September Woods Garland
Death devoured his beloved over the course of a waxing moon, blackness creeping up her fingers and toes like a morbid thermometer. He cried at her bedside, holding her hand and begging for a do-over. The town was far and the burden too great, so he moved her body into the walk-in cooler where they stored their bounty. Shelves of preserves that once signaled abundance now haunted him with a promise of finite servings of her love.
To pass those first nights without her, he hid from the world and baked obsessively, the kitchen his personal limbo between life with her and a flavorless future alone. Hands sticky with jam and confectioner’s sugar, he hungered for the days he and his love foraged bulging flats of huckleberries and sold their love-pies at the local market.
It was at the height of the full buck moon when the idea entered his mind like a download from the cosmos. Surrounded by his culinary creations, he was consumed by this new inspiration. The berries of his belated, hand-plucked with love, would serve his vision now—a vision he scribbled on a scrap of parchment in a surge of grief-driven madness.
His was a generative madness, first tasted when she led him on a polar plunge in the peak of winter. Like that dip in the ocean, her attention had shocked him into his body after years of numb plodding. He’d watched her run naked into the surf, laughing and beckoning him near. He’d never run with such abandon. After all he’d seen and done that he’d been sure had condemned him to a lonesome existence, she and her moon showed him hope.
It was this madness he channeled now as he placed his beloved among the mise en place, the star ingredient of his newest confection. Into the early morning, he worked on her. As he sliced through her epidermis, he bisected a tattoo of an eclipsing moon. The ink had faded through decades and death, yet the sigil pulled at him like an invitation to elemental intimacy.
That skin-moon glowed, echoing the lunar light they’d bathed beneath. Moon after moon he, the skeptic, had felt magic. In a world where he’d not been shown grace, she’d led him to the safety of moonlight and they’d poured each other out. Dissolved into the sea. Shivering, loving, alive.
Peeling back the penumbra, he half-expected moonlight to pour from the wound and illuminate a detour around his grief. Instead, her insides shone slick under the artificial light. Muscle, tendons, yellow bubbly fat. Ordinary and dead.
His hands stayed steady, his mind intent on preserving every ounce. Layers deep he cut, through flesh and to the bone. Digging for something he couldn’t place. Searching, certain he’d discover a treasure. Something to cling to.
Her smell mingled with the fading scents of days-old scones and muffins and a compulsion to feel her insides arose in him, the onset a rush that nearly knocked him off his feet. To be close again, intimate. A yearning to be inside her pulled like the moon on the tides.
Just a quick touch, he bargained.
He recoiled at first, the cold of her parts an unsettling confirmation. There was no life in her. No blood pumping or lunar magic flowing. Just cold death. But his heart refused and directed his hands to go deeper. Bare fingers searching. Tentative touch gave way to exploration—pulling and tearing. A rhythmic movement, urgent and frenetic. Soon enough, ragged filets lined the butcher’s block counters. Timers dinged. Flour and sinew coated his apron where he wiped his hands after the final fold and seal of each pastry. Batch after batch, he stuffed them with equal parts berry and beloved.
He wrapped the tarts in foil and scrawled the dates of a decade’s worth of full moons on each with a permanent marker. A vision began to form, fueled by love and lunacy. A vision of ritual and reunion, of consumer and consumed. His heart pounded at the thought, his mouth dry, an acrid taste creeping forth.
Where for weeks her body had lain in stasis, preserved by the power of electric cold, he now placed tray after tray of his love in her new, consumable form. Preserved. Here, not yet gone—not really. And maybe never, if he were to believe in consumption. And act upon that belief. If he could only bring himself to.
SEPTEMBER WOODS GARLAND hails from the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys long, romantic walks through haunted houses and feeding Bigfoot peanut butter & seaweed sandwiches. Her work has been supported by Hypatia in the Woods and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Berlin Literary Review, The Stray Branch, Crow & Cross Keys, and elsewhere. September serves as editor in chief at Weird Lit Magazine. She splits her time between Richmond Beach, WA and Fidalgo Island. www.septemberwoodsgarland.com