I should not. Every cell in my body says no. Every hair says yes. I open the door just enough to slide inside, and pull it closed.
Darkness greets me. The heartbeat of the house is in here; slow, deep. The smells are stacked like pancakes; old insulation, dried up wasps’ nests, the faint vinegar ghost of my mother’s cleaning. And the scratching is right behind me.
I turn slowly towards it, while my knees bend on their own.
Lower is safer. Lower is smart.
The boxes grab my attention. The shoebox with the label from sleepaway camp. The white dress bag is like a ghost. Andunder it, where it’s somehow made itself a home, is the mouse doll.
I told myself I’d thrown it away. I distinctly remember the gesture yesterday: arm, arc, trash. I had a whole performance about it, an exorcism for nobody. But here it is, its little pink dress tidy, the gray felt rubbed smooth along the snout. It sits like someone posed it, and waited for me. The glass eyes catch no light and return none, and yet I know where they are, what they are looking at.
Mine.
The word arrives without permission. It has weight. It feels like that same pressure in the back of my mouth where my palate meets my teeth. I scoop the doll up, and it fits into my hands like it was carved to my shape. Heat bleeds into its fabric. My heartbeat picks up - or the doll’s does. The difference is less and less.
It is wrong to hold it, it is right, it is both at once. My breath hitches. I think of Maya again, not because I regret anything, but because the memory of her movement is juicy. Because when she startled, something in me clapped its hands in delight. Because the way her shoulder jerked, made me want to see if it would jerk again if I applied just the right pressure.
Who am I? I put my face into the doll’s chest like a child, and the felt rubs my upper lip. It catches, it tugs. The sensation is so precise that it gives me an electric shiver that’s hard to resist. I press harder. The whiskers that shouldn’t be there—that cannot be there—bend and then spring back, whisper-fine rods transmitting every motion into the bones at my nose.
They tell me the air’s temperature.
They tell me the closet is too cramped.
They tell me there is a spider’s thread to my left, and the spider itself is three inches above my shoulder.
I reach up blindly and pinch the thread between finger and thumb and it snaps, wet and delicate.
The knowledge is pleasure. Information is pleasure. Food is information.
Hungry. I am all words and some of them sink. Hungry floats. The tea is wrong. Bread is right. Dry things that scratch at the place behind my teeth are right. I want walnuts. I want the baseboard.
Yes. God, please.
I need the steadiness of wood, the give of it.
I want to put something in my mouth and take it apart, piece by piece, until it is not a threat because it is inside me.
I slide out of the closet holding the doll. The scratching has moved into my veins. It’s in the backs of my knees. It has speed. The hallway is now a tunnel, a journey I have to endure.
I keep low—my hips want this—and my shoulder grazes the wall, and I can feel texture through the sweater as if I pressed my bare skin there. I stop in the kitchen and stand very still until the refrigerator motor cycles off, and the house is briefly a bowl of quiet with a thin high thread through it. Dawn traffic murmurs seven streets away. The faucet drips every eight seconds. I can count it with my blood. The fruit bowl stinks. The bananas are going off. Under that though, is the good smell; cereal dust in the cupboard corners, the heel of bread in its bag, the wooden spoon in the drying rack.
I tear open the bread bag and cram the heel into my mouth whole. My teeth want to meet through it with a nice crunch, only they don’t.
I spit it into the sink, and the lump sits there like a small dead thing.
I grab the spoon, put the bulbed end between my incisors and bite. The wood gives with a perfect, clean complaint. Thepressure spreads through my skull like a hand smoothing my hair. Relief floods everything.
I bite again, deeper this time. A flake of wood breaks loose and slides down my throat, scratch-scratching and that is ecstasy. I close my eyes, and I am not in a kitchen. I am in a tunnel mouth the exact shape of my body.
“Briar?” My mother’s voice from the living room turns my insides into needles.
I freeze. The doll in my arms is a small weight that pulls me back into the dark. My tongue flattens.
Quiet. I am quiet.
She goes on talking to my father, blathering on about something like vacation days. Silently I creep back to my room, knowing she does not see me.
My smell lifts and braids itself around the banister. I will deal with that later. Later is not real. Now is just the tunnel.
