Dig Me Out, published in 2021, is no longer available in print. But you can get the stories here!
This is “Double Dare Ya.”
We three sat at our window table after lunch of turkey pot pie, drinking lemon ginger tea for digestion.
“We call it moonrise,” Maude said. She spoke low, and I leaned forward. Elbows on the paisley tablecloth, socked feet hovering over the checked carpet, backside aching from the poorly cushioned wooden chairs.
“Why moonrise?” I pulled my cup to my mouth, then pushed it away just as quickly. My favorite tea, but today the smell made my stomach churn.
“Because of menses,” Abigail said. “We never called our monthlies that, of course. But the word, menses. It comes from moon.” She wiped at the corners of her mouth, the only place on her face where the wrinkles settled deep, then patted the gray fuzz circling her head.
We quieted as the men at the table next to us began the slow process of rising to their feet, steadying, and shuffling toward the exit. Everything pained, slow bodies working around worn joints and thinned bones.
I tried the tea again, pushed it away again.
“Happened to me too, Leslie,” Maude said. She pointed to my tea, then her nose. “My smell went funny around the time the changes started. It passes.” Her face was all wrinkle and sag, white skin folded over itself and mottled with moles, but her nose was long and smooth.
“What’s happening to us?” For weeks I’d been wanting to ask them this. We’d known each other a year now, since Donald’s health started to fail, since he and I sold the house and moved into the Lazy Acres Assisted Living Community. I’d wanted to ask, but feared laughter or pity. More, I feared that this thing, this strange new something, was the sign of decline, finally coming for me.
Now Abigail placed a gnarled brown finger, big-knuckled and bony, on the laminate table. “We get our monthlies when we’re little. I was thirteen.” She moved her finger across, a gap of inches. “Then they leave us when we’re in our fifties. And then what? Past was, we’d die long before that.” Her finger moved again, another gap. “But here we are. In our eighties. Goddamn 2015. Our men gone. And...” The finger lifted, and her hand flipped, holding something invisible.
“What?” I watched her hand, and for a second could swear I saw something circular, clear, a cylinder of sorts. Then it disappeared, and only Abigail’s light brown palm remained.
“We’ve always been the strong ones, haven’t we?” Maude leaned forward again, and Abigail and I did likewise. I saw us from above: we were like girls at the cafeteria lunch table, huddled over secrets and scandals. Teenagers talking about the new blood they’d shed. Middle-aged mothers, gabbing at church potlucks, commiserating over the hot-flashes that drove us to the freezer. Now shrunken widows. And we finally had something truly secret to whisper about.
“Of course,” Abigail said, adjusting the thick frames that magnified her black eyes. “We’ve always been stronger than our men. Doing what needs done. Eugene could lift any furniture I’d set him to, but face our Lanie’s chemo treatments? See our daughter lose chunks of hair and wither away? Hell no.”
Maude nodded, her pale chin loose and wobbly. “Ask Perry to fix our lawnmower, sure. Ask him to watch me have his children, and he faints.”
I thought about Donald, his calves and forearms. They had been so round, so meaty. Seeing him at our church, near the end of my senior year of high school, I’d pointed him out to my girlfriend. That’s a man, I said. I thought we would be a unit, Donald and Leslie, under his protection. I hadn’t yet seen how muscles could be like makeup, the things we girls used to hide our flaws.
“So we’ve always been strong,” I said. “True. But...”
“Not like this,” Maude said, smoothing her zip-up hoodie down her sides.
The tea had grown cold. The cup was almost industrial in its plainness, the beige the color of boredom, the sturdy plasticized edges resistant to shatter. I pictured these cups as two-for-one at some old-folks-home supply store, along with plastic runners for the hallways and grip bars in the showers.
“For some of us,” said Abigail, those giant insect eyes bearing down on me. “There’s a third phase nobody talks about.”
The tea. That damn cup. Anonymous, ordinary. Picked for people on their way out. Just looking at it made my stomach twitch and turn. I raised a hand above my head and waved, like I was a queen, dismissing someone who disappointed her.
