Searchterm Entry #11: My Extra Sex

A chilling and unsettling entry for the Search Term Challenge, which starts off dark and gets progressively darker.

For details of the challenge, and to see other entries, click here. Voting for stories will begin once all entries have been posted online.

This entry was written by Eliza Hirsch, whose thoughts on writing you can find here.

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My Extra Sex

When they cut us out of mama, the doctors thought my sister was stillborn. A lack of oxygen had made her face turn blue, made her heart so weak and perilous as to be almost silent. They lifted us from mama’s weeping belly and took us away before she could see this terrible bundle: healthy son and failing daughter, attached at the chest like some sideshow fable. While they were able to coax my sister back to life, the same could not be said of our mother. My father’s suicide, six months later, made us orphans.

We grew up in the Saint Lutgardis Home for Blessed Children, surrounded by boys and girls whose parents had either died or given up. Our fused heart was one of the lesser monstrosities at the home, which gave sanctuary to boys like Bart, whose skin was covered in weeping sores, and whose eyes were the color and texture of curdled milk; and girls like Edda, who pulled and pulled and pulled at her hair until there was nothing left but the strange, pendulant growth on the back of her skull.

Being quiet and rather self contained, the nurses at the Home paid us little mind. This, in itself, was a blessing, the nurses being of roundly bad temper and prone to violence. When your world consists of those God forgot, I suppose it is no surprise.

On the anniversary of our thirteenth year my sister, Daisy, awakened me by grabbing my hand in hers and shaking it.

“Danny,” she whispered as I came awake. “Danny, we’re no longer children.”

“What do you mean?”

She reached between her legs and brought back trembling fingers tipped in blood. It took me a moment to understand; she wasn’t hurt, exactly. But she wasn’t quite well, either.

“What will we do?” Her voice trembled in my ear, smelling of sour nighttime.

We hobbled out of bed, Daisy with a pillowcase clamped between her thighs, and went to find a nurse. She smacked Daisy once for soiling the linens, and when she raised her hand to hit me, I snatched it out of the air and bit her wrist. As her blood flowed into my mouth, I wondered if it tasted the same as the woman’s blood snaking down my sister’s legs.

***

White walls… so different from the grease stained oak of Saint Lutgardis. Bright overhead lights that flickered and buzzed like dying insects. Clipped voices urged me to stay quiet, behave, settle in for the long haul cause boy, I’m going to be here awhile.

My eyes felt gummy and caked with sleep or exhaustion. Reminders of blood flaked off my lips, onto my parched tongue, and refused to dissolve. My mouth was full of copper pennies and railroad rust. Daisy was whispering in my ear, bellowing bastard brothers, bellowing bastard brothers, over and over, her voice a high, manic squeal.

My sister. My extra sex.

My broken record.

My hands balled into fists. The sharp pain of my fingernails digging into my skin pulled me from my stupor, bit by bit. I pressed hard until most of my haze had cleared, until drops of rich red decorated my palms. My eyes creaked open.

We laid on a rolling bed, moving down an empty hallway, two unpleasantly heavy nurses flanking us. My right hand was caught in a circle of leather and attached to the bed. Daisy’s left was similarly fastened. Our feet had been looped together, like a hog. I blinked back into darkness.

***

I spent a week tilting madly in and out of consciousness. In my rare, lucid moments, Daisy chattered madness into my ears, so that, in time, even my dreams were filled with her incessant vocals. She became my choir.

“Shush…” I would tell her as the ocean of my mind tossed me up. “Shush…”

I wanted to think, and could not, her voice burning through the shreds of myself I struggled to grab onto.

“Daisy.” I clamped my hand over her mouth, felt the sharp edges of her teeth flirting with my skin. She did not draw blood, she merely sucked at me like a kitten might on a mother’s nipple. Now, while the room around me was quiet, it was her tongue against my palm that served to shatter my concentration. I pulled my hand away, pressed one finger to my lips. “Be quiet, Daisy.”

Her eyes rolled in their sockets. She looked paler than I was used to, her skin a parched and papery white. Her teeth, between chapped lips, snapped at me.

“Brother…bellowing bastard brother…” She jerked her head back. A tic, or a direction, I couldn’t tell. “Where we are, the place in between…the place in between…”

“Be quiet.” I repeated. She shook her head and snapped at me, her teeth coming within a hair’s breadth of the tip of my nose. Other than the click of her teeth, however, she made no noise. I took the opportunity to take in this new world around us. Walls the color of dirty skin, soft and stained near black in places. A single bulb hung over our heads behind a thin wire cage. A door, a window, and a face.

