There once was a creature who lived in my head. I remember speaking to him directly when I was a child and I remember him answering back and hearing his voice with my own ears. I found in in a wet place under the flattest stone in the yard. He was doll-sized and smelled of violets. I gave him a Barbie jacket to wear, which made him laugh. He pushed lost coins into my pockets and slept on my pillow. I slipped him candy and balls of white bread which I rolled between my palms.
His name was Walter, or something that sounded like that. I would watch him while he crushed M&Ms between his jagged teeth as I lay in my girlhood bed, listening to the desert coyotes howl. Sometimes, as I studied him, his tiny face would fall into sadness for a moment. Then he would catch my eye and wink, his eyes shining bright and gold against his deep, turquoise skin. One night, he told me the story of how he came to be where I found him:
“I was a stowaway on a ship, dearest delight. Not the type of ship you have in these late days, where you must split stars in twain just to get it running, no. These ships were moved with the very breath of Njord and they creaked and moaned in the waves like jilted spinsters. We sailed out of the blackest Baltic with our wooden belly full of the reddest Rhine wine, stopping only to dump the cheap stuff in Gothenburg before heading out into that endless blue. Oh the wine we carried over the deep was the finest, love, tasted by the singing tongue of the Lorelei Queen herself, and I certainly helped myself, haha, but I do digress. The men on that sturdy merchant’s ship left me things to eat, as you do, my pet, though not quite as toothsome as your offerings, I must say. I helped those men too, and tried to stay out of their oaken barrels as much as possible, heh. How? Oh, I untangled their fishing lines at midnight and darned the holes in their socks with my yarn that never breaks and is spun from the softest miniver collected from the breast of the fearsome beast who guards the gates of eternity. I enjoyed the seafaring life; the way the sailors sang through storms was admirable and I meant to stay on the water forever. God does laugh at plans, however and when we dropped anchor in New Orleans I espied a parasol blowing open down the docks. It was so lovely and bright that I couldn’t help but chase it through that thick, wet air until I lost sight of the wine merchant’s ship forever. When I finally caught the thing, I saw that the lace it was made from was tattered and not as fine as I had assumed from the decks of my beloved lost clipper. The parasol did contain a woven label and it read: (and here Walter cleared his miniature throat) ‘M. Cristobol, Haberdasher and Spindler, Tucson, Ariz.’ I decided to go right to Tuck-son and give this M. Cristobol a piece of my mind.
I caught a train and I sang with the filthy men who rode the cars right under the noses of the trainyard bulls. They owned nothing but their voices and so I taught them the most secret songs of the sea and expected nothing in return. My face got bluer in the wildest sunshine I had ever felt, even surpassing that of the first desert, the one the Lamia rested in when the world was new, not that you could ever know such age, my little pollywog. Where was I? Ah! So I went to the home of Mr. M. Cristobol with malice in my heart and a dark curse on my lips, promising dull needles and cracked bobbins for a hundred generations. But he had a very lovely daughter, your great great grandmother, and I felt a spark in my rocky heart for the first time in donkey’s years as the man was much better at making daughters than lace. So I whispered an oath into my shoe to serve the family of M. Cristobol as long as the daughters remained lovely. And thus, here I am, at your service. And you, Dolores, are truly the loveliest daughter spun yet from that lacy old rascal’s sin.” And Walter kissed my hand like a prince from the movies and I laughed and gave him another M&M. He especially loved the blue ones.
One night when I had just turned twelve, I brought Walter some candy but he refused to eat it. His skin was the pale blue of the morning sky and he sat on my pillow staring at me for a long time. When I asked him what was wrong, he just folded his small hands under his chin and looked pensive. I chewed candy until he finally spoke.
