The Twelve Deaths of You

SPRING 2025, SHORT STORY, 2700 WORDS

An open grave is Mother Earth’s cunt. That’s what he tells you, just before he teaches you how to dig your first grave. You are knives and needles as you stand on a patch of loamy earth under the baking sun, holding a sturdy metal shovel.

Eight feet by two-and-a-half-feet rectangle, six feet deep.

You will have memorized these dimensions by nightfall.

The job is meant for four men. It is meant to take six hours.

It will take you twelve.

One

They say the body is a temple; yours is a tomb. You have cultivated its marble architecture for years with every slash of a pocketknife, every hiss of a burn.

The first time you cut yourself, you were twelve years old. You were trying to open a portal to a new world through your wrists, but all you got was pain, blood and pain, and a rush of intense euphoria that told your brain, “This is good.”

Your mother found you, splayed out like Christ, and beat you with her wooden spoon and “How dare you!” and “What have you done!”

You didn’t care. You had unlocked the secret of pain.

But you did care enough that next time, you slashed yourself across your hip, where your clothes would cover you and hide your blood-spotted secret.

Two

When you were born, they opened you up and buried another child inside you. A lost child. A dead child. Then they stitched you back up and gave you his name. From then on, you were never just you. You were we. You were us. You were the amalgamation of hopes and dreams for two souls.

You loved it. You hated it. Carrying on someone’s else’s legacy at one, two, four, ten. Knowing that your achievements were his gains and your failures, a sign that you were never good enough to be his successor.

He wouldn’t have come home late and made me worry.

He wouldn’t have broken the lamp and tried to hide it.

Well he isn’t here, Dad, Mom—what about me?

What about you?

Three

The first time he hurt you, your “uncle,” you were five and it was playtime and you were a pretty pretty princess, with the tiara and fairy wings and the rings, even the black ring nobody else liked but was special to you. You didn’t know why, yet, you were drawn to the darkness of the world, didn’t understand the boy stitched inside of you.

Come over here, your uncle said and, Sit on my lap and tell me a story.

And you did, you flew over to him on your wings without trepidation, because he was your uncle and you were invincible.

You told him the story of a pretty pretty princess living alone in a tower, and how she had a tea party, and how the woodland creatures saved her, and as you were doing this your uncle stuck his hands beneath your dress and touched you where you mama cleaned you in the bath, and it felt wrong and it felt good and you wanted to throw up.

What are you doing, uncle? you asked innocently. You were oh, so innocent.

Shh, he said, removing his hand. This has to be our little secret. Pinching you where your neck met your shoulder. Shh.

And you could feel your wings dissolve into sticky muck and turn to vapor, and the next time your “uncle” came, you tried to fly away but your wings were gone, and it was just you, and him, and the dim light of a moon-shaped lamp.

Four

It was eighth grade, and you were on the precipice of being popular. That is, you associated with popular people, and they told you how to change yourself. How to transform yourself into something acceptable to the world. With razors and sticks of eye makeup and lip color and special clothes, they redefined your being into a perfect chameleon.

Now you would be popular. Now you would be loved.

Shifting colors and clothes at will, you stalked behind the natural-born butterflies, glorying in their notice of you. Seen, for the first time, you found your insides meeting your outsides, glutting out into the world in diatribes of grief and agony that you’d never shared with anyone before.

It wasn’t long before the head butterfly, your closest friend, came up to you one day and said with a smirk, I think we need space. You vent too much. We can’t be friends anymore.

Three solitary sentences linked into one exultation of exclusion.

Your colors shifted to black and brown and gray and you watched as the butterfly flew away to the other butterflies. No one missed you. No one came to check on you.

You were alone now, holding their rejection in your hands like a seed.

And so you buried it deep, deep where it could implant and spread tendrils.

The boy? Was playing creepy crawlies with your insides.

Five

Some children love Christmas; you joyed in Halloween. While the peons were prying open their presents and pouting about what they got or didn’t get, you delighted in the act of disguise. You were still a chameleon, but now you could shift your darks and drabs into any combination of colors you wanted. You could be a princess never a princess or an owl or the Grim Reaper himself or a goddess of the native wood. It didn’t matter that no one else understood or appreciated your costumes. All that mattered was you were someone else for a night, and you were powerful.

