Lily Grange did not like to cry.
Whether it was born from a desire not to be seen vulnerable or cultivated from a military household (her father had been in the Army), shedding tears was a sign of weakness or loss of control. Her father hadn’t been the nicest man in the world, but he had some merits. He had been supportive, always ready to push her to her limits and then some, and he never seemed to hold her to anyone else’s standards but his own.
And now he was dead.
Her old man was finally, absolutely dead.
“Took you long enough.” she sniffled, taking another tissue from her purse to wipe her scarlet nose. Harrison Grange had been in the most rotten state since he had collapsed in his house a month ago. They had driven him to the hospital, and then he just suffered silently until today. His kidneys were damaged beyond repair, and so were his lungs; the double-whammy from cigarettes and alcohol. The Dynamic Duo had been her father’s only friends after the war, and as much as she hated to admit it, he became another statistic of vets who were just too damn screwed up to readjust to being normal.
Lily had seen the signs: excessive drinking, sleepless nights, sallow skin. She had seen all of it, but had written it off as over-excited nerves when he jumped at every car backfiring. Fire alarms became the number one enemy, and she hadn’t been surprised to find that he had broken them all during one of her last visits before his hospitalization.
Lily and her mother, Amelia, had discussed placing him into a home and contacting a therapist only a week before. Lily only suspected, but her mother knew something was not the same. Amelia had woken up one night to find him gone from their bed. After gathering her wits and slippers, she had walked down the stairs to find him at the window, shotgun leaning against his shoulder, and eyes as wide and alert as a deer in the midst of a hunt.
PTSD.
Everyone knew what it was: how couldn’t you? It was diagnosed by every single psychoanalyst quack after 9/11, and by the time Desert Storm was over with, it was a household name. Everyone had to be educated on it, or else you might be shot by your husband because he thought you were Abdul, the Iraqi man who tortured you for weeks, come back to finish the job.
But all that was the past. Yet, it still existed, but now, her father wasn’t the conduit anymore. It was a distant nightmare, a shadowy presence that had once been very close, breathing down the back of her neck.
The bus pulled up then, rumbling engine and screeching tires jarring her from her reverie. As much as she would rather drive home, Lily was sure that she would cry so much that she would run herself off of the road. Besides, her mother said she could drive the car over in the morning from her house.
I hope she gets some sleep tonight, she thought.
The bus ride to her street was quiet. Tension hung in the air like smoke, the gravity of her father’s death slowly becoming realized. He’ll never see my next birthday, give me a present, send me a postcard when he’s on vacation or a Christmas card when the season comes calling. He won’t help me get over a breakup, or lend me a thousand dollars if I ever need it. Lily’s head ached with her heart as she thought of all of the things he would never do again: smoke a cigarette, have a casual drink with her at a bar, play with her future children, smile, laugh, hope, despair, worry, jump, dance, sing–
The bus driver was too tired to notice the shuddering woman in the back of the bus. Her shoulders jumped erratically with each sob, and it took all of Lily’s self-control to not let out a single noise.
She didn’t need anyone seeing her like this.
Except for Cooper, though. Cooper was the rock in her life, the one thing she could cling to in the rushing, turbulent river of her life. They had met when she had first moved to the city, and he was charming yet cocky, rude yet sympathetic. He was a ladies’ man, to be sure, but there was a soft side to him that she coveted above all everything else that she knew of him. He was the guy who, in private, was much nicer and more affectionate.
Besides, he was also attractive in a way that Lily had never known before in her life. He had the standard blue eyes and blonde hair (a good combination), but it was the little things that drew her eye. Like the squareness of his jaw, the small dimples in the corner of his mouth that only showed when he smiled, and the fact his nostrils flared when he was angry or embarrassed. They were the icing on the cake that was Cooper Allison.
He’ll be waiting home for me, she thought, the little spark of hope and relief burning in the dark waters she was sinking under. I’ll curl up on the couch and he’ll hold me and let me cry myself to sleep. Then we’ll go to bed and talk over coffee in the morning and he’ll tell me that I can get through this and that he’ll be there every step of the way.
