Venus Buried

The girl in the graveyard is your best friend, so you take her home. The night is a bruise between you, a blotch of rogue in the passenger window; the colour of fruit left out to fester. The body pries at her seatbelt, a finger, then two. The radio hisses static, the body shuffles in her seat. You study the face; the similar slice of jaw, the nose humped from where a baseball had hit her at twelve, just slightly off centre. The skin like a rain-licked plastic bag. The stink of musk and sulphur. You want to look away but you can't. She's so beautiful, even like this. Your headlights rake warbled slits through the dirt road, a yellow like jaundice. Your hands are numb with the chill, your lips cracked. The girl next to you is dead, and you're taking her home.

You had walked four days ago into a hardware store and out again with a shovel strong enough to dig life up out of its hole. Four days you'd spent digging dirt in your own backyard yard until loam muddied under your fingernails and erratic holes split garden beds like the mouths of greedy beasts. Until you could sift through soil with your eyes closed, with a hand bound. Four nights you had lain in your bed staring at the pockmarked ceiling, wondering what it felt like to burn alive. Now, the shovel beats dull against the skin of your trunk, your hands gripping the steering wheel like a throat you’re trying to silence.

The body turns, dawn bleaching the salmon-grey of her skin. The left eye slips from its socket and she pushes it back in with the heel of her hand. She smiles, head lolling like a marionette’s

"Sorry baby," her voice comes out strained, "I wasn't expecting company. I'm sure you understand."

In a sickle of citrus moonlight, Adeline Marcus smiles up at you with shell-pale gums.

——

Adeline Marcus died on the 31st of October and was buried a week later, the date on her gravestone a month shy of her eighteenth birthday. The boys will say in court it was an accident, that they didn't know she was inside. For better or worse, you believe them. Fingers striking out matchboxes, the beer cans constellating the sidewalk, a prank gone too far, the wrong place, the wrong time. Doesn't have to be on purpose. She didn't have to be home. The coroner ruled it suffocation but all you can imagine is flame like a stiff palm striking over and over. Adeline had crawled from the mouth of the home on her hands and knees. She was dead by the time she reached the pavement, her Sunday dress singed up to her knees, the dress you knew well enough.

Either way, the boys were left with twenty-five to life and the Marcus' were left with a dead daughter, a ring of ash like chalk on the pavement. You were left with a misplaced guilt like hunger, a guilt like an ouroboros; choking on the tail, swallowing the head, eating yourself alive and being unable to stop, even as it consumes you.

Because this wasn't the sort of thing that happened to good people.

——

You watch water curl down your shower drain, carrying with it mortuary makeup, kaleidoscopic insects and jasmine bubbles.

Strings of grime stretched out in lines like sinew. The head of the body rests on her knees, vertebrae needling through her spine like a line of molars. The electric lights wash her green, dark veins rooted under brittle skin. She turns her face to the showerhead and picks at the powdery sediment under her fingernails. The shower floor is a mess of grit, and you think of a child scooping up the sand. You turn the heat up until it scalds and scrub mildew from the base of the shower door. You think, if you can only get everything clean, everything will be alright.