by Nick Petrou
It is not my wife.
I knew it before they removed the bandages, exposing its waxen face. Nose melted to the bone. Two dark windows into the nasal cavity. No hair.
Long before, I knew.
In fact, I sensed the exact moment the flames steamed my wife’s soul out of her body. I had been at work when something like nausea wobbled through me, turning my muscles to muck. I was a terrified speck of consciousness suspended in an ocean of tar. I lolled over the side of my desk chair, and Callum ran across the office like I was having a stroke.
All I said was, “My wife. I can’t feel my wife.”
When the doctors told me she was terribly burned, but alive, I insisted they were wrong. She was dead; why would she be in hospital? Several days later, they said I could come and see her for myself.
Before the fire, whenever I was driving towards my wife, wherever she was, it felt like driving home. The road to the hospital was a road to nowhere. The void. I wept for her on the way, but also for how the doctors and my family were prolonging my fall to despair. I just wanted to strike the bottom already. From there, I could see if what remained of my life was even worth living.
My mother-in-law guided me into the bleached hospital room, and there it was, lying on its back. Mummified. Through the smell of disinfectant, I caught a whiff of sulphur. Through the choruses of my weeping family, I heard it whisper.
I am yours.
Of course, no one believed me. And when I shouted at it to get out, and was lifted out of the room, I swear, even bandaged as it was, that it smiled.
When they made me bring it home and feed it through a straw, I drove my car into a tree. Much too slowly.
Callum stayed with me for a while after that.
Driving me home after my failed suicide, he had said, “All that stuff about inner beauty—it’s hard. To wake up to that every day. God, I’m so sorry, man. But it’s her. Your wife. All her memories. All her love.”
“It’s not her,” I said.
After Callum left, it started doing things on its own.
It shuffles through the house, sucking on mince and ice cream with its lipless maw, touching the things that once belonged to my wife, giggling whenever I turn my back. Its sulphurous stench continues to grow, though it bathes in scalding water.
I weep whenever I stare into its eyes, which never blink. I weep, and I think of my wife. Peeling. Wilting.
I think of the last thing she saw. It.
I ask it what it wants. I scream the question. But it never answers. It only whispers.
I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.
NICK PETROU works as a freelance writer out of Perth, Western Australia, where he likes to read unsettling fiction and complain about the sun. His short fiction is forthcoming in AntipodeanSF and two anthologies by Black Hare Press. You can find out everything there is to know about him (and more) at nspetrou.com.