Churn

Cosmic/Body/Psych Horror

Churn
by Dylan Bosworth

I was three. A woman lay spilled over the side of the bed with one leg wrapped in the sheet, crumpled like the pile of clothes next to her. It’s hard to draw the memory from the pit of blackness where I’ve shoved it. I drag it forth again, sliding it from my mind like a sliver.

Her curved neck was bent under the weight of her half-fallen body, her eyes meeting mine, her body facing the wrong direction. She seemed to balance there. My hands crept over my mouth. I remember wanting to scream, but I didn’t know why. I watched the dead woman, and I watched red trickle in a thin line from the corner of her mouth while my dad paced the room, panting like a dog.

It’s my oldest memory, I think. Ingrained there with the confused awareness that the woman wasn’t my mother, and somehow, that was worse than her being dead.

A stygian ripple blooms across the bruised purple night, a black eye, its flickering lids: a million sequential ripples bending across thrown stars. My own pupils are dilated black holes while I recall the first dead body I ever saw.

Feed us them all.

My father tore at the sweat-soaked hair at his temples, and he reared back and screamed. He roared toward the ceiling, wordless ravings, as if something there should have prevented this. When his eyes landed on me, I shied away. He was my dad, but he was also a nude and towering man baring his teeth. He couldn’t catch his breath.

His face softened some when he saw me, though. However I looked there to him, cowering behind the door. His eyebrows squished together high on his forehead, and he stared at me with his mouth parted as though he wanted to speak. I wanted to run, but my little legs, maybe my little heart, wouldn’t allow it. Instead, my bladder let go.

As I think about it, I remember the warmth as it spread over me, the sudden confusion, patting the wetness there to make sure it wasn’t red like the blood pooling around the dead woman’s head. Soothed it was only piss.

My father dried his eyes. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, and placed his face in his hands and sat. He beckoned me to come near. To join him in the room, next to the dead and twisted woman who was not my mother.

Listen to the screaming pigs.

The glass tube in my hand goes hot, my breath scorches my throat when I exhale thick white smoke. The very darkness behind my eyes shimmers, radiates in waves of blacker night.

That memory dies like a run-through candle. The air around me shimmers. I can’t tell if my eyes are closed, or if the night sky is really pulsing or not. In my head, I’m searching for my next memory, but like the first, dragging it forth is a task. A strain, one that hurts—if the first was a sliver, this is a razor blade. I feel it slipping, feel inky dark spilling over my brain from where I’ve yanked this thing. I try to avoid seeing it, even though I know it’s what the dark between the stars asks me for. I can’t help it.

My next memory as far as I can tell, is the next dead body I saw, and that was my own. I take another hit and exhale.

A stygian ripple blooms. My eyes dilate as far as they can go. Blackness.

“Go on,” says a woman’s voice, refocusing me.

I wasn’t aware I was talking out loud.

“You were.”

“I was?”

“You were.”

I try to see the room, but there’s only the night sky, rippling like something had pierced its glassy surface, then sunk back below those waves. I blink. A million times, I blink. And each time I open them again, this gaseous, sable pool beyond all those glimmering stars, agitates. It smolders, billows wider like disturbed silt.

I think of my mother. I picture her how I remember her from some other vision. A different plane. I watched from above, where her back blocked sight of myself where I thrashed under shallow bathwater. It’s a short memory, but I see my arms and legs go still in it, and I felt for certain…something there. Something tugging me toward the light, or whatever you believe.

The woman laughs, and I look for her once more, but can’t find her. Can’t find anything but darkness. Far away screaming.

“Anyway,” I say, this time, sure I’m talking out loud, “next part of that memory is my dad busting down the door. Whatever part of me watched my mother drown me sucked back into my drowned-rat body as I tried to cough myself back to life. There’s a fleeting memory of my father ripping my mom from the edge of the tub and pulling me out at the same time. Then it goes black.”

I reach for my pipe, but when I turn and open my eyes, I’m looking at my mom from twenty-two years ago. She reaches over me as she had when I was in that bathtub. I flinch on reflex, expecting her arms to come up, her hands to wrap around my throat.

They don’t.

When I peek between my fingers, I see my mom holding my pipe. Her hands and my pipe are massive, the lighter too. She knuckles my shoulder, so I pull my hands away from my face. She turns my drug paraphernalia and lighter over into my palm, my tiny, tiny palm. It looks so strange held there, massive, with my little baby fingers wrapped around it. The bulb is smoking.

