Chrita Penanggalan

CHRITA PENANGGALAN

by Lisabelle Tay

Content Warnings: Body horror, blood, gore, murder, implied sexual assault, self-harm

The woman unpleats herself, sinew by sinew, and when her flesh is laid out like a skirt around her waist, she retrieves her tweezers and begins. From deep jungle silence emerges the rise and fall of insect song, an occasional animal bellow, and now the plink, plink, plink of glass against metal as she flicks each shard into a brass bowl. Outside her window dawn brushes over the trees. The house stinks of blood and vinegar. Her eyes reflexively fill with water, though she can no longer smell; each time her head unknots from its body something is lost. 

The first time, she lost her name.

Sometimes she hears a woman humming a lullaby and falls awake. But as she arrives at the cusp of remembering—as she sees in her mind’s eye the outline of that repeated word and her mother’s mouth shaping it—as she hears it spoken like a prayer and at other times bright with irritation—something inside her snaps. Her soul slips out into the white spaces, and when she comes to another woman is dead.

At first she thinks the villagers are right to blame her. Though she remembers nothing, she wakes each time with blood and gristle in her mouth, her body slicked red, her throat raw. Kill me, she begs them, for as you say I am unclean and a murderer. But their attacks never end in death. Sometimes, while her body slumbers stupidly inside a large vat of vinegar, someone pours broken glass into her neck's gaping maw. Other times Pakcik Syari and his men fling mengkuang at her, the barbed thorns hooking onto her innards in a way even broken glass cannot. The pain does not kill her, however. It does not even stop her head’s whistling dark flight back to its body. 

The second time, as she woke on the smooth tiled floor of her bathroom, needy and unknowing as a newborn, she registered the shapes of men and women above her. We have her now, said a woman’s voice, so let us leave before she sees our faces. A man protested: Ko Chik, we must silence her now while we can! Ko Chik Chye tutted. Bodoh boy, she said, do you fear this creature more than you fear going to jail?

The woman does not remember what happened after. She doubts the memory is real, anyhow; surely Ko Chik Chye, the village matriarch with so many daughters to protect, would never spare her. After all she is the daughter-killer, the mother-killer, slipping through floorboards in the womb-black night. She thinks of the five women who’ve died, all of them pregnant. That’s when she takes a knife to her wrists and pelts headfirst into the dark, but when her eyes open again someone is brushing the hair back from her sweaty face, humming. Silly girl, murmurs Ko Chik Chye. Do you place no value on your life?

The sixth time, she spits out a bone upon waking and thinks: Why are they keeping me alive? 

She goes looking. What she finds transforms her.

She learns, perhaps too late, that the best way to cover a crime is to commit another. That the best alibi is a monster on a leash. That the victim turned murderer is a better story than the man who simply takes by force what he wants and cannot have. Unlike the man, the demon is competent at evil and knows to cover her tracks. When she is done there is nothing more to investigate, no more tellers of tales.

The village idyll depends on her, she thinks, as she stirs honey into tea and drips it gingerly down her throat.

When the sun rises she picks the mengkuang herself, padding around her garden with soft, bare feet. She watches her fingers weave the leaves into a crown, and when it’s done she sets it on her head, paces steadily to the village square. It is radiant with the clatter of morning. Children are running around laughing, swatting mosquitoes away from their flesh. Go inside, she instructs them, and cover your eyes and ears. 

Pakcik Syari and his men are scrambling, fumbling with their parangs and staring slack-jawed at her barbed mengkuang crown. Ko Chik Chye comes out of her house to see what the fuss is about. The penanggalan meets her eyes and smiles. 

Something is trickling down her face, sweat or blood, she couldn’t say. She begins humming a lullaby, calls up the shape of a forgotten name. As the villagers draw near the white spaces bloom inside her. Unmooring from harbour, she disembodies herself. A click and a slight hiss of air, like a jar opening—then a vast bright agony—then she is free. 

She puts them to bed, one by one, under the earth.