Hello there, fuckers! Lettie Harper here, coming to you from a root cellar with far too many spiders, recounting the last one-hundred-eleven years of my life. Welcome and/or welcome back to the broadcast. Either works. Mostly because I entirely forgot to explain myself last time.
Have you ever heard the fact that your liver can regenerate itself in four weeks? Since 1935, my whole body can do that. Don’t ask. It’s a long, and frankly, bewildering story involving magic worms.
Right.
Y’know, you’d be surprised what a person does after someone decays in front of them and tells them they aren’t going to die. After they finish puking.
I got married in 1937.
Riveting, I know. But see, it was all part of my ingenious plan to pretend nothing was wrong. Even if I was having nightmares. Constantly.
I was convinced I would have that old horrid curse: to grow old infinitely. Convinced my husband, Edgar, to change my will.
Until around my thirty-fifth birthday, in 1947, I realized I still looked twenty-three.
Exactly twenty-three. I had the same slightly red scar crossing the bridge of my nose, always seemingly a week or two from healing. A bruise on one of my toes that hadn’t changed in over a decade. And all around me people were wrinkling. They grew old. They sagged.
Sometimes, late at night, when Edgar held me, I would hear scuttling. Not in my ear.
But in my skull.
And around then I fully discovered the extent of… other abilities of mine.
It’s a side effect of the whole not-dying thing. I think. I discovered one day making sandwiches, when I cut the tip of my ring finger off with a kitchen knife, just before everything else in my life went to shit.
Then I stood there. Watched the blood. Looked at the half of my nail on the floor. And at some point I thought that it really wasn’t worth fixing. That I was damned if I went to the hospital. That I’d be better off not acknowledging it, because I was frustrated, and tired, and I wanted nothing more than to lay down on the couch and not think for a little while. So I took a kitchen towel. Tied it around my finger. And then I lay face down, just as the first cracklings of a storm rumbled in the distance.
And for once, I slept, and did not dream.
Then I woke up with a pain in my hand like nothing I’d ever felt before.
Or, that’s not true.
I woke up with a pain in my hand that felt like something was chewing through my skull.
I pulled the towel off.
Thin, white roots grew out of the stumpy edge of my finger, forming a crisscrossing pattern where my nail bed had been. A few loose tendrils of muscle attached lazily to them, slowly making their way up. I thought of lattices.
It bled a truly amazing amount.
Whining slightly, I stood up. Swayed like I was drunk. There was blood on the couch. The kitchen floor. It was more than should have been possible, from a severed finger, as bad as it was.
I looked at my hand again. There was a single grain of dirt embedded in my finger. When I picked it out with my thumbnail, the spot healed over with fresh, red skin.
A noise banged in my driveway. I made my way to the window.
And sitting there, on the side of the street, was a janky Ford Model 47, painted that gray color of the sky. Two men in beige suits stepped out, decked madly with clipboards, papers, sunglasses, pens, lapel pins, badges, umbrellas and wandering, shifting eyes.
Have you ever had that feeling, that your whole life was rotting, like hot fruit in the sun? That no matter what you did, or said, or became, that it was all going to turn belly-up? That feeling was sick in my chest that day. I watched the men. The storm whipped their coats, battered their hair. And I knew, with a deep, undying sort of certainty, two facts more important than anything I had ever known before. More important than air. More than water.
The men were from the government.
And whatever it was, it was about me.
I never did learn how they figured it out. There’s lots of forty year old’s who make money being on the front of magazines, pretending, and almost looking, twenty-five.
They came up the driveway, and knocked on my door. It rang through the empty house.
And then, a moment later, the deadbolt unlocked itself.
Up close, I could see them better. They were well dressed, considering the car they drove, and seemed annoyed at the rain, annoyed at everything.
I was standing, frozen, by my stairwell, clutching a kitchen towel to my finger.
“Oh.” The older of them said. “You’re right there.” He scratched his nose. “Uh, ah—Mrs. Harper, yes? My name’s Norman.” He paused. “I’m going to ruin your nice carpet here.” He said. And then he shut his umbrella and stepped inside.
The other man followed him
There was something wrong with him. I just knew. He had eyes which were blue on the outside and brown in the middle, and his face was stuck in a half scowl.
A hound, I thought, queerly, without really meaning it.
The edge of a tattoo poked up out from beneath the collar of his pressed shirt.
“We need to talk.” Norman said.
Silence.
“If it helps, it’s probably about that.” Norman nodded to the kitchen towel.
I looked at the younger man. He stared back at me, unblinking. Then, after a moment, he began to grin.
“Fuck it.” He said. “Lets get this done.” And then in one quick motion he reached his hand up and nearly touched my ear.
That buzzing writhing thing inside of me kicked. There was a faraway screaming noise, like a ghost of my past, burning somewhere. I dropped my towel. And all at once, I was trembling in a world which had at once become unreal.
My vision swirled, dove down, plunged black.
And as I hit the floor, the last thing ringing in my ears were curses.
The last thing in my mouth was the taste of mud.
***
I dreamt, I think. When dead. I always do. But I don’t know of what.
***
Dim light in patchy swirls, scattered over everything.
That was the first sensation, separate from the nothingness, the void of no-color which had fallen over me for indeterminate time. I felt myself breathe. Every part of me ached.
“I think we call that an eye twitch.” A man said.
“What?” A woman replied. “Yeah, and we’ll call 103 a Great Dane.”
The man sighed.
“No. Watch.”
And then there was a breeze across my face.
I sat up screaming.
And punching.
And my first days in Unit 240 began.
***
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