Then the cup was gone, the dirt-colored water gone, the smell gone. Vanished.
I looked for it, on the floor, on another table. When I couldn’t find it, I looked at my friends.
Maude and Abigail didn’t move, but their lips curled back into toothy grins.
*
He had died in his sleep a month ago. It’s what we all hope for. And that morning as I sat beside Donald’s cooling body, my mind still gummy from sleep, I resented him that. Why a peaceful, merciful end for him?
I poked at his cheek, his neck, his skinny arms. Pushed harder. Pinched and twisted.
His calves and forearms had long since wasted away, hanging from his legs like stretched-out rubber bands. His strong black curls had grown gray and lank. His mind was pricked with pinholes that grew larger every day. When I’d bring him meals from the cafeteria, I might find him hard and sharp, seated in his chair and nodding along to a sermon or Fox News blast on TV. Or I might find him with kind eyes and a smile. Then I’d linger and turn the TV off. I’d hold his hand, wipe his chin, kiss his soft forehead, slightly salty. It was irresistible to see: this must have been what he was like as a baby, before he assumed the mantle of manhood.
But still, he had finally passed peacefully.
That first week, I made myself wear black, through the wake and funeral. At the graveside, I held my daughter Heidi’s hand, and she held her daughter Nora’s hand. At the reception, people praised our strength. No tears to be seen.
The second week, I made myself go through his things, holding each shirt for a long minute, sniffing out sorrow like a cat her litter. I packed up all the shirts, slacks, and shoes, the toys, devices, and gadgets, the rules, rules, rules. Manny, the Guatemalan handyman whom Donald would scream at whenever a light bulb needed changing or toilet handle fixing, took away the boxes. He gave my hand a gentle squeeze, and wished me all of God’s blessings during this hard time. I bit my cheeks and nodded.
When he was gone, and all of Donald with him, I shut and locked the door to our unit. Now my unit. In our bedroom, now my bedroom, I grabbed a pillow, stuffed it against my mouth. After a few seconds I heard meaty, wild sounds that tore tears from my eyes, stole breath from every corner of my body. Laughter. Laughs that, for a second, I thought might kill me. And how would that be as a way to go?
My hands gripped the pillow, squeezing, kneading. And then they were tearing, the cloth ripping in half like tissue paper. The stuffing exploded, the clumps of poly-cotton blend dancing on the air like dandelion fluff.
No one would complain about the mess. Not anymore. No one would complain about any mess, or the dry steak at dinner, or the poor calls of the college football coach, or the decayed morals of the people who wore jeans at church, or the lies of the Des Moines Register promoting the gay agenda. No one would complain about my behavior, or make demands, or mete out punishment.
Three things happened very quickly. I cramped, my guts seizing so that my body curled around it. Then I flushed, sweat popping from my pores and soaking my shirt. Then I came, my back arching, legs stretching, head rolling.
I must have fainted for a second because I opened my eyes to see the ceiling. There was a fleck of paint directly above me, a spot of blue on the white. I blinked, and it was closer. I blinked again, and saw the spot’s rounded edges formed a pentagon. Blinked, and I saw what the ceiling hid, pipes and wiring and insulation. One more blink, and I saw only blue sky.
I shook my head. Maybe Donald’s decay had been contagious.
Getting to my feet was easy, and that task hadn’t been easy for a long time. My legs felt strong and sure as they carried me to the living room.
Donald’s recliner sat there like a throne. Such an ugly thing, cheap cracked leather and sweat-worn arms. I’d read that mattresses get heavier over time, collecting dead skin cells. We molt, like snakes and birds. That recliner carried pounds of Donald.
I picked it up. My body carried eighty-two years and ninety pounds and five feet. I’d long since stopped picking up things that didn’t fit in the palms of my hands. But I picked the recliner up like it was a beige plastic cup, carried it to our spare room, put it down, and covered it with a quilt.
I stared at that chair a long time, then at my hands. They looked the same, spotted and knobby. But they felt fuller somehow. Tingling, like they were coming awake from a long time asleep.
