The Dark Spot

The dark spot is always there, or else it appears so early on in Winny’s life that she is unable to remember a time without it. It wades through the air, hovering over her mother’s shoulder when she is carried, swaying along beside her stroller when she is pushed. At night, it rocks her cradle. Winny learns to speak with abnormal speed, because of all the things it whispers to her. When she is old enough to know the difference between you and I, real and imaginary, she becomes acutely aware that no one else has ever seen the dark spot, or heard its voice.

Her mother takes her to the doctor many times throughout her childhood to have her checked for moles, discolored patches of skin. Her father says that her inventiveness is a sign of an expansive imagination, and that she will grow up into a poet, just like him.

Winny doesn’t argue. Although she is accompanied by a peculiarity, she is otherwise no different from any child, and comes to understand the world in the same way that they all do: adults set the parameters of reality, and children must abide.

—

She asks, around age three or four, what its name is, and it says, “What name do you like?” and because there is a girl in her preschool class with tightly coiled ringlets and glossy patent-leather shoes named Clare who Winny would rather be than herself, she says, “I like Clare.”

“Then I’ll be Clare,” the dark spot says, and smiles with glinting white teeth.

When Winny starts referring to her imaginary friend by this name, rather than The Dark Spot, her mother is relieved, her father mildly disappointed by the diminishment of her poet’s soul.

—

Clare does not touch her, although it is able to touch, and asks no favors of her, although such requests are typical of monsters. It asks her questions, and answers those she asks, though it is more eager to share impersonal information than the reveal details of its own nature.

“If people in Australia are on the bottom of the world, how come they don’t fall off?”

“Because the Earth is spherical, there is no bottom. There’s no bottom to space, either, because it is expanding infinitely in every direction, so there would be no downward toward which the Australians could fall. Up and down exist only relative to gravitational pull, and since the Earth has its own gravity, in a sense you are all being pulled downward at this very moment. You are standing on one of the bottoms of space.”

Winny blinks and does not attempt to understand. “But not you?”

“No.” Clare’s smile sometimes stretches across the whole of its amorphous black body, slicing it open and revealing rows upon rows of sharp incisors. “Not me.”

—

At age six, Winny asks, “Clare, are you a boy or a girl?”

Clare huffs a laugh, and says, “No.”

This is easier to understand than gravity, but no less contrary to everything Winny has been told.

—

Clare is there within the bristling warmth of the duvet when she wakes in the mornings, floating behind her in the bathroom mirror when she brushes her teeth. It turns the faucet off with a spectral flourish when she is being wasteful, and ties ribbons into her hair if she asks it to.

Her mother cooks pancakes that are still wet in the middle and holds both sides of the conversation.

“The washer’s broken again. Your daddy said he would call, and he didn’t, but that’s okay. I’m okay with that. Your daddy’s sensitive, you know? You know that. He doesn’t know what voice to use on the phone. He just falls flat. Are these alright? A little under-done, I guess. Not so much syrup, baby. I’ll tell you something if you promise not to mention it to him, but don’t ever marry a man for his art. Not so much, Winona. Christ. We’re gonna be late.”

Clare winks, and knocks over the bottle of syrup as her mother searches for her keys.

On the school bus they sit—and hover—side-by-side, speaking lowly about haruspicy, the Ancient Roman art of reading the future in the entrails of sacrificed animals. Halfway through the conversation, a boy sits down beside Winny, and Clare dematerializes with a roll of its pale eyes, reappearing a moment later in the seat behind them.

“Aren’t you in Ms. Nguyen’s class, too?” the boy asks. He has small bones, faint freckles, and a smile that flickers at its edges.

Winny turns and stares out the window until he goes away.

—

Her mother complains that Winny doesn’t ever bring home any friends. Her father expresses his earnest belief in the value of solitude in shaping a young person. Three nights in a row, her mother puts herself to bed with a glass of something clear that smells clean as a swimming pool.

“It’s gin,” Clare tells her, gleefully.

“What’s gin?”

“Distilled grain, flavored with juniper.”

Winny is drawing a picture of her mother and father and herself, with their cat, Otis, on the planet Neptune, which she had learned about in school that day. “What’s it for?”

“Obliterating one’s sense of self.”

“Oh. How do you spell ‘obliterating?’”

Clare tells her.

—

Winny’s teachers express their worry that she is not being treated well at home. Her parents express their worry that she is being bullied at school. When she is nine, she is taken to a child psychologist, a bald man with thickly-rimmed glasses who asks her placid questions about her memories, dreams, hopes, and fears. There is a bowl of hard candies on the table between their chairs, and she makes a point of putting her fingers on every one of them.

