Alexis T. Morrison

That abject feeling one experiences after the warmth of a bathtub is no longer calefacient but merely hot, the initial moment of transition of stepping out into what is inevitably going to feel algid in comparison. It’s remarkably like the feeling one experiences after a loved one hangs up on them for the first time and refuses to answer the ensuing forty calls.
I don’t want this to seem like some kind of foreshadowing; this is not a love story.
At least not in a bodily sense.

Alexis T. Morrison, better known as Morris to her friends and family, was discovered shriveled and exsanguinous in her basement last year. Time of death: 11:58, Tuesday, August 1st. There was a gray-blue cat beside her, very Russian, like my cat, who lies loftily on the only leg-rest in my apartment, my living-room. Morris was, not surprisingly, “not like other girls.” She never picked up any type of phone, never called anyone, and always went to bed at her chosen curfew, 11:58 PM. She died of starvation, malnourishment, and water poisoning. The paranormal aspect that she had no blood in her body was deemed inexplicable.
Before the autopsy, the mortician (off the books) told the investigating detectives that it seemed like the girl had been locked in her basement for “quite some time.”

Morris scraped the rust off the bottom of the door above the steps leading to her basement, and ate it. She survived off of rats, cockroaches, worms, and eventually ate the entire sand flooring of her basement, gnawed into the framing. She then ate the dirt off and out of the framing. She trapped flies with her bare hands, and delicately picked off their wings. She made a fan out of congealed saliva and fly wings, for when it became insufferably humid over the summer. She tried to communicate with her cat’s nose beneath the door. Her only source of the light was that tiny crevice.
In the beginning, before the light bulb blew out, she’d only turn it on during emergencies, striving to conserve its life. To pass the time, she’d count cracks on her ceiling. She’d hear her parents tempesting in a teacup upstairs, gave up screaming for their attention long before her death—she’d hear her little sister shrieking her name in the night.
She threw herself into walls, and practiced cartwheels. She laughed as much as possible, at the darkness, at nothing; she’d heard of the myth that laughing supposedly makes one live longer. When it rained, water would seep from the cracks in the ceiling. Someone would quirt drops of it from beneath the door.
That single crevice, beneath the door, was her only source of light. She witnessed the skin on her fingers desiccate and wither, eroding from the aphotic atmosphere.

Morris had a friend, equine complexion, named Leinad. Leinad told the detectives that she didn’t go out much, if at all. Didn’t think she’d ever kissed anybody. Never talked about her family life at home, ever. He claimed that…she often complained of a certain feeling that tormented her mercilessly, that nothing was real, that she wasn’t real, that she felt like a ghost, that she observed herself outside of her own body. He didn’t take it seriously at the time, shrugged it off and hugged her; she’d stave him off.
Leinad also recalled that she also complained that she “couldn’t stop thinking.” That she wanted her thoughts to just “shut up” and she’d say this trembling, gripping and pressing her fingers into her forehead until her veins protruded. The closest she’d let him get to her was when he offered to massage her forehead.

Morris never knew why she had been locked in the basement, she also never knew who locked her in the basement. She began to wonder why no one ever raped or sadistically tortured her, in person. She began to wonder if there were video cameras in the walls, if she was a victim of some sort of snuff film. Before she lost her energy to move (early during her captivation), she’d try to pry open the walls, or uncover a trapdoor. Even after she knew there were no video cameras or trapdoors, she continued searching; she never punched holes in the walls, she never started talking to herself. She tried to talk to her cat and bade it to open the door, not forgetting to say please but desperately making those noises humans make that tend to incite cats to look quizzically at them.

Morris’s autopsy report showed nothing out of the ordinary besides the exsanguination and death via the aforementioned causes. But death is ordinary, I said. To whom?

Morris’s skin was a translucent wan stretched rug, with varying blotches of imperial purple and charcoal. Her veins and internal organs were all visible to the naked eye. In attempting to construct a probable chain of events from her waking up in the basement to her untimely bereavement, the forensics and profilers failed.
Untimely, thus indicating that to some morticians, lecturers, and funeral orators, there is a timely time for death. Her body was well on its way to fully disintegrating while she was still alive; bits and pieces of her mind left themselves behind on the walls.
Morris, on her knees, perched before the door, talking to her cat’s knees. Her cat’s nose was the most munificent sight she’d ever witnessed in her isolated, anomic life. She would stroke it with her fingers, stick her tongue out to touch the cat’s. They would lick each other. On the mouth, kissing. Love for one’s cat, that she never quite returned. The labyrinths she would go through in the upper world to even come close to experiencing such wonder. When the death is imminent, all restraint vanishes, and the regret one feels for detaining themselves in the past becomes all-encompassing.

