Chthonic

Anna was dead; that much was undeniably true. The doctor had said so, and then the coroner, and then the funeral director, and then the eulogizing priest. This was excellent news to her roommate, Charlotte. Anna and Charlotte had lived together in a small two-bedroom apartment for three years and had despised each other for the overwhelming majority of that time. Which is why it was so strange when Charlotte arrived back at that apartment the evening after Anna’s funeral, covered in dirt, with a soil-caked coffin sitting in the back of her Kia.

Charlotte and Anna had found each other on Craiglist and the vetting primarily consisted of, “can you afford the nine hundred a month, do you have a car, do you have any pets?” Charlotte disliked the way that Anna spoke, which was always too loud, and, in her opinion, inconsiderate of the general thickness of the walls; Anna thought she had every right to be loud if Charlotte was going to continue to bring around her obnoxious rotating cast of vague acquaintances. Anna disliked how long it always took Charlotte to get around to cleaning her dishes, although perhaps Charlotte would have cleaned her dishes faster if Anna hadn’t always left her wet clothes sitting in the washing machine. Both had wanted to move out, but neither could find a place as convenient within their budget. Anna was an artist who occasionally sold a painting but largely relied on her family’s generosity. Charlotte was a sales representative at an electronics store and hated every second of it.

A couple of days after exhuming her roommate, Charlotte invited a fling she’d met at a club that evening back to her apartment for drinks and what-follows-drinks. She directed him to the kitchen, towards the liquor cabinet, where he encountered Anna propped up in the breakfast nook. Anna’s skin was sallow and jaundiced, and the ants that she had often complained swarmed the apartment when she was alive were crawling across her face and over her gelatinous eyeballs. Her slack fingers were wrapped around a coffee mug that had been carefully placed there by Charlotte that very morning. I Hate Mondays, the mug said; Anna had bought it a year prior as a joke, and it was one of the few aspects of her taste that Charlotte appreciated.

“What is that?” the fling asked Charlotte as she followed him into the kitchen to pour them glasses of wine.

Charlotte explained that it was her roommate.

The fling explained that it was a dead body.

Charlotte shrugged. “Anna has a monthly allowance from her trust and her bills are on auto pay. No one has cut it off yet. She can still cover her share of rent and utilities. It wouldn’t be fair to kick her out, not if she wants to be here. Let her finish her coffee in peace.” She quickly filled each wine glass and handed one to the fling.

The fling, though thoroughly unnerved by the sight of Anna, was a man who hadn’t had sex in nearly a year, so he swallowed his disgust and followed Charlotte out of the kitchen and into her bedroom.

Charlotte rarely took the same person home twice, for whatever reason. She brought back fellow pupils from her dance classes; hookups she’d found at clubs; a person she’d been chatting with at the hair salon. One of every person and every experience was typically enough for Charlotte. People were boring and spiteful, their surfaces glossy in the same way one might give a fresh paint job to a car with a sputtering engine. They never wanted to talk about the right things or go to the right places, and always grew to resent her with time. Let us meet once, Charlotte thought, and have good memories of each other to last forever.

When the fling left the apartment early the next morning, Charlotte slinked back to the kitchen, dumped out Anna’s stale coffee, made a fresh pot, and poured both herself and Anna a cup. “Good morning,” she said to Anna, and Anna said nothing, and Charlotte nodded thoughtfully before taking a sip. “His name was Kyle,” Charlotte said to Anna, and Anna said nothing, and Charlotte laughed. “He is hot, isn’t he? I hope we didn’t bother you. I’d hate to be inconsiderate. Not that you’d understand. Loud asshole.”

And Anna said nothing.

“Looks like you’re finally learning how to be a good roommate,” Charlotte said. A fly landed on Anna’s nose.

“There’s something on your face.”

Anna’s head fell to the side, her neck muscles weakening with decay, and the fly, startled, took off. “Whoopsie,” Charlotte said. She propped Anna’s head back up, but to no avail.

“Just a moment.” Charlotte went to find her neck brace from when she’d suffered whiplash in high school. She fastened it around Anna’s neck while looking her in the eyes, which were growing ever-drier and seemed to be covered with a kind of milky film. Charlotte frowned. “The brace doesn’t suit you,” she said. Charlotte went back to her room and found an orange scarf her aunt had given her for Christmas the year prior. She removed Anna’s brace and replaced it with the scarf, wrapping it just tightly enough to give Anna’s neck structure. “You look gorgeous,” Charlotte said. “I told you you ought to wear more color.” She smiled at Anna, for whom the orange scarf gave resistance against nodding in return.

