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You have always been different, ever since you could remember, always felt that strange, calling, itching feeling. Not a physical feeling, not really, even though it made your tiny arms tremble with it, made your disgusting pores perk up across clammy skin—the urge to try and cut and scrape them off, those unnatural natural raised bumps—and even though it made your hair stand on end like a static shock.
Like that girl Betty who used to go to Good Energies until she broke her neck, who stared into deep blue crystals with her deep blue eyes, who told you about the time she stuck a fork into an electrical socket when she was seven years old—what a lucky number, seven, you told her, and she claimed it was more than that. She’d claimed that the electricity had always been in her, that it wanted her to live because it understood her. Something about that still lives deep in you. You wish you could have known her better, someone like you. You’d walk past the tree she fell from every day on your way to work, and when it was stormy, you’d pause to watch the lightning reach it’s spindly fingers down the violent wind-vane triumphant on top, like some strange holiday decoration. You’d pause and think you imagined it when you saw a young woman illuminated by the white light, swinging
her feet.
♥
You have always felt different, on your first day of your first school year, when you paused to watch a worm on the wet pavement twist into a heart shape, like it knew you, like the heart was for you. When you paused to scoop it up, feeling the silky smooth slimy feeling of it in your tiny palms, gently set it into the grass. At the time, you hadn’t cared when those three boys saw you. You cared later when they cornered you on the playground and pelted you with mud and sticks. You cared when you stared at your distorted reflection in a brownish puddle, and you looked more mud than girl, dirt and tears washed down your cheeks by the pelting rain, like a punishment from the God that your aunt believed in.
You cared when you went inside, tracking dirty footprints down the clean white floor, like a snail’s trail of slime, ducked tight inside your shell, and the teacher took you to the lost-and-found to replace your dirt-smeared pink dress and to wash your hair and face off while you cried to her. Everyone saw you, and some of them laughed, and the next day, Dirty Jane was the name they’d chosen for you. Dirty Jane in your too-big lost-and-found again clothes, which smelled of mildew and hung off of your thin body in all the wrong ways.
You cared when you went home to your aunt in those clothes, tucking the heavy coat around yourself like protection, and she opened the door for you with her arms as thin as yours, arms like yours on a woman four times your age. She stared at you with her sunken eyes, took in your face pink from crying, your sodden eyes and the still-dripping ends of your hair. The coat and shirt and jeans that weren’t yours, with holes already picked into them, your busy fingers already unraveling threads. The more you were teased for your ragged clothes, the more the anxiety compelled you to tear them apart—better that then what you really wanted to do, to scratch at your arms and your legs until that singing call flow ed out with your blood, sickly and blackened.
Your aunt stared for a moment, then ushered you inside. She was never unkind, your aunt, but she wasn’t a mother. More a mother than the nobody who left you alone at the hospital, swaddled in a blanket covered in tiny pink hearts, crying and utterly alone, even though you had no idea why. You cry yourself to sleep with that very same blanket pressed to your own leaking heart, and you wonder if she left you because she had known, had seen in you the very same infection that you feel.
♥
The moniker of Dirty Jane didn’t fade quickly, and neither did the physical jokes. It was as if the more the girls called you that name, the more the boys played it up to impress them. One day, it was notes in your cubby, crude little crayon drawings that made you cry, however much you tried to hide it. You didn’t understand it. You just wanted them to love you, to care . Perhaps they were just like whatever mother you could have had —perhaps they s aw your decay, perhaps it was more external than you’d ever thought.
One day, it was your aunt taking you to church, and the other kids snickering in the pews while you tried to listen to the preacher man speak about loving and being loved by something higher than you. You believed him for a while, because it all felt so appealing, even if your prayers were never answered. Prayers for love, for your aunt to bring in money, for a better home that wasn’t leaking and a bathroom without mold , for pretty clothes—nice and pretty pink dresses like the one that’s now festering with the spoilt milk at the bottom of a school garbage bin, too dirtied for repair. Prayers, guiltily spoken, for a real mother, for a mother to love you and hold you.
