BODY/HORROR

I wrote the story because I didn’t know where else to hide the bodies. My insides are dusted with the crushed-up bones of girls, and the coating is getting too thick. Every time I breathe I choke. Girlbones caught on the roof of my mouth like powdered sugar. I don’t know how to carry all that death in me every day, in line at the grocery store reeking of rotted flesh, so I decided to write a story where I could keep them locked up in the little white spaces between the words, a girl graveyard.

Maybe I could write my way to their killer, too, find out who fed them to me like pills to a cat, clamping my mouth closed and stroking my throat with their hand to make it go down easy. So I wrote the story, and the story was this:

A little girl about ten or eleven is scouring the Hallmark store for the perfect stuffed animal. She’s verging on too old for Webkinz, but she can't resist their sewn-on smiles and the way you can enter a code on your computer and watch the pixelated version of your new friend jump on a trampoline or try on a funny hat. She is of the age where the idea of being a grown-up sounds nice, but when no one is looking she clutches her toys a little tighter. So, she looks them over: the hippos, the ducks, the cats (cats are her favorite) and tries to pick one to take home.

Buried in the rack, though, somewhere she doesn’t see, is something more alive than cotton. The monster in the rack follows her with its eyes, watches her ruffle her awkward brown bowl cut, listens to the slap of her cheap plastic flip-flops on the linoleum. She is wearing a shirt she made herself, a white Hanes undershirt from Walmart sticky with puffy paint polka dots, pulled tightly over her plump kid-fat belly. The monster looks at her and knows she sits alone on the bench at recess, or else looks around the perimeter of the yard for rocks to take home, bugs to keep in pencil sharpeners with a few blades of grass. She’s so embarrassing, this little girl with her buck teeth and her unfunny jokes and piles of young adult fantasy series aimed at young boys, Artemis Fowl and Alex Rider and Pendragon. The monster looks at her holding a grey, fuzzy cat in her arms and knows she will never be able to sleep without hugging a stuffed animal to her chest, sees the tracks the tears will make down her chubby cheeks when she cries too many times in front of too many people.

A hand shoots out from the rack, clothed in a tattered robe, and grabs the young girl's neck like she’s one of those toys. The fingers around her throat are bleeding at the cuticles where the monster has chewed them, in nervousness or anticipation. Up against the soft cloth of the cats and hippos and ducks, the hand pulls her in and thrusts a knife into her back. The blood leaking out looks at first like another puffy paint spot on her white shirt, but soon it’s too big, swallowing the other spots, seeping onto the merchandise around her.

By the time her mother finds her staining all the cotton a deep crimson and lets out the kind of ear-splitting scream they pay big bucks for in Hollywood, the monster has already slipped through the glass entryway into the great unknown of the pleasant, suburban shopping mall. The monster gets by unnoticed as the commotion gathers and grows, almost drowning out whatever top 40 track the speakers are blasting in the hopes of getting people to shell out more cash from their wallets.

The thick metal shutters clang definitively as they close off every exit to the mall. Like a bad murder mystery dinner, no one can leave until the identity of the killer is revealed. It’s somewhere in the mall, hidden amongst the price tags and the kiosks selling hair straighteners and expensive lotions. Somewhere in the sterile hallways overrun with rowdy teens and middle aged-moms clutching their Starbucks cappuccinos, the monster lurks.

A girl freshly fifteen, with a button nose not unlike the one on the face of the girl lying dead in the Hallmark store, is one such teen, having her run of the mall. She doesn’t know it, but she belongs to the last mall generation—the last era of kids to grow up in food courts, to learn what a vibrator is during a nervous giggling trip through Spencer’s, to negotiate identity through Hot Topic tees—before online shopping would take over, leaving malls dead and crumbling all over America like the body of the girl stabbed straight through the back. But this girl doesn’t know that, she only knows that her mom dropped her off here so it’s Emily’s mom’s turn to pick them up in a few hours in her big blue minivan, that she has a crisp $20 to spend on some lacy underwear her mother would never let her buy.