Charlotte sighed playfully. “If only I could stay here with you instead of going to work,” she said, wrapping her arms around Anna’s sticky torso. “I could spend all day here. Can I tell you about my boss? She’s such a bitch.”

Anna said nothing.

“I’m sure you two would have gotten along well before— well, before you started acting right. I’m really proud of you, Anna. Seriously. You’ve been so thoughtful lately. I think what we’ve got going on here is just perfect.”

Anna said nothing.

Charlotte laughed.

Charlotte had always thought that it was ridiculous that the landlord insisted on maintaining a landline at the apartment. Everyone uses cell phones, of course, so the thing never rang; it just sat there like some kind of retro decoration. And then, one afternoon, a couple of weeks after Anna’s funeral, it did— the shrill noise causing Charlotte to nearly jump out of her skin. Cautiously, she answered it. Such a novel occasion required a proper response.

“Hello?” said a voice that Charlotte didn’t recognize.

“Hi? Who is this?” Charlotte said carefully.

“Sorry, did a woman name Anna used to live here? She gave me this number for emergencies,” the voice said. Charlotte glanced at Anna, who was sitting askew on the couch, a bit of brownish liquid dribbling out from her pale lips.

“May I ask who’s calling?” Charlotte said.

“Sorry, my name’s Mia. Anna was my sister. Were you her roommate?”

Charlotte felt a dryness in her mouth. “Yes, I’m her roommate. Charlotte.”

“Charlotte,” Mia said, her tone empty. “Charlotte, did you know that someone desecrated Anna’s grave?”

Charlotte froze and quickly tried to come up with an appropriate response. “How horrible!” she shouted, a little too enthusiastically and much too loudly. She quickly held her hand to her mouth— she didn’t want Anna to hear.

“Do you know anything about it?”

“How would I?”

Mia laughed humorlessly. “She always said she never liked you much. I’m sorry, you probably didn’t want to know that. Everyone wants dead people to like them.”

“She likes me very much,” Charlotte said quietly.

“I can’t hear you. Can you please speak up?” said Mia, a bit strained.

“I considered us very close,” said Charlotte, a bit louder, and sweetly, in case Anna overheard.

“Well. If you learn anything, could you let me know?”

“I don’t expect to learn anything,” Charlotte said. “but if I do, you’ll be the first person I contact.”

“Great,” said Mia. “Here’s my number.”

Charlotte brought fewer and fewer people around to the apartment. Everyone she met, everyone she spoke to, paled in comparison to the conversational prowess of Anna. No one got her the way that Anna did. And besides, taking care of Anna required a lot of time and money, time and money that Charlotte didn’t want to waste on strangers who didn’t deserve it. Charlotte bought hard wax from the beauty store and filled in the gaps where Anna was decaying the worst, then painted over them with spray paint and lacquer. When Anna’s blonde hair began to fall out, Charlotte purchased her a high-quality brunette wig in its place. She ran her fingers through the wig hair and smiled, thinking that Anna had begun to look particularly beautiful and sophisticated. A stray strand of wig hair flopped across Anna’s reddish-greenish-yellowish face. It glommed on to the dark fluid that continued to ooze from Anna’s nose and eye sockets and mouth. Charlotte fixed the hair and leaned her head across Anna’s shoulder, which had grown soft and moist and had taken on a rancid stench in recent days but was nonetheless warm and inviting. This is how they lived, or half-lived. Charlotte: going to work, hating work, coming home, picking up Anna from wherever she had been left and moving her to wherever Charlotte saw fit, cleaning her up, doing a sort of quasi-embalmment. Anna: growing quieter and gentler, delicate both in tone and in texture. Anna was fascinating, this soft woman who only wanted to listen and please. There was a newfound safety within Anna, as if every time Charlotte stepped through the apartment door was a true homecoming.