The longer I look at it, the more disgusted I become. This isn’t real, is it? I think, but it comes out small and confused in my head, the intention behind it there, but the thought bubbling up in my toddler brain something less like words, and more like a shadow that falls over every little spark of joy, and I blink dumbly, unsure why I’m so unsettled.

I look up toward my mother for reassurance, but her face is a blood-smeared pig’s—snout dripping long ropes of viscous red.

I blink again and open my eyes to the sun eclipsed by a black and motionless moon. Behind it, the sun’s flames flash weakly around the edges, and farther, ripples flow outward from the center, their waves growing exponentially, bending the starlight behind them. The black nebula still blooms, like squid ink in dark water.

“Feed us them all,” I say.

“What?” It’s not the woman’s voice from before.

I blink, then rub the gunk out of my eyes. My left arm throbs like it’s about to explode meat and fluids across the room. My eyes focus, and I see the tubing tied around my bicep. When I move to stand, the room topples sideways, and this guy with matted brown hair and a sweater eaten full of holes and black with burns is picking me back up and leaning me against the wall.

“You gotta stop doing that, man.” He slaps my forearm a few times, and I notice he has a syringe in his mouth. I feel like I should panic, but I only slightly raise my eyebrows.

That panic I tried on sheds its skin, and soon I’m sweating for it. Itching, everywhere.

“Come on, man,” I say. I’m full on shivering.

“I could get you straight faster if you’d stop fuckin’ moving, bro.” The guy with the holey sweater sniffs, clearing some wet congestion, then wipes the back of his hand across his nose. How he didn’t stick himself with that needle, my needle, I don’t have time to make sense of it. A second later its contents pump into my veins.

I open my eyes and feel my pupils swell to swallow galaxies.

Hear them in their sable eternity; somewhere, pigs are screaming. This magnificent eclipse burns off a dust horizon. I stand before it on sand black from the moon’s shadow, and I imagine I’m in a nitrate snapshot that goes black and white—silver under gaseous hues.

The woman my father murdered is there. Her head, twisted around. She walks backward toward me, her gait awkward but insistent, and I feel my pants go wet with piss. Maybe it’s blood. She wears no expression, but I’m shrinking anyway, falling away with fear. She towers over me now. My spine crunches against something hard, so I grit my teeth, I clench my eyes. When I open them, I expect my mother—expect to be backed against the tub’s edge—but she’s kneeling over me, the dead woman, and I’m a fetal form, curled on the dust ground.

I open my mouth to tell her about the third dead body I’d ever seen, but instead of words, there’s only squealing. My soul emits the screams of a thousand starving pigs, and the dead woman with her head on backwards turns and kneels to me. She faces me with the front of her body, which means I can only see the back of her head. She wraps her arms around my neck, and nuzzles her head against mine.

“It’s okay, sweet boy,” she says. It’s muffled and far, like sucked away with the wind. But it’s tainted. It gurgles, sour, like bad milk.

I tell her I’m sorry, and go to pat the back of her head, forgetting, and end up covering her eyes. I apologize again, my hand shaking as I pull it away. My palm feels as though I’ve held a garter snake. A white, musky film drips in thick strands between my spread fingers.

Whether I’m apologizing for her death, whatever infraction I’m committing now, or something else, I don’t know.

She turns her body away, and her face has my handprint burned over both her eyes.

The guilt of it makes me sob. Somewhere between chokes and gasps, when I can get words out between sniffles, I tell her about the third body.

The day had been hot, one of those days where the air smells like rain turning to vapor off of hot tar—an industrial sort of petrichor. Urban and invasive. I can still smell it. Rain puddles scattered over sidewalk hollows reflected the gray sky, still blotted with clouds holding a black tempest within their ragged borders.

I walked with my hood pulled over my head, staring down at the sidewalk, watching the tall buildings of Michigan, Ave. pass in crystal clear reflections, thinking how the reflections looked even clearer than the real world.

My father held my hand, I remember, and he squeezed it in little patterns and rhythms that I would replicate. When I’d look up to him, checking to see if I was doing a good job mimicking his game, he’d only smile, giving my hand one long squeeze—as if his hand held everything required to voice, “I love you,” and have it mean even more than spoken words.

I was trying to show it back and match him without missing one, because in my head, of course, that meant that I screwed up and he hated me or something. I remember loving him intensely, but in this moment, being starkly afraid.

Feed us them all.

“Why have you stopped?” Her voice still sounds far, although I can sense she looks at me even with my eyes closed.

“I…I keep having these intrusive thoughts—some recurring, some–”

“Why have you stopped?”

It’s my dad’s voice. I feel his hand squeezing the bones of mine. Grinding them.

