Anthrax

Violet looked at her oatmeal and her mouth flooded with the clammy sheen of saliva that often accompanies a wave of nausea. It reminded her of the consistency of those small globs of spittle he would hack up into the old rag of plaid shirt he called a handkerchief. The urge to vomit lulled and died in the base of her throat, as quickly as it had initially appeared. She forced her spoon through the glue-like paste that sat sadly in the bowl. She tried to avoid looking at him for the rest of the meal.

It was the first time he had eaten properly in days, and certainly the first time they had eaten together in perhaps as long as months. This made the distraction of his laboured eating even harder to bear; it was such a rare sight. Sometimes he would emerge from his stupors and demand gruel; a sloppy, tepid fuel for another binge. Violet could make it sweeter if she wanted to - she could stir in some syrup or sprinkle fresh fruit in there. But she chose not to; she instead made her oatmeal as purposefully bland as possible. As akin to prison food that outside cuisine could be.

Friends and neighbours, who had long since visited their property, described Violet as quiet and dutiful to her husband. This was consistently misconstrued. Behind the pursed lips were a set of ever-grinding teeth, cracking and sliding against one another in a rhythmic chatter of frustration.

“Vye,” He slurred through a mouthful of gloop. “You do the best oatmeal,”

She stole a glance at him from under her lashes. They had started falling out - no, she had begun plucking them out of absent-minded annoyance - recently, and so they were thin, sparse and cast shadows of spiders’ legs onto her cheeks. Her lips twitched into a feigned smile, “Thanks, dear,” she said flatly.

She hated the way he called her “Vye”. Even her full name was too much for his addled brain to muster nowadays, apparently. And she detested the nickname anyway - it made her sound like that fungus-riddled bread that made the Salem girls crazy and dream up witches in their midst.

Violet liked to read. It was all she could do when he was in one of his stupors and the work on the farm was all but done. In the summer she would settle down in the field, hitching up her skirt so that she could crack a book onto her lap while the lambs tottered over on their growing limbs and sniffed curiously at her. In the winter she would edge close to a pathetic fire she had poked and prodded into life and wrap herself in the old tattered quilt her mother had sewed for her when she had been lying, bored and frail, through hours of chemotherapy.

She liked non-fiction, mostly. She enjoyed marvelling at things that had somehow occurred beyond the boundaries of the cavernous void that was their farm. They may have well have been stories to her. The fall of Rome, the Reformation, the French Revolution - all were as distant to Violet as a Brother’s Grimm fable. And yet the notion that they had indeed happened, however high they appeared to teeter on the vertigo-inducing precipice of history, kept her scanning through every epoch for information on famed catalysts of chaos.

There was a part of Violet, one she didn’t care to give credence to so much, which enjoyed sucking up the finer, more macabre aspects of these historical fables. Her favourite book in the last year had been one she had picked up on the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre in 16th Century France. Though, she would not readily admit to herself that the image it conjured of bodies strewn in the blood-laden streets made up for a great deal of the reasoning behind her championing it as being amongst her more revered titles.

After the oatmeal, her husband slinked off to the living room, where he resumed his day-long task of rolling around on the couch. Violet, in the rare instances where he actually vacated the lump of sweat-slicked leather, noticed that the cracked cushions beneath him had now become imprinted with his silhouette. Its worn and weary foam mirrored the juts and curves of his dozing form. The sight had made Violet wrinkle her nose in ill-masked contempt.

The crescendo of his rasping snores rose and fell like the irritated stirrings of a night tide. Violet set herself on the task of feeding the ewes, and was about to open the door when there came a sharp knock from the other side of it.

Her feet in her fur-lined boots stalled on the threshold. Her eyes narrowed into harsh lines of suspicion. They no longer had a peephole; her husband had done away with it when he was in one of his paranoia-fuelled fits, cleaving the door in two. The wind had whistled through the large crack he had made for two weeks before Violet was forced to call someone out to fix it. He had, of course, been too high to bother with such a mundane task. Violet was comforted only by the fact that their farm was too isolated and disheveled for any malicious wanderers to bother with them. Her husband’s habits had also rendered them too poor for any valuables to lie within the house’s walls. She was sure the nearby town gossiped about such a fact as often as there came a new birth or death. Her jaw tended to clench with the mere thought of dry lips tutting and heads shaking in pity for her sorry state, married to a layabout farmhand-turned-junkie.

Violet’s hand closed around the cool metal of the door handle. She turned it slowly, and heard the lock slide out of its set nook. Wrenching the door open, she was greeted by a tall, gangly man set against the dull canvas of overcast sky. His thin lips spread wide, revealing an incomplete set of yellow teeth sunken haphazardly into purpling gums. His sallow skin was beset with lesions and bruises, as if he were rotting on the inside, and his skin was merely a thin wrap of cellophane keeping his skeleton from tumbling out.

Violet bore her own, more unified teeth in a listless return smile. “Can I help you?” She said flatly.

“Roman in?” The man grunted.

“Yeah, but he’s out of it,” She retorted bluntly.

“I’ll come back tomorrah,” The man offered.

“Is it a pick-up?”

The man seemed shocked by the frankness of her statement, then his erratically-toothed smile emerged from behind thin lips once more, spreading across the crags and sores littering his face like a fresh river over dry earth. “He already sent me the cheque,”

His spindly hands fumbled inside the breast pocket of his jacket for a moment before closing around a package enclosed in grease-stained brown paper. “‘Nough there to last him a month or so,”

Violet took the package from him. Her fingers brushed his as the transaction was made; her calloused fingertips felt as though they might break open his paperish skin merely through touch. “We’ll see,” She replied curtly.

The man laughed. The sound was sharp initially - the bark of an aged dog - before tailing off in a meandering wheeze. “He sure does need to take it easy of late - never in all these years have I visited the farm so much in one damn season,”

Violet feigned a taut smile, but her eyes remained hard and glowering. The man seemed blissfully unaware.

“Give Roman my regards,” The man said. “He sure is one lucky man to have you behind him, Miss Vye,”

Violet clenched her teeth behind her constant hardlined smile. There was the nickname again. On his rare trips into town he must have waxed lyrical about his dutiful wife ‘Vye’. The irritation made her blood curdle. “Why thank you,” She said stiffly.

