catalyst: chapter 22
The Smiling Woman
It was hard to avoid the sand getting in her mouth, too hard once it was in to keep it from scratching the insides of her cheeks, from sticking in the gaps between her teeth. The sand was a sufferable consequence, though there wasn’t much left of her prize on the beach once she had finally arrived. Each delicious, precious bite was worth whatever sand she had to expectorate later. If only that photographer had gotten the photo to media sources earlier, she could have maybe beat mother nature to the wreckage.
So, while she couldn’t have all of it, she certainly could have some of it. The red glass melted delicately in her mouth, a flood of copper and iron washing over her tongue and had a small crunch worth savoring. Like the seeds, each bite gave her a renewed sense of life, each swallow another swell of growth and power inside of her. This was arguably less edible, but again, worth the gain.
“Not all artifacts are whole, sometimes you just enjoy the pieces,” she said to herself.
She called them artifacts because they marked a change in humans, a change in herself. These things were pure creation, pure transformative power. The smiling woman had been on a journey to consume as many of these artifacts as possible since first discovering them. The image of a sad woman made of red glass on a beach, a missing woman’s apartment filled with strange leaves and seeds, and some various others she had yet to find. The logistics of consuming some of the others would be a future problem, especially the two men who had become paintings and metal, respectively.
The anomalies had started a few years before, some strange occurrences leading to mysterious phenomena left behind, or maybe a witness was able to share the fantastical story. More than a few times in her search had she broken into homes, into morgues, into graves themselves. It had taken her a singular instance of a false report, something mistaken for an artifact, for her to learn how awful someone unchanged tasted. Even worse was the bite she took out of some embalmed remains barely worth burying, let alone preserving.
The smiling woman had been sitting at home, wasting away in a life she had outgrown but couldn’t break out of when she saw the first news report. A woman had allegedly gone missing shortly after giving birth, witnesses claiming she had unraveled like fabric. The woman had reportedly slowly tugged at herself and fell apart into a pile of thread. If memory served correct, it had had a smoky flavor and the consistency of clouds, though it looked and felt denser when she recovered it from the church repository. The smiling woman had watched her husband give zero care to something she found so fascinating when they saw the news report.
“What do you mean,” he had asked.
“What do you mean, ‘what do you mean’? That is insane that a woman just turned into a pile of thread, unraveling like a sweater.”
“Just some crazy Georgia people out in the woods on LSD. You heard the lady, that footage could have been faked. Nothing to fret over. Couple of weeks, she’ll turn up and they’ll try to pass her off as some saint or something. Yarn lady, back from the dead. Probably some stunt for the internet.”
Her husband had always been willfully unaffected by the world, his sight ending at the edge of town, his aspirations achieved twenty years ago and never updated.
“Well, I want to know what really happened! I bet they got that thread locked up. I wanna see it. Let’s go see it!”
“Let’s go see it?” he stared at her incredulously, “have you lost your mind, woman?”
Maybe she had.
After the first story, there were no updates, no follow-ups, and even though she had reached out to the news station, the church, and had tried to find other people mentioned in the story, she came up with nothing. Even when she brought it back up to her husband, he had to be reminded, as if the event hadn’t affected him at all. But she couldn’t let it go. She searched online, hunted for groups that could offer any more information. She joined message boards for the church, newsletters, followed the social media of the church’s members, those of the families of the people involved. She had even tried to find the baby’s father, a man named Kane, who had taken the child and disappeared.
“Maybe they’re thread now too,” she mumbled.
“What? What are you saying? Put that screen away, it’s late!”
Not only had she lost a sense of division in her inner and outer voices, but the smiling woman had lost all sense of time back then. She started sleeping in the guest room so she wouldn’t bother her husband throughout the night in her search. She stayed home from her volunteer position at the library, citing a need for a break to explore new creative avenues. She had even stopped responding to her friends and other social ties, eschewing all responsibility to find where this thread woman had gone, where this man had taken their baby.
“He has to have her. The three of them just ran off.”