“What is it?!”

I try to open my eyes, but I can’t. A tremor rips through my brain, lightning forking through the plushy gray. The pain sends me to my knees. My stomach heaves, vomit erupts from my throat.

I open my eyes and I’m on my hands and knees in some shitty apartment with cigarette butts all over the floor and some guy is yelling at me. I blink.

I open my eyes to silver-gray sand, near black in the ghost rays of a dead sun. The woman my father murdered kneels on all fours with me, her head facing the sky. When I look up, she leans back and kisses me on the forehead.

When I open my eyes again, I’m just a boy. Staring down into a puddle on my hands and knees. My father is tugging at my coat gruffly muttering about people, and public, but my focus is on what’s reflected in the puddle.

Or who.

Listen to the screaming pigs.

“What’d you say about your dad, bro? He killed–”

The man’s voice is so far away it might as well be God’s. My entire body shakes, the puddle ripples, individual little spikes of water spouting up as the ground vibrates beneath. The ripples splatter until they settle and come together, forming concentric waves, growing out from some disturbance in the center.

“What’d you see with your dad, boy?”

The dead girl’s voice is far. Closer than the man’s, who is the man, where am I–

“Focus!” The puddle shimmers and it’s the dead girl, and my dad yanks against my coat, and I yank back. The dead girl’s image ripples, washes out.

And in the calm pool left behind, I see myself as a boy, my upset father reflected there too, and my mother. My mother standing behind us with her hood pulled up, too.

It’s wrong, though. There’s something wrong about it.

A stygian ripple blooms in the water.

“What?” The voice is polyphonic. It’s all of them. My mother and father, this dead woman, and the–

My father rips on my coat again.

“What are you supposed to be telling me?”

I ignore the voices. The image of my mother trembles, like it’ll fade if I step away. I’m gripped by this need to stay there. To keep her image in front of me.

“Why?” they nearly shout.

“Because she’s…” I can’t make myself say it. Isn’t it obvious, though? I swear I say this out loud, but my lips aren’t moving. The third body? Why is this where the memory brings me? Why am I made to recount my traumas?

“Why?”

“You know why,” I say—this time, sure I’m talking out loud. “You know she’s dead.” I whisper it, the words feeling strange, sounding strange coming from a toddler. But the voices are relentless.

“WHY?!”

“Because she’s fucking dead!” I scream, my high little voice breaking, cracking with the force.

My father looks around, whipping his head back and forth. I see his eyes go wide at all the people staring, and he lets go of my coat and I fall. Before I hit the water, hands braced stretched in front of me to take the puddle, the reflection changes, cycles, and I see me falling, I see my father’s murdered woman, my mother—most her flesh and muscle torn away—the murdered woman again on that cosmic shore, then a man in a dirty room looking down at me while he holds a lighter to a spoon.

I crash through the puddle. My nerves fire warning shrieks throughout my system as the cold—no—as the warm water hits me. Scalds me almost, it’s so hot. I cough and sputter, but realize I’m breathing water. It’s filling my lungs. My chest feels like it’s going to burst, and hot acid boils in the muscles of my throat as the blood vessels die under strain. What air I hold in my lungs feels as though the oxygen ignites, and I can’t help it, I’m sucking in water, gratefully choking.

A stygian ripple blooms. All I could see were bubbles as I thrashed, as I fought to get free of the water, scratching and wailing at the hands that held me under. Now, a blackness expands. It ripples like calm water, dark and silken.

My thoughts seem to coalesce and simplify. I hold the wrists which pin me to the floor of the tub, see my mother’s face distorted and wavy above the surface. The black encroachment expands like smoke, flowing outward with the rippling of everything I see. Instead of ravenous, I’m calm. Instead of thrashing for escape, I’m only confused at the dull ache in my chest—the strange face of my mother behind a field of black, looking down at me.

I’m remembering now.

Before…this.

That same face with the down-turned lips—this frown, cartoonish in its exaggerated curve. My mother, her hands on my shoulders while she looks into my eyes—her own, glassing over with a thick wetness, like an overfull cup of milk.

“What are you saying?” she asks, her voice trembling and quiet.

Behind her, a shadow forms high in the far corner of the ceiling. I think I see something move.

I look back to her, the question she asked still lingering in the air. I reach for the answer, because it’s right there. There’s no implication attached to the thought.

“You’re dead,” I say. “Because you’re dead.”

“What?”

“Because you’re fucking dead.” Those words are right there on my tongue, as if I’ve said them as a mantra. As if it’d been a bedtime routine, like brushing my teeth. Trying to go on the big boy potty. I try to remember where I heard them before, why I had to say them to Mommy right now.

She looks at me with that same face for another minute or two, and that black shadow slips over the innocent thoughts of soap in my eyes, and the dinosaur book before bed, and it’s only dark and wrong feeling. Mommy’s lips tremble, then she lowers me backwards under the water to wash my hair. But she keeps pressing down until my ears go under.

My eyes shoot open. That black shadow in the corner has grown larger. What look like snakes, like worms, like the things in the ocean exhibit at the zoo, slither and spread over the walls, the same shade of black gray as the shadow.

Then my mouth is under water, then my nose.

Feed us them all.

“Listen to the screaming pigs.” A woman speaks to me from somewhere, and her voice is not my mommy’s.

A stygian ripple blooms, the water goes purple, bruised, then black as night. Waves roll outward in larger and larger circles, my inner dark, a puddle, disturbed. I no longer feel my body, only as though I’m floating in nothingness. Beyond me, before me, a black eye, its flickering lids: a million sequential ripples, folding.

I’m on a beach with a corpse and everything is made of shadow. The woman half-buried in sand is pitched forward, her twisted head looking up from where the beach has blown around it. Her bare back is arched. There is a line of men standing behind her, each looking impatiently over the shoulder of the one in front. They all have my father’s face.

The sun is a charred orb with soot orbiting it in a luminescent haze, lightly sparkling by moonlight. The moon hangs big and dark, but glowing. I throw my arm over my eyes as the sun ignites and the sky turns to white fire.

When I can see again, my father is kneeling over me, rhythmically pressing on my chest. I cough up water, spitting it all over myself, coughing it all over my dad. He doesn’t back away, instead he pulls me from the floor and squeezes me to his chest. Something hitches inside me. I want to cry, to sob, but also have never been happier to see my father. To feel the comfort of someone holding me.

How long has it been? This thought lands strangely on my tiny mind. I feel like I’m old—much older than this pudgy thing clasped to my dad’s torso. I remember my dad’s funeral in…

The dead woman and her face come back to me. It feels like a million years ago, feels like yesterday, feels like only moments before now. My whole life. Flashing in splashes of color and reams of black and white stills. Emotions flooding me, a whirlwind of experiences leading to a single defining moment. Leading back to another defining moment.

I see girlfriends, the stab of orphanhood, school; I remember pieces for all but fractions of seconds. Jobs, and my consciousness distorting. Refrigerators clinking with brown bottles, ashtrays full of–

There’s something I’m supposed to do.

The thought slams into me. It lays over all other thoughts like a marquee.

Behind my father, where I nuzzle my face into his shoulder and breathe gobs of watery snot into his shirt, my mother shifts on the floor. She’s sitting on her hip, one elbow supporting her weight resting on the toilet, her other hand pressed against her head where a thin trickle of red runs.

Other memories burn and curl in my mind. Clear when they come, then disintegrating into a feeling, a mute understanding, like a weighted blanket laid over my little boy heart. White powder, a burn in my nose, deep, and this thick drip down my throat. I gag and vomit more water down my father’s back as the memories die. As they dissolve.

My mother tries to stand, but wobbles on one foot and plops back down on the ground.

I’m supposed to do something.

I see myself waiting outside in the street; it’s nighttime and I’m just out of sight at the egressed shadow near the streetlamp. A man with greasy hair shambles up and looks around.

“Psst. Hey, it’s me,” I whisper.

A stygian ripple blooms.

I can no longer see my mother. The shadow in the corner of the ceiling and the slithering reaching thing expands, douses the room in blackness. I try to blink it away.

When I open my eyes, I’m sitting in my apartment. My memory is clear. This is twenty-two years in the future, I know. I know this as surely as I know that lady with the snapped neck my dad killed was not my mother. The man who I met on the street kneels on my floor over his setup. I’m sitting on the floor, too—my back resting against the wall. There’s a green tube tied over my bicep, and my veins are huge and tender. My lamp is dull yellow, the room dingy, filthy. I keep pulling a pipe to my lips, holding a lighter under the glass bulb, and drifting somewhere else.

I feel a sharp poke in my arm, a warm pressure wash into the vein.

My dad is squeezing me tight to him again, and I have this intense feeling there’s something I’m supposed to do. Some responsibility. The feeling comes on so strong, I know if I can’t remember, something bad will happen, but I can’t remember at all.

I look up at the ceiling, confused, sure I had just seen something there. Mommy reaches out to me. She’s on the floor too, and there’s red on her head and hand. Why is she crying? Why is Daddy crying?

