I know girls sometimes do witchcraft. I’m at a pizza parlor two blocks down from my job. This is where I meet Margaret.
I’m on my lunch break from driving warehouse forklifts. The warehouse is freezing in January, and my nose is always running. I can see the slice I’m choosing through the glass. I want to press my hands against the glow of the pizza case and stay there forever.
I don’t see her at first. She turns around in front of me in line and says, “I feel drawn to tell you that you have beautiful energy.”
Mentally, I am still halfway inside the fog of the freezer. The part of me that is conscious of the pizza parlor is fixated on a certain slice of cheese, hoping no one ahead of me takes it, and it’s like she has just appeared there. What I notice first is her hair: black, but somehow also purple, turning away from me. I make a strangled sound. Girls don’t usually talk to me in public.
I sink down to tie my shoe, and the crumbs in the lines of the linoleum are close to my face. She is ordering a slice of pizza with spinach and mushrooms curled into the cheese, talking to the cashier about lapses in veganism, and I feel a gravitational pull to her.
“Thank you,” I say, at the soda fountain. “About my energy.”
She is filling a disposable cup with water, tinted soda pink. When she smiles, her teeth are surprisingly small and angular, like an animal’s. “It feels very clean,” she says. “And old.”
I’m not sure what comes over me, but I ask for her number, and she writes it on a napkin with the pen from my jacket pocket. I keep the napkin with its spot of pizza grease and its leaning sevens in my wallet behind my library card.
I text Margaret on a Thursday. I am standing at my kitchen counter eating a rotisserie chicken out of the container. The chicken is becoming more and more skeletal, almost by itself. She comes into my psyche like a popup ad on a website. For a second, I am so lonely there is a cave opening in my stomach.
Margaret meets me for coffee. In the coffee place my hands are sweaty. I’m asking a lot of questions, like “What do you do for fun?” and “What are your favorite foods?”
I am watching her mouth move while she talks. There is a panicked silence where I cannot think of another question.
“Do you want a tarot reading?” she says.
My sisters prepared me from a young age. They told me that my sun sign is in Taurus, my rising is Virgo, and my moon, which is everything that is wrong with me, is in Aquarius, and then they said, “Get out of our room.”
Margaret is different from this: more concentrated. She is already lifting a deck out of her purse.
“That would be great,” I say.
“I am sensing a heaviness,” she says. “How have you been feeling?”
Usually I feel things remotely, like looking down at water in a canyon, everything deep and still. I spend hours in my apartment at night, watching videos about the formation of caves. I never have the urge to sink my teeth into my own forearm.
Margaret is looking at me, waiting for an answer. I picture an imaginary hand moving through the darkness of my inner self and hope it will brush up against something—a thought or a feeling. “Okay,” I say. “Never too good.”
“Right,” she says.
The cards fall.
She turns them over, slides them into place on the table. “You’re carrying an unspeakable sadness,” she says.
“I am?” I have been a little sluggish, doing fewer reps in the gym, feeling overwhelmed at work sometimes. I can admit that. I feel special that she is noticing this about me.
“I have a place for this,” she says. “You can come with me if you want. It’s for spiritual healing.”
The idea of spiritual healing makes me feel a little sick, but I want to see Margaret again.
The first time I go to her apartment, her roommates collect around me like I am a strange specimen from another world. I am used to gray walls, my nondescript furniture ordered from Amazon. Her room is full of knitted things and stones with special properties, jars of moon water, a rug with mushrooms on it. I can tell that when she is not with me, she does not think about me at all, or barely.
We sit in the deep fur of her bedroom carpet with the lights off. Her face is purple in the nightlight. She kisses me first, and then we are making out. She pulls back with lipstick all around her mouth, and for a second, I have the feeling I’m being gored to death.
The first time Margaret takes me to the Circle of Love and Spiritual Expansion, I feel wrong. I am wearing pants with big pockets and a flannel. I am rough and too big, my elbows hanging at strange heights. The Circle meets in a rec center gymnasium. Everyone is sitting on yoga mats and camping chairs. There is a young woman in expensive looking exercise clothes and people who look like they have just rolled out of bed, wearing sandals, divorcees, a burnt out looking man in a button down and a couple who could be my grandparents.
