Chapter Text
Helena wakes up and she is lying on her back and Rachel is stitching her belly, even though Helena hates needles, even though Helena would heal on her own. Even though Rachel put the knife in Helena’s belly in the first place, she is here, she has a needle. She doesn’t have eyeballs anymore, because Helena ate them. She smells like blood and the things Rachel always smells like, which are: a breeze, and also metal.
Helena says:
The light shining down in the middle of a golden afternoon. Curling up with someone you love and feeling their heartbeat.
“Yes,” Rachel says, in English. “No thanks to you. I put her in a dining room.”
A big animal letting a small animal go and catching it, over and over again.
Rachel exhales through her nose; the corner of her mouth ticks up. She flicks the needle through. Helena says:
Two bleeding things, leaning on each other, stumbling through the dark.
“She asked me to.”
A bird flapping out of the trees, into the dizzy color of the sky.
“Are you really?”
The woods going on forever, with no paths. Helena reaches up her fingertips and touches the bandage over Rachel’s eye. She does not use her thumbs. She says:
A mother carrying a baby between her teeth, away from something.
“You always are,” Rachel says quietly. She leans into Helena’s touch, just a little bit, and then takes her wrist and puts it down again. Helena sighs. Rachel brought them back to Helena’s bedroom, which was strangely nice of her. Usually when she puts Helena back together she uses one of the shinier rooms, one of the metal ones. Maybe it’s because Sarah asked her to. Sarah brings things out of Rachel that Helena can’t. Rachel smiled at Sarah, once, and Helena has never forgotten how it looked. If she could she’d trap it in a bottle – leave it here with the bones and teeth and shirts that Sarah wore, the pretty glass things she finds around the house, the furs. She’d make a pile out of both of them, Helena’s only loves.
Helena worries her lip between her teeth and says, quietly:
A body lying on the forest floor. The ripped open shape of a rib cage. A beating heart.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Rachel says.
A pool of water that looks deep but is actually shallow.
Rachel’s mouth goes flat. “I haven’t thought about it,” she admits. She sighs through her nose. “She screamed. I should be making you speak English.”
Flicking water off your pelt after bathing so it splatters everyone else.
“Now I’ll insist on it.”
“Hurts,” Helena says. “No like.”
“Do better.”
“Vile,” Helena says. “Vile. Adjective extremely unpleasant.”
“Good,” Rachel says, and ties the stitches in a knot. She swallows the needle. Helena imagines it clinking against all the other bright sharp things Rachel has swallowed. Sometimes she thinks about punching Rachel in the stomach, so hard Rachel vomits up treasure. And then Helena could cup it in her hands and give it to Sarah, who would make a soft face Helena wouldn’t touch even if she wanted to very badly and desperately.
“Did she really hate it,” Helena says. “Did she. Do you promise.”
“I told you I don’t know,” Rachel says. She tilts her head away into the dark soft warm fur space of Helena’s room. Someday Helena is going to bring Sarah here and say you’re safe, you can sleep, and Sarah will say thank you, and Helena will keep her eyes open and guard her forever. She’ll eat the sound of Sarah’s heartbeat and nothing else, she’ll be so good, Sarah will be so proud of her.
“I should have been there,” Helena says. “When she saw it. I should have.” She covers her face with her hands and aches with it.
“Well,” Rachel says, sounding like she doesn’t care. Because she probably doesn’t.
“No,” Helena says. “You don’t understand. You can want to take her to the island but there is no island, because the island is gone. So this will always be a dream for you. But she went into the—” she hates English, she hates it. She says:
A body lying on the forest floor. The ripped open shape of a rib cage. A beating heart. Sarah looking at the body. Sarah picking up the heart. Sarah opening her mouth—
“English.”
“Pernicious adjective having a harmful effect.” Helena lashes her foot out, lazily, kicks Rachel in the leg. It will bruise. Oh, Rachel only has one leg. The other one is a stump. Whoops.
“Animal,” Rachel says.
“Animals,” Helena says. “Noun.”
“Singular.”
Helena slaps her hand into her belly, once, twice. She flicks her tongue in Rachel’s direction and then sits up so they’re sitting together in Helena’s fur-nest.
“Did you hurt her,” Helena says, “when you brought her back.”
“Not as much as I could have,” Rachel says. “Not as much as I wanted to.”
Helena considers this. She says: “Ha.”
“Eventually,” Rachel says, “she will realize that you’re just like all the others. What a shame it will be when someone helps her realize that.”
“So are you,” Helena says. “And now she already knows. So ha.”
“Ha,” Rachel echoes. This is the part of the conversation where she would close her eyes, if she still had eyes. She doesn’t, but Helena can see Rachel closing them anyways. __ you _____ Sarah ___ eat, Rachel says. She always sounds younger when she’s talking in her native tongue; Helena likes it, even if Helena can’t understand it. She only gets pieces. She wishes Rachel would just talk in meaning, but talking in meaning is too hard for her. Helena understands. Helena can be the real meat heart of Rachel’s body, if Rachel gives her veins to pump blood through.
