I never wanted to live there to begin with. It was his house, not mine; I knew that as soon as I walked in. Those awful pinkish-reddish curtains, the colour of irritated labia. They were velvet, embroidered with a pattern that was meant to resemble vines – a branching network crazing across the breadth of the god-awful fabric. A crime against nature, against taste, against fashion. I didn’t tell Daniel that. He didn’t want to change a thing about the house. It hadn’t been updated since the seventies. He was in love. I wasn’t. I didn’t want to live there.

I didn’t like the way it was so far from the city.  People were different here. Or at least, the people here treated me like I was different. They stared at me like I was some kind of bizarre and troubling art exhibit. What could I do? They wouldn’t serve me in the shop. I walked in; they went silent. I picked up a packet of digestives, some eggs, a pint or two of milk. They just looked at me, in that blank, unphased way, until I left. I didn’t go back after that first time. If I was in the garden, they were sure to walk by. To stand there just outside the wall, pressed up against it, waiting until I turned and looked at them. Until I scuttled inside, changed out of my gardening shorts, closed the curtains. Sometimes I still felt them watching, even then. I was certain they didn’t stare at Daniel like that. I was afraid to ask. What would it mean if they didn’t? Or if they did? I started to waste hours in front of the mirror, pinching my skin, stretching it, wondering what it was about me that they found so troubling. I never quite worked it out. I could pinch and poke until my skin was raw. I could stare and stare until my body started to change, shifting proportions like a Picasso painting. I could stare until my eyes bled – it wouldn’t make any difference. I would never see what they saw. I would never see how they saw. 

So I spent more time in the house. Away from prying eyes.

I banned meat from the kitchen. It didn’t feel right anymore, somehow cannibalistic. No more sides of pork, no chicken wings, no fish. It seemed wrong that meat appeared in parts. Inhumane. Where was the rest of the body? Daniel took the criticism and came home with a pheasant. He left the creature hung up on the back porch: a challenge. I couldn’t bare the preparation. Plucking the feathers, sloughing back the skin, disrobing the meat. Delineating fillets, breasts, legs. The slap of thick wetness on the chopping board. The dissection. The bleeding. And all the while that disembodied head, its glazed eye staring at me. I couldn’t face its gaze.

​

We became a vegetarian household for a while, and that worked. Until it didn’t. Cabbage heads. That was what did it. A head of cabbage. Daniel had peeled it for soup. I saw the destruction on my counter. The fragments of the whole.  I had dreams that night of turnips. Their pale, bulging, prenatal bodies, toddling around in the middle of the night, making their way upstairs, scratching at my door. I woke him screaming. The next morning, he was gone. 

It’s more difficult than you’d think to keep people out. It’s not just the windows you have to think about. It’s all the little cracks, too, in the doors. It’s the keyholes where fingers could slip in. The water in the toilet bowl, the taps, the plugs. I stuffed them with hair. I blocked the doors with piles of furniture, broken chair legs, the claw-footed bathtub. Even so, I would find mice, ladybirds, spiders – in the cupboards, on the countertops, spinning tapestries in corners. Where they came from I didn’t know, how they’d made their way in I couldn’t tell. But the fact they were there meant other things – other people – could get in too.

Then I found the basement. It was dark down there. Silent. It was thick with hanging musk, dust, dirt, age. Even the air couldn’t escape. It was safe – I was safe. I walked down the stairs, down and down into that maw, that hole. The further I got from the surface, the more I felt my edges start to blur. I felt less solid. It was my fingers first. Then my arms. My torso and my head divided. I think my eyes had disintegrated very early on, but I felt my spine dissolve, vertebra by vertebra. My knees went before the tibia, the fibula. My feet went last. Each of the twenty six bones. I stopped hearing my steps a long time before I stopped feeling them. 

It has been a long time since then. I have no way of knowing how long. I’d forgotten about time until you turned up. I was beginning to forget altogether.  A little longer and you wouldn’t have gotten a word out of me. But, as things lie… now I’ve told you. Won’t you tell me? Satisfy my curiosity?

Why was it that you stared so?