Or, at least that was her plan before the murder. Now, she is listening as a grainy, distorted voice booms through the speakers, asking everyone to remain calm. Except no one is remaining calm; everyone is running around with their shopping bags cutting into their arms and bumping the people next to them, straining to try and lift the metal shutters and escape. Emily and the girl watch in awe, the metallic Sephora eyeliner testers still gripped in their hands. They pocket the eyeliner, deciding now is as good a time as any to shoplift, and make their way out into the chaos, a perfectly made-up woman with false eyelashes and a bad attitude locking the door solemnly behind them.

The monster looks on from behind a kiosk advertising customizable phone cases as the girl starts to cry. She’s preppier than the monster’s last victim, wearing a too-tight Abercrombie tee-shirt and skinny jeans. Orange stains from her tanning lotion litter her white zip-up hoodie, matching her tinted orange face. Her hair is packed with so many highlights its nearly white-blonde on the top, though her natural chestnut brown peaks out from the bottom, and it's straightened to high hell, lying like a stiff board over her shoulders and parted so deep to one side that it’s almost a comb-over.

Thick rings of eyeliner circle the whole perimeter of her eyes, giving her just enough of an edge to clash with the rest of her appearance. The monster looks at her and knows she is a bad actor, donning the Popular Girl’s clothes even though she is not popular, even though she’d rather be wearing her neon orange skinny jeans and pop punk band tee, but she’s too chicken shit. The monster hates the Preppy Girl the second it sees her, trailing that sludge of teenage desperation to be liked behind her like a slug. Disgusting. Pathetic.

The Preppy Girl’s phone rings, and she shuffles around in her purse until she retrieves her slider phone with the lime green stripes that still makes a grating noise when she slides it up to reveal the keyboard, grits of sand stuck in it from when her friends buried it as prank once. She has a text message from an unknown number. She wonders, briefly, if it might be from her crush, though she realizes it’s silly to think of Jake from science class and his teasing jeers at a time like this, when she’s trapped in the mall with a murderer. About to get killed and never been kissed, she thinks ruefully as she opens the message that isn’t from Jake. When she opens it, a creepy piano tune blares from her phone speakers, one she recognizes from the cursed chain messages she’s always getting, forward to ten friends or you’ll die in your sleep, and not from the horror movie that made the song famous in the first place. Preppy Girl doesn’t watch horror movies; even the chain messages sometimes keep her up at night. The monster is right—she’s chicken shit.

She reads the text to Emily, throat already clamping closed around a growing sob—

I wonder if your insides are as orange as your outsides. I wonder if you are so hungry for love that you will let me cut you up, just to tell you that you look pretty with blood on your face.

Just across the way, through the fake plastic trees and fountain glittering with wishing pennies, another girl with the same nose is stumbling out of Barnes and Noble. She spots Preppy Girl and a shiver of recognition and hatred crawls up her spine. She used to be like her, desperate and cloying for attention, to be seen as beautiful, to draw the eyes of the old men on the street, but she knew better now. Now she was Exceptional, different—older, almost eighteen. She had learned she would never win at the pretty game, so she placed all her bets on the smart game instead. Chopping off her hair above her shoulders, close to her ears but long and floppy on top, she grew back in her natural brown and let the curls form. She wears glasses but not makeup or bras, just XL graphic tees and Goodwill flannels and knock-off Doc Martens. The monster takes one look at her and knows she thinks she is better than the other girls, wiser and less shallow, when really she has only taken the same insecurities and shaped them in a different way. She stinks of desire, too, but just a new flavor. Disgusting. Pathetic. The monster thinks the same thing when he looks at Exceptional Girl as Exceptional Girl thinks when she looks at Preppy Girl.

Exceptional Girl sits down at a table by the fountain and takes out her new book (Murakami, of course), determined to show just how unbothered she is by this whole murder business. In reality, she can feel the terror straight down the marrow of her bones, but she is soothed by the thought of someone seeing her and thinking of her as calm and collected and into surreal existentialist literature. Someone is watching her, but not in the way she thinks. When she flips open her copy of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, something other than her receipt tumbles onto the shiny mall tile.