*
After I made my tea disappear, we went and sat on Maude’s concrete rectangle outside her unit, a four-by-six allotment that comfortably accommodated two chairs, three in a squeeze.
Maude held a cigarette between her second and third fingers, the ash growing. My fingers itched, wanting one. But I’d had to give it up years ago. We all did.
I told Maude and Abigail about the strange fits of strength, and how, after that first time, I woke the next morning sore and weak. But within days I’d rearranged the living room and relocated the bed without grunt or pain.
“That’s just the start.” Abigail held her hand aloft again. There was another shadow above her palm, a shape that teased me before disappearing. “Have you seen things?”
I nodded.
“Have you seen people?” Maude spoke quietly around her puff of ashy air.
“What do you mean?”
“I always had a bit of sight, when I was younger,” Abigail said. “Like the time I had a strong notion that something was wrong. For weeks, I couldn’t shake it. Then Lanie was in the hospital. They’d just found her cancer.”
I remembered then. Feelings, instincts, over the years. Knowing Heidi had something big to tell us before she called to announce her pregnancy. Knowing the police would find something vile in the neighbor’s house before they discovered the cache of children’s photos. Knowing the outlines of things.
“It wasn’t useful, though,” said Maude. “I knew in my gut that Perry was sleeping with other women, but couldn’t do nothing about it. I was just imagining things, according to him. Acting crazy.”
“Right,” Abigail said, lighting up her own cigarette and sinking into her chair. “We’d just be overreacting, trying to get attention.”
“But now it’s different,” Maude said.
“Detailed,” Abigail said. “Specific. And we can control it.”
“You know what we mean?”
I let loose the breath I’d been holding.
I remembered the volunteer, a gap-toothed teenage boy, from a week past. He’d caught my eye while clearing our cafeteria table. I saw him, and something inside told me to keep looking. So I did. And then came a vision of him in one of the other rooms: an engagement ring and gold chain in his hand, he’d stuffed them into his pocket. Just then the front desk staffer came into the cafeteria, on the hunt, and pulled the boy aside. Everybody heard later he’d stolen jewelry from a couple near their end.
On Maude’s porch, Abigail nodded. “We’ve always seen more than people think,” she said. “Our whole lives.”
“Now we see even more,” Maude said.
I looked past them, towards the golf course next door. A handful of raisined men in knee socks stood circled on the course’s edge. They craned their necks, hands on canes or walkers.
“Look at that smile, Abigail,” Maude said. “This one sees plenty.”
*
The next day, we went to Walmart on the weekly Lazy Acres bus trip. Dozens of elderly women and a few men set loose for an hour to pick up the necessities.
There’s a humor to it, Maude and Abigail said. Like there is someone up there, something conscious, with a sense of irony. Letting us have fun.
“See what their eyes do?” Maude pointed to a group of men, perhaps in their twenties, backwards caps and board shorts, picking over the cases of beer. Maude waved to them and, drawn to movement, the pack looked our way. But their gazes only glanced, hopscotching over us to the TV display, the stack of “As Seen on TV” items, then back to their beer.
“We’ve been invisible for a long time now,” Abigail said, performing her own wave. The men didn’t look this time.
“It’s the young who are seen,” Maude said.
I watched the boys-pretending-to-be-men as they spotted a woman in tight, shaped yoga pants. They puffed up, the boys, growing taller with their leering. When she heard their whistle, saw their attention, she shrunk, curling into herself.
“I remember when I knew I was officially old,” Maude said. She pointed to her chest, two ample breasts held in place by what I imagined was a heavily-wired bra. “These things always got notice. Until I was about forty or so. You know how you can tell someone is looking at you? That sort of itchy feeling? It went away.”
“Black like me, I always had that feeling,” Abigail said. “Walk in a store, walk down the street, all eyes. Waiting for something wrong to happen. Until I was about fifty. Then I became just some harmless piece of scenery.”
I saw my own moments. The McDonald’s employee who called me ma’am for the first time. The grizzled man in camouflage who barreled into me at Quik Trip, apologized with confusion. The clerk at Menard’s, who looked at me and a teenage Heidi with a gaze driven by genetics, a biological need to identify the best of the species, and settled on Heidi with an abrupt finality.
