Venus, Part 1 Stalking Venus chapter 6 by Paok

Content warning: This 3-part chapter contains themes or instances of sexual assault, domestic violence, and suicide.

 

Despite the alopecia, her wet raven-dark hair was still shimmering and beautiful. If one could look past the jaundice and early stages of liver failure, her yellowed skin and eyes had clearly, at some point, been beautiful, smooth, and blotch-free. Summer Weaver didn’t mind. She knew she was still beautiful on the inside, where it counted. Still, her arms had been getting weaker and weaker before one broke. It was now in a slung cast. She should have been much further along the healing process by now, after all these months. Summer wondered if it would ever get better, and she was not reassured by the doctors’ growing weariness of her strange maladies. Nonetheless, Summer soldiered on. She knew, somehow, it would all work itself out in the end.

 

She was dressed in a flowing red bridal gown, running from a gigantic rolling ball of flesh. It was a sphere of human skin 50 meters tall. It rolled down the hill street after her, crushing cars, trees, and electric poles in its wake. She ran and ran until she reached the edge of the vast and terrible river. Out of breath, she wasn’t sure what was worse – the boulder of death approaching from behind, or the inky river of death ahead, and its raging white rapids that would consume her and drag her into the unknown depths. She was wavering between the two horrors when the mountain of flesh burst open. The pink skin sac exploded like a balloon. Red blood showered the streets. Yellow gobs of fat splattered against the buildings. Pale bones flew like shrapnel, and a falling rib was about to pierce straight through her heart when she was saved by the sun, shining through her bedroom window through the branches of the apricot tree, its leaves rustling gently in the wind.

 

She opened her eyes to the burning light. The nightmare was already forgotten. It was Wednesday morning.

 

She was still tired. Her head felt swollen and stuffy, like her blood was trying to squeeze itself out of any hole it could find. Her eyes felt like they were being pushed out of her skull. Her whole body ached. She turned to look at her alarm clock – it was only 7:00. She still had time to sleep, but knew getting back to sleep was hopeless now.

 

Coughing and hacking, she grabbed her phone and yanked it off the charging cable. TikTok. Same garbage as always. Twitter. Same deal. Nothing exciting. She checked her fan group. Nothing new since after she went to bed late last night. No emails. No texts. Nothing on Facebook. Why the hell was she checking Facebook? 7:30. Fuck. She locked the phone and laid it on her cast. She was too groggy to get up, and the bright daylight in the room still hurt. She turned to the window.

 

As kids, she and her sister had been so excited for the first harvest of that apricot tree. She fondly remembered the summer afternoons she spent chewing on the soft, ripe fruit with her sister, sitting together on the grassy hill without a care in the world, enjoying the sweet nectar. Those happy times seemed worlds away now.

 

So she closed her eyes and dreamed. She wore a pale blue gingham dress, passed down from her kind old grandmother. She was tending to flowers in the side garden, plucking a brightly colored apricot from the tree. She bit into its sweet, yielding flesh just as a warm breeze blew through her, under the warm, blue, open sky, and heard a man’s voice calling to her from across the grassy hill. “Dear… Oh dear… Where are-”

 

Today’s test. Fuck. She nearly forgot. She only had 50 more minutes before she absolutely had to leave, or she would miss the train and the transfer bus. She wanted to jump out of bed, but she knew she would fall on her face. Stupid cast. She could still feel the festering dead skin and sweat inside it, rubbing over her arm as she moved. She would have killed to itch under it.

 

She swung her legs over the bed and stood up, grabbing her phone. She stuck it in her disabled hand and bent over to grab last night’s shirt from the floor – a pink tank top with fading red text: “COUNTRY MUSIC GIRL – CITY BOYS NEED NOT APPLY.” (She had owned the slightly embarrassing thing since high school.) She clumsily slipped it over her upper body with one hand, reaching and twisting to tug the arm hole under her cast. Her housemates weren’t home today, so no need for a bra or anything. It was a pain in the ass to put it on with just one free arm.

 

She headed to the kitchen to make a quick breakfast – sashaying with her imaginary apron, letting its frills swish left and right with each step. This morning she could only have cereal. She just didn’t have time for anything more complicated, even though she craved eggs. She had to have a big glass of water too - the hepatologist said she needed to drink as much as possible, and especially clear liquids. Did food coloring count? Milk was white, was that okay? She gazed idly at the Lucky Charms as they floated in the rising milk within the blue spotted bowl. It was her favorite bowl since childhood. Almost every Saturday, she would watch cartoons in the early morning with her sister, eating cereal from this same bowl. They laughed and tried to push each other over, playing on the floor while Tom and Jerry fought on the glowing TV inside the great oak cabinet.

