Housewives by Nicky Peters
Image by Benjamin Elliott via Unsplash
Mornings were my favourite. Especially winter mornings, just before dawn in December when mist crept over the waves, the sky dark but ebbing into the bluish-grey of suffocated dawn, and the entire world of salt and sand was numbed by a layer of fog. No one would be on the beach except for a few dog walkers, usually locals. I could hide in that fog and the rest of the world would disappear. I only took my jacket and always went early, before Ronnie woke up and wanted his breakfast. It was a chill morning of faint misty rain and sopping sand when I slipped my trainers and socks off and sat on the rocks opposite St Michael’s Mount. I looked out at the castle, over the submerged causeway, wondering about the people who used to live there before it was National Trust property. What great figures had lodged within those walls, what history was written beneath those stones and oak beams. What violence played out there. That was the morning I found her body.
I was rambling across the rocks to a sheltered cove when I found her. At first, I thought she was a beached whale or a basking shark, maybe a ship washed ashore. She was huge, her loose fists larger than the shoreline boulders. The water had seeped into her body and washed away her features, leaving a bloated grey caricature of ears, fingers and lips. Her pale skin and sand-smeared body seemed part of the beach itself, absorbed into the ecosystem of boulders and salt foam. I could barely tell that she was a woman at all. It was the eyes that gave it away, cold as sea glass orbs, but they looked human enough, only unnaturally large and blue. But she wasn’t human. She was too big. I stood on the rocks looking down at her, my breakfast souring in my stomach. My cold hands scratched nervously at the scabs on my face. I chewed my lip, waiting for her to move. She didn’t.
I considered calling the coastguard or climbing back to the rocks overlooking the causeway, pretending I hadn’t seen her. If this was a woman, her body should be reported. Finally, I clambered down the rocks towards her. She was alone. How long had she been there? She deserved to be seen, at least. As the person who found her, I owed it to her. My bare feet met the wet sand of the cove, and I walked softly forwards. My toes sank into sludge, a mixture of sand, water, seaweed slime and something dark red and pungent. The air was thick, clogged with a metallic smell and the choking decay of seaweed. As I approached the corpse, I became aware again of her size. She was larger than the crabber yawls I’d sometimes seen in the harbour, but not so large as a whale. Her skin was spattered with blue-purple, dinner-plate sized bruises like limpets on the underside of a ship. Her clothes were dull brown and clung close to her body, soaked through with seawater. I watched her chest for a long time. A part of me still thought that she might get up. But she never moved. An eerie calm settled over me.
I approached her hand, reaching out with my own. I touched a blue fingertip and a chill seeped into my skin. She was cold, her skin slick and damp. There was a filmy mucus on her, almost like a frog’s, and as I looked closer, I noticed her fingers were webbed with the same thin film. Her skin was almost translucent – I could see the web of veins beneath it, the stillness of her blood, the shadows of muscles. I touched her neck and for a moment I thought I caught the faintest pulse there. But then it was gone. I traced my hands over her cheeks, her gashed lips, through her knotted black hair and down her body to her callused toes. I tried to guess how she died. Had she drowned? That was my first thought, her body swollen with water. But when I reached her face and touched her forehead, I noticed a large cleft between her brows. The cut was deep, a green haze bordering it. Blood had gushed down, saturating her hair and pooling in her ears, but most of it had dried into a crust. She’d been hit with something. My hands came away from her brow smeared the colour of red currants. As I pulled them away, a giant strand of hair came loose from her scalp. It fell to the sand with a muffled thud, thick and dark and congealed with the same liquid that stained my palms. I hesitated, then picked it up gently.
I left the body sprawled on the hidden cove and returned across the sand. I got back to the house at eight. Darkness pulled away into another grey morning. Ronnie wasn’t awake. He was sprawled out on our bed, though I hadn’t slept there since our honeymoon. Empty beer bottles and broken furniture littered the living room floor. I locked myself in the bathroom, stripped naked and stood before the full-length mirror. My eyes were blue and glassy now. The bruises around my legs, breasts, abdomen and shoulders were only just fading. I put my hands to my chest and began to work. I smeared my skin with the colour of red currant, covering every bluish blotch I could see with a soft, filmy coating of darkened carmine. It dried on my skin, but it didn’t flake. Instead, it seemed to seep deeper, easing into my skin like a tattoo. I picked up the giant hair I had taken and left the bathroom.
The mists had peeled away when I had finished. It was a sunny morning now, the warm rays of light dissipating the fog. I watched the seashore through the open window of our bedroom. It was time to leave. I left the giant black hair in Ronnie’s lap, his neck pale and slick. The dark blue ribbon of a bruise marked his throat, his eyes wide open and vacant like sea-glass orbs.
Words by Nick Peters
Edited by Tillie Holmes