dogs eat dogs

There was one hundred and forty pounds of rotting flesh underneath the closed casket. After seeing an old family vacation photo, I noted that Lisa Stanley was a pretty woman. She was probably a happy woman, no reason not to be.

The funeral home’s wake room was big, yet over capacity. Unfortunately, Lisa’s face could not be fixed enough to put on display. Beauty and death do not always mix. The car crash had mangled up her head too much, there were clumps of brunette hair matted and tangled inside one of her empty eye sockets and half her skull had collapsed. Lisa remained a gruesome sight within the sealed coffin. But it did not matter, both Lisa and I knew she would decay the same regardless.

A walling baby began to give me a headache, and I was growing ravenous, so I tried to make my usual exit of no goodbyes. Unfortunately, an older woman stopped me before I could. Lisa’s mother. She was a stout, grieving bitch whose face so pumped full of Botox she could not even raise an eyebrow when she screamed at me as I expressed sympathies about the funeral requiring a closed casket.

Well, why can’t you fix it? That's your job!

I had not known a way to explain the exposed brain matter so she may satisfy her appetite for anguish.

She was horrific.

But this encounter was much different — she thanked me for trying my best.

“Sure.”

I had not, actually, tried my best, but it did not matter either way. Some things are far gone beyond repair.

She asked, “how could one withstand seeing all this despondency everyday.”

“I get the weekends off.”

“Witty,” a strange look casting over her face, “have you ever lost someone close?”

“Sure.”

She waited for me to continue. I did not.

“Who? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“I mind,” I turned to leave, but felt a light touch to my shoulder. I shrugged it off. She had begun to cry again. “Sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

I walked away from the mess.

The sun was still out and my car struggled to start. I drove to the local news playing dully from the car’s busted speakers and I tried to stay focused on what was in front of me, but a mutilated piece of roadkill shoveled to the side caught my attention. I started to veer off, towards the divider, but corrected myself and tried to subvert my attention back to driving. It did not work. I could not get my mind back to normalcy. So, I made a U-turn and pulled off to the side. I waited for a single car to pass before popping my trunk and retrieving a large trashbag. Another car had to pass before I could cross the road.

By the time I was almost home, blood had transferred from my hands to the steering wheel and was beginning to dry there as a sick smell stained itself onto the fabric. I put the car in park, the engine sputtering as it cut off. I rounded to the passenger side, retrieved my new dog, and locked it behind me.

The house was dark, save for the porch light illuminating a short brick walkway. The bugs were silent tonight, but I could hear an owl screeching somewhere in the woods nearby as I unlocked the front door. Sitting my bag on top of the console table, I stopped to make eye contact with myself in the decorative mirror. My skin was clearing up, my hair shinier and teeth sturdier. My eyes, my eyes looked brighter, more alive than they had in God knows how long. I smiled to myself before taking the trash bag full of dog to the deep freezer.

After that was all said and done, I sat on the worn couch. My phone began to buzz beside me. The face lit up with my mother’s caller ID. I contemplated not answering it, she typically only called to complain about problems I couldn’t help her with. Regardless, I clicked accept.

“Hello?”

“Emily.” She sounded reserved.

“Yes?” I stared blankly out the window.

“Are you coming home anytime soon? William’s funeral is next week.”

I paused, something violently clawing up the inside of my throat. “Yeah, I booked a flight for Tuesday yesterday. I’ve just been busy with work. Forgot to tell you.”

“Okay, honey.” She waited for me to respond. I had nothing to say. “You know if you need anything, anything at all, your dad and I are always here for you. I know this is a tough time, so please don’t just disappear again, it’s not healthy.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I won’t.”

She hesitated for a moment before settling on, “okay. I love you. Try to get some sleep tonight.”

My voice sounded foreign to my own ears when I responded, “I love you too,” before listening to the static of a disconnected line.

Outside, the waning moon had disappeared under the tree line, no longer visible from the living room window. My stomach growled, starting to feel like it was eating itself from the inside out. I felt nauseous, torn between grief and anger. I loved William with everything in me. I gave him everything and he took and took and took. And when he begged on his knees, I forgave him. When my vanity became cluttered with his baseball hats and chewing tobacco cans, I loved him enough to never say anything. I consoled him when he lost his job, let him cry in my arms after his dad took his childhood dog outside and shot it in the head. It was unconditional love.

I looked over at the box of his things to give to his mom. Half of me was tempted to go through it again, just to laugh a little, cry a little, but I resisted reopening that can of decomposing worms. Instead, I stood up and walked to the kitchen. The yellow lighting flooded the near-empty room.

