Issue 24 Preview: The Body Made Curious, by Megan Walsh
The following story appears in Barrelhouse Issue 24, which you can buy right here.
At night, flesh. Her tits sliding into her armpits, her stomach pushing against the elastic of her panties. The elbow with the dry patch that’s cracking, the crick in her neck. All of her sinking, spilling, oozing into the mattress, sloppy and sweating with a pillow between her knees, an itch on her ribcage she can’t ignore. Her stomach growling, her heart thumping. Meat.
In the morning, something else.
Pete wakes up stiff. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that her body is made of wood.
In front of the bathroom mirror, she lifts the hem of her over-washed sleep t-shirt to discover the artistic swirl of a bellybutton nicked out of the gently curving wood. The skin is not a different color, but it is marred by wood grain, glimmering like stretch marks as it ripples out over her torso. Higher, and there is the projection of her breasts, nipple poking out like a button. She touches it, very lightly, and hears a click.
A seam she hadn’t noticed runs up her left side, and now it sits slightly open over a shadowed interior.
She is a human cabinet.
“This is great,” Pete says. “I never have to carry a purse again.”
The person whom she would most be inclined to call upon experiencing a Kafkian transformation is, unfortunately, not taking her calls. Or, rather, taking them intermittently —scrolling up through their texts reveals an uneven pattern of call-and-response, sometimes an easy joke shared and sometimes stilted small talk. You okay? Pete has asked, several times, over the past few weeks, to varying results. It didn’t used to be like this.
Instead, she puts her lunch and coffee cup into her empty chest cavity, a book beside them, and goes to work. Such is the society she lives in; she has no sick days left.
The thickness of her sweater mostly conceals the rigid awkwardness of her torso, and the doll-like seams where it meets her shoulders and neck. Throughout the day, Pete finds herself idly touching the base of her throat, feeling flesh to wood and wood to flesh, warm and cool and warm again. It’s as though she’s never touched her skin before. Never recognized how alive it is, how vital in its simplicity, like the petal of a flower. There’s no con- sciousness in either, no thought, but still breath and nerve and blood and
elasticity and feeling and sweat — all these things together that makes up her animated, operated self.
The wood is just wood. There is a slight hollow sound when she taps on it. Underneath, within, is a space like the interior of a canoe: the sides curving pleasingly towards the topmost point, the wood smooth as though sanded and lacquered. It has a single shelf. For the first time in her adult life,
her back doesn’t hurt.
Pete starts to treat it like a junk drawer. Stuffs a pair of scissors in there, a pen, the vitamins she always forgets to take. A penny she finds on the sidewalk one day, an impulsively-purchased statuette of a snake she buys off the street. The cabinet adjusts. Where once there was a shelf offering enough room for lunch and entertainment, now there are crannies and cubbies, drawers she can pull out and tiny doors that swing neatly shut. The outside, too, is changing. She’s been sponge-bathing it because she’s not sure about soaking the wood (is she supposed to oil it, like butcher block counters?), and begins to notice designs etching themselves into the surface. A knotty whirl twist- ing around her hips. Flowers tumbling down her back. She is becoming the kind of thing you see in an antique shop, or a museum.
Hey, don’t want to bother you, she texts Sylvie. But something kind of weird is going on.
Twelve hours later, Sylvie texts back, Cool, let’s talk tomorrow, goodnight.
But Sylvie doesn’t pick up when Pete calls the next day.
Pete and Sylvie are cousins, sort of, in a way that involves poring over the family tree that someone’s mother is very proud to have made and shows off to indifferent younger generations at Thanksgiving. Their great-great- grandmothers emigrated together and had three children each, two sides of the family branching off and eventually growing apart, one half in one city and the other in another. Someone’s uncle arranged a reunion in the late nineties, which Pete and Sylvie attended as the only two ten-year-olds in the whole clan.
“What kind of name is Pete for a girl?” Sylvie asked.
“A fucking cool one,” said Pete, who had become very invested in saying forbidden words just within earshot of her mother and waiting to see what happened. Then, begrudgingly, she added, “It’s Petra, really.”
Sylvie wrinkled her nose. “Pete is better,” she said. Pete agreed.
Their moms connected and they ended up at the same summer camps, the same family-enforced spring break vacations, and finally the same college. Theirs was a friendship of elastic distance: written letters that their mothers
had to remember to send, scrawled with marker on the ripped-out pages of marble notebooks; shyly exchanged lanyard bracelets and beaded necklaces; phone calls that held up the line when someone wanted to check their AOL. They graduated to near-incomprehensible AIM chats and then text messages with every letter carefully punched out like morse code, thumbing viciously down on each button until they’d cycled through to the right letter. College was an insane luxury, two beds so close that Pete could throw something at Sylvie’s head without even having to look up.
Sylvie wasn’t like any other friend Pete had, almost imagined, like some- one’s totally for-real girlfriend who lived in Canada. “Well, my friend Sylvie, who lives on the West Side,” Pete would say, again and again, to her increas- ingly bored friends. It had an air of mystery, the implication that Pete didn’t need those other girls with their lunchroom powerplays because she could always escape to Sylvie. She skated through school with a social safety net, someone she would never lose.
Sylvie had her own things going on. Pete maybe didn’t pay enough atten- tion to that.
Eventually, Pete shows someone else. She’s out for after-work drinks with her friend Kade and hadn’t counted on how ungainly she would be perched on a bar stool, completely unbending and ramrod straight, like a nun or a princess.
“What happened to you, are you wearing a full-body cast or something,” he says, thumping her on the back, and it echoes.
He pauses. Pete pauses. Then she says, “How comfortable are you with magical realism?”
“I’m gay,” he says. “Very.”
They cram into a bathroom stall with a sticky floor and a toilet that isn’t worth looking at; around them, drunk women teeter on heels and stumble in sneakers, cooing apologies and thank-you’s to each other for holding the door, having a tampon, wearing such a cute shirt.
“Ok,” Kade says. “Show me your tits.”
There is now scrollwork unfurling along her collarbones, cranes taking flight on the plane of her chest. Carved grasses seem to rustle around her bellybutton and the latch of her interior cabinet is a clawed foot. His eyes widen by degrees as Pete opens up, revealing the faces of wolves on her inner drawers and doors, the twisting bodies of scaled snakes bordering her open shelves.
“Wow,” he breathes. “Can I...?”
She nods. She steels herself but it feels like nothing to have him reach a hand inside, like standing next to a bookshelf someone is selecting a book
from. He takes her keys from their hook — the tip of the snake’s tail — and puts them back. He fingers a lip balm. Then he says, “What’s this,” and opens a rattling drawer to take out a long necklace with a dangling gold flower, its petals made up of pale blue stones.
“I —” Pete is agape. “I lost that years ago. That’s —”
It was her mother’s and, before that, some distant great-aunt’s, a lavalier that Pete was supposed to be real careful with but lost in a move sometime after college. She closes her fingers around it and looks down at herself. She is a clown car, and the silk scarves are unending.
“What the fuck, man,” is all she can think to say.
When Pete calls, Sylvie picks up, but after her terse hello comes an impene- trable silence.
“You still there?”
“Yeah. Yes — sorry. I’m not really... What is it?” “If it’s not a good time —”
“I’m sorry. I’m just —” It’s never a good time. “You know, it’s been hard.” “I know.” Pete breathes. “I know. Do you want to —”
“I don’t want to bring you down. It’s —it’s a lot, I know, and it’s not like you’re even getting paid for it. You could make a mint.” It’s a joke, but nei- ther of them laughs.
“Well, I won’t hold you up, then.” Pete’s stomach sinks, metaphorically, because she never feels butterflies in there anymore, or hungry or full, or anything. She keeps eating, but she’s not sure what happens to it. “Unless you want to talk. I’m here, you know. If you want to talk.”
“Thanks, Petey,” Sylvie says, already so glad to get off the line.
The first time Pete noticed it was during a sleepover sophomore year. It was Sylvie’s birthday, so Pete’s mom made the trek to drop her off for the weekend, and they had a blast for about twenty-four hours. They made cookies, the kind you thump out of a cardboard tube and dump on a bak- ing sheet, their sugared surfaces imprinted with Halloween bats and pump- kins. Sylvie’s birthday was in November, but she’d been saving them. They watched movies and mocked the actors mercilessly, dissected the idiots they went to school with, read each other the backs of romance novels Sylvie had taken from her grandma’s house. They fell asleep like babies, wherever they sat, mouths open, drooling.
In the morning, Sylvie didn’t want to say anything to her. Pete kept asking what she did wrong but Sylvie said nothing, her mood silent and black until Pete went home that afternoon. The next time they talked on the phone, it was like nothing had happened.
It became more pronounced in college. Everyone slept ‘til noon and sub- sisted on garbage, so Pete didn’t notice right away. But eventually she caught on to the fact that Sylvie slept a little later, stayed up longer, that some days she wouldn’t get out of bed at all and only watched sitcoms in illegal seven- ty-minute increments on her laptop. She brushed her teeth only occasionally and did not do laundry. Her schoolwork stagnated.
But then a switch would flip and Pete would come back to a spotless room, even the bedframes buffed with multi-purpose cleaner. Sylvie would catch up on everything she missed with a furious passion and Pete thought, well, maybe it just takes a lot out of her to live like that. To put so much of herself into everything she did.
Because Sylvie was like that. If a girl on the floor was dealing with a breakup, Sylvie would throw an arm around her and take her to lunch in the dining hall. If she had to write a ten-page paper, it would come with an illustrated cover. Her clothes were painstakingly customized with stitches and paint, lace frills added or sleeves removed. She fell in love every six weeks and was devastated every seven.
Pete liked that about her. Not a lot of people could do what Sylvie did, and it made her special. Pete wasn’t like that. Pete had wanted to be aloof ever since she heard the word in a daytime soap while her mom was in the hospital. It required a certain level of cultivated mediocrity that she enjoyed. But she liked to collect special things.
The cabinet is getting crowded. More and more it spits out things Pete thought she had forgotten: the friendship bracelets with PETEY and SYL in alphabet beads, her dad’s old dollar store cigarette lighters, a Polaroid of Pete’s ex-girlfriend that Sylvie had burned in a quasi-ritualistic ceremony. She doesn’t know what to do with any of this stuff so she puts it back inside herself, and so loses out on space for her coffee cup, her lunch, the book she’s reading. Still has the hook for her keys, though.
It’s all starting to feel very heavy.
She starts leaving stuff everywhere. At the coffee shop, she drops her father’s wedding band into the tip jar; on the train, she leaves that dog-eared book she never finished from ten years ago. She dumps an old sweater of Sylvie’s into a donation box outside a thrift store. On someone’s stoop go the handful of pebbles from those family beach vacations.
Two weeks after that, Sylvie calls her. Pete stares at the phone for a min- ute like she’s imagining it, and then she picks up.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” Sylvie says. “I keep coming across all this stuff from when we were kids. Like, I was taking the train to an interview —”
She hasn’t talked about interviews in a while.
“And I sat on this book someone left behind, and it was the same book you wouldn’t shut up about senior year. It even had a receipt in it like you used to use as a bookmark. Then I almost tripped on these shells and pebbles that were all over the street. And do you remember that sweater I used to have, with all the sheep on it, and I used glitter-paint to give them sunglasses?”
“Hard to forget,” Pete says weakly.
“I saw one just like it at a thrift store,” Sylvie says. “Isn’t that a crazy coincidence?”
“Syl,” Pete says. “Come over.”
It does feel different when Sylvie sticks her hand into the open cavity of Pete’s body. She doesn’t seem to notice any of the stuff; instead she touches the wood. She inspects the hinges. She strokes the now-gleaming eyes of the wolf, inset with copper that winks as it catches the light.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know,” Pete says, defensive, and very stiff and very still. “I didn’t want to bother you.”
Syl raises an eyebrow. Pete rolls her eyes. “You know. Because you were —”
“Subsisting on Chex Mix?” Sylvie suggests. “Watching over-tanned Brits compete for the momentary high of televised social validation? Staring at my ceiling until my eyes rolled back in my head, convinced —” Here her voice changes. “Convinced that I’m nothing, and no one cares about me, and nothing will ever change?”
“Sad,” Pete finishes lamely. “I care about you.” “I know.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Sylvie’s hands are still on Pete’s shelves. “I think unnat- ural physical transformations are a good reason to bother someone. You’d want to know if I turned into a fish.”
“Is there a danger of that?”
“Now? Who can say.” Her mouth curves a little at the corner, and the familiarity of it offsets the stretched, exhausted quality of her skin. Then her head tilts. She is looking into the cabinet. She reaches for something, and keeps reaching, and keeps reaching until she is up to her elbow — her fin- gers close around it and Pete can feel it somehow, the tightening of her grip. She has to yank whatever it is free.
It’s a bone, but it’s made of wood, too. “If we break it, do we get to make a wish?”
“I don’t think it’s that kind of bone,” Pete says. She takes it, turning it over in her fingers. She puts it on top of the TV. “Wanna watch a movie?”
Sylvie does.
They fall asleep on the couch together in the tangle of impulse-bought fuzzy blankets, with cheese dust at the corners of their dry mouths. Pete is the first to wake up. When she does, she breathes in and her chest moves with her, gentle motion like waves on the shore. She stretches and her back cracks, her neck aches. She bends in half, head between knees, and her spine sings with relief, as though she’s been sitting up straight for two hundred years.
She realizes.
Her hands scrabble across her torso, the buttoned-up flannel shirt and the body under it happy and alive, empty or full. Sylvie, asleep, misses all of it.
“Fuck,” Pete says, laughing, maybe crying. “How the hell am I gonna get my keys out?”
Megan Walsh is a writer and artist living in New York City.