One Creature Devouring Another

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “One Creature Devouring Another” by Alicia Lim. Alicia is an artist, writer, and labor organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in KHÔRA. She is currently obsessed with horseshoe crabs and bog bodies, and has recently become completely enamored with ceramics. You can find her artwork at alicialim.com.

Boar With Wolf by Alicia Lim

I.

Night falls, spreads. A woman with dark hair and dark eyes opens the door to the last room she will occupy and walks through it. She turns on the light, which glows a soft yellow overhead. She sits on the bed and pulls the gun out of her bag. It lies on her lap like a sleeping cat.

The woman with dark hair lifts the gun with her right hand. She levels the barrel at her right temple. The trigger feels cool against her warm finger. She fires. Everything is red. In that moment, she excavates a new intracranial pathway, a conduit carved through soft tissue and brainstem, like fire tearing straight through the earth’s mantle. The resulting exit wound—a portal.

Officers find her body lying face up on the bed, as if she could just be asleep, dreaming. Except that her eyes are wide open. Her black pupils radiant, holding the golden corona of light from above, looking into the other world.

II.

He often says he’s trying to prepare me for adulthood. He is endlessly patient with me. You have to be less picky and more agreeable. You should smile more. Otherwise, what man will ever want to go out with you? Do you really expect anyone to want to marry you with this attitude?

When I pull away from his touch, he tightens his grip like a vise until I can’t move, telling me I’m lucky to receive any affection at all. He insists that when I grow up, I’ll realize how callous I’ve been, ignoring everything he’s tried to impart to me. Surely I must see that I could never survive on my own in this harsh, unforgiving world without his guidance, his firm hand supporting and caring for me, as he always has. I should stop taking him for granted, he says, and be grateful for what I have right in front of me. Everything could be taken away in an instant. I should remember that.

He would often tell me to loosen up, to relax. All I had to do was accept his love. How meager an ask. Who am I to refuse? How could I argue with this man? I was new to this pre-invented world, while he had already seen and traveled the globe, fought in a war, loved and lost, and buried his dead in holes in the ground.

It could easily have been the other way around. Officers in starched uniforms would visit a mother on a winter morning, warm air rushing out as she opens the door. First, they identify themselves: name, rank, assignment. Then they ask who she is, a formality to confirm the next of kin. The men express deep regret as they tell this mother—one of many mothers they visit—that her son died honorably while serving in Vietnam. The mother falls back, down across the wall behind her—an avalanche of the spine. Through the open door, a sliver of sunlight, like a knife, splits her forehead in two.

But in this instance, it isn’t a mother, but a son, who is visited by police. It isn’t in the daylight, but a night blooming like a blue-black bruise as my father unlatches the front door. And it isn’t Vietnam; my father had not died as he thought he surely would when he was drafted, treated like the enemy in a war he had protested just a year before. Instead, he had returned, spat on by civilians upon landing. My father is left alive only to be asked, on this night, if he is his mother’s son. Only to be informed that she was alone, found in a hotel room in Las Vegas.

It is cold in the office, but my father doesn’t feel anything. The examiner is wearing cream-colored latex gloves when he pulls back the sheet. There is the white streak in her black hair and the entry hole in the side of her head. No blood.

The hours and days that follow her death—identifying the body, notifying everyone, the funeral—are collectively the length of a held breath. My father is shattered, burned, buried. The earth has been hollowed out completely. Time hurls forward, gaining speed and momentum. Life roars past my father’s half-closed eyelids like a time-lapse video, and he barely registers any of it: job, wife, house, kids.

IV.

My father tells me I am the only one in the world he loves, the only person he can trust. No one else understands him like I do. He often talks to me as if we have this singular, true bond. I am special. I’m the love of his life. He can’t live without me. He describes being practically incapacitated by his love for me, which is why I must care for him and love him just as deeply in return.

He has always been shy and sensitive, easily hurt by others. Helpless in the face of the circumstances of his childhood, underestimated his whole life, slighted by people talking down to him every day. My father must constantly work to uphold his rightful status, and he characterizes his reactions as a matter of pride and dignity. People must be taught lessons when they step out of line. My father sees himself as tasked with restoring a kind of balance, a measure of order to the chaos that surrounds him.

I am the unwilling custodian of my father’s confessions. He frames his explosive moods as part of a practice of openness and trust between us. But his words are a hand over a mouth to muffle sound.

My father tries to convince me that I am the only one who can help him, the only one who really knows him. He is a lost and broken boy in need of care. I am vital and strong and wise beyond my years. I am the one with all the power in our relationship, he says. My nine-year-old body smeared in obligation, slick like blood.

He insists that he is bestowing this great honor upon me, of opening up to me, because of the depth of our connection, our love. I am fortunate to be the only person in the world who has the privilege of seeing the whole of him, his entire self. My father declares his love and allegiance to me, but my body interprets them as curses.

I can’t leave. I have nowhere to go. And he knows this. He’s created the conditions of my world. My father’s attention is claustrophobic. I do not hug him. I do not smile at him. I can barely stand being near him. And so he takes what he wants. Isn’t he entitled to some affection after all he does for me?

