Homeopath
- Sep 21, 2022
- 3 min read
by Ronan Fenton
Lucilla was the appendage of a larger organism, both invisible and diseased, one that poisoned her blood, corrupted her thoughts and haunted her shadow with its own, overthrowing her spirit and establishing a court of feral jesters in its place. She fumigated her apartment on a regular basis and swept the skeletons of the tiny creatures who infested it into the corner where they could be forgotten, their legs curling in on themselves in a lonely embrace, smiling up at the chipped ceiling from their mass graves.
On alternate Tuesdays, she visited her neighbour and watched him shave his tusks with a straight razor. He had taken to leaving the bathroom door open and ignoring her as he preened himself. Neither of them ever acknowledged this shared ritual; an unspoken contract existed between them that, in return for her participation as a silent observer, he allowed her to collect the shavings, which she bottled and wrapped with gold ribbons to sell at the local market as a cure for a wide range of conditions, including impotence, incontinence, insomnia and infertility. After the ceremony, they sat in silence on opposite sides of the room and nursed saucers of cold Rooibos tea, before Lucilla returned home and smeared herself with prescription creams, meant to hasten the aging process, and lay down on the floor to purify in her anti-vernix.
The light streaming through the windows in her apartment was always pale. The sky sundered and stitched itself back together again. Dust collected on every surface, all bare and untended. On her days off — and they were all off save Sundays, when the market took place in an empty lot behind the chemical plant — she volunteered to scrape cysts from the nether regions of mental patients, death row inmates and homeless veterans. Instead of destroying them in the furnace, in accordance with departmental regulations, she collected them in empty jam jars and rebranded them as homemade remedies for nymphomania, asthma, haemophilia and menstrual cramps.
One night, as Lucilla lay motionless in bed, staring up at her textured ceiling, counting the syphilitic bumps and wondering what it felt like not to be alone, her neighbour’s tusks came crashing through the drywall. He was sleepwalking again and in the throes of his reverie he called out her name. Sitting up in bed, Lucilla reached out and grazed the ivory tips with her fingers as a larval moon shimmered outside her window, nested in the heavy smog rising from the thick jungle of factories and clotting the night sky’s glowing pores.
Lucilla went into the kitchen and retrieved her sharpest knife before returning to whittle away at the gleaming prongs protruding like sabres of bleached bone through her bedroom wall, brushing the shavings into a pile which she then stuffed into bottles aligned on her windowsill, with perfectly even distances between them. With his tusks no longer supporting him, her neighbour slumped back down to the floor on the other side of the wall, still muttering her name forlornly in his sleep. Lucilla climbed back into bed and drew the covers around her neck, telling herself she only did it for his sake, so his elongated canines didn’t curve inward and puncture his brain.
The factories burned furiously through the night. Lucilla roused herself just before dawn to press an eye against one of the circular holes in her bedroom wall. Her neighbour was still lying there, murmuring her name as a mantra that dispelled degradation. She stood on her toes to watch him sleep. Something was coming. The cure she’d been waiting for: the panacea.
Ronan Fenton is an Irish writer living in London. He has an MA in Creative Writing from UCD and a BFA in songwriting from BIMM Dublin. He writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama and art criticism. His work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Violet, Indigo, Blue, Etc., Selcouth Station Press, Strukturriss, and Coven Poetry, amongst others.
