My Husband Will Eat Himself

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in many journals, such as the Molotov Cocktail, Jellyfish Review, Sunlight Press (Best Small Fictions 2019 nominee), Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Ellipsis Zine, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Bending Genres, MoonPark Review, Litro and others. 

@happymil_ 
https://www.facebook.com/milevaanastasiadou/

Burn, Babylon, I sing, while I cut the patient open. The intern looks at me from the corner of his eye, wondering whether I lost it or not. He probably doesn’t recognize the song, it comes from another era, in which I was raised, while he probably wasn’t even born yet. I’ve never sang during surgery before, not that I never wanted to, yet I’m well aware of my limited skills in singing. I smile at him, only he can’t see the smile behind the mask, which takes me a while to realize, since I don’t usually smile either while I operate. A few hurried but delicate movements later, the tumor shines bright before our eyes, which takes the intern’s attention away from me and onto the pathology ahead. Don’t touch it, I order, before he makes any movement and he shrugs, like he knows he can’t touch anything, like he knows he’s only here to help. You have to be clear though, to avoid misunderstandings. Boundaries are all that matters in cases like this. 

My husband has a thing with boundaries. He’s one of those men who won’t settle for anything less than everything. That makes it tough on me, yet I don’t mind. That’s what I liked about him in the first place. He knows what he wants and won’t calm down until he gets it. That’s what boundaries are for, he’s told me. That’s how I’d like to be, but I’m not. Truth be told, I’m goal-oriented as far as my job is concerned. Doctors can’t be but goal-oriented, we must be the perfect match, he must have thought to himself. Together we’ll conquer the world. Yet I wasn’t motivated enough to conquer the world, I only wished to conquer disease, for that was what I had been trained for. So he conquered me instead. 
He conquered every aspect of my life, as he had nothing else to conquer. He’s now the emperor and I’m the slave. You could be queen, he tells me. I could be queen, only I’m not that motivated, he means, except I now know he likes me this way, for he could expand endlessly, or so he thought. His boundaries demanded most of my free time, which I gladly gave to him. He would demand all my time, only he’s not that out of his mind. My best friend won’t talk to me, but that’s because she won’t accept the boundaries I set, he claims. I kind of miss our nights out, yet my husband insists I don’t have time for that kind of fun, now that I’m married. 

The intern is watching me cut out the tumor and clear the lymph nodes. Don’t touch it, I order him again and he shies away, bowing his head. Boundaries are important, I tell him. You have to respect boundaries. I pretend I don’t trust him enough yet, that he’s not skilled enough, while all I want is all glory to myself. 
Last night, my husband asked me to spend less time with my son. He said he couldn’t accept coming second best now that he has a wife. I told him I’ve only known him a couple of years while I know my son all of his life. The kid is about ten and wants my attention, while he’s forty and can do without it for a while. He says I have to teach my son boundaries, yet I realize he only wants the largest piece of the cake, only the cake is now finished and he can’t stop. My husband will eat himself, for that’s what greed does, like a tumor won’t stop expanding, the more malignant, the more it expands, until it destroys the host, until they both end up dead, like an unstoppable imperialistic army, which won’t stop until it rules the world, only to be eaten from inside, like all empires in the course of history. Greed doesn’t stop until the very end of greed.

I’m done here, I tell the intern. Burn, Babylon, I sing, while walking out the room, taking off the gloves, leaving him the joy to finish off the battle, cause I’m not that  greedy to take all joy myself.  He smiles at me from behind the mask, while he’s about to perform the final sutures.  
It’s ‘Pop Will Eat Itself’, I tell him, but he doesn’t even recognize the song, let alone the band. 

At the Café de Flore

Elodie Rose Barnes is an author, poet and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States and the Bahamas. Her love of travel and seeing new places has inspired a fascination with the ideas of time and space, and this seeps into most of her writing. Her poetry has most recently been accepted in Crêpe & Penn, Burning House Press, and The Failure Baler, and she is a contributing editor at The Fruit Tree. Current projects include a chapbook of poetry inspired by time, space and Paris, and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes. She can be found online at http://elodierosebarnes.weebly.com. 

