Page 51 of Grave Love
With careful steps, I circle the tree. A figure catches my eye—almost like a hollowed-out lifesize doll hunched against the trunk. Shoulders propped up, chin curling into the chest. Legs stiff before the body. Clumped blond hair. A leathered face, the layers peeling back, revealing spots of gray bone, still sticky with rotting flesh. The breasts are sunken and thrashed, the gnarled ribs broken in the middle; they were obviously hacked to piecesbeforeshe died. A palmetto bug skitters across the cavernous chest, then crawls between the thighs, disappearing completely.
And then I see it. The gash on her neck. Like he used a saw to take her last breath.
This isn’t his mother. She’d be more decayed than this.
But it is one of the others.
Sharp pain stabs through my tongue, then copper slithers over my taste buds. I pinch my lips together, then glare at Blaze as if it’s his fault, but he wasn’t the one who bit my tongue.I did.And somehow that reaction reflects this realization.
Blaze truly is a killer.
I never truly believed Blaze when he said he had killed women. Even with the corpses I saw on a daily basis at work, his claims seemed so far out of the everyday world that I refused to accept it. He was a fantasy, a man who was pretending that he could give me what I wanted. And maybe one day, I could die pretending like I meant something to him, even if I had to kill myself to prove it.
A sour, dry scent wafts around us. I sniff it in, willing myself to understand it. It’s different from most of the bodies that come through the mortuary. Slightly bitter. Old. Months—possibly years—have passed. I don’t know how quickly bodies decompose in the Florida soil, but in the end, it’s the same as the corpses at the mortuary, isn’t it? A brittle, rotting body. Contorted. Forced into the right shape. Still submitting to the world around it. Like a seashell, washed up on a shore, the holes of past carnivorous snails unrelenting as they forced their mouths through the hard exterior, just to suck the life out of the mollusk within. Leaving the shell worn. A fragment of its former self.
As far as I can tell, this corpse was never submerged in the ocean. It was once buried here, in the earth. Laid bare to larvae. Worms. Rodents. Any scavenger—including Blaze—could use it for themselves.
It could’ve been buried right in the box where I tried to masturbate.
For a brief second, I see my mother. The deep sockets. Her broken neck. A blurry image of a black-haired toddler watching a box get covered with dirt.
I used to wish I could’ve seen my mother’s corpse. I guess there was comfort in it—closure, maybe. I thought it would give me the answers I was searching for. The reasons why I wasn’t enough.
Now, I realize it wouldn’t have helped me. Rotting flesh or ashes, I still would’ve been haunted by her death.
My mother must have felt like the world was walking all over her too.
“Who is she?” I ask Blaze.
“My third.”
His most recent kill, then. She doesn’t get a name; she’s simply a number in a sequence, like the first grandchild in a hopeful lineage of many. Being Blaze’s third seems more valuable than being the first in a big family. Even if Blaze kills hundreds after her,after me,she will always be his third. When he realized that he needed something different.
Someone like me.
“What about your first and second?” I ask. I hold my breath, my fingers itching for his touch. I don’t remind him that his first kill was his mother; like the third, she’s been reduced to a number.
“My mother is buried near your rejected grave,” he chuckles. “I wanted to feel like I did when I first killed her. I tried to find blonds that looked like her.”
I turn back to the corpse. Blaze’s mother must have had blond hair too.
My hair is the exact opposite.
Will he still kill me if I don’t look like them?
I shake my head. We need to focus onus.On our agreement.
“Why are you showing me her?” I ask.
“Why am I showing youthis?”he asks, correcting me. He kicks the corpse’s legs, and the head rolls to the side, barely hanging on to the spine. “You should know exactly what you’re getting into if you’re my fourth.”
If.
There’s a choice in that. A variable.
His murky eyes, shrouded in darkness, glimmer with the faintest hint of moonlight. And that soullessness pierces through me, beckoning me to see the truth behind his words.
I tell myself that this corpse is a legacy to him. A string of dead women are evidence of his power.