“Girlishness, you know I hate to be crass or non-genteel in any way. But I must address this. Your blood is coming. And when the blood comes I lose my girls to the most banal and repulsive of creatures, the males of your, frankly, accursed kind. I can say without a doubt that my opinion of human men has plummeted since I brought the daughters of M. Cristobol under my own umbrella. Especially these wretchedly modern boys you girls must contend with! Ugh, I cannot stand them, with their oily chins and hatefully big feet and their disgusting urges pushed perverse by your dying culture. Ach, I can barely think of your petal-soft face rubbed rough as a washerwoman’s by their awkward stubble. So I have been thinking. There is something I must give you. I gave it to Concepcion and to Maria Blanca and to Rosa and to your mother Linda and now I give it to you. It comes in a form most appropriate to my desert blossom.” Out of a leather bag much too small to contain it, Walter removed a long thorn. It looked like one of the sharp leaves of the Joshua trees that grew in the high hills. I took it from him and my skin tingled where I held it. Walter drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t much.
“This talisman is yours now, love. Prick yourself with it once and you will die. I cannot stop you from taking lovers but if you are dead, you can tolerate their touch without corruption. Prick yourself twice and you will become a ghost. I cannot stop you from taking their endless outpourings of wants and needs seriously but if you are a ghost their words will never crack your inner heart. And this last one, lean in close, my love. Let me rest my lips in your shell-pink ear as I say this to you. Prick yourself three times with this fine awl and you’re alive, alive-o.” I heard an audible pop as he winked away from my existence and left me all alone. My mouth was empty of candy and the thorn lay on my pillow. As I looked at it, a drop of liquid formed at the tip and slid down its length. It looked like honey but I knew it wasn’t.
I didn’t see Walter for a long time after that. My blood came and I fell in love with a boy with green eyes, one of them as lazy as an old dog in the summer. His dad was the sheriff and I thrilled every time I saw his last name on those roadside signs promoting his dad’s reelection. His dad had the same eyes but set into a fat pig’s face. I chose to ignore that and imagined kissing the delicate eyelid of his son, the thin membrane that contained that lost, rolling orb. I was sure it saw things that normal people didn’t see and that this green-eyed boy and I would discuss those things under a rose-strewn bower in the moonlight, Instead, that wandering eye looked past me toward a cheerleader named Kali Yeager and I thought I knew true Loss and Suffering, so I pricked myself with Walter’s thorn and I died.
Through my death I grew older. My body filled out in the shape of a woman’s and I let those boys that Walter had warned me about run their hands over it. They pressed their hot aches right into me as though there was something inside my dead carcass that could cure those aches forever. I felt nothing under their touch, or so close to nothing that it didn’t really matter what they did to me.
When I was almost done with high school, I fell in love again. I felt my cold heart blaze up inside my dead chest and my hair grew three inches the first week I knew him. This boy had brown eyes and met mine properly but he had been born with a defective left ventricle and bore a large scar down his sternum where he had been broken to be fixed. His shoulders arched forward with the weight of the world and I realized that I would do absolutely anything to put my lips to the mark that made him suffer. He called me a fool with the pain of a man far older and I realized it was time for Walter’s magic again. I pricked myself with the thorn a second time and became a ghost.
I haunted a black-haired scamp who was tormented by sex and a blonde bard, too serious for this world, who made the worst music I had ever heard. These and many more sang their songs to me and blew their wind at me and dreamed of me in the night and tried to encircle my eldritch wrists with their fingers. Finally, I haunted the one who would become my husband, the melancholic with a lock tattooed on the back of each hand. He told me he had open eyes but he never found my grave or even realized I was a ghost. In fact, my husband insisted that he was the dead one and took to sleeping on the couch with a wheat penny over each eye. I would have to gently pluck them from his eyelids every morning and polish them while his clothes tumbled in the dryer.
One morning, one of those desert days where the air is packed with the sort of diffuse light that makes you feel as though the top of your head is coming off, I was at the grocery store. I had my cart full of what I typically needed to cook for my husband, mostly healthy stuff. On a whim, I decided to grab a bag of M&Ms to eat in the car on the way back. As I pushed the cart through the parking lot, toward my car I realized I was suddenly ravenous for candy. I gripped the bag with my teeth, tossed my head and the candy pieces exploded out of the bag. Most of them fell onto the dark pavement and I could see that each piece was blue. There must have been some sort of promotion or something. I dumped the remainder in my mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Crows strutted behind me and plucked at the candy I had left in my wake. That night, while my husband slept, I lit a candle for him and for all of my lovers. At three o’ clock in the morning, I remembered the thorn.
