Creepy - An Eternal Bloom

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

On closer inspection...***Written by: J.M.J Brewer***Bonus Episode: "Vestigial" written by: Jennifer Lesh Fleck and narrated by: Heather Thomas***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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The 31 days of horror is less than two weeks away. No, if you'll excuse me, I need to go rent a bus. No, this is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.

Creepy presents An Eternal Bloom Written by J.M.J. Most days, like today, I worked alone. But my apprenticeship last year been with an old-timer named Hoop who would regale me with tales of notable inspections. Chaotic homes were surprisingly common. I attributed the phenomena to a latent death wish by the homeowner, unveiled subconsciously by spiking their own home sale. Hoop had once told of a domicile which had been host to a rollicking shindig.

his words, the night before inspection. Party gas straped this way and that way. Half of them didn't have any clothes on. The stench, I tell you. Who put on to describe decadent meats vultured into bone piles and pie crusts arranged in occultic representation. The chandelier swung from open skylight windows and the basement door hung off its hinges.

At the bottom of the stairs were three, naked forms, a writhing ball of garter snakes, and a snow sled. Most remarkably, Hoop swore that a burning Rolls Royce hung in the highest branches of an oak. He could see it through the third-story loft window. The mansion was down a ravine and the rolls must have spun out of control along the drive. Flew off and landed true as a treehouse. Funny thing, a little fire danced off the top of that rolls his hood. I kept expecting it to explode and fling a piece just perfect height to give me a jugular haircut. It was the type of story you naturally disbelieved. And it was the final tall tale he delivered to me under the mask of wisdom. Mere days later, he'd applied over a month of accumulated

vacation and retired without so much as a tip of your hat. Anyway, it was this story that hung in the back of my brain while I embarked on the inspection. Maybe because traffic up pin hook was strangled on account of a fiery wreck. The owner and I had made eye contact as I drove by and he tipped me an odd little salute, an admission of awful luck, hey stranger? Wind whipped his blazing car into shapes like people pirouetting, all stuck to the hatchback and dancing themselves so hot they couldn't help but burn out and fast. Or maybe I recollected Hoop's story because this neighborhood of condominiums and McMansions seemed like some sort of unreflection of that spirited house full of spent people. And here? Not a soul. For my money, nothing felt so dead as a fresh

building yet occupied. This sensation was the engine for my vocation. As I started on the first ranked buildings, condos bookmarked by five-story apartment complexes. I wondered if the future denizens would feel the imprint I was making in their homes. My past presence would linger as a fog, a smoke, more like, clinging inside their nostrils until their noses became blind to the harsh tang of my manifestation. I had a week to make the rounds before anyone moved in. On that initial morning, I found no issues precluding sale. Every countertop shined as brightly as the fillings and a handful of teeth.

Still, my instincts could beware. The evolution of this land from marsh to little boxes had been swift indeed, and I couldn't help wondering about corners cut in instances of extreme and immediate development. Over lunch, I read on the balcony of a penthouse apartment. Below me, the inner expanse in the neighborhood sprawled like a European count, sculpture garden, except substitute statues for playgrounds, albino peacocks for exotic, tough ducks, and gravel paths for concrete sidewalks. In the fires three, Dr. Russell White argued it was not chance nor bad weather, nor a comet, but rather a revolutionary cabal of the United

States Forestry Department that lit the three simultaneous infernoes known as Great Chicago Fire, the Great Michigan Fire, and the Pistigo Fire on the night of October 8, 1871. Before continuing on, I lit a few matches and dropped them off the balcony. The fall choked each little flame. Except for one, it burned a black wisp into the concrete walk. I collected the spent matches and held them in my mouth. By the afternoon, I had a small section of my map covered in pluses to indicate they'd passed inspection. I held a flat hand up to the horizon and counted how many fingers there were between horizon and sun.

Lately, I'd taken to leaving my watch at home. Its hands advanced unwholesomely behind the crystal glass of its face. Once the watchmaker put the cogs into business, the damn thing never stopped. It had no opportunity for emptiness, no time to be still. The watching question wound itself with the movement of my arm. And after waking from a nightmare in which I failed repeatedly, to torch it in the kitchen sink, using exorbitant amounts of vegetable oil kerosene and scraps a hamster bedding.

I've never owned a hamster. It had occurred to me the only way to defeat the watch was immobility. My finger trick worked as well as a watch, anyway, or better. It was four hours before dusk. The sun burned wildly above my hand, and I imagined what it would be like to stick at risk deep into the sun, left of one street and right at another took me to six houses ringing a cul-de-sac. I could spy what was left of the swamp behind the houses. The heat of the day created ghosts of water above the glades and in the dips of the asphalt.

I spun in the cul-de-sac to number the homes on my map. House four tugged at my inspector's strings and I drifted over to it. The front door was locked. The side door to the garage hung open. Instead of going inside, I circled the place. The grass was beginning to grow in through the straw. The bevy of unplanted shrubs, flowers, even a few trees, huddled along the back of the garage. I peered through House Four's windows into the finished basement, a shade carpet and space for a rec room.

I pushed from the foundation to stand and yelped at the pain. My left hand bloomed bloody. I licked the palm to keep it from deep. dripping. The foundation is evidently not concrete, but instead appeared to be a rough-hewn ancient slab. Plenty of places to cut yourself. I made a note, underlined it, circled House 4 on my map. Despite the foundation, the house was wired for modern usage. Sineous silver pipes led to the breaker box. Fiddling it open one-handed placed me at strange perspective such that I could see behind the breaker box where it wasn't flushed at the stone.

There, drawn blackly onto the stone itself, was the message, Hoop 5-30, which meant that Hoop had inspected this home exactly a year ago. I completed my auto revolution. Aside from the primeval foundation, it was hunky-dory. My fingers were idly rubbing an errant match against my thumbnail. I snapped the match to life. The flame grew, bloomed, and my fingers smothered it to death. I counted back to months to when I'd last seen Hoop.

Must have been last May, because I'd gotten sick and taken off for a week, and upon my return, the old boy had already shoved off, which would place this home as one of Hoop's final inspections before walking off into the sunset. I stared into the house's blindless window eyes and studied its final olive skin, and wondered how vinyl sighting burned. Bubble? Or slide? Shadows lulled out of the side door like a blanket of black tongues.

To procrastinate going inside, I ran the hose and watered the plants. Having nothing else to put me off and feeling foolish besides, I strolled inside. The inspection went as swimmingly as every other. Well, the furnaces hall appeared half a decade newer than its interior workings. probably indicating an illegal recycle job, but the unit would function for at least a year before I needed replacement and was therefore no skin off my nose. Houses one and two were likewise acceptable.

Still, I couldn't shake the strange feeling of some grand trick being played on me, as if each house had some crucial yet easily overlooked infraction and my misidentification of these issues would result in dire consequences of uncertain nature. But what did I care? These homes passed inspection. And if every so often it felt like I wasn't alone, exactly, in this development, well, I could chalk that up to the human instinct of over-awareness when solitary. Still, I was overcome with a nervousness that neared dread, an awe even, a shining curiosity.

My urge to enter House 4 fought my urge to do no such thing. I split the difference between retreat and advance and sat cross-legged in the center of the cul-de-sac. Nothing happened. I wasn't sure what I thought I was doing, so I began to read. Dr. White was outlining the casualties of the Pashtigo fire, and I found myself turning quickly to study House 4. Someone was dancing in the second-story bedroom. They were evidently on the other side of the room, and what I was seeing was their shadow's reflection in the mirror.

A streak of sunlight jaking in and out of view like the glare from a watch face. I was rushing through the side door of house four before I even realized. That certainly couldn't have been who I thought it was. But say it was right. Say that hoop had been, I don't know, stuck here all this time. or live in here like some weirdo. I couldn't very well leave him. Hope!

The walls of House 4 strangled my voice. I called louder, and this time House 4 echoed my words as sonorously as any crevasse. No one answered. The house felt a different beast entirely than the first time I've been inside. Well, not entirely. More like I'd accidentally touched the other side of that beast subsist. substantially asymmetrical face. I prowled at the second floor.

The angle of the stairs felt too steep, and the loft tilted so acutely that I half expected the divane and end tables that slide into the railing. This cantered loft was bookended by closed doors. One of these had to lay to the bedroom in which I'd maybe seen hope. Hope?

Nothing so much as a squeaking floorboard from either direction. I tried to orient my body is if I were yet in the cul-de-sac. But no matter my efforts, I couldn't seem to figure out my spatial relationship with outside. I was loathed to look out the blinds, for that I would leave my back exposed. I'm coming in, bud, I said. I all but charged at the leftmost door.

Inside? Nobody. Before my nerves could slow me down, I dropped to my belly and checked underneath the bed. then whipped the closet doors open, unoccupied and empty, respectively. The door across the loft seemed to stretch far away, but when I stepped out at the empty bedroom as if I made the expanse in a bare step,

nausea roiled in my stomach, into my throat. Knock, knock, I said. I turned the knob and crept in, but nobody stood at the window. Nope. I ventured. Nothing. This room is as empty as the other.

Cramped as the other, too. The walls slanting inward as they rose to meet the too low ceiling. I sat on the bed and caught my breath. Maybe the sunlit shape had only been a trick of the light. A reflection from the metal clasp on my lunchbox, say, sparkling on House 4's window. I peered out the window. The cul-de-sac looked empty. Yet, I knew it wasn't.

I felt it in my bones. The matchbox from my pocket had found its way into my hand. Between my fingers, a match. I indulged myself with a flick, but could not feel my gaze away from the cul-de-sac. When I felt the fire licking at my fingertips, I shook out the match and stood it on the windowsill. Just as whatever lurked in the cul-de-sac finally moved. Only then could I make out the vagaries of its figure. Something empty and insubstantial and hot.

Something like the absence of flame with all flames emission. The shape flitted as if to mimic a bonfire, but one racked with misery. Long poles a sun-letged flame stretched infinitely in the direction of each convulsion. The houses in the cul-de-sac appear to bend towards this coroner. corona of pain. They appeared to shudder in commiseration with the figure. House four came unmoored from the earth, falling relentlessly towards this living aurora. My cut hand spluttered blood, and even that pain wasn't the whole of it, the fraction of it,

because I felt completely a fire, utterly consumed in flames agony, only without evidence the agent. I was sure a match had lit in my pocket and was burning me from the inside. When I ripped them free, the match just scattered the hardwood like so many dead teeth. And that was when the roiling shape fled deeper into the development. My pain fled along with. In that split second, I was released completely from the burning. Yet I couldn't let him get away. I dashed out of the house and once I had the pavement, the relief of being outside overwhelmed me. I did not leap up, expecting him to be far gone, except there he was, backlit against the horizon, weaving and staggering with the zeal of a headlight reflecting a jumping deer's eyes. Our silent course

continued past endless identical domiciles. But no matter how much I ran, I could not catch the light. Finally, as we came to the swamp, which marked the subdivision's edge, the swamped up once encompassed the entirety of this neighborhood. He blinkered out. Quick as that, and I was utterly alone. I slowed to a walk and lays my fingers behind my head. My breath hitched. Miss drew off the swamp. Its ferns, its pools, seemed as prehistoric as dinosaur bones.

Suddenly, I very much. I wanted to go home. I hunted for my truck keys and found them absent. My book was not in my rear pocket either. I'd left them in the cul-de-sac. Backtracking was not as easy as I expected. But after minimal roaming, I returned to that paved whirlpool, a flock of sparrows or whatever a light from roof to roof.

