fiction by greer ohlsson

Harrowing

The steepest cliff in our town did not have a name, though we prescribed it many. It stretched across the mulch of shipwrecks and boulders lain bare from erosion. It was said to look like a hand reaching out—some said for help—but the details changed depending on who you asked. Ships passed below, never getting too close. The old lighthouse was out of service and had been for some time. Preservation teams never bothered, knowing their efforts would likely result in its demolition, so the ships let the water carry them somewhere safer—less harrowing. I would watch as they disappeared. I found myself drowning in the passage of time. Each vessel unleashed a series of anxiety-tinged thoughts about what kind of life I might lead if I jumped onto their wooden decks. I, too, was being pulled by something. Though, its vastness had not yet revealed itself to me. 

We lived on the mountain, a stone’s throw away from the lighthouse, in one of those permanently damp, cobblestone fishermen’s villas that looked something like a cross between a small castle and a large shack. There were rows of these villas, and a surprising number of them remained occupied, albeit by widows, mostly. Ours was in the center, and it often smelled poorly, though the cold helped confine the stench to the entryway, where clusters of Black Drum dangled from cleaning hooks—waiting to be dried, cured, and put on ice. My father was the last real fisherman in a town once brimming with capitalist interest, but we’ll get to that later. 

I had just gotten in from another idle afternoon—smearing blackberry preserves over wheat crackers while clicking through cartoonishly edited, staged photographs on stagnant apps, and writing poetry near the lighthouse. Dead skin pilled all over my arms from scratching. Something about the sea-lined air made me itch the way you itch when you’re young and growing too fast for your skin. I hung my basket on the coat rack before going upstairs to find lotion. 

Martha was in the dining room, which I had to cross to get to the staircase. Her yellow dress caught my eye, particularly the way it clashed with her yellow hair, or “Blonde at all costs,” as she once referred to it. She was staring at Mom’s urn on the mantel. I often dreamt that I’d wake in the middle of the night to her curled up in the corner of me and my sister’s room, silently eating locks of our dark hair. She reminded me of the centipedes that got in on occasion in the sense that she was eerie but posed no real threat. 

In truth, Martha did not have the personality to be a wicked stepmother. She was our neighbor first, the calculated middle sister all grown up, still grasping at straws for attention. Only we were the straws now: myself, my sister, and my father. She didn’t know what to do now that she had something tangible in her hands. My mother and I were wearing yellow sundresses and picking flowers in the small stretch of grass along the road when she showed up in her little Versa. Mom approached her like a strong wind, greeting her with a handshake. I’ll never forget the faint “Hello” that jumped from Martha’s taut lips. I thought she was going to cry. Just watching her empty eyes bore through the urn elicited a strange shade of empathy. She didn’t sign up for this, to compete with a dead woman all her life. All she wanted was to cut away the human parts of herself, to be convenient enough to replace my difficult mother, hoping that one day, some ounce of her grace might pour from my father’s lips and fill the oubliette inside her. 

It started with the Christmas decorations Mom put up the first year Martha was here. She ridiculed my mother for making such a fuss, called the decorations things like “Adorable” in front of my dad, said she wished she had time to do something like that. Come Easter, Martha wrapped her little villa up like a maypole. You’d swear she spent the prior months in a bunker with nothing but protein bars and Martha Stewart Holiday playing on a loop. I remember the compulsive, sorrowful smile on my mother’s face when my father told Martha her decorations looked nice. He was only being polite, but it was all the fuel Martha needed. There were times I was convinced my mother died of knowing, and there were times I was convinced the knowing would take me, too. 

“Don’t doll yourself up too much,” Martha called up as the door slammed. She thought she was performing a kindness for my sister, Beatrice, whose boyfriend was coming to dinner. Martha made her thoughts painfully obvious when it came to the ranking of mine and Beatrice’s looks while managing to never pay me an actual compliment. There were so many things I could have yelled back that I had to bite my tongue. 

