Beautiful Sorrows (13 page)

BLOSSOM BONES

She was beautiful before she died; but afterward? Ah, she was exquisite. He couldn’t look at her enough, couldn’t touch her fingers enough. She was all hair and gentle silence and, after a while, ribbons of bones.

He carried her everywhere, dressed in delicate dresses with a pink parasol tied to her hand. He told her stories about his childhood. He sang sweet lullabies. He set her in her favorite spot, the garden, and the vines twisted around her femurs and made love to her ribs. She was coolness and full of night blooming flowers. Her eyes shone Delphiniums.

EDIBILITY

“Tink electrocuted himself today. No joke. Remember the bobcat thrown over the power lines? Just like that. Tink climbed up there to see if things looked any different.”

She was sitting in the flowers, eating petals. She examined each one individually before gently placing it on her tongue, closing her mouth and savoring.

“So the funeral is Thursday. The bobcat, right? Remember how it fell to the ground and started on fire? Man, I never thought I’d see anything like that again! And now Tink. It was just awesome.”

They had a lawn once, but she had pulled it all out, first by hand and then with a shovel. She had lain in the black dirt, sucking at the grass roots in search of nectar she never found. Then she had pulled seeds out of her pockets, all manner of seeds. No grass now, only flowers.

“The guys are going out to shoot pool tonight, wanted to know if I’d come. I said you wouldn’t mind. You don’t mind, do you, baby? I thought not. I’ll bring something home when I come. Something with pecans for the morning. I’ll make it good.”

She was baking lemon cakes today, but he didn’t notice or didn’t care, and this did not bother her. She stood up, carefully picking her way through the flowers, a bunch of purple and yellow johnny-jump-ups in her hand. He tromped over the flowers, crushing blooms as he went, but it was all right. She could get them to raise their heads again.

“So, later, darlin’. Don’t stay up too late. I’ll get back when I get back.”

He pressed a kiss into her hair, and she smiled at him. The flowers screamed as he headed to the car, but she gave them a little wink, and they calmed.

The lemon cakes were shaped like stars. They cooled on the windowsill because this house was their own little suburbia, and such things were allowed. She removed the heads of the johnnys and floated them in a bowl of chilled water.

She mixed together powdered sugar and milk, added vanilla and frosted the cakes. She carefully laid the johnnys side by side on a clean dish towel to dry.

The cat wrapped around her leg. She sent it outside to chase the flowers, who squealed merrily when the cat batted at their petals. The cat hummed.

Once dry, she sprinkled the johnnys on the star cakes. The cakes were beautiful, cheery little things, and she waited for somebody to come by and ask for one. Somebody always did.

Two goldfish swam in a bowl resting in the hollowed out TV. “Shhh,” she whispered to the bigger one, who was complaining. She crumpled up a little bit of cake in her hands, let it fall into the water like sand. The johnny-jump-ups swirled across the top of the water to their own music.

She curled up in the chair, slipped a blanket over her translucent body. She opened a book but didn’t read, instead running her hand across the words on the paper. If she took scissors, cut the paper into the shape of a mask and peered through, what would she see? What would she see?

HEARTLESS

“It’s snowing outside and I would like to sleep in your bed, please.”

The voice was unfamiliar and she turned over to see who was speaking.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t look at me.”

He sounded so reasonably polite and yet so cold that she quickly resumed her hunched position.

“Who are you?” she asked. She was strangely calm. She felt pleased to feel any emotion at all.

“I only want to sleep. Nothing else.” He slid under the covers on the empty side of the bed. There was no pillow there. She felt the heat radiate from his skin, and was vaguely grateful for it. She had caught a chill two Christmases ago and it had never gone away.

She should leap from the bed and run screaming for the door. She should fight for her life if he chose to steal it. But was it worth fighting for? Her eyelids were already starting to droop. Unusual, considering that she generally stared at the shadowy walls until the early hours of morning.

“You’re not going to tell me who you are?”

“Does it matter?” he asked.

No. She supposed that it didn’t.

“Would you like a pillow?” She was starting to slur her words, and she heard the smile in his voice. It was not reassuring.

“I’m fine, thank you. You should really go to sleep.”

She drifted away before he had finished talking.

—

The next morning she woke up refreshed for the first time since her husband’s death. She sat up quickly and looked at the other side of the bed, but it was empty. The blankets had been disturbed, although whether by her nightmares or a visitor, she couldn’t tell.

“Odd,” she said, and rummaged around in her dresser for her exercise gear. She hadn’t gone running in months.

