Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, page 14
Melanie let go of the steering wheel, reached over the passenger’s seat, and popped open the door. “Get in!”
The girls scrambled inside, filling the space beside and behind her. Infectious she-clowns or frightened stowaways? Melanie couldn’t tell. The Beetle veered onto a nameless path. Pines towered to either side in a thick black curtain, their needle-coated branches grasping at streetlights.
The Cadillac rumbled alongside. Did he ever stop grinning? Just my sunny disposition, his teeth assured her.
Café girls clustered around Melanie, pawing and curious. She focused ahead. This way dipped deeper into the woods. Beyond headlights and luminous streets stretched a dark road. No more streetlights; only blackness lurked here.
Cadillac stuttering, her admirer raised an eyebrow. You sure you want to do this? Absolutely positive?
She wasn’t, but she cranked up the radio and floored the gas. None of her escapes had been sure things, every flight a flirtation with disaster. But this time, she wasn’t alone.
Maybe that mattered.
Both cars sped onto the unlit road, where trees and sky fused into solid night. Melanie’s radio blasted static, and the Beetle’s engine screamed. She and the café girls screamed with it, their smiles cracking apart. Deeper darkness reached for the oncoming cars, too absolute for headlights to pierce.
Too absolute for him. His engine yelped, tires skidded, and he U-turned with his Cadillac’s tailpipe between his legs. His music faded with him.
Melanie kept driving until black woods smothered all light, where the Beetle could finally stop. There was no rearview mirror to check; the café girls were only shallow, panicked breaths in the dark. Melanie couldn’t even see herself.
She stepped out of the Beetle and onto soft soil, where unseen creatures slept and crawled. They did not insist she join them, only invited. She and the café girls were free to lie here or to walk back to the world where the Cadillac roamed.
Melanie stretched herself across cold earth, amid trailing fingers and teeth that broke her skin and chilled her blood. One café girl sprawled beside her, and then another, until each lay in the blackness. Their breath, and the breath of the things around them, synchronized and became one. Music of the darkness, the departed.
Right now, Melanie could take anything but him.
Recitation of the First Feeding
I never told my parents about the ghost girl.
From a young age, they expected me to sleep through the night in my own bed. Children’s nightmares weren’t their problem, no matter what stories Grandmother told when we’d gather at her place on days off from school. If anything, those story-filled summers on her porch and winters by her fire assured me nothing bad would happen so long as I heeded her warnings. Don’t read a book that promises gold; don’t take ice cream from smiling strangers.
But the ghost girl was no story. Some nights I’d lie in bed waiting for sleep, but instead her shape would wash across my bumblebee-patterned nightlight. There were nights she’d kick my toys, and others she’d aimlessly wander the house.
There were nights she’d climb into my bed. I’d wake up to her chill across my back, her face in my hair, and we’d stare into the bedroom’s darkness together.
People can get used to anything. In time I realized she wouldn’t hurt me, not in an obvious way. We lay side by side in bed, her thinking whatever ghosts think while I wondered why she was there. She sometimes mimed me when I sipped water or scratched my head, but other nights I followed her lead, wandering the house without purpose, never sleepwalking but not always in control.
Especially when she got me in trouble.
My little sister’s plastic dolly wound up in my room. She’d spent the better part of a day searching, only for our father to find it under my bed. He shook it at me like an accusation—Why is my daughter’s dolly in my son’s room?—but didn’t say a word.
My mother’s nail polish was worse. My parents started giving me looks, and I overheard them at night discussing aloud what might be wrong with me, if I liked boys, and I didn’t understand. Was I supposed to hate boys? I didn’t want to hate anyone. Eyeliner, leggings, and lipstick all turned up in my room, even my mother’s lace and silver cross. I might’ve thought that was fine, but my father said it was a bracelet, unfit for me to wear.
Not once did I mention the ghost girl. I was in enough trouble without looking loony.
The overheard conversations piled up between my parents and teachers, the principal, other parents. Whispers swirled at school about things I didn’t understand. What did I do? Why did everyone suddenly hate me?
It was the ghost. She wanted to live and would do it through me if she had to. Her spectral fingers slid my mother’s belongings under my pillow, and the nights I mimicked her, didn’t I use them? I tried to be puppeteer and not puppet, but the line was blurring between us. If I let this go on, I would end up possessed.
Grandmother knew stories about possession. She knew stories about worse things than ghosts. To absolve myself these sins of makeup and jewelry, I would need worse things.
The ghost girl had to go.
When the summer solstice freed me from sixth grade that year, I left home in the early morning and started uphill toward Grandmother’s house. My friends would soon be gathering downtown at the roller rink or arcade, places kids were allowed amid Briarstead’s stores and hotels, but I had grown-up work to attend. Here and there, dirt trails shot off into a wilderness of woods and ponds. Where town’s edge plateaued, the trees gave ground to golden fields of grain, wheat, and grazing cows. Briarstead was an odd hodgepodge of fertile rural and urban landscapes.
Grandmother’s one-floor wooden house and the property where it grew sat at the edge of one dirt trail. Yellow-green grass swayed to either side of the house, broken by islands of car tires and similar junk up to where the land hit the woods. The trees didn’t encroach on Grandmother’s property; her roots ran too deep.
She sat on the high porch in her wooden rocking chair, looking to the road like she knew I was coming. Wind snatched at her curling white hair and amber pooled behind her cataracts. She didn’t look like me, my sister, any of us. Most likely we weren’t related to her by blood.
“Morning, Alex,” she said. “Sister coming? Friends?”
I shook my head. No one visited Grandmother alone, but we never understood why. A pitcher of lemon tea sat on a wooden stool beside her, ice cubes bobbing at the top. On summer days, we ran wild together across her property and then collapsed on her porch to soak up a story and cool drink.
“Don’t suppose you’re here for a story?” she asked. “Come on.”
I stomped up the porch steps and sat on the highest. Grandmother stuck a slender glass of lemon tea into my hand. If only I could’ve sat there for the rest of my life. No need to be rid of the ghost girl if I never had to see her again. But then, I felt her with me, as if she’d followed from home.
I turned to Grandmother. “I need to know more about the court that eats.”
Grandmother’s ancient mouth curled into a stern, knowing smile. “You don’t want their help.” She rocked back and forth. “We call them the Culinary Court. Most things like them don’t make much of names, but they’ll take what we give. The right setting, they’ll come. They’ll eat.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Highland. Visit those hills with the court in mind and the table will be waiting, but you’ll have to bring dishes, cutlery, and food. Don’t call them without bringing something they’ll want to eat. Set the meal in courses, and etiquette will chain the court. Once that’s run dry, you’d best get going until their next feeding. And the next.” Grandmother’s rocking chair paused. “Once you start feeding them, it’s on you to keep feeding them. They always come back, you hear? Best be sure.”
I was sure. Probably the people in her stories were sure, too.
Grandmother stood, and skirts unfolded in layers around her husky legs. “I’ll lend you the silver setting.” She opened her groaning screen door, let it crash behind her, and returned with a sagging brown backpack. “Heavier than it looks.”
I glanced inside at silver dishes, forks, knives, and spoons.
“Return every piece.” Grandmother zipped the hefty backpack shut and slung it around my shoulders. “Last warning. Bring nothing you can’t bear seeing eaten. Desperate summoners craving the court’s help, they bring things that they want eaten, or things that stand for what they want eaten, but they forget to leave behind what they mean to keep. Don’t make that mistake. If you love it, leave it someplace else. Not a favorite hat, a pet, not even thoughts on those you love. Only what they’ll want to eat and what you’re willing to feed.”
I thanked her. She ruffled my hair and wished me luck.
Farther along the woods, golden flatland grew green and hilly. Even on its highest mound, you couldn’t see any houses, only the thick trees of Briar Woods most seasons, the Kanawauke Pond through naked branches in winter, and the black suggestion of Appalachian Mountains year-round. It’s the quietest place I’ve ever been.
“Only the wind lives in Highland year-round,” Grandmother once told me, an earlier summer. “It’s a place of meetings and partings. Never stay the night.”
If there were a real place where Grandmother’s stories might take place, it was Highland. Summer people gathered there for music festivals, but in autumn you got the sense that other things traveled through, and in winter, kids said you could hear babies crying in the surrounding Briar Woods. Spring rains washed the hauntings out, again made it a place for mortals in summertime.
But summer could be a time for other things, too.
I set my mind on the court and walked until the grass became a dry ocean. It had been a clear day, but the sky darkened as I neared Highland’s center, forecasting rain that never fell.
I spotted the table nestled in a green dip with slopes on all sides. Its glass surface reflected the blackening sky. Six high-backed, ornate chairs surrounded it, one on each end, two at each side. I slid down the grassy dip and unzipped the backpack. Grandmother had packed six sets. The sky danced in their silver.
There was clockwork to setting the table, and I was a clumsy eleven-year-old. Each time I set a dish a little off from its chair or placed a knife on the wrong side, I packed it all up and started again. This wasn’t family dinner table setting where I laid each plate and then tossed lumps of silverware to either side. I needed etiquette. We didn’t have much of it in Briarstead, but it was all that chained the Culinary Court.
I began again at the end of the table and worked place by place toward its head.
It was midday when I finished. Wind swirled above the dip, but not down the slopes, perhaps afraid to upset the table. If Grandmother’s stories about the court were true, they had power to eat those gusts and leave Highland’s winds still and dead.
A bell rang over the hills, and the land rumbled as if a thunderclap ripped through the earth. The court had arrived.
Six pale horses slowed to a canter at the lip of the grassy slope, their manes dark as the sky, and turned to one side, revealing the bone-white carriage they drew. Gold trim lined its windows where the gloom hid the passengers inside, but I made out five shapes. On a splashboard atop the carriage sat a coachman in a brown patchwork suit and stunted top hat. He tugged the reins until the horses came to a full-stop and then slipped alongside the carriage toward the door. We never spoke. I was too scared, and when his dry face flashed an open-lipped smile, he showed neither teeth nor tongue. His gloved hand, the fingers poking free, grasped a gold ring on the carriage door and swept to one side, opening it.
Grandmother should’ve told me what to do with my hands. I fished a folded piece of paper from my pocket and clasped it behind my back. Sweating in T-shirt and jeans, I probably looked silly. Surely the Culinary Court had seen worse.
They had eaten worse.
I knew their names from Grandmother’s stories. The Starvation Artist clambered out first. He was a skeletal creature, bones tied loosely together by dry skin that stretched from his distended gut. His eyes were sewn shut. Long fingers and toes picked through the grass, down the slope toward the table. Despite his name, he ate as much as the one that slithered behind him.
My heart sank when I laid eyes on the nightmarish Glutton, a white segmented creature, like a worm and a maggot mixed together, whose face was thorny teeth and whose six sapphire eyes shined from each side of its serpentine head. Wet, fingerless limbs helped it down the grass. I doubted it had any use for utensils.
“Bonjour,” it croaked. Its toothy face rippled, but I couldn’t read its expression.
Those first two turned my stomach, but the rest chilled my blood.
The Connoisseur crept next from the carriage doorway. Unlike the first two, he clothed himself in a pale violet, double-layered jacket, its white frills puffing from the chest and sleeves. His slender pants rolled down to his knees, where white socks tucked up underneath. Black shoes crunched the dry grass, their silver buckles agleam. He was pale as the horses, blue veins drawing faint maps beneath his skin, and a white, curling wig crowned his head. His tiny mouth was sewn shut, the flesh around the thread scarred white. He treaded down the slope, bowed to me, and stood to one side. His violet gaze never left me.
The Scholar emerged next, who I first mistook for a he since her clothes copied the Connoisseur’s. Charcoal hair slicked back along her head. Jet black shades hid her eyes, almost always perusing the enormous hardbacked book that she slung open across one arm. Her other arm held a quill ready to strike the pages. She descended behind the Connoisseur.
“Name,” she said.
I swallowed hard. “Alex.”
“Alexandra.”
“Alex.” I paused. What was she asking? Had she mistaken me for a girl like I’d mistaken her for a man?
“My mistake.” She said it like a curse. Her pen snapped across the page the way my teacher would mark a failed exam. Was it rude to have corrected her and I’d risked breaking etiquette? “The First Feeding by the Summoner Alex.”
Last came the Gentleman. He dressed same as the Connoisseur and Scholar, but his arms and legs stretched much longer. His spindly body prowled down the slope, where he clasped his hands beneath his chin. He had no hair, eyes, nose, or ears, his flesh long ago burned and scarred white. A lipless, tar-gummed mouth peeled open, where pointed tigerfish teeth were too happy to see me.
“Bonjour, bonjour!” he almost sang. “The Culinary Court has not graced this land in some time. I do not suppose French is spoken fluently yet in Highland?”
I shook my head.
The Gentleman’s grin deepened. “Pardon. We did not intend for our voiture à cheval to frighten. If we might begin?” He clapped his hands.
The coachman scurried downhill and began seating the court in the order they had appeared.
I offered my piece of paper to the Gentleman in trembling hands, afraid he might nip my fingers. The paper was folded like a private note passed in class. This one held my worst secrets, all about the ghost girl and what I needed from the court to be done with her.
“Ah, la carte.” The Gentleman unfolded the note, peered eyeless at it, and handed it to the Scholar.
“Two of the summoner’s courses.” She spread it over one side of her ledger. “I will transcribe it before we begin.”
“Merci, mon amie.” The Gentleman watched the coachman seat the Scholar and then started toward the head of the table.
An impulsive urge hit me to put the court’s horrible faces out of my head. I fought the words out of my mouth, a request that would haunt me long after the meal’s conclusion. “There’ll be one last course, but I didn’t write it down.”
The Gentleman turned. “Oh? Dessert?”
I turned from the gaze of his teeth, each point glaring at me. “I’m not sure you can eat it.”
The Scholar flipped pages. “We dine fine on wars and worlds. We have savored tiny morsels of love and swallowed species whole. Our palettes have tasted dreams and dragons and the final unicorn, flavors now lost to eternity.”
The Glutton sighed, forlorn. The Connoisseur offered a stitched smirk.
“It is all in the preparation,” the Gentleman said as he clasped his hands and leaned over me. “S’il vous plait. What does the summoner bring to the table?”
From his seat, the Starvation Artist’s long fingers scraped the glass surface and made it shriek. “Tell us. Bring us. Give us.”
The Gentleman glanced back, the corner of his mouth curling in annoyance.
If he hadn’t turned those awful teeth from me, maybe I’d have kept quiet. “Eat my memory from now until it’s over,” I said. “I don’t want to remember what you do to—” I almost said to her, but I chinned at the paper I’d handed over, where I’d written what I wanted the court to eat.
The Gentleman answered with a revived grin. Behind him at the table, the Scholar’s quill chewed at paper.
From what I could tell, the meal began at that moment, but everything from my sitting down to their carriage rolling again across Highland—that was an empty chasm in my head.
And my heart. The court left a hollowness growing beyond memory, telling me that the purging of the ghost girl was not an exorcism. It was crueler, colder, and cut my insides like no stranger’s amputation should. Had I known her before she haunted me, some dead sister whose existence my parents had kept a secret? Just who had I fed to the court? There was no telling; that gap in my memory was complete. I thought that last request would ensure an ordinary life, unscarred by that dark day.
I was wrong.
Grandmother’s warning rang true. “Once you start feeding them, it’s on you to keep feeding them.”
Weeks passed between some meals, months between others, but the Culinary Court always came back, and they came hungry. I fed them my hobbies, fascinations, fondness of others, and guilt. All flavors of life, thrown onto their table and down their throats. Their constant return never let me forget that there was a feeding I’d forgotten, a ghost girl now digested. I couldn’t remember the meal itself, but I knew it had happened.
