"Soul Searching" by Jamie Paul

The man I met in the woods took the wrong parent. 

It’s the kind of realization that comes in a lapping wave. I’ve just gotten my feet wet in the thought when the tide rips me under. Then, all at once, it soaks me to the bone. 

A scream lodges in my throat as I take in my family’s gutted parlor. My bookbag slides to the floor with an ungraceful thud. It’s all so sudden, I feel like I’ve been kicked in the chest. Something wraps around my heart in a quick loop, feeling like shredding barbed wire. It’s that special kind of horror that burns from top to bottom, pinpricks of it reaching from my feet to my neck. The dread can’t manage to escape from the coffin of my larynx, even if it digs its sticky finger into the ridges of it. I’m silenced and cut down by remorse. 

This is not what I wanted. Dear Lord, it’s not even close to what I wanted. I know I went and summoned darkness. I know what I invited in. But it was never supposed to touch him. 

Boots muck up the floor, leaving mud behind. The police have clearly been in my house for a minute, but not quite long enough for them to be combing through our things with latex gloves and tiny baggies like they do on the TV—only long enough to coo over the sobbing woman who shares my last name. I struggle to inhale through my fish-gaping lips, but it just comes out jagged and clogged, familiar sulfur and citrus dancing over my taste buds from the tainted air. My legs feel faint and weak, and before I know it, I’m easing to the floor, knees hitting hardwood. My jean shorts bite into my thighs as they pull taut. Mother always said they were too short for a girl like me—for a good girl. 

But good girls don’t do things like this. 

Good girls don’t make deals with the Devil. 

“Oh, Marleane—” Mother says with a scolding edge as I fall apart. She sounds so angry I flinch. Then, her tone melts away like hot butter, turning weepy instead. She must have remembered we had finer company. “You ain’t even supposed to be home. I just came back from Ms. Patty’s, and now this—” 

Her voice grates me. I can only stare as words evade me. I almost start praying—God, what have I done? I want to take it back—but I know it’s far too late for that. No God will be listening to a wretch like me. 

The grandfather clock bongs away, the brass pendulum lazily counting the seconds as boots creak across the living room floor. Crime-solving heavy. It’s easy to imagine they always walk with this kind of doggedness when someone shows up missing. I count each ear-ringing chime. Twelve. 

 Noon.  

The time that had been promised to me with a kiss. The man in the woods’ eyes had been dark as coal, but his hair looked cinnamon dusted and soft. His cologne had made my nose wrinkle. It almost smelled like burning hair. The fruit that he pushed against my lips as he pinned me against a tree and the sugar on his tongue made it easy to overlook. “Miss Marleane, why don’t you sit down and eat of the fruit with me?  Let me take care of your little problem.” 

His voice still throbs through my core. 

White bites at the edges of my vision in a dense fog. The color throbs in and out while my heart pummels against my ribcage like an organ scorned. The beating melds with the hum-singing of my blood, making my ears burn scarlet. But I’m shivering in the unnatural cold of the room. It’s enough to make focusing nearly impossible. Nearly. One thought still rings bright and clear. 

I messed up in a bad way. 

It was all wrong. Because those were Dad’s glasses shattered on the floor. The shards reflect in the yellow light, making Mother’s Persian rug look like it was getting ready to spark into a bonfire—like a smoldering warning. The thick-rimmed frames have been stomped all to hell, the arms bent at impossibly wrong angles. Every time I blink, flashes of Dad take their place in a horrible, predictive fantasy. I see skin cleaved open and bone piercing through with a splintered, arrogant wrongness that could only be achieved by something inhuman. Those arms used to hug me Grizzly-tight. I see his body pale and drained, limp as it slouches into creeks of black blood. We had plans to go swimming down at the lakes—he had joked about getting good and tan. The gray matter slimes up the floors, his skull nothing more than a crushed divot. He’d been working on a novel in his free time. The kindest man I would ever know soulless and gone. I don’t think I can live without my daddy. 

But that’s a grim thought. Afterall, I only have his shattered glasses. And a torn apart house. The table is broken, and the chairs are skewed. The lamps have been ripped from the plugs and smashed into bits alongside the specs. There’s no reason to go running to the coroners and the casket makers. There’s no body for proof yet. 

That doesn’t matter, something cruel in my head echoes around, whispers and taunts in a familiar way. You know. You feel it. You know what you’ve done. 

I do. Tears have been building in my eyes since it hit me. They start to leak hotly, brimming over my lash line. This setting was my very creation. This was my scene. 

