Sophie

Lisa returns from an evening stroll interrupted by rain and stumbles upon a line of fire ants carrying a copper cicada molt into the woods.

She walks into the cabin longing for a bath and hears dull breathing coming from a sunless corner under the stairway, and resists the urge to walk away when their eyes meet. The trembling bone-thin shape limps back to her own dark room like a maimed flesh puppet holding a ragged, stuffed giraffe called Captain Rufus by its hind leg, dangling loosely from a thread. An object hangs from the creature's flayed neck.

The creature shivers in the cold room where she eats and draws and dances to the tune of Dad’s jazz records on the old wind-up phonograph. She lays her camera on the floor blankets along with hair brushes, storybooks, and color markers. The floor is littered with photos of trees, flowers, and Captain Rufus. But her most precious picture is hidden under the mattress. Two girls, one white and frail like porcelain, the other hazel-eyed with a detached smirk.

Lisa struggled to keep her confined since the first year after the crash—fingernail scratches still ran carved through the door’s varnish. Only Captain Rufus for company. Every time she met her lost gaze, the violent sound of mother’s neck snapping in the front seat, followed by the smell of gas, and burning flesh crept into her thoughts. 

The creature’s smell permeates the cabin despite the countless baths, like a sullen cloud of decay.

“Stay inside. Stay inside,” she repeats like a mantra amidst the nausea-inducing odor.

***

Lisa’s bedroom is tidy, with a bookshelf all to herself. Perfumes and wild lilies keep the stench away. Nailed hands and feet cling to the crucifix on the wall while the messiah rusts buried somewhere in the woods where his stare cannot follow her.

“I’m sorr-rry,” The creature says knocking on the wall. Her voice is hoarse and feeble, a petty enunciation. “Liss...”

Lisa contemplates the brunette in the mirror brushing her hair before bed, moisturizes her pink cheeks, and caresses the scar on her left wrist; the only blemish from that night, usually hidden under long sleeves. Her fist strikes the mirror. Shards of glass fly and some dig into her smooth hand upon realizing the thing’s gone through her stuff, leaving dregs of dead skin on the dresser along with cotton from the stinking doll on the floor.

Nausea works its way up her throat. She runs to the bathroom, throws up, and the burning sensation matches the rising blood-boiling rage reddening her face.

The creature stares at her own reflection in the tub and the ensuing wailing keeps Lisa hidden under the sheets, covering her ears with a pillow; Reminiscing of the winter night, the creature knocked on the door until she let her stay and sleep in a corner; cuddling the dirty giraffe through the thunderstorm. And woke early to the smell of a reeking puddle. And punished her by hiding Captain Rufus for a week until the creature sobbed and refused to eat, growing thinner yet until collapsing on the floor like a dead fish with bite marks on her fingers.

***

A bird’s singing wakes Lisa drenched in sweat. There’s a note written on a blue marker under her door, and she struggles to read the writing but notes the smiling face at the bottom.

Lonely

please visit.

“Sophie, please don’t wander off like that. I don’t want to lock your door again, alright?" Lisa says in front of the dark room and leaves cookies on a tray. “I know you like to take pictures, but we don’t know who might be out there. So just trust me, fine?”

Lisa spends the rest of the day in bed, occasionally listening to footsteps and giggling from the adjacent room. The music keeps Sophie amused, but to her is like a painful noise. She reaches for a shoe box under the bed. It is filled with butterfly wings and a lock of dark hair from a wounded kid who’d wandered too close one afternoon. She nursed him for some weeks in the attic before taking him to the woods. Sophie believed he’d returned home. While tinkering with the lock she falls asleep to a buzzing in her head accompanied by a choir of distorted voices speaking in reverse.

The car drives through the highway as the radio plays static. Dad says something to Mom, their faces blurred out of the mirrors. And the frail eyesore is nowhere to be seen; only the ragged giraffe sitting in her spot. Dead Crow’s rain from the starless sky, breaking their necks against the roof until one shatters the windshield.

Lisa wakes from her dream’s shelter when dad’s watch marks 12 pm, and curses her sleep paralysis as an eye watches from behind the partly closed door. The flesh around the socket is red and scarred, leaving gaps of visible bone. Lisa shuts her eyes in hopes she will leave. Usually, this works, but sometimes she stays until dawn like an unwound doll.

Bare footsteps retreat. Lisa runs to the bathroom, kneels by the toilet, and throws up again. She’d lock her up in the shed again were her screams not loud enough to burst a blood vessel.

