Dead Bodies
By Katy Lennon
fiction | 12 min read | TW: gore, death/sex, disease
The barn was huge, even bigger than our house. It was round and bulbous as a pustule, its walls built from the stones of the last family’s home, the roof thatched with dried hay. Inside, before the deaths started, it smelled of warm fur and animal dung. The chickens used to sleep in there when it rained, but they all died soon after the plague came. My sister and I used to spend nights up in the loft, watching the moon move across the sky from the tiny window at its head. After we found my mother fucking our neighbours’ son in there, it never held that wonder for me ever again.
My mother got the plague from him, the neighbour’s son. The one she told me I should keep well away from, the one who would make me embarrass myself and my family. She told me my virtue was a gift that I had a duty to protect. I guess her virtue didn’t need protecting. When my sister found them, she made a series of strange sounds, like she was being strangled, or throwing up. I rushed out to see them too, sweaty and glistening in the hay, the afternoon sunlight shining in through the slats of the walls.
Ma came stumbling through the back door and looked at us like we were sin itself. She pulled her dress straight and muttered something about helping him find the clinch cutter. Her body looked paler than usual but hot, red patches had come up on her chest and neck. Like someone had been throttling her. I said ‘But Ma we changed the horseshoes yesterday,’ and my sister let out a bitter laugh. Before we knew it, our mother was slapping us across our heads, screaming that we were insolent, ungrateful girls. I could feel the heat of her hands though my hair. We didn’t know it then, but she’d be a corpse within the week. That she could have given it to us too. I hated her right up until she died and for a long time afterwards.
We turned the barn into a charnel house, to hide the bodies strewn all around the dead crop fields. We had a duty to preserve their dignity, Father would tell me. But I didn’t see anything dignified in lying in a heap, slowly rotting, even if it was behind closed doors. The plague spread fast and soon both of them ended up in there too - my mother and the boy next door. Just another couple of dead things under all the others. When my sister would hold open the door so I could throw another one in, my eyes would dart upwards, to catch glimpses of them. Each time they’d be covered a little more, until one day all I could see was one of the dead boy’s eyes. I knew it wasn’t right, but I still thought him beautiful.
We lived quietly and without touch. Touch was how it spread. We gathered the bodies in the charnel house as they fell, farmed our remaining animals and crops, cleaned up after each other. Barely glanced up at each cough or sigh. I took my crying where I could; letting myself feel it when we had a death to mourn. Sometimes it would rise up inside me when I least expected it, the feeling growing so big it turned painful. The sight of all those bodies tangled together sometimes made me think of sex, and excitement would snarl against the pain. It made me feel sick with shame. I knew it was wrong. But the stench only stayed with me as long as the door was open.
After they both went, his mother walked right across the dead cornfield between our houses and straight into our kitchen to slap my Father across the face. Her husband had to come to drag her back to their house. He kept saying we weren’t worth getting upset about, that my mother was nothing but a slut. She got what she deserved, he yelled back at us as they crunched our dead corn beneath their feet. I wondered if that made their son a slut too. Soon after, we had to go over to the house to drag their bodies across the cornfield and throw them on the pile.
***
They look at us only when they have to. We watch them avoid our gaze, eyeballs rolling to match theirs. We know what fascination and disgust we awaken in them. Our mingled fluids, our groping affections a lure. All of us moving as one, turning our necks and stretching them taut, as to accept a kiss.
***
My sister said she hears our mother whispering to her at night. Says she hears tiny sounds like fingernails tapping on glass. Sometimes she knows without a doubt the voice is our mother’s and sometimes it could be someone else’s. Sometimes the voices talk in turn, other times it’s all at once. She wouldn’t tell me what they said, but she avoided my eyes in a way that tells me it’s something she shouldn’t be hearing.
I never tell her she’s the one who speaks every night. Sometimes from her bed, sometimes so close to me I can feel her breath collecting warmly in my ear. Some nights she talks so fast I can’t hear the gaps between the words, and some nights the words come so slowly it takes her all night to say it. I’m not always sure what she’s saying. But I know they are the words she should not know, and I should not be hearing them. I know acting on them would make me a slut. Just like my mother.
One night I dream I look across to her bed and it is empty. In the dream I rise and move to the window. I see my sister on her knees at the barn doors. They open without her touch, spreading warm light over the night-blackened grass. It shows her nakedness in the dark, her hands moving over her skin in an urgent, desperate way, like she is on fire and trying to put it out. Her eyes are open. Wide and white, like a frightened horse. She turns to face me and it’s not her face, but my own.
When I went back to sleep I dreamt of hands and woke to find my own buried under my clothes, warm spit running down my cheek. My sister was sitting up in bed, staring at me. ‘You were making noises,’ she said, not bothering to hide her disgust. I didn’t tell her about the dream, or the charnel house. The bodies twisting together inside. How she was me. Something deep inside me told me this was wrong and shameful, and I longed to feel hot hands slapping my head, to feel their heat through my hair.
I thought of how good sex with next door’s son must have felt. I felt guilty. I thought what my mother did must have been worth it. I felt guilty. I went downstairs to make breakfast in silence. I felt guilty. I poured milk into cups and it curdled instantly. I felt guilty. I thought how I’d rather be dead than go without the touch of another’s skin as long as I live. I felt guilty.
***
She hears the echelons of our putrescence. The resonations; dried bones rubbing against one another. The sloughing of skin from putrefied flesh. A ritual of disappearance. A dance to summon our own end. Our mouths shine with grinding teeth, our eyes wide with delight. We know they think of us at night. We laugh wildly, loudly, letting our cries reverberate, as in a church. We breed. We spread. We touch. We invite them in, with hands outstretched.
***
Even from my bed I could smell their decay, like old fruit and shit. I wondered how long it would take for them to turn into a pile of bones, how long until I ended up in the pile. My Father had taken up the mantle of corpse-thrower, even driving to the next town to collect the dead. I would wait and watch for his return, the wagon swaying with the weight, some fresh, others kept waiting and rotted down to blackened bones. The stink was something else, like unwashed clothes and old garlic and piss.
How long till he throws me on the pile? How long it would take before it became only bones, before we couldn’t tell whose skeleton was whose? The thought became a strange comfort to me. I imagined my ribcage enmeshed with tiny finger bones. The empty cavern of my hips delicately holding a skull. I thought of letting myself fall into the tangle of dead limbs and staying there. I thought of taking rotten fingers into my mouth, feeling the skin come off between my teeth to reveal tender flesh, soft as too-ripe apples. I think of breasts full of putrid fat, of cocks stiffened and black with death.
My Father beat me for unclean thoughts. Since he couldn’t touch me, he’d crafted a whip he’d made out of old scraps of cow hide for punishments. I cried as the leather strips came down on my back, begging through my sobs. When he had finished with me, he stormed to his room, and I heard the sounds of cupboards opening and closing, his bags open and yawning on the bed.
‘Are you leaving us?’ I asked. He stared back at me in fury. What else did I expect him to do? ‘You girls have tried me for the last time. There is evil about you two. I think you are demons sent to tempt me, hellions of Satan himself. If it is so, you will starve and die without a good Christian soul to feed off, and the world will be better off,’
‘And what if we are not?’
‘Then you will go to Heaven, and be free from this putrid earth. You will be with your Mother,’
‘But Ma didn’t go to Heaven,’
He glared at me, raised a hand to strike me. Lowered it. What I’d said seemed to only confirm his suspicions. He left at dusk. I told my sister and all her crying came at once. The welts in my back taught me even inaction could lead to punishment.
That night I went out. To the charnel house. The doors opened, weightless, its light washed over me. And I saw them. Sweat and cum and spit sparkling in the sunlight. How was it sunny? It was night. And yet it wasn’t. The air in the barn was thick, rotten and moaning, penetrating the communional silence that had followed me from the house. My stomach turned with the stench of it, yet I breathed deeply to take it all in.
Warmth flowed from between my thighs to caress my belly. I felt the blood warm the outlines of my guts, pulsing across them in thin, winding lines. Hands moved involuntarily, following the steps of a dance they did not need to be taught. Bones began to ache with painful needing. The night felt warmer and looser than it had ever felt before. The boy who lived next door appeared, naked and more beautiful than I’d seen him. I gasped and it was like blowing out a candle. He kissed me and it was the purest I had ever felt. Sunlight warmed my skin. I felt God himself had blessed it.
I leaned my head back to be kissed on the neck, eyes closed against the light.
***
She knows this is where she belongs. We need only to exist; when the time comes she will throw herself into us. We caress her cheek while she sleeps. There is nothing wrong with what you feel, child. The only wrong is the denial you subject yourself to in the name of innocence. We will be here, as we always have been, long after purity has been reduced to a pool of blackened fluids, long after God’s corpse is thrown into the charnel house to rot.
***
When I entered the kitchen the next morning, pulling my dress straight, my sister looked at me like I was sin itself. She poured me a glass of milk and it curdled instantly. That night, after I got back from the barn she yelled herself hoarse, the filth pouring out of her made my cheeks hot and a pulsing start between my legs. I milked the cows every morning but that day they screamed like when Father used to slaughter them. When I gave up and walked back to the house, they emitted a low, mournful moan, the sound they make when they’re separated from a newly born calf.
That night my sister did not talk to me, not even to scream. This time, the same filth that had poured from my sister’s mouth appeared in my mind. It had infiltrated me. I felt I had given away something last night that could not be reclaimed. One voice took my attention immediately. It was my sister’s. When I looked over at her bed she was gone. Her voice didn’t seem to be coming from this room, yet it was loud and clear, as if she were crouched next to my pillow. It had the lyrical, childlike tone she used when she wanted me to do her chores for her. She was telling me to go back to the barn. She did not have to beg.
***
We write her love letters in filth. We leave wetness in her bed. We beckon. At night we scream so hard it leaves tears in our throat.
***
When I got to the charnel house it was dark and warm, as if it were emitting it from within. The light had gone, but I realized I no longer needed it. I could hear moans, grinding and senseless. Desolate, slaughterhouse cries, like foxes in the night, echoed out across the fields of dead crops. The doors opened at my touch. The charnel house was black inside. Things were moving in the darkness I couldn’t yet see. Their cries became cacophonous, rising, falling, congealing into monotony. But I wasn’t afraid. I stepped inside and let the darkness swallow me. The barn doors closed slowly as I got down on my knees.