Morris never did drugs. She never alluded to sex, or got up early and spent hours in front of the mirror before going to school. She never asked me to take her to go shopping. I could never elicit an emotion out of her besides anger, when I asked to keep her up past her designated curfew. She had a residual flat affect, and she was absently gullible; I don’t think she thought it capable or necessary for anyone to lie. I personally took her to psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists numerous times but they couldn’t diagnose her with anything but unipolar depression, of which from living with her, I knew she didn’t have. I had numerous suspicions that she be showing early signs of negative symptomatic schizophrenia, but I didn’t want the rest of the family to think I was…let alone make her situation worse. At sixteen she reminded me of a Stepford Wife; maybe I was being too motherly, maybe I was being irrationally paranoid; moonstruck, even. All I knew was that there was something wrong with my daughter and I couldn’t…bear to see her live, operate, like this, with a neglectful cheating father and an ordinary, pathologically lying psychomotoragitative unless hedonically satiated teenage brother.
When she was around the age of eight she’d carry around a magnifying glass to burn bugs with. That’s relatively normal, for both sexes, but hoarding the burnt bodies isn’t. I often caught her talking to herself faced against a wall or in the shower. At school, boys would take advantage of her, as she had no sense of the circumstances or why or what they were doing to her; if they had told her that they derived pleasure from it she probably would have let them do what they wanted with her. Maybe they did. She was detached from all societal standards. During holidays, when we had relatives or neighbors over, we’d lock her in her room, so she wouldn’t start a riot.

Morris, jumping up and down trying to touch the ceiling. Her head bangs on the chandelier. She sprawls over, lashing out while mid-air. After eating most of the framing away she attempts to dig hole to crawl out of the basement. Realizes she doesn’t have the energy left. She can hear a mosquito; she can’t determine what sound they make, whether it’s buzzing or—it lands on her shoulder, without a sound. She awes at it, giggling that her shoulder is cold, as if she was giving the mosquito a cold shoulder. She waits intently for it to feed; it doesn’t. She takes a cautious step forward, to not affright the tiny confidant she’s stumbled upon. The little guy. Someone to listen to her; how she’s amassed so much to say—but she finds herself suddenly aphasic; a mosquito is no messenger. Then again, a mosquito, like a human, dies just the same. And so she confesses her predicament. The mosquito remains inert, unresponsive; waiting to be swatted? Morris ponders.
What could spur a mosquito to fly beneath a door, into a basement, a cellar, and not feed off of the only plausible reasoning as to its actions. She recalls that mosquitoes don’t have cerebral cortexes, which could make a significant impact to plausible reasoning. Nevertheless, the mosquito, petrified, listens to her dithyrambic soliloquy. Finally it bites her and she doesn’t recoil, doesn’t shoo it away. The female mosquito has a much lighter body than the male; it almost weighs nothing at all.

When Morris entered the later stages of starvation—gnarled nervous system, organ damage, anemia—she positioned herself in the manner in which she was born. The autopsist professed that she underwent debilitating agony; “her body ate itself from the inside out.” Every word out of his mouth elicited pangs of remorse so subterranean in my body that I almost felt as if I was suffering what Morris must have before she died. My intentions had been purely benevolent; once I locked her in the basement I knew that I couldn’t retract my resolution to expunge her of her torment. It wasn’t until after her death that I realized how fascinated she was with life.
We managed to convince (my husband and I) the detectives that Morris locked herself in the basement and refused to come out. They were suspicious of the savage lacerations on the door, that we claimed to not hear her screaming; because of Morris’s already well-known eccentrically aberrant nature they let us go on mere charges of child service inspection. The detectives knew, of course, that it had been murder; why they let us go, I’ll never know; perhaps they wanted to afflict us with the guilt that was founded upon the callous methodology by which we murdered our own daughter, despite her portentously quizzical and anomalous character. I thought it had been for the best, I sincerely did.