It wasn’t until you were twenty-three that you found your fellow darklings. You remember the first time someone invited you to the Carnival Miraculous. It was a theater of dreams, of daring, a spectacle sinister and sportive that only occurred during the month of Halloween. Debauchery ruled at this backwoods bacchanal where carnival rides and games were just opening fare, providing the amuse-bouche for darker delights. Surrounded by other chameleons, you danced and drank and gloried in the acrobatics and burlesque, and it was like the Carnival was your home.

But two years later, pandemic came, and the Carnival died too, and with it, the largest part of your soul.

Six

Apparently, it’s illegal to try to kill yourself.

You find this out on your eighteenth birthday, when you stuff your mouth full of lithium and Ativan and chase it with Jim Beam.

The boy in you is not quite quiet. He is sloppy seconds, slurring words—it’s almost funny, it’s almost sad, really.

You sit on the toilet for a while, growing woozy and faint, and then your stomach revolts and starts to spew onto the plastic you laid down to make the cleanup easier on your parents, who are sitting downstairs watching a network procedural crime drama so loud you can hear gunshots.

You pass in and out of consciousness, in, and out.

They find you—you wake up—in an hour, or two, when your father has to use the bathroom and they’re out of toilet paper.

Why’s the goddamned door locked?

Honey? Honey!

Your father kicks down the rickety door and they find you, marinating in your own shit and vomit, on the plastic-covered tile floor.

Call 911, we have to call 911.

You blink again, and the EMTs are there, shining lights in your eyes, asking what you’ve taken. Your throat hurts too much to speak, but they find the empty pill bottles on the side of the sink.

Let’s get her on the stretcher, says one of the EMTs. We need the doc to sign off on a psych hold.

A psych hold? Dad cries. My daughter is not crazy!

Point-blank, he says, Your daughter just tried to kill herself, sir. Then he schleps you onto the stretcher, which he and his partner bang down the stairs and out into the chilly night.

The stars above you look luscious and ripe. You pluck one from the sky and pop it into your mouth, where it fizzes like lemon Pop Rocks, all the way to the hospital.

Seven

You were in Memphis watching horror movies when you got the call.

Oh, honey. Your dad. You didn’t need her to finish the sentence.

Your dad, who’d been having heart problems. Your dad, who had refused to quit working because there was always more money to be made.

Your dad, who had gone into cardiac arrest on a ladder and then lain at the bottom, between the ladder and the house he was working on alone, for six hours before anyone found him.

Our dad, says the boy inside of you.

Shut up shut up shut up—you will not let him have this too.

You wear the same dress you wore to your aunt’s funeral at the wake, the black one with the big transparent white flowers like ghosts, and you avoid your cousins and the few friends who could come. You want to see him first. You need to see him first.

While everyone else is in the receiving room, pouring wine and eating iced cookies, you head into the room with the casket. It’s a beautiful piece, oak, maybe, with brass finishings. Your dad would have liked that.

Tiptoeing up like a child, you peer over the coffin. Your dad lies there, waxy and wrinkled, and he blinks at you. His tongue lolls out of his green-gray lips. You don’t hesitate. You pull the shawl from your shoulders and you stuff it over his mouth and nose, and while tears stream down your face you press the shawl down harder, harder, until there is no more warmth of breath burning your hands, and your father’s eyes are closed for good.

Eight

They say the French call orgasm “la petite mort,” the little death. You had experienced many little deaths in your life, but you were twenty-five the first time it happened with another person. He was kind, nerdy, an ectomorph who gave off no alarm bells like some of the bulky boxer types who sometimes wooed you.

You had to be drunk first. It was the only way you could open up.

You didn’t love him but, in the haze of Jack Daniel’s and a few hits of weed, you were ready to profess everything to him. You told him your cherry-picked stories. Your “uncle.” Your dead dad. Not enough to scare him off—unless he was too much of a pussy, in which case, good riddance—but enough to fabricate a false sense of closeness.

He held you, and his fingers dribbled down towards your crotch, and you stiffened at first, took another swig of Jack and Coke and let it blur your resistance away as he slid his fingers into you a little bit and then deeper.

