Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  “Amanda?” I squeak.

  Amanda groans. She lifts her hand and presses it to her face. Her lips work around words: “Where am I? Hospital?”

  I clear my throat, setting Lothar on the floor. I stand beside her cart. “No…not a hospital. But you’re safe.”

  She blinks up at the fluorescent light. “I know you.”

  “I’m Charlie. From your class.”

  “Charlie.” She nods, wincing. She reaches up at the corner of the sheet. “I’m cold…and hungry…Why am I naked? Where am I?”

  Her stomach growls audibly in this small space.

  “Stay…right there. I’ll get you some clothes. And something to eat. Don’t move.”

  I back away, dragging Lothar out with me. I scramble up the stairs to the washing machine in the laundry room. I paw through the basket of clean laundry for something of mine that I hope isn’t too dorky. I come up with a pale pink sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that are a bit baggy on me but might work for her. I also grab a pair of socks and the comfy sneakers I wear to mow the lawn. I zip through the kitchen to snag a granola bar and a Gatorade, stuff them on the top of my laundry basket, and scurry back downstairs.

  I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around what’s happening. I saw Amanda dead. My mom saw her dead. Now she’s alive and asking for food. It doesn’t make sense, and I plan to find out what the heck is going on.

  I pause before the closed door to the cooler unit. I try to knock first, but I’m clumsy with my hands full. I tug on the handle with one hand, awkwardly opening the door and slipping inside, Lothar under my feet. I’m afraid that she might disappear if I don’t move quickly, that this is all my twisted imagination.

  “Amanda, I…Oh.”

  I don’t know what else to say. My brain just shuts down.

  She is wearing the sheet, wound around her like a toga. It trails behind her bare feet, sort of like a painting about Greek goddesses I’ve seen in art books. She’s leaning over another body stored in the cooler unit on a cart. Her back is to me, and I can only see her pale skin and her burgundy-black hair shuddering.

  “Amanda.”

  She turns at the sound of my voice, seeming only to hear me for the first time. Her face is covered in dark blood. In her hand, she’s holding a big chunk of purple flesh. Her eyes are half-closed. The autopsy incision on the elderly body below her has been ripped open, and I’m pretty sure that what she’s holding is a lung.

  “So hungry…” she murmurs.

  I retreat until my back presses against the cold door. A whimper escapes my lips, and I drop the laundry basket with a sharp crack of plastic on the tile floor. This has to be a dream. A screwed-up anxiety dream that I’ll wake up from any moment now…

  Amanda’s black eyes snap open. She stares at the chunk of flesh in her hand. “I…Agh…What’s going on?”

  Lothar waddles over to her and begins to beg. Bile rises in my throat. “That’s Mrs. Canner,” I manage to answer. “She’s seventy-two and died of surgery complications for varicose veins. Deep vein thrombosis, I think. I don’t remember.” I’m babbling, trying to keep the bile down.

  Amanda drops the lung with a wet splat. Lothar scrambles to it and begins scarfing it down. Her hands are trembling. She presses them to her temples. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

  I nudge the laundry basket closer to her with my foot. “I brought you some clothes. And, um. Food. You should get dressed.”

  I think I should be afraid. I think I really ought to be. But Amanda seems genuinely confused. She reaches for the clothes I’ve brought her. To be polite, I know that I should really look away. But I can’t move. I am not turning my back on her. My heart pounds, and I struggle to take deep, uneven breaths.

  Amanda unwinds the sheet and slips into my clothes. Though I avert my eyes, I see that her shoulder and side are still torn open. But my mother hasn’t begun the autopsy yet, so there is no Y-incision across her chest and abdomen.

  “Do you remember what happened to you?” I manage to ask. I congratulate myself for having a rational thought. Woot.

  Her voice is halting, and her brow wrinkles as she struggles to button my jeans. “I remember…something was chasing me. Jesus, it hurt…” Her hand comes up to her neck, and she seems to remember, fingering the edges of the wound. “Am I in a hospital?” she asks again.

  I suck in a breath. “No. You’re at my house.” It’s not a lie. Not really.

  She scans the room, as if registering the sight of the cadavers. “You’re the girl whose parents run the funeral home. The Ghoul Girl.”

  “It’s gonna be okay,” I tell her.

  “Why am I here?” Her breath makes ghosts in the cold air.

  “The Sheriff found you, alongside the road.” That’s true also, even if not the whole truth. “I think we should get you upstairs, so you can talk to my parents…”

  She shakes her head, and her dark hair slaps across her face. “No. I…Oh my god. I’m here because…somebody thought I was dead?”

  I swallow hard. “Yeah.”

  Her hands press to the wound on her side. “But I’m not dead!”

  “I…uh…I think we need to get you to the hospital.” I tentatively reach toward her, to grasp her arm and guide her upstairs, toward the light of the much more civilized parlor and rational discussion. This is so far over my head, and I need my parents to handle it.

  She shakes her head. “No. No. No.”

  I hold her elbow gently, trying to keep her calm until I can get her upstairs to my parents. Her skin radiates cold through the sweatshirt, and I can see that the edges of her neck wound are dry, not seeping so much as a hint of blood. “Come with me.” I open the door and gently lead her into the lab, as if I’m herding a frightened cat. She gazes at the stainless-steel equipment. “I was here. I remember being here.”

  “Come upstairs,” I urge, struggling to keep my composure. I use all the empathy that I’ve learned, dealing with grieving family members, trying to understand the shock and lead her away from the Body Shop.

  She squints up at the buzzing light. “You were here, weren’t you? You and that woman. Looking at me.”

  “My mother,” I say. I’m thinking crap crap crap. I’ve heard of cases of people whose vitals have dropped far beyond detection, who have awoken in hospital morgues. This has never happened to us. Not ever. Oh shit. The other body. Maybe it the same thing…

  “The woman with that knife…” Her fingers go to her sternum, where my mother’s scalpel had rested. All of a sudden, Amanda becomes rooted in place, as immovable as a mountain.

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” I promise. “Let me make you some coffee.”

  She shakes her head, and I feel her trembling. Her eyes slide to the back door.

  She slips from my grip. Before I can stop her, she rushes to the back door. She slams it open with a sound like a gunshot and plunges into the darkness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Amanda!”

  I shout, racing after her in the inky black night. There is no moon, and after leaving the bright light of the Body Shop, I can barely distinguish my feet from the ground. As I plunge into the dark, I stumble in a gopher hole, turn my ankle. Wincing, I lurch forward, into the wet night and the song of crickets. Dew from the long grass soaks into my pants.

  Lothar has surged ahead of me, his barking loud and clear.

  “Amanda!” I call. “Come back!”

  But she doesn’t. I follow Lothar through a field and to the creek. I peer among the trees clustered around the bank. Lothar trots east and west, and I know he’s lost her trail. I hear a distant splash. It could be Amanda, or it could be a bullfrog. I race along the bank, the only remaining sound that of rushing water. I take a tentative step on a flat rock on my turned ankle. My shoe is soaked, and I lose my footing and slide into the gravel.

  She is gone. I know it.

  And I have a helluva lot of explaining to do.

  I trudge back to t
he house. I can see that lights have come on, summoned by Lothar’s barking. I limp to the back door of the Body Shop. I see two figures, one holding a flashlight, and the other holding a gun.

  “Who’s there?” my father demands.

  “It’s just me, Dad.” I raise my hands, but I don’t know if he sees me.

  I’m momentarily blinded by the flashlight glare. Then Garth’s arms are around me, while Lothar runs ahead to my father, yapping.

  “Charlie! What happened?” Garth demands.

  My breath is hoarse in my throat. “Amanda…she’s gone.”

  “What?” My father’s brow is creased in the light pouring from the door. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “She’s gone.” I’m not sure what more to say. My thoughts and my stomach churn.

  The light of the Body Shop is sharp and sterile. My mother smothers me with a hug when I step over the threshold. “Charlotte! Are you all right?”

  I nod against her shoulder.

