Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

“So, do you have a boyfriend? You’re very pretty,” the woman remarks. If I didn’t feel so nauseated I might laugh at the “Who’s your boyfriend?” stereotype, but there is a knowing, ironic tinge to her voice, as if she’s intentionally slotting herself into the cliché and doing it with a smile. I wish I could know what she’s thinking.

“Not at the moment,” I answer.

Clip.

I was lying on my back on my best friend’s bed. We were sixteen years old and I was in a phase where I picked at my nails, and that’s what I was doing then, pulling at the cuticles around my middle finger as she told me about the boy she was dating and how she thought she might be in love with him. I knew that her boyfriend was a scumbag, but I was trying to sound sincere with my “yeah”s and “no way”s and “really, what did he say”s and I was afraid she could hear the artificial brightness in my voice. I listened just enough to his good-night texts and favorite bands to respond to her, while focusing on trying to figure out what was creating the pebble in my throat, growing larger with each passing moment.

“Hey, stop that!” I broke into her monologue and my own reverie as I reached out to swat at her hand—she’d wrapped the long cords that dangle to adjust the blinds around her finger, tightly enough that the top joint had swollen up. The meat of her fingertip was pressing over the edge of her fingernail, turning a mottled violet. It looked almost shiny in the low lighting, practically circular and ready to pop. It turned my stomach.

“No.” She laughed, yanking her hand away. “I like it. It feels kind of cool.”

I tussled with her for a moment, then lay back in defeat. She picked up from where she left off about their Olive Garden dinner and I watch her finger fade from purple to gray, as outside the window, the sunset turned the sky the same colors.

“It’s not usually this empty in the evenings in here. I guess it’s just your lucky day,” she says, smiling broadly. I think irrationally about punching her, knocking those off-colored teeth out.

“You could say that.”

Clip.

I was seven years old and my cousin was chasing me around the house. He was older than me and bigger and my mom had told me to tell her if he ever tried to play doctor with me or made me uncomfortable. He never had, but the tone in my mom’s voice made me queasy whenever I was around him and I would never let us end up alone together. He was laughing and moaning like in the zombie movie we had watched last night—against my parents’ better judgment—and I had to get away before he ate my brains or, more likely, sat on me. The kitchen floor was patterned with sunlight as I flew across the tiles, heading straight for the back door. If I made it outside, I could climb a tree and be safe, but he was gaining on me fast. I could feel the back of my shirt stretching out as I grabbed the handle and threw the door open ahead of me. I raced through it, spinning around backward to fling the door shut, and then—

I was screaming and blood was flowing freely onto the floor and soaking into the edge of my sleeve, turning the blue fabric into a rich magenta. I went to wrap my other hand around the finger and felt the entire nail shift underneath my palm, pain pulsing all the way through the bone of my arm. I stopped trying to hold it and screamed louder.

After I got home from the hospital, I had to soak the finger in Epsom salts every night for the next six months while I waited for the nail to grow back. I don’t know what it was actually for—to keep it from getting infected, probably. At the time, I thought the cloudy, milky water was some sort of magical potion to make the nail grow back faster. It couldn’t grow back fast enough to replace the series of Hello Kitty and Toy Story Band-Aids that covered the sensitive pink flesh that stung at the lightest touch. I spent far too long staring at it, fixated and horrified by the tiny nail creeping up my finger day by day and the strange alien appearance of skin not supposed to be seen.

“Do you know what color you want when we’re done here?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. Blue? Maybe?” My voice sounds higher than normal and cracks on the last word.

“Red would look lovely with your hair.”

Clip.

For most of my life I was meticulous about keeping my nails clean and healthy—never biting them, washing with soap to get the dark rings out from underneath the tips. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, however, I started picking. I would sit in my room with my headphones on and try not to hear the sounds of my parents fighting through the vents and study my nail beds. The tiny white peaks of dead skin around my cuticles drove me crazy. First, I would slide another nail underneath to make one stand straight up. I would press the side of that finger against my teeth and close them with a click—an echo of those dreaded scissors of my childhood—to try to bite it off. Sometimes the skin would still be soft and I’d tear it away with a tiny, tiny swell of pain as living skin came with it. Sometimes it would be hardened and would snap off, but there would always be a stout piece still rooted into the flesh of my finger. Try to bite it again, but now it was damp and flexible and too short to get a good grip with my teeth. I’d start pulling with the bitten stubs of my thumb and index nails, pull until purple welts would appear around my nail beds and it hurt to wash my hands.

“You seem a little tense,” she observes. “But I promise I won’t cut you! Five years working here and I’ve never cut anyone.”

My breathing is erratic. My heartbeat is pulsing in my ears.

Clip.

I have never been able to go ice-skating. The first time my parents took me was when I was six years old. My dad kneeled down in front of me to lace up my skates and warned me that if I fell down, I needed to move to the side and get back on my feet very quickly so that no one would skate over my fingers. I started crying and refused to go out on the ice. In the car all the way home, I kept imagining the schick of the blade, the cool spray of ice chips against my hand, the pink-gloved finger skittering away across the ice, leaving a thin red line behind like a caterpillar’s damp trail.

“Almost made it,” she tells me. “Only one more. You’re doing great.”

At some point I must have moved the hand she has finished under the table. It’s clenched in a fist, green veins pressed taut against the skin. I can feel my nails pressing marks into my palm. I want to cry.

Clip.

“See, just one more left. I don’t know why you were nervous.” She folds my other fingers down, just like my mother used to do. My head is spinning and spots flicker in front of my eyes. The small pink caterpillar is crawling away from me, a swollen purple head protruding from the end, sparkles haphazardly smeared along the back, a Hello Kitty Band-Aid wrapped around the middle… red trail smearing out behind it, red just like the puddle on the gray desk collecting underneath my rigid finger and the woman is buzzing—

“I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry, you must have jumped or my finger slipped or something, oh my God, I don’t know what happened, just wait here while I get the first-aid kit, do we need to call a doctor? There’s a lot of blood—”

My cousin reaches out to grab my shirt and rakes his nails down my spine, my grandmother touches my cheek and digs her claws in deep enough to hit my molars, the boys are watching my back but they’re doing more than watching, they’re sliding their nails across my shoulders as lightly as feathers and I can’t see them but I know they’re there, my best friend who I lovelovelovelovelove has wrapped the cord back around her finger and pulls tight, so tight that the top joint pops off with the sound of a can opener ripping the last shred of metal apart, my mother and father are tearing at each other’s tongues and throats with their fingers so they don’t have to listen anymore, I’m scratching at my own nails, scratching until I dig down deep enough and the nails spring off, chunks of meat still attached to the underside, spinning away through the air—