A-Sides Read online

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  Jenny Flynn took a hobbling step backwards and admired herself in the mirror. She delighted in the high, spiked heels and ornate, blue bride’s maid dress which flowed overlong on the floor beneath her. Her blue eyes, black-rimmed with mascara, peered out from the reflection of a small face oozing rouge and lipstick. Not bad for an eight year old, stilettoed Viking princess, complete but for crown and scepter. Not bad at all for the Friday afternoon follies.

  Jenny liked to play dress-up, and the guilty lure of her sister, Lisa’s, bride’s maid dress had just been too much. Even flush with delight, Jenny curdled a little inside at the thought of Lisa returning and finding her pilfering in her personal belongings, especially her unworn bride’s maid dress. She cast a nervous glance from the upstairs window of Lisa’s bedroom.

  No-one. The driveway was empty. Lisa was at her boyfriend’s house, that no good rat, Steve Kirk, mom and dad still at work. Reflected in the mirror behind her, the bedroom door was still closed. Plenty of time to admire herself and still put everything to rights before Lisa got home.

  Her gaze strayed from the mirror as she reached for a bottle of perfume on the dresser. When she got older, she would use some of this perfume to attract a boy that would treat her good, not like Steve Kirk who was sixteen, and had a car, and treated Lisa like his dog on a choke chain. Maybe that was Lisa’s problem. Maybe she needed someone who treated her better.

  Jenny unscrewed the top from the perfume bottle.

  The door swung open behind her.

  Jenny gasped and whirled around, the perfume bottle falling from suddenly wooden fingers. The bottle cracked and shattered on the wooden floor, tiny crescents of glass flashing like razor-edged ice in the sunlight spilling through the window. The treacly smell of perfume caught in her nose.

  Lisa stood in the doorway, tall and imposing, her dark eyes blazing. Whatever expression had been on her face was replaced by one of black fury.

  Jenny. Standing in front of her dresser, wearing her shoes, her makeup, and her dress with the hem snarled around the shoes and getting torn and dirty. There was a pathetic, pop-eyed expression of terror on her little pie-face. Her mouth was puckered in a perfect circle like a doughnut hole and her hands grasped protectively at the bodice of the dress. Time slowed and stopped like a still from a motion picture, a perfect diorama. They stared at each other, Lisa’s eyes dark and catlike, Jenny’s wide and terrified.

  “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing!” Lisa shrieked.

  She stalked across the room in three long strides, her footfalls jarring on the wooden flooring. She grabbed Jenny by the shoulders and began to shake her, screaming and cursing like a sailor pinched by the shore patrol in a cat house. Scarlet rainbows of fury danced before her eyes, something that always came, but that she couldn’t quite make out as the black rage engulfed her. Uncontrollable tremors cramped her muscles into knots.

  Jenny choked and cringed against the dresser, her arms thrown upward uselessly.

  (….should have known better. Life is a fairy tale and the evil princess always finds out. Should have known better….)

  “Haven’t I told you never to come into my room!” Lisa screamed. What should have been unworried flesh on Lisa’s teen-aged throat had tightened to taut, vertical lines. Her teeth, mere inches from Jenny’s face, gnashed and grated.

  Jenny started to cry, her tears flung through the air as Lisa shook her. Downstairs, she heard the clock strike four, a quartet of hollow bongs.

  (….should have known, should have known, should have known better….)

  Lisa’s rage seemed to have no governor as she continued to rave and scream.

  “Little bitch!” she shrieked. “My dress is ruined! I ought to kill you right now. That would stop your whining and pilfering, once and for good, wouldn’t it?”

  With one enraged heave, she hurled Jenny to the floor. She kicked and pummeled Jenny, her own dark rage fueled by her sister’s cries of agony. Jenny’s right arm had fallen in the spill of broken glass on the floor and she felt the warmth of blood and the stinging of the perfume as it eagerly sought the open lacerations.

  Jenny had passed screaming now. She gasped and gagged for breath, her helpless face turned upward towards her sister in an unheeded plea as she tried to ward off the savage kicks. Her wild tears had melted the mascara and rouge into muddy brown war paint as the endless tirade above her raged on.

  With unexpected suddenness the blows ceased and Lisa was screaming at Jenny to get out before she really had something to cry about.

  Jenny blinked the tears from her eyes and saw that Lisa had turned away, her hand absently rubbing the side of her head.

  Through the tear haze, Lisa appeared to be haloed in shining silver and outlined in violent black. On either side of her, Jenny could see the eyeless imps with their pointed teeth, red skin, and stunted, dwarf-like bodies, twisted like malformed trees. They grinned at Jenny, and even though they didn’t have eyes, she could tell that they were looking at her. For some reason, Jenny knew that Lisa couldn’t see them. She probably didn’t even know they were there.

  Jenny stood up uncertainly, clutching her stomach, and ran from the room, looking back only once at the horribly grinning, blind demons that had laid hold in her sister’s mind.

  Jenny fled recklessly down the stairs, hugging tight to the rail, tripping and stumbling in the high heels and snarled hemline. At the bottom of the stairs, she lost one of the shoes and continued clumping along madly in the remaining shoe towards her room. She threw herself on her bed and cried in watery snuffles and choking gasps, her heart stuttering like machine gun fire.

