Thick Thicks Save Lives

Trigger warnings: Abandonment, Allusions to suicide/self-harm, drug abuse, Drug-induced panic attack and paranoia, Violence

When I lived in Thorncreek I was able to convince myself daily that this town didn’t harbor a witch. I’d walk everyday down to the pier, which led out into a mammoth manmade lake, squat on the planks, and finger the tapering wood. From the woods around the edges of the lake I’d hear a chanting, abrasive and grating, like a taunt. 

Thorncreek was a small town. Since my birth I haven’t left Kentucky, but I haven’t been immobile either. When I was twelve, my mother relocated my sister and I to our father’s apartment in Louisville, where we’d sat one whole afternoon staring out at the skyline’s reflection on the Ohio river, until our father came home and informed us that he wasn’t yet ready for parenthood. Crowding the doorway behind him, three blondes caressed its frame, hair cascading down their backs. One of the blondes was our mother’s sister, who slipped her apartment’s key into my pocket as we passed back over the threshold of our father’s door for the last time. 

Her apartment, a cramped three rooms, was in the basement of a midtown skyscraper. There were no views or coffee shops beneath us. Over us we’d hear the constant whirring of a Zamboni all night because the first floor of the building housed a hockey rink. The floors above the rink serviced an ambiguous big city business, the kind filled with men in pinstripe suits carrying black leather briefcases and leaning over to one another to mutter things about a falsifiable affidavit and the S&P 500. My sister Emily believed that the whole business was a coverup for a counterfeit money scam. 

The more time we spent in that building, the harder it was to feel like we weren’t a part of it. When I dreamed, it was of the radical memories our couches and grooved wooden furniture contained. Once, I was my aunt’s bathroom sink, collapsing into a ceramic heap of rubble. A Black child peeked his fingers towards me, touching me lightly, and then diving the whole of his hand into my depths and pulling out a dozen figs, squeezed through the grooves in his fingers. In another, I was a perfume bottle knocked oblique beneath a desk and spilling, all the objects around me tormenting the smell. Emily told me that dream meant I was afraid of showing my passions to other people. I told her all the cum she was swallowing was messing with her brain chemistry. 

Emily was ugly even then. She had small eyes, pupils like pinpricks, and no waist or breasts to speak of. She had a passionate love affair with spanx and often called upon multiple lovers at once. She’d squish her shapeless body into beige shapewear after beige shapewear, while I sat in the dressing room and mentally compared the thighs of the women around me. Emily would tell the whole boutique I was gay and I would splay out on a garish pink ottoman and open my mouth in invitation. I was a big fan of thighs and I was a big fan of Emily because I was an idiot. I liked how thighs moved like their own body with each step, I liked how Emily would joke that if we ever chose to escalate this relationship Kentucky would be the place. When she was mad her wide oval face would smear like a deformed egg yolk, popped. She had practically no thighs. I told her I loved her anyway. 

Our aunt visited the apartment three, four times in the totality of our time there. She was a sharp-faced woman, anemic in body and character. The whole time we’d lived there, she never once slept at the apartment. Emily said she was a prostitute with a pimp infatuated with her and that’s why she never lived there. I didn’t believe her because even for a prostitute’s standards our aunt was unattractive. The only reason she got by was because of her blondeness. For her body she had no value, unless she was an escort — she was flat as a board, with knees that pronated inwards and acne scars all across her back. Rich men like that kind of thing; they like to test how much a woman can look as much like a mannequin or a man while still being socially acceptable as fuckable. 

A while into living in that apartment, Emily started coming home later and later, losing the little definition left she had to her waist and dropping molars on the floor and clogging the drain with pubic hair. I thought it was a heroin addiction. She was cold and locked herself in the bathroom, draining our aunt’s expired prescription pills and permeating the room with the smell of sticky, cloying hair products and scattering the floor with discarded foil from the backs of melatonin packages. She’d come crawling into my bed at three AM and talk about the moles on our father’s back that resembled nothing. “My whole life,” she’d tell me, “all I’ve ever wanted is for them to connect.” 

So I’d roll over and with my back turned from her, reply, “He’s not dead yet.” 

It felt serious to me then, but I recognize now that it was just the transitory angst of a teenager. That and everything Emily did was infused with her stupidity. She never fucked with a condom, or so she told me, she popped pills she found on the floors of gas station bathrooms, she kicked homeless tents, she kept a list in her room of all the different jewels she’d like to buy when she became rich, though don’t ask me how, since as dumb as she was she was commensurately unmotivated to make anything of herself. Once, on a picnic in the park at seventeen, she squeezed a pimple on my forearm and posited, “This really is the ideal age to be abandoned.” 

