Consummate
A couple trying to conceive, obsessions of endless hunger and a collection of knives | Witch Craft Magazine
by Fox Henry Frazier
The graphite rendering was immensely detailed: irises of different sizes, pupils gazing in slightly different directions — one up, one down. Gnarly crow’s feet. A man dangling a mouse by its tail, hand gracing his cheekbone, lips parted below its head. On the table before him lay a snake, a scorpion, a large knife, and a caged bird. His hair was disheveled, clothing unkempt but tailored in an antiquated style — he was sloppy, not a pauper.
Jamie, my husband of nearly a year, gazed raptly at this image on his cell phone, sitting on our living room couch while I prepared dinner. The couch was just under the little window space over the kitchen counter that provided a connection of sorts between the two rooms. I leaned through the window space and looked over his shoulder at the cell phone.
“Who is that guy?” I asked. “Why does he have all those animals around him?”
Jamie jumped. “Jesus, Heather.” He placed his phone face down on the arm of the couch. “You startled me. And why are you looking at my phone over my shoulder? Respect my privacy, please.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just saw the picture and since you kept staring at him, I wondered who he was.”
“You can go without me, Heather,” Jamie said, his eyes wide, tone pointedly reassuring. He was finally answering the question I’d asked several minutes ago, which he’d pretended not to hear. “I told you I’m not going. But it’s OK with me if you go.”
“Isn’t the point of getting married that you do family stuff together?” I asked. “My parents have offered twenty times to pay for it. My mom is planning a surprise—”
“—party for your dad’s fiftieth birthday in Scotland,” Jamie talked over me, rolling his eyes. “I know. The MacArthurs, and all that. And now I’ll say the part I’ve said fifty times already: I’m not going because I can’t afford it. But I understand that you’d like to see your family. I’m offering to let you go.”
“I do miss traveling,” I said, “but I want to travel with you. It’ll be Christmas! My dad’s birthday! New Year’s! Why wouldn’t you want to come?”
Jamie turned his back to me. “I’ll think about it.” As he moved away, I caught the eye-roll I assumed I wasn’t meant to see. He tipped his bottle back and polished off his second forty-ounce beer.
Sunset filtered through the half-open floor-to-ceiling blinds. Our neighbor pulled up the alley in his truck and honked; his wife ran out of their house to open the gate for him. He pulled into their yard, got out of the truck, and went into the house. It was early October, and SoCal was still enjoying summer weather. His wife retrieved his lunch cooler and fluorescent yellow work vest out of the passenger’s seat, then followed back into the house after him. She paused at the front door to wave to us. I waved back. Jamie popped the cap off a fresh forty and raised it to her.
“OK,” I took the last pieces of chicken from the pot of sizzling oil on the stove. “Time to eat!” I pulled off my apron. “Chicken and waffles, with a big salad.”
“Smells wonderful,” Jamie said. He didn’t get up off the couch.
“Fiiiiine,” I said, rolling my eyes, and started making him a plate.
“Thanks, baby,” Jamie said with his charming smile and pale blue eyes that popped against his tan, handsome, square-jawed face. He dug in as soon as I passed him the plate through the window space. “You gonna come out here and eat with me?”
I said nothing, and sulked a little. I didn’t have to watch for his reaction; if I took more than five seconds to answer something Jamie said, he’d come looking for the reason why. I feigned fascination with a grease splatter on the stove, rubbing at it with a paper towel, and continued to pout. I knew he was looking at me.
“All right. Fine. I will think about Scotland. Really, I will. OK?” I let my gaze flutter up to his. His eyes were earnest, but I could tell by the tension in his chin that he was lying.
“Really?” I asked, letting him see my skepticism.
“Really,” he said, relaxing his jaw. “If all goes according to plan, Mack, you might not be able to travel again for a pretty long time.”
Jamie called me Mack when he was trying to be cute. He was reminding me that we were still hopeful about getting pregnant; I’d had two miscarriages this past spring. We’d started trying again now that it was autumn. If we succeeded, he was right I wouldn’t be doing much traveling for a while. Not that I’d been doing much since we got together, really. Whenever I tried to figure out why, we went in circles about money and I ended up tired.
But in this case, I knew I might really just go without him, if it came to that. My parents had invited us along to Stonehaven in December, the plan for us to arrive sometime before my dad’s birthday on the thirteenth and to stay through Hogmanay. I’d never seen the fireball ceremony, but I’d heard about it from my cousins. I wanted to go and I desperately wanted to share it with Jamie.
We sat in bed later that night watching Penny Dreadful on Netflix. Jamie sipped his final forty of the evening and casually sharpened his knives. His collection laid out all over the bed, he pulled each blade repeatedly through the handheld mechanism with a flick of his wrist. Eventually, when satisfied, he’d test the point of the blade against the tip of his finger. Seven knives in, he slipped and cut himself a little — the tiniest slice, finer than a paper cut. A thick burgundy droplet formed in the middle of his fingerprint.
