The Hare

by Melanie Finn

  His body, though, had stiffened with rigor mortis and the arms would not move from their position, one across his chest, the other to the side as if waving “Hello.” His body was bulky as a large wooden bureau, rigid, with no desire to cooperate. Rosie almost laughed. How could a dead man retain the intransigence of his life?

  Then she considered: if you need to move a bureau, you need to make it lighter and you take out the drawers, you carry them one by one. Thus, she’d have to cut him up, take him out in pieces. Like a deer. Just a deer, no different to a deer, the body, the meat, the tendons: she knew exactly how to dismember.

  Rosie kept her butchering knife in the very back of the kitchen drawer. The blade made a slick, silvery sound as she wiped it back and forth over the stone. Night surrounded the house, and she was aware of a new solitude, for Billy had always been just across the field. Part of her brain stubbornly insisted that Billy was still there, the day hadn’t begun, Bennett hadn’t returned, and that she was immersed in a dream. There was a wall of probability around her, a padded buffer, and for long moments she was reassured that none of what had happened had happened. Surely, if Billy was dead, she would feel grief; if she was about to carve up her old lover in the basement, she would feel fear or at least trepidation. Or she would at least consider her options, such as going to the police. Yet she was filled with calm and a profound sense of disconnection from herself.

  In this state of mental objectivity, physical sensations were particularly intense. The sound of the blade was extraordinarily loud, and when she sniffed, it sounded tidal. Her exhales boomed and her heart thumped — though not fast, not a stampede, but a steady, certain heavy-booted march. Her mouth tasted of tin, a childhood memory of sucking on a metal pencil sharpener and the tart mineral flavor on her tongue, and she could smell the house around her, as if it were an unfamiliar house, the smell of mouse, of laundry soap, of something damp, and the cheesy insoles of Miranda’s shoes that she insisted on wearing without socks. And Rosie could smell the cellar, the earth, the copper piping, the distinct tang of blood.

  When the blade was sharp, Rosie descended into that cellar. The disbelief was like a magic cloak that would allow her to do the necessary. She remembered the first time she’d butchered a deer, the feeling of the knife slicing through the skin and flesh. Billy had told her to grip fast, cut sure, like it was pie. Only Billy pronounced it poy and she’d wondered what a poy was, as she’d once been confused by cads and beahs. But flesh wasn’t like pie, more like ripe avocado as long as the blade was sharp. And Billy had taught her exactly where to dismember the joints, the way to slice the tough sinews. In one quick swoop of the blade, to disembowel the animal, and clutch the hot, slippery guts in one hand so they didn’t unravel. Rosie could butcher a field-dressed deer in an hour and twenty minutes.

  Now she knelt beside Bennett and pressed the blade below his ribcage, for here was the place to start with a deer. Yet, perhaps she should simply cut off his limbs, carry legs and arms and then wrestle his amputated body up the stairs. As she squatted, she contemplated the blood. Bennett would of course bleed all over the place. She’d have to deal with the quantities of his blood. She’d have to get garbage bags and line the floor, she’d have to get towels and sheets, all the bed clothes to soak up the blood, then she’d have to bury those or burn them. And still some blood would soak into the earth floor, more than already had, and the flies would find it. She and Miranda would be having supper in a few days’ time and a fly would buzz above the table, and it might land on the butter or Miranda’s broccoli, and Rosie would know what Miranda did not, that the fly was fat from her own father’s blood.

  And where might she bury the pieces of him?

  Among the apple trees? No, further out. In the woods beyond Billy’s fields? Somewhere Miranda would not go. Deep, deep underground, she must encase him in drums of cement like radioactive material, a thousand feet, perhaps, or seal him within a mine shaft on a mountainside. It wasn’t simply that Miranda must never know about her father’s death, but that, in her innocence, she must never come within the proximity of his body.

  Laying the knife across Bennett’s body, Rosie rocked back on her heels and she covered her face. Not grief, not horror; she was exhausted and her eyes felt as if they’d been pushed back into her skull. And then her hands fell to Bennett. She pressed her palms against the coldness of him, the irreversible, immutable, deaf-blind-dumb deadness of him. He had defeated her. She would have to go to the police and try to explain why she had carried Billy’s body into the mountain and left it for animals to eat, and, oh yes, explain how she’d shot him. The explanations could not possibly suffice — who would understand the sense? She would go to jail, Miranda would be placed in foster care, and she’d move forward in her life with the story of her mother as the killer of her father.

