Rebecca Jones-Howe

Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Jones-Howe

All rights reserved. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

My childhood home stands before me. Its fake Victorian facade managed to hold through the High River flood of 2013, but just like every other house on the block, it simply waits, its windows black and its grass yellow and sepia-stained with memory.
It’s nighttime now. An April breeze sweeps over the cul-de-sac, scattering debris. The dead oak tree in the front lawn twists and writhes, the branches like fingers calling me home.

I don’t dare step onto the driveway.

Nobody lives here now.

Beachwood Estates was built over floodplain that should have never been developed. After the flood, the neighbourhood was condemned and all the families were forced out, the houses put up for auction under the stipulation that buyers would have to relocate the homes.

Behind me, Darren and Alex light fireworks on the abandoned street. The crackling fuses sounds like angry crickets in my ears. Red explosions flicker across the house’s blue vinyl siding as their laughter roars up into the empty night.

We’re all too old for this, really. I didn’t want to come but Lilly begged me, saying that she’d drive, that I could drink and smoke as much as I wanted to dull the memory.

“Hey, Ash,” Darren calls. “You should check out your old bedroom.”

Alex laughs. “Oh shit, yeah!” He slurps his beer and sets it down to light another roman candle.

“Don’t laugh,” Lilly says, slapping Alex’s arm as the fuse flickers.

I drop my dead joint on the cement in front of the house, staring up at darkened window that used to be mine. Another explosion sparks red across the house, casting glare over shattered glass. The hole reveals the black inside. It’s a void that I stare into, an emptiness that tenses all my limbs.

A streak of light moves beyond the glass. It looks like glare, but then it shifts, human-like against the wall inside.

A small firework explodes right against my bare ankle.

“Fuck!” I cry, scrambling out of the way, dropping my beer in the process. The liquid spills from the can and drips down toward the storm drain.

The boys laugh. Lilly laughs.

“Fuck you guys,” I snap, tucking my hair behind my ear. I glance at the window again.

The white’s still there. It’s taken form.

A bunny. A costume.

A fucking mascot.

It moves into window. Its giant plastic eyes stare down from the place where everything went wrong. It smiles. Grimaces. Accuses. It raises a hand, extends its reach through the shattered glass.

I try to swallow but its thick furry pointing finger extends, curls, luring me in from the night. I cry out. I try to turn. A pressure forms right where my silver heart necklace used to hang.

My scream erupts with the next explosion of red behind me.

Morgan’s Diner opens late now.

I clutch a cup of coffee, trying to calm the rattle of my shaking nerves. The coffee doesn’t help but it sobers me a little, makes the memory of the window seem like imagination.

Darren and Alex and Lilly still stare at me like I’m crazy again.

“It wasn’t because you brought it up,” I say. “He was there. He really was there.”

Darren shrugs. “Could be somebody with a furry fetish.”

Alex laughs but Lilly kicks his shin.

“Be fucking sensitive,” she says. “It’s a legit phobia.”

“It’s Easter break,” Alex says, shifting into maturity for my sake. “Maybe it was just somebody messing around.”

I sip at the black brew, glancing out the window. Across the street is the empty remains of the old video store. It wasn’t Blockbuster. It was local, but the people who worked there still wore blue and yellow and recommended movies.

Or at least, Jordan did.

He was older and should have been going to college in Calgary or Edmonton or Lethbridge like all the other kids did after graduating. But there he was every night, slim and shy and trying to grow a beard. One night I went in and rented Jennifer’s Body and he told me he knew tons of better horror movies.

Everyone else was pirating their movies by then but I went back and pretended like I hated Jennifer’s Body just so he could enlighten me.

“Please recommend me another,” I’d beg.

“Please give me more,” I’d swoon.

“I neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed more,” I’d plead like a stupid little idiot girl.

And Jordan would smile. He’d blush. He’d oblige.

Mom and Dad’s new house never felt like home.

It’s half of a duplex in a neighbourhood built for flood survivors. The door creaks as I stumble out of my shoes and into darkened living room. Mom and Dad both turn to look at me, the TV’s glare casting shadows over their expressions.

They know that I’ve been out and that I’m been drinking.

They’re surprised to see me clutching the coffee cup from the diner. It’s empty now but it keeps them from judging. Not that they can anymore and not that they should, but being a stranger in their house makes me feel like I’m supposed to play my old good girl role.

I take a seat on the recliner. I pull at the lever and the leg part shoots out.

Dad looks at Mom. Then Mom looks at me. They both know where I went. They have to.

“Did you have fun with Lilly and the boys?” she asks.

