I have an intimate knowledge of wounds. I am a patchwork person, my skin inlaid with hundreds of reminders of my ancestors. There is a friction burn on the knob of my right wrist, from the decaying popcorn ceiling that covered every room in my house. I remember, so distantly that it almost seems like a dream, standing on the heavy wooden table in the kitchen and pushing my hand against the ceiling like I was trying to saw it off. My father sipped his beer in one of the two chairs that we owned, and he didn’t tell me to stop until my blood was dripping into my eyes. There’s a shallow cut across my palm from when I slipped while practicing with my knives out in the yard, throwing them into the side of the barn that was probably older than me. A burn on my knee from when I knelt on the same coals that my father used to make us barbecue. Four crescent-shaped scars on my forearm, from where I dug my nails in when my mother left.
My father brought back a doe once, when I was ten. She was still breathing, faintly, when he set her down onto the wooden table. The knife that I used had a thin line of rust down one edge. I stared at the starburst pattern of rust while my father wrapped his hands around mine and guided them through her ribcage, so I wouldn’t have to look at her frenzied eyes. When she was dead, he peeled back the skin on her back and showed me the blubbery beads of fat, the intricate pathways of blood. Then he took the deer away, shoved the rusty knife in my hand, and told me not to leave the kitchen until I found out what lay beneath the fat of my leg. I cried, of course, but in the end I gave myself a scar, two feet long, across my thigh.
Understand, my father was not always a violent man. Sometimes, there would be weeks or even months where the knives would stay put away in their assigned sheaths and it would be almost like before the ancestors came. During those calm times, he would take me down to the tiny creek and sit me down next to him on the bridge that often had more mud than water beneath it. He would talk about our duty to the ancestors, yes, but more often he would tell me about my mother. I hoarded the little tidbits he gave me greedily. Her favorite flower was daisies. She loved the smell of yeast. She had not understood the blood we owed to those who came before us, and so she abandoned us. When she was a child, she had a fish named Squishy.
On the very rare occasion that I was allowed to leave the woods that contained our cabin and go into town with my father, I would always pick up the magazines that always appeared in the check out aisle. I imagined that one of the glossy women on the covers was my mother, and begged for my father to get one for me, but he never did. It was a ridiculous luxury, to him.
My memory of my childhood is spotty, and even the parts I do remember are so drenched in blood that it’s hard to distinguish one part from another, but I think my father was not always followed by the ancestors. Sometimes I dream of memories like the sun, bright and painful and foreign, where my parents are still together and I had no scars.
My father described the ancestors as blurry figures cloaked in darkness. The only clear part of them, he said, were their fingers. The fingers jutted out of the black that shrouded them, five long claws on each side that extended almost two feet. He told me that the arms seemed to be a normal length, but those fingers came almost to the feet of the creatures. And when they were hungry, they raised their hands and brought the fingers slowly closer to his face until they were fed. I never saw them, as a child, but his descriptions terrified me.
They fed on our pain, and they were always hungry. According to my father, they were our actual relatives, cursed by a deal with the devil that my great-great-great-grandfather made centuries ago. I don’t know if I believe that, but I do know that my mother left when the ancestors started getting bloodthirsty. They only wanted my father at first. They would shriek and hiss and scratch their nails down his face until he bled for them, and then they would leave. But then something changed. They weren’t satisfied with just him anymore.
The first day that I fed them, my father came into my room with long, bleeding lines down his face from the creatures. He was the most frantic I had ever seen him. I don’t think he even explained at first, just took my hand gently in his and left a cut so shallow that it barely even bled. He relaxed instantly, said the ancestors were gone.
He explained them to me, after that. He told me that feeding the ancestors was my honor and my duty. And so I bled for them, after that. Little bits of pain, at first, but as my father got used to hurting me, they got greedier. Soon, they didn’t want him at all. So every weekend, my father sat in his chair and taught me about my body, and had me cut myself open to find out more.
When I turned fifteen, he brought me a puppy. I raised her myself, walked her around the woods and fed her part of my dinner every night. She had a heart-shaped white spot over her left eye, and I named her Osiris, Ozzie for short. When she was six months old, my father told me to kill her, to create pain for the ancestors. When I said no, he slammed my head against the wall and went to do it himself.
There was Ozzie, cowering in the corner. There was the grime on the floor in front of me and the cold tile against my cheek. There was the starburst of rust on the knife in my hand, the one I used to kill a deer years ago, and the starburst was all I could see. There was my father, and the knife, and Ozzie, and blood, and starbursts exploding in my head.
I left my father dead on the tiles, took Ozzie, and ran into town still covered in blood. CPS was called. I threatened to beat their skulls in if they took Ozzie away from me, and given that I was wearing the barely-dried fluids of my father, they didn’t try. I told them my story, and it was confirmed with the scars on my body, the blood all over our cabin, and the meticulous journals that I didn’t even know my father kept.
I was sent to my aunt, eventually, who I had never met or even heard about. She got me one of the really good therapists, and eventually we convinced each other that the ancestors were just the product of my fathers insane mind.
But I’m scared. Throughout my childhood, I was never scared. I couldn’t afford to be, fear was not pain and pain was what I lived for. But yesterday, I heard Ozzie growling at the window of my flat. It was too dark to see much, when I glanced outside, but for just an instant I could see long, dark things curling over the edge of my window box. They looked almost like fingers.