You were not sure how, when, his fingers were replaced by his dick, but it hurt less than you had thought, or rather the pain was diffuse, throbbing throughout your body on a tide of weed, and you fucked for minutes or hours or somewhere in between and you even let him kiss you.

And as you fucked, you sucked the energy from his body through your skin, until you were golden and glowing and glorious and he was desiccated and asleep.

Nine

They said you never forget your first. You married yours. A precaution, perhaps? A preservative against loneliness. The boy stitched inside of you was no friend.

They said you looked beautiful that day, your chameleon skin painted in shades of white, gold, and silver. Surrounded by the cloying lily-stench of dying flowers, you made your way up a white aisle in a starry warehouse somewhere south of the river, where a nondenominational pastor and your ectomorph waited.

You felt like a princess.

Your stomach clenched, vomit tickling the back of your throat. You’d already thrown up in the bridal suite bathroom.

You felt like a princess.

No. No, you weren’t going to let him have this too.

Like a princess.

With a slow step, you dragged your train down the aisle to the tinkling tones of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” because of course it was, you didn’t care, and you stopped in front of your husband-to-be.

Do you take

Do you take

In sickness

In sickness

The vows carouseled through your brain, meaningless and trite.

’Til death

’Til death

You were already dying, the girl of you gone, replaced with the wingless woman who was to be this man’s wife.

Ten

Dozens of little deaths later, and you could almost feel the quickening in your womb.

Fuck. You had never wanted this. Had used every means not to have this.

You know it’s true when the test shows its cheery little plus sign that you hide deep in the trash, then take to the outside garbage where no one will see.

How was your day, darling? your husband asks.

Same shit, different day, you answer, a joke between you. He laughs. He kisses your nose.

You don’t tell him about the quickening and the plus sign.

The next day, you drive to the next county over to find a clinic that will get you in discreetly. You’re still not so far along, they say. They can use medication, they say.

You’re used to poisoning yourself. You eat the abortifacients greedily and then sit in the motel room waiting for your insides to burn away like the embered ashes of paper lanterns on the Fourth of July.

Eleven

You are different after the abortion, as though the pills have scraped you hollow. As though even the boy inside you is gone.

You don’t regret it. You don’t feel sorrow or pain.

But whatever you felt for your husband, he who implanted you with the invasive species, is gone.

Gone.

What’s wrong? he keeps asking you. Doesn’t he see that every iteration fans the flames of your rage? Doesn’t he see the deadness behind your eyes as you pour his nightly tea? Doesn’t he wonder why it smells like almonds?

I’m fine, you assure him. Drink up.

He drinks.

You leave the room and go to your vanity. Somewhere downstairs, he is beginning to froth and convulse. For the first time in years, you are taking your pocketknife and trying to open a portal in your wrists to a better world.

But not all the way.

Not yet.

Twelve

Well, he says when he opens the door, slicking back his thin, dyed hair. I haven’t seen you in years.

You smirk, sultry, hoping the clingy dress you chose is to his taste. Perhaps only princess dresses on little girls are to his taste. I was in the neighborhood, you say. Can I come in?

He is unsuspicious, or else thinks he has the upper hand. He lets you in to that same old house with the shag carpet and deer skulls above the couch.

It doesn’t escape you that he locks and chains the door.

The hairs on your arms stand up, but you breathe calm into your limbs and take his invitation to sit.

He offers you something to drink, something that could starch a collar. You take it. It doesn’t matter. You won’t be here long.

When he turns back from the bar cart, you have the gun pointed at his forehead. It wasn’t hard to get one. You live in a red state.

Shit! he cries, dropping the glasses to shatter and spew the scent of liquor around the floor. What are you doing? Put that away.

No, you say. Don’t you worry. This will be our little secret.

In TV shows, they always lose their courage because they wait.

You don’t wait. You squeeze the trigger three times and hit him once through the meaty part of his chest. It’s enough to get him on the floor where you can stand over him, executioner’s style.

Any last words, motherfucker? you ask.

I—

You don’t wait for him to finish speaking. You bury a bullet in his forehead.

Twelve hours later, your arms ache like they’re about ready to fall off, and you stand at the bottom of one perfect grave.

Are we finished? you ask.

No, he says. We’ve just begun.

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