I nod, taking a sip from the cup only to remember that it’s empty.

“You okay, Ashlynn?”

“Uh huh.”

Unspoken concern settles between them, creating a rift in the room that makes me cross my legs, makes me hug at my chest. It’s late and the news cuts to footage of the Easter parade in Calgary and all mascots running about the streets.

Dad shuts the TV off.

“We were just gonna head off to bed, Ash,” he says, offering the remote.

I don’t take it. He sets it on the coffee table and they both leave me alone with my toes curling inside my socks. I make sure the front door’s locked and I shut the lights off, putting the house to sleep before rushing up the stairs for my temporary room.
This room was mine for only a short time before I moved out. Now it’s got a trundle bed and a desk and a bunch of organizational shelving for all of Mom’s scrapbooking supplies.

Everything that was mine before the flood was thrown out, stained with red.

Mom’s got pages and papers and little chipboard frames and letters for every holiday. Sitting on a shelf are her finished books, her prized memories, each of the pages sealed in archival quality plastic for protection.

I pull out the book marked ASHLYNN and flip through all the baby photos and toddler photos and photos of Lilly and Darren and Alex and I, just kids from the same cul-de-sac enjoying our child-size waffles from Morgan’s Diner downtown.

Of course, Mom had to include that picture of a 5-year-old me screaming while Dad forced me into the lap of the Easter bunny. Mom even wrote a little caption in her neat calligraphy:

ASHLYNN GETS OVER HER FEARS.

Something patters against the window and I slam the book closed.

A lump forms in my throat. I try to swallow but the lump works its way up, tasting like coffee and cherry Schnapps and Irish Spring soap.

I’m just crazy.

I’m stupid.

Reaching with unsteady finger, I push up the slat of the blinds and peek outside.

Nothing’s out there. Nothing should be.

I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I borrow Mom’s car and drive back to the diner where I meet Lilly for waffles.

“It’s tough for boys these days,” a mother says in the booth beside us. She shakes the newspaper at her mom friend, pointing at the article about the high school’s new dress code. “These girls have no respect for themselves.”

Lilly shifts, her shoulders tightening. There’s still judgement in her gaze, a side-eye that makes me pick up my fork, makes me firm my grasp over the cold metal.

“There’s only one good thing about this town and it’s these waffles,” I say, slicing the edge into the crispy edge. Raspberry syrup pools into the broken squares. It drips off the edge of the plate. I wipe at the sticky sweetness and bring my finger to my lips, accidentally making eye contact with the slut-shaming mom.

“Is your mom still doing that Easter egg hunt?” Lilly asks.

“It’s not like it used to be,” I say, my mouth full. “She just does it in the front yard for the toddlers in the neighbourhood now.”

Finally, Lilly picks up her fork, but all she scoops up is a little serving of whipped cream. “You going to stay inside?”

“She didn’t rent a costume this year,” I say.

“How considerate of her.” Lilly pulls at her cross necklace and licks the white off her fork.

I shrug, tasting nostalgia, tasting childhood, us little goody goody church girls being treated to waffles for Sunday brunch after church. I want to dwell in this but Lilly barely eats more than a couple bites.

The mother in the other booth keeps ranting about girls in their crop tops and their skinny jeans. She points at the photos, paranoid about how they’ll corrupt her son.

Mom makes a casserole and Mom and Dad and Maisie and I eat dinner like we used to.

Mom spoons some of the casserole onto her plate, the mix of tuna and pasta and green beans looking like the piles of sludge they carted out of the town in the cleanup process.

“I found some of your old photos the other day, Ashlynn. They were in a shoebox in the basement. I thought you might want them.”

She points at the china cabinet, where the box sits now, an old decoupage thing I made with song lyrics from all the music Mom and Dad didn’t like me listening to. They said the beats were too suggestive and the lyrics were too salacious, but I just shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t care,” I said. “I love it.”

Icona Pop. My favourite band.

How I just wanted to be a “90’s Bitch”.

Jordan’s “90’s Bitch”.

Everyone looks at the box, containing all those memories I thought were lost.

Most of them are probably bad.

Most of them I’m sure nobody wants to remember.

The serving spoon gets passed around the table, making sucking noises as it scoops out the casserole sludge, a little bit on each plate. Maisie hands me the spoon and I hesitate instead of taking it.

Mom reads my face. “I just wanted to be considerate and let you decide what to do with your own things,” she says.

“Okay, Mom.”

Maisie shakes the spoon at me. A bit of tuna flies off and lands on my shirt.

Instinctively, I pull it off and lick at the chunky attempt at comfort.

“Thanks, Mom,” I say.

