good girls don’t bite

Good girls don’t bite, your mother snaps. She has restrained you to a dining room chair using rank-smelling kitchen towels and leftover yarn. The back of the chair digs into the nape of your neck when your head lolls back, and your yellow teeth are bared to the ceiling fan, to the spiders congregating around the lightbulbs and the fruit flies circling the leftovers. Spit soaks into the cloth she’s clogged your throat with and it froths over the sides of your mouth. You could move if you really wanted to. Your mother is a petite thing, ovine and wiry, with weak wrists and trembling hands that couldn’t fight back even if she wanted to.

Good girls don’t sink their dirty teeth into things that aren’t made for them to eat, your mother snarls. The gold of her capped incisors catches in the dim kitchen light. Your mouth is a wound, detached from the rest of your body. You never thought your mother would do this; her threats always seemed tiny and breakable, like bird bones. The tea she gave you with tangled roots was only supposed to be tea, but then your vision vignetted and you could not see. You could not hear or feel or fear, just breathe heavy, wet huffs through your nostrils against the table and you feel yourself curl away somewhere cool and dark. And here you are now, leashed and half-conscious, feeling the smallness of her hands bump against your teeth and poke around your mouth with a chisel and a chopstick. You taste metal and rust. She probes at your heavy tongue like it’s roadkill.

Good girls don’t leave things bloody and broken and hurt, your mother barks. She clamps one hand on your jaw, grip tight enough to coax bruises, and forces your mouth open wider and wider until it feels like you’ll never be able to snap it shut again. A stray growl drags itself up your throat like a dying dog. It is manged and stubborn. She ignores it, brings the file she took from the tool shed up to your mouth and angles it at your teeth. Your jugular thrums beneath the skin of your neck. The file drags against your canine with a force you didn’t know your mother had, and your body tremors with each grate. The grinding is loud. Everything inside you claws, crawls, scratches for release. The knots from your mother’s makeshift leashes are cutting into the flesh of your ankles and wrists, the pain and discomfort gnarl your fingers, and you sink your nails into the tenderness of your palms. You try to whip your head now, like a tail, from side to side, but your mother moors you, attempts to tame you as best she can. Her hand muzzles you, and she shaves the jagged points of your teeth down to a grit. Tooth-dust collects at the floor of your mouth and makes you gag.

Good girls sit still, your mother howls. Oily tears drool down your cheeks, saliva slicks your throat, snot dribbles into your mouth. Your mother is stripping you of everything. Your teeth will be dull and useless, only good for things that are soft and swallowable, like hers. You won’t be able to bite what you want, hold it in the trap of your maw until it stills, feel its fear pulsing sweetly against your tongue with every ragged breath. You cannot let your mother rid you of this. She cannot rid you of your sharpness.

Good girls don’t bite, your mother pleads when all the fetters finally break.

haimatasseography

r/tasseography

sybil444 • 33d ago • Edited 28d ago

Has anyone read something other than tea leaves before?

Edit: Let me rephrase my question, has anyone ever read period blood?

Context: The first time my period came down, as mom lovingly described it, I was thirteen and miserable and about to start high school. Everything about that summer felt swollen. When I woke up that morning with the pillows and sheets kicked into a mountain on the floor, I knew something was off. Call it teenage girl intuition. In hindsight, the lack of blood splotching and staining my bed was pretty weird. There was only a cold stickiness between my legs, a grosser feeling than the clear discharge I’d only recently got used to, to clue me into what was happening. I’ll spare you the details of the inspection of wadded up toilet paper, just know that when I peeked down between my legs, there it was. A crudely dribbled heart with a fat, Jello clot right in the middle slipping down the calcium-streaked toilet bowl. I kicked off my soiled cotton underwear to a corner and scooted half-naked until my back was pressed against the toilet lid and my feet rested on the seat. I was looking for some way to discredit what my own body produced. Half-naked and sweaty, I squatted there for an hour, closing one eye and ghosting a finger over the outline of the heart, then doing the same thing with the other. I couldn’t make anything of this sign at the time. Six days later, mom died from a coronary embolism, a stupid clot in her heart.

Truth be told, the months after mom’s death bled together. I existed in a state of half-awake and half-asleep, hyper-focused on the unimportant things: the holes in the window screen, the peeling steering wheel in our car, the chalk dust collecting on the lip of the blackboard, the tiny hole on the heel of one of my school socks, the coffee grounds dad never threw out. All of it felt infinitely more interesting than what I was feeling and living. Things like changing my sheets, studying for exams, remembering friends’ birthdays, brushing my hair, holidays, talking to dad, bleeding monthly; all became secondary. By the time I realized I hadn’t gotten my period, the first and only time being before mom died, it was Easter weekend and I had about a month left of my freshman year.

Part of me was grateful my uterus lining was clinging to its mother organ for dear life. I was relieved at the thought of drying up, and terrified at the thought of just how much blood I had backlogged behind the dam of my uterine sphincter. I knew I wasn’t pregnant. What I really wanted was to know whether I’d really predicted mom’s death, whether my next period would show me a sign only I could decipher, whether I was some modern oracle of Delphi, Indiana.

The summer nights were newborn, blue and hot and angry. The week before I turned fourteen, I woke up in a tangle of blood-smeared sheets, cold sweat sparging my entire body. It happened again and I was scared shitless. In the toilet bowl, illuminated by the glaring bathroom light, was what I could only describe as two half-assed fingerpainted figures. Globules of my lining were their heads, heavy and red. Gross, I know. It could have just been a weird coincidence, just two human-looking figures, but I still spent embarrassingly too long keeling over the bowl to make something else out. Come morning, my knees were bruised and I still didn’t know anything. At my sad little party, a movie night dad organized with my three friends, the prettiest, Amanda, kissed me happy birthday. She took me by the shoulders and smashed her lips against mine among the food cans and boxed dinners in our pantry with the bulb dad never fixed fireworking above us. I spent the rest of the night tucked between Amanda and the couch’s arm, trying not to speak or eat so I could keep her oily strawberry lip gloss on my lips.

After that, my period returned with some normalcy; it came and went like a migrating bird. Months, usually three or four, would go by and it wouldn’t come down. Spending less money on uncomfortable XXL pads meant spending less time worrying about what I would see, could see, staring back at me from the ceramic bowl. When my periods did come, I was miserable. I’d spend the entire week curled into a fetus, wanting to punch the softness of my belly and stick a hand up inside myself to rip my uterus out. I imagined it would look like mom’s heart after she died, ballooned and bloody, tangled in vein thread and still warm.

Only the first blood could show me the future, I learned, after spending hours hunched over the toilet, like a fortune-teller and her crystal ball. On my second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth days, nothing resembling anything ever came out. There was only piss or shit mixed with rusty, rank water. That eased my mind a lot. Dad took me to a gynecologist sometime after I turned fifteen, his own strange and loving version of a quince, an acceptance that I was now more woman than girl. Everything inside me looked fine, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, said the gynecologist looking over my bloodwork results. Her office looked like a shrine dedicated to figurines of sleek, naked women with swelling bellies and holes in their crotches. When I asked her what the weirdest period symptom she’d heard of was–I was trying to set up my hypothesis about my period predictions but needed a way to bring it up–she only took my hands in hers, squeezed until my knuckles clashed, and reassured me that whatever I was experiencing was normal. Since then, I’ve seen her twice every year but never mustered up the foolish courage to ask her about it.

I’m seventeen now. Our neighbor’s death, my last breakup, a friend’s pregnancy, dad’s new girlfriend, the puppy that showed up at our door. Those are all things I predicted. A bullet, a heart cut down the middle, a rattle, a rose, a bone. Those are the signs I saw in my blood. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I really don’t know what else to do. Can anyone tell me what this means?

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boy blood

They found Jeffery’s body by the creek, in late spring, after three weeks of useless searching. Blighted leaves were tangled in his blood-matted hair and his skull was cracked open like a china dish. The worms had started taking pieces of his body for their dinner and the maggots were boiling under his decomposing skin. Everyone said his face looked peaceful, like he’d gone in his sleep, despite the crusting faultline somewhere under his corn-white hair.

Momma told me that everyone assumed he’d been smoking something by the creek before he slipped on the dew-slick grass. She didn’t tell me what she thought, though. She only told me to be careful.

Later in the year, around midsummer, when the horseflies bumped about and the wasps stuck their asses together to make babies, Mrs. Mason found Eli with slit wrists in her chicken coop. One of her laying hens, the perpetually fat ones that look like church ladies, were pecking at the lice in his hair, and another at his pinky toe. She’d gone to get eggs for her omelet and had seen him thrown on the shit-splattered floor like a discarded toy.

