Tear by Erica McKeen

Author:Erica McKeen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Published: 2022-08-10T10:47:42+00:00

Eighteen

What do you do when you hear scratching in the wall and there’s nothing but earth beside it?

Really, what do you do?

You tell someone. You tell someone and you get them to come and listen, and if they hear what you hear, you know it’s real. Because that’s how reality is qualified, by shared experience, by communal agreement. This is how you know that the scratching in the wall isn’t just scratching in your head. This is how you know for sure.

But what if there’s no one to tell? And what if it’s dark—dark-dark like that blinding, black quality of your childhood nightmares? What if the walls are dark and the window is dark, the rooms are dark because it’s always night? What if the window won’t open and it only looks onto a square of snowy backyard, locked in by hedges—what if the door at the top of the stairs won’t open either? What if nothing will open for you, and here you are with your brain and bones, and also the scratching? What do you do? When it’s been days or weeks, what do you do? When it’s been months? When it’s not always just scratching but banging, when covering your ears doesn’t help, and covering your mouth doesn’t stop the retching, because the banging seems to flood up from your stomach? It’s fear, an outsider watching would call it fear, but it feels like nausea, like acid under your tongue, like cold hands against your neck, like a hunching of your whole body, like your joints have disappeared, and everything—limbs and cartilage, blood and muscle—buckles together. Fear, after weeks of feeling it, is a fog between your eyes. It shows itself minutely, as a crease between the eyebrows. Here you are and here also is the scratching.

What, then, do you do?

This is what Frances did. She went out to the kitchenette in the dark. She opened the drawers and fumbled through the extra utensils until she found, as she knew she would because she had watched Ky put it there when they first moved in, a long, serrated breadknife. She brought it back to her bedroom.

In that shadowy light from the bedroom doorway, leaking in from the bedroom window, she was a drifting, amorphous shape, the lines of her body dripping off into the walls and floor, her hair like a floating haze around her face, like some ghostly mane. The only definable parts about her were those that caught and reflected the light. Her eyes sat glassy in her skin, as round as the tops of lollipops. If you looked closely you might see her nails extending out of her sweater sleeves like abnormally long fingers, stiff but somehow jointless as they spiralled toward her palm. And the knife in her hand, a wedge of silver, a slice out of the darkness, hovering as if suspended in front of her body.

Frances sat on the floor in front of the wall, and although she couldn’t hear any scratching, she knew exactly where to place the knife, to press and turn and force the knife.

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