I was fifteen before the flood.

I dig my bottle of wine out from my luggage and twist the cap off. The alcohol numbs, hazes, makes me open the shoebox like it’s nothing.

The stench of mold wafts up and I cough and consider opening the window. Instead, I hold my shirt over my mouth as I pick through the old pictures of Lilly and I. There’s a bunch of folded notes she used to write me between classes, back when we’d assess whether Darren or Alex was hotter and whether or not it was weird to date dudes we grew up with.

Dumb shit.

Stupid shit.

Inside is a copy of Ginger Snaps, which is the first movie Jordan ever gave me. And by “gave” I mean “let me rent it and never return it”.

It made Lilly uncomfortable back then, when we’d walk into the video store and she’d have to pretend to be interested in the movies while I leaned over the counter and flirted with Jordan.

He must have felt awkward with her there, too, because it wasn’t long before he wrote his phone number on my receipt.

“Are you really going to call him?” Lilly asked, but I didn’t answer her, just pocketed the number and thought about how adult it would feel to talk to a 21 year-old man later that night. And I did, with my entire body buried under the covers and my voice hushed so nobody would hear.

“I was scared you wouldn’t call,” he said.

“I like you so much,” he said.

“Nobody else gets me like you do,” he said.

My heart pounded so hard in my chest that it beat me into thinking it was love.

There’s nowhere better to smoke pot than in the abandoned suburb, which is what Lilly tells me on Good Friday. “I don’t really wanna go either but I’m kind of nostalgic, you know?”

So we load back into Darren’s dad’s truck and park at the cement barrier blocking the entrance to Beachwood Estates.

Somebody’s spray painted the word EVIL on the cement.

We decide to head to Darren and Alex’s house because it has a patio and an empty pool that we can throw stuff into. It’s another breezy day and we walk down the sidewalk like we used to when we were just kids with training wheels.

A bunch of leaves scatter over the word PUSSY.

Lilly scrapes her foot over the paint and links her arm in mine.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says.

But the words pound as we walk.

WHORE

BITCH

CUNT

The words change. The paint deepens, looks like Sharpie, looks like blood. They shrink down, changing from judgemental statements into hand-written sentiment.

YOU’RE A COCK TEASE

YOU PLAYED WITH ME

Words trail up the cracked driveway and I stop. Lilly keeps walking, her arm slipping out of mine. She waves me forward. “Come on, Ash. It’s okay.”

But it’s not okay.

A dead leaf twitches over the ground and she steps on top of it, the dried matter crumbling beneath her foot. She continues over the words, not feeling them, not feeling anything because nobody else knows.

YOU RUINED MY LIFE YOU FUCKING SLUT

“Holy shit,” Darren says.

“Whoa,” Alex says.

The red lines trickle like red rivers. I follow them around the back of the house, my toes pinched and my heels raised, not wanting to touch the sentiment. The words gather into larger rivers, forming red puddled paragraphs before raging into into the empty swimming pool in the backyard.

YOU’RE A GUTLESS DISGUSTING WHORE

Alex pulls out his carton of pre-rolled joints. “Somebody’s got problems,” he says.

Darren picks up a rock and tosses it into the bit of water settled at the bottom of the pool. The rock splashes. Ripples form and spread outward, lapping at the words on the pool’s sides. The ink bleeds into the detritus and decay.

HOW COULD YOU?

“Maybe we should go to my place instead,” Lilly says.

One of the windows is broken. Darren squeezes through and unlocks the door for us all, but I stand in the entryway, debating going in at all.

Another prairie gust tugs at my hair. Dust picks at my cheek and I scramble into the house, pulling the door closed behind me.

The living room seems bigger without furniture and decor and character. There’s hardly much to remember, other than the bad things. I shut my eyes and stare at the swollen floorboards, remembering the sound my high heels made the night night I brought Jordan here.

Lilly’s parents were gone for the weekend, so it was opportunity for stupidity, opportunity to drag an older man to a party. I thought he’d get a kick out of it, being in a party just like the ones in all the slasher movies he liked to recommend.

He didn’t like the music or the crowd, which wasn’t so much a crowd as it was a living room half-full of drunk teenagers. He clutched at my hand while I downed red cup after red cup of Coke and Cherry Schnapps. We sat together on the love seat, hip to hip, his arm around my waist, pulling me closer, pulling me over his lap like a security blanket.

Bass pumped. Lyrics suggested.

He pulled me in and kissed me with tongue and everybody screamed. We were nasty. We were disgusting. We needed to get a room. The words felt like compliments in the moment. I smiled and I laughed. I kissed him back.

