Anne-Charlotte Fabre

Extract from ‘Nuclear Waste’

I

The wet sounds of tearing flesh wrapped around her like a cold claw. A hawk, perched on the old swing-set, slowly peeled away layers of a squirrel’s meat with the sharp hook of its beak. The hawk was two brush strokes of brown and white, under it were swatches of grey. A thin mist hung in the air which muted all the colours and made them dull, but a splash of blood red cut through the grey. A smatter of it bled into the hawk’s soft underbelly. The scene was perfectly framed by the kitchen window.

           The fridge hummed mechanically and the white light escaping from the open door reflected onto her back. Ben walked in carrying a cooler in both hands with plastic bags stacked on top. Pearls of sweat crept out from his dark hairline. He dropped everything on the linoleum floor with a thud, grunted, and swatted a moth off his sleeve.

Syrupy yellow light pooled from the bulbs over the stove. They had landed only a few days ago and she was still waiting for the jet-lag to clear. They said it took a day for every hour lost. The brief stay at her parents’ house before driving here hadn’t helped.

“You okay?” Ben asked.

           “There’s a hawk eating a squirrel outside,” she said.

           “Oh.” He made a gargled sound.

           “It’s perched on the swing-set.”

A set of hands found their way to her shoulders, pinky fingers digging into her collar bones. A pair of lips kissed her temple.

           “Let’s see?” His breath was acrid with coffee.

           She took him outside and the porch door swung open with a creek, opening wide, and the spring sighed as the gaping mouth closed. Humidity descended upon them.

           There was the sound of ripping paper as the hawk took lumps off the corpse. Was it actually dead? She didn’t know whether corpse was the right word for something that might still be in the process of dying.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” His hand snaked around her upper arm and pulled her to his side where she fell limply. “I know you like squirrels.”

           She didn’t.

           “You didn’t see it when you were coming in?”

           “No.”

           The hawk noticed them then and it flew away with a ruffle of wings, abandoning the squirrel’s carcass, its head lolling over the side like a martyr.

           “Can you grab the rest of the bags from the car?” Ben asked and let her go.

           She heard the dinging of the car’s open-door alarm and the purring of the engine that Ben had forgotten to turn off. Exhaust filtered out of the back and nauseated her. She reached inside and turned the key, then silence. In the trunk were their two duffle bags and huddled in the fabric’s crease of one was a paper-winged moth. Black spheres like crystal balls draped in silk watched her.

           She carried the bags through the door while Ben’s face was in the fridge rearranging parcels of meat and milk bottles, given to them by her parents. “We need more groceries,” she said.

           “We have plenty.”

           “We need vegetables or something.”

           Ben straightened and turned to face her. She half expected for his mouth to be ringed in blood.

II

On the drive they let the radio wash over the silence. The hosts spoke of floods in Germany that were spreading across the border to Belgium.

           “Bruges will be safe, at least,” Ben said. “We’ll be able to go like we planned.” His hand clapped her thigh and settled there, rubbing circles with the sandpaper pad of his thumb. “Did you book that off work?”

           She hummed and nodded along.

           It rained and the roads became a slick black. The moisture caused the earth to sigh out great billows of mist that wisped around the edges of the road from the forests on either side. Weaving in and out of the bark, flashes of neon orange caught her eye. It was what seemed to be a search party, a group of twenty or so men and women in hi-vis jackets, poking at the damp ground with sticks. The car whizzed past them and splashed into a puddle. Her window was decorated in ribbons of murky water, and the search party snapped their heads her way, like a pack of deer caught in headlights.

           Then a streak of silver dashed out from the woodwork and the car in front jolted into the air, the back tires going in for flight and kissing the ground roughly as they landed again. It swerved, skidded on the wet tarmac, and then stopped. Ben hit the brakes and she lurched forwards violently.

           A mass of fur lay in the road between both cars. The belly of the beast gaped open, warm red insides steaming and spilling out onto the tarmac. It was a coyote with speckled white fur and a leather black lip snarled back to reveal yellowing teeth. It exhaled a whine, caught somewhere between life and death.

           “Shit,” she whispered, putting a hand to her own stomach. Something inside her retreated back to its cave.

           “Fuck,” Ben said.

           The driver from the car in front trotted out to the rear of his car to inspect the damage. The coyote shrieked a weak and pitiful sound. The man wiped his hands on his thighs, she could see the panic on his face. Her teeth bit into a familiar notch on the inner lining of her lip. The sight was made into a triptych by the overjoyed windshield wipers. A man, a dead thing, and an empty space between them.

           The driver pulled a shotgun out of the trunk, cocked it once, and no second later was the coyote dead. The boom resonated in her mind. Somewhere inside her it would stay.

           The parking lot at the supermarket was busy. She pushed a coin into the slot and navigated the cart through waves of rowdy children and their parents. She and Ben marched on solo, each with a separate list in their hand, determined to make the errand as short as possible. As she checked the ripeness of a few avocados, she found him over by the clothing section, holding up tiny onesies in his  hands.

           They met back up at the register where a noticeboard and a rack of tabloid magazines were on display. The line in front was long.

