INFESTED NO MORE

INFESTED NO MORE

I birthed her in April, and in December she left me.

***

I carried her myself into the fragmented cabin beyond Wester Lake. I didn’t want to leave her out on her own, out in the slippery, trampled grassfields where she had first sprung from my chest. She was the size of a barrel and larger than the grudges I had spawned in the past, but still afflicted with the same sickened expression. Scrunched brows, reddened sclera, and chapped lips. Yet somehow my hands clawed at her, unsatisfied by the slightest gap. Even the heavy rain could not slip between us.

At the door, I slid her down my body, careful to avoid the still-raw slit of open flesh under my neck. Her little feet touched the rotten wood, all the while keeping her hand in mine. She looked up at me, and I pinched her fat fingers. “Which one are you?” I asked. “Talk to me.”

Her black, wide eyes bored into mine. “Stolen money, stolen money, stolen money.” The words drip from her lips like burned oil.

Well—that made sense. On the calendar hung on the dilapidated wall to my right, I could see streaked red ink that circled the nineteenth. Today.

It was two years to the day my sister took my meager savings—the fruit of over a decade’s worth of labor in the woodcarving shop, the diner two miles west, and with the carp fisherman on the lake—and fled.

I eyed the damp, languid creature in front of me. “You can stay with the others.”

***

The letters arrived as they always do, wrinkled and wilted in the summer humidity. I carefully opened each anyway, dissecting the pieces I found with each pull.

Go to therapy, said Marianne.

Visit us soon, said Johan.

Get over this, said Lucia, I never meant to hurt you.

With those words, my tongue stuck to the inside of my bitten cheek, and the kitchen became heavy with thick fog, smearing any ease in the air with its weight. The grudges were here—it was always like this when they came. “My siblings won’t leave me alone,” I explained to no one in particular. But they—the grudges, waiting in every corner, nook, and sliver of space—heard me just fine.

I looked at them, shoulders aching and throat tight. I’d birthed them all. In the cupboard was the day I arrived covered in mud on my first day of sixth grade because Lucia decided it would be funny to push me. Under the floorboards hung the weekends of snatched food, shifted blame, and casual insults. And now perched on the shelf by the preservatives was the most overwhelming—the final straw, when Lucia took all that I had and spent it, leaving herself on my porch wine drunk and coated in vomit just six days later.

Little hands and fingers and tails poked out from their hiding places. I felt the familiar call of the grudges, the vibrating, heated, painful grip on my chest that somehow felt calming. I ran my finger along the faded scar along my now-jagged collarbone, the source of the creature now peering at me from among the jars of jams and jellies. The sharp sound of creaking caught my attention.

I squinted. Have they always been this big?

***

“I’ll go. Once.”

“Wait, are you—are you serious?”

“I will change my mind if you ask one more—“

“Okay! Okay, great, great. That is so great. The appointment’s set for four. Two weeks from now.”

I don’t pay attention to the rest, choosing instead to toy with the amber molt of the elm in the dirt driveway, balancing the phone on my shoulder as I played in the leaves. It wasn’t often I got a break. My mind wandered, chewing and then spewing the worried ramblings of Marianne, and suddenly I wondered if Lucia had ever worked four weeks straight without a day off.

And just as suddenly, next to me among the honeyed autumn leaves, are the same, blank eyes. “Stolen money, stolen money, stolen money,” says the grudge.

“Like I said, I’ll go to therapy,” I said into the phone.

***

Worn out notebooks bled ink onto the wobbly breakfast table. The windows were open, the air flowing between the wisps of smoke from the wax candles perched on the kitchen counter. There were patches of fresh hardwood in the floor, and for the first time since last winter, there was fresh food in the cupboards.

It’s odd. I hadn’t seen black eyes or little fingers in a while. Perhaps they preferred the earlier seasons.

***

“I wanted to rest in it,” I heard myself say. “I felt like no one else would feel as sad for me as they should.”

The woman in front of me tapped her manicured nails against the armrest of her cushioned chair.

I continued. “So I held on. I mourned for myself because no one else would.”

She held my hand, and said nothing for a while.

***

It was quiet, save for the blistering winds tossing snow on my roof, and the loud crack of the firewood amongst the flames. There was no scuttling, scrambling, shifting, or slithering. Just me, alone.

It was quiet. It was December.

***

They would return every now and then. Sometimes on sweat-slicked nights, when dreams of the past seemed to blend into reality. I’d caught glimpses in the early morning too, when my bones would rattle and creak as I forced myself to work each day. Or when Johan and Marianne stayed a little too long or pushed a little too much. But as long as I tried, prying that warm, tempting and heavy grip from my body, writing in the notebooks on the breakfast table, funneling the noise from my chest to the ears of the woman with the manicured nails, I was steady.

And so they never stayed.

***

Outside, the melted pink of the roses against the wet, bored skies of the countryside looked lively. I stepped out of the cabin, tilted my face towards the sun, and exhaled.