WIP: Anathema Excerpt

Every once in a while I like to post sections of the novel I’m currently working on. This is a very early draft but thought I’d share with everyone anyway. Enjoy!

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Peachtree Sawyer lived with her mother and grandmother in a red-brick, white-clapboard single story home in northern Independence, MO. In summer the yard was patchy with dead grass and clumps of dirt but now all was covered in a gleaming white sheet of snow and ice. There was a single large oak tree in the center of the yard that was as enormous as it was frail-looking, its long skeletal fingers reaching towards the frozen, starry sky like a monster’s claw. She had lived in that house all her life. Her bedroom was the size of a walk-in closet, which was what the space had initially been intended for. It was right next to the laundry room and was probably meant to hold linens or vacuums or mops, other such cleaning supplies, but instead her mother had taken out all the shelving and installed a thin twin-sized mattress, like something a prisoner would sleep on, and viola, suddenly they had a three-bedroom house. Her grandmother had her own bedroom across the hall from her mother’s which, when Peachtree was younger, was where she would escape to if ever awoken by a nightmare or loneliness. Sometimes she still slept there when her grandmother wasn’t home, just because it was more comfortable and tended to stay warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than her own room did.

Peachtree worked the nightshift as a cashier at a 24-hour supermarket. It wasn’t her first job, but it’s the one she’d held the longest. Three years come May. She financially assisted her mother and grandmother. Her mother had much difficulty maintaining employment, and whenever they came up short for the month it was Peachtree’s responsibility to make up the difference, which sometimes was small, but often was quite large—half her paycheck or more.

The nearest bus stop was a little over two blocks away and she had to trudge through the crunchy snow the remaining distance to her front door. The first thing she noticed as she rounded the corner of her street and her house came into view was that every window was brightly illuminated and blaring out into the cold dark winter morning, reflecting off the gentle swirling descent of the still-falling snow, which had caked heavily on the roof, causing it to shimmer and sparkle in the fading moonlight. This was unusual. Normally by the time she got home the house was dark, her grandmother having already absconded to work and her mother, who also worked the night shift at a casino on the river, not yet home. The lights on meant her mother had probably not gone to work at all. Likely she had stayed up all night partying and had called in sick. With any luck she’d be passed out already and Peachtree wouldn’t have to see her.

The first thing Peachtree noticed when she came inside was the smell. It was a smell she vaguely recognized but couldn’t pinpoint. Some distant memory. A pungent, industrial cocktail of chemicals, some kind of cologne, maybe, mixed with liquor and sweat. It lay just beneath the scent of her mother’s Pall Malls. Her mother’s door was closed. Growing up the only time her mother ever kept her door closed was when she had a man over but her grandmother had long since stopped allowing her to have company and it had been a few years since the last time she had seen a man in the house. There were still times, less often now than when she was younger, when her mother would disappear for short stretches, shacked up somewhere. Most recently there was a man named Kravis she sometimes saw who lived in a trailer and sold methamphetamine. But Kravis never came by the house, not anymore. She didn’t even know if they were still together.

It wasn’t unusual for Peachtree to spend hours soaking in the bathtub when she got home from work in the morning. It was probably her most favorite thing to do. It just felt so good. She had many positive associations with the bathtub and the jarring squawk of the knobs and the rush of incoming water racing through the pipes and spilling into the tub never failed to cause pleasant, tingling sensations to flow through her. She undressed, peed and then sat there waiting for the tub to fill. She had long brown hair that she let hang loose and messy. Sometimes she put it in a ponytail but usually she just let it freefall. It was about a shade-and-a-half darker than her mother’s dirty blonde. She had never learned to shave, so her legs and underarms were hairy, her pubic area wild and shaggy and unkempt—she didn’t even trim. She saw no need. And as she never wore shorts or dresses or skirts, not even in the summer, there was no one on earth, except maybe her mother and grandmother, who were aware of how hirsute she was. Some days, in her more mordant moments, she looked upon her fleece as a kind of armor, and the thing it shielded—her—as a kind of early primitive humanoid transported to the present era. She was au naturel. Not many girls could say that, and she was proud of it, even if unwilling to show it off publicly. On other days, however, she felt abhorrent and distasteful, like some gross female effigy, and think no wonder I’ve never been laid before.