When she returned, she showered and went about her day until night relentlessly fell again. She read cookbooks and scrubbed bathtubs and did everything that she could think of to fill her time, but eventually she slid a soft nightshirt over her head, brushed her teeth, and climbed into bed. She turned on her side and stared at the wall. An hour passed.

She pulled her knees up to her chest, but still shivered.

“You always seem to be cold.”

She started, but before she could turn toward the voice it said, “Remember that you are not to look at me, please.”

“But why not?” she asked, carefully keeping her back to him. She felt him slide into the bed.

“It’s personal.”

“And this isn’t?”

There was a pause before the voice said, “Would you rather that I leave?”

She thought about it for a while. It would be much wiser to ask him to go. But Christmas was coming, and she couldn’t bear to be alone for it. And quite frankly, she didn’t have much to lose.

“No, you can stay. But,” she said evenly, “are you going to kill me?”

“Not at the moment, no. Although it wouldn’t really upset either one of us if I did, now, would it?”

She didn’t answer and knew he didn’t expect her to. She counted her breaths—one, two, three—and then she was asleep.

—

The next night he brought her some holly. The night after that, he left her a dead bird. She became used to him and realized with mild surprise that the faint alarm bells going off were so quiet and listless that they were easy to ignore. It seemed almost normal, their brief minute of conversation and then sleep. She didn’t even keep her back to him anymore, but merely closed her eyes when he entered so as to give him the privacy that he demanded. Sometimes she caught a faint coppery smell, but it was almost familiar and not too unpleasant, so she put it out of her mind. She put everything out of her mind. It wasn’t at all difficult to do.

One night he said to her, “You miss your husband.” It was simply stated, but not necessarily heartless.

She slid her hand into his, and didn’t care when he didn’t close his fingers around hers.

“We’re all going to die,” she said. Her voice was quiet and steady.

He took her hand, pulled it up to rest on his heart. She felt the heat from his skin, but no movement beneath his ribs.

“Yes,” he said. He pulled her fingers to his mouth and kissed them, one by one. “Yes, you are.”

“You sound sad,” she said. She buried her face into his shoulder and sighed. She thought of her father, how he must smell in his grave now. She wondered if he felt the cold or saw the poinsettias that she left for him.

“I might be sad,” he said. His voice sounded like the wind. She didn’t notice the tears running down her face.

“What do you want from me?” she asked him softly. She remembered holding her best friend’s wrists together in high school, the blood running over her hands. The warmth of it had been startling.

He was silent for a long time. He rubbed his chin against the side of her face. She stared at the ceiling, thinking of the moment that she had heard Eric had shot himself in junior high. His brother always fed Eric’s kittens to their dogs.

“Do you think that you could love me?” he asked.

She knew worms crawled through her husband’s eyes. They had been light green.

“The things that I think when I’m with you…” Birds pecking holes in her skin.

“I know,” he said. “I think that I am sorry. It is the nature of things.”

She held her breath. He smelled of death and all things abandoned. She couldn’t hear him breathe.

“Would you want me to love you?” she asked him.

He didn’t speak again. Not for several more nights.

She began showering every day. Brushing her hair. She pulled the worn box of holiday decorations out and slowly put them up. They glittered and it was almost beautiful.

“Blood,” she said one evening. His hand wrapped around hers. “It’s blood that I smell on you.”

“Yes.”

“I want to ask. But you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”

“No.”

“Then don’t ask me to love you.”

The next time that he came, her hair had grown two inches. She had stopped eating and had lost more pounds than her frame could afford. The holiday decorations adorned the walls and mantel, just in time for Christmas. She hadn’t taken them down since he’d left her last year.

“I can’t seem to sleep without you,” she said. “Why would that be?”

He ran his fingers along her cheekbone, into the gaunt hollows underneath.

“I do not know,” he said. “But you are unwell. That is why I am here.”

She turned onto her back, stared at the ceiling.

“I hear carols in my head. That’s supposed to be a good thing, yes?”

He didn’t say anything. The warmth of his body slowly melted her chill.

She turned into his side, rested her head on his still chest. She grabbed his shirt with both hands.

“For a while, I thought that you were Kristopher coming back. That somehow...”

“I am not your husband.”

“I know that now.”

He ran his hand down her hair.

“I could...find him for you. If you wanted. He wouldn’t be the same, but I could—”

“No.”

He fell silent.

“I could love you,” she said.

He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at his face. His eyes were hot blackness, but she reached out her hand and laid it on his cheek. Her skin felt like it was singeing. She nearly winced.

“I am of the darkness,” he warned. “I can only bring horror.” His teeth were sharp, but she couldn’t blame him for that. It wasn’t his doing.

“Horror is relative,” she said, and smiled at him for the first time. When he smiled back, her heart only dropped a little.