Like Blood, Like Flame

by Rachel Harbaugh

Opal was seven, the first time. Curled up under Granny Neda’s crazy quilt in the front bedroom, she dreamed about pixies knocking on the window pane to fly her to fairyland. When the tapping got loud enough, she sat up in the bed, eager to let the fairies spirit her away to some green place that didn’t have a daddy that drank and a mama that hollered and a Granny who was dead in the church yard.

But in the wispy moonlight leaking through yellowed lace curtains, Opal saw no fairy. A man hunkered on the floor by the closet door, head hung low as he rocked back and forth and back and forth and –

Opal pinched the inside of her elbow hard enough to make tears trickle and shut her eyes tight and willed herself to wake up. One of Granny’s hymns lilted through her mind, clear as Granny Neda singing into her ear, and she clung to the notes so maybe they could carry her out of the nightmare. When peace like a river attendeth my way. When sorrows like sea billows roll. Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say it is well, it is well with my soul.

Somewhere in the midst of the first verse, the thumping had stopped.

Opal opened her eyes.

The man stood next to her bed.

His hair was dripping onto his shoulders as if he’d just braved a rain storm with no hat. Deep-set eyes flashed lightning below heavy eyebrows. On his forehead, blood pooled like the deer her daddy had gutshot.

“Help me, little girl. I hear the angels callin’ me and I can’t leave.”

Opal gripped the quilt to her chin, her lip quivering.

“Why can’t you leave, mister?”

The man sighed, and his eyes became puppy-dog sad.

“I… I don’t know.”

Tears began to roll down his cheeks.

“I miss my Annie. She looked like you–same red curls. I just want to be with her again.”

Opal was scared of a lot of things.

Her daddy’s belt. The preacher’s shouts about hellfire and damnation. The way her mama never looked at her except to hurl words that hurt deeper than Daddy’s hands ever could.

But seeing this man crumble at her bedside—desperate for his daughter—didn’t scare her. It made her battered little heart melt, and she clambered out of bed and hugged him as best as she could.

“I’ll figure a way for you to leave, mister. Annie’s missin’ you too, I bet.”

They held each other there, the ghost and the little girl, invisible creatures starved for a gentle touch.

#

Twenty years later, and Opal saw them everywhere. Some lingered on riverbanks, blue-tinged faces staring listlessly at water that offered no reflection. Others leaned against tree trunks, their necks lolling to one side like snapped branches. The worst for her were the babies, tiny bodies on the ground crying for their mamas. She could help the adults, even the children, pass over. But the young ones couldn’t tell her their stories.

Trying to piece together someone else’s story was how Opal found herself at the front of Mayor Tatum’s rambling house. She’d learned over the years that sharing her abilities with others created visceral, sometimes dangerous, reactions. Widows screamed. Preachers accused her of bewitching their parishioners. Mothers collapsed into her arms in a crumpled mix of sorrow and relief. Opal had figured out the importance of caution. The need to tip-toe around hurting people like she’d tip-toed around her parents.

When she’d walked past the Mayor’s house and heard squawling coming from the hydrangea bushes, she thought it was a kitten mewling for its mama’s milk. But the cries got louder and louder and decidedly more human, and Opal had to look to find what she already knew. A newborn baby wrapped in an apron as a loving substitute for an unburied casket. She picked the baby up, the ephemeral turning solid in her hands, and the crying quieted. Blinking brown eyes blindly searched Opal’s face, and the baby nuzzled her chest looking for the scent of her mama.

On the ground behind the hydrangeas, unpacked earth hinted at the baby’s grave. Opal let the baby nestle into her chest, empty breasts aching to give milk even though nothing could sate the child’s hunger. She walked around the porch to the back of the large house. The screen door to the kitchen teased the air with wafts of bread baking and chicken frying. Druscilla, the mayor’s cook, bustled around the kitchen in a practiced rhythm as Opal stood outside the door.