They might have been trailing me. House for his abnormality, it was not abated in my absence. I flipped its bird, trying to liven the mood. The sparrows tittered. My keys and book should have waited in the center of the cul-de-sac where I'd taken lunch. The Fires 3 had a distinctly emblazing cover which I had seen on the approach. No sign. House 4 seemed to look right back at me.

I clicked my pen and wrote High Strangeness on that unit's carbon sheet as well as on the device. development map. Then I saw it, and a stone grew beneath my tongue, because my book leaned against the inside of the bedroom window, exactly where I'd lean my spent match. It had been split open so the cover image could be seen in its entirety, a roaring, abstract flame. Within the flame, screamed a figure tied to a conflagrating tree, drifting between the his toes for the black tendrils of scorched leavings.

I searched for any human-shaped slice of sunlight. Nothing. For what I hoped was the final time, I ventured into House 4. The garage smelled like mud for some reason, and cooked meat. I noted the scent, perhaps a possum or raccoon in the walls. The door to the house swung sticky. I stepped over an amber-colored Icar, which pooled in the entryway between house and garage. Iker also dripped from the power outlets and bubbled up from the cracks in the hardwood.

I logged the Iker in my notebook. When I squatted for a closer observation, I also discovered it was the source of the stench. Unless the walls were packed with formaldehyde-blooded possums, I could not imagine the source or composition of a liquid so foul. I crept upstairs. Bits of blue painting tape marked studs on the walls. Each room had an Ethernet Wall Jack which dripped amber. If this place weren't beyond repair, one day every mother's son could stream simultaneously.

I pitied the family you would settle here. House 4 was so nearly a home. Its gulf for trueness was all the deeper for its lack of width. Hope? I called. One of the loft doors was open. Spread against the window glass, spying wrenched in its submission, was my book. Its pages were damp and stunk of crushed bugs and crisp bacon.

I read from the top of the page, a slice into Chapter 5. The Pistigo fire killed some 800 persons in Pistigo alone. In the surrounding communities, another 1,000 to 1,700 human lives were lost. Still, the fire's impact on the infrastructure of eastern Wisconsin is not to be ignored. Since census data burned in the courthouse's basement, there is no exact count of how many buildings were consumed by the flames. We can assume it was in the hundreds. This last bit had been underlined, in black marker.

Whoop had been here. Hoop had marked this passage and left two gifts nestled in the crotch of the book's wet pages, a match, unlit, and my truck key, glistening in the same icker. I found myself unable to continue inspection. Instead, I roamed and contemplated. I locked myself into a dog kennel. Every other unit on the block was equipped with one. I sat down to better mimic the dog's height.

This dog's point of view obliterated the horizon and so, looking up, empty residences seemed to proliferate infinitely. It was easy enough to imagine a dog skeleton with me in the kennel, a dog abandoned by a cruel owner. The dog, remembering his kennel at home, roaming to the street and finding a new kennel to die in. What if she had puppies? I imagine two graveborn puppies sucking at Mama's brink. bones. You could burn bones, given enough heat. But even in cremation, not every bone was transformed to ash. Shake a funeral urn, and it will rattle softly. But imagine as I might there was nothing but sunlight and air and myself trapped in this cage. Oh, but if sunlight could feel, would it not shriek in

pain? Would it not want to die? It struck me that I should be bold, admit the realities of life, however unlikely. Hoop was showing himself to me, beckoning me for help. Was I really going to chase an invisible flame and pretend an hour later had been a trick of the light? Ignore an underlying passage on residential conflagration? No, and no. Hoop was not a not living in pleasant retirement. He'd been trapped in this bizarre, off-kilter development. He was in screaming, constant pain. And he'd picked the right man to burn him free.

Next to the garden tools and weed whip in my truck bed were two five-gallon gas cans. One of the gas cans had unlighted for the truck. The other can held that oily mix which was necessary to run a two-cycle. I always wondered which was more flammable. Still, there simply wasn't enough for the entire subdivision, not to mention the entire development, I would need to get a real wildfire going, a storm which could sustain itself and its own consumptive powers.

