Liminal Grave

another short story

When I take you back from the soil and the roots, the worms and the maggots, they’ve already partway gotten to you. I scoop them out of the hole they’ve made in your sternum, snuggling inside your collarbone, and deposit them on the soil next to the coffin, where they belong. Let them find their own food. Your skin is wrest from its place, where your body has bloated and then collapsed on itself, flattened and airless. Your teeth are loose. Two have rotted, falling into the gap between jaw and cheek. I can get you new ones. I’ll slip coins under your pillow until you wake up. Your wisdom teeth had grown in, later than most adults, but despite the pain you hadn’t yet made an appointment to get them taken out. They’ll be easy enough to remove before you wake, surely you’ll thank me. I stroke your hair as it regrows; I’ll have to shave your head to make sure the growth is even. Patches have fallen out, the skin with it. Once your skin grows back, your hair will follow, don’t worry. I’m careful when I drag you from your temporary bedside. I try to hoist you with a rope but as I strain to pull you from the grave something snaps. Probably a rib. It pulls out rather than in, poking your skin. At least it’s not a lung, that would’ve taken me weeks longer to fix. Your skin will knit over the wound and I’ll kiss it better for you, letting the stitches dissolve on my tongue.

*

Darkness fills my eyes brain lungs heart.
No air to breathe no pumping blood in these veins,
I danced once. This humming from somewhere.
I might remember if only
I could breathe.

*

I’ve gotten you back home, to our bed. I’m sweating, hair stuck to my face, droplets on my lip, by the time you’ve been put back to rest on the covers. White sheets hide your chest, the bones that I’d managed to snap back into place. You’ll be awake soon, I hope. I pull on the exposed muscle in your face, holding it at the top of your cheekbone and contracting it. You smile at me. You’ll look so much prettier when the rest of the skin grows back. I watch your chest rise and stutter, linen floating in the air for a moment at the top of every breath. When I slip the sheet down your body, it exposes what had been growing whilst the rest of you rotted. Little split-gills, growing from your veins, stained with what blood you have left. I stroke the ridges on the underside, the white fur that near blends into your pigment, before placing my hand on your abdomen, fingers flush against your skin. I circle the attachment point, feeling for the small gap between skin and fungi. My fingers push into the wound, and I tear the parasite from you.

*

This humming woman cleanses, she repairs and strokes.
I know this touch, this memory.
Breathing into consciousness with her.
Once I rest, I will open my eyes and thank her.

*

You are alive but not awake. The fungi blooming from your torso is gone, slowly melting into compost. The rib has set into place perfectly, and when I trail my finger across your skin, bringing gooseflesh to the surface, there is no evidence of a break. Breaths hesitate in the open air, the pause so long I imagine moss has travelled down your windpipe into your lungs, crawling over bronchi and coating your insides in thick, green fur. I imagine it keeps your lungs fresh and moist, starting its own marsh, keeping the air in there clear. After the third week of sewing your skin back together, you wake. I help you to sit up, slowly sip water, get your bearings. You sputter a few times, choking on the life that I have given you. I wipe the spit from the corners of your mouth with my thumb, the lamplight glinting softly off my ring. Your hair has grown, sprouting from the skull like fresh blades of grass that I smooth my hand over, the fibres softly bristling through my fingerprints. You are a newborn swaying where you sit, learning how to balance again. Your chest rumbles, full of sleep and soil. I know you, you whisper, and it catches in your throat, your tongue a dying fish in your mouth. Yes, you do.

*

She looks at me with eyes that I remember,
but a wideness to them that I do not know.
I rest for a while.

When I learn how to walk again, she leads me by the hand
to the dinner table and feeds me, spoons soup into my mouth
and I slowly remember how it feels to be warm, to be warmed.

I speak again for the first time in days. I remember loving you.
She misses with the spoon, the soup spills across my mouth, down my neck, and she cleans it with her tongue.
Do you remember this?

*

The next week of our lives is littered with mistakes. You learn to feed yourself again, the angle at which to hold a spoon to avoid spillage. I do a lot of laundry now. I sit too close whilst you sleep, and sometimes when you wake up you forget who I am momentarily. Whilst your heart calms and slows itself, I sit outside your door sniffling until you remember and call me back in, your voice lingering at a cadence more rhythmic than before. I forget to check on you in the night, or you forget to call out to me. You try to move yourself to the bathroom, manoeuvre yourself onto tentative deer legs, branches in the wind with no muscle mass. I hear the collapse, run to the room. The worst images sprout before my head like the split-gills: I didn’t take care of the bone properly; your heart has grown morals and has given up on your sewn back body; you’ve choked on another tooth. I find you sat against the frame of the bed, tears dripping, hands trying to cover the evidence of sodden trousers. I forgot, you say. I clean you, the floor, and your clothes, and help you back into bed. I find myself staring at wide expanse of the back I loved and clawed at, now reduced to skin that clings to bone, wondering what keeps taking you from me.