The two officers that came to check what she was babbling about over the phone ruled that it was a suicide. They concluded Eli’d done it because Mrs. Mason’s niece, who’d been staying with her until early May, said she wouldn’t ever date a boy like him.

Mrs. Mason told me, when Momma and I went to check if she was okay, that I shouldn’t be like her niece and make a good country boy kill himself.

In the early fall, Tommy with the rattail broke his neck while trying to catch squirrels in one of the heavy-set oak trees near the lake. Jonah went in November, a wolf or bear or something worse attacked him while he was out collecting firewood. They found Carson behind the high school’s dumpster with puncture wounds in that inner-arm area that’s as thin as Bible paper and bloody ribbons unfurling down the length of his forearm. David was the last boy to die. There was a single gash across his pale stomach.

The town hadn’t lost any more teenage boys since early December.

We were snowed in. No one could go anywhere. We had all been trapped in our houses, with the heating ramped as hot as the fucking oven, walking around with mangy blankets around us like a second skin. Momma hadn’t been to work in three days because of the blizzard and school was out until the cold left.

We’d been eating dinner on the sagging couch with paper plates balanced on our laps, watching whatever game show was on. Momma would head to her bedroom, the humid one across from mine that always smelled like dusting powder, and be asleep, or at least in bed, by nine. She’d leave the door open just a crack. She never left her swaddle to check on any noises, though, and pretended not to hear me scuttling about.

The rats came out after midnight, when the light’d been out for a while and the tumbling ice in the freezer was all that echoed. They’d scurry out, sniffing wildly at our splintered floorboards, looking for chip crumbs and bits of buttered veggies. I would wait for them under the kitchen table with a chunk of cheese on a saucer from my old ceramic tea set.

When they’d appear, scruffy with hair gray like Momma’s and stinking of garbage, I’d lower my hand like God did to special people, like I’d only pet them. They fit almost perfectly in my fist. They’d thrash at first, the way newborns do—I remember seeing a birthing video in health class—when I grabbed them by their little necks. The bone is as soft as ear cartilage. When they’d try screaming, I’d squeeze harder and harder and harder. I'd pull my pocketknife out from under me and slit their throats once they went still, and I’d ignore their squeaking if they hadn't. Warm blood trickled down my arm and dotted the floor beneath me as I suckled at their necks. It was thick and oily on my lips and slid down into my stomach with ease.

I didn’t dislike killing the rats. It was just unsatisfying because they never filled me the way I wanted them to. But they were the closest thing to boy’s blood that I’d tasted and they’d have to hold me over.

My thirst for it came around the same time the rank blood started staining my underwear every month. I was thirteen and my period came with the new year. At first, I didn’t know what the hunger was for; I’d told Momma and she’d just brought me some extra snacks from the junk food aisle. I’d melt chocolate buttons between my fingers and crunch on puffy, orange chip-curls until my teeth were stained. I’d gorge on trays of cookies, greasy cheese sandwiches and chunky yogurt. Nothing ever satisfied me.

That month, when the first craving came, I found a fat fly in my soup amongst the wilted greens and it dissolved on my tongue like a crystalized sugar ball. It didn’t fill me, but it satiated something in me. I started picking carpenter ants like jelly-beans off the pavement and popped them between my teeth. I bit into one of the warted frogs that hung out by my window and sucked the sour blood. I slurped from the bowl of a stupid bird’s head, the one that crashed into our kitchen window, while crouched over the kitchen sink. All of them tasted better than anything Momma had been putting on my plate.

One day, when I was walking home from school, this boy who lived near us named Carlisle kissed me on a dare. Carlisle was older, a sophomore, and looked like those vintage Hollywood actors. His lips were shedding like snakeskins and bloodied from where he’d pick at them until his fingers turned sticky brown. A speckle of blood stayed on my lips after he pulled away, flushed with embarrassment, and I licked it off eagerly. I felt the kind of instant relief that comes with finally taking a shit after holding it all day. After that, I started kissing boys after school, biting down on their slug-like tongues until they oozed blood I could lap at. Frenching boys with blisters in their mouths wasn’t enough. The killing came soon after.

By the weekend, the snow had started to slosh around our front lawn, pale like the grits we got from the diner, the new year had come again. January had just started, fresh as a wound, and I hadn’t drank from a boy since late November. I was hungry and the rats weren’t fucking as quickly as I needed them too. When Momma realized what I’d been doing, she just told me to put the damn things in the bin at the end of our driveway, just outside the yellowing picket fence that jutted out like ingrown teeth, instead of hiding their carcasses under floorboards.