In the morning gloom, the cookies remain untouched, and she figures the memory of the razor blades in a slice of birthday cake still lingers.

***

She heads to the pantry and grabs Dad’s last wine bottle and drinks herself to sleep, hoping to see Mom and Dad again and ask them if Grandpa was up there; she never got to meet Grandma. She dreams instead of Grandpa's abandoned farm shrouded in mist, and where her younger self carries a child wrapped in a blanket to a bottomless well from which a smell of ash rises. A flash wakes her but she’s too drunk to do much besides watch as the blurry shape draws near.

Lisa kicks away the tray, bursts into the cold room, covers her nose, and wrests the camera off the scraped pale hands. Sophie lets out a whimper as her mother’s gift is taken away.

"I said not to take my picture," she says threatening to drop the camera.

Sophie gets on her knees and tries to reach for the camera as Lisa backs away. She grabs the photo and hands it to Lisa who shreds it while Sophie tries to gather the pieces before a kick strikes her hard enough it's a miracle it doesn’t knock out one of her remaining teeth. She retreats into a corner, hugging herself. Blood gushing from her mouth.

Lisa kneels and shoves the camera into her chest.

"I’ll find you new batteries if you promise not to do that again."

She nods, trembling, the last few strands of black hair covering her eyes. 

The miserable burnt doll attempts to hug Lisa who backs away, and shuts the door behind her.

***

Lisa sits on the porch reading a pulp crime novel with a pump-action shotgun on the cover, while inside the cabin, Sophie draws animal figures on her sketchbook adorned with zoo animal stickers. Doodles of stars, flowers, and giraffes that she loves bring life to the old mold-stained walls.

Lisa skims through the words on the yellowed pages: wrath, sin, maim, cartridge, nail, cranium, saw. And vividly pictures the murder scene as a mirror of the cabin’s surroundings.

An owl spins its head around, eating a featherless hatchling, and flies off into the limestone-grey sky. A spider eats a moth caught on the porch lamp’s web. Varmints rush under the cabin’s foundations sensing the storm. And she goes back inside when the downpour starts.

The frigid wind blows through a window. Mud footprints run throughout the kitchen, and fingerprints stain their parent’s picture that stands next to the cracked frame of a pale, prematurely born infant in mom’s arms. She bottles up the anger as she’s done for 5 years.

She slashes carrots on the cutting board—her hands faltering until a cut stains the knife’s blade red, and leaves a burning wound on her thumb.

A little yellow finch chirps outside with a broken wing in the rain. Lisa steps out and carries it back inside and lays it on the table as it attempts to fly away, and holds the knife above its neck like a guillotine. She chops its head off, and the body dances around, fluttering like a broken wind-up puppet, spraying blood on her shirt.

She stands blank-faced above the headless songbird, peering at her fair complexion on the blade’s reflection. Something lands on the window, and the pitched buzzing drowns all other sounds. 

***

It’s 3 am when the older sister pulls the covers over herself and tears up as Sophie’s wailing starts again. Sometimes Lisa wants to finish the deed and set the cabin ablaze, and run far away and find a pleasant meadow to sleep.

The thing stands outside the window, staring into the bedroom like a menagerie. When she vanishes there’s only the waning crescent moon withdrawing into the dark.

A great, suffocating silence falls over the land at dawn. Sophie is not in her room and neither is Captain Rufus. The older sister calls out her name and runs around the cabin, finding footprints leading into the woods where they used to play. She packs a lantern, a compass, and a water bottle and sets out into the endless bitter woods; charcoal clouds blocking the sun.

***

The older sister threads belligerent through the trail where a spiked caterpillar crawls over soft rotten wood, and drab-leaved weeds grow from patches of grass where dead butterflies wither and meld back into the soil, while ant hills form like primal summits.

She walks through the woodland that smells of damp earth and the carcasses of its inhabitants. Thunder startles her and she points the light at a dead bear caught in one of the traps; covered by red lumps growing on hairless patches of skin—black dilated eyes staring back. Pearly larvae feed on undigested sustenance in its stomach.

She searches amidst the noise of thunder and violent wind blowing through hemlocks and spruces covered by mantles of ashen-yellow crustose lichens and pauses when she finds the Giraffe’s leg in the trail and hears a familiar humming.

***

“Sophie,” She says walking under a treefall gap where larkspurs grow. And meets the mangled pale creature in a puddle. The camera swung from her neck.

