Beastly Comforts

Content warning: gore and death

The kettle whistled. 

They were lazy and lounging in bed, sweat-stains left in the sheets. Outside, the leaves rattled and the asphalt oozed the last of September’s heat.

“You gonna get it?” Cass said, lifting an eyebrow, unself-conscious ease. The only betrayal: the slight shiver of her sloppily-manicured nails. 

Hesitantly, Lyre stood up and straightened. She hurried to grab the tea, their little makeshift morning routine. 

As they sipped, soused in the steam, Cass said, “You think they’ll find us?”

A loud, guttural laugh from Lyre. “No.” 

“You think this is a dream?” Cass said, splaying her fists against the silk satin of the sheets. She said dream more softly and tenderly than she said anything else. 

Lyre knew all of Cass’s dreams. She knew about the orchards, tangled branches heaving with glossed and sweetened fruit. She knew about Cass’s mother at the stovetop, raspberries and coarse sugar sizzling on a pan, half-filled fruit compote jars spilled all over, collapsing in clumps on the floor at their bare feet. She knew about Cass’s love of caves, the damp and humid and yawning, the bleary-eyed bats clustered and chittering. And Cass’s fear of all animals, of course, especially the fat and lolling tongues of dogs, cornered by canine teeth. She had never been attacked by an animal, surprisingly, simply grew up surrounded by them, by all the cows, chickens, feral and fattened cats, and birds that perched on the lopsided roof of the stables. When Cass spoke about her dreams, Lyre pinched away some of them, filed them safely away, traveled the gold-studded and corn-filled fields alongside Cass’s intense but easy stride, tasting heaping spoonfuls of marmalade, and knowing Cass at ten-twenty-eighty. 

Lyre never told Cass about her dreams. Not about the bloodied beetles picking scabs from her ankles and elbows, the same iridescent and flickering shade of Lyre’s brother’s eyes. Her brother, with his pinched lips, and sagging, sallow skin, and burnt brown eyes. Her brother, who lingered at waterparks, savoring summer shade and guzzling chlorine, goggle imprints left behind. Who flocked to the frothing ocean, or the lake, or even the puddle following the rain. He always claimed, I like the want of the water. I like its belief. Lyre never understood what he was talking about. The water’s belief? She had always blinked back slowly, memorizing his slow and sure syllables. At least she had that to hold onto when the handcuffs chafed his wrists, and the gavel sounded, with the same slowness and surety.

The beetles and her brother’s eyes, one and the same, and they were feasting, feasting on the rotted wooden floorboards underneath Lyre’s feet. Crawling towards all the little scraps of herself. The wax-covered Q-tip buried at the bottom of the trash, the snot-soaked tissues from all of Lyre’s constant colds, the polished pennies Lyre collected in a plastic bottle, evidence of all the times she’d wandered and wanted, and the clay creatures she made, no matter how much Cass mocked and resented them. All the clay wings and mouths, tooth encroaching on tooth in the jaws of slinking tigers and parrots and sharks of the sea. Her brother’s beloved animal.

Cass asked now, “You think your brother is happy now?”

You think. You think. You think. 

They were not questions. Cass never asked questions. It had bothered Lyre once, because Lyre pointed to the pockets of dew in furled leaves, and asked, Is it enough nourishment? Lyre stiffened on the subway, scanning how loudly and sickly people laughed, or how people bent over to polish the toe of their shoes, or fasten the laces to their ratty sneakers, how can they - we - all exist? Will we always? Lyre loved her job at the art gallery, paints all slick and sloppy, her own canvas hung up in the hidden back room drip-drip-dripping, all her inquiries, Are you seeing what I see? Can I find what you find? 

She had found what her brother found. 

“The tea is excellent,” Cass said. 

No, it bothered Lyre, still, how Cass did not ask. 

Lyre traced the tooth of a shark tattooed on Cass’s wrist. Serrated edges and smudged shadows. She loved Cass, maybe only for the tattoo. Maybe only for their yesterday, when Cass sobbed with an ugliness and an urgency, all her ease and excess absent, Cass instead crouching in the corner, then kneeling, flinching from Lyre’s far-reaching fingertips. 

Because Cass stayed. 

Because Cass wrung out their clothes and hung them up to dry. The sweet laundry detergent, exactly like Lyre’s home. Her brother, Apollo, sprinting across the lawn, breathless and tripping, grimacing at the broken and intermittent sprinklers. Lyre, wringing dress and blouse and self, We’re all alone, we’re all alone… See, see, she wasn’t, because now Cass did it for her, with meticulousness, the same she applied to her science research, the same tongue flitting in and out in concentration. 