The electronics store felt louder and more stifling. The questions people asked her felt increasingly stupid. “You turn it on and off again,” Charlotte explained, time after time after time after time. “No, I don’t know your grandmother, I don’t know if she’d have an easy time using this. Bring her here yourself and try it out.” The buzzing of customers and coworkers became unbearable. Eventually, Charlotte pulled off her company polo, tossed it in her boss’s face, and walked out the door. She didn’t need to be here. She needed to be with the person who really knew her. There were options, Charlotte realized, beyond the electronics store. She’d get a new job eventually. But she had time. She had a savings, and Anna still posted her checks. And indeed, savings was how she paid her share of the rent for the next month. A month spent with Anna, a month of pure, utter bliss and understanding. It would run out eventually, but “eventually” was the domain of the future; today, she was content in being loved and in loving. She relished in her acts of care. For example: Anna’s eyes had fallen into her skull, and Charlotte had spent an entire evening researching where to get high quality doll eyes. She thought that she’d give Anna purple eyes this time. Purple was Charlotte’s favorite color.

Three months after Anna died, there was a knock on the door, a sonorous pounding that woke up Charlotte about a half an hour before her alarm was supposed to. Charlotte rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and went to check on Anna to make sure she was okay. Satisfied, she peeked out the living room window to get an illicit look at the would-be intruder. It was a blonde woman, young, dark eyes red around the rims. Something uncanny about her. The woman kept knocking. She knocked louder and harder. Charlotte sighed, pulled on her robe, and opened the door.

“Are you Charlotte?” the woman asked. Her voice was creaky, as if her lungs were full of dust.

“Yes, can I help you?”

“We spoke a few months ago, I think. I’m Mia. Anna’s sister.”

Charlotte took in a shaky breath. “Of course,” she said, plastering on a tight smile.

Mia sat on the couch, which was stained with the fluids that had leaked from Anna’s body. Mia took a whiff of the air and choked down her disgust. “I looked at Anna’s accounts,” she said. “With the suddenness of her death, and all the bullshit surrounding that, no one had quite gotten around to it. I saw that the rent was still being deposited.”

“Bureaucracy,” said Charlotte, shifting on her toes. “You know how it is.”

“Yes,” said Mia. “Bureaucracy.” Both women were quiet.

“So,” Mia said, finally breaking the silence. “So, I just wanted to come and check up. Make sure everything is okay.”

“It’s fine. Everything is great. I have a new roommate now. She pays her fair share,” Charlotte said. “The landlord is just an asshole. You know how they are. He should have sent back the checks.” She swallowed a little. “Making extra money on a dead girl. Disgusting.”

Mia looked hard at Charlotte. “Could you get the money back, then?” she asked.

“I can try,” said Charlotte, who felt like there was a beach’s worth of sand lodged in her throat. “He’s not very responsive. Doesn’t answer emails or phone calls. But I…I can try.” She put on her best impression of a sympathetic face.

Mia nodded. “Good.”

Charlotte walked Mia to the door and turned the deadbolt to let her out. As she left, Mia turned to Charlotte.

“I wish, more than anything, that is really was her sending in those checks,” Mia said, twisting her fingers together, an edge to her voice. “I didn’t even get to see her body at the funeral. It was closed-casket.”

“I remember,” said Charlotte.

“I don’t remember seeing you there.”

“I imagine that it’s hard to recognize a face in a crowd when you’re too distracted by your own grief,” said Charlotte, who had not been at the funeral.

Mia stared at Charlotte for an uncomfortable moment and took several deep breaths. “Can I go see her room?” she finally asked. “Can I see the last place where she lived when she was— um, when she was living?”

Charlotte thought quickly, and hoped that Mia didn’t notice any flicker of ambiguity. “Mia,” she said, feeling like she had left too much of a pause, “I told you that I have a new roommate. She’s still asleep. It would be rude to bother her.” She stared Mia down, hoping that this resolve could compensate for any nervous energy she might have let slip. Mia may have been Anna’s sister, but Mia did not deserve to have Anna.

Mia gave a quiet nod that Charlotte couldn’t quite interpret, and walked back towards her car. The door closed softly behind her. The sound of the latch clicking in the frame sounded like an accusation, although from who, Charlotte didn’t know.

But just in case:

“I didn’t mean to lie about you, Anna,” Charlotte shouted down the hall, so that Anna could hear her from the bedroom, but, dissatisfied with her explanation, Charlotte ran to Anna’s room to comfort her properly. “What we have is just…it’s just so good. It’s pure. I couldn’t let Mia ruin that,” Charlotte said. “She doesn’t understand you the way that I do.” Charlotte clutched at her elbows; she felt somewhat small. And then she added, “why don’t you pick the movie tonight? I’ve picked so many times and it only feels considerate to give you a chance.”