Their faces all turn when we approach the circle. Everyone has sad eyes. They are not people who understand the organization of a warehouse. I follow Margaret’s movements, unroll a mat, sit beside her. The talk is just starting.
The man who seems to be responsible is wearing flowy pants. “Welcome,” he says. “My name is Clarke. Today we are talking about the Shadow.” He looks at each of us. “Have you ever felt evil things around you? Felt an abnormal impulse?”
I have chills. I keep my elbows on my knees.
“It’s important to be protected,” he says. “We know that there are invisible things out there. Beings that feed on us. We’ve all felt it. A weird pull that isn’t you. You’re suddenly craving fast food all the time. These beings feed on our addictions: getting high too much, our time spent scrolling on social media, anything mindless and unhealthy.”
During the time for questions, I raise my hand, “Is this real or a metaphor?” I hear my voice say. I’m hoping it’s some kind of self-help analogy. Margaret’s eyes are on me, like searchlights, like she is seeing me for the first time, evaluating me. I realize that I am afraid.
“What is real?” the man counters. “What do you define as real?”
I shake my head, gesture to the room, to the basketball hoops.
“There are many ways of understanding things,” he tells me. “Many ways of perceiving.”
I don’t appreciate this. I like yes or no answers. I nod my head because I want everyone to stop looking at me. I have watched YouTube videos about how differently animals see the world than we do.
A man recounts his experience kicking heroin. After it is over, several people hug me. They said, “Thank you. Thank you for sharing your heart.”
Everyone knows Margaret, in ways that I don’t. They hold both of her hands and speak intently into her face like she has answers. She is passed around the room. Clarke, who I find out is a swim instructor and teaches yoga a couple nights a week, holds her against him by two points of her spine and sways back and forth. I look at my work boots respectfully and make myself be cool. I shouldn’t think anything. I’m not that kind of guy. Somewhere deep down, there is a great violence.
I drive Margaret home. She finds an old song on the radio and moves to it like she is tripping. “So what do you think?” she says, finally, as we slide through a green light.
All week, Margaret has been taking off her clothes in my mind. All week, she’s been understanding me, seeing something special about me in my imagination, saying “I sense a heaviness.”
“It’s neat,” I say. “It reminds me of church, but different. I don’t trust some of the men.”
“What do you mean?”
It’s obvious when Margaret doesn’t like something. It sucks the air out of the car.
“Just weird,” I say.
“There is no room for jealousy in this connection,” Margaret says. “No one can belong to anyone. We are two souls on separate journeys. The men are my spiritual family.”
It’s too hot in the car. I feel like I’ve gotten caught doing something wrong and I want to say that I’m sorry, that I’m not like that. “I’m just saying,” I say. “I think some of them are looking at you as more than a soul.”
At work, it all falls away from me in the rhythm of metal hitting metal, cardboard, hard, fast motion, icy air, heavy things. I place my sandwich in the fridge. I skewer the pallets for hours, lift them into the steel.
Sometimes, I listen to the top caving podcasts to fill my head with human voices. In the safety of my earbuds, I imagine stalactites and stalagmites, calcium carbonate instead of steel, everything suspended in the light coming down from the ceiling. I have begun to feel something lurking in the deep waters of my feelings.
I would like to talk to someone about this feeling but I’m not quite sure what it is.
Sometimes, the truckers at the loading dock are the only people I talk to all day.
“Did you catch the game?” I say, when the shipping clerk is in the breakroom at the same time as me.
He’s eating a chili dog. His eyes are on the TV. “Hell of a game,” he says.
When he leaves, I see myself in the creek at seven years old, picking up stones. I am always alone. My sisters are in their own world of nail polish and magazines and no-boys-allowed signs. I remember the science lesson on limestone and dolomite, the geology of erosion, the library books about caverns. I am left at the grocery store twice in the same summer. Years and years are going by and nothing that bad is happening, but everyone is moving past me and no one is seeing me.