Our room was the whole of upstairs; four stone walls iced with stucco, painted landlord-white; a window on each; a bed beneath one, and another—tucked into the corner like a rat’s nest. Most things gave my sister Beatrice anxiety and sleeping near a window was no exception. When I found her that evening, she was covered in a cemetery of pillows and blankets with only her high forehead and sprouts of her black hair sticking out. She always stayed up a little late, arose a little late, and took long naps in the afternoon. She had no academic ambitions, no artistic talent outside of her thoughts, and few romantic prospects besides a few men from the neighboring town. We were both out of school, with my having one year on her, though you could never tell by the worry lines etched permanently into her forehead. I did, however, have dark circles that would make a French existentialist faint, though it wasn’t as noticeable with my complexion. Martha said not to worry, that flaws were mistaken as personality traits when you’re beautiful. 

“Wake up, Bea. He’s skinning the Bluefish.”

Beatrice peeled her covers off like a thick layer of fondant and shuffled out of bed. By some miracle, she was already dressed—in a cream, satin mid-length skirt with tights underneath, and a red top. She pulled the chair out from our mother’s old vanity and plopped into the lax cushion. I started padding night cream onto her skin, then blush, then a sparkly shimmer over her eyes and cheeks. Beatrice dotted a coat of matte, red lipstick over her tiny mouth. “What were you reading, poetry again?” 

I changed into a modest, blue gown as she heaved a layer of Vaseline over the lipstick. “And this study in a science journal about humans being really good at smelling rain. Like scary good. It said we’re always seeking that smell because it gives us these boosts of dopamine and that it’s our brain’s way of tricking us into farming new land.” 

Beatrice pressed her lips together. “Hmm. Well, I was not meant to farm. Maybe for one afternoon as an excuse to wear one of those sun scarves over my hair and carry a basket of oranges.”

When it was my turn to put on a coat of mascara and lipstick, we “No longer had time.”  Beatrice stood in the doorway with the raging impatience of a cartoon train. “Lenore, I don’t wanna smell like fucking Cobia.” 

It was Bluefish. Not that she would have heard my correction over the incessant beeping of her phone. 

I hurled the lipstick into a drawer and followed her downstairs, into the field behind our villa, where she ignored me the whole time. I was left solely with my chaotic thoughts for entertainment. For instance, the spider crawling up my leg was soothed only by the thought of telling Beatrice her eyebrows came together like a thatched roof when she laughed, or that she looked exactly like Dad when she opened her mouth too wide. There was an unspoken rule in our house to not upset Beatrice. She was like an oracle—traipsing around at the strangest hours, and always appeared to be crushed by the weight of some imperceivable threat. 

When I heard the latch come off the shudders, I knew it was almost time. I knelt down, using my hand to clear the brush of leaves over the berry vine, which had carefully woven itself through wheat and barley stems like some secret highway system. I thought maybe they were planning their escape, too. I began to eat them and couldn’t stop. One by one, I placed them between my back teeth, slowly biting down until a bitter explosion followed by a sweetness filled my mouth. I was bored, and cold, and needed to numb the sound of Beatrice’s sharp, erratic breathing. 

“Can you believe he sent me this?” A white screen encompassed my line of vision, stinging my retinas. I pushed her wrist forward until the image came into focus—this Brandon fellow “Leaving work” to come see her, only with strategically placed, and unusually hot coworkers in the background. I tell her this means he thinks she’s too good for him.

“Imagine he’s a fish and those are lures. He wants you to think he’s a pre-vetted commodity.”

Beatrice was not pleased, but it was my only train of thought she could handle. “Does he really think that’s going to work? I’m not a man.” The way she spat the word out pleased me, especially since Beatrice always made it a point to try and fix the men’s she dated deeply ingrained personality flaws. From the outside, it just looked like she’d tolerate anything, and she was too naïve to understand how dangerous that was. For all of us.

“Look, they spend their whole lives making their mothers crazy, then their mothers say something like, ‘I worry because I love you,’ and they never recover. They want you constantly in a state of panic or they don’t feel loved. Just try not to react, okay?”

We rushed home when a sudden glow encompassed the dining room window, stopping in the alley to pull ticks off our ankles. The entryway was littered with a hazard of apple-scented candles and potent garlands which nearly disguised the smell. The fish had been moved to the kitchen, giving our home an almost normal appearance, but all I could focus on was an oil spot on the wall where the fish that were normally there tapped against as they hung to dry.

Dad came through the living room, wearing the fancy pirate shirt he usually wore for the market, and a dab of musk oil. He looked nice, but before I could tell him, Martha yanked me into the kitchen. 