A few days after Mia’s visit, Anna’s accounts were closed and her rent check was returned to the apartment, bounced and useless. Charlotte swore under her breath as she went to fetch Anna for lunch. “They don’t respect your rights,” Charlotte whispered into a hole where Anna’s ear had been (both ears had fallen off four days earlier). Her hand was shaking as she poured glasses of water for Anna and herself. “Leaches, “Charlotte said. A bunch of goddamn leaches. “I’m glad you agree, Anna. Drink up. It’s important to stay hydrated.” Charlotte tipped the water in between Anna’s bony teeth and jaws. The water spurted out of her deteriorating esophagus and leaked from her lungs, spotting the blouse Charlotte had selected for her with growing patches of moisture. A strong mildew scent took hold in the air. “Oh Christ, how could I not realize that you couldn’t hold it in?” Charlotte said. She grabbed a bottle of lemon-scented kitchen cleaner and sprayed Anna all over.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’ll try and clean you up some more. I’ll try and take better care of you.”

Anna gazed at her emptily through glassy purple eyes.

“I’ll start looking for work,” Charlotte said. “For you. For us, I mean.”

Charlotte passed an expensive-looking restaurant one evening with a “HIRING: BARTENDERS” sign in the window, and so she went inside. She spoke to the host, who said he’d get the manager.

“In the meantime,” the host said, “feel free to grab a drink at the bar.” So she did.

“Can I buy you a drink?” asked a deeply drunk man one seat over.

“Sure,” Charlotte said, because she couldn’t justify buying a drink on her own, and besides, it was nice to have a drink, especially at a place as nice as this. The man gestured to the current bartender and ordered two whiskey sours, and the bartender mixed them so gracefully that it made Charlotte feel particularly self-conscious about her reason for being here. The bartender handed the drinks to the man, who in turn handed one to Charlotte.

“What do you do?” the man asked.

“I’m unemployed,” Charlotte said. “I’m only here to talk to the manager about a position.”

“Really?” slurred the man. “You’d make a greeeeaaaaat fit here. Gorgeous.” He gave Charlotte a little wink, and she found herself blushing at the attention despite herself. Then she felt a slight twinge of shame. She imagined Anna, deteriorating back home, and why? Because Charlotte would rather flirt than focus on her reason for being at this restaurant in the first place. She would ignore their needs and they would run out of money to keep her whole and Anna would grow more and more weak and brittle until she crumbled into dust.

“You’re very pretty,” the man said, snapping Charlotte back into the moment. She glanced around nervously until her eyes fell upon the man’s credit card sitting on the counter. He must have been too drunk to notice how out in the open it was.

Charlotte smiled, and gave the man a coy glance. “Tell me more about you,” she said, taking a sip of her drink. The alcohol loosened her mind a bit, and she thought: why not have your cake and eat it too? She could scam this man and have a fun time doing it. She could get lost in the woods of flirtatious conversation, the kind of chatter she’d prided herself in before Anna had been buried.

But the man spoke, and as he spoke the music in the restaurant got louder and louder, and Charlotte looked at her drink, and then at the man again, and realized that the man’s mouth was moving, but that she could hardly register what was coming out. Something about tennis. Charlotte didn’t care about tennis. Why was this man talking about tennis? Did everyone she spoke to before Anna always yammer on about the most inane bullshit? They couldn’t have.

She took another jab at it. “Have you played field hockey?” she asked. Charlotte had played field hockey as a child and knew how to talk about it. She remembered it as being something that had been very important to her back then.

“No,” the man said. “I don’t know anything about field hockey.”

“Oh.” They sat there in awkward silence, although the man was so drunk that it was possible he was trying to establish a sense of equilibrium. Charlotte imagined conversation flowing from him about field hockey, about what kind of material made for the strongest hockey stick, about something she could sink her teeth into and take a bite out of. Instead, the man took another deep swig of his drink and resumed his lecture on tennis.

Charlotte abruptly set her glass down on the bar. “Excuse me,” she said. “I gotta piss.” As she got up and walked away, out of the bar, she quietly lifted the man’s credit card and slipped it into her purse. She wasn’t particularly confident, only praying that the man was intoxicated enough to not notice what she’d done.

