Today on Midwest Weird: “Corporeal” by Amy Lee Lillard.
Amy Lee Lillard is the co-creator and producer of Midwest Weird. She is the author of three books: Exile in Guyville, A Grotesque Animal, and Dig Me Out. Her fiction podcast, Wyrd Woman, has all episodes available now. And with Erin Johnston and Heath Smith, she hosts the 80s and 90s pop culture podcast Fuzzy Memories.
This story originally appeared in Exile in Guyville, and is included here with permission from BOA Editions.
Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Episode Transcript:
This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.
We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Today’s episode: A short story by Amy Lee Lillard, titled “Corporeal." Read by the author.
The doctor sees my name on the chart and pauses, her face showing the calculations in her head.
“Wynn Ferone,” she says. Her eyes scan me, laying prone in a hospital bed, where I’ve been since the morning’s crash. She’s probably in her fifties, like me. Someone who lived through my highs and lows.
The bearded nurse hovers behind her, waiting for his cue to hand over gauze or needle. Maybe if he wasn’t here the doctor would say more. Ask for an autograph, if her coiffed hair and glossy lips hid a slacker past. Ask, in a professional way, about the truth to those recluse rumors.
“I loved your book,” she finally says, quickly, quietly. Then: “Do you remember the car accident?”
I nod, and I see the white sedan in my rear-view, covering the distance between us, speeding too fast to stop, the sun bouncing off the hood so the machine looks like a bolt of lightning, a meteor.
“That hit knocked you out,” the doctor says. “Remember that?”
Yes. First, the slowed-down second before the car hit, where I saw the yellowish-orange of the construction signs on I-80, the midnight-black of the torn-up asphalt, the brown fields shouldering the road, the morning sun sucking sweat from the hard-hatted woman standing up ahead. And that reprieve, a second’s break from the corrosion eating away at my insides, the knowledge that everything is wrong, all wrong, that I’m not where I’m supposed to be, that me, Wynn Ferone, I am wrong. Then: impact, car to car, head to wheel. Then: color, vision, light.
“Anything else hurt?”
I think of telling her, describing the vivid dreams when knocked unconscious. But I am no longer truthful with doctors. Not since my lost year.
She asks me to move my head from side to side, back and forth, in small circles, and have me rate the pain. My neck throbs and my head pounds, but it’s distant. No doubt the drugs in my IV have made the edges of the pain slippery, sloping away. After a few more hours of observation, they let me go.
My car has been shoveled off the interstate, so I take a cab home from the hospital. I unlock my dark house, leave the lights off, strip my clothes, slip under the sheet in my bed.
When I used to write and draw, I’d always keep my characters firmly awake. No accidents, no head trauma. No natural sleep, let alone unconscious rest. Not even dreams. I never remembered my own dreams. And something in me told me not to dig there. Dangerous. Even if I was making it up.
But when that car hit me, and my mind shut down while my body sped off in an ambulance: I remember it all. Another world came to me. Like a rib-spreader cracking everything open. I dreamed.
In my bed, I closed my eyes and hoped to dream again.
*
In that dream, I was dead. But yet, I stood on a sidewalk, watching a small bunker appear in the empty green lot.
“Another one,” said RobotWynn, shaking her head.
“There must be war on her world,” said CultWynn, holding her fingers to her lips.
“There’s war on every world,” I said, curling my hands into fists.
The bunker shifted and morphed, the walls contracting and expanding under some invisible designer’s pen.
We watched, sighing as one. We all had the same brown hair, with waves in the same places. Same brown eyes, buried deep beneath brown eyebrows and prominent white cheeks. Same thick earlobes, fleshy chins, dense shoulders. Same divots and plains of our features, showing our same age of twenty earth years.
When I met them, when all of us Wynns were in one place that first time, I felt dizzy, my bowels tightening at seeing something forbidden.
The bunker slowed, settling. The entire process felt like minutes, but that meant nothing. Days didn’t exist here, nor years, since those were figments of imagination, supported only by the movement of the planet around the sun. This place was not a planet bound by physics. My death could have been months ago, or centuries, or seconds. All the same.