The witch in the forest makes it clear that she will not be acknowledged, but her presence asserts itself over my head anyways. I think she doesn’t look like a normal witch, at least not on the outside. No gnarled hands and elevated, rotund warts ordaining the tip of a nose, no tiny black eyes nestled squarely into a heap of wrinkles. I can see her sitting, edge of her bed in the morning, a yawn settling into a serene feminine face. Wide gray eyes, cheeks round as an apple, lips swollen and slightly open at all times, a perfect gap in her making. Maybe she has glasses she fixes with the tip of her index finger as they slide down her nose. Every morning she eats an alligator foot or the freckled skin of a human child but caresses the food with her tongue like ice cream topped with cherries. I’ve seen her a few times, the witch. An evil witch, I decided, staring out at her from a tree with binoculars, watching her from my pier. She had the spell I desired, the one that would suck out all the evil, all the bad that slapped around my head like the tentacles of an octopus on a waxed floor, but she was a badness herself. It was strange to imagine that something as black in soul as she could pawn off a purifier to the public. I suppose our gods work in mysterious ways. 

The first thing I noticed about Thorncreek was the proliferation of godly presence. There was a new god at every storefront, a god patting my shoulder as I walked past, a god bobbing in the sink of the bar’s bathroom. A little gold light enshrined their hairlines; their skins were mauve or chartreuse or celadon; they lingered at edges and ate the community garden’s cucumbers and squashes like animals; in the bar bathroom, one got on her knees and started to unbuckle my belt. I shook my head and moved away and she pulled out a glittering dust wrapped in aluminum foil and shuffled it into lines on the sink. 

When I think of the gods here, confusion warps my perception of Thorncreek. Why would they be here when they could be in Louisville or Lexington or Somerset? All the gods concentrated in one town. Mornings meant waking up in a sheen of sweat, fearing the crowds with their pitchforks and torches surging towards Thorncreek, staking claim to the gods the rest of the world doesn’t know about. 

I found it unbearable to live by myself. The town was stuffing down a strange feeling of fullness, clogging my throat with pink and white fluff like ceiling insulation, and every time I tried to speak all that was emitted were soft, baby pink puffs. Sitting at the pier, thoughts fleshy and cheeks progressively softening, I saw Emily’s dead body bobbing in and out of water like a buoy. I hadn’t seen her in almost twelve years. A forty-one year old, coddled by the world and abandoned by his mother, sat on a pier and I couldn’t even envision him. After looking in the mirror in the morning I’d forget my features immediately. It was an arduous, daily task not to believe I was dying a slow death, unconvincing even to myself.

On a Thursday in August, five months in Thorncreek feels like five years. The few people I’d talked to leak from my head like water from a popped balloon. I threw my phone out the window of my lake house. It splashed in the water and electrocuted an exceedingly ugly cat that tried to eat it. I thought I’d been doing better, doing well, before I came to Thorncreek. August is suspending my body by rope around the neck from a ceiling tile. Calls from no one ring in my head endlessly. The heat clings to me, attracts my clothes to my skin. I fantasize of picking up a rotary and dialing out Emily’s number. 502, something something something. Why hadn’t I recognized the hate that number contained? The morning of that Thursday in August, squatting on a linoleum basement floor which can and can’t be mine, I stand and start my walk down to the pier. I pass the bodega and the pharmacy and the thrift store that keep trying to pawn off its maneki-neko. There are good people here, there just have to be, but I can’t help seeing the Emily in everything. Two thin thighs rising like distanced pine trees, towering pink heels, I hate her and I hated having to sleep next to her every night. I hate waking up at four and pretending she meant something when she said, “You’re like fluorescent lighting down a hallway.” I hate living my life in habitable paragraphs, I hate feeling fuller and fuller, a pig stuffed down a garbage chute. Fattened for tastiness.

August is when when I track down the witch and knock on her door. When she opens the door, sunlight runs over her features, highlighting a fine cupid’s bow above gapped lips, face kept between bulging cheeks like parentheses.

“Hallo?” And she is very gentle in her saying so, very deliberate, revealing perfect teeth surrounding a small purple tongue like an auditorium around a speaker. “How can I help you?” 

She braces small hands against the door, causing me to flinch. 

“Yes. I need a spell from you.” 

Her eyelashes flutter. There is goo caught between each one. Individual lashes filter off her face with each blink. 

