This is Where It Stops Making Sense
Brother called me leech, but the puppets call me lychee: bristled, sweet. In the attic, they give me pain killers and stroke my head. They cut me open just enough to see the creature trailing along the corners of my right lung, holding a flocked bear. Bald-bodied, keloid-crusted, it grazes on the vagus nerve. The puppets try to remove it, but it hides behind vital organs. There is a slight girlishness to the creature, its long lashes and nail-bitten hands.
“There’s nothing we can do,” the puppets say. “Not without damage.”
They sew me back up, the closing more painful than the opening. I pass out. In the dream, I can feel my brother watching my every move. The sky is white and the ground is white and the ocean too, which screams a prolonged, concentrated sound of glass breaking.
#
Let me explain. I am hiding from my brother, and I have no plans of returning. It is the only part of the game I have invented. He usually makes the rules, plays all the parts. He was Sam, my best friend, and he was also the man who shot him. He was the mad scientist who strapped me to a chair, and the agent who cut me loose. I was a good prop. And I played with him because who else did I have? He’d chased all my friends away.
Like all prey, I saw best through peripheral vision. I saw what he did to my journals, took them apart the way he peeled butterfly wings. Lavishly and with great care. When the pain began in my chest, I knew my brother had put it there. When he was near, it knocked me down on all fours. Like all prey, I had the instinct for flight.
When no one was home, I snuck up to the attic, the place where my family would not think to look for me. I was afraid of the dark. But I was afraid of my brother more, so I closed the door behind me. This is where it stops making sense.
#
During my recovery, the puppets introduce themselves. There is an old marionette, larger than the rest, which is to say, two watermelons tall, and the white string she stitched me up with falls out of her back in limitless supply. Her name is Olga, babushka eternal, and she is the puppets’ matriarch. There is the Rugged Princess, who spends her time in the shadows. A glove puppet that moves by bouncing. Hard to tell what she is made of. And Nima, a talking dog, a sock puppet. Three finger puppets who call themselves Ant and speak in unison. Though not a puppet, Pearlhead, the jack-in-the-box (“Our oracle,” Olga explains).
They welcome me into their home. They sleep on old blankets around a broken piano. It occurs to me that the broken piano, however normal it seems, is another impossible thing. How could it have gotten here? There is only one way to the attic, through what I call the trapdoor: a little opening that becomes a ladder. There are two windows on either side of the attic, but they are about the same size as the trapdoor, approximately three watermelons wide.
The puppets revere the house and try to protect it. “It is why we have a bad reputation,” Olga says of the stories my brother told me, of puppets creeping through closets and stalking children, winding around their parents’ hands and slitting throats. “We aren’t senseless. We only respond as the house asks us to.”
The puppets, though kind hosts, are reluctant to reveal their secrets to me. They strike me as tricksters, carving labyrinths of traps and dead ends into the hollows of the house. I get the sense that they are powerful. Like the piano, like everything in this attic, they are impossible, driven to life by rough, bloody feelings.
#
I try very hard to touch nothing and keep to myself, but there’s only so much you can do before you go stir-crazy and touching something, anything, becomes an act of grounding. I pick a corner of the attic as far as I can get from the broken piano, and I rummage through some packed boxes. Behind some of the boxes, there is a large brown trunk, and I decide to save this for last.
Inside the boxes are photographs that I don’t recognize. A girl and her nanny lighting candles. A boy kneeling in the garden. A woman petting her cat. Our family moved here when I was five, when the only furniture in the house was a cream-colored couch and a sign above the kitchen window that said thankful. Appa had peeked into the attic, came crawling down and hacking up dust and saying, “There’s not a thing in there.” Then he closed it up for what he thought was for good.
I work my way through the boxes, more photos of people I don’t know, cracked frames wrapped in tattered clothes, jars of screws and sewing thread, a candelabra, a quilt, eight spoons, newspapers that go back a hundred years, CDs, DVDs, records (classic pop, a compilation of surf rock), teacups, a rusty tea kettle, a globe that places Africa too close to South America, paper boats, clocks that tell different times, and a film camera without film.
I make it to the trunk. I undo the buckle and open it.
At first, the trunk seems empty. But no: it goes down through the floor, down to a dark place. I lower myself.
“You found my secret spot.”
The Rugged Princess lights a candle. I am in a little room. There is a blue cot, and a desk with mounds of wax—sad, finished candles—and something like a forest cropping up on all four walls, gray-brown mushrooms and colorful molds, polypore steps growing out of the wall. It is warm and damp.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” I say.
In the candlelight, I can see the Rugged Princess more clearly. There is no mistake. Mixed in with patches of cloth, she has skin—real, human skin. And real eyes that blink, and yarn intermingled with black hair. A cloth chest. No legs—an opening. And I am not the only one in the attic with a heart that beats like. Ba dum, ba dum.
“You seem afraid,” the Rugged Princess says.
I reach for the hole, but the trunk slides shut. The candles go out.
“No,” she says, “not yet. I’ll let you out, but not yet. First, I must tell you our story.”
#
She doesn’t open her mouth, then, but I hear her speak. In my head, I see the story.
What skin remembers. I had something like a brother once. He made me—attached my eyes first, so that I could see the rest and talk about it later. He went down skin with needle and thread, pinching blood into my frayed yarn-veins. The red fruit he placed in my chest, I called the Wound. And hair from his own head.
He put me on. He’d ride his hand up the pocket of skin in my back and my limbs would go limp. I’d feel an ache of fingers in my arms, crawling around cloth and bone, and I would take a step back from my body, into a room without light or sound, where I could watch the show he put on. Afterward, drained, I would curl up under his arm, full of his bitter smell, and fall asleep.
My inside scurries, foams at the mouth.
What he called dreams, I called transportations. Take the night I first met you. Closed my eyes and entered the long, fast train that took me to the rice fields. There was a hessian sack in my lap. When the train stopped, I got off and walked to the center of the field, where I dug a hole. I opened the sack and turned it over, and your head fell to the bottom with a thud. Eyes closed, covered with hair. I buried it. The rain fell ash-soft, and I lay down beside the mound, and it could have been hours later when I heard another train shrieking in the distance, when you climbed out of the earth, head on body, body on crooked toes, wearing a gown that flowed like silk petals.
#
I am falling asleep with the Rugged Princess running her fingers through my hair. Far away, a piano sings.
“Tomorrow,” she says, “I’ll walk you home.”
“What for?” The trunk hollow is so warm, and the Rugged Princess has a voice that transports you, a low, lingering voice that cradles you.
She tells me what we’re going to do, what the house asks of us. “We’re going to make something new with our hands,” she finishes. And she doesn’t say more, but I feel a shift in the smoke-haze, in my chest, blood spinning into fine threads. A desire to tunnel through marrow, haunt back what’s haunted you.
Anjali Ravi is a writer from Maryland and graduate of CU Boulder’s MFA program. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Liminal Stories, Necessary Fiction, and DREGINALD. Find them at anjaliravi.carrd.co.
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