside the apartment complex. Inside, she crawls in next to the shape of her husband with a gas can and a box of matches. Her broken bottle of ketchup leaving a trail through the parking lot.
Summer is one long cut. Frame by frame we arrange ourselves on plastic lawn chairs. Slather our bodies in baby oil until we glisten. Every girl's sigh like ribbons floating the handlebars of bikes. Still, the men named Dave or Mike pull their t-shirts over their head in one quick motion, cannonball into the creek. What we remember of drowning, we tuck into our slouchy bags, next to our plastic sunglasses. The body of the hooker found floating in the reeds not 10 yards away. Her hands and feet bound. The weight of the cinder block that neglected to hold her down. But then again, girls were always throwing themselves from one bridge or another. Always gone off when the wind was right. You can't throw a stick without hitting some Susie wading too far into the lake. No one there at all to save her.
Like all writers, I spend a lot of time in bed. Nothing sexy, but staring at the window, daring the daylight to skim across the horizon. I'm good at it, sleeping in. Slipping through dreams about rooms that appear, suddenly, behind a cupboard or a closet. Opening one into another then another. As if all this time we'd been living only in part of the house with so much more house inside it, filled with lamps and chairs and taxidermied deer. Thick with record players and busted vacuum cleaners. While I'm in the kitchen pouring coffee, there's a woman crawling the ceiling in the next room. Another trapped in the wall. Still another opening a door that leads to another door. Something terrible in her step.
One by one, the prom queens burst inexplicably into flame, their pink dresses singeing at the hem. Going up in a fury of ash and burning crepe paper. At home, all the bedspreads are pink. The carpets, the lampshades. Even the wallpaper a tiny spray of tea roses. Pink as the insides of their mouths. The insides of their thighs. No one loves a mean girl, spilling her purse into the sink. The pink compact gone missing in the glow of a thousand poodle nightlights. What to do with so much pink? Even the carnation pinned to her dress. The pink lady he slides her way at the bar. How after, she vomits into the pink commode and wanders dazed, fingers trailing the hallway’s pink tiles.
In 5th grade, the girls line up in the classroom. Line up in the gym. Red rover, red rover, send Jenny right over. When the teacher’s not looking, the oldest boys grope us with their hands, sticky with chicken fingers and jelly. I am the spelling bee champ and not to be trusted. My nights filled with math books and magic, levitating pencils and girls twice my size from the basement floor. My mother says I'm gifted, but yells when I lift the butter dish off the counter & slam it into the fridge. Nudges me under the table when the forks begin to bend backwards. When the chandelier begins to shake. In my easy-bake oven, I am killing everything by fire or water, drowning Barbies in the bathtub before cutting every hair off their head. Fucking up the cafeteria with all my bleeding. Speaking to the dead through my transistor radio. Red rover, red rover.
Ultimately, I am not to be trusted. I once read too many novels and now I’m very twisty with the truth. Prone to toothaches and broken appliances in every cupboard. Hoarding the ties of bedded strangers and discarded wedding rings. Every good piece of horror needs the villainess. Red lipped and vicious with her plotlines. That single red heel floating woefully downstream. The smudge on the lens that lets in the light. In the right circumstances, the suitcase full of cash and a gash on her temple where he nearly killed her. In the wrong, her limbs floating the bathtub of a dirty hotel room. Blood blooming around her like roses.
Think of it as a traveling through. Things were on fire, so we made a house out of fear. Something liminal, lit by smoldering sticks. Collected wishbones and the teeth our mothers warned us against losing. Another cut going deep but not hitting the bone. I was my own savior, the knife in my hand. The band of gold round my throat from some other husband, some other villain we invented to haunt our backroads. The truck driver that drove real slow past a group of girls combing the roadside for a locket. The thing we meant to keep but forgot we lost.
Freshman year, I am another girl altogether. Tangled hair and tanned legs, hefting my purple backpack through dormitories and dining halls and into the affections of boys whose mothers still do their laundry on weekends. At the only frat party I ever go to, we drink warm beer from solo cups, panic when a girl goes missing for an hour and is found crying in the woods skirting the yard. Her shorts around her knees and pine needles in her hair. It's the 90's and we're all drinking or dying. No one is talking about it. It's the 90's and the dorms still close to opposite sex visitors after 7pm. The day I lose my virginity to a history major, I go looking for it in the dusk outside my window. Locked out, I wait in the twilight for a roommate to throw down my keys. Watch the boys on the first floor, smuggle girls, laughing, in through the open windows that flare, then go dark as mouths.
