Felicia C. Sullivan - Follow Me into the Dark

Published in 2017 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition 2017

Copyright 2017 by Felicia C. Sullivan

All rights reserved.

This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing March 2017

Cover design by Drew Stevens

Text design by Suki Boynton

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sullivan, Felicia C., author.

Title: Follow me into the dark / Felicia C. Sullivan.

Description: New York City: Feminist Press, [2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016034355 | ISBN 9781558614109 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Stepsisters--Fiction. | Brothers and sisters--Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Psychological. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3619.U425 F65 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034355

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyones heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark. RAYMOND CARVER

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THERE IS A woman on a hotel bed, and her hair is on fire, I shout into a pay phone. The operator asks me whether I saw actual flames, was there actual fire? Maybe I saw a woman smoking a cigarette, because this is California and thats what people are prone to do. No, you dont understand, Im talking a fire here. Im talking about a burning, a smell.

Come to think of it, the woman, Gillian, was smoking or, rather, swallowing a lit cigarette that burned down her throat. I know this because I put the cigarette in her mouth, struck a match, and said, All you have to do is breathe. Ill take care of the rest. I bound her wrists and ankles with rope, dialed up the thermostat to ninety (because why not?), and drew the curtains. The woman writhed and thrashed; her face was a rivera flood of tears and black kohl.

I waited for the heat.

You should know that Id come for the hair. The hair that is a constellation of stars, a map of red curls tumbling down the womans back. The hair I saw James, my stepfather, run his fingers through. The hair he tucked behind a pierced ear. The hair he took in his mouth. The hair that replaced the clumps that fell out of my mothers head.

Tell me why you did it. Why you came into our home and broke things, I had said to Gillian. Actually, forget it. I dont want to know.

The operator makes inquiries about the location and coordinates, room numbers and facial descriptions. To be honest, the operator confesses, Im finding this hard to believe. Who goes and sets their hair on fire? You swallow pills. Or turn on the gas. Its easier that way. Quick. Nobody wants a problem suicide, a complicated death by ones own hand.

From the pay phone Ive a terrific view of the room I booked and paid for with a credit card that belonged to James. While the flames devour the curtains, I clutch a lock of Gillians hair, tight. Later Ill place it in a small box, next to my mothers ashes.

The hotel manager arrives in a pickup, surveys the fire, and calls the police. Murray, youre never going to believe this, but my goddamn place is on fire. Again. By then Im in the car. Gone.

I imagine my mothers suffocation: her love strangled in her body in life, and her regret, rage, and hurt contained in a small box carrying her to the afterlife.

CALIFORNIA ISNT HOME. Its not Nevada. Death in California comes without warning; the land never stills.

Quit it with the story no one wants to hear, says everyone, always, whenever I complain about Gillian, the home-wrecking whore whos stealing the breath right out of my mothers mouth by prying my stepfathers warm body out of bed. All my friends want me on mute because theyve heard this story before, and the story is never new. Wife becomes a somnambulant. Shes expired, beyond her best-by date. Husband lifts the sheets and checks for signs of life but there is no movement, only the warmth of the sheets. Wife removes her ring and places it on one of her toes, and then kicks it off the bed. Husband raises the sheet over her head as if shes already one of the departed. Wife still breathes but no one bothers to check for a pulse. See the chalk outline of her body. Feel the sheets cool. Husband drives down to the beach to collect his head and meets a girl listening to Tosca. Her name is Gillian, and shes a photocopy of me, which sickens and comforts him all at once. I think about the bed and the beach as crime scenes, and I tell my friends this but everyone stops caring. Hurt becomes a constant state.

Its an affair, Kate. Theyll likely divorce, Kate, they say. Until my mother becomes terminal, is delivered a death sentence in an oncologists office, and then they dont say anything at all.

The day my mother is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, James drives us home, lets the motor run until were inside the house, and then hits the gas. Hours later, I find him and the whore in a hotel room and I watch my stepfather wrap a scarf around Gillians neck. She nearly blacks out; her eyes roll to white. Coughing out sentences in starts and stops, the whore speaks in staccato. It gets to the point in the game where it seems like she cant breathe. James makes out the word love, and he pauses and says, Lets get something straight. Thats not a hand Im playing.

Gillian says, Okay, fine, her mouth all dry and scabbing. Her pain registersthe physicality of her face coming undone, as if it were an abandoned house with rotting stairs, a flood rising up through the floorboards, and a Closed for Renovations sign swinging like a pendulum (although this is the kind of house no one will take on, gut, clean, and repair)and I can tell that this makes my stepfather want her more.

After six minutes of the old in-and-out in a room theyve rented, after their bodies come together and untangle like live wires, they eat ceviche with their hands and talk about Cubanscigars, not people. On the television a man shifts uncomfortably in his seat as he regales a now-infamous story about a former employee who didnt quite work out. A perfectly normal individual, he says. Two barrels of a shotgun, he says. Stacked neatly in one of the hotel rooms, he says. From my secret vantage point, I watch them nod, their bodies covered in fuck, letting the scene play out.

Lately Ive been thinking about the old, deaf artist who painted savagery on his walls. He felt a need to correct the serene and sublime, to undo the harm done by portraits of refined gentry, and the artist was something of a fakir drawing out the barbaric. A still-beating heart held in one hand and a scissor in the other. He made a mural of the macabre, replete with Viejas conjuring, a Sabbath, and a mad Greek devouring the limbs of his newborn. The child was rendered in a chilling white, but all I can remember is the cavern that was the fathers mouth.