“The Kincaid boys just finished paintin’ those walls,” Mother wails, sickly sweet and pitiful with molasses, gesturing to some blood spatter that lined from the floor to mid-wall.  Thick lines of mascara run down her caked foundation from her own tears. Her drawn-on eyebrows draw together, high and whiny, as she drapes herself over the nearest officer’s arms. He’s a young-looking thing, red-cheeked and flustered and full of football-playing muscle—the kind of guy I would have been sneaking looks at from the schoolyard. She grips onto the boy harder. “Cost Orrin a damn near fortune. Now look!” 

The cops all spare a glance. Mother has that effect on people. As soon as a word trembles from her painted lips, everything is to be dropped and done like she was Christ himself.  It’s something that missed me—both the spell and its enchantment alike. The police stare at the streaks of blood that haven't even dried yet, and I can only gawk at the floor, and my own shaking, bestrewn hands. My fingers crawl forward on the rug like a black widow, touching a bead of glass as if it was a part of him. The shame, fear, and guilt twist and claw together in the deepest part of my gut—like God is trying to weave out a whole new emotion. I press so hard that I feel it slice through the pad of my finger, blood beading hot. A distant part of me is surprised I can even bleed still. 

I didn’t know monsters could do that. 

“Such a shame,” Mother snuffles on, straightening her spine to perfection and smoothing her golden curls with damp hands. Another one of the officers nearly trips over himself to hand her a handkerchief, presenting it as if it’s a Hollywood award. She snatches it out of his hand, eyes rolling to the ceiling as she dabs at the crepey skin beneath. “Oh, thank you, sugar. It was the good paint, too. Sherwin-Williams. Then those good for nothing boys—Oh, I bet they did this. I want them arrested! I know it's them!” 

It wasn’t. Those boys didn’t do anything. But Mother has always been good at putting on a performance—she was Miss West Virginia in 1995, after all. That followed us. 

“Mrs. Elaine,” the deputy slips his hat from his thinning hair, sweat making the straggly strands stick wet and strangled to his red scalp. He presses the cap to his stomach. “We most certainly will look right into that. But first, we need to know when you last saw your husband. Was Orrin—” 

And she’s off in hysterics again at the mention of her husband’s name, babbling and wailing as she collapses into the shoulder of her rookie rescuer. 

She’d move on fast from Dad. She’ll have another man in his bed by tonight. Just like always. She’ll disappear. She has no reason to stay. 

My spine snaps. Another wave makes me choke. It’s almost exactly what I had longed for. 

I slam my eyes shut again.  I swear I can hear my eyelids click and my tears hitting the floor. A new sludge of thoughts bombard me, and something vile churns my stomach.  

I feel like I can see him die, and that’s when I realize I’m gagging, bile spilling past my fingertips from a clapped hand I didn’t even know I was moving.  

I knew what was happening. Just last night, I had been dreaming these images up, unable to stop my lips from curling in satisfaction as I reveled in the carnage running Shinnston-tornadic in my head. I got so excited about it, my feet twitched together under the last quilt my mamaw had patched together right before she went home to be with the Lord. My ankles knocked, and my heart smacked in place with a sick delight. I had spelled out every single one of these fantasies to the man in the woods, the words spilling just like the sour acid smearing down my chin. I had rattled them off with the excitement and anticipation of winning lottery numbers, each thought worse than the last. But it hadn’t been my father I was thinking of. He’s not the one I wanted tortured and ruined. He’s not the one I wanted gone. He wasn’t my target. 

It had been my Mother. She’s the one I requested. But my request wasn’t what I was really asking. I had just wanted her gone. That was the sealed deal. 

And I didn’t need to see my daddy’s unnaturally grotesque corpse to know he was long gone instead. The deal, after all, was an honest one. The words were becoming crystal. 

“I just need your soul in return, Marlea girl,” the man in the woods had said in his birdsong voice. His words were like a windchime. “I can make or break dreams, and the Devil’s only in the details. You won’t miss it much.” 

I had nodded. I had agreed  

The man in the woods had pulled out a perfectly round, ripe orange. He tossed it in the air before catching it again, quickly gouging his big thumbs into the pedicel. It all but popped, a spurt of citrus juice gushing on his hands as the yellow rind buried under his nail beds. He parted it like the Red Sea and pushed it to my lips. And I nodded my damned head. 

I wished to God I wouldn’t have. 

Mother might be leaving, but it was my soul that was gone. Every happy memory I had was with my dad, but I could already feel them wilting away like rotting funeral flowers, replacing them with decay. My soul was my love, and my love was my light.  

  There was no getting it back once the candle was snuffed out. The darkness enveloped me.  

It hadn’t been the wrong parent. I just hadn’t been sure what I was asking for.  

The taste of orange is still on my tongue, but with every swallow, I can’t get the bitterness of blame and guilt out of my mouth.  

The hatred swallows up the good. 

And somewhere in the woods, a man laughs and licks his fingers clean.