“And what about this picture, Winny? This drawing you made of yourself in art class, where you’ve scratched out your own body with black crayon? Do you want to share with me why you did that?”

“My body isn’t scratched out, Mr. Cavanaugh.”

“No?”

From over his shoulder, Clare crosses its eyes and wiggles its tongue. Winny’s lips purse to hold in a grin.

“No. There’s just somebody in front of me.”

“Somebody who is a big dark blob?”

“Yes, Mr. Cavanaugh.” She sniffs. “Do you have any marbles?”

“No, Winny, no marbles. I do have some dolls and some model cars. Would you mind telling me about this person who’s in front of you in the picture?”

Winny bites her thumbnail. “Could I see one of those dolls?”

—

Sometimes Clare leaves her for a few hours. Sometimes for days on end. These periods are rare, but traumatic. She will find herself caught in a strange silence, alone with herself from the beginning and end of every passing minute. Aspects of her daily routine become hectic, and empty hallways loom with new perils. She becomes aware of the conversations going on around her, jokes made at her expense, shared pleasures she cannot understand because she has never tried to.

She is in early adolescence when she realizes that she is deformed in some way, but she is too used to her deformation to know how to change. When Clare returns, after three days of running mysterious cosmic errands, she forgets any wish to.

—

Clare’s talents include: flying; forming itself into perfect copies of objects, animals, and people whom it has studied; an intuitive understanding of both classical and quantum physics; mimicking voices; telling celebrated fairy tales; telling forgotten fairy tales; telling the tales of illiterate historical persons who shared their stories with no one; imitating musical instruments.

Winny’s talents include: drawing animals; getting straight B’s; keeping her expression so still when kids try to bully her that they don’t try again; landing on her feet after a cartwheel; making grilled cheese sandwiches; lying.

—

When Winny is thirteen, she finds her mother asleep in bed at 5 o’clock in the evening, with a slow pulse and an empty prescription bottle on the nightstand. The ceiling fan pulls rhythmic shadows over her face in the blue light of the television. Clare casts no shadow as it hovers over her.

“Do something,” Winny tells it. “You have to do something.”

“What, like CPR? Call 9-1-1, Winny.”

“9-1-1,” Winny repeats. She walks the room in a slow circle, looking for the phone which is kept downstairs in the kitchen. She goes over to her mother and cups her face softly. “Mom. Mom mom mom.”

“Winny.”

“Maybe she’s just asleep. Mom. Mom.”

“Winny.”

The staircase is a blur. Winny passes the light-switch without flicking it on, knocks the receiver out of its cradle with clumsy hands. She dials her father’s number. He picks up on the second ring.

“Dad.”

“Hey, sweetheart, what’s up?”

“Mom.”

“Winny, what’s that?”

“Mom won’t wake up.”

“She won’t—”

“We’ve got to call 9-1-1. We’ve got to call.”

Her eyes sting, then blur. Her father shows up in his grumbling Volvo four minutes after the ambulance, while she is standing on the sidewalk with a blanket somebody gave her without asking if she wanted it. Clare is telling her a version of Little Red Riding Hood where Little Red eats the grandmother and the hunter herself, and disappears into the forest with the Big Bad Wolf. She hasn’t seen her father in three days—since the split, he gets weekends and her mother gets weekdays—and when he pulls her into a hug the cologne he uses to disguise the stench of his cigarettes is overwhelming.

“Hey, Pooh Bear. Hey,” he murmurs into her hair. “It’s all gonna be okay. It’s gonna be a-okay.”

Clare continues: “‘What big teeth you have,’ said Little Red, ‘but mine are bigger.’”

—

Clare steals a bouquet from the 7-11 across the street from the hospital and Winny puts it in a vase that a nurse gives her. Her mother is distantly apologetic, with gleaming eyes and a nose chafed by tissue after tissue. Her father keeps folding and unfolding his hands, sat in the chair by the door. Neither of them seem to know what to say to each other when Winny is in the room, though she can hear the low murmur of their voices from the hallway when she and Clare go to buy snacks from the vending machines.

That night: everybody lives.

—

In Winny’s sophomore year of high school, a boy named Sunny Sanchez asks her to homecoming by way of a folded piece of notebook paper tucked into her chemistry textbook.

“It’s probably a joke,” she tells Clare. “He’s probably laughing about it with his friends.”

“Probably, but the kinds of jokes that groups of boys make at the expense of individual girls are almost always powered by misdirected sexual energy. If they band together against you, it’s because they know that alone, none of them stand a chance. You’re the stronger creature, they are the weaker. Don’t forget that.”

Winny doodles strange insignias in the margins of her notebook. “And if he’s alone? And he’s really just got a crush on me?”

A portion of Clare’s dark ooze elongates into an approximate hand, which bops Winny on the nose with a ghoulish finger. “You’re still stronger.”

