Excerpt From a Young Woman’s Journal - Rachel Myers

Excerpt from a Young Woman’s Journal

RACHEL MYERS

I was nine years old when it started. There had been nothing different about that day. The sky was its usual blue, and my mother and I were going to the store. I stepped outside and my mom grabbed my hair and yanked me back in, yelling that there were vibrations and I couldn’t leave the house unprotected. She powdered my cheeks with ash, but I didn’t say this is why dad left. I was not as cruel then as I am now. Exiting the store, I saw it. I was riding on my mother’s back while she carried the groceries – she was exceptionally strong – and I glanced towards a gutter. I thought it was a naked child. But its gray skin hung off its scrawny frame in waves of wrinkles. It was on all fours, staring intently into the gutter with bulbous bug eyes the color of yellowed paper. It lifted a skeleton hand to scratch itself with absurdly long nails, twisting into coils. It yawned, revealing two sharp, vampiric fangs, surrounded by rows and rows of rotten teeth. I watched as it reached into the gutter, plucked some small trapped animal, and ate it. My mom didn’t see it. I didn’t point it out to her because I knew she would blame the vibrations and exalt her own wisdom. I didn’t want to hear it, but I would have to anyway eventually.

The non-stop news coverage focused on how some people could see them, some could not. I saw them every day: climbing trees, perching on branches, crossing the street, peeking through my window. My mother also saw them. In one news interview, a man brought a creature he had trapped, and the anchors nodded uncomfortably, playing along, until finally they admitted to seeing nothing but an empty cage. I stared at the screen, at the gray goblin they couldn’t see, and I screamed. I was crazy, wasn’t

I? I was seeing things. I blamed my mother. The coverage started to die down. It was, after all, just the same story over and over again: another loon claiming to see a creature that clearly didn’t exist. Meanwhile, they continued to increase in numbers. I took to calling them Raisins, because of their wrinkled skin.

[ 73 ] prose A couple years later, in middle school, I was wandering alone behind the school building during lunch. I didn’t have any friends; obviously none of the non-crazies liked me, and us crazies avoided each other even more than non-crazies avoided us, because no one hates a social leper with the same passion as the social lepers themselves. I saw a Raisin running across the grounds like a hairless, wrinkly monkey. It let me get quite close, and I threw the uneaten crusts of my sandwich at it. The Raisin turned and stared at me, for a real long time, until I heard the bell marking the end of lunch and started back inside. As I opened the door, I glanced over my shoulder. The Raisin was still watching me. Around this time, I started wearing beanies every day because the weather seemed to be getting colder, the sky grayer. The first time a bite happened was in high school. I was getting stuff out of my locker when I saw a classmate, a non-crazy, walking with a Raisin latched onto his ankle. He limped, grimacing, but oblivious to what was causing him the pain. The Raisin was dragged along the floor behind him, apparently unbothered. The other non-crazies didn’t react, but one crazy gasped and screamed. I just watched him pass by. After that it was a common sight, Raisins hanging

off of human bodies. They only bit non-crazies, who continued to deny the existence of the creatures even as they felt the sting of their fangs. I started having nightmares and took to sleeping during the day. This made it difficult to go to school, so I dropped out and moved out of my mother’s house because she was driving me insane. She had littered the house with ash. She claimed it kept the Raisins away, though swarms of them sat on her roof. I was sick of it. The nightmares stopped once I moved out, though the amount of bitten people – and the number of Raisins biting them – only increased. I distinctly remember going to the store and encountering a lady with a Raisin hanging from her face, the weight of the creature causing the flesh under her eye to start to tear away and blood to leak out like tears. I got a job as a receptionist in an office full of the bitten. I took the job because the dress code is so lax, I can wear my beanies. One day, a Raisin casually crawled in and leapt onto my lap. Disgusted and frightened, I pushed it off, but it jumped back on, curling up comfortably. Since it wasn’t biting me, I left it there all day. When I got up to go, it climbed nimbly up my arm – the cold feeling of its curled claws making me shudder – and perched on my shoulder like a parrot. It has lived with me ever since. My shoulder is its favorite spot. I hate it. I hate waking up with it curled next to my face. I scream at it, I throw it across the room, I kick it. Except for an occasional hiss or two, it never retaliates.

One day I was walking home, my Raisin in its usual spot, when I saw a man across the street with his own Raisin. We stopped walking and locked eyes. My loneliness urged me to go to him. But as we stepped into the empty street, our Raisins hissed and screamed at each other. We turned and went our separate ways. When I got home, I pried my Raisin off of me with a

screech and threw it into the oven, turning it on. Soon the place was filled with the stench of burning flesh. My Raisin shrieked and clawed and banged on the oven door while I held in my nausea. After several hours, when my Raisin had fallen silent, I opened the door, only to find it was not harmed. Ever since, it has smelled like a burnt corpse. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night with it curled up on my chest, the putrid rotting smell filling my lungs and choking me, and I hope that it has died. But it always wakes up.

prose A few months later I was on my way to my mother’s house to bring her a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. I was the only one out, people rarely left their homes anymore. Raisins shuffled along in the road, blinking their disgusting eyes at me. Vultures circled in the gray sky. They follow me now because of my Raisin’s stench. My mother’s roof was covered in Raisins. Not a single shingle was visible. I knocked on the door, but she refused to let me in because I had one of them on my shoulder. I could see through a window that piles of ash covered her floor. I sat down on her front step and began to eat the pie with my hands, digging into the fleshy middle and lifting a fistful to my mouth. Vultures landed around me, disappointed that I was alive. My Raisin drooped lazily on my shoulder, paying no mind to anything. I felt my insides twist together into a coil as tight as the Raisins’ nails while the cause of all my troubles sat comfortably without any feeling of guilt. I began to cry and wail. I screamed through the door that this is why dad left us, telling my mother that she’s crazy, saying that she probably summoned these stupid Raisins, that the vibrations were all in her head, that she had made me crazy just like her. That was the last time I tried to talk to my mother.

I saw a crazy the other day and attempted my first conversation in years, but they were disgusted with me on account of my little companion. I could’ve told them that seeing it every day makes me want to rip my eyes out. But I didn’t. I just went to work, listening to the bitten non-crazies bemoan how their youth has fled them before their time. They do age faster than us crazies. I don’t age at all. I have been alive for years and years now and I look exactly the same as I did the day my Raisin hopped into my lap. Each bleak day is like the last. They stretch on into the endless future. I blame my mother.