Jenny Haniver

by Jaq Evans

Mama kept a demon under her bed. My brother Jon and I used to sneak into her room while she made breakfast. We’d get down on our stomachs at the doorway and wriggle closer so we could see every inch of the way, just in case the demon chose that morning to wake. But it never did.

She called the demon Jenny H., always on a laugh but she left it there for years, a tiny withered thing on a straw pallet underneath the spot where her head would rest. We weren’t allowed to touch it. Jon may have disobeyed once or twice but I never did. I worried if it felt my nice soft skin it would grow jealous. Who knew what might happen then?

When I was eight and he was ten, Jon told me the demon was a skate—a kind of ray. You took one that was dead and bent its little wings up, folded them like arms, and dried it in a cool dark place until it turned cartilage-yellow. Then you showed it to your friends and said, “Look at the fairy I found beneath my porch!” Or in Mama’s case, something else.

The beach was several hours east; without Jon I don’t know when I would have realized this ugly little creature came from the sea instead of far below the ground. But even knowing didn’t cure my fascination, because Mama wouldn’t speak of it, and things Mama didn’t speak of were magic. Where our father had gone. Why I had to wear my silver bracelet all the time, even in the bath. Who gave her the skate with its sad flat face, the coquettish angle to its leg that I mimicked in my room, tipping one foot behind the other ankle as if to say, shyly, “Come closer.”

When Jon turned thirteen and stopped playing with me, I visited Jenny more often. We never went to church but my friends told me of confession and I came up with a game: sit in the tunnel at the far end of the playground; keep your face to the wall so all you see is deep blue plastic edged with light, like being underwater; whisper very softly all the worst things you’ve thought but would not do. The other kids played once or twice but didn’t seem to enjoy the delicious creep and clench, an anxious feeling like needing to pee but also the anticipation of how good it’ll feel to let it out. And so I relocated my confessional to Mama’s floor. Jenny listened faithfully.

One day, Mama found me in her room, speaking low and playing with the clasp on my bracelet. She pulled me up by my wrist, her fingers hard against the silver so it cut into my skin. When I gasped and smiled at the pain she took me out into the woods and left me in the dark. But she came back an hour later and rushed us home, gave me ice cream. The next morning I prayed she would regret it anyway. Jon fell that week and snapped a tooth in half.

I was fifteen when things went sour. Mama’s demon had gone from make-believe to truth and then begun to spoil into restlessness. The skate had heard my darkest thoughts, those wishes like fat, black flies that bite and fuck and spawn inside of dead things, and never once had Jenny answered. This seemed right and fair when I was younger, but now I felt stupid. When I got down on the floor, all I saw was mummified skin.

“You liar,” I said to it the day a girl at school pulled my hair so hard a hank came out. Although of course Jenny H. never lied. But I could hear Mama and Jon downstairs making dinner, the scent of marinara in my mouth, and suddenly it was too unbearable to keep inside my skin—their comfortable movements around the house, the ease of them like splinters my body couldn’t force back out. So I took off my silver bracelet and threw it underneath the bed where it hit the skate and knocked it skittering into the dust.

Then I went into my room and locked the door, lay face down on my bed, ignored Mama’s knocking for dinner. Slept.

I woke to scratching on my lips. A tug. Chapped pieces pulling free. I tried to open my eyes but something held my lids by the lashes, pinned them shut. The marinara scent was gone; now the air smelled ancient. Bitter. A noise crept around my ears, the soft, dry rustling of skin and under that a whisper—

“No!” At my cry the pressure left my eyes, hard cartilage working in between my lips to grip my tongue. It clamored past my teeth before I blinked away the dark and then the dark was all I had, the dark and the scrabbling in my throat and the memories, all those rotted thoughts I’d fed the demon rising up as Jenny H. climbed down—

And finally the sound, almost deafening, of Mama and Jon breathing slow in their beds down the hall.

So that is my confession (that and what came after).

Won’t you crawl down here and tell us yours?

Jaq Evans lives in the Pacific Northwest and has not yet contributed to the region’s impressive serial killer pedigree in any way. She’s working on an MFA from the University of Southern Maine while awaiting the inevitable.
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