The Fig Woman

"The concept of fate is weird in that it implies twisted forms of time and causality that are alien to ordinary perception, but it is also eerie in that it raises questions about agency: who or what is the entity that has woven fate?"

- Mark Fisher, "The Weird and the Eerie"

The Fig

The man dug with his bare hands. The soil was frozen, numbing his hands up to the wrist as sweat burned his eyes and dampened his spine. And yet, in spite of what felt like hours clawing at the ground like a dog, the frozen earth beneath the fig tree would not yield.

All at once, he froze. Was the earth bleeding? Was that blood in the snow?

Then he saw his fingers. He had worn his them down to the bone, pawing at the frozen earth, hands so cold he couldn't feel his fingernails snapping loose, the flesh wearing down. Chalk against a blackboard. His fingerbones gleamed bright in the moonlight.

He gasped inward to scream, the freezing air like a razorblade down his windpipe, but a soft thump beside him made him pause.

A dark fig dropped before him, plump, weeping milk from its stem, impossibly out of season.

He reached for it, picked it up with his trembling, bleeding, abbreviated fingers.

The fig was so ripe, it practically fell apart in his hands, begging to surrender its fruit to him.

Open me, Daddy.

He prized it open with his the sharp pins of his fingerbones, and what he saw nestled at its core nearly stopped his heart. An eyestalk slithered round, reaching for purchase in the larva-like innards of the fig, and a wide eye turned to regard him. Even in the dark, he could see an iris. The pupil dilated, focusing on him.

More figs dropped. They fell all around him, some of them the size of footballs. One burst as it hit the snow, and a length of intestine wormed free, inching toward him like a caterpillar. Another squelched open, and molars fell out.

Then the man screamed. He was too late.

The Witch

(six months prior)

"What do you desire?" the Witch said.

A blizzard muffled the world outside, erasure by whiteout. It was mid-July in the northern hemisphere. This shouldn't be happening.

"Honest to God?"

She gave a solemn nod.

"I want a woman," he said. "That's all I want. A good, traditional woman to marry and settle down with. A homemaker. Someone chaste, but submissive, if that makes sense."

The Witch's eyebrow twitched.

"Hey, I'm just being honest here. Don't tell me to be honest, then judge me for it."

She motioned for him to continue.

"What, you want me to be even more specific?"

"As specific as you can."

He described his dream woman in detail: her body, her temperament, her hobbies. When he was done, the witch mixed herbs and ingredients into a jar, including the tiny corpse of an enormous, dead wasp, then stoppered and sealed the jar in black wax.

"I've done my part," she said, setting the on the table between them. "To complete the spell, you have to bury your seed at the base of the fig tree."

"What fig tree?" he said, even though he knew. He just didn't know how she knew.

She stared back in silence.

"Alright. By seed, you mean...?" The man made an obscene gesture with his hand.

"Yes."

He laughed.

She stared back, serious as the grave. The space around her eyes was so blacked out with makeup it was as though two lumps of coal had sprouted eyelashes and sclera.

He cleared his throat, stifling another laugh.

"Bury it with this," she said, sliding the jar towards him.

He took the jar. Inside, the dead wasp curled in on itself. Less like a cashew, he thought, and more like a fetus. "How much do you charge for this kind of thing?"

"It's fate. You've already paid. Just don't come back."

He shrugged the nonsense away. What could it hurt?

The Woman

(later)

He couldn't move. His hands were smothered in bandages and the silk shibari ropes wrapped around his body in latticed knots and loops restricted his movements down to a few centimeters in any direction. It was like sleeping in a cat's cradle, threaded between her fingers.

She hadn't let him out in days.

The pain was constant, his body covered in cuts and scrapes and gashes. She didn't allow painkillers, said they were bad for him, that they were "unnatural."

He could smell her in the house. The scents of dark figs and spiced wine wafted around corners, mingling with the smell of fresh baked sourdough and cookies from the kitchen, and the rancid stench of urine and his blood congealing on the mattress.

The clack of high heels announced her approach down the hall. Then she was there, in the doorway: red lips, ample hips, enormous breasts that the buttons of her blouse could barely contain.

"Am I everything you ever wanted?"

She had asked him the same question every day. She'd crafted a flail out of an old leather belt threaded with rusty fishhooks from the garage. She held it by one end, letting those fishhooks sway in the air by her side.

He swallowed hard. "Yes."

She flashed a picture-perfect smile, and he flinched.

"You're so sweet," she said. Then her smile vanished. "I want kids."

"Okay. Sure. We should start trying."

"You promise?"

"Yeah, of course."

Her flail clattered to the floor. She pulled the tie loose on her flowery apron and let it fall. She reached up under her dress and pulled down her underwear.

"Wait, you mean right now?"

"No better time than the present."

She climbed onto the foot of the bed and crawled toward him.

He tried to tell himself to not get aroused, but it couldn't be helped. She was, after all, perfect.