SUMMER 2025, SHORT STORY, 2500 WORDS
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Domestic, physical, and emotional abuse.
The sixth or seventh time my husband buries me, I can tell by his jackknife grin that he thinks I’ll finally stay down. My internal organs slosh, and he takes my feet for good measure and tosses them in the northern field for the wild things.
Worms in my hair, cubic zirconia rusting on my finger, voice box torn out somewhere along the way. I don’t know what I need/desire/deserve anymore.
Not even when the three-legged fox returns my right foot to me, like a game of fetch.
I’m in the kitchen when he returns from the factory/the roadhouse/her place. The night sky beyond my gingham curtains hangs stony and outside of time, but fluorescent lights buzz over the yellow Formica table, and I’ve kept his porterhouse warm in the oven. Garlic powder and onion salt, special like he likes it.
Cursing/cringing/smirking at the flyblown sight of me, he relents into his chair, head of our table. I smile pleasantly with missing teeth and curtsey as I present his plate, the pearl-bone knob of my left ankle smearing the linoleum. I used a byzantine cross stitch to secure my right foot, but he doesn’t compliment the intricate needlework or fancy golden embroidery floss. I try not to let it worry me. Grateful just to have him home.
He hardly touches his meal.
I brush my gums before bedtime, spit all the ooze and messy feelings down the drain, preen for a kiss goodnight. Instead, he shrouds himself in bedsheets along the far cliffside of the mattress, like a man who might jump. He turns cold and rigid, plays dead. Am I oozing again?
There must be a surgery or a cosmetic that can fix me for him.
I know I’m not like other girls, not like the younger ones, or the older ones, or the ones in between. My uniqueness used to be what he adored/monitored/imagined about me. Not anymore. I’m not like her. Whoever she is. The specter in his eyes every time he turns away, goes away. So far faraway, until I become the specter buzzing around his weary head. Buzz-buzz little house fly, too loud in the ear, too irritating to the eye.
Sleep proves impossible without dreams, so I spill from bed and fold his socks and lick the black mold from the walls. I rehang our old photographs. Over and over again, because when one goes up, another falls down, as if our years together never were. I refuse to believe he wills it. I peruse my empty closets and move over him while he snores, my ankle stump seeping into the floorboards.
There’s a meat fork drying atop a dish rack in the kitchen, and I don’t even fetch it. That’s how I know we are real. Once, maybe twice, captured and vulnerable beneath the twitching eyelids of a dream, I think I hear him mumble/whimper/exalt my name.
Or perhaps that’s just the wistful hum of blowflies.
He must have an early shift at the factory. He slinks through the shadow-bruised house with his flask and his steel-toed work boots in his hands. How sweet of him, not to want to wake me. Naturally, he finds me bushy-eyed and bright-tailed in the kitchen, nose freshly powdered and a griddle of eggs on the breakfast table. Yolks runny, an ooze of blood in the center, just how he likes them.
But this morning, he grumbles, says he doesn’t have time for this crap. I nod and keep my insides in and stand by pleasantly as he slams out through the screen door, the dirt-clotted sky bleeding red with the dawn.
He forgot his sack lunch and his goodbye kiss. I’m delighted when he rushes back inside a few seconds later, passion/urgency/fury twisting his eyes, his toolbox rattling in his hand.
It’s the three-legged fox who wakes me. Nipping my apron and my pelvic bone with quick needle-teeth, tugging me sideways from the shallow garden. Uprooted the daisy-roses, the untamed naughty thing. I sit up in a rain of thorny soil, gathering a bouquet of buds and stems and the splintered handle of a hammer. Mud chokes my right eye. I rub the side of my forehead, touch upon pulpy concave thoughts. The moonlight shines oddly upon me. Goodness, have I missed his supper? The fox whines, nips at me, tugging my apron strings, away, away.
But windows glow inside our slantwise marriage house, yellow and grimy, and I hear the record spinning, wobbly discordant jazz-time melodies. Two silhouettes swing-dance inside.
I didn’t know we were expecting a guest?
I stand, torn. The fox bolts into the northern field, trailing ribbon-shreds of apron, her elongating shadow floating into the mudded sky on gloom and a phantom leg. And oh—
There are others gloaming in the field tonight.
How lovely. I see them rising, waiting, watching me with reflective silver eyes, toothless blackhole grins, inky anarchic curves and limbs, like gritty lines of wishes and watercolor bleeding into the wild barren nightscape. All of them slavering/lonely/ready.
I enter through the screen door and find a young woman sitting at my table.
