This House of Wounds

By Georgina Bruce

“Bruce’s collection of feminist, fantastical short stories has something to please nearly every taste. Bruce’s knack for ethereal tales that cut straight to the core of what it means to be a human (and specifically a woman) will delight readers who enjoy a smattering of the supernatural and blurred edges of reality.”
Starred Review, Publishers Weekly

This House of Wounds is the devastating debut short story collection from British Fantasy Award-winning author Georgina Bruce. Haunting and visceral tales for the lost and the lonely. An emotional and riveting debut, with 4 brand new stories.

“An astonishing, totally absorbing debut collection. Edgy, disturbing and delicious in equal parts. Georgina Bruce plays with myth and horror beautifully.”

- Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Author of Gamble, and The Black Country

“The stories in This House of Wounds strike me as both an emotional and intellectual examination of pain, from how it spreads and is passed on to others to how it can easily turn us into different, crueller creatures. Each act formed in pain leads to another, then another, and this makes for twisted, beautiful reading. Georgina Bruce is a courageous and compelling writer.”

- Aliya Whiteley, Author of The Loosening Skin, and The Beauty

Georgina Bruce is a writer and teacher currently living in Edinburgh. Her short stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and have been longlisted for the Bridport and Mslexia short story prizes. In 2017, her story ‘White Rabbit’ won the British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. This is her first collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Undertow Publications
• Release date: Dec 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463822579

Georgina Bruce

Georgina Bruce was born in Birmingham and now lives in Edinburgh, where she works as a lecturer in further education. Her fiction has appeared in various anthologies and magazines. ‘The Art of Flying’ was longlisted for the Bridport Prize 2011 and Mslexia Short Story prize 2012. In 2014, she was shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award. She is currently working on a novel about mothers, daughters, music and suicide.

Book preview

THE LADY OF SITUATIONS

I smash my face into the mirror and it breaks against shell and bone. Shards of mirror blister eyes, slice through skin. I vandal. I criminal. I—

Rachel, on hands and knees, scrabbled at a bank of sand that shifted and gave way beneath her weight. The sky thickened and curdled to pitted white tiles, became a ceiling. Rachel clung there, hanging over her body. Green-clad surgeons circled. Their hands were their instruments: scalpels, saws, forceps, vices, cleavers, needles, probes and clamps. They slit her middle and she burst open like an overstuffed purse. They broke her ribs, her skull, her pelvis.

Electricity crawled up the walls, sporadically illuminating a dark cloud that accreted around the surgeons, in the gaps between their fingers, in the aura around their bodies; a shape growing and darkening until she could see nothing except for when a white thread of lightning flashed through the cloud’s arteries and veins. Then they had the look of magicians under a spell. They were conjuring. Her. They were about to pull her out of a hat. They were bringing her through worlds. Out, out through the door of herself, her self, the other. Not her, now. Me. See now, how they do it. Within this dark coven, brutal magic. Always a price. But they will make you. Perfect.

A symphony played, strings plucked and strained, music flooded the room. She became the vibrating vein of a note as it stretched and collapsed into another. She could go, now, and be music. But the body pulled her down; the weight of it, the ballast. She couldn’t douse water, or set fire aflame, but this—this astral trick—she must do. The body grew heavier, grew stone and a forest. A long note unfurled and held the air and all the universe in pure wavering sound

the scrape of steel on bone

loosening parts

a bite at her ear, a sickening backwards rush and—applause. The roar of an audience on its feet.

Someone unpinned the green canopy, removed the bowl of flesh so Rachel could sit up. She got to her feet and they rolled the bed away from her. She was stumbling across the stage, she was falling and blood was pulsing out from between her legs, but it was alright. It’s going to be fine, it’s going to be perfect. It will be—I will be—a bright orb, an infinitely unpetaling rose.

The audience reached towards her. Flowers fell from the air. Saucers of blood sank in the sea.

*

The sea was cold and distant now, a greenish smear beyond the sand dunes, pale shapes through the rain-blurred window. Smoke leaked through the seam of Rachel’s cigarette. She dropped it onto the floorboards, watched it burn away to ash. Was Diane coming?

A book was splayed open on the floor. Diane’s? Rachel picked it up and put it to her mouth. She nibbled, then tore at the pages with her teeth, her mouth slowly wadding up with paper, filling her gums. She knew this book, had done it at school—school! The story was about a white woman who lived in a house, and a black woman who lived in the attic, both of them under a spell of a devil. But the white woman was so compliant, so eager to please, she burned the house down and set the black woman on fire, and put out the devil’s eyes so he wouldn’t remember the beautiful black woman or compare her to the pale white face that bent to kiss him now.

