Our section editors chose some of their favorite published submissions from past issues to feature on our blog. This piece is from Issue 41, selected by Anna Brunner, our current Prose Editor.
The first people who talked about her were children. They thought, maybe, that she came from the village nearby, the one where tourists flock and people drown often. Their parents only brought them there once a year, in summer, for Gaspee Days, when they celebrated burning a British ship by filling the streets with tents and people and noise. She seemed like someone who would drink to burning ships.
The stories were quick to spread. Some said she was big as a tree and twice as wide, sitting outside the bakery with a hat that blocked out the sun; others said she had no tongue, that she talked with her hands, and that those had hands of their own. When she walked, her shadow reached the next town over. The people who encountered her claimed she wore very little, and that she carried an old bucket full of knives and fishhooks. But despite all the rumors and stories and songs, one thing remained constant: she made people feel better. It was enough reason for me to go looking.
I find her at a gas station. She sits in a plastic chair that barely holds her, drinking something spoiled, and her many hands are cracked and black with grease. A man is thanking her. He puts money in her palms, then his watch, then he takes the shirt off his back and gives her that, too. When he walks away, he looks at me like I’m about to be struck by a car. I even brace myself. When nothing happens and the man becomes a fleshy speck at the end of the road, I continue toward her. She, on the other hand, looks at me like an old friend. When she smiles, I see fly specks in her teeth.
All the stories come back to me at once. I ask her why only her reflection cries. She tells me that when she was a girl they carved the skin off her face. I ask her why when she screams no sound comes out. She tells me two neighbor boys pulled her heart out through her throat. I ask her why she sleeps with her eyes open. She tells me ghosts use doors too.
She tells me about the process. “Removal,” she says. “Freedom.”
“Show me,” I say.
She starts in my chest, where ants crawl around in a fat, red bunch, eating and dying and eating the dead, shitting out more ants. She tells me memory lives here, but you’ll find it everywhere. She tells me that once, in a tent painted white and yellow, she watched a man tear his own heart out and take a bite, and with strings between all his teeth he laughed and laughed. That’s what hearts are for, she says— waiting patiently for someone to run through them. That’s when she puts something sharp between my ribs. I feel the worms inside me squirm, cowering to one side, but she knows all their tricks. She pulls my heart free with ease and wrings it into her bucket. It looks like the one I drowned ants in as a kid.
“Next,” she says.
She cuts into my lungs, the twins full of spite and ferocity. Sound writhes under her precision— or lack thereof. Television static lives in the walls and a broken speaker sings Zeppelin on repeat. I’m young again, I think, or maybe I only feel that way. I guess the right music does that, like a strong smell or the view from a window you’d forgotten. She begins telling me about her first time performing this procedure. A woman, older than me, thought there were ghosts living in her ears, so she cut them off. But ghosts are clever and they moved to her feet, so she cut those off, too. Then, all the woman could do was sit there, haunted, until her son found her dead in her bed. That’s what I’m thinking about when she pulls the worms from my chest and puts them in her mouth: dying alone.
She draws the curtains of my stomach wide, where I used to park cars with boys from down the street and put little blue dreams under our tongues. Exhaust filters through her while she rummages, pulling out rocks and rubber mallets, and the rifle from the back of my father’s closet that I touched once, the day I learned that death is cold and metallic. She tells me about the time she held a gun in someone’s face, or sort of their face, and how the night stayed in her knees forever, and that the only way to get it out was to pry the caps free with an old can opener.
She feels around under my stomach, making a scrunched face and looking at the sky. She finds the blue jay egg from my summer away from home, and the dish towel I stuck there a few months later. Coated in bile and brown, it lands in the bucket with a smack. The egg, less heavy, falls quietly. It breaks, bleeding out onto the mess.
She turns me around, peeling away the skin on my back, leaving ribbons around my feet. My spine, where the things that existed before me roam and grapple, making weapons from each other’s bones. They dance like the old people did, up and down and alien, ceremony and ritual, before rhythm and records and Renaissance. She wraps her hand around it and pulls, shaking it like a palm tree. I feel things dislodging from the base of my neck. Rusted, jaundiced things, caked in grime and mud. Can’t even drag a finger through it, she says. Won’t ever be what they were again, she continues, but she keeps shaking, until the spiders crawl from their homes and into my shoulders instead. Eventually they’ll eat their way free, out the back of my neck, she explains, scooping the garbage away, dropping it into the bucket by the armful. I see old guitar strings and the VCR my brother took apart as a boy.
She reaches behind my eyes and I try to sneeze her out. There’s meteors in her way, and galaxies too big for my head, all hanging on old string. Then we hear birds screaming, hundreds of them crying, and she tells me, with a wave of one of her other hands, not to worry, that she sees it all the time. They’ll sleep in winter, she explains. By the time she reaches the center of it all, the sound is deafening, but the bucket fills up anyway. Spent matches and rosary beads, a stick horse that’s been snapped in half, a tube of brown lipstick; slinkies that bound down the stairs, they keys to my father’s Saab, the one I fell out of and onto the ground, where I probably died for a minute or two, which makes her laugh. At the bottom of it all she finds a bright green crumpled up t-shirt, The Beatles walking across its face. She tells me it’s not my color. I tell her it never was.
She pours bleach into my bones and scrapes the marrow with her nails. She trims the fat from my liver, telling me it will grow back while waving the adipose sliver in my face. It squirms. It wants to get away. She marathons through my intestines and insists we play Cat’s Cradle with my veins. I show her Jacob's Ladder, she makes the Eiffel Tower and Fish in a Dish. We toast to each other’s health with the bourbon from my kidneys. She tells me she can see scorch marks on my ribs. I tell her that it’s because I thought I loved her, briefly, and then I didn’t. She laughs so loudly the ground shakes for miles. I leave dandelions at her feet when I go.
That’s how the town comes to be empty, and the village over. People line up until they reach the water, leaving their cars idling in quiet streets and their kitchen faucets running, and the rest swim. They stand in her long shadow with flowers and money and hearts with open mouths. Some have anchors tied to their heels, or bricks in their lungs, or trees growing out of their bodies. Some say they’ll name the town after her. Others just cry. But she sees every one of them, until the streets and homes are filled with junk, until the shore is brown and the fish have floated to the surface. And only then does she leave, larger than she was.
People spend their entire lives looking for her. Sometimes an imposter will show up, and the town will empty again, but the first man in line will bleed to death, and they’ll scatter. Sometimes children will play in the places her shadows touched, singing about the tall woman who scooped the pulp from their mothers and fathers, hoping to feel her footsteps rattle their bones. But she never returns, and the sun forgets the way it felt to cling to her body, and the people forget her face, until there’s nothing but cracks in the pavement and the stories of how they got there.