The way I figured it was that everything had a portion of itself best suited for burning, some integral bit that would render the rest, even unburnt, and operative. For a country, it's capital. For a house, it's roof. For a table, any leg. For me, my heart, my brain. For this development?

House 4. I drove my truck to the cul-de-sac and backed up until House 4 loomed through my rear view. I might as well have been sitting in the truck bed. But I was not so scared this time. because I had the sun waiting in my pocket, or at least next to me, in the passenger's seat. In and out of the house did I slither. I left behind my trail of oils. When the gas cans ran out, I drizzle paint thinner in long, slow loops.

I found the paint thinner in House One's attic. The smell bit so sharp I could have followed the trails with my eyes put out. if I became stirred when I was inside the house, well, how could I expect any other reaction? To be in the bedroom alone. The last person to ever exist in this place. It would have been impossible not to touch myself. I could feel the entire breadth of House 4's anti-life. The whole time it did not exist, when it had not housed anyone, not a family, not a family, not

even a starving dog. All that solitude pressing against itself, squeezing essence out in dribbles of sweet expectation, sweat sliding between the flexed muscles of its imminence, and lurking below all that was a spoil, a wretchedness of which hoop was only one part. A core of togetherness, a blacknadeer, which existed as a perfect counterpoint at the apex of what,

came next. This vulgar sheen was not enough to stop my expulsion. If I'm being honest, it added my orgasm's keenness, its volume, painted the walls and carpet with a power of mine which had from the inside come out. After my climax, excitement unabated, I poured a stream of paint thinner from the side door, the garage to the foot of the driveway where I sat a five-gallon bucket. I shucked my shirt and pants and stuffed them into the six fingers a paint thinner. I found a match rolling around my fingers. It danced against my fingernail, made as if to nozzle. I groped its throbbing tip. My fingers plucked the matchbox from my pocket and set matches within the crooks of my knuckles. One, two, three. The first match was two, one. The first match was two

wet. Dumb fingers fumbled the second match unlit into the bucket. But the third, oh, the third. It flicked a swift life as surely as a torch struck by lightning. I dropped the match into the bucket. The paint thinner blazed away and shot in a pulmic bundle of cotton, khaki, and paint thinner directly into house four siding. Concurrently, a streak of flame ran toward the house along my drizzled route, faster in a wildfire, insistent, penetrant. I was already sprinting for the truck when House Four's windows blew out, first floor, then second, glass tinkling and visual orchestra. I sat on the roof of the cab and watched the adolescent firestorm grow to maturity under the strangely silent roar of utter consumption.

House 4's siding was burning. Vinyl drips the lake tights and sizzled into burbling pools which dried tortoiseshell on the grass. House 3 caught a sprinkle and went up like a cat tail. I hardly noticed. House 4 enchanted me. What existed beneath the siding was beyond my keen. I couldn't make any sense of it, certainly not concrete. nor wood nor metal.

The entire house was lurching rhythmically, as if gasping flammatic breath. And with this movement, my perspective shifted. I recognized what I was seeing, even if it was impossible. The glistening flank of some gigantic organ. With each throbbed the organ shucked another exfoliation of vinyl or shingle. The house sprinkled to the sidewalk.

A sheet of windows sliced the garden hose in half and the hose undulated like a decapitated viper. The venom water surged onto the lawn. I could hardly hear the spurt for the throbbing of the great organ now played in concert with my headache and my heartbeat. I had to be wrong. I couldn't bear to see anymore. House one through three burned as hardly as House four. The road leading from the cul-de-sac was guarded. either side by towering infernos. A duck ran by with its tufted crown of flame. He plunged into

the pond and resurfaced, looking none the worse for where. Yet, as I bore breathless witness, the world around me a wreath of apocalypse. My chest here singed, my boxers tented. The fire climaxed, too early. The burn was already received. house three's walls and roof were disintegrated. Flames guttered not in split wood or broken bricks, but rather in the humor of a translucent orb. I was trying to decipher this organ's identity when a plate shifted inside the acquiesce. And suddenly I gazed at a black manhole, surrounded by striated spaghetti and gold. Under this gaze, I could not move.

