Blood and Pines

CW: Brief descriptions of body horror, brief discussions of sex/sexuality, internalized misogyny/homophobia, family and religious trauma, stigmatization of menstruation

I felt her misshapen claws dig into my neck and blood pooling around her knuckles. Her fingers turned a lustful rusty red. I bit down on my scream and bit into her hand. She was hurting me. She slashed her many daggers along my jugular until nothing remained but tattered strips of flesh. Dripping. Heaving and wheezing, giving up the air before it could get to my lungs. She promised me no one would ever know. There was no voice left in me, my mouth and tongue void and vacuous.

This isn’t how I wanted my summer to end.

She had always been my best friend. We spent every summer together at camp, trading stories of parental neglect and elementary school crushes. Kid stuff. I loved her. I really thought she knew me better than my family, and maybe I was a little in love with her, but I was too young to know what that was, what that would make me… A scary word spoken only in soft urgent whispers between relatives or cruelly bellowed across parking lots.

But I’m dead now, so I guess we’ll never know. What I would have been like, I mean.

The Charity Camp for Girls in northern Minnesota ran from 1941-1990, but was shuttered in the 90s due to staffing issues and low camper enrollment. So they tell me. It re-opened in 2011 when a bunch of camp alum came together to raise funds to rehabilitate the 40-odd acres of coniferous wilderness. The property had two lakes, one designated for boating and fishing and one for swimming. The one we fished and boated on was affectionately called “leech lake,” presumably because when people still swam in it in the 1980s, they would come out covered in leeches and would need to ask each other to check their backs to make sure they got them all.

We told campfire stories about boys who went skinny dipping in Leech Lake (it had always been a girls’ camp but that didn’t matter for the story) and came out with fishhooks threaded through their skin on their extremities and more unsavory areas. “They trailed blood behind them, so by the time they made it to shore they were covered in leeches and hooked like bass. Almost as though the leeches were fishing for them.

“What if my Aunt Flo is here?” “What about it?” “Can the leeches smell it?”

Veneera nudged me with her foot while I bent over a plastic bag of marshmallows, carefully selecting one for roasting. “What do you think, Sage? Can leeches smell when Marie is on the rag?” I shrugged. I secretly wondered if she was on the rag. Upcoming evidence notwithstanding.

Most of the books about periods I read growing up talked about them in metaphor, substituting “period” with “time of the month.” We love to talk about them delicately, like we’re thorny roses instead of skunk cabbage when we get hormonal. That’s the word. Hormonal.

My dad says it’s the reason why we haven’t had a woman president. She would get her period and start a war, as if nearly every war in history wasn’t started by men. He would wave that point away before beginning a rant about the Clintons.

I am getting to the age where I start to question whether my parents have all the answers. We were really close when I was in middle school. When I didn’t show any interest in boys, they started to worry. They didn’t want me dating, of course not. But I should want to date them. How compelling is temptation when you don’t even feel it? Not even a spark of desire for my brothers in Christ.

My sisters, on the other hand…

I remember an LED flashlight shining bright inside my cocooned eyelids. The way a grid of 6 or 8 or maybe 12 bulbs scorched into my vision. I don’t know if it had even fully gone away by the time I died. The light went out, and my eyes gave up on adjusting to the dark. Pine needles whispered to each other outside.

“Veneera?” I whispered.

A hand reached out of the dark to clasp mine, it was hot and clammy and smelled a little like pine-sol. I felt her wrist for the friendship bracelets we added new charms to every summer. I pressed the pad of my finger into the point of a circus tent, the curve of the smooth basketball, and the wide-then-narrow path of the paintbrush. Satisfied, I reached into my blankets and brought out a sweatshirt and my own flashlight, my parents had bought me a new one this year, stronger than my old one. I could have blinded her right back if I was feeling mean. I tiptoed down the ladder from my bunk and slid into my sneakers, quieter than death.

The thonk of a filthy shovel against bone, scalp, and hoodie. Once, twice for good measure. The rust of a wheelbarrow under my armpits and the backs of my legs, elevating them like I was an over sized baby in a pram. My shoe is untied…

I came to next to the fishing/canoeing lake. I was still in the wheelbarrow. Stars twinkled above and below me, I may as well have been adrift in a washtub. If she hadn’t knocked me out beforehand, it would have been an innocent prank, like putting someone’s air mattress on a lake.

I pulled my limbs in and clutched my head while it pounded.

“I’m letting you choose, Sage. I can drown you, or we can make it a bit more personal.” I tried to flip around to look behind me and the wheelbarrow listed precariously. She caught the handles to steady me, and laughed. She was framed beautifully by the treeline. They really barely touched the trees except to trim them back from the lake each summer. The pines loomed around us like a watchful jury.

It wasn’t the first time we’d snuck out. As we got older, we found ourselves wanting more and more time alone together. The heavily-regimented hour-by-hour camp schedule ensure we were surrounded by peers for a minimum of 12 hours daily. Even after the camp opened back up, the cabins were never all full, and a few had already fallen into disrepair. We would sneak off to Osprey (all the cabins were named after birds) and explore the very thing grownups wanted us to be ignorant of.

I’m proud to say I had my first orgasm at a Christian all-girls camp. I don’t get to tell many people that. Then again, I don’t suppose they’d think to ask.

I drew myself up, careful to keep my center of gravity low, crouched in the center of the vessel of involuntary baptism. “Pull me in Veneera. We’ll do it your way.” She grimaced at me with canine teeth and bloodshot eyes. I think she licked her lips. She wobbled back onto the shore a bit awkwardly, dragging the wheelbarrow up, not taking her eyes off me. She held out a hand to help me onto solid ground. It was sweet. She kept holding it. I started to pull it away and her grip tightened.

“Lay here with me for a sec, will you?”

“Before you kill me?”

“Ha. Yeah. Before I kill you.”

We threw ourselves down on the marshy sand. There was no moon. I rolled my head to one side and made eye contact with her for what felt like the first time. I have never felt as close to anyone as I did to her that night. Her pupils burned into me, bearing down, scrutinizing me. No, not scrutinizing. Evaluating. Perhaps she was deciding which part of me to eat first.

“What big eyes you have.”

They widened and then crinkled, she put her hand on my shoulder and half-heartedly shoved me. “The better to mentally undress you with my dear!”

I kissed her. Her lips were hotter than normal. Boiling. Sweat evaporated off her too quickly. Her eyes rolled. Her teeth bit through my lip and still I kissed her. She lathered my blood with her tongue and relinquished any control that remained over her animal instincts.