She says:
A wounded thing running and running until it falls down.
_____ ___ __ you _____ Sarah ____ fall?
Helena leans so her shoulder is pressed against Rachel’s. She says:
A forest fire, so all the animals are running. They are all running together.
___________, Rachel says – it’s a nice sound, a ripple that bends back in on itself.
“English,” Helena says. “I am insisting.”
“Implausible,” Rachel says. “Do you remember that, Helena?”
“Adjective,” Helena says. “Failing to convince.” She’d tried to eat the dictionary at first, but – she was younger then. Rachel had just kept stopping her from eating it, even though Helena was so hungry.
“I think it could convince,” Helena says. “I think maybe. If you let me eat her. I’m hungry.”
“We’re all hungry,” Rachel says. Helena leans her head onto Rachel’s shoulder, feels Rachel stiffen with annoyance but not move. Helena shifts her head so she can press her tongue to Rachel’s throat, feel the hot wet metal of her blood through the skin there.
“Helena,” Rachel says, sounding exhausted, “no more. Not now.”
“You want to.”
“I want,” Rachel says, and stops. She sighs through her nose. “To see,” she says, which wasn’t how she’d meant to end the sentence. Helena can tell. It’s a truth, but it’s not the only one; Helena can tell. She says:
A body lying on the forest floor. The ripped open shape of a rib cage. A beating heart.
“Ask her yourself,” Rachel says, sounding irritable, and Helena says Rachel’s name. All of it. The entire thing. Says it right here, thisclose to Rachel’s throat.
I hate __ _____, Rachel says. I hate ___ _______ forest. I hate you. You ____ ____ hunger __ _______, __ _____ me ____. ___ _____ you ____ ________? _______. _______. _______.
_______, Helena tries, and fails. Her throat isn’t made for it – sounds like that, clear winds and sweet glass.
“Animals,” Rachel says. Helena says:
Teeth and claws and howling, rolling on the ground, eating each other because you don’t know what else to do. Eating each other because you think that might be what love is.
Rachel says:
Teeth claws howling too fast, around and around, being scared of it, wanting it, not knowing the difference.
“Close,” Helena says. “Better.”
I _____ want __ __ _______ _____ __ ____, Rachel says. I _____ want __ __ __ animal ____ you. I want __ __ home.
“The island is gone.”
“I know,” Rachel says. “No one is more aware of that than I am.” She sounds so tired. Helena is sad that she ate Rachel’s eye. Soon she won’t be sad about it anymore, but right now she can taste the feeling on her tongue. It’s nice. She never used to feel things before.
“This could be home,” she says.
“It could be,” Rachel says. “If you let me eat her.”
“Ha,” Helena says. She tilts her head and bites Rachel’s shoulder and Rachel tangles her hand in Helena’s hair and – easily – flips Helena over and onto the floor. She brings her foot down hard on Helena’s neck.
“No,” she says.
Helena laughs. “See!” she says. “You want to. Always.”
Rachel trills something that doesn’t sound very nice. Helena doesn’t understand any of it, though. She wriggles under Rachel’s foot until Rachel lifts it back up and Helena can roll over into a pile of old jawbones and pressed flowers. She sits up. “Ow,” she says, looking with interest at where Rachel’s stitches are already coming undone.
“You deserve that.”
“Do you have a word for it,” Helena says. “This deserving.”
_________, Rachel says.
“I don’t,” Helena says. “I only have—”
Debt. Like bones. Solid weight at the center. Debts like rocks. Debts like tree trunks growing solid.
“—and I was not owed this. So.”
Rachel has stopped paying attention. She is touching her fingertips lightly to the bandage over her eyes, to the place where her leg should be. “If we leave her long enough,” she says, “she’ll eat.”
“I don’t want to leave her,” Helena says. “I want her to be there for always. I don’t want her to ever go away.” She picks up a pressed flower from the ground and eats it. It tastes like dust and then it’s gone, it’s gone.
“I can taste her dreams sometimes,” she says quietly. “I didn’t know love felt like that. Before.”
“How does it taste,” Rachel says.
Helena says—
Just kidding, she doesn’t say. She doesn’t have the words for it. Rachel might have the words; maybe they’d sound like a wet finger running around glass.
Helena sits up, staggers back over to Rachel, sits down. Carefully she folds her arms around Rachel; she rubs her hand up and down Rachel’s back. “Like this,” she says. “It tastes like this.”
“Oh,” Rachel says. It lasts for a moment and then her fingernails are in the edges of Helena’s wound, picking at the stitches like an instrument nobody ever taught Helena to play. Rachel tried teaching her piano, but she never had to teach Helena pain.
Helena slithers a hand between them and grabs Rachel’s hand, so hard the bones grind together. “Are we bad,” she says. “Are we going to break her.”
“Yes,” Rachel says, and she finally bites Helena’s neck.