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Every day the pit in her stomach gets bigger and bigger, the size of a girl.
Every day it’s like that toy her father brought her back ages ago from some conference in some European country she can’t even remember the name of now. It’s like a Russian doll backwards. What started as a tiny, mean spot of hunger below her belly button has swallowed itself whole and then swallowed itself again, the same on the outside but impossibly larger, like a tree growing new rings. Wooden girls on wooden girls. A set of solid heavy weights getting heavier every second she spends in this godforsaken forest. Today they stretch all the way from her hips to her throat, pushing up upon her brain.
Taissa, the smallest girl at the bottom says. Each subsequent one echoes. Taissa, Taissa, Taissa.
Taissa, the girl in the window who is her but not her says. Taissa. She smiles a row of painted teeth.
Drip, drip, drip.
Taissa blinks and she’s gone.
She wonders, for a second, if the thing is at all edible, but no. The meat on it is gone, and the bones are paper brittle.
Rats, Van—a different Van, a cheeky Van, a Van from ages ago—might say.
Akilah is crying. Drip, drip, drip. Tears stream down her face. In her head, Taissa washes the walls with them.
“He was real,” she sobs over. “He was real, Tai, I swear to God.”
She has a little girl face, little girl hands. Her clothes dwarf her even more than they used to, big enough to hide a cartoon mouse within their many folds.
Taissa tightens her grip around the dead thing. Taissa runs her fingers down Akilah’s back. Taissa imagines crushing it between her hands. Taissa pulls the smaller girl into her lap, urges her face into her neck.
“Shhh,” Taissa whispers, rocking her as she cries and hides her face. “You’re right.” She kisses the crown of Akilah’s head, a line of sweet braids like branches. “You’re right.” Taissa looks up and stares right at her.
She smiles with no teeth at Taissa. The girls inside her blink, a cascade of wooden eyes dripping all the way down.
When she looks again, Akilah is wrapping her own arms tighter around her torso. Taissa pushes herself forward to drop the decayed thing in her lap.
“Pull yourself together.”
She used to love trees. She remembers begging her dad to build her a treehouse. It doesn’t even have to be the treehouse, she remembers telling him, the one with three triangle rooms shaped into a star and a diamond in the ceiling that lets in light and not rain and a basket to pull up apples and crackers and Diet Coke bottles and books and blankets and puzzles and maybe a small black cat to curl up in her lap. Just a room, a square. A ladder, a window or two. A lock and a key, or, if that doesn’t work, a sign signed off by you that says Taissa’s Treehouse. Knock before entering. No boys allowed.
Her dad always laughed, or frowned, or scolded, and went back to work.
Now she cuts trees down, bludgeons them to pieces. She’s not even much good at it any more. She swings the ax and the girls inside her yelp and scream and snarl. She’d whisper shut up, but the last time she did that Van looked at her funny and made her sit down. Taissa can’t have that. She can’t have Van putting a hand on the small of her back, whispering who’re you talking to? in a sing-song voice, adding lady at the end a half-second later, like it was a joke or would’ve been a joke in a past life except now it’s not, now that Van looks at her with expecting eyes, intense and clearer than the sky.
No one, Taissa said then, lying. Van’s mouth flattened to a thin line. Myself, she added, staring at snow.
Now she tries not to talk anymore.
It’s easier that way.
She’s tired all the time. She falls asleep in a chair, on the floor, in a patch of daylight in the corner. She wakes up with her mouth on the window, her hands in the sink, her face against her own face.
No. No, no, no. Just her reflection. Just Van, behind her. “Just lightheaded,” Taissa says.
Van frowns, and it’s mean, suspecting. You’re lying to me, her voice says in Taissa’s head, an echo dripping from somewhere far off and deep inside her, the whisper of a pelvis twitch. And I wanna know why.
I’m not, Taissa wants to say. I’m not, I swear. I’m not lying, just like I wasn’t lying the morning I woke up and acid sank up my throat for the first time in forever and it tasted perfect. I wasn’t lying when it came out minutes later in the snow the color of meat, the color of the girl who used to make me roll my eyes, the color of her lip gloss that I used to borrow at parties—
Instead she tries to smile Van’s smile, the one she saves just for her. She twists her lips up, but the girls inside pull her down, tugging at her knot, and Van just frowns more.
Taissa keeps her eyes taped to the floor as she turns around towards the sink below the window once more.
She tries rocking them away in the rocking chair. Back and forth and back and forth. Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Her mom’s voice, humming. Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? She can’t remember what comes after.