Sophie spins, and hums, swinging Captain Rufus around like a child. She splashes and mumbles in delight, exposing missing teeth, blisters, and burnt skin in the grey daylight—a lower rib fully visible. She dances in circles like a bumbling ballerina and sings in unintelligible speech, and sticks out her tongue to taste the first raindrops.

“Sophie,” Lisa repeats.

Lisa’s face doesn’t contort even as her fists clench and pupils constrict. She steps closer and yanks at the thin arm, but Sophie pulls back, bellows and playfully splashes water on her sister’s coat.

A rabid stare follows Sophie, and her heartbeat hastens to watch the mumbling wretch. She steps back, skims the ground, grabs a heavy sharp rock, takes a deep breath, and bashes Sophie’s face, knocking her down.

Sophie falls, disoriented by the blow, and the joy flees, snuffing out her laughter as she drops Captain Rufus. Her sight clears and sees red on Lisa’s lips.

She whimpers like a pup as Lisa straddles her, holding up the rock. Sophie caresses her sister’s face as it distorts with repulsion. 

“Sis-” Sophie whispers, at a loss for breath.

Lisa bashes the head again and again until the whimpering dies out, and hears that crushing sound when the frontal lobe caves in. Sophie flails her arms and for a second stares into her older sister’s bloodshot eyes and then lies still.

Lisa’s fingers shiver and loosen, letting go of the rock. She lies beside the dead thing—brain matter and teeth in the grass, and a teardrop on the corpse’s cheekbone. And stares into the sky through the gap in the canopy; raindrops touch and cool her forehead. Lisa ponders if Sophie might start moving, and lies in wait until it’s dark, and when she doesn’t, stands up, takes the camera, and snaps a photo of the corpse before smashing the camera to bits. She then takes the stuffed giraffe and leaves.

***

The older sister walks free with blood on her face and nails as if baptized, hoping the rain will wash the red away. The buzzing disrupts her thoughts and follows her in the dark. She sits to rest on a dead, fallen trunk colonized by gilled fungi and inspects the compass which loops erratically. And walks on through the downpour and falls into a deep gully and lies contemplative among decaying bones of varmints like fossils fused into heaps. She rises when the rain ceases and sees the corpse again before it disappears and realizes it was never there. She looks at the photo every now and then as a reminder that Sophie is dead. And she whispers it as a mantra.

A blinding penumbra descends on the woods cloaking the rotting trees, and no moon shines in the sky, and the lantern’s light dies as if swallowed by an unnatural darkness. She drops it and continues the aimless march.

The odor of something roasting draws the weary figure into a campfire where a man sits with a hunting rifle on his lap. The smoke clouds his face, but his voice sounds young, and his tarnished clothes smell of dung.

“Stay there,” he says.

She risks walking into the glow, and his tone changes laying eyes upon her.

“I’m alone,” she says and sits.

"You hungry?"

He hands her a piece of half-raw flesh. She snatches it without looking away from the man behind the flame, and eats like a caged beast—eyes dart at the rifle.

"Are you a hunter?"

I guess I still am in some ways. And you?

"Dad took me hunting once."

Sophie came along on an autumn day. But they returned home after she began sobbing when Lisa shot a buck in the eye, and both watched it shudder before death. 

"He gave you that giraffe, too?"

"It’s my sister’s."

"Thought you were alone?"

"I am."

The fire illuminates the watch: the three hands stopped at 6.

"How about you spend the night? I lost my companion, too in some bear trap. Could use the company."

She nods.

In the dark, after the fire faded, she falls upon him and breathes close to his ear, touching the rifle’s stock, and he wraps his arms around her, and she pinches the neck with her teeth, and then bites into the throat.

***

The lurched figure walks with the rifle in hand and the stuffed animal strapped to a leather belt.

The flow of a shallow river lures her in and she finds a fish flailing by the bank and catches it and bites the head off, spits it out, and devours the pink, pulpy flesh. She tramples over shed molts that carpet the earth and limbs of trees, like hollow statues.

She roams, bruised and unclean; caked in patches of blood clots, and dung and clay soils. Knowing not where she is going until she walks into a meadow where the wind is still and an alder tree grows. She hooks Captain Rufus on a branch and sits under the tree, watching a faint glow on the horizon. The thundering swarm of cicadas numbering billions soaring throughout the sky rocks her to sleep.