“This house if it could talk would tell a tale.
But me-I talk to those who know and then
I lose my memory.”
***
Where is my mother? What does the word mean?
The whole of Ufrana was burning. We dressed ourselves in layers of all we owned and limped across a dying purple skyline. “Look! There is one moon tonight!”
I looked up to see the first moon only to mind the second had devoured it. The land rewriting itself into obsolescence. The making of all our names. Passed out and branded on us like chattel, sewing us into our skin. There is nothing so damning in all of creation as a name.
One
I got a call from my mother at six in the morning. My grandfather was dead.
An hour later I was at Keith’s house, pounding on the back door. I sat on his couch, letting him hold the complicated rig of crystal cylinders and bubbling water up to my lips. I inhaled. I said something. He turned to me, his eyes alive. He was reading my mind. He came up to me needle in hand and got to work. Keith baby oh baby oh baby oh…..
I welcome black bile inside. I felt myself roll down onto the dirty carpet, limp. I kept singing. On the screen behind me cartoon ponies were flying. The word Keith, heavy on me. The world is heavy on me, Keith. My arms are too long. The plunger dropped each little molecule of blood turned circular and released. Outside a second moon was rising. A body lying on the floor. With a body lying above it. Bleed. His skin peeled off and flew over me in little dandelion seeds. I caught them in my teeth.
I will not remember this. I am an expert at forgetting. I remake the world and take out parts I don’t like. Whole swathes of days and years devoured.
“Beatrice is scaring us. She talks about it like it’s real. She talks all night to her little online friends about Ufrana. She won’t go to school. She won’t do her homework. It’s a delusion. We’re taking her to the doctor to be evaluated but I need you to come home, please. Please, Baby.”
I had maybe 200 dollars in my checking account. The plan I had was to let the money run on drugs and UberEats and overdraft fees until I had nothing and then I would shave my legs, go back to Rhino’s, and sit my stupid junkie ass on that fucking pole or I would shoot myself in the head with Keith’s Smith & Wesson.
Instead I bought a ticket to Grand Rapids and started to pack my duffel bag.
On the train the sensation of living, its overwhelming oppression, wrapped around my neck like a vice. I closed my eyes and it all went away. Silence like a wall I had built. I, the kestrel, flew from the hole inside of me. The winding of my veins and leaves, aimless wandering, the sound of wings I drift to sleep beat beat beat. There is nothing to be scared of. All that is left is a world washed out with the act of dying.
Two
There are two versions existing within me. And neither one of them is Beatrice. There is Pell and the nameless girl. The girl without a name has taken mine like a piece of silly putty in her hands. She has taken the word Beatrice like a stick of gum and chewed her up and spat her back out. She tramples Pell, twisting the skin of her arm with indian burns. All I have left is memories which walk over each other, their footsteps tracking backwards and forwards until I am lost.
My grandfather calls me into his room. He has a scuba mask over his face, and wires all over like a living computer. He points to the nurse, who hands me a glass figurine of a dandelion from the desk beside the bed. I cradle it in my palms. I can’t speak. I wish I still had my magic powers. If I did, if we were in Ufrana I could put my hands to his chest and chant the words and he would be all better. In my head I ask my grandfather if there is a better world out there, where no one ever hurts anyone else.
I know God touches all lives equally. Like cling film the second memory wraps around my face, and pulls tight until I am left gasping, choking for air. My grandfather is undying and young with long white hair. We walk through the palace garden past the golden trees. He says. My baby. This is the best possible world. How could anything be better? The word drills into my head creating hundreds of little holes.
I am too afraid to say goodbye. I am too afraid to kiss his wrinkled cheek. I watch him inhale and cry, big fat droplets, like little jewels. His eyes look nowhere.
I am not Beatrice. Beatrice was never born. They are looking for her everywhere. But they will never find her. I have hidden away her skin beneath my bed. Loose and sagging.
I am completely and utterly alone in a foreign land.
Three
The doctor prescribes her two bottles of mood stabilizers, one SSRI, and an atypical antipsychotic.
He turns to Beatrice.
“Are you experiencing any troubles at home, Beatrice? Any bullying at school?”
She stares at him uncomprehending. I know she wants to ask. “Who is Beatrice?” I grip her wrist hard enough to bruise. She keeps her mouth shut.
I had asked, earlier, if we could go to Grandpa’s grave. “He doesn’t have one.” My mother’s blurry face, devoid of any features. I asked if I could see his ashes. “He doesn’t have any.”
Gone. All gone. As if he had never existed at all. He would have made a great King, but there are no kingdoms left to rule over. He had been an enlisted soldier. And like all soldiers he left behind a killing idea. His quivering eyes, back out there in the stomach of repulsion, always drawn back outside his skin through time and space to another world still at war. In eternal battle. The killing idea: creation.
We were sent packing to Bea’s room. My mother grabbed me in a suffocating embrace, the smell of spun sugar wafting into me. My face to hers my head on her shoulder her hand on my knee. Oh babybaby. I felt sick and black dread. Dead worlds can’t hurt you. All that’s left is to forget. My sister’s room was neat. She had taken a hammer to the place. Pink, pink, white and pink. A whole table of glass figurines, a nativity scene with a giant glass dandelion as the centerpiece. The menagerie were items gifted to her by her grandfather, The King of The Moon before she left Ufrana. She had hidden them on her person, sewn pockets into the elaborate gowns so they would not be found. Each figurine could be used to store magical power. On her bed was an Angelina Ballerina doll I’d gotten when I was thirteen and she was nine. The only thing that managed to bridge the gap between her past life and the next. Its sad little whiskers filled me with unnamable revulsion. What a thing of endless, useless horror. I felt sick but didn’t understand why. Like something bad was in the room with us. A monster hovering over my shoulder, its talons waiting for the right moment to dig in and suck.