She can tell it’s an omen before she even picks it up—it looks so prophetic lying on the ground, folded and discolored with age even though the book was brand new. Like a misplaced relic. The second her fingers brush the paper to pick it up a surge of nausea hits her, like she’s in a boat that has just pitched forward over the top of a massive wave. She thinks about kicking it into the fountain, resuming her reading, but somehow the idea of not knowing what horrible thing waits for her is worse than the horrible thing itself. So, she brings it up to her lap, gently unfolds it, looks.

The monster can see every drop of blood drain from her face, leaving her already pale skin looking even more like alabaster. This is one of the monster’s favorite parts—watching the fear take over, the spirit faltering like a flickering lightbulb—second only to the feeling it gets when it finally extinguishes a pathetic girl and goes calm like water settling after a splash. The girl is looking at a photo of herself in the book stacks, brow furrowed over the same book she now holds in her lap; it must have been taken no more than 20 minutes ago. A lens flare from the store’s bright fluorescents cuts a line clean through her neck. She has an awful feeling about it, one that ratchets up the nausea and makes saliva pool at the back corners of her mouth to prepare for the vomit. When she runs to the bathroom, she forgets her prop book on the sticky plastic table. The ruse is up.

The back hallway of the mall where the toilets are has a strange air about it—the ceilings stretch taller than they should, the walls and the doors and the tile floors all morph into the same shade of sterile, office-building grey. Exceptional Girl feels she’s left the mall entirely, stumbled into a place she doesn’t belong or a place that doesn’t quite exist. At the end of the long hallway hangs the sign, restrooms, with its stick figures; the girl swears she can spot a thin crack in the acrylic cutting through the neck of the stick figure wearing the dress, right where it was in the photo. It takes her longer than she thinks it should to hustle down the corridor, bile rising in her throat, each door she passes on the way marked “employees only” rattling aggressively, until she finally stumbles into the old stall, the hinges squeaking loudly as she slams open the door, and, finally, hurls. She has had her fair share of late-night sickness, but nothing like this—she's convinced when she finally opens her eyes she’ll see her own insides flipped out in the smelly water, intestine still dangling from her mouth.

Instead, when her eyelids crack open, she is faced with mounds of damp, wadded-up cotton, turning red at the edges. She blinks, but the sight remains, and the image enters her mind of a dog tearing up its favorite toy, thrashing wildly about. Whether she is the dog or the toy, she can’t be sure, but she turns away from the toilet because there is nothing else to do and splashes water on her face, brushing away the fibers caught in the corners of her lips.

When she looks up, there is another girl standing in the mirror behind her. They both shriek, those same noses crinkling with mutual panic. Once they realize they are both equally terrified, though, they settle.

“Are you ok?” asks the new girl, who has more of an edge than the others, and is older still, about 21. Her hair is even shorter than Exceptional Girl’s, a cropped pixie dyed snot green. Her liquid eyeliner is drawn on in giant wings that nearly reach her temples, and a tiny black heart sits on her left cheekbone. She wears a sleeveless tee that frames her scratchy, amateur tattoos, ripped jeans, real Doc Martens, and giant sparkly knife earrings tipped with blood red sequins. Exceptional Girl feels immediately safe and inferior in this Punk Girl’s presence, wanting desperately to stand near her but feeling like any proximity to this girl with the green hair renders her a glaring fraud.

“I’m, uh, fine. I guess. But I get the feeling something terrible is happening.”

 “Me too,” says Punk Girl, and instantly her eyes cloud with fierce rage, the likes of which Exceptional Girl has never seen. The monster, watching through the two-way mirror, knows this rage well, knows what it will do to her. It can look at her and tell she has a radio show at her small liberal arts college where she plays 90’s riot grrrl music late into the night, blasting 7 Year Bitch’s “Dead Men Don’t Rape” at an hour so late that the only person tuned in is a passing trucker. The monster can see right through her skin and muscle right to the burning coal housed in her ribcage that makes her behave like a volatile animal. This girl carries more hurt than the others, and she thinks it has made her stronger, that her anger will protect her. Really, the fury renders her weak, makes everyone look like an enemy or a victim, removes all shades of grey from her world. The monster laughs gleefully. They can almost hear it.

