a return to the house of death (5)

He felt great remorse for the way things were left and three days later returned to the garden to retrieve her body from the thin dry soil, digging the first few feet or so with great whacks of the shovel and scooping with his two cupped hands after that, to avoid further damaging her flesh with accidental impact. Eventually he felt his fingers brush against the skin of her arm as cold as stone and he scraped the mud away gently like an archaeologist unearthing something of immeasurable significance. When he had exposed the whole of her he lifted her and carried her towards the threshold as though they had been recently wed. She was very bloated and the skin around her jawline and her shoulders was greenish, and as her body was manipulated within the cradle of his arms he saw purge fluid oozing from the corners of her mouth. Inside he carried her to their bedroom and laid her onto her side of the bed, resting her head on the pillow, the movement of which pushed much more fluid from her mouth. He dabbed it away with a white handkerchief on which his initials were embroidered. He rolled the tissue of her face back up and into place as best as he was able. Her eyeless stare was captivating and weirdly intense, as though she could see right through him. Uneasy, he went downstairs to the kitchen and took the medium sized food bag into which he had placed her eyeballs from the refrigerator and carried them back up to their bedroom; he returned the eyes to their sockets and felt the comfort of privacy. He unfastened the pyjama top she had been wearing when it happened and eased it out from underneath her. Her torso was peppered with blisters of varying sizes; he presumed them to be filled with the emmited liquids of her putrefying body and caressed them beneath his fingertips, a sensation quite unlike anything he had ever experienced. There were some stains upon the bed linen around her and he observed a kind of oozing from her anus. Her gone viscera sought urgent release. He poured himself a glass of the mid-range red wine they had enjoyed, just supermarket stuff, and swallowed it down; he poured another and drank it too, then another and did the same. He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and climbed into the bed. The curtains were drawn but the sun was still very bright, the room aflame with it. He could hear the radio still on in the kitchen below his bedroom, some breakfast show. He had lit candles all around the room. He nestled his head into the crook of her armpit. There were maggots working her. He snuggled up alongside her. She was very cold. The stench was bracing. Let the bed take her, the bed they had chosen, let the bed take her fibres in its. He held her dead hand in his and felt the old chemistry.