—

Winny asks Clare for a favor which delights it.

Behind the locked bedroom door, among the piles of unwashed laundry and unopened school books, Clare transforms. Its shapeless body takes shape, shrinking, tightening, stilling, features carving themselves into being, acquiring detail, specificity. It does not approximate, but replicate: here, the hump in the nose, there the first growth of stubble, the creased flannel shirt, the flat-brimmed cap. Sunny Sanchez stands before Winny, three dimensional and in-full color.

She nods to the bed. Clare draws Sunny’s mouth into a tight smirk, takes off his shoes, and lays him down on his back.

“This good?” asks Sunny’s stumbling baritone.

“You don’t have to do the voice,” Winny says, climbing on top of the body, planting a knee on either side of its hips. “It’s too real that way.”

“Just want him for his body?” Clare clicks its tongue. “How crass.”

“I don’t know what I want.”

Winny presses her palms against the plane of Sunny’s chest, feels the slight bulge of muscle under which no heart beats. This is not a person, but a fantasy of a person. A safe and malleable prop. Winny’s hands still when they reach the protrusions of Sunny’s hip bones. Is this kind of obscenity alright if it’s never known about? Sunny’s eyes stare emptily up at her. Her ribcage feels hollow, and she hurriedly climbs off of him—it.

Clare’s jovial strangeness returns rapidly to Sunny’s expression, and then the whole body blurs, deforms, and returns to its amorphous state. “Not your type?” it asks.

Winny doesn’t answer.

—

She doesn’t reply to the homecoming invitation either way, and skips the event altogether, in favor of asking Clare to transform into a woman she’d seen in a television ad, with large hips and shiny black hair. She smells the hair, seeking to satisfy a dimension of the senses which Clare is unable to reproduce, and drags the pads of her fingers up and down the woman’s skin, nudges their lips together, seeking—what? The answer to a question she is too afraid to ask anybody real.

They cycle through celebrities, distant acquaintances, faces glimpsed once in a crowd. Clare never lifts anybody’s hands to touch her back; that is a rule that is never spoken, but always followed. Winny feels guilty, but not guilty enough to stop.

The request she puts off the longest is the one Clare seems to have been most anticipating. Standing among the dust motes lit by her west-facing window, it shudders into shape: bony knees, slumping shoulders, an unsentimental face still soft with baby fat. Clare blinks Winny’s own eyes back at her, smirks with her mouth. It is an expression she has never seen on herself, and it makes her slightly wary of one of them—though she is not sure which. Stepping cautiously forward, she prods her copy in the sternum. It doesn’t wince. On impulse, she smacks it across the face. She has never hit anybody before, and the fizzing in her palm is euphoric. The copy’s head snaps sideways, still smirking.

“Did that hurt?” she asks Clare.

With Winny’s mouth, it says, “That’s like asking a fish to do arithmetic. I can hardly fathom what ‘hurt’ means.” It squints, scrunches up Winny’s nose. “Did it hurt you?”

“I don’t know.”

There is a red mark blooming on the copy’s face. Hesitantly, she runs her finger tips against it, then leans forward and gives the spot a kiss. She kisses the other cheek. She kisses the forehead. She feels as if she could cry.

“You know,” Clare says, “most teenagers just masturbate.”

Winny’s laugh is so abrupt that she shocks herself. “You don’t know what hurt means, but you know what masturbation is?”

“I know everything,” Clare says. “But I can’t feel anything.”

Winny picks up her copy’s hand, examines its bitten down nails, its torn cuticles. “I wish I was that way. I wish I could turn into a puff of black smoke and float up through the atmosphere.”

Clare laces their fingers together, squeezing her hand. “Close your eyes and wish. That’s how I do it.”

Winny closes her eyes and wishes. Nothing happens.

—

Her mother almost kills herself again. Winny gets used to the buzz of the fluorescents, and memorizes the menu of the Chinese place across the street from the hospital. Her father drops her off every day after school, and picks her up every night. She and her mother have never had very much to talk about, and they still don’t—sitting in silence most of the time, with the TV on mute, reading separate magazines—but Winny feels a new kinship between them bristling up among all the resentment and rage.

“You must not be trying very hard. If you really wanted to do it, you could find a better way. Something foolproof.”

Her mother holds her eyes closed. Holds a lot. “You’re a very sour girl, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

A sniffle. A hiccup. “I was, too.”

“So, this,”—Winny gestures, with emphatic mockery, around the hospital room: cheap curtains, untouched pudding, Clare’s bulky darkness—“is the future I have to look forward to?”

Her mother shrugs. “Decide to be different.”

“Like it’s that easy? Did you decide to be like this?”

