Original writing work (or something)
This is a story about a necrophiliac who really isn't. Or something. 2202 Words. Concrit would be appreciated.
Do you know how hard it is to be a necrophiliac? On the list of sexual fetishes, this is definitely one of the toughest. No, let me rephrase that - there’s vore, and then there’s unbirthing, both of which are equally physically impossible. So some would say I’m lucky. Though honestly what I’m doing right now - perching on the side of a highway, waiting for someone to get hit by a car at two in the morning - is not one of the high points.
Do you know how hard it is to store an entire body? It’s not just something you can put in my freezer. In this Californian weather the body stays good a day, maybe two - and then the neighbors will start complaining. You need special equipment.
I held jobs as a gravekeeper, as a coroner, a burger-flipper, a hand in a processing plant. Right now I work the graveyard shift as a janitor in a hospital. But it is so very hard to get time with the bodies - alone.
People don't talk about it much, but when they do, they get angry. They paint pictures of drool-encrusted neckbearded basement dwellers and slavering hand-wringing Hannibals. They don't paint me - a regular guy with a regular face.
I like to think I’m a pretty decent person. I pay taxes. I drink only moderately. There was the time I ate those weird brownies that made me shit bricks for an entire day, but nothing else. While others were looking at glossy magazines - and later, glossy computer screens - filled with busty blond girls, I was looking for roadkill. I found a whole squirrel covered in green fuzz.
In my line of fetishes, you don’t get much choice. Beggars can’t be, you know. I think I would prefer soft skin and red hair, if I could choose. But I can’t.
Which is why I’m here. It’s the third night in a row I’ve sat, crouched on damp grass, half-hidden by some scrub on the edge of a lonely highway turnoff, smoking a cigarette for heat, hoping there’ll be a car accident.
Fantasy is almost as good as the real thing. It’s a curvy, empty, rail-thin California highway. I hope for a drunken frat boy driving, veering into a big-rig as the drink dulls his reflexes against the rain-slick road. Or a girl, straw-yellow hair and cheeks red with laughter, living on borrowed time, going way over the speed limit in her daddy’s car, feeling invincible with youth.
They die, and I - I salvage the body, bring it back on a blue plastic tarp I have stashed in the back of my truck. I’ve parked it on a lonely back road, hidden from the main highway. I could carry him or her - or, at least what parts I can find. I’m a decently sized guy, and young enough - I could manage it. I have everything planned out, set up at home. A plastic-covered, easily washable area. A human-sized icebox, the kind they use in those fancy seafood restaurants you see off the main drag. It completes the illusion. I could do this, and the thought arouses me like none other.
(I have a severed foot - got it in a motorcycle accident. As far as I know, the guy made it out alive, but I have his foot - he won’t walk again without it. If the surgeons had found it, they could have reattached it. But I stashed it away in my icebox carefully, unwilling to give away my one memento. I’ll move it to a jar of alcohol this weekend.)
I dream about death. About the frozen look on someone’s face, blackened, charred flesh. Mangled stumps where limbs used to be. Of slivers of bone protruding in awkward angles. I have an active imagination. I think about removing the gastrointestinal tract from a cooling body - leaving 12 inches of colon, just in case - then the kidneys, liver, everything else that’s in the way. At this point, anal or vaginal penetration seems so pedestrian. I push into the hole in their diaphragm, imagining a corpse giving one more deep, gasping breath, pressing the esophagus neatly into itself. I push against the bottom of a once-beating heart.
Blood would be in the cavity and - the excitement makes me flub lighting my next cigarette, and I drop both the lighter and the pack onto the dry grass. I reach for them, and the movement makes me pitch over onto the road, my cigarettes spilling everywhere.
Headlights rush towards me as I stumble to pick them up. My hand closes around my lighter, and the lights blind me. My mind goes blank for a second.
“Hey, do you need a lift?” It’s a woman’s voice.
It’s still dark enough, and I’m still blinded by the headlights. My mouth gapes open and closed like a dying fish.