“Let’s get out of here,” says Punk Girl, grabbing Exceptional Girl, who she suddenly has a fierce maternal urge to protect. She saw her reading earlier. She resolves to tell the girl, if they live through this, that she should read Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin instead, since it’s like Murakami’s character-driven surrealism, but without the misogyny. And it’s queer! Exceptional Girl is clearly closeted, despite her haircut, but Punk Girl decides a little nudge can’t hurt. If they live.

Back out in the hallway, everything has shifted. The wall that once held the doorway to the mall is now solid concrete, and in front of it slumps Preppy Girl, sobbing, smudging her eyeliner all over her face.

“We have to find a way the fuck out of this hell hole!” yells the Punk, and Preppy shakily rises to her feet. The three of them meet in the middle of this deranged, alive hallway, and look around frantically. All of the doors have been swallowed by the grey walls, except for one, which has the word “RECKON” carved into it hastily with some sharp object. “When I find the man responsible for this, I swear to god...” mutters the Punk under her breath. With Preppy on one side still sniffling, and Exceptional on the other looking ready to puke again, she turns the wobbly metal handle and pushes in.

The bright seafoam green paint on the walls hurts their eyes; its optimism is aggressive after the corporate neutrals. When their eyes adjust, they see they are standing in a young girl’s bedroom, fully furnished with the rustic white monstrosities they sell at Pottery Barn Teen. Twee bird decals populate the walls along with the posters for soft rock bands like Coldplay and Oasis, and the floor is littered with clothing. Each of the girls is drawn to a specific relic as if with string: Punk sits on the bed with its fluorescent pink comforter to go through a beat-up iPod Nano that was laying on the bedside table; Preppy cradles the old hair straightener plugged into the wall by the mirror, its metal plates turned rusty at the edges; Exceptional caresses the spines of the old books on the orange bookshelf, smiling at the ones that remain from her childhood, Pendragon, Artemis Fowl.

They used to live here. They used to come home from the mall into this room—try on the too-small thong they misguidedly purchased from Victoria’s Secret, cry their salty tears into the pink fabric of the bed, painstakingly type out messages to their crushes from the desk their mother bought them to use for homework. This is where they stretched and transformed and reinvented themselves, from one girl to the next to a thousand others. What is a teen girl’s bedroom if not Frankenstein’s lab, a place to conceive of a new self, sewn together from old parts, animated by hot sparks crashing through the temples? In an instant they could all see the stitches on their arms where they had been made.

But as soon as the recognition arrived it turned to panic—the straightener flaring too hot, the spines of the books suddenly sharp as razors. From under the bed, with unnatural speed and force, the hand with its bloody cuticles shoots out and snatches Punk Girl’s ankle. She looks at it and swears she knows it, swears it’s the hand of the man who gave her the hurt, who made her swallow the coal. She yells to the others to run, that this is her battle, that she knows who it is and she can kill him.

Begging her to change her mind, to reconsider and run, the two others slip behind the sliding mirrored doors of the closet. But the Punk sits resolute in her bitterness. Stronger than the need to protect or the need to survive is the need for revenge, the prospect of it so sweet it makes her drool.

She flips onto the carpeted floor to face the monster under the bed. Fucker, she seethes.

 Grinning, the monster reflects on how perfectly this has all come to pass, just as it planned, all those pathetic girls right where it wants them, like a line of carrot tops waiting to be wretched from the ground and devoured.

The last thing visible before the girl disappears under the bed is the look of awe and confusion across her face, now that she finally sees the monster for who it is.

“You?” she asks incredulously, but the monster is not one for clarification. Without a sound it yanks her under the bed.

The two girls peek out of the closet doors to see the Punk’s fingers leave grooves in the cream carpet as she’s dragged away, then hear the horrible noises—wet stabbing and bones crunching and teeth tearing into skin—then watch the pool of blood seeping out. Then silence.

They don’t know what to do besides close the door and their eyes, hope to wake up. But instead, they fall asleep, the darkness swallowing them like the bed swallowed the Punk, leaving their limbs heavy and immobile, at the mercy of whoever or whatever would find them there.