Every day, she arrives at the café at 10am and takes her table under the awning. She never sees the server discreetly slip the ‘reserved’ sign into his starched pocket when he sees her clicking her slow way down the street with her cane, but she knows he does. He must do. Her table has always been free at 10am, every morning for over thirty years. 

She gives the same order she always gives. Black coffee, short and sharp, and a butter croissant, no jam. The server has never dared to second-guess her by bringing it without asking. Her cigarettes are already out on the table, one half-smoked before the coffee arrives. It’s almost as if they time it, a silent dance that neither acknowledges but that simply happens.

Thelma always used to tread on her toes when they waltzed. 

She will stay there for exactly an hour. The croissant will be pecked at, flake by pastry flake, until not a crumb remains, and the coffee will be sipped in between gasps on cigarettes. She sees everything but comments on nothing, watching the boulevard, grimacing silently at tourists and listening with a sharp ear to conversations at the tables nearby – talk of stock markets and politics, literature and cinema. It’s the only news she gets. 

At 10.30am, there is always a moment when the bells of St Sulpice start chiming, harsh and loud, as ugly and as reassuring as the towers they spring from. In those few seconds, she appears to drop out of this world and into another that was cruel enough to die long before; the world of her first day in Paris, fresh off the trans-Atlantic steamer and still green around the edges, walking through the ancient cobbled square by the church. The evening light had been softly tinged with violet. Then those bells had clanged for Vespers, and she had shrieked so loudly that Thelma had caught her arm, laughing at her innocence. It had taken an hour for her heart to stop echoing the chimes. 

At 10.35am, her gaze always drifts along the boulevard, rising upwards with the bells towards the sky, coming to rest on an apartment six floors up and ten doors down on the other side of the traffic jam. Her life is still in there, she’s sure of it. Trapped inside four walls, clinging desperately to the last shreds of love and laughter that had filled her in those years. She doesn’t know anything about life now. 

At 10.55am, she smokes her last cigarette and drains the last cold drop of coffee. The bill always comes to €9.90. She always pays with a €20 note and the server always gives her, not a €10 bill in change, but a different €20 from the wallet around his waist. She accepts it without a word – the only help she will accept, because it’s given without drama or fuss – and she’ll leave to spend the next hour in the Jardin du Luxembourg, her cane tapping slowly along the gravel paths. She knows what time of year it is by the colour of the leaves that fall at her feet. If they’re rusting around the edges, it would have been Natalie’s birthday. If they’re fresh mint green, Elsa’s. Pink blossom means it’s hers, and she can ignore it. No leaves at all means winter, and Thelma’s. The leaves are her only company. The rest of the day she will spend alone. 

Some days, she feels the burden of being the only one left alive. Other days, she feels as if she too is nothing but a ghost, a crinkled leaf drifting in the breeze. 

Pink Wine Words

Anita Goveas is British-Asian, based in London, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently in Okay Donkey, X-Ray lit and New Mag. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, an editor at Mythic Picnic’s Twitter zine, and tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer Links to her stories can be found at https://coffeeandpaneer.wordpress.com

I’ll bring a bottle of crimson red wine, that I spent 32 minutes searching for in Majestic wines, but it will be the wine you liked last month, so you’ll put it in your third wine-rack, the one shaped like the Eiffel Tower you keep under the table, in that slow, slow, slow way you have seemingly so I won’t notice but almost certainly to draw attention, and I’ll splutter that red wine tastes like overcooked cabbage to me but I liked the label, and you’ll sigh, sigh, sigh heavily to the nearest guest and say my sister was never good at apologies, and I’ll notice the open bottle of rose that we used to call pink wine but not anymore because you grew into your adult palate although I didn’t, didn’t, didn’t and I’ll drink two-thirds of it before you look at me and I’ll wave the bottle at you and say I know you were the one that was there for Dad at the end and I don’t know why he left me the money but probably because he was a bastard, and please, please, please can we stop letting him do this to us and I’ll buy you every bottle of red wine I can find but I’ll always remember how giggly the pink makes us and somehow you’ll hold out your glass and I’ll finally, finally, finally breathe.

Books Can Be A Burden, When She Can No Longer Read

Emily Harrison uses writing as an escape from reality and doesn’t drink enough water. She can be found on Twitter @emily__harrison, and has had work published with Ellipsis Zine, Storgy, The Molotov Cocktail, Retreat West and Riggwelter Press to name a few.

