T E N A N C Y

by Maddison Bray

Content Warning

Contains elements of suicide and self-harm.


Part I
mansuit

I was squatting in a house off 8th and G. 
Sweating cold in molding sheets. 
This is where one found me. 
Something out in the dark morning fog. I was anxious, with a cigarette to warm my mouth, looking out the window with the rotted curtains yanked down. It was something the size of my scabbed thumb held up through smoke. Just beyond the payphone dangling above the broken sidewalk. It was a dope-sick assumption to think it was staring at me. But the bugs bit at my scalp, and there were teeth in my stomach–in my feet. Nothing else to see except this house crumbling and vacant as my mother in her nursing home, sucking at her empty mouth.
It stood there with its head bloodhound-low and its shoulders hunched up. Its body was thick but the legs were wrong. Wind whipped its pants right to where the shin bones should be. A thing on stilts maybe. Shifting in the way a vulture waits. 
I laid back shivering until the dim light of December Monday sobered me. Then the thing was not there. Something flickered now against the phone booth like the end of a feathered lure. Or a single asphyxiating finger beneath piss-stained blankets of a heroin den. Bold lettering. Inky; twitchy; in my bored hands; out on the bare street.
Below an address read:

T E N A N C Y 

L O W – I N C O M E

S L I D I N G  S C A L E

OR 

T R A D E   F O R   W O R K

Apply on-site 

You should not do what I did.
You should not take this flier to the bottom of the city. Don’t pass the tents and garbage and loose sewage and piled up feces. Don’t go beyond the flies and into the wretched air of animal-rendering factories.
You should not.
I did. 

Part II
snared

I should have died there at the doorstep, knocking, holding my breath, scratching at my scalp with broken nails. But maybe you’ve never known your own animal-self boiled down. Eating raw from cans. Maybe you’ve never worn your friends to holes like your clothes. Maybe you’ve never had to watch the world pass by like people on the street calling to each other drunk, and beautiful on a Saturday night. You haven’t watched them holding hands, kissing mouths, laughing with their heads thrown back. Maybe you’ve never had to wonder how it could ever be possible to love this. Any of this. 
It’s not hard to destroy yourself. 
I won’t tell you what this house looks like.
Don’t come find it. 
But I will tell you how the black space between the door and its spine stretched open like possibility. And the figure there, it could have been anyone:
a wife,
a professor,
a judge.
Mom.
She was tall and smelled only like orange soap. The kind meant to scrub skin raw. 
I held the damp flier with its weeping black letters looking the way I did. And next, with her long hand slipping from the door, she invited me in.

Part III
the rotted maple

A man with a short-boxed beard had the house built on the back of 1812. Brick and stone; clay and maple. How could he have known the way the world would crumble? How could he have foreseen the decay of industry? Old factories and refineries, paper mills, and stink. 
The trees choke here on summer smoke. So, when fall comes, their leaves don’t change. Instead, they wither and hiss across the streets layered with oil and ash and cigarettes. Every living thing, like me, just wanders through dust and sleeps under concrete; shadow creatures in the winter’s sun. Hollowed by hunger; spoiled by peanut-butter crank; monster-made-methamphetamine. 
A man with a short-boxed beard built his castle right over the backs of opiate-fiends shitting on the street curling their lips and scabs screaming at the ghosts of kids harassing them. But all the kids are gone now. Factory smoke.
And yet, suddenly, there I was, inside a velvet foyer rich with mildew and the pungence of pestilent things blossoming in numbers beneath the hardwood floors–the rotted maple.
There are nine bedrooms. Three per curtain-heavy corridor. I only saw this once, that first day, when I was granted a tour around 5000 square silent feet. Silent–save the itch of whispering in the closed living room with no light to leak from the door. Only unsuspecting darkness.
And now I know, they were smelling me from there, listening for the simple softness of my feet.

Part IV
If you lived here, you would be home already!

