Possession Rot

This possession is already wearing out. I know because the lymph nodes in her neck swell bulbous under her fake tan, my temporary home in her fleshy nail beds curling inward, black and rotten and permanent. No doctor or manicure will be able to heal them. Never let it be said I don’t leave my mark. I’ve done this in a hundred different bodies, and I’ll do it in a hundred more.

I’m not quite done with her yet, though. The MLM housewives like this one are the easiest to take because their bodies are infinitely pliable. They have to be for all the lies they spool out on a daily basis, voices dripping with sour meandering notes of toxic positivity that rise or lower in pitch depending on what’s trending. Add the sweetness of a fox’s magic, and you have the perfect den for possession. A body needs a layer of lies. I’m just doing them a favor by adding another layer. Yes, I make her say, curled in her throat, drinking this smoothie twice a day will cure your stomach cancer. Yes, I make her say, gnawing on the optic nerve of her left eye, causing the lid to twitch maniacally, punctuating her enthusiasm, you’ll be making 6K more a month, easy peasy, you got this, Erin! It’s a fucking riot.

This one, Brittany, she’s special, so I go a little sweet and peppy on her layer. It didn’t take long to find Brittany once I knew where to look. I’d recognized the green and white decal on her car as I watched her drive away from her unforgivable crime. I’d worn through enough MLM suckers to know exactly who to possess to find her: the perky, overly personable, doe-eyed Janette. Poor Janette, but also thank you, Janette. I wrung her dry and abandoned her in the city’s least reputable rehab center. Before I left, I scuttled around in her booze-addled mind until I sniffed out the memory of that car, the tread of its horrible tires, the decal on the back window, the driver’s face, her name, her house, her bedroom. Once again, thank you, Janette.

The night I took Brittany, I almost crawled into her breast, but I’ve no taste for silicone, so I burrowed my lithe body and nine tails under her fingernails instead, gagging on the acrid fumes of sky-blue nail polish. Worth it. Her right thumb is rather cozy, joint linings warm with the pink beginnings of rheumatoid arthritis. But I can’t get too comfortable. This possession is different, sharper with revenge. I’m pulling out all the tricks, all the embarrassments humans latch onto and can never forget. I’ll ostracize her so thoroughly, her family and friends will only remember her antics and not her death, not who she was before. Oh, her death. That’s going to be fun.

But first, a thorough dose of humiliation. On Sunday in church, I squeezed my tails around her bladder and urinated, soaking her daffodil-yellow skirt. Really, that horrid color gave me the idea. I massaged her throat into a reedy giggle that cut through the pastor’s sermon and shot a toothy grin at the president of the neighborhood association two pews down for good measure. Worth it. Brittany’s husband turned red at my blatant flirting and tried to seduce me that night, even got out a can of whipping cream and a blindfold. I snapped my teeth playfully at him and threatened to bite his cock off. He gave up real quick. Thank the gods. Human sex is weird.

On Tuesday I’m on my knees in front of the couch scooping out dust bunnies with syrup-drenched palms when a teenage girl inches her way inside, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder, eyes wide and wary as a deer’s on the side of the road, debating whether or not to cross. “Uh… Mom?”

I’m so startled I shove the dust bunnies in my mouth. Mom. Fuck. I should’ve known my first day here when I saw the pink door on the second floor and shied away from it. The daughter watches me chew for a moment before fleeing up the stairs, no doubt through that pink door. Inside her mental prison, Brittany whimpers. She tries to shove the daughter’s name into me, but I black it out, I rotten it out of her ears and pores and mind, I don’t want to know, and she deserves to forget.

After I merrily served steamed potholders slathered in shaving cream for dinner, the husband takes the daughter aside and blazes out the usual diatribes: crazy, unhinged, out of her mind, bonkers, blah blah. Predictably blames his wife’s mental demise on the MLM job, on the daughter’s week-long suspension last fall. I snigger and whoop like a monkey from the bedroom the whole time, but I can’t stop my tails from trembling. I spend a restless night rooting around Brittany’s memories, just barely toeing the surface of her daughter-shaped lake of memories. I can’t get in too deep. I just need to know a little more about her. What food she likes, what movies she watches, what she’s afraid of. That’s all.

The daughter gets the guts to approach me the following afternoon. That deer look is back in her eyes as she edges into the bathroom where I’m drawing cartoon penises on the mirror with Chanel lipstick. I’ve decided to only look at her askance; it’s better that way. I pull my burgundy lips back in a faux polite housewife smile. “Oh, hey, wanna draw?”

Her eyes fall on my wet stockings. “Did you go somewhere?”

“Yeah, I went to terrorize Mrs. Deerborn’s dog! I hate dogs. I got it to jump into the pool and the furry bastard almost drowned. Very fetch. Haha, fetch! Like in that movie you love, what is it, Mean Girls? Mrs. Deerborn caught me and saved the dog, unfortunately. Not very fetch. She’s in my burn book, and so is Mrs. Deerborn’s dog, and you—”

“Okay, okay, I get it! Oh my God!”

I stick my tongue out and drag the lipstick down the center. “No God here! No God at all anywhere. Sorry.”

The daughter’s eyes bug out. “It’s the MLM hustle that’s making you act like this, right? I told you not to do that, it’s a pyramid scheme, everyone knows that!” A frown wrinkles her skin. “Wait, you’re not still depressed about killing that fox, are you? Ugh, Mom, you gotta get over it, there was nothing you could have done. If you’d swerved to avoid hitting it, you would’ve hit a tree or gotten banged up in a ditch or—”

I throw the lipstick at her face. It leaves a garish red streak on her flushed cheek, but it’s not red enough. It’s nothing, but she’s stunned anyways, as if I’d actually cut her, bled her, scarred her. Gods, if only I were that cruel.

