Andromeda Smith

I’ve been buried alive.

I wake with a fevered start, eyes closed, chest tight and burning, and limbs locked to my sides. But a moment of struggling yields no wood or hard-packed dirt.

When I open my eyes, Iris waits for me, sitting on my chest, battered and broken from her fall. Her bruised and shattered face, a splintered mirror of mine, holds one eye. That eye shines faintly blue as she stares out through red-blonde curls, dyed redder with blood, which drips down onto my face. Our hair once matched, too, before I cut it all off when I came out.

Is this what my twin looked like behind her closed casket? Did her wrist bone stick through paper-white, rotting skin? Did she gore her leg from knee to hip on the way down?

‘Jules,’ she whispers, and the sweet foulness of her breath tells a hundred stories of too-broken-for-preservation, cold and wet on my cheek. ‘Jules… put me back.’ Her hand reaches up.

I hold my breath and screw my eyes closed.

***

I gasp up, shivering, and swipe wet droplets from my cheek. My lamp’s still on, and the traitorous clock reads 3 a.m. I grimace as I rub at the indents of my binder. That’ll be why my chest hurts. Once it’s off, I pad down to the kitchen, hoping to grab some leftovers dad’ll have picked at tonight.

There’s only one chunk taken out of the quiche slice left on the counter. As it heats in the microwave my nap-addled brain boots up enough to finally realise there’s more than just the glow of microwave lighting down here.

A fire gleams at Iris’s altar.

In a flash I blow out the candles and stamp the flaming stick of herbs until the microwave’s beeping. It’s a miracle none of these caught the tablecloth alight before I found it.

Dirt and a stick with rotten red berries clinging to it sit on the table. Dad changed it from her funeral cuttings. But if it was changed tonight, I can’t fathom why it’s already rotted.

The undamaged tag on the stick of herbs reads Mullein in a fancy handwritten cursive. A pixellated tarot logo sits in a top corner, alongside the shop name Witchlight.

The microwave yells insistently again and my stomach gurgles.

On my way back, Iris’s bedroom door gapes out, revealing her open window. Outside, in the dark, a light flickers from the shed. He must be awake. Iris’s windowsill and carpet are damp where fat raindrops have blown in, so I shut it and the door behind me.

***

Dad’s gone the next morning, and the Saturday slot on his calendar is booked out until the afternoon. So, I put it from my mind and grab my skateboard, heading to the halfpipe Crikston calls a skate park. Niles, and Seb Rickett are there, staring as their boards idly roll back and forth on the nadir of the concrete, losing a little height each time their wheels drop into puddles.

‘Julian!’ Niles grins, showing off his chipped tooth. ‘Rickett said they’ve started up construction in the marsh again.’ He swings his thumb over his shoulder to point past the patch of trees that border the park.

‘My dad said they’re held today cause of rain,’ Rickett confirms, eyeing my he/they pronoun pin. Small town Tassie.

‘Wanna go?’ Niles being Niles seems to smooth Rickett’s suspicion that I’ll make him sprout blue hair. He looks excited again.

I bare my teeth defiantly. ‘I’m game.’

We scale the chain-link fence, ignoring the trespasser signs. My jeans catch on the barbed wire as I swing over, pricking my skin, so I’m slower descending. Most of the equipment is up in cars and trucks, just one covered circular saw left out between the trucks and the trees. Our feet make suckering sounds as we move to big plastic pipes where brackish water mixes with farm runoff to smell like sewage.

‘Look, the chainsaws are in here!’ Rickett calls. He’s climbed onto the outside of a semi-truck. I heave myself up to him and he points, shooting me a smile.

My breath fogs the glass, so I almost miss the wisp of white at the tree line. She slips behind a tree, and I nearly fall on my ass. Ass-falling-on notwithstanding, I jump down and stumble around the cab toward the trees, searching desperately for a flash of red-blonde.

My foot catches on a blade guard and I fall on the saw, landing with the blade pricking into my jeans, and my hand safely on its handle.

Then the switch flicks itself on.

My thigh splits like I held a knife to nylons. For a moment I see yellow fat, pink strings of muscles and a hint of bone, all swallowed up by blood in the next. Someone wrenches me back and then I’m lying in the mud, blind with tears.

‘Shit, he needs stitches!’ Rickett’s voice swims in my ears.

Everything is muffled and cold, even as hot blood bubbles down my leg. I almost don’t feel the pain, just the heat of blood and phantom claws holding my flesh apart. Niles wraps his flannel around it and pulls tight, and the claws dig harder, desperately scrabbling to keep the wound open. It’s then, I think, that I start screaming.

