Kelsey Keaton: “A Bloody Chamber”
About this Short Story
“Sometimes I wish I could have an exo-skeleton, rather than a skeleton. That feeling grew into this story.” - Kelsey Keaton
A Bloody Chamber
“Sooo there’s a scorpion loose in the lab,” Rita says, stopping me in the hall.
“Wait – what?”
It’s just past nine a.m. and my brain buzzes from its daily trek across the city: walk, train, bus. Repeat. Repeat until weeks roll up into months and then those months into years. Museums have a way of collapsing time like that. Down the hall is a researcher who studies pre-solar grains from meteorites – nanodiamonds that are two billion years older than the sun.
My job is far less glamorous. I photograph beetle specimens and digitize their labels.
Sometimes grad students or visiting researchers come to use the equipment, but often Rita and I are the only ones in the imaging lab.
“It’s a locked-room mystery,” Rita says with a grin, the two of us like to exchange Agatha Christie paperbacks. I tap my badge on the door lock and it flashes green. She follows me through, “Jim had one of those donor tours last night. So he locked up his critters in here, rather than his office. But this morning he found the scorpion cage open and, well, empty. We’ve looked everywhere. But, you know, they’re nocturnal and like dark spaces…”
I nod, but there’s a fluttering in my middle.
“I guess no sandals for a while,” I say.
Rita shrugs in her oversized t-shirt, as if scorpions were a normal work hazard, as if our work was normal work. Rita images skulls for a bat researcher but she’s also a sharp field photographer. She helps the Birds department with the Peregrine chick banding each year. It’s easy to imagine her standing there, small but steady, snapping photos as angry falcon mamas dive at her helmeted head. If Rita isn’t worried, I shouldn’t be either.
But still.
I drop my bag at my work station then head to the far side of the long room. Watery light seeps in through the skylights, but the cabinets stay in shadow. Thousands of dead beetles inhabit their drawers. But that no longer affects me much. Nor does the pervasive smell of mothballs. You hardly notice either after a while.
And yes, all of Jim’s little pets are stacked in their enclosures along the back wall. The rose-haired tarantulas, the hissing cockroaches, the mantis – she holds her angular body so still she could almost be pinned, but then her head begins to rock, back and forth. Assessing for prey. The small case next to her has only a water tray. A little plastic cave sits overturned beside it on the counter. As I look, pain blossoms in my abdomen.
I grip the counter. A hot needle slides through me and pulls tight. I breathe, face to face with the sandy bottom of the empty cage.
This has nothing to do with the scorpion.
It’s merely my womb rebelling against the piece of copper placed there yesterday. But placed is not the right word. Placed does not describe the waterfall of pain endured, the thrust of an object unfolding itself inside soft flesh. Placed does not covey the sunspots that darted across the ceiling, or the strain against muscles trying so desperately to run away.
Yesterday as I closed my eyes and waited for the third and final jab (open, measure, implant) a memory intruded, another time when I had wanted to run, but didn’t – my voice pinned against my throat, my body pinned beneath that boy’s body.
In the doctor’s office, my legs spread like a butterfly, the smell of that boy’s Axe shampoo flooded my nostrils. It was as if the pain had released something wound tight, a sixteen-year-old body that was folded inside of my own. My eyes watered.
I wanted to vomit my guts out.
xxx
This chamber inside me is a lot like Bluebeard’s – the walls are sticky with blood. But he locked up his past and I’ve locked up my future. Sealed it for ten years with a copper key.
I stand under the vaulted ceiling of the Women’s bathroom, hands on the cool porcelain of the sink. I was told to expect mild cramps, a few days of spotting.
It had seemed silly to take off work.
In the 1990s they shot a horror film in this museum. Pure camp. The only part I really recall is the monster attack in the bathroom: the blood, red bright against the marble of the floor. It was in a Men’s bathroom, the one on the east side of the building. But if you look at the blueprints, it’s the mirror image to this one.
I look at my own mirror image. Drawn and tight.
I long to be a valkyrie.
I plait my hair into twin ropes and pin them across the top of my head, just like my mother used to when I was young. Battle-maidens do not have fear. They bathe in blood and gold, coating each inch of skin until it reaches a rosy patina, an ecstatic shining hue…
How do I explain?