Anna was sitting on the couch when Charlotte returned. Perhaps that was where Charlotte had left her, or perhaps it was not. Charlotte was a little drunk and a lot tired and didn’t really give a damn one way or another. “Do you like field hockey?” Charlotte mumbled out. She slumped beside Anna and grasped at her papery wrist. “Please tell me all about field hockey. I feel like that’s something we have in common that we should have discussed earlier. Childhood sports, y’know? Emotionally foundational for your self esteem or whatever-the-fuck.“

Anna sat still.

“Anna,” Charlotte said. “Anna, please. Field hockey. I used to love it.”

Anna sat still.

“Okay, fine, not field hockey, that’s dumb, you went to art school, obviously you don’t love sports. Fuck, um, you ever seen a Van Gogh in person? I saw Starry Night in New York back in college. It looked like frosting. I wanted to eat it. So stupid, right? I bet you’ve seen it. It’s famous and you like art so you must have seen it, yeah? And you liked it? And we can talk about it because you like art and I like art and we have that in common?”

Anna sat still.

“Anna. Please talk to me. Please tell me how much you love Van Gogh.” Charlotte dug her fingers deep into Anna’s right wrist, barely noticing that her nails were piercing the delicate surface.

“Anna! You’re an artist! You have to want to talk about this with me! Because I don’t know! I don’t know anything about him besides that he cut off his ear!” Charlottes nails dug deeper, lacerating veins and scraping bone. It was the sensation of nail against bone, which made her shudder as if she’d been dragging her fingers across a chalkboard, that made Charlotte realize how deep she’d cut.

“God damn you, you bitch, talk to me!” Charlotte screamed. She plunged her fingers deeper into Anna’s wrist and began to twist and tear at the weak ligaments. Anna sat politely as Charlotte screamed and pulled, until finally, the hand popped off at the joint. The release of pressure made Charlotte fall back against the couch and bang her head against the wall behind it. She looked up, dazed, and glanced at the shriveled hand in her own. Her eyes began to well up, and she blinked the tears away.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as she skittered back towards Anna. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I’m so sorry, please forgive me.” She stroked the nub of Anna’s wrist and held the body close, thinking that although Anna was stiff and chilled, Charlotte could offer her some of her own warmth.

The landlord called the next week. “I don’t care where it comes from,” he said, “I need the full eighteen hundred.”

“I lost my job and Anna can’t work,” Charlotte said.

“Like I said, I’m sorry. But a lease is a lease. Somehow or another, the rent has to be paid.”

“Bastard,” Charlotte muttered once he hung up. She had applied for more jobs, but had heard nothing back. She had begged her boss for a second chance at the electronics store, but was laughed off the phone. She tried gigging, but found her profits to be scant. Could she sell her car? No, that would cut her out of any number of the jobs she was trying to get. In the meantime, she had tried to pay the rent with the stolen credit card, but found it had been cancelled before she had a chance to use it. In response, she’d sliced it into pieces and flushed it down the toilet, subsequently causing a clog that took several hours to fix. Filthy and exhausted, she went to Anna’s bedroom, where Anna was waiting for her on her window seat. Charlotte had posed her so that she could see the sun, but had moved the curtain enough for the sun to not really hit her. Anna’s skin was quite sensitive these days. Her hand was duct-taped back to her wrist. The hand gave Charlotte an idea.

“Wait here,” Charlotte said sternly before leaving. She returned an hour later with several canvases, paintbrushes, and tubes of acrylic paint— purchased with the last of Charlotte’s savings. Delicately, she laid them before Anna, dipping one of the brushes in a bright cobalt before gingerly wrapping it within Anna’s weak fingers. “You have to help me,” Charlotte whispered. “Make something we can sell. You can do it. I believe in you. I’ll go find another job. I’ll sell a bunch of my shit. I’ll do whatever I have to do. I just can’t leave you. I can’t leave here. I can’t. I can’t.”

All the while Anna sat on the window seat, giving Charlotte that glassy purple stare, with an expression that lacked the clarity provided by a full mouth. Charlotte tried to avoid Anna’s gaze, which felt warm on her neck.

Charlotte stood up quickly, trying to shake the discomfort of Anna’s probing eyes. “I’ll be back in a few hours. By then, I’ll have sold a bunch of my shit and you’ll have painted something worth selling. I need this from you, Anna.”