“An’ I hear there’s been an anthrax outbreak here lately?”

Violet refrained from rolling her eyes at the new subject matter; she wished he would leave. The sheep needed her and, following that, a pot of strong tea was calling her name. “Yes - we managed to quell it before it hit the whole herd, but we lost a lot of good cows this year,”

Her tone was more solemn than she had intended. It had managed to peek through the tough facade she had chosen to bear when she opened the door that day. The memories of the cows wild eyes as they lay, limbs flailing in fruitless efforts to regain their footing as their bodies gave way to death, was still painful for her. They had not known what was happening to them; their once strong frames could no longer support them as their organs had shut down. Violet remembered sitting on the grass outside, weeping as she watched vital members of her herd fail. Cows whom she had spent morning after morning singing to as she gathered their sweet milk, became suddenly unrecognisable to her in their panic.

The disease had rendered the gentle cows she had considered friends into beasts unaware of their faculties as blood and bile spilled from their gnashing mouths onto the hay.

She could still hear their weakening cries at night, drifting in from the now half-empty barn.

Roman had shot up and dozed on the couch through it all. When she had tried to tell him what had happened and what the consequences would be for their milk intake that year, he had merely shook his head and shrugged. He flopped onto the gathering of cushions that made up both throne and chamber. Violet saw his eyes were barely open.

“Nasty business,” The man said sadly, drawing Violet back from the memories of the last few months.

“Yeah,” She failed to muster a greater response. Her eyes darted to the small mound over by the clustering of trees that siphoned off their farm with forest. She had dug for two days, gloves and balaclava tightly bound so that no spores could infiltrate her system, before enough earth had been disturbed for the cows’ carcasses to be dragged into. Roman had actually emerged from the house prior to his first hit of the day to help her with the first ten. Then, he had started to sweat and shake, and so he wandered back down the hill to bake his precious powder into golden brown. As the day wore on and Violet’s scarf grew gradually more saturated with her own sweat and spittle, the stench from the pit had become nauseating. Her eyes had watered from the enveloping scent of necrotic meat, mingling with the gritty earthiness of the soil she committed them to, one by one.

The acrid stench had stayed in her nostrils for days after. She had slept for long, breakless periods as exhaustion from dragging huge corpses into her hastily-hewn pit consumed her weary form. When she was hauled from hours of dreamless rest by some deep and distant notion, she could still smell the decaying flesh on her body, even though hours had been spent in the shower, scrubbing it from her. It seemed to cling to her; a pestilent goblin with its gangrenous claws deep in her back.

Even on the farm itself, she could not escape it, even now.

The mass grave was shallow, so she always gave it a wide berth when tending to her duties. She had also re-routed the sheep pen so that they wouldn’t stumble over the infectious mound. The bump in the earth jutted from the naturality of the landscape like a dislocated bone, popped from the socket of pits and falls she knew so well. Sometimes she could still pick up the miasma of death wafting over to her on the wind. She was probably imagining it. Roman had told her as much when she had come stomping indoors with her long nose scrunched up and a pinched look on her face.

Ironic, she thought, coming from a man who saw faces in the leaves of their house plants.

“Well, I hope it doesn’t strike again for you folks any time soon,” The man said, a genuine smile written over the deep crevices beside his eyes.

“Thanks,” Violet murmured “And I hope Roman keeps making his payments,”

The man chuckled, almost surprised to hear such wit on the tongue of a lady farmhand. The sound of his laugh made Violet clench her teeth again. Between the visitor and his humble buyer sprawled on her couch, she would soon be admitted to the town clinic with a bad case of lockjaw.

“Oh I always let him know when they’ve dried up,” The man said, a wan smile spreading across his rotten mouth. He bid a polite farewell and stumbled over the hill towards town on spindly legs.

She thought for a moment how often the well had dried.

The door closed. The click of the metal jig in the slat made the sigh slip involuntarily from deep within her chest. She had not told the man how she wrenched a leg bone from the last corpse she had dragged onto the pile. Nor had she told him how she had found a box in the house and placed the bone within it, before sealing it tight and committing it to the earth, too. She knew the thick layers of tape she had used around the lip of the box would keep the spores in, and that Roman was too out of his mind to even notice its absence from the living room architecture.

When she closed the door, she leaned against it and stewed in the stony bitterness the unexpected encounter had bestowed on her. Her lips were empurpled by the pressure of pursing them together for so long. She thought of the box, and the stark white bone that sat patiently within it.

She did not know how long she stood with her back against the door, listening to the soft wind lick every nook in the threshold. Nor did she know how long the sheep had been pining for their feed.

“Vye!” She was jerked violently from her reverie by his slurred cry.

She composed herself for a moment before padding down the hall and edging herself around the doorframe. She peered in and saw him stirring beneath the sweat-stained throw. His limbs were flailing blindly, kicking up the blanket so that it began slipping from him. She saw the sheen of sweat, rising from the disorientation of a long nap, sitting on his stubbled jaw. She watched him struggle. Revulsion sat in the back of her throat like bile.

“Yes, Roman?” She said flatly.

“Oh shit,” He murmured, “There you are,”

He raised his gaze in an attempt to observe her. His eyes rolled in their sockets, and eventually came to focus on her knees. His eyelids trembled at any feeble attempt to greet her face.

“There a sheep in here?” He said, commencing the phrase with a smack of his lips. She could see they were flaking. She could easily have gone into the kitchen to replenish the glass of water she left on the floor beside him every morning. Instead, she lamented on the fact that the knitted throw he was thrashing about in like a great slug, littered with holes from where he had let lit cigarettes slip from his grasp after a hit, and tie-dyed with sweat, was the same quilt that had once been bequeathed to her by her mother. It was one of the few tangible links to her family she still had following the swift move to Roman’s bright idea of an isolated farm like the one he grew up on. And here he was, soiling her mother’s handiwork with his idle filth. Her jaw tightened, and she remained with her shoulder pressed against the doorframe, watching him.

“A sheep? Roman, this is a new one, even for you,”

“Nah, I heard it bleetin’ and shit… just a second ago,” His foot clipped the empty water glass standing on the floorboard next to him. A dull thud filled the air.

“I was just at the door, fetching this. Special delivery,” She tossed over the brown paper package she was suddenly hyper-aware of being tucked under her arm. She launched it carelessly, and it landed at the end of the couch, where Roman’s feet were gathered under her mother’s desecrated throw.

Roman examined the crinkled exterior of the package for a moment, before his eyes bulged in a mixture of shock and fury. “You be more careful with that!” He barked. It was the first time Violet had seen her husband animated in months.

“Oh come on, it’s all wrapped tight in there,” Violet retorted, holding back a sneer.

She watched as Roman, child-like the way he moved, grasped the package and clumsily stuffed it under the blanket. She saw the unusual lump in the throw where it sat against his chest, his arms folded over it like a toddler with its favourite teddy bear. It was such a ridiculous sight, it caused the bubble of bile and gas to hover in the back of Violet’s throat again. She looked down at her earth-stained shoes, finding them a more pleasant sight.

“Still, cost me a lot of money,” Roman said.

“Cost this farm a lot of money,” Violet shot back, digging her heel into the floorboard.

“Oh don’t start with me, Vye!”

“It’s about time someone did, Ro!” She placed emphasis on the nickname she never used, mocking his thin affection for her and the promising start they had once embarked on at the beginning of their marriage. She had called him ‘Ro’ all the time in those days. But, he had eventually become like a stranger to her, and so she had regressed to treating him as such.

When they had first met, Roman had been full to the brim with an energy that Violet had found infectious. She had learned a couple of months into their relationship, after witnessing him scoop a string of powder into his flared nostril, that his boyish sense of adventure was fuelled by cocaine. The revelation had irked her, the two had argued, Roman had produced a litter of tried and tested excuses he would continue to summon for the remainder of their lives together, and Violet threatened to walk away. She cursed herself now for not having done so.

Roman had promised never to use again, and Violet had not seen a trace of the sickly white powder for a long time. Following their marriage, and Roman’s suggestion they move to the farm his uncle had left to him in his will, Violet had fully bought into the notion that Roman was forever changed.

Then, one day, Roman had been gallivanting about from pen to pen on the back of a horse they had since sold to a neighbouring landowner. When Violet had finally managed to calm the bemused beast down to a canter slow enough to grab its reigns, Roman had slumped against the steed’s muscular neck, huffing a steady stream of laughter. He had then thrown his hands up as if a criminal caught in the chase. The act was seemingly too much for Roman’s dopamine-flooded mind to manage and he began guffawing loudly into the dry earth. There he remained, sprawled like a crime-scene chalk shadow, while Violet processed this gross violation of her trust.

Violet had cursed at him as his sluggish body fell into her, winding her. She dropped him clumsily on the parched earth, before leading the horse wordlessly back to its owner. She had barely looked in the aging, rugged man’s face when she crossed into their land, too ashamed to mutter more than a garbled apology for her husband’s behaviour.

She had trudged back to the farm with her head firmly angled towards her feet. She would likely have collided with the fencing separating the two properties had she not known the fell of the land so well.

As she neared the borderline, she fell into the hard wooden fence, the thin jeans of her dungarees permanently scuffed by the force with which she hit the gnarled barrier. Her stomach gushed with a pressing hotness and she stooped over quickly to vomit. Her stomach heaved up more bile several more times before it quivered with emptiness. She stared at the brown sludge spoiling the grass at her feet and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.

Violet had known then that Roman, no matter how many times he promised otherwise, would place his priorities elsewhere than her and the farm. With both their names tied to the land, and a newfound love for the animals on VIolet’s behalf, she also knew that she was irrevocably intertwined with its wellbeing. Her perpetual punishment for trusting Roman on a whim would be that her happiness would be forever blighted by his presence. While she was imbued with a vitality from her pastoral habitat, that life-essence would be subsequently drained from her being. That cycle, she knew, would begin from that day.

She had crossed the borderline with a clenched jaw, listening to the dry grass crackling beneath her feet and silently praising herself for having made the unknowing decision to tie her hair up that morning before setting about her chores.

That night, she and Roman had bickered. Once roused from his fog by the smell of her cooking, he had almost immediately began spewing the typical excuses he presumed she wished to hear.

But Violet, distant and short in her responses, had focused on chopping vegetables and had not turned to address him once. This had angered Roman, who had always expected attention on command. This was when he erupted, slamming his hand down on the chopping board beside her. She stared, brow arched in unamused surprise, at his hand, and was struck by how smoothe they were. Her eyes flicked back to her own, clutching the vegetable board’s edge and a blade in the other. They were littered with callouses. The index finger which ran against the knife’s handle was wrapped in flaking skin which was almost scale-like from constantly working the land and changing the animals’ feed.

Not trusting herself entirely, she purposefully set down the knife beside the half-diced potatoes and stared pointedly back at her husband, in time for him to begin his bombardment of insults.

Violet had pretended not to be affected by his words. Yet, behind the hard-set jawline her teeth ground together. She was doing all she could to stop herself from recoiling into the corner to weep. She curled the now free hand that had once held the knife into a ball and pressed it into the wooden grooves of the chopping board so that he would not see how badly she shook.

Roman told her that night, perhaps in the last truly animated and colourful display of venom she would ever see from him again, that he consumed drugs because of how much he was bored by their life on the farm. Contrary to what she had told herself in the vain hope that he may simply be a tortured soul she needed to fix, Roman faced no trauma that the drugs were the easiest solution for. He told her that, instead, drugs supplied, if only briefly, the only excitement or sense of feeling he could otherwise fail to glean from their miserable life together.

“Yeah! I rushed into this - I thought all this could make me happy, but guess what? All I am is fucking bored,” He spat. The malice in his eyes, mixed with the eagerness to gratify himself with the sight of her squirm at his words, burned into her. Her face grew hot. It was the unbearable heat of angry shame.