Maybe like this: I hate having a room inside myself that does not belong to me. I wish I could find it sacred or magical, but somehow I only want to be a vessel for myself. In your teens and twenties, contraception is often just a matter of course, but as you cross into your thirties it becomes more and more a line you draw in the sand. Soon it will be too late.
Whenever I tell my mother that I don’t want children, her face takes on that iron-clad expression. The one usually reserved for my tattoos. ‘That’s horrible. Don’t say that.’ she says.
It’s nothing to do with children themselves. I delight in my friends’ kids and my little cousins. I play hide and seek for hours. I catch frogs and build intricate habitats. I place my hands on the drum-tight flesh of my friend’s belly and find such tender resonance.
I sit at my desk and stare at the label on the screen: looping cursive, in German, from 1889. It had been folded up to the size of a thumbnail and placed on the pin with its beetle. I’d unfolded it with tweezers, then photographed it flat. Or somewhat flat. Now the text hovers large on the screen, but it’s still undecipherable.
My mind drifts, it attaches to the scorpion.
Hurry, scurry, scuttle. Front arms held in guard position. Tarsal claws clicking along the wood floor. The darkness presses in warm and close.
I dream up ways to lure her out.
Should I cut a slice of moon and leave it on a plate? Or maybe scatter star-shaped candy?
What does a scorpion desire anyway – besides safety?
xxx
I wake with inflammation in my body. It radiates from some central place. A knot of scar tissue calcifies into an unforgiving form. It’s not right.
That’s all I can think: I don’t feel right.
Fear spears through me as I reach fingers deep inside, as I feel for the strings of the IUD. Stiff as iron thread, the edge of one catches my fingertip and I shudder. Tendons tighten in my neck. I look down to find my whole hand slick with red.
Weeks have passed and still no sign of the scorpion.
Over breakfast I tell my lover the saga of her escape. I tell him how a scorpion hunts and hides, how she lives under the cover of darkness. I tell him that scorpions have poor eyesight, but some biologists suspect that the waxy substance that coats their exoskeletons can actually detect light, that it can function as some giant, multi-surfaced eye.
My lover drinks his coffee. He smiles with eyes closed, as if it were all a good joke. And I wonder if he still finds my nonsense charming.
This is what I said I wanted: just the two of us.
But now that I’m here, it seems there’s nowhere else left to go.
When he gets up from the table, my lover leaves a kiss that flutters on my inner wrist. The more I collect there, the more ephemeral they seem. It can’t last, this bubble of peace. Sitting here inside of it, I see the surface area growing thin. It sparkles in the morning sun, ready to pop. I think probably I will be the one to destroy it, just so I can have a say in when it does.
xxx
After lunch I sit with Rita in a low-ceilinged room. It’s one of the mezzanine level collections where you can sense the weight of stone pressing down around you.
I drift in one of the wheeled chairs. Over the last seventy years or so the foam inside has disintegrated, leaving a yellow breadcrumb trail across the linoleum.
“Ingrid, you ok? What’s up?” Rita asks. Scattered before her are dozens of boxes, each containing a skull. Most are smaller than a walnut.
“I think I’m turning into a chrysalis” I say, holding up my blue white hands to her.
I have no idea what I mean.
Rita turns to me and frowns a little. She adjusts her high pony of shiny black hair, then takes my hands into her warm ones. She studies them as if she’s determining my classification.
“You need a break,” she diagnoses. “Let’s see if Wren’s parents will let us use their cabin. The four of us can go for the weekend.”
I’m late for a meeting with my boss. Which is not ideal. We discuss the funding for my position, which runs out at the end of the year. She says she’d like to keep me on, but it’s all dependent on a grant that may, or may not, come through. As I walk back upstairs, I spread then claw my fingers, over and over, trying to force pinkness back into them. The numbness has been happening on and off for a while now, as if my body were trying to send a message in morse code.
Propped up against the computer monitor is a tea bag with a note: Mint tea is good for circulation. The note isn’t signed, but this is how Rita operates. I walk down the echoing lab to thank her, but her desk is empty.
