My grandmother, Edith, told me that her poetry could sway the minds of kings and bend the whole world to her will. She said she could protect the world with only herself, her poetry, and God.
That was the thing about Edith, she collected war words
and tried desperately to fit them in the drafts of poems
that littered the TV chair and the informal table and the den piano.
Animus, enmity. Odium, affray.
Vendetta, disunity, bad blood and death.
There is a woman writing in the barracks
with a gun strapped to her back. I think it might be her.
(And I smile like a smile at old houses in real-estate shows.
She’s a real fixer-upper.)
She numbers each poem like cattle,
like the less-than-monsters she crushed like dogs.
When I asked if she could hear each individual bullet
or if they all collapsed into one long gasp of sound,
She said it became a symphony.
(And I loved her like I loved a supernova.)
After my parents died, I was raised by Edith. Those days are defined in my memory by Edith’s endless attempts to make me into the perfect Chrisitan girl. She would read aloud from the bible when I was in the room, and the TV was constantly playing grainy recordings of Tammy Faye Messner—at least until Edith found out that Tammy supported LGBT rights. Then Ms. Messner was never seen again.
Every weekend, we would drive out of the suburbs of Moab to an abandoned church, miles from any sign of civilization. It was shattered, mostly, with just the altar exempt from the ruin that had swept across the rest of the building. It also had a completely intact basement, only accessible through a trap door in the middle of the church. The doors were heavy and metal, and Edith had the only key.
The basement was a tiny room with dust making mandalas across the ceiling and decades worth of debris piled in the corners. The only thing in the room was a sloppy bullseye on the floor, seven concentric circles made out of copper laid into the floor. Every Saturday, Edith would unlock the basement door and lead me down to the basement, where we would stand on top of the first circle while she said a prayer. I was expected to repeat each word, like one of those call-and-response songs that are chanted around a bonfire at camp. We always spent exactly an hour in the circles and said exactly six prayers, moving forward onto a new circle with each new prayer. Then Edith would set a piece of meat or a bit of bone down on the center circle, which I was never allowed to touch, and the second part of my lessons would begin.
Down in the basement, Edith spent hours describing the tortures that souls underwent in Hell, making funny noises that were meant to represent the sounds of screams and bones breaking. She was a woman of God, she had a real sense of justice, so she put her hands on my shoulders and told me that I was already damned.
“You’re going to be flayed,” she whispered in my ear, her fingers pressing bruises into my arm. “They’re going to peel you like an onion.”
I promised her, over and over; I’d be good, I’d be whatever she wanted me to be.
Edith was obsessed with poetry, too. She would constantly be muttering some obscure poem from the nineteenth century or making up her own, and she encouraged me to write too.
“Poetry is how we connect with heaven,” she said, like it was obvious. I wrote my first poem that summer, a meaningless thing about the glory of angels. Edith was thrilled.
“Words are your weapons,” Edith said. “You will be a great asset to the fight.”
She would never tell me what ‘the fight’ was, just that I would be in it.
As I got older, she…escalated. I wouldn’t be allowed to eat until I wrote a certain number of words, or a certain amount of prayers. Any complaints were met with swift punishment. Her favorite manner of retribution was to make me go down into the basement with a knife. She’d stand right behind me, arms crossed, as I cut into my arms over and over, the blood landing in the center of the metal bullseye. Edith had a hypnotism to her, a way of talking that made it impossible to say no to her. She wanted me to bleed for her, and so I did, the thought of disobeying her never crossing mind. I don’t know whether that was because of her own personality or because, even then, she had already made contact with the thing that she called God.
I met Ari when I was sixteen, in the Christian all-girls school that Edith had finally signed me up for after she got too annoyed with homeschooling me. I was excited about the flip-phone that she had finally gotten for me, playing around with the buttons while I waited for something to happen.
“Hi, I’m Ari. What kind of bread do you think you’d be?” Ari asked, stealing my pen.
I grabbed it back, out of her hands, and scowled at her. “I don’t care.”
Undeterred, she leaned further over my desk. “Maybe you’d be rye.”
“She’d be pumpernickel,” the teacher said from across the room, then went back to cooing over her computer.
“My soul being made of bread would explain so many things about me,” I said, fending off Ari’s desperate attempts to take anything on my desk that wasn’t the desk itself.
“I have seen the future, and it’s made of yeast,” Ari said, pouting at her inability to pilfer my belongings.
“Stop that,” I said, smacking away her hand when she tried again. “Are you a fucking magpie?”