“I’m bored of you,” He snarled, “I’m bored of this quaint little house, and I’m bored of this pipedream. My father’s boring pipedream he pulled out of his ass for me, because he wanted to carry on with his boring legacy of mud, shit and boredom,” He flapped his hand over his head, referencing the drab surroundings of their well-worn kitchen, before jabbing his thumb in the direction of the fields and the modest barns that punctuated the flat greenery. “It’s all fucking boring, and no one ever listens to me when I say it - fucking boring. And I blame you, Vye. You were really something when we first hooked up, you got me going. But when daddy dearest suggested this plot of land was ours for the taking you just rolled over. You softened, and even you, who I never thought would mellow, became boring too,”

He sounded like a petulant child. Slamming her fist into the chopping board so hard the knife rattled suggestively, Violet bit back tears. Clearing the mist from her eyes, she fought back the sob creeping up her throat before uttering the strangled cry, “Then why don’t you do something about it and leave?!”

Roman’s eyes remained wide for a moment before he settled back into himself in an alarming rate of calm. His eyelids lulled into slits of a quiet smirk. “Because, it’s a comfortable boredom, dear,” He sneered. “I can exist on this farm and shoot up and get all the joy I want from it. I’ve found my perfect little pocket of happiness in this dump,”

Violet stared at him, aghast. The heat had now drained from the high points of her cheeks. She now felt the cold tingle of revulsion nestling into her shoulder blades.

“This way, I’m comfy and entertained, and you still get to tend to Old McDonald’s fucking farm,”

Her eyes flashed down to the knife glinting at her seductively beside her closed fist.

“You wouldn’t dare,” He said, grinning with a cockiness that furthered her urge to snatch the knife from its resting place.

“Why not? If you died, nothing would change. I do most of the shit round here already. There’d just be left horse theft,”

Roman fell into a bout of laughter. He reached over and unfurled her fist, before guiding her fingers with his own over to the knife and closing them around its hilt. “I just know you wouldn’t Vye. Not like this. Too violent - not your style,”

He then slipped away into the living room, leaving her clutching the knife and trembling still. The pie in the oven would be burned beyond the hope of salvaging it.

In the bitter silence their arguing had left in its wake, Roman’s thin protests sliced cleanly through, “All I had asked was whether there was a Goddamn fucking sheep in the house,”

Ears trained to hear his requests through even the most slurred speech, Violet picked up on his grumblings even as she had turned away from the sitting room door.

“You know good and well there was no sheep in this house, you idiot,” Violet spat, “Even the dope isn’t a good enough excuse for that. You heard me at the door, talking to your dealer. If you wanted your precious cargo, I’d appreciate you having the courtesy to just ask for it outright, instead of spinning some bullshit,” She was surprised at how venomous her voice sounded. And yet, like a cobra’s fangs sunken into deer flesh, she could not staunch the flow of poison once it had started. She could not unclip herself from his hide - the tirade was too sweet.

“You want me to just say ‘Hey, gimme my dope?’ from now on, is that it?!” Roman cried, his voice unusually shrill. His eyes had begun to focus, and in them seemed a doleful look that was trying desperately to appeal to what little pity she still possessed.

“At this point, I’d respect it more,” Violet said.

Roman shrank back into the couch, like a scalded dog retreating from his owner’s withering gaze. “You know I don’t actually want to be like this,” He whispered. She could see tears brimming on the boughs of his eyelids. She saw his long lashes, coated in the crud of sleep, and thought of how he had looked on their wedding day. He was a shell of that rugged, joyous man shielding his eyes from the tempest of rice showered down upon them by smiling friends and family, none of whom they saw anymore. None wanted to visit. None wanted to see what they had become, and she didn’t want to subject them to that sobering truth, either.

“You’re sick, I know,” Violet pushed the word through clenched teeth.

“I am sick, yeah! I know I should never of picked up the dope in the first fucking place!” Roman cried, “You think I lie here and sleep, that’s all I do?” He looked at her with a flash of accusatory hurt. As the fog of dope-induced bleariness left them, Roman’s dark eyes produced a gaze that seemed to strike her squarely in the chest. She did not dare to meet it.

“Sometimes,” He continued, “I wish I was out there, sitting in that pile of - of death! With all those poor bastards you had to bury,”

Violet bit her tongue. She had been subjected to one of his merciless soliloquies of shame before. Their seasonal appearance had blunted their effect. With every passionate monologue was the expectation from Violet that he would vow to change; to stop subjecting her to the stresses of the farm she worked alone. He never did. Instead, he continued to express the An audience to them practically on rote, Violet did what she always did in the midst of such a storm: she remained silent.

She thought about the box.

Buried at the back of the house, it lay dormant. It was like shells stored in the barrel of a prized gun mounted to one’s wall - a slumbering threat.

As Roman continued his speech, Violet made a silent vow to herself to dig up the box. She would do it this evening - after dinner, when Roman had taken his next hit.

“I’m sorry,” Violet mumbled when she was aware that silence had fallen between the two. The simple placating phrase was enough to make Roman fall back against his sagging mound of pillows.

The phrase, unlike the box which she now held in trembling gloved hands, had been utterly void. Scarf wrapped around her mouth and nose, she lifted the box out of the earth and held it at arm’s length. Seeing what the pathogens it contained had done to a large percentage of her herd, it was the equivalent to holding live bomb. Sweat pooled on the hill of her upper lip, an uncomfortable dewiness settling beneath the scarf.

Swiftly, she thudded over to the small shed over the way. It was a small wooden hut where Roman’s tools had sat untouched for years, before they had been taken up by Violet herself. Sick and tired of the animals being neglected, Violet had organised the entirety of the abandoned shack’s contents into accessible, usable devices for the farm. The door creaked as she kicked it open, still holding the box as far from her torso as she could manage. The rusted hinges cackled and screeched as it oscillated momentarily on its directional curve, before resting almost perfectly ajar. Violet shimmied inside and closed the door behind her firmly with her boot.

Her hard rubber heels clicked and scraped against the warped wooden panels acting as the shed’s floor as she ventured over to the small table and placed the box upon it. She leaned over the table for a prolonged, thoughtful beat, before she removed the heavy granite pestle and mortar from the deep inner pocket of her jacket. She had retrieved them earlier when the plan had first been set in motion, beads of sweat springing against her temples as she lifted them from their designated cupboard space and into her coat with as little resulting noise as she could. They clunked merrily against one another like those strange oval magnets that she had played with as a child; the ones that vibrated ever so slightly when the pull of their fields caused them to collide.