“A — I’m sorry, I don’t —” 

I burst through the door, some sudden force collecting my body and head in its palm and dumping it back inside this enlarged shell of myself. A hand around her neck, I search wildly with writhing fingers of one hand. Down goes vases and scatters pens, so falls the small books stacked on her bedside table and cards written in a foreign language. I drag her to the kitchen, palm pressed against her neck. If she struggles, I don’t register it. All I want is the indigo or cyan vial I know is there. “Alright,” I tell her, settling her down onto the floor, “don’t worry.” 

The girl shakes hard, her thighs white and undulating with fear.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” 

“Y-you can take anything,” the girl stutters in reply. “The crystalware is in the attic. Please don’t hurt me.” 

“I want your spell.” 

“I don’t —” 

“It’d probably be unwise to lie.”

“Spell? Spell — yes, in the — the attic also.” Ostensibly releasing her words from a tight leash of reticence, her verbal stumbling makes sense. “Surely, the attic.” 

Over the bed is a retractable ladder leading to a tight, triangularly-ceilinged room. The room is filled with piles of things: dirty magazines in a language I dare not discern, columns of polaroids, empty, whitened turtle shells, taxidermied rats, rubix cubes, Chinese finger traps, cigarette butts with strange blue stains, ornate pictureless picture frames, and most cathartically, dozens upon dozens of colorful vials scattered across the floor like a complex line of dominoes. 

“Which one is it?” I ask, surveying the array. 

“I forget, I forget. Please don’t hurt.” 

“All I need to know is where the spell is.” 

She flings out a finger and points to the left corner of the attic. “There. One of those.” 

There are fourteen vials in total she could have been pointing to. Eight are empty, and three do not contain fluids. There is one fuschia, one forget-me-not blue, and one honeydew-colored vial, three in total remaining. I grab the three of them and take them all at once and swallow. Viscous residue generates a lethargic tongue; I stumble saying nothing. If I had known better I never would’ve been up here. I could just have taken the vials with my mind, with no shivering blond girl in the corner. And am I hated so much, that much, by the universe? Like a pencil tapping empty paper, anticipating the words to fill an unfinished sentence.

Their reactions are light at first. I feel my skin rising off my body. There are dusters brushing up against my brain. My mother is pressing bare feet against wooden floors beneath me, and the light of our kitchen is all around her but never on her. She had bad acne, my mother; it rose like a small mountain range across her face and back and the tops of her breasts. She was geographical, my mother. Wasn’t it funny how breath is just personified air? 

The girl across from me is smart enough. I can see the thoughts like solid hydrogen. They come and they go. Maybe I am good enough for this. But that’s just it, isn’t it? All along I’ve been attempting to circumscribe a perennially enlarging entity. The ugliness inside me isn’t leaving. Emily isn’t leaving. I’d dropped her inside a lake, where she’d bobbed and dipped and risen again and writhed within the fluid, a fluid which couldn’t have been water, couldn’t have been the life force of every other human I know. And her thighs, white and exquisite. That’d been the mistake all along: to try and shut off that part of me, to think any love inside of me had ever been familial. I was right back then and I’m righter now. I see myself in her eyes across the room, fishing out metaphors wherever she can, flailing in desperation, a fish out of water, a human out of air, a wig out of hair. Why had she wanted anything from me? I feel like nothing, like my whole existence was a fleeting thought in someone else’s brain. Splats of onyx crack through my vision. My reality wide open, and beneath it lies a realer, truer reality. There is no witch in this town but all the witches and all the towns stick inside me, inside the real reality. If I grasp her shoulders, she’d tell me how to get back to it. When I close my eyes, my neurons splatter against the black wall, like branching veins exploding in white or lightning preemptive to the storm on a dry summer night. 

See, my sister had been there all along: skimming the surface of reality, knocking from the other side of the lake. When I look down the square hole in the floor to the witches bed, Emily is reflected back at me, frigid. Through the door, she extends towards me a knife. 

“Of course,” she tells me on a hot summer night, watching the lightning. She sits with me on a picnic blanket, Thorncreek spread out below us. “We weren’t meant for the normals, and we weren’t meant for any of here.” From her mouth, spit arches out longly. “Us people — the ones untorn from their people of birth — we can’t just go on living. No, brother, you have to embrace it. You can’t breathe until you embrace it.” 

Often that sentence had left the innermost lining of my veins and arteries with ice. It ran through my head with constancy. Had she wanted us, in Thorncreek, to return to our mother’s womb and share it? Could we crawl back up there if we tried? Like all the others, the thought faded immediately, the Underneath Reality, the Impenetrable, Greater Reality inundating my mind with its presence. Emily above me, holding back a hanging knife from hitting me straight in the head. 

So this is it, yes. The witch in the corner is made of paper: she has no depth. When I look at my hands, they are one-dimensional. 

I reach through the lake and wrap my palm right around the blade.