The Land of Ufrana was in an eternal battle. That’s why Beatrice had been reborn here, placed in this body. So that she wouldn’t be harmed by the encroaching enemy. She would be leaving soon. While she was here she dedicated herself to the art of taxonomy, Dictating names for flora and fauna that did not exist into college ruled notebooks, lining the shelves of her pink bookshelf. She would bring the art of names back home with her as a gift. I knew all of this, because she used to tell me. My sister had a grandfather in Ufrana. But no mother. And no sister. She watched me now curled up on her floor, a small black roach, staring at her music box filled with cheap sea glass. The pieces of sea glass were petals she had grabbed in her haste to leave, picked in the Garden of Everlasting. Filled with the famous flowers made only of colored glass. And trees with leaves made of gold. When she was thrown into her new body the petals broke apart on impact. And couldn’t be put back together again. Not in this world.
Beneath the glow of her pink ceiling covered in the stars we put there together I asked the only thing I could think of to make her staring go away.
“Will you show me how?”
I didn’t think it was real. But I wanted to understand what she had been showing me, reels of girls in ten second videos talking about how they had met Draco Malfoy last night and he had professed his love for them and how they were now rulers of entire kingdoms, and how they had been able to fly.
To create an entire world within a world, a second sun rotating around the inside of your mind, eclipsing the terror of living with soft diffused darkness of an empty dying day. Where nothing ever goes wrong. Somewhere where Beatrice was safe.
Four
She sets up a nest for us to lie in. I crawl inside, watching as she dims the lights until only a neon LED purple remains. The process is easy. We both lay down next to each other in her canopy bed, our legs straight, our arms crossed over our chests, like we’re dead. She puts on a Spotify track that is at a lower decibel than the human ear can process. She coaches me in breathing. In for four seconds. Hold. Out for eight. Again. I close my eyes and fall into the spots of light. Her voice starts to drift away from me, the distance between us widening. I feel, as if from the other room, as she curls herself around me and starts deep breathing herself. I can not move. Not my arms, or my legs, or my eyes. They aren’t my body anymore. I feel myself falling. Down. And Down. My air leaves me. I am outside of the window of her small room, looking down at the darkened street, the dim glow from the street lamps. I fly higher, my wings beating, into the quiet of the night. Nowhere at all. The sun above me sets and in its place a moon rises. The world begins to rearrange itself. Eons of evolution, dandelion seeds floating and blowing away in front of me, behind the first moon a second rises, a predator setting its mouth to bite. Mountains formed out of purple lines. Faster and faster still, out of the green sea the peaks grow. Though the earth forgets. I tried to think of my sister’s name. The sun rises. The sun sets. Blackness blooms through me. Where did her name go? Buildings die and grow like saplings from the rubble rich with nutrients. They feed on gold fillings and birth metropolii from their sodden wombs. Flatness is death. And I embrace. Behind me I a cold shadow, fingers reaching.
I open my eyes. I am in Ufrana. All I know is losing her. We are in the Garden of Everlasting. She stood beside me, the girl with no name. All around us, for as wide as I can see, is a garden of glass dandelions. My finger brushes across a blue glass petal, which feels almost velvet to the touch.
A name, all things have names. Except for me. I have nothing except for joy inside of my heart. Because I have less than nothing. I am smiling with no teeth. She smiles back at me. A moment of silence.
Then a door slams. And I make it all crack open. I can’t help it. I am a failure of forgetting. I lose my grip, and trip, and let it wash over me. Ufrana is a six letter word. It stamps its name over our common grief, our little agonies. It washes off like watercolor paint. It does not abide liars. A lie is that we dressed ourselves in layers of all we owned and limped across a dying purple skyline.
She sat bloody, her eyes crying. She hunched over like a dog with a bone. Her limbs twitched, too white. I cannot stop her now. The truth is that she has been made into a monster, just like me. The moon blots itself out and through asexual reproduction and bears itself again. A symbol is pressed to my forehead. Branded into the skin I live in, so I cannot escape. I hold the cup of justice and do not let it tip. Mother stood above the bed like a black cloud. The sickly smell of rot, like spun sugar. I cannot protect anything. Not on God’s green Earth. I leave. I do not know how silence cries except in dark blue dripping. My wings do not beat. Tarred to the roots of a tree and dandelion leaves. In Ufrana, the girl with no name would say. In Ufrana we live forever. And now I see what she means. I open my mouth to scream. The monster’s face holds me. The petals crack open and fly away, just like everything else that owes itself to being. Everything inside of me is ripping.
I open my eyes. Mother is there, in the doorway. Keening in fear, I open my mouth but no sound leaves. I cannot speak.
I am back inside skin. I am lying in a pink bed in a purple room. I have no idea who I am. I cannot judge distance. Beside me, the thing I have helped kill, rolls her eyes, sighing.
I laugh. Afraid. These words mean Nothing. Horror comes inside. There is no end. I can’t remember why I am afraid. Endless war flattens the old, and replaces it with something worse. There is no forgetting. There are only ever new worlds.
— Jessie Lifton’s work has previously appeared in The Writer Magazine, Bizarre Publishing House, and APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL. She is a student at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. Jessie Lifton is on X @jessiechrxst.