“Bunker looks analog,” said RobotWynn. “She’ll be all human.” She had a mechanical leg, and where a shirt should be there was metal armor. Like a robot, I thought upon meeting her. RobotWynn had a forearm made of the cheap fake plastic of a dollpart. It hung loosely by a few wires, the result of a botched skin graft, a back-alley operation that killed her.
“She may have prepared for the end days.” CultWynn opened her eyes wider, until we couldn’t look at her. “I will bring her tidings of joy and peace, one disciple to another.” A figurine of a woman, with two braids stretching down to her waist and thick smock covering her skin below the neck. Her pupils were large black holes. She had a starved look about her, body and mind. She died birthing her faith leader’s child. When we met, I thought of the pictures of the Manson girls, the People’s Temple, the Moonies.
“Best to leave her be,” I said, remembering the overwhelming welcome these two gave me, full of prying eyes and cult gibberish.
Just then the bunker jolted to a solid, unmoving stop with a mighty thump.
What might have been seconds back in the living world passed quickly. The giant sealed door creaked and groaned. It burst open, and spit forth the newest Wynn.
This Wynn, she was crying, extending her hands to the abnormally blue sky, the well-heeled greenery marking her border, the smooth concrete of the sidewalk. She howled, her mouth wide in agony, and she twirled, jerky rotations back and forth, pounding the idea of her body.
This new girl, she had jeans like mine, a plain green shirt like one I might have worn. But her seams and hems were frayed, torn into ribbons by flame. Her skin too, red and angry and melted from the neck down. She missed an eye, and one side of her face was a garbled cubist vision of an ear.
She ran screaming from her house, so she missed the house’s welcoming announcement. The memory of it seared in ours. So I started: “This is not heaven or hell. Myths are not real. But death, and this place, they are real.”
RobotWynn joined. “The plane of existence known to you was only one of infinite worlds. A version of you, called an alternate, exists in many of these worlds.”
“In death, you join your alternates,” said CultWynn, with the intonement of a sorceress. “When you’re ready, they hold curious truths to explore.”
I whispered the last. “Best wishes for your endless future.”
BurntWynn slumped and fell, collapsing into the idea of a faint.
“She’s a pyro?” RobotWynn said, a crooked smile and a wagged tongue.
“She’s a martyr,” CultWynn said, that incandescence of fervor coloring her cheeks.
“She’s nobody,” I said. “Just like all of us.”
*
When I wake, my entire body throbs from the impact of the day before. Metal meeting its match, and crumpling in defeat. But I’m awake, alert.
That car, that beam of light, maybe it shook something loose when it hit me. Disconnected my brain from its cage. Jolted everything back where it should be.
I rummage through my bedroom closet and find a blank notebook. I take it back to the couch and start scribbling. I fill it with all I can remember from the dream – the different Wynns, the street to nowhere, the bunker and who was inside. My head and neck hurt, but I shake with excitement. I could be the cliché, the recluse artist restored by a brush with death, her lust for life returned. Why not?
As a kid, I wrote stories and I drew faces and creatures that didn’t exist in this world. It was natural as breathing, as satisfying as a good meal. I kept doing it, all through school, and college, and after. And yes, I saw my stories out in the world. Bad Reputation, I named my graphic novel, and when it came out in the mid nineties, billed as a feminist response to the dude-heavy Watchmen and Sandman and all the other men, I was known. At least in some circles.
All before the age of twenty-six. My lost year. After that, paper was just paper, with no story or face to unearth. Then I became known not for my stories but for the tragedy, the mythos, the romance of the unexplained.
Maybe that could change. Maybe the rest of my life is not just something to be borne.
I write and sketch all day.
At night, I take a handful of painkillers and stare up at the ceiling. That other place pulls, tugs me back, and I welcome it with gladness.
*
In the dream, I decided to wait with the new Wynn, be a calming presence when she woke. The others went to their homes, and I found a decently comfortable bench in the spartan space designated for this new Wynn’s survival. I got back to work on the handbook.
I lived twenty years on earth, twenty years consumed by school and textbooks. When I died, and woke in a house built with me in mind, in this strange place that was nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by copies of me, all of them thinking they were the only Wynn alive, just like me, the most painful part was the lack of answers. There was no textbook. Only a brief voice from invisible speakers, announcing the bare bones of my new existence.
