The Vorrh Read Free

with a singsong insistence to erase my forgetfulness and its fence of doubt. The entire room was covered in blood, yet no insect would trespass this space, no fly would drink her, no ant would forage her marrow. We were sealed against the world during those days, my task determined, basic and kind.
    She had explained all this to me while I served her breakfast on a rare rainy morning. The black bread and yellow butter had seemed to stare from its plate with mocking intensity, the fruit pulsing and warping into obscene ducts and ventricles, vivid in innocence at every direct glance. I perched on the edge of the bed, listening to her simple words glide and agree with the rain, while my fear ignited them into petrol wires of ferocious anger, stuffed into my oxygenless, hidden core.
    I shaved long, flat strips from the bones of her legs. Plaiting sinew and tendon, I stretched muscle into interwoven pages and bound them with flax she had cut from the garden. I made the bow of these, setting the fibres and grains of her tissue in opposition, the raw arc congealing, twisting and shrinking into its proportion of purpose. I removed her unused womb and placed her dismembered hands inside it, sealing the misshapen ball which sometimes moved a little in its settling. I shaved her head and removed her tongue and eyes, and folded them inside her heart. My tasks finished, I placed the nameless objects on the wooden draining board of the sink. They sat in mute splendour, glowing in their strangeness, untouched by any criminal light. What remained on the table and floor was simply waste. I left it for the wild dogs when Ideparted that place with all its doors and windows open. For three days I lived with the inventions of her and the unused scraps, the air scented by her presence, the musk-deep smell of her oil and movement. The pile of her thick, unwashed hair seemed to breathe and swell against the bars of sunlight that turned the room towards evening. These known parts of her stroked away the anxious perfumes, the harsh iron of her blood and the deeper saturated smoulders of her unlocked interior. On the third day I buried her heart, womb and head in the garden in a small, circular pit she had dug with her very hands a week before.
    I buried the compass of her and covered it with a heavy stone. I obeyed with perfection, tearless and quiet, picking up the arrow that she had made and walking back into the house for the last time.
    The bow quickened astonishingly, twisting and righting itself as the days and the nights pulled and manipulated its contours. There was a likeness to Este’s changing during her dying, although that transition had nothing in common with all the deaths I had witnessed and participated in before. With Este, an outward longing marked all, like sugar absorbing moisture and salt releasing it. Every hour of the three days rearranged her with fearsome and compelling difference. Every physical memory of her body, from childhood onwards, floated to the surface of her beautiful frame. Every gesture that had evolved into her grace found its origin and almost joyfully puppeted its awkwardness through her. Every thought found its way through her bones and exhaled waves of shadow from a deep ocean floor, rising into sunlight and dispersing, meeting the decay that was closing in. I could not leave her. I sat or laid next to her, fascinated and horrified, aroused and entranced as the procession gently disgorged. Her eyes waxed and waned memory, pale transparency to flinted fire. She was dimly aware of me, but able to instruct and explain the exactitude of the process. She did this to dispel my anxiety and pain; also to confront the ecstasy of her control. In the evening of the third day, the memory in my dreams began to show itself. It refined our timetogether, the constancy of her presence. Since leaving her village, we had never been apart, except for those strange weeks when she had asked me to stay inside while she dwelt in