Have You Seen Jenny?
Here is the alley, laced in shadow—not the kind you, a wary member of the audience, would traipse alone at night. Yet here comes our Jenny: a pale girl, limp brown hair, just thirteen, eyes a hue identical to your daughter’s. The streetlight illuminates her, naked bulb blinking. From the first row you can even read the names of her schoolbooks: Reading, Writing, The Complete Works of Lovecraft.
The set looks like it was painted by children, and it was—your daughter behind the scenes among them, with paintbrushes wide as your palm and dipped in dark buckets—but there’s something familiar about it anyway, in particular a smeared yellow window on the top floor of a grey cardboard skyscraper that reminds you of the light your father left on when you were late coming home in the night. You lived in a city like this. Is the light for Jenny? You hope, and yet you know.
Jenny moves like she speaks: a stuttering step forward, jump back, now a skittish attempt to move in a new direction. Going nowhere, always, but with pigtails swinging. Peripherally, you notice the figures swathed in black, darting in and out of the eerie metropolitan backdrop, and that one, tall as your father—where is he going?
Jenny, eyes wide, newly aware (and too late) that she has discovered the wrong side of this town, the one she calls home. Goddammit, Jenny, don’t you know home can be dangerous, too? The figure, the father, ghosting toward her as she approaches stage left, sneaking out from a dark corner—Jenny, behind you! You want to call to her from the upholstered safety of your front-row seat, but know she could not hear you if you did. Too late, already, and the figure presses a leather-gloved hand over Jenny’s mouth. Another scream rendered silent.
He drags her resistant body offstage. She continues to cling to her books.
*
Here is the forest, with its gnarled rows of trees so innately sinister they’ve existed for a thousand years outside the ken of taxonomists altogether. They’ve been waiting. You follow the reach of their spindly branches with your eyes and wonder when it was that your daughter’s imagination began to surpass your own nightmares. An animal hoots somewhere offstage, too deep an octave to be just an owl.
Veins of anemic moonlight wind down Jenny’s arms as she grips the shaft of her flashlight. Like the handle of a knife, you think. As she makes her way across the stage, you notice that the beam does not waver. But you, you’re shaking in your chair.
A deceptively gentle breeze blows through, toying with the ribbon of Jenny’s chestnut ponytail. She comes to a sudden halt as she raises a skein of yarn in her free hand. Your gaze drifts from Jenny to the trees, each of which has scarlet yarn gashed around its trunk.
Like a bowtie, you think. Or a cut throat.
*
Here is the bedroom, with its poster of The Cure and its yellow floral bedspread and its sturdy oak dresser pushed flush against the door. A woman screams offstage—does she sound familiar? The knob rattles. On the bed, Jenny curls, cries.
*
Here is the highway. Jenny stands to the left, a beauty waxing and waning in lonely car headlights. Seventeen and a knowing smile, lipstick red. Her backpack hugs her spine, filled with photographs and clean underwear and a diary to record her travels probably, along with the bubble gum she stole just to see if she could. Dammit Jenny, sweet, stupid girl, you think you know so much.
Her thumb juts out, as yours once did: a quiet beacon. She has done this many times before and is hoping, perhaps, that this will be the last. You see, this Jenny wants to leave, which for some members of the audience (yourself included) will make this the scariest Jenny of all. Your nails are leaving indents in the armrest—why can’t you just relax?
A crimson Ford rattles up: a wreck survivor with dents in its side the size of a child’s arm. A bandana hides the driver’s mouth from view, but you imagine it anyway: the nooks for missing teeth, a nicotine-yellow tint to his smile, the wet slick of his tongue against sandpaper lips. You know this will not end well for Jenny, but she does not seem to share in your concern. Girls like Jenny would never listen, even if they could hear you.
The driver reaches a latex-gloved hand out the window, gestures to the backseat. Jenny opens the door and slides in, brimming confidence and dreams of another life. The vehicle lurches offstage and you are left staring at the deserted highway.
*
Here is the cornfield. Green stalks like a skyline rising tall, Jenny diminishing among them. You hardly recognize her, this Jenny. It’s been years—could this even be the same Jenny, really, with hair the color of nothing and those dim blue eyes? But you see it then, the yarn, and she ties her hair up into a ponytail—what’s left of it—and that’s when the spotlight shines down, a single white beam into all that green, and you think it’s to illuminate her better, so you can see how she’s aged, the exhaustion in its final form—God, will your daughter one day be that old? And then, so close you can see the twin constricting pinpricks of her pupils—this is a good seat, the front row!—but now you can see so clearly the spotlight reflecting in them, and you can’t say why but this frightens you. Jenny looks up, smiles into the light like an old friend. It begins to rotate around her, faster and faster, and a deafening whir fills the theater, causing your chair to tremble beneath you. The rotation persists until a disconcerting calm smoothes over Jenny’s features. She says to the sky, or the ceiling, or the void: Well, what took you so goddamn long?
The whirring stops, the stage empties, and every light in the auditorium goes out. The man in the seat to your left begins to weep.