*

I remember I had a job in an office, and that I wore a different colour tie for every day.
Some were novelty. I have a Christmas tie with a small singing bear on it.
I remember soup was never my favourite meal, but it’s all I can stomach.
I remember she sang all the time, but since I’ve woken there’s been no words, just song.
I remember that birds sing in the morning and now I try to listen to them more.
I remember that the last thing I remember is a piercing pain, almost as if a hand had clawed under my ribcage and tried to pull out my heart, the smell of something burning, and then nothing.
I remember that when I woke, I could not recognise her deep brown eyes, but I saw something in them that made me remember I love her.
I remember that I’ve never had any accidents, but woke up in the early hours feeling a forceful pressure and forgot what it meant.
I remember our vows, what we promised, and the ring on my finger takes on new meaning.

*

A couple of weeks later I’m at work, and the cacophony of customers and colleagues bores into my ears, drilling a hole into my brain. They give me twisted frowns, a pat on the shoulder, a whispered offer of “a talk”. I can’t talk. I can’t tell anyone what I’ve done. Instead, I sit on the shitty chair with its slight lean to the left and think about you. What if someone knocks on the door? You open it and whatever sympathy dish they’ve brought crashes to the ground, shards of ceramic and lasagna all over the front path and they think you’re a monster. They think I’m a monster. Instead of caring for you, making sure you don’t fall down the stairs or choke on a glass of water, I’m organising flowers into a colour scheme and all I can think of is the dirt that coats the stems, coated you. The manager sees the tracks of tears in the foundation I’ve covered countless sleepless nights with and sends me home. It’s too soon, he says. He’s right. I can’t leave you alone this soon.
You sit on the worn-out sofa when I burst through the door, barely making a dent in the brown corduroy. Your hands are folded in your lap, legs together, straight backed, like you were the first time I took you to my parents’ house. But this is our living room, our home for a decade, and you’ve never sat on the sofa like this before. You smile and greet me, show me the room cleaner than it has been in months. I thank you, touching my lips to yours in the deepest kiss I’ve dared to give since before, but the wideness of your smile and the stiffness of your posture linger when I taste you.

*

She leaves early in the morning, but I’ve been stretching my muscles for hours. I move across the room with practised steps, a smoothness to my balance that I’ve been working on. I walk down the stairs, white knuckling the banister, and by the time I get to the bottom I’m winded but grinning. I feed myself food that I have made, remember the relaxing motions of stirring clockwise, and work on tidying the bottom floor. It takes until the afternoon, but she takes such good care of me after my accident that the least I can do is more than I did before. When she returns, I’m sat on the sofa I’ve always disliked, more so now the softness of it angers the muscles in my lower back. Maybe once I can get up and down the stairs without stopping for a break, I’ll work on strengthening myself again, looking attractive for her again. She kisses me, her tongue flicking out at my lower lip, and I know I can be better, now I have a second chance.

*

I watch your chest as you sleep. Rise, fall. Rise, fall. Rise, fall. I used to lay on you to sleep, curled up into your side as though you would absorb me with the next rise, fall. The rhythm of a calm, steady heartbeat and the warmth of furnace skin was all that would help me rest during the months before-
The months before. I got too used to the extra space once I was alone, and this was the first night you’d left the guest room to sleep in here. I ignore my first instinct to thread my leg through yours and settle myself into the crook of your arm, and instead I sit with my back against the headboard, watching the rise, fall. If I lay my head on your chest tonight, I’m afraid of cold skin against my cheek and silence.

*

I sleep. I rarely used to dream, and haven’t since my return, but tonight my mind is alive. Memories that I thought had escaped into the empty space of the coffin, leeching back into the soil, fill my dreams. I remembered where we met a few hours after coming to, but now I could hear her first words to me tinkling like a windchime in a summer storm, warm and full of life. She had every coffee with coconut milk, and I could never stand the cloying taste. The day we met she was wearing a deep blue skirt. She had part of it repurposed for our wedding. The day I died we were snippy with each other. Not annoyed, but short. I’d made her a coconut coffee before I left.

