Rachel Swirsky - If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love, and Other Stories

I work until I jizz on her pillow. It dries next to her drool.

When I’m showered and dressed in slacks and button–down, I head to the kitchen. The smell of my wife’s shit travels with me. Frantically, I check to see where I’m fouled. It’s not on my clothes. I undo my belt. Not on my cock.

My eye catches a spot on my thigh. The smell isn’t shit after all. It’s black, rotting skin I smell. Death, not excrement.

I find a bandage to cover the necrotic flesh. Adhesive doesn’t damp the odor.

The bathroom mirror tells me that necrosis is mottling my spine. Black rashes creep down my legs. I watch a new spot appear inside my elbow. Blood bursts through the skin and a puzzle–piece–shaped lesion dapples to black, exuding a charnel house stench.

She’s killing me. This house is killing me.

I have to get out. I pull my pants up, button my shirt. At the front door, I pause with my hand on the knob as dark instinct draws my eye to the inset window. Through leaded glass, I see shadows. They come closer.

At last, I can make out one of my wife’s friends approaching the porch. Saliva drips from her slack jaw, trailing down her chin. She stares at the door for an evil second and then paces down the front steps and turns, heading for the gate that leads to our backyard. Her steps are spasmodic, disjointed, but she travels with a determination that makes her path seem inevitable.

She breaks from sight, but before I can calculate my freedom, my wife’s second, identical friend passes by on the same route, her expression a perfect mimic of the first’s vacant–and–hungry look.

I wait, breath incipient, fingers still closed around the knob. The woman departs from sight, but as I expected, it’s only moments until the first returns. Without altering her path, she swivels her head toward the door. Her eyes catch me as if she can see through wood and glass.

Realization hardens in my mind.

They’re circling the house. Circling me.

My ex wears stretch marks like jewelry. They shine when the light hits. She laughs when she sees me staring. She jiggles the fat under her arms to make it swing.

My ex has three men. She doesn’t bother to hide them. When I go to check the cars, they’re always there. They attend in rotation: first one, then the second, then the third, and then back to the first again. They stand behind her when she opens the door. They’re thin–haired and weak–chinned. They stare at me with mouths agape, spit shining on their gums.

My ex laughs and pats their arms with simulated affection, sneering at me as if I could ever be jealous of the new men mired in her trench.

I hamstring my wife with a knife from the kitchen and tie her by the wrists to the hooks on the ceiling that some prior resident used to hang light fixtures. Her feet hang above the floor. I can see now that they are scaled, the yellow keratin cracked and dry. Talons droop, fissured but sharp.

Her baggy stomach overhangs the greasy feathers of her legs. Her fingers poke, half–flesh and half–claws, out of her ragged wingtips. Breasts swing, bare and sagging, nipples pointed toward the floor. She stares at me, grin still jagged, eyes still dead.

A flood of shit drenches her legs. It splashes me. I jump back and curse. Laughter scratches her throat as I retreat to the sink to scrub my hands and shirt. There are spatters of blood as well as shit. I leave them to stain.

Her feathers are matted with feces, but I armor myself with gardening gloves and grab a bucket from beneath the sink. I pluck one forearm–length, broken feather from her tail. Oily black residue slicks my fingers.

I pluck a second and a third. Pained, creaking noises escape her mouth. I pull another. Freshly exposed pink skin puckers where the quills were ripped out. Specks of fresh blood redden the shit on the floor.

She swings her head back and forth, trying to watch me, but I keep to the shadows behind her so that she never knows where pain will strike next. Her hisses rattle as I make my way down to where I’d once thought she had calves. Now I can clearly see where her skin calcifies into the scales of her giant bird feet.

Her strong thigh muscles remain intact. She kicks. Limp talons swing toward me. Even lacking precision, they are heavy and deadly. I dodge out of range.

Back in the kitchen, I grab a stronger knife. She watches my return with fear. I bend to the task of sawing through her bird–ankles. Scales and bone give way with a consistency like rotting teeth. Viscous yellow ichor oozes from the wounds. She throws her head back, neck working as she births a vibrating, interminable screech.

From outside the house, I hear the heavy thump of wingbeats. I go to the kitchen window; her friends are swooping past, enormous wings outstretched as they glide in circles around the house. Their foul feet dangle, gore glistening on their claws. Naked, red necks emerge from their feathers, capped by identically grinning faces. With each pulse of my wife’s scream, they lunge closer, talons clenching with excitement.

I laugh. My wife’s screech ascends in pitch. Her wings and legs flail, striving for impossible escape.

When I fucked my wife, it was masturbation. Cock hot in that slack, cold body of hers; her gaze wall–eyed and half–focused; her tongue protruding from the edge of her mouth. Fuck and grunt and think about whatever: women’s fingers pinching their nipples; vulva spread and hot; sweat slicking smooth thighs. The mind can be wherever it wants, but the cock remains in that distended cunt, working and working toward a little pleasure. All the heat and blood and life — that was mine, never hers.

I return to the bathroom to mirror–check my necrosis. Spots cluster everywhere. Blood blooms to black on my chest, my elbows, the underside of my scrotum. Her very presence is decay.

I drag the knife through a necrotic flower, trying to cut it out like rot in fruit. The knife slides through the soft, pulpy wound, revealing the inside of my arm. It’s a monstrosity. Black veins branch across muscle that’s purpled like a bruise. Geysers of strange yellow substances, more viscous than pus, burst out of the fibers. I reach in to touch the muscle and my finger pushes straight through. The bone is no longer white and smooth, but rough and porous like pumice.

The smell it emits is sweet. It’s the smell of perfume on a grieving widow. It’s the smell of a sachet pinned to a corpse. It’s the smell of a banshee’s sugared breath.

It’s unfathomably worse than the rot and the shit.

My ex took the house and both cars and our address book. She slid her fingernails into my chest and cracked my sternum. She prized out my heart, a great pulsating ruby, and shoved it into her mouth. Her teeth tore through it. Her lips were covered in my blood.

Still, I had to listen to my friends bleat. “You used to be so in love.” “She could be sweet, though, you’ve got to admit it.” “Sometimes people just grow apart from each other.”

Idiots, all of them. Can’t see the shit running down her legs. Can’t see the fouled feathers. Can’t see the blank–mud–black she stares back at them as they fawn.

New necroses colonize my left hand. I’ve got to finish this. Got to get out.

I stumble back into the kitchen. Every few seconds, the air cracks beneath the vultures’ six–foot wingspans. The house rumbles beneath me. My wife stares at the window, still screaming, but she no longer looks afraid — instead, she’s smug, satisfied.

One bird dives against the glass. It creaks but doesn’t shatter.