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

He withdrew the blanket further and examined the juts and angles of boyish, bony Ayl. She would never flower as her sister had done, was cut off forever from the softening of womanhood. She smelled like the childhood that kept her: like a skinned knee, soil and exertion with a hint of blood beneath.

His enemy’s two dead girls. Vare had never seen anything so beautiful.

He rolled them off the bed, thunk onto the floor, and stripped a blanket off the mattress. He wrapped it around the two corpses, swaddling them together as if they were a single babe. With rope he’d brought for this purpose, he bound the bundle together and strapped it to his back.

His spine hurt with the good, dead weight of them. Bent, he shuffled to the door and down the stairs, biting a burn-you charm in case a servant should return early and discover them. No one came and he escaped into the darkness, one more reveler, though carrying an odd, heavy load.

Once outside the city gates, Vare had planned to deposit the girls in some lonely place where wild animals would devour them before they could receive a decent burial. But in the morning, as he bowed beneath their bodies, he found himself unwilling to part with them.

Each ounce of their weight upon his back gave him a thrill of rich, red pleasure, the kind he’d never thought he’d feel again. Ayl’s bony elbows jutted into his shoulder blades. The uneven pressure of Delira’s curves created a jigsaw of pain across his back.

Their deaths had been his life’s obsession; their corpses were his prize.

He carried them out of the villages that surrounded wealthy Whitcry and onto the plains. Rosy-cheeked do-gooders, seeing an old, sunken man bent beneath his load, stopped to offer help. Vare grinned as he watched them discern the shapes in his pack, their internal arguments written on their faces: “Is that—? It couldn’t be—A sweet old man—”

“My daughters,” he’d lie with a terrible grin. ‘Dead of the plague.”

The word plague filled their eyes with alarm; shuddering with horror, they’d stumble back and flee. Their terror was almost as savory as the sweet rot of his girls’ flesh.

As the sky turned from navy to black, Vare crossed away from the road, cutting across fields to find a small, sheltered niche where he could set down his pack. He untied and unrolled the blanket, revealing Ayl and Delira lying side by side just as they had in their father’s house.

Blood pooled in their limbs, leaving their faces an ethereal blue. Rigor held their arms by their sides, their fingers curled as if reaching for something they’d never grasp. Blisters rose across Delira’s neck and face. Vare waved away the flesh flies that swarmed toward the girls’ scent, looking for places to lay their eggs.

He pressed his lips against first one mouth and then the other. Their lips were soft but cold. “Goodnight, my lovely,” he said to each, brushing his fingers across chilled cheeks.

He could have done more, but there was no need. Their bodies were already giving up their secrets to him. He would be there to watch as their flesh softened and broke down. He’d peel them back, layer by layer, revealing their viscera, and below that, their stark, delicate skeletons. They had no coffins to preserve their maidenly modesty. Throat and heart and stomach, they were all his.

He lay between them and prepared to sleep, one arm wrapped around each dead girl’s shoulders.

Compared to noisy and colorful Whitcry, Houndsmouth was drab and soundless. The effects of countryside famines echoed through the city. Refugees crammed the slums, bringing filth and disease. As more mouths competed for the city’s depleted food supply, paupers fought bloodily in the streets, clawing each other for coins and scraps. The losers starved, eyes huge in their desiccated faces.

For several years, Vare had rented a decaying manor house in what had once been a wealthy part of the city. Now the building faced tenements and the river view which had once distinguished its location looked down on one of the most polluted bends in the city, choked with trash and starved corpses.

When he arrived at the once-grand façade, Vare pushed through the creaking doors and slung his package onto the parlor floor.

Hearing his arrival, his housekeeper rushed in. She balked at the parlor entryway, clapping her hand over her nose to protect herself from the stench. Horrified eyes tried to discern what in the hells Vare had brought home with him, but the girl knew him well enough to still her tongue.

She saw the package’s contents soon enough as Vare unwrapped the girls and demanded the housekeeper’s help shifting them. Ayl went onto a threadbare daybed. Delira lay across the thinning velvet of a loveseat, still-growing mahogany curls draping over the arm.

The housekeeper spoke hesitantly. “Should I fix them a room…?”

Vare looked the girl in the eye. She was forgettable, broad-faced and middle-aged. Drab, blondish hair fell out of her bun and across her face. Worried hands clenched at her sides. She’d been in his employ for years—the last of a small group of worn-out servants he’d found cowering near the burned-out magitorium—but he didn’t remember her name. Her face recalled a vague memory of what she’d been like ten years ago as a maid, younger but equally anxious, always scouring and scurrying.

“I haven’t decided yet,” Vare said.

“They won’t be… I mean, how long do you think they’ll…” The girl choked down vomit. “They aren’t moving in, are they, sir?”

“For now, of course they are.”

Vare sat on the loveseat, settling lovely Delira’s legs across his lap. Flowery perfume still hung on her skin, blending sickly with the rot.

“Some brandy,” Vare demanded. As the housekeeper turned to go, he added, “And hot milk for the girls,” just to watch the frightened hitch in her step as she hurried from the room.

Ah, at last, relaxed at home and alone with his girls. Vare stroked Delira’s plump calves. Their cold stole the heat from his palms.

Day by day, since their deaths, his girls had continued to change. It was as if their bodies remembered that they needed to rush toward womanhood, but since the girls had lost the warmth of life, they’d also lost their way. They felt the urgency of metamorphosis, but each transformation away from girlhood led them toward something very different from their original destination.

Their bloated stomachs pushed, bulbous, against their nightdresses. The effect was much more pronounced on skinny Ayl’s frame; she looked as if she was pregnant, ready to give birth to whatever horrors grow inside dead girls. Their mouths frothed. Strange liquids oozed from their noses, their anuses, and any other orifices from which they could escape. Grey, veined flesh resembled marble.

How perplexing, the matter of what to do with these hard-worn trophies. Display them? Perhaps. He could have them stuffed and mounted. In any guise he liked. As servants… as prisoners… as whores, all painted and teasing… Or perhaps he should leave them as they were, rosy and innocent, swaddled in lace and white linen, to emphasize what he’d stolen.

No, the idea seemed—like taxidermy itself—too contrived.

He needed something else. Something clever and unique. Something suitable for his girls.

Late at night, Lano arrived, knocking, at Vare’s manor house. The housekeeper opened the door but refused to admit him, not knowing whether her master would want a visitor to see the two corpses, still sitting in the parlor.

Vare, roused by the knocking, descended the stairs in his nightclothes. When he saw Lano, he smiled. They’d known each other a long time, since before the sacking at the magitarium. They’d been unfriendly then, but now that they both belonged to the tiny fellowship of survivors, their interests had come into alignment, bringing friendship along with them.