Across the hall is the Insect library which doubles as the break room. As the water boils in the electric kettle, I wander the stacks. The naphthalene smell of the museum, mixes almost pleasantly with the sweetness of book mildew.
Bombyx mori, domesticated in China some five thousand years ago, is the only moth that makes its cocoon solely of silk. The other three thousand species mix twigs and leaves and other debris into their spinning. It’s to keep themselves hidden during their vulnerable transformation. In lab settings, larvae will use whatever is at hand – curls of sawdust, even shredded thesis drafts.
To make my cocoon I would use the books in the Insect library: all the large leather tomes with their marbled endpaper and gilded edges. I open one and run my fingertips, still tingling with pins and needles, across the indent of the letters. It would be a pleasure to eat them all, one by one. Maybe with all those fresh letters in my gullet, I could learn how to say whatever it is that I want to say. Because there are words I can’t cough up.
Because I didn’t say NO. Or fight as a valkyrie should. Because that night, I retreated from the shell of my body. Left it there, unable to defend itself.
And I’m worried that’s all that remains of the scorpion: an armored shell. I’m worried that she’s starved to death, alone in an alien landscape.
Still, I drove myself home afterwards. Gripping the steering wheel tight, as the rest of me tried to float away. On AOL instant messenger, he wrote, ‘So are you my girlfriend now, or do I actually need to ask you out?’ When I did not reply, the messages grew more aggressive. Then more aggressive still. It made me feel underwater to read them. Lungs collapsing. So I blocked his number. Deleted my AIM account outright. I spend rest of the school year scuttling through halls and hiding out in bathrooms, biding my time until I could forget.
But later, home from college for winter break, I came face to face with that boy at Target. There he was at the end of the aisle, holding laundry detergent, his skin chalk white against his dark hair and distinctive black clothes. His face did something strange as recognition dawned. Then he took a step toward me.
All at once I wanted to crush his glasses beneath my boot. I wanted to drive a spear through his ribs and watch the blood drip red and viscous on the gleaming floor.
Instead I hurried to the parking lot, and straight into a flurry of fresh snow, my mother’s errands not accomplished. That night he tried to friend me on Facebook. For weeks he sent request after request, then the message, ‘Could you get over yourself already? I just want to be friends.’
xxx
Dani ends up having a shift at the restaurant, so we leave much later than planned, nearly ten p.m. At least the road is clear, smooth sailing out of the city.
We pass the AUX cord, and take turns DJ-ing on our phones. There are bags of sour gummy worms and peach rings. The sugar sits rancid in my stomach, yet my fingers keep creeping back for more. I lap up the gossip and the coziness.
I miss how it feels to live with other women, the boundaries all tangled and matted: strands of black and blonde and ginger hair that reappear and slime the drain, no matter how often you clean.
In that world, there’s always a new lipstick shade to borrow, and someone to hold you as you cry. Always a stockpile of Taiwanese meat sauce to reheat (Rita’s grandma’s recipe) – it’s umami syrup rehydrating your entire soul.
Talk settles to a low simmer and Dani naps beside me in the back seat. Heat radiates from her body but my fingers curl inward, still icy. I notice a peachy sunset cloud at my feet.
“What’s this?” I ask and as I pull it up and it balloons out across my lap. Wren swivels her bob of bubblegum pink hair.
“Oh that’s just my knitting project.”
“It’s huge.”
I pull out more and more of it from the tote bag.
“Yeah I keep changing my mind about what I want it to be, it was going to be a sweater but then I kept going… I dunno what it is now. Maybe a snuggie?”
Rita laughs, “How can you knit in the middle August?”
“Well that way it’ll be ready by the time it’s actually cold.”
“Ok so you got candle making, and the sourdough starter,” Rita says, ticking off items with her fingers,
Wren nods, “His name’s Charlie.”
“Truly, I admire your commitment to whimsy.”
Wren’s small nose crinkles very charmingly when she laughs.
“Do you?” she asks.
“Yeah, I sorta do.”
I tuck Dani inside the knitted landscape and curl myself in too. Around three a.m., the night still purple velvet, we pull into a gas station. Dani unfurls, a bird of paradise, her face all flushed and dewy.