“Hello, Dru.” The baby was starting to fuss again, and Opal tightened her arms around her. “Is Lottie here?”

Druscilla smiled at Opal’s voice.

“Naw, honey. She’s upstairs seein’ to lunch. What do you need?”

Opal shifted the now-crying baby girl, considering Druscilla’s consistent kindness to her over the years. Her tears soaking Opal’s dress when she’d shared her husband’s wishes from beyond. As her husband watched his wife start to heal, his own tears turned to gleaming sunbeams. Then his spirit shattered into a thousand fireflies.

“Dru,” her voice was soft as fresh churned butter. “Was Lottie ever with child?”

Druscilla’s hand fumbled the pea pod she was snapping.

“You saw her baby, Ms. Opal? You truly did?”

She turned and looked at Opal for the first time, the fine hatching of the screen casting Opal’s image like tiny quilting squares, and she saw her arms cradled at her chest.

Druscilla gasped.

“Oh honey, you’re holdin’ her, ain’t you?”

Opal nodded, pinprick tears poking at her eyeballs as Druscilla opened the screen door and swept her inside.

Opal collapsed into Druscilla’s welcoming arms, careful not to put too much pressure on the little spirit baby dozing on her breast.

#

Opal’s attempts at reconciling Lottie and her baby are what got her sent to Dix Hill. The clay bricks of the North Carolina Insane Hospital reminded her of a set-in bloodstain and the hallways of brown-tinged bone. She stayed in a large room with twenty other women, some insane, most not, others becoming deranged by the asylum itself. Screaming kept her from sleep most nights, horrible animal wails echoing through the corridors. When the other patients weren’t keeping her awake, it was the ghosts.

A girl with open gashes on her wrists wrote scarlet poetry on the walls. Twin boys tried to stitch themselves together. A grandmother knitted a blue blanket that never grew larger. Through all the tears and pain of the living and the dead, Opal rocked back and forth and back and forth and –

Her arms ached for a baby that wasn’t hers. And she tried to comprehend the mother’s love that drove Lottie to the point of burying her child in her kitchen apron, shaded from the sun and rain by the bright blue sky of hydrangeas, after Mayor Tatum killed their daughter to cover up his mistake.

Opal wondered where Lottie was–if she was even still alive. Was she in some dark corner of Dix Hill too, rocking herself and longing for her baby?

#

Everything felt too heavy for Opal inside Dix Hill, and she took to stuffing her ears with papers torn from books to try to drown out the pleas of the myriad spirits wandering the halls. But they never really helped. The wails and pleas scraped her brain like a fox trying to gnaw its way out of a trap.

She had started to learn a way to half-survive there. Rules that Opal repeated to herself like some of the other women committed bible verses to memory. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t look anyone in the eye. Keep your distance from the ghosts. That worked well most of the time, but some spirits are stubborn and don’t like being ignored.

One morning, as she was walking to chapel, type-written paper spilling out of her ears, she heard Granny Neda’s voice rifling through her mind clear as day. Be thou my vision, oh lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me save that thou art. Be thou my best thought, by day or by night. Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

Of all the ghosts, and over all the years since Opal first saw the man in the front bedroom, she’d selfishly yearned to see Granny Neda again. To touch her, feel her arms wrapped around her tight as the closest thing Opal’d ever had to a savior.

But seeing her there in the dim hallway, the blue dress they’d buried her in leaving a trail of gravedirt where it brushed the ground, made Opal’s heart speed up to a staggered gallop. She broke all three rules, in that one moment.

“Granny?” Her voice was hoarse from lack of use. “That you?”

Granny stopped, blue skirt billowing as if by some invisible wind, and turned to look at her. A sly smile–what Opal had thought of as her pixie grin–teased her face, and she beckoned Opal to follow her.

So Opal did, feeling like she were a child again, playing tag outside in the twilight.

