Sing Me Your Scars (Apex Voices Book 3) (6 page)

“The fifteenth is fine.”

“Excellent. I’ll print up flyers.”

It’s her turn to nod, and as she does, she traces her finger over
the title of the sketch:
Yesterday’s Girl.

“Are you okay?”

“Of course. Why?”

“You seem, I don’t know, on edge.”

“No,” she says, putting on a smile that feels too small, too
tight. “I’m fine.”

On her way home, Olivia hits a vintage shop filled with odds and
ends in various condition. She doesn’t find any useful clothing. Sure, she
could go online and order something in pinup girl style, but she doesn’t want
anything made in the now. The prices are crazy high for what she requires, and
she wants the wear, the frayed edges, the split seams.

In a display case in the
back, she finds a straight razor with a mother of pearl handle. Perfect.
There’s a bit of rust on the razor’s blade, but no nicks or dings, and she
knows it will sharpen nicely.

She presses the tip against her finger and keeps pressing until
her skin opens. The small cut won’t take long to heal at all. She turns and
there’s a salesgirl standing with wide eyes, one hand over her mouth.

“Don’t worry,” Olivia says. “I had a tetanus shot last year.”

But she recognizes the look all too well. If she were within the
walls of the gallery, she’d revel in it, and even though she shoves her hand in
her pocket, hiding the cut, she has to fight not to press the blade against her
skin again.

Title: Stigmata in Repose

Medium: Whip, knife, skewer

Canvas: Palms, feet, back, forehead, side

When the moon is full in the sky, Olivia takes a paring
knife from her nightstand. This blade will never be part of her exhibits; it’s
hers and hers alone, a token from her childhood. She opens the scar on her
chest and watches as the blood trickles down. Would her mother remember this?
She had to, didn’t she? Or would it be another afterthought, a horror, like her
daughter?

As a child, blood was a sign of danger: scratches on a cheek from
a too long fingernail; glass in the ball of a bare foot; teeth accidentally
biting through lips and tongue. Every family photo album was a symphony of
wounds—major breaks and minor stitches. Now, blood is only a sign of
possibility, of how far she can push herself.

She threw out the albums after her father died. They were
reminders she neither needed nor wanted. It was obvious, once you looked past
the casts and the bandages, that her mother never stood close to Olivia in any
of the photos. Her smile was always strained, her eyes distant. She couldn’t
even fake it well.

Olivia wipes the blood from her chest, and the realization that
her mother knows where she lives sinks in. She can’t imagine her mother would
knock on the door and invite herself in, but it leaves Olivia with an uneasy
feeling in her gut.

Title: The Human Pincushion (Inspired by the movie
Hellraiser)

Medium: Small sewing pins

Canvas: Entire body, including shaved head

She finds the right outfit in another vintage shop on the
other side of town. It costs more than she wanted to spend, but it’s perfect.
It’s a swimming costume, not a bathing suit, all sequins and ribbons with a
short, ruffled skirt, and she bets the woman who owned it never set foot in
ocean or pool. The fabric holds a ghost of perfume beneath the scent of old
fabric. It isn’t an exact fit, but with a few nips and tucks, it will be. In
the dressing room mirror, she stares at herself for a long time, the scars on
her body a patchwork of intersecting lines, tiny road maps leading nowhere.

The delicate designs of a puzzle box hiding a monster, but unlike
a Cenobite, the sensory overload of her ritual mutilation will never come.

Halfway home, she feels the weight of unseen eyes on her. She
stops on the sidewalk. All around her are shops and people walking. No one
looks familiar; no one is paying her any attention. Still, she cannot shake the
feeling that someone is watching.

Title: Why Don’t You Love Me?

Medium: Paring Knife

Canvas: Chest, directly above the heart

A second letter arrives via the regular mail with a local
postmark. She throws it out unread.

Title: The Ghost at the Table

Medium: Salad fork

Canvas: Arms

Olivia wakes in the middle of the night with traces of a
dream still playing through her mind—her mother’s face, the shiny blade of the
knife, the blood on skin and silver. She sits up in bed and lights a cigarette.
Blows smoke into the air. Finally, she gets up and starts sketching ideas for
the next exhibit, but every idea becomes a crumple of paper littering the
floor.

Then, she sketches a woman with the skin of her chest peeled to
expose her ribcage and the heart beneath. She writes
Changeling
across
the top of the paper. It’s something she overheard her mother say once, along
with freak and monster. Did she know Olivia was listening?

Olivia smiles, small and hard. She supposes she
was
hard
to endure. It’s not as if there were manuals on what to do when your teething
child chewed off the tip of her pinkie, and the disorder was too rare for any
sort of support group.

She slides her finger over the sketch. It’s an impossible design.
She might as well call herself Kafka’s darling and wither away in a cage,
forgotten by all. Fuck that.

Title: Attention Lure

Medium: Fish hooks

Canvas: Arms

The week before the exhibit, she sharpens the razor and
replenishes her first aid kit. She has surgical glue, bandages, thread, a
curved needle. A prescription for antibiotics is filled and ready to go, and
she’s been taking extra iron. The alterations to the bathing costume are
complete, the poses practiced and practiced again. There isn’t anything else
she needs to do but the performance itself.

Another letter arrives two days before the exhibit. She burns it
in her ashtray.

Title: Shake, Rattle, and Buzz

Medium: Beehive

Canvas: Arms, legs, face

At what point did she decide her mother’s horror and
revulsion were emotions to be desired? Invoked? Was it the derogatory names she
heard whispered? The refusal to touch her? Perhaps the young Olivia thought it
a game:
Look what I can do, Mommy.

But what good is a slap if a small face turns red but the mouth
doesn’t twist and the eyes don’t fill with tears? What help is a boundary if
crossing it carries no fear? What price do you pay when a coin means nothing
more than goodbye?

At the age of thirteen, when Olivia stepped into the street, she
knew the car was moving too slowly to kill her. After the impact, when she was
on the ground with a bone protruding from her calf like an exclamation point,
she watched her mother’s face, certain this time would be different. This time
her mother would pretend to care.

Her mother remained expressionless, her eyes blank.

Two nights later, Olivia went into the living room and slid the
paring knife across her chest. Her skin split like delicate silk, spilling out
a crimson worm.

Look what I can do, Mommy.

Her mother didn’t even blink.

Maybe Olivia should have cut deeper and pulled out her heart.
Held it in her palm while the beats counted down to nothing. Maybe that
would’ve made her mother happy.
See? I was real after all.

A week later, Olivia watched her flip the coin and make her
choice.

Title: Toddler Interrupted

Medium: Shards of glass

Canvas: Soles of feet, fingers

The gallery is packed, everyone standing shoulder to
shoulder. Olivia stands before them on a small raised platform, the base
covered with white butcher paper, her mouth sewn shut with heavy black thread.
She makes a few poses of the cheesy, pinup girl variety and is rewarded with a
titter of laughter. Faces show confusion, but that’s to be expected. There’s no
blood yet, and her other exhibits have been static.

She lifts the straight razor, cuts through the stitches, careful
not
to draw blood. Brows crease, mouths twist, whispers emerge.

Her lipstick becomes a smear across one side of her face with the
back of a hand. She twists her fingers in the careful rolls of her hair, pulls
them out of shape and keeps pulling until they’re a tangle. She tears one of
the straps of her costume, and sequins fall like iridescent fish scales.

She gives the crowd a wide smile as she draws the blade across
her forearm. Several people gasp. The wound curves, another smile, and the red
it reveals matches her lipstick. Drops of blood patter on the butcher paper.
She knows how to wield the blade for maximum effect with minimal damage.

She watches their eyes. Even
when their mouths twist in revulsion or disbelief, their eyes reveal the truth.
A glint here, a shimmer there. Hunger. They’re waiting for her to slip and open
a vein. They come for the shock factor, but it’s not what they really want to
see. They’re vultures, waiting for her to fall so they can pick at her bones.

For several long moments, the
red dripping down onto the white is the only sound. Then someone exhales
loudly. A grey-haired woman in the front holds her mouth tight, but she can’t
lie away the excitement in her eyes. Olivia meets her gaze, and the woman looks
down. Another woman, younger, with flushed cheeks, covers her mouth with a
hand.

Olivia switches the blade to the other hand and slices a twin cut
on her other arm. Two more cuts and she can hear whispers, voices too low to
decipher into words.

A man in a suit shoves his hands in his pockets, his eyes
revealing disbelief, perhaps a touch of disappointment at Olivia’s lack of
response. She’s a sadist’s worst nightmare.

None of the reactions surprise her. At this point they’re a
guarantee, made mundane by their predictability. What she notices most are the
empty eyes. The blank canvases that say nothing. She’d like to chip away their
façades and peek inside. She’d like to break them into pieces.

She makes another cut, then she sees the woman standing in the
back. Twelve years have added grey to the hair and lines around the eyes and
mouth, but the face is immediately recognizable and far too like Olivia’s own
for her liking.

Olivia makes another cut and another, until her arms look like
railroad tracks. Her mother doesn’t blink, doesn’t move. All the years she
watched Olivia, she never did a damn thing. Somewhere inside Olivia there is a
little girl who wants to throw down the razor and scream, who wants to know
why. Why didn’t her mother understand why Olivia did the things she did? Why
didn’t she know that all Olivia wanted was one reaction, one fucking reaction,
to let her know she cared?

Why didn’t her mother stop her?

Olivia clenches her jaw, tugs her top aside to reveal the scar on
her chest, and draws the razor down to reopen the half-healed wound. From the
gap, she wiggles a quarter free, breaking the tenuous grip her flesh has on the
metal. She turns it so the lights reveal the tarnish of time beneath the slick
of blood.

The crowd doesn’t understand the significance, nor do they need
to. It’s another macabre parlor trick and gauging by their smiles, one they
like. But her mother’s face pales and, finally, she breaks free from the crowd
and heads out the door without a glance over her shoulder. Olivia’s own shoulders
sag, and something inside her crumples, like a paper cup beneath a boot heel.

A woman near the front sways. Silence shatters into murmurs of
concern, a bit of laughter from the unbalanced woman. Olivia curls her fist
around the coin and gives a small nod.

Yesterday’s Girl
is over.

When the applause fades and almost everyone is gone, she plucks
the ends of thread from her lips and wipes away the lipstick smears. Some of
the blood has already dried on her skin, but instead of cleaning and
disinfecting the cuts, she wraps her arms in gauze, shrugs on a jacket and
jeans over her costume, and slips out before Trevor notices. She knows he’ll be
upset; they usually get something to eat after an exhibit, but she doesn’t have
the heart for it. Not tonight.

Across the street, she sees a figure standing beneath the yellow
glow of a streetlamp. Olivia pulls the quarter from her pocket and bounces it
on her palm. Such a small, insignificant thing. Such a heavy price.

Heads, she’ll cross the street. Perhaps they can have coffee at a
diner. Maybe her mother will finally tell her why.

Tails, she’ll head home. Sketch a new exhibit, something less
extreme. Let the cut on her chest heal for good this time, throw the quarter in
a fountain, a gutter. Give herself permission to let everything go.

She stares into the shadows for a long time, waiting, hoping her
mother will walk away, but she doesn’t. She stands and waits.

Olivia touches the cut above her heart and flips the coin.

Andrius Kavalauskas, the last magician of Lithuania, closed
the door and rested his head against the wood as the nurse’s footsteps faded
away. He smelled cabbage and pork cooking from the apartment across the hallway
and knew that in a few hours he would find a plate of food sitting by his door.
Daina was a good neighbor, a good friend.

He headed back into the tiny bedroom at the back of the
apartment. Laurita was a still and silent shape beneath the threadbare blanket.
Far too still.

He froze in place. Stared at the blanket. Heard neither breath
nor whisper.
No, no. Not yet. Please, not yet
, he thought.

Then, the blanket moved up and down. Laurita raised her head and
smiled. He exhaled, the sound harsh in the quiet.