One day, it was you reaching into your lunch bag and staring at the bruised skin of a sweet pink apple, thinking about Eve’s sin, your hands shaking with the urge to tear and strip and create holes, until you speared your cheap plastic fork into the apple, seeing how easily that rotten skin broke open, the sickly off-color of the apple’s insides. Your peers were staring at you, and the fork jittered out of your hand and onto the floor. You didn’t know why your legs shook when you asked the lunch-woman for a new apple. You ate it, crisp and crunchy, but with an unmistakable tang to it, like your disease corrupted everything you touched. But it was better than the food your peers ate, green and grey sauce, meat that didn’t taste like meat. Everything tasted like plastic, like filament , like the future expunged into the present, sliding from a landfill and into your stomach, like the extinction is coming that early.
One day, it was Marius Brynt, the boy with the bright brown eyes and the one crooked tooth, and the wavy blond hair who smiled at you during art class, when you’d drawn another unidentifiable mess of scratching and itching and yearning. You’d tried to cover it, the heart-vomit all o ver the page, but he was staring in awe, not revulsion. It was Marius’ face you covered God’s with when the preacher spoke every Sunday. Silly, yes, but he was the star that the Earth spun around, the face in your dreams.
♥
It was Marius Brynt that you drew when you itched, whenever you wanted to peel off yet another cute pink bandage to see if you wound was decaying underneath it. It was him who you followed, like a tiny pink shadow, clinging to him like a fungus, like the mold in the bathroom, like a chronic illness that wouldn’t go away. You got a fever around Marius, blushing pink and frenzied until your temperature was high, like he was an infection that needed to be combated. You didn’t want to combat him. Giving in to the infection was like giving into the song, the itch. He made you feel so dizzy and lovestruck that you threw up in the girl’s bathroom, while cheerful pink walls stared you down with their chipping paint, their own scent of mold and disinfectant and floral soap. Another girl stared at you when you came out of the stall, panting and wiping your mouth, a frail little thing shaking at having lost everything inside so suddenly.
The rumors and jokes kicked up again after that, but you kept yourself close to Marius anyway. He was kind, not overly so, but he didn’t kick you on the playground, and he didn’t cut worms in half in front of you, jeering, tauntingly asking you to stop him. Marius wasn’t like that. You knew, because he’d smiled at your drawing, and that wasn’t much, but you didn’t want to be alone. He had seen your filth, and he hadn’t abandoned you, and that made him God. That made him your favorite person in the entire world.
It was when Lizzy Lore started holding his hand that you got upset. Lizzy with her thick, heavy braids of pretty brown hair, never frizzy like yours, never broken and dry like yours. That’s why you’d sawed Lizzy’s braid off with a pair of cheap red safety scissors, and threw it in the dirt. You were sent home, and your aunt didn’t say anything. She just prayed, and she smoked a cigarette in her cigarette-thin fingers, and she patted your head and made you smell like smoke, rancid and chemical and falsely-natural.
You cried yourself to sleep again, because you were afraid Marius wouldn’t like you anymore, now that he’d seen the violence bubbling underneath your skin, spreading like a cancer. You thought it had been only against yourself, that the violence was only the type to result in scarred skin and pink band-aids. You didn’t know how much anger you had until your turned it outward. And you were terrified he would hate you, leave you. Like your mother. Like everyone else.
But he didn’t. He acted like nothing happened. He even smiled at you reassuringly when you reached into your cubby and came back with a handful of writhing earthworms.
♥
It was the night before Valentine’s Day that you stayed up until your eyes hurt making a card for Marius, the most lovely card you could think of. He’d been smiling at you all week, coy little glances, murmured whispers to his closest friends. You’d seen him heaving the corner shop with a box of candies and a floating, shiny, red heart balloon. You made him a creation of frills and lace and glitter and stumbly, awkward young handwriting. You wrote him a sermon on your card, a declaration of his highness, the perfection you saw in him. You asked your aunt for words, because your young mouth stumbled over things like exemplary and contagion and deific .
And you dressed yourself up to match, in pink and frills and lace and pretty little dots, like you embodied the blanket your mother had abandoned you in. You looked so little and pretty, and your shiny red heart was floating out of your chest.