For at twenty years old she was still a virgin. Though she had recently decided she wouldn’t be much longer. There was a boy named Michael who worked as a pharmacy tech at the supermarket where she worked that had shown some interest, and after nearly eight months of him sweet talking (badgering, if she was honest about it) her to go out with him to anyplace he could think of—the movies, a museum, miniature golf—she had finally relented. She was going to go ice skating with him on Saturday, which was two days from now. Tanaya appeared even more thrilled about it than she was. Tanaya was also a cashier at the supermarket and fond of trying to set her up with boys she thought Peachtree would like. She was also fond of chastising her for being so damn stubborn by refusing to go out with any of them.

She could barely even remember how she and Michael had met. He worked days so they didn’t see much of each other. She was usually leaving as he was arriving, and it was in that small interval, at about seven o’clock each morning, or a little before, and only for a few minutes at a time, that they would banter with each other before heading their separate ways. He never failed to stop by the register to chat with her as she was closing out, even if just to say hello and ask how her night had been. Or he’d roll up out by the loading dock where she and Tanaya would be smoking to shoot the shit with them for a while. He was the inquisitive type, always asking her about herself, what she liked to do, the kinds of music she listened to, who her favorite Beatle was, if she had gone to see the new Freddy Krueger movie or the one where Brandon Lee had died, or Interview with the Vampire, whatever happened to be on his mind, and she would answer him succinctly (she almost never went to movies, wasn’t a big fan of The Beatles, though she was practically obsessed with David Bowie), and then he’d head to the pharmacy to open up and she would go home. Then for her birthday he had brought her a rose, which made her blush—no one had ever given her a flower before—and that’s what solidified her decision to go out with him.

“Oh. My. God,” Tanaya swooned. “That is so cute I could just about die.” Then, upon seeing the deadpan look Peachtree wore, she rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t be such a stick in the mud. It’s not like you have to make a lifetime commitment or anything. Just go out with him. If it doesn’t work out, so what? You can chalk it up to life experience. It’ll be good for you.”

He was a few years older than her, tall and slender and he wore his hair in a lengthy mop so that it covered his eyes and he was always sweeping it aside with the back of his hand. Which was kind of adorable, she had to admit. She also knew that he really had his life together. Much more than she did, anyway. He made more money than her and had his own place, a one-bedroom apartment not far from the supermarket. He was responsible and self-sufficient. Though she couldn’t help wondering what it said about him that he was interested in her. She had no delusions about herself. She was not attractive, and she was certain he could do better for himself.

It was as she was sitting there on the toilet waiting for the tub to fill that she began to hear what sounded like a cat mewling. It started far away and then seemed to undulate towards her in long slow waves, a kind of low moan, or wail, hovering somewhere beneath the sound of the cascading water. At first she thought it was a trick of her imagination. She bent over and shut the water off so she could hear better and sure enough, there it was. It was coming through the wall behind her, where her mother’s bedroom was. A familiar sound she had not heard in years, at least since her grandmother stopped allowing her mother to bring home her lovers. An icy chill cut through her and she shivered. She turned the faucet back on, testing its temperature on her hand.

The water was scalding as she lowered herself into it. She wore a small silver necklace with a razorblade on it and in the tub is where she would remove it and make swift, lacerating cuts on the backs of her thighs or calves, or way up beneath her upper arms, near her armpits. She enjoyed watching the bright red strawberry blood swirl around in the water. She’d add some bubbles and stir it with her fingers until the water became a faint pink froth and then she’d lie back with her knees up relishing the throbbing, tingly, stinging sensation where she had injured herself. She had been performing acts of self-mutilation since she was eleven years old and she had the scars and scabs all over herself to prove it, if ever such evidence became necessary. She was very careful to keep covered, which was part of the thrill. It made her feel like some kind of superhero. Like she possessed a power no one else knew about—the ability to withstand deep, physical pain. In truth, however, there was no pain to withstand. She had ceased feeling it as pain a long time ago. It was something else now. Something deeper and more acute, more resonant.

Peachtree had just lifted her right knee to her chest, holding it there with her left arm while she slipped the blade beneath the torrid water to make the first cut of the morning when the door flew open and in burst a stark-naked man still at half-mast who was working to unroll a slimy condom from himself. When he saw her he froze, both thumbs tucked beneath the rim of the rubber, the end of which hung off him heavy with his white gunk. Peachtree sat up so fast, yanking the curtain closed, that nearly a quarter of the water in the bathtub went sloshing onto the tile floor.

There was a moment of quiet that felt like it lasted for eons, and then she heard the man call her name. “Peachtree?” he said.

“Can you get out, please?” she asked, more politely than the situation warranted.

She sat listening, her arms wrapped around both legs so her knees were pressed up against her chest. She still pinched the razorblade between her fingers.

“Your momma didn’t tell me you’d be coming home.”

“Wonder how that might’ve slipped her mind.”

She peeked around the edge of the shower curtain. “Do you mind?” Then she snapped the curtain shut again. She could hear him finish slipping off the condom and plopping it in the toilet, which he then flushed, before backing out of the room and shutting the door.

She emerged from the bathroom wearing only a towel, as she hadn’t thought there would be any need to put on her PJs until she was back in her bedroom. To get to her bedroom, however, she had to pass through the kitchen, and that’s where Waylon was sitting, fully dressed now in jeans and a white t-shirt, sipping from a cup of instant coffee, the container for which sat behind him on the counter with a measuring spoon sticking out of it.

“When did you get here?”

“A few hours ago.” He tried forcing a smile, but it came across more like a horse’s grimace. He moved to get up and come towards her but she took a sudden, instinctive step back so he stayed sitting. A sheepish look crossed his face. “I’m sorry about that in there.”

Lindsey appeared behind him bending over to throw her arms around his neck and shoulders. “Peachtree, look who it is!” She was sans cigarette, which was noteworthy. If her mother wasn’t actively smoking she was either putting out her last one or lighting one afresh. Just a few hours, and already he was having his effect on her.

Peachtree knew he hated cigarettes. One of her earliest memories was sitting across from him in a diner when she was probably four. He never let her mother sit in the smoking section—this was back when restaurants had smoking sections—because he didn’t want her blowing cigarette smoke in his face or ash onto his food while he was trying to eat. So when she finished she excused herself to take her cigarette outside. Her father said to her, “It’s a filthy habit. Don’t ever start it. Promise me that. Once you get hooked it’s almost impossible to stop. Makes your breath and hair smell bad. Turns your skin yellow. Your lungs black. It’s a filthy, nasty, no-good habit.”

“Then why does she do it?” she’d asked in her four-year-old way.

“Your mother has what is known as an addictive personality,” he’d said. “Once she starts something, she can’t usually stop doing it. Unless someone makes her.”

“So why don’t you make her?”

“I am working on it. Come on now. Finish your toast.”

She remembered that day so clearly because it was the first time she ever met her father. It was also the time that ended with a black eye and the deep wound that probably needed stitches but never got any. You could still kind of see the scar beneath the tail of her left eyebrow.

“We’ve met,” Peachtree said. “I’m going to get dressed.”

“Don’t take too long.”

She was back in the kitchen a half-hour later.

Lindsey was sitting on Waylon’s lap now but swiveled around him so she could take a seat at the table. She exuded suave satisfaction. “Mind making me a cup of Joe, honey?”

Peachtree got another cup from the cupboard and started pouring the water from the pitcher at the counter but realized it was lukewarm, which wouldn’t do. Her mother liked her coffee scalding. So she set it to boil and returned to the table where she sat on the other side of her mother, across from Waylon.

Peachtree knew that Waylon and her mother had been chatting on the phone again after several years without speaking but she never expected to see him again, despite her mother’s insistence that one day he would return for good. She had been telling that story since Peachtree was barely old enough to make memories. There were long periods of silence betweentimes. But inevitably the day would come where he’d call her up on the telephone to again profess his love and promise her that one day, it could be any day now, he would return and they would be together forever. Peachtree never took these promises seriously whenever her mother told her about them, which was often. More often, anyway, than his rare phone calls should have led her to believe. The sticking point was always his other family. He couldn’t leave them, no matter how much he wanted to. It would be impossible, he told her. Utterly impossible. His father wouldn’t stand for it. Never during that time, in all the years Peachtree had been alive, did he ever, even once, ask her mother to pass the phone to her. Not to say hi or ask how school was going or to say I love you and am thinking about you. Though Waylon and her mother may have held an unrelenting passion for one another, it did not extend to her. Despite her very existence representing its earliest fruit.