 

She scrolled TikTok without paying any attention to what was on the screen or to the taste of the cereal. She needed to focus on remembering the test material. Today’s test was worth a huge amount of points, and was absolutely crucial: if she failed this test, she would fail the whole course. And if she failed the course, her Human Resources Management degree would be as good as gone, and all that tuition money would go to waste. So today had to go well. No pressure.

 

She pored over the study material in her head. She remembered the words “Social Responsibility Programs” and “Situational Judgment”. She tried to remember the definitions of Unconscious Bias and Blind Hiring. What was the difference between an SMB and an SME? Images of the professor, her textbook, and her classmates swirled around in her head. She remembered many of the words the professor spoke, but none of the facts. Most clear in her memory wasn’t the network of dry information she was supposed to have memorized, but instead the strange lisp her professor had, or the foreign accent she couldn’t place – she especially remembered the bizarre way he pronounced “football”. It was like his tongue was rolling in circles around his mouth as he struggled to pronounce it, the way a drunk person barely manages to walk a straight line. It was so bizarre it was almost hypnotizing. It was even sort of arousing. But her seat was way too far back in the great lecture hall, and his face was barely more than a dot in her field of view. So she was surprised when she saw him up close for the first time, during his office hours – she didn’t even realize he wore glasses. She could barely remember the topics she’d listened to from 7 PM to 9 PM every other day for the past three months.

 

Her brain felt like the burnt, black, sticky remains coating the inside of a charcoal grill, the kind her Dad grilled hot dogs with for the Fourth of July. Her family and relatives – most of whom were still strangers to her – ruffled her hair, pulled off her hairband by mistake, laughed and bounced her on their knees, or gave her noisemakers to play with. She loved smell of gunpowder mixed with the smells of the hot dogs, hamburgers, and snacks. She was sitting in the sun, drinking lemonade and eating thick slices of watermelon, letting relief wash over her until she let go of the whole world. Existence was nothing but blue sky, wet grass, and sweet food.

 

What was on the exam anyway? Her textbook was in her bedroom. Did she have time to flip through it and go over her highlights? But she still needed to shower. But she needed to leave soon. Maybe she could study on the train. Maybe she could skip showering today. She sniffed her armpit. No, she smelled terrible.

 

She wondered if Samantha and little Henry’s plane from New York would be delayed again. She got so impatient waiting sometimes. She would have to circle the airport in her car, since she couldn’t pass the time in the mall, now nearly empty of shops and people. She couldn’t go to the mall because last time, Sam had gotten so angry that she was late. But what if Sam was delayed? She didn’t want to bum around for hours. She didn’t want to pay for airport parking, either. Why couldn’t Sam take the train home like everyone else? Well, Sam charged rent way below market. She did owe her. But that didn’t mean she was Sam’s bitch every time she needed something.

 

On the kitchen counter there was a bowl of fresh strawberries, picked just a few days before. She grew them herself, in the small raised garden bed in the modest backyard. She was so proud of the little red things. It was incredible – she grew them herself! She’d eaten just a few so far – they were so sweet and juicy. A few dozen more remained in the bowl, waiting for her return, once she came home – in other words, after the exam. Her whole life now seemed to be divided into two – her happy, carefree life before the test, whose success her whole degree hinged on, and the mystery afterwards. Her whole existence hurtled towards that confusion, not knowing whether afterwards there would be a green wildflower meadow where she could lie around all day drinking lemonade and eating watermelon, or if instead there was a steep drop into an inky precipice from which no rescue seemed possible.

 

She swiped up on video after video thoughtlessly, her eyes glazing over, giving herself over to the stream of colors and sounds, all else vanishing in the halo around the phone. Mom would be so disappointed in her if she failed. She knew it would make her mom cry for a whole hour, and not for the first time either. What was it the last time? What was it that made her cry so –

 

She looked at the time. Shit. She needed to hurry. She left her breakfast and rushed back to her room, to her own bathroom. A private shower – an unexpected perk of renting the room in Sam’s house. There was never a need to have an awkward towel-walk across the shared hallway.

 

No, wait, before she showered she needed a bag to put over her cast. She ran back to the kitchen to grab one, then ran back again. She fumbled with her clothes, still struggling to do it elegantly with one hand, but finally twisted herself out of them, and let them drop to the tiled floor. She tied the plastic bag – a white bag with “thank you” printed repeatedly in hollow red letters, from last week’s Vietnamese takeout. She’d gotten the pork bánh mì, and little Henry had cried over the jalapeños, and his tears and mucus got all over her arm. Oh no – there was a little hole in the bag. Getting the cast just a little wet was fine, right? It would dry, wouldn’t it?

