By Aimee Parkison
TRIGGER WARNING- Implications of sexual violence
The boy carries the Book of Screams through the house in the hills, that maze of stained carpets and scarred walls, into the house of dirty dishes, where his mother has no idea what he has done or what he is doing. He imagines himself as a detective working the case for the women and girls he finds in the Book of Screams. Scratching the pages, the boy releases scents and inhales them placing his nose just above images of women whose eyes smell of tears in crumbling photographs, paintings, sketches, even holograms.
In that haze of hair draining to black water of the basement cellar, where I lost my dignity. Filmed without my consent, with other women, I have come to rage because no one knows it’s happening.
My self-respect follows boots down a well where I slept ragged with the prettiest lost girl in the city. I still see her deep brown eyes. Men turned her degradation into gold until the movie industry became an indictment against them. Dressed in blood, tenderly, the girl picked up her knife and removed her clothes and her eyes.
Please help me understand why the house in the hills has the ambiance of a haemorrhage during a heart attack, the grace of gnats drowning in shallow wine. In puddles outside the shaded garage, water bugs skitter with cops securing rooms furnished with sadness before searching for smuggled opium.
The Hairstylist of the Damned makes Caligula seem gentle as he uses blood to sculpt my hair at night while hostage negotiators carry on, script by script, bargaining for the victims as if we are still alive.
Everyone talks about the house in the hills with its painted flowers and its bloody legends, but no one talks about Jane.
Jane emerges from the house and approaches the truck with the laughing man. I love Jane because I remember how she said she would fight for me after seeing my blood in the bathroom sink with those photographs in the bottom of the sink.
Men would rather go crazy than see the world as women who know why Jane no longer emerges from the house in the hills.
A shallow whine emerges from me when I open the wrong door and see my sister in the inglenook.
This was long ago. The moment is preserved in the Book of Screams.
The boy’s mother calls to him as he pulls back the tab, lifting the flap on the page, where my sister waits in photographs, preserved under wax. The boy pulls one tab, and the inglenook opens to reveal her.
In the closeup of her face, her mouth is a door. The boy lifts a flap over her mouth, and her mouth opens so that he can stare inside it. Using a magnifying glass, he observes my anguish in close detail by expanding my sister’s open mouth.
Can he see how much I wanted to save her? Can he guess how she waited for me and listened for me, knowing we were somewhere held inside the same house, separate but together, part of the same story?
On film, it keeps happening. As long as the film is out there, being shown, we can’t make it stop.
In the Book of Screams, we are frozen in glue, shellacked in cement, sealers, and furniture polish, anything to hold us down. Images held in resin, we are varnished, lacquered women of similar fates. Sealed under glossy layers of polyurethane and epoxy, we flake and crack. The boy gently places us beneath his pillow.
I never escape what happened to my sister, and the boy will never stop dreaming of her alive. He thinks too much about her, as do other men. She was the prettiest lost girl in the city. I could never hold a candle to her beauty when strangers burned her clothes in the fireplace.
I will always be inside my sister’s mouth when she screams.
This is not the story of the Book of Screams. This is a gift to you, a plea, a warning: you may not make it home tonight. An attacker is difficult to deal with in the Walmart parking lot while unlocking your car in the dark or pushing the cart. In the restroom with your pants around your ankles, the rapist is hard to escape. It’s easy to forget your place when a man claiming to be a police detective asks you to follow him to where it’s easy to forget fighting isn’t always self-protection. The way he looks at you in the Book of Screams, how easy it is for men like him to get away with it.
The victims’ families collect press releases about mothers burying their daughters, but the boy falls asleep with the Book of Screams gifting him surreal nightmares under his blanket, my death shroud where Martha Graham teaches dead girls to dance with the ghosts of their sisters until the boy wakes to find my face swollen beyond recognition.
Remember the dead, how their families chalked and drew and colored and spray-painted flowers all over the walls of the house in the hills? Instead of placing more flowers on victims’ empty graves, they spraypainted giant flowers with the names of lost women and girls. Today, these painted flowers bloom as the house is hit by the wrecking ball, and the lost women head for the river, singing.
Even the headless are heady with their heads swinging in their hands clutching tangled hair styled in blood. They are singing sounds unheard as painted chalk flowers bloom, pollinating the city air with powder of painted petals. People all over the city breathe in the dust of destroyed flowers, the dust of the demolished house floating through ozone with human ashes, over the river cloud fog, pollinating the lungs of strangers.
Jack the Ripper schools the Zodiac Killer.
Ted Bundy shadows the Axeman.