I had kept it in a shoe box with a letter my great grandmother, Maria Blanca, had written to my mother when I was born. The ink on that fragile paper had faded to violet and the cursive was so old fashioned as to be almost unreadable. She had printed one line, however, and I read it aloud though I knew it by heart:
“If little Lola is beautiful then I sincerely hope she is also a fool. If she is intelligent, then I hope she has a plain face so she can get some work done in her life.”
I pulled out the thorn. It had gone almost colorless over the years. I pricked my ring finger with it and watched the blood bead up on the whorls of my fingertip. Nothing happened. I snapped the brittle thing in half and brought my bloody fingertip to my mouth. The blood tasted sweet and wrong and I thought of diabetes. My house was still. I felt no different. I felt nothing at all.
Later, I slept and dreamed of Walter. He was my size for once, lounging naked in a clawfoot tub in the middle of a forest clearing. He looked at me and then turned away. I could see a knife handle sticking out of his blue back and I ran to the tub as rose-colored water sloshed over the side with his movement.
“Take this thing out of me now, dearest. It’s been twisting for years,” he said to the trees behind the tub. I grabbed the handle of the knife with both hands and pulled it out of him. It slid from his body with a sick ease and I staggered backward as it came free. Walter turned toward me in the bath. His skin was no longer blue. His features had softened and become sweet and handsome. The only thing that remained of his old form were his golden eyes, huge and blazing like lanterns. He smiled at me and his teeth were straight and true.
“Ah, my leibchin, wolf-apple, bride of my ancient and impish heart! You have returned to me!” He grabbed both of my hands and I felt the warmth of the bathwater he had been soaking in. “Come now, come with me! Let us dance together in Arcady. We’ll leave the bones of the past for the wind to play with. Boot the grime of your world in the crotch, darling, and run away with me, your true soul’s love.” Walter brought my hands to his lips and said my full name as no one had ever said it before in my life.
In all the oldest stories the woman heeds the lesson of Eve and turns her head from what the creature offers, returning to her life fortified and enhanced from her experience with the extra-mundane. The lesson is always obvious, but I was indeed a fool. I decided to ignore it.
“Yes, Walter. Yes, my love, I will go with you,” I told him. He dropped my hands and sat up straight in the tub, shocked. Bloody water splashed onto the bedroom slippers that I was apparently wearing.
“Oh, Dolores Liliana, if I had not guessed long ago that you were a fool, I would have known it myself in this moment. That thorn was not meant to prepare yourself for the likes of me, just a sad, tired demon among many. Those pricks you took were so you can learn to take pricks yourself, if you can forgive this horny old goat the expression. If you go with me, your blood will turn to the sap of the woods and you will never, ever go to Heaven. You would be my queen, loveliest daughter, but you will share me with every springtime concubine that buds on the branch. I cannot take you. I simply mustn’t do it. The human heart has no place with my kind. Leave me now and love your poor husband, the hapless beast. Love your husband and grow old and die like every other member of your species. Go!” As I listened to Walter speak, I turned the knife over in my hands. On its blade had been etched the image of a woman whose body ended in the tail of a snake. I thought of my life, made gray and dull with mortal men. I gripped the hilt of the dagger.
“Sweet Walter, my oldest friend. I’m sorry but I must claim my Eden,” I told him and plunged the knife back into his body. He smiled as I did it and as the bathwater turned redder his teeth turned jagged and his skin went back to blue. I found I liked him better that way.
When I woke the next morning, I was alone. I found my husband’s wedding ring in the kitchen on top of a dagger that had the image of a snake woman etched onto its blade. I slipped the ring onto my thumb and wrapped the dagger in a dishcloth printed with a star pattern. The whole apartment shone with a strange, copper light that seemed to be coming from under the front door. For a moment I pretended that things don’t change, that I had learned all the lessons of all the women that came before me. Then I grabbed the doorknob and pulled the door open, bathing my body in that orange desert brightness. I shaded my eyes against it and made out a canyon and a path leading to its rim. I tucked the dagger of Walter into my belt with its sheath made of stars and stepped out into the light, suddenly ready for the world without end , alive alive-o.
