Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.

But there was no body. No bloodstain. No tangle of hair caught on the coarse fallen branches, no red wool scarf damp with morning dew festooned across the bushes. There was just the note on the ground, rustling at my feet in the soft May wind.

if they still existed, would have made for a charming old town. But there were no ghosts or romance left there.

What a commotion I could have caused. How embarrassing that would have been.

peaceful and satisfied, and pleased with my decision to make such a drastic move so many thousands of miles across the country from Monlith. I was proud that I’d had the pluck to sell the house, pack up, and leave. Truth be told, I would still be back there in that old house if it hadn’t been for Charlie. I wouldn’t have had the courage to move.

Just to have another heart beating in the room, a live energy, had cheered me. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been, and then suddenly I wasn’t alone at all.

Never again would I be alone, I though...

I’ve never been one to break any rules. It was not out of a sense of civic duty or pride or moral certitude, but it was the way I was raised. In fact, the only time I’d ever been admonished was in kindergarten. I stepped out of line on the way down to the music room, and the teacher raised her voice. “Vesta, where are you going? You think you are so special to wander off alone like a queen?” I never forgave myself.

spent a minute piecing that together. What horror! And then, what a miracle!

Times are tough, yes. And there I went. I tried not to think too much of the house back in Monlith, what the new owners were doing inside of it, how the porch had withstood the winter. And what my neighbors were saying. “She just took off, like a thief in the night.” That wasn’t true, though. I knew that. I was a good woman. I deserved some peace at last.

Strange, strange what the mind will do. My mind,

Walter had always said I was sort of magical that way, a dreamer, his little dove. Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with sharing a bed. The mind, untethered during sleep,

I missed Walter. The big house became preposterous without him.

It must be nice to think you can become invisible just by standing still. They were beautiful deer, some as big as horses. What a nice life they must have, I thought. It was so quiet in the woods, sometimes I could hear them breathing.

I felt inspired to bring something new to life. I stood at the sink and looked out through the window, picturing how my garden would grow.

knew he appreciated my cooking. You see, these were the simple things that gave me pleasure:

That was how life seemed to be—finding things to do to pass the time.

Those days, my list of things to do was short: Read, Nap, Eat.

It was hard to separate the opinions of the reviewer from my own. And in that, it was easier to enjoy a book, feeling that I’d already made up my mind to like it. I didn’t have to debate with myself so much, even if the book wasn’t all that interesting.

Real

As I ate my cold bagel and drank my coffee that morning at my table by the lakeside windows of my cabin, I wrote out my plan for the day.

She gets it

It was a note of acknowledgment, not an invitation. Still, it left so much unexplained.

By then I knew, he was mine. There were no greener pastures. He would always come when I called.

And how nice it was to know that one could forget such things. We are resilient. We suffer, heal, and proceed. Proceed, proceed, I told myself, taking up the trowel.

A wave of impatience came over me. It was new, this feeling. Somehow it had eluded me all winter. I’d fallen into a kind of dreamland while the world had frozen over and grown thin, days so short they vanished as soon as the coffee was made. My mind had become eerily gray and peaceful, as if I’d been hibernating from November through April.

a gust of cold swept through as a cloud covered the sun, and I shivered and felt a little melancholy, and my mind drifted once more to Walter. It was a simple thought: He was gone and would never return. He was deceased.

“If you die before me, please, send me a sign. However you can. Just let me know that you’re around, and that it’s all right over there, wherever we go when we die.”

“It’s either this or that. Decide and move forward. You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.”

But I felt very emotional there. I felt a bit like I’d been abandoned in a bad dream. The words swirled by again. My hands began to shake. What was this? What was I forgetting? Magda? Is this you? What a strange responsibility it was, to hold someone’s death in your hands.

I felt exhausted by my own thoughts by now. I wished I could just forget all this, go back to my innocent stroll through the birch woods,

“Lazy woman,” I’d called myself. Oh, I’d go soon. I’d go, I’d go. I’d avoided it, out of laziness, but fear, too. There was something lonely about being out there

Men were deceitful that way. Even the most delicate of them had that flair for the primitive. In the hearts of men, all are hunters. All killers, were they not? It was in their blood. And yet they could appear so kind. One could never tell a man’s true nature from looks alone.

If you know how the story ends, why even begin?

shops and things, saying hello to people who knew me. I strolled through the public parks. I was a bit like my own father the way I’d just linger around,

One makes mistakes when there is confusion between having a future at all and having the future one wants.

“It’s quite obvious what the next move must be. Write a note back to Blake. See if he bites. One doesn’t go fishing without a pole, Vesta.

I didn’t really mind. When two beings live together, the smell of them just becomes the smell of togetherness.

That was it. It seemed so easy once I’d done it. I didn’t say a mournful good-bye. I’d done enough of that already.

It was probably all a gross misunderstanding.

his dinner heated in the oven, and I’d have the lights in the den so lovely and comfortable, and I’d be reading on the couch, and he’d simply walk past, drop his coat on the back of the couch, nearly hitting me in the head. Not “Good evening, Vesta,” or “How are you?” Nothing.

Later, in bed, he’d groan and complain about a student or a colleague or some paper that was due, as though his work were so important and he was so put upon by the trivialities of life.

on the pillow beside me. He was still handsome, but there was no romance left between us. I’d conjured that out of him, I supposed. Maybe I’d wanted too much, to be too comfortable. I could have run away, but those stories never ended well.

some old woman in her dusty coat grasping Death in her hands and whistling into the forest.

women or young people often find pity consoling, and so they pervert their tearfulness into superficial melancholy in order to be further comforted. Some may become dependent on this superficial comfort, and will entangle themselves in darkness so that those around them will constantly try to “brighten” their spirits.

If you must weep, do it in the bath, or in bed alone at night. Do not dedicate your sadness to anything but the dead. It is easy to confuse things, which is another reason to be discreet.

I cried and cried, thinking of the love I could have had, had I never met that awful, deleterious, pompous man. I let tears drip from my eyes, my head bent toward the gravel, and as they splatted they made a little trail behind me.

He was the only one on Earth who loved me, and even he had left. My head began to throb. I got dizzy again.

“Let me see if I understand you. You say you are bored, and yet you have the entire world at your fingertips.

It was useless to look for him. He was gone, and I had to accept that. I cried as I walked. It felt good to feel so sad, to allow myself to grieve. I was haggard and tired and thirsty and hungry. I needed to be soothed, and there would be nobody to soothe me.

Most of my erotic memories were from my adolescence, obsessive crushes on boys who reminded me of my father,

the audacity of all those stars glittering above me, blinking and shimmering without shame. Even though so many had already burnt out, like me, they still glimmered. They still survived and hung there as though to say, “Remember me! I was beautiful! Let my light shine on without me! Never forget!” I was a coward for having lived as I did. But never more, I resolved. I would persist despite my fear, despite my innocence, my depravity, my skillful denial of all that had pained me. Never again.