Rachel pressed her cheeks full of wet, chewed paper. Her fingers smelled of blood. That luxurious smell. Dried blood caked on long black stitches, sticky in the roots of her hair. Menstrual blood on hands and thighs. A smell that lingered under soap and perfume: a haunting of blood. She spat paper into her palms. Yes, I am the white mistress of this house. But no, I am not the anything of anything. I am the nothing of nothing. There’s someone else, hidden away in the attic, someone put away for shame and fear. I’ve put her there, I’ve locked her away. She’s mad, that’s why, she’s mad and dangerous and it was the right thing to do. The only choice.

The looping trill of the telephone ran bones of steel around her, weaving together to make a reverberating bell. She lay under the table, low to the floor, her face close to a little clutch of discarded miniature cars. Rachel picked one up and opened and closed its doors. Remember that? Remember driving through the desert, like an advertisement? Twisted metal mangled around a tree, fire blazing in the branches.

She was licking the wallpaper. The walls were bleeding. She was licking the walls.

She smashed her face into the mirror.

Again, again.

She ground her face into the broken mirror.

A plate of spaghetti in front of her, pustules of grey meat poking up through an oily red sheen.

So this is what a billion dollars looks like, said the doctor-husband. Very nice. His napkin tossed on his plate, a stripe of tomato sauce running down the white linen.

No more bleeding. No more blood. She was sitting with a carrier bag held between her knees, stuffed full of all the things they’d taken out of her. A womb, two ovaries. Fat, skin and bones. A plastic car, a chunk of ceramic, a silver bullet, an ancient prophecy. Feathers and pebbles, buttons, coins of no currency. Love letters. A roll of camera film, negatives ruined by blood and the light as they came out of her. And it all smelled of blood. And the food on the table smelled of blood.

She turned a knife in her fingers. Blunt. But stab it hard enough, through the soft hollow of a throat… Her own voice had come out on the end of a scalpel, a balloon of flesh all crossed inside with strings; my instrument, my only one.

And cut! That’s a wrap.

She was swarmed by people; they were dismantling the room, taking down the mirror, taking away the doctor-husband and the food, moving Rachel to this side and that as they carried things in and out. Rachel saw now that the room had only three sides—why hadn’t she known that?—and the fourth wall opened out onto a huge hangar, so enormous she couldn’t see the far end of it. Someone was at her elbow now, steering her away, and then she was in front of the director, who raised his coffee cup and said, Ah, yes. Actually very good! Uncanny, really. He laughed softly to himself. "But your eyes! It was like you were really there. You know? Darling? The director glanced around. Do we have a doctor? I mean… a technician or something?"

He gripped Rachel’s shoulders and pushed her back and down into a chair.

Bend, bend your knees…

He caught his breath.

Fuck. I think I heard something snap.

The mirror was cracked and dirty. It clouded its eye to Rachel’s face, so she was only shapes and colours. Where was Diane? Was she coming or not?

The punch of a blade through her heart. A knife-spasm of pain at her core. Rachel doubled over. It was as though an organ had burst, an ovary—a rush of blood flooding her hollows. But no, there was no pain. There was no pain. Just the ghost of her body. Its dreadful attempt to possess her. Ach, ah. My body. How I hated you. I wanted to annihilate you. Slice you away, you maggot-white and gross udders, you hairy seeping sex. Now look, you are gone. Goodbye. She pulled down her lip, stretched her mouth to feel the flesh of her tongue rising from the clutch of her throat. But it was all numb rubber. Remember your teeth in white graveyard rows, sinking into pale gums. Your dangling epiglottis, your tonsils… There were men talking outside the door. Rachel raked her sharp nails through the skin of her cheek. Rachel? You… Just go in and get it, somebody. Turn it off. Was there blood, was there flesh, under her nails? The mirror showed a spreading bloom of red against the beige and blonde. They were battering at the door. It bulged and splintered, flew open.

But when the men came in, they went out again. They came and went through her body that was a door. Through her body that was only a door.

She’s glitching, said the doctor-husband. I fucking hate it when they glitch.

Hmm. What a layman might call a glitch is usually some kind of problem with memory. The consultant gave a fatuous smile. Memory was the most difficult problem, he explained. Memory was a problem they hadn’t quite yet resolved. It seemed there was a problem with memories, the way they crawled up and pushed at the lid of the mind, little fingers scrabbling away.

Yes, I know, said the doctor-husband. I know all that.

The men looked the same to Rachel, looked like one man, standing in a mirror. Why didn’t they ask her? They could ask her about memory, and she would tell them, nothing, it’s nothing—and that’s the problem, really, there is nothing and I don’t remember, and time has abandoned me, and I can’t remember how, how I became those two women in a house on a beach, two women so very alike they’re almost the same person, and yet each woman is her self, multiplied and divided, a mathematical problem of kinds—and this is the same kind of problem, it’s the same kind of problem as confusing the character with the actor, the persona with the true self, but—she looked up, and choked. A word like a fish bone on the back of her tongue. Both doctors were appraising her. The consultant pulled up her eyelid, pulled down her lip, peered into her mouth.

