The Staircase in the Woods

Words hurt as bad as a fist. Maybe worse. Because a fist, maybe you excuse that as oh, he couldn’t help it, he’s just an animal, a primate, his blood was up. But someone cuts you with words? Calls you names, tells you how little they think of you? That bypasses all your armor. A razor sliding across the meat of your heart.

Friendship is like a house,” Lore finally managed to say, Owen’s head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness, too. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.

C’mon, please.” Lore shook her head. “He always was what he was, and he told us from the beginning. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Isn’t that the saying? You knew who he was and who you were voting for. You probably voted for him the other times, too, you just won’t say it out loud. You took the hat off, oooh, but I bet you still own it. If I squint, I can still see it on your head.” She rolled her eyes. “Half of America put the hat on and took the mask off and that was that, and that’s where we’re at now.

Dreams curdling fast into nightmares. It's where home stops being where the heart is. Home is where the hurt is. Where the horror lives. Home becomes another name for that place where monsters go to hide and do their terrible work.

whole thing about sticks and stones was a lie. Words hurt as bad as a fist. Maybe worse. Because a fist, maybe you excuse that as oh, he couldn’t help it, he’s just an animal, a primate, his blood was up. But someone cuts you with words? Calls you names, tells you how little they think of you? That bypasses all your armor. A razor sliding across the meat of your heart.

Her mind felt calm. That, strangely, was how Lore knew things were really truly fucked—she wasn’t so great navigating her regular life, but she was aces in a crisis. The worse things got, the sharper and colder she became in response.

A good night. Though one whose memory was already fading, like the taste of dessert lost to a sip of water. That’s how it goes. Nothing lasts, Lore thought.

Half of America put the hat on and took the mask off and that was that, and that’s where we’re at now.

March 1995, ninth grade. Hamish has a group of kids who bully him every day—metalheads, mostly, not the cool metalheads who listen to Metallica and Anthrax and Gumdropper, but the shitty heavy heavy metalheads who liked Cannibal Corpse and Slayer.

Life makes life, a fungal efflorescence of existence begetting existence.

How fucked is it that I didn't even like myself enough to hate him for what he did to me?

A father straight out of the 1950s with the Ronald Reagan hair and the pipe in his mouth, his salmon pants & trim cardigan spattered in the blood of his family.

Those who'd perished under the weight of a difficult & unloved life.

Her mental teeth worked every problem like gristle, at the cost of rest.

Like a call & response inside his own mind, the spiraling thoughts like a buzzsaw, chewing into his sanity.

Were these his thoughts? Were they his father's words? Had they buried themselves in his dirt so long ago that the plants that grew there felt like they were part of his garden instead of the invasive root and choking vine?

It pulsed & flickered with images: scenes of war, of White House insurrection, of rallies & red hats, of the man with the face like a melting citronella candle, of transgender women made to look demonic, of a border wall going up, of starving migrants in a sun-fucked desert, of a big red X flashing cartoonishly over a vaccine needle, of red-cheeked, froth-mouthed white men thrusting tiki torches forward into the dark night as if to burn away anything that wasn't white and bright like them.

The Blood Spatter Music Room, teenager playing an electric guitar, fingers ruined & bloody, the blood spraying with every power chord, rock on, kid.

And that's when [he] hit him. At the end of his fist rode a world of resentment.

I'd stare in those mirrors & I'd say the worst things to myself. Things you'd never say to your worst enemy, man.

But that, he supposed, was what it meant to be human. To exist in constant opposition to yourself, you as your very best friend at the exact same time you were your own worst enemy. Oh, how stupid it was to be a person.

Like a bad hangover dissolved by a good cup of coffee & a little sunlight. That's what this place felt like. Sunlight.

A spark of destruction lit in the darkness of her wandering mind.

Strings of flesh & blood hung between his cratered visage and the jungle wallpaper, like a cheese pull from pizza, sticky with marinara.

His mental state had begun to dissolve: a sandcastle under assault by the steady drumbeat of the sea. Except in this case, the sea was a nightmare tide, corrosive & foul.

His children were mysteries to him. They were like those Russian nesting dolls except he never saw the smaller dolls inside, only the one on the outside. The one they showed to the world. He never bothered looking deeper.

Hell is not a place, or a presence. Hell is an absence.

Another bedroom, a boy's bedroom out of the fifties with faded teal walls and a bed made up with rocket ship sheets, had a Scouts uniform laid out on the floor, and on the ceiling above it, a swinging noose made from clothesline.

He found himself wandering the ever-shifting rooms of this place, but they were half-formless, bubbling & melting even as he passed through them, like the sloppy hallucinations of so-called artificial intelligence.