 

Wait – music. A song exactly 5 minutes long, so she knew when to stop. She knew just the thing. She slunk back into her bedroom naked – crouching so the imagined eavesdroppers wouldn’t see her nude – grabbed her phone, and crept back. She paired her phone to her Bluetooth speakers and queued up “Lovin’ Our Dream” by Dan Barley, from his album Bluegrass Smoothie. Not her favorite album, but the song was one of her favorites, one of the special songs she often listened to as she fell asleep.

Daniel Barley, or rather Danny, was Summer’s favorite musician. He was a singer-songwriter of middling success from a small town along the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee, and his musical repertoire spanned many different genres. He was a small-time indie musician who never played stadiums, but still had a relatively large dedicated core audience for his music. He was considered niche by critics, who mostly didn’t care for his “generic, paint-by-the-numbers” genre music. Summer, however, was a big fan.

 

She owned every one of his albums digitally and on vinyl. She had a large collection of “Barleycorns”, small keychain-sized images of him, which she sometimes posed with for selfies. She also ran the largest online fan group, “Danicorns Anonymous”. It was almost entirely female, and everyone thought he was hot. She made life-long friends there, and organized IRL meetups around his concerts from time to time. His voice on the tinny phone speaker was barely audible over the shower.

 

That bluegrass summer we met

The twinkling in your eyes like rain

I thought you’d never remember

 

In the mirror she saw herself as Danny’s beautiful, loving wife. She saw herself in the pale blue gingham apron dress he bought for her. She saw the perfect Summer – the pretty, smart, beautiful, accomplished woman, the one she always wanted to be, the one she knew she would become. No amount of aging, hair loss, or skin yellowing would change that. No amount of bilirubin in her eyes could ever stop her, no matter what the hepatologist said. She stepped into the shower. She tried not to look down at the floor, so she wouldn’t see the little rivers of water pouring into the drain and disappearing. The sight disgusted her, but she wasn’t sure why. As the warm water soothed her sick feelings – somewhat – she let herself be swept along with his southern drawl and weeping steel guitar.

 

Life is a dream, babe

A dream with you

 

She was sick of her miserable job as a cashier at Target, always having to smile at everyone, and saying “thank you”, or “have a nice day!” like a circus clown. They didn’t return her smiles any more – they did less and less since her health started failing. There were only a few months left until she would get her HR Certification, assuming she passed the test – but then, she’d have to tackle finding a job. She should probably start sending out applications soon. She felt pathetic sending a resume with nothing but odd jobs in it. “Hi, can I join your HR department? I have no experience in HR, and I find HR work boring and awful.”

 

Let’s go back to that day

Let’s leave everyone behind

We’ll reminisce on the good times

And start makin’ some of our own

 

“You have to start somewhere, sweetie!” was her mom’s well-meaning mantra. It felt like knives in her back every time she heard it. Mom used such a sweet and fawning tone for such a fuck-up like her. “Can’t worry about the past!” That’s what the therapist said. But he didn’t know what it was like, did he? That Ivy League guy had never flunked a class – or a dozen. He’d never been held back. He’d never been told to “strongly consider community college as an alternative” and had certainly never been asked, in such a somber tone, to “make our expectations more realistic”. She’d never been any good. She didn’t deserve this, she didn’t deserve anything, she wished the water would sweep her up-

 

The way we laughed

The way we walked together

That twinkling in your eyes like rain

That grin like a fresh corn cob

I thought you’d never remember

But you came back to me

 

Summer’s worries melted into nothing and ran down her back into the drain as Danny’s last verse echoed and the melancholy piano began to fade out. She finished rinsing, shut off the water, stepped out, and dried off. The clothes she’d – thank god – left on top of the toilet last night were today’s outfit. A long, summery, tiered ruffle midi skirt, from an outlet store. She’d begged Mom to buy it for her, and Mom was so happy she liked it. How many years ago was that? She loved this skirt. She also had her airy, square-neck, shirred blouse with a turquoise flower pattern, which was a gift from someone. Was it for her birthday? She didn’t remember. But she remembered squealing in excitement when she opened it. It was so perfect.

 

But first, ugh, her bra. The blue one. The one that smelled the least bad. It was a giant pain in the ass putting these on with one hand. She had to clasp it in front, yank it around her back, then pull the straps under and over her useless arm, stuffing the cup under her sling at the same time. It was impossible to get her chest to sit comfortably in the cups like this. It looked like someone had played “pin the bra on the donkey” on her. Even this small effort sent her into a coughing fit. But she didn’t have time to shimmy and stuff herself. She had to get her stuff together and leave as soon as possible.