“I don’t think magpie is a type of bread.” Ari was smirking like a satisfied cat.
“Please place yourself in a warm place for two hours or until doubled in size,” I deadpanned.
Ari grinned. “I think we’re going to be friends.”
And so we were.
“You need to go to the police,” Ari said, a year later, when I told her about Edith and the church, with its rusted metal circles underneath. “That’s not okay.”
“I can’t,” I said. “She’ll know.” Edith always knew when I was going against her. And she was always willing to hurt me for it.
Ari held my hands between hers, her eyes big and pleading. “She’s just a woman.”
“There’s something wrong with her,” I hissed.
“Please,” Ari said. “I’ll go with you.” She sounded scared, and I felt my doubts crumbling like a sandcastle. I agreed.
I’d been considering it for awhile, honestly. At that point, Edith was doing full-on blood extractions, with a new cabinet in the basement for the needles and blood bags. When she was finished and I was trying my best not to faint, she would empty the blood over the circle. What disturbed me more, though, were the rusty stains that covered the whole floor, more every time we went down. I knew what bloodstains looked like; I had left plenty of my own on the concrete. But I hadn’t left those, and the volume of blood needed to create them seemed far too much for someone to survive losing.
“You’ve got to create a connection with God,” Edith told me. “This is how we save the world.”
I was afraid to use my phone to call the police, worried that Edith might look at the call history and intuit what I was doing. So on an early Monday morning, Ari and I ditched school to go to the police station. It was a small building, with cactuses growing in random places along the front wall. It was very obviously the cast-off of the sheriff’s department. There was another, nicer police building across town, but that one was too far for me to walk to from school.
They gave me paperwork to fill out, about who I was and why I was there. Through the endless paperwork and hours of waiting, Ari held my hand.
A vaguely bored-looking officer finally took a seat in front of me. “Hello, I’m officer Jones. Why don’t you tell me what happened?” His words were barely audible over the background noise of all the other people in the room. I took a deep breath, pushed down my fear, and began. “I need to tell you about my grandmother.”
Jones leaned forward, gestured for me to continue.
I took another breath, squeezing Ari’s hand so hard it had to hurt, and looked up from the table, where I was tracing the wood grain with my fingertips. I looked up,.. And I saw Edith in the corner of the room, under the burnt-out lightbulb.
She was stepping out of the shadows, wreathed in darkness, with her face twisted in rage. The shadows parted around her, and she stepped fully into the room.
Edith closed her eyes, then leaned forward and spoke in a voice that permeated the room, hissing and supernatural in its volume.
“Your breath is added to the collective atmosphere,
through the sermons that you speak
from the back of a model rocket. From childhood wonder,
you forget.”
I was pinned in place by the force of her voice, static filling my mind. The buzzing of it froze me in place, taking over my thoughts and hollowing me out. It faded slowly, drawing away in little bursts and seeming to seethe in anger like a living thing. I raised my head, blood dripping from my nose, to find the room absolutely still. Every single person in the room was immobile, from Mr. Jones, sitting across from me, to the secretary at the front desk, even Ari. They all stared sightlessly forward, blood dripping from their noses like it was from mine, but also leaking out of their ears and eyes.
“What did you do?” My voice shattered the awful silence.
Edith held my arm with a bruising grip and pulled me to my feet. “Only what you forced me to.”
She pushed me along easily, leading me away from the horrible thing she had done. I glanced back at Ari, but I was numb, dissociated from myself; I went where she put me and I left Ari behind. When we reached the door, she stopped and turned to face me.
“Darling?” Edith put her hand on my face and waited for me to look at her. “Never disobey me again.”
Edith took my phone and locked me in my room, so I had no way of knowing if Ari was alright until I saw her in class the next day. She looked awful, pale and frightened with broken blood vessels in her eyes. She was sitting apart from everyone else, methodically running her fingers through her hair.
“Are you okay?” I said, fighting the urge to hug her and never let go.
“What? Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied. Her nails were digging into her arms.
I dropped into the seat next to her and leaned in. “But yesterday…”
Ari’s face went terrifyingly blank. “Nothing happened yesterday.”
“Edith—”
Fear shone in Ari’s eyes and she shuddered. “You were right. There’s something wrong with your grandmother.”
After that, she would say nothing else about it. I don’t think she remembered what happened, not really.
When we graduated at the end of senior year, Edith wasn’t in the audience. I knew that she wouldn’t be, Edith could go to astonishing lengths to avoid human interaction, but I was still relieved. I was expecting Ari to leave with her family as soon as the ceremony ended, but instead she bounded over to me and grabbed my hand, radiant in her excitement.