It wasn’t until a year later that we heard the first scream. We performed unwarranted euthanasia on our own daughter; I had no doubt that I, at least, my husband more of the stoic type, would experience some sort of vague psychological residue eventually. I was still grieving at the time; compulsively, wistfully, nostalgically browsing through her belongings, her writings, the perverted, childish short stories she wrote; she had genuine talent for describing emotional nuances and tingeing.
The screaming continued, every night; undoubtedly Morris’s, undoubtedly coming from the basement. One time, stressed, I stormed down into the basement while I heard her screams to find my son smoking methamphetamine with his friends. Instead of scolding them I ridded them like a gaggle of geese and intently listened for my daughter’s scream, which seemed to be coming from beneath the stairwell.
“What the fuck are you doing,” my son inquired; I, peeking beneath the stairwell.
“Get out of the house. All of you. And give me that.”
“No.”
“Give it to me or I will call the—” My son hit me in the face, pummeling me onto the floor of the basement.
“Or you’ll what? I know what you did. I’ll talk. I’m scared as it is that you two freaks will do the same to me.”
I was less surprised by his retort than I was by the immediate stop of Morris’s screaming. Had I been hallucinating? My son, flabbergasted that I outright ignored him, took off. I closed the door to the basement while I was still in it, there no longer being a light after the incident; we…didn’t bother to install a new one. I lingered in the darkness, waiting for…something, a sign, a sound. I was terrified, but I felt that Morris at least deserved the temporal recapulation of her torture vicariously through me.
As I was about to leave the basement, spooked that the door would inexplicably lock itself before I made it up the steps, I heard the faint trace of Morris’s gossamer, aerial giggling. I could feel her simpering at me; not out of sheer hostility but scheming. When I opened the door to leave the basement I heard her titter one last time.

Over the next couple of months I intermittently heard her screams, her laughs; at times I thought she was behind me. My husband didn’t pay any attention to the spectral outbursts. I, on the other hand, became obsessed and consumed by them. I idled apprehensively, anticipating the drygulch, or the moment she would approach me, an apparition, and haunt me until I endured a fate as gruesome as hers. What would she have to say to me? Why? I’m not even sure now. Whether or not ghosts exist or not is besides the point if you believe.

My husband is snoring like an ambulance siren. I cannot sleep. I toss and turn in bed, fixated on the clock; the digital red numbers; I feel like I’m choking on grapes. I slip out of bed making as much noise as possible to spite my husband, who looks rather dead opposed to being asleep, his mouth sagging open like a black hole sucking our perfunctory marriage, our murdered daughter, our deliquent son, into clapping his hands upon coming home boisterously, merrily, beseeching glibly as to what’s for dinner with a deaf look on his face.
I walk downstairs to the kitchen and ruminate out the window; I do not smoke, as should most mothers in my position. Maybe I’m becoming schizophrenic. I heard rumors that it ran in my family. Maybe I’m experiencing severe post-traumatic stress disorder; maybe the sounds are real, maybe she escaped, maybe the body was fake and she’s still alive, lurking from beneath the—sink cupboard. I muse over how I could conjure her forth. Have a talk. One we should have had before I killed her.
I putter until dawn without a notion of my daughter.

