She goes to the horror film festival in lieu of her sister, who was ill with morning sickness and suddenly felt, despite years of being an aficionado, that watching horror while pregnant was a form of blasphemy.
“Blasphemy of what,” she asked her sister, who threw up her hands and then threw up in the kitchen sink.
“Fuck if I know,” her sister said, then heaved again. When it was over she wiped her lips with her forearm, the tomato soup from their earlier lunch smeared on her upper lip. “I can’t behold death while I’m building an eyeball.”
She sighed, snatching the ticket from her sister’s fingers. It was hosted at the historical theater on the northwest side of the city, with rotted, velvet seats that flipped down, and the air smelled faint of Chesterfield cigarettes. It was a twenty-four-hour horror movie marathon—not technically a festival, she thought—starting with the oldest movie and working its way forward in time. The first movie was the 1928 French silent film of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
What was it about this film, she’d wonder later? Grousing violins, a lamenting harp, played in the background as characters mouthed “Usher. Usher?” Roderick Usher paints Madeline. Her portrait comes alive as the woman herself wastes away.
Madeline looks askance from her portrait in the shadows.
Perhaps it was then that her soul cracked in two.
She’d had one, and then there were two. Her hands trembled and she rocked back and forth. Part of her was still at lunch with her sister, sucking on soup spoons, asking if she’d heard from the grandmother who raised them. No, no never. She could be dead for all they knew. As if the crone would deign to speak to them from here or beyond—one pregnant out of wedlock and the other queer and sworn off marriage. Half her soul was that of the crone herself, claws curling from her fingers, looking askance and smiling devilishly.
A soul slice that hurt, and the slice that sought to hurt.
At the film’s climax, she cried, moaned, wretched, and coughed, until other attendees began to mutter. Rather than leave, she sunk,
sunk,
sunk
to the floor, where a flattened Skittle ravaged her fingertips and popcorn kernels punched her hip. She lay down and rolled forward, springing up again in a new row to sit in an empty seat next to another spectator.
“You’re not the first,” the person said, and she turned toward the voice, raspy, buttery, and expectant.
“To do what?” she asked.
“Cleave,” he said, and she only knew that by the “he/him” pronouns on the nametag they gave each entrant at the booth out front. He’d slapped his on his shoulder, and she’d forgotten where she put her own. No name was written. Only the pronouns, along with an emoji-like face drawn so hard that the paper ripped on the smile.
He angled toward her, and she saw from the screen’s moonlight that he had no nose, merely shrunken skin that writhed where the bone was.
“Oh, this old thing,” he said, pointing to it. “Necrotic. Started to fall off, so the doctor did the rest. I used to want to skin the rest to fit, but here we are.”
He smiled, his tongue pinched between the upper and lower teeth.
“Cleave,” she said faintly. He nodded.
“I reacted similarly when I saw Jacob’s Ladder for the first time,” he said. “That fucking tail.”
The silent film ended, and Bride of Frankenstein began.
Now, she was of two souls looking at this stranger.
The first wanted her to flee, letting his face be the last she beheld as she exited the theater. She’d lie to her sister about sitting through it all, bullshitting that she enjoyed Sam Neill in Possession best. The other, the crone with curling claws and god-awful hunger, was tempted to lick the void where his nose used to be, her lips becoming cartilage he lacked. She wanted to eat him. With their missing parts together, Plato’s pursuit, they’d become incomprehensible. Two people facing the gash.
Instead, she sobbed
and retched
and scratched at her throat so hard the skin burned and puffed. At one point, he snatched her hand within his own, his own nails carefully manicured to points. At the end of another movie—the fourth, or was it the sixth, what was the fucking title, a mother licking birthing blood off an infant—he whispered in her ear that he’d like to put his face between her thighs, inhaling her through that thirsted void, how scent was so much more potent now, and he bet she smelled like library musk and a sweat-strewn stage…
A scream rent the air; a figure stood from a seat in the front row and ripped out their hair. Another moan. A wretch. A howl. The screen as backdrop, they looked like hooded fates. Three more followed.
Someone sighed behind her.
Voices.
“Here we go again.”
“This old thing.”
“Fuck if I know.”
“Where were you?”
The screen’s silver light mixed with other, supple colors—from the blue-fluorescent hue of the swinging doors—to the amber overhead lights that brightened and dimmed. Many sat frozen in their seats, their heads shaking in a nonsensical blur, or screamed in tongues at the cleaving.
“What do you think?” he asked, grinning at ensuing chaos. She’d forgotten his question. To go back with him? To sink to the floor among the Mike and Ikes, and lick and chew right then and there?
*
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She intuited: it was her grandmother. The crone that spoon-fed her oatmeal when she had the flu a decade before, who lifted a hot spoon to her lips, told her to open wide.
Wider.
“Don’t pick up the phone, darling,” she’d said, though the phone on the wall hadn’t rung yet. “Ignore it, whatever you do. That’s not the ending we want.”
__________
Lyndsie Manusos’s work has been featured in LeVar Burton Reads and published in Necessary Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Her debut novella, FROM THESE DARK ABODES, recently released from Psychopomp in September 2024. She lives in Indianapolis with her family, works as an indie bookseller, and writes for Book Riot. You can read more at lyndsiemanusos.com.