“I’ve got a surprise for you.” She was beaming in excitement.
“Now I’m scared,” I responded, as she pulled me along towards her car. “What is it?”
She rolled her eyes at me. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you!”
I planted my feet and stared her down.
“Fine, we’re going on a road trip to the beach. Happy?” She said it over her shoulder as she opened the car door.
Edith was waiting for me to get home. If I wasn’t back before midnight, I knew from experience that the results wouldn’t be good. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Ari’s car was constantly a biological wasteland. Old take-out containers took up the backseat, with moss growing underneath one of the seats and a slightly unpleasant smell permeating the whole place. Nonetheless, it was one of my favorite places. On the trip to the beach, we rolled down all the windows and pretended that we were going fast, even though the car’s maximum speed was pretty pathetic. Ari put on a Black Sabbath album and screamed along even though she didn’t know the words, then laughed at me when I knew all the lyrics to the Taylor Swift songs that came on the radio. We spent two days together in the car, two days I spent enjoying Ari’s company and ignoring Edith’s calls. I wrote a dozen different poems and learned all the words to The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. Ari stole my lighter, the one I kept in my pocket because Edith liked to smoke sometimes and it was always best to make sure Edith got what she wanted.
When we reached the beach, Ari took an instant dislike to the way the sand scrunched under her feet, but loved the water. She splashed around in it even though it was still a bit too cold for comfort, and I stayed near the shore, kicking water towards her.
We made it to the end of the beach, the place where the sand ended and there was only water and the urban landscape left, just as the sun was dipping below the horizon. Ari walked to the very end of the sand, then tipped her head back and yelled, pure joy in her voice. I joined her, and we filled the world with our voices, screaming wordlessly at the sky. I think that’s when I fell in love with her.
These are the things I remember. Count it out, darling,
count to three. It’ll all be over by the time I’m done.
Ari’s the deadwood branches, the rough-and-tumble memories.
I love her in the gumbo we made together, the filé
stored in a plastic bag that my uncle got from the Amish market.
It stains my fingers green and she kisses the color away.
We’ve got gravity, the two of us, a sense of scale that hides
in the frame of her bike and the sand between her toes.
(She laughs at me when I tell her. “Gravity is for losers,”
She whispers, her words muffled
against my chest. “I want to fucking fly.”)
When we were cooking in the kitchen, she chewed up
the stardust between her teeth like tobacco and spit it out onto the tiles.
(“You turn me on when you smile like that.”
I leant in to kiss her grinning mouth.
“Like what?” She was teasing, sleek like a panther and just as dangerous.
Like you’ve got the wreckage of planets stuck in your gums,
I thought but didn’t say, and kissed her again.)
The drive back to Moab was solemn, for me at least. I knew Edith would be angry, but I didn’t regret it.
Edith was waiting when I got home. As soon as I entered the house, she pushed me to my knees in the kitchen, her hands wrapped around my head, covering my eyes. “You’re going to stay here until you find God,” she hissed into my ear, and suddenly my mind was filled with fire. “And you’re going to forget about that girl.”
I was floating in an ocean of flames, drowning in the heat, and I could feel something moving, through the ripples of the fire around me.
“Do you see it?” Edith murmured, reverent. “Do you see God? Do you see our savior?”
There was something in the fire with me, bigger than I could comprehend, with nuclear-bomb scales and a mouth that looked like abandoned dreams. It was seething around me, nibbling at the edges of my awareness with an endless hunger.
“It’s going to burn the world so we can start anew,” Edith said. “One more war, with you and I as its generals, and then there will be peace forever.”
I screamed, and Edith laughed. “Now doesn’t that sound nice?”
She maneuvered my body like a puppet, yanking me to the car and holding me in my seat as she took off down the road. As she drove, she whispered to herself, endless words of poetry.
As the trip went on, I felt her hold on me weaken. Not enough to get control of the car, or jump out, but enough that I could reach my hand into my pocket, slow as I could manage. Using the big buttons on my flip-phone, I typed out a message by touch, terrified all the while that Edith would catch me.
I texted Ari the address of the abandoned church, and two words.
help me
As soon as we reached the church, Edith made me get out of the car and walk down into the basement. Edith pulled a slim book out of her jacket, a book that I’d seen her read before, an old collection of T.S. Eliot poetry. She flipped through the pages, caressing each one like a cat, before tearing out the first page with a decisive motion. She dropped it into the center circle, and the ground trembled.
