I’m doing things a little bit different this time around. Usually I do a book review every other month, but honestly, this book I’m reading right now is slow going. Ugh. I’ll get through it; it’s just taking quite a bit longer to get through because it’s not all that interesting yet even a quarter of the way through. I’ll power through, though. Because I’m a completionist. I’m also a masochist.
Anywayyyy…
You may remember a while back when I shared the first chapter of the novel I was working on. At the time, I entered it into a contest on Booksie. I didn’t win, but I did get a few nice messages about it.
Fast forward. I’m in the final stages of editing before I figure out how to write a book proposal and send it off to some agents and hope one of them bites. Things are moving along quite a bit faster than they did in the beginning, and it’s only going to move faster since I now have time set aside five days a week to write (thanks to my new job). I’m excited. And I’m terrified. But mostly excited.
Point? I want you to be excited with me.
I present to you the first chapter of Zemblanity (formerly Death in a Sundress). Then, come back around in another few weeks to get chapter two. I’ll keep the trend going until I get to chapter five.
Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next installment and future writing news from yours truly!
Without further adieu, here’s the first chapter of Zemblanity.
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Chapter One
She would ask. She was ready to move those little lips, too plump for her hollow face, in rhythm with buzzing vocal chords. She could visualize each and every word down to the font. But she could smell the whiskey from the other side of the room, and her question died on the exhale. Bothering him over something as stupid as a question about homework was akin to digging her own grave. When it came to her father, if the booze was out, most things were better left unsaid.
She turned to go back to her room, and her heel snagged a splinter from the unfinished hardwood.
Crack!
Her foot, blissfully unaware of what two inches of wood lodged between skin cells felt like moments before, now felt full to the brim. Her moan was hushed, almost muted by the echo of neglected wood separating. It rippled the silence of the house, a drop in an ocean of quiet. Tears burned and spilled over, eyelashes catching the ones they could, hugging them tight.
And then, a rustling from the darkened living room, a sound of papers and old food wrappers being crumpled and stomped. She could feel the bruises forming without him even laying a finger on her. The skin had a way of remembering.
Before the inevitable blow, her eyes squeezed shut, almost as if not looking took the power out of the sting of pain or the bitter taste of blood.
If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. If I can’t see you, you can’t touch me.
She stumbled under the initial strike. Her legs struggled to regain their footing enough to keep her upright. Allyson knew better than to fall. If her legs gave, there would be no escape from whatever heavy steps and kicks that were sure to follow.
He thrust his fist into the mess of black hair at the base of a poorly woven braid, forcing her to face him. Fingers spread, his hand was easily as big—if not bigger—than her twelve-year-old face. Even after years of priming, she could not stop herself from flinching, wincing, and, ultimately betraying her better judgment, crying out. Against her better judgment, she screamed.
Allyson did not hate her father. Far from it. Roger Alexander was all she knew. He was more than hurt to her. Hugs and kisses and bedtime stories were not a foreign concept to her. They’d watch television together on the couch while eating overcooked frozen dinners. Sometimes there was a comedy, and they’d laugh, both of them, just like what she supposed normal families did. Other times there would be a show where people got hurt and it was supposed to be funny. He would laugh, and she would smile and pretend it tickled her in the same way, it she didn’t like the joke.
Most of the time when she heard the glass bottles and aluminum cans echo through the empty hall, she stayed in her room. It was easier that way. Out of sight, out of mind. An unspoken rule of the house.
No, she did not hate her father. In her own way, she supposed she loved him, just as she supposed he loved her.
It was funny, she thought. Funny in a twisted, fucked up way. The situation was not new. If she was being honest with herself, she should be used to the whole thing by now. The pain always numbed after the white-hot stinging, and occasionally, she could find bliss in the sparse moments of feigned unconsciousness. It was funny because she knew she should just lay there unmoving and he’d stop, but she couldn’t bring herself to let down her guard just yet.
Sometimes she thought she might be a masochist. Or was it a sadist? She could never remember the difference.
Sometimes he’d make her waffles with extra syrup after he slept off the whiskey. Never was there talk at the wobbly kitchen table about the beatings, and for that, Allyson was thankful. It made it easier to believe that nothing happened when neither of them acknowledged why her lip was split and her eye was swollen. She never dwelled on whether or not he remembered hitting her. The pain was bad enough, but the shame was somehow worse.
Roger struck once, twice, thrice, altering between the side of her face near her eye and her mouth. Each time his hand was open. In terms of beatings, she would have preferred his fist kiss her mouth with its dull, splintering ache than the sharp, screaming pain of those spread fingers.
Her tears fell, hot and thick, heavy thuds to the floor. Through squinted eyes she watched as they burned small holes in the floor as if they were not tears at all, but acid. The smoky wisps that remained in the air were satisfying.
Take that, floor!