  There was another body, of course, on the road to Meriden. Years ago. Perhaps Rosie should be in jail, she was damaged, and the best thing for Miranda was for her to be removed, placed far, far away. Perhaps the best way to express her love for her daughter was to leave her to the safety and measured care of strangers. Yet Rosie knew the lunar loneliness of the abandoned child, and it was no mitigation but a different kind of hell.

  Though the light in the cellar remained as it had for the past hours, outside the dawn chorus had begun. Down here, Rosie could hear the wild singing of robins and goldfinches, buntings and sparrows. Still she felt nothing — neither regret, nor shame, nor grief.

  And yet, the singing of the birds stirred her, they were there on branches demanding the sun and the warmth of the late spring day; the songs, when the listener attended, were aggressive and passionate affirmations of territory and love. They weren’t pretty, they were mighty and irrepressible.

  Into this particular moment, memory came like an arrow. Rosie remembered, with absolute clarity, The Giggle Man. Not his face, but the Balthus-like impression of him. Sit on the bed, he said. He pulled on his white gloves and slid his hand up her thigh and tickled her. Not a playful tickle but an act of violent trespass. He tickled her and tickled her and she writhed in agony and laughter, and he would not stop. She couldn’t breathe for laughing, convulsing from the agitation of her nervous system. She had no control. Time had been impossible to tell. How long did she stay in that room, minutes or hours? Do you like it when I do this. The light through the trees outside, the clock in the hall downstairs. She had ached with the pain of laughing. Her ribs and thighs and armpits felt bruised, but there were never marks. Please stop, please stop, but she was laughing, she was giggling, and so he kept going, her aching body truant with joyous laughter, and every week she returned, every Sunday she went up the stairs and along the hall and she sat on the bed and he tickled her. When, at last, he was done, he gave her money. The rent, for your grandmother. She’d straighten her clothes. Good girl, there’s a good girl.

  And then, one particular Sunday, she had pissed on him.

  Pissed all over him. Squirting hot volumes of urine as if she’d horded it for days, weeks, as if she’d connected a fire hydrant to a garden sprinkler of piss.

  It had not occurred to her that she had any defense because it had not occurred to her to defend herself. She was that open. Her body was for him — for him — to play with, his possession that she kept all week, carefully within its skin case for him, for him to lift up her shirt, pull and bare, to pry apart, her ribs cracking, so open, she’d been so open, he could reach in and take out her heart. Do you like it when I do this.

  She had not meant to piss on him.

  She had meant to oblige, the ancient tenet of her gender. To not make a fuss. He was only tickling her.

  But some rebel force within her — oh, her angry little bladder! Her red-faced, furious, rubbery, redoubtable little bladder — had fought back, had turned and charged back down the hill toward the enemy.

  He had thrown her off in disgust, hard, against the wall, he was soaking and stinking you filthy, you disgusting but
then next Sunday he was gone.

  So now Rosie stood, knowing that she was fierce, had always been, and she took up the shovel Bennett had brought down to bury Billy, and she took off her clothes and continued his job. Naked, swearing, she dug. The earth was hard and packed for the first few feet, but deeper down it crumbled and darkened and turned loamy. She dug for three hours, a proper grave, the length and width of him, six feet deep. Getting down on her knees, she braced her back and pushed and pushed and rolled him in.

  Rosie looked at Bennett’s face as she threw down the soil. She breathed into the rhythm of the labor, the blistering of her hands, the sweat flowing over her naked body. By seven, she was done. She showered, scrupulously scraping the dirt from her fingernails. Billy’s dogs had set up a fresh round of howling, and Rosie dressed and set out across the field toward them.

  HOOK

  1993

  The dogs: she shot them in quick, unsentimental succession. No one would want the dogs; Billy-centric, too old to be re-trained, certainly no one’s pet, they’d be killed anyway. The dogs had tried to get away from her, they had grasped her intention even before she shot the first one. But the chains held them. They had pulled away from her, they had whimpered. Rosie had done the very best she could, she shot fast, she shot true, one, two, three, four, five. Reload. Six, seven. She knew what the police would think.

  But one dog. Hook. Hook had put her head under Rosie’s hand and pushed up, and Rosie’s fingertips had felt the sleek fur, the hard skull beneath, the knob on the crest. She’d never had a dog, did not know their language or even what they ate other than deer guts.

  Rosie led Hook home. She phoned the police and she set a tremor in her voice: “My neighbor is missing. Her dogs are all shot dead. I’m worried that something has happened to her.”

  They came, in no particular hurry, without lights or sirens, two careless cops, and they saw the dead dogs in the yard, and in the house, the drawer open and empty by the bed where a hand gun was likely to have been. They saw Rosie, pretty and distressed and the way her shirt fit snuggly over her young breasts. They asked Rosie how well she knew Billy, if she’d seemed depressed, and Rosie had said Kinda and Maybe. The lies bloated within her, like a foul pregnancy — a deformed ball of cells and hair and fingernails and teeth. And, yet, Rosie felt Billy would expect no less, for this was a fight for survival, you ate your own dogs because you were starving. Events turn.

  One of the cops was somewhat acquainted with Billy, she was his cousin, he said she was “strange and crazy” and Rosie had not disagreed. It was obvious — wasn’t it, for look at the dead dogs — that Billy had gone into the woods with her strangeness and her craziness and her gun and would not be coming back. The dogs were already attracting flies in the sun. Then they drove away, the two cops, they went to get coffee and donuts or whatever, and they never came back.

  No one did. Not even to bury the dogs. So Rosie buried them.

  And then in the afternoon, she sat on the sofa in her house. Her hands were raw from digging. The new sense of isolation felt oceanic, a particular part of the ocean where there is no wind, no current, a slow gyre where you die and no one finds you for days or maybe never. Hook whined and regarded Rosie with her single yellow alien eye. For a moment, Rosie thought the dog might attack her — having witnessed the massacre of her pack, having a mysterious understanding that Rosie was in some way responsible for her owner’s death. But Hook stepped forward, bowing her head and pressing it into Rosie’s knee with slow insistence. Rosie let her hand move down the dog’s back, she was too thin, Rosie thought, the knuckles of her spine protruding, the hip bones angular and mobile beneath the skin. Hook wagged her tail.

  “It’s okay,” Rosie whispered, and the wag engaged Hook’s rear end, the hip bones shifting steady as a metronome. Slowly, Rosie slipped off the couch and onto her knees, and Hook moved her chest in against Rosie’s shoulder, and in this way Rosie found her face in the crook of the dog’s neck, the smell of the dog was earthy and clean and oily and she wept.

  THE HARE

  2019

  Rose regarded herself. She needed to know what she looked like, if only this once. She believed that a person — a woman of 54 — should be acquainted with her naked physical self. And so here in the changing room of JCPenney with its merciless prison break lighting, here and now was as good a place as any.

  This is what she saw: her neck in loose folds, so if she pulled the skin with her fingers it remained pinched into a peak of skin for long seconds, then slowly softened back to its original sag. The skin itself was pocked like a plucked chicken. She leaned in, tilted her chin to the side, that single dark, bristly whisker had grown back. Insistent little bastard. She moved on, down her neck to the wide, boney rack of her shoulders from which the rest of her body hung, pale as a fish belly. Things had gone horribly wrong. Her breasts looked as if someone had shoved tangerines into panty hose, her nipples faced the floor. Her arms, when she held them out, jiggled, flop-flopped, the muscle like pizza dough. She realized her analogies were to food items, and wondered if this was because food rotted, food was fresh and plump and then it moldered and stank and bit-by-bit disintegrated. Her belly rounded and pooched above her pubic mound — again, food: the “muffin top.”

  Her pubic hair was getting sparse. One day it would disappear altogether. What irony that young women — she’d been one once — spent a fortune manicuring this, ripping it out with hot wax, right there alongside the delicate labia. Some women even took off all the hair, so their privates resembled those of a child. What kind of man wanted to have sex with a child? What kind of grown-up woman would encourage this?

  Sex, however, was no business of hers. No one would touch her again, no hand slip across her hips, no kisses upon her neck. She might live another 40 years with not a single touch other than her own.