Charlotte sold the majority of her wardrobe, her old guitar, several pairs of heels, and a number of vaguely nostalgic tchotchkes. She made five hundred dollars total. When she returned, she found that the paintbrush had fallen from Anna’s arm and the resulting paint splatter had landed upon her ankles. The canvas had absorbed a few residual sprinkles of blue. Charlotte slid to her knees and stared at the near-empty canvas, then at the near-empty look in Anna’s eyes. She closed her own and tried to forget that she, too, was alive.

The next morning: another knock at the door. Charlotte peaked between the curtains to see Mia, dressed in her laziest Sunday attire, standing by the entrance. She knocked again, harder, with greater purpose. Her eye darted up, catching the twitch of the curtain, and ruining Charlotte’s chance to play dumb. Charlotte clenched her fists tight as she went to open the door.

“Can I help you?” Charlotte asked as she slowly peeled the door from its frame.

“You didn’t do it, did you?” Mia blurted out. “I’m going crazy, aren’t I?”

Charlotte took a heavy breath. “I’m sorry?” she asked.

“I know I’ve been a bitch to you, I know I’ve been weird, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just— I just— you don’t understand. How it feels. Or maybe you do, maybe you’ve lost someone close to you, I don’t fucking know. Anna said she hated you and now she’s gone so I felt like I had to hate you too.”

“Oh,” Charlotte said quietly. She thought of Anna’s severed hand clutched tightly in her own.

“I just want her back. I want her back and I made that your problem.”

“I know it’s been—“

“When I heard what happened to the cemetery at first I thought that she had some kind of secret enemy, maybe some awful roommate trying to steal some imagined last month’s rent that she took with her to the grave. I got all vigilante about it and that’s shitty and I’m sorry. My therapist said I should be honest with you and—”

Charlotte scratched at her fingernails as Mia continued to babble. She didn’t feel good, but felt like she ought to.

“There was a part of me, a stupid, childish part of me, that fantasized about her digging herself up,” Mia said. “Pulling herself out of that dirt and coming home where she belongs and saying sorry to me and mom and dad, sorry that she was late for dinner, she got held up, but she’s here now and she’s so happy to see us and are we having spaghetti? But that’s impossible and it was probably just some depraved fuck that I’m going to have to think about for the rest of my goddamn life.”

A wheezing huff from Mia. Charlotte stared at her.

“Thank you for loving her, I suppose,” Mia said. “Even if she didn’t love you back.”

And then: “Okay. Okay, that’s it. I’m leaving. I’m have to move on. You can call me if you want.” She held Charlotte’s hand in her own. “Maybe we can move on together. Help each other.”

“No,” said Charlotte. “I think I need to grieve on my own.” She spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable as if reading a line in a play.

As soon as Mia’s car was out of sight, Charlotte rushed into Anna’s room. Anna wasn’t there. Charlotte began to sweat. She was certain that she had left her there. She checked her own bedroom, the kitchen, the living room— all empty. “Anna?” Charlotte yelled. “Anna, where are you?” She checked the bathroom and all of the hall closets. She even checked the basement that they shared with the unit next door, hoping she’d find Anna tucked into a corner alongside the dusty storage boxes and bicycles.

And then it occurred to Charlotte that Anna had understood her logic, that Anna had simply understood the mechanics of the relationship. In short: Anna had left when it was good. Anna didn’t need her anymore. Charlotte looked down at her fingers as they began to shake. She backed up against the wall, trying to control her breath. She was alone.

And why wouldn’t she be? What more could she provide Anna with? Another movie to watch? More work to do? She must have insulted her, she must have, when she demanded Anna make her a product. Or something else, goddammit, something she’d been too dumb to even register as an affront. The truth of it all was that Charlotte was not a dear friend to be loved, she was an acquaintance at best, and always had been to those temporarily yanked into her orbit. And who could understand this better than Anna, who had been subjected to no one else but her for months?

Charlotte walked slowly, in a daze, towards Anna’s bedroom, hoping that there would perhaps be comfort in its familiarity. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Christ. Christ, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to— I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She kept moving forward, her tears and words coming faster and faster. “I thought you— I thought we understood each other. Because I loved you. I really did, I loved you. And if I had known you didn’t feel the same way! God. I did everything for you.” She wiped a string of snot from her nose.