“I’ll take the last shift,” she says blinking dark eyes.
“You sure?” Wren asks, rummaging around for the candy. “I can keep going.”
“When’s the last time any of you beautiful babes stayed up til sunrise? I got this. I just
need like, a monster coffee. Or something else wickedly caffeinated.”
We chitter under the glare inside the gas station store, overtired and feeling almost drunk. The bathroom, thank god, has three stalls. All of our bladders are ready to burst. I wait my turn, then slip into the narrow space. I crouch. Blood drips steady into the toilet bowl.
Heavy flow and longer cycles, these are common side effects. The data is well documented, the copper intrauterine device is an effective contraceptive, it’s just that the science behind why the copper works is a little murky. It simply does.
In alchemy, the seven main metals all have a celestial partner and their planetary symbols are used synonymously in recipes and texts. The Sun for gold, and Mars for iron. Interestingly, copper is represented by Venus, and the symbol still used in scientific literature to denote the female sex: ♀︎
Wren and Rita are mulling about, cracking up at a something on one of their phones.
“No seriously,” Rita says. “It’s this kid who works down in Fishes, his tiktok is really blowing up. It’s all skulls and slimy stuff. It’s awesome that people are so into it.”
Then Wren asks, “You ok in there?”
I’m thinking of the museum, of the rows and rows of jars – all full of slimy things. I’m thinking of the warm pressure that fills me.
“Just bled through my cup again,” I say and there’s that pitch to my voice that I absolutely detest. “I’ve been bleeding for eleven days now. And it’s so much, like a slasher film amount, like a Grimm fairytale amount.” I want to laugh but I can’t, I will break, I will spill blood everywhere.
“Eleven days. Seriously?”
Even through the fog of bleach, I smell worry in Wren’s words. I want to creep out of this space like a scorpion. I want to press myself flat, where I won’t be seen.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“That’s happened to me before,” Rita says. “The worst is when you get those big clotted pieces.”
Rita’s not squeamish about anything. I’ve seen her in the museum basement skinning skunks and rabbits and beavers – her hands glistening with entrails, her brows steady on the serene lake of her face.
“But we need to replenish your iron. I brought these great steaks, we’ll cook them tomorrow…or well, I guess it’s tonight. Oh come on. You don’t have to eat them.”
I can perfectly picture the thin line of Wren’s lips. Despite myself, I feel the jagged edges of a smile.
“These are from a grass-fed, pasture raised cow, ok? Josh’s family down in Tennessee gets one butchered every year, all the parts, and freezes it. They send us a bunch of cuts. If you are going to get meat, this is the meat to eat.”
A slithering snake laugh escapes. It has a domino effect.
xxx
“Beautiful friends,” calls Dani as we leave the bathroom. “Come help me. I can’t decide what I want. Also, should we get beer for later?”
We join her in the glowing aisle but I shiver.
“Gonna wait outside,” I say.
The night air is summer thick and the floodlights make long shadows on the pavement. I don’t have the car keys, so I lean and wait, squinting up at the pinprick stars. The smell of gasoline mingles with pine resin from the nearby gathering of trees. There are some paper birch too, standing like ghosts in the darkness.
A bell jangles but it’s a man exiting the building. He’s on the phone. His voice is low and I can’t hear the sense of the words, but they’re throbbing. He wades towards the only car parked near ours. A huge pickup truck, black and sleek.
But this man doesn’t get into the car. Instead he paces. He tucks the phone into his jeans pocket and pulls out a vape pen, but puts it away without bringing it near his lips. His pale hair and white t-shirt sear against the night. He appears to be in his twenties but I base this on his posture and thick shoulders. I can’t see his face well, so my brain fills in the gaps. He could almost be my brother. Except that he’s not.
The bell jangles again and it’s another man, dark-haired and also vaguely young. He heads toward the truck holding up a kaleidoscope of chip bags.
“You ready to go, man? Hey…what’s up? You ok?”
The fair-haired man does not speak. I know that stance. He’s retreated somewhere else. He’s holding himself so still, I can almost feel the vibration as he wills himself not to run. His friend is slack jawed, standing by the car but not getting too close.