*
Here is the diner, with the red truck badly parallel-parked outside. The insides of the diner are made of mirror. A reflective silver substance coats the ceiling, the tables shine back the eyes of the people who sit before them, the floors reflect the bottoms of your feet and your stare, if you happen to look down. Disco balls hover above each table. And then there is the matter of the waiters, all identical, and how their collective gaze reflects Jenny’s own numb expression as she places her order. Good acting, you think, unnerved, at which point you realize you’ve been biting your lip all this time, and suddenly there’s blood. Jenny, likely in her twenties, requests her eggs sunny side up.
The man who sits across from her is unceasing in his dialogue. As soon as she orders he begins. He asks her: Jenny, how’d your eyes get so big and blue, huh? Jenny, how’d you get so sweet? You’re going to marry me one day, Jenny, aren’t you? Oh Jenny, won’t our children be beautiful? Do you think our kids might look like me, Jenny? That we might create a trio of little mes to run around the house we build together? Do you think we’d name the first one after my father, Jenny? Won’t our life be everything you ever dreamed of, Jenny? Don’t you love me, Jenny? Hey, Jenny, wouldn’t you like a kiss? Jenny, where’s that smile? I know you have one, Jenny—Jenny, won’t you let me see those teeth? Goddammit Jenny, don’t you have any teeth? Why won’t you show me your teeth, Jenny? What are you trying to hide? Jenny? Jenny!
The eggs arrive, quivering.
*
Here is the classroom. The walls are lined with the requisite ABCs and 123s, but just that, only that, the walls wallpapered with this pattern, the Zs and 7s and Qs all jumbled together, like some kind of code for which you don’t yet have the key. And the Jenny that stands in this room is but a child, not more than seven—and you remember your daughter at that age, don’t you, how she was always reaching for the brush when you painted her bedroom that bright, bright blue. Jenny’s hair is cut bluntly into an unfortunate mahogany bowl that stops just short of eclipsing her eyes altogether. She towers in her small way over a man’s body—a concerningly immobile extra in a flannel shirt—but he’s okay, right, he’s just acting, isn’t he? From the front row you’re close enough, you think, to see whether or not his chest might be moving, and just as you’re craning your neck Jenny plunges the dagger, which you didn’t realize she had, and the squelch that emanates from the extra’s chest sounds unnervingly real, and as you find yourself wondering how exactly they’d create that noise without the use of human flesh you catch what Jenny is mumbling, whilst she stabs—not words at all, in fact, but the alphabet. Backwards.
*
Here is the talk show. Jenny knows better now and wants the world to know, too, or at least the world that watches daytime television. This Jenny is an even thirty, perched on the edge of a plush couch as though she might get up and run at any moment, nose looking slightly less aquiline, and her hair so red—how did she get her hair so red?—and she has such good news to share. How there could have been prostitution, but there wasn’t; how there could have been drugs, but there weren’t; how there could have been death, but she escaped it; how a man could have taken her—a jagged mountain of a man with a patchy beard and claw fingers and eyes not like pools but like tunnels, endless ones possessing a great force which sucked everything inside them, where there was a pitted dirt floor that you walked and walked and walked until your shrinking lungs contracted in a way that felt ultimate and yet, still, you found yourself walking, caught forever in the eyes of the crooked man.
How there could have been any of these things, but there wasn’t, and thank God! And isn’t it lucky that such crises were averted! You can’t see the talk show host—she is an off-screen presence, a bodiless and buoyant entity—but from the pitch of her voice alone you can tell that she is smiling.
*
Here is the desert. Sand everywhere, in piles and moats and mountains, with trails running through the grains that lead to nowhere, grit crunching ominously in your teeth when you finally close your open mouth—and how did your daughter carry all that sand onstage, anyway, in her little arms, with her tiny hands? When did she grow so strong, your little girl?
The light pans across Jenny’s body. This Jenny is in her forties, long-haunted by her demons. Jenny recently made the mistake of inviting them in for tea. The demons, it seems, do not drink tea.
The sand swallows Jenny’s form in pieces—a hand lost first, the bony fingers slipping under an umber wave, and then her leg begins to go, the painted toes and a toned calf and the cap of her knee, which she never liked anyway, and her thigh next, and after a while she looks more and more like a thing—like something someone lost because it fell out of their pocket on a walk one evening, a disembodied keychain of a girl—and less and less like herself. Like Jenny.
*
Here is the stage. Your sweat has pooled around you on the seat; everyone else rises to offer a standing ovation but you find yourself unable to move. Suddenly, you cannot remember a time before the applause, just as you cannot imagine an era beyond it: the clapping around you almighty like thunder, or the explosion of many pipe bombs, or a thousand men running up and down a winding staircase. Your daughter comes out from behind the curtain, clad in all black, with scarlet paint staining her sleeves. She clasps Jenny’s hand, bows, and Jenny grins, but to you her grin seems tight, hollow, and just slightly too wide, her grip tightening around your daughter’s fingers as you wait for her to remove her mask, but she just continues to bow and you still don’t know—
What have they done to you, Jenny? Who do you think you are?
Abigail Oswald holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and currently resides in Connecticut. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anomaly, Fugue, Gone Lawn, Hobart, Necessary Fiction, Sundog, and elsewhere. You can find her online at abigailwashere.com.