She always hated that song. All the songs were about boys. Fool-hardy, sweet, baby boys, sung to sleep by soft-bosomed mothers. They’re never really like that, except maybe the dead one. Except maybe Javi, and even he annoys her. He hasn’t spoken in two months and she can still hear his voice buzzing in her ear. Tai, Tai, Taissa. Little wooden wolf, staring her down from the attic window sill, from the darkest patch of trees, from over the meaty slope of her girlfriend’s mauled face. Taissa, please, Taissa.
No, she murmured, screamed. No.
She rocks back and forth and back and forth but the girls keep wailing in her stomach. Please, please, please. They claw at her insides. She rocks, trying to crush them. She sings in her head and the organ accompanies, drifting up, up, up towards the stained glass windows shining light down on the closed casket where a body with no eyes lays in the place of her nana.
Still, still, still, the choir sang. To sleep is now his will…
Still, still, still…what comes next? She didn’t always used to be a shitty Christian but now she’s forgotten. She doesn’t remember much before the age of seven, when her mom gently told her that the angels took Nana and Taissa insisted that no, no, it wasn’t the angels. She didn’t mean to take her dad’s side, that’s not what she meant when she said it, but somehow the message got lost in translation and suddenly she was sitting on his lap and parroting her brother saying Santa isn’t real and angels are nice ideas but we know they don’t really exist, right? Eventually her mom stopped going to church, too, because she couldn’t find one she liked in Wiskayok and well, she really only kept that up for Nana, anyway, and besides Nana only did it because of her Nana and the Nana before her, even though Taissa knows that isn’t really true, that it wasn’t really Jesus anyway who they cared about, that it wasn’t his name they whispered into pews and altars and antlers and violets in the garden.
Still, still, still. She’s tired. Still, still, still. It doesn’t matter anyway. She’s hungry, so, so, so hungry still. Still, still, still…still, spill, still…
“...the dripping,” a voice says in the dark. Still, spill, spill. “I just heard it.”
“I hear it too.”
The sound of her own voice almost shocks her except that it doesn’t.
“Really?” Someone replies. Mari, a voice inside her says.
“You do?” Van. Alert, awake. You were asleep. It’s me, Tai. Answer me, Tai. Tai, answer me.
“Yeah,” she says to Van. Taissa nods when she says it. Yeah, yes, where are we? Home, darling, we’re home, Tai, let’s go home. Four cabin walls, a four-walled treehouse. A bucket full of girls, a sign on the wall. Still, still, spill. “I think—it sounds like maybe it’s coming from over there.”
She points at the wall and sighs. She leans back in the chair and closes her eyes and jumps when Mari screams.
“...they’re dead, they’re dead, they’re dead!”
Taissa bolts up towards Mari’s trembling form and the faces jump into the shadows and that girl stays rocking in the chair.
“Mari, there’s no one there!”
Taissa shouts it so it’s true. The wall goes blank so it’s true. It’s true.
“There’s no one there,” Taissa assures, and it isn’t a lie except that it is. “I promise.”
“You heard it!” Mari exclaims, her gaze flickering from the wall to Taissa and back again. “You…you…”
I…I…I…
Taissa shakes her head. The girl rocks in the chair, back and forth and back and forth.
Still and spill and still…
I, I, I—
Van pulls the words from her mouth like the ghost of a lullaby. “It’s the hunger, Mari.” Shhhh, shhhh. Van touches Mari’s shoulder but it’s Taissa who feels all five of her fingers, gentle but firm. “It’s just the hunger. That’s all.”
The girls are crying. She made them up and they’re crying.
She’s in a girl pile on the floor and it’s dark and she can’t sleep. Her stomach burns from nothing and inside her the wooden girls keep piling up, one on top of the other until she can’t breathe.
Sometimes when she blinks open her eyes it’s not dark-dark and she’s beside herself on the floor sliding up to touch herself on the forehead like it’s the door to the house of her, her hands pounding and scratching and smoothing her hair down, knock knock knock drip drip drip let me in, let me in, let me, me me me me—
“Shhhhh.”
A hand grabs her flailing arms and squeezes them down. A thumb ghosts over her wrist. Lips kiss the side of her head. A heart beats in tune with the dripping, the stilling, the spilling, right against her back.
“Don’t fight it, baby,” Van whispers into Taissa’s shoulder.