She used to talk to her books as though they were lovers – the printed pages sentient and self-sustaining. I suppose it was the words that talked back. 

I can’t recall the last time she read, let alone spoke aloud to them. The illness has set in like a winter fever, though it’s not nearly as treatable. There’s no known treatment at all. The consultants are cold in their calculations, causing internal commotion. 

She asks me for clarification over sherry she shouldn’t be drinking. I’m going to lose my sight, is that it? I order white wine and pour it myself. I tell her yes. She asks me why? 

I say I don’t know, because you are, and realise that being her daughter doesn’t mean I am equipped with answers. 

I thought I knew it all when I was sixteen. 

Are you ready? 

The mascara she’s attempted to curl onto her lashes has dripped down underneath her eyes, settling in the creases of her skin like ants. I feel sorry only for myself at the display. 

Do I look ready? 

No. 

I couldn’t say why she’s put on mascara. We’re going home. Her current home. My childhood home.

It’s going up for sale – she’s coming to live with me. We’re clearing it of things that mean nothing and things that mean everything. The cost of it all will be more than monetary. 

I have to explain each piece – what I’m holding and what I’ve found.  

The kitchen and front room are easily cleared with a quick yes or a solid no. Her bedroom is a labyrinthine museum, and both of us begin to suffer under its archival weight the deeper we delve into the past. When I, in search of reprieve, ask about her books, for they are nowhere to be seen, she tells me she has made plans for them. 

She has never been a secretive person. The illness is clouding more than her eyes. 

We return a week later. She’s been back in the interim, though not with me. She has a day-time carer whilst I work. I don’t trust him. I’m jealous of him too. 

Can you help me into the loft?  

She’s been sat at the dining room table, twirling a purple ribbon she’s plucked from her craft box between her fingers. She loosens the ribbon, flexes her thumb and switches to her left hand, winding it slowly. Over and under. I was sure she couldn’t see me. 

It becomes clear, on entry, that this is where her books have been taken to rest. Boxes and boxes of them. I don’t ask for explanation. I help her settle into one the old folding camping chairs that’ve been discarded to the mass of items. 

Leave me alone up here, will you. 

It is not a question. She is curling herself into a combatant crow. I leave her to her former lovers. 

The noise is akin to a fox wailing – high pitched and piercing. It travels from the nape of my neck, across the bones of my shoulders and down my vertebrae, blooming out and building to a panic. 

Half an hour has passed since I left her alone. All I’ve done is sit and think of her.  

A distinct thud follows before another wail goes up. It echoes around the house, reverberating off the walls. 

Mum. Mum. Are you alright? I yap like a Yorkshire terrier.

Another thud. Another wail. Each splinter themselves through me. 

I clamber up the ladder to the loft. She is torment as I emerge.    

Pages of books are strewn haphazard and chaotic. Some float listless in the air and she is wet with blood that isn’t hers. Humans don’t bleed such rich onyx. 

A collection of book spines are pooled at her knees, the stitching hacked on each. Blood is splattered across the loft in smears and polka dots. The boxes that contain her beloveds are upended everywhere. She wheezes and heaves for another title, eyes utterly alabaster, and with strength kept from me like a vicious secret, secluded to her soul, she grips the head of its spine and rips down over. Blood pours over her hands in a flushed weep. 

Her veins are pronounced and near cerulean, the streams pushing up and out of her skin. 

I do not believe in possession. No. 

She lets the spine drop and flings the detached pages towards me. 

There are no remedies when you are unsure of what you’re witnessing. I set my jaw tight and observe; a separate entity to the execrable scene and wait for a laceration.

The chance presents itself as she, doused so wholly in the blood of her books it could be liturgy, reaches for my lost treasure. It must’ve got caught up in her collection. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. A rare first run copy.   

Her body punctures ever so on contact with the cover and the trauma takes a moment to exhale. 

Her skin has recognised what she’s holding. I’m convinced of it. 

Hands and knees to the chipboard that lines the loft, I crawl forward. Around us the murmurs of her dying books distil. 

Mum. 

It wasn’t a question. She takes an age to answer. 

