There, two crosses to her right, hung a brown-skinned girl, nine, maybe ten years old. Like all the others in the Garden, she was bound to her cross with barbed wire, and her flat tummy had been sliced open, her innards splayed onto the ground at her feet. Flies crawled over her organs, infested her open body cavity, buzzed around her head, landed on her face, scuttled across the soft flesh there…. Despite her condition, the girl’s eyes were wide open and alert, and she watched Lori with intense interest.
Lori experienced no shock of recognition upon seeing the girl, but she did feel a sort of tickle at the back of her mind, along with a tightening in her gut.
You don’t want to do this, she thought. It was true. She didn’t. But she walked over to the girl and stood before her anyway.
“Do you know me?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” the girl said. Her voice was weak, but this close Lori could hear her well enough. The girl leaned her head to the right, then the left. Lori had the sense she was trying to draw her attention to something, but she didn’t—
Her gaze focused on the girl’s inner forearms, first right, then left. They were sliced open from wrist to elbow, the cuts deep. Unlike her abdominal wound, which bled freely, the blood around these cuts was old and crusted.
Lori’s head swam and her vision blurred. She took several steps back from the girl, her movements awkward, clumsy. She felt numb, disconnected from her body, and she thought she was going to faint. She fought to hold on to consciousness, and while for several seconds the outcome was in doubt, she managed to remain aware and on her feet. When her vision cleared, she saw the girl was now a young woman, probably in her late teens. Lori recognized this version of her, just as she’d recognized the previous one, but this time she was able to give her a name.
“Aashrita,” she said.
The young woman gave her a weak smile. “Yes,” she breathed.
Was this the real Aashrita, somehow brought back from the dead, or was it something that only looked like her? Lori hoped the latter but feared the former was the truth. She felt memories beginning to crowd at the threshold of her mind, screaming to be allowed in. This was why she had come here, why she’d gone to Aashrita’s grave in the first place – to get answers. All she had to do was allow the memories to come. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t a matter of choice, a mere exercise of willpower. She simply could not allow the memories in, knew if she did, they would destroy her. The mental struggle was too much, and pain erupted in her skull as a migraine flared to sudden life. It hurt so much that tears streamed from her eyes, and her vision narrowed to pinpoints. She had to get out of here – now.
She turned to flee, the blanket falling away from her naked body as she did. But she only managed a few hobbling steps on her bad knee before something flew over her head, came down around her bare waist, and started pulling her backward. She fought it, gritted her teeth, put all of her strength into moving forward. She reached down to take hold of whatever it was that had wrapped around her and felt something soft, spongy, and wet. She looked down in revulsion and saw that her hands were slick with blood. A cord of some kind pressed tight against her flesh, bumpy and pinkish-pale. It was a length of intestine, she realized. Aashrita’s.
Lori continued to move forward. Another loop of intestine wrapped around her left wrist, and yet another encircled her right. Still she fought, although her movements were almost completely restricted now. The intestines were slick, though, so if she could manage to wriggle free….
A last loop came down over her head and pulled tight around her throat, immediately cutting off her air. She tried to reach for the portion of intestine choking her, hoping to loosen it so she could draw in a breath. But her arms were held away from her body, and regardless of how hard she struggled, she couldn’t budge them. She was restrained in four places now – waist, wrists, and neck – and the intestine, flexing like a giant constrictor, lifted her off her feet.
When she’d been a kid, she’d read somewhere that together the human large and small intestines measured around twenty-five feet. That had sounded so long, and she’d found it hard to believe that all of it could fit inside a person. She had no trouble believing it now, though.
Aashrita’s intestines raised her several feet higher, turned her around to face the young woman and brought her closer until their noses practically touched. Flies now buzzed around both their heads.
Aashrita’s eyes bored into hers, shining with eager anticipation. “I’d like to say I don’t want to do this to you.” Aashrita’s weak voice was stronger now. “But that would be a lie.”
The coil of intestine wrapped around Lori’s neck began to squeeze tighter. Her lungs blazed with fire and her head pounded so violently she thought it was going to explode. Darkness crept into her vision, and she realized she was going to die – strangled by the internal organ of a girl she’d worked so hard and so long to forget. She was surprised by how little this distressed her.
I deserve it, she thought.
She fell into blackness, and there, in the great nothing, her memories broke free at last.
* * *
Lori sat on her parents’ front porch, right leg resting on a pillow her mother had brought out and put on a stool for her. A pair of metal crutches lay on the porch next to the chair. It was late afternoon in September, but the day was summer-warm, and she wore a T-shirt and shorts. No shoes. Despite the temperature, she had a fuzzy blanket draped across her legs. She didn’t want to look at the angry red incision on her knee, didn’t want to gaze upon the swollen, puffy flesh there. The knee throbbed with pain, but she’d discovered it was worse – or at least felt worse – when she could see the incision site, so she kept it covered whenever she could. It helped. Her pain meds helped more, and while she would’ve loved to take some now, her next dose wasn’t due for two more hours. She’d just have to tough it out until then.
Even though her meds had nearly worn off, she still felt spacy, and she sat looking out at the street, headphones in, listening to an Alicia Keys song on her MP3 player, and not thinking about much of anything.
After the accident during soccer practice, she’d needed to have a knee replacement, and now she had to wear a CPM – Continuous Passive Motion – machine to slowly move and strengthen her leg several hours a day, as well as doing physical therapy. At first, both had hurt like hell, even with pain meds, but the pain had continued to decrease as the days went by. At this point in her recovery, she didn’t use the CPM much, and she could get around without her crutches, unless she was tired or her knee started hurting too bad. She’d originally come outside so she could walk up and down the street and exercise her knee, as her physical therapist had told her to do. But once she’d gotten outside and felt the warm air, she’d said to hell with it and sat down on the porch and put her leg up. She was finding it increasingly difficult to stay motivated when it came to her rehab. Sure, she wanted to get back to the point where she could get around normally all on her own. But no matter how hard she worked, she wouldn’t be able to play soccer again, so really, what good were the painful exercises her PT wanted her to do? No matter how religiously she did them, she’d never be able to get back her full strength and speed. And if she tried to play, she’d risk screwing up her knee replacement, and she did not want to go through another operation and long recovery period.
So basically, her life sucked.
She’d sit out here for a half hour or so, and then go back inside. With any luck, her mother wouldn’t realize she hadn’t actually gone anywhere. Lori promised herself she’d go walking tomorrow, but she knew she didn’t mean it.
So she was in a dark frame of mind when she saw Aashrita coming down the sidewalk. Aashrita lived a couple blocks from Lori’s house, and while Lori only had one sibling – Reeny – Aashrita had four brothers and sisters, two of each, all older than her. She needed to escape the chaos in her house on a regular basis, and when she did, she’d walk over to Lori’s place and the two of them would hang out. It had been that way for the better part of a decade now, but Lori hadn’t seen Aashrita since the accident during soccer practice. Aashrita hadn’t visited her in the hospital, nor had she been over to the house since then. She had sent a get-well card, however, a small one that had come in a blue envelope. When Lori had opened it, it had begun playing music – soft and slow – in electronic tones, and it had contained a single printed word: Sorry, below which Aashrita had signed her name. Lori hadn’t replied. No calls, no texts, no emails. She’d been so damn angry at Aashrita that she hadn’t wanted to talk to her, see her, or even think about her.
So Lori was not pleased when Aashrita reached her parents’ front walkway, turned, and started walking toward the porch. Toward her.
If she’d had full mobility back, she would’ve gotten up from the chair, quickly gone inside, and shut the door before Aashrita could reach the porch. But she didn’t want Aashrita to see her awkward movements as she reached for the crutches and tried to get to her feet, so she remained seated.
Lori tried to read Aashrita’s face as she approached. She saw several different emotions there – fear, hope, anticipation, guilt, shame, defensiveness – all swirling together in an uneasy mix. Like Lori, Aashrita was also dressed in T-shirt and shorts, only her shirt was the one given out by the Oakmont Recreational Soccer League. Had she worn the fucking shirt on purpose, intending to mock her, or had she simply been unaware of the ramifications of wearing it to visit the girl whose knee she’d fucked up so badly it’d had to be replaced? Either way, it was a pretty shitty thing to do.
Aashrita came halfway up the porch steps and stopped, as if reluctant to come any closer. Maybe she felt she needed permission to step all the way onto the porch. Maybe she wanted to keep her distance to avoid getting an up-close look at the damage she’d caused to Lori’s body.
“Hey.” Aashrita’s voice was tentative, the word almost a question. Are you willing to talk to me?
Lori did not want to talk to her, wanted to tell her to turn around and get the hell out of there. But she found herself saying hey back, her tone neutral, noncommittal.
“How are you, uh, doing?” Aashrita asked.
Lori felt grim satisfaction upon seeing how uncomfortable she was. Bitch should be uncomfortable.
“I’m all right. Getting better every day.” She spoke these words with a cold edge that she didn’t bother trying to hide.
“Good. Glad to hear it.”
Lori didn’t respond to this. She just looked at Aashrita, watched her grow ever more uneasy as the silence stretched between them. She liked seeing Aashrita this way, liked seeing her hurt. If only a little.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come over sooner. I…was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me. You know, because of the accident.”
Was it an accident? Lori thought. Or were you tired of not being the best on the team, so you decided to take out the competition?
Lori knew this wasn’t fair of her. Aashrita had never shown any sign of being jealous of her before, and honestly, had Lori really been the best player on the team? She’d been good, one of the best, but the best? That was debatable. This was a reasonable way to look at the situation, an adult way. But she didn’t want to be reasonable. She was angry, and she wanted to lash out at the girl who had robbed her of her future.
