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.
* * * * * * *
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.