The daughter swears, throws the lipstick in the sink, then huffs and leaves. I can’t do anything but stand there. Even Brittany, who usually chatters and pleads whenever her daughter is near, is quiet in her prison. I’m trembling. The broken lipstick in the faucet glares at me. The cartoon penises glare at me. Everything but the skin I wear seems to glower and chastise me. It just had to be the daughter, didn’t it. It would be easier if I knew there was a fox cackling in her young mind, but there isn’t. I’m the only fox here.

I place a hand over Brittany’s heart. This uppity walking sack of saturated flesh hit and killed my kit. She was right behind me, I swear. I checked the road both ways before darting across, I swear. I had to carry her crushed body off the road, all the way back to our den where I buried her, home as grave. A saving grace: she died instantly. But I’ll never be rid of the rubber and blood and shit, the soft scrape of her intestines dragging through dirt and leaves. There’s still dirt caked in my pads from digging, digging, heavy as the mourning. Her absence breathes in me, in the empty den behind my ribs, reflected now in this mirror in this bitch’s house. I am many things, but I’m no longer a mother.

The low unexpected whine keening from my throat — Brittany’s throat — shutters that grief. No. I wrap a hand around my throat and squeeze, glaring in the mirror. No, Brittany, you don’t get to be guilty. It was early dusk, there was enough light, you saw us crossing the road, but you didn’t slow down. You were so excited to be presenting at that MLM conference, you just had to be there early. You needed the attention, the praise, the validation that you were helping people, not conning them. You were going too fast and you know it.

Her throat works against my palm. She gurgles, “I know, I’m sorry.”

I clap a hand over my mouth and smother her back into her prison. That night I knead my misery into once plump nail beds, all that rubber and blood and shit I carry with me. I slather, I am raw and tired, so tired, with milk unfit for even a ghost. Dragging this lunacy out in this woman’s life won’t bring my kit back. I know this, and yet the next morning I stick her hair curlers and lip balms down the toilet. I pour vegetable oil into her husband’s sock drawer. I bury expired smoothie product in the flower beds lining the driveway.

I also watch Mean Girls with the daughter. I cause chaos everywhere but in her room. I paint her nails a murderous shade of red. We make pie with blackberries picked from the overgrown patch in the cul-de-sac, a welcome thorny intrusion even this high-end suburban neighborhood can’t sneer at, because gods, those berries are good, and my kit loved blackberries. I am stalling. It’s so nice having a daughter again.

But the more time I spend with her, the more desperate Brittany grows. She’s figured out where I am and is trying to exorcise me. She bites her nails in her sleep, veneers gnawing, blood settling in the hieroglyphic grooves of her chapped lips, and she’s so close. I could let her bite me out, I really could, let her clamp those pearly whites around one of my tails and pull. Or I could leave my cozy home under her right thumbnail and venture up, up, until I’m squeezing into her mind, sniffing past motivational quotes, social media posting schedules, inventory lists, until I come across the small black lozenge of despair where the guilt shaped like my dead kit is. I know she’s there. I’m feeling her contours now while the daughter and I pick blackberries for more pie.

Our fingers brush, and she stills. Does she know? Can she sense I’m here? Her throat works, and she speaks in a hoarse whisper, some long-buried fear cresting and spilling out of her. “Mom, can you stop acting possessed, please?”

My hand spasms, crushes the berries, a blood that isn’t mine but might as well be threading through the lines on my palm.

“Dad’s serious about sending you away to some mental hospital. I overheard him on the phone with Dr. Michaels. I know you’re still normal in there. You have your… what’s the word, lucid? Yeah, your lucid moments. See, we’re picking berries! That’s normal, Mom. You can be that again.”

I’ve seen this tableau before in past possessions, before I was a mother, but it’s different this time. A daughter shouldn’t have to beg her mother to act like a mother. I open my hand, let the crushed berries glide wetly off my palm and plop to the dusty asphalt. It’s the sanest thing I’ve done in weeks.

I look at her, really look at her. She’s beautiful. This body is layer upon layer of lies, but the truth snakes through anyways: she would remember the death more than the antics. She would grieve, she would scar, she would carry a mother-shaped guilt for the rest of her life.

A sob escapes me; is it mine, or Brittany’s? Perhaps both. I almost say, I don’t ever want to know your name, yet I wish you were mine, really mine, except I don’t have room in my mind for another daughter-shaped guilt. Unless.

In her prison Brittany is screaming, shaking, pleading, no no please, I’ll do anything, not my baby girl. Well, Brittany, I’ll do anything. Not my baby girl.

“Oh, baby girl.”

The daughter flinches. This must be an endearment she’s never heard before. It scares her. It scares me. Yet she leans into my touch when I raise a hand, the hand covered in blackberry blood, the hand already showing signs of possession rot, and rest it on her bare shoulder, a shoulder that will bear a twin rot in a week’s time. “I’m not going anywhere.”

***

Alyssa Pearl Fusek is a freelance writer and aspiring Japanese-to-English translator currently haunting the Pacific Northwest. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her work has appeared in Ghost Parachute, Noble/Gas Qtrly, and Coffin Bell Journal. You can follow her on Twitter at @apearlwrites