Years pass. Our son packs up, pilfers what’s left of my saving’s account; I haven’t heard from him since. My husband is debating whether or not to retire, just can’t decide what mistress to do so with.
I stand in front of the door to the basement. I feel as if I’ve never felt anything before. I open it, tiptoeing down the stairs. I leave the door open as we, rather, I still haven’t installed a light. I am still in my nightgown, braless. I loom to to the center of the basement, left untouched all these years; for some reason, this gives me maternal delight. She’s remained undisturbed. We never administered her a proper funeral. Her ashes are still propped up on my wardrobe. I could never decide what to do with them, where to sprinkle them…so I kept them. Sprinkle; sprinkling a cremated body, dispensing birdseed.
I can’t help but to expect a response from her of some sort. I’m willing to conceive the paranormal to apologize in some garbled, insufficient discourse. The more I believe in ghosts, it seems, the less they believe in me. I stand in the center of the basement for thirty minutes or so, assessing more acutely the conditions I immured her. Palsied with remorse, spasmiing as I, pouting, turn to leave once again, she appears before me, in the flesh, un-phantasmal. She’s smiling, not maliciously; her body is in the state in was when she died. Her gown is sordid, scatological even; she raises her arm and puts her hand on my shoulder. I begin to choke on my own breath, panicking—her hand is freezing, deathly; frigid frigid frigd cold—she sweetens her smile, reaching down to suppor t me as I tremble and cower onto the ground. She stands so, so unreally still; of course, of course, because she is unreal, and I am hallucinating, a visual manifestation of my guilt…
She took the family; I—with her.
“Do you know what time it is, mother?”
I don’t respond.
“It’s 11:00. Do you remember how I always used to go to bed at 11:58?”
Stammering, “yes.”
“Did you ever…know why?” She continues to smile, contrived now.
“No,” I retort, gathering my neurotic, bemused but distressed, baffled— stunned devastated, definitelydevastated, composure. My daughter has come back from the dead and I want to get as far away from her as I can.
“I thrived off of routines, order. It kept me in check I think the idiom is. It’s been awhile since I’ve…employed spoken language.”
“So you’re insinuating…there are other methods of communication.”
She sneers girlishly at my…to her what must seem ignorance.
“I’m not giving you any prefigurements, mother.
“And as for earthly means, you could try text-messaging.”
“Morris I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was younger then; I thought it was for the best; I thought you were—“
Opening my eyes, she’s vanished. Why did we lock her down here? Even if she had been schizophrenic we wouldn’t have done so—what was it, I can’t recall, I can’t—for the life of me.
I scamper up the steps, tear open the door. Aghast, what lies before me is ineffable. I’ve always hated basements.
“11:07, Mom. I never called you anything else, such as your first name, did I…”
“What did you do. Why is—“
“Being undead has its perks.” When I opened the door, if you haven’t already inferred, it lead to exactly the same basement I had fled from; I stood teetering at the top of the stairs.
“So what exactly—“
“I’m not evil, I just didn’t favor Dad. He was never there—not that you were—so I figured no one would notice.”
I snicker against my own will.
“Already done away with him I suppose.”
“Car crash. Thirty-three car pile-up. Looked kind of like Dante’s junkyard. He survived the crash…burned to death trapped askew in the driver’s seat.
“Fitting, no? I figured that if he ever were to die he would have preferred being in the driver’s seat.”
“Morris…I wish I pitied my husband, but I don’t. What of my son?”
“He’s killing himself in increasing doses.”
My eyes swell up with tears; aguilt trip of helplessness, there was nothing I could do, was there? I could have gotten him help, I could have gotten her—
“Do you really believe I needed it, Mother?
“Mom? Whichever you prefer.
“Maybe just once…a psychopharmocologist appointment. Maybe you could have left me liberated, like you did with Rye.”
“I didn’t want you to suffer.”
“Are you sure about that? Are you? Because I have the slightest notion that…
“It was you who didn’t want to suffer. Both of you, of course, but primarily you.”
“No…as seemingly as that well, seems, no, that wasn’t it.”
Morris laughs scornfully.
“I know I’m going to die; there is no point in my lying to you, and I’m not going to stand here—actually, I think I’ll sit—I’m not going sit here and eat crow over what you obviously want to hear.”
“I’m not interested, that much, as to why you did it. I’ve been haunting houses these past few years, debating whether or not I should bother with you…no offense, psychopaths. You so kindly decided for me.”
“Why would you do me the favor of dying when you can’t.”
“Oh I’m dead alright. I’m dead.”
“No you’re not. And don’t give me that unfinished business bullshit. What, do you think that murdering the people that murdered you will bring you peace? True death?”
“You’re assuming I want to die,” she scoffs.
“Morris, I don’t know why I did what I did to you. I’m old, and ready to die. You may do as you wish, torture me in the same way as I tortured you, etcetera. I don’t blame you. But I will be dead and you will still be…a—“
“A ghost! A phantom! A wailing, constipated banshee! An apparition. A spectrum! The Lockness Monster. A figure of your imagination.”
“No better than me. No less evil than I.”
“No. No, no, no. I won’t be.
She paces to the corner of the basement she died in, in the fetal position.
“There’s nothing to understand about compulsions. And I don’t need to understand. I’m going to save your son, my brother. You can negotiate with karma.”
“Thank you.”
She glances at me, pensively. I am elated to see my daughter again after all these years.