What am I supposed to do?

I know in twenty-two years—the thought stabbing into my brain like a poke at the doctor—that I will die in a shitty apartment in Detroit with a needle in my arm, covered in vomit, and I’m supposed to stop it. I’m supposed to do something.

I cry harder against my daddy’s shoulder because I don’t know what those words mean, those mean thoughts that just popped into my head, and dissipate. Fade to nothing.

Listen to the screaming pigs.

I can hear my mother sobbing now as the sound of the bathroom rushes awake. Her wails are long and thick, like a siren, and my daddy sniffles softly with his chin press against my head. The tub goes glug glug glug, and I know if I look over the edge, my toys will be spinning over the drain.

I pull back and away from my father and place my hands on my shoulders. They hurt. The bones there feel as though they’ve been crushed. I crane my neck down to look, and I can see almost perfect handprints there, red and darkening.

My daddy looks down at me and then over to my mom by the toilet. She’s shaking, and I wonder if she’s as cold as I am. I don’t know why. She’s not the one who just got out of the bath. Her face, that wild frown and glistening eyes, overshadows how I look at her now. I think of when my nose went under the water and I tried to sit up but she wouldn’t let me. I remember the world going dark.

“Why’d you do that, Mommy,” I say, but she can’t hear me.

She’s sleeping now, her head flat against the closed toilet seat. She must be so tired from trying to…trying to–

I can’t finish the thought.

“Hey, buddy,” my father says, standing next to my mom, rubbing his knuckles. “Are you okay? It’s okay, I promise—you’re okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

I’m not sure what he means, so I don’t say anything. He has a serious look on his face, but the wrinkles in his forehead tell me he’s concerned, and the way his eyes crinkle tell me his concern is for me. It feels warm.

“Do you remember when you helped me with my friend?”

I know what he’s talking about. Who he asks if I remember. It comes with a slick, ill feeling, though. I don’t know what to say.

“Remember? You helped me by holding her hair?” he says. “She had an accident? You held her hair so it didn’t get dirty on the ground while I carried her, remember?”

I remember. Her hair was blonde, and her head was twisted around. Hair so blonde it shone gold, and I held it in my little fists like a rope so it didn’t drag in the dirt. Dad dragged her by her feet. I wanted to hold her head up, so her face didn’t scrape all across the ground, so I held her head up by her hair. I don’t tell daddy that was why. Instead I just nod.

I hold my mommy’s hair this time as Daddy drags her out the door. This time it’s different, because her face looks up at me. Mommy, and her closed eyes.

There’s a feeling rushing through my blood, like I have to, I need to move. I need to jump or run, something I absolutely have to do, and that feeling comes back like if I can’t think of what I’m supposed to do, somebody, something will be upset with me.

A warm breeze shakes those thoughts away, and I focus on my task again. Mom’s brown curls loop through my fingers. Her eyelids flutter when I lose my grip and her head bounces off one of the cement steps outside. Crickets chirp all around, and in the barn, there’s a clang of a bell as the cow shuffles about. The moon is bright, and we don’t need a light this time.

My dad’s way, whatever this is that we are doing, it doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m a good listener, he says.

He says, “Don’t worry, it’s for the best.”

That’s what he’d said with the other lady too.

We reach the far pen with the wooden fence, slatted, but tight enough nothing can escape. It sits weathered in a semicircle, connected to the barn. I help—or pretend to help—as Daddy pulls Mom up and rests her body half over the fence, then grabs the rest of her and topples her in. She lands next to the trough, right in the mud with a hard splat.

My daddy grips the metal bar hanging from a string by the feeding bell triangle, and he gives it a good ring. He clangs it around in there, round and round, and pretty soon I can feel them coming, the ground trembling a bit underneath my feet. Mommy’s eyes flutter open and she looks confused. She tries to sit but splats back in the mud again.

My dad puts his hand on my shoulder and presses me there, keeps me still where I’m shoved up against the fence.

“It’s for the best,” he says, and animal snorts break the quiet night.

Their stomping cascades louder, and Mommy’s eyes go big and wet. Bright in that dark moon. She looks into me, wanting something, and there’s a tiny speck inside of me that knows I forgot something. A sinking feeling looms at the edge of my understanding, and all I can think is I’m trapped somehow, and it’s not about my dad and how he holds me near.

The animals break the threshold of the shadowed barn, a swarm of writhing pigs. They run toward my mom, their short legs thundering, pounding against the packed mud. Over her shrill cries, I listen to them scream.

My daddy squeezes my hand in a rhythmic beat.

End.

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