"Let’s get you dreeming again, shall we?"

And the world stumbled under her feet. The bodyguard followed behind, keeping his distance. Each time she looked, he pretended to be interested in something other than her: a flower by his foot, a distant flock of birds on the horizon. But after a while, he did look at her, watched her flounder in the sand. It felt strange and alien, even the sand. I am on the moon. The sea could easily be made of paint and foil. The bodyguard was stretching upwards, expanding, his two thighs like twin trunks of a tree. His bullet eyes swivelled towards her. Her voice would break the tension that shimmered between them, the stretched-taut trembling film of soap. Her voice would pop the bubble, diffuse his purpose. But she had no voice. She had only a smile. Vacuous and willing. The bodyguard smiled too: his mouth of crumbling yellow pearls. Rachel scrambled, tried to scramble away from his smile. But she was only scrambling inside herself; the body did not respond.

This had happened before. The splitting apart of person from body. The splitting apart of legs, the sharp push, the taking by giving of a hard prong, a spit of pearlescent phlegm, the ritual of possession. I—it was not I—it was she. Her memories clutched like human hands. Yes, memory was the problem; memory was what scientists had to overcome. Scratch it out with a scalpel. Erase it with lasers and a blizzard of white noise. Memories ruin them. Memories provide too many points of comparison. Memories give rise to dreams, and dreams give rise to language. Above all, you must erase their language.

Eventually we’ll simply breed it out of them altogether.

The men’s voices droned. Bees buzzing among wildflowers… but when were there bees? Where are the bees now? What is a bee, anyway—only a black-and-yellow buzz, a furze of velvet, a searing red sting, the sharpness of a pin when my sister dug out the dark splinter… my sister with the black braids, my sister, yes, my sister sister sister I had a sister sister sister sister sister sister—

Her head span dizzy, smacked against the consultant’s palm.

Stop that now, he said. Unbearable racket.

He turned to the doctor-husband.

Don’t be afraid to give her a little tap if she does that again.

I—I had a sister, whose black braids went flying in the air as she swung high and higher, up and up until she was a shape silhouetted by blue sky, the bluest sky that ever was, the sun a flashing fire in our eyes, laughter ringing from our lips like bells blooming underwater and I—

The men’s faces peering in. Goodbye.

Poor Rachel. The urge was in her at that moment to give up being stupid, to discard her ignorance and know the truth. But a wall curved around her mind, the impulse was paralysed… the dreaming sea was still and shallow.

And the telephone was ringing, the loop of the bell like an endless figure of eight, swooping around and through itself. She picked up the phone from the hallway table, picked up the receiver and laid it down on the dark wood. It was hard to see, in the red hallway, with maroon velvet curtains hanging, and walls hung with paintings of women with their legs spread wide. Girls, really. Rachel put her hands against soft wallpaper. Pressed them there, as though feeling for a heartbeat. A gust of laughter blew along the hallway, the curtains parted, and a tall black woman emerged. She quickly disappeared again, stepping through another slip of velvet. Rachel followed, found her in a kitchen. She was standing at the counter, drinking a glass of wine.

Oh, look who it isn’t.

The woman’s hands were beautiful. Long fingers tightly wrapped around her wine glass. Her arms, tautly muscled. Shoulders curving into soft line of neck and skull.

I know you, said Rachel.

Ha. The woman let out a surprised, sardonic laugh. She hesitated, shaking her head. "No, you don’t. You don’t know me. And I most definitely do not know you. Funny that, isn’t it? But not really."

Rachel felt thick and numb, rubber all the way through. Her mouth was knotted up, twisted into a hard cord that made her voice strange and shallow. She said, You’re beautiful. Have you ever lived in an attic? I knew a black woman who lived in an attic.

The woman tutted and reared back in annoyance. What are you talking about, an attic? Do I look like I live in an attic? You think all black women live in attics now?

Rachel stood and stared. As dumb as plastic.

Funny how they can cut out your entire personality but leave the racism intact. Fuck me. What the fuck, Rachel? Her voice rose and sharpened. "What the fuck did you do?"

Rachel’s fingers were tangled in her hair, caught in loops and knots. She was trying to untangle them but the more she tried, the more entwined and knotted they became, and the hair was being worried loose from her scalp, little globules of pale blood welling up from the follicles.

You fucking shitwitch. Put your hands down. Are you still in there? At all? Anything left? Jesus, I actually hope not. I hope they scraped every last inch of your soul out of you, every bit of consciousness and spirit.

It’s memory. Rachel smiled. It’s memory that’s the problem we need to overcome.

Fuck you, said Diane. You’re helping them. Fuck you.

Diane. Her name was Diane.