So I started writing one.
The presence of alternate versions of you can be a shock. Many worlds in existence do not yet understand or acknowledge the multiverse. But every choice you’ve made, every choice those around you made, created a parallel world. In another world, you made a different choice.
I write what I’ve learned from the other Wynns, who got here before me. I write what I’ve experienced. But I also write what I hope is true. Like casting a spell.
Learning you are dead may bring a mix of emotions. These emotions may feel stronger than any in life. While your body bore the weight of your emotional state in the past, your consciousness is your entire being now. Be comforted: over time, your emotions will fade.
I wanted to be at peace here. But in those first units of time in this afterlife, I hurt, burned, ached. The fact of my death seared and cut, the knowledge of what I would never do careening around in my imaginary head. I would never grow up. I wouldn’t finish college. I would never kiss June, the girl I so wanted to kiss. I would never see who I could be.
BurntWynn shifted in her bed, made noises, the kind that signal rising from unconsciousness to awareness. I wondered if she had loved. If her world even allowed such frivolities.
She opened her eyes, and jumped back on seeing me. I held my hands above this new girl, hoping for the idea of comfort.
“They did it,” said BurntWynn.
“Who?”
“The Soviets. They actually did it.”
When I died in 1991, the Cold War was waning, with the Soviet satellite countries declaring independence and Gorbachev pushing glasnost. BurntWynn must have come from a world where the Cold War turned hot: mutually assured destruction, nuclear shadows on walls, the nightmare come to life.
“You’re safe now,” I said.
“I’m dead.” She picked at her clothes.
“Yes. And this is…it’s safe here.”
I told her the basics: infinite worlds, infinite varieties of us, all coming here when we die. I showed my writing, the key points that could be a comfort. I told her this was a perfectly fine place to spend eternity, an afterlife far better than the fire and brimstone of nuclear war, or the threat of hell.
What I didn’t say, not yet: This wasn’t paradise either. There was this dread, which should have no place in paradise. Seeing all these versions of myself, who are both deeply foreign and intimately familiar. So far the other Wynns had come from worlds vastly different than mine. Comparing myself to them felt like fantasy, a science fiction movie come to life. But someday, a Wynn like me would appear. Maybe that Wynn smelled the gas that night in 1991 and woke, running outside, surviving. Maybe she ran into June’s arms and stayed there. That Wynn would graduate college, get a career, love June, be happy. And after a long amount of human years, she’d come here. I was afraid of that. Afraid of resenting that Wynn, so strongly it would overpower me. And then, would this place become a hell?
“Why all of us together?” BurntWynn finally said in her cot. “Why aren’t we with our families, or people we love?”
I told the new girl I didn’t know. BurntWynn accepted this with the stoicism of a casualty of war.
*
My next day is more writing and sketching. Scrambling to get it all down. The details! These dreams, these creations, they’re so rich and colorful, layered and visceral. They come to me fully formed, ready to be transcribed and rendered into art.
Even the language — what was a Soviet?
As I work, I think of that feral cat that lived near my duplex when I was in my twenties. The gray feline with white paws was pregnant many times, and when she birthed her kittens, she grabbed them in her mouth by the loose skin around their necks. Once they grew up a bit, a few kittens would hang out on my tiny porch and mewl. When I fed them tins of Purina, and they were drunk with the mush they tongued into their tiny bellies, I would grab that loose skin, see how it slid over the bones. Like the two weren’t connected, weren’t even related.
It’s rare I let myself think of those cats. Dangerous territory.
That was right before I fell hard, slipped between the spaces of some shifting ground I’d always known as solid. Before my friends found me on my roof one night, hands bleeding from a frenzied climb, hair tangled and twisted, clothes gone. They said my whole body twitched and shook, that the sounds coming out of my mouth reminded them of owl hoots and dog howls.
I don’t remember that, any of it. They got me down, somehow, got me into a hospital, and there I bounced for a time, between units and facilities, as something in me broke and wouldn’t come back together, not for many months.
