The Haunted Vagina (3 page)

Then it dawns on her. Yes, Stacy, this is actually happening to you. She looks at me with wide dilated pupils, frightened of her own vagina.

“Help . . .” she says. Her voice a soft croak.

I leap to my feet and grab the skeletal hands away from her thighs. I have no idea what I think I’m doing. I pull on the skeletal arms and a skull pops out at me. Animated, chattering its teeth. Stacy grabs onto the bed frame and I pull as hard as I can, ripping the skeleton halfway out.

It throws me back, thrashes at Stacy and knocks her to the floor. I watch as the skeletal figure, waist deep inside of my girlfriend, claws at the hardwood floor, crawling out from between her legs.

Stacy is crying in a panic now. Her face bright red, her mouth drooling wide open, her eyes so squinty wet that she can’t see anything anymore.

“Do something!” she cries.

But I don’t know what to do.

I pick up a turtle-shaped lamp and hit the skeleton with it. The turtle’s head pops off. I hit harder, then harder, until I find the right angle to break its skull.

I cut my hand on the shattered lamp. Blood spills onto the corpse. It’s still moving.

Flesh begins to grow on its bones like moss, lightning-fast. The lamp is in little pieces, and my blood is leaking everywhere. Stacy screams in Russian at me, angry profanities that I don’t understand.

I step away from the corpse. It is growing organs. Blood red balls fill the eye sockets of the skull, and the skeleton looks up at me. It releases a deep moan. I run to the corner of the room and pick up the night stand, knocking clocks, glasses, a jar of coins all over the floor. The skull watches me, cries at me, as I lower the night stand onto its neck. Then I drop all of my weight on top of it.

A loud crack. It stops moving. It stops moaning. I turn over the night stand. Its spinal cord has been severed. Its head crushed. Blue ink dribbles out of its mouth.

Stacy whines, shrieking at the corpse still halfway inside her. Her hands twitch inches away from it, wanting it out of her but she doesn’t want to touch it.

I pull on the corpse, but it pulls Stacy with it. She cries. I pull again. She just moves again.

“Hold on to the leg of the bed,” I say, in the calmest possible voice.

She’s hiccupping now, leaning back to hold onto the bed.

She doesn’t watch as I pull it out of her. With each tug she cries out. I cry as well, with my sliced-open hand rubbing against the thing’s rib cage. Once it slips all the way out, she leaps to her feet and runs out of the room.

I look down at the body. It seems to be melting. Its flesh turns to blue, red, and orange mucus. Its bones melting into egg whites, crumbling into baking soda. I drape the big fluffy blanket over its body and leave the room.

CHAPTER FOUR

Stacy is standing in the corner of the living room, behind the couch, covering herself with the curtain. She doesn’t realize that the people walking on the sidewalk outside can see her nude backside.

“Let’s go for a drink,” I tell her.

She nods her head and goes for her purse, digging through its contents, not looking for anything in particular. I get us some pants and t-shirts from the hamper in the laundry room.

“Here,” I say.

She sniffles and puts her purse down, then gets dressed. Strangely, she’s come out of it unscathed. My hand is still bleeding everywhere. I can’t feel much pain. Must be in shock. But her stomach has flattened back to normal. No stretch marks, no tearing of her vagina, no blood. Some claw marks are on her inner thighs, but they are just white scratches. The claws just barely broke the skin.

I bandage up my wound and put on the smelly crusty clothes. We go into the garage and slip on some junky old tennis shoes that we were planning to give to Goodwill.

“Ready?” I ask, wiping away her tears.

She doesn’t hear me, busy examining a spider web that has recently formed inside the doorway of one of her old doll houses.

We go out to the Kennedy School across town. It’s an old elementary school that was bought by a brewing company. All of the classrooms have been turned into bars, restaurants, tobacco lounges, and hotel rooms. Stacy’s not a big fan of all the breweries in Portland. She just doesn’t like beer at all. She prefers drinking cocktails in the Pearl District. But I love breweries. And I need a very strong brewery beer right now. I’m also thinking if she’s not in a condition to go back home tonight, we can just stay in one of the school’s guest rooms.

She doesn’t speak to me for a couple hours. In the Cypress Room at Kennedy School, I feed her screwdrivers with freshly squeezed orange juice and I drink the Sunflower IPA.

I try to ask her questions, try to learn more about how the heck a man-sized creature could crawl out of her vagina, where the heck that thing came from, and how long has this all been going on. But she doesn’t know.

She tells me everything that has to do with her haunted insides. She tells me that ever since she was a little kid she’s heard noises coming from inside her. She thought it was normal. Her parents never noticed. Or pretended not to notice. When she was six years old, for a few months, she had an imaginary friend who used to come out of her vagina to play with her. Another little girl, about her age, with paper white skin and funny slimy horns on her head. She doesn’t remember much from that time, but had always assumed the girl was just her imagination. She thought maybe it was just her young mind giving a form to the voices she heard coming from inside of her. Now she is not so sure.

When she was a sophomore in high school, she realized that her vagina was different from other girls’ vaginas. Her first love was a girl named Charlee, who was a nerdy freshman who always spoke in a fake French accent. The first time they were naked together, giggling and scared, Stacy’s vagina called out to Charlee and knocked the French accent right out of her voice.

“That’s fucked up,” the girl said.

Stacy didn’t understand. She tried to get close to Charlee but she pushed her back.

“Don’t touch me,” the girl said, and they never spoke to each other ever again.

She stayed away from girls after that, made friends with guys. But most high school guys always wanted to get into her pants, so she only hung out with the dungeons and dragons skater kids who were nice and somewhat fun, but most importantly they were way too shy to solicit sex from her.

In college, she ended up getting drunk and sleeping with some wannabe Beat poet English major. She warned him about having a haunted vagina, but that only turned him on. After they screwed, he said that it was the most amazing thing he’d ever done. They dated for a while, and he worshiped her vagina. He told all of his friends about her and would even have them listen to the voices through her pants. All of them thought she was brilliant. She brought magic into their worlds. She was proof that their drunken philosophical discussions of rebellion against reality were somewhat correct. And when she got bored of her boyfriend, she moved on to one of his friends. And when she got bored with him, she would move on to another. All of them treated her like a goddess.

She stayed in college until she was thirty, becoming something of a legend on campus. Near the end of her college years, she started going to goth parties and charging money to all the little goth boys and girls nearly 8 to 10 years younger than her for the chance to listen to her vagina for a few minutes. There would be lines out the door to see her. Eventually, a rumor went around that it was all fake. She just had some kind of wireless speaker inside of her playing tape-recorded noises. Nobody believed her after that. She was no longer dating any of the college kids, since they were all so young, so there was no one who had gotten intimate enough with her to back up her story. And she didn’t really care to prove it to them. A few guys still paid to listen to her vagina, but once she realized they were just doing it to rub the sides of their heads between her legs, she stopped doing it completely.

That’s all the information she had for me. It all seemed harmless to her, before. Just something that made her unique and special. She’s never been scared of it. She might have been scared that people would find out about it as a teenager, but she was never scared of what might be lurking inside of her.

She drinks screwdriver after screwdriver until she can barely walk.

CHAPTER FIVE

We’re drunkenly relaxed, wandering through the halls of the school/brewery, staring at all the murals of scary dancing children with the faces of eighty-year-olds. I go to the front desk and get us a room.

“We’re going to stay here tonight,” I tell Stacy.

She sways at me, leaning her head back with her eyes closed and a dumb smile on her face. I get a pitcher of Hammerhead from the movie theater, which used to be the school’s auditorium, and take my giant drunken girlfriend into the room.

I continue drinking, fidgeting with my hand wound that has finally stopped bleeding and is beginning to itch, sitting in a chair next to the chalkboard. The room was once a classroom. They left the chalkboards on the walls. Employees have drawn flowers on the board in red and yellow chalk, with the words “Welcome to Kennedy School” written in girly cursive. Stacy sits on the edge of the bed next to me and tries some of my beer, then spits it back into the glass.

“Yuck,” she says. “I wanted the raspberry beer.”

“You didn’t say you wanted anything,” I tell her.

“I want the raspberry.”

“You want me to get you some?”

She nods her head sloppily against her shoulder.

“Okay, I’ll get another pitcher.”

I decide to just get her a 22 ounce bottle of Ruby at the front desk, rather than a pitcher.

The school has gotten pretty quiet. The restaurant is closed. It’s just a few minutes before beer-o’clock. Looking at the old pictures on the walls of the school when it first opened decades ago, little monochrome children kneeling in the dirt, holding their school projects. A few of those same school projects are a few feet away, behind glass: crudely painted bird houses. I wonder about all of those kids. Most of them must be dead now. Their bird houses like ghosts they left behind.

I get back to the room.

“Steve . . .” Stacy calls out as I open the door.

I turn the corner. Her pants are off and she’s probing her vagina with her arm, almost all the way up to her elbow.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

She laughs at me.

“Look,” she says, pulling her vaginal lips open. They are stretchy like rubber.

Then she laughs, hysterically. I chuckle too in a nervous kind of way.

“I didn’t know it could do that before!” She lets the lips go and they slap back into place. Her head wobbles at me. She’s way too drunk. I hide her beer behind the bed.

I take her hands away from her vagina, and try to put her pants back on.

“No,” she says, kicking her pants away.

“Stacy!”

She laughs at me. I keep trying to put her pants back on but she just kicks and laughs. Then she sits up and looks at me.

“I want you to look inside,” she says.

I snicker, like it was a joke.

“I can’t see for myself,” she says. “I want you to tell me what it looks like in there. If you can see ghosts.”

I look up at her cute brown eyes and can’t tell her no.