And then one day she just ran off. Left, not knowing whether her husband even noticed outside of no one cooking him dinner anymore and moved to Georgia before ingratiating herself into the church. While they had been leery of new members once the rumors began spreading, she had played dumb well enough that soon she was working her way up in the structure of the church. The leader, Valia, had been suspicious of the smiling woman at first, but they bonded over the treatment they received from their late husbands, a lie the smiling woman could allow since she didn’t plan to go back to hers anyway.
Valia’s husband seemed like a real piece of work himself. Not that the smiling woman’s husband was anything more than neglectful of her emotional and intellectual needs, but Valia’s ex-husband had made her own seem like a saint. Valia and him had been married for twenty-five years before she was able to finally get out from under her ex. Twenty-five years of physical, mental, and emotional abuse, abuse that extended past her and onto their kids, abuse that she hadn’t been able to stop and felt guilty for every day. Despite her past, the smiling woman thought Valia had come out kinder than most, she just had an intensity that overshadowed others.
“You know, the church saved me. God bless it. I know everyone says that, but it really did. It really did, sister.”
The smiling woman nodded as Valia continued.
“After I left that scumbag, this community welcomed me without judgment and gave me a place to call home. I even slept here a couple of times hiding out from that man. These walls, they saved me. God gave me a new home. He blessed me, as he so often does.”
Valia was giving a new group of prospects a tour through the church. Originally started in the living room of some locals, they had grown their flock to be able to afford to build out an old industrial building into a welcoming space for people to worship. While the smiling woman had never really been much for religion, besides the faith and divine she saw in herself, it was easy enough to pretend in order to get closer to that artifact. She’d been lying about her faith in her husband for years, God was no different. Her biggest complaint was how cold the building was despite a constant hum of the heating system overhead.
“I know it isn’t the most ideal place for a church, but we have been able to build it like our own inside at the fraction of the cost. We don’t expect our followers to give unless they feel so called to do so. We find a way somehow. He finds a way for us.”
Valia seemed to have a pattern of sacrificing herself to the needs of those around her, the smiling woman noted. Perhaps that could be used to her advantage seeing as how after a few months she still hadn’t seen the artifact. It had been locked away in some room, and if it weren’t for the smoky smell occasionally wafting from Valia’s office, the smiling woman would have been wiser to believe the thing didn’t exist. She had laid eyes on it once before during some special tirade Valia was on proving some point not worth proving. A brief glimpse that reminded her of what she had seen on the television that day and why she had come out here and done all of this. That one little peep reignited her passion for being close to this, to understanding this, to finding a way to harness this power she knew just had to be in it, this would begin a path of worshipping each special meal after each special meal.
She waited in the rows of folding chairs until closing and snuck herself into the bathroom before anyone could notice she was still there. Her best shot of getting at it was at night, and since there would be no one around her, she could truly savor every second of it. She waited for a while in the dark, waited for the large front doors to close and the lock to sound before she snuck back out of the bathroom and into the back offices. Valia’s office was in the back, and the smiling woman knew she would have kept their most precious item as close to her side as possible. She searched the church leader’s desk, the drawers unlocked and easy to access.
“Nothing.”
She started pouring through the cabinets and armoires in the office, hoping that she would find something. In the last one she checked, she found a little hook on the back of the inner part of the front, just above the frame of the door. She grabbed the keys that dangled there and set to trying to find the lock they corresponded to.
The smiling woman couldn’t find any clues as to where the thing could be hidden, and while she felt silly, like she was in some old spy movie, she started running her hands over the paneled walls, looking for some sort of lip or knot that would betray a secret chamber behind it. That was when she noticed the rug on the floor under the chair. Rolling the chair out of her way, she picked up the ugly patterned carpet, something so clearly chosen by Valia and so out of place in an office that held such an important item. Underneath, there was a little hatch with a small notch taken out of it. The smiling woman placed her nail in the tiny sliver of space and pulled up, uncovering a lock and keyhole underneath. Once unlocked, the smiling woman lifted out the glass case that held the artifact inside of it and placed it on the desk. She sat in the chair and opened the box, resisting the urge to just grab the pile in front of her. She took in a deep breath, inhaled the smoky scent she had captured before when she encountered it.