I only remember echoes from that period, feelings without words. A gaping hole in my head, combined with a sense of penetration. The idea that my body was a trap, that I couldn’t get out, that I needed to get out. I told the doctors and staff, again and again, about the kittens and their skin. I begged them to slice me open, let me free. Something was in here with me, I said, trying to kill me. Help.
Later, when I came aware again, emerged from my psychotic break as if from an excessive nap, cranky and sleepy, I’d hear the rotating medical students talk. Acute body dysmorphia. Potential homosexuality and/or transsexual tendencies. Aphasia, schizophrenia, maybe even dissociative disorder. Such a strange, sudden case.
They could have been talking about a stranger. They were talking about a stranger. Nothing sounded real in those words, in that place.
Falling so hard showed me the cracks underneath me. After I stabilized, seemed sane enough to release back into the world, I couldn’t write anymore. The pages inert, bland things that just made me think of dead wood. The people that knew me as a writer saw my lack of writing, dug a bit, found out what happened. And that became my public story – how I broke and couldn’t fit my pieces back to together.
As I write now about that other place in my dreams, something magical occurs. All these memories of kittens and hospitals, and running from ghosts, they don’t feel as painful anymore. In fact, they feel purposeful. Maybe that lost year, and all the years after, were necessary. My brain has turned turmoil into allegory. A beautiful fantasy I could put into the world.
I write long into the night, then lay in bed and wait for what’s next.
*
In the dream, our trio of Wynns became a quartet. We sat together in my home, reading books. We walked together on the sidewalk that connected our homes and the kids’ centers, one big cul de sac to nowhere. We went to the beach, the long line of coast that circled the cul de sac, a design that made this place like a small suburban island. We played in the water, and imagined we could feel it on our nonexistent skin.
We talked. I started a ranking game, where we listed our top five lunch foods from when we lived. Our top five annoyances. Top five mammals. Top five injuries. Top five people. Top five enemies. Top five remedies for wax-plugged ears. Top five headaches.
Nice, all of it. I liked the other me’s.
But then one day, BurntWynn disappeared.
We waited for her on the sidewalk, ready for our walk. But she didn’t come. We went to her thick bunker door and knocked, then tried the latch and found it open. And empty.
I didn’t know what to do after that. Where could she have gone? There was nowhere to go, no uncharted territory and nowhere to hide.
RobotWynn snooped, unearthing a few aluminum bins of newspapers and magazines with headlines about nuclear stockpiles and war games turning violent. CultWynn found a cork bulletin board with maps of likely targets, surrounded by ever-larger circles of initial blast, radiation clouds, and acid rain. I looked for a note, a journal. Some sort of clue. For what, I’m not sure.
After awhile, we left, stood outside the bunker. It felt strange, sort of empty, to have just the three of us again.
“Is there another place?” RobotWynn asked. “Like — is this is the first stop, and we’re supposed to earn our way to the next? Is that where she went?”
I’d wondered this too, the idea that this place might be a sort of purgatory, an in-between place where we have to earn admission to another place. But that couldn’t be right. There were babies here, children. That expectation, after such short lives, couldn’t be.
“Perhaps we do this too,” said CultWynn. “Disappear when we lay down to rest? Our minds shutting down and letting go of the notion of our body?”
Possible. Sleep was unnecessary now, but each of us still held to a sleep schedule. We went home at what might be evening, and emerged again at the idea of morning. I knew I lay in bed during that time, sorted of dozed or shifted into a lower gear. A form of rest. Maybe this was what it looked to others – disappearing?
We guessed, and hypothesized, and wondered, and in that way time passed.
*
The next morning, I quit my current temp job, where I was a grunt typing data into spreadsheets.
Since that lost year, I’d moved to another city, then another, and another. Jumping, hopping, running, from place to place, man to man. I threw myself into temp jobs, and did well because of that abandon, that lack of self-respect. I did fine. Lived fine. I lived, and tried to forget about that slippery feel of skin over bone.
Now I sleep hard, and wake with more of the story.
One day I see that the doctor who recognized me has talked to someone, somewhere, because I’m trending. This happens every now and again. Words appear in articles and in feeds that note my appearance in the wild, speculate about the true reasons behind my twenty-six years of absence, remind the youths of why they should care, and predict if I’ll ever produce again. I unplug my modem after that.
I spend all my waking hours curled over paper that I make come alive.
I ache all over, and my hands cramp, and food tastes like nothing, but none of it matters, because I’m creating again.
Days turn to weeks. I’m exhausted, and electric, and alive. So alive. My body feels real, not just a case for all my blood and organs. Not just a graveyard for the remnants of one-night stands and blackouts and droning days. Not just a ticking clock counting down until I detonate again.
I pass out each night into a long sleep, and those hours that used to be dark, a practice session for my death, turn into art.
I dream the same scenes again and again, giving me time to get it right.
Then one night, the story jumps forward.
*
Years, a handful of human time. New Wynns arrived by car accidents. Botched abortions. Spousal abuse. They died from domestic terrorists bombing health centers or shooting strangers in big-box stores. They died by choking on chicken bones and cherry pits and popcorn kernels, suffocating on their own vomit after binge drinking, overdosing on sleeping pills and painkillers. They died by ovarian cancer and viruses with an alphabet soup of acronyms. They died in ways mundane and terrifying, and their split-level ranches and spacious condos and beach-side mansions and tent-city campsites appeared, stretching this cul de sac to comic proportions.
The new Wynns were still young, in their twenties. But I could see the day their imagined bodies would grow older, when we’d chart the paths of wrinkles and gray hairs as prisoners might carve lines on cage walls.
The day BurntWynn came back, a skinny townhouse appeared in between a duplex and a tree fort.
I was alone, walking by myself on our infinite sidewalk. I knocked on the door of the townhouse, stepped inside, ready to greet the new arrival.
But inside, two Wynns. There was a sort of GoldenWynn, clothes smacking of quality thread and sweatshop-free production, skin glowing with the health of financial comfort. And BurntWynn beside her.
GoldenWynn shrieked. She ran around the room, wild and wounded. Before I could calm her, talk to her about death and this new life, she came to a stop in front of BurntWynn. Hands slapped and pummeled at the woman I knew. GoldenWynn screamed about invasion, an infection in her body.
BurntWynn stood still, let the blows happen, a bored vacancy the only response.
GoldenWynn continued her shrieks and accusations. How she’d known it was someone else, how no one believed her. No one believed her that something was in her body, besides her.
And I understood.
“You…took her body?”
“I wasn’t supposed to die at twenty-one,” said BurntWynn, looking down at her charred clothing.
“But we all did,” I said. “I did.”
“None of this is fair,” said BurntWynn. “I died because of a pissing match between politicians. Everyone here died early, because someone else fucked up. That’s not fair.”
“Fair is fantasy.” The words came from my lips and she squinted.
“Exactly,” she said. Then she ran, up the stairs, two at a time.
I ran too, not sure why, GoldenWynn behind me. The two of us bounding up carpeted stairs to the third level, following the parting of air before BurntWynn’s purpose. She darted into the bedroom, and we followed. There we found her touching the wall where it met the floor, back in the corner where a nightstand had been pushed aside.
“What are you doing?”
“You don’t want to see this,” BurntWynn said, as she pressed her knuckles into the blue paint, threading a line up and down.
“I was trapped,” GoldenWynn said behind me. “Pushed aside in my own body.”
“I didn’t choose where I went,” said BurntWynn. She pressed, and then there was give. A panel popped open, its seams only visible now they had their use revealed.
“What is—”
“I’m not done,” said BurntWynn, pulling the panel aside, revealing a reflective surface, like a dresser-sized mirror behind the wall.
“This is too much,” said GoldenWynn, sinking to the mattress, head in hands.
“I can’t be done,” said BurntWynn, her head twisted to look at me. She spoke to me. Just me. “I can’t.” Then she stuck her head where the panel had been, and her body followed. In an instant, gone.
“What is this,” said GoldenWynn, leaking fat water drops down her cheeks.
“She can’t do this,” I said. “Can she?”
GoldenWynn was working herself into a frenzy, arms and limbs and tears. I stared at that space behind the wall. How had she known? Did her bunker…did all of our places…
Useless words and grunts behind me, empty space before me.
If I could breathe, I would have taken a deep gulp of air. If I could squeeze my butt and arms and thighs in anticipation, I would have gripped tight. If I could feel my body, I would have.
So I laid back on the floor, slipped my feet into the secret space, and slid in.
And when I fell, I fell into a pile on a soft shag rug. The air heavy, pressing against my shape, wanting to be breathed. The light of the room brighter and harder than that of the other place. My body felt bigger, a corporeal thing. Almost as if I was a real live girl again.
After a moment, one that stretched in a way I was no longer used to, moving at the speed of planetary motion, I raised my head.
A small house, disheveled in the way my apartment often was, in the way renters do. A couch with a red plaid pattern, and thin shelves with books and plants. A screen door open to a small patio, colored by an orange overhead light. A small cat, a kitten really, cried at the door, and—
*
I wake because my heart is ready to pound right out of my chest. I wake with a rush of air that shudders on the way out.
That house, the kittens.
Terror, the feel of it, the sting of its chokehold. Terror fills that moment, where I struggle to slow my body.
But—of course, I remind myself. Of course. These dreams, as full of fantasy as they are, they’re a story about me. Populated with versions of me. Some truly personal details were bound to seep into this story sooner or later.
And of course it would be that house, the one with the kittens. The last place I felt secure, comfortable, real. I’ve been thinking about that time so much lately. Of course.
The shock, that’s all, of seeing something so deeply familiar, so uncanny, really, in this otherwise fantastical tale unspooling for me. That’s what woke me.
I lay back down, breathing slowly. Of course, I think. Again and again, as I let myself drift back.
*
—a kitten, really, cried at the door. Soft music played.
A shriek behind me, and I turned. BurntWynn loomed over a white couch, on which was another Wynn, wearing a red sweater. This RedWynn cried black tears and pled with her twin.
“Stop,” I said, or tried to say. The sound moved strangely here.
BurntWynn heard me, rose up. RedWynn scrabbled back, over the couch armrest.
“No,” said BurntWynn. “Go get your own.”
“You can’t do this.”
“We’re all dead anyway. We’re all headed to that place. She’s lived enough—”
“But so have you. You lived more years by stealing that other body.”
“It’s not long enough.” BurntWynn shook, the light zigging and zagging off her shape. “You know that. You feel the same.”
June, I thought. That one word, one face, for all the years I didn’t live.
“Don’t you see those clothes I was wearing?” BurntWynn pointed to her chars. “I died by fire, face-melting nuclear heat that our shit bunker didn’t block. It was painful, and slow. How did I deserve that? How is that right?”
“You invaded another body,” I said. “How is that right?”
“Why would they put us together, make us compare? Why would they make it actually possible for me to do this, to take her? If we weren’t supposed to?”
“For what? She’ll die too, and you’ll end up right back there.”
But BurntWynn ignored me, moved, fast. She pushed her hands into RedWynn’s cheeks. The live woman’s mouth open but no sound coming out—
*
—another image, slipping in to the dream. Sitting on my couch one night, and the air shifts and then I see this apparition, these ghosts of myself.
I’m still asleep, but I recognize this shift for what it is, this memory that’s lived only in the dark.
The cat outside cries, and the ghosts talk funny, and I see one of them leaning over me, pushing her hand into my—
*
I didn’t think, I just moved, fast, grabbing BurntWynn’s hands. That spark, that jolt of energy when any of us touched. But more in this moment, as we pushed, slapped, leaned into and through the other.
“You can do this too,” whispered BurntWynn. We gripped one another’s hands, our foreheads pushing against the other. “Anyone can.”
“That’s crazy,” I said, grabbing biceps. “Everyone stealing each other’s bodies?”
“Maybe that’s why we all feel like a fake. No one feels real, no one feels like they’re living the right life. Because no one is.”
I turned my head, until we were cheek to cheek, still pushing, still fighting. On the ground, RedWynn panted and retched.
“That first time was an accident,” said BurntWynn. “I was just exploring my bunker, moving things around. A panel opened, and I saw that... I went through, and found another one of us. Living a life she didn’t deserve. And I just acted on instinct. I stepped into her body. Whatever soul or energy made that Wynn her, she just sort of went to sleep, and I took control. It was easy.”