I was utterly caught. When the great eye rolled on, I ducked beneath the lip of the truck bed. House whose roof and chimney were contracting and expanding in ludicrous proportion. An ululation uttered from these elastic cords, high and mighty, louder than a hundred children's choirs burning alive within the steel hides of school buses. A whip flame wrinkled the cords until the sound lengthened, deepened. The other houses were likewise weathering the blaze. The true faces of House 5 and 6 were yet hidden.

House 1 expressed a body part of which I could not identify and would never again study, no matter my curiosity. My firestorm had failed. In 15 more minutes, even these weak blazes would be gone. I screamed at the flames and at these unhomely houses. and when my voice echoed back, I couldn't believe a horse I sounded, until I realized that it wasn't my echo at all, but rather the collected quacks of a score of ducks. Honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, until I screamed again.

And when that wasn't enough, I climbed through the back window the truck cab and slammed the horn. And there it was. Hope had not just left a book open for me. He'd puffered my keys along with the text. Left the truck key protruding. The truck. I checked the horizon. Two fingers to dusk.

Thirty minutes or thereabouts. My wrist wasn't naked without its watch. It was freed. I had all the time I needed. For my last few minutes, I read about the postigo. to think that such an inferno could happen in my own state. It was as if the universe was winking at me and going, Yeah, maybe you too.

Was this how aspiring actress felt when they noticed their downtown in a movie? How Jay Robbie felt when he was about to flip the big switch at Trinity and turned sand into glass. I had three-quarters tank in my truck. I backed it up as far as I could without compromising a straight, shot at House 4. The old girl wasn't known for her acceleration, but I figured I had enough of a lead to be doing 40 or 50.

When I couldn't fit any more fingers between the sun and the horizon, I shifted the truck into drive. My foot felt naked on the pedal. My skin dipped into the grooves, and I knew that if I would look at my soul, I would find parallel pale alternating red lines where the blood had been squeezed, where the skin had been connected more to the rubber and the metal and the polymer than the very blood moving inside of me. But I could not look at my foot because I was looking at the rapidly advancing, slowly pulsing mass of House 4, at the foundation, at the rough-hewn altar, or whatever it was.

I did not release the wheel. I guided her in. I believe there was an explosion. I believe that in the breath after my fiery lance, in the silent moment in which I laid Ray doll in the driver's seat, that destruction inhaled a cul-de-sac in concentric circles, and plasmatic ripples, onwards, outwards, until this neighborhood was nothing but bones.

I believe this because a moment later I floated above it all, up through the truck's roof and house four's broken skull, up into the air. From this vantage I saw the fire. I was not so transcendent that I could not feel the pleasure of it. I could still appreciate how my blow to the heart had resulted in a body's failure, written in arcs of conflagration. my own body drifted oddly, not with the wind, which was fast, but with a toss and lick of the

flame below. Another body danced alongside mine. A body just like mine was now, writ of flames ejaculation and the shadow of reflected sunlight. Hoop, of course. Close but far away. Passing me on his way. out. He drifted into the setting sun until he was nothing but missed and then nothing at all. A flame retired. I did not follow. Could not. Instead, I revolved in a gyre around the subdivision.

I spiraled in perfect regularity against the dome of wide sky. I gazed and witness of my new self, my new forms, and the alien body. The body of the subdivision became as intimate as my own, became my own self, in fact, now ravied by nature's sharp tooth consumption, the flame quenching in my pools, my liquids, my organs, my puddles of light and air. For your bonus episode, Creepy Presents, Vestigial, written by Jennifer Fleck, and narrated by Heather Thomas. Such messes my spouse left behind.