I surveyed the fridge, deciding to reheat some leftovers close to their expiration date. My body grew warm with the aroma flooding the room after I took off the container lid. The only thing bringing comfort, the only thing I found myself looking forward to throughout persistent weeks of mundane life, being found in the form of a homecooked meal.

The wooden chair croaked under my weight. Legs crossed, utensils symmetrical, and napkin placed neatly in my lap, I dug into the meat slowly, perfecting the meat to fork ratio for every bite.

I ate and ate and ate until my utensils were scraping the plate and there was all but one piece of William’s ground up heart left. I ate and ate and ate until I felt full.

After finishing my meal, I gathered up the dishes and turned the faucet as hot as it would go. The water was boiling. As I washed the dishes, skin began to melt off my hands. Tendons and veins leaked off the bones, and I watched as the sink began to drain a soft pink color.

The blood and soap and water had all mixed to create a hue of pink that soothed the aching sensation clouding up behind my eyes. Suddenly, the room felt too hot, and I felt sick, rotten from the inside out.

I stripped bare in the dingy, suffocating kitchen. Staring at the sink water, bits of meat juice turned the alluring pink into a vile brown. It was too much. I needed to be cleansed. Absolved. I fished the empty bowl out of the sink, filled it to the brim with water.

Beginning to pour it over every inch of my bare skin, I baptized myself. The water pooled around my feet, absorbing through the tile and concrete and right down into the fresh dirt beneath me. I placed the bowl back into the sink and stared out the small window. My reflection illuminated back to me. I had become nothing but bones, divots of sin marked into my ribcage.

Absolving often means cleansing yourself with dirty, purifying sink water, and freedom often means climbing under silk sheets and falling into a heavy sleep. I dreamt of William’s childhood dog as a puppy, running around in a dog park.

William was a teenager, throwing the puppy a tennis ball and laughing. His laugh was always so beautiful. A child approached, trying to pet the puppy. The small thing panicked. William tried to catch it, but it kept running. Others occupying the park space tried to help him, but suddenly the dog turned untamable — volatile, as it reverted back to natural instincts and began grinding its teeth, saliva drooling off, at everyone who got too close.

The child reached her arm out in an attempt to soothe, and the dog tore it off. When it turned its attention on William, my body began to feel paralyzed. He laughed at the scene. Until the beast ripped one of his eyes out.

I cracked my own eyes open in the midst of a guttural scream. I tried to define my senses. The room was so still and my body so immobilized a shadow of a man watching me in the dark began to form himself. His stature resembled that of William’s as he watched me from the doorway. Only my eyes could see and my throat would not allow me to scream and I could feel none of my body.

The lack of control grew extremely disconcerting as he began to move closer, walking quickly until he was crawling on top of me. It was petrifying. He began whispering things in my ear, a foreign language I did not understand but the words still induced nausea. I desperately wanted for it to end. I begged a god I was not sure I understood, for it to end.

And then I awoke, with a startle of movement, as sunlight tore through the curtains. The nausea remained a distant reminder as I readied for the day, but dissipated as my mind soon grew distracted. And, by the time I turned my keys in the door’s lock, it was all but forgotten.

The drive was uneventful, nothing of importance catching my attention until I put the car in park and watched my co-mortician finish his cigarette next to the emergency exit. It was so brutally humid out today, I could see the sun radiating off the concrete and feel my forehead break out into a sweat the minute I stepped out. My heels clicked against the stainless steel of the mortuary as I scrubbed my hands clean in a sink made for dumping post mortem bodily fluids.

My co-worker and I made small talk over Ms. Shannon Harper’s exposed chest cavity. He had just remarried.

“How’s the new wife? New life?”

He rolls his eyes, “same difference, just with more nagging.”

I removed a lung and placed it in a viscera bag, “you shouldn’t talk about your wife like that.”

“Have you heard yourself talk?” He looked at me hard, “you have no room to judge,” with a chuckle.

“Let’s just sew her back up.” I stroked the body’s hair. The stitching around her hairline looked like a toddler had done it.

“Okay,” I said with a smile.

We remained silent the rest of the embalming. It was a slow day, so I only worked on this cadaver before packing up and leaving.

My mother called me again on the drive home. I declined it this time and focused on what I would be having for dinner. An uncomfortable thought creeped across my mind, making me rapidly tap my forefinger against the steering wheel as I tried my best to relax again.

They’re going to see you.

They’ll never know, though, what I really did. That will go to the grave with me. And they’ll never find a body. And he deserved it. Because I did it for him. I loved him. But he couldn’t understand how much. And I needed him to understand. So it was necessary, and I enjoyed it.

Regardless, nobody else would understand it the way I do.

Nobody else can know I ate my husband.

All of him. Until there was nothing but a few slabs of meat left.