She knows Van means sleep, she knows Van has been staring at Taissa’s heavy eyes and drooping form and now thinks she’s doing it again, not sleeping to stop it from happening and she’s not wrong but she’s also not right but Taissa trusts her and she trusts her and so if the Taissas take it differently when Van says, “I’ve got you,” no one knows at all.
In the morning Lottie is dying.
Lottie is dying and everyone is starving and she is awake.
Van is right next to her breathing down over her neck for who knows how much longer, because she’s dying and Taissa is dying and neither of them can die. Spill, spill, spill. Lottie is dying and under a different moon in a different forest it could be her but it can’t be because she hears it too, the dripping and the spilling, she didn’t hear it first but she was the first to say she heard it, to name it it and they came to believe her. Even Taissa believes her a little bit now, even if her believing is just Shauna breathing, Van being.
So no, not Lottie.
It’s her idea. She starts it and she doesn’t. It’s true and it isn’t.
Pile of girls in her throat, pile of girls on the floor. She’s sleeping and she’s not. She spills and she doesn’t.
“We need to find a way to stay alive,” she says.
It’s her idea. It isn’t. It can’t be hers. It’s her. It can’t be her.
“And it can’t be her,” Taissa adds.
Pile of girls in her throat, pile of girls on the floor. Pile of cards shuffled between her lover’s freckled hands.
Later Taissa won’t remember who came up with the game.
She’ll remember the hush, the circle, the crisp folds of the deck. Still, still, still. She’ll remember Misty picking first. She’ll remember Van’s fingers on the card, the twist of them turning, the wooden girls going silent in her throat, the two that is them folding into one rapidly beating heart.
She’ll remember the gasp of the Jack and Van’s certain, hard, handsome face.
Girls pull, and pull. They’ll fold into one another, doll upon doll, time upon time that this happens, the stillness. She’ll pull and stare at the floor and one of her will pretend to hope that it’s her even though neither of them really want that. She’ll show the card to Van and that’s how she’ll learn they’re safe.
She’ll remember Natalie’s face. God, will she remember that. She’ll remember trying to erase it for Taissa, painting features over the eyes. She’ll remember it not working.
The running, though, and the smell of the girl, the skid from the ice, and the snarling all feel like dreams. The boy falling in the water, that’s a dream too. Boys. Taissa hates boys anyway. Only a little bit more than she used to hate dolls.
She tells them to grab him and they do. She can lead, too.
Later she’ll let much of it drift away, calling it haze or hunger, calling it the wilderness choosing. It isn’t a lie. It also isn’t true.
Later she won’t let Taissa remember that it was Van who drew the stars over the queen’s plastic eyes.
After, Taissa clings to Van, and Van clings to Taissa. They cling and cling in the way they always said they wouldn’t even if they could, because god, isn’t it embarrassing, prom kings and queens gushy and ridiculous all over each other in high school hallways and movie theaters, can’t they keep it for the bedroom at home?
Except this is home. These four walls, these countless trees. This other girl in their arms.
They only let go to face his face icing on the driftwood. They don’t cling then, with Shauna’s knife at his throat, because who would they cling to?
Who would be clinging?
They eat. Taissa throws them bites. A bit for the tiniest girl of her, bigger bits for each girl after. The acid burns them up until all that’s left in her is ashes of the girl made of girls who Taissa used to know.
They lay down to sleep in a pile of girls. Snug as bugs, tummies full.
Only in the dark does Van break their silence.
“I love you,” she whispers.
If Taissa could speak, she would ask who.
Tell me a story, you want to ask.
The dolls ask for you.
“Tell us a story.”
She opens her priestess mouth, the shape of a pansy.
“Once upon a time,” your knight hums, “there was a place called the wilderness.”
The cabin is warm. Natalie is alive. Years later you’ll keep her alive with money and mandates and fake mothering and you’ll pretend you don’t know why.
“It was beautiful, and full of life, but it was also lonely, and violent, and misunderstood.”
You want Van to finish the story, but she’s asleep beside you, beside Taissa. Her soft features have relaxed for the first time since either of you can remember, her pink nose buried in Taissa’s shoulder. Tonight you held her for once, cradled her until she fell asleep.
You could only do it because she thought both of you were asleep already.
The story can wait, you say, ghosting your fingers over her heart-shaped lips. There’s time, you tell Taissa.
“So one day, the wilderness built a house. It waited.”
The story stops before it’s supposed to. The dripping stops, and it’s not supposed to either. You move your hand.
A tree house with four walls. A story told to you about you. That’s all you ever wanted.
“Summers came. Winters came—”
You see fire.
Taissa wakes up.