“You bitch. You should have given me a warning. You fucking lying bitch.” But there was no response, because there was no one there.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean—“ Charlotte was a few steps away from Anna’s door and wholly unprepared to face the void behind it.

“Can you just tell me why? That’s all I’m asking— why? What did I do? How did I hurt you? How can I fix it? Please, please, tell me what I can do to make this right. Anything. Please. Please, just let me love you.”

She opened the door to find Anna back on the window seat.

“Jesus Christ Anna!” Charlotte shrieked, slamming the door behind her. “You scared the shit out of me!” Anna’s right arm, which was propped upon her lap, fell to the side from the force of the door returning to its frame. Charlotte rushed to her side and tenderly held the arm, stroking the dry skin and avoiding the duct-taped wrist.

“I didn’t forget about you, I promise,” Charlotte said. “I looked for you all day. In every crack. Please don’t think that I forgot.” She pulled Anna closer and leaned across her bony lap. “I’m here. I’m back. I missed you.” Exhausted, she let her head sink deeper into Anna’s bones and peeling flesh, Anna’s chemical-yet-earthy scent lulling her to sleep.

Charlotte woke up in Anna’s bedroom. It was pitch black outside. Anna was exactly where Charlotte had left her, on the window seat, gazing at the latter stoically.

“Hi Anna,” Charlotte said. “I’m sorry, that was embarrassing. I’ll leave. Good night.”

“Please don’t leave,” Anna said. The voice seemed to emanate from deep within her tattered throat, and yet was so clearly Anna’s voice as Charlotte remembered it. “When you leave,” Anna said, “I get lonely.”

“I want to stay here together. More than anything. I just don’t know how,” Charlotte said in response to a more tacit question.

“Then we don’t have to stay here,” Anna said. She stood up, weak bones snapping and creaking, flesh sloughing off of her sides. She approached Charlotte and laid a cool, bony finger on her shoulder. “Come with me,” she said.

Charlotte followed Anna quietly, the air silent but for the creaking of Anna’s spindly limbs. Anna opened the door to the apartment and beckoned Charlotte to come after. She was holding the keys to Charlotte’s car, which Charlotte didn’t remember giving her. Together, they emerged into the cool night air and walked, one after another, towards the vehicle.

“Where are we going?” Charlotte asked.

“Do you trust me?” Anna replied.

“Yes.”

“Get in,” Anna said. Charlotte obliged.

“I’ll be taking us somewhere no one can hurt us,” Anna said.

A storm was rolling in the distance. By the time they were on the highway, the downpour had begun.

It wasn’t a long drive to the cemetery. They rode in silence, the way Charlotte liked. Occasionally, they would hit a bump in the road, or a pothole, and Anna’s bones would knock against each other, producing a hollow sound. Anna didn’t apologize for it. When they arrived, Anna parked near a tree, and picked the gate lock with a pointed, skinless finger.

They wove through the tombstones, first Anna, followed by Charlotte. The cemetery smelled of wet moss and dirt. Lightning occasionally lit up the black sky, and there was the rhythmic pinging of rain against stone. When they arrived at Anna’s gravesite, the soil had already been filled back in.

“We’re going home,” Anna said.

Charlotte rolled up her sleeves and plunged her fingers into the cold earth. It was still fresh enough to have a certain looseness, so she dug down, first with her fingers, then her hands, and eventually with arms flinging dirt in every direction. Within the hour, Charlotte was caked with slimy mud and the grave was open. She stood there, six feet deep, staring up at Anna’s jaw-less face, which was haloed by a moon that seemed to give her a smile in the absence of a mouth. When Charlotte began to try and lift herself out, Anna shook her head.

“Wait,” Anna said. Anna gently lowered herself into the grave beside Charlotte. The latter opened her mouth to speak, but Anna pressed a finger against her warm red lips.

“This is good,” she said, as she scraped the interior of the grave and allowed the dirt to slide in. The rain poured harder, making the accumulated soil on either edge of the grave flow over, filling Charlotte and Anna up to their knees, their chests, their necks.

“This is good,” Charlotte said, just before the mud ran into her mouth and down her throat.

“This is good,” Anna said, as the earth blotted out the night sky above them.

***

Sarah Michelson is a slipstream horror writer and scholar. She spent her childhood trying to summon ghosts and fairies and has never become well-adjusted since. You can follow her inane ramblings on Twitter at @sarah_michelson.