I’d grown hungry and restless that winter, pulling at the toughened skin around my nails until they clotted with blood, chewing at my lips until I could rip the skin away, nipping my knees with my pink razor when I shaved to suck on whatever came out. I was unashamed, gnawing and biting in front of Momma during TV time. I needed to drink from a boy. Momma seemed to know it too.

I’d been watching Andrew through the crepe-paper curtains by the living room, hauling in our groceries to the doorstep in those blue canvas bags. He looked like a younger version of the rich men who only went to Easter masses, all bottlefly eyes and floppy blonde hair. Momma liked teasing me about staring at him. This time, when he knocked on the door, I had to get it because Momma was sitting on the toilet, her cotton panties hammocked between her knees, playing that snake game on her Nokia. She’d called for me and told me to hand a damp five dollar bill from her flaking black purse to Andrew and bring the groceries in.

“Momma said this is for you.”

“Oh shit, she really shouldn’t’ve. I’ve told your Momma that I ain’t allowed to accept her tips.” Still, he folded the flaccid bill and tucked it in his back pocket. “Are you bringing ‘em in yourself?”

“Yeah, I bring ‘em in and Mama packs ‘em.” “Let me help you.”

“What a gentleman. You doin’ anything tonight?” “Not that I know of. You lookin’ to change that?”

“Mama should be sleeping by eleven so I can meet you behind the church at twelve.”

We never locked our windows, and the panes were always smutched with greasy fingerprints from where we opened them during summer and forgot to clean them in the fall. To slip out of my bedroom window, I’d have to peel back the mosquito mesh that trapped desiccated spiders and crunchy flies and clamber out. Outside, even with three layers of winter clothes on, it felt like how hell would when it finally froze over. My boots squelched when I landed in the muck outside. The cold, wet air nipped at my ankle like a needy dog. The sidewalk that was usually made of dust during the searing summer was filmed with snowmelt, gobs of dirt, and dead insects from our driveway all the way to the church. It was a three-block walk. The dew dribbling down the Madonna at the entrance of the church’s lot made it look like she was crying cold tears. Despite the paint peeling off in layers like real skin, she looked pretty. The stone pavers floated like heavy boats on the brown, cake-batter mud and wobbled under my feet as I hopped from one to the other all the way to the shed out back. Andrew stood there like an idiot with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

I’m sure he greeted me, said something about me looking pretty in the dim light as the bugs bumped against my face. I’m sure I was drooling, I usually do at the thought of a boy’s wound. I’m sure he screamed, or at least tried to, like the pigs do when they’re tied up for slaughter. I’m sure no one heard him.

“Delilah May, where’d you go last night?”

“To sleep, Momma.”

“Don’t be smart. I know you snuck out last night. I know all about your little escapade. I’ll bet it was with Andrew.”

“Well if you know, why’d you ask?”

“I’d assumed I’d’ve gotten some honesty from you.”

We picked at the phallic breakfast links smothered in oil on our plates. The heater purred in the background.

“So, where’d you leave him?”

“Hm?”

“Where did you leave him?”

“In the shed behind the church.”

“Jesus Christ, Delilah. I’ve told you to stop leaving those damn boys around like they’re rats.”

They found Andrew’s body with a snapped neck and a broken-rope necklace around the raw, bloodied slit. He looked like a Christmas decoration left up too long, pale and dusty and lifeless. When Pastor Ron found the body that morning, he’d dropped to his knees and prayed over it, for it, having forgotten what he’d originally needed from the shed.

The two officers waddled about like Michelin men in their oversized, stained coats as they poked around the shed. Somehow they deduced that he’d killed himself because his daddy remarried in the fall and decided it was a shame. Such a shame, they said. To do something like that and on the church’s lands. A damn shame.

By the time our neighbor, Sandy, shuffled over in her pilling pink bathrobe and curlers to tell us the news, Momma already knew what happened. She never asked for details. She never told me to stop. She only told me to be careful.

Neah Ziana Mendoza is a Belizean speculative writer. Born and raised in Orange Walk Town, she’s found her way back home after earning a BA in Creative Writing from Murray State University. She is a proud, weird, queer girl who writes stories for other weird, queer girls. Her fiction can be found in Waxing & Waning, Glassworks Magazine, and The Page Gallery.