The Dark Magazine

I stopped eating on a Sunday.

It felt right. That most holy of days; the purging of fleshly desire laid bare on an altar of my own making. If there was any God lingering in the holy dust I carried in my lungs, I could taste nothing other than the emptiness I would craft for myself.

So I balanced the final bit on the edge of my knife and pressed it against my tongue, wishing I could pass the serrated blade into my throat again and again and just be done with it. But my fingers were disobedient, clumsy things, and instead I smiled at Michael and chewed like a good boy, all white straight teeth and perfectly combed hair, and made a small sound that was something like appreciation.

Michael drained the last bit of his Bloody Mary and smiled back. Later, he would taste of tomato and pepper, and I would hold my breath when he kissed me because I could never abide either of the flavors coating his tongue. In my mind, I would repeat the prayers I’d learned as an altar boy; the names of the flaming angels who stood watch over the earth tumbling forth as a litany to hold up as our bodies carried on in the act of memorization of the other. Every curve. Every muscle. Every bone. All of it parceled out in the dark, our breath coming heavy and fast, and still there were the angels because Michael was named after one, and he’d started to keep his eyes screwed shut tight when he came. I told myself it wasn’t because he couldn’t bear to look at me anymore. I told myself it wasn’t because of the extra thirty pounds I’d gained over the past six months.

There had been a time before when I’d done the same. In college, halfway through my junior year, I spent the winter learning to hate myself, and the solution was so easy. So simple. I’d spent my life denying my body all of the things it wanted. The good Catholic son. The finality of that last bit of food was not so different as the clandestine sweat of my carnal desire for muscled, sinful, unholy bodies.

Michael and I left whatever new, trendy restaurant it was and walked back to our house with the backs of our hands touching. It was something Michael liked. This barest form of intimacy. Our cells dying off and commingling at this most surface level. Once, I’d teased him that his form of romance was nothing more than an obsession with the macabre, and he’d bared his teeth at me, a ghoul’s moan rattling out of his throat followed by the explosive laughter that had made me fall in love with him.

For six years I’d loved him, and now I’d grown to hate the body I laid down next to him at night. The stinking organs inside of it, how they stuttered through their steps, the necessary operations of drawing blood through my heart, oxygen through my lungs. Meat and blood that were so easy to spill. To spoil. I’d begun to wake before Michael to watch myself in the mirror, the pale violet and verdant blur of my veins a reminder of the wet slop of my heart. I would close my eyes and hear it, the dull rush of blood, and I would have to turn and quietly vomit into the sink. After, I brushed and flossed my teeth until my gums bled and then swished with mouthwash for longer than necessary, happy to still be able to feel the antiseptic sting.

I would run the water over my hands until they stopped shaking and then go to the window and watch the trees. How they bent under the weight of the vanishing moon. How there seemed to be things moving beneath them. How they seemed to be the portions of myself I wanted to erase. How I could not hear but knew they whispered their approval of this lightening, and this was how I arrived at my decision. How I knew that it was time again. To end. To stop. To waste as I had once before. There had been a kind of ecstasy at the end of that last time. A beautiful delirium. I could replicate that moment. That feeling. I could.

That afternoon, Michael put on a movie—a worn copy of The Pillow Book because Ewan McGregor went full frontal in it—and groaned about the bloat in his stomach, how he’d need to spend extra time on the treadmill, and I nodded along with him, my hands tracing over my ribs.

“I think I’ll skip dinner. Too full,” I said, and he agreed, and there was no question from Michael. No concern for the beginning of my starvation. We were worried about the appearance of our bodies. About the extra five pounds. About a beer gut. For Michael, purging had everything to do with vanity, and I knew his disgust would mask itself behind support.

I woke again in the early morning and told myself I would not go and stare in the mirror, but of course I did, all the while wishing that when I stared into that darkened glass I would see the future of my body. The hollowed cheeks. The sharpened jaw. But there was only the face I’d come to know and despise, and I pressed my fist to the glass, my teeth bared.

Behind me, the window beckoned, and there were those whispering things in the trees, but I could only focus on the indelicate, ugly machinations of my body. How it was a thing to be spilled in the dirt. Unworthy and hideous. Still, I could not keep myself from turning away from that reflected hatred and looking out.

What had once lain in shadow was now illuminated. Pale, bloated forms drifted, seeming to search for something on the ground. Bent low, they moved slowly; their heads—if that’s what they were—twitching side to side as they searched. Whatever they were, they should not have been, and I turned away, my hand clamped over my mouth so I would not cry out. It seemed important that whatever moved out there in the dark did not see me. Did not hear me.

Michael slept on in our bed, and I placed myself beside him, my eyes open so I would not fall into slumber and see those things creeping beneath the trees in a dream. And I told myself that was what I’d seen. The vestigial remnants of a dream. Nothing more.

The next morning, I rose and showered without glancing in the mirror—even on accident—and left before Michael could wake up and ask if he could make us breakfast.

The world smelled of rain, and I was lighter than I had been but still filled with waste, and I drove and pictured my stomach shrinking, pictured it turning itself inside out, pictured how my body could reject and then rid itself of its uselessness.

At work, I sat in front of my computer and drifted—the screen blurring and then snapping back into focus—as I thought of the shadows. Of their slow movements and of my fear. How it outweighed the sharp hunger that had already stolen its way into my belly.

I had not stayed at the window long enough to see what the shadows were looking for. If they were even real or if they were only things I had dreamed up. Pareidolia in its finest form.

During an afternoon meeting, I drew the creatures on my notepad, but they were poor approximations. On paper, there was nothing intriguing, nothing frightening about their mass. It was that slow creeping, the heads twitching without revealing a mouth or a set of eyes that I could not stop envisioning. And always the low susurrus of their whispers and my curiosity. My longing to know what it was they were saying.

As I sat through the remainder of the afternoon, I wondered how long it would take my body to die. There was some stupid show Michael watched that had mentioned how long the human body could go without food. Twenty-one days? Or was that how long you could go without water? I wondered if I would be able to stop myself before anything went that far. I had before, but there had been talk of hospitals. My mother’s face drawn up in concern, and my father’s visible disappointment filling the room like a heavy vapor.

At home, I sat beside Michael and watched the television without comprehending anything.

“Any thoughts on dinner?” he asked without removing his gaze from whatever bullshit cooking show was on. It was a conversation we were always having. The mundane need of stuffing our bodies and then performing some awful form of penitence later. Squats. Pull ups. A 10k on the treadmill. Our bodies as performance and temptation.

“I think I ate something weird at lunch. Haven’t felt right since. But you go ahead,” I said, and he nodded but stayed on the couch.

“I’ve been thinking about intermittent fasting. Nothing from eight p.m. to noon. Jeremy said he lost fifteen pounds on a month.”

“That’s crazy,” I said and pictured what it would look like if my kidneys failed. If they would shrivel. Yellowed or blackened or sludge like and peeling off proteins into my blood stream. If it would be my kidneys or my gallbladder that would go first. My body dissected and pinned open, the skin butterflied and exposed to the chilled air of some coroner’s examination room as they tried to discover exactly what added up to my end.

Michael pinched his belly and shook it. “I used to have a six pack.”

I didn’t respond because he didn’t expect me to, and there was a part of me that understood that underneath the commentary of his own failings, there was the more obvious subtext of his criticisms of me. The evening wore on, and I imagined Michael fucking Jeremy, their skins flushed with blood, the dark interior of their mouths stinking with rot, their tongues flopping like pink worms as they licked stubbled stomachs. Michael was absorbed in his phone, so he didn’t notice when I darted from the couch to the bathroom, the exhaust fan barely covering the retching that brought up only bile and saliva. Outside the window and under the tree, the figures clustered together, bent low as always but unmoving as if in prayer. Like some dark sabbat.

I pressed my forehead against the glass, but there was no coolness there, and I wondered if I had a fever. If what I was seeing was nothing more than my body reacting to my self-imposed starvation. Maybe Jesus never saw the devil during the forty days and nights of his temptation. Maybe it was only his mind crafting evil out of the earth molded by his own hands. Maybe I was doing the same, and the creatures were devils of my own making.

Perhaps the figures were prostrate out of reverence. Perhaps they worshipped something that lived beneath the trees or was buried inside the earth. Or it was possible their bent shapes were nothing more than a request. Prayers of thanksgiving and prayers of need often fall from the same lips.

I giggled at the inanity of my own thoughts. They weren’t real. Those creatures with their bodies flush with the earth. Yet here I was inventing stories for them. Scriptures of obedience outlining their behavior. They weren’t real, but I was determined in my hunger to make them so.

Slowly, I pushed the window open. Just a crack. Just to let the air in. Not to listen to the quiet. Not to listen to see if I could discern the meaning of those syllables, those whispers. Never that. But the creatures were silent. There were no whispers, no sounds, and disappointed, I closed the window. Even in its emptiness, my stomach churned, and I thought I would vomit again, but I held my breath and listened for the chatter of the television, and when I looked again at the window, the forms were standing once more. Immediately, my skin prickled.

I could see their faces.

There were no eyes. Only mouths. Dark openings gaping inside mounded flesh. Together, they closed and then opened again, and I scrambled backward and slammed into the sink countertop, my hands fumbling behind me for the door, for anything that would take me away from seeing those mouths opening and opening and opening. Hungry in the way I could never be again.

Behind me, the door rattled, Michael calling my name in concern. “The hell was that? You okay?”

I drew in a ragged breath and forced my eyes away from the window. “I’m fine. Just dropped something,” I said. I checked the window again, and the forms had bent back toward the earth, their mouths hidden, their whispers still silent.

I splashed water on my face. Rinsed my mouth and spat, unable to look at the sink to see the blood I imagined would be there. When I opened the door, Michael had already parked himself back in front of the television, and he lifted his head as I approached, but his eyes didn’t leave the screen. If he had looked, if he had really seen me, could he have seen the imprints of those things? Could he have seen the small openings in my flesh, the skin flayed and pulsing with their squirming bodies as they pushed further and further into the meat of my wasting organs?

“I’m tired,” I said, and Michael grunted, his face uplifted for the expected goodnight kiss, and I bent, passed the tip of my tongue over his lips in the movement that told him everything was fine. Everything was normal. He laughed and drew me closer, but when my body did not respond, he sighed and pulled away.

“Sleep tight,” he said, and I turned, willing my body to not tremble until I was behind our bedroom door, my head buried beneath the covers as I had when I was a child and woken from the depth of a nightmare, convinced I had pulled whatever monstrosity I’d concocted into my bedroom. In the closet, under my bed, in the darkened corners, it breathed, and if I stayed still, if I forgot how to move, it would not find me. But that was the story our parents told us to keep us in our beds.

I was practicing my death through starvation, but still the monsters had found me. No amount of playing dead would keep them away.

There were sleeping pills in the bathroom cabinet—remnants from Michael’s last excursion to his psychiatrist—but I could not bring myself to return to the bathroom or to hear again that ill-voiced chorus emanating from formless mouths.

I slept fitfully, waking as Michael turned over in his sleep, his arm flung around me, my body sweating under the covers. In the morning, I should have felt hollowed out. My body an automaton with darkened skin under its eyes, the whites threaded through with red. Weakened and lethargic with lack of food and sleep. But I rose, and my body bent and stretched, and my heart counted out its beats with health and fervor, and I was thinner, but death had not marked me, and I tore at the thin cage of skin over my ribs and screamed silently behind clenched teeth, understanding then that what the creatures were whispering was not prayer or worship.

It was a ritual.

I left without showering. Even in daylight, I could not go back into the bathroom, could not face that window. As I backed out of the driveway, Michael waved from the front porch, and I pulled my lips back from my teeth, hoping that in the glare of the windshield, he would interpret it as a smile.

Through intersections and red lights and stop signs and then highway traffic, I could see only the creatures—those sightless faces lifted toward the dark of the moon. Even as the hair of my arms lifted, there was a portion of the vision I recognized. As if the scene that had unfolded the night before was something lifted from another point in my life. By the time I climbed out of my car, I could feel the dim outline of it, aware in the back of my mind but fluttering about in the way déjà vu strikes and then evaporates.

Tucked inside my cubicle, I powered up my computer and wished for the enervation I should have had by that point. Three days without food should have left me fatigued and confused, but my body felt lithe and my mind clear as I typed into the search engine already knowing what I would find.

When I was twenty, when I’d last starved myself, I’d studied abroad in London. A single, summer semester filled with droning professors and too cigarettes to mitigate the hunger. On the weekends, I let myself gobble hash cakes with the other students in my cohort—the only calories I’d allow past my lips—and wandered through the city, high and laughing at how absurd it was that we existed in this moment. That was how we found ourselves stoned out of our minds and standing in the National Gallery. A girl named Martine had declared herself my personal chaperone and dawdled behind me in her dowdy peasant dresses and scuffed combat boots. She had a pale mustache that she touched the tip of her tongue to constantly, and she smelled of melted butter. Her presence made me even more paranoid, but I couldn’t tell her to go. It felt like kicking a wounded dog, and I was so wounded myself. It felt good to at least have some form of attention paid to me even though I’d still been fifteen pounds shy of my goal.

She trailed me through the exhibits and I lurched from painting to painting, trying to peer past the swirls and stiffened acrylics into something deeper, but Martine was a distraction. The deep odor of her seeped in and darkened my high so that by the time I came to the Salvatore Rosa’s, it felt as if I was wearing my skin inside out, and every color was blood-tinted.

After, when I was back in the dorms and coming down, I told myself it was the drugs combined with the lack of food; the paranoia of Martine at my back, her fingernails snarled in the loops of my sweater and her breath heavy on the back of my neck. Told myself I had not seen the painting—Rosa’s Witches at Their Incantations—move, the colors rippling and the forms turning to look out at me with faces that seemed to have no eyes. Told myself the nude, pallid witch seated in the center had not turned her fleshy body toward me, her hands splayed before her as she lifted her head to reveal an empty, cavernous mouth. Told myself the cowled face in the background had not flung itself outward in a quick, skittering motion; that the decayed corpse swaying on its rope had not begun to climb down.

Stumbling backward, I’d knocked Martine to the ground and left her there, blubbering with a bloodied nose, as I fled back to the dorms. When the sun finally rose, I was still terrified but had at least forced myself to somewhat believe that what I’d seen had not been real. But I’d never looked at the painting again. Too afraid that I’d see again what I saw all of those years ago even if it had only been a hallucination.

But seated in my office, I waited for the image of the painting to load and curled my fingers against my palm to keep them from trembling. On my screen, the pixels did not bend, did not bloat to become anything other than what was set down in paint so long ago. If there was anything of nightmare in the image, it remained locked in the past.

Still, I was frightened. The pale witch. It was her body I’d recalled—the dim subconscious calling it forth. Those creatures in the backyard looked so much like broken versions of her hunched form. It had taken their movement, the revelation of their amorphous faces, for me to understand the sharpened edge of my breathless fear. Those faces had turned. And they had seen me. The same ones that had stared out from the painting when I was in college when my starvation had reached its apex. I’d dismissed the vision then, but I understood as I stared at my computer that I shouldn’t have.

I pressed my face to the screen until the colors bled together and then closed my eyes. Around me, the air grew hotter, but I could not open my eyes. Knew that if I did, I would turn to see the witch behind me, her fingers trailing over the carpet as she traced sigils and signs into fibers, and looming over her, the cowled form with its arms outstretched before it fell upon me, mouth open and tongue worming damply over my neck and jaw.