On my way home from work, I find rose quartz in my glove box. I know because I look it up.
In my apartment, I am pointless. It’s like being in storage. It is Thursday again. I stand in my bathroom mirror. My hair is limp. Margaret texts me, “Circle at 7?”
I remember the way I felt last time, as though something had happened to me, and not fully in a good way. Still, there was something to the tension of the gym—the way the car felt like a release afterwards. Mostly, I want to see Margaret. I text, “Yes.”
Some weeks in the Circle, people go into the middle and tell us the worst things that have happened to them and cry and cry and then we hold them. This makes me realize that in my life before Margaret, no one was hugging me. I wrap my arms around an old man who is shaking, then around a mother of three. I feel something enormous in my chest that I have never felt before. It’s like I’m connected to these people, like I want to protect them, which makes me feel slightly repulsed, like I never want to see them again. My feelings are in well-wrapped units, safe to ship, difficult to access.
“How do you feel?” someone asks me. Everyone is looking at me.
“I’m just happy to be here,” I say. I smile until they all look away.
Some weeks, we all lie on the floor with our eyes closed. Afterward, I Venmo my suggested donation.
Things are beginning to speed up, to gain definition. Now, when I sleep too little, I see a dark figure standing in my closet and I want to hug it. Before Margaret, there were showers and frozen pizzas and no one checking if I was okay.
When I am awake in my apartment and she is not texting me back, I look at pictures of underground lakes, of caves with water in them. Some are better than others.
I’m not sure if the Circle is good for Margaret. We are sitting in my bed and she is talking over the TV show, her voice mixing in with the voice of the home improvement man.
“I think I’m a troubled person,” she tells me. “I’m gifted, but a lot of bad things happened to me as a child. That’s why all of this has been helping me so much.”
I’m keeping my eyes on the TV. I don’t know what to say. My chest feels tight. I want her to talk to me about these issues instead of all those people at the circle, except now that it is happening, I want to talk about anything else.
“The spiritual teachers are giving me special protocols to help me,” she’s saying. She is working with Clarke personally. He’s telling her how to breathe. I try not to think about this.
She has started living off strange smoothies, celery juice and spirulina. Earlier today, she texted me that she has been shitting black but feeling a little better. She doesn’t look better. She looks like she’s rotting from the inside, but in a hot way.
I put my hand on her thigh. “You know,” I say. “You can talk to me about anything.”
She looks into my face. “Okay. Thank you,” she says. For a second, I think there is going to be a flood of words, and then she reaches for the remote.
I feel a little relieved.
On top of everything, her memory seems to be deteriorating. She has barely been texting me back. Sometimes, I feel so gross that she probably does not love me. I can feel it clearly, with her cheek against my chest after sex, like deep swamp mud all through me, and then she sits up and the side of her face is purple in the light of the TV, and I try not to, but I feel lucky just to be near her.
At the Circle of Love and Spiritual Expansion, Margaret talks to Clarke intently. I wait for her to share with the group, to let it all flood out over the gymnasium floor. She sits like a statue, watching me. I know that I need to show her that I am a part of this too, someone she can trust. When we’re almost to the end, I scoot out to the middle.
“Sometimes I feel so bad,” I say. My voice echoes. I keep my eyes closed. “Sometimes I am afraid that I’m not doing anything with my life. Like that I’m not adding anything to the world. Sometimes I am so lonely I can barely eat. Sometimes I think all my feelings are too far away to feel.”
The silence is an oasis.
“Thank you,” says the man leading.
“May I say something?” says a woman’s voice.
I nod my head.
“I feel that you are carrying a negativity and I’m not sure if it’s yours. You are blocked. I would suggest a medium. I would suggest Margaret.”
I open my eyes. Margaret is coming towards me with her palms up and I see her veins. She is holding me and her breath is warm on my neck, “Don’t worry,” she says, as we sway back and forth on gym floor. I want to stay like that for an hour.
In the car, she is fiddling with the air conditioning. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m really a medium. I think I am. The people in the Circle think I am. Sometimes if there’s something, I can reach it.”
“Holy shit,” I say. I’m trying to make my voice sound like this is a normal and plausible thing. “When did this start?”
She moves the dark mass of her hair over her shoulder. “When I was very young,” she says. “I was always talking to things. People thought I had imaginary friends. I’m careful now. I take all the necessary precautions with those things.”
“And there might be something with me?” I say. I feel like I am playing a game with a child, but there’s a cold feeling creeping through me.
“Maybe,” she says. “I can look, if you’d like.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“No pressure,” she says. “When you feel ready.”
I am suddenly a little afraid of Margaret, which is enjoyable, almost sexy. Maybe I have been afraid of her all along. When she kisses me goodbye it is like she is trying to take part of my soul.
When I arrive to pick Margaret up for dinner that week, the front door is slightly open. I go in, calling, “Hello.” It’s dark and her roommates are gone.
The bathroom light is on and the door is open. There is Margaret, looking dead in the bathtub, which is full of black liquid. A woman I have never seen before is rubbing her head and the smell is like black tea and mud from the bottom of a lake.
The woman turns on me slowly. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she tells me. “We are drawing out the impurities.”
“Wait,” I say. “Is she okay?”
“Leave,” says the woman.
I do not leave. I go to the kitchen. The fridge is a glowing crowd of jugs and emptied out pickle jars, full of green and brown and black liquids. There are limp necks of rotting celery in the sink. I do not know what I am looking for.
I stumble to my car. I don’t know if I should call someone. I don’t want to make Margaret mad. I drive in circles around the block. Eventually I go home.
Margaret finally texts me back at midnight. I have been checking my phone compulsively between video games.
She is fine.
The next morning, she shows up at my apartment door. It is Saturday. She looks like she has been crying. “I went too far. It’s all coming up for me,” is all she will say. She goes straight to my bed, crawls in with her shoes on.
When she says she is hungry, I make her foods that remind me of my mother: bowls of steamy noodles with parmesan and butter. Grilled cheeses with cartons of tomato soup, warmed in a saucepan. I think maybe she is on her period. I pick my sisters’ and my exes’ comfort foods: a carton of ice cream, Takis, sour candies, dark chocolate. I go to work and when I come home, she is curled in the same place under the same blanket in my bed. On Monday, she gets up stiffly, like an old cat, puts on one of my hoodies, and goes to the daycare center where she works.
The next time I see her is a week later. She is digging her garden when I come to pick her up. She has a mason jar of the green juice.
“Who the fuck are these people?” I ask her, gesturing to the juice. “Are they trying to kill you? What are their qualifications? Are they certified?”
“It’s not like that,” she says. “They know things.”
“I get that but there has to be something. Clarke especially,” I say. “What makes him so special?”
“He’s not special. He reads books. He’s had important experiences. He’s a healer.”
“He’s a swim instructor.”
“Listen, I’m not going to talk to you about this if you’re going to be judgmental.”
“I’m not judgmental.”
“This stuff is getting mainstream,” she tells me. “There are documentaries and everything.”
I am having trouble explaining. It feels like practices from different therapy groups and religions cobbled together with Clarke’s most stoned thoughts.
“You’re so closed off,” she says. “I can feel your skepticism. Sometimes it seems like you don’t even care about getting better. I can’t have people around me who refuse to grow.”
“I’m trying,” I say. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t ask me that,” she says. “Look at yourself.”
“This is about the medium thing, isn’t it?”
“No,” she says. “That’s up to you.”
In my reccurring dream, I am swimming through water that is smoothie-thick with algae.
I am pretty sure all of it is bad, but Margaret is the most fascinating girlfriend I have ever had. We have been going out for two months and I think about her all the time, like she has an invisible hand, cradling my stomach gently.
My other girlfriends were nice people who I felt comfortable around. Girls who wore t-shirts of bands that I liked and were not concerned about my spiritual wellbeing. Margaret is like something from a music video or a movie. She is scary. She is hot and cold and emotionally intense. She sees things about me. When she talks, with gum in her mouth, without looking up from her phone, her voice is like water. She uses two kinds of lip gloss at the same time. The way she wears her clothes and the way her body feels and the way she doesn’t care about anything makes me think she could leave me at any moment, and that makes me want to keep her. After our fight, if it is even a fight, I am afraid that she is slipping away.
I bring her an organic smoothie at work, meet her in the parking lot on her lunch break. “I think I’m ready,” I say. “I want you to reach whatever it is.”
She smiles. Her voice is even, but I can tell she is happy. “Okay,” she says. “I can do it when we’re together or I can do it remotely and record it for you. You might feel it or you might not. Whatever you’re most comfortable with.”
“With you, I think,” I say.
At work, I am hyperaware of my skin. I am tearing around on my forklift feeling like a specter. At one point, I think I feel something clinging to me, but there is nothing there.
Margaret arrives at my apartment covered in lotion, wearing only a purple bathrobe. She says she’s been in the bath. We order takeout. She consumes lo mein like a feral being in preparation for the channeling.
When she is ready, she sits on the floor. “You can lie down,” she says. “You can be wherever you want.”
I lie on the floor with a pillow under my head and close my eyes tightly. She seals us in energetically, speaks an intention of protection, an intention only for the highest good. Then she is quiet for a long time.
“Thank you for being here,” she says, finally, and I know she is not talking to me. “Is there anything you would like to say?”
The voice that comes out of Margaret next sounds nothing like her. It is deeper than mine, gravelly, full of squeaks and shards, like it is ripping her throat from the inside. The thing that scares me is that I don’t know if she could even make a sound like that.
“Please let me stay. Please. I am not doing anything wrong.”
“It’s not up to me,” says Margaret. “I’m not here to hurt you. Do you have something you want to say to him?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” said the being, hysterically. “You’re not doing well. You’re not doing anything you want. You’re so lonely because you are bad. You are disconnected. You need to get back to who you are. Go to the caves. You need to go within. We don’t need anyone else. We don’t need anyone. Take your vitamins. Go to the caves. Go to the caves. You used to collect rocks. You used to go outside. I miss mac n cheese. I want to stay with you. I need trees. I want to be in the water.”
The voice becomes so garbled and pitiful I can no longer understand. I steal a glance at Margaret and see her wet hair swinging over the floor. “He’s leaving,” she says, in her normal voice. “I need water.”
I watch her drink the water with my hands pressed over my mouth.
“I did collect rocks when I was little,” I say. It’s not real, but it feels real. It’s not real, but I want to open the windows and get the feeling out of the room. I want to drive to somewhere safe and well lit, somewhere nothing bad happens.
“I know,” says Margaret. “That’s what he said.” She talks to me about the being in the way I imagine parents explain their children’s allergies when they drop them off at daycare. “He seems like a very old entity. He wants to stay with you, he feels safe with you, but you can send him into the light if you want. Don’t feel guilty about it.”
“I need to think about it,” I say. “I need some time. Do you think it is a demon? Like the ones they talked about at the Circle?”
“No,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like a demon.”
I find myself laughing hysterically in the shower. There’s no way I believe this. There’s really no way. I have Old Spice body wash. I don’t believe in ghosts or Jesus or any of it. The smooth stone in my stomach disagrees.
If it’s not real, how does she know about the caves? I hadn’t talked about them. It had seemed like a strange interest, something private and internal. Maybe she saw them in my YouTube suggested videos when I pulled something up. I try to remember her in my apartment, my browser history flashing across my computer or the TV. I try to think of anything I may have said, any stories I told her about my childhood: myself staring at the stones at the bottom of the creek, the water moving over them. It is all murky. There are no obvious memories.
If it’s not real, then Margaret is lying, trying to manipulate me, or she is delusional. I can tell she believes it wholeheartedly. If it’s not real, then I don’t know how she knows this stuff.
At the next Circle of Love and Spiritual Expansion, everyone treats me with respect. Clarke tells me they have organized a ritual for me, for clarity, for cleansing, for rebirth, a kind of baptism.
“Is it an exorcism?” I ask.
“If you have something to get rid of,” he says. “This would be the opportunity.”
I look at Margaret. She shrugs. “Okay,” I say. I’m trying to be involved, trying to show her that I still want to date her, even if she has been talking to the dead.
We gather in the rec center swimming pool after the meeting. Clarke comes out of the bathroom in his swim trunks. A few stragglers from the circle are gathering to watch.
Clarke shakes hands with a few people, pretends he is going to push Margaret into the pool, and then turns to me and gets serious. “So we will do a breathing exercise and then I will hold you underwater for 2 and a half minutes. When it feels right, release the being completely and ask it to leave.”
I do not like Clarke, with his shifty eyes and his ballooning swim shorts, but I do not want to seem scared. We stand in the shallow end and breathe in sync, the chlorine blazing around us. I feel like he is challenging me. I remember what the being said about wanting to be in the water. I lie back in Clarke’s arms, and he pushes me under the surface.
I submerge. I hear the water echoing in my head. I remember being a little boy in the bathtub. For a while, I am relaxed, and then my body begins to strain and bulge with the pressure of being unable to breathe and suddenly I am getting jolts of my real life: a series of benign misfortunes, the boy who kicked me in the shins on the playground in elementary school and walked away like nothing had happened, women barely registering me in bars, rejecting me like I am almost transparent, late rent, bad grades, my ex-girlfriend telling me I’m a loser, my credit score, my father.
I have a rupturing feeling in the edges of my consciousness. Something comes over me: a surge of strength. I feel the anger so clearly and beautifully. I do not release anything, I hold on. I feel like a human embodiment of the Loch Ness monster, rising up out of the water and punching Clarke in the face.
At first, it seems like he is trying to fight back. He is strong, but I have been working in a warehouse since I was eighteen and I may be possessed. He screams for help. People are pulling me back.
Everyone is looking at me. I feel years and years of a tension I did not realize I was holding running off of me so quickly that at first I think I am peeing in the pool. Then I am sitting on the side with bloody knuckles and someone near me is still screaming and I am very still, hundreds of miles away, feeling extremely good. Margaret is rushing towards us, her face frozen in a shocked expression.
Clarke is okay. I send him a balloon in the hospital. He is rude to me when I call.
I’ve gone through into a different place. I don’t need anyone. The blue light of my computer in my apartment is enough for me. I don’t text Margaret.
That week, she sends me a voice message. It is full of sounds, like she is doing something else at the same time.
“I think we need to take some distance. You lack spiritual and emotional depth. You have it but you’re refusing to tap into it,” she tells me. “You’re moving without direction. Violent. Unpredictable.”
I call her. “Are you breaking up with me?” I ask. “For the record, I do see what I did wrong.”
“I think I’m in love with the ancient being and not you,” says Margaret. “I think that’s what I felt about you at the pizza parlor.”
This seems harsh. I did not know she was in love with anyone. “I kept the being,” I say. I don’t think he is feeding on me. If anything, I am eating him.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I mean, do what you want with the being, but it isn’t right for me to be with you and I know that now.”
I don’t feel like crying. I don’t feel like anything. Margaret is on a different plane of existence. Punching Clarke has given me all the spiritual expansion I need. The being, if that’s what it is, feels like a strong, good energy all through me, an interconnectivity of caves. The being, if that’s what it is, is not particularly interested in Margaret.
That night, in the glowing safety of the pizza place, I go online and begin shopping for scuba gear and camping gear and shovels. I purchase a water purification system, a lantern, and knife. I go to Google Maps and zoom in and in.
I am going to the caves.
Gabrielle Girard received her MFA in fiction from UNC Greensboro and currently serves as a lecturer in the Synthesis Program at UC San Diego. Her work is available in Atlantis, Signet, Business Insider, and storySouth.