It was the way that you took in the classroom decorations, all white and red and pink, every color you considered your favorites because they connected you to a woman you weren’t ever going to meet.
It was the way you almost vomited again when Marius handed you that box of candies, his few friends giggling, that coy smirk clear across his face. But you saw no wrong in Marius—no wrong in God. He loved you. He was your favorite person in the world. Your heart fluttered up your throat while he read your shaky praises, the fever blushing across your cheeks, the itch so bright and loud it was like a bell ringing in your ear, a deep buzzing song, like a symphony of insects. Your nails were digging gashes into your palms, but you didn’t notice. Everything was blurred except Marius, emblazoned in sharp relief, the only thing you could see above the rising hum that overloaded your senses one by one, until you wanted to rip your hair out.
And then Marius laughed. And Marius tore your carefully constructed Bible in half. Quarters. Eight hs . Sixteenths. You stood there, staring in wide-eyed horror, unable to move. Your hands shook, and you clutched the box of chocolates to your chest, unable to move as burning tears dripped down your cheeks, plopped wetly onto the floor.
There was a wrong in Marius. There was a wrong in God.
It’s easy, perhaps, for someone young to lose their faith, but you hated the church after that, knew that God couldn’t possibly love you if he tormented you so.
You knew it when Marius pushed you into the mud on the playground and said that he’d never loved you, that you were a stupid silly girl with a mind full of mush and dirt and rot that nobody would ever want to love, and each word felt like a strike with a knife, razor sharp and magma hot.
And when you went home and cried endlessly into your aunt’s sharp, thin arms, she didn’t say a word, but when you crept outside the window that night, the worms that bubbled up from the soil sang you their comforting song, and you wished you were one of them, wished you were a worm, unknowing of love, of caring. Worms don’t know their mothers. Worms don’t fall in love. Except they did, these, squirming in her hands, like plump pink ribbons.
Your aunt found you in the morning, face down in the garden.
♥
It was in middle school that the rot ruined your further. Your aunt didn’t know what to say when your legs stopped working. Your cried and cried at the doctor’s, until they shut you up with a heart shaped red candy-pop that tasted like artificial cherry, like that factory extinction stirred into the organ that rules your life. You ate it on the way home, and you tried not to cry.
It was crutches from then on, because your aunt never had the wheelchair-buying type of job. Two silver sticks with cute pink stickers all over them. All of the old women at the church, and the young ones too, said you would be in their prayers, and looked slapped when you said your God doesn’t love me, he wouldn’t fix me if he could .
The crutches made everything harder, harder to carry your books while you walked, harder to keep up with the rest of your class, harder when Marius Brynt kicked them out from under you and sent you sprawling into the dirt, papers fluttering into the mud.
You tried to take it all well, but you hated that you weren’t strong enough on your own to do what the other girls could. You couldn’t dance at the dances, as if anyone would dance with you anyways. You tried not to get attached again. You couldn’t get attached without obsession, without worship. Without the screaming sickness of the itch in your veins. Making you wild. Making you violent. Making your fragile heart drip and bleed like rotten fruit. But you wished you had someone to hold your books for you, someone to help dress you and help you out of the bath when your aunt was at another bar, searching for her own seedy, shameful sort of connection.
Y ou wished you were strong enough to force yourself through the agony required to walk. You wish you could speak to the cells of your body, like the queen of a colony, to beg or to order them to work. You wish you had a body that loved you, but it was a body created by a woman who cursed you. No comfort could possibly be found in it, you thought.
You hated your body more the more you aged, the more you looked in the mirror and wondered if you looked like the stranger who’d ruined your life. You hated the imperfections in your skin, the way your decay wormed it’s way to the surface. The itch took on a new form then, the violence turned inward again, a danger to yourself but not others. Never again others. The itch turned her to scratching at your face until you bled, bright red in the white sink. It was an era of more pink band-aids than you could count, of tearing out hair and scraping and filing. It wasn’t cutting—you didn’t cut skin that wasn’t blemished, you found it silly. You only knew about the cutting from one of your aunt’s women, the ones with the stick thin bodies and glassy, large eyes, and straw-brittle hair.
