by Didi Wood
“Do you like my dress?” the girl says, twirling.
The church basement is dim. Some of the bulbs have blown, the fevered light emitted by the rest straining vainly towards the corners. Everyone’s upstairs, gulping bitter coffee and discussing the sermon, the slush, the Christmas bazaar. No one should be down here, least of all an unaccompanied child in a limp, dingy sundress that’s too small for her, too meager for the season.
“I’m looking for the bathroom,” you say. You know there’s one down here, your own children showed you once, long ago, when they were small and both were alive and creeping down the back stairs to the church basement was one of those harmless transgressive adventures you could share without worrying it would corrupt them. Turns out it didn’t matter what you did, but of course you didn’t know that, then.
The girl spins in front of you, then stops abruptly, swaying. There’s a draft, and you tug your sweater closed. She must be freezing: her arms are bare, one strap of her dress knotted at the top of her shoulder and the other undone, trailing.
“Do you think it’s pretty?” she says. “Do you know where I got it?”
What a story this would be if you, captivated by the child and her pretty dress, leaned closer and asked, and she opened her mouth to reply but instead of answering, her mouth kept opening, painfully wide, horrifically wide, jaw creaking and then cracking around an expanding maw the size of a cantaloupe, a basketball, a doorway, a cave, a gaping abyss yawning dark and cold and sharp around the edges, roiling with shambling, half-glimpsed figures, shadowy shapes nearly but not quite human, swarming with sizzle and buzz and chitter, a din that almost drowns out the sound of someone (your daughter? is it Isabelle?) calling from deep within, calling and calling and her voice is rising and now she’s shrieking, she’s shrieking for you, where are you where are you, she wants to go home and why is he and her wrists shred against the restraints and her hair hangs in greasy ropes around her face and her breath smells like the basement of your childhood home where a rat died under the freezer and no one found it for months and the entire basement reeked of decaying flesh, of moist sludge and rot, things long dead and best forgotten and you never wanted to go down there but you had to, you had to, someone has to and it’s always you, why? – but now, now, now you stumble back, towards the stairs, and you trip and bash your head on the banister, and you scramble back up on hands and knees, up and up through the door into the narthex.
Panting, a cloth pressed to your bloody temple, you try to tell the other parishioners what you saw, and they look at each other and set down their coffee cups and coffee cakes and search the entire church, top to bottom, but nothing like what you babbled will be found, not in the basement or the choir loft or the vestry or anywhere. Then, perhaps, an elderly man in a dandruff-dusted jacket will recall in a slow, sonorous voice a tale he heard from his grandmother, who had it from hers, about a nameless, homeless girl whose body was discovered in the church basement, hands folded neatly over the bodice of her threadbare cotton dress. And the others will nod, whether or not they’ve heard the story before, because there’s always a girl, isn’t there, and then there’s a corpse and then there’s nothing, barely someone else’s memory, and no one knows who or how or why, no one knows anything, she’s just gone.
That would be quite a story.
But that’s not what happens. The twirler is just a plain, lonely girl, someone else’s girl. There’s nothing in her mouth or beyond, nothing that’s yours, only tongue and teeth and some words about a dress.
“Do you know where I got it?” she says again.
You ask where, since she wants to tell you, and when she says it was in the dumpster behind Goodwill, you act surprised and tell her it’s pretty, although you aren’t and it isn’t, really. No, it’s not anything special at all, and there’s no story here.
Didi Wood's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Pidgeonholes, Lost Balloon, and other publications. “Rattle & Rue,” originally published in Cotton Xenomorph, was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2019. Find her at www.didiwood.com and on Twitter @DidiWood.