I told the woman I could not pay anything and asked to trade for work, instead. 
Her mouth quivered, prionically, as she sat me in the nook of the kitchen, sharpened by natural daylight and shadow. I didn’t ask why there were no pots or glass-tempered casserole dishes. Why not the cast-iron to collect oil on the stove? No wooden knife-blocks moistened by washed cutlery? No silverware on plates beside the sink.
Only, I noted the hum of the refrigerator.
Only, I noted the kettle screaming. 
And then, tea.
I’ll tell you now and don’t forget it: she has marks on her hands. Signatures of her own desperate contract. Her own security deposit. Animals can’t help but bite in times of scarcity. Food insecurity.
When I asked about other tenants, twisting my mouth from the bitter tea, she drew in careful words like breath.
“Ah, yeah,” she said, looking at me wide and neutral. “They’ll be knocking around in the evenings.”
Then, I turned to watch, heavily, as the December sunlight eclipsed over the gated yard where nothing grew but patches of weeping moss. There I went catching myself as if I were falling just before a dream. I reached up from the warm shell of the empty cup to cradle my numbing head. My hand tickled deep, up past the tiny bones and into my arms.
“Do you like to play dress-up?” Her words warped like the slowing voice of Ketamine. Scar-bitten fingers offered a silk napkin to politely wipe the lace of saliva dangling from the pink slip of my mouth.
“They love trying on new things.” 
And my cheek was on the linoleum floor slick like drug sweat. Pulsing. It felt so good to be so safely tired. I moaned. Should I apologize? The refrigerator’s hum stretched further away. My eyes rolled upwards.
There is a smudge on that fridge, I remember thinking. Iron-rust and red. So slight, I shouldn’t have seen it pulsing. My vision thickened as I watched my body being yanked at my legs; my pulsing feet.

Part V
interlude

I will tell you the story of my ungrateful life. 
This house of my body, and all the manner of things I could do to it:
needles and glass.
Nitrous and smoke.
Crumbling crank. 
Sugar in button bags. 
If you know one story, then you know them all. But you don’t know what I actually did to my mom, to my friends, to my wife. You don’t know how I faked my own death.
In my eye, at the end of every street, there is a light blinking across slick tarmac. At the end of every street, there is someone small smeared like blood behind me on the road. His body is open, and the light shines on his single red shoe. The other one has flown off revealing the bone of a broken foot. Missing, missing, missing.
There is me, too, at the end of every street with my head dented by a steering wheel and
my fingers
unbelieving in my lap. There is the anchor of my breath wheezing below my broken nose. There, I can feel the trauma in my teeth, in the salted gums, where one is missing even now. The ghost of undeployed airbags.
Even now, I know why I still drove off. I wanted to. I couldn’t believe this belonged to me. This. The shoe. His eyes, upside down, staring out with his head arched back. He watched me as I stole away. Or maybe he was staring at something else– a god in the darkness.
I left a woman wailing with the wet road under her knees. She flickered smaller and smaller in my mirror until she was gone, gone, gone.
I tried to even the score.
I tried it, darting out on a highway. I tried in a closet. Then I found a burnt garage sinking into empty pasture. There, I taped my mouth to the rust and key-lime of my exhaust pipe. Yes, fitting.
The final time I tried to kill myself it almost worked. It almost worked so well, if anybody came, they only found what was left of my blood, lying still in a tub, coagulating and drying against the ceramic. The only thing missing: my body.
No note. No blade. No phone.
The only thing missing: 
me.

Part VI
machine

I’m in a bedroom, and I am bruxing at the taste of lemons in my mouth. I rotate peacefully in-place like the earth. My legs are stuck, but it’s good to lie so still, paralyzed and blank. Isn’t this what I wanted? Clean sheets surround me cold and warm where I am and am not. I am emptied, quelled, and deliciously calm all the way to my scalp.
I am about to rub my legs together, comfortably, to moan with my heated eyes closed, when a door opens somewhere beyond my head. It’s too much to look back, though. My head is so heavy. I’ll just stay here and wait. 
There is my name.
Someone is saying my name. 
Can I even remember the fold of lips saying it last? It is enough to rustle me so that my eyes open toward the ceiling. And then something strange: the demand of my body doesn’t come. I can’t rouse it to sit upright. I dread the hint of tenderness somewhere below my knees like pain to be met later. But the meat underneath my gown–the bone and sinew and ligaments and fat–all of it is puzzle pieces missing, missing, missing.
I vomit and it spills into my ears. The drug-spell is slipping away. I am awake and she is here, hovering neatly in the corner by the door. Witnessing. She holds out my ID card and tells me she didn’t expect me to be legally dead. Most in my position are, one way or another. Unmade by drugs or exposure or violence or brain damage–or neglect.
All things considered, she tells me it’s best that I be comfortable. Feels like sick in my stomach to know what she means. Then, she leans down so her long hair drops from her shoulders and tickles my face. Orange soap. Her finger fidgets with something beyond my head and I hear a soft click.
A sucking hiccup. Lemons again, I think.
I twist my head back as far as I can be bothered to see something out of my reach. I barely make out two tanks fused into one unit. Plastic tubing snakes down to each arm where they are stuck to me with something tacky. I already know I can’t take them out. There are ports under my skin, too. They itch and ache. My veins are stretching with fluid. Clicking; humming; throbbing, like sex. And something else. A slow subtracting like a snake pulling from its husk. It comes from my right arm with an impolite prick. The port moves.
“Isn’t this what you want? What would you do otherwise?” she asks, surveying the stunted shape of me. “Live in your filth and starve?” 
Her hand rests on my thigh. I cry, finally. But only in the way an opiate can allow. So, it’s slow and sticks to the rings of my eyes. She makes the sound of a mother tending to her injured child. Her hand slides up, up, up to my face and smears the drops there. 
“Crocodile tears,” she coos. 
She pinches a silicone bag in her other hand. It’s dark and it sloshes.
I stop weeping when the machine stops humming, and leaves the widening throb contracting and releasing. I catch her words again: “rules…”
How could I have known?
“You might attempt to dismember or manage, somehow, to leave the room–” She’s just a streak of white in the marble of my eyes.  “One tenant made it out front to the steps. On stumps, if you can believe it. Well, anyway….”

Part VII
The last time I tried to kill myself,

it was the motel bathtub. I remember sitting in the empty ceramic, not ready to strike myself. That I should be killed was a sentiment constructed for its blunt execution and equal measure of courage. I wanted to die. To really die.
So, I tried for the last time. I injured myself, though not as deeply as I had wanted, and something came to me. Not in the form of audible thought, but of a picture. A quick reactional synapse: it was me walking away from the abandoned garage across the flooding field barefoot in spring dusk with packaging tape around my head; torn open at the mouth; sick from exhaust fumes. Everything was blue in the setting light, and I tasted it on my burnt tongue. I gasped, pulling the air toward me, coughing corrosion from the pockets of my lungs. Whimpering. The grass slipped under my feet. The world was so beautiful.
I should have died there.
I should have died sinking like a garage into soil. Or like a house into its rotting bones.

Part VIII
blood bag

Maybe one day this estate will be divided into smaller pieces at a price too high for anyone like me. For now, it stays put, still and cavernous. I listen to them race around in it. At night, after they’ve fed, are the curtains tied up? Do they stand in the blue squares of moonlight through the windows with their arms reaching up and mouths open rimmed with blood? Do they see the light pollution like I do or do they still see the stars? The city before it was. I couldn’t tell you what this house looks like. My only memory of it is warping like a building in dreams; a house made of other houses; I can’t remember it.
Every day, she comes in four times. Twice for breakfast and dinner. Once to clean up my piss bag, bandages, and my body. Once for collection which takes all day to draw itself out into a couple pints. 
How many of us are in here? I wonder.
How many of us suck down protein shakes and chew the blood and salt of pre-cut steak? How many are pricked by a catheter and bound to a bedpan, like me? I haven’t heard the telltale sign of anyone else–screams; muffled voices; crying.
It’s just her every day. And how many of them
“How many?” I’ve asked her before.
“Oh,” was all she said, taking a plate of leftover meat juice in her arm, eyes wide. She’d said it, “oh,” like she’d hurt my feelings.
I’ve tried to count the steps at night, when they flicker around the halls, hissing like cats.
I’ve found pieces of paper slipped into reachable places. Symbols, mostly, etched by charcoal. Smudged with fingerprints. Like a child’s drawings. Because of the drugs, I can’t be sure these notes are even real. I keep them stashed in crevices around the bed, but I have a favorite. It’s a symbol: a black pointed vertical line marked with a smaller perpendicular line at the bottom. Like legs. I think it’s supposed to be me. It sits in the middle of a deep deep red rectangle. I keep it in the crack between the mattress and the wall. They like it when I look at it; I can feel it; their pleasure under my skin.
I’ve been visited, too. But it’s always when the machine gives me my highest dose. I don’t know how many there are in this place, so I can only be sure there has been one coming to see me. It is always tall. It clicks and whispers like the machine. 
One night, I was just beginning to soften, pooling softly into sheets changed just that morning. So clean, they smelled like baby skin. The door opened right as I released a warm surge of urine into my catheter. It came in, slowly, heavily. It went closer to my window, swiping a meaty smell toward me. Light from the street hit its bulky shape like a limelight. Still, my eyes could not see much in my stupor and the illumination was primitive. It did not face me, and there were rolls of skin settled around its head like an amphibian.
For a long while, I was beginning to wonder if it would speak to me. But it did something else. It moved, animated suddenly, like a puppet jerked by strings. It held its arms out, posing them with no rhythm. A beetle turned up on an empty road. Then, it stopped, bringing the awkward bulk of its arms down clicking to itself, moving with the sound. Was it laughing? I wished I could have closed my eyes then. A sense of stilling dread settled like pulp to the deeper parts of me. 
Its clicking stopped, too, and the rolls of its head shifted in the contrast of shadow and light.
“What?” was all I could say garbled in a mouth filling with spit. 
The creature snapped its head back, arching its neck and body toward the window so that it was looking at me, upside down. It screamed from somewhere in my head with the sound of a woman. It shows me a dark road with a body.
It happens in my dreams, too. Its skin falls off as one heavy wet heap to the ground. I never see what’s underneath.

Part IX
admin fee

This is the story of my ungrateful life. It’s not a good ending. This is all that happens to me.
There was a day she didn’t come in at all and the machine stopped and the pain was so bad. I was grateful to feel it though because it meant something would change. Something would have to be different. She would have to come, and I would have something to look forward to. 
She came the next morning, when my urine bag had just begun to overfill. I wonder what would have happened if it had. Would I become infected? Would she just have to put me out then? Would she shoot me? Or just drain me? Pour the rest of my lifeblood down the esophagus of the kitchen sink? Was sepsis still delicious?
She looked empty. She had dressing on one of her arms, and tried to avoid using it. A warm blossom of fluid was just beginning to leak through the thick layer of bandaging. She was sallow and crooked. In her good hand, she had a full syringe, still capped. No breakfast this morning.
She ignored my growing discomfort of withdrawal, the way it twisted my face, and straightened making eye contact with me finally. We stared at each other for a long moment like dolls. I realized her eyes were swollen. Oh, this was not good for me. She was going to do something new. 
“It’s been three months,” she said. Then she snapped her hand behind me toward the machine “Would you like to renew?”
I was too sober for this moment. Too afraid of this crest which would soon valley into a terrible thing. Three months. That’s it.
“You’ll be paying in more weight. A new fee, I guess.”
There always is. 
I didn’t want to choose this. Was this really my life now? Did this all really belong to me? She was expecting an answer, which surprised me further. Her body was still. Something something was very different about her. Desperate.
“There’s another option, though. If you want.”
I strained to look up, and view just the edge of her sharpened face through the strands of her long pale hair. That’s when I saw it. I knew that look. It was mine at the end of every street where a cone of light stutters. She was going to do something irreversible, or had done it already.
“And then?” I said.
She turns the machine back on.

Part X
run

My skin is beginning to loosen. There are sores, little craters, forming at my back. Every day, they burrow further to find the center of me. It is morning and she’ll be coming to collect once the day bends a long shadow through my window. And even though there is a morphine-taste on my tongue, I look out and actually see.
There is nothing but light out there. Just the gray spring. It will go on forever like this stretching longer and longer. I could sit here and watch as the world warms itself and comes alive out there without me.
I squeeze a hand in between the mattress and the wall where I keep the picture and scrape it out,
wrinkling it. I open it from its worn creases, blanched, because I have done this so many times. I look at it, hoping to see something different, but nothing has changed. It’s still just me. A little stunted symbol floating in a smear of red. Fingers curl around the inside of my head like they always do when I look at it. They coo at me. They pet at me, softly. What are they looking for?
She comes in, newly bandaged, with the syringe. Pentobarbital. I was imagining it would be yellow. I have no idea why. Maybe because yellow is the color of sick and dying things. She unwraps a new blood bag. 
I’m going to follow her out in that little vessel. I’ll finally see the halls again as I splash from one side of the bag to the other in her good hand. I’ll watch how she serves it to them. I wonder if she does it in glasses or if she just feeds them like guppies in a tank, dripping blood from the tube into their hungry mouths. I’ll fill their throats and watch their horror from the inside out as I transform into something else in their bowels. I’ll turn snake black and writhe through every vein until I find it: their parasitic center. I’ll squeeze, squeeze, squeeze until they collapse. Then, I’ll swallow them whole.
She’s connected the new bag when I hear the syringe fall to the floor.
“Mumm, mumm, mumm.” It’s a sound she makes, not words. Humming.
She’s shaking. I strain around to look at her, because I think she’s trying to talk to me. But I can’t turn far enough. I’m too stiffened by inactivity. She’s leaning against me. I reach for her.
I could bite her.
Why haven’t I thought of that before?
She moves back like she heard the thought working its way through me. She catches something like a hiccup in her throat, and clamps her teeth. I look down and see the syringe lying unsuspecting on the hardwood. Her hand is there now, snatching it. Everything smells like fear. She’s mumm, mumm, mumming, pulling spit back in her clamped mouth. I’m so still because now I’m filling up again. The machine is replacing my blood with something better, better, better like it does.
The blue plastic cap falls back down to the ground and I hear her stick herself. I’m getting fuzzy now, slipping somewhere this isn’t my problem. And just as I’m getting good, good, good, she makes a high-pitched shriek like she’s so delighted and runs, runs, runs up the wall with all four legs. I laugh because she looks like a spider or a monkey up there fixed to the corner all dressed in orchid white. And she’s opening her mouth so wide.

Part XI
meatsuit

I’m visited tonight. My bedpan has overflowed, so I apologize for the smell, lolling my head back against the headboard. I wonder why I’ve never thought to throw it. Or smear myself in it. Make her take me out of the room to wash me. Try to escape.
One long hand reaches into the room, the machine clicks off, and I know this means the medicine is done. Gone. The creature slips in after its hand and commands again. I’m raised up sitting stiffly. I expect my head to fall back, like a newborn, but it doesn’t. Then, the creature moves toward me. It puts those cool hands on my face and it feels good. Like holding water in my thirsty mouth. It squeezes until light reaches my eyes.
It’s day, suddenly, but I’m in a different room, and it’s sleeting outside. The window sits across from my side, instead of straight out, and the door is where the window should be. I feel terrible. I feel like something is inside me rotting. My body is wrong, covered in fine golden hairs that aren’t mine. They’re slick against the skin which is yellowing. I know that I’m septic. The stub of each thigh is exposed, revealing infection. The skin is purple and swollen, leaking the same smell that comes from my pores now. The sweat of a dying thing.
She is here assessing me, leaning against the window sill, her arms crossed. There’s the blue cap of a syringe pointing up from the crease of her arm like the bow of a sinking ship. 
After a thought has settled into her face like an inconvenience, she sighs a little and sets to removing my gown. It hurts when she brushes gossamer against my thigh. I’m scared but also tired and also relieved to be useless, now. To the other unlucky tenants before me, I’m sure the opiates eased the horror. But they’ve just made me sick and constipated. 
I think she’s undressing me before anything else because it’s difficult to undress dead weight. I’ve done it loads of times. From outside the room, she brings in a folded wheelchair and snaps it open with a couple practiced jerks. 
I’m surprised when she says, “I’m sorry.”
It’s like apologizing to a pig in a factory farm–captive-bolt pistol in-hand. Then the horrible part: she moves me to the wheelchair. And I help her because, what else can I do? It’s agony to move like this.
When I’m settled, I’m weeping uncontrollably, realizing that I’m just an animal now. Wasted meat. I know she’s seen this before, but she still makes eye contact with me and gives me a moment. She doesn’t cry. She knows what I’ve done. Then, it’s right to it. She pops off the cap of the syringe. She doesn’t sterilize me, and she doesn’t use my veins. She goes right for the muscle of my thigh. Maybe she thinks it will alleviate the pain faster. But it doesn’t. Within minutes, I’m filled with pressure; quartered and drawn; drowning and terrified. I can’t believe this is mine. This death.
Then I’m somewhere else. 
I am heavy like leather or embalmed skin or a pelt. I am not in the house anymore, but out on a street. A payphone dangles in the early-morning fog, and I’m holding a sheet of paper in my hand. It’s still dim and blue out here, with the winter. I’m not cold at all, though. I am heavy. I am draped across someone’s shoulders. Tall now because I’m at standing height. Across the street, there is a rotting house with a broken window. There are curtains, but the rod has been yanked down so that it lies crooked against the glass. And just beyond, inside, there is a mass moving under a pile of blankets. Cigarette smoke plumes and swirls in the dark. I’m giddy to know I’m seen, and I set the snare with the gloves of someone else’s hands. My hands, but not mine. They’re still flecked with golden hair. The ones underneath the skin gloves are also mine, puppeteering. I paste the flier against the payphone with a thick liquid crafted from some inhuman orifice under my body. Like a spider’s silk and glue. Like a tenant’s spackle.
The creature releases its grip, and my body flops to the mattress. 
I’m no longer so many things now, refracted from six eyes.
I’m just me. Dead meat.

Part XII
eviction

She’s in my room again. 
Summer morning light casts itself across the walls and floor, catching the dew of sleep in my eyes. Nightmare tears. 
She has been watching me since I woke. She’s not cleaning me. She’s not changing my bedpan or checking my urine bag. She’s not attending to the machine, which is disconnected from me now, leaving abscesses in my arms. She’s not checking my vitals for the stages of detox. She’s not feeding me or giving me water. She’s not speaking. She’s just watching. Sitting on the ledge of the window.
Because withdrawal heightens the senses, I am sick with her new smell of fresh leather, now. Like a clean car left to bake in the summer heat. There are soft clicking noises that come from her fused smiling mouth.
She sits there while the daylight begins to angle, 
and the bed is soaked from my shaking body, 
and I know I will die this time.
Around her head, rays of sun blink out just enough so that I may finally see the eyes of the thing that’s wearing her from underneath.


Maddison Bray (she/they) is a Seattle author, specializing in poetry and lyrical prose with elements of horror. You can find them on most platforms @cellardoorprose.

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