TO SEE THE WIZARD
Tornadoes scratched at the sky’s green edges, threatening ruin. Clouds swirled like dirty pond water, scummy algae surfacing and submerging. Tips of trees whipped, chopped, like greens in a food processor, beating every ounce of nourishing vitamins into healthy, earthy pulp. It wasn’t raining but pounding, splitting every blade of glass, grinding every pebble of sandy soil.
She killed them both, then ran. Anxiety welled up in her chest, like the feeling of watching someone blowing up a balloon, overfilling it, knowing that the only outcome possible is its explosion. The balloon is your chest. Your heart can only take so much before it has to come out somewhere, an explosion leaving your body rendered useless, lifeless, in a thousands parts, no longer a body but flesh, gore. Wasted. Such a waste. Or you could allow it out in fists, in fists holding knives, in your teeth, in teeth biting ears and shoulders, in your feet, your calves, your knees, running, running, running. The tornado was her motivation, the churning drive inside her stomach, digesting any fear, helping her bowels move it through her body. She left it behind, the fear, in a comical, steaming pile on the side of the road. The air was thick and humid and soupy but now she could breathe again.
***
Her mother left her at their doorstep ten years ago – not an infant, but a chubby, mobile five-year-old. Left, told to stay and instead immediately wandered off into the grey grainy meadow, came across a barn cat being torn and tasted by vultures. Holding her blanket, sucking her thumb, watching the carnage until the vultures abandoned their task, leaving the head with its watery, bloody eyes protruding, ants beginning to scrape skin from bones. She remembered the eyes, remembered waking up in the morning, continuing to wander, finding a road, following it, humming and skipping, Aunt and Uncle M squealing the brakes of their pick-up truck as they came across her.
She never remembered what had come before. Aunt M removed photos from family albums with zeal, culling the nonsensical nonessentials. Aunt M hated nonsense, things she found ridiculous, wasteful, frivolous, pointless — Dee found those things the most powerful. The memory of the cat, for example — something Aunt M immediately declared nonsense — was almost always in her mind, even now as she ran down the abandoned highway.
***
That cat got her in lots of trouble this year. She drew pictures of it, sketches in her sketchbook, black pencil grinding black dust. Sketches turned into dark, putrid paintings, the deepest navies and indigos, black just barely tinted with shimmer. Paintings turned into sculptures; she heard the art teacher confessing to a colleague as they passed in the hallway, “I’m afraid to leave it alone in the studio overnight — if it came to life it would eat our brains.”
It wasn’t just the cat. She was fascinated in biology class, dissecting frogs with vigor when the other students recoiled, gripping the forceps with a ferocity she couldn’t conceal. Fingering the organs, tender, taking off her gloves to touch the rubbery softness of the heart, the lungs, the liver. Removing her goggles to see the colors more clearly — brown, copper, translucent green. The blood. Almost salivating. The teacher shouted, snapped, “Put your goggles back on!” Something about safety, something about hand sanitizer. She had dreams about that day for months, dissection over and over again.
Last night she fell asleep listening to the weather report, the meteorologist forewarning the morning’s danger, the storm she took cover in now. She slept on the pull-out couch in the living room; she liked the way the metal rod down the middle of the flimsy mattress burned into her back, like it would melt her completely in half if she wasn’t careful. Dee wasn’t careful; she didn’t want to be.
The dream began the same way it always did, not a moment out of place. Entering the classroom in a trance, her classmates bent over their lab tables. Hesitating before crossing an invisible threshold, some tripwire that flipped a switch in everyone else to stare at her through their goggles, necks whipping heads with blonde and brown and black and red hair, hair bunched up behind the thick rubber straps of the goggles. Leaving bloody footprints behind her. Remembering the rotting cat, its jagged hiss curling like steam, not yet dead.
The bad smell is in her nose like when you’re sick and smelling your own infected mucus. The smell is in her. Everyone watching as she finds her seat, puts on her goggles, reaches for the scalpel, slices the frog open, wrenches out the organs with her fingers, crushes the organs with her fingers, reaches for the neck of her lab partner with her fingers, closes her fingers around his neck.
That doesn’t make the fear go away. The familiar balloon is still in her chest. Nothing makes it go away. The blood only makes it feel a little better, lets a little bit of the air out, slowly, slurping through the mouth of the balloon like a wet fart, like her uncle when he sits at the kitchen table in the morning, drinking black coffee and sucking on his teeth.
Then, he is there. He isn’t like the other grownups, doesn’t act afraid or disgusted or amused by her. He is there in every dream, and, she suspects, he is there outside of every dream, in every waking day. He comes from somewhere else, like her, somewhere different and dangerous. They see each other, their eyes connecting like opposite poles of a magnet, the current faint but ever present, rushing through her nerves like an urgent telegram. He reaches for her hand, slides the cool, cylindrical handle of a knife into her palm. He wraps his other hand around her waist, his neck bending towards her face, his breath puffing warmth on her forehead like the chugs from a train’s engine, building momentum until she can taste it on her lips, thick and dirty and black smoke.
She always wakes before their lips meet, her heart pounding so fast she can’t tell if it’s moving at all, like a hummingbird suspended in the air.
***
The highway stretched in front of her. She looked around, saw a t-shirt so ripped apart its tendrils waving like fingers in a tree, suspended, stuck, waiting. She was going to find him; she was going to see him. It was the end of the world and it didn’t matter if she got carried away. She was the end of the world. She liked closed doors and lights turned off.
He wasn’t just a figment of her imagination, something she had dreamed up to fill a hole only a teenager finds deep enough to wallow in. He was real, flesh and blood, like everyone but his flesh and blood rawer, realer, juicier.