“What do you have against your sister’s happiness!?” Her fingers squeezed my upper arm like she was taking my blood pressure while her French tips dug into my skin. Her forehead vein wiggled beneath the surface of her skin like it was being snake charmed.

I drew my arm back. “What are you talking about?” A question that only seemed to intensify her seething. 

“What do you mean, ‘What am I talking about?’ Your lips.” 

I wiped my sleeve over my mouth and held it up to show her. “See. Nothing.”

“And now you’ve stained your dress. Go upstairs and change, quickly.” 

The anger left her face for worry. Martha pushed past me, carrying a tray of bread to the living room. I flipped my wrist up. A purply-pink impression of my mouth darkened the sleeve. The Berries. Of course. The berries I wouldn’t have eaten if I weren’t dragged into a field by my neurotic sister who couldn’t accept that she, and I, and everyone in that town would irrevocably smell like fish. Berries—mine and my sister’s ruin. 

I scaled the narrow steps to our room, reemerging in a white gown that went all the way to my ankles and up to my collarbones after scrubbing off the berry stain, which only made my lips redder—something I secretly rejoiced in. I did not fold easily into the mold of loose-fitting beige ensembles meant to deter the attention I suppose others felt entitled to. I did not want the attention. More specifically, I did not want Brandon’s attention. Not any more than I wanted to abide by this strict set of courtesies imposed on me by women who saw me through men’s eyes. 

I could tell by the way Brandon stood and stared that he would cheat if anyone would have him—they wouldn’t, but that matters less. Brandon looked like the type to remember the names of porn stars, which he typed into the search bar as neatly and often as a coffee order. His future wife would agree to share her naked body with him, mostly unaware of these para-social relationships and the strain they’d go on to cause. She would have some idea, but the carnal sounds of the dead, missing, and the underage—or the occasional female-empowerment type whom he actually paid to see—would remain a dull sadness only felt in the gut as she looked at him from across the dinner table. I resembled those women trapped in the eternal loop, whose entirety was unknown, much more closely than the Beatrices of the world. I lived in the part of men’s brains with the chattel whores. The part that did not warrant pleasantries, especially if I was not being presented as a form of entertainment.  

My father’s heavy step severed Brandon’s glance, forcing a ‘Hello’ as faint and withdrawn as a dying breath. He took Father’s calloused hand and shook, a staple of this ancient ritual. We found our seats amongst the garland and holly-laced dishes Martha set out. Buttered peas, mashed garlic potatoes, and some kind of sourdough rolls. A large braid of fish right in the center, on a bed of carrots and parsley, smothered in white wine sauce. The spell had been cast. 

Brandon spent the night talking about himself, his dreams, and his ideas. It was an endless monologue and at the end, he turned to Beatrice then back to Dad and said, “I just love talking to her. We can talk about anything.” Beatrice hadn’t said two words the whole dinner. 

I realized there was no bigger difference between two people than my father and Brandon. They were the brightest, blindingest day, and the blackest, most soul-swallowing night. Every time Brandon spoke, I felt embarrassed that my father had to hear it. It was like lying when someone knows you’re lying—unbearable. 

My father hardly ever spoke, let alone complained, even when he was reeling in boatloads of fish with calloused hands, tossing mackerel back, and fabricating tasks for the remaining husbands to do (because he knew what happened in a society where men felt useless), he accepted nature and was part of it. If he believed in a god, he never used that to separate himself from other creatures on Earth, so they yielded to him. People joked that the fish of Harrowing wanted to be caught. But for someone like Brandon, being a man was never enough. He wanted to conquer nature and death through women, to distance himself from the two as though he were their god. He was no match, though. He wore cargo shorts with nothing in his pockets. He certainly wasn’t a fisherman. 

That night I awoke from a sea of shapeless, intangible dreams where pots simmered on an unfamiliar stove, on the brink of bubbling over, in a room where the walls were made up of giant, red candles packed together like sardines. The crimson wax dripped in volcanic eruptions, gathering in pools on the floor. I rolled onto my toes to see over the wafts of steam out the window. The stars in the sky were diamond rings. I watched them fade back to stars with every blink into the waking world. Reality set in before my astigmatism could hurl through them like a cat scratch. Their mundanity felt wasteful. This couldn’t be what everyone else saw, these tiny, boring white dots littering the sky like fallen powder. I felt sick. The kind of guilt-turned-stomach ache you get when you hate all your birthday gifts. I thought, “How could I look someone in the eye one day and say they’re enough if the heavens bore me?” 

