Dead Inside

by Chandler Morrison

  A couple of weeks pass, and she keeps visiting me and telling me things I don’t want to hear, but don’t really mind hearing, either. I do, admittedly, somewhat enjoy the stories of her escapades into abortion clinics, and the way she describes the taste of dead infant flesh. It’s soft and moist, she says, and incredibly tender, like slightly undercooked veal sweetened with a dusting of brown sugar. She says it has a way of melting in your mouth. Some parts of it are jelly-like. The fat is soft but tough, and she savors the time it takes to grind it down.

  Each baby is a little different, she says, but they all share the same traits, in regard to the general taste.

  She tells me they’re all delicious, every one of them, down to the last bite.

  I ask her if she ever adds anything for additional flavor.

  She says she doesn’t have to.

  She says that would ruin it.

  “I don’t know if this is related,” she says, “but I had a baby brother when I was a child, named Jason. I was six years old when he died. I was the one who found him. I still dream about it. I think it . . . really fucked me up.” She looks at her hands and fidgets with them. I wait for her to continue, but she doesn’t.

  “How did he die,” I ask her.

  She doesn’t answer at first. When she does, her voice is very low and I have to strain to hear her. “I had this ferret,” she murmurs. “His name was Samson. I loved that ferret. My parents got him for me when he was only a few weeks old, and he was my best friend. He wasn’t like most ferrets, where they just run around and do their own thing and ignore everyone, for the most part. He was like a dog. He was always at my heels, and he slept with me every night. I would snuggle him close and go to sleep to the sound of his breath.”

  She stops, and I want to ask her how a ferret is related to her dead brother, but then it occurs to me, and I know the ending of the story already.

  “One night, I woke up and he wasn’t there,” she continues. I realize I’m kind of excited to hear the rest. I told you how much I hate babies, and the thought of Helen’s ferret smothering an infant in its crib is pretty great. “I got up, and I looked all over for him, but I couldn’t find him. Then I went into Jason’s room.”

  Aw, shit, it’s about to get so good.

  “And there he was,” Helen says. “There he was.” She pops a few pills and I hand her my Diet Coke, and then she says, “In the crib. Samson was in the crib. He had smothered Jason.”

  Right on, Samson, right on.

  “There’s more, though,” Helen says. “After he had smothered him, he had . . . he . . . he’d started eating him. He’d started eating Jason’s face.”

  Yikes, didn’t see that part coming.

  “There wasn’t much left by the time I found him. Of Jason’s face, I mean. All the flesh had been eaten away, and you could see his skull. I screamed and my parents came running in, and then they screamed. My mom threw up and then fainted in her own puke. My dad ran over and picked Samson up, he threw him so hard against the wall that his head broke open and some of his brains started to come out.”

  She’s crying now. I’m supposed to comfort her—I think any decent human being would—but I’m not a decent human being, and I don’t know much about comfort, so I just sit and wait for her to finish telling the story.

  “My dad picked up little Jason and held him and cried and cried, and screamed at God to bring him back. And do you know what I did?”

  I shake my head.

  “I ran over to Samson and held him and sobbed into his fur. His blood got on my pajamas, and I screamed when I realized how much blood there was. I didn’t care about Jason. Or my mother, who ended up drowning in the puddle of her vomit while my dad and I screamed and cried, him over my brother and me over my ferret.” She pauses to wipe her eyes, and I get some tissues out of one of the desk drawers and hand them to her. She blows her nose, bunches up the tissue in her fists in a manner that’s almost hateful, and then says, “Samson didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “No,” I say, nodding my head in genuine agreement. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Nothing was really the same after that,” Helen says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That makes sense.”

  The two of us are quiet for a very long time. She cries a little more and I keep thinking about the ferret eating the baby, and I have to fold my hands over my crotch to conceal my half-hardon.

  I’m about to ask if she wants to smoke, when she suddenly starts up again with another story. “I was thirteen when I had my first one,” she tells me. “I was walking in the woods, and I found this little bundle wrapped up in a basket. Someone had just left it there. It hadn’t been dead long.” She looks at me, as if expecting me to tell her to stop. When I don’t, she goes on, her voice still hushed, “I don’t know why my first thought was to eat it. To take a big bite out of it and see how it tasted. Maybe it was the smell. It just smelled so good. So, I did. I started with its face. I took a bite, and then I took another, and before I knew it, I’d pretty much gnawed it down to the bone. I ate so much I threw up, but even the vomit tasted delicious.”

  I realize I’m leaning forward, enraptured.

  She shakes out a couple more pills, and I give her my Coke. She washes them down and then says, “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. For the longest time, it was all I thought about. I stopped thinking about Samson and Jason, and I started thinking about babies. More time passed, and I was able to deal with the cravings, but I never forgot.”

  “When was the next time,” I ask.

  “Med school,” she answers. “I’d waited so long. We dissected them for class, and then afterward, late at night, I sneaked in and stole one and took it home with me. I feasted upon it, and . . . ” She trails off, frowning, looking away. “And it was then that I knew there was something seriously wrong with me.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “You didn’t think there was something wrong with you after the first one,” I ask, bemused.

  She shrugs. “I was young. Sure, I knew it was a bit strange, but I guess I never acknowledged the correlation between what I’d done, and what that said about me as a human being. I craved it, but I suppressed the notion of what it really was. And that . . . that just makes me more fucked up. It wasn’t until the second act of cannibalism that I realized what I was.”

  “What are you,” I ask her.

  “A monster.”

  I lean back in my chair and tell her, “That seems a little extreme.”

  “People aren’t supposed to eat babies.”

  I swivel casually in my chair, twiddling my thumbs. “People aren’t supposed to do a lot of the things that they do. People aren’t supposed to fuck dead girls, but that doesn’t make me a monster. It just makes me different. It makes me . . . separate. From everything. From everyone. I am enlightened.”

  I notice there are tears in her eyes. She wipes them away with her long-fingered white hands and says, “It would be nice if I could look at it like you do.”

  I stare hard into her bleary eyes and say, “Who says you can’t.”

  “Everything I know to be true.”

  “Nothing you know to be true, is true. Society has brainwashed you. Don’t be like the rest. Fuck the rest.”

  She nods, unconvinced. “I have to go,” she says. “I think I’m supposed to deliver a baby tonight, or something. I don’t know. I can’t keep my schedule straight anymore.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  She leaves. I’d pity her if I was capable of it.

  ***

  Helen and I sit outside under the entryway awning, passing a cigarette back and forth, staring at the fat fullness of the moon, and listening to the moths mindlessly slapping against the light above the main door. She is close, her shoulder touching mine. I can smell her modestly-applied perfume, and the lingering scent of shampoo in her hair. Her proximity should feel smothering, I should be crawling in my skin, but for once, the physical closeness of anoth
er living being is entirely tolerable. Almost, dare I say, pleasant. Not quite, but almost.

  “How did it start?” she asks. I can feel her looking at me, though I don’t return her gaze. “As in, when did you realize you were like this, and what did you do about it? I told you my story. It’s your turn, now.”

  The question takes me by surprise, and there’s really no easy or definitive answer. I’ve always known I was different, that I thought differently from other people, saw things in a different light, a darker light, but for a long time I didn’t know there was anything I could do about it. I had no urges, no aberrant lust—I was just different, painfully so. I was perpetually uncomfortable, unbearably insecure, and in my angst-ridden tween years I even became borderline suicidal, always one wrong word away from slashing my wrists or swallowing Drano. I felt like a disfigured monster whenever I was around other people, convinced they saw me for the alien I was, and that they hated me for it. My mom sent me to therapy, but that only made me feel even worse.