She thought of her chair at the library. It was green, fabric unknown, worn like old felt. She came to read in peace, to scratch the ancient lacquer off of the chair’s arms until it built up beneath her fingernails in yellowish peels.
It wasn’t the old book smell she loved about the library, it was the smell of the people, the scents they leave behind on the books, in the chairs, in the bathrooms. The library was different than a restaurant, where the food smells blocked other odors, where the bathroom smelled like the shit from people drinking coffee or eating rich desserts or too much cheese.
As people walked past her, she would imagine how their joints fit together, how their muscles worked and affected their gaits. Perfumes, deodorant, lack thereof. The pungent, sour smell of women not wearing underwear beneath their athleisure. The teenagers rolling in from biking or skateboarding, sweaty and dirty and smelling like real people, not like clean people.
He was one of those people, unclean and all the more powerful because of it. Whether he had noticed her or she had noticed him didn’t matter then and didn’t matter now. It had happened like how most things happened for her: as if she were riding along a moving sidewalk, passing other people and other events and watching them go by, and then suddenly coming to the end of the sidewalk and having no other option but to get off, to step onto solid ground and face whatever it is that has been put in front of her. He was like that – suddenly in front of her where he hadn’t been before.
“Hi,” he had said, and “Hi,” she had said, picking at her cuticles, peeling strips of skin away from the bone of her nails and sliding them between her teeth and her tongue.
“Whatcha reading?” he had asked, and she lifted the book cover over her face. He picked at a zit on his chin and it started to bleed. He blotted it with his thumb, leaving a smear of pink up his jawline.
After that, they would sit together at the library every day, and sometime he put his hand on her thigh and she inspected the dirt beneath his fingernails and the dry cracks in his knuckles and wondered what she was supposed to feel when he kissed her goodbye and his sour breath escaped into her nostrils and into her brain.
***
She turned left at the next intersection, a state highway, a combination of letters and numbers that meant nothing to no one, when it was just the old south road. She knew where she was going; she didn’t need a map. She still imagined what he was like on the inside, like the frog, like the cat, like her Aunt and Uncle, wondered about the size of his organs and the texture of his liver and the smells of his bowels. Sometimes she poked his stomach and imagined its contents adjusting beneath her touch, and this gave her a shock that shot up from her pelvis to the throat, and the back of her tongue burned with something much more pleasant than bile.
***
“Come in, sure,” he said, his eyes flicking from her face to the street to the black sky. He closed the door behind her as she walked in, stomped her rain boots, owned the place. He locked the door.
On the other side of that door, the wind picked up, the sky turned emerald. Cars began shuddering in place, as if they were shivering from the cold. Dee wondered if flies had begun to gather on the bodies of Aunt and Uncle M, if they would be found dead in the wreckage in a week’s time, or if the house would survive the tornado and the bodies wouldn’t be discovered for months. By then, she will be long gone, somewhere else, somewhere different. Somewhere new and with nothing.
She observed the small apartment: only one room, only four walls. The kitchen cabinets frayed at the edges like the wires that would soon be ripped from their tethers, dancing around the streets like fireworks; the cheap plywood had gone soft on the edges, like a cracker after a baby has been sucking on it for too long. Dee liked to see the insides of things without even trying.
“It’s getting pretty bad out there,” he said. “You’re nuts to have walked.” He reached over and touched her shoulder, his arm straight at the elbow. His fingers caught on the cotton of her shirt. “We should go in the bathroom, s’posed to be the safest place. I guess ‘cause of the tub.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
Wordlessly, he turned and walked to a door on the opposite side of the apartment. He opened the door and walked in. She followed.
“What should we do now?” He asked, sitting on the toilet seat. “Wanna take a bath?” He laughed with a few cough-like breaths of air, and he reached for her and pulled her onto his lap, and kissed her neck, and his breath smelled yeasty and his lips were dry. He said, “Might as well go out with a bang, right?” as his hands crept around to the small of her back and beneath the waist of her jeans and she felt a hangnail on his ring finger scratching the soft, private skin of her hip. The exhaust fan wheezed like a deflating balloon and the balloon in her chest filled with air and she felt her pocket knife strapped to her wrist. She kept it there for easy access. Easy to flick out and open. Easy to slice across someone’s throat. Easy to return to its place while the blood spurts and gurgles from his jugular and from between his lips.
He slumped on the toilet, the plastic of the seat popping inwards, concave. She squeezed out from the hinge of his torso and sat on the edge of the bathtub. Her shoulder, her neck, her collarbone, soaked through with blood, blood now pooling on the moldy bathroom tile.
Then there was shattered glass covering his body, flecks of it spattered across her face. Her eye twitched – a piece stuck to her eyelashes.
A large piece of metal had shattered the window, lay twisted on the tile, looked like the head and neck of a brontosaurus. Brontosaurs were never her favorite dinosaur – no ripping of flesh, no roaring, only gentle tugging of leaves from the highest branches and curling around their eggs and young. She gravitated more towards the little dinosaurs who sprayed venom from a spout in the back of their throat. She couldn’t remember the names of those dinosaurs, just their shape, small like lizards or chickens, a red wreath around their necks, and a tiny row of razor sharp teeth parting to expose red, liver-shaped tongues. She nudged him with her boot. She realized she couldn’t remember his name, either.
“What’s your name?” she asked his body, imagining his mouth opening, displaying razor teeth, a throbbing tongue, a stream of poison.
She turned on the faucet, joined the mess of debris in the bathtub. She hadn’t been set free. She hadn’t escaped. She was in the same world in which she had always been. She sunk into the dirty water, closed her eyes. She wondered where she would be when she opened them again.
***
Robin Lanehurst is white, queer, neurodiverse, and currently writing from Houston, Texas where they live with their wife, son, and a small menagerie of pets.
