STENCH
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
~ Genesis 2:24, KJV
JESSICA BUTTONED THE ugly maternity jeans back up, tight once more against her bulging stomach. Every day lately, something was more uncomfortable, ill-fitting. There were moments—like here, in the rectory behind the meeting hall, with Caleb inside her, where the cumbersomeness of her stomach briefly became a fun kink, but the pleasure of that swiftly sank back into sickly discomfort.
At least she was sure the child wasn’t Caleb’s. She had only cheated physically after she already knew she was pregnant, though there had been tension between her and Caleb almost as soon as she took over altar duties. That had been part of the reason why she volunteered to be the candle minister—not so premeditated as to plan out the affair, but she’d just felt drawn to Caleb, watching him at the front of the church with his hardscrabble words and bust-a-rib sermons. He was so much younger than Darrel, too, not even a line of gray in his hair; and you know, she tried to be a good Christian woman. She knew that her husband was supposed to be enough for her. But she forgot how much she needed excitement, and then she’d seen Caleb looking at her across the finished basement at their game-day party, and somewhere in there her subconscious was making plans she couldn’t control.
Jessica busied herself opening up the cabinets of felt drapery and half-burned candles, fat and multicolored, trying to ignore the flutter of her heart. A rain started outside and beat down heavily on the aluminum roof of the converted agricultural supply.
“What are we setting up for this afternoon?” she asked, voice raised above the hammering.
“A funeral,” Caleb answered, and she had to strain to hear him over the pounding water. “Actually, you probably know of the woman, have you ever heard of—”
Jessica knew who it was as soon as the question left his lips. Her fingers curled in the dull purple felt with swaying comprehension.
“Oh god, Marylyn?” she said, and Caleb’s mildly raised eyebrows told her she was right. “Caleb, I didn’t know she was part of the congregation, are you serious?”
“Her family was,” Caleb said, peering over a ledger on his desk, where just a moment ago the papers had been disarrayed from where her ass rifled them. The unsteadiness only worsened, until the spray of lace in the cabinet filled her vision, dancing and weaving and cutting across her eyes like writing to the illiterate. “They wanted to have it here. I actually tried to discourage them, given how she died, but I’m not really one to give a grieving family a hard no.”
Jessica had loved Marylyn Doyle. Not personally, of course—Marylyn was an influencer, someone whose posts she’d followed and commented on but never met. Marylyn was The Miniskirt Wife, happily married and mother to five sons who she was raising in the ways of the Lord. What was she known for? Her huge hair sprayed bouncy blonde, her dark blue eyeshadow, and of course her clothing that wasn’t quite what the modern, modest wife should wear, but Jessica would be lying if she said she didn’t envy how much fun she seemed to have with skirts a little short and shirts a little low, low enough that her shiny gold cross sat right between her big spray-tanned—
Well, there was no need to say much more about that. Marylyn was devout, though, no one could challenge her on that. They could call her a slut all day if they wished, but she knew her scripture and she went to service with her family daily, and how many Christians could truly claim to do better? Honestly, part of why Jessica loved her is that she could put all those catty women in the church to shame: both with her knowledge of God’s word and by being a hot little thing.
As for what she posted, it was everything from recipes to fashion for mothers and wives, to pictures of her and her sons. Some posts were light-hearted or instructional, and some were more personal.
And then she’d died.
Her death had been plastered all over the internet, on Facebook and Instagram, everywhere but her own accounts. Brooke had forwarded Jessica eulogy after eulogy until Jess told her to stop. As a regular guest on the evening show The Grand Old Tyme, the host Lorelai Trentham had eulogized her beside the smiling picture from Marylyn’s blog, the Miniskirt Wife’s grin wide and white in front of the hazy suggestion of trees, grass and sun. Jessica had been glued to the stream through surging tears as Lorelai declared, “We should all take her as an inspiration to live more truly in ourselves and in our love of Jesus Christ the Lord.”
“I thought it was really weird,” Jessica remarked, studying Caleb’s expression, “that none of them would say how she died. It wasn’t anywhere I could find.”
Caleb glanced back at her. His face could have been the still of compassion or the calm of hidden mischief, but of course he didn’t have a bone of mischief in him. “The body is in the front room,” he said. “Let’s take the flowers out and look.”
And Jessica crossed her arms over herself, a chill coursing through her body.
Lights were half-off in the sanctuary as they passed through, and rain pounded against the windows. In the windowless foyer, the electric lights felt like a circle of known territory against the dark.
“When I talked to the family,” Caleb said, “they said it was a medication interaction. Evidently she had just tried a new herbal remedy, and as best they can tell, that caused something to go wrong with some other prescription she was taking.”
Marylyn’s second-to-last post had actually been about a new oil—a naturally-derived skin treatment from a tree resin the name of which Jessica hadn’t recognized. Marylyn had advertised it as a way to effectively stop aging, smooth out wrinkles, and make your skin soft and lush. It smelled like lily-of-the-valley, her favorite scent. The oil hadn’t done much for Jessica, but it smelled nice and she’d used it for a few days before forgetting about it.
The fact that she’d worn it, that she’d tried it, twisted up in her stomach like sour milk. Nothing bad had happened to her. But maybe she’d got lucky. Or Marylyn hadn’t.
“God, really?” she said. “So what happened? Did they just find her? Was it at least . . . quick?”
Caleb walked over to the side door and glanced back at her. “I don’t really know, Jessie,” he said, and a weird little thrill went through her, mixing with guilt like soap in the bath. Only Darrel called her that. “I don’t think so, though.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked, but as he opened the door, a smell hit her like the hot breath of a dead beast. She had a sudden vision of the only biology class she had been allowed to take, where they had dissected a dead cat in the name of anatomy.
It had come in a plastic bag filled with formaldehyde, and when they had pulled it out like a sick birth, it reeked like chemicals and preserved, gamey flesh. The students spent a freak hot week in March scalpelling apart this cat, pulling hard, lumpy organs from within the cavity of its body and pinning back the skin to see the structure underneath. The cat had been pregnant; in its womb—barely recognizable as anything of the sort, not that Jessica had really known what she was looking for—each wrapped in its own little sac, lay the tiny half-formed bodies of kittens. What had been strange, Jessica recalled, was that it wasn’t disgusting because it was dead and preserved. What had been disgusting was all the things latched inside of it as it died, growing stronger as it weakened.
Caleb stepped into the dark room, and the foul scent followed. It clawed up into her sinuses and lodged there, breeding and fermenting. Lights flickered on like a concession, and the nausea turned to a pounding inside her stomach, a foot pressing against her organs, making space for itself by shoving her out.
“Oh, God, Caleb,” she said. “That’s not . . . her, is it?” The coffin sat up in the little viewing room, surrounded by fake plants. White with silver handles, it captured the dull light from the drop ceiling in a way that made it glow brighter than the rest of the room, like sunlight off a knife. “They wouldn’t bring her here if she were rotting, would they? Caleb?”
He didn’t answer. As Caleb opened the lid, Jessica saw the face of Marylyn Doyle. It was still, plastic and smiling, and Jessica realized that something was wrong. Her face was actually a cut out, a cardboard printing of that smiling picture on her blog. The grin was white and warm with projected sunlight. Just the eyes were cut out, showing open orbs beneath.
The longer Jessica stared, the more she understood. Marylyn wore a white dress, a white blazer and a thin white blouse, but her skin . . . Jessica climbed the step next to the coffin, not wanting to look, but needing to, in the same way she had needed to see what was in the cat.
The body of Marylyn Doyle had no skin. It was as if she had been peeled apart for autopsy and not put together again, or perhaps it had all sloughed off in some chemical reaction. All that was left beneath her clean white clothing were gray muscle and veins and yellow fat, sallow and preserved.
In the entry hall, Jessica heaved against the wall. Her eyes felt like pinpoints in white paper, light barely bleeding through. The door shut softly as Caleb came to her, the hand he placed on her back too hot and close.
“I thought you’d like to know what happened,” he said, something which sounded almost true.
“Why would you think that?” Jessica blurted, though of course she had gone with him, and of course she was to blame for looking. The baby in her stomach kicked and squirmed as if it, too, wanted to rub its nose in the dirt until the rotting stench of flesh and chemical and varnish was gone.
“I didn’t think it would upset you so much.” His pastor’s voice was calm and measured, a man of the community. “It’s unpleasant, but in the church, we know that death is not the end.”
***
After Kelsie was tucked into bed, Jessica scrolled through the last post again. Her finger hovered over the phone’s lock button, ready to turn it off at a moment’s notice. She had always wanted kids, just like Marylyn had. When she had been younger, she had wanted as many as seven, though after she had Kelsie that number had been revised to maybe four or something. Now in the middle of pregnancy number two, she didn’t think about it at all.
“My husband knew I had cheated on him before I said anything at all,” read Marylyn’s last post. It was written in her usual dramatic style, but there was a sick self-loathing behind it. “I had been carrying all this weight with me, but when he came up to me with disappointment and compassion in his eyes, it all spilled out at his feet. Isn’t the purpose of a wife to love her husband, body and soul, and hadn’t I failed in that purpose? And for what, excitement?”
It felt like she should have been crying, but her eyes were dry as paper. It was rich, Jessica thought, for Marylyn to turn against excitement, the thing she was always talking about being good and important, just before kicking it. This felt like such a pivot from the woman who encouraged other women to liven things up in the name of better honoring their husbands. There was infinite joy in following one’s purpose as a wife, Marylyn said many times—but you weren’t to be blamed for wanting some fun sometimes, girlie!