“I decided a lot of things about myself, many times, over many years. Most of them were good decisions, some weren’t. This one wasn’t. This wasn’t even fully a decision, but it wasn’t an accident, either. It was something halfway between. An impulse that I get sometimes, when I’ve had a lot to drink.”

On the TV screen, Rachel shouts something at Ross and Ross shouts something back.

Winny says, “An impulse to die?”

Her mother nods.

Winny frowns and, after a moment, nods back. “Okay. I’ll try to be different.”

“Okay. I’ll try, too.”

“Okay.”

Her mother gives her a wet smile. Clare gives her a wink.

—

She gets invited to a party. By accident, she’s pretty sure, but she decides to go anyway. Red dress, red lipstick—her mother’s, old but very much used—red flush crawling up her neck as she walks the cold October streets, sheer stockings over goosebumps. Winny has never accepted an invitation before. Winny has rarely even accepted eye contact.

“Little Red,” Clare says, floating at her shoulder. It had offered to go about its own business for the night and leave her to have her fun, but she had scowled at the word fun, and begged it to stay. It’s bad enough she doesn’t have any friends that are human. She doesn’t know what she’d do without any at all.

“No,” she tells it, climbing the porch steps of a well-manicured house shuddering with bass, “I’m the Wolf.”

It scoffs. “In that case, what am I?”

“You know, I’ve been wondering that my whole life.”

She rings the doorbell, but nobody answers, so she just goes inside. Elbowing through the crowd, she picks up a drink off a table and gulps it down, even though all conventional wisdom suggests that she shouldn’t. She doesn’t think of the possibility that it could be drugged until she’s staring down into the empty cup, feeling bleary. She’s never been drunk before, so she doesn’t know if this is normal. Everything is blurry and blue-black, hot breath, bursts of laughter, snatches of music, oozing groups of squinting faces jostling her down a hallway.

“Clare,” she gasps.

“I’m here.”

She feels the familiar uncanny weight latch onto her palm. Breathes very deep. Some girls from the gym class she always used to skip are darting unsubtle cackles her way. She feels distorted, like her shoes are on the wrong feet, feet on the wrong legs. She turns the first knob she finds, hoping it’s the way out, and ducks into a closet, curling down so that her chest buckles against her knees. Decide to be different, she thinks, but no matter how many decisions she makes she cannot seem to stand up again.

“I’m here,” Clare says.

Winny presses her eyes closed. “Tell me the one about the man who swapped places with his shadow?”

“Uh. What?”

Winny’s eyes snap open. That wasn’t Clare’s voice.

“Hello?”

“Hi.” The closet glows blue with LED light and a girl with very thick glasses blinks at her, phone in hand. “Nice meeting you. What about a shadow?”

Winny glances from the girl to Clare, who floats above them, among the coats and scarves, grinning down with evident pleasure. “Well,” it says, “would you look at that. Guess you’re not the only weirdo.”

“Sorry,” Winny says, strung between mortification and dizziness.

“No need.” The girl blows a pale bubble until it pops, then sucks it in and chews. “It’s not like it’s my closet.”

Winny’s hands quiver in her lap. “Do you go to Claremont?”

The girl shakes her head. “Nah. Dropped out as soon as I turned sixteen. I’ll never turn down free tequila from water polo jackasses, though.”

Winny blinks. “Right.”

“Want some?”

“No. No thanks. I—don’t like tequila.”

“Don’t like parties much, either, huh?” She looks between Winny and the door.

“I guess not.”

Winny looks at Clare for help. Clare says, “Come on, Big Bad Wolf. I’m sure you can think of something to say. You can always think of something to say to me.”

“What about gum?” the girl asks. “You like gum?”

“Uh. Sure.”

The girl’s fingers are warm with confidence when she tucks the stick of gum into Winny’s hand.

“So, what about the man who swapped places with his shadow?” the girl asks. She’s looking at Winny expectantly, without judgement.

“It’s a fairytale.”

“Sick.”

“Yeah, I—guess so.”

“Well? How does it go?”

Winny looks to Clare. Clare says, “Remember, it starts with a man who loses his shadow over night.”

Winny says, “It starts with a man who loses his shadow over night.”

“And then a new shadow grows out of the tips of his toes.”

“And then a new shadow grows out of the tips of his toes.”

Clare grins, Winny grins, the girl grins. “Shit, okay. What happens next?”

Clare doesn’t say. Winny looks up to ask it, but there is nothing there but a row of jackets. Her fingers clench around the stick of gum, still in its wrapper. Sometimes Clare leaves her alone, but she is not alone right now. The girl with the glasses is looking at her, drunk and expectant.

“What happens next?” Winny repeats back to her, because it is a good question.