Short stories

Like I promised, I’m going to start posting poems and stories on the newsletter. Enjoy my first story, “Darling.” Content includes blood and violence. This was one of the very first short stories I wrote after college, so it’s quite special to me. I look forward to your thoughts!

Darling

You came to me with roses, the scent of them so strong I could have imagined myself bedded down in a garden, and you came to me with thorns. The thorns I snipped away. The roses I kept.

- Unknown Author

What a desolate place the world would be without a flower.

- Charles Balfour

#

When did you become mine? Was it the night we ran together in the rain, footsteps squelching against the cobbled street? Or was it the night I claimed you, thrust myself into you and held your screams of passion in my soul? Or the night I held your hand in mine and whispered universes into your palm?

I don’t think it was one moment. You have been becoming mine in little ways all along. The caress of your fingertip against my shoulder. The bite of your lip in a sultry smirk. The swish of your skirt as you beg me to give chase. A thousand indefinable instances that have brought us to this perfect moment.

If only our love hadn’t bloomed after you were already dead. 

#

I never knew that the voice of a woman could taste like persimmons. I never knew it could taste like anything. But when you first spoke to me, persimmons and rose petals were all I tasted, tangy-sharp and sweet invading an effluence of petrichor from the cobbled street. I walked the crooked alley alone, a specter in the lamplight.

“Pardon, sir, do you have the time?”

I turned. You were a wispy, insubstantial thing then, more air than form, the flash of lightning gilding a steady rain. But I saw you. The lambent outline of a woman. Lithe. Waifish, almost. Garbed in a raincoat buttoned up all wrong as though you’d dashed out of your house just that moment in a great hurry, your mouth a knife slash of red, and no shoes. I remember the lack of shoes distinctly.

“Er, yes. Half past midnight,” I answered. You must have thought me strange, standing out there in the rain without even an umbrella. That was my first thought. She must think me strange. It didn’t even occur to me to comment on your translucence, the way you floated an inch above the ground, the taste of your voice. When those details asserted themselves, it was slowly, a tide lapping at my feet.

“I think I’m dead,” you said.

“I think you are,” I replied. You were, unmistakably, a ghost.

And yet I didn’t run. Oh, why didn’t I run? Even then, I trusted you not to hurt me. Trusted those snowberry lips and limpid eyes half-seen in the lamplight.

No, what I felt was not terror but curiosity.

More afraid was I of chasing you off, like a deer frightened by a hunter’s crackle in the brush. “Do . . . you know what happened to you?”

“No.” You furrowed your brow. Ah, how little did I know how I would come to cherish that line creasing your forehead, that little tip of pink tongue that darted out between your lips whenever you pondered the more difficult avenues of the cosmos. “No, I just woke up.”

And we both smiled half-moon smiles because we knew how silly it was for a ghost to “wake up.”

“I should be shivering,” you said, non-sequitur, “but I don’t feel cold. I feel . . .”

“Incomprehensible?” I offered.

“Infinite,” you amended.

Your cheek dimpled when you smiled. I proffered a hand. Oh, my rough, ungentle man’s hand, such a paltry offering, but you took it anyway in your stardust fingers and I said, “Let’s get you out of the rain.”

#

Those first weeks after you came home with me I cradled you like some half-broken thing, some fragile glassware that would crack beneath a breath. I simply didn’t know what to do with you. If I touched too roughly, would you splinter? If I stalked too close, would you fracture? I found myself watching you while you sat on the window seat and gazed outside, sometimes looking back at me with those wide, wondering eyes.

You seemed gentle and curious, a nymph dodging around an invading satyr, taking the measure of me.

“You can see me,” you said again.

“Yes,” I refrained.

“I wandered for days and no one gave me a look, but you can see me.”

A smile flickered onto your lips. It seemed delightful to you, this revelation. You spoke it like a mantra, whispered it like a prayer. As though you might come untethered from the world if you failed to assert its power.

I couldn’t wait any longer. I closed the gap between us. “And touch you,” I said. I moved; you moved with me. We shared for a moment one breath, one shivering body, lips crushed against lips, hands alighting on hips and shoulders.

When I pulled away, you were all seriousness. Your eyes glittered like glass crunched beneath a heel. Your smile snuffed out. “You can see me.”

