The sisters of Gamma Beta Pi long held that the goddess was a myth.
That their initiation ritual, the bloodletting under the cover of darkness in the woods behind their house one night in late October every year, was nothing more than simple tradition. That the magic they claimed to call forth, bringing beauty and power to those few worthy women, were nothing but empty affirmations.
But Marsha Hart knew the truth.
From the road, the modern building looked out of place – as though it had been dropped into the Kansas wasteland by accident, meant for another location, but destined to end up here. We stood in silence, neither of us with any constructive thing to say and already exhausted in the creeping summer sun.
My eyes fell to the cheap sign that didn’t match the rest of the aesthetics: The Museum of Museums. The sign would have fit better in one of those old time tourist traps and looked at least twenty years older than the stark white behemoth it guarded.
Sasha’s attention fell on the harsh staccato of Stick’s nails, clicking across the hard floor. It’d been too long since she’d cut them, Sasha thought, distracted for a moment from the steady rhythm of her own breath. Stick clicked past again and Sasha heard him scratching against the front door. He had to go out. But it could wait. For one more breath at least, it could all wait — Stick and his nails and the world outside the door he was scratching at. Sasha re-focused her attention on the next inhalation, following it from the air fluttering past the edges of her nostrils, to the rising tide beneath her chest, as her diaphragm dropped and her lungs filled with—
The scene is like this. Julia’s guidance counselor who vaguely looks like hot Top Gun Kelly McGillis pushes her reading glasses up from the tip of her nose while holding out a manilla folder like she’s going to tell Julia something important about college applications or her next term schedule. Julia hopes that the anti-learning book banners aren’t trying to cut the school’s Latin program, again. Aside from working with marionettes, translating The Aeneid is Julia’s favorite thing. But no, to both Julia’s annoyance and relief, Miss Langtree doesn’t say this. Instead, the moment turns noir weird.
I’m leaking again, and it’s just as annoying as the last fucking time. Harvey had to tell me there was blood on my shirt because I didn’t even notice at first. So now I’m standing in the bathroom rewrapping my bandages while he waits outside as usual.
He offered to help, of course, but I don’t need help. As frustrating as it is, I usually like this being my own little ritual where I can just dissemble and breathe freely. It’s less enjoyable when I’ve ruined another shirt and I’m getting fluids all over the sink.
They corner me a quarter of the way into my evening walk. I’ve been tracing this route since the first week of lockdown; now, in week five, my soles can pull me through it in my sleep. These habits are innocuous enough in isolation. And yet I can’t contain that air of doom, the anxiety throbbing underneath it all. I see myself shuffling through my neighborhood like those fleeing pixels that become Pacman’s lunch, gliding down the same old tunnels to no escape.
I’m entering one such tunnel, a sort of wooded path forking off a driveway, when I hear a hello at my heels. I turn, squinting in the glare of early sunset. It’s three women: an older woman and two young women. A mother and daughters, teacher and students? Leader and disciples? They approach, this strange trinity, asking if they can give me a “presentation” on the Passover. Lucky for them I say yes because I’m a poor practitioner of saying no. (Do I emit a heathen look? Hare Krishnas like to stop me on the street.)
“I saw polar bears tumbling into a cloud-filled crater,” I told him. “As if going into the clouds of heaven–but down, instead of up.
“I had this feeling in my dream that my friends were worried,” I went on. “But me? I don’t know what I felt. Elation, maybe. Excitement. Kinship. The clouds were so dense, white-tailed deer galloped on them. There were rabbits, too. All manner of animals–anything but human–making their pilgrimage to it: a wide, lonely crater.”
“Yea, uh-huh,” he said. “That’s a weird dream, Perry.”
Trying to thrive in hostile places; unwanted, despised. Some are brazen, resolute in their right to be. Bursting from cracks and last year’s baskets, slithering through flowerbeds like venomous snakes. Others are timid, quietly seeding in shadowy hollows, in long grass. Hiding their delicate leaves, their pale flowers. Trying to live unseen, be unobtrusive. Trying to live.
I make myself sick three times today before running into her this evening.
The first is in the morning. Standing in front of my mirror, paralysed with indecision over what to wear. I feel this cloying need for comfort, I want to bury my body under thick layers of fabric but my jumpers are worn and old, everything tired and used up and repeated and stale. I stick three fingers down my throat and heave my morning coffee into the toilet. My day begins badly. I brush my teeth again.
Idle Ink 