Because Cass was home, home, all the hum of it. Because Cass didn’t mind if Lyre was more her brother than herself. Rather relished it, even, right? For once, Lyre bled all her rage and righteousness, all of it, as quickly and embittered as Cass did, and Lyre got to paint on all her blank canvases with the borrowed blood. 

Yesterday, yesterday! Yesterday, Lyre had seen what her brother had seen. 

“I think we’re going to be happy,” Lyre said, because Cass was thinking it. Lyre’s gaze drifted from Cass’s trembling knuckles. It was easier to believe Cass was thinking it, at least. 

***

The want of the water. The want of the water -

Lyre repeated it to herself in the mirror. She chopped off her recently growing-in hair. She had buzzed it a couple months ago, right after her brother’s sentencing. At first, the prickling of her scalp was disconcerting, the reflection vying for a glimpse of someone else’s shadow and skeleton. But now, it was comforting. She was closer, closer. 

Lyre administered the blue-black dye. Put in colored contacts to conceal the blue of her eyes. 

Then, she sucked in a breath. Twirled around. She used to dance. It was still familiar. 

The buzzing, fluorescent light rippled across Lyre’s body. She liked that she could see the pushing and pulsing of bone. Apollo’s bones, convincingly. 

Cass was already at work and she’d tacked a Post-it note to the fridge, which Lyre ripped off and kissed. Have a lovely day, and it was simple, and Cass’s words. Lyre fixed up breakfast, some toast slathered with salted butter. She pulled off the burnt crust and discarded it in the garbage, alongside Apollo’s favorite bow and arrow, the splinter still soggy with blood.

Apollo, always so foolish with his weapons. They never landed on target. He was too busy scrounging for the sea. Making boats with his own weathered hands, or his own young hands, polishing the hull and stitching up the sails. He never asked Lyre to join, and he never asked questions, either, but he was always believing. Lyre could almost feel it, in its rawness. 

She watched him make his own little things, as she made her own cherished clay creatures. 

She took his bow and arrow instead. Pointed it to the empty expanse of the sky. Sometimes, Apollo screeched that she should direct it to the scorpion stuck in the sand, or the spider that lived in their bathtub, but Lyre always refused. She was not him in that way, no. She did not take life. Instead, she let the spider’s cobweb fester on the shampoo bottles. She smiled at the scorpion’s tail, swishing and swishing. 

But now, she smiled when she brought her thumb and smushed the stink bug alongside the sink faucet. She didn’t even bother washing away its guts. Instead, she sauntered towards the painting she buried underneath her bed. 

Yes. Yes. It looked even better, more writhing and alive, in the sunlight.

Lyre had seen through Apollo’s eyes, and now she could see him better on the outside, too. With her feeble and fraying brush, she’d painted his rather stubby eyelashes, and his unkempt eyebrow (only the one on the right side), and his characteristic grin, hungry yet half-hearted. 

And when she stared at her art - absolutely her best artwork yet - she forgot time. It was a couple hours, or an entire day. She stood there, straight-spined, examining how thickly she had applied the layers of paint. Where the shadows fit, or where they appeared more like a painting, rather than a person. Apollo had been the first person she’d shown her scribbled drawings and on their shared room walls, she’d drawn interconnected rivers, right above Apollo’s collapsed pillow. He traced it every night before he slept. 

When Cass returned, she was talking about the dissection of mice. 

Cass gasped upon witnessing the painting. “What a corpse, what a corpse,” she murmured. 

Lyre shielded the creation with a strung-up shirt.

And the two of them, Lyre knew, they were going to live out their days in this somewhat taut bliss! They were always going to remember Apollo’s cracked-open skull, and his weapons, and his sprawling sea. It was the biggest relief, Lyre confessed, because she used to stay awake in her and Apollo’s room, all jittery, wondering if Apollo was all she had. 

No, she had better. 

She pulled her lips now in his smile. Hungry and half-hearted. 

What a sweet, ugly comfort in this art. What a sweet, ugly comfort in Cass. What a sweet, ugly comfort in her brother’s absence, and her own. 

They drank their tea, and they settled in their sheets, and they slept. 

Lyre dreamt of the beetles, the blood, and her brother. She liked, briefly, that nothing had changed. Not even a murder could change everything.