  I hear Garth pulling open the door to the cooler compartment. “Amanda’s body is gone. And there’s damage to one of the other bodies.”

  My mother cups my face in her hands. “Who took her? Who did this?”

  I take a deep breath. I know I have to tell them the truth. “No one took her. I came down to say goodbye, but… she woke up.”

  “She woke up,” Garth echoes, incredulous.

  My mother shakes her head, smoothing a piece of hair from my face. “What do you mean, sweetie? Did rigor mortis—”

  “No. She woke up. She was walking, talking, eating…and she ran away.” I shy away from describing the half-eaten lung in her hand, because I still can’t believe it. “She was terrified.”

  “Oh, honey,” my mom says. Her eyes are wide and frightened. Not of what I’m telling her, but of me. “Amanda is dead. That’s just not possible.”

  But I know that it is.

  *

  “Your parents are worried about you.”

  I frown at my grandmother’s mild assessment. I’m upstairs in my bed with Gramma perched on the edge beside me. She tucks a blanket up around my chin, adjusts the ice pack on my ankle, which is propped up by pillows. She is in her pink fuzzy robe and wearing not a stitch of makeup. She looks pale. Like a winter.

  I know I’m in huge trouble. Huge. This goes way beyond lifting an artifact from the museum. This is…I don’t know what it is. There are all kinds of crimes that can be attached to the desecration and removal of a corpse. But when the corpse walks away on its own? I don’t know what that is, or if even there’s a law against it, but it’s definitely big trouble.

  I turn my head to the window. There’s a flash of red-and-blue strobe lights below, and I catch snatches of conversation downstairs.

  I feel lightheaded and muzzy. My mother gave me some pills. Klonopin, I think. And I overheard her asking my father to make a doctor’s appointment for me.

  “She blames herself, you know,” Gramma says. “For letting you see the body.”

  I shake my head, and the room swims. “I’m not making this up.”

  “Your father thinks you were dreaming, sleepwalking. Like you did when you were a little girl and found all the Easter eggs he’d hidden before dawn. And that you saw something terrible, and created a story that made sense around it.”

  “No,” I said. I reach for Gramma’s bird-boned wrist, desperate for someone to believe me. “She was awake. Talking. Scared. Her eyes were black as buttons, and she…she…was chewing on Mrs. Canner.” My voice is a conspiratorial whisper.

  Gramma’s lip turns down. “What did she say?”

  “She wanted to know where she was. She was so confused.” My voice slurs a bit.

  “Did she try to hurt you?”

  “No. No, she didn’t.”

  Gramma shifts her weight on the bed, and that small motion makes my stomach lurch. She pushes my frizzing hair away from my face, as if she’s looking for marks. “Did she try to bite you?”

  Her reaction isn’t what I expect at all. “Nuh-uh. No nomming.”

  My gramma’s eyes are dark, and she taps her pink-polished fingernails against her teeth. She seems nervous.

  “You don’t believe me,” I despair.

  “No, I do believe you.” She sighs. “And that’s what scares me.”

  Tears glaze my eyes. She believes me.

  Wait. But why does she believe me? Even I know how crazy my story sounds.

  Gramma stares up at the shadowed ceiling. “My grandfather told me a story once, about a man who was said to be a warlock a very long time ago. He was buried in the churchyard, but he somehow came back to harass his wife and children. Her youngest child disappeared, and it was rumored that he had stolen and eaten the baby. Small bones were found near the gravesite.”

  I shudder. “Did you believe him? I mean…”

  “The story sounds like an urban legend? Yes, I know. But Granddad never lied.”

  “Never?”

  Gramma shakes her head. “Never.”

  Maybe I was grasping at a way to justify what I’d seen earlier when Amanda came back to life. Maybe I just needed to know that someone believed I wasn’t crazy. “What else did he say?”

  “A hangman from the nearby town was summoned. He opened the grave to find that the corpse was still fresh. And full of fish, oddly enough. He dismembered the body, burned it, and cast the ashes on the river. My father said that the ashes changed to fish and swam away.”

  “Harsssshh,” I slur, thinking of the dark figure I saw in the creek.

  What if…?

  Gramma’s gaze is unfocused. I dimly realize that she’s not telling this story for me, but reviving it from her memory, dusting it off. “That seemed to end the problem for a time,” she continued. “But the warlock’s wife fell ill and died. And then her other children disappeared. The hangman was summoned again, to open her grave. And she was found nestled around a wreath of small bones, wearing a dress made of fish scales. There was even a bone in her mouth.”

  My mind flops to the charm of the catfish sucking on a bone, but I can’t hold on to the image.

  “They called her the warlock’s ‘Fish Wife.’ They cut off her head, burned all the bones, and scattered her remains in the river. And all was well.” Gramma smiles, smoothing my hair, seeming to come back to herself.

  “You always tell the best stories, Gramma,” I mumble.

  “Some stories have a grain of truth in them, my dear.”

  She leans forward to kiss my forehead, and I slip deeper into blackness.

  I swim in dark water. It churns around me, rushing, pushing me. I can see nothing, but I can feel things touching me in the water, brushing up against my legs and my arms and tangling in my hair as I try to move. I try to swim up, but I can’t tell which direction I’m moving in. I can make out the paleness of my fingers as I claw through the murk. In one closed fist, I’m holding the catfish charm.

  Something bites my foot. I howl, but I can make no sound. I look down, seeing a giant catfish, sucking at my foot, his eyes black as buttons and the tendrils of his whiskers brushing against my feet.

  I swim up, up, to a gray, wavering light. But the catfish is too fast. He lashes around me. I can feel him sucking the flesh from my bones, greedy as Amanda was with Mrs. Canner’s lung.

  I can’t make it. I can’t make it to the surface.

  I gaze downward. The catfish has changed. It’s changed to Amanda, and she’s chewing on my ankle, with the same black, soulless eyes.

  *

  “You understand, of course, why your parents are worried.”

  I sit on a sagging chenille couch, dotted with floral tapestry pillows. I sit bolt upright, refusing to sink into the couch. The shrink’s couch is like a black hole. It will suck you in, lull you into complacency, and then force you to spit out the bones of truth. Once upon a time, I could have talked to Renee about these things. I could have walked down the road, sat on her bed, and cried my eyeballs out. But I can’t ta
lk to Renee anymore, so I am stuck with my family having to pay people to listen to me.

  I make a face at Dr. Katz. She sits in her desk chair with her back to the computer. I can see her colorful schedule blocked off behind it. She probably had to move a bunch of stuff around to see me. She gazes at me through heavy-framed hipster glasses, her perfectly-manicured fingers laced together at her knees.

  “I don’t want any more meds,” I say. My head is still muzzy and my mouth is cottony from what my mother gave me last night. I resolve not to take what she gives me anymore.

  Dr. Katz doesn’t answer. “Do you think your parents should be worried about you?” she asks instead.

  I cross my arms over my chest. “No.”

  “Your mother says that you saw a body come to life. That would be scary.” She’s humoring me in well-reasoned tones.

  “Yeah. And she made me take a drug test afterward.” I blurt, irritated that I seemed to be getting more scrutiny than the crimes occurring around me were getting. I don’t know what’s more concerning: that my mother made me take a test, or that she had an instant drug store pee test just hanging out in the bathroom linen closet.

  The doctor just looks at me.

  I roll my eyes. “I passed.”

  “Was it the truth, what you told her?”

  I take a deep breath. “I’m regretting having said anything at all, but yes. That’s what I saw. And nobody believes me.”

  “Is that why you regret it? Because nobody believes you?”

  “Well, yeah. My parents didn’t believe me. They wouldn’t even let me talk to the cops.”

  “They didn’t?” A small twitch forms below Dr. Katz’s right eye.

  “Nope. They sent me upstairs and told the Sheriff that they heard a sound, came down, and found Amanda’s body gone. No mention whatsoever that I saw her walk out.”

  “Why do you think they did that?”

  “I guess they’re trying to protect me, in their own way.” But I was still angry. “I am not making this up.”