*

We fall into routine after the first couple of months. Sleep bathe eat sex sleep. You sleep on the other side of the bed now; say you prefer to be closer to the window instead of the door. You say you like to have the moonlight on your face. You don’t wash in the bath anymore, only shower standing up. You even fuck differently. You stroke my hair, my face, kiss my cheeks lips nose with each thrust. I try to focus, to enjoy you, your face, those eyes that I first fell in love with, but all I can think about are the kisses.

*

All I want is to show her how grateful I am, how sorry I am for how I used to be, how she has given me a new lease of life. We fall into bed together and I kiss her skin, the freckles that have nearly faded, instead of just watching the headboard move. She looks at me, drinking me in, her eyes never moving from mine until she shifts, and I realise that the whole night she has been looking just past my face, at something seemingly hovering just behind my head. We make eye contact for the first time that night, and her grip on my arms hardens. I hope she’s not worrying about me.

*

I come home from work and you’re not in the house. I find you in the garden and I watch as you dig into the dirt, bare fingers dipping into the earth. Transfixed, all I can see is you, wrist deep in soil, ripping out weeds and sectioning off a small area of the overturned grass. Does it call you home, the ground? I say nothing, just watch as you dig your own shallow grave.

*

She’s even lovelier than I remember. She holds me while I walk, though I don’t stumble any more, and she hums when she cooks. I’ve taken to tidying whilst she’s gone at work, now she knows I can look after myself. I never used to do this, I always left her to it once I got back from work, staying in my office until dinner was ready. I miss her whilst she’s gone. The sex is better. More loving. I’ve forgotten what it felt like to have a heart until she put it back in my chest. I’ve started gardening. It would be nice to take care of it; strip back the weeds, grow some colour. I put my hands in the soil, expecting a feeling of horror, a nightmare of my time without her. I feel nothing, I remember nothing. It’s just soil.

*

I watch you for hours on end, always in the garden when I come home. When you see me standing there you come inside and we have dinner together, but you never notice me straight away. Over the days I watch you transform, getting stronger and more agile. It’s not until I walk into the bedroom at night to see you at the window, hand on the sill, staring out at the plot you’ve dug, that the thought firmly cements into my brain. I have done something truly evil. I have removed you from your resting place, forced your body to do something it doesn’t want to do; live.

I know I need to fix my mistake. You crawl back into bed with me and it feels so much like before that I try to push the thought from my mind to keep you like this, pretend that this is right. It hurts, but I need to help you.

*

After a week, I remember how good it feels to put work into making something look nice. It’s nowhere near finished, but as I work my hands into the soil, treating it with the compost I haven’t touched for years, I imagine it full and blooming. Enough so I can make a bouquet out of what I’ve grown and give it to her. Maybe she’ll unwind if there are flowers at home as well as at her work. Lately she’s been twitchier than usual, maybe going back to work has been an adjustment. I know she worries about me, but with the progress I’ve made in the months since the accident I feel more me again, more alive than I did before it happened. She doesn’t want me to leave the house yet, and I don’t want to upset her by leaving whilst she’s gone. If she comes back from work early and I’m gone, she’ll panic. I’ve been finding things around the house, lights and a blanket, that I’ve been hiding in the shed in the garden. She’s been so tense, so distant with work that she locks herself in the office after dinner. A picnic in the garden might make her feel better.

*

On the day I decide to correct my error, to return you to your rightful resting place, you’re overly secretive. You hide things from my view, and you won’t let me into the garden when I try to step through the kitchen door. I imagine it, six feet deep, crawling with the creatures that should have eaten your skin ten times over by now, if only I hadn’t meddled. I’m a coward, so I do it when you’re not looking at me. I don’t stretch it out or kiss you and tell you I know everything. When you turn to look out at the garden, I take the shovel from where it rests by the back door. I raise it over my head, and I don’t see your face as I bring it down in an arc, splitting your skull with the same tool I stole you from the earth with.

*

It’s all set up: the blanket and the string lights and the little decorative plates and cutlery that we never bring out because we never really have guests over. I made three courses today; with ingredients I’ve asked her to buy when she went shopping. I even make her a coconut coffee. I turn around to show her the surprise, hold my hands behind my back and wait for her to take them like she used to. I haven’t surprised her in a long­­­­­­­­­­­­­—

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Thank you for reading :) I’m hopefully getting round to publishing an essay soon, but dissertation work is taking up most of my writing time! I thought that in the meantime, I’d edit and post another short story. I hope you enjoy!