#

“Do you care about me?” you asked me once. “Truly?”

“Truly,” I answered, with every atom of breath in my lungs. Today you were bluebells and poisonous nightshade. Your edges vibrated and blurred into the downy bank of grass where we lay in the park, a familiar copse somewhat distant from the walking path. If I screamed, no one would hear me. Above us, the trees fractured the sky into tiny islands, a heaven of blue glass.

Your cheek did not dimple. There was that furrow, though, in your brow. “I’m feeling restless.” Your edges seemed to ripple as you said this, as though you were threatening to splinter apart.

I took one of your opalescent hands between my own callused palms and gazed into your eyes, wishing I could remember what color they used to be. “And what has made you restless, darling?”

You rolled your head back and forth, as though to escape something only you could see. “I have no purpose! No growth. I can never get married or hold a job or mother a child. I can never change.” You pursed your lips. I wanted so badly to kiss them, to subsume your spiritual stagnancy into my own soul.

“You’ll always be perfect,” I said instead.

“Perfect?” You rolled the word around on your tongue as though you had never tasted it before.

“Perfect.” Like a doll. Like an Incorruptible.

“Perfect.”

My laughter surprised you.

“What?”

“You’re wrong, you know.”

That furrowed a deeper crease into your brow. “I’m serious. What?”

I’m serious. You were, more than I cared for, and I wished I could wring gaiety from you and force you to dance with lighter feet. But I answered, “You can get married.”

Your eyes faltered with a welling of tears. “Don’t joke. A court will never allow you to marry someone they can’t see.”

“Then I will marry us.” I leapt to my feet.

“You?” You raised a wry brow but allowed me to pull you to your feet. 

“I’ll have no other. You will be my wife. Even if I have to preside over our own wedding.” Your hands in mine, I dropped to a knee. “Will you marry me right now?”

Laughter burbled from your lips like a stream of light. “Right now?”

“Right now.”

We spoke our vows beneath sharp pinpricks of starlight and when I pronounced us man and wife, your kiss tasted of rainwater.

#

Images only, those next three nights, and sensations. The curve of your hip where I cupped with a light hand. The freckles dusting your collarbone where I placed a lingering kiss. The smell of you, taste of you, dandelions and supernova light and a copper tang like new blood.

You were everything a living woman could not be. Perfect. Malleable. An instrument to be strung and played only by my fingers. A flower, tended only by my careful hands.

You made love like I was the only thing in the world you knew to be true.

#

Today you were lilac and apple, and the kisses you teased across my collarbone were frostbite.

“I wonder why you’re the only one who can see me.”

I teased my fingers through your dark hair. “I don’t know, mon chere,” I said, affecting the French endearment. You always brought out the poet in me. “Perhaps fate wanted you to be mine. We’re soul mates.”

“I don’t believe in soul mates,” you said quietly.

My brows quirked upward. “Why not?”

You seemed to be gathering yourself, as though afraid of my reception. “I think we choose the people we want to be with, and every day we go on making that choice.” Your eyes raised to me demurely, half-shrouded by a fringe of bleached-bone lashes. “I choose to be with you. Every day. Just like you chose me.”

Did I imagine the shudder in your voice? Or the jerk of hesitation in your body as you kissed me?

I must have, because when I gazed upon your perfect face, iridescent in the half-light, it radiated joy.

#

The night I found you wandering the house, you didn’t seem to hear me, although the old wooden steps creaked beneath my heel. In a white nightgown with a fringe of lace collar, hair cascading down your back, you were a doll grown, a mannequin of a ghost in some sinister tableau.

For the first time, I hesitated.

“Darling?”

You flashed around, your eyes saucer-wide and maw agape, hair flying away recklessly at your temples. You were an apparition, a Poltergeist. Your edges irradiated the air with sparks and splashes of unholy light.

Then suddenly you were you again, settling back into the softness and grace of your body as though that other creature had never existed.

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

I laughed. “Wake me. Darling, you frightened me. What is wrong?”

But you couldn’t see yourself, couldn’t have known the horror you had appeared to me for just an instant before your perfection eclipsed it.

“Nothing,” you said innocently. “I just felt restless.”

I gathered you to me and whispered a kiss like a cigarette burn against the top of your head. Your scent pervaded me, rosemary and rust.

