Read Online Stunt by Claudia Dey - Free Book Online Page B

shell. She could burst apart.
    My rope falls to the ground. And I fall, fast after it.
    My breath in pinpoints. Eventually it matches Immaculata’s, calm as a tidal pool.
    We sit at the edge of my bed, the rope still around my neck. A collar, brittle and sure, its bite rises red on my skin. ‘Don’t you dare.’ She smells like antiseptic. When she bolted into my bedroom, I was hanging from the rafter, my body kicking, a kipper on the end of a line. I will have a bruise on my stomach from where she charged me.
    Immaculata’s braids came undone in the struggle. Looking at her now, the colour of wax, I see that she has grown her hair to cover her face. Not because it is ugly, no, but because it has that quality of belonging to another world and she is tired of uninvited eyes. Her beauty has pried her open long enough. Her cheeks are Paleolithic slabs, her hair red as warning, her eyes: ink wells. She is betrayed by their depths, and tries to coat them, blinking back indifference. ‘Don’t you dare, Euge.’ She says it again, hard. With a period at the end of the sentence. Suddenly full of punctuation.
Death for life. A clean trade.
    You taught me how to tie a noose, and after you did, you said to me, ‘Unlearn that, unlearn that right now, Eugenia!’ But I never forget anything.
    Mink appears in the doorway, her arms up against its sides, the threshold of a saloon. She is naked and sweating. Her breasts hang shallow. Her belly is round and small like the tip of a helmet. She gives the impression that she has been running for years, reached her destination and forgotten what it is that she wanted. She looks at us as though she has never seen us before. She does not come toward us in measured steps. She does notchide us. She does not hold our faces to hers and make promises about the future. She does not make us hot drinks. She does not cry. She barely interrupts this moment that is a lifespan in itself. Instead, bald and toothless, her face buried under a thick coat of white cold cream, she says, ‘How do you even know he was your father?’ and then, for one last time, she rises up onto the tips of her toes, those sharpened points, turns, opens the winter closet, pulls out a brown fur coat and a pink toque and makes her naked way down the hall and down the stairs. Too late, Immaculata says, ‘Where are you going?’ And then, never forgetting her manners, ‘Good night.’
    We listen to Mink’s footsteps fade. The retreat of an intruder. A perfect stranger. The click of the front door. The whine of the engine. We look out the window. The car pulls away. The sign still there:
with my daughter.
Mink is gone. We are safe. For now. We laugh. We laugh in shudders and balls, heaps and chokes, spores caught on the wind.
    Mink leaves her hairbrush behind.
    As though performing for my stare, Immaculata’s body begins to exaggerate itself, a swan attacking. In a shock, her red hair turns milk-white and her bones sling through her, multiplying themselves, an eerie mathematics. Immaculata does not groan or cry but watches intently, the spectator to a race, as she embodies her final transfiguration. She is a giantess with the appearance of a child bride. Her white dress is now shockingly short, pulled tight against her, a bandage. I realize it was this that stopped people in the street. They could sense that her form could shift. They would not so much watch Immaculata as they would be watchful in her presence, unsure of what they might witness; she could have a fit and lash out or bite her tongue or fly. Whereas, if she could, she would drop herself into a jar filled with clear liquid and spin weightless for the white noise of eternity, under a box spring, in a house soon to be entirely abandoned, a world abandoned of eyes.
    And then it is my turn. I grow. It is the sound of a heavy gate being opened, hands crowded against it, pushing. Then there is a loud crack –