Dead Inside

by Chandler Morrison

  Her eyes on mine, gray and unblinking, she pulls her sweater off and lets it fall to the floor.

  This shouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve seen her naked before.

  She has a figure-hugging white tank top underneath, and she peels that off next, revealing the navel piercing and the hip tattoo I’d forgotten about, as well as a pink bra that seems a little too lacy and erotic for the occasion. I wonder if she did that on purpose.

  Her eyes are still locked with mine when she unhooks the bra and tosses it atop the other discarded articles. Her pale nudity, in tandem with the slack, stoned, might-as-well-be-dead look on her face, sends a chill down my back, and a tingling quiver down my cock.

  Might-as-well-be-dead isn’t the same as dead, though, and I have to keep telling myself this to keep an erection at bay. Christ, this is ridiculous.

  She steps out of her sneakers and then pulls her jeans and underwear down at the same time, finally tearing her gaze away so she can fold her clothes into a neat little pile. Then she stands back up and resumes staring at me, as if waiting for an appraisal of her naked body.

  My hands are shaking as I light a cigarette. “You should get started,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. She nods and turns around to walk over to the freezer. She pulls the door open and then disappears inside, leaving it slightly ajar. Cool air drifts out in silver plumes.

  She’s still in there when I finish my cigarette, so I crush it out and then drop it into one of the toxic trashcans. I lean against the wall and light another, and then she emerges.

  Her hands and forearms are already stained red, and she’s holding a shriveled, not-fully-developed fetus. It looks a little too big to be what I would think is abortion-eligible, but hey, what do I know.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Helen says. “But the best law to ever get passed in Ohio authorizes late-term abortions for extreme scenarios. Usually, abortions don’t look anything like this. They’re just chopped-up globs of meat. Every once in a while, though, I get lucky and find one that’s more or less baby-shaped, like this one. It adds a crucial element to the fantasy.” She stares affectionately at the dead thing in her hands as she walks over to sit down in the middle of the sheet she’s laid out. She’s drooling again. She sniffs it and licks red slime from its misshapen body. A small moan escapes her lips.

  This must be what rapture looks like.

  I’m not even going to try to describe the sound of her biting into the thing’s lopsided head. Just suffice it to say it’s kind of jarring. She chews slowly, thoughtfully, and then moans again after she swallows. Pressing her now-maroon lips to the hole she’s made in its skull, she noisily slurps out whatever fluids may be floating around in there, before tearing off a sizable chunk of its tiny arm with her scarlet teeth. More moaning, and now she’s touching herself, masturbating as she chews. At some point I forget about my cigarette, and it goes out and falls to the floor. I hadn’t known about this part of the dining process. Maybe it’s for my benefit, but I don’t think so. This seems too practiced, too ritualistic. I’ve heard of women associating sex with food, but I’m pretty sure this is uncharted territory.

  “Oh, God, oh, fuck,” she says through a mouthful of flesh as a clear stream of fluid ejaculates from between the blushing lips of her vagina, while she continues to stimulate herself with her bloody fingers.

  She’s covered in blood now; it’s streaked and dotted across the tops of her breasts, running down between them, and spattered over her face and shoulders. She’s still wearing her glasses, and the lenses are freckled with tiny red flecks.

  My dick is hard.

  She’s totally oblivious to me, completely engrossed in her engorgement, and that just makes me harder. Watching her stuff her zombified face with fat chunks of dead fetus while she finger-fucks herself into orgasm after leg-shaking orgasm—I’ve never been so turned on by a living woman.

  With little thought, I’m suddenly approaching her, fumbling with my belt and dropping my pants, tripping a little as I step free of them, my erect cock standing at quivering attention. She’s still unaware of me, all the way up until I’m standing over her, with my shadow enveloping her naked figure, and I get on my knees, straddling her pale thighs, and shove her on to her back.

  “Yes,” she says, dropping the remains of the baby and running her scarlet hands under my shirt. “Yes.”

  “Keep eating,” I tell her as I slide in. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop eating.”

  She obeys my command, resuming her feast while thrusting her hips into my pelvis.