Our finances and tricky tangles. Closets, drawers, cupboards, sloppily stripped. All the good LPs, gone. Evan took what he wanted, as always. Then he swayed all our old friendships and loyalties to his side. For I was, old Jane, that shit crazy. a would-be witch who cuts herself for sympathy and attention. And he was the charismatic tenured professor.

Beloved, revered, perennially innocent. Believed. But Evan wasn't blameless. I'd often suspected, though, I'd never known for certain. Two months ago, I found the newest evidence in our master bathroom. Signs of his latest dalliance. The mirror bore handprints, the smudge of a cheek, and a partial lipstick print, like half a kiss. It told the tale of a figure who'd been rammed against the marble sink from behind, her hands braced and faced against the glass.

Someone who wasn't me had left these signatures, perplexing as the shroud of Turin. Then as I became aware of what I was seeing, damning as a perfume on a collar, I assumed her position, mirrored, doubled. I created a crime scene reenactment, imagining his face by my shoulder, twisted in passion. A forensic middle finger. My stomach dropped. Here was all the proof I needed.

It marked the end of my marriage. There are indignities you can survive, and others you refuse to endure. bereft, shackled by student loans, and shockingly poor. That's how my partner of 13 years left me. He moved in with her, their carryings on now common knowledge. Not a student of his, but another professor. The one whose poetry readings I'd been dragged to all winter and spring semester,

breathy and stilted word salads about love and affairs of the heart, long pauses while she sought my gaze in the audience with a smug glimmer brewing in her eyes. Thinking back on it, putting two and two together, I filled with rage. Eventually my feelings cooled, clarified, became bitterness with an ice-sharp edge. My attention shifted from her to him. The way he'd taken her arm over the free wine and cheese, leaned forward, whispering something that made her smile, the blatancy of their affair, the publicness of it. As I stood nearby, tracing a scar that curled like a question mark on the back of my hand,

feet aching, hoping we'd leave soon. I was now impoverished, alone in a house in an underwater market, my home slated to be sold soon at a loss. But I was not without my own ways. and means. There's a ritual, rare in these days. I informed work of an upcoming operation, a week needed to recover. I hinted at painful and intimate, which was no lie. It's a female thing, I told my supervisor, my eyes downcast. The squeamish curl of his lip ensured privacy and space. No further questions asked. I began the preparations by papering over the windows and checking the locks on the doors, laid in a larder of rich foods, fatty cuts of beef, sticks of butter, avocados soft and smoky with rot.

When night fell in the ripening moon rose, I painted the sigils on my skin in moss green and pebble gray, family colors from the old world, and began the fasting, the quiet chance that rose and fell. As the pains came, I held my back and paced the hallways. I covered all 4,382 ridiculous feet of Travertine and Persian wool. Pangs at first tedious and grinding, then nearly unbearable. I grunted and loat like an animal, went on my hands and knees, panting and slobbering. A night and a day, and a day passed.

we'd never had children. Evan promised we'd try later, ever later, knowing I'd reach the age where such a pursuit becomes increasingly difficult. Once we were settled, he'd say, and I'd look around me and point out this expanse and plentitude, all we'd bought to consume and to enjoy, or to grow tired of and to throw away. He was placating me,

no sincerity behind his sweet, assurances. He took a lock of my graying hair behind my ear, chucked me under the chin, and dismiss me by opening his phone. Now as the moon rose at last in all its fullness, and my pain reached a zenith and edged past it, I arranged all the small mirrors so I could see deeply into myself. I took up my scalpel and scissors. I was no stranger to the particular pain of sharp blades, of cutting. The first long cut unzipped me from breast crease to pelvic arch and eased my labor pains. I peered inside.

Everything seemed arrayed in the usual matter, yet I paused to marvel at the parts of me that trembled in their veils in viscera. I slowed my pulse. I only needed but a small piece of each organ. But it must be taken quickly before my body caught on to what dark trickery I'd gotten into. I sniffed, pinched, severed, pride, cut. When I finished collecting what was needed, I closed muscle and skin, my stitches rough, hairy, but strong. I'd scar impressively, crisscrossing all the old silvery tracks and trails.