“Next time wake me,” I said. “Then we can be restless together.”

But an undercurrent of apprehension wouldn’t leave me for long into the night.

#

Your first tantrum was hemlock and honeydew.

I heard it before I saw it. Crash, went the teacups. Smash, the plates. I entered on a field of sharp carnage that would have cut your soft feet had you been corporeal. A battlefield of bone china and ceramic.

I rushed into the kitchen just in time to catch your wrists before my vase met the same fate.

“Darling, what is the matter?” I still didn’t fear you, not then, but something like apprehension leadened my voice.

Milky tears streamed down your mother-of-pearl cheeks. “I can’t do anything! I can’t be anything! I’m stuck here. You age, and all I do is stay the same. I want to do something! I want to change something!”

You struggled in my grip; I held you more tightly, cooed like I would gentle an animal or a child. “You shouldn’t feel this way. You shouldn’t think this way. You are perfect. You’ll always be perfect.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be perfect. Maybe I want to be real.”

I didn’t dignify that with a reply. I coiled my arms around you and held you close while you spilled snowdrop tears onto my shoulder, late into the night, and my stomach coiled into a knot.

#

I should have expected the head.

“Where have you been?” you accused me, spearing a long white finger at me as though to split me open. “You left me alone.”

“I was out walking. Just out walking. You know I can’t sleep.”

The severed head meanwhile sat between us on the counter, face as white as talc, neck as red as hellebore. Disgusting. Catastrophic. And you behind it, an avenging angel. I had never seen your anger like this, lashing out in wild tendrils of rage. Nettles and kudzu. Your furrowed brow creasing until your eyebrows touched. Your mouth open red and gaping.

I tried, oh, did I try to spare you what I felt then as I spoke between gritted teeth. “Darling. Why is there a head on the coffee table?”

“I found him trying to rape a woman,” you said, perfectly matter-of-factly. “I stopped him.”

I tapped my thigh. One, two, three, breathing in and out. I wouldn’t, couldn’t let you see the side of me clawing its way out. “We’ll have to cover the evidence.” Emotions simmered beneath my calm, a witch’s brew of annoyance, frustration, exasperation, but no! I wouldn’t inflict them on you, my dear one.

You didn’t understand, you perfect, beautiful creature. “Why? They won’t find me.”

Some of my frustration frothed over, no matter how tightly I held it in clenched fists. “But they might find me, and then what will happen to you?”

Your hands flew to your mouth. Only then did recognition spark in your pupils. “I didn’t—didn’t think—”

“That’s right,” I said calmly, veneer restored. “You didn’t think. I am your only connection to the world of the living. So unless you want to visit me in an eight by ten cell for the rest of my natural life, I suggest you tell me where you left the body.”

I returned, hours later, with dirt beneath my fingernails. Women. Such passionate creatures. I couldn’t fault you. But for the first time, I understood what you were capable of.

#

One day, you were gone. The perfume of you lingered in the air, only just gone stale.

I cried your name and you didn’t come. For many minutes I cried before the panic seized me, clawed thorns clutching around my heart.

Gone. Gone. You had abandoned me, at last, this putrid imperfect body that aged into revulsion while you remained always pure.

No. I couldn’t let you leave me after everything I had done to bring us together. I scoured the area around the house, then went farther, dowsing by moonlight.

I found you on the cobbles where we had met that rain-soaked night. You held a butcher’s knife in one hand. It dwarfed you as it might a doll.

I didn’t understand. “Darling, what are you doing?”

“Hello,” was your only reply. Something jerked in my chest. Something was different about you. Your smile did not dimple your cheek. Your brow was unfurrowed, not pondering but resolute.

“Darling—”

“I’ve tried,” you interjected, your voice as calm and biting as the susurrus of salt water. “I’ve scoured for any glimmer of redemption and found none. But no one can say I didn’t try.” And then you grew in stature, looming over me and blacking out the moon. Pinpoints of red flashed in your pupils, red like fire. Red like blood.

It was the first time I had ever feared you. “I don’t understand, darling. What are you?”

You raised the knife. “Only what you made me.”

“What are you talking about?” My voice cracked on the last word.

You smiled. “Let us not mince words, darling. I know you were the man who murdered me. I’ve always remembered.”

You lunged at me with the knife. A flash, agony, and—

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