Granny Neda zig-zagged through the serpentine passages, and Opal chased her as fast as she could without raising suspicion. Granny Neda went through a white door, and Opal flew after her, flinging the door wide in her eagerness.

The room was white too—sterile and cold. A wooden desk took up the bulk of the small room. Shelves full of books and strange collections lined the wall opposite. There was no Granny to be found.

Opal’s eyes slid around the room, curiosity had always been what did her in. The bookcases called to her, the scent of leather and dust sitting heavy in the air. A massive animal skull peered down at her from the topmost shelf, and she was caught up in its empty gaze.

“Equus caballus.” A deep voice came from behind her, and she shrieked, turning quickly.

A man stood there, cleaning a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with a handkerchief.

“The skull, it’s a draft horse.”

He nodded at the second shelf.

“That small one there, that’s a squirrel. And down there –”

His glasses flew from his hand as he pointed towards the bottom of the bookcase. There was a grating crack like a legbone breaking as it landed on the wooden floor at Opal’s feet.

She knelt down and picked the frames up, wincing as the fragments of the left lens fell to the hardwood.

The man cursed as she handed what was left of the glasses to him, her eyes downcast.

Don’t look anyone in the eye.

“I’m very sorry, sir.”

“It’s not your fault,” he chuckled. “ I always have gotten a bit too enthusiastic when it comes to science. Now, how did a patient find her way inside a doctor’s private studies?”

Opal’s ears began to feel hot – the feeling of shame rising up from the pits of childhood memories.

“I’m very sorry, sir.”

“No, I’m simply curious.” The man stepped closer; she could see the tip of his boot shining black against the piney wood floor. “You’re not in trouble; I give you my word.”

Opal stared at the boot, for a moment that seemed to stretch unnaturally long.

“It’s an asylum, Doctor. I thought I heard voices.”

#

Opal learned through listening that the bone-man’s name was Doctor O’Neil. She hadn’t met anyone else before who shared a fascination and affinity towards death. Opal watched from the shadows as he interacted with other patients in Dix Hill with kindness and laughter, all while wearing eyeglasses with mismatched lenses.

Opal had lost track of her time spent in the guts of the hospital. Time worked differently there. Her days were spent in dull rhythms. Get up. Go to breakfast. Go to chapel. The only reprieve from her time at Dix Hill were the mornings spent outside. The compliant patients were allowed to work in the greenhouses and gardens, in hopes the fresh air and clean earth would help heal them.

Opal loved the rose bushes. She felt a kinship in how they were so fiercely defiant. Delicate, but barbed. Her hands lingered on the coiled petals in a palette ranging from the palest pink to a dark, nearly metal-rust, brown. Dr. O’Neil found her there, surrounded by a shock of color, her fingers wrapped around the stem of a red rose.

“Ah, my favorite color.”

Opal jumped at the sound of his voice, her thumb catching on a thorn.

“Red, like blood?” She held up her thumb, beads of blood dripping to the grass.

He shook his head, fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and offered it to her.

“Like flame. Fire has always fascinated me, the way it burns everything down to its very essence.”

#

They began working together amongst the rose bushes. He never once asked her about her hallucinations, as her diagnosis stated, and she never questioned him about the gathering shadows under his eyes. She learned that while he was trained as a field surgeon during the war, before that he’d been an undertaker.

“It’s truly not that different, working with the bodies of the dead and the living,” he said, one morning when the air was damp with the humidity of summer.

“Which do you prefer?” Opal asked, ignoring the man carrying his own head as he limped up the garden path.

“Well,” Dr. O’Neil smiled sadly, “at least the dead don’t cry out when I cut into them.”

Lottie’s baby’s screams echoed in her mind.

“How lucky for you,” she said.

#

Their friendship grew as the days lengthened. Dr. O’Neil began to confide in her, little crumbs at first.

“The board is urging more stringent treatment of patients. I’m afraid it’ll cause more harm than good.” The shadows under his blue eyes seemed particularly dark. “They’re talking about using trephining here, though there’s no good evidence that causes any positive symptomatic changes.”

“Trephining? I’m afraid that I don’t speak doctor.”

“Boring a hole into a patient’s skull. There’s a belief it rids patients of —” He trailed off.

“Of what?” Opal pressed.

“Hallucinations.”

Opal traced her finger in the dirt, drawing a big house with a porch.

“You know,” she said, “I’m not crazy. I do see them. Truly. They follow me like lost dogs looking for home.”

Dr. O’Neil bent down and added a raincloud to the sketch, his finger lingering inches from hers.

“I know you’re not, Opal. But the board doesn’t.”

#

The rose bushes had begun to lose their leaves when he offered her a proposal.

“I’m going to be leaving Dix Hill soon. I can’t stand by and watch the board hollow people for the sake of a quick cure.”

Opal focused on the dying roses.

“Where will you go?”

“The mountains. I got a letter from a man I doctored during the war. Had to saw off his leg before the gangrene could set in. He spoke of a need for a doctor there in his ‘cove,’ as he called it.”

Dr. O’Neil sighed, a heavy sound.

“If I’m going to work on the living, I want to help and not hurt them.”

“Well Dr. O’Neil,” Opal said, “You’ll be missed. Kindness is scarce here.”

“That’s the thing. Would you like to come with me?”

Opal blinked.

“Wha—?”

“The trephining is coming, and you will be subjected to it if you stay. You’re an ideal candidate for the procedure, unfortunately. Come with me, and you’ll keep that Sight of yours, and gain back your freedom.”

Opal laughed.

“There’s no way they’d just let me leave with you, doctor or no doctor.”

But Dr. O’Neil wasn’t laughing.

“I know they wouldn’t. But they would if you were to marry me. It would just be a marriage of convenience, of course.”

She looked at him, her lip quirked in a semblance of Granny Neda’s pixie grin.

“You’re a right good-lookin’ man, Dr. O’Neil, but I am shocked at how open your advances are. If you’re suggesting convenience of anything other than cooking and cleaning, I’m afraid I’d be delving into completely new territory.”

His pale cheeks flushed sunrise pink.

“My lord, Opal. I’m expecting nothing of the sort. At least, not unless it were something you’d be open to exploring. It would strictly be a way to get you safely out of here and far away.” Dr. O’Neil smirked. “Although, it would be very nice to not have to worry about cooking any longer.”

Opal grinned.

“Now, I’ve never been the world’s greatest cook and I’m horribly out of practice so don’t be too disappointed.”

“So you’ll do it?”

“Yes, Dr. O’Neil, I’ll marry you.”

He smiled, and the storm clouds under his eyes softened as he slipped a circle of woven grass onto her ring finger.

“You can call me Henry, Opal.”

#

According to Henry, there were no raised eyebrows in the board when he announced their impending marriage and his desire to discharge her from the hospital. Apparently, doctors marrying patients wasn’t unheard of, no matter how vulnerable they were, and that reminded Opal of the way Mayor Tatum did Lottie and that poor little baby buried beneath the hydrangeas.

Henry’s right hand enveloped her left, as they walked towards freedom. The blade of grass had long since disintegrated, and as he helped her into the buggy, his thumb caressed the naked digit.

“One day, Opal.” Henry’s voice prickled her skin like fog rolling off the grass. “I’m going to buy you a ring. A ruby one.”

“Red, huh?”

“Mhmhm.” His fingers danced across her neck, sending sparks running down her backbone. “Like blood, like flame.”

He kissed her then, and all the spirits’ ceaseless cries were drowned out by Opal’s heart, so finally and completely full that it wept.

As they reached the gate, Opal turned on her perch next to Henry on the buggy’s seat and looked back towards the top of the hill. The hospital loomed large in the brilliant sunset, red bricks gleaming like a skinned animal. She thought of all the ghosts, both living and dead, that lingered within and she was thankful she no longer was one.