  Too warm.

  Too wet.

  Too alive.

  That’s how I would describe her cunt.

  But it’s okay, because her face is dead, and the chilled air of the basement renders her skin cool to my touch. I clutch her cold breasts as I fill her with every last inch of my cock. She groans as she gobbles, and I tell her to stop, no noise, just eat. She does, though she has to keep biting her lip to keep from crying out. She squirts a few more times, slickening my groin with sticky vaginal liquid.

  I’m able to go for longer than usual, due to the less-than-favorable conditions, but eventually she casts aside the last of the fetus, moans out a nigh-incoherent apology, and then shrieks a shrill orgasmic scream just as I finish inside her. I flop down beside her on the bloody sheet, shaking violently.

  Withdrawing my cigarettes from my shirt pocket, I light one and listen to Helen gasp next to me. “I thought . . . you don’t like . . . fucking live women,” she pants.

  “I don’t,” I say, not looking at her. “There was something different about this.”

  “Like the fact . . . that I was eating . . . a dead baby?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Something like that.”

  “Do you want . . . to try some of it?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  A still, awkward silence falls over us. I smoke tiredly. I’ve always hated this part. With live women, of course—it’s not a problem with the dead ones. Pillow talk has never been my forte. I mean, shit, conversation in general gets me all tense and weird, so I’m entirely incapable of that whole post-coital ruminating on the nature of life and love, or whatever garbage they prattle on about in movies after the obligatory sex scene. I feel like I should say something, though, and I’m still trying to think of what exactly that might be when she reaches over and takes my cigarette, sucking hard enough on it for the paper to crackle. She coughs as she exhales, apparently still out of breath.

  “I should get dressed,” she says, returning the cigarette to my fingers. She doesn’t get up, though. She just lies there. I can hear her breathing. I can feel the heat rolling off her perspiring flesh. I can even smell the distinct scent wafting from between her still-parted legs.

  I am uneasy and repulsed, but not as much as I should be.

  When a few more minutes pass by, and she still hasn’t moved, I say, “I’m sorry if I wasn’t very good. I’m not used to them . . . moving.”

  I feel her look over at me, and then she laughs. Kind laughter, light and amused, not mocking. “It was wonderful.”

  “So you say.”

  “I don’t come like that for everyone.”

  “So you say.”

  She rolls over onto her side and props herself up on her elbow. I could tell her it’s a stereotypical pose, and that it’s not as sexy in real life as it is in the movies, but I don’t. “You’re being awfully insecure for someone who talks so confidently about being comfortable in your uniqueness,” she says.

  I don’t have anything to say to that.

  She looks into my eyes and says, “You need to relax.” After a few moments go by and I don’t answer, she asks me, “What are you thinking about?” She takes the cigarette again, which annoys me; she keeps wet-lipping it with her bloody lips.

  “Nothing,” I say, blinking at the ceiling. “I’m not thinking about anything. Sex empties me. It fills my void until it wells up and overflows, and I am consumed by black . .
. nothing. It makes me blank.”

  There’s another weird silence, and then she says, “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to talk. If . . . um, you can sleep for a while, if you want.”

  “I think I will,” I say, already drifting. She says something else, but I don’t hear it. I’m already gone.

  ***

  The blood is dry on her naked skin when she wakes me. Her eyes seem more alert, so the pills must be wearing off. I squint through half-lidded eyes at my watch; I’ve been asleep for about an hour.

  “I have something for you,” Helen says. “And I want to watch.” She’s kneeling in front of me and her hands are behind her back.

  I’m still fuzzy with sleep, so everything is kind of foggy; if you sleep for longer than twenty minutes, you shouldn’t wake up until at least two hours have elapsed or you’ll interrupt the REM cycle, and it fucks you up. My head thus feels heavy and cumbersome. My mind is too slow. “What are you talking about,” I ask, and it sounds far away. My eyes ache.

  She takes her hands out from behind her and presents the “something” in question.

  And I’d thought the last one seemed too big to be aborted. “Jesus, Helen. I’m not eating that. I told you already.”

  She shakes her head, lips stretched across her face in a bloody grin. “I don’t want you to eat it,” she says, and then she touches her finger to the tiny vagina between the fetus’s stubby legs. “I want you to fuck it. I want you to fuck the shit out of this dead baby.”

  I regard her, unblinkingly. Now, I’ve fucked corpses across all age ranges, with the oldest being in her late fifties and the youngest being nine, but this—this is weird, even for me. “Helen, I don’t know . . . that’s really not my style.”

  Balancing the fetus on one hand, she runs the other down my stomach and cups my testicles. Her grip is ice cold. I stiffen immediately.

  “There you go,” she coos. “Now, go ahead, lie down.” She gently pushes me onto my back and then mounts the fetus atop my erection. The dead infant’s cunt is cold and slightly hard, but the tightness is unlike any girl I’ve ever fucked before.

  “Motherfuck,” I breathe, reaching down and wrapping my hands around its tiny waist. Helen is beaming and masturbating as I start to bob the kid up and down, its head lolling around with its mouth open and its tongue hanging out. I thrust harder and I can feel its insides tearing. I clench tighter and my fingertips punch through its flesh.

  Helen is kissing my neck with cold lips and digging her fingers through my hair.

  My penis is all the way up in the baby’s stomach, blending its insides into a pulpy slop. “This is so—oh God, oh God—fuck, this is so fucked up,” I groan.

  The skin on the baby’s neck has ripped and its head is about halfway dislodged, so I have to put one hand on its soft scalp to keep it from detaching completely. The thing is falling apart in my hands, but it just feels so fucking good.

  Helen gets up and sits on my face, so I start tonguing her and she cries out as a rush of fluid floods my mouth. Not exactly my thing, but I do have a dead baby on my dick, so one could argue tonight is all about exploring new areas. I use my free hand—as in, the one that’s not holding the baby’s head on—to fondle Helen’s breasts as she grinds against my mouth, her pubic stubble tickling my chin. The extent of her cries should piss me off, but all I can think about is the deliciously tight cunt enveloping my cock, which feels ready to burst at any moment but hasn’t yet, mercifully prolonging the ecstasy.

  I lose my grip on the head and I feel it peel off and tumble onto my stomach, so yes, I am now fucking a headless dead baby, thank you very much.

  I’m breathing heavily through my nose, and I keep having to swallow Helen’s endlessly flowing juices. Her nipple is hard against my palm, and my other hand is tearing new holes in the fetus’s skin as I struggle keep hold of it, to prevent it from flying off. Just when I’m thinking it’s about to slip from my grasp and go soaring into the air, my abdomen is wrenched by the most blindingly intense orgasm I’ve experienced in the entire freakshow of my life, and I scream an animal cry of pleasure into Helen’s gushing vaginal canal. I can feel globs of semen seeping out of the holes in the baby’s now-mangled corpse, and finally it does fly off, and I hear it thud squishingly on the floor, a few feet away, in between Helen’s shrieks. The tip of my penis is still spurting, and I claw at Helen’s back with my newly freed hand.

  I shove her off me when I’m done, gasping hoarsely, my cheeks damp and sticky with her copious ejaculate. “Fuck me sideways,” I say wheezily. “That was fucking unbelievable.”

  “I’ve . . . never done anything like that before,” Helen says from beside me. “I didn’t know sex could be like that.”

  “I didn’t know anything could be like that,” I say. I sit up and look at the mess around us, covering us, and at the mashed-up dead baby lying on the floor. “We should probably clean this all up. Some of it got on the floor. The sheet didn’t catch all of it.”

  “I’ll bring a bigger sheet next time,” she says with a grin, reaching over and squeezing my cock.

  “No,” I say firmly, grabbing her wrist and moving her hand away. “There won’t be a next time.”

  She’s silent for a moment, and then she nods and gestures over at her duffel bag. “I have cleaning supplies in there that I always bring, just in case. I’ll fold up the sheet and put it away.”

  “We should clean ourselves off, first.”

  “We could clean each other.”

  “No.”