“You know this is like, illegal, right?” Lilly asked in the kitchen. “He’s like 21.”

Instead of taking the drink she made me, I took Jordan’s hand and we wandered off the cul-de-sac and toward the river where we would never be seen or found. The darkness touched my shoulders but the wind pounded at my exposed skin, swept up the stupid mini-skirt I chose to wear to impress him.

“What’s your biggest fear?” he asked.

I cried when I told him.

Masklophobia.

My voice wavered. I talked about childhood and stupid things. Tears slipped and he wiped them away. He embraced me, cradled me, told me everything would be okay.

I rested my head on his shoulder, pressed my lips against his neck and breathed in deep.

Darren and Alex lay on Lilly’s kitchen floor. Pressing their shoes to the tiles, they kick themselves backward like slugs. They’re high, staring at the ceiling fan. Light creeps through the blinds, casting glare over their wide mouth laughing faces.

We shouldn’t be here. It feels wrong.

The lull in my head makes my eyes widen, makes me scrape at the bit of red on the wall that looks like jam. The paint flecks off, revealing a word.

SLUT

I sigh, so sick, so tired. “I’m not a slut. I’m not a fucking slut.” I right myself to scratch a little lower, a little more.

REMEMBER

The paint flecks, revealing more than just a word. There’s an infestation of them behind the wall, crossed T’s and dotted I’s like legs crawling, moving, touching my skin as I scratch.

REMEMBER WHEN EVERYONE THOUGHT YOU WERE A GOODY GOODY GOOD GIRL?

I swallow. I’m high. Pressure throbs in my head. My tongue’s a sponge in my mouth, absorbing moisture, a place for infestation. The extended legs of the words slip along my tongue, the sentence centipede long.

I USED TO THINK YOU WERE A GOOD GIRL BUT YOU’RE NOT AND YOU NEVER WERE AND YOU’RE JUST AN EVIL SOUL-SUCKING WHORE, AREN’T YOU?

I claw at my tongue but the scent of Irish Spring crawls up my nose, worms its way down deep into my throat, the lump forming there, making me gag.

“Ashlynn? What the hell are you doing?” Lilly stares, the confusion in her voice pulling the boys out of their funk.

They notice the words but they look at me. They want my reaction. They want me to be okay, to shrug it off. It happened so long ago, happened when I was dumb and stupid. It’s over now. I should be normal now.

ADMIT IT SLUT

“I, I’ve got the pasties real bad,” I tell him, licking my lips, smacking my tongue against the roof of my mouth. I scrape at my tastebuds. I bite down. My breaths quicken and pace and hyperventilate, and then Lilly grabs my arm and pries me out of the house.

The silver heart-shaped necklace Jordan got me sits in a sealed envelope at the bottom of the shoebox.

Seated at Mom’s scrapbooking desk, I tear at the side and tip the metal charm into my palm. The thin chain coils over my fingers. I clutch hard, letting the guilt crawl over my shoulders as I try to recall what it used to feel like when I wore the necklace every day.

Mom and Dad wanted to know where I got it, who gave it to me.

I was a shitty liar so I told them to leave me alone.

I’d sneak out to meet Jordan in his truck beside the river, craving the soft touch of his hand on my back when I straddled him in the driver’s seat.

He always smelt like Irish Spring.

YOU RUINED MY LIFE

The necklace goes back into the envelope, back into the box. I close the lid and open the drawer that contains all of Mom’s chipboard letters. She’s got a little carton of Easter-themed letters, the chipboard prints all matching soft pastels like a child’s bedroom. With shaking fingers and with a heavy rock in my chest, I spell out a response:

I’M SORRY

Something hits the glass. A little pebble, its clatter like rain.

It’s what Jordan used to do. I used to like it because I had no respect for myself, opening the window, climbing out, going to meet a man in the dead of night.

Another rock strikes the window, this one bigger, harder. It rattles the glass. I twist in the chair, knocking the Easter letters askew.

“I was stupid,” I say.”I was an idiot.”

A bigger rock hits the glass hard enough to shake the blinds. My limbs tighten and tense, but the next rock hits the window and shakes me loose. I shudder in the chair, heart throbbing between the ears again, the lump in my throat making my words bob.

“I shouldn’t have to apologize.”

The glass shatters. The blinds shake. A fist-sized rock lands on the bed, rolls off the covers and onto the floor. It’s red and wet and it stains the carpet.

EVIL

I scream.

Dad bursts in first, followed by Mom. They’re not angry like they should be. They both look at me like I’ve just had a nightmare, like I’m a child who needs consoling. My mom pulls me into her arms and Dad goes to the window, his biceps twitching as he pries back the blinds to reveal the empty street below.