I grew up believing in the Devil. In the possibilities of demons possessing the unsuspecting and wayward sinner. How their arms and legs would contort, their throats bulging with obscenity. I grew up believing that fasting was a way of purging the body for greater spiritual transcendence. Daniel had done it. Christ himself had done it.

But this was not what I was doing. I had not gone seeking any kind of spiritual rebirth either then or now. It was the messy churning of my organs, the slippery meat of me that I could no longer abide. I had not drawn the creatures forth with prayer or piety, yet they had appeared once more.

Through lunch, I kept my face close to the computer screen and my hand cupped against my ribs as I followed the painted lines of the witches’ bodies. No one bothered me. No one offered anything other than silence. I wondered if that was how my body was feeding itself. On the silence of so many unanswered and unasked questions and the ease with which people see only what they want to see. How wasting away was something worthy of either admiration or apathy, and where the people around me passed me over, the creatures—these witches—had followed me into this second famine.

Perhaps they saw something in me worth paying attention to. Perhaps in my wasting, they could sense something more. Only those whose poverty starved them were worthy of burning. So much of history taught us that.

I left work early—my computer gone over to the screen saver with the painting of Rosa’s witches still behind—and drove home where Michael was not and likely would not be for the duration of the night.

Happy Hour at Salted Pig. Wanna come? He’d texted while I was driving, and I ignored it. Figured he would forget the lack of my presence after his next gin and tonic and come stumbling home in the early morning with the ghost of an apology on his lips.

Instead, I drove home and waited for the sun to set.

Outside, I sat at the base of the tree, my back pressing into the bark, my legs planted in the earth as I formed and then dismissed the questions I wanted to ask the witches. Why had they come? Why was I not hungry like I had been before? Why was I not dying when that was what I had gone seeking?

But they did not come that night. The night fell around me, the damp creeping up from the ground, and I sat alone. If I breathed in their remainders, it did not sit in my lungs as a slow, aching rot. Before Michael was home, I was inside and tucked under the covers, drifting in and out dreams I would never remember.

“You were whispering last night.” Michael was pouring coffee into the green, chipped mug he always used, the sugar bowl defiantly ignored because he’d overindulged the night before and was determined it wasn’t going to throw off his diet. “You want me to make you a cup?” he said, and I shook my head, my hand over my chest.

“Heartburn. What was I whispering?”

“Just a bunch of random words. Didn’t make any sense.”

“Like what?”

“You said something about tongues. Like . . . about tongues being useless muscles? And then something about trees. I dunno. Must have been some weird ass dreams.”

“Yeah. Must have been,” I said, and he kissed me with the corner of his mouth. Non-commital. Absent-minded. An afterthought of love. How long had I been gathering these mediocre scraps, telling myself they were a feast?

Michael showered, did his hair, spritzed his Tom Ford cologne three times into the air and then walked through it, and I dressed without letting him see my body. The shoulder blades cutting against the fragile skin covering them. Inside the closet, I bent over at the waist and breathed in deeply and erratically, filling my lungs until I thought they might burst, and then stood up with a jerk, waiting for the dark spots on the edge of my vision, waiting for the rush of blood to leave my head, waiting for an indication that the portions of myself that had gone without food were beginning the inevitable process of shutting down, but nothing happened. There were Michael’s clothes lined up in order of color and season, and my legs didn’t buckle beneath me, and I dressed without paying attention and then rushed out of the house without telling Michael goodbye.

I did not go to work but parked twenty minutes away at a chain coffee shop that smelled too much of heated breakfast sandwiches and too little of coffee. My stomach should have been lurching inside of me; my body responding without regard for my will in the face of the greased scent of bacon and eggs and carbohydrates. But it was still. Dead. I pressed a palm against my chest to be certain my heart was still beating. It was, but it was a dull flutter, as if an insect had crawled into my chest and become trapped there, calcifying into an approximation of a heart and pushing what little blood remained up to my stuttering brain. I took my hand away and drew a breath and pushed it out and then turned the car around and drove back home.