When younger, we practice holding our breath til we faint. The girl who counts to 50 gets a pack of gum. A charm bracelet. A host of bragging rights to grade school bathroom shenanigans out of sight from teachers. Every two hours, we collect by the frosted door at the end of the stalls and dare each other to sound the alarm by opening it. Once a month in the spring, we crowd inside to duck and cover, tornado sirens screaming, our heads between our knees. Girls are anything if not resourceful. At slumber parties, we play Bloody Mary, those minutes in the dark exquisite and terrifying. Trade lip glosses like witches. Recant the story of the girl who sucked her insides clean out with a soda bottle. The couple necking in the car, the hook held fast to the passenger side door. The girl who faints gets all the spoils. The rest of us wait, the intake, then the hold.
I trade you a faulty transmission and give you an alibi for every dead cheerleader. For every Debbie sidling up to a car parked mysteriously empty in a clearing. Every webbed over window where something very bad happened. Every skirted lap he tried to caress. Witnesses hang themselves in the telling. This one certain the devil was involved. The borrowed shovel he used to bury the body. Another watching behind dirty curtains and caressing himself through his khakis. The slack weight of a hundred men and their desires worn rusty as the Ford he sold to the woman in Freemont for a discount. The cunt had no clue he'd pulled it from the bottom of the lake the previous summer, full of bluegill spilling out onto the gravel.
On Saturdays, I take my anxiety for a walk in the park. Buy it lattes and a muffin. Stuff everything into a garbage bag and set it at the curb. When I had nothing to be afraid about, I was afraid of everything. Everything full of spiders and things we thought were spiders. Our closets stuffed with goblins and robbers waiting to slit our throats. There are lines in every horror movie I would want to change. Mostly “Everything is going to be okay.” The ghosts in my house watch silently as we stack dishes at the edge of the counter and wait for them to shift. I perfect my gift for disaster, for catching every plate before it hits the floor.
It's the 80s and my parents go bowling every Friday night like clockwork, leaving I and my sister alone in the house. Alone in the house , we watch the killers carve their ways through camp counselors and backwoods towns. Then tuck ourselves into bed, safe in our cat pajamas. When it thunders, we shudder, but the doors are locked tight. The windows streaked with rain. The call is always coming from inside the house. Inside the house, we smell like lavender and candy. Inside the house, the babysitters we never have are walking, one by one, into the basement. One night, a car idles for an hour at the end of the driveway. I stand in shadow at the patio door, my mother's largest carving knife in my fist. The tv glows and swells.
My anxiety starts hanging out at the hometown mall. The gates all closed, slammed shuts on disco lights and polyester skirts. The potted fern gone wild and tipped into the fountain near the abandoned movie theatre. It’s all ruin porn and rough outlines of signs where signs used to be. My teen years, a past where a past should be. Full of bright plastic bangles and empty orange Julius cups. In our 20's , a guy I once sat behind in junior high bio sets himself on fire in front of Marshall Fields. His body wicking brightly in front of Black Friday crowds. In the city, I play panic roulette with the el trains, on and off again in a single commute, waiting for the worst. On the screen, the undead knock over the Sunglass Hut and start in on the pet store. The thin blue light of the smashed aquariums spilling over us all.
Once we've locked down the house, we begin inventing our monsters. Like all things, they are only scarier from afar. Wielding axes and chainsaws, butcher knives and a claw head hammer. Everything stops just short of the screen, where we cover our eyes and burrow deeper into the couch. Now, a friend says he hates horror, his California high school awash one afternoon in gunfire. Every murder a punch in the solar plexus on screen, a girl covered in blood running screaming down a hallway. How he waited, crouched in the bathroom stall, to die. But didn't. And of course, neither do we. Our fear in its box of the body, softly knocking.
Thank you to the following journals, who have published some of these fragments:
Radar Poetry Midway Journal Elsewhere
dancing girl press & studio