The oldest ones Evan had once traced tenderly, saying he'd never hurt me. The next to oldest, he'd inspected with a barely. concealed disgust. The newest scars. These he'd ignored entirely. He'd thought all of it a message to him, each and every mark. But instead, they'd been tiny doorways I'd cut to find a way out of temporary states of anguish. But now wasn't time to dwell in the past. I was a mother, my body given over to lives, not my own. The take of the time. Taken pieces lay bloody in an enamelware bowl. Five in all, I bore. One from my spleen, child of earth and the songs at summer's end. One from my lung. She of cold metal and colder tears,

Autumn's darling. One from my kidney. Birthling of black water and brine. Winter and fear. One for my liver. The green woods babe, bright with anger and fresh insult. And the last from my heart, red as fire, seed of joy and bitterness both. The runt, still as a stone. With blood-sticky hands I wrapped my heart's child in black coffin satin and fell back in exhaustion. The others squirmed to me like newborn kangaroo kits, latching wherever they could to my flesh, sinking their new teeth, nursing with vigor.

Rich foods near spoiling nourished me during my confinement. I devoured skin and rind, pit and bone, and my body, in turn, fed my brood. My heart's child finally stirred in her satin trappings, revived, sluggish at first, then her needle teeth pierced me, and I felt how starved she'd been. Plenty of fight in you yet, I murmured, stroking what I thought might be her cheek. Only a mother could love children like these, and I brimmed with admiration and adoration,

like kittens stripped of skin, only the barest impression of limbs and paws. They quickly grew larger, in terms of fruit. Cherries became Clementines, became apples, then can't. than pie pumpkins. When they threatened to overgrow, I knew the calling time had come. Only the strongest could live, for the ritual is firm on this point,

as cruel as it is exacting. Had those sightless eyes of theirs, too many like spiders, fixed upon me, I'd have lost my nerve. So I waited until they fell into their collective drowses. Into a plastic garbage sack went liver and lung, spleen and kidney. I heard angry panic seething from the Mercedes trunk as I drove,

barreling through the dark to a forgotten beach I knew. By the time I'd hurled them into the river, four had become two, having devoured each other. I returned home to little heart. It took hours to calm her. It took many promises, whispered into the ears now growing under her new hair. It silken strands the color my own were in youth. By Saturday morning heart was fully developed.

She stood before me, my gallum daughter, dressed in the best clothes for my wardrobe. Diamonds on wires I pushed through her lobes as she winced, hissing. Then the whisper of stockings, the pinch and teeter of stilettos with blood-red souls. My will ran through her, traveling spreading nerves, the branches of a tree made of lightning. At the threshold of the world she stood, hands clasped, awaiting instruction.

Like me, but better. Like the best me possible. Heart's been out in the world a while now, doing my bidding. I've managed to hold back the realtor who's all too eager, ready to drive a stake into my yard. for if all goes well, this child of mine will come back to me reformed. She'll have pried out Evans' heart and substituted herself, her body shrunken again, all beating muscle and machine-like purpose. She'll return to me clothed in his form, to all future curious and prying eyes,

a vision of my husband returned, contrite, dutiful, doting. Then she'll hand me his heart, gone cold and still. This offering we'll dedicate to family, to those in the old world, going back and back in history. Our family line a network of scars, of backs broken on wheels, of bodies bound as flames rose and consumed them. We'll sing, we'll chant, we'll rejoice. Then the final task the ritual demands will burn his vestigial organ, the blind pocket of questionable origin or function, to cinders.

The ashes will go in the morning's trash. All who whispered, judged, and disparaged me. They'll assume he came back to me, Evan did. They'll think of this surprise outcome as a reconciliation. a love story and maybe that's what it is

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