That train of thought sustained her until the bus stopped a few blocks from her apartment, where he was waiting. It groaned to a halt, and the bus seemed to purr at her contentedly like a cat as Lily stepped onto the sidewalk. As its hungry rumbling faded away into the cold night air, she walked steadily, but slowly, home.
The streetlamps were on, casting tangerine light onto the sides of the buildings. If she looked long enough, she could see the lights peeking through the cracks of the curtains in the windows. Activity flitted in a few of the windows, from the electric blue glare of TV’s to the neon rainbow lights from a strobe or disco light. Someone was having a party in the building right next to hers, and the sound trumpeted proudly out of open windows. Bass lines pounded like her heart, steady and unstoppable. There were peals of drunken laughter every so often, but Lily held no irritation for whomever the laughter belonged to. That building had been the host of many parties since she had moved in, and she didn’t care anymore.
As Lily passed the front door of the building, a woman stumbled out of it, light cutting into the air like a muted sunbeam. Her skin was the color of caramel, maybe darker in better light, and her ebony hair was made into braids and cornrows, held in place by a multi colored bandana. There was a bottle of something— likely beer—in her hand, and she had stumbled out to the street for a breather when she caught sight of her.
“Somebody’s gettin’ bizay in ‘dere, cher. Bettah not try an’ interrupt leur passion.” she said, accent floating through the frigid air like warm coffee. She apparently wasn’t that drunk, as Lily had suspected. There was not one word that tripped and stumbled, and her French was impeccable.
“I’m sorry?” she said, not entirely sure if she was talking to her or not.
The woman squinted a little in the evening light, and Lily thought her eyes were scarlet. But the color flashed away, only to be replaced with the characteristic brown irises she should’ve expected.
Eyes are playing tricks on me, she thought to herself.
“Sorry, cher. My accent is a little rough to you. Let me repeat myself: Dey- de people in dat apartment over ‘dere— are bein’ rowdy dis evenin’.” As she spoke, the woman pointed to her right, at Lily’s apartment building.
Lily’s building was a pretty standard one for the city: brick walls, cement foundation, two floors for two parties to share or for one party to spread out in. As was the case for Lily and Cooper, they were the only people in the building; they had made sure they had their own privacy for the same sort of passion that this woman was speaking about.
“Are you sure, ma’am?” Lily asked, concerned that the woman was perhaps mistaking her apartment for the one over.
The woman nodded somberly, and it was then that Lily noticed the way she was dressed. She had on a small neon crop top, too short to be comfortable, and if she concentrated hard enough, she could discern what looked like the bottom of the woman’s breasts peeking out from under it. Hurriedly pushing her eyes to somewhere else, she took in her skinny jeans, colored black in the pale moonlight, and those sandals that looked like the ones that Jesus wears in his paintings. These were no clothes for this kind of evening, not when the high right now was 51 degrees.
All of her clothes were fit for a younger person, and the woman looked maybe at the high end of that spectrum, almost old enough to look odd in a crop top, but for some reason, that wasn’t the strangest thing about her. Maybe it was the way she stood: hand on one hip, legs slightly staggered, and bottle hanging from only two fingers. Her posture didn’t read ‘cold’; no, it radiated comfort or perhaps warmth. How could someone be so confident and be dressed like that in this weather?
Lily herself knew that it was difficult, if not straight-up impossible. She never wore ‘summer clothes’, as her mother had told her when she was young, in the winter. The closest she had ever been was when she wore a t-shirt and a pair of athletic leggings, and that was when she was going through her depressed phase. That had been a bad time, and that particular outing had left her with a flu that required a few days leave from work.
And even when she was dressed up in a peacoat and thicker pants, like tonight, Lily was freezing, and could barely relax her shoulders, let alone her entire body as if it was thirty degrees warmer than it was.
“I’m positive. De noises comin’ from dat place–” she shuddered a little. “-Crazay.”
“That’s odd, then.”
“What do you mean, cher?”
“Well, that’s my apartment. And only me and my boyfriend live there.”
The woman’s face morphed then, the slight playfulness in her eyes jumping from glee to shock and then settling on pity. There was a sad smile on her face, as if she knew something horrid and wasn’t telling her. Lily’s mind whispered, maybe she knows about Pops dying, but there was no way that could happen. That leaves…..
Cooper.
“Maybe he has friends over,” Lily offered up to the woman, but even as she said it, it sounded fake.
The woman looked as though she could tell, too, and she also gave an unconvincing, “Yeah, mebbe so.”
The silence ebbed between them silently, and was only punctuated from the music leaking through the doors and windows of the apartment behind the woman. Something shattered in the night- maybe a bottle, maybe a light bulb-, but Lily knew it had come from her house and for a moment, she was filled with a certainty, a knowing that she was too scared to accept.
No, she’s lying or something. There’s- There’s no way that Cooper would even think of- No. NonononononoNONO! Pull yourself together! You need to get over there and unlock that door and see what the hell is going on in there. This is no time to jump to silly little conclusions.
“Thanks for the heads up,” she murmured as she walked towards the condo, keys in hand. She didn’t see the woman’s eyes flash again, didn’t hear her softer “You welcome.” She didn’t hear the car backfiring a few streets over, and the bass line dissolved into her mounting heartbeat as she ascended the steps to the door.
It was a red door, something Lily had taken personal pride in. It had been her decision to paint it, the only one that Cooper hadn’t given his opinion on, and something that had been purely for her alone.
Red. The color of love, fire, passion, romance, and ruin.
The key slipped into the lock, turned softly, and Lily opened the door soundlessly.
The first thing she saw was the blue lamp, shattered on the floor. Sky-blue shards littered the wood panels, and the electrical cord snaked through them. Glass sparkled intermittently among the fragments of ceramic, but they were forgotten when Lily looked up into the house.
Everything was different.
The furniture was there, the paintings and photographs on the wall still hung there, and the paint was unchipped, pristine. It looked as though it had been assembled only a week ago, that they had moved in only just recently. If she wanted to, Lily could easily see her past self painting the walls herself, a brilliant yellow that was neither too loud nor too dark, but something in between.
Cooper had helped her paint, helped her buy the furniture.
Now, the pictures were crooked, one laying face down on the floor. She didn’t need to pick it up to know it was the picture of the two of them on the top floor of the Empire State Building. There wasn’t any shattered glass around it that she could see, but her heart quivered just a little.
The pillows from the couch had been thrown off, haphazardly thrown around the room with the force of a hurricane. Each one seemed discarded rather than thrown about, and the sense of being abandoned filled the room with a pungent, yet odorless stink.
Lily took a step inside, not even looking at the pillows or the pictures, because something else drew her attention: the sounds. Everything else fell silent in the world then, as she proceeded further into the apartment. The shades were drawn, to prevent peeking eyes, and muffled grunting and gasping echoed throughout the apartment. It had good acoustics, something Lily had picked it for because she enjoyed to play the piano in her spare time or at parties they hosted. Only, now, those damned acoustics were bringing to her evidence of something she had never wanted to hear, unless she had been involved.
She turned the corner into the kitchen, eyes registering not the bodies at the kitchen table, but the colors of the walls (tangerine, to energize the atmosphere) and the hanging lights (left over from the last homeowner). Everything was still the same, but they didn’t feel right anymore; Lily felt as if she had been separated, cut off from everything else, a cell in a foreign body.
She didn’t look at Cooper and his mystery lover, because she didn’t want to, didn’t need to.
She didn’t make a sound, didn’t speak, didn’t even breathe because if she did, then Cooper and his friend would know someone was here that shouldn’t be, and then the situation would go from bad to worse. Then, she would likely have to yell at the poor girl and make her leave, and then she would be left alone with Cooper, who was gonna pull all of the tricks out of the Manual For Cheaters Who Get Busted, and then everything would really go downhill.
Lily simply turned around, as quietly as she could without disturbing her boyfriend- about to be ex-boyfriend, her mind whispered dejectedly. She walked across the floor, grateful that she was wearing sneakers rather than heels. As she reached the door, she turned once more, looking at the place that, not five minutes ago had been her sanctuary, her happiness. Something had happened, not just here in the physical world, but now, nothing looked at her with the same warmth that Lily had enjoyed.
The house was now cold and dead, like a heart that hasn’t stopped yet, only numbed itself to the pain it refuses to feel.
And she turned and walked out of the door, making sure to slam it as hard as she could.
The woman was standing there, arms held out in a hug, and for reasons her shocked and scandalized mind couldn’t give, Lily leaned into the touch. The two women walked to the other building, and as they entered the door, she wasn’t surprised to find herself silently sobbing, almost as hard as when she was on the bus, her father still floating just out of memory’s reach.
If Cooper had called out then, tried to win her back, he would’ve met a numb wall, brick so hard and stalwart that not one sweet word or gesture would’ve penetrated even the smallest crack.
The climb up the stairs to the second floor of the woman’s apartment was spent absorbing the woman’s soothing words, spoken in a language that Lily had once known but had somehow forgotten as she grew up. Syllables tripped through her mind as they climbed, but the feelings the letters made swam under her skin, and she began to feel weightless, as if she was happy. But it was all tinged with regret and sadness, and Lily somehow felt as if it were safe to cry in this woman’s presence.
“You’ve really fallen down ‘dis well, now, Lily.” Her name came out as “Leelee” in the woman’s Haitian accent, and for a moment, she giggled, like a child who has been told a joke. The sadness had cleared then to reveal blue skies, but then it all came crashing down again, and Lily became aware they had stopped at a door.
Unlike her front door– redforpassion- this one was painted an almost indigo black, and carved in the center was a symbol: a heart, with lines pushing to the center like ribs. A line ran from the top of the heart up to a little star, and from the bottom to an arrowhead. Two swirls protruded from the heart’s sides, each curling into the curlicues she used to doodle into her journal. Two ocean-wave spaces arced up into the heart, the space inside of them devoid of any marks save for two more stars.
“Come in here, dear, let’s getchoo all comfortable an’ such.” she said, the door opening without ever receiving her touch. Something twinged in Lily’s mind, whispering wrongwrongwrong over and over, except she was too grief-stricken to listen to it.
Inside the woman’s apartment, there was few furniture, save for a single black couch facing a modest TV set, a plain coffee table in between them. There was a kitchen to the left, one that was as bare as the living room, and a bedroom behind them both, whose door was closed. Everything was neat and orderly, almost as if it hadn’t been touched before by any hands. There was no dust, no curtains, nothing that made this place seem as if someone had lived here at all.
There was, however, a metal latticework model of the sign on the door, and it glimmered softly in the light of the ceiling fan.
Lily allowed herself to be maneuvered to the couch, and it was warm and soft, something she hadn’t expected from it. It looked so new, it should’ve felt hard and rigid, like any new thing.
The woman spoke as she rose, busying herself with the task of making tea, something Lily had longed for the moment she left the hospital but never asked for out loud. She had been planning to make some when she got home, but–
“Don’tchoo tink for one moment about dat defiler in yo’ house, Lily!”
She had not turned, and Lily had certainly never said that aloud, but she seemed to know anyway, as if she could read her mind. But such things were not possible, she knew- or, at least, she had been convinced of it. Despite how open-minded she was to that sort of thing, like psychics and cryptids and all that hullabaloo, there was more than a smidgen of rationality in her head that advised against blind faith in anything. Thus, she only had an interest in the occult, a mild kind that comes from frequent indulgence in fantasy and daydreams, but not full-on belief.
“Dat’s a wise mentality to keep, cher. Just wide enough to keep ‘dose like me in da realm of da real, but narrow enough so dat we don’t become too real. A Goldilocks sorta situation.”
She turned around then, and Lily stared into eyes a red as the petals of a rose, or a drop of blood, or the last moments of a sunset.
“I-I-I never got your name.” She stuttered, brain whirling on a broken hinge, round and round.
“Erzulie Ge-Rouge.” Erzulie smiled, a Cheshire smile that seemed to stretch beyond her face, causing ripples in the air like the mirages on a hot summer day, and for a moment, Lily thought she could smell the tang of spiced rum, rose-scented perfume, and smell of the air before it rains. But then the moment passed, and Erzulie walked silently over to her, eyes still red but no longer radiating that captivating, dangerous power. As she sat down on the coffee table, handing a cup of chamomile tea to Lily, she took a closer look at the woman’s eyes.
Her irises were not red; no, the effect seemed to persist throughout her entire eyeball, and the pupil was absent. She had seen contacts that tried to capture this effect before, especially all-black ones that were popular with fans of certain fantasy TV shows about demons and such. But with contacts, there was a faint outline or shine that allowed the iris to be visible. With Erzulie’s eyes, there was no such divide; her eyes were as red and seamless as a stream of blood crossing behind both lenses.
“Are-Are you a demon?” She blurted out, before feeling immensely foolish and stupid.
“No, mon cherie. I am a Lwa, a vodou spirit. I come when called, or sometimes, I just wander around, learning what it is you humans do with your time. All of us have someting dat we preside over: fire, death, magic.”
“What do you preside over?”
“Love. Lust. Passion. But, in dis case, Jealousy. Revenge against dose who cause pain to deir loved ones.”
Erzulie leaned close to her then, face inches apart from Lily’s pale white face. Neither woman breathed, and the tension in the air was palpable. Ozone seemed to emanate from this woman’s body, akin to a thunderstorm, and Lily vaguely realized that this is what magic was like, what power this… Lwa had access to.
“You said… vodou. How does that work, exactly? If you don’t mind—”
“Dere’s no problem wit askin’ a few questions, darlin’!” The Lwa said, playfully chastising the woman. Lily laughed a little, feeling slightly more relaxed, which worried her immensely. Being familiar with an entity beyond this world was something she wasn’t sure she necessarily wanted.
“I am a Lwa, or spirit. I work for da Bondye, the greater, bigger being on de other side. Lwa are more like secretaries, or messengers for da big guns. We have powers, sure, but we mainly just interact witchoo so dat he don’t have to. Dere are special priests in vodou, houngans for da men and Mambo for da women. Bokors are sorcerers, but dey are a bit diffrent dan de other ones.
“Usually, we- de Lwa are summoned by de Houngan or Mambo, and we possess de body of da priest. We are given offerings specific to each of us; for instance, I am usually given jewelry an’ perfume an’ combs. Doesn’t matter which Erzulie I am, I still get dose tings.”
“Wait, what do you mean ‘which Erzulie you are?’?”
Sighing slightly, Erzulie got up and paced around the room, explaining as she walked.
“Dere are different aspects of me dat specialize in different tings. Erzulie Freda is da basic version of me, deals wit love and sex. Erzulie Dantor is for da lesbians, de passion and de jealousy, but she don’t punish people. Dat’s de me you see now: Erzulie Ge-Rouge. Or, Red-Eyed Erzulie.”
She sat down then, electing to sip her tea in contented silence. Lily mirrored her movements, not looking at the goddess. Well, more like a spirit, but to her, Erzulie was much closer to the goddesses of Roman and Greek mythology than a spirit. She was much too powerful, even for what she considered a ghost.
In truth, she should’ve been bewildered, been freaked out. She was sitting in an apartment with an lwa, a vodou deity, and was drinking chamomile tea with her like it was no big deal. Shouldn’t it have been harder to know what she was, or get information? There was no mystery behind her, not really, but maybe that was how it worked with vodou. You contacted the lwa, gave them offerings, and they did things for you, provided you respected them and paid them generously.
“Do you only help people when you are summoned?” Lily asked, following her train of thought.
Erzulie looked up at her, an unreadable expression in her face.
“Do you want me to help you, cher?”
“What kind of help would you offer?”
“Considering I’m de protector of women and punisher of dose who do wrong by love, I can make Cooper hurt for what he’s done to you.”
A beat.
“What do you mean, hurt? What does that entail?”
“You’re speaking mighty formal for someone who’s just met a vodou deity.”
She shrugged then, a sense of boldness returning to her shocked, grief-wracked mind.
“Well, this is a deal, isn’t it? Someone summons you, appeases you, and you help them in return? As long as the houngan or mambo person doesn’t royally piss you off, you offer advice and assistance and favors, right?”
Erzulie nodded, light sliding over her red eyes like a second set of eyelids. The light didn’t reflect off of the corneas, but rather disappeared inside of them, like there were miniature black holes behind her eyes that absorbed every trace of ambient light, drawing it in until you could no longer see it.
“Dat is true, Lily. Dat is very true indeed.”
They didn’t speak again for some time, Lily bursting with questions that the Lwa seemed oblivious to, despite apparently being able to peek into someone’s mind every so often. Erzulie sat quietly on the coffee table, perched on it like it was a throne made especially for her, and pondered queries of her own. It was a comfortable, yet tense silence, the kind usually to end in an offer or a shootout- or, in this case, a refusal or maybe a final cup of tea before sending this silly little mortal girl on her way.
If she thought about it, made her eyes a little foggier than usual, Lily could just imagine her in her world- Erzulie in the Land Beyond. She would be graceful, a flowing, rose-tinted spirit, ever so elegantly jumping from point to point in bursts of light and scents of flowers. Her throne would be surrounded by mirrors, combs, jewelry of all kinds- diamonds, pearls, obsidian, rubies, and topaz. Everything about her world would be glittering, and her red eyes would capture it all, light dwindling to dust behind eyes that would not allow it to glimmer.
“I’ll make a deal witchoo, sweetheart.”
Lily perked up, the thrum of excitement electrifying her veins. Something is gonna happen, Lily girl, her mind murmured. Something is gonna happen that will change your life forever, and it will be a thing that neither you nor Cooper nor that woman he’s with will have ever seen before.
“I’ll help you out wit yo’ little problem here, and when de time comes for you to pay de debt, you bettah make sure you pay in full.”
“I-I will, Madam Erzulie, I will!” She said, internally recoiling at the schoolgirl-ish tone to her voice. Lily sounded like those Southern belles who are so eager to please someone that they never ever seem to care to take seriously. And she did take this matter seriously: she might be selling her soul away to a deity, for God’s sake, for the chance to hurt Cooper in a way he would never forget! But this is what she did for her living- if Lwa can even consider to be alive.
“Dere’s no need for de ‘madam’, cher, but for de sake of flattery, I will ignore it.” Erzulie smiled a cheeky smile, but underneath it was a thread of steel, as cold and as hard as the bars of a jail cell, a binding contract of metal that could only be weakened, but never broken. Something clicked ominously in Lily’s heart, then, a personal clock ticking ever closer to the moment when it would cease, and the gears would stop turning and would collect dust.
“What’s the payment for this- this transaction?”
“I have no idea. When de time comes, dere will be something mebbe for you to do, or something you need to get, or maybe it is to keep on livin’. It’s all in de cards, my dear. But, for now, let’s focus on something we can take out our fury on.”
Erzulie snapped her fingers, and the apartment swam in Lily’s vision, distorted and bent like her image in a funhouse mirror. She could hear muffled cracking, splintering wood and strong bursts of metallic screeching, but overlaying such a cacophony was the scent of orchids, and roses. The room disappeared into a space so white, so limitless that she was sure she had died and gone to Heaven, and she was worried that this is what it really was to die. Maybe Erzulie had tricked her, and with a snap of her ebony fingers, had snipped away Lily’s life as easily as one might break a spider’s web.
“No, bebbe girl, dis ain’t Heaven. It’s much bettah dan dis. Dis-” the deity gestured to the blank space around her. “–is where decisions are made. Where Cooper receives his sentence, and where you finally get de happy ending you deserve.”
There was no sun or moon in the sky- or what she thought could be the sky. Everything was white, the same shade all the way around her. As Erzulie’s heels moved on the surface she supposed to be the ground, Lily didn’t hear one sound: no echo of plastic reverberating throughout the room. There was no wind, so no noise could carry, but she still her Erzulie muttering to herself plain as day.
“Let’s make dis place a little mo’ comfortable.”
Another snap of her fingers, and Lily was inside some sort of pulpit, the kind inside stuffy courtrooms with no window clasps, so that the wood was saturated to such a degree as to bend occasionally, without warning. It hung in the air as it would attached to a wall, and it was like the top-notch opera seats where you can see everything. The seat beneath her was plush velvet, so delightfully soft she wondered if she could ever find a chair like this back home.
Back home. That was, if she could ever get back home.
A clinking noise, like coins inside of a tin can, drew Lily’s attention outside of the pulpit. Cooper was suspended in mid-air, supported by four spiked chains. The spokes of them dug into his shins, his wrists, and his chest. The chains faded into nonexistence as they extended farther from his body, and Lily could smell the rusty tang of blood mixed with the sickly sweet sense of roses. He was wearing only black pants, and she almost threw up as she heard the steady drip-drip-drip of blood on the floor.
A prick of fear spiked through her chest, and Lily much too late realized that she wasn’t too convinced that the man in front of her wasn’t the real Cooper. Even though she knew this place was completely outside of her real world, that she could go home to apartments and tea and boundaries she could define with her eyes closed, he might be the realest thing here. He was her tether to her emotions, to a large chunk of time she had coveted like a child holding onto a cherished teddy bear even when she is too old to play with it. Even if he wasn’t her Cooper, this projection still spoke, groaned, and shivered like Cooper.
“Now, what should he get fo’ his punishment, Lily girl?”
Erzulie was sitting beside her, eyes covered in opera glasses, her crop top and pants changed into a beautiful red dress the same color as her eyes. She looked both younger and older, straddling the line between youth and maturity as one might stand precariously on a razor-thin wire. There were roses intertwined with her chair, and Lily saw with muted horror that the arm rests were made of old, fermented bone. A rose twisted its way through a skull’s vacant eyes, and thorns broke through the cranium with the force of a tree root through cement.
As she opened her mouth, perhaps to say “No, it’s alright, you don’t have to show me.” or “I’ve changed my mind; let me go back.”, Erzulie answered for her.
“Dismemberment, perhaps?”
With no warning, Cooper screamed in pain, and Lily caught sight of his arms being ripped from their sockets by the Lwa’s force, blood spouting out of them like miniature geysers. They flopped uselessly to the ground with wet smacks, like meat on a cutting board. His head and chest remained in the chains, and Lily’s head ached with the shrill screams still coming from his mutilated body.
She covered her eyes and turned away, but she still heard Erzulie’s remorseless “Look, dear. He’s back.” Shaking and shivering in a cold she couldn’t feel except under her skin, Lily looked around for something to throw up in, the rising bile in her throat clamoring for some sort of release. With a lazy wave of her hand, the Lwa conjured a serving bowl, too beautiful to hold vomit, but she accepted it nonetheless.
After letting her body rid itself of its stomach contents in an effort to calm her horrified heart, Lily peeked through her eyes to see that Cooper, her Cooper, was suspended by chains again. There were no legs on the floor, no body parts strewn about for the sake of showing Lily what the Lwa could do. He was whole, but she was scared to wonder for how long.
“Is- Is-”
“Dat will happen every time, my dear. I will make him suffer for you, and he will come back so he can die again, another way.”
The words were uttered with no remorse, the apathy of the immortal being beside Lily slicing through the air as quickly as a flash of lightning. She saw Erzulie quietly inspecting her fingernails, disinterest and perhaps boredom radiating from her relaxed posture. She hasn’t even gotten started, Lily realized. Suddenly, her grief and her rage disappeared from her mind, and she saw very clearly who she was dealing with: an animal, a primal being capable of little remorse, save for the disdain felt when time was wasted. Cooper, and every other man, by extension, was Erzulie Ge-Rouge’s prey, and she played with her meals like any other predator.
“Can we stop?” Lily asked tentatively, body humming with tense, nervous energy.
The Lwa looked at her with something akin to astonishment. “Why? Are you ready to quit now when de source of yo’ anger and despair is right dere, waiting to suffer for what he has done? You an’ every other woman I have found before you are weak, content to let de big men walk all over you so you can feel loved. Well, love is messy, Lily girl, and it is a fight to be won. To earn de true love of a man, you need to break him, make him suffer for you, and only den can you rise above him!”
“Does it need to be so… “
“Graphic? Everyting in dis world is horrible, gory, disgusting, appalling. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see it wit yo’ eyes: it’s still dere. I’m just gettin’ you used to da feeling, showing you dat dis is what you crave. And I am more dan happy to oblige.”
Lily’s blood chilled in her veins, and the goddess, all cold fury and glee, turned back to the suspended man.
“How about…. disease?”
Cooper doubled over, skin popping with sores and pustules. Yellow pus dribbled from his nose and his mouth, and his eyes began to bleed black goo. There was a constant low groan coming from his mouth, turning to gurgling when the pus blocked his throat. His skin became yellow, then pale grey like ash, and then it started to blacken. Teeth fell in small clumps with the pus, clinking on the floor like pennies.
“Insanity?”
Cooper was screaming now, just plain out screaming. His voice wavered between wordless cries in languages neither woman could hear, to trembling songs that Lily had heard on the radio. Now, they were demented and eerie, and his body hung limp from the chains, head lolling back and forth. Froth spilled from his Cheshire smile, and it glittered like the sea foam from their favorite beach.
“Let’s try epilepsy.”
He was wracked with jerking motions so severe, that Lily could hear bones cracking under the constant pressure. There were more groans, punctuated by second-long pauses in which Cooper bit his tongue repeatedly until it was on the floor, and blood covered his face. She wasn’t aware she was screaming with him.
And so an eternity passed in the white room, every single punishment that the deity could think of inflicted on the ghost of the man that Lily had once loved. For what seemed like years, she heard his groans and cries of pain, felt bones snapping in her ears, watched as his body convulsed and contorted in ways that she never wanted to see. She saw him torn apart by lions, bitten by a thousand spiders, constricted by an anaconda the size of a bus. Every animal under the sun had their way with him, and she saw him stabbed, shot, electrocuted, injected with cyanide, run over with a steam roller, skinned alive, burned with a gasoline fire, crushed by a bus, a car, an anvil so cartoonishly real it made Lily sick to her stomach.
In the beginning, Lily couldn’t help but be sick. Every time he screamed, her stomach lurched uncomfortably in her body. After ten rounds of horrible punishment, bile became a constant presence in her throat, and she coughed out choked tears of regret, of sorrow, and of outrage. Erzulie, ever the vengeful goddess, did not let up. She was not the same woman that Lily had met on the sidewalk. The kind, motherly woman, taking in a fellow traveller on the scorned lover’s road. Lily would’ve done anything to get back to the day that she had accepted tea into the goddess’s home.
But after a year of torture, after seeing Cooper Allison pay for his greatest crime, Lily came to appreciate the Lwa’s taste. Outrage at having hurt someone she loved dwindled into dispassionate observance; she no longer threw up at the sight of blood, cried at every moment that he stopped breathing, sniffled at seeing him hanging there, waiting to be punished for a sin that he had not committed. Slowly, she realized that this was what she had wanted all along: to see Cooper suffer as much as she had, and more.
The first time she stabbed Cooper and felt the warm blood run down her hands, there was nothing short of elation in her heart. This is the salvation I’ve always wanted, she thought giddily. This is the anger being released from my soul, and here, I won’t be damned. Her father had raised her not to be angry, to redirect it into her studies and into her pursuit of a career. The rage came easily, but it was just as easily internalized. It had been that way since she was a little girl, and Lily had become quite competitive. And her anger festered quietly inside of her, a virus that lay dormant long enough to become a part of her.
After that first kill, that first ending of a life in all of Lily’s existence, the euphoria that overtook her was powerful enough to make her sink to her knees and cry with joy. It was akin to the most mesmerizing high that one could ever experience. She knew it would subside with every moment she didn’t participate in Cooper’s punishment, and there was only one solution.
Soon, Lily exacted every single punishment the goddess could think of, knives and guns and whips and barbed wire becoming her closest confidants. They grew familiar in her touch, and they hummed in appreciative tones when her fingers caressed their handles. The older weapons from times so ancient that not even historians had records of them also excited Lily, and Cooper’s punishment was paramount to eternal. Her anger at being betrayed only grew, and soon she was not only angry for herself, but for every single woman who had ever been deceived, raped, ignored, and beaten. Every man who had ever cheated, or slept with anyone other than their woman, became her targets, and Cooper was not the only one she slashed with her knives.
Finally, after what seemed like millenia of endless carnage, brutality, and blood, Erzulie stayed Lily’s hand and asked the question that the woman had been waiting for for years: “What shall be Cooper’s punishment, cher?”
Lily turned and looked at Erzulie, a Cheshire Cat smile resting on her face. It was a smile of experienced soldiers making another kill in the field, of a hunter bagging yet another deer in season, of a lioness only seconds away from pouncing. All dat weakness is gone, Erzulie remarked. Dis is no longer a woman scorned, but a warrior feared.
“Me.” she said simply, and Erzulie smiled.