#2024MakeAMonster day 10: Trash

 #2024makeamonster

Warning: violence, misogyny, decomposition and body horror

Trash

He wrapped me in bin bags after he killed me. No one ever tucked a duvet around me so tenderly as he wrapped those plastic sheets. Masking tape fitted around my arms and legs tender as a tailor; he tucked in the stray ends as if I were Cinderella preparing for the ball.

In life he'd never touched me. He'd been a fussy man, nervous-handed; I'd seen him down the hallway sorting his mail, setting his shirt-cuffs straight, turning his key with careful precision in the lock. The people above complained about a smell, and that surprised me because he always seemed so clean: clothes freshly washed, hair shampooed every day, and just a little too much aftershave stinging the eyes as I walked past him.

I'd say, 'Good morning,' to him, or 'End of a long day, huh?' because I like to be on good terms with my neighbours. He'd nod to me and never said anything. Not till he had the rope around my throat, when he told me I'd wanted to be looked at and now I'd caught the eye of a man who really saw me, a man who knew a slut and a tease when he saw one, a man who could give her more than she'd bargained for.

Well, I hadn't bargained for it. So much pain, now I look back. Afterwards my nerve endings lost their charge and stopped bothering to hurt. It's funny; you miss pain more than you'd think. There's no sweet pleasure in the absence of it when you know you'll never feel it again.

I wasn't the only girl under his floorboards. We were all wrapped up like Christmas presents. Perhaps he'd had more tenderness for my dead body than for the others, because mine was the neatest bagged of all, or perhaps he'd just been getting better at his work. That was how it seemed at first, but I understood when I began, like them, to melt. The finest-tucked trash liner starts to buckle when your flesh begins to swell.

There was only so far we could rise, it seemed; like dough in proving tins we bloomed, but the floorboards kept us pressed and he had heavy furniture on top. A sofa, it was; at nights he sat on it and watched television. A quiet man, you might say. A homebody.

The bags were tucked tight enough that I felt it when the started to split. I'd died too young to know much of stretch marks on my own skin, but the bag did my aging for me. Thin puckers appears as my body bloated; wrinkles gathered in the tightening masking tape. For a while I got to be an old woman, my retirement years lived out beneath his floorboards as what was left of me entered its final riot.

But nothing lasts for ever. The other girls had already been through it; they had passed their swell and settled into rot. Soon enough I was with them. Flies tickled my muscles and maggots nuzzled my bones. I thought, as I lay there, of the people that had touched me; in tenderness, in play, in care, in aching desire. All those hands smoothed over my skin. I'd been a lucky girl, really. Only once did anyone touch me too hard. It just turned out that that one time, he touched me too hard to survive.

Now I was back in the arms of the insects. Me and my new friends, my last friends, we lay together. Mites crept from one of us to the next, little traces of our melting flesh on their delicate feet. It was a sewing machine, the tap, tap, tap of insect feet tacking pieces of one of us into the next, the next, the next. Our flesh greened and liquified, and through the tattered bin bags, we seeped. We couldn't reach hands to each other, but this we could do. Where our flesh ran, it ran to each other.

The neighbours above complained of the smell. My brain pulped quickly, but I didn't need it to remember. We floated atoms of ourselves aloft. With our throats honeycombed by the beetles' kiss, it was all we had to scream with.

But it wasn't all we had to do. Liquid runs; liquid seeps. Liquid knows.

By the time we'd softened his wooden floorboards, we were one. Life had made us separate, but we hadn't the movement to keep apart any more. We were there, we teemed beneath him, we waited.

Of course I wasn't his last girl. Nothing made the us that once was me any different from any other body on earth; that was what the floorboards taught us. For a while she'd been contained in a skull, but that skull was feathering holes through its dome now, and she was back with us now. Everything softens. Everything is matter. When we stop running, we run together.

So when he prized up the floorboards, his face covered with a scarf, the new body was wrapped tidy as anything. Pristine edges, firm and sealed within her skin. She was trapped for now, but she was ready for us, and we were ready for her.

But he shook his head. He shook it angry, frustrated, bewildered. He thought, us crowded together so safe and intimate as we'd become, there wasn't enough room for her.

He turned away. He was ready to deny us our sister. He wouldn't give us back to ourselves.

When we stop running, we run together.

It was easy to tower the maggots up; we are flesh and maggots are we. They made beautiful rippling ropes, their white backs boiling in the churn as we lifted them high, high, high, wrapping around her to drag her down to where, an ocean of patient green, we waited.

He screamed aloud; his throat was still tight-strung enough to sing out like a violin. It was the girl our maggot-tentacles reached for, our thrashing, craving hunger to welcome us back to ourselves. And he tried not to let her go; we had to wrestle him for her. The maggots fell in showshowers where he swatted them, but we were beyond pain and he wasn't, and when we broke his legs with our knotted arms of pupae, she fell down to where we waited and he screamed again.

It was the screaming that got his door opened; he couldn't run on his broken legs, and those above with noses to smell our mute cry had ears to hear his open one. The police came, and they were wrapped too: plastic on their limbs like it had covered ours, holding them separate from what we'd always been, always but for the brief dance of life where, for a few short years, you forget.

They took her away from us.

They tried to pull us apart too; skeletons, they said. And what was once her skeleton, her skeleton alone, now rests somewhere. People cry over it, but we can wait for them to stop. Pain doesn't last. All of us together, our mingled fragments, are too entwined to be dispersed, and now in the earth we wait, our buried joy. The end of a long day, and after it, the union. This graveyard has so many more of us. We lie together, and we blend and blend.

But she that she took away - we don't forget those plastic-coated moving bodies that carried her away from our embrace. Our flies will whisper in their dreams. They won't forget that they took her from where we lay, soft-hearted and tender, waiting for her to join us.