Waylon was still looking stunned. Like he’d stuck his finger into an electrical socket. Finally he looked at Lindsey. “I mean she looks exactly, I mean exactly like you did, angel, on the day we met. It’s incredible.”

“Are you trying to insult me?” Lindsey said. She reached out and grabbed Peachtree by the hair so quickly there was no time to react, shaking her head around. “This ugly thing?” She laughed like she thought she was being hilarious. “If it wasn’t me she slid out of I never woulda taken her for mine. Yours, maybe. But certainly not mine. Oh come on don’t look at me like that, Peachtree, I’m only joshin ya. She’s so goddamned sensitive.”

Lindsey let go of her and Peachtree smoothed out her hair with her hand.

“How old are you now, anyway?”

“Twenty.”

“Go on now,” Lindsey said. “Don’t be rude. Give your daddy a hug.”

She looked at the two of them briefly then got up and rounded the table behind her mother and bent down to put her arms around her farther where he sat. When she tried to stand straight again, he held her there by the back of the neck, running his claw hand over her cheek, his thumb tracing patterns on her skin before snaking around the back of her head to pull her into him again. He stood to embrace her more fully. The wiry patch of hair sticking out the top of his t-shirt made a mess of her cheek, scratching and tearing at it like steel wool. She made no additional effort to return the gesture.

“God I’ve missed you.”

He smelled like sweat and pussy. The sound of the teapot whistling gave her the excuse she needed to shimmy out of his grasp. “You want another one too?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“One scoop or two?”

“Excuse me?”

“You like it strong or weak?”

“Strong.”

“Milk? Sugar?”

“Black.”

She made both cups and set them on the table alongside one another. Then she grabbed the sugar and a bottle of milk from the fridge for her mother. Rather than sit back down she chose to light a cigarette and stay leaning against the counter. She smoked Camels herself, not because she liked them more than other brands but because her mother hated them, so wouldn’t swoop in and try to steal them whenever she was out of her own cigarettes.

“When did you start smoking?” he asked

It was just the reaction she’d been hoping for. “A while ago.”

Her first time meeting her father was also her first time staying in a motel. She remembered that night with such crystal clarity it was almost like a movie in her mind that she could unspool and respool frame by frame. There was only one large bed but the motel had provided a cot for her. She wanted to sleep on the bed with Lindsey and Waylon but they wouldn’t let her. After they thought she was asleep she saw why. She kept trying to figure which of them was the aggressor and which the aggressed—who was trying to defend him/herself from whom. For it did appear a contest of wills. One would seem to be winning, then the other would ascend and gain the upper hand. At the end they both behaved as though they were dying. A mutually defeated duo, their limbs all bound up and entwined like a dozen venomous snakes battling to the death. That, anyway, was how she had experienced it. She had watched the whole writhing, sweaty, tangled mess and for weeks afterwards, anytime she was hovering in that place between sleep and wakefulness, it would creep back into her consciousness to become the raw ingredients of nightmares. She would wake in fear sweating and panting.

Waylon wasn’t like the other men her mother hung around with. Even at four she recognized that. They spent almost an entire day together before that night in the motel. She didn’t understand what it meant, that he was her father, because how could he be her father if she had never laid eyes on him before? She kept staring at his disfigured hand. It didn’t look like a hand at all, but a claw, like what you would find on the end of a lobster.

After Waylon left that first time her mother was so angry she ripped the telephone out of the motel room wall and smacked her with it, which was how she’d ended up with the black eye and the cut on her eyebrow. She remembered the cut most because it had bled so profusely that for a while in her left eye all she could see was liquid red. She never understood why her mother blamed her for her father leaving again but she suspected it had something to do with what she had witnessed in the motel room the night before. When they’d gone to breakfast the following morning Peachtree would not look at or speak to Waylon or her mother. She found a spot in front of her slightly below her line of sight and she fixed her vision there and would not look anywhere else. When her mother tried to force her to look up at her she had thrown a fit, screaming and kicking and tossing her head around and shortly after that Waylon took off and she got beat with the telephone and that’s about all she remembered about that.