“My sister.” The fair-haired man stops as his voice cracks and then he begins again. “My baby sister, dude. They said… an accident. What the fuck… She’s gone. Just gone… God I can’t…” Then something breaks.
He’s crying. Not loudly but visibly. His whole body shakes like a mountain crumbling. It’s horrible to watch. And his friend just stands there, frozen. My nails dig into my palms, and I feel crescent moons forming there. Soon I will scream.
At last, the dark haired man moves. It’s a statue coming to life. He steps toward the fair-haired man and stiffly encircles him in large arms. Neither of them say anything. Nothing needs to be said. The dark-haired man just holds his friend as he weeps, the chip bags still clutched awkwardly in one hand.
“Earth to Ingrid – ”
“Huh?”
Dani has her hand on my shoulder. I smile and try to make it reassuring, but something gives a piercing twang just below my navel.
She gets into the driver seat. It’s my turn to navigate.
“And watch out for deer,” Wren chirps as she and Rita snuggle into the back seat under the mass of knitting. I nod, I grew up in Michigan too.
Though I’ve only had near misses.
xxx
“Where is it that you’re always going to?” asks Dani.
I blink, force my eyelids apart. The music from the speakers drains into my ears like sand. The sky over the fields is pale opal, shifting into too many colors to name.
“Sorry, I think I fell asleep.”
“Yeah. But no, I mean normally, when you space out. It’s like you’re in your own little Ingrid world. Are you thinking up erotic fan-fiction or what?”
“Wait – what the heck kind of face do I make?”
“A joke. But seriously, you’re always thinking. I bet you have this whole secret garden in your thoughts.”
Her eyes are on the road and I don’t know what she wants from me.
“Thinking isn’t a bad thing,” I say.
“Of course. I didn’t say that.”
I have that bruised fruit feeling, like I’m a peach she’s let tumble to the dirty tile of the grocery store. “I don’t keep secrets,” I say. “You know I hate secrets.”
Dani frowns.
“Honey I know. What I mean is, doesn’t it get lonely?”
I feel three long heart beats. All the words I need are so far from me, scrambling and darting away. And before I can even begin to reach for them, to gather them into my arms – the whole world lurches.
Something big and full of blood thumps into the side of car, or rolls across the hood. Maybe both. I can hardly tell. My brain seems to slip out of me, downward for a moment, then back again as Dani slams on the breaks and my seatbelt pulls tight.
Then in the stillness, in the empty road, we all gasp. We take in sharp air, squeeze it in into our lungs. Someone whimpers, maybe me, and all four of us stumble out of the car. We look about us, and take stock of our limbs. An egg yolk sun is bleeding red into the horizon. I can smell the dew on the fields.
Without thinking, I step off the road. I move towards the trees.
My gaze is dragged through the dirt and into a wooded area off to the left. I can’t see the deer, but I can hear its heart thundering. I close my eyes and feel cloven feet push hard against the earth, each reverberation lapping against my skin. In each leap there is a spring and release from gravity.
Wren calls out to me, but I’m too absorbed.
I’m thinking of the scorpion’s exoskeleton, how it functions as a larger eye. Then my own eyes flicker open and again, I take in the burnt colored sky.
At last I can feel the scorpion building a nest deep inside of me, at home inside the blood soaked walls. Funny how it’s always the last place you look.
The gentle prick of her claws reassures me that we may have venom, but we can choose when to use it. We ourselves are not poisonous, or broken, or no good. Despite what that boy may have said, long long ago.
Because they are different defenses, venom and poison.
Venom is a finely hewn tool; it takes so much energy to craft that it’s used with great discretion. A snake will not strike, nor a scorpion, unless sure of the result. But poison is merely revenge, only effective after you’ve been consumed. By then you’re just a brightly colored frog liquefying in your predator’s stomach. You may be able to watch their organs shut down, one by one. But is there really any joy in that?
“The car is fine,” I hear Wren say. “Barely a dent. I hope the deer’s okay. Shit. It’s probably ok right?”
“Ingrid,” Dani calls over the murmur of the other two. “The deer’s run off. Let’s go yeah? Everything’s alright.”
I head back to the road, nose lifted, moving toward the warm honey of their voices.