In the Wal-Mart aisle, Maude and Abigail both, as one, placed fingers to their lips. They breathed in tandem, a gigantic intake of mutual air. And then they were gone.
I spun in place, like a cartoon. I walked up and down the aisle, peered over a shelf.
I waited, listening.
Then I reached out my hand, and felt solid bone and tissue.
Abigail laughed, and they were there again.
“See what we mean?”
*
They showed me how. Just a bit of thought, a bit of focus, and I could make myself truly unseen. I winked in and out of view, disappearing from the toilet paper display in the Walmart to reappear by the row of toothpastes, vanishing from the lunch meats to arrive again by the boxed wines. We chased each other through the backs of the aisles, following the laughter, breathless as children.
A bit of thought, of focus, and we could lift things, bend things, manipulate things.
I could make my phone move into my lap without a touch.
I could see people in their heads, see what they hid.
I could break my china, and fix it, all at once.
At night, I lay in my bed and thought about all the things I could do now. Options, choices, buzzing in my brain. That unfamiliar tingle.
*
But after weeks of playing with the power, I began to feel restless.
“What’s the point?”
Maude and Abigail were in my living room, drinking gin in tumblers of ice and smoking marijuana. Maude got medical-grade for her arthritis, even though she’d already knitted her joints and ligaments back into working order. We’d held hands and worked our interiors early on, clearing our lungs of smoky clouds from past two-pack-a-day habits, straightening our curved spines, re-lubricating dried collagen and synovial fluids, filling up our hollow bird bones. We’d neutralized viruses waiting to be discovered, cut out cancerous moles, repopulated guts with good bacteria and unclogged our veins from cholesterol.
“This is the point,” Abigail said, holding her breath, then expelling smoke and a laugh.
“But,” I said.
“Leslie, we get to do what we want now,” Maude said. She offered me the joint and I shook my head. She shook her own. “You’re still thinking about rules. About things we should and shouldn’t do. We don’t have to anymore.”
“When’s the last time, before all this, that you did something just because you wanted to?” Abigail stretched her arms high over her head and smiled. “I couldn’t do this a year ago. My body wouldn’t listen to me. Now it does. Because I tell it to.”
“Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, use this somehow?”
“We are using it,” Maude said. ”We’re healing ourselves.”
“What do we tell our family?” I thought of Heidi and Nora, who might eventually notice my rising health.
“This is ours, no one else’s,” said Abigail, gritting her teeth.
I looked out through my patio door. Around the courtyard sat all our peers, husks made of papery skin and gummy bones, some connected to IVs and respirators, some asleep, or dead. All of their bodies filled with broken things, things that might be fixed.
“Why us?” I asked the glass. I knew we were the only ones in Lazy Acres. We could sense one another, anywhere at any time. We didn’t sense anyone else. And even out in the world, at Walmart, at the gas station, at restaurants Heidi took me to when she visited, I didn’t feel anyone like me.
“There’s no shame in doing what you want, Leslie.” Abigail stood next to me in the door frame. I wondered how she knew my shame. She was the harder one of the two. Burying a daughter and husband in the same year would do that. She told me once she’d always felt like a turtle, the soft head that led the way but hid under too much scrutiny. When her family died, she became the shell.
But now she patted my hand, then let hers stay there for a bit.
“Think of it this way,” she said. “We used to be tied to the moon, for decades. I know, science may not agree there, but some things are beyond science. So every month our wombs were puffing and bleeding. Then we lost our connection to it, and there was nothing to do but shrink and shrivel. Watch ourselves die.”
I looked up. The sun was bright, but I still could spot the outline of the moon in the eastern sky.
“The moon is locked by tides,” I said.
“What’s that now?”
“We always see the same side of the moon. The gravity of the earth and its tides keeps it there.”
“Well now,” Abigail said, smiling. “You know more about this than you think.”
“My daughter does,” I said.