Violet placed the perversely smoothe and inviting utensils beside the box. She eyed the large mud-stained yellow gloves hanging like industrial marigolds from the rustic hooks she had placed on the wall. Pulling them on, she tried to ignore the unsteadying feeling of her heart thudding against the cavity of her chest. It threw itself so violently against her ribcage with every beat that she thought she could see the vignette of her pulse on the edges of her vision.

Inhaling deeply, she held the trembling breath until her heart was forced to slow. Still, her veins seemed to pulsate like electrical circuits as she readjusted the scarf over her face. The burning current raced up and over her shoulders as she grasped the wooden box and prised open its lid.

And while the coursing of prickling heat continued to consume her as she gingerly reached in and lifted the bone from its coffin and into the large, gaping mouth of the mortar, something changed. She now moved, not with hesitation, but with a certainty of one giving themselves unto utter automation.

The first blow of the pestle splintered the bow of the bone into dust.

She was surprised how fragile the earth had made the cow’s skeleton, even when concealed in her little wooden casket. The gasses of degradation had seeped through the walls of the pyxis and infected the marrow. Once a vibrant, damp centre was reduced to a fine, sterile cylinder of ash held loosely together by bone as fragile as eggshell.

She worked into the night, her bicep spasming and her forearm screaming out for rest. Yet, despite her body’s protests, she pressed on until satisfied with the even, yellowish powder gleaming up at her. Once satisfied, she covered the mortar with a thin scrap of burlap she found strewn in the gloomy corner of the shed, and carried it into the house. As she breached the front door, she was careful for the wind not to infiltrate the edges of the burlap and set any of her poison free. Closing it firmly shut with her elbows, she slipped past the front door where Roman slept in front of the low hum of the television. Keeping the bowl safely concealed in its makeshift dressing, Violet placed it below the sink before rushing back outside. There, hidden from view of the house by the shed’s lopsided shadow, she removed her gloves and scarf and burned them in a small metal silo she had once used many years ago for chicken feed; another of the shed’s many hidden gifts gathering dust.

She tossed the pestle in there too and let it smolder under the dark blanket of night.

Thankful that Roman’s most recent hit had kept him placated long enough, Violet cautiously reentered their home before sprinting upstairs and showering herself several times over. As she lathered her hair for the third time, her mind was filled with the contorted expressions of her beautiful cattle as they had all succumbed to the disease. The disease that had settled in their bones like radium, and slumbered there even as they were covered by earth.

She was then dimly aware of a stinging sensation in her head and an arching in her arms. As she became trapped in her reverie, with the water thundering down over her torso and feet, she had sunken her nails into the flesh of her scalp. The faintly-scented shampoo had pooled into the small grooves she had crafted there, the suds marrying with the thin slits of blood they had begun to exude.

Once she had rinsed herself clean, Violet stepped from the shower and into her slippers and robe. At the door, she hesitated, her hand hovering over the doorknob. Insider herself, she wrestled with the urge to jump back into the shower and wash herself all over again. Her scalp was singing with the searing remnants of her shampoo sitting in the cuts lining her skull like a halo of thorns. With each synchronized throb of the wounds a thought swirled about her mind like debris at the belly of a tornado: was it enough? Did she accidentally carry some of the residue of the bone on her body somewhere? Did she successfully rid herself of the risk of infection? She thought of the cattle again and fear sprang up in her throat like ice. She did not want to experience the same agony that had consumed her livestock; that had caused their impressive forms to wither and weaken in front of her, and their eyes pop with the endless, silent scream for her to cure their agony.

Another intake of breath; she held it, and swallowed. The sharp sliver of fear ran back down her throat and settled uncomfortably in her stomach; still present, but for now, subdued. Reminding herself that she had take every precaution, she padded determinedly down to the kitchen and planted herself in one of the stiff wooden chairs crammed in beside the breakfast table.

There, she remained until the sun broke over the horizon, rousing her remaining cattle from sleep.

Violet organised breakfast as she did every morning. They had not spoken since his rousing speech, but Roman’s vocal appreciation for Violet’s oatmeal the previous day led her to assume that he would not protest at being presented with it again. Besides, Violet had found it to be the perfect medium in which to conceal the powdered bone. It mixed in as discreetly as the tablespoon of sugar she had thought it best to offer Roman that morning. Despite his affinity for bland porridge, Violet had thought it best to include a little sweetener, so as to disguise any powdery taste from the smattering of bone she had sprinkled over and stirred into the magma of hot oatey pulp.

Violet first heard Roman complaining of nausea the following day. Surprised by how quickly the infected bone had resonated in Roman’s system, Violet had initially reserved the scintilla of hope that exploded in her chest. Perhaps it was simply a bad effect of the drugs. Perhaps he was in need of a hit and had woken from his fourth nap of the day already submerged into the preliminary stages of withdrawal.

Yet the nausea persisted even after Roman had shot up. Violet had tossed him a tupperware bowl to throw up in before retreating to the safe distance of the doorway. Retching, punctuated by the occasional gurgling and wet splattering amplified by the bowl’s base, filled the air. Roman wailed weakly when the bout of vomiting drew to an uncertain close. Shakily, he set the bowl on the floor. From where she was standing, Violet could see over the rim and its contents; thick, unprocessed oatmeal mixed with the brilliant vermillion of bile. She made no attempt to conceal her disgust, and wrinkled her nose.

“Vye, what’s wrong with me?”

“Bad hit?” She offered frankly.

“No such thing,” Roman grunted, doubled over beneath her mother’s soiled quilt.

Violet shrugged. Silence fell between them momentarily, before Violet straightened up in the doorway. “Give me a holler if the bowl gets too full. I’ll fetch you another. I’ve got to tend to the sheep,”

She ignored the whining protests of her husband as she slipped out the front door. His cries came to her, like the muffled cries of a lost child, through the windows of the front room as she headed over the grass. The cluster of little floating clouds grew clearer as she crossed the field, soon revealing the black legs that kept them upright, and the almond-shaped heads protruding from their white mass. Their faces were kind, and their curiously horizontal eyes bore no malice. They were utterly peaceful. For the first time in what was surely years, she felt something akin to peace, too.

