On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

The first sin was believing we would never die. The second sin was believing we were alive in the first place.

“You’re breathing too loud, Arc,” Daffy said in a whisper. “She’ll find us and feed us to the needle monster.”

We even drew our mother and father. We gave them smiles because it was a drawing, and in drawings you don’t have to tell the truth.

“I kno-ow you will, kiddo.” She smiled up at me. “You di-ig up everything.” This was something she would say over a decade later, when a journalist from New York came to interview her.

All the roads here are not graveled in rock, girls, but with the woman’s scars, because only a woman’s scars are strong enough to bear something driving over them, again and again.”

“For without patience, you will always be at odds with the task before you.”

A witch is merely a woman who is punished for being wiser than a man. That’s why they burned her. They tried to burn away her power because a woman who says more than she’s supposed to say, and does more than she’s supposed to do, is a woman they’ll try to silence and destroy. But there are some things that not even fire can destroy. One of those things is the strength of a woman.

“Because in this world you must be smart and you must endure. Most importantly, you must be ready to be treated like a woman. If you are not ready for that, you’ll break wide open.”

I had heard the words whore, slut, and tramp all my days growing up. It was what I was told my mother and my aunt were by those who believed they were better.

But no one ever saw her or my aunt as women who would flourish in anything more than spreading their legs.

Men in a house, then suddenly, one in my room. His shadow like the shadow of the spider on the cartoon he watched with us.

She looked up at the spider’s web in the corner of the kitchen. “The same spider has been in my room,” she said in the hushed way all girls say the monster’s name. “What do you mean, Daffy?” I asked. She dropped her eyes to mine. “You know what I mean,” she said. I searched my sister’s face, seeing in her eyes the same eight-legged shadows on her walls.

When he turned around, I realized spiders come out in the daylight and they wear official clothes to try to cover up who they are at night. But you can’t cover up the eyes that look like black oil is caught there. He looked at my sister and me, his badge gleaming in the sunlight in ways that made me want to capture it and set him ablaze.

Who do you tell about the demons when the demons are the ones who you tell?

We make believe that we ride among the stars wearing crowns. But the only things resting on top of our heads is the hand of a john whose sweat we taste just before he pays us to swallow him.

We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.

“Don’t you feel trapped, Arc?” she asked. “Trapped in this room, in this house? Sometimes I feel like I’ll never leave this savage side. That I’ll always be here with no escape. Caught in the center of the spider’s web.”

Addiction is a thief. It steals the minutes from the day. The color of the sky. It steals the hero from the story, the leaves on the trees, the answer to the question, Who am I? The thief doesn’t go completely away because you’ve stopped holding the needle to your arm. Sobriety is just a better hiding spot for the minutes of the day, the color of the sky, the answer to the question, Who am I?

When Daffy returned home, she pulled her chair up to the table while I set Petticoat down on the floor. She meowed loud and long, butting her head into our bare ankles while I rolled up our sleeves.

I started to hate her. But the more I hated my mother, the more I hated myself. Those things are connected, you know. And even when I’m in a room full of people, I am always astonished at how lonely I can be, because the one person I need isn’t there.

Destruction is just a phase. Sometimes we have to break like an artifact in order to be discovered whole.

Remember some men have twisted veins and a wolf for a heart. Run away when you hear the howling. Remember the smell of knives. They smell like blood. Stay away from the puddles full of night. Listen for River Man.

I cannot say that today I will not fray. It is my nature to go away—to go away and stay.

There are exceptional demons that wait for us all. An infinite pulse that insists we float down the river that has been made for our drowning. In shallow water, rocks mutilate our truths. In the deeper depths, it is our own dying that forms an opinion of us.

“You met her at our house,” I said. “When you came to say sorry about killing Mamaw Milkweed. Remember?” “Yes.” He nodded. “But I never saw her after that.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Not at the start. But then I remembered when I first met the two of you at your house. I remembered your right eye was blue and Daffy’s was green. Every time I saw Daffy at Big Gray, the eyes were wrong. Her right eye was blue like yours. Just like here when you came to the Evergreen Daughters. I heard you with the other women. Heard the way you said you were Daffy at times, but the eyes were as wrong as they’d been back at Big Gray. It was only ever you. So where is Daffy, Arc? What have you done to her?”

“Where is your sister, Arc?” he asked. “She’s in the river,” I said. “Has been ever since she was nine years old.”

Lives lost to addiction are not always because the victim was the addict. Sometimes you die because the person you love is one. In Daffy’s case, that was our mother.