“Paul sets the record straight for all who seek to be saved through their own righteousness, by reminding us we are weak through the flesh,” Marylyn wrote.
It was strange that there was no photograph or video accompanying the post. Usually, Marylyn posted an image as well, but this was all text, nothing else. What if whatever had been happening to her had started taking effect, and her skin had hung loose and damaged around her eyes, peeling away from the muscle and tissue? What if she was too ashamed to look at her own face?
She wondered if Marylyn had been pregnant when she died. Inside her own stomach, Jessica imagined the bones of the child, that tangle of white sticks that would grow larger like tree branches, extending through her meat until they reached her bones themselves, looking for something just like them.
“Jessie?”
Darrel stood in the doorway. She didn’t know how long he had been watching her, but there he was, the middle-aged enigma himself, in his pale blue button-down as exciting as a water cracker, with his boring brown eyes and fading brown hair the color of an animal. They locked eyes, the way a dog spots a frog on the edge of the water, and it comes down to who can lunge or leap the quickest. He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look like anything.
She asked him, what’s going on, honey, and when his response dragged, that pressure on her lungs got heavier and thicker until it was like breathing in oatmeal.
He asked her to join him in the living room. She followed him like a scolded child, waiting for the question as he sat across from her, his face still and cold. Her stomach felt fatter than ever against her jeans, and she felt suddenly so vulnerable. There was a reason that animals protected their belly, and it was because it was a soft, easy place to tear into, just like she had with that cat. Darrel could fall on top of her right now, and she would have no defense, because why would she have a defense against her own husband, her protector?
When he spoke, it cut through her like a scalpel. “Are you having an affair?”
“No, of course not.” The lie fell out easily, ready to be born. “Why would you even ask that?”
“Please don’t lie to me, Jessie,” he said. As he continued to question her, heat rose to her face, her hands trembled, and her mouth dried as if with the heat of the lie. Her body was weak, betraying her. “Are you cheating on me?”
***
“I didn’t deserve Henry’s love and forgiveness,” Marylyn had written. “I didn’t deserve a second chance.”
Jessica’s foot slipped off the accelerator, but then found it again. The porch lights at Brooke’s shone like an eye in the dark, so bright that she almost missed the other cars in the drive. Tears streaked salt down her face like finger lines as Brooke came outside. A day had passed, and it had gotten no easier to speak to Darrel, no easier to remain in the house. She had stayed with her mother in her old child’s bed, paralysis seizing her brain.
“Honey, are you okay?” Brooke asked as Jessica staggered toward her, feeling like a puppet holding itself up. “What happened?”
Brooke was an old high school friend. Jessica hadn’t been close with her at first, but then they’d fallen in together, the way you sometimes do when other friends leave town or turn out to be two-faced. Jessica stared, mouth flapping open, no idea where to begin. There was too much to confess, and tears shook loose and imminent behind her eyes.
“Are you having a party?” she asked.
“It’s a gender reveal,” said Brooke, and wrapped an arm around her. “Honey, is this about Caleb?”
Something heavy and thick inside her pressed up. Her child was growing at an unnatural rate, she was sure, and reaching for room.
“How did you know about that?” she said hoarsely.
Brooke led her toward the door. “Jess, you told me.”
Marylyn had written that her husband had her down on the couch, then sat beside her with his hand on her knee. Do you want to stay? he had asked after the horrible truth had been extracted. He had been giving her the chance to try again, to do better. Jessica had read her words with a judgment that came from somewhere deep and rotten within her. As if to say yes was cowardly. She was relieved that Marylyn’s husband had taken her back, allowed her to redeem herself. She was scornful that Marylyn had accepted.
But that was days before it had been Jessica’s turn. Darrel had sounded so much like Marylyn’s husband, it was as if he had followed a script.
Do you want to stay? he had asked.
Brooke’s house was hot as that dead-cat classroom, and the women sweltered as they circled around the living room; sweat beaded under a pink ball cap, along the modest neckline of a maternity dress, through the back of a t-shirt. Children played on the floor, ages one to four, as if it weren’t long past their bedtimes, voices high and chattering. Some of the women looked up, but continued talking, the conversation rolling along like a boil.
Jessica hadn’t told Brooke about Caleb. She wouldn’t have. So how did she know?
“Whose gender reveal is this?” Jessica asked as Brooke positioned her on a sofa.
Brooke laughed, and the other women laughed and talked, and Brooke put some orange juice in her hand as if it were midmorning, not after dark. The black outside the windows was suffocating, and the lights inside were dim and electric-coil hot.