  Her thighs dimpled, pale and lumpy, as, yes, oatmeal. Clusters of burst veins resembled bruises, so the oatmeal looked mottled, indeed moldy. More skin gathered in a crease above her knees. Pastry. Her lower legs were a relief. Her calves were still slim, tapering to nice ankles, and her feet had so far evaded the ravages of bunions. Her gran had had those, they had hobbled her, deformed her. She must have been in considerable pain.

  Rose now braced herself to turn, to angle herself in the 3-way mirror, and there it was, her ass. Not so much like food, but wax, melted, the whole structure dropping down as if subjected to great heat. Her ass was vertical, flat. Her ass connected directly to her thighs and her back, straight up and down. It was no longer an ass, no one would call it an ass, she was missing an entire section of her body; what she now had instead of an ass was — basically — a toilet seat. Further up her back, around the red marks of her bra, were handfuls of back fat. She could grasp them, fully, with both hands. Why did she have fat on her back? She was not a fat person. Her shoulders were bony, muscular even, so what was this fat? And why was it not on the other side of her body, filling her breasts, where it might look OK? It was all a terrible joke, her boobs migrating to her back, her round ass swapping places with her flat belly.

  What was the point of a woman her age?

  She felt sad, but her sad expression wrinkled her forehead, deepened the crease between her eyes, and she appeared even older, even less attractive. Was ugly a word she might use? I am ugly. Slowly, she pulled on her underpants, swung her breasts into her bra, slipped into her clothes. A big puffy neck-to-knee fake-down parka covered everything, a winter burkha.

  Clutching a Liz Claiborne blouse, she opened the dressing room door, walked solemnly to the cash register. The woman at the till was at least 100 pounds overweight and her grey roots were showing through the hard brunette dye. And yet she was wearing lipstick and mascara and jaunty yellow earrings. And yet she was wearing a wedding ring. Someone loved her.

  “Did you find everything you need today?” She smiled at Rose.

  “Yes, thank you,” Rose replied, smiling back.

  “I love
this blouse!”

  “It is a wonderful color.”

  “Do you want to use your JCPenney Rewards card today?”

  “I don’t have one, and I don’t want one. Thank you for the offer.”

  “That’s twenty-six dollars and eighty-one cents. You saved sixteen dollars today!”

  “Did I?” Rose took the bag, releasing her smile again. Here we are, all smiling. “That’s great, thank you.”

  It was drizzling outside, the snow turning sloppy and she slopped across the parking lot, slop, slop, slop, her stupid boots, supposed to be waterproof, were already damp. Slop slop. She got in her Toyota Tercel, and she drove out onto the main road. The slop splattered her windshield; the wipers obviously needed replacing as Rose leaned forward to peer through a low arc of clean glass below a gritty brown smear. She had to pee, she should have peed at JCPenney. Now she had to make it all the way home. Plus — Fuck! Plus! — her feet were cold from the leaky boots and the Tercel’s feckless heating.

  The day was suitably mournful, the way only early April can be in the far northeast. Dumpy, grey skies, squatting low on the land, obscured the mountains and their sense of distance and drama. On such a day, there was nowhere other than this small, cold town. The temps hovered in the low 30s, enough to keep the drizzle from turning to snow and the slop from freezing. A sharp-tongued wind screeched down from Canada.

  Once home, she found the stove with only embers. She was down to the last of her firewood. If she was careful, she’d make it through the month. But if May proved cold, she’d just have to be cold, too. With prodding, the stove soon roared to life, and she sat with tea and reached for her book club book. It was about a woman fashion photographer. She had no interest in it and thought the writing was poor. It was one grade up from the pulp that got sold at the Rite Aid. She should probably quit the club, but the other ladies would guess it was because she thought she was better than them. There was a look she saw pass between Bev and Jean and Laurie and Connie, a look that slipped like a coin, one to the other, if she happened to make certain comments. She could not say, outright, that she didn’t like a book; this would be taken personally by the member who’d suggested it. This was unspoken courtesy, for they never criticized her choices, though Rose was sure they didn’t like them. The Power and the Glory, Play It as It Lays, My Ántonia. Strange books, unsettling, she often couldn’t understand what she felt when she finished them, and she liked that emotional ambiguity. That was the crux of the problem, she wanted to feel muddled, the others in the group wanted to feel certain.