As I’m pulled through trees over both boys’ shoulders, I know to try and grab their hands. I can’t quite make my fists close.

‘My house…’ one of them is saying. ‘Mum can…’

Blurred through trees and tears stands a girl, her leg wound healed. The claws bury deeper.

‘…Iris.’

‘You are not dying, too, damnit!’ That voice must be Niles. His cracks when he’s scared.

***

I practiced walking without a limp the entire way home, so when Dad gets home too, I’ve got it good. The tetanus shot and stitches Rickett’s mum gave me make it difficult, but biting my cheek helps me focus on not looking half-dead.

I can’t shower for a day or two because of the bandaging, so I wash my hair in the sink to get the sweat out.

Dad’s living-room desk has a freshly microwaved piece of quiche waiting when he enters. He greets it with a grunt.

‘How was work?’ I ask, perching on an armchair. From the look he shoots me as he picks up the fork, my attempt to make sure he eats isn’t subtle.

I cast around for another conversation topic as he shovels quiche into his mouth and spot a book resting against his printer. It’s dog-eared. Weird. Dad’s blue-ringed octopus bookmark is usually the only thing he uses.

‘Whatcha reading?’ I try again.

‘Have you given Iris some flowers? Old ones’ll be dry. You should go see her.’

‘Only if you eat that while I’m gone,’ I joke, masking the hurt at him talking past me.

‘Gimme a break, Jules,’ he snaps, dropping the fork with a clatter. ‘I lost both of my daughters in what, six months? I’m allowed to need a minute.’

My shoulders rise, and it’s a dying, small thing when I say, ‘You only ever had one daughter.’

‘You know what I mean—’

‘I’ll grab some carnations, yeah?’ I leave, knowing I should let him grieve with more grace than I feel. I only let myself limp when out of his sight.

***

The flowers aren’t just dry, they’re rotted. Flies surround the posies and, when I pick them up, maggots drop off in a grotesque hail. I drop them, yelping, and the maggots worm down into the loose earth of Iris’s grave.

Loose?

Tossing the carnations on yellowed grass, I crouch, wincing at the pull of stitches, and shove my hand in the dirt.

It parts as though it hasn’t been bucketing down for weeks.

My hand hits something wet and solid when I’m elbow deep, and that’s when I recoil at what I’m doing. The way up is a struggle; something’s yanking on my wrist. I pull harder, but the grave fights to keep me. When I wrench my throbbing hand free, it’s holding what looks like more mullein, alongside flowers I don’t recognise, and a short lock of Iris’s red-blonde hair.

Did some Satanic sicko dig up my sister’s fucking grave?

But—I only know it’s mullein cause Dad put some on her altar. This doesn’t have a tag, but the last one came from that Witchlight shop. My heart squeezes again. If he’s going through some witchy new-age crisis of faith and I’ve been pushing him…

Guess I’m headed to Witchlight tomorrow.

Dad’s hiding in the shed when I get home. He stays there till my eyelids droop closed.

***

He’s gone by morning, but Niles’ dad’s heading into town. He sighs and lets me toss my skateboard in his ute bed.

Honest-to-God whale songs play over Witchlight’s speakers as I wander to the dried plants. The yellow and purple flower matches ‘henbane’ but I can’t find the umbrella of little white flowers. Henbane’s label fronts its hallucinogenic properties, but my eyes catch on its use in ‘summoning spirits’.

‘Hey hon, can I getcha anything?’ Calls a middle-aged lady in a sheer cardigan who’s bringing boxes out from the back.

I bite back my instinctive “no”. ‘I found a couple plants I recognised, but I don’t know this one. I think someone was… trying to cast a spell.’

Her eyebrows raise at my half-explanation, but when she beckons me over to examine them, she does it seriously.

‘This is hemlock.’

‘Like what killed Socrates?’

‘…Yup. Dunno what spell your friend’s trying, but the only thing hemlock has in common with mullein and henbane is death and ghosts.’

‘Right.’ I turn to leave through the bookshelves and spot a blue-ringed octopus bookmark nestled in the pages of A Historie of Necromantic Rituals.

When I grab it, my wrist flares with sharp agony and I drop the book, which falls open to the bookmark’s place.

An illustrated living corpse covers the spread awaiting me—The Revenant scrawled in its heading.

A reanimated corpse sent to haunt the living… a gored leg, “put me back” …a creature between life and death, believed to have been given life by Satan or a witch invoking a source of living power… a switch that flicked itself on, a short lock of red-blonde hair.

My hair?

Fuck that. This is insane. I flick through pages for anything useful, and catch the words staked into the grave, most commonly by rowan.

I’m not waiting for a lift, so I put my skateboard on the road and go.

Thoughts barrel through my brain: Is my sister’s corpse in the shed? Is he trying to make her less dead? (Is it making me dead-er?) So, I don’t see the rock before it catches on my wheel.

***

I open my eyes in a ditch, cut up by blackberry bushes, with my wrist swollen, burning hot, and pulsing in time with my heartbeat. A broken beer bottle glares an inch from my retina.

My stitches have split, but only at the skin. So, although I’m lightheaded and bloody when I climb cack-handedly out of the ditch, I’m not dead from lying there long enough for the sun to start setting.

At least everything hurts when I start skating again, so nothing draws focus anymore.

And at least my bone’s still in my arm. Unlike Iris’s. Fuck. This might be real.

***

I don’t waste my time looking for them in our empty house—light flickers in the shed window.

The shed door creaks open to reveal a room etched with symbols of strange lines and circles. On the far wall, my father kneels before an altar. Twin to the one in the house, it holds candles, dirt and a red-berried branch. He holds something to a flame reflected in a hand-mirror. The smell of burning hair permeates the room.

‘Tell me you didn’t dig her up.’

‘Julian—’

‘Tell me I’m hallucinating, and this is all just coping shit.’

He looks at my purple wrist and blood-stained leg and, awestruck, breathes, ‘It’s working, Jules. She’s getting better. I know you don’t understand, but if you just—share the load.’

‘I’ve been nothing but understanding! All I do is give you time.’ His figure blurs through my tears. It’s just a candle-lit shadow that slowly stands, mirror flashing as I lurch forward, aching and bleeding and scored like wet pottery. ‘How can you want more from me? From her?’

‘It’s not right, outliving your child!’ One of the candles goes out. Iris has climbed through the window.

When my tears drop, her healed wrist comes into sharp relief.

She swings her shining blue eye to look at me. ‘Jules. Put me back.’

‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying,’ he hushes her, moving forward to place his free hand on her shoulder. ‘Iris, baby, it’ll be okay.’

‘It hurts.’

‘It won’t hurt for long, sweetheart. We’re here.’

‘Listen to her.’ I shove him off Iris. My wrist grinds against itself, and I grit my teeth against the pain as I stand between them. A headache builds behind one of my eyes. He’s between us and the door. ‘I just need a rowan stake, right? Pin her in the grave and this all ends?’

‘Get away from my daughter.’

‘Your daughter is dead!’

In a rabid spasm, he smashes the mirror against the wall. I flinch back in time for a fifty-cent piece of glass to lodge between my brow and eye socket, just missing the eyeball. Shellshocked, I reach up and yank it out, blinking red from my vision as the opened flesh sears.

He drops the mirror, eyes blown wide with fear.

‘I didn’t mean to—’ he reaches out a shaking hand that I slap away.

‘Don’t touch me!’ I press my palm to the wound to stay the blood spilling down my face. ‘You did mean it. This isn’t different from breaking my wrist or goring my leg. Just cut my eye out, already, you’re doing it either way!’

‘Jules…’ In the faint candlelight he finally looks at me. He looks small. And scared.

‘I love her too. I miss her too. But I can’t be this for her. You can’t keep us both half-alive because you’re afraid to let her go.’

‘End it,’ Iris rasps from split blue lips.

Dad’s breath hitches and he stumbles back, mirror shards crunching beneath him. He staggers to her altar.

I make to run for the open door, but Iris stops me with a hand on my shoulder. Seconds stretch as he gazes at a flame.

Slowly, he blows it out and holds out a stick with fresh red berries. Oh. Rowan.

‘I love you,’ he whispers to the empty air.

***

Leaving Dad to his goodbyes, I take Iris’s hand and walk her home.

---

Andromeda Smith is a Nipaluna Hobart based writer who has been startling adults with their passion for all things scary since before they could read. Their work often explores the horrors of childhood and disempowerment, with a dash of the Gothic, occultism, and trans identity for flavour. Andromeda’s experience skews non-fiction, including an editing internship for Island Magazine’s 175th issue, and their creative endeavours include working with the Australian Songwriting Association and various Nipaluna theatre companies. Grave Robber is their debut narrative, exploring the burden of a parent’s grief, and the trans child left in its wake.

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