I decided if any man loved me, it would be evidence of my trickery. Why this was so wanted of me, I would never understand. Teachers fanned my questions away like clouds of stench violating their pure, Protestant air. What would a future trophy wife possibly need an education for? A girl born poor can only infiltrate so many spaces, even less should she have the audacity to be attractive. If I had to be a girl in class, I could at least be a respectable girl from a nice, successful family—someone unnecessarily groomed, not to the goal of beauty, but class. There were lots of them. I’ll never forget their coldness, their sexless wardrobes like fine-tuned dog whistles, and their haircuts which screamed to the world that they were above competing in the sexual marketplace. They had a dowry, or at least some modern equivalent. My existence was primitive to their eyes, like looking directly at their great, great grandmothers doused in Lye and bruised below the bustline. Go back to being a domestic ghost so we don’t have to look at you, so we don’t have to think of sex. My hypothetical husband will look me in the eyes and I, his curated wife, will flinch, and he will know. I’ve never seen an engagement ring I liked, never imagined my wedding day, and I don’t look good in white. 

My eyes fell to the half-drunk tea at Beatrice’s nightstand. She once put six sugars in her mug and could never taste the natural sweetness of black tea again. I watched her sleep, mouth wide open as her phone buzzed with alerts from apps she needed once and couldn’t bring herself to delete. Her unending dissatisfaction repulsed me. I drank bitter tea for the first twenty-four years of my life. 

I grabbed Beatrice’s phone. What happened next was a blur. I remember it buzzing in my hand, passing the brick overlay of our front door, and being bathed in moonlight. I regained cognizance somewhere along the old signs, “Teach a man to fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish Harrowing, he becomes a God.” 

They really tried to save this town with the promise of old-fashioned masculinity, but nature called our bluff. A group of poor boys could steer a boat back safely, but it’s all they could do. Since none of them could work the industry, Harrowing capitalized on this game of survival. It was funny at first, the sons of trophy-hunting billionaires toting a week’s worth of luggage only to be airlifted from the surf the first day. The news crews made it all seem very mystical. Something a sterling American boy couldn’t accomplish, more at five. That’s when the town was booming with new growth. An east coast Venice Beach where too-young-to-be-old couples migrated to sell beaded shit—when Martha came. Now the signs are rotting, and most of them up and left. Ironically, women do most of the work to sustain this place condemned for its alleged danger to mankind. 

The rocks scattered into lofty grass I used to wipe the mud from my feet. I had known her password for a while—9933. It was always some variation of those numbers. There was something poetic about Beatrice only remembering sequences of odd numbers. As her floral lock screen dissipated, I saw that the internal organs of her phone were cancerous. No, metastatic. The endless pages of apps: SnowFaceLab, Skintra, BlurFace, an app that plays white noise, two calculators, a music app that’s not signed into, Slime Simulator, Femme Fatale Affirmations. Her search history was the worst of all: Fifty trends men hate; Ten things men secretly ADORE about you; leaky gut (all caps); Ehlers-Danlos syndrome; EDS and hypermobility; Do guys really like the splits?; How to do the splits; How to make your breasts look bigger without looking like you’re wearing a bra; Faux nipple; How to get faux nipple to stick to seamless bra; Waist cincher; Waist cincher invisible under clothes; Pain in arm; Pain in arm blood clot; Does Adderall cause blood clots in women? There was a story to it, but I was too close to the author. 

I took a few steps toward the cliff. The wind blew inland, and I started to scratch. It was compulsive. One by one, little droplets of blood painted my arms and legs. I began scratching my neck and face. Something was supposed to happen. That little window installed in every girl’s mind began sprouting ideas I didn’t recall planting. That moment, like so many others seemed to have been missing a man. Not just any man, but Him—the reason I was never alone, since childhood, since before I can remember. I imagined him nearby, atop his black horse, wrapped in a purple mist. I knew him as well as myself—his glossed-over eyes, almost like he had been blinded. His vision was only to be cleared when we finally came face to face. If he said anything at all, it was the right thing. He would feel like touching smoke, more headless than horseman. But in the dark, the cold, in my hour of need, this conveniently blind and silent man was not there. 

I reared back and threw the phone, and my shoulder went with it. The pain sent a creaking noise up my neck. The kind of noise Beatrice would spend an hour of her afternoon researching. Immediately struck with guilt, I bolted. I wasn’t sure why I would even do such a thing. All I knew was back in bed, neatly tucked beneath the covers, I felt exhilarated. It was the first time since I was a child that my life didn’t feel like watching a movie for the second time. But where was the always-there man, and why did he abandon me after all these years? I fell asleep wondering. 

At 6 a.m., the tortured screams of a pained Beatrice traveled down the stairs, into the kitchen, and directly through my ears like an arrow. I clenched up, assuming she’d come for me any second for stealing her phone, but she couldn’t know. Once Beatrice passed out from exhaustion, she was incapacitated. She couldn’t have seen, and there was no reason for me to have done it, after all. 

Martha smeared damp gauze with mugwort over my face. “You’ll no doubt have to settle for a poorer husband if this scars.”

Brandon was there, in the kitchen that morning on some official male-outing business with Dad that he wouldn’t return from until 4 p.m. Just before I could pass off Martha’s dated words, he said, “So poor men deserve ugly women just because they’re poor?” A slightly less terrible man would add that he wasn’t necessarily calling me ugly. 

Beatrice gathered herself enough to say goodbye to Brandon and Dad. I caught her behind the house crying later when I walked up to the lighthouse. Brandon offered to buy her a new phone when he came back, and not one week later was there a phone in her hand, and a ring on her finger. The tectonic plates had shifted, and from the earth rose a question: How long before it’s you? 

*

It had been two months since Brandon slid a diamond onto my sister’s left hand. The air was thickened by the warmth of spring, as were the things growing from the earth. I was leaping up to the cliff for what I sensed would be the last time but couldn’t come to terms with it. That morning turned out to be a power struggle between all forces in the house. Martha had been secretly packing up Beatrice’s things, convincing her it wasn’t the right time to tell me she was leaving. I screamed something to the effect of, “What would Mom say?” when I discovered a packed suitcase. Martha said something like, “You should keep him happy,” strongly implying certain engagements could still be broken off. When my father agreed with me, it felt like the house caved in. It was the first time I saw Martha lose her composure in front of a man. I sensed that she was secretly hoping to isolate me more than to rid us of Beatrice. After all, she didn’t even like my father. I bolted, having no interest in what happened next. I knew everything anyone in that house could ever say before the words left their mouth. 

The closer I got to the cliff, the more I itched. Each step was accompanied by tiny rivulets of blood spiraling down my arms like drunken ballerinas. Something had plateaued, and if I just got as high as I could, I thought maybe I would be able to see the other side. Like a frightened cat, I climbed, and climbed until no one could reach me, and no one tried. I kept picturing the cataract man, atop his spectral horse, climbing through the fog beside me as if someone typed “Horror,” and “Love” into one of those photo-generating apps. A step of his for every step of mine. 

As the sun rose, the fog and the man dissipated, and blood began to pool in my shoes. One thing about my blood, it never liked to scab. I could go on bleeding forever. Just like that lighthouse with its old, leaking pipes. Just like my father’s daughters, draining the life from him. All of nature, as much of a burden on resilient men as Harrowing. The men don’t come with horses, anymore. They like women soft and easy to mine, unlike our waters. They prefer plowable, cultivated land to nature. And the ones who don’t take pleasure in making us so. 

I looked down at my dress, at the ribbons as red as Christmas bows peaking beneath it, infiltrating, and forcing the fabric to cling to my thighs. It was the same dress I wore the night my sister met her fiancé—a visual representation of women’s relationship with time. 

From the highest peak, everything looked the same. All the usual stories spiraling from my mind fell flat. But it wasn’t sad. That time, when a ship passed by, closer and slower than one ever had, I felt more tested than tempted. We’re not meant to imagine our whole lives at once. We’re not meant to know. My mother died of knowing. My father will eventually die, too, and all that will be left is Harrowing. 

Greer Ohlsson is a debut fiction writer and essayist from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is fueled by her obsessive interest in evolutionary psychology and unusual family dynamics. She is currently working on her debut novel "The Devil And Selene."  

You can find her on Tiktok and Instagram @Theendisgreer.