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 echoes 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 from the cold, your lips chapped. The girl beside you is dead, and you're bringing her home.

Four days ago, you'd walked into a hardware store and come out with a shovel sturdy enough to lift a life on. 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. In court, the boys would say it was an accident, that they didn't know she was inside. For better or worse, you believe them. The fingers striking out matchboxes, the beer cans constellating the sidewalk, a prank gone too far, the wrong place, the wrong time, it 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.

Any way you look at it, 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 kind of thing that happened to good people.

——

You watch as water spiral down your shower drain and take with it mortuary makeup, kaleidoscopic insects, and jasmine bubbles.

Strings of grime stretched out like sinew. The head of the body rests on her knees, vertebrae needling through her back, 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. She turns her head, looks at you through eyes obscured by glass panelling. She says, 'It's not as bad as all that. I don't even think I felt a thing.'

But she says it through lips the colour of spoiled plums, so the sentiment doesn't ring true.

You haul threadbare towels from the bottoms of your linen closet. You make three passes around your block and come back to a corpse sitting on your sofa like she has nowhere better to be.

___

There are ants in your sugar bowl.

You try to remove them, lift their crystal-knotted bodies on the prong of a fork but they slip between the gaps and you are left with a mess bigger than when you started; tea-brown sludge bleeding from thoraxes and the stink of vinegar. There's a dead girl on your sofa, but let's talk about the ants in your sugar bowl—how they thread through the cysts of white, like veins on a leaf or the capillaries that run under the skin of your face. You make tea anyway. You put in too much milk and sit cross-legged in front of the body. She stares at you. You stare back. The two of you drink and ribbons of watery milk pour clean out her trachea the gaping hole in her chest but she doesn't stop drinking until you do.

"You're not looking at me," she says, "Not really."

"Yes I am," you twist your hands in the shag carpet, "Aren't I now?"

"No," she says, "You're not."