“It’s nothing,” he assures.

He picks the rock off the floor and he shakes his head. He pats my shoulder and he tells me that everything is going to be okay even though the rock stains his hands like a still-beating heart would.

Flashlight, white, bright in the eye.

That’s what I remember when Dad found me in Jordan’s truck. Dad pulled him out by the collar. He called Jordan a rapist, because legally, that was what he was.

The newspaper called him a predator. I was a minor. My name was kept from the reporting but it wasn’t like people didn’t know, didn’t gossip, didn’t think that I was at fault.

“Why do people keep calling you a slut?” Maisie asked while we all ate take-home diner waffles after church.

Mom cried.

Dad shook his head and said nothing.

Jordan was charged with a misdemeanour, fined, his name put on the sex offender registry.

Forever ruined.

I turned sixteen after the flood but he didn’t make it that long.

The entire town was evacuated.

We lived in a trailer for months.

I liked living in chaos, in limbo. The crisis made everyone forget, but then the water receded and the town was rebuilt and we got notice that we could go back to Beachwood Estates to retrieve whatever belongings had survived.

Jordan was there, waiting on my bed with a knife at his side and a pair of dried red rivers running down his forearms. The rivers gathered around him, pooled on the mattress, his heart flooded into a lake on top of the sheets.

We go to church on Easter Sunday.

I wear a white dress. It’s knee length and it has sleeves that reach my elbows. It’s sophisticated and appropriate and properly adult. I sing the hymns but all I feel is everyone staring at me because I’m still a distraction.

People walk up to the alter for communion. They eat the bread and drink the cranberry juice but I remain seated.

Lilly and Darren and Alex all look at me like I’m crazy.

Like it was my fault.

Like I don’t deserve forgiveness.

After dinner on Easter Monday, I take Mom’s car to Beachwood Estates. The suburb waits beyond the concrete barrier, a dead neighbourhood that never should have existed despite the fact that I grew up there, thrived there.

Words bleed out from the sewers and trickle over the cracked roads.

YOU COMPLETED ME

I THOUGHT YOU UNDERSTOOD ME

I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME

I walk over the rivulets, queasy, shaking, my mouth always awash with soap.

YOU LOVED IT

YOU WANTED IT

I turn the bend, passing Darren and Alex’s house, passing Lilly’s house, heading closer to my old house and my old broken window.

The door’s wide open and covered with angry red.

YOU KEPT COMING BACK

The floor’s slathered. My shoes pucker over the boards, kisses like filthy memories. My breaths echo like they did in his truck.

I COULDN’T RESIST YOU

I NEEDED YOU SO BAD

I’ve climbed these stairs so many times before. They used to be carpeted, but the now-bare steps creak like his groan used to vibrate in my ear. The desperate sound of it throbs on the landing, where I make my way toward the door at the end of the hall.

My bedroom.

It’s bigger than I remember, just an empty space and a broken window. Nothing is as it shouldn’t be, save for a single word on the wall. It’s tiny like his scrawl used to be. It pulls me close.

MASCOT

The door creaks.

The white rabbit stands in the threshold, no longer white but stained, the white arms of his suit slit open, the fur torn and red slipping out. His smile droops. His eyes sag.

“Please,” I say.

His head tilts. His mouth opens but the costume’s weathered and worn. The stitches gives and his mouth gapes with a cry that doesn’t resonate. He steps into the room, his arms reaching out for me.

My throat tightens. The lump forms there again. I turn for the window but the broken glass slips between the panes, jamming it in place.

He touches my shoulder, braces his hand firm. He turns me around and the phobia takes over. I push him back, thrashing, screaming.

“It wasn’t my fault!”

The bloody fuzz of his costume sticks to my skin. I push at his chest, at his face. The fur sticks to me. His blood sticks to me, fuses to me. The heat of it peels at my skin.

“You should have known better!”

Nerves flare. Synapses fire.

“I just was a stupid kid! You knew! You knew everything about me!”

He embraces me like he used to. He takes a knee below the window and he pulls my shaking frame down with him. I try to catch myself but my foot slips in the pool of his blood. He pulls me over his lap, his grasp soft, his hand on my back.

I squirm and I writhe but he hold on tight.

“I’m sorry!” I scream. “I’m so fucking sorry!”

His bloody fur sticks to my flesh, to muscle and bone, fusing me in his embrace. He rubs at my back, trying to assure me that everything will be okay even though he bleeds and bleeds, the red building over the floor, flooding it thick with the guilt that will never go away.