  She nods, so we wipe ourselves down with rags, individually, and then get dressed and finish cleaning up the evidence of our presence. She folds the sheet and tucks it into the duffel bag with the cleaning supplies.

  ***

  We’re standing outside my car. I don’t know why we haven’t gotten in yet. We’re just looking at each other.

  The way she looks in the moonlight, clichéd beauty to a damning fault, flaxen hair rendered the white gold of karats unmeasurable, eyes glittering like newly-minted silver dollars, burning with feverish yearning, intensified by the thick lenses of her glasses . . . her skin glows, smooth ivory polished to the white purity of new snow, and all I can say is, “I wish you were dead.”

  She blinks slowly, shutters swinging closed over the windows to her shuddering soul, only to be flung back open once more, piercing through to my own inner self, and she says, “Sometimes I kind of wish I were dead.”

  “You would be perfect.”

  “Maybe everything else would be, too.”

  We stand there for a few more moments, and then I drive her home. Not a word is spoken between us the whole way there. I don’t tell her goodbye. She just looks at me for a second, and then she leaves. I don’t watch her as she walks up the driveway.

  ***

  Some nights I go to the graveyard because it’s always been the only place where I can truly relate to people.

  Morgues are great and all, but none of those people have been dead more than a couple of days. I’ve been dead inside for a long time. When I dream of camaraderie, I’m surrounded by skeletons, flesh barely clinging to their ancient bones.

  Helen, though.

  Helen is alive.

  This poses a problem for me.

  It’s warm outside and my hands are in my pockets as I stroll through the rows of headstones. There’s a light breeze and the moon is bright behind the canopy of rolling gray clouds. It smells like impending rain. I tread lightly, out of respect, because I think the long-dead sleep a fitful and restless slumber, and I’m preoccupied with my thoughts, so it’s more important than ever not to stir them.

  Despite the night’s warmth, I am cold. There’s this chilly feeling you get in graveyards. You don’t really feel it come on—it just happens, to the point where you’re enjoying the warm whisper of a summer wind and then, all of a sudden, you realize you’re cold. It’s a strange kind of cold—it’s sort of an icy tingling that starts at your shoulders, around the base of y
our neck, and it permeates through your veins in place of your blood. It’s like the kind of chill you get when you have an eerie realization, or experience a joltingly bizarre coincidence. That “someone just walked over my grave” feeling. Someone get me a snare drum.

  The difference, though, is it lingers. Most “ooh, I’ve got chills” moments last but only a few seconds. The graveyard chill, however, stays with you until you leave. You don’t feel it pass any more than you feel it come on. After you’ve left the domain of the dearly departed, you’re walking away with a serene sense of peace, humbled by ancient dates and pretty stone structures, and then it occurs to you that the chill has disappeared and the mental perception of your body temperature has returned to normal. Everything is as it was, and it’s as if time had stood still.

  But sometimes, you take one last glance over your shoulder, and though there’s never anything there, you’ll get one final jolt of the chill, alarmingly potent in its presence, and then it’s gone, and you’re still alive, and you take comfort in the deceptive notion that, with your back to the cemetery, death is behind you, and not waiting patiently ahead.

  But not me.

  I live for that chill.

  I want death neither behind, nor ahead, of me, but around me and within me.

  Helen, though.

  Helen is alive.

  Helen is warm.

  I fucked Helen, and I enjoyed it.

  I think I might actually fucking like Helen.

  Problems, problems.

  As I’m lighting a cigarette, I notice a man sitting at a gravestone a few rows ahead, a bottle of liquor lying beside him in the dirt. He’s weeping, talking to someone named Roxanne, as if she’s really there. Maybe she is; I’m not one to know these things. I give him a wide berth as I pass, and he doesn’t see me. A crow cries from one of the black trees.

  Helen is alive.

  That’s all I can think about.

  The living are dangerous. They inflict pain. They’re so fueled by greed, a lust for useless material shit, a smoldering desire to fit in . . . and they’ll hurt and betray and destroy whomever they must in order to get anywhere close to all of it. None of them are any different. Not even Helen, really. She craves conformity, longs to be one of the rest.