Where Albert Fish sets a lovely dinner table for cannibals of the future, I have gone on a hunger strike.
The man who devoured pieces of me wanted to keep me after I died. Because there is a romance to cannibalism in the madness of the flesh, devouring me was devotion, a final indignity.
Never was I his, even when he ate me and my sister.
I was not me, and she was not her.
Rendered helpless, we all become something we are not: a body, a victim, a survivor.
If we survive and are brave enough to report the crime, we may be judged as bad victims for wearing the wrong type of panties.
Panties are political if you’re sexy, and pretty, but if you are plain, your panties won’t matter.
Since I was never the prettiest lost girl in the city, I disappeared from my life just as quietly as my name disappeared from the news, but my little sister was front-page because of her face.
To prepare for our final scene in the large bathroom called “the green room” marks on our faces were hidden by the makeup kit: cream foundation, powder, judicious lipstick. Long tresses hid bruises on our bodies, silken hair cascading over bruises like frilly black lace.
As the elder sister of the prettiest lost girl in the city, I was worth less than she was to those who paid for our destruction. She was the star of the movie, and I was background, disappearing like a prop.
When the insects in our mouths writhed, it was too late. Police removed flooring from the bathroom to find evidence, but they missed evidence in the car under the backseats and in the cracks in the house’s walls, where our captor watched us.
What can I say of the man who murdered us?
Dr. Death was an angel compared to him.
Our murderer works on his victims as if he consults a cookbook authored by the Butcher of Rostov, a book on taxidermy by Ed Gein, and a book on arts and crafts by Jeffrey Dahmer, all while living in the house he remodeled using the architectural designs of H.H. Holmes.
Like the rest of his kind, he only celebrates acts that show him in the right light. There are acts he won’t admit, acts he attempts to erase, for the same reason Bundy never admitted he was a necrophile.
How do I describe my sister now that she has been dismembered?
She’s like the infamous unknown actress named Elizabeth Short, who became the Black Dahlia after fame cut her in half and exposed her body to strangers. People who saw her on death’s stage kept mistaking her corpse for a mannequin in a field. Dehumanized, she was never forgotten in the way she would have been if society had found a way to humanize her.
November 17th was my time to die.
Because my sister had eyes like mine, I was estranged from her.
Strangled to release, again and again, I watched my captor gaze into the eyes of the prettiest lost girl in the city.
In the Book of Screams, pieces of me were preserved, collaged in taxidermy, shellacked, super glued, sealed in wax with remnants of my sister, who pretended not to know me to keep me alive.
Now, my little sister and I are ghosting Hollywood with the other women in the Book of Screams.
#Timesup breathed new life into us, helping us more than we could have ever imagined.
Haunting Hollywood, #MeToo came along and canceled auteurship in Los Angeles, until a group of underground artists reinvented auteurship by recruiting murdered girls like my sister and murdered women like me to re-enact our demise in reverse, no killer required.
Unmurdered, we spoke reverse sentences: Eerf won ma I. Reverof evil lliw I. !Smaercs fo kooB eht depacse I, until questions, the makers of legends opened the gate to the reborn in the eyes of the curious boy devouring the Book of Screams.
Turning the pages, the boy questions how long drunken strangers were galloping beneath the tree on the ground floor while gazing down into the basement windows to catch a glimpse of me, the third victim. (Pages 11-21 in the Book of Screams.)
“None of my business,” drunken strangers would say in passing after gazing down at my tied ankles.
Hogtied. Elegantly dressed men with southern drawls said “hogtied” like it was nothing to the ghosts of moviegoers who assumed women dressed like me deserved to be tied with girls dressed like my sister.
In the movies, who is to say what is real?
Wherever the shadow of Harvey Weinstein’s deformed penis falls over the faces of a generation’s most iconic women, there are miserable ways to become a survivor. Ladies fight back by smiling through pain, looking pretty while angry, and faking an orgasm.
In the Book of Screams, I am smiling at the boy to get him to see me as more than a tortured body.
He will see my eyes through generations yet unborn, but he will never see me as having hopes and dreams equal to his.
The Book of Screams is such a shitty book, the only way I can get close to the boy, who one day will be the father of my grandchildren, who will never know me.
As the boy becomes a man, I’ve wanted him to love me, not this way.
Aimee Parkison is the author of several books, including Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Parkison is Professor of Fiction Writing at Oklahoma State University and serves on the FC2 Board of Directors. Her fiction has appeared in Best Small Fictions and in literary journals such as Puerto Del Sol, Five Points, and North American Review. Her newest story collection, Suburban Death Project, was published by Unbound Edition. More information is available at www.aimeeparkison.com