If anything deserved to be damaged, it was it in all its unfinished glory.
Allyson didn’t notice the flesh falling from her cheeks in small flakes at first, or the way her tears tore into her skin to create river beds under her eyes. If there was pain, it didn’t register over the feel of her cheeks swelling from the contact of flesh against flesh. She did not notice the way the holes in the floorboards grew outward in web-like tendrils.
The room grew unbearably loud with screams that were not her own. Her father took a step back and held the palm of the previously offending hand, moaning through gritted, crooked teeth. She watched wide-eyed, not comprehending, face hot and throbbing.
“You bitch you little bitch what did you do to Daddy what did you do to me what did you—“
And then silence.
Allyson learned several things that night. For one, there was such a thing as overloading the senses. The nerve endings under her broken skin shut down from the force of his anger. She was deaf from the screams of both her and her father. Or maybe it wasn’t any sort of audio stimuli that stole her hearing away. Perhaps it was her eyes getting overwhelmed causing time and space to collide and morph into something that couldn’t be. Perhaps it all stemmed from the hooked blade emerging from her father’s unshaven throat.
She really couldn’t be certain.
It was as if she were watching a movie in slow motion. Her father’s fingers twitched one by one as he tried to grasp the hook in his burned, bloodied hands. His mouth opened and closed uselessly, reminding her of her classroom’s pet fish. Allyson didn’t think any air was getting through. She opened her own mouth to say something, but her voice wouldn’t work. They mirrored each other for what seemed like an eternity.
The hall swallowed what little light normally pierced through the blinds in the adjoining rooms. Was it so late already? Staring into that darkness made her mouth dry, her throat tight. She thought she saw something behind him.
This is it, she thought. This is when the hero runs to a different part of the house and grabs a weapon to defend themselves.
But her legs were rooted to the spot. Her body felt like cement. Her appendages were nothing but for show.
There was a light switch within reach, but something—be it intuition, if you believed in that sort of thing, or otherwise—told her it was a bad idea, as if whispered from the cracked walls. It was foreign; a different language altogether. She did not know the words, but she did understand the intent. In the darkness, it’s less dangerous.
Here we are now, but that’s enough entertainment for one night, thank you very much.
Her eyes had trouble adjusting to the empty black, but little by little, shapes came into play. Toxic, neon green eyes peered at her from behind a veil of thick black hair that was parted strategically as if not to obstruct its vision. Its wide, smiling mouth, while predatory, did not feel threatening. It would not attack her. If it wanted, she would be dead already.
Anxiety wavered to disassociation. She smiled back at the creature. It, in turn, smiled wider than before, the skin stretched around its mouth like it wasn’t skin at all, but instead made from black powdered latex gloves. It formed around the bone structure too tight, too thin.
Allyson felt nothing. Her father’s thrashings subsided little by little, until his body hung limp from the throat down. His eyes didn’t see her anymore. The hook retreated back into his throat and disappeared, leaving nothing but a large bleeding cavern in its place. Roger’s feet held him for a fraction of a second before his dead knees gave way to the full weight of his corpse. He fell forward with a dull thud, and Allyson kept standing.
She wondered if he got a splinter on the way down.
The creature crouched before her. Its nine eyes were missing the pupils, and no pupils meant she couldn’t tell which direction it was looking. Maybe nowhere. Maybe everywhere. All seeing. All knowing. It reminded her of a spider. Her father’s murderer stood unmoving, then turned its attentions back to its prey.
The knife-like appendages complimented the sword-hook that had previously been in her father’s throat to create a gross interpretation of a human hand. From the hole in his neck, the hooked thumb cut with ease to the groin, blood spilling on the unfinished flooring, the wood soaking it in greedily.
Allyson did not lose her footing, even when her father’s insides slopped to the side. The creature’s jaw unhinged, displaying impossibly long teeth proudly before diving in, claiming only organs and leaving skin and bone relatively untouched.
This is fine, she thought. Everything would be alright enough, okay enough, because nothing was as bad as living with an alcoholic father for the rest of her life.
No more bruises to explain to teachers or classmates or Zaque. No more picking up a twelve-pack for Daddy after school. No, this is fine, for the best, really, a jolly good opportunity.
Allyson almost had herself convinced of all this and more when the creature gazed at her once again with its bloodied grin. And like that, the spell was broken. She screamed, as loud and as hard as any normal child would, with no idea that it would be the last bit of normalcy she would ever experience.
The creature crawled back to the hole from whence it came. The flooring closed up as if nothing ever happened, leaving only a few tiny holes from her acidic tears to remind her.
***
Like it? Hate it? Leave a comment and let me know what you think! Check back here on October 25 for chapter two. Or, if you would like, you can subscribe to get notifications right in your inbox every time a new post is ready. I have new content every other Sunday at 8:00 am sharp!
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Manda Kay Writes 