My Darling Dreadful Thing

by Johanna van Veen

Ruth unhooked herself from my spine and crawled up my throat. I coughed softly to help her, then breathed her out, tendril after tendril of her until she sat beside me, clawlike hands curled in her lap. She worked her broken jaw, producing a series of rapid clicks.

I talked of Ruth’s hair dyed red and her skin dyed brown by the bog, her eyes that were sometimes a gleaming black like a beetle’s wing case, sometimes dried-up raisins, and sometimes not there at all because the bog that preserved the down on her upper lip and the whorls on her knuckles ate away organs and eyeballs.

“I can see you now,” she told Ruth once I stopped talking. She held out her hand. Ruth laid hers in it, and Agnes did not hesitate, did not shudder at the dead flesh.

When I felt I had created an opening large enough to pull him out, I grabbed the meat hook. I had blunted the tip so I wouldn’t accidentally impale him with it. I pushed it into a hole in his suit and tried to drag him out that way, but the cloth tore, exposing a shoulder blooming with green mold.

He was smeared with mud and earth now. I tried to wipe it from his rotting clothes and face, but all that did was make his ear fall off, taking a good chunk of skin with it.

“You’ve already bound me to you.” “Is there a limit on how many spirits a person can have?” “I don’t know, but I find it distasteful.”

Thomas always said that women with too much time on their hands turn to mischief or madness.