Iris and Eric were in the living room watching The Six Million Dollar Man, and Vi wished she were out there with them instead.
She lifted the sweating glass in her hand and took another sip of the bitter tonic. “A regular day,” she reported, smiling, shrugging her shoulders a little, like an apology. Sorry that the truth was so boring. “We did some reading and math, then watched TV. Went for a walk in the woods. Read a bunch of comic books. Went over to the vegetable garden to get some tomatoes. Old Mac yelled at us for taking too many.”
Gran studied her for a long time without saying anything; then she asked, “Are you all right, Violet?”
“Of course. What do you mean? Nothing’s wrong.” Vi tried not to squirm, though she felt like a worm on a hook. Caught, caught, caught!
“You and Iris seem a little… tense,” Gran said, peering at Vi as she took out her cigarettes and lighter.
Vi shook her head. “Not really. We kind of had an argument, but it was stupid. Everything’s fine now.”
“An argument about what?” Gran wanted to know.
“Over a game we were playing. Like I said, it was dumb. We made up.”
And Gran looked at her like she could see right through whatever lies Vi might tell. Like maybe Vi wasn’t the actress she thought she was.
“What happened to your face?” Gran asked.
“Huh?”
“The bruise on your chin, Violet. The one I’ve been pretending not to notice for days now.”
Vi rubbed at her chin. “I… I fell down when I was out in the woods the other day.”
Gran had stared at Vi for a long time. After lighthing a cigarette, she’d taken a deep drag of it and blown the smoke in Vi’s direction.
* * *
“NONE OF THE monster stories have happy endings,” Iris said now, turning the page to the werewolf entry, breaking the silence at last. She flipped to the Invisible Man (Eric had drawn only a hat and glasses on that page).
Vi bit her lip, scrambling for something to say to make it all better. The God of Words was silent. Her head was full of a strange, humming static that was getting progressively louder. Another headache was coming on. She’d been getting so many of them lately. All the secrets piling up, creating a pressure that built and built until she felt like her head might actually explode.
“The monster can try to live among the humans, to act like a human even, but it never works, does it?” Iris asked as she closed the book and stood up. “People always find out the truth.” She was crying now, but her face didn’t look sad. Her face didn’t have any expression at all. It was like a wax mask, except for the tears flowing down her cheeks.
“You’re not a monster,” Vi said, standing. She reached out and touched Iris’s wet cheek. It was cold and pale, like white marble. Iris jerked back.
“Yes, I am.” Her voice was high and loud and strange. All wrong for Iris. “You saw the notes. Patient S was a monster Gran created. And I’m that monster.”
Vi’s chest felt tight, like she couldn’t breathe, like her heart might just stop beating. She was scared, more scared than she’d ever been. She stepped toward Iris. Her legs didn’t want to cooperate: They were all wobbly, as if they didn’t belong to her at all.
“Stay away from me,” Iris ordered. “You don’t know what I might do.”
“I’m not scared of you,” Vi said. “You won’t hurt me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do,” Vi said, putting her hands on Iris’s shoulders, looking her right in the eye. “I know you. I know the real you.”
But Vi wondered how much anyone could really know anyone else.
Had Vi really known Gran?
No. She’d only seen what Gran wanted her to see. One side.
“I know the truth,” Iris said. “The truth about monsters. I know because you taught me.”
Vi gripped Iris’s shoulders more tightly. “Stop it, Iris, please.”
Now Vi was crying—Vi, who never cried, who couldn’t remember the last time she felt this broken, outside or in. Her whole body throbbed, and her head was full of white noise and static. She let go of Iris, who seemed to waver through the watery lens of Vi’s tears, as if she might not be real at all.
“First things first, monsters are real. So real they can reach out and touch you.” Iris pressed a finger into Vi’s chest, and Vi let out a racking sob.
“There are monsters walking among us.” She stalked in a circle around Vi, like a predator sizing up her prey.
Vi was scared. Not scared of Iris, but scared for Iris. Scared for both of them. Scared of whatever might come next.
“Sometimes a monster doesn’t know that it’s a monster”—Iris leaned in, whispered in Vi’s ear—“but when it learns the truth, everything makes sense suddenly. At first I didn’t want to believe, but at the same time, it was like some part of me already knew.”
“No,” Vi said, gulping at the air between her own sobs.
“Monsters will always be monsters, and they are always dangerous,” Iris said, quoting Vi’s own words, the ones she’d carefully written down in their book.
“It’s just make-believe,” Vi sobbed. “Just stupid words I wrote.”
Iris raised her right arm, flexing all her muscles, her hand clenched into a tight fist, like she was going to hit Vi, but Vi grabbed her arm, twisted it behind Iris’s back, shoved her up against the wall hard and fast with a strength she didn’t know she had. The whole building seemed to shake: the walls, the floor; Vi worried the roof might come crashing down. Iris let out a little oomph as her head hit the wall, her eyes flashing a look of complete surprise and disbelief. A look that seemed to say, Who are you and where did you come from?
“Enough!” Vi yelled, her face right up against Iris’s, her spit flying, landing on Iris’s cheeks, mingling with Iris’s tears. “Stop it!” she bellowed, afraid that maybe her voice alone could make the whole building crush them alive.
Just then, she felt like the dangerous one. A roaring rushed in her ears, like all the gods were talking at once, screaming inside her. She was filled with fury, fury at what had been done to Iris, fury that her grandmother could be so wicked and cruel, fury at herself for not being able to fix any of it.
“You’re hurting me,” Iris said.
But Vi did not let her go.
Her body didn’t feel like her own. She’d lost control of it to something else, something that had been sleeping deep inside her.
A current was running through her, and running through Iris too, she was sure: the pull and push of a magnetic field; the motion of electric charges spinning, being drawn together and creating a power greater than anything either of them could produce on their own.
She felt herself pulled forward, her breath on Iris’s cheek, her lips moving to find Iris’s lips. Their mouths pressed hard against each other, teeth banging together. Vi had never kissed anyone, other than Gran on the cheek at night. And she knew it was wrong—girls weren’t supposed to kiss girls, not like this, not like men and women did in movies—but it felt as if everything inside her was pulling her to Iris, and she couldn’t stop it if she tried. She kissed Iris desperately, hungrily, as if her kiss alone could save Iris, could pull her back, take away all that had happened; as if her kiss could banish the monsters.
Iris pushed Vi away, her eyes huge with fear.
Vi staggered backward, started to speak: “I—”
She was breathless, heart hammering, unsure just what she was going to say, what words were going to come tumbling out like a random roll of the dice:
I’m sorry.
I love you.
Let’s forget this ever happened.
Iris raised her arm, pointed to the window. “There’s someone—” she said, and Vi looked in time to see a pale face turn away from just outside the window, a hood over the figure’s head.
“The Ghoul,” Iris whispered, voice breaking, terrified.
Lizzy
August 21, 2019
THE BANGING WAS loud, insistent.
“Miss Shelley?” a voice called.
The voice of God, perhaps.
One of the old gods maybe.
The God of Time that’s run out.
I opened my eyes.