I didn’t think the creatures, the witches, whatever they were, would appear during the day, but I wanted to sit again where they had sat, to breathe in what they had breathed, to press my body to the earth where they had supplicated themselves. Perhaps there would be some remainder, some portion of their ritual they had left behind, and I could catch it, burning and bright, up in my hands and examine it until they revealed themselves to me. Stepping out of the ether to gather me to their bloated breasts, to feed me with their mouths until everything else had flooded out of me, voided into the air to stink and become corruption in a way that had nothing to do with their blessed acts of cleansing.

Beneath the tree, I lay prostrate, my face pressed into the grass and rocks and exposed roots, and closed my eyes.

My throat. My stomach. My organs. My blood. Empty. Empty. Empty.

This was my own incantation. My own ritual. Without an altar. Without a living sacrifice other than what should have been my own failing body fumbling through the motions of existence.

If the appearance of the witches was supposed to be a harbinger, I was impatient for the personal apocalypse it should have heralded. My heart turned to ash, my blood immolated and scattered as so many seeds. If I pressed myself hard enough, would the earth open its maw and devour me whole? Would the witches take my limited body and transmute it into something worthy? As I sat, the want—the need—for them to come, to make me anew grew larger until it was a warped kind of pain.

I did not open my eyes when the whispering began. It could have been only the wind, and I did not want to open them and see only disappointment. There were no discernible words, only the small, glottal clicks of consonants followed by small sighs and then inhalations.

Time passed, but I wasn’t sure how much. The light seemed to fade and then darken even though not enough time had passed for night to fall. I opened my mouth and tore at the earth with my teeth. Swallowed and ate. Perhaps this was some form of communion. Some form of acceptance.

It burned going down and dropped heavily into my belly, anchoring me there, holding me with a tenderness and fierceness I’d only ever felt on the brink of orgasm. Was it possible for the body to die without experiencing weakness? Without the gradual slowing of the heart and the final, shuddering moments as everything shut down, blinked off, cut out piece by piece until there were only the still animate nerves causing twitching fingers?

If magic was a force that fruited hidden desire, was that what the witches had felt in me? The fevered burning of my body a beacon and then this second, more absolute resolution of starvation the very thing that finally set the final step of their ritual into motion. If I were to open my eyes, would I see a full, heavy moon set too low in the sky? Would I see pale, amorphous forms drifting through the air, their horrible mouths open in silent screams as they went hunting for something to gnash between their teeth?

Michael would come home and go inside and never think to look for me beneath the tree. There had never been any significance to that rough bark, to that scattering of leaves on the grass. Outside, I would grow lighter until the witches, the creatures, could cradle me in their arms as their whispers dripped over my emaciated form like honey and only then would I gather enough strength to rise as something new. Perhaps I would return to Michael and press my mouth to his and pour into him everything I had learned. Beneath me, he would choke and gibber under the weight of those transformative syllables, and when the tears fell down his cheeks, the water would taste only of gratitude and nothing of fear or confusion or regret or hunger.

Above me, something creaked. A limb bent under weight. I envisioned one of the witches creeping through the branches, her fingers spread wide as she dropped lower and lower toward the earth. Thought of her coming to stand over me and then crouching to taste what little my wasted flesh could provide. Such an inconsequential, foul offering. But I had done what I could to cleanse myself even if I hadn’t understood at first that was what I was doing, and I hoped for at most their forgiveness and at least their repulsion.

“Take me. Take me,” I said, and something settled next to me and exhaled. Still, I could not open my eyes. Still, I could not bring myself to look upon what I had called forth with my self-fashioned deprivation.

When they parted my lips with fingers cool and smooth as the stones at the bottom of a lake, I let them push past my teeth, my tongue. Let them reach deeper until they scraped the back of my throat. They smelled, tasted, of nothing or of an early morning wind in the winter when the ice has not yet cracked under the weight of the waking world.