The girls awaken lying flat on their backs, looking up at a towering ceiling lined with more abrasive fluorescents. Neither of them can move. They know from the smell, though, the nauseating clash of sweet and sour sauce, McDonald’s fries, garlicy pizza, and burnt cookies, that they must be in the mall food court. There is no more chaos, though, no more sounds of people panicking or low police voices trying to control the situation. It is silent except for one set of footsteps, growing nearer until the shape of a head looms over them, the lights above framing its silhouette like a halo.

The monster removes its tattered hood—content to reveal itself now that its job is nearly done, hoping for the flash of recognition in the eyes before it drains them of life. Now, it wants to be seen.

With the hood removed it’s not an it at all—it’s a girl like all the other girls, with that same nose. Her face, like her hands, is covered with raw open wounds, places she has picked herself apart. The skin around her eyes is puffy, like she has been crying for a very long time, and her brow is furrowed with disgust.

When she speaks, it is with such vitriol that the girls on the table wince against it, the hate- steeped hot breath leaving their skin itching like a bad sunburn.

“I hate you,” says the monster. “I hate your vile, fleshy bodies and the way the skin stretches across your chubby bellies. I hate your stupid bodily wants and hungers and your tears that never stop falling. I hate all the horrible, embarrassing things you do in the hopes of being loved, and I especially hate that they never even work. You are pathetic, disgusting, better off dead. The world will thank me for slashing your throats and bleeding you out on this cheap plastic table, for disappearing your miserable selves. I wonder if your blood will be desperate like you; I wonder if it will come out reeking of your asinine wants, if it will be so thick with your insecurities that it will congeal at the edges of the table before it can drip off. You ought to thank me too, for the humiliation I’m sparing you. I’m doing all of us a favor.”

With that last word, favor, still glittering in the air like a promise, she plunges her knife into the Preppy Girl’s chest, right in the center of the Abercrombie logo. The other girl shrieks, sounding like her mother, sounding like the mother of the girl bloodied in the stuffed animals, as blood seeps onto her sleeve.

“You look pretty,” says the monster, just like she vowed she would, and the girl sputters out her final breaths.

The monster is inhaling deeply, savoring the feeling of the water of her soul going still and glassy, satisfied, relieved—when she is hit over the head and sent crashing to the floor.

One ultimate Final Girl has been summoned into existence. She looks like the others, of course, the same button nose, but something ineffably different floats in the air around her. She is that unnamable, wonderful thing that runs through all of them—the joy, the impulse to laugh after a sob, the gold sheen of forgiveness; the one who runs the hot baths and makes the playlists and cooks the meals when the other girls have withered. And she’s holding a food court chair high over her head, gazing down at the monster.

Then, she’s next to Exceptional, hurriedly loosening the knots in the ropes that fasten her to the table. She wants to tell the poor tied up girl that it will all be ok now, but she looks like she knows that already, the color slowly returning to her alabaster cheeks.

Then they are running, the two of them, hand in hand, looking like funhouse mirrors, sprinting for the exit.

Then Final Girl’s hand is on the bar of the door like a prayer; against all odds it cracks open and offers a way out.

Then Final Girl feels herself ripped from her hands. She turns to see the monster, awake, upright, real, wild with shame, holding Exceptional girl to her chest, drawing the sharp knife deep and slow across her neck like a lens flair, or a crack in an acrylic sign.

“You know it had to be just us,” says the monster, and the Final Girl, pulling the door closed again, stepping back into the hellish mall, knows she’s right. There’s no other way. There’s no one else.

Still, under the stitched together parts is something alive, undoubtedly, something that made them breathe and bleed, a bolt of electric truth through their temples.

And part of them lingers, though I put them in this story. I am still a bit like a haunted house, a never-ending climactic battle waging on in my ribcage, leaving knife slashes on the insides of my lungs. She was never the Final Girl—there will always be another.

I already miss the powdered sugar taste of the girl remnants. Thank you for visiting their graves.

Kellina Moore is a writer living in New York and attending the nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University. You can find Kellina on twitter @_babyslasher