As Violet opened the gate to their pen, she found herself smiling.

Roman complained of a burning fever over the next couple of days, alongside the perpetual nausea that ebbed and flowed from him like a particularly aggressive tide.

Violet collected Roman’s bowls when he was passed out, and started noticing streaks of blood in them. She initially equated this to the constant spew of bile stripping the lining of his throat. But, with each check she made she saw more and more marking the fresh vomit she carried away and disposed of, until it had become burdened with an alarming scarlet hue.

Violet came back from tending to the cows one afternoon and was startled by the sound of their toilet flushing. She hesitated on the threshold, watching a shadow form through the wooden banisters of their modest staircase.

Roman’s peaky face soon appeared round them. A pale moon hovering in the darkness of their wintry abode. Its luminescent quality was begotten by a thick sheen of sweat. His pores throbbed with it. His grey shirt was an entire shade darker than she usually recognised it to be, it was entirely drenched in perspiration. He looked awful.

“Vye, I don’t feel too good,”

“What’s wrong now?”

“Shitting my insides out, that’s what,” Roman moaned, fumbling his way down the stairs. His arms, pockmarked from years of endless needle use, shook slightly as he gripped the handrail. Violet remained where she was, rooted to the doormat as if it were her marker. She watched him struggle. A pang of guilt erupted at the sight of his trembling, pathetic form.

“Then you need a doctor,” She said.

In that moment, under the veil of her usual indifference, Violet’s nerve split in two. Perhaps this was too cruel. Yes, she had suffered under Roman’s neglect, but maybe it wasn’t outlandish to conclude that she had talked herself into a rut. A bitter one that had caused her to fester and fume in a well of dank hatred. She had seen a single way out - a pinprick of light which had signalled, in her tunneled vision, only one outcome to satisfy the longing of the sour bile coating her insides.

Now she had nearly hauled herself out, the situation had grown a little clearer.

Perhaps this situation did not have to end with the finality she had originally intended. Maybe something as simple as a hospital trip before the disease truly took hold would result in the same definitive separation from Roman that she so deeply craved. The doctors would surely identify his drug misuse and offer an extensive programme of rehabilitation. Violet, despite Roman’s protests, would vouch for his willingness to be submitted to the programme’s mercy. She would then retreat to the farm and, with great haste, take measures to ensure Roman could not return and poison her newfound peace ever again.

She would tell his sallow-faced dealer, whenever he returned, that Roman had taken an inevitable tumble into a bout of ill health and was recovering at the nearest clinic. She would even, despite her reservations and simmering resentment, invite the dealer into the house, and faithfully adopt the guise of a mournful housewife fretting over the state of her husband’s health while completing her duties on the farm. She would feign a hitch in her throat as she took the curious man into the living room and showed him the nest of blankets Roman had made for himself in one of his many stupours, still imprinted with the ghost of his slumbering form. She would lie through gritted teeth, and tell the man that she had not been able to bring herself to clear the couch just yet. It allowed her to cling to the hope that he would be home sooner rather than later. Any skepticism the dealer had would melt away like midnight wax as he watched Violet hover in dutiful longing beside the woven throws, coated with Roman’s morbid scent of idle musk.

Roman’s wavering voice, hoarse from straining to vomit into the kitchen’s entire supply of pans and bowls, cut through her reverie. This interjection shattered the vivid array of plans she had begun to construct for herself, and instead made the decision for her. “I ain’t goin’ to no fuckin’ doctor,” He spat, his face contorted with disgust.

“Why not?” Violet sighed, half-regretting the challenge as soon as it left her lips.

“You know why!” Roman barked, a trembling hand coming up to meet his brow. It wiped away the beads of sweat resting there like early morning dew on grass. He cleared his throat gruffly of the membrane of phlegm that had gathered there, before continuing his assault. “They’ll lecture me once they find out what’s in my fuckin’ system. They always do. I’m not goin’ through that,”

With that, she watched as Roman ambled resolutely down the stairs

Violet’s face set into a hard mask as she stood alone in the hall. Roman’s unknowing resignation to his fate had caused the scintilla of mercy that had fluttered in her chest to rapidly extinguish. She heard the distant creaking of the couch springs as Roman clambered stiffly into his usual pit.

Not staying to hear the groans and sighs that would soon follow, Violet threw open the door and immersed herself in the cacophony of bleats and brays that her livestock greeted her with, instead.

Some days later, with Roman’s condition worsening, Violet had spent barely any time in the house. She busied herself constantly with odd jobs around the farm, refilling troughs and changing hay until her forearms ached. She even packed herself lunches in the morning, while the wheezing rhythm of Roman’s snores drifted in from the front room, so that she wouldn’t have to return for a solid eight hours.

On one fateful occasion, she had forgotten to pack a carton of milk. Throat prickling with thirst, Violet eventually buckled and snuck back inside to fetch a drink. Silence reigned in the house, and as she set foot on the threshold, chilled milk carton clutched in-hand, she thought she had successfully evaded notice.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Came the strained cry from beneath the pile of rotting blankets.

Violet silently uttered an incantation of curses before breathing deeply in a bid to compose herself. She peered through the crack in the door and saw Roman’s pallid face glaring at her from the mound of fabric that had become the couch. It was developing, like a tumour, its mass multiplying to grotesque proportions. The layers of fabric had almost fused with the emaciated figure stirring beneath them. In the resounding silence, an uncomfortable clicking sound made its erratic rhythm.

Peeling back the blanket’s edge, Roman’s vomit crusted lips became visible. His eyes popped helplessly in their sockets, and Violet was eerily reminded of the revenants that shuffled across the screen in the old zombie movies they had frequented at the local drive-in in their youth. The comparison caused her shoulders to hunch, even beneath the hood of her thick coat, in a deep shiver.

Even Violet, who had watched in agony as the disease had claimed the majority of her animals, had been shocked by the way the disease ravaged the human body in such a short amount of time. She saw, even from a distance, how the vibrant, marigold bile had matted into the week-old stubble. Her eyes traveled down to the floor, where various stains surrounded the collection of pots lining the couch. The smell slithered through the door and Violet struggled not to conceal her disgust.

The consistent clicking sound, which she had presumed to be the rusting mechanisms of the old clock her mother had gifted them upon moving into the house. became unshakably present in the foreground of Violet’s mind again. Her stomach stirred upon the disquieting realisation that the sound’s origin was Roman’s teeth smacking together as his jaw spasmed frantically with the fever coursing through his body. Beneath the sea of blankets, she could see Roman’s body was bunched up and seizing periodically with the bitter tempest of disease.

Immediately defensive, Violet emitted a growl of rhetoric. “Who else is gonna tend to the animals, Roman? Will you tell me?”

Roman’s accusatory demeanor quietened, before softening into one akin to a small child complaining they had scraped their knee on gravel, “I can’t warm up,” he whined. The more vigorously he shivered, the more his cocoon of blankets rippled like some bizarre body of water. As his knee jerked one of the layers out of place, a flash of metal appeared, followed by the sharp clattering sound of a spoon hitting the floor.

Violet’s eyes traveled to the spoon, which glinted at her almost sardonically in the prevailing gloom. She saw a thick crust of golden brown, pooled and dried in the centre of its curve, and knew instantly that Roman had been using. She wondered within which layer of woolen sediment the matching tourniquet, syringe and lighter also languished.

Roman, evidently, had been watching her fearfully from beneath his fabric fort. His voice, wavering violently, trickled out to her and caused her to grimace, “Going cold turkey would only make it worse,”

Violet’s shoulders sagged. She knew he was right. A swell of calm suddenly rose within her; a jarring, yet satisfying contrast to the steady panic which seized her husband’s fading form. She was, in that singular moment, abundant with a blissful numbness that could only be equated to total apathy.

Whatever small dose of comfort Roman could bring himself in these final days, Violet supposed, he was welcome to. She was not to scald him for it, or even view him with contempt. While she loathed him and the strain he had placed on her for all their years of morbid union, he was still her husband. For those initial, short-lived days of pure, untainted romance.

“Yeah, fair enough,” She said, as softly and simply as the clanging of a child’s triangle, before slipping away again.

As Violet tended to her cattle she noticed that one of the elderly cows had collapsed. The poor creature was keeled over in the corner of the barn, its legs tucked beneath it as it huffed its last breaths at an agonizingly slow rhythm. Its eyes were wide and strained as it struggled to keep a grasp on life’s essence. They roved the interior of the barn wildly but likely saw nothing. Occasionally a younger cow or calf would pad over and give an inquisitive sniff, or nuzzle the sickly beast’s head. No reaction from the elder animal was gratified. Instead, Violet watched with a pang of sadness hitching in her gut like a bundle of barbed wire, as the cow faded away before her eyes. The barbs seemed to scrape against her innards with each breath, until she was dimly aware of the tears rolling down her cheeks.

She reached out and stroked the still beast, before her hand drifted to the smaller form of the calf who had tried to comfort its elder, still shifting its weight from hoof to hoof, aware that something was not quite right. She brushed its surprisingly soft snout with her fingertips and wept until the barbs gradually relinquished their thorny grip on her insides. She gradually pressed herself into a standing position, her knees singing with the relief of no longer being in contact with the unforgiving cold floor of the barn. A tiredness swept over her as she swayed in the barn, the last of her tears tumbling onto the collar over her jacket.

When Violet returned she went straight to bed, ignoring the weak, warbling cries floating up the stairs after her, as easily as if they were the idle brays and moans of her livestock settling down for the night. She let the rhythmic pattering of rain on her window drown out Roman’s cries and dipped into a restful slumber.

When she awoke the next morning Roman was dead.

Her careful padding into the hall, wincing at every creak her footfall caused on the old wooden stairs, was for nothing. As she approached the doorway and peered round the frame, she blanched violently upon seeing Roman’s bulging eyes staring at her accusingly.

She opened her mouth to chastise him before an uncertainty spread through her chest like the insidious warmth of whiskey running down one’s throat. His eyes had taken on a peculiar glassiness that caused her to hesitate. His hand was hanging limply over the edge of the couch, as though he had been reaching out to plead to the empty doorway for help. The skin around his eyes were tensed and the purpled, broken blood vessels blooming beneath the skin as though he had strained to scream in the seconds before the blackness claimed him.

As her eyes searched his face, heartbeat bellowing through the chambers of her veins to a distracting din, she noticed the trail of vomit drying on his chin.

He must have choked.

Violet clutched the doorframe with some difficulty. Her hands were prickling with an impending numbness as the gravity of the situation weighed down upon her. She tried to picture Roman’s final moments, perhaps earlier in the morning, the sun still far from dawning the horizon, while she had slept soundly. Her first unbroken sleep in years.

He had been in a dozing stupor, his body on temporary shutdown in a feeble attempt to preserve him. Suddenly, the urge to vomit had arisen in his gut. But the body, in its forceful state of rest, had not reacted in time. By the time Roman’s eyes flew open, Violet supposed the vomit had been pooling in the back of his throat for some time before his conscience broke through the exhaustion.

Lying on his back, Roman’s eyes had likely bulged as his brain caught up with what was happening to him. He may have clawed at his throat as the thick sludge stopped any air from passing his windpipe. His legs may have thrashed between the pile of blankets he had made his duvet. She did not know. All she knew is that Roman had barely known what was happening before death’s eternal grasp tightened around his throat with frightening finality. The only thing he had managed to do before his lungs shuddered and gave out was reach out for the empty door frame in a silent plea for her help.

Violet cast her vision away from the vacant stare of his glassy eyes and got to work, refraining from thinking about how he had once looked in life. Though, she could not help but suffer the occasional flash of Roman’s grinning, chiselled face as he turned to her in the movie drive-in lot after witnessing a particularly grizzly scene.

Violet’s back was screaming in protest as she dragged the bundled corpse of her husband into the field. She mopped her brow before stooping again, bundling Roman’s gradually stiffening feet into her hands. Once sure she had a solid grip, she hauled him into the barn, oblivious to the curious stares her cattle offered her as they grazed in the nearby field.

