Darcie watches. She pulls a feather out of her wings and chews the quill. Marcus stares at the doll with the missing arm.
On the road, the weight has fallen away. I’m surprised at how small I am without my clothes, board straight except for the bulges of breast and belly. I pinch my collarbone and the sharp lines of my hips. I feel the veins on my stomach.
The liquid has no aftertaste. It disappears on my tongue. I try to think Cherry Meth and not Grievous Bodily Harm.
Darcie leads me into the tunnel. She closes the door behind me. I start walking. My toes grind into the dirt. In the narrowness of the tunnel, I begin to feel thirsty and dizzy and like I am not still inside a house but wandering into some distant land.
A wave nearly knocks me down. A wave of what, I’m not sure, but it makes me hot and sick. I stop walking. My stomach lurches. I want to get close to the ground and put my head between my knees, but the cold of the dirt drives me away.
What if all of this is wrong? What if we have gotten lost?
I can imagine these questions, but I am in no way equipped to answer them, because my brain is a blue jellyfish that has crawled out through my ear and is hovering somewhere along the roof of the tunnel, happy to finally be free of the body.
“Come back here,” I say to the jellyfish. I snatch at the air above and scrape my knuckles on the top of the tunnel.
Echoes.
Deeper inside, the cold hits. I start to shiver. My teeth clank together. The cut on my forehead pulses. I feel a sharp ache in the bone, like something is trying to burrow into the soft matter. Grit on my heels. I want to turn around, to run back to the door, but it’s like the path behind me has disintegrated and now the only way to go is forward.
I reach the end and touch the stone and the empty place where a stone used to be. The blue jellyfish brain returns for a moment, the tentacles twisting around my hair, before floating away again. I turn and find that the path back is still real and solid and I picture Darcie and Marcus standing behind the steel door, waiting.
I’m halfway there when I hear the voice—faint at first, like the tendrils of language you catch through static on a radio. I stop walking. I listen to the gradual swell of sound. The voice is singing something. It sounds like a nursery rhyme. I make out the words “billy goat” and “ax” and “wooden leg.”
I smell burning rubber. Another waves comes.
I lose all sense of the minute and the hour, become trapped inside some strange pocket of time, like the watchtower with the stopped hands that Marcus saw from a bus window. I try to find the source of the singing, but it’s everywhere, in front and behind and on my skin and in the air and in my plasma. There is no getting away from it and I’m not even sure I want to get away, because maybe this is my mother speaking and maybe I will want to crawl inside this voice and live there forever.
My high keeps stretching on. I feel vibrations under my skin. My eyes are running, but in a way that almost feels good, like a toxin is being released.
“Don’t leave,” I say in the tunnel, reaching into the emptiness in front of me.
The voice disappears. Like my mother, it doesn’t give a damn what I want.
*
In the basement, I lean over and vomit on the floor. My body acts without warning, a sneak attack. The liquid splatters up the naked insides of my legs. Marcus throws my black sweatshirt over my shoulders.
“What did you give me?” I cry out to Darcie.
She is supposed to go in the tunnel next. She still has her clothes on, but from the look in her eyes, the expanding pupils, I can tell that she has already swallowed the liquid.
She stands in front of me, on the edge of the vomit. She grabs my chin and lifts my face, so we’re looking each other in the eye. “What have you been eating in the woods?” she says back.
I’m squatting and hunched, my lips wet. “Nothing you haven’t been eating.”
She lets go of my face and steps away, disgusted. Now her basement is going to smell. I wipe my mouth. Another wave is coming. I clutch at my stomach and feel something move inside me.
*
I keep going into the tunnel. Every time, I hear the singing. Every time, it fades into nothing. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. Once Darcie comes out crying so hard, she starts hiccupping. Marcus and I crowd around her and I pull her naked body close and feel her jerk in my arms, like something is trying to kick its way out.
Marcus has become a kind of facilitator. He folds our clothes and screws the eyedropper on the vial and waits on the other side of the door for whatever we bring back with us. I wonder what he and Darcie talk about when they’re alone and waiting on me. I wonder if she asks to see his face and if he shows her and if they come up with their own theories of the sickness, their own ideas about who or what is to blame.
“I’m scared of rabbits. Aren’t you scared of rabbits?” I heard Darcie say to him once.
“Rabbits are afraid of everything,” he replied. “That’s what makes them dangerous.”
Away from the tunnel, “billy goat” and “ax” and “wooden leg” keep playing in my mind. I arrange and rearrange the words like puzzle pieces, wait for them to start making sense. I lie on the mattress and smell that grass scent and look at my mother’s photo and try to remember. I am moved by the idea of her singing to me, but troubled by the question that must follow: why did she stop?
Sometimes, when I’m in the tunnel, I can picture her so clearly, I trick myself into thinking she’s right there, standing against the stone wall, and all I need to do is reach out and touch her.