A Gentle Hell (11 page)

My shovel hit something metallic and hard. I set down the shovel and knelt down. I brushed away the dirt until I revealed the contours of the circular object buried underneath the grass.

I lifted up the formaldehyde jar, impossibly large, out of the dirt. Inside the jar was a pair of charred black legs.

I unearthed the rest of the jars soon after that. The feet beside the shower, the torso by my upholstered living room chair. The head I found next to the refrigerator. It was almost unrecognizable as a head, a burnt lump of flesh with a shredded neck. It had no lips, no eyes, and two hooked holes for a nose.

“What now?” I asked, after I set all the jars on my bed beside the jar of black arms. From the girl watching me from behind the tree line, there was no response.

The body parts inside the formaldehyde jars started to move.

I stepped back. The lights arranged on the singing grass burst on. More budget horror movie props, I thought, even when my head threatened to pop off my neck with anxiety. The black arms slammed against the top of the lid and the jar burst. The noxious smell of formaldehyde spilled over me, and the arms crawled toward the jar that contained the feet. I unscrewed the lid. The feet kicked and the jar tipped over, flooding my bed with its chemicals. The arms freed the legs next, which uncurled onto the bed like two dying birds. The head turned inside its prison, gnashed its teeth and grimaced to show me its gray, mottled gums. The jar that contained it cracked and collapsed in on itself.

Amidst the glass and formaldehyde on my bed, the body parts found each other and the skin, that black, burnt skin almost unrecognizable as something once human, sewed itself together into what it used to be.

The broken entity on my bed lay flat on its back. Its head sunk down into the bedspread, arms and legs splayed out. He opened his lipless mouth, and he spoke to me with a crumbling tongue.

“You’re tense,” he
sai
.,
“Come here.”

I paused. My bones shuddered.

“You’re him,” I whispered.

“Come here,” he said once more. His voice softened. “It’s been too long.”

For once the singing grass laid hush around us. My furniture loomed up like fighting animals, and the air crystallized. I had to push through solid matter to take a step, another step. I broke frozen particles on my skin to climb into the bed. He outstretched his arms. I crouched on top of him.

“Quantum entanglement?”
I asked.

“Something
like
that,” he said, “if it helps you to wrap your head around this.”

He undressed me with those burnt fingers. Languidly, like we were touching each other underwater. Those motions were no longer mechanical and awkward, as they had once been back in the cemetery, but purposeful, almost vicious. I dug my fingers into his cracked shoulders, and when I looked down into his eyeless sockets I didn’t laugh. I didn’t look away.

When I was naked he rolled me over on my back, on top of the broken glass and pool of formaldehyde. He spread my legs apart and penetrated me in one fluid motion. I cried out.

“It’ll hurt less the next time,” he said, and he touched my face. My hands squeezed into fists and my toes curled as he rocked inside of me. Slow, deep, like I felt the walls inside of
me
might bust open. I uncurled my hands.
Curled them again.
Dug them into his skin.
Squeezed the bed sheets between my fists.

When we were finished the lights gutted out. I rolled off the bed and searched for my clothes in the grass, in the dark. The singing grass picked up its song again,
its
howling song. I dressed.

“I can’t stay together for long,” he said.

“You came here just to take my virginity?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he said. “I have business to take care of.”

“Why were you buried in those jars?” I asked. “What’s going to happen to you?”

“Don’t worry about it, baby,” he said.

He left.

The girl stood behind me.

“I know who you are,” I said.

“No need to say it.”

“What do I do now?”

“Go home and write about it,” she said, and she left once more.

I didn’t have to look back to know that the artist was behind me. I felt his cool shadow, his breath, the heart overworked from too many years of smoking cigarettes. The artist as tragic hero, I thought, burnt up and buried in jars. There’s nothing more typical.

“Autumn, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.
It doesn’t matter anyways,” I said.

A sickening vertigo overcame me. I fell in the grass before he could catch me, my head spinning. I heaved and my spine buckled. I vomited up the quivering cougar heart at his feet.

THE END

My name is
Autumn Christian
. I am a horror writer currently living in Austin, Texas.

I grew up in Fort Worth and attended university as an English literature major before I decided to drop out and run off to an Oklahoman dairy factory for six months. I became small town famous after writing a blog about the monsters that lived in the town pond, but soon after took off for a Texas commune. After getting kicked out of the commune for my ex-boyfriend’s suspected communist leanings, I ended up on the East side of Austin and lived in a Burning Man enclave with a haunted blues band. Later I arrived on the South side of Austin and moved into a demon infested apartment above a coffee shop where I continue to this day to write stories and wake up in the middle of the night to junkies screaming outside my window.

I’ve been a freelance writer, an
iPhone
game designer, a cheese producer, a haunted house actor, and a video game tester. I consider Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Katie Jane Garside, the southern gothic, and
dubstep
as main sources of inspiration. I’ve been published in numerous literary magazines that are probably too obscure to worth mentioning. I also find writing biographies the proper way in third person intensely uncomfortable.

Thank you for reading this collection of short stories from Dark Continents Publishing. For additional titles, visit www.darkcontinents.com