I’d taken Heidi to an observatory once, I told them. Donald stayed home, insisting that looking for heaven through a telescope was dangerously close to pride. He was just transitioning then, from his long nights in bars to nights with his prayer group. But she was in junior high, and they were doing a class project on constellations.
Usually quiet, Heidi was a chatterbox that night, pointing to all the stars and naming them, reciting distances between bodies, describing light speed. We’d looked closely at the moon, near full. The gravity of the tides locked it, Heidi told me.
“You know,” I’d said. “When the moon is full, strange things happen. Emergency rooms fill up. People have seizures. More babies get born.”
“That’s not true,” she said. And she had a kind of authority, through the crooked baby teeth and brown braids, the skinny legs with scabs on the knee.
“Sure it is,” I said. “And women. We can feel the moon more than men.”
“How?”
It was nearly time for the birds and bees, the talk of blood, of becoming a woman — but not yet. “You’ll see.”
“Mom. You can’t just talk without proof.”
“Don’t you think your mom knows things?”
It impressed me even then, seeing her cutting look, the one that said she knew more than I did, the one that said she’d be more than me.
And she did and would, pushing past Donald’s objections. It was 1974, she told him as she applied to colleges. Women could do things now, she said, as if that fact would turn a switch in his brain, inspire change rather than fear. As if that fact would change my life too. She went to college on a full academic scholarship, then to graduate school, where she was one of a few women to earn a doctorate in physics. She got research grants, awards, professorships. All of which Donald ignored each time we saw her, asking instead about potential husbands.
I’d tell her to ignore her father, who just had a hard time showing his love.
“It’s not love when you don’t even know someone,” Heidi said. She was thirty then, just a few years from taking over the physics department at Michigan, and a few more from getting pregnant from an unknown source, announcing that she would raise the child on her own. Donald would refuse to see her, or our grandchild, a beautiful and smart girl named Nora, so I would meet them in secret. Until his dementia made rules null and void.
“Of course he knows you,” I said. But later I would think back on that statement and hate myself for the lie.
“He has an image of a good daughter, and I’m not it,” Heidi said.
I said something vague, conciliatory.
“The world is much bigger than him, Mom.” She pointed up, in the direction of the moon and stars. “Bigger than what we know of life. We may see the same side of the moon through a telescope every time we look. But what’s on the other side? What don’t we see?”
I looked then, and saw only darkness.
On the patio, with Abigail, we were silent for a moment.
“We’re connected again.” She pointed up, somewhere above us, and then to the ground, the green of July. “To what’s up and what’s down here. We have the power to do what we want.”
“But we only feel it if we’re free.” Maude said from behind us, pulled a deep drag into her lungs, and I watched the ash grow. “Well and truly free. No more husbands to take care of. Or kids. No more responsibilities. People making our meals and taking care of our bodies. No more women’s work.”
“All that old life gone,” Abigail said.
“But then what?” I said.
“Leslie, what do you want?” Maude said.
They watched me struggle, comb through my mind and heart and come up empty.
*
The girls drank their gin as the afternoon waned, and smoked another joint. We held hands, repaired the damage to our livers, cleaned the room, then said goodnight.
Lying in bed I thought about power. I thought far back to history classes, the ones I didn’t sleep through. I thought back through decades of news reports. Remembered lectures by Heidi when she deemed my understanding of an issue unsatisfactory. Kings used to call their power over their subjects absolute, ordained by God, allowing for any and every action for and against those subjects. Warriors used swords and guns and drones as power over other people. Men created laws to make their power dominant, keeping down others who were unlike them. So much effort and blood to claim power.
But all that was just machinery and messaging. Their power wasn’t innate.
The next day, Maude’s daughter Melanie came to visit. She drove our trio to lunch at Olive Garden. She and her husband would soon be leaving for a cruise to Cozumel for their 20th anniversary, she said, flipping her two-toned hair, rattling her charm bracelets, twisting the rings on each finger. I looked deeper, and saw that she’d caught him with the boy next door, a college sophomore home for break. Maude saw too. But we nodded, smiled, wished them the best time.
After, we stopped at Barnes and Noble. Abigail read cozy mysteries, tore through the cat-covered whodunits with elderly detectives at two a week, and Maude read the bodice-rippers, pirates and wenches on the covers. I wandered, eventually finding my way to the comic book section.
I flipped through a few. Heidi had never had much interest as a child, always so serious, idolizing inventors and pioneers. But I knew the gist. Powers came from radioactive spiders in these books, from science experiments gone wrong. They flew, they fought, they smashed. All in the name of truth, justice and the American way. They hid their true identities, but welcomed fame for their costumed alter egos.
Their power was all theatre. Manmade. Unnatural.
On the way back to the entrance, I walked by a display for teens. “If you liked Harry Potter,” the sign read. The books were covered with boys and girls wielding wands and curling over cauldrons. I remembered a movie I’d watched with Heidi, women burned alive, branded as witches, for seduction, for spells, for communing with animals and dancing naked in the woods.
Their power, whether real or imagined, still had to play by rules.
I begged off from the girls that night, lay in my bed, sideways across the mattress as I’d taken to doing. I thought about all the things I could do now. Options, choices, buzzing in my brain. An unfamiliar tingle.
*
When Heidi came to see me that weekend, I offered her a drink.
“Are you serious?”
“What?” I held my half-finished gin and tonic in one hand, an empty glass in the other.
She smiled. “I’ve just never seen you drink much, Mom. Let alone offer it.”
I shrugged. I poured her one and topped off my own, then joined her on the couch.
Her eyes were on me, itching.
“What is it?”
“You just look good, Mom.” She put her drink on her knee. She was almost sixty now, but looked bright and lean, like years weighed little on her. Like she harnessed the universe she taught and researched, and its light lived in her.
“And you, kiddo. Always.”
“I wondered, you know. How you would do after Dad went. I knew he would go first. I was never quite sure what would happen to you then.”
“And?”
She raised her eyebrows, the smile still there. “I don’t want to be disrespectful. But you look healthier and happier than I think I’ve ever seen.”
“Since when do you care about being respectful?”
She laughed, and I joined her. “I just meant, I wanted this to be how you reacted. I wanted you to feel...”
“Free?” It was a surprise, hearing myself say it. It surprised her, too.
“Yeah,” she said.
We sat for a moment, sipping our drinks.
“He was a bully,” she finally said.
“He was.”
“I tried to be sadder when he died. I really did.”
“I know.” I stopped there. Thinking the thoughts were enough.
“I’ve always wanted to ask why,” Heidi said, speaking to her glass. “Why you stayed. Especially...”
I knew what she was thinking, because I could see it. In her mind, but also in mine, played in dual stereo. The night of the observatory, when we came home. He’d lapsed, skipping prayer for the bar. He yelled. I told her to go to her room, but saw her on the stairs, watching, before his fist closed my eyes.
There were other nights, too.
“I don’t have a good answer. Not the one you or I want, anyway.”
She wiped her thumb across the glass.
“I thought it would be done, when I got out of that home,” she said. She looked quickly at my eyes, then back down. “But there’s guys like him everywhere. Maybe not the same tactics. But even scientists.”
I rifled through her head. Saw the things she hadn’t told me, the panels made of men, labs filled with them, the talking to her breasts, the gossip she’d walked in on, the reduced salary, tiny cuts that she scabbed over.
“What kills me, though, is the younger generation. I thought for sure she wouldn’t have to deal with the things we did.”
“Nora?”
She exhaled hard, and her empty fist tightened. She nodded, and I saw: after Donald’s funeral, the two of them at their home. Nora cried. Heidi, free of tears or guilt, asked why, since Nora’s grandfather never asked or tried to be part of her life. Nora told her.
I felt very still, very cold.
Nora’s boss, at the advertising agency where she interned. There were texts. Implications. Times when he touched her shoulders without needing to, lingering. Things Nora batted aside respectfully, carefully. But that only increased the volume, the thrill of the chase, the cornering of prey. He drew her a future, a career, with him. Drew its inverse, without him.
Heidi and I sat in silence on the couch. Her straw squeaked as she reached the end of her drink.
Nora would be ok, I told Heidi. She looked at me a moment, seeing something on my face. Then her smile, warm, dismissive. The adolescent, the college-bound prodigy, knowing her mother’s power was nonexistent. But she thanked me, and we talked about nothing, the balance restored.
*
I thought about choices, in my bed, alone, awake, the courtyard lights drowning out the moon.
I thought about that song, the one Abigail kept playing on her boombox, the one that had wormed its way into my head, daring me.
I thought about what I wanted.
That’s how I presented it to them. And their assent was instant. Curled eyebrows. Wide grins that matched mine.
“Look at that smile, Maude,” Abigail said. “This one finally gets it.”
*
We planned. We researched. We practiced. We waited, watching the sky.
We walked out of Lazy Acres on the night of the new moon, hidden by night’s darkness and our own will, invisible to all but ourselves.
We walked miles on strong legs.
We walked fast, so fast our feet left the ground.
We found his house, a brick two-story in a neighborhood of homes known for their mid-century style.
We entered his house. He slept upstairs, and he did not wake.
We walked the rooms. He’d furnished the house with knock-offs, copies of things popular when we three were young, starting our married lives, crafting a home, creating children, disappearing.
We picked locks, pulled out drawers, pocketed photos. He had copies of ID badges from his company, all girls, all Nora’s age or slightly older. They looked like the staged, awkward settings of school photos, the same mix of embarrassment and pride.
We examined what we found. We looked into each other’s heads. We were convinced, and resolved.
We climbed the stairs, our feet hovering over the old wood that would have announced our presence.
We moved, one by one, into his bedroom, and stood at the foot of his bed. We saw him clearly in the dark, the sheets thrown off in the throes of a dream. The bald head, with red hints of alopecia; the small, feminine nose; the sharp incisors; the wiry gray hairs on his bare, sunken chest; the thin, drooping thing between his chicken legs.
We waited, letting our presence fill the air, penetrate his nostrils, his pores.
We watched as he finally blinked, twice, before gasping, scrabbling, curling back against his headboard.
We saw ourselves as he saw us. Huge, towering statues, crones and queens. We let him fear us, let that fear fill his veins and take his breath. We grew taller in that fear, felt ourselves get stronger. We felt our power fill the final spaces of our bodies.
We threw the pictures at his feet.
We watched his eyes roll back. He sputtered out words, sounds meant to explain his actions and his impulses, meant to protect him.
We did not move.
We watched him gain his footing again, as he remembered this was his house, that he was a man, he was a boss, he made women obey. He spit out more words, sounds designed to cut at us, make us small, reassert the balance of power.
We smiled.
We dug into the soft, pulsing matter in his skull.
Stop, he said.
We watched in his head, watched the girls come and go, his slow sizing up of each challenge, his advertiser’s skill of finding the soft spot, the insecurity, the flaw, the subtle mirror he held to it. And the sell: himself, their savior, their solution. Sometimes they accepted his sell. Sometimes they fought.
Stop, he said.
We held up our hands, and in each there was the shadow of something circular, clear, cylindrical. Something celestial. We poured ourselves into that shape, focused all our will and fury into it.
Stop, please, he said.
We forced his hands down from his eyes. He would see what we would give him.
Please, he said, a long pleading syllable.
We burrowed into his head.
We picked. Pinched. Penetrated his brain.
We poured the contents of our hands into a vein in his skull, watched as it formed a bubble of air pressing against the wall, bulging, threatening to burst.
Please, he screamed.
We looked at our fingers, puckered and chapped, bathed in detergent and bleach, the dried sheep hair in knitting needles. They felt full, our fingers. Every cell’s contents tripled, every nerve surrounded.
The bubble in his vein grew, stretched, thinned.
We looked at each other, one by one and all at once.
The moon shone through the window.
We felt like howling. We three, Maude and Abigail and I, my friends, my kin, my selves, multiplied.
So we did.
This story first appeared in Dig Me Out by Amy Lee Lillard, published 2021 by Atelier26 Books.