“Yours, Jess,” Brooke said, and stretched out her hand to Jessica. “I may have lied a little. I actually knew you’d be coming.
Jessica took the hand before she knew what it meant. A familiar woman took her other hand, and the orange juice was now balanced between her knees, and there was seven months of pregnancy in the way, her center of mass all wrong. A little girl squirmed around her feet, laughing and laughing, as the women all joined hands, lowering their heads. The conversation stilled.
“But how do you know what it is?” Jessica asked inanely.
Brooke spoke, but didn’t answer. “Lord, please be with us here. We gather here today to say a prayer for our friend Jessica, for you to bless her marriage to Darrel, and to ask for guidance. Before we learn the gender of her soon-to-be-born baby, we turn to you to bless her, and her husband, and her marriage, and to grant her your grace and forgiveness.”
Heart thumping, Jessica stared into Brooke’s face for signs of cruelty or coldness, something that would explain this mind game, but all she got was the clammy slop of disappointment.
A panic seized her like a hand around her spine, tugging on her bones. She wrenched her hands away and pushed herself up with a sudden motion, quicker than she thought she could. Orange juice splashed and soaked into the carpet. The room fell dead silent, tens of eyes drifting wide and unblinking.
I don’t even want the kid!
“Bathroom,” she said aloud. “I have to pee. Sorry.”
The door latched behind her, not as firmly as she would like. She tested the handle, and it jiggled weakly. She stared into the mirror above the sink, then splashed water on her face. This was insane, what Brooke and the girls were doing. This was fucked up. She guessed it didn’t matter how Brooke knew about Caleb. Maybe this was punishment for not coming clean. Maybe this was punishment for being an evil mother.
The porcelain sink was bone beneath her hands. The water was too hot on her face. Something in the room smelled like lily-of-the-valley, and the smell clung to her like a child that wouldn’t let go.
Did she want to stay? Jessica couldn’t imagine leaving. Where would she go, what would she do, with Kelsie at home, and seven months pregnant with a child that barely felt like hers? It wasn’t like she hadn’t thought before getting involved with Caleb. It wasn’t like she didn’t know the risk, and it had been worth it, and it hadn’t, and even her friends weren’t to be trusted.
Was there some reason Marylyn’s skin had to be removed? Was there a reason it wasn’t needed?
A knock came at the door. Jessica called out for a minute, please, just a minute.
The lily-of-the-valley was overpowering now. The shower curtain hung closed, and Jessica stared at it, and at the line of dry red-brown that stained it. The knocking grew more insistent, as did Brooke’s sweet voice.
“Jess, open up. It’s just me. Jessie, open up.”
Something bony and sharp scraped inside her esophagus. She swallowed, trying to rid herself of it, but it just bobbed in her throat, bob-bob-bob like an Adam’s apple, like a caught fishbone. She reached for the curtain, her hand shaking, terrified of what was behind it.
The curtain scraped back, and Jessica fell to her knees in sudden pain.
The Wife floated in the tub. Her bouncy blond hair was now soaked bloody spikes, the water the red and tan of blood and resin. Her eyes were gone, her mouth open to nothing. It was only her skin. All she was, was her empty skin.
Then Jessica doubled over as the bones pressed up. Her skeleton was broken. No; her skeleton was alive. There was another skeleton within her, and fingers wriggled in her throat, felt and reached around her mouth. She let out a strangled cry as she reached in between her teeth and the hand grasped at her, tried to grab her.
Bone clacked on teeth, then ribs, then clavicle and tibia and humerus. She felt her jaw crack, and then crack again, and then crack even wider still until she screamed and panted and choked.
Her skeleton pushed out, and then women’s hands were all around her, holding her stomach, pulling at her mouth, at her arms, at her skin. “It’s nearly ready, it’s already loose,” they said. Jessica felt her organs shoved away, and her hands felt too large, as if something was pulled from inside of them. Her head slid back from the skull, sliding down, and her eyes pointed up at the ceiling, then the wall, then up at all the women who helped, who helped so efficiently and with female wisdom. Bones snarled, knotted, wove together until Jessica lay, exhausted and helpless and thin against the floor.
“The gender is bones!” cried the many women, stained with blood and fat and viscera. “Everyone gather around, it’s going to be bones!”
Their celebration carried the body and muscle from the bathroom, away from Jessica. The sounds swelled and dimmed and faded. With the last of her strength, she pulled herself over the white porcelain lip, and down into the tub. Marylyn’s face, her true face, turned toward her. Skin caressed the back of her arm, and loose fingers tilted her chin toward the mouth, gaping and black, of the woman she loved. When it kissed her, she tasted meat and formaldehyde and lily-of-the-valley, sickening and loving.
Skin fit into skin fit into skin, their empty bodies entangled, and Jessica felt a warmth and love like she had never known before.