She wanted to eat it.
The smiling woman picked up the thread and placed it on her tongue, feeling embarrassed at her childish urge to eat the whole thing like a cartoon dog eating spaghetti. The smoky flavor overwhelmed her the moment it entered her mouth, and she couldn’t get past the light weight of the thread. She had seen pictures of the woman this used to be, had mined for stories and clues as to who she was, but ultimately, the smiling woman didn’t need to know who she was for this to give her power. Not that she was sure she would gain anything from this act, but she had a yearning to consume this, a hunger for something more, something she didn’t understand. Now here it was, the anticipation finally over. Each fold, each pull of the thread into her mouth warmed her in a way nothing else had. Each bite gave her a strength in her bones, a surge in her blood of vitality that had long been missing. There was something about this woman who had come unraveled that filled the gaps in the smiling woman’s life, gaps she had tried to fill with success and family and love, each effort more worthless than the last.
“My God! What are you doing?!”
Lost in the revery of her meal, the smiling woman hadn’t heard the door open behind her, a careless mistake.
“Oh my— are you eating that?!” Valia shouted as she approached the desk where the smiling woman sat for her meal. The woman tried grabbing at it, but the smiling woman quickly ripped it away.
By now, the smiling woman was beginning to feel something change within her, something shifting and evolving as she digested the holiest of holy things in the church. She ate faster, craving this new magic that was building inside of her, and while Valia was trying to wrestle her away from the last of her meal, the smiling woman felt a strength pass through her. She grabbed the church leader by the collar and tossed her into the wall, knocking the other woman unconscious, never breaking from consuming her meal. Fast now she ate, almost done with the smoky prize, it was going down easily without chewing. It was becoming part of her, changing her, and for a brief moment she considered that she hadn’t fully thought through what might happen. She had purely chased a high that she wanted to feel, and now she was devouring the thing she needed to feel that way.
She took her final bite, pausing before swallowing, and as she was relishing the completion of her task, Valia rose up and slashed at her with a letter opener from the desk. The smiling woman’s forearm split down the length of it and forced her to stumble backwards. Valia stood ready to swing again, the smiling woman stepping back away from the wild arc. She turned at the perfect moment to dodge Valia as the woman lunged at her with the blade. The smiling woman took the missed attack as an opportunity to kick her church friend back away from her. Valia stumbled and dropped the knife while the smiling woman pulled her own hand away from the wound she had clasped so quickly. The blood was dark from the initial slash, but the wound itself had stopped bleeding. Valia and smiling woman watched as the wound started to seal itself back together, quick threads crossing the gory chasm of her forearm. The wound healed slowly; the wet conjoining of flesh seemed deafening as the two women watched in horror and awe. Valia had blanched and looked unstable, and as the wound closed itself up, she fainted to the floor.
The newly healed woman smiled. So, this was the power of that thread.
She couldn’t assign her strength previously to anything concrete besides adrenaline, but this healing factor was absolutely a direct cause of eating the thread. She smelled the air, the smoky scent dissipating as she stepped over her friend laid out on the floor. She searched the box for any extra scraps she had missed, but it seemed that she had gotten the whole meal in one fell swoop.
The smiling woman was excited by the prospect of what this newfound power meant, what she could accomplish if she had more, and wondered what new things there were to find in the world. Healing herself was a wonderful power to obtain, especially if didn’t wane. She didn’t know where she would need to search, but if the man and his daughter had escaped, if she really had been the one to cause all of this, then there would be others she affected surely. There was sure to be a trail leading her to the girl, leading her to her next meal.
Leading her to her power.
Valia watched from a hunched position on the floor as this strange, new monster strode out of her office without looking back.
thank you for reading the next installment of catalyst. if you’d like to get new chapters every week, straight to your inbox, subscribe above!