           “Caroline,” he said, “That would have been a good name. Don’t you think?”

           Her throat went dry. “Maybe a bit too classic.”

           “Why don’t you suggest anything, then?”

           She shifted her weight from right foot to left. Her hands tightened on the shopping cart handles. “There’s no point.”

           The line started to move, and Ben placed their items onto the conveyor belt one by one. They scuffled forward and she got a closer look at a cluster of posters on the noticeboard. Each one had a portrait of a child and ‘Missing’ printed underneath in bold letters. On one of the posters was the photo of a young blonde girl, she guessed she was no older than five.

           The clerk greeted them with a hearty smile and scanned their items with speed while another bagged everything for them in an unnecessary heap of plastic.

           “How long has she been gone for?” she asked.

           The second clerk looked up lazily and shook his head “The blonde girl? A few weeks.”

She pressed her forehead into the cool glass of the window as Ben drove them back. She heard the tightening of leather as he white-knuckled the steering wheel. He didn’t know what to do with himself. She watched the white lines of the road slip by like silver fish in a lake.

III

The hawk again. Screeching calls woke her up. Ben slept with the blanket covering only half his body. She flicked on the dim amber light by the console and started to unpack the suitcase that had been abandoned the day before. She folded handfuls of jumpers and shirts into the drawer, and on top she laid her favourite sweater. A coffee-coloured cashmere blend which Ben had given to her for a birthday years ago. It was soft and she held it to her chest, stroked it against the grain. Ben stirred. She pulled the jumper over her head and her thumb caught on a small hole that had formed in the sleeve.

           Under everything, at the bottom of the bag, there was a box of condoms with flattened corners that Ben had packed. She picked them up, weighed the box in her hand, and cringed at the idea that he had pierced them all with a safety pin.

           Downstairs she turned on the radio. The floods in Europe had spread and broken past the Belgian border. Outside, the porch was being eaten by moths and she stood in the midst of this chaos, coffee in hand, and her thumb threaded through the hole in her sleeve. It was silent up here in the cradle of the trees, but she could hear the zipping of wings. The moths flew around like pieces of confetti made from Bible-page paper. They huddled around the painted wood of the porch and the bark of the trees. The trees were bare silver husks like bled-out veins. She had been coming to her parents’ cabin for years and never had she seen it like this; a skeleton of itself.

           “Your mother said there were too many gypsy moth caterpillars this year,” Ben’s voice cut through her daydream as he crept up on her. Her skin felt grimy like she needed a shower.

           “Why are they awake in the day?”

           “They must be diurnal.” He shrugged. She didn’t know that was a thing. “Or maybe they’re sick.” He wrapped his arms around her stomach, placing a palm over her womb. He squeezed.

           “I thought of another,” he continued speaking with his lips pressed against her ear, “Celeste.”

           “That’s nice.” She worried the hole in the sleeve.

           “Not too classic?”

           “A little bit,” she said and felt his grip loosen in despair. “But I like it.” She uncoiled herself from his arms and offered to make him coffee.

           Inside the cabin everything was the same; in the twenty or so years her parents had owned it, nothing changed. It was overwhelmingly brown with notes of ever-green and cranberry red. Rustic, with wood panelling and pine cones embedded into the decor. When she was younger, she spent hours finding faces in the wood. Nothing ever changed, like this house was frozen and preserved by the grips of time. She imagined that’s why Ben liked it, wished they could have stayed here a few months ago, just to freeze time.

           Somehow a moth had slipped inside and now crawled around pointlessly in the sink. Its wings must have gotten wet, it couldn’t fly. She dumped her coffee right on top of it just to drown it some more.

            “I’m going to go to the lake,” she called to Ben on the deck. He nodded, staring at his feet or the walls or the moths, but never looking at her.

           She made her way on the dusty road walled by pines and sycamores, swatting away the bugs that flew into her orbit. Thankfully no one was at the beach when she got there, and she got to enjoy the still waters that lapped at her toes. The mountains were blue over the horizon with mist rolling over them. She had been told that the mist was from the fires in California, and the reach of it had astounded her, branching together New Hampshire and the Eastern Coast with the West.

There were no boats on the lake. There were no footprints in the sand. Something bad could happen here, and no one would ever know.

IV

The lingering pain of rejection showed on Ben’s face now as he grilled burger patties outside. His frown lines set deep creases into his tanned skin. In his calloused hands he held a bottle of beer by the neck and a silicone flipper in the other. She sat on the couch, as far from the grill as she could, because the smell of red meat made her feel sick.

           Two months ago, Ben had asked her to marry him. He had taken her out to dinner and when the waiter brought out a raspberry pavlova, he got down on one knee and asked her to become his wife, and with that, take his last name and grant him a child. She shook her head and her teary-eyed smile masked the anger simmering inside as she told him to wait a little longer. Ben knew she wasn’t ready. He wasn’t either. But two weeks prior to that she had been pregnant and ended it. He had lost something growing inside her which he desperately wanted back, even though they had both made the decision and held the carving knife with steady hands. Marriage was the only thing he could think of that might absolve them of her sin and his guilt. To seal the wound, spackle and paint over it, and forget and build something new.

           They ate their dinner outside. Ben lit a citrine candle to keep the mosquitos away, but it did nothing for the moths, and one dropped into her plate, stuck in the small lake of blood. Another landed on Ben’s burger and without realising he ate it, and she didn’t say a word.

           Ben’s body collapsed onto hers, slick with sweat that clung like morning dew to his coarse chest hairs. He panted into her shoulder and reached between them to pull himself out with a muffled grunt. The smell of sweat coupled with the residual red meat in her belly nauseated her.

           “I have to pee,” she said.

“Just, lie here with me for a second,” he said, though he had already resigned.

“I don’t want to get a UTI.” She nudged him and he toppled onto his side not without a slight look of disappointment.

           The bathroom light buzzed, it was one of those fluorescent classroom lights, and a brown papery moth whirled around it, clearly enthralled. She sat on the toilet and watched it flutter aimlessly, repeatedly hitting its head against the light’s plastic covering.

           She got up and scraped her knee on the counter's edge as she climbed up to unscrew the plastic case. It came off fairly easily and she placed the casing on the floor; there were mounds of dust collected inside. The moth flew straight into the naked white-hot bulb like Icarus to the sun, and then it fell with a thud, denser than she thought. The moth’s legs curled up into its thorax, its wings flat out to the side. A crucifix. She brushed it into her palm and dropped it in the toilet bowl. It floated like a folded paper boat, and then she flushed, and it swirled away.

           “I just gave a moth a Viking burial,” she said, dropping back into bed and settling her shoulder under Ben’s damp armpit.

           “What’s that?” he said.

           “It’s when you send the body off into water, and I think you’re supposed to set it on fire.”

           “What the fuck is wrong with you? You set fire to a moth?” Ben’s voice was strained but he refused to face her.

           “No, I didn’t. It was already dead.”

           There was a beat of silence in which she curled away from him. With the night came humidity and the room was filled with a thick blanket of it that clung to her naked body. The more she lay still, the more she found herself settling into it, and it was getting heavy and starting to crush her. She wished she could move or break the silence, but there was nothing she could think of doing. She stared out the window, but everything was pitch black. The only thing she could see was the cluster of moths on the glass, drawn by the bedroom light. They squirmed and crawled over each other, desperate to get a closer look.

           “You said things would be better here,” Ben whispered.

           “I enjoyed dinner.” She changed the subject, and she lied, she had been wanting to stop eating meat for a while, the thought of blood and flesh that wasn’t her own being carried inside her produced a violent reaction she had to suppress. Ben grunted in response. The blanket of heat was so heavy on her now she glittered and was suffocating. He felt stiff in the bed beside her. Neither of them would do anything, she knew, they would let themselves drown.

           “I’m joining a search party tomorrow,” she said.

           “Why?” he asked, and she heard him shift in bed. They were back to back.

“For the missing kid.” She continued to watch the swarm of insects outside. If she squinted really hard, they all merged into one sheet of beige. It was disgusting. All those bodies merging together into one formidable mass.

She climbed over Ben and placed her lips against his almost shyly, like it was their first kiss and they had never discovered each other’s touch before. Something wet and salty fell on her upper lip. The humidity wrapped around them tighter, holding them firm in its slippery embrace. She pressed her mouth against his with more force, their lips squished together savagely, and she bashed her front teeth on his. She kept tasting salt and she couldn’t get Sodom and Gomorrah out of her head.

Ben pushed her away with an urgency that halted everything around her, and a shriek escaped the cavern of his throat. She had never heard anything like it before and before she could react it stopped, and Ben crumpled like paper in bed and sobbed. It was pathetic, really. It was an ugly thing to watch. But she was torn, and she picked up his heavy blushing head and cradled it against her breasts and pet his hair and rocked him to sleep and murmured words in his ear, until he stopped, and she was sure he was asleep and wouldn’t wake.

Then she was alone, in the middle of the night, and the bedroom smelled like sex and red meat, it was maddening. She couldn’t sleep, she felt she needed to be clean. She slipped out of bed and pulled on her jumper, her thumb sliding into the hole which now gaped around the top of her wrist. Before she left, she took pity and kept the bedside lamp on and opened the window and bug screen to let the poor nocturnal creatures in.

The moon glittered on the surface of the lake like a giant silver coin. She was alone except for loons which called for each other over the expanse of the lake and white bugs that fluttered on the surface.

She stood shin-deep and then took a step deeper and let her bare thighs be submerged. She thought of the floods on the radio and how she couldn’t even picture what that would be like. She tried to imagine it, brown water breaking down doors and infrastructure, snatching memories inside slippery hands and washing away people’s lives. The water was waist-high now. She couldn’t remember taking another step. Was flooding like drowning? She wanted the water to slip inside her and pull everything out.

A moth flew to her with wings made of lunaria and perched on her forearm. It had a fuzzy head and big black empty eyes through which she could see all of infinity, and all of life. It crawled up her arm and its tiny legs felt like the slow tide of the search party poking sticks into the hostile ground of her body to find a dead thing.