 

She put on another Danny song on her phone as she slipped it into her pocket, and she stepped out of the bathroom. The cool air felt freezing against her wet skin. It had been three weeks since she cleaned her room, and the garbage bin was overflowing. Empty cans of energy drinks were piled around it. The cans were all Ultra Peachy Monster, her favorite. Unworn clothes were scattered randomly across the fully carpeted floor. There were threadbare and dirty camisoles, graphic tees, a Garth Brooks shirt given to her by an aunt who didn’t understand her taste in music (but the shirt was still surprisingly soft and comfortable), and several shorts and panties. A spill she had never cleaned left a permanent dark spot in the gray shag carpet.

 

Dust was visibly starting to cake on some of her shelves, lined with unread books, some country music memorabilia, birthday cards from years past, and clusters of pill bottles, mostly empty and forgotten. There were also many Barleycorns, some Sanrio plastic figurines that had fallen, which turned their cute expressions sideways – My Melody, Kuromi, and Cinnamaroll. She loved them when she was younger, and brought them with her every time she moved.

 

She pulled the plastic bag off her cast and tossed it onto the top of the garbage bin pile. Summer had never once neglected to clean her room; she simply never thought about it. She had too many things on her mind.

 

Summer, in her gingham dress, in the small cottage at the foot of a mountain, with French doors and bay windows, spent a lot of her time happily cleaning. She never stopped smiling while the birds whistled to her, as the fawns napped in the flowerbeds, while the music of the traveling circus troupe resounded in the town square, echoed over the hill, and delighted her, while Danny sat in the red armchair in the living room, puffing on his pipe, reading the newspaper, and smiling softly, while the smoke shone in stripes in the golden afternoon sun that poured through the half-open blinds. He wasn’t a big talker, but with those small knowing smiles and “I love you”s, she knew the full depth of love he had for her, and all the things she did for them and their cute little children. But don’t play by the river, little children, it’s dangerous. It’ll eat you up, and there won’t be anything left of you. Why, just the other week, some poor soul was –

 

Her messenger bag had been thrown on the floor sideways. The laptop, her old, slow, Chromebook piece of crap, was open to Danicorns Anonymous. The laptop’s light gray body was scratched up and dented, and its fans always ran loudly. It could barely handle Chrome and Spotify at the same time anymore. She saw a notification. It was a message from Danor8d, a Danicorn friend of hers. How long ago did it come in? Was it there before she got in the shower? Did it come in during it? She couldn’t respond too quickly, or else she would seem desperate somehow. But if the message was important, maybe it would be rude to leave it until later. She tried to brush away the gnawing, nagging thought of her friend. She had to get ready for the test. She didn’t even have time to fix the half-unmade bed. No, she had to put her backpack together. She busied herself under the caring eyes of young Danny, featured on a poster of hers, smiling mysteriously from a steel chair in a rustic barn, fingering his acoustic guitar. A signature from the man himself covered the lower right corner. He had signed it in a huge, loopy, illegible cursive with a white sparkly marker. The marker was taped to the wall beside it.

 

Scatterbrained. She was scatterbrained. Just like the therapist said. Just like the guidance counselor said all those years ago. She said she “needed to consider community college”. She just went right out and said it to her face, like it was no big surprise, like she had never expected anything more out of her. God. God!

 

Wait, she needed to breathe. Breathe. Focus on one thing at a time. Maybe turn up the volume on the music. She did not need to think about the lab results, or the blood results, no, stop, don’t think about it. Breathe. She needed to breathe, and focus, find her inner focus.

 

Inner.

 

Focus.

 

But, just then, Summer noticed the pudgy gray blob on her nightstand. It looked like Samantha’s little brother Henry had made her a little clay present again. It was far more intricate than his usual crafts, like the yellow blobby shape he said was an apple, or the red abstract cuboid he called a firetruck.

 

Summer bent down to get a better look. It was a long gray spire, perfectly geometric, and peppered with pin pricks. There was a deep beveled cut across the middle spanning all the way around it. It was surprisingly solid and dry for child’s clay. Maybe it was one of those air-drying clays? Like the one for sale at Target? She was sure Samantha hadn’t bought it for him, even though he begged for it. He had seen the silly cartoon animal on the packaging, and that was more than enough reason for him to want it, to scream for it. She spun the object around in her free hand. The whole thing was covered in tiny dots and scratches, like he had rolled it across hundreds of pins. Was it some kind of fantasy thing? Was it from one of his stories, maybe from one of those Nintendo games he liked? The kid had a precocious imagination. But she didn’t know what to make of it. She’d have to ask him about it – well, he probably wouldn’t be able to explain it. He’d just talk in circles about it. Maybe Samantha knew what it was? Anyway, it was impressively intricate for a boy his age.

 

“Ah!” She squeezed it just a bit too hard and it cracked – it split in half, and the top popped off and fell to the floor. Following it, hundreds, no, thousands of small shining fibrous scraps fell out. A rain of white glitter. Oh god, she broke it. Her heart dropped. But it was like she had accidentally cracked open a snow globe. Or was it shredded paper? Did Henry really make all this? What in the world…?

 

Her attention was drawn downwards by the slowly falling sparkles. Then, Summer noticed the ladybug on her nightstand. Just next to where the pillar had been was a small, round, red-and-black bug.

 

Summer had always loved ladybugs. They were so much prettier than the other insects. They didn’t have long, spindly appendages, or bulbous, segmented body parts that moved and bent with inhuman motion. Summer believed that ladybugs were beautiful and sweet, and she loved how they wiggled cutely when they moved. She had fond memories of playing with them as a child, letting them crawl up and down her arm. In the pastoral cottage by the river that she, Danny, and their four little children called home, ladybugs were frequent guests. She just loved tiny, cute things, and did not know that on the underside of the dotted, colorful exterior of a ladybug was exactly that bulbous, burnt-ochre insect body she hated, made of hairy segments with too many wiggling legs, fuzzy antennae, and serrated sickle-shaped mandibles, just as disgusting and just as disease-spreading as any other insect. No, to her, ladybugs were joyful, whimsical things that leapt right out of a fairy tale, just for her.

 

But there was something a little strange about this ladybug that she couldn’t quite express. Its red carapace wasn’t very shiny, and its black dots weren’t very round. These facts were beneath her conscious awareness – to her, it just seemed a bit odd. Even odder, it was facing her. As she approached the nightstand, it continued to turn towards her.

 

Well, a ladybug was still good luck, wasn’t it? She lowered a finger to the nightstand next to the bug and waited for it to climb on. It crawled over and started ascending. It seemed slow to move, like it was injured. She felt nothing on her finger, but if she had been more sensitive, she would have noticed that it had the wrong number of legs. Raising it carefully to her eye…

 

She heard squeaks. It started to make shrill little squeaks and pips, like a mouse.

 

She jolted involuntarily. “AH! Ew! What the fuck??” Summer shook her hand like mad, trying to unstick the bug, flinging it to the floor. It didn’t fly. It just fell, like a stone. Something now looked very wrong with this ladybug. Adrenaline pumping through her body, she automatically raised her sneaker-clad foot, and brought it down with all the force she could muster, right into the carpet, into the bug. She smashed it. It made a slight cracking sound. She could feel it burst through the sole of her shoe, just a little bit. The sensation knotted her stomach.

 

“Ew!!!” She jumped back, as if the dead bug was capable of biting her. Her heart pounding, she kicked off the killing sneaker. It slammed against the nightstand, rattling the lamp on top, which nearly fell over.

 

The lamp’s near-shattering brought her back to reality. She tried to catch her breath. Why had she freaked out so much over a bug? A ladybug, too. She killed it without thinking. Had it really been squeaking? No, that was impossible. She must have heard something else; it must have been a freak coincidence. It was just a normal ladybug. And she had just killed it. Oh god.

 

She gingerly picked up the shoe, half-expecting it to contain a live, venomous bug, vicious and ready for revenge, somehow no longer a harmless ladybug. She didn’t even flip it to look at the sole. She looked back at the spot on the carpet where she crushed it – nothing there, thank god. The poor ladybug’s corpse was entirely on the shoe. Holding it at arm’s length, she hurried back to the bathroom. She held the sole under the running water without daring to look.

 

The faucet washed off the ladybug’s blood, its organs, its red-and-black robes of death, its entrails, its brains, bits of its ribs, clumps of its hair, its smashed skull, its smashed penis, its burst eyeball, its severed foot, some caked-on dirt and dust, her dead skin cells, Sam and Henry’s dead skin cells, minute amounts of pus, numerous bacteria, microorganisms, fungal spores, and some short stray hairs. Everything was washed down the drain alike. Nearly identical organic matter, all dead. Some of the ladybug’s bones would remain in the s-trap of the sink for years until an unrelated clog necessitated a cleaning.

 

The sun shone brightly on the pink-shingled cottage as she and Danny kissed passionately, their arms twisting together, lying far, far away from that river engorged with blood.