She had seen him only one time since, when she was nine. By then she had grown afraid of him. She wanted him to forgive her for witnessing what he had done with her mother in that motel room five years before but wasn’t sure how to broach the topic. She had never forgotten it. If anything the memory had grown more vivid with age. They spent a week together, maybe ten days, on the road. She remembered riding to the top of the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis, to the observation deck. She had never been so frightened. Her mother kept trying to pry her eyes open with her fingers to force her to take in the view, but she wouldn’t do it. Being so high made her dizzy. She crouched low to the ground and held onto the wall, fearful a gust of wind or some other type of malfeasance would knock the thin-looking arch onto its side and send them all tumbling to the ground below. She began crying and telling him she was sorry in great big weeping gasps, as if he’d have any notion what she was trying to apologize for. Her mother tried pulling her up by the arm, which made her press her weight more fully into the wall until all the other tourists were staring at them and the scene she was causing. Eventually Waylon had knelt on the floor with her and held her to him. He spoke in gentle, crooning tones about how the Arch was the tallest stainless-steel monument in the world. An architectural marvel, he’d said. Its foundation went twenty feet into the bedrock. Twenty feet! Imagine that. That’s like five of you, all stacked one on top of the other. That’s what gives it its support. It’s earthquake resistant. It’s designed to sway. It can withstand high winds. If I promise to hold you tight, will you look? It’s perfectly safe. I’ll hold you up to the window. What do you say? Eventually she acquiesced. Waylon held her up to the little rectangular window and she looked first with one eye and then the other, her palms and underarms sweating. She wanted more than anything to exhibit bravery, to make him proud, to cause him to forget about how he had left her mother because she’d had the audacity to spy on them in their most secret moment, but she couldn’t find it in herself. When he lifted her up she froze, became like a plank of wood in his hands, utterly terrified by how high they were, gritting her teeth to prevent herself from screaming, while tiny mouse-noises escaped her throat, threatening to become screams, but thankfully they never did. She just wanted to get out of there.

Then that afternoon he went to a payphone to make a call and that was the last time she ever saw him. They had to take an Amtrak back to Kansas City, alone, where her grandmother picked them up from the station.

“You’ve got to eat something,” Waylon was saying now. “You’re too skinny. Want me to make you some breakfast? Ain’t anyone around here feeding you?”

“I had a pastry from the bakery. After I got off.”

“You working at a bakery?”

“A grocery store.”

“Graveyard shift?”

“Five nights a week.”

“Waylon needs a job. I told him ain’t hardly nobody hiring.”

“My job’s hiring.”

Lindsey reached for Waylon’s fingertips so she could draw herself towards him, taking up position on his lap again. She spoke into Waylon’s ear. “You hear that, honey? Maybe you should go over there later and fill out an application.” Then to Peachtree. “You think you could help him get on over there?”

“Why can’t you get him a job at the casino? Surely he can wash dishes.”

“They only hire illegals for that. The supermarket would be more his speed, anyway, if I do say so myself. Which I do.”

Waylon wasn’t even listening. He was still just staring at her like she was some rare precious jewel, or like he was afraid that if he took his eyes off her she would disappear completely. “My god. I cannot get over how much you look like your mother. I’ll bet you have a lot of boyfriends, huh? You break a lot of hearts, little girl?”

“No.”

“She ain’t got no social life,” Lindsey said. “Just likes to sit alone in her room listening to music or cutting up her skin in the bathtub. You should see it. Has cuts all up and down her arms and legs like some sort of suicide case.”

Her mother had been trying to make a joke out of it but Waylon was looking at her very seriously. “Now why on earth would you do that?”

“Feels good, I guess.”

“Can I see?”

She scoffed. “No. So how long you planning to stick around for?”

“This time I’m staying.”

“What about your real family?”

“You are my real family.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’re divorcing.”

“Why?”

“It was time. You’re not happy?”

“What’s grandma have to say about all this?”

“She’s not happy.”

“Where is she?”

“At work. Where else? She’ll get over it.”

Peachtree offered up that dead-eyed, deadpanned stare she’d so perfected, looking from one to the other and back again. She put her cigarette out in the sink. “I’m tired,” she said, turning her back on both of them. “I’m going to bed.”

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