Venus Buried

The girl in the graveyard is your best friend, so you take her home. The night is a bruise between you, a blotch of rogue in the passenger window; the colour of fruit left out to fester. The body pries at her seatbelt, a finger, then two. The radio echoes static, the body shuffles in her seat. You study the face; the similar slice of jaw, the nose humped from where a baseball had hit her at twelve, just slightly off centre. The skin like a rain-licked plastic bag. The stink of musk and sulphur. You want to look away but you cannot. She's so beautiful, even like this. Your headlights rake warbled slits through the dirt road, a yellow like jaundice. Your hands are stiff from the cold, your lips cracked. The girl beside you is dead and you are bringing her home.

Four days ago you’d stepped into a hardware store and emerged with a shovel sturdy enough to lift a life on. Four days you’d spent digging dirt in your own backyard yard until loam muddied under your fingernails and erratic holes split garden beds like the mouths of greedy beasts. Until you could sift through soil with your eyes closed, with a hand bound. Four nights you had laid in your bed staring at the pockmarked ceiling, wondering what it felt like to burn alive. Now, the shovel beats dull against the skin of your trunk, your hands gripping the steering wheel like a throat you’re trying to silence.

The body turns, dawn bleaching the salmon-grey of her skin. The left eye slips from its socket and she pushes it back in with the heel of her hand. She smiles, head lolling like a marionette’s

“Sorry baby,” her voice comes out strained, “I wasn’t expecting company. I’m sure you understand.”

In a sickle of citrus moonlight, Adeline Marcus smiles up at you with shell-pale gums.

——

Adeline Marcus died on the 31st of October and was buried a week later, the date on her gravestone a month shy of her eighteenth birthday. In the court, the boys would claim it was an accident, that they didn’t know she was inside. For better or worse, you believe them. The fingers striking out matchboxes, the beer cans constellating the sidewalk; a prank gone too far, the wrong place, the wrong time. It doesn't have to be on purpose. She didn’t have to be home. 

The coroner ruled it suffocation, but all you can imagine is flame like a stiff palm, striking over and over. Adeline had crawled from the mouth of the home on her hands and knees. She was dead by the time she reached the pavement, her Sunday dress singed up to her knees, the dress you knew well enough.

Either way, the boys were left with twenty-five to life and the Marcus’ were left with a dead daughter, a ring of ash like chalk on the pavement. You were left with a misplaced guilt like hunger, a guilt like an ouroboros; choking on the tail, swallowing the head, eating yourself alive and being unable to stop, even as it consumes you.

Because this wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to good people.

——

You watch water curl down your shower drain, carrying with it mortuary makeup, kaleidoscopic insects and jasmine bubbles. Strings of dirt stretched out like sinew. The body’s head rests on her knees, vertebrae needling through her back like a line of molars. The electric lights wash her green, dark veins rooted under brittle skin. She turns her face to the showerhead and picks at the powdery sediment under her fingernails. The shower floor is a mess of grit, and you think of a child scooping up the sand. You turn the heat up until it scalds, and scrub mildew from the base of the shower door. You think, if you can only get everything clean, everything will be alright.

She turns her head and looks at you through eyes obscured by glass panelling. She says, ‘It's not as bad as all that. I don't even think I felt a thing.”

But she says it through lips the colour of spoiled plums, so the sentiment doesn't ring true.

You lift threadbare towels from the bottoms of your linen closet. You walk three times around your block and return to a corpse sat on your sofa like she has nowhere better to be.

____

There are ants in your sugar bowl. You try to remove them, lift their crystal-knotted bodies on the prong of a fork but they slip between the gaps and you are left with a mess bigger than when you started; tea-brown sludge bleeding from thoraxes and the stink of vinegar. There’s a dead girl on your sofa but let’s focus on the ants in your sugar bowl, the way they thread through cysts of white like veins on a leaf, like the capillaries that run through the skin of your face.

You make tea anyway. You add too much milk and sit cross-legged in front of the body. She stares at you. You stare back. The two of you drink and ribbons of watery milk pour clean out her trachea, the gaping hole in her chest, but she doesn’t stop drinking until you do.

“You’re not looking at me,” she says, “Not really.”

“Yes I am,” you twist your hands in the shag carpet, “Aren’t I now?”

“No,” she says, “You’re not.”

You leave your teacup on the floor, saucer an iris of yellow, and go upstairs. You take two cigarettes from the carton squashed on your father’s desk and then think better of it, press down with your heel until tobacco dissipates into the tawny carpet. You change your bedsheets twice, eggshell white, no, grey with peonies. You make a second cup of tea. When you get back to the room the body is still there. You are looking at her. You are not looking at her.

“Do I disgust you?” she says.

“No,” she shakes her head, dark hair plastered to her shoulders like reeds, “No more than I always did.”

“You need to sleep.” You say.

“Baby,” she tilts her head to one side, “Sleeping is all I’ve ever done.”

__

The last time you saw Adeline Marcus alive was in the back of a stranger’s car, parked on a strangers street, with the taste of a stranger’s tequila fresh between your lips. You were never two built for parties, so the outcome was a pair of girls who looked like they were playing dress up. Blousey dresses with sleeves like a nun’s. Thrift store necklaces noosing your necks. Shoplifted lipstick which she hid beneath her mattress, more wax than pigment. But in the citrus peel of street lights, in the low trill of distant music, the two of you looked beautiful. She had her legs curled under her and was sitting sideways in the backseat, her hand resting on your knee and the other palmed against the window, a song on her lips that you couldn’t quite place. You were too close, but it was night, and everyone was inside and drunk, and sometimes we all need to feel closer than we should be, to lose ourselves a little.

The song melted on her lips, swallowed into the limp press of salvia and booze, and you said something like “I think I should go home now.”

And she said something like, “Have another drink.” And so you did. You let her pour the liquor into the flimsy mouths of red plastic cups and watched her swallow. She said, "You're so pretty."

And you said, "I think you should stop."

And she said, “Just let me say that, that one thing.”

And you wanted to say stop fucking looking at me like that, and you wanted to say I want to crawl inside you and make a life for myself in the city of your mind, and you wanted to say let’s just be quiet, let’s just not talk, let’s just not ruin a good thing by telling the truth.

Instead you pushed open the passenger door, stumbled out onto the skin of vein-blue sidewalk.

“I’m going home now.”

——

The body lays with her back to your bed, hands worming in the floral sheets, chestnut hair spilling across her throat, past the ballpoint pen-marred bed posts, over the grey skin of her forehead.

You are thinking about the silken mouth of a coffin. You are thinking of how she looked when you pulled her from the rose mouth of heaven. The radiator hums, a lace curtain bellies your open window. She rolls over onto her side, slots her hands together like pieces of a decaying jigsaw puzzle.

“You still can’t even look at me,” her mouth moves too slowly, words like chewing gum, “Why am I here, Bette? What’s it for?” 

There are pink crescent moons on the bed of your palms from the bite of your nails. She pulls her knees to her chest and a bone cracks. She pulls her knees to her chest and a molar tumbles from between her keyhole lips. 

“You can only love me when I’m not here, you can only love me when there’s nothing left to love.”

You press your cheek to the cool spread of linen beside her, you listen to the steady beat of your heart; the way you can feel it in your fingertips, entirely singular.

“Don’t tell anyone.” You say.

“Did you want it to die with me, Bette?” she shifts and her hair falls against the nape of your neck, “Were you glad it was silenced?”

“Don’t tell anyone.” You say again.

She sighs, lays herself back down so you’re face to face. Crooked nose, eye pulling from its socket, the onset of grey-green decay wreathing her jaw. The smell of soil and rot and cicada-heavy nighttime.

“Who could I tell?” She brushes your hand, “I’m not really here.”

And suddenly you can imagine it is your fists splitting beer cans in two like overripe fruit, it is your fingers on the matchbox, your fingers striking out. But you both know the house would still be on fire, and you both know you’d leave alone.

You take her hand. You put your face in the crook of her neck and beg forgiveness from a ghost.