I pushed against her, but watched RedWynn on the ground, dry heaving and sweating.
“I lived a good life in her body,” BurntWynn said. “I didn’t break the rules of the living. I didn’t hurt anyone—”
GoldenWynn, how she attacked, screaming about invasion that only she could feel. “You killed her,” I said.
“I didn’t!”
“You trapped her, stole her life. You saw her in the other place – she knew what you were doing. You tortured her.”
“What makes her so special?” BurntWynn asked. “To get to live more than us?”
“But,” I said, still pushing, still fighting. “You just died again. And if you take this body?” I nod towards RedWynn. “You’ll keep coming back, to the other place, to us.”
BurntWynn smiled, showing gritted teeth. “Somewhere out there is a version of us that will live a long, long life. Maybe even forever. I can do this as long as it takes.”
We were two boxers leaning on each other to stay upright. We both looked at the woman on the floor, who finally shook off the nausea and pain, who crab crawled backwards, towards the door.
“You can too,” BurntWynn whispered.
The kitten meowed outside the door, and I could picture feeding that kitten, petting it with hands that feel. Maybe even bringing it into this house, this warm, threadbare but cozy home. It looked like a good place to call home, to live. Not fully familiar, but not unfamiliar.
There would be no June though. And the cost. Hurting another one of us. Too much.
But what was the alternative? Go back to the afterlife, dragging BurntWynn, like some sort of police for the dead? Keep playing at acceptance, at peace. Creating a pathetic mythology, trying to explain the unexplainable. Ignoring the one feeling that still thrummed through the idea of my blood: the unfairness of it all. Unfair, that I died so young. Unfair, that I would meet my twin one day, the Wynn who lived through that night of the gas leak, who had her life. That loved June.
And if that was the system, if that was how life and death worked, cheating some by the chance of physics, then … was cheating the only thing left?
Maybe June was here too. Not mine, but another. One that might let me love her.
I pushed against BurntWynn, one more big push that knocked her back. Angry, frustrated, resentful, righteous. Tired, pained. It all felt so real, so like what I remembered of life.
So sad, so silly, so stupid, that I wasn’t the one living in this house, in this world.
I flew towards the woman that still thrived with that life. I would get her away, save this Wynn from being severed from her body. I would do what sounded right.
Until the last millisecond of planetary time, that’s what I thought I would do.
But instead, I pushed my whole fist into RedWynn’s face, cracking and silencing that scream of horror.
*
—and the ghost, the one that had looked on me with pity, she pushes her whole fist into my face, and slides her hand into my chest, and slips into me, pushing me into the edges, squeezing me tight against my skin—
*
I slid my other hand into RedWynn’s chest, slicing easily through skin and breastplate, as only a ghost can. I shimmied my arm inside, then sidled my torso in halfway. I shrugged the rest on like a snow suit. I shifted, and locked myself in place, latching with the spinal cord and easing into the coccyx and snapping into the control room of the brain.
“Shit,” said BurntWynn. And with new eyes, a bit blurry and irritated but still alive, I saw the dead woman shake her head. BurntWynn said something else, but her language was no longer mine.
We stared at one another.
Finally she shrugged. Smiled. Did a little bow. Then she turned back the way we’d come, though I could no longer see the mirror. BurntWynn disappeared in a moment, taking the afterlife with her.
I felt cold floor underneath my bare feet. I felt the beat of blood in my wrists. I touched my head, firm, unyielding. Like my fingers, arms, hips. I rolled my ankles, heard them pop. Good. So good.
*
I wake. Slower this time, coming to awareness with a new weight. There’s a song playing somewhere, either in my home or in my head. And the first thing I do when I rise from bed is go to the full-length mirror hanging on the back of my closet door.
Just a dream, I think. Just a dream, I say out loud. All of it, even the stuff that dug itself out of the darkness, the images from that night, in my house, the sounds of the kittens, the feel of someone invading me—
I pull at my cheeks, bring my red eyes right to the glass. Just me, I say. No one else.
But.