Sobbing, he wraps his arms around me, pinning the small bones of my body in place. He squeezes me. My breath is taken from my lungs. I look up as he opens his mouth. I see her corpse hanging heavy at the edge of his teeth. He asks me to say I love him. I know this to be a command. I tell him that I love him in a monotone, devoid of energy. He has drained all of my energy. I feel nothing.

Now he is shaking me as if trying to wake me up. He stands, looming, menacing. He’s growling, his anger crashing down on me like waves: You are unfeeling, heartless. You’re throwing my love, which I’ve given you freely and selflessly, back in my face. Is a man just supposed to take this kind of treatment? Is that what you’re asking me to do? Surely you must understand that I am not that kind of man. I deserve respect. What choice do you leave me with? You’ve put me in this position. What would any reasonable person expect a man to do in the face of an attack against him?

V.

It might begin with a small cup of water spilled on a table, a word said out of turn.

Pressure.

Spark.

Explosion.

My father’s emotional outbursts always had a predatory force. I learned to read his expressions, his movements, like a map. I knew from how he opened and closed the front door if he had a good or bad day at work. From a sigh, I could tell if he was hungry or thirsty, if his rage would manifest as tears or screams or whispers—or no sound at all, just hands. I learned to interpret the language of locks and doors in the house; their creaking and clicking tongues would tell me how close or how far away. I could and couldn’t tell all of these things. I anticipated everything and nothing.

As vigilant and as precise as I was in anticipating his moods, he was always able to match me, to best me in inventing new and creative ways to punish and disorient me. I learned that, ultimately, it didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do, what I anticipated or failed to anticipate, because none of it made sense. There was no reason or pattern, only power.

Language narrowed its focus in that house. It became only what was useful to my father. I learned that words existed only to serve his needs. Every day, he announced new rules I’d broken and fresh proof of my failures: I don’t care about him. I don’t treat him how he deserves to be treated. I don’t greet him warmly enough when I see him. I don’t say thank you. I don’t have the right attitude. I am spoiled. I’m never grateful for what I have. I’m arrogant, always acting like I’m better than him. I’m unreasonable. I don’t show him enough affection or appreciation. I don’t love him unconditionally, the way his mother had. I am cold. I am cruel. I am worthless. I’m unreliable, clumsy, forgetful. I never try to make myself look nice for him. I never wear my hair down. I don’t put enough effort into my appearance. I never consider him when all he does is think of me. I never put his needs first. I ignore him. I don’t listen to him. I’m disobedient, stubborn, willful. I’m always trying to make him angry. I can never just be agreeable. I can never just do what he says. I can’t get anything right.

What his work on me over the years did was set my body against itself, making ordinary habits and responses occasions for shame, discomfort, and pain. My father instilled in me that I was not punished because I exhibited bad behavior, but because I was fundamentally, intrinsically wrong.

Certainty closed like a heavy curtain over his eyes as he insisted he knew who I really was. I should be ashamed of myself, he said, because I was such a difficult and ungrateful child. It was not easy to love me. And when you are fundamentally unlovable, you must do everything you can to try and counter this deficiency of your being, the debt of your birth. You must make up for your value in other ways.

At times, my father made himself my path to redemption. He taught me that acts of service to prove my love and worth to him might—just might—make up for my inadequacies. All I had to do was listen to him and do exactly what he said, without objection or complaint. Each small act a kind of reparation.

I was expected to spend every moment of every day making up for the audacity of my existence. After all, I walked around flaunting my life, not appreciating all I had, while his mother lay dead with a bullet in her skull. I pictured the burnt hole in her head, the earth opening to receive her body. He told me I should be grateful I still had breath in my lungs.

Other times, he foreclosed the possibility of redemption. When my father looked at me, just looked at me, my presence was an accusation, an affront. Punishing me was rectifying a violation. He could also tell when I sensed his fear, when I could see his vulnerability, and when I glimpsed the frightened little boy inside him. That’s when he untethered his fury like a mad dog, starved and desperate. The dog chased me, tackled me, sinking its teeth into the side of my head, puncturing and then ripping.

I was a contamination, a disruption, a thing without a heart. My father taught me that my body was an unnecessary and unwelcome excess. That I was undeserving of everything he had given me. There was only ever one person who was deserving, and her body had been buried under so much earth, consumed by maggots burrowing through soft tissue, ants crawling over her tendons and bones.

My father’s hands were always on me. He would grab my thigh, grip my waist, fix his hand on the back of my neck. He would often use his hold on me to place or move me in space like a marionette. He would tell me that most men wouldn’t be as kind or as gentle to me as he was. That he would never hurt me.

Growing up, I came to understand my body not as my own, but as a puppet belonging to my father, while I was merely its daily ward. I was supposed to position its arms and legs and face and torso in various arrangements. A body kneeling. A body lying down. A body on its stomach. A body standing up. A body with its arms reaching. A body with its mouth smiling.

I close my eyes and can still see my father’s dark shadow against the yellow light from the hallway. When he came into my room at night, he would say he wanted me to feel good. He would make me take off my clothes. My father would tell me he was giving me a massage, always insisting it was for my benefit. Sometimes I could hear crying. It might have been me.

I learned very young that it was worse to say no, to try to get him to stop. He would just ignore and overpower me, act as if I hadn’t spoken at all. Sometimes I also think he liked it when I resisted, that it excited him in some way, and because it justified a show of force in response.

I came to understand that even an involuntary bodily reaction, like flinching at his touch, would be read as a rejection of him, an attack. And it wasn’t hard for him to restrict my movement, to disallow breath to come into my body. He was twice my size. Just let me love you, he’d snarl. Or sometimes he’d say it softly, sweetly, the way you soothe a toddler as they’re held still for a shot at the doctor’s.

After a while, when I heard his heavy, muffled footsteps on the carpet, coming into my room at night, I learned to play dead. I complied with whatever he told me to do. It became easier that way. I would turn off my body—that’s what I called it—like flipping a switch inside myself.

I remember the metallic taste of my dread. The terror entering my nostrils, going straight down the back of my throat. It crawled around my gut, looking for a place to settle but never finding it.

I remember how I slowed my breath, made it shallow. I remember how, when he touched me, he said he knew I liked it. I remember how I didn’t have a choice. How he would whisper, with honey in his voice, how much he loved me, how he’d happily die for me in an instant, I just had to say the word.

But there is also much I don’t remember. Sometimes it’s as if I know exactly what happened and as if I don’t know what happened at all. Like film exposed to light, parts of my memory completely obliterated, fogged, portions unsalvageable.

When I was ten, my father got the gun he planned to use to kill himself. He hid it in the garage behind our house.

An open mouth, filled with earth. Cold hands gripping bottles, pills, needles, guns. My ancestry blazes with addiction, depression, and suicide. The corridors of my brain, full of bones.

When I was eleven, the President invited my father to be a special guest at that year’s State of the Union address. I remember sitting in my sixth-grade classroom and my teacher telling us that it was an honor that my father had been invited by the President. She said I should be proud to have a father doing such important work.

Once his work began to be recognized by people with power, I knew my father liked the influence and prestige it afforded him. It shielded him from criticism. And the more he was raised up by the community, honored as a pillar of morality and goodness, the more he could act without accountability in private. He understood this public praise to be a powerful mask. And in wearing that mask, he could push past new boundaries.

When I was twelve, a shock of white hair began spreading like lightning through my obsidian hair—another betrayal of my body. I mistook the hair growing out of my scalp for my own. My father corrected me: I wore the hair of a dead woman.

I walked around, obscenely clothed in her flesh, my face masked by her memory. My father buried me in his mother’s image, and I became a living grave.

When I was thirteen, my father’s delusions and rages ascended to a new register. In a frenzy, he would rant about how everyone was trying to destroy him, conspiring against him behind his back. He said I was the only one who could understand the position he’s been put in. How unfair it all is, how unfair his whole life has been.

He would repeat over and over again that, above all, I must stay loyal and true to him. That I couldn’t trust or rely on anyone but him. That I don’t have to worry, he will always protect me—he is faithful and devoted, not like those vipers. The most important thing is that we have each other. They are all deceitful. I can never, ever betray him. I can never leave him.

My father’s paranoia continued to escalate, and he began raving all the time about vast plots against him. He decided he would sue everyone he believed had betrayed him. He threatened to empty my small college fund, and he would take out another mortgage on the house.

He’d plead with me, grab me, shake me, insisting all he had left was me. He’d threaten me—roaring that I’d better not betray him like that bitch who didn’t really love him, like those traitors who only pretended to be his friends. He stomped around, seething and promising they’d all get what was coming to them, and warning that if I wasn’t careful, I’d get what was coming to me soon enough.

VII.

His mouth twisted into the shape of war, his words falling like bombs. I remember the intense vibration through the center of my body, the blast wave down my spine. But sometimes, it’s as if someone has removed the sound, the actual pitch of his voice, the words that came out of his mouth. My thoughts dismembered.

The words only surface for me many years later, separate from the sensations, from the image of his screaming face an inch from mine, overwhelming my field of vision. His eyes, on fire.

Sometimes, all I remember is large, rough fingers digging into the soft flesh of my upper arms. The shock of bright pain, inescapable.

Other times, I only remember the timbre of his voice, energy so intense that it fractures everything around it. When he raged, the walls around me shook, the floor opened up, my father’s poison seething through the house’s nervous system, through mine.

Sometimes what I remember is the panic surging up through my rib cage, knitting it together and pulling taut so my breath is cleaved from me. For so long, all I remember is my absolute stillness. A rabbit snarled in the jaw of a wolf, a cage of teeth, of bone. The sound of blood pumping through my head, between my ears.

Sometimes, what comes back is the memory of him cornering me on the stairs, my small wrists trapped between his large hands, as if even my bones are pliant under his touch. When I recall this, I can still see the sun pouring through the windows above, slicing the space into golden planes. I remember the soft quality of the light, how it silently rested on the chipped white paint of the banister. Tiny motes of dust hung suspended in the sunbeams, swaying gently as if carried by invisible tides.