SEVENTEEN
Blood and Balloons
Miriam jolts awake. A shadow passes over her eyes.
She sits up. Her eyes adjust to the darkness. Ashley lies next to her, unmoving.
Her eyes catch sight of the shadow again – it eases into the corner, then ducks into the bathroom, a whispery, crinkly sound accompanying the drifting shape.
She reaches down over the edge of the bed, her hand darting into her messenger bag and coming up with the butterfly knife, a knife she bought at a flea market in Delaware for six bucks. Soundlessly, she flips open the blade.
Her feet touch carpet. Gentle steps stalking the shape.
Her free hand slides along the wall around the doorframe of the bathroom. Fingers find the light switch.
Click. Harsh, garish light.
Her heart stops.
A red Mylar balloon floats in the upper corner of the bathroom. It bobs and shifts. On the balloon is a picture of a cake, and above the cake, written in the cartoony flames of the cake's candles, is a message: Happy Birthday, Miriam.
"It's not my birthday," she says, apparently talking to the balloon.
The balloon shifts – another whispery crinkle – and drifts to the center of the room. Miriam looks at herself in the mirror. Both eyes are bruised. A rime of crusted blood rings her nostrils.
"This is a dream," she says.
The balloon turns slowly – on the back is another message.
A skull and crossbones are where the cake should be. From the skull's open mouth, emerging through crooked, jaunty teeth, a comic strip word bubble: Happy DEATH-day, Miriam.
"Cute," she says, and she thrusts up with the knife.
The balloon pops.
And it sprays blood everywhere. Black blood. Thick with clots. Miriam wipes it off her face, spitting. It runs down the mirror, globs of rusty treacle. Bits of pale tissue are trapped in the flow like maggots in tree sap. She's seen this before, seen this kind of blood. (On the floor, on the bathroom floor.)
She doesn't know why, but she runs her hand across the mirror, wiping a clear spot away so she can see her reflection.
What she sees surprises her.
It's still her, the reflection. But she's young. Chestnut hair pulled back and tied with a pink scrunchie. No makeup. Eyes wider, fresher, that glimmer of innocence.
Then, movement behind her, in the reflection, obscured by coagulating clumps of gore.
"Nine more pages," says a voice. Louis's voice.
Miriam wheels, but it's too late. He's got a red snow shovel.
He cracks her across the head, laughing. All goes dark. As she's drawn deep into the well of unconsciousness, she hears the squalling cries of a child, and then that fades, too.
She wakes to the antiseptic stink of a hospital. It crawls up her nose. It nests there.
Her hands clutch the sheets. She struggles to get out of bed, to swing her feet over the edges, but the sheets have tangled her, and the bed is edged with a metal rail that she cannot, not for the life of her, seem to overcome. It's as if they form an invisible perimeter. It's hard for her to get air. Her lungs won't draw full breaths. She feels trapped, like in a box, in a coffin. Sucking breath, tight throat, gasp.
Hands reach out suddenly – hard hands, heavy hands – and they grab her ankles and, no matter how hard she struggles, buckle her feet into cold rubber stirrups. The palms feel greasy, wet. A face emerges from the edge of the bed, rising up from between her legs.
It's Louis. He tugs aside a mint-green surgical mask with blood-stained fingers.
"There's been a lot of blood," he says.
Miriam struggles. The sheets have coiled around her hands. "This is a dream."
"Could be." Louis reaches up and scratches the edges of the electrical tape X over his right eye. "Sorry. The tape itches."
"Get my legs out of those stirrups."
"If it's just a dream," he says, "why not just wake up?"
She tries. She really tries. She cries out, willing herself to wake.
Nothing. The world remains. Louis cocks his head. "Still think it's a dream?"
"Fuck you."
"Such a dirty mouth. It's why you'll be an unfit mother."
"Fuck your mother."
"You're like that girl in that movie, the one where she gets possessed by the devil? You know the one. All that vomit. All that angry rage slagging our blessed Lord and Savior."
Miriam pulls again at the stirrups. Sweat beads on her brow. She grunts in frustration, anger, fear. Why can't I wake up? Wake up, you stupid girl, wake up.
"We're going to have to stitch you up," Louis says. He leers toward the exposed space between her legs and licks his lips. "Tie it shut, nice and tight."
"You're not Louis. You're just a phantom in my head. You're my own brain, toying with me."
"It's Doctor Louis, I'll have you know. Respect the credentials." He pulls out a needle. It's huge, like a crotchet needle. Like a baby's finger. He sticks out his tongue to concentrate and, even blind, is able to thread a dirty, fraying cord through the eye of the fat needle. "You don't even know my last name, do you?"