  It wasn’t until my fifteenth year that things started to come together and make a semblance of sense. By then I had, for some time, begun to really experience the sexually-frustrated horror that is puberty. My body had desires that conflicted clashingly with my conscious mind. A short skirt or low-cut top would set off maddening twinges of “lust”, for want of a better word, but the thought of actually being naked in front of a woman made me sick with terror. How could anyone want to strip bare before another human being, opening himself up to the very real possibility of endless judgment, spoken or otherwise? And even if you were somehow able to endure the inevitability of her silently scrutinizing eyes, and provided she didn’t cast you out in disgust, you then had to actually get close to her, touch her, and worse, let her touch you. The thought was unthinkable.

  From about the time I was twelve, until I was fifteen, my loins were at constant war with my brain, the latter doing everything in its power to suppress my confused libido. I had no outlet; even masturbation was a nauseating impossibility, resulting in a steady stream of contorted nightmares from which I would awaken to semen-soaked underwear, due to my body’s need to relieve the pressure in my groin since I wasn’t doing it myself. I started washing my own sheets. My mother didn’t ask questions. By then, she had learned not to ask questions.

  And then, like a glorious gift from the gods themselves, there came the night of the party.

  I really had no business being invited—I had no friends and I avoided conversation by any means necessary, blatant rudeness notwithstanding—but the guy who was hosting it had been absently handing out invitations to everyone in the hall after the final bell rang, as all the students were stampeding for the exit, and one of the unsealed envelopes somehow ended up in my hand amidst the confusion.

  To this day, I’m still not sure what compelled me to actually go. My mother was spending the weekend in Hong Kong or Moscow or something, for some sort of business conference, and as I sat reading in the dim light of my room that Saturday night, I found myself unable to concentrate on the words, my mind wandering to curious musings about what a high school party might actually be like. The invitation taunted me from my nightstand. The address printed on it was less than a block from my house. I could go check it out, and if it was as awful as I suspected, I could be back at home without having sacrificed any sizable amount of my night.

  So, yes, I went, and yes, it was awful. One of the football players took my coat at the door and told me it would be upstairs in the first room on the left. Another one, already sloppy drunk, clapped me on the back and handed me a beer and slurred something about communists in the school administration. I sipped the beer, hating the taste of it more and more with each swallow, and wandered from room to room, not talking to anyone but trying desperately not to appear as awkward as I felt. The music was loud and annoying, and the snippets of overheard conversation were boring. I don’t think anyone really noticed me, which was for the best. When the beer was half gone and I was sure one more sip would make me puke, I threw it out and went upstairs to claim my coat.

  The room was dark, but I could make out the pile of coats piled haphazardly in the corner. When I turned on the light, though, my eye was caught by something else.

  A girl.

  On the bed.

  Unconscious.

  I recognized her. She was a senior, and a cheerleader or a volleyball player, too, I think. Very popular, very pretty. Long blonde hair and tan, muscular legs that went on for miles. She was wearing short jean cutoffs, despite the cold late-October weather, and a loose-fitting sweater that hung off one shoulder. It had ridden up her stomach when she’d fallen onto the bed, exposing a flat, golden-bronze midriff, and a butterfly navel piercing.

  I approached her, not breathing.

  Poking her leg very softly, I whispered, “Um, hey, are you okay.” Of course, I didn’t care if she was okay—I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to wake up. My mind had already decided everything for me, but I had to be sure she was going to remain drunkenly comatose. Judging by the empty bottle of Grey Goose on the floor, and the slow, heavy raggedness of her breathing, I thought my chances of that looked pretty good.

  I poked her again, then shook her, and finally slapped her across the face. Nothing.

  I closed the bedroom door and locked it.

  My entire body was shaking as I undressed her. First, the shoes and shorts, sucking her toes, running my hands over her smooth thighs. I then peeled her shirt over her head and tossed it aside, hungrily seizing the great globes of her breasts and squeezing them as hard as I dared. I think my eyes probably rolled back in my head. I don’t remember. I didn’t remove the bra because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to redo the clasp when it came time to put her clothes back on, but I did peel the cups down so I could peek at her huge round nipples, kissing them and flicking them.

  My heart was racing so fast I feared it might charge up my throat and burst out of my mouth, only to die pitifully on the bed next to her. There was also the ever-present notion that she could wake up at any time to find herself being molested by a creepy little freshman, in a locked bedroom that was not her own.

  When neither of these things happened, I slowly pulled off her white silk panties, pausing for a brief observation of her pubic region before stepping out of my jeans and underwear.

  “I’m going to fuck you, now,” I whispered weakly. “I promise I’ll be quick. Don’t be mad if you wake up.”

  I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to keep from crying out when I first slid into her; there was some resistance at first, but it was followed by a tight, suction-like feeling for which I had not been prepared, and it was incredible. I do remember thinking, however, that it wasn’t quite right. There was that nagging terror that she’d wake up, and her proximity was unnerving, unconscious or not. Still, my body hungered for this, and with four quick pumps I was done, collapsing onto her and gasping into her neck.

  I didn’t dare lie there for long, so I got up and hastily dressed her, and then myself, before grabbing my coat and walking back downstairs as casually as I could, sneaking out the back door and running home.

  “Hello? Are you still with me?” Helen is looking at me expectantly, glassy eyes piercing my own.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I . . . spaced out.”

  “So . . . how did it start?” she asks again.

  I shrug. “I guess some people are just born fucked up.”

  She blinks slowly, and I can tell she knows I’m not telling her something, but she doesn’t press the issue.

  “I don’t think you’re fucked up,” she says. “I’m the one who’s fucked up. I think what you do is . . . kind of beautiful, actually. Beautiful and pure. You recognize your own unique tastes, and you act upon them unabashedly.”

  “I mean, so do you.”

  She shakes her head and gently takes the cigarette from me, dragging thoughtfully and then flicking it out onto the asphalt as she exhales. “No, with me
it’s different. I’m afraid. All the time. Can you imagine the things they’d say about me in the papers? The way people would look at me? They’d lock me away and scorn me for the leper I am. They’d call me ‘the Maternity Monster’, or something. A doctor trusted to bring new life from the womb of womankind, who secretly devours dead fetuses. The damnation would be unending, and the fear of it haunts my every waking moment, and most of my dreams, as well. You, though, you’re so calm and unafraid. You just do what you do, and you don’t seem to have a shred of anxiety of what will happen if you’re found out.”

  I don’t entertain the notion of getting caught, because I don’t see it as a possibility. Not yet, anyway. I’m confident enough in my own discretion to believe my sex life will remain uninterrupted until I’m able to carry out my future plans. My foundation is solid.

  Speaking of babies, though, I should mention that the girl from the party ended up getting pregnant. She naturally assumed it had been her boyfriend, a dauntingly tall fellow on the varsity basketball team who stayed out of trouble and was a favorite for the valedictorian title that year. Who knows. Maybe it was his, but the timing seemed a little too coincidental for that.

  Whatever the case, the girl decided to abort the pregnancy, a choice she claimed to have been her own, despite rumors that it had been the squeaky-clean boyfriend who had talked her into it. A few weeks after the procedure, she slashed her wrists in the bathtub, purportedly while listening to Enya. I spent a solid fifteen seconds somewhat distraught over my disturbing lack of guilt.

  I didn’t go to the funeral, either, but I did break into the funeral home for another go at her. She was infinitely better the second time.

  Because there was no chance of her waking up.

  Because she was dead.

  I had found my true calling.

  It also stands to be said that fucking a corpse in a coffin provides for a morbid eroticism that is absolutely to die for. Yes, that pun was wholly intended, and yes, I do find myself amusing. The audience doesn’t get it, but that’s what laugh tracks are for.