“Why don’t you put that stuff away? Come snuggle before bed?” I didn’t want to snuggle, but I wanted to want to. Mostly, I wanted him to put the knives away.
“I can talk to you while I do this,” Jamie said, working on the eighth blade now. He wiped his finger on the corner of my pillowcase.
“Jamie!”
“Oh, relax. It’s like two drops. It’s nothing. I’ve licked more than that from you in one sitting.” He smirked a little. “Do you not like it that I’m sharpening knives, Mack?”
“Well, you can’t snuggle me and do that,” I said. I was careful to smile just right, to keep my tone light. I emphasized the word snuggle. I made a silly face.
“Sure I can,” Jamie drawled. He lifted his arm. “Come here, baby.”
“NOPE,” I said, forcing a laugh. My whole body tensed up. I inhaled and relaxed my shoulders so I wouldn’t look upset. “Not with all those sharp steel points over there. No way, man.”
Jamie cracked a smile and put the knives away. He put his arms around me; I relaxed against him. A quiet whirlpool sensation moved through my torso; it took a couple minutes for me to associate it with the word anger. I pushed it away.
I was probably just dreading working the next day. I was ABD — All But Dissertation, my coursework done and my research complete — and teaching university classes while I finished writing the last few chapters of my monograph. I liked both my research and teaching. But tomorrow I would have to spend much of the day in my office, in the Comparative Literature department. After a couple years of being socially hazed by a handful of graduate students in my cohort, and entirely ignored by the rest of them, I’d started having panic attacks. Even hearing some of the other PhD candidates’ voices in the hallway outside my office was enough to make me feel like I couldn’t breathe, start sweating and shaking uncontrollably. My doctor had put me on Xanax the week prior; I wasn’t certain I believed it would work.
“Hey, I read something today at lunch that I think you’d really like,” Jamie said, pulling me back into the present moment. He arranged his pillows and lay down. “It’s about that famous guy who kept eating and couldn’t gain any weight.”
“Oh yeah? Someone write a book about Lenox?” My brother had the metabolism of an entire Olympic swim team combined.
“Ha,” Jamie said. “But you know who I mean, right? Tar-rare-ray, I think his name was.”
“Sorry, I actually have no idea.” I shook my head, then giggled a little because the name sounded funny to me. “Did he live in a terrarium?”
“Yes, you do.” Jamie ignored my joke. “Ta-rah-ray? He was European.”
“Do you mean . . . Tanqueray, maybe?” I asked blankly, searching my brain for any memory of a name that might sound similar to the unrecognizable syllables Jamie was stringing together.
“No,” Jamie snapped, his lips pressed together in a sour expression, his purse-and-grimace combo. But I giggled a little, again, and he gave me the faintest smirk once he realized I was half-teasing. “I don’t mean Tanqueray. I don’t know how you say it. Tar? Tarrer? Tarrer.”
“Are you . . . are you trying to say ‘tartar’?” I was genuinely baffled, but we were both laughing now.
“Tarr-err-ee,” Jamie said insistently.
“Dude, you sound like you’re having a stroke,” I giggled. “I’m sorry. I honestly have no idea. I’ve never heard of him.”
“For Christ’s sake.” Jamie was frustrated now, but his tone wasn’t outright angry.
“Well,” I offered, “you can tell me about him, even if his name is, uh, a mystery at the moment. Who is he? What’s his deal?”
“I bet you’ve read about him before,” Jamie said. “It’s right up your alley. He ate and ate and ate, but he was dangerously thin and couldn’t gain any weight. And then when he died they cut him open, and they found all this weird shit inside him.”
“Like parasites?” I had settled down now, and was genuinely curious. “Or pancreatic tumors? Or . . .?”
“No, like wrenches and screwdrivers and springs, shit like that,” Jamie said.
“Oh, that is weird. Wouldn’t it kill you? Was he, like, actually a robot, or something?”
“No,” Jamie said impatiently. “He wasn’t a robot. This was in the late 1700s. And he ate live cats, and shit like that. He could swallow them whole, while they were still alive. It’s pretty obvious what was going on with him, don’t you think?”
“Swallow them whole?” I was horrified. “I was going to say it sounded like he had pica, but— that last part sounds like psychosis or like he had something diagnosably wrong with him. Who would eat a cat whole and alive, even if they could?”
“No?” said Jamie, and his eyes had a glow behind them like he was inspired, or knew a secret. “It’s obvious to me, anyway. He was possessed.”
“What? You mean, like, by a demon?”
“Think about it,” Jamie said. I could tell from his small smile that he was pleased with himself, getting to teach me something.
“It sounds like he might’ve had a parasite,” I said. “I don’t know about a spiritual one, though. I was thinking, like, tapeworm.”
“I’m surprised that you, of all people, don’t get it,” Jamie said. The joyous glaze of excitement in his sky-blue eyes was distressing. Then again, I was also intensely interested in weird, obscure things on a regular basis. I figured I shouldn’t judge.
“I’m probably not explaining it well,” he went on. “But you’ll see. I’m gonna read up on him, and you’re gonna end up wishing you wrote your dissertation about him. He’s fascinating.”
“OK, cute nerd,” I said, and kissed his nose. “Good night.”
Jamie growled playfully in response, and gave me a mock-offended look.
I had to laugh; if Jamie loved anything on earth, it was being admired — not just by me, but by anyone and everyone. I could have called him a cute used Kleenex and all he would have heard was the cute part. A small smile played on his lips as he drifted off to sleep.
At five AM, Jamie pressed a cup of coffee into my hand. “There was a shooting last night at the Rattlesnake Inn,” he said. I was amazed that he could drink so much beer every night and wake up without a hangover. He’d been up since four.
“That bar down the street?” I’d passed it a million times, but had never gone in.
“Yeah, my buddy Colby, from work, was hanging out there when it happened, around three. He texted me about it.”
“Jesus. Is he OK?”
“He is. But . . . I don’t think you should go into the University today,” Jamie said. He put his arms around me, held me close.
“Why? The shooting wasn’t at the University.”
“I know,” he said into my hair. “But you’re very precious to me. I just— I don’t want to be an asshole, but I’d feel better if you stayed close to home. Just for today.”
“You don’t sound like a jerk,” I said into his chest. It felt good to be loved, even if Jamie didn’t always show it in the ways I would have preferred.
“Good.” The relief in his voice palpable. “Just tell them the truth— the shooting happened in the wee hours down the street from our house, and traffic is a mess and all the streets are roped off by the cops. You can’t get anywhere.”
“OK,” I said. “Honestly, I could use the day off. Going there is stressful for me.”
“I know.” He kissed the top of my head. “And with any luck, for all we know you could be carrying precious cargo by now.”
I checked the news after Jamie had left for work. Three people were dead, five more critically injured. I scanned the article to see if they quoted Colby at all. They didn’t.
By midday I got restless and took a cab to the Galleria. I thought it would help ease my mind to start looking for Christmas gifts for Jamie and our families. I imagined us in Stonehaven, half-tipsy, all of us exchanging presents and singing carols, jovial and off-key. Helping my mother in the kitchen with my two older sisters. My entire body relaxed.
I parked at the Target end of the building and went inside. On my way towards the entrance that would spit me out into the rest of the mall, the baby clothes section caught my eye. You could be carrying precious cargo by now. Maybe continuous, low-key exposure to bibs and onesies would help convince my body it really was time for something to take.
I was idly looking through fox-cub-themed pajamas and infant slippers when a young mom with a couple of kids ran past me towards the doors. They looked to be about four and six, and the mom kept hissing shhhh! at them. It was weird because they weren’t making any noise. She had each of them by the hand, one on either side of her, practically lifting them into the air as she moved and they did their best to keep up. Despite her frenetic pace towards the exit, she kept looking over her shoulder. I tensed up, wondering if an abusive partner could be menacing her. But I didn’t see anyone in pursuit.
They were followed by a couple of very loud, blonde housewives in yoga pants and tank tops. One was hysterical, screaming and hyperventilating, the other one grabbed at her friend, tears streaming down her face. They paused and looked at me, then kept on running and flailing and generally acting bizarre. Full-moon behavior, I thought.
“Ma’am?” a Target employee touched my elbow, then put her hand around my wrist. “Come with me, please. We have to leave now.”
“What?”
“There’s an active shooter in the mall.” Her name tag said Grace. She looked like she was my age, maybe a few years younger, with an obvious pregnancy bump.
“Oh my God,” I said, my stomach dropping to my toes. “Another one? Already?”
“It’s at the other end of the mall,” she said quickly. “But we need to get out now, for our babies.” She gestured at both of our stomachs, then quickly looked around. “And before we get trampled. There’s more people coming.”
I looked up and saw that she was right — people were streaming into Target from the mall, surprisingly hushed and orderly given the circumstances. Grace took my hand, and we floated towards the door like a couple of children on an icy lake. In the cacophony outside, people spilled into the streets while police attempted to set up a perimeter. She let my hand go.
From some deep hungry part of myself I was barely even aware of, I suddenly didn’t want to be alone. I impulsively grabbed onto her hand again. She squeezed mine in response. I was so grateful I almost burst into tears.
“How far along are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-four weeks.”
“You’re gorgeous,” I said, and I meant it. “You’re as big as a house, and it’s so beautiful.”
“Because I am a house,” she laughed.
“Let me walk you to your car,” I said. As much as I wanted to feel some kind of connection with her — with anyone, probably — in these moments, I also knew we should probably both leave before one of us got shot.
Grace glanced around with uncertainty. “I’m not sure we’re allowed to leave? I mean, the cops?”
“I really doubt anyone is going to stop a visibly pregnant woman from leaving an area where there’s an active shooter.”
As it happened, Grace was parked two spaces away from me.
“Take good care, OK?” I said. Irrationally, I wished that I would see her again someday and we’d become friends. I knew we wouldn’t.
“Thanks,” she said, and then she hugged me. I waited until she pulled away to get into my car.
“It wasn’t even a shooter,” I said, as Jamie flew in the door just a few minutes after me, wild-eyed, and scooped me up in his arms. “It was some idiot kids setting off bottle rockets in the bathroom on a dare. They got arrested for criminal mischief. They said so on the radio as I was driving home.”
“I’m just so glad you’re OK, Mack,” he said, holding me tight. His fluorescent orange work shirt smelled like dirt and grease and Old Spice deodorant, with the familiar musk of Jamie’s own smell coming out in his sweat. I found it gross and comforting at once. I closed my eyes as he pressed my face hard against the rough fabric, surrendered to being held and breathing in.
That night, I woke up and Jamie was gone from our bed. I got up to use the bathroom and saw he was sitting in the dark living room, reading on his tablet.
“Everything OK?” I asked. He didn’t react.
“Jamie?” I pressed. When he still didn’t answer, I shrugged it off and shuffled to the bathroom. Too sleepy to bother.
As October continued, Jamie’s insomnia intensified. I tried to suggest he see a doctor, but he said no — and told me not to bring it up again, with such an edge in his voice that I believed him. It became the new normal that between two AM and four AM, he would be awake and reading, or pacing the apartment. And then, one night, I woke to find he wasn’t even in the house at all.
The first few times it happened, I said nothing. But the fourth time, I waited up to confront him. Sure enough, just a few minutes after four in the morning, he strode back into our home wide awake, with a smile on his face. The sight of him carefree and grinning gave me a sharp pain in my chest, and then I flooded with rage.
“Jesus!” Jamie said He jumped to one side and the smile evaporated. “You scared the shit out of me! What are you doing out of bed? Waiting here in the dark for me, like a fucking psycho?”
“Where have you been?”
“If I laid in wait for you like this, you’d say I was being psychologically abusive,” Jamie said gravely. “This is really obsessive and controlling behavior.”
“I don’t think it’s controlling to ask why you continuously leave home in the wee hours of the morning.”
“I just wander all over. Through the suburbs, into the foothills. The woods. I smoke cigars and drink beer in a paper bag. You don’t want me smoking in the house.”
“Are you cheating on me?” I held his gaze steadily.
He bent down and gave me a dry kiss — gentle, but firm. He didn’t taste like cigars.
“Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
I jerked my hand out of his. “You didn’t answer me.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Of course I’m not cheating on you,” he said, and stormed into the living room.
“Why didn’t you just say that, then?” Too angry to wait for an answer, I turned and slammed into the bedroom.
-
“When he joined the French military, they used his weird ravenous abilities to smuggle intel across enemy lines,” Jamie said. I had coined the term Weird Ravenous Abilities, because playful neologisms made his info dumps slightly more bearable.
We were in the living room on a Sunday afternoon in mid-October. Jamie was several whiskey shots in. His fascination with Tarrare had not waned, though it had plateaued a bit.
“They had him swallow a wooden box with a message in it for a French colonel who had been imprisoned by Prussian forces. They told him the documents inside the box were top secret. Even he didn’t know what was in them.”
“Dude ate a box full of classified intel? That’s actually kind of bad-ass.”
“Yes! Yeah. See, I told you, he’s fascinating.” Jamie seemed to understand that I was listening solely out of love. But he also appeared to think, for reasons I couldn’t discern, that if I just gave Tarrare more of a chance, I’d see what Jamie found so mesmerizing about his narrative.
“Anyway, so, he ended up getting caught about five minutes after he crossed into Prussian territory. They interrogated him and gave him a beatdown, and he ended up confessing the entire plot to the enemy.”
I was genuinely surprised. Jamie was a big fan of war movies and gangster films. He had the swagger about him of someone who enjoyed cracking skulls, and by all accounts of his youth he’d come by it honestly. “I’m honestly kind of shocked that you still like him so much. He turned coat after a single beating?”
“Yeah,” Jamie shrugged almost sheepishly. “He was kind of a pussy.”
“You are what you eat,” I said, before I could stop myself, and a flurry of giggles burst out of me. “Get it? Because he ate all those cats—”
“That’s enough,” Jamie said sourly, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, it goes along with my theory that he was possessed.”