That year, the gone year, it started out of nowhere, just one night, a night I couldn’t remember, leading to hundreds of nights I wouldn’t remember, where doctors said I screamed and begged to be sliced open, pleaded for them to pull the thing out.
No, I say out loud. No. No. Psychosis. Schizophrenia. Dysmorphia. All words that explained that night and that year. Words for the power of our brains to trick us.
I bring my fingers to the corners of my eyes, touch the white part. Push.
And deep inside my chest, something pushes back.
I’m breathing hard, and I want to vomit, and I want to cut, cut, get the scissors, cut it, cut myself—
But there’s more coming, moments this body held that I couldn’t remember, wouldn’t remember, not until now. And they come when I’m wide awake, because they’re not dreams, not my creations, they’re—
*
Time, measured once again by planets and physics, where I felt the joy of having fingers and toes that can touch, grip, spread wide.
But then. Once I sobered from the intoxicating feel of a real body. I felt this Wynn splitting, her brain cratering around me, her body sending its cellular warriors to stand against me.
BurntWynn said it was easy. She didn’t say they fight back. That bodies don’t want to be invaded.
This body’s temperature spiked, her blood boiling. It seized, stomach and intestines emptying themselves in great torrents. It throbbed and thrummed, heart racing after the foreign object that was me. It fainted, then woke again with beating and drumming, then blacked out, then woke, again and again.
And I held on, gripping tight as the rollercoaster dipped and the scrambler scrambled, because what else could I do?
I held on, that night, and the next day and night, and the next, as her body went wild. I held on when she stabbed at herself, pulled at her skin, dug into the flesh and found me. And finally, climbed the roof and tried to fly.
I held on as they put her in a hospital. Told her she was crazy, that there was nothing inside her but human bones and blood.
I held on, until she, wearied, believed them.
It wasn’t pretty, how I found a place to wedge myself. It took a year, of pain, and narcotics, and bloodied surrender.
And when we emerged, we were both changed.
*
I stare at that mirror. I see myself, now, at this moment. But I also see myself at twenty-six, living in a house where the only thing feral was wild animals in the night. Not me.
And I see her, too. That other Wynn, the one I thought existed only in dream, the one that’s lived with me, in me, for twenty-six years.
There she is. There.
Huh.
I could cut her out of me. I’m tempted to do it, carve at my face, or my eyes, or the big veins in my legs. Release the both of us into the air, into that other place—few who kill themselves know where they’re going. So there’d be peace in my passing. All those versions of me, welcoming me.
But I’m here now, she says.
And what joy, what shocking relief, to realize that she is not a dream. She’s another person. Another me.
It’s nice, I think.
It is, I hear.
*
It’s a month later, and we’re finishing the final draft of the graphic novel. We’ve changed the names and faces, maintaining the illusion of fiction. Readers will believe more that way, she says, and I agree.
When I’m awake, we talk. I didn’t understand my loneliness until it went away.
When I’m asleep, she sends me her memories as dreams. Not of the afterlife, but of her life. The moments that made her Wynn. She shows me her world, and shows me June.
We discovered that June died in my world, just a few years ago. I did my best to comfort my GhostWynn after that.
We talk about what makes a life full. What could fill the holes of her thwarted life, and my numb one. Being together, we decided, being a team, that was a first step. Our book is another. And after that?
I wonder sometimes, really wonder, if this is all truly happening. If maybe the psychosis was a fact, and it’s come back to claim me. Maybe this other voice is a personality I’ve created, one that broke off from me, which I couldn’t accept. Maybe this whole thing is indeed a dream, and I’ve just let it take me.
I think about that, let it sit with me. Then my GhostWynn speaks up, and I’m no longer just one lost voice in the great cavern of my body. That’s really all that matters.
Amy Lee Lillard is the co-creator and producer of Midwest Weird. She is the author of three books: Exile in Guyville, A Grotesque Animal, and Dig Me Out. Her fiction podcast, Wyrd Woman, has all episodes available now. And with Erin Johnston and Heath Smith, she hosts the 80s and 90s pop culture podcast Fuzzy Memories.
This story originally appeared in Exile in Guyville, and is included here with permission from BOA Editions.
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