With their hands, they fed me portions of themselves. I kept my eyes closed. It was the only thing I could imagine. The witches neatly drawing themselves open and then offering me the communion of their blood. Perhaps this was what I’d been approaching my entire life. This disgust with my body leading me toward a new kind of satiation that could only be delivered once they’d seen me emptied of the physical.

They whispered, but the words carried no meaning. There was only the eating. The rough stroke of their hands. The ache in my jaw. I would have nothing else. Let it all be obliterated. Let it all crumble. The witches had seen me once and had bided their time, but I could not wait any longer now that I understood. There was only this obliteration, and I gasped and swallowed and waited for a command, wishing I had known to listen for it. Wishing I had begun my starvation so much sooner. So many years wasted as I fought against my need. Against my nature. But no more.

I cried out. I lifted my hands. I willed my flesh to fall away. To rise and take the place the witches had made for me. To become more than the limitations I’d been born into. More than the altar boy. The shamed son. The excommunicate. The failed, cuckolded lover. The starved.

The whispers dropped away. The hands withdrew.

I opened my eyes.

There was the tree. The earth. But there was nothing more.

I ran my tongue over my gums, hoping to find their taste, a lingering scent, anything that would prove they’d been with me, but there was nothing.

I did not scream but waited under the tree until I heard Michael’s car out front and then drifted inside, accepting his kiss but feeling nothing, hearing nothing, until he left again. I wasn’t sure for where.

For five nights I waited for Michael to sleep and then slipped outside to sit beneath the tree, my eyes closed as the wind played over my naked body. But the witches did not come. The air held no whispers. The nocturnal creatures shrieked to one another, but there was no absolution in their sounds.

Still, I took no food. In the shower, my hair had begun to fall out, and my hips appeared bruised, but I felt none of the typical effects of hunger. Michael told me he was jealous. He’d never seen me look better. He’d never wanted me more.

Would it have been enough before the witches came to me? Would Michael’s frenzied rutting, his need laid so raw and bare, been enough to sate me?

Ten nights. Eleven. I slept but there was not even the comfort of a dream where the witches finally came to me.

On the twelfth morning, Michael rose early and kissed me goodbye, his hands exploring the new angles of my body. He marveled. He groaned. There were too many hours to get through before he could touch me again. I smiled, my tongue pushing against a back incisor that had begun to come loose.

“Not much longer now,” I said, and he kissed me again, swearing that if he was late to work it was my fault. How could he be expected to do anything productive when I had a body like that?

But he did leave, and I listened to the thick silence of the house. Wandered from room to room until I no longer recognized the items that sat inside of them.

It hadn’t been difficult to gather what I would need. A single trip to the hardware store. Payment in cash. A crumpled ten-dollar bill pushed across the counter. The plastic bag not even hidden but resting on the kitchen table, the receipt folded beside it. Michael had not noticed. Had not asked. Later, I knew he would not remember seeing the bag or what it held.

Outside, I stood beneath the tree and closed my eyes for the last time. Should I have prayed then? Would the witches have even responded if I had? For a count of thirty I waited, and when there were no whispers, I opened my eyes and went back into the house.

The chair was light but sturdy. One of the four from the dining set I’d brought with me when we moved into the house.

Around me, a nimbus of heat blossomed, but I had forgotten the singular dominion of my physical body—how it fights, how it longs to not be extinguished!—and  there was only the symbolic cord about my neck, and the hanging tree, and the leaves skittering as I took a breath and then another.

It was only right to do this. To join the witches in their filial death. To hope they would see and understand what I was willing to give.

Did they fear before the fall? Did they wonder at the dark expanse that opened under their feet, at the Reverend’s promised hell licking upward to swallow them up?

I feared my body would be too light, but there was the rush of air, the momentary sensation of weightlessness as the ground rushed upward.

In the moments before darkness, I waited for the whispers.

As the rope caught, as it held as it had held for every other witch, for every other person prepared to shed the weight of the body, the silence had never felt so infinite.

Originally published in The Fiends in the Furrows II: More Tales of Folk Horror, edited by David T. Neal and Christine M. Scott.