“How’s that?”
“Think about it. In movies, every once in a while the demon strategically retreats and lets the human come to the surface, usually just in time to absorb violence or physical punishment.”
“So you think he was possessed and the demon made him get caught and when he was about to get beaten, it fell back? So he’d be the one getting the shit kicked out of him?”
“Right,” Jamie said excitedly.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve heard people say that in possession stories, the real conflict is between the demon and the person witnessing the possession. Like, in The Exorcist — the demon is there to fuck with the priest. So was Tarrare’s demon trying to fuck with the French Revolution?”
Jamie scoffed. “I always thought demons were just sadistic spirits who preyed upon human misery, and fed off the feeling of power they got from terrorizing people. Anyway, they chained him to a latrine for two days, waiting for him to shit out the documents. But it turned out the papers he’d swallowed were worthless.”
“Wait— what?”
“Yeah, there was nothing in the box he’d swallowed, except a dummy message. The French higher-ups were just testing to see whether he’d be a good courier.”
“Holy shit,” I cackled. “The Prussians must have been furious. Can you imagine?”
“Oh, they were,” Jamie said emphatically. “Yeah, their general ordered him to be strung up on a gallows. They put a noose around his neck. But then, at the last minute, they let him go. Scared the living shit out of him, and sent him back to France.”
“Poor bastard,” I said. But privately, I thought it was probably God punishing him for all the cats.
-
From October through December, Jamie and I fucked twice daily for five consecutive days on either side of my ovulation window. Which meant for ten days, we had a ton of sex, and then we’d be completely abstinent until the next month’s ten-day marathon. I had an ovulation home test kit, but Jamie said he didn’t trust it.
It was after one of our twice-daily lovemaking sessions in late October that Jamie went out to pick up dinner at the local Italian restaurant. While he was gone, I decided to design a t-shirt for him as a Christmas gift. Jamie collected funny graphic tees; I thought one with my “you are what you eat” joke and an image of Tarrare would be a unique addition to his hoard. Plus, Jamie loved my art; he was constantly trying to convince me to drop out of my PhD program and apprentice at a local tattoo shop.
Quickly, I sketched out a cartoon of Tarrare’s visage. I made the head of a cat peering from his open mouth, its face contorted in an unnerving, Cheshire-adjacent grin. I tried out several different taglines on tattoo-style banners: you are what you eat, or maybe eat more pussy, or when pussy bites back — but nothing felt right.
Jamie thumped on the bedroom door and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Hang on!” I yelled, hiding the drawing in a folder and putting it on the closet shelf.
“Why was this door locked?” Jamie asked, his brow furrowed, as I emerged from the bedroom.
“Because I was making something for you,” I grinned. “You’re gonna love it! It’s Tarrare-themed!” I wiggled my eyebrows.
“Really?” Jamie smiled a little, his curiosity piqued. “But you hate him.”
“I don’t find his life as fascinating as you do, but the gift is for you. It doesn’t really matter if I like him or not.”
“Well, thanks,” Jamie said. He puffed out his chest a little.
“You’re welcome.” I smiled up at him, and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thank you for getting dinner.”
-
“The doctor he got passed off to was the Chief Surgeon of the whole hospital, and he wrote in his diary about Tarrare, ‘The dogs and cats fled in terror at his aspect, as if they had anticipated the kind of fate he was preparing for them,’” Jamie read from his cell phone, seated on our living room couch.
I half-listened, trying to focus on moving my folded clothing and other sundry items from the armchair to my open suitcase on the floor. Every few items, I’d stop and cross things off my checklist. It was finally early December, and we were set to leave for Scotland the next day. Jamie had given in about the trip on Thanksgiving, and my parents had bought his plane ticket before we’d hung up the phone.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to pack for you?” I asked. We had to be at LAX by three in the morning, and he hadn’t packed at all yet.
Our departure could not come soon enough for my liking. Jamie’s weird interest in Tarrare had become the least of my worries. Since Jamie had stopped leaving the house for hours in the middle of the night, he was drinking more at home. He’d begun buying a weekly three-liter jug of vodka at Trader Joe’s, and every morning, a few more fingers of it would be gone. I worried about him getting hurt at work or pulled over for a DUI on the way there. When I tried to bring up the topic, Jamie would simply ignore me. His unaffected, neutral silence — and his entire demeanor, as though he literally couldn’t hear me speaking to him — should have been a welcome relief from his anger. But it unnerved me.
“I can pack for myself,” Jamie said with an edge in his voice. I knew he wanted me to shut up and listen to him talk about goddamn Tarrare some more. My back to Jamie as I put sweaters into the suitcase, I rolled my eyes freely. But I knew it would be easiest to just comply.
The info dumps had become relatively benign. Jamie would often intersperse them with anecdotes about his co-workers’ weird sociopolitical conspiracy theories. They were funny sometimes. And sometimes, if I laughed at them enough, Jamie drank a little bit less.
“He was killing dogs too, by then, huh?” I said flippantly.
“More meat on the dogs, probably,” Jamie said. He opened the vodka jug and poured himself a highball with a ghoulish grin, and I winced. An unexpected side effect of his increased drinking was a sharp decline in his personal hygiene. He had started tasting like tobacco all the time and I’d thought he was smoking more, but soon I realized he was no longer brushing his teeth. Then I realized he hadn’t been showering, either.
I’d tried to bring up hygiene as delicately as I could. The impact was nominal. I didn’t bother addressing that he was also sharpening his knife collection in the wee hours whenever he tried to drink away his insomnia. It was the combination of heavy drinking and playing with knives that worried me, but Jamie simply didn’t care. At the end of the day, they were his fingers.
“He was so desperate to avoid being sent back to the military, he told this doctor, Dr. Percy, that he’d do anything he wanted. So for years, Dr. Percy was doing all these medical experiments on him, to see if anything would make him less constantly hungry.”
“Medical experiments?” I echoed, throwing the last item — a pair of fuzzy Uggs — into the suitcase and slamming the lid down with far more force than was necessary or productive. “That’s a pretty grim phrase. What do you mean, exactly?”
“Some?” Jamie extended the vodka jug my way, nodding at the end table near me, which held a glass of juice I’d poured.
“No, thanks.” I sat down on top of my suitcase, to squish everything in as much as possible. “I mean, since we’re trying, I probably shouldn’t.”
“Suit yourself,” he shrugged. “Never saw the point of drinking cranberry juice without it.”
Jamie had become so habitually slovenly that I was afraid he’d give me a UTI while trying to impregnate me. This conversation about vodka and my cranberry juice happened at least once a week. I was at a loss for what to say. After all, it wasn’t like he didn’t know he was doing these things. What could I say to him that he wouldn’t find controlling? I thought this trip would be a good opportunity for both of us to relax and recalibrate a little.
Jamie broke into my thoughts. “They gave him opium and wine and tobacco pills, but none of that worked.”
I couldn’t resist laughing. “That’s, like, the rock star diet. That’s the diet of your youth!”
Jamie laughed too. “Probably why I was so damn skinny when I was nineteen. So then they tried giving him just a ton of eggs and water. You know, the SoCal yoga mom diet.” We both laughed and my anxiety eased up.
“Every time they tried something new to help him, it would work for a while, but inevitably they’d catch him dumpster-diving outside the back of butcher shops for organ meats. Fighting stray dogs for dead rats, shit like that. He’d kill the dogs and eat them, too, of course.”
“This story is getting really dark, really fast,” I said. “That sounds like such a tormented existence. And no one could help him? God, I would have just taken all the opium they’d give me, and stayed high all the time. I feel sorry for the poor bastard.”
“Yeah.” His eyes got that excited, intensely focused glint in them, the way they did when he sharpened his knives. “Just listen. This was back in the 1700s — sometimes you’d go to the doctor and they’d bleed you, to get your bad humors out or whatever?”
“Blood-letting patients?” I sat back in the armchair, juice in hand. It felt like a surrender. But I was done packing, done cleaning up from dinner. There was nothing left to do but talk, finish our drinks, and go to bed. Well, and Jamie still needed to pack. I tried not to fixate. It was his suitcase, his belongings. He could pack himself. I took a sip of my cranberry juice. It was noxious.
“Yeah, he started getting caught drinking their blood. Like, over and over. And then they’d catch him in the morgue — eating corpses.”
“Jesus Christ.” I nearly spit out my juice. “I feel like that would get you burned as a witch or something, no? But at the very least, I would have thought they’d have restrained him.”
“A lot of the doctors and nurses wanted him sent to an asylum. But remember, his doc was the head of everything. And he wanted to keep experimenting on him. So they kept him right where he was.”
“This is like so many horror movies rolled into one,” I said. The clock said it was ten minutes after ten. “Hey, Jamie, we should probably go to bed soon. We have to get up in a few hours.”
“Yeah, and then finally,” Jamie said, licking the shine of vodka off his lips, “He kidnapped a one-year-old kid and fucking ate it.” He threw back his head and laughed — a deep, raw sound that came round from his belly and turned jagged in the air between us. “An entire kid! Can you believe that shit?”
“Jesus Christ.” I recoiled, crossing my arms in front of my body, hands under my chin, leaning back into the armchair as though it could swallow me, protect me. I dropped my cranberry juice, felt the glass hit my pressed-together thighs. “Jamie. What the fuck? I have had multiple miscarriages this year!”
“Whoa, Heather. Calm down.” Jamie jerked his head back every so slightly, his expression stunned and almost wounded, as though I’d slapped him. He was genuinely surprised by my upset.