I can’t read them anymore. 

She talks of burden. To know they exist without me. The brutality is an equal release.  

I didn’t realise they’d hurt this much. She spreads open her stained palms, so sable it’s as though she’s bruised a sea of blackberries. I didn’t realise they’d bleed. Her mouth aches around the words. Aches like she had tentatively tested the waters at the first sign of blindness. 

I don’t know what’s happening to me. 

I don’t say neither do I. I don’t say anything at all. 

Mama Says

Rachel Tanner is a queer, disabled writer whose work has recently appeared in Honey & Lime, Porridge Magazine, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. She tweets @rickit.

I’ve never seen a flower in real life. I’ve only seen them in pictures. Mama talks about how flowers used to yawn themselves awake when it was warm, like they were reaching out to meet the sun. Sarah says her grandma has a flower that she keeps inside her house but we all know Sarah’s lying. She’s gonna get in trouble one of these days for fibbing.

According to our textbooks, the last flower died 30 years ago, 17 years before I was born. Mama thought about naming me Gardenia, but daddy said it wasn’t proper to name a baby after something extinct. I guess I agree but Gardenia is a way prettier name than Sunny. I know five other girls in my school named Sunny. I don’t know any Gardenias. It might’ve been nice to feel unique.

The ground is mostly dirt and mud now, so we have to wear boots everywhere. Mama says when she was little, they got to wear all kinds of different shoes. Can you imagine? I can’t. I don’t even know what those would look like. Unlike the flowers, there are no pictures of shoes in our textbooks. But I hope one day I get to wear a pair of those shoes. I’d be happy wearing anything besides boots, really. My feet get so sweaty inside my boots. I know they’re practical, and if you’re rich enough you can get boots with little designs on them, but I want to try out “flip flops.” What a cool name. “Flip flop.” It’s probably one of my favorite things to say out loud. Mama banned me from saying it at the dinner table because I would just say it over and over and over again. “Flip flop flip flop flip flop flip flop.”

When I was little and mama still tucked me into bed, I’d ask her to tell me about flip flops and flowers before I fell asleep. She always said yes. She never got tired of telling me about the past, and I never got tired of listening.

Mama still cries. Tells me she’s sorry for how the world is. Tells me there’s not much time left. I ask her what she means and she just holds me tighter. I don’t know what our home will look like in a year. I don’t expect it’ll get any better. I don’t expect much at all.

The Quiet of Giraffes

Cathy Ulrich might have gotten a book of facts for Christmas, which might have included something about giraffes not having vocal cords. Her work has been published in various journals, including Last Exit, Sun Dog Lit and Heavy Feather Review.

In the paper the next morning, you read an article about a herd of giraffes they found in Central Africa that could speak.

Your wife is at the sink, washing dishes from last night’s party, dries her hands on her apron front.

That can’t be right, she says. Giraffes can’t speak.

You rustle the paper, point at the article.

I mean, she says, they don’t have vocal cords.

She says: I read that somewhere. It’s a fact.

There is a bruise on the back of your wife’s elbow where she can’t see, from last night. Jim from three houses down, following her into the kitchen for another glass of wine and everyone running in after them when they heard the crash, your wife backed up against the counter, he fell, he just fell, wine spilled on the floor sticky beneath Jim from three houses down’s head.

And everyone saying Jim, hey, Jim, you okay? and thinking what a shame it was his wife left and took the kids, down to Florida, they were saying, left him in that big house all alone, such a good guy, such a great guy, Jim from three houses down, and he sat himself up, rubbed his head, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.

You wouldn’t let him leave till he could say how many fingers you were holding up and what year it was and his favorite joke, I was talking to the duck, and your wife smiling at the door beside you in her apron, and she fell asleep leaned up against you on the couch, watching the headlights of cars as they pulled out of your driveway, her left hand up around her throat, the soft sighs she exhaled, and she didn’t move till morning, said, oh, you should have woken me.

Jim from three houses down will be found, finally, Wednesday afternoon, five days after your party, face down in his back yard, subdural hematoma, face gone purple from pooling of blood, no open casket for Jim, no trips to Florida to visit the kids, but your wife is asking you now well does it at least tell you what the giraffes said, and you read the article again and again to see, but no, it never does.