"You don't have a last name," she huffs, trying to free her hands. "You're a figment. A fragment. I don't care about you. I don't care about ghosts and goblins."
"You feel guilty. That's okay. I'd feel guilty, too. We can talk about that, but before we do, I really need to stitch up your naughty place. That's medical lingo, by the way: naughty place. But I know you're fond of certain words, so, let me rephrase that: I need to sew shut this stinking, worm-choked cunt of yours so that you can never have another baby, because the last thing the world needs is for you to breed true once more and crack your whore's pelvis giving birth to whatever little godless maggot decides to wriggle free from your scabbed womb."
Miriam is horrified – horrified at the words coming out of his (her?) mouth. She wants to say something, but her voice is just a squeak, a hoarse squeal. She tries to say no, tries to reach out and stop him –
But his head dips down and the fat needle pierces her labia, and she feels a gush of blood and she tries to scream but no scream will come –
Long highway – tapering to nothing in one direction, and tapering to nothing in another. Gray, blasted, pale, cracked. Desert on both sides: red earth, pale scrub. Blue sky above, but far off a rolling thunderhead like an anvil tumbles end over end over end.
Miriam stands on the shoulder of the highway. She catches her breath, as if she just emerged from the icy waters of a winter lake.
She feels her thighs, her crotch. No pain. No blood.
"Jesus," she gasps.
"Not quite," a voice from behind her.
Louis, again, with those dead-X eyes.
He smiles.
"Don't come near me," she warns. "You come near me, I will break your tree-trunk neck, I swear to all that is holy."
He chuckles, shaking his head. "C'mon, Miriam. You've already established that this is a dream. You already know that I'm you. So are you saying you want to break your own neck? That's very counter-productive. Suicidal, really. You should seek professional help."
Louis starts to pace, and as he moves, Miriam sees two crows in the middle of the highway. Dark beaks peck at a smashed armadillo, pulling up strings and tendons of red. The dead animal almost looks like a cracked Easter egg. The birds peck at each other.
"Maybe I'm not you," Louis says, slowly ping-ponging from dusty shoulder to dusty shoulder. "Maybe I'm God. Maybe I'm the Devil. Could be that I'm the living manifestation of fate, of destiny, of that thing you curse every morning you wake and every night before you lay your head to sleep. Who can say? All I know is, it's time to meet ze monsta."
Miriam begins to pace along with him. They are like two predatory cats, stalking each other on two sides of the same cage.
"Get me out of this dream," she says.
He ignores the request. "Maybe I really am Louis, though. Maybe I'm his sleeping mind, psychically calling out to you – because, after all, you're so sensitive. Poor little psychic girl. Maybe I know what's coming, and I'm begging for you to make it stop. Please, make it stop, Miriam. Boo-hoo."
"I can't make it stop."
"Maybe. Maybe not. You still have choices. I'm going to die in two weeks, but instead of trying to stop it – or, at least, trying to make my life a little better during that time – you're going to haunt me like a ghost and steal from my dead, eyeless body."
"Girl needs to eat." Miriam sneers.
He stops pacing. "Is that how you justify what you do?"
"You don't know what I do or why I do it," she says, even though she suspects the opposite must be true. "I'll be with Louis – and trust me, you're not him – and maybe I will make his life better for those two weeks."
"Blowjobs are nice," Louis says. "Try one of those."
"Fuck you. I can make him happy during that time. But don't ask me to save him–"
"Save me."
"– because it ain't happening. It can't happen. It won't let me."
"It."
"Fate. You. God. Whatever."
He shrugs. Then he looks somewhere over her shoulder.
"Hey," he says. "What's that?"
She falls for it. She looks.
It's a Mylar balloon. Drifting over the road-top, caught in a heat haze, dripping blood onto the asphalt, where it sizzles as if on a hot griddle.
Miriam turns to say something to Louis, or not-Louis, or whatever he is, but –
He's gone.
He's been replaced by a white SUV, and it strikes her dead in the chest, and she feels something break inside of her.
The crows caw. A baby cries.
? ? ? ?
When Ashley wakes, he finds Miriam in the corner, soaked in sweat. She's sitting there, back against the two walls joining, and she's furiously scribbling in the notebook.
"What are you doing?" he croaks.
"Writing."
"I see that, Hemingway. Writing what?"
She looks up then. Mania glints in her eyes, and a mad smile plays.
"Wrote two pages, that's what. Only seven pages left." Then she goes back to scribbling.