  In a few minutes her crying dwindled to a few disconnected tears and her breathing steadied. She swiped her hand across her eyes as if waving a magic wand that would make the tears vanish completely. She got up and closed her door quietly. She returned to her bed and lay there silently, thinking about Lisa.

  Lisa

  Lisa finished sweeping up the broken glass and tossed it in her trash can. Her head ached and the smell of perfume nauseated her. Opening the window had helped a lot, but the sickening-sweet stink was still nearly unbearable.

  The headaches had become much worse lately. She sometimes thought they would drive her mad. Well, she wondered, who wouldn’t go crazy with a pilfering, crybaby, daddy’s girl of a little sister to put up with. What had happened today was not unusual. It had, in fact, become something almost normal lately. What wasn’t normal were the headaches and, yes, even the beatings. They had grown worse together, as if tied to one another by a hank of black yarn. And days like today, she really felt that it wasn’t her, but something orchestrated from outside of her. Just stress, she reckoned. Aunt Flow was in town, her cousin’s wedding coming up, and now her dress ruined (something she would have to deal with), her worries about what would happen to her should Jenny ever decide to show off a rainbow of bruises from her beatings to her parents (which, oddly enough, she never did), the rappings in the walls of her upstairs bedroom at night and the deep voices speaking some language she didn’t understand. Though she didn’t want to admit it, that was what she really wanted to get away from, and Steve Kirk was her ticket out.

  He, too, was a miserable sonofabitch-prick. He treated her badly, used her for his own purposes like a dishrag, then disappeared. All he could think of was sex, sex, sex, and her not even on the pill. But that was alright. Next year she would be sixteen and she would by-god be leaving this place with Steve. Away from Jenny. No more: Oh, isn’t Jenny the cutest thing; Lisa, help Jenny with her homework; No, Lisa, you can’t go out tonight; Lisa don’t you ever talk to your sister like that again. No more Jenny pushing her buttons. No more of that shit.

  And no more troubling noises in her bedroom walls at night, keeping her awake and making her afraid.

  Lisa knew she might have killed Jenny today. Once it had started, the whole thing had become kind of a blur and, though she might not admit it to herself
, that was another reason she wanted to get out.

  Lisa put in the ear buds from her mp3 player and turned up the volume. Music gushed into her ears in a steady roar. She sat in her favorite wicker chair and put her feet together primly, a princess trapped in a serf’s body.

  Lisa hadn’t always hated Jenny. Even now, but for the headache that pulsed in her brain like a broken bone, what she had done today might have made her cry. She might even have loved Jenny at one time, but something had changed in Lisa.

  Lisa tolerated Jenny. She could never love her again. She might kill her, but she could never love her.

  Even still, as the afternoon wore on, she cried for a little bit, and didn’t really know why.

  Jenny

  High, tinkling, fairy tones crossed the room from their source, a music box with a tiny, pirouetting ballerina. Jenny watched the ballerina slowly rotate, the head downturned, the delicate white arms upraised over it as it did its ageless dance.

  Jenny watched the music box a while longer. She didn’t hear the cars passing on the streets outside, or the exuberant barking of a dog in pursuit of a luckless cat, or the laughter of young children at games of jump rope and Red Rover at the park down the street. Nothing concerned her now but the ringing melody and serene grace of the ballerina.

  Until the memories came, rampaging goblins that hammered at the walls of her inner redoubt. Lisa screaming at her, hitting her, cursing and threatening. A picture formed, a perfect slice of time branded into her memory. She had been watching the cartoons on channel 48, her favorite show, when Lisa had come in and changed the channel to one of her corny soap operas. She had been sickly white and hadn’t looked very good at all. Jenny had opened her mouth to complain and Lisa had turned on her, screaming.

  The image wavered, became tenuous, then vanished completely like the trick ink she had once bought at a magic shop, only to be replaced with another one.

  Jenny playing with a doll. Lisa descending on her like some evil angel and smacking her hard across the face for no apparent reason. Jenny still remembered Lisa’s eyes, the weird blackness and doubling as if there were someone else inside her head, behind her eyes. For all Jenny knew, there was. She, too, had heard the odd noises in the walls that came from Lisa’s room, the troubling, croaking voices speaking some pre-human language.

  Lisa hadn’t always been bad. Not until the malformed presences had appeared, seeming to have festered up ex nihilo from some terrible, black abyss. Love for her sister had not yet completely curdled, but Jenny still sometimes wished she could get back at Lisa. But not today. Today she had to cover Lisa’s tracks.

  She looked at the cuts on her arm and concentrated on them. Not too hard, really not that much effort at all, and the crisp, brown scabs began to fade to ocher, then to evanesce, then to disappear, leaving innocent, pink skin. The welling bruises on her arms subsided and the throbbing pain went with them.

  No, Jenny wasn’t as helpless as she seemed, and one day Lisa had just better watch out.

  She turned her attention to the ruined dress, the scuffed and broken high heeled shoes, and actually felt a little guilty. She really shouldn’t have been pilfering in Lisa’s things. Those items would have to be fixed.

  The ballerina finished her dance and the music stopped. In the silence, Jenny heard the tinny, crashing chords coming from Lisa’s room, her ear buds turned up so loud Jenny could hear them all the way downstairs. She listened for a couple of minutes, then went to gather up the broken shoe in the hallway.