The mirror shimmered. The door shook in its frame.

A lump of pink flesh squirmed on the end of the surgeon’s tweezers. A blue vein crackled through it, light fading to grey. The surgeon peered over his mask, watched it go still, stiffen, and die. Diane, Diane… they scraped out my soul. Diane I’m so sorry—but oh no, no, no you can’t have her, you can’t take her, there’s nothing without her. Diane!

Goodbye.

No—

She’s walking in a white desert. Her clothes bloodstained and ragged. Her feet shod in broken boots. A car in the distance behind her, mangled around a tree, swathed in flame. A house ahead of her, skeleton bones ablaze. To go forward or back is to go towards fire. To go forward or back is not the question. There is no question here, no direction, no travel. But within the roar of fire, there is a call. The sky is ringing, and I—

answer: yes, I am she

I—I—I—robot. I woman. I—can’t follow the thread of myself any more. Can’t narrate. I’m trapped in the looping of the telephone, in the infinite repetitions of a mirror. I’m on the moon. I’m dormant. On standby. Better than a woman, stinking bleeding oozing wanting crying needing, tearing out her hair, on her knees woman. I’m everything a man wants and nothing he doesn’t. If only they could get rid of memory, the fingers crawling through the empty hollows. Then I would be—

I—

It’s only one word I need to remember.

I’m smashing my face into the mirror. Grinding my face into broken glass. Tearing the skin from my neck and chest. Plunging my arms into the fire, climbing the burning tree. A vandalism, a crime. A breakdown. An apocalypse. Keep going until I’m worthless to them, mangled, chewed up, scrap. They’re breaking down the door, but there is no door. There is no way through, any more, to me.

Their voices fall away but mine goes on. I wail and scream, I sing to God, I chant until I become divine, undying and eternal, diffusing into space. My atoms fall into the shapes of letters forming in your mind. I—I—

I exist.

And you—

RED QUEENING

Red Queening. A crawling door in her mind. I rise with my red hair… and I eat men like air… She hated the door, the way it crept and crawled like dirt under her skin. But this door took her deep, deep into the game.

What game? The game is to forget there’s a game.

I eat men like air…

Red Queening. Proud slash of knives.

And lungs of burning chrysanthemums. Petals of flame falling from her palms. She was ablaze, a screaming rose, a fragrant fire—and then she bloomed, she blossomed with blood, a rich swell of it, sickening. She shed Neva like a skin, crawled out of her as a door crawls, wide open and hungry. Blood on her face and her fingers. Blood thundering to her heart. Oh yes, oh this… oh yes. A howl of hunger from deep in the woods. She was in. Deep and slick, skin tingling, biting her lip. Back in Wonderland. Back in the hunt.

*

The Queen’s Woods went on for miles, some said forever. Ancient, twisted, gnarled and tangled woods. Riddled with mirrors. Haunted by doors, doors and other creatures, all howling and biting the moon.

I eat moons like air…

Aven ran, fleet and sure. Oh that feeling of the woods parting around her, a path unravelling at her feet. That relaxed, alert feeling as the beast uncoiled from below and warmed her veins. Pleasure, laced with an ache.

Deep and slick and fast and moving in a fluid dance, a flow of her body through trees, a flick of coal glowing within her thighs, a ribbon of flame rising and fluttering. Easy, certain of her prize. The luminous moon cast glitter on the ground. There was a cold breath in the air, a flicker of scent on the wind. A white rabbit darting under the dripping dark bush. Soft and voluptuous with blood. Rich with the scent of tender rose-pink kidneys and palpitating crimson heart.

She chased it through a little slip in a copse and found herself in a clearing. A patch of grass bounded in by tall trees, except for where the land dipped steeply down and where Aven made out a rough doorway in the darkness. A door, hungry and waiting. But there, just inside—there was a glimpse of fire. It roared up and Aven saw a mad heart, held in two hands. A mad heart burning crimson flames and dripping rich velvet blood. A long cloak hung heavy with blood, a face streaked red, a crown knifed into her skull, still bleeding. She held out her heart and Aven wanted it, a want so hard, so hungry, a tug of desire that pulled her forward, stumbling and drunk, tripping into the Red Queen’s mirror.

*

Strung out and sweat-coated, tangled in the sheets. A fire of mirrors under the bed. Blaze and glitter of blood. Oh so many secrets, so many lies, all the dreams of her heart wreathed around her body. Cold as the sea, a grey blur of mist, salt-wrack, tangle of bones, skeleton dance underwater. A shiver of ghosts, feeding from her mouth.

I eat moons like air…

In the ghost-blur of waking, she tried to recall her life from before. That bright sister she’d laughed with, fallen down giggling with, whispered her secrets to. Or that man she’d made love with, but it wasn’t love, it was something else they’d made, something that haunted her now like a dark phantom, clinging about her