You would lay on your bed late at night with your light on, moths fluttering around it, the light casting strange shadows, casting your body in such a strange glow. You would lay there in your white silk nightgown, because the itch was burning in you too hard to let you sleep. You couldn’t close your eyes without the writhing behind your eyelids sparking another migraine. You couldn’t close your ears to the buzzing song. You’d get up with your crutches to the best of your ability, struggling out of bed on exhaustion and legs that didn’t work, the itch your only energy. You would put on your cd player, pink and red, the only colors you wanted to buy. You’d play love songs, and when they didn’t soothe you, you’d put on your aunt’s music, dark and heavy and loud and steeped in sexuality and death and religious guilt, with singing that sounded like anguished wailing and instruments that sounded like violence. It made you feel violent, but not toward anything. It was a type of energy, adrenaline, filtered into violence through the screaming itch.
You dropped your crutches and spun around to a song for several minutes, the pain dropping to the backdrop as the rage and longing of the singer synced perfectly with the hum of the itch, the song built into your very DNA. And then the rush faded again, and the pain flooded back so hard that you collapsed, black flickering into your vision.
In the morning, you’d woken to yourself in bed, with your frilly fluffy pillows under your head, and your baby blanket tucked over you, the music player gently shut off. It was the best morning you’d ever had, knowing that sometimes, your aunt was there. Sometimes, she noticed, and sometimes she cared. Perhaps she loved you like your mother couldn’t have.
♥
It was only when you’d grown up a little more that you’d learned about Wicca, and it was, at first, a breath of clean air. You’d longed for religion again, for the love and acceptance of a higher being. A higher being is a good substitute for a mother, you thing. They aren’t too different, when you get down to it. A creator who does not answer you. But you swore you felt something with Wicca, that the shaking in your skin when you did your rituals was a good thing. You gifted yourself to a mother-goddess, because your aunt never called you after you moved out, and you never learned if she’d died or not until that sad man who hung around your work told you it was lung cancer, a complication from smoking.
You never could fully get that smell away from you, however much your itched and scrubbed your skin raw in the terrible water of your terrible apartment. The water was always too hot—everything was always too hot, no matter how many fixes to the air conditioning were pulled from your paycheck. The owner smoked too, and it smelled different somehow, more fire and brimstone and less nuclear fallout. More like a bang than a whimper , is what the hum told you, when sometimes the singing formed into clear phrases. However many subtle differences in the smoke there were, it never really mattered, because the scent clung to you until you started burning incense for your own sort of smoke.
A nd so you sold crystals and sage and tarot, to all types of customers, the pleasant young ones, the stern elders, the giggling couples that made you so envious you started scratching at the rash you were certain was breaking out across your arms. And there were stranger ones too, who hung around the shop, like that sad man who watched you when he thought you couldn’t see, like he knew the itch inside you, like he was tracing with his eyes the pathway, the thread that would lead you into your future. There was something uncanny about it.
And there were others, others like Betty, drawn to the shop. You hoped it was because of you, that they detected a kindred spirit, but they never stayed long enough to become friends. There was a poor single mother, dirt caked deep beneath her fingernails, deep as the dark shadows of exhaustion beneath her eyes, who handed over several dented coins for a wealth spell, her hands clammy, yet caked with dust. There was one who admired spiral patterns, one who resembled your aunt’s women, gaunt and pale and thin, with watery eyes and strange pruning, with bony hips and sharp sharp corners. And there were the ones you felt the most, like you could have been one of them, had you not had the itch and the hum.
Lonesome types, who seemed to carry the morning fog on their shoulders, swirling around their ankles. They complained about feeling cold, and grasped your hand at the desk as if they’d never felt the touch of another living person. You understood that.
♥
Y ou didn’t feel another’s touch in a true way for quite a while, but you felt their virtual imprints against you. Your blog was your escape, a different type of ritual, where you posted pictures of your candles, your alter. Pictures of insects and pictures of a romance you could never have. An ideal relationship, red and pink and white, boxes of candy, valentine cards, shining balloons, hearts as far as the eye could see. An aesthetic idealization of everything you longed for. A collection of comfort, of things that made your itch subside, if only for a moment.
And there were friends there, not real friends, but people to speak to, to exist in silence with. People to repost your photographs, to read your scattered thoughts. Women like you, who used crystals and religions as a way to cope. Women like you who understood the beauty of pink frills over a rotting-sugar core. Women like you who save images of hearts and chocolates, who dress in pink and red, and white nightgowns to hide the loneliness that they actually feel. Women who listen to the same melancholic music about romanticized places and relationships, about drugs and about love and about Summertime Sadness. Women who replaced the song of the hive with the lilt of bleak literature. Women who were bone sharp and wafer thin, and had blog names with words you like, words like rot and doll and love and angel and gore and candy and crystal. Women who wrote about how they were slowly dying, and what it felt like, and they wrote about this compulsion that they had, how they hated their bodies for hating them, that they both wished they could recover and wished they never would.
And although these women felt the same as you, your itch was never cutting, or starving, or drinking, or drugs, and especially not nicotine. Your itch was the same as ever, the scratching and the love.
But it was nice to have friends, who you could show your crystals to, who you could joke with about slowly rotting until it stopped being a joke, and really, it never was, for either or you. And they were beautiful, for looking like the younger forms of your aunt’s women, like burnt out addicts in their larval stage, sitting in a meadow with flower crowns on their heads, white dresses falling off their bone-rose shoulders, veins bright and lurid under thin, pale skin, like the veins of a plant. If you were a plant, you were the type with a blight.
♥
The pain in your legs became worse as you got older, of course. You never did get a wheelchair, because you never did have a job that payed enough for it, and posting photos never got you any money either. It made things hard. You never were able to drive, always had to force your way down sidewalks on your unwieldy crutches. You arrived late to places, late late late.
It was one summer that the itch seemed to scream. Not shocking, considering the only mote of friendship you received was from women who were also suffering and itching and decaying and addicted. The scream was so loud inside you that you couldn’t wear long sleeves anymore without burning up, and you couldn’t wear anything tight without a rash, so you stuck to loose silk dresses, red and pink and white, of course. And the scream was so loud that you sometimes couldn’t hear what others were saying. And you could feel the song inside of you, build so deep into the fundamental atoms of you, reaching out and singing and singing, and you would feel responses in kind. Other songs, similar, with such entrancing melodies, that resonated deep inside of you, like a puzzle piece, in a way that your aunt’s metal bands and Lana and church songs simply couldn’t.
And you were at the counter at work when one song sung too brightly. Your manager had been to the side, checking her phone anxiously, tapping at the screen, a repetitive clicking of her blunt painted nails. She was blathering about some type of flash flood warning to your co-worker, a man who’s name you never cared to learn. You were walking over to her, about to ask if working hours would be affected by the flood, but those weren’t the words that came out.
Because there was a song beneath the building, just off tune to the song inside of you, and it echoed through your bones until you began to sing aloud—no words at first, just a hum, inhuman sounds crawling out of your mouth, mandibles clicking, the voices of many in the hum of the one—and the hum began to escalate to sounds that weren’t words but sounded like them, like a language wrong, and then into words.
Words about the ants the ants the endless ants we are the ants we are power in numbers we are unending hunger we are an infestation no you are the infestation this is our home this is our home first before you built atop us with mortar and brickwork we are tiny but we have bites that bring pain and we work and we sing beneath your feet and you do not even notice you do not even care you do not want to notice when we are noticed we are killed yet we want you to notice you are our gods and we pray ye be merciful we pray you hear us yet we pray we stay hidden you are our gods but we see gods differently that you do you are afraid of us we are your gods too we sing we sing we love to sing all hives have a song all infestations have a frequency we sing beneath you we wait we bide time with song and muttering and plan and when the Crawling Rot surfaces we will blanket you and the world and we will consume our gods as you humans do you should see the reckoning as a Eucharist—
You’d recoiled when the manager slapped you, coming back to your senses. A pair of customers were huddled in one corner, and a third was trembling by the counter. A sweet young couple, one with a strange glisten to xer eyes and another a gentle woman, and a bone-rose waif with thin hands and a nicotine tongue. There was a fourth, too, a plump goth girl who’d spilled her pack of tarot cards across the floor. You moved to help her, but she stumbled backwards and dashed for the door. You stood in shock, your manager’s hard gaze digging into your skull. The couple was edging away from you by the wall, and the girl by the counter was craning her ear, as if she was listening too for the song.
You threw your uniform jacket onto the counter and stormed out the exit. The man was waiting for you outside, the sad one, who looked at you then with sorrow, understanding, a little fear. He slid the heavy grey overcoat from his shoulders and held it out to you, who trembled in the sudden cold, arms bare and goosebumps rising. You took it, put it on and pulled it tight around you, like another borrowed coat so long ago.
The flood crashed down over you while you walked home, and you watched for worms, squirming to the surface.
♥
Your friends left shortly after, one after another, for different reasons of course, but it was really because the itch was the loudest it had ever been, like you were a metal detector chiming insistently over the place where coins were buried. For rot , you were too clingy. You saw a kindred spirit in the cuteness-over-corruption Druxy genre of woman, and you couldn’t let her go. She was the closest to you of them all, the one you saw yourself in. You didn’t idolize her, but you were afraid to leave her lone, and that is what drove her away. For doll and love , it was the attitude. You felt special, chosen, because for once, since you channeled the song of the ants, you felt as if the itch was for a reason, that it was more than a curse of your mother’s genetics, that she didn’t put the song in you, that some other thing did. They said it made you pretentious, haughty. You pushed them away because you preferred your soul song to theirs.
For angel and gore , it was a lack of true connection. And truly, they was the farthest from you, girls more of flesh than of rot. It became hard for them to understand you, once you fell fully into the song, satisfying the itch above empathizing with the touch of another power.
For candy , it was that you didn’t want to get better. You didn’t want to save yourself, you wanted to fall deeper into the song, into the itch. She couldn’t understand the holy processes that drove you, she wanted control of herself. You wanted someone to help you.
For crystal , it was that you began to fall away from Wicca, since you quit the shop, your photos of alters and herbs dwindled to nothing. In fact, your blog entirely dwindled. Gone were the careful arrangements of moodboards idolizing a romance you could never have, gone were the silk dress photographs, the tarot spreads, the lyrics to Lana and Nicole. Gone was that Jane, replaced by blurry mirror selfies, no makeup, blood on your cheeks. Replaced by wild rants that spiraled and crawled, rants about love and religion and becoming a home. Replaced by poetry, the lyrics of a song sung deep inside of you, engraved into your primal existence, the song of fear. But more than fear, the equal and opposite—love.
The pure religious fear of falling in love with the thing that destroys you, to love and fear at the same time. A relationship where both parties feed each-other, an oreboros of adoration and sacrifice. A symbiosis.
You’ve always craved symbiosis, truly, although you’ve been described as parasitic, taking and taking and never giving back, but you do give back! In devotion, in sacrifice, in all consuming obsession.
♥
There is a nightmare that once was named Jane, and she is you. You are not alone. You are loved. There is a singing beneath your skin still, but it is a harmony, a duet between you and the insects. You are a home for them, symbiosis. They are a greater lover than Jesus Christ or Marius Brynt or a mother-goddess or rot could ever be. They are always there, holding your bleeding heart close.
They are soothing, their song is gentle to you, a lullaby. A caress.
You can walk, thanks to the worms. It’s your childhood dream, a relationship where the tiny things controlling your body will listen, will move you. Will take the pain so you don’t have to. They do this because they love you, because they always have loved you, in a way your mother never would have, a way your aunt never could have.
You don’t hate your body anymore. It isn’t just yours, it is theirs, their body and home, and it is perfect for what it is. They chose it, after all. You don’t need to scratch anymore, to scrape and pick. You have given into the itch, and it does not pain you any more. The violence is a motherly instinct, the drive to protect yourself, to protect them . The worms are a warm embrace.
You wear dirt on your pink and red and white frilly dresses with pride. You are a mother and a home. You do not care what others think of you. You wear the title of Dirty Jane with the highest of honors. Your are beautiful. You are complete and whole. You are, for the first time, loved.
FIN