Practically a baby doll in pearl earrings. Her sleepy eyes roll in sunshine sockets, lashes click-click-clicking as I approach the table, dragging my left ankle and a soiled smear of myself. She is as I was just last week/last year/last decade. Thin-poured waist, painted-plum lips, twiggy arms bent at the elbows. Her kisses have never tasted like mold.
Over the crackling, spinning swoon of jazz, I hear the shower running and wonder if he’s scrubbing off her filth or mine. I smile, show her my tooth-hollows packed with dirt and severed roots. Our roots, as in him and me, squirming and tendril-deep.
The girl goes bloodless, demurs, compliments the cross-stitching around my right foot. But her fear of me and my envy of her make us sisters, for we are both wrong.
“It’s cramped inside his ribcage,” I tell her, but my jaw only clicks, and my words crumble out as loose dirt. I’ve forgotten my missing voice box.
“He doesn’t want you,” she babbles in a thousand other words. Gushes about him in all the ways that come freshly hatched, the yolk and blood of new lust/love/’til death, before everything starts to smear and run thin. Her shiny future with him pours from her, liquid as the organ-slurry inside me, and I wonder what vital parts she’s already missing. When she pauses to take a breath, her face and breasts fold inward and melt into plastic obscurity, oozing onto the supper table and the bland grey meat she’s prepared for him.
She forgot the garlic powder and onion salt, I think smugly.
The shower creaks to silence, and when he steps out, slick and whole in his towel, us girls sit up straighter, shed our snakeskin sisterhood. She scoops herself together, resolidifying, bones and bits knitting into new and exotic shapes, all for him. Survival of the pertest.
Glaring/sneering/true-heart-beating at me, his handsome grin spreads like yellow grease, and he opens lewd arms. To her.
She hurries over on tiptoe doll-feet and offers him the meat fork.
The three-legged fox makes a great leaping game of returning me to myself. Though, somewhere in the muddy northern field, my long-missing voice box begs her not to. There’s not much left of me. A breast here, an ankle there, the lower hinge of my jaw.
The fox fetches other pieces, shards of puzzles that shouldn’t belong, but oddly do. A pearl-earring ear that isn’t mine, false ribs and floating ribs, a sleepy eye, a tiptoe doll’s foot. A few scraps of me, a few scraps of someone on the side. I wonder how many hours/days/prayers she lasted. Before the reek of my festering memories clung to her, before her nagging kisses fatigued him. We give so much, don’t we? I ask no one and everyone in particular. I miss the scratching of my heart, the pesty, hope-stained wild thing gnawing at its cage.
The silhouettes from the field gather around my incompleteness with warped black-velvet curves and patient quicksilver eyes. The fox whines and hop-scratches at the mud, unearthing thorns and twigs, splintery picture frames and rusty meat forks, wire birdcages and cracked porcelain ruins. Gathers anything she can to fill my dotted lines and gossamer hollows.
Odd how the love of a small thing can be a big thing.
I teeter over my husband on rib-bone legs while he sleeps. Wondering, wondering.
How he can be so content/shameless/intact when I am in pieces?
Stale kisses molder where once I bloomed a voice. The backwards-slanting earth and silver-eyed shades of the field flicker past our naked bedroom windows.
“Do you see yourself?” I hiss at him, every word shredding inside my rusty cheese-grater throat. What does his consummate wholeness say about my worth? Savage indifference picks away at the soul. But whose soul?
Who is this void I keep chasing?
The three-legged fox springs onto the bed, sniffing, baring needle-bone teeth.
My husband’s eyes crack open along serrated edges. He glares past the fox, sees only the remaining bits of me standing here, jawbone/ankle bone/jeopardy. At once, his hands hook into fists and he lashes out at me, tries to bolt upright.
The fox pounces playfully, places a single paw upon his chest, pins him down. Phantom paw or flesh-and-blood paw, I’m not sure which she uses. Every creature is stitched of both.
My husband’s muscles and bones lock up rigid. He falls paralyzed, mouth gaping like an empty grave as he curses me with vile names that aren’t my own. Nag/drag/hag! I lean over him, and the door of my birdcage-ribcage swings open. Hard-packed dirt crumbles from my unhinged jawbone into his open mouth, turning to mud upon his greasy tongue, inside his swampy throat.
My toothless cavities ache and needle and squirm. Our roots, his and mine, push up through my gums and snap loose, falling into his mouth, reseeding him. My single sleepy doll-eye rains nourishing tears.
And how dare I share myself with him! His furious screams become an open garden. Green buds sprout from his blackest soils, and slow curls of lacy vines escape his teeth and tangle upward, entwining the weeds and worms of my hair.
He fights this new growth, naturally he does. He thrashes against the fox’s paw and the indignity of his paralysis. He tries to snap teeth like futile hedge clippers. But these vines are too sturdy, the beanstalks too wished-upon, born of all the diamond-ring promises he sowed, born of all the once-upon-a-times and happily-ever-afters he refused to nurture.
Even now, I wonder, wonder… What is happiness to this man?
What is it I need/desire/deserve from him?
He begins to choke. The shimmering wild-growth from my inner field is too much for him. Retching, eyes bulging. Poor put-upon thing. I tilt my earthen head.
Wind and grave shadows glisten beyond our window, and the moonlight sharpens, curve of a scythe. I extend my makeshift bones, my meat-fork hands, and pluck stems and vines from him, culling weeds. With our final roots tossed aside and withering on the marriage bed, he sucks in vital new breath. He actually looks relieved/self-gratified/aroused. I don’t stop there.
Surely this man has something to fill my broken spaces. I thrust my rusty sharp arm down the pit of his throat. I burrow elbow-deep, chest-deep, through his muscle and rancor, until my fork-twine fingers stab the invisible organ throbbing inside.
I yank it free with a spray of black blood. It spasms once, twice, then melts to tar in the moonlight, oozing all over the floorboards.
The fox tilts her head at me and whines, as if to say, well now, that’s less than useful.
I return to my husband, who never needed a heart to survive. He watches me with glinting, undying contempt and a bloody, entitled mouth. I’m not what he wished for either, but we knew that already.
Sometimes a wife’s gotta dig deeper.
Nothing remains inside his chest cavity, so I dissect the rest of him, repurpose him, arms and legs first, like pulling petal-wings off a fly, like casting out one last wild daisy wish.
He loves me not.
For our happily-ever-after, I turn him inside out, muscle by muscle, bone by bone, until his wholeness becomes nothing but sagging meat and void. I had hoped to plug his pieces into my missing gaps, a pelvic bone here, a foot there, lots of sacred ribs.
But everything from him comes twisted and toxic and overinflated. Nothing fits properly, nothing he has can puzzle me together again. Not even when I reach his festering soul-center, a cavity oozing a single maggot root.
The fox growls, low in the throat and full of thorns.
I straighten my rose-branch spine, and my sleepy doll-eye flutters open all the way. From the knotted intestine of the man, a stagnant reek/purpose/spirit rises into the bedroom, just barely. Before I can clasp it in meat-fork hands, it flits and fizzes away in a hiss of noxious steam no bigger than a blowfly.
There are no prayers after that, not for him.
His discarded chunks and the black tar of his heart drip around the bedroom something foul. The whole house is a muddy sight in need of a mop, and the breakfast eggs need fixing in between all that. I grab a sponge and fill a bucket with soapy water from the kitchen sink.
But the three-legged fox whines and scratches at the screen door, wind-touched and eager to be free of old routines. These routines that held me together for so long—but only for so long. I drop the bucket where I stand, swipe the eggs off the counter as I pass them by. Crack, crack, yolks and blood.
With each step I crack, too.
My jawbone loosens, my breast sags, my ankle knob twists, and I crumble, crumble, crumble. Pieces falling away, shell to ephemeral dust, shedding this makeshift cocoon until my rummaged bones slump and I collapse upon the three-legged fox, pounding with flesh-and-blood heartbeats, phantom heartbeats.
As we exit through the screen door, only she holds me up.
But I’m not alone out here.
The silver-eyed shades from the northern field and the jagged-vast world beyond are waiting. They surround me in a tangled Godspeed gloom, a hoary resilience, and a crooked crown of hard-won spring blossoms. Once cast aside, once buried, an inner wilderness dug them free. Their crooked bones melt into mine, and mine into theirs. Hardening, we reinforce each other, our battered heartbeats weaving an elaborate arterial stitchwork. Together, vast yet singular, we become something different, something myriad.
Something released/empowered/dangerous.
We need only ourselves, our wild animal selves.
Racing through the feral grasses, wind kissing our hair and fur and scars, our throats shriek and shimmer and shake the night. Above us, the moonlight cuts a beautiful hello through grave-soil clouds. Behind us, the slantwise marriage house fades into the night, a stain upon the darkness.
And I don’t look back/I don’t look back/I don’t look back.
Amanda Cecelia Lang is a horror author and aspiring femme fatale from Colorado. Her stories haunt the dark corners of many popular podcasts, magazines, and anthologies, including Gamut, Ghoulish Tales, Cast of Wonders, Uncharted, and Flame Tree’s Darkness Beckons. Her short story collections Saturday Fright at the Movies: 13 Tales from the Multiplex and The Library of Broken Girls are now available. You can stalk her work at amandacecelialang.com—just don’t be surprised if she leaps out at you from the shadows.