“I will not calm down!” I was yelling now, only because I couldn’t stop myself. “Why in the alien abduction icy probe fuck would you tell me about someone killing and cannibalizing a baby? Like that’s funny? What is wrong with you?”
“I forgot about the miscarriages, OK?” He sounded peeved, like I was ruining his good time. “I’m sorry.”
“You forgot?” My hands were in fists on either side of my juice glass, still cradled upright in my lap. I imagined picking it up and smashing it in his face, something I knew I wasn’t capable of doing. But I might be capable of throwing it like an axe at the sliding doors that led onto the balcony, shattering them completely. I thought about it for a minute. How good it would feel to throw something in that way. How satisfying the crack would be upon impact. As I imagined the sound, I relaxed my shoulders a little.
“Not forgot,” Jamie snapped. “Not like how you’re making it sound, anyway. I just don’t obsess about it all day every day, like you do. We’re trying again. Those other things, they’re in the past.”
My body quieted, I felt almost resigned. Helpless.
“You’re like a different person,” I said. “I don’t understand this insatiable obsession you have with some criminal asshole from two hundred years ago. I don’t understand why you snuck out of our house in the middle of the night for all of September and half of October. Or why you’re drinking three liters of vodka a week. That’s sixty-six drinks a week, Jamie. That’s insane.”
“You’re counting my drinks?”
It was all over now: his eyes were glassy with inarticulate rage, his breathing haggard. He wouldn’t hear a word I said.
I was too fed up to care. I set my glass down on the end table, harder than necessary. I leaned forward, baring my teeth slightly as I continued to talk. “And I don’t understand why you don’t brush your teeth anymore. Why you don’t shower, Jamie. How are you going to help take care of a baby? You can’t stay home, you can’t stay sober, and you can’t execute basic personal hygiene! And the man I married? Didn’t think killing babies is fucking funny.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jamie said casually, his expression detached and mildly amused. His glass was empty. He filled it again, taking his time, smiling as he savored te ritual of the pour. He was toying with me now; he was enraged, he wanted me to be upset too. He raised his glass and right before he took a drink, he smiled at me, “I’ve always appreciated a good dead baby joke.”
“Get fucked,” I said. I was shaking, but I stood up to leave the room. I was done listening to this. But as I walked past the couch, Jamie put out a hand, grabbed my wrist, and spun me around to face him.
“Here’s what I know.” He leaned towards me, his voice lowered with a quiet influx of anger. “I’ve done everything you have asked of me, and none of it is enough. You’re impossible to satisfy. You’re like a fucking succubus. In my mind, I’ve been calling you Tether instead of Heather for weeks now.”
I was surprised by how much his words hurt, although in some other part of my brain, I registered surprise that Jamie even knew the word succubus. I felt that familiar whirlpool sensation moving through my stomach and chest, tornado tracked by the tightening pain in my muscles. Anger, the word came again. I pushed it away.
“You’ve miscalculated, Heather. You fucked yourself over, trying to puppetmaster me like this.” Jamie’s eyes narrowed, his lip curled in contempt. Then, without warning, he grabbed my glass from the end table and threw it against the living room wall. It shattered, cranberry juice splattering all over the white paint and dripping down to the floor.
“Jamie!”
“You’ve finally pushed me too far, and now I’m not going to Scotland with you.”
I stared at him, speechless. He got up and slammed into the bedroom, taking his jug of vodka with him.
I sat on the couch for thirty minutes, waiting for him to calm down. Finally, I got sick of staring at the crimson splatter on the wall, retrieved a container of Clorox wipes, and began erasing it. When I had completed the task, I knocked on the bedroom door to ask if we could talk. No reply. I wondered if he was passed out. The clock read 11:33. I had no idea how that much time could have passed.
“Jamie,” I said through the door. I was crying. “We’re supposed to leave for the airport hotel an hour ago. Our flight takes off at five tomorrow morning. Can we please talk about this?”
Desperate, I tried the doorknob; it was locked. I waited another fifteen minutes, then finally gave up, called an Uber, and went to wait outside. I was lucky, in that I had packed my suitcase in the living room. At least I didn’t have to choose between buying all new clothes in Scotland or missing my flight. But I cried the whole way to the hotel.
I checked my phone obsessively once I got to my room, hoping Jamie would text me back or call. Nothing came through. Finally, I gave up, sleeping fitfully and crying by turns until two AM. Then I got up, showered, and made my way to the airport.
I wondered what Jamie was doing while I was on the shuttle and making my way through security. Passed out drunk? Regretting his choices from last night, and on his way to the airport? Drunk and ‘exploring the canyons,’ whatever that was code for? Did he love me? Was he cheating? Where did he learn the word ‘succubus’?