Unable to disentangle him entirely from his blanket fort, Violet had peeled back some of the layers and left the bottom throw as a makeshift burial shroud. She had been sure to cover Roman’s face with one of his blankets, so that she wouldn’t glance over her shoulder and catch him glaring vacantly at her with that void, yet oddly accusatory, stare.

Flies were already gathering around the body of the elderly cow, still slumped as if it were sleeping, beside one of the hay bails. Had it not been for the stale, murky aroma of death slowly filling the barn like a poison, one could have easily mistaken the animal for a late sleeper, abandoned by its herd for the crime of sheer laziness.

Heaving the dank air through her nostrils, Violet stoppered the wave of bile rising in her throat by swallowing hard. The ball of saliva gathered from beneath her tongue corked the vomit for the time being. Blinking the sweat successfully from her eyes following a few steadying beats for breath, she snatched the sickle from the trophy hall of tools hanging from the far wall.

Foresight had told her to sharpen it days earlier. She was glad she had, though she was pleased that the cow’s unexpected deterioration had provided it with a slightly easier usage.

She dropped to her knees and immediately hooked the fang of the blade into the cow’s stomach, making her mark right between its front limbs. Grasping the rusted handle with both hands, she dragged the blade through the cow’s abdomen, until an unpleasant squishing sound could be heard. Relinquishing her hold on the sickle as her momentum drew her to the cow’s udders, Violet almost toppled backwards from the force needed to tear the animal’s skin.

But she had done so, and before long the bluish array of guts breached the rough tear in the animal’s hide. They splattered onto the straw-strewn ground with a cold, wet thud.

Violet wrinkled her nose at the wave of putrid gas that followed from the crevice of punctured flesh. The bile rose again, and was stoppered once more. She knew she couldn’t allow herself to buckle, or the task would never get done.

Pulling on a pair of Roman’s old farming gloves she had stuffed into her jacket pocket, Violet gingerly prised apart the cow’s stomach and began methodically emptying its insides onto the floor beside her.

Sometimes her fingers would hit something soft and unbearably slippy even beneath the tough gloves. The cold, blood-slicked organs were alien to the touch, and yet distantly familiar on sight. She tried not to give them too much thought, however, tossing them aside with a mix of haste and disgust before recognition could truly set in.

Once satisfied that the cow’s innards had been emptied to the best of her ability, Violet turned to where Roman lay, sprawled in front of the barn door. The way his feet stuck out from the blanket was comical enough for Violet to suppress a throaty bubble of hysterical laughter. The bubble was quickly replaced by another tingling tide of bile. She grimaced, licking the sweat that had pooled on her top lip during her toil. Then, without much more hesitation, she went to work again.

Despite Roman’s modest height, stuffing his body inside the cow was not easy. This bizarre sarcophagus was not tailor-made, and so Violet found herself holding her breath as she forced Roman into a more curved position.

The advanced rigour of his corpse made this even more of a chore.

Violet huffed deep, trembling breaths as she sat Roman upright, trying to ignore the glassy eyes staring at her from the sliver of blanket that had fallen away from his face.

Grunting, sweating and screaming, Violet pushed on Roman’s shoulder blades until there came a resounding snap.

Like the dismantling of some grotesque puppet whose strings had been severed, Roman’s head toppled forward until it came to rest on his thighs. It was as if she had fractured the wooden rod propping his body upright. The greasy, tousled hair from days on end of melting into the couch cushions peeked at her from his shroud. His matted crown, underneath which sickly yellowish skin bloomed, was all that reminded Violet that he was not the giant, prized doll from some antique collection.

With some relief, stuffing him inside the cow was now a great deal easier.

Years from working, practically alone, on the farm had made Violet strong. This, doubled with the heavy secretion of adrenaline from her brain, made her persevere through the next stages of Roman’s burial.

Still, it was beginning to grow gloomy and overcast by the time she had dragged the foul flesh-made coffin into a distant patch of field, away from where her animals finished up their grazing.

Her legs threatened to buckle with each step as she advanced over the uneven ground to the shed in order to fetch the remainder of the gasoline she had used to burn the infected paraphernalia some days earlier. Snatching some matches from one of the small utility box in the damp corner of the shack.

When she returned, she did not squander any more time. The sun was lowering, and if she paused a single moment more than she needed to, Violet knew her body would give out. Darkness would swallow her, and perhaps so would her nerves. If she woke tomorrow, would she possess the same unwavering reserve to press on with the task? She realised she could not run the risk of allowing her nerve to falter.

The sweat-sodden pall went up first. She could see the tendrils of wool peeking from the large opening in the cow’s chest. Then, like the mouth of a great furnace, the flames burst into vibrant, flickering life. Scintillas drifted into the air above her, lighting the growing gloom like the strangest, tiniest stars. The flames, writhing as though possessed with some great ether of being, licked the opening of the cow’s corpse before engulfing it entirely. The acrid stench of singed flesh and hair told her that inside the grotesque cavity, Roman’s flesh had begun to smolder. It was a smell both familiar, but not so; it had all the notes of barbecued meat, but was elevated above that of the decaying cow by its distinct sweetness. Harsh leather being curled and tightened by flame was now infringed with a nauseating saccharine that made Violet take a few staggered steps back.

As the light flickered and strobed over her face, she became aware of the spidery shadows stretching out over the high points of her cheeks. With some initial confusion, it dawned on Violet rather slowly that they were her lashes, now a great deal fuller than they had been while Roman had not languished in the grips pestilence. With even steadier realisation, Violet triumphed in the knowledge that she had not plucked them for weeks, now. Her habits, spurred by Roman’s parasitic presence, had withered until near obscurity. The tendrils of flame bathing her face in undulating puppets of light and shadow did their best to disguise the grin creeping across her jaw.

A disturbance in the gloom caused the widening smile to falter. She noticed the thin figure of Roman’s dealer watching her from the borderline as she mopped her brow and stood back to admire her work.

Thinking she would panic, she was surprised about the calm tide that washed over her as she squinted through the wind at his slight, willowy figure. To older, failing eyes, he could have been nothing more than the base of a young tree sprouting sheepishly from the horizon’s edge.

With her back to the plumes of flame billowing out into the sky, Violet gave a small, inviting wave.