Our eyes met, this girl on the other side of our prison. She waggled her pitch black eyebrows at me and pressed her tongue flat on the finger smeared glass. Daisy gibbered something quiet and nonsensical as the girl came through the window, tongue first, and tumbled onto the floor of our room. Her hair, long and tangled and black, spilled over her shoulders as she stood before us.

“I’ll tell you a story about the time I killed my mother.” And so she did, detailing how a dark August night and a series of dull blades rid her of maternal worries. When she was done she sat down and tilted her head sharply to one side. “Tell me how you killed your mother.”

“I didn’t–” I started to protest, but Daisy bit my shoulder, then began to speak.

“We tore her in half, like a sheet of paper.” She said, making a guttural sound in her throat. The girl clapped her hands together. “In the middle of a dirty house, my father hung himself up to dry, a piece of fish, while we watched…we watched…we watched him jerk and jerk and jerk.”

She bounced us as she said the words. Bounced and bounced and bounced.

“You’re not real.” I said to the girl. I knew, as I said it, that I spoke the truth. She disappeared.

***

Knowing she wasn’t real did not prevent the girl from returning the next morning, moments after a nurse finished spoon feeding us cold oatmeal and a dozen white pills. She came through the crack in the bottom of the door this time, and spent an hour whispering in Daisy’s ear. I could hear snatches of what she said, but none of it made sense.

This time, when she disappeared, Daisy fell asleep. I shook her and shouted and begged her to wake up, to no avail. Slivers of black ice crept out of her mouth, out of her nostrils, until her face was covered with black, black, black. I screamed until my voice, like the girl, disappeared. My stomach rumbled, but the nurse never came. I slept, finally, fitfully, beside my sister. In my dreams, the girl came, and sung me lullabies about ashes and crows and naughty little children like me.

***

“He’s still asleep?” A faraway voice.

A muffled reply, words I can’t understand pinging at me, urging me up.

“Poor thing…so young.” The first voice, a sound of shuffling feet.

“She needed eleven stitches.” A sharp reply.

I pulled myself out of a sea of eyelashes and into my cushioned room. When I opened my eyes, and look at the two women at the foot of my bed, on of them jumped back with a little shriek.

“Quiet,” someone whispered.

Yes, quiet. For the first time. Except for the women. Daisy was quiet. The girl, though she hung by her thin fingers from the light fixture and studied me with beady eyes, said nothing. My head felt dull.

“Boy…boy, can you hear me?” A woman, so soft and pliable. Her marshmallow skin and cotton candy lips….my stomach twisted, empty.

“Danny.” My tongue stuck to the sides of my mouth.

“What?”

“His name.” The other voice came into my sight. I looked over at Daisy. Quiet, quiet Daisy. My stomach clenched, twisted, parted and set me heaving into my pillow. My pillow. Daisy, her lips as cold as rock, needed nothing.

“Oh god…oh…god…” I moaned.

The girl laughed and leaned over me, putting her mouth against mine. “Can a murderer claim anything from God?”

“I didn’t kill her.” I told the girl, the nurses, anyone who would listen. It became my mantra over the next twenty four hours. But for all my protestations, I got only narrowed eyes, more drugs.

***

The girl laid beside Daisy, her painfully long arm stretched to lay atop our chests.

“You’re not real,” she said.

“I am.”

She shook her head, kissed Daisy’s hair. “Not like you think you are.”

“No one can see you,” I said, wishing she would kiss me like that.

“We both know I’m not real. Look at me, Danny.”

I turned my head. She lay beside me, my sister’s half corpse gone…gone where?

“Give her back.” I said as I rolled onto my side and pulled the girl to me.

“You don’t need her, anymore.” She felt insubstantial in my arms. My arms. “You don’t need me, either. Wake up, Danny. It’s time for your medication.”

“No.” My arms clutched her…clutched nothing. “I can’t.”

“Wake up, Danny.” A hand caressed my cheek. As I came to, my fingers sought out the scar on my side. My sister. My other sex. My imagination and my curse.

The nurse feeds me drugs, writes longhand in her little notebook, and walks me to breakfast.

***

“My sister died with my mother.” I parrot back to the doctor. He nods, his hands steepled in front of him.

“Again,” he says.

“My sister died with my mother,” I say obediently.

“Yes, Daniel. Good job. How are you feeling?”

The girl kisses my earlobe. The scent of loam permeates her image.

“I feel good.” I press my cheek against the girl’s lips. The girl he cannot see.

“And Daisy?”

He is testing me. I can tell by the way he catches his tongue between his teeth. I know the answer he needs to hear, the one I finally believe.

“Daisy…Daisy was stillborn. Daisy is gone.”

But I am not. And soon, I’ll be free.

******

Eliza has been writing stories since she learned how to hold a pencil, and writing horror since she learned how to think.