I considered texting him again, asking him one last time to please come with me. But something in me had changed during my miserable night of mourning. I wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, but I didn’t really want him to come anymore. The impulse was tepid and weak, but grew stronger as I boarded the plane. I was angry. I had space now to feel it without fear. I was relieved to be going to Stonehaven without him.
-
At the hotel, I took out my phone and set a timer. Then I checked my email. Forty-eight hours since I’d left our home, ten since I’d arrived in Stonehaven. Jamie hadn’t texted me, not even in response to my check-in when my plane landed. But he had, as I saw now, sent me an email.
I’m glad you chose to go ahead without me, Mack. It makes everything easier on me, and better for you in the long run. I think on some level you knew it was time. I know you’ll be upset, but whatever you might think of me now, I did love you. I tried my best for you. Take good care of yourself. Jamie
“The hell?” I wanted to be angry, but I felt panicked and hurt instead. Like someone had punched me right under my ribs. I couldn’t breathe.
I called him twice, But both calls went directly to voicemail.
His phone was off. He’d wanted me to go to Scotland so he could abandon me more easily. Fucking coward.
The timer rang. The pregnancy test showed a pale pink plus sign.
Holy fuck. I stared, barely able to comprehend what was happening. Jamie knocked me up, then mindfucked me into traveling without him so he could — what? File for divorce in Los Angeles? Why did he keep trying to get me pregnant? What the fuck was happening?
The little pink plus just kept getting darker. More real.
More indelible. More undeniable.
Barely aware of what I was doing, I wrapped it in several layers of toilet paper and placed it at the bottom of the trash can, under all the other refuse. Could I get an abortion in Scotland? Did I want one? Thank God I lived in California. I had at least a little bit of time to decide.
I began washing my hands.
I’d give myself twenty-four hours to process this. I’d figure things out tomorrow.
I dried my hands on the plush towel, hating myself for the hope I still felt — that Jamie would come back to me, apologize for his insane cruelty. Get help. Get clean. That we could still be the family we’d been trying to make.
In the living room, my parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, and in-laws were sipping cocktails, and there were trays of hors d’oeuvres. The television blared in the background. Should I say I’m not drinking? Would I just ask for seltzer? Was I keeping it?
You know what? Fuck Jamie. He could pay child support and stay the fuck out of our lives.
“My goodness, that woman looks so much like your neighbor,” my mother said, seated a few feet away from me. Distracted, I glanced up at the TV screen. An ash blonde news anchor with severe eye makeup and pointy lipstick was saying something.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I snapped.
“The woman who lives across the alley from you,” my mother persisted. “I used to watch her every morning, hanging up her laundry, while I was drinking coffee. That time I visited?”
“I remember,” I said, trying not to sound irritable. “I just don’t think that woman looks anything like her.”
“She’s the spit and image,” my mother said, incredulous.
“My neighbor isn’t blonde.” I wanted to be alone, to process the shock of Jamie’s betrayal. I felt like I was freefalling through an alternate reality.
“No, not her,” my mother said, laughing. She gestured at the screen, where a dark brunette stood in frame next to the ash blonde reporter. “Her.”
“Oh,” I said, startled. “Yeah, actually, she does look a ton like our neighbor.”
“She’s telling them about the perpetrator,” my mother said.
“Of what?”
“They just announced right before you walked in — there was another shooting in Los Angeles. Six people are dead, six more are critically injured.”
“And they said six other people are still unaccounted for, whatever that means,” my sister Annie chimed in. “But the cops took the shooter into custody alive.”
“Holy shit,” I said, as the camera panned back. I recognized my neighbor’s yard. Her husband’s truck. The laundry lines she dried their clothes on. “That is my neighbor. Was there a shooting in our neighborhood? Did her husband do it? Why are they interviewing her?”
“We didn’t hear,” my father said, cranking up the volume.
“He and his wife, both nice people, very friendly,” my neighbor was saying. “The wife — quiet, very sweet, a bit timid. He was loud and outgoing, but friendly.”
Before I could give any or all of the clichéd reactions — whispering No — no, it can’t be, bursting into tears, falling to the floor, fainting — the ash blonde said, “We have this photograph to share with viewers now, which we have been able to confirm the shooter posted to his private social media account just an hour before the attack.”
The photo was of Jamie holding an AR-15, posing for himself in our bathroom mirror. He was wearing the shirt I’d designed for him: my drawing of Tarrare with a cat’s head between his teeth, peeping out from his open mouth mischievously, with tattoo-style banners above and below:
What you crave will soon come / to consume you. And will.
about the author
Fox Henry Frazier is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who holds an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from University of Southern California, where she was also a Provost's Fellow. Her first book was selected by Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord as recipient of the Bright Hill Poetry Award. She lives in a haunted town in upstate NY, where she runs the small literary press Agape Editions and the magazine Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself.