Page 42 of Bent Heavens

Liv reached for it with both hands before hesitating. She’d touched this thing dozens of times, but gloved and with bandages between their skins. This would be a touch of a different order, but there was no time to blanch. She took the skinner by both its arms, her fingertips sinking into its squashy skin, and tipped it onto its side. A cannonball of blood fired from its mouth, followed by other, smaller blasts. But it was breathing, air scraping hoarsely over the craggy remnants of its teeth.

How in the world, how in their worlds, could it be that Liv wanted to lean down, place her dry skin and clean clothes against the mucky, tumorous flesh of this inside-out monster, which had perpetrated who knew what violence against her father, and embrace it with all her might, never minding the slime of its earholes, the fishy wobble of its eyeballs, the blood-stench of its mouth? It was a shock of a thought; instead, she pulled the gauze from the kit and began unwinding a large strip into a ball it could bite on, the only thing she could think of to do.

“You’ll make it,” she whispered. “I believe in you.”

Thursday, the day that would change everything, Liv strode directly from her final class to the station wagon and sped through spitting rain under the yoke of a blasting, all-day headache. It was the headache, though, that had given her the idea: The skinner needed drugs. There was no telling how it would react to them, but if it could eat their food, maybe it could process their pharmaceuticals. She could not let it exist at this level of pain any longer.

In the bathroom, she read the ibuprofen label. Headache. Muscular aches. Toothache. Menstrual cramps. Fever. Some of it had to be applicable. She tapped a couple of pills into her palm, stuck her face beneath the faucet to swallow them, and then tapped a dozen more for the skinner and put them in her pocket. Only then did she recall an old prescription of Vicodin she’d once spotted in Aggie’s bedside drawer. She darted there, found the bottle, and took most of the pills—perhaps her mom would be as fuzzy about pill count as she was wine.

Back in the bathroom, Liv gripped the sink and wondered how she’d gotten this far so fast, able to visualize interacting with the skinner without disgust. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror. There was her answer: The face that disgusted her now was her own. She watched her eyes grow tears. Tears had plagued her since the first day of school, yet so far this week had vanished, and she knew why. Because Lee Fleming had vanished, too, from her mind, from Doug’s mind. What they were doing in the shed no longer seemed to have anything to do with Lee; it had become its own self-perpetuating machine, powered by its own bad fuel.

She heard Doug’s car rattle and gasp into the drive beneath the lulling patter of rain. She considered sprinting to the Armory and using her recently gifted padlock key to get some Vicodin down the skinner’s throat before Doug appeared, but it was too risky. She stared out at the shed, small and innocent in the rain, and watched Doug enter, the lights go on, and then, quite ominously, nothing else about it changed at all.

She entered the Armory to find the skinner still cuffed and curled into its usual crumple, and Doug seated on a table. The last she’d seen him, he’d been gagging over what he’d done to the skinner. He looked to be fully over it; he was now reading. Not military memos, either, but Lee’s personal, autographed copy of Resurrection Update, the water-warped one he’d forced into Liv’s hands before he vaulted the farm’s electric fence.

Doug had his nose deep in the book’s gutter; Liv could see the faint squiggles of the notes her dad had made over his final months. Liv shook off the rain and walked past Doug without a word, choosing to ignore the sight. It was impossible; it was like her dad was in the room. She checked behind her to make sure he wasn’t. It was just Doug, not only reading but writing, as if he were the author chosen to complete a master’s unpublished work.

Liv picked up the first aid kit and knelt so her body blocked Doug’s view of the skinner. Instantly, its arm, that three-fingered, bone-knuckled deformity, strained toward her. She sensed nothing of menace in the move. In fact, if the thing’s wrists weren’t tied, she felt that its hand would be pawing her like John’s when he’d been a scared puppy, as if to beg, Please, please, please never leave me again.

Liv’s emotions splashed into one another: moved, repelled, dejected, alarmed. She swept them away and got down to the business of pretending to conduct a typical nurse’s survey. She knew she should wait until Doug left before slipping the skinner painkillers. But its big, scared eyes bulged at her, pleading, and anxiety screwed into her gut. She tilted her head slightly to listen. The scritch-scritch of Doug’s pencil was a knifepoint along her skin, but she couldn’t let that stop her.

She slid the water bowl closer in case the skinner choked on the pills. She finned her hand and forced it into her pants pocket, a difficult maneuver while squatting. She shifted a bit, hoping it looked natural, until her fingertips touched the curved plastic of the Vicodin bottle.

Blackness enveloped them.

“What are you doing?”

It was Doug, blotting out the fluorescents, and Liv screamed, though somehow she kept it inside, her ribs shaking painfully from the gulped decibels. Her instinct was to fling herself over the skinner and cry for Doug to get the fuck out of the shed and off her property, but it wasn’t an instinct she had time to evaluate or understand. She slipped her hand out of her pocket with what she hoped looked like nonchalance and resisted the urge to turn.

“What does it look like?” She tried to sound affronted. “If you’re going to sit there reading, I’m going to see how its mouth is healing.”

“I’m only reading because I was waiting for you.”

“You didn’t wait yesterday before cutting its tongue out.”

Doug sighed. “I’m sorry. But caring about its stupid sounds wasn’t going to help, you know? It was just going to trick us into feeling sorry for it.” His voice became gentler. “I just thought we could work on A together. Like we did at the start.”

Now Liv did turn, pivoting on a sneaker.

“Did you just call it ‘A’?”

“Huh? Oh. I’ve been”—he gestured vaguely—“taking notes. It’s just shorthand.”

“Shorthand for what?”

Doug shrugged. “Subject A.”

“What’s the point of A,” she asked slowly, “if there’s no B?”

Doug grunted with exasperation, turned away, and swiped up Resurrection Update.

“I’m doing everything this book tells me to do.”

“The poems? My dad’s notes on poems?”

But for the first time since she forced Doug to take the book by the fateful electric fence, Liv wanted to know what her father had written in it, not to mention what Doug was adding. She looked hard. From here, she could see her dad’s handwriting, but also Doug’s, along with Doug’s sketches—the kind of tidy designs he used to make for the Monk Block Corn Maze.

Liv flinched when Doug slapped the book against his opposite palm.