It begins, on a rainy Sunday two days after her wife Olivia’s funeral, with her left ring finger.
Melanie wakes to a weird little pressure under her ribs and sits up, and there it is: nestled into a fold of the sheet, the glossy magenta acrylic nail lying discarded to one side as though it’s just politely excused itself. She picks it up with a mix of startled curiosity and a little bile hiking acidly up the back of her throat, sees the smoothness at the digit’s base, and can’t help noticing that her rings are still snug around it. The gap between her second and fourth fingers is silky and flawless, the skin above the barren knuckle dimpled and only slightly paler than the rest.
She should worry. A part of her knows she should worry; a tiny voice in the back of her mind is already whispering oh God oh God oh God. But Melanie is still far too numb from Olivia’s sudden passing to regard it as anything more than a bodily quirk, a curiosity, so she gets dressed and wraps the finger in black crepe and drives to the cemetery, and buries that part of herself, rings and all, in the shallow hole she can dig in the loose earth with two hands.
You should be grateful, her Aunt Leslie had said at the churchyard on Friday, that the cancer worked so fast and Olivia wasn’t in too much pain. Then Leslie had sniffed, in that way she had when she disdained something, and added in a mutter, You should be grateful you’ve got a chance to find a man next time.
As if, Melanie can’t help thinking as she walks back to her car, picking clingy black dirt from under her nails, as if there’s going to be a ‘next time.’
On Monday afternoon, after tea and a nap, it’s half of Melanie’s blonde hair, fanned wide across the pillow, where it stays behind as she gets up. On Tuesday she’s standing in front of the bedroom mirror, gingerly brushing out the rest, when it all just tugs loose with a painless not-quite-pop, a noise she hears only inside her head. No obvious flaws, no stubble, no bloody roots; Melanie sits on the bed and vacantly runs her fingers through the light gold strands, the way Olivia had always done. I love every part of you, Olivia had said so many times, even at the end when she could barely speak, so the hair gets bundled into a neat braid rubber-banded at both ends, and buried beside the finger.
At least people will only think she’s shaved it.
On Wednesday, Melanie wakes minus three bloodless teeth, dropped onto the slope of the pillow just beneath her chin, and her lower lip—the one Olivia had liked to bite now and then, when she was in a certain mood—feels oddly gelatinous and unstable. Now that little voice in her head isn’t so quiet, shrieking help something’s wrong, so this time Melanie wraps the teeth in a square of paper towel and goes to her doctor.
She gets stared at by multiple sets of eyes. Prodded: with the end of a pen, not with fingers. There are scribblings and fake-sympathetic murmurs: are you eating? do you feel well? are you sure you haven’t hurt yourself?—to which Melanie just bows her bare head and holds out her gapped hand and says, Do you see wounds? Do you see scars? with a whistle through the gaps in her gums.
“Stress,†is the uncertain verdict, and a prescription changes hands. Melanie’s staring at it in the car when the rest of her teeth shed in a rattling cascade that bounces off her knees, scattering onto the rubber floor mat around her feet, bouncing and clicking together like miniature mahjong tiles.
It takes her half an hour to collect them all, to pick them out of crevices and shoelaces and account for them. By then, Melanie almost thinks she knows what’s going on. She can practically hear Olivia beside her.
I love every part of you.
The soil mounded over Olivia’s grave is rain-damp and fragrant. Melanie scoops out a hollow and deposits the teeth and says, You know, you didn’t have to be so literal.
Then her quivering lower lip finally drops, jelly-like, into the hole.
It’s okay; Melanie hasn’t felt like eating in days. She just shrugs and smoothes it over, and goes home to see what will happen next.
What happens is Thursday.
Her left arm and hand below the elbow. Four toes across both feet. Her left eye too, the one Olivia had sworn somehow held so much more sparkle than the other. Melanie just gropes a plastic bag from the container in the kitchen, never before so grateful to be right-handed, and clumsily scoops everything inside except her eyelashes, which are fine enough to get lost in the high pile of the carpet.
Melanie waits until after dark. She has to, for this. The missing eye, with its smoothly covered socket, is just a little too much to try explaining if someone sees her.
And she’s not just talking to herself when she says, You always were a drama queen, Liv.
This time digging a proper hole is out of the question, so Melanie attacks the side of the heaped, drying soil with hand and feet, unsteadily carving out a place for herself. By the time she’s made a space to burrow into, by the time she’s clawing her earthen blanket down, the sky is growing light again, and she’s left two more fingers and an ear in the dirt.
The loosened earth crumbles over her, but Melanie just huddles in the hollow she’s made, curled into the fetal position and breathing hard. She coughs out a sudden thick blockage in her mouth and realizes it’s her tongue.
Her skin parts and opens. One by one, her drawn limbs begin to loosen and disarticulate. Something detaches inside her chest. Melanie sighs with what’s left of her breath, sagging wearily into the damp and dark.
If she focuses, if she concentrates, she can almost feel Olivia reaching up for her, reaching for every beloved part.
by Scarlett R. Algee, from the 2021 Wicked Women in Horror Special at The Wicked Library
Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay
