by Somer Canon
“It’s not a knot that makes it do that,” I heard Grenadine’s smooth voice say from behind me.
I spun around and was completely thrown off by what I saw. It wasn’t Nummy Nellie, nor was it Anais. It was Grenadine. Her real skin. And even though her coloring was not something you’d normally see on a human, she wasn’t as nasty as I expected she would be. She was actually sort of beautiful.
Yeah, her skin was a sickly gray color, and when seen on only one body part when surrounded by a typically peachy human skin tone, it looked gross. But when it is the main color it is much easier to digest. Her fingers all had those nasty talons on them, but here on her home turf, they looked glossy, sort of like how I imagined a dragon’s talons would look. Her hair was brown, mousey brown, but it was long and wavy, and she wore it in a loose braid down her back with little white flowers woven into the plait. Her eyes were black. Totally all one color. No iris, no pupils, no white part. All black. She was wearing a sort of shift that was the color of tree bark, but it looked soft and it looked clean.
“Don’t think that anything here is even remotely human,” Grenadine said, smiling at me. “You can’t handle a rope woven by a fairy. What makes you think it would be that easy for you?” Her grin widened.
Okay, the teeth thing was still there, and she stopped being beautiful when she smiled. She looked like the scary crazy thing with the stew pot of horrors I didn’t want to know about. Apparently, Stephanie agreed with my views on that and she started crying at the sight of that hideous smile.
Grenadine turned away from the sobbing Stephanie to return the enormous, heavy chair to its spot at the table. She did it with one hand. When it was back in place, she patted the seat, beckoning me. I gave a long look at Stephanie, thinking as fast as I could of a way to get us both out of this.
“Stop it and come sit,” Grenadine said to me harshly. “You’re not even in your own world anymore, so let it go.”
I walked to the chair with the sound of Stephanie’s sobbing ringing in my ears.
“No, don’t leave me up here!” Stephanie said to my back.
I looked at Grenadine and a thought hit me.
“Let her go,” I said. “Let this be the favor that you owe me.”
The next thing I knew, I was leaning over that heavy table and one side of my face really, really hurt. I stood up straight and looked at Grenadine, who was standing right next to me, her fist still clenched from where she had clocked me. She reached out one of her taloned hands and gripped my jaw roughly.
“You don’t get to decide the favor with which I will grace you, you insect!” she growled into my face. “Now sit down and be quiet! Maybe you’ll learn something, and I won’t have to write off your entire race as a waste to the world.”
I sat down like a good little listener. Grenadine nodded down at me and then walked to Stephanie. She pulled a scary looking hooked knife out of a hidden pocket in her shift and held it up to the light, making sure that Stephanie was getting a good look. Stephanie’s eyes were wide, and her mouth was closed tight and turned down.
“Stephanie D’Agostino,” Grenadine practically purred at Stephanie. “You are a bad and manipulative woman. You had terrible parents who put you down as a child and you grew up to become a vicious and ambitious creature that cares little for the people you use as long as the means meet your own selfish end. You were going to hurt my little pet over there,” Grenadine pointed the knife at me, “and you have badly used that poor, wet rag that you both copulate with on occasion. Stephanie D’Agostino, as a being superior to yourself, I deem you unworthy of my universe and choose instead to add you to my stew pot.” Grenadine turned and pointed her knife now at the gleaming brass pot.
“Let me go. I’m not a bad person! I donate to charities! I take care of my parents! I pay their bills!” Stephanie cried out.
Grenadine started slowly unbuttoning Stephanie’s blouse, revealing the luscious skin and black, lace bra beneath. Next came the button of the snappy brown slacks that slid down her lovely round thighs as they fell to her ankles.
“You donate to charities so that you can write a yearly column wherein you brag about said charitable giving. The bills you say you pay for your parents are their medical care and home nurses so that you don’t have to bother visiting them.” Grenadine slid the knife seductively along the delicate skin of Stephanie’s ribs. “I’ve certainly seen worse humans, but you can’t be bothered to strive for a better version of yourself. I’m going to put those expensively manicured hands of yours in a box and mail them to one of those charities you liked to brag about donating to. If you’d actually exercised a human heart instead of your newspaper’s expense account, you’d perhaps have actually improved someone’s life by being a part of it.”
Before either Stephanie or I could react, Grenadine buried that curved knife into Stephanie’s lower stomach and drove it up, curly guts and shining wet innards spilling from the gash. The guts started to unravel, and they fell to the cloth on the floor with a wet thud, but the rest of Stephanie’s organs stayed hanging in a mass just inside of the wound.
Stephanie was trying to scream, but with her stomach muscles ripped apart and her innards poking out of the long gash going down the length of her torso, the most she could manage were choking gasps and grunts. Her eyes were bulging from their sockets, twirling about and looking everywhere, but apparently seeing nothing.
My hands had flown up to my mouth and I wished they would go to my eyes and cover them, but I couldn’t seem to look away from the slowly spilling intestines. The wet sound of them moving out of her body was so exaggerated that it sounded like a bad sound effect in a low-budget horror movie and the blood was such a bright red that it almost didn’t seem real. Wet slithering, Stephanie’s gasping and grunting, the ripping sound of the knife doing its work, it was a series of noises that I would have been happy to have never heard in all of my life.
I suddenly registered that I was crawling underneath of that massive table with my hands over my head and my eyes squeezed shut. I shut out the sounds as much as I could, but some splats and crunches still came through. It also didn’t help that Grenadine started dictating to me her actions once I stopped being a willing spectator. There was no escape. No happy place.
“Now we have to cut the tissues that are keeping everything attached to the body so that they all spill out. I won’t use these in the stew, but there’s a creature that lives not far from here who appreciates organ meat heartily. Oops, I popped the stomach. Woo, that’s a smell, isn’t it, Christina? (God awful fucking smell when she popped that stomach.) Now we just reach up inside of the ribcage and cut out the heart and lungs. Ooh, there she goes, she’s dead now. Farewell, Stephanie! I hope you make a better stew than a human being.”
I was singing to myself, a sort of ingrained way of self-soothing. It was the Nummy Nellie jingle again.
“A pack of love, a pack of happy,” I choked out. “Share a cake and make it snappy.”
“NUMMY NELLIEEEEEEES IS LOVE FOR THE BELLY!” Grenadine finished for me.
I stopped singing.
“You’re being childish, Christina,” Grenadine said to me. “You like to think that you’ve toughened up to stuff like this. I know you’ve seen some pretty grisly crime photos, how is this so much different?”
“Because I can smell her blood and guts!” I yelled from under the table.
“Hmm, yes, the sense of smell is the one most tied to memory, isn’t it? Oh well. Your line of work needs a level of reverence to it for it to be done well. Now, I’m not accusing you of being someone who sensationalizes murderers like some of your critics, but I do think that you try to protect yourself from the ugliness of it all by distancing yourself from the pain that your fellow humans have suffered and that’s a useless tactic, Christina. Ugliness, in its contrast to beauty, enhances beauty. If it didn’t storm every now and then, how could you really appreciate a sunny day? Look at this, Christina. Look at it so that you can look at
living people walk down the street and see their life and see it for the precious thing it is.”
I was shaking my head under the table, eyes still closed tightly and hands still over my head when I felt a warm wet hand gently grab one of my wrists and start to pull me up and out from under the table. I couldn’t fight the pulling, and I knew better not to at this point. I didn’t want to end up in the stew pot.
I was pulled to a standing position and when I opened my eyes, I felt my throat clench shut to hold back the tidal wave of vomit trying to make a prison break.
Stephanie’s hair was now tied to the hook hanging from the ceiling, holding her severed head off of the mess on the floor. I stared at Stephanie’s dead face longer than I wanted to. In the movies, the face always gets nasty and scuffed, even during a neat decapitation. There’s always blood that comes out of the mouth and nose and the eyes go all wonky and crooked, but Stephanie’s face was clean and even serene looking. She looked pale, but other than that, she looked asleep. Until, of course, you noticed the neat cut along the neck that liberated her head from her gutted body.
Her body was skinned and cleaned on the floor. Grenadine worked preternaturally fast because both arms had already been cut off and it looked like the meat was being removed and cut into stew-sized cubes. The hands had been cut from the arms and were sitting neat and clean on a separate cloth near the body.
“Yes, I really am going to send those to a charity. Something called the ASPCA, for animals I suppose. If she’d worked those hands in an honest and genuine way, they would be better than the polished things lying cold and dead on that cloth,” Grenadine said to me.
I watched her strip the meat off of Stephanie’s arms and take the bones to a large bin at the far end of the room. There was a heavy board on top of the bin, but she removed it easily with one hand. I could hear a strange sound coming from the bin. Grenadine put a hand into the bin and scooped out a handful of fat, white squirming maggots. The sound I was hearing was of their disgusting bodies wriggling about and rubbing against each other.
“They’re actually very clean,” Grenadine said, reading my mind. She gently placed the maggots back into the noisy bin and she put the meatless arm inside.
“They are wonderful at stripping away that excess tissue. I’ll roast the bones once they’re stripped and make more stock for the stew pot,” she said.
I gagged at the thought of maggoty stew broth.
She left me standing there by myself and went out of a door. She returned with a basket full of root vegetables and herbs. She winked at me and started chopping the hearty vegetables from her basket and tossing them into the hot brass pot sitting over her goddamned enormous fire.
“You shouldn’t be so upset over this, Christina,” Grenadine said to me as her hands flew over the vegetables, the knife in her hand working as an articulated extension, cutting so fast that her movements registered as little more than a blur to my eyes.
“As much as you love to eat meat, you should remember that it came from a creature that was once a living being with a life and habits and a place in the world. Meat comes from life, Stephanie, not the grocery store wrapped in sanitary plastic wrap and Styrofoam trays. To be blind to the slaughter that goes into those meals you love is to rob yourself of the real experience of extinguishing life and taking the remains into yourself. It really is a beautiful thing if you think about it. Nothing should be taboo.” Grenadine seemed to have a sense of calm over her as she kept her hands busy. She was the most coherent when she was chatting while having something to work on with her hands.
“I’ve eaten the flesh of many living things. Birds, large game animals, giants, other fairies, humans, all of it. I think my favorite meat, though, is the flesh of the young. I know some of your kind agree with me. Lamb, veal, suckling pigs. All succulent and tender and just the finest of meats. Back in the times of small villages and human reverence and fear for my kind, I used to be fond of stealing human babes from their sleeping places and roasting them in clay pots. I could never do it as often as I would have liked, as you humans have an unnatural love for your young that only causes undue grief when they die or are taken. A young one fresh from the womb would have been the perfect tribute to me and mine, but you are strange creatures, Christina. Truly strange.”
“I want to go,” I squeaked out. I didn’t want to listen to her talking about roasting babies anymore and I didn’t want to watch poor Stephanie being butchered.
I didn’t want the warm pleasant smell of the brown liquid in the stew pot in my nose anymore. I didn’t want the pleasing smell to cause my stomach to growl anymore.
I didn’t want to see the head hanging from a hook by its hair anymore.
“Shall I let you keep her head as a trophy, Christina?” Grenadine asked me, walking to the head and knocking at it lazily so that it swayed back and forth.
“I want to go home,” I said, backing away.
“I still owe you something, Christina,” Grenadine said to me. “I’ll be seeing you.”
I fell to my ass in the sandy ground by the pond. I was sitting in front of my car. Stephanie was gone. Grenadine was gone. My bag was sitting neatly next to me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I drove like hell was at my heels back to my hotel. I ran up to my room and started packing my things, noticing the blood on my arm from where Grenadine had pulled me out from under the table. I took a break from packing to wash the blood away with the hottest water I could stand and the complimentary bar of harsh soap three times. I planned to call Anais on the road to tell her things got too weird for me and that we would have to put this file on the backburner for the time being. I didn’t think enough of Terry to really care about telling him I was leaving town and I sincerely hoped that he had enough sense to think little enough of me to not care. I’d miss his thigh-clenchingly handsome face smiling at me, sure, but there were other guys in towns that didn’t have fairies with fucking stew pots that would haunt my dreams for the rest of my life. I knew that I could always send an apologetic text later.
I had loaded all of my stuff into the trunk of my car and decided to walk to the front desk to checkout so that I could get some footsteps in. The parking lot was sectioned off into squares and the squares were separated by blocks of manicured shrubbery. I was passing one of these that had a holly tree when I felt a hand grip my shoulder and pull me back. The pull was so hard that I fell on my ass for the umpteenth time that day. I blinked a couple of times and noted the pain in my tailbone and butt when I looked up into the face of a really, really angry Grenadine. I shrank away from the blazing black orbs that she called eyes and heard myself whimper.
You never think of yourself as the type of person that would whimper if you saw something scary, but then something scary is staring at you nose-to-nose and there you go. You’re a whimperer and have little inclination at the time to give a damn.
“This will not be happening, Christina,” Grenadine growled into my face. I could smell meat on her breath.
“I want to go home,” I said, scared out of my mind.
“How would you like for me to go to Parkersburg and grab that mom of yours and make you watch me add her to my stew pot? Or Anais? Have you ever seen someone get raped by the business end of a gutting knife, Christina? Because I could make that happen for you. If you continue to show me this disrespect, I’m going to have to do something to put you in your place.” Grenadine, in her Nummy Nellie form, wrapped one of her craggy fingers around the lobe of my right ear. She stroked it gently at first as she stared holes into me, but then I felt one of her talons gouge the top cartilage. I managed a pained squeak, but I knew that if I made a fuss, I’d bring unwanted attention to this situation and it would end badly for the good Samaritan coming to my rescue.
Grenadine pulled her claw out of my ear and licked at it, making a disgusting smacking sound with her lips.
“You taste nice,” she said. “I wonder if it’s hereditary. Your mom could be my desse
rt.”
“Stop,” I said. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. I was prepared to resign myself to the will of this thing in order to protect my mom and Anais.
“You’re going to stay put until I can think of what I can do to pay off your tribute,” Grenadine said, millimeters from my face. Her lips brushed mine as she spoke.
“Okay,” I breathed, moving my head aside to get away from her soft lips and from the terrible sensation of arousal that they brought on in me. To me, I was almost kissing an older-than-time creature from another realm, but to an onlooker it looked like I was being seduced by Nummy Nellie. I’d been walked in on having sex by Anais, I’d been caught picking my nose, but being caught looking like I was being seduced by a snack cake mascot was too much.
“Then you be a good girl and go put your things back in that room, go launder the filth out of your clothes, and do your work as is expected of you,” Grenadine said.
Instead of her usual disappearing act, Grenadine actually stood up and backed away from me so that I could stand up. I dusted my pants off and looked down at her.
“Just remember that I’m not done with you yet,” she said, smiling up at me. “I’ll never be far.”
She did her unnerving “now you see me, now you don’t” thing and I walked back to my car, climbed into the backseat and fell asleep. I know that sounds like the absolute last thing one would do in a situation where you’ve had the wits scared out of you, but that was my second run-in with Grenadine that day and the adrenaline rushes and crashes exhausted me. It was weird, I’d been sleeping extremely well since Grenadine first came to me. Sometimes I attributed it to my time with Terry, but it was more likely that it was the stress of trying to maintain a normal façade and work life while also carrying the knowledge that I’d found the murderer I was profiling. She was a murderer I knew that I could never write about if I ever hoped to be taken seriously. And I really hoped to be taken seriously.
