Submersion

 Annabel's body returned to me with the tide, bloated and bleached like driftwood. Scented like brine and things kept far too long in the ocean. For seven nights, I had kept vigil on the shore outside our beach home after she fled into the storm. Her eyes were raw from weeping, face ruddy with an unspoken anger that etched those harsh, ugly lines over her pursed lips. I believed, truly, she would come back before the week bled out. That our argument was but a stumble in the dance of our devotion.

She came back changed. Sea wrought and hollowed. Her skin marbled blue and green to tell her body’s tale of its travels through the deep, hair tangled with kelp and small crabs that clung to its blond strands as I had done so many times before, tiny pincers still working though their host was dead. Never with quite the same gentleness as I. The gulls had been at her, flesh pecked apart and one eye missing so that sand could take its place. I could see the ragged patches where skin torn opened to reveal white bone underneath. To another, she may as well have been a stranger, but I knew the contours of her body, the angle of her jaw and the mole above her lip that was now half eaten away. My Annabel. Washed away in a horrid storm only to be delivered back to me- altered but still mine.

I will not justify what came next for those who have not loved past reason. To be without her again so soon was a torment beyond the first loss. Nor could I let strangers gawk at her disgrace. So, by the same full moon she loved in life, I stole her away from the shore.

The old canvas trap from our boathouse smelled of dead fish and gasoline but I wrapped her in it as gently as I could. Her left arm was missing entirely, and only after searching further down did I find it half buried within the sand, fingers still curled as if clutching at life and wedding ring wrapped around one of the swollen digits. Her right leg hung by a rope of tendon and was nearly torn free when a wave surged forwards- I plunged knee-deep into the icy seawater to reclaim it, my trousers soaked but heart hammering with the victory of keeping her intact. The cold so biting it felt like teeth.

Her own heart was another matter. I had to pry it from her ribs where splintered bone had threatened to puncture the muscle at the slightest of movement. I carried it home wrapped in my shirt, tucked against my chest, praying that my own warmth might rekindle the memory of a pulse within its cold chambers. I knew such a thing to be but a dream, still I had wished for a miracle. My breath clouded from the chilly night air as I whispered promises to her.

I laid her on my wedding bed with the same care I had used for the past twelve years. Arranging her limbs to mimic her in her waking life, her golden hair splayed across the pillow. When I pulled the blanket up to her chin it gave that appearance that she was only sleeping. That when tomorrow rose I would find her awake and alive and she would rush into my arms with apologies ready. I would shush her and promise that the bad dreams had passed.

 But life had not been kind enough to allow me such an illusion for long, so I began my work.

She deserved this. Annabel was good. Mine. Our love had been too bright, too full, and had invited the envy of the heavens above. Her death was no accident, but theft! A correction by some bitter God that longed to know but a drop of what our love was like. And oh! How I loved her! The overtime I worked to buy her that pearl necklace that was now lost to the deep! The way I brushed her hair each night! The discipline I have when she was forgetful or too sharp tonged. Always with a heavy hand and heart. No one would ever love as I had loved Annabel. I would have unraveled the sky itself to have her back. I would have plucked the stars from the sky if it meant she would be warm again!

Others would have thought me mad! A broken man that had lost his mind along with his wife! But I was careful, ever so careful during the midnight where my lantern casted shadows over the graves of forgotten men and women that I had scavenged parts for my Annabel. My fingers caked with dirt as I chose each piece with a lovers discernment. The careful stitching of a stranger’s supple flesh onto my wife’s crumbling form. But love is not madness; it is perseverance. With suture and scalpel, I replaced what was lost. Shaved a rib so her heart would be cradled tenderly within its revitalized home. Packed fresh brain matter where hers had liquefied like rotting fruit- for I knew her thoughts better than any surgeon knew anatomy. Her lovely hands were now bare of their painted claws- those same ones she had brandished at me like knives before her early departure that night. She would have no need for such weapons in her return.

My love was a greater force than decay, than reason, than any whispered doubts that circled like sharks in my mind.

I know what I saw, that night when her chest first rose in a shallow, rasping breath. As I hovered over her body, I watched her remaining eye open, clouded but aware, and fixate on me. Her heart, nestled safely in its rebuilt cage, began a steady rhythm that answered my own. A beautiful harmony that sang to the world that she was back! That she was mine!

Annabel breathed.

And then, she wept.