“This is how we guide God to our dimension,” Edith said. “With the power of our poetry.”
She kept tearing out pages, dropping them first into each ring of the bullseye on the floor, then making a trail up the stairs, like Hansel leaving breadcrumbs. She made a line all the way to the mostly intact altar at the center of the church, me following in her footsteps.
“This is the way the world ends,” whispered the woman at the altar who was not my grandmother, not anymore. “Not with a bang, but a whimper.” The book slid out of her hand as I watched, landing soundlessly on the floor. I was frozen in the doorway, staring into her hellfire eyes. “Come here,” she said, and I obeyed, trembling. It wasn’t a choice. My legs moved rigidly, carrying me closer to her against my will. I was forced to kneel in front of her, kneel like I had hours before, when she had pushed the image of her God into my mind. She stood and walked behind me while I stared at the far wall stonily, trying desperately to speak and failing. “I need your help, my dear. I can’t do it alone.” She combed her desiccated fingers through my hair, gentler than I had ever known her to be. I could feel her hands shaking against my scalp. “I’m not strong enough. But you…You are filled with the poetry of our God and together we will remake the world in His image.” She gripped my shoulders and pulled me to my feet, then pushed a paper into my hands. I knew without having to be told that I was to read it. “Glory,” I said, my voice pulled out in a metronome that I had no control of, Edith reading along with me. “May his reign be long. May all sinners be punished. May his…” I gasped, stumbling over his words, struggling against them with everything I had. “His rule…”
Ari hurtled through the sagging doors of the church like an avenging angel. She took in the situation for a moment, then held the lighter she had taken from me, back during our car trip to the beach, to the ancient wooden floor. It went up in an instant, the dry wood catching easily. Distantly, I heard Edith scream, and the pressure on my mind lessened, as if it was rearing back in shock. With effort, I lifted my head to look at Ari, the paper crumbling in my grip. She nodded at me slowly, and suddenly I knew what to say. The poem I had written years ago in secret, scribbled piecemeal on homework and tissue paper, came back to me all at once, more complete than I had ever ended up making it.
One. Skin.
Edith prays in a litany, tracing the leylines
of where I’d be flayed in Hell. It’s Sunday school in Dixieland,
and I can smell burning tires in the rearview mirror,
humming through the scorched ground of the Spartanburg
back roads. Edith was angry when I came out to her.
(“A lesbian,” she says, disgust in every syllable.
“You’ll never find a good man like that.”)
She’s a woman of god, he’s got a real sense for justice,
and she makes sure I know exactly how Satan
would break my bones. I dared to love, so she puts her hands
on my shoulders and tells me
that I’m already damned.
Two. Muscle.
We’re twenty miles from the beach,
but I can still hear the roar of the waves
in my lover’s lungs, my head pressed against her chest
in benediction. Lover—what a wonderful word,
a strange synonym that tastes like TV static on my tongue.
We’re only twenty miles from the beach,
but her face is still stained orange from Utah dirt.
She brought the bleached sun back with her,
mountains and heat exhaustion stored in her suitcase.
On endless walks through the dusty roads of Moab,
she whispers the love-song drama she caught
from the radio in her mama’s beat-up Honda Accord,
Makes it into a poem about water molecules.
Three. Bone.
Sinners that we are, we unzip our own body bags
and dig for evil in each other’s backs with needle-nosed pliers,
like uncovering seashells in the sand.
Spread out on my sunflower quilt,
her hair is tinted chlorine-green
from waterlogged days spent worshiping
the drains at the bottom of the pool.
She reads from her book of T.S. Eliot poetry, mumbling along
to the rhythm of the words.
“This is the way the world ends,”
she says through her whirlpool smile.
“With a shockwave that lasts generations.”
If we go to hell, we’ll go together.
The cord between me and the dark creature lurking on the other side of my thoughts frayed with every word, love weaponized against it to break the link between us and trap it in its own dimension. I felt the bond break with a sense of relief, my sentence trailing off into the crackle of fire and the last angry howl of the creature echoing in my mind.
I glanced to the side to find the fire altogether too close, and Ari gesturing wildly to me from the door. Edith was almost entirely surrounded by the fire, her long dress already signed. “Repent,” she murmured in an endless litany, sitting hunched over with her back to the altar. “Repent, repent, repent.” I left her there in the rising flames, not looking back, even as her voice grew to a shriek. “I repent,” she screamed as she burned. Ari and I left her there, my poem still lingering in the air. The world kept turning, oblivious to what had almost happened.