four

by Grace Raidan

There’s an ugly infestation of the number four in my life that began about twenty years ago.

For instance, when I was fourteen, my stepdad’s dog bit the thumb off my left hand, and I only had four pale fingers left to wiggle. There was a miniature stump where my thumb used to be – smooth and tight, shinier than the rest of my hand, always a little colder, not quite dead, not quite anything else. If I wasn’t hiding it by pulling down the sleeve of my sweater, I had a nervous habit of rubbing the stump against my bottom lip as if it were chapstick. The skin felt rubbery and numb against my mouth. I had to stop doing it because it grossed my mom out for some reason.

I used to dream about having my thumb back. In one of them, my stepdad had grabbed my left hand and was shaking it violently, hoping to wiggle my thumb off again, as if it could pop off like a doll’s head. I could always hear the dog panting somewhere behind us. My hand made a dull clicking sound as he pulled, bone against bone, as if something was loosening. I would wake up at 4am after each dream, fuming, the only respite I had was that my stepdad was still probably sad that he was required to put that dog down after it swallowed my thumb.

When I was eighteen, I fell in love with a twenty-four-year-old university student. I met him in a cafe. He was horribly tall and loomed over me, so close I could feel the heat of him when he leaned down to talk. Mom and stepdad gave him the nickname Dracula, because he was pale and always wore dark coats that he buttoned all the way up to his chin, even in summer. I adored him.

We would make out outside a pizza shop a few blocks down from the university, the windows of his car fogged over, the air thick with grease and heat. I had to tilt my face up to reach him. He always tasted sharp and red, like biting into a tomato. I would run my hands through his hair as we passionately knocked our teeth together. I swear I’d feel his shoulders curl inward, cringing, when my stumped thumb would delicately graze the back of his neck.

He cheated on me with four different girls, all in the span of four months. I think he was spiteful because I refused to sleep with him. I was a very superstitious person, and I was terrified that if I lost my virginity before marriage, something else would be taken from me. I only had one thumb left, after all. It was a ridiculous thing to fixate on. I wasn’t even raised religious. But I treated my body like a fragile object anyway, careful and counting, as if restraint itself could keep me intact.

I never knew the four girls. I only knew because Dracula got guilty and mailed my stepdad – not me – a letter explaining everything. The paper was thin and folded too many times. He even referred to each girl by name. Jasmine. Florence. Helena. Rosemary. Mom snorted when she read them. Said nobody had fancy-ass names like that in our town, and insisted he probably made the whole thing up.

But I knew he was telling the truth. The girls began to visit me in my dreams every fourth day of the week; a stupid, useless Thursday.

In the dreams, they were always blonde, probably because I’m not. They leaned over me as I slept, so close I could feel their breath on my face. One of them smelled faintly of soap, clean and sharp. Another kept touching my wrist, as if checking something. Sometimes they were gentle, pulling my blanket up to my chest, tucking my teddy bear into the crook of my elbow. More often, however, they were cruel, pressing their fingers to their mouths as they giggled, watching me. One of them smiled without showing her teeth. Another wouldn’t look at my face at all. They lifted their hands to wiggle their thumbs at me, slow and deliberate. When they were feeling especially mean, they used their thumbs to make shadow puppets on my wall from my lamplight.

My mother married my stepdad when I was four. I don’t remember much of that night clearly, only fragments. My aunt stuffed me into a sequin dress that scratched and burned against my skin, the fabric stiff and unforgiving, leaving pink welts along my chest and shoulders. The lights in the restaurant were too bright. Everyone kept touching me – my hair, my arms – leaning down to say things I didn’t understand.

I remember watching my mother dance with him, her face tipped up toward his, smiling in a way that felt private. His hands rested low on her back. They swayed slowly, surrounded by people I didn’t recognize, unfamiliar relatives staring at me from their seats, their eyes shiny and curious, as if I were part of the evening’s entertainment.

The wedding cake was cold and slick behind my teeth, the frosting thick and blue, slimy, like there was another tongue in my mouth. I felt sick watching them together. On the drive home from the restaurant he’d rented for the wedding, I threw up blue frosting all over the backseat. He slammed on the brakes and screamed at me. I had to scrub the vomit out with a bucket of soapy water, kneeling on the pavement, while they consummated their marriage inside our new house.

At twenty-four, a black cat constantly wanders onto my porch every afternoon at four o’clock. I have an apartment on the first floor, ground level, so there's nothing I can do to stop its skinny, shadowy body from squeezing in between the iron railings. It sits neatly, unmoving in between two of my spider plants, and watches me through my glass screen door as I do my chores.

I try to chase it away with a broom, but it never budges, instead, it blinks at me, amused as I swat at it helplessly. I read online somewhere that to ‘cleanse’ the inside of your home from bad energy coming from outside, you need to put salt on your windowsills. I spend a Saturday evening sprinkling a careful, straight line of table salt on every window in my apartment, and for good measure, dump fistfuls against my sliding glass door.

I stop keeping mirrors in my house, and instead fill my kitchen sink up with water and comb my hair in its dark, murky reflection. I touch both sides of the doorknob whenever I leave each room. I whisper “rabbit, rabbit” to myself in the morning of the first of every month, and I make sure that I have no more than three of the same object in my apartment.

Some nights, I watch the cat back from inside my apartment, staring at its unblinking yellow eyes. When the night gets so dark that I can’t see the outline of the cat anymore, I begin to think about the skin on my knuckles, the lines of my palms. I turn my hands over and over, studying each freckle, each hangnail, each loopy blue vein. I vigorously rub my stumped thumb over my chapped lips, and I get the feeling that I’ve done something wrong, but I can’t remember what.

Photo of Grace Raidan

BIO: Grace Raidan’s fiction has appeared in Exclamation Mark Magazine, Feminine Collective, Maudlin House, and Marrow Magazine. She is a Lebanese-Canadian writer, currently studying English Honours at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta.