Head Case

This is the opening of my story "Head Case" which is available now on Amazon and GODLESS.

The oven light only succeeds in throwing the pig into silhouette. I tip the door open and check it with my naked eyes. Browning nicely.

Rosa is late – as always. I’m worrying whether I should take the roast out now to avoid it going dry, when the doorbell rings.

She is stunning – as always. Her alabaster skin glows, framed by her black hair and the upturned collar of her leather jacket. Her glittering necklace draws my gaze far down her pale chest.

She is also carrying a strange new handbag, shaped like a hexagonal lantern. Its six sides look like black glass, opaque and tarnished. She likes gothic accessories. On our first date she brought a tiny empty birdcage, carpeted in black feathers. I don’t know what happened to the bird.

She notices me noticing her handbag, and puts it gently on my side table without explanation.

‘Something smells good,’ she says, plucking her gloves off finger by finger. She shrugs her jacket into my hands, revealing bra straps and angular shoulders.

‘It’s what you wanted. I found a farm that sells them.’

‘Oooh. Did you get to choose it before they killed it?’ Her eyes glitter. Rosa loves dark thoughts, dead things, and magicke.

‘No, they prepared it for me to collect.’

‘Pity.’ She crosses into my kitchen, and kneels in front of the oven, inspecting the baby pig through the grease-encrusted door. ‘They must have killed one especially for us.’

‘Yeah, that’s how butchery works...’

She raises a perfect eyebrow; my sarcasm is not appreciated.

I push the dining chair under her thighs. I raise the decanter, which I had earlier poured a full-bodied Rioja into, and fill her glass.

‘You’re wearing your bracelet I see,’ she says pointedly.

She gave me this bracelet on our second date; a tight circle of amethyst fragments on elastic. But some of the gems – though beautifully cut, to my inexpert eyes – are sharp and after a day of wearing it I usually find my wrist encircled with tiny lacerations. ‘And aren’t they pretty?’ she gushed when I showed her. Now I only put it on the minute before we meet.

The gift of this bracelet was particularly unexpected because Rosa is not romantic. We met at a scene event, and she took a shine to me for reasons I still don’t fully understand. Then the same evening she initiated the communication online, which made me feel flattered and noticed. But subsequently our dates have felt performative, like she finds them necessary more than enjoyable. The times we spend together without speaking are the times I think she enjoys the most.

Not that we have nothing to talk about. As I prepare the food in the kitchen, Rosa talks enthusiastically about a manuscript she recently purchased through an antiquarian bookshop in Whitechapel. As she talks about her ‘codex’ and its ‘remarkable marginalia’ I am stirring the gravy and seasoning the parsnips. I confess that I find her passion for the esoteric erotic.

I place the whole pig upon the table with as much ceremony as I can muster. It is a beautiful, uniform pinkish-orange. The skin has receded from the trotters where the edges of the crackling are turned up perfectly. The ears and snout I protected with foil, so they retain a leatheriness, which I was told is quite inedible.

Rosa looks elated. A little colour has rouged her marble cheeks. I pass the carving knife across the table to her, knowing this is the part she has been anticipating.

‘I hope you sharpened it,’ she says.

‘Try it.’

She stands and dances the point of the knife up and down the piglet as she gauges the perfect place to pierce its spine. With little resistance from the keen blade, she inserts it, finding the gap between two vertebrae which, with the slightest twist of the blade, pop audibly apart, releasing the aroma of perfect moist cooked flesh.

With a few more slices, the head lies separately on the dish.

We fuck until we pass out.

I don’t know how many hours have elapsed when I wake in my dark bedroom, aware of Rosa slipping out of my bed. Her naked silhouette passes by the curtains in the direction of the living room. I don’t think anything of it. In seconds, I am asleep again.

Some time later, I am awake again but something is different. Rosa is sitting on my chest, hunched over with her hands embracing my neck, fiddling with something behind my back. But her look is not amorous.

Then I notice that I can’t raise my hands. I try to sit up to investigate my predicament when I realise I can barely raise my head either. I can just perceive my wrists, which have rope around them, tied to the foot of the bed. I surmise that the reason I can’t raise my head is because there is also rope around my neck.

I notice she has placed her hexagonal lantern on my bedside table. Two of its six sides have been opened on their tarnished hinges. Inside is a crepuscular cavity, padded with black velvet and inscribed with shimmering symbols. It is not a handbag. Or a lantern. It is a box.

Rosa seems satisfied that my bindings are secure. But she has a look in her eye different from the usual. Studious. Measured. Then she raises her hands from my neck. I see that she has her leather gloves back on, and she is holding firmly the two ends of her glittering necklace. But her silver necklace is no longer around her neck. It is around mine.

Even in the sparse moonlight, its teeth sparkle.

Absurdly – not to disturb the neighbours – I start to whisper, to ask her what she’s doing. But I don’t even have the words in my throat when she abruptly tugs the necklace and I feel its fine dentitions rasp around the full circumference of my throat.

In a second, the teeth have cut into my flesh. The action is so fast I have not yet felt any pain when she tugs the biting filament back the opposite way.

The wiresaw severs my tendons. I’m no longer in control of my neck. With each cutting motion, my vision swings from one wall to the opposite as my neck is wrenched one way and then the other. Her face whips past me each time and I glimpse her gaze, still stony and determined.

The sawteeth rasp through my vertebrae, then through the bony channel of my trachea. My Adam’s Apple vibrates in its hollow and the vibrations travel up into my skull.

​​My head rolls loose on the pillow, unbodied. Bizarrely I watch my chest fall away from under me as Rosa picks up my head and swings it into the jet black opening of her hexagonal case.

My mind spins trying to comprehend that the ‘me’ that is my body is no longer the same ‘me’ that is my head.

Then she closes the windows and I am locked inside the head case and at this juncture I fall into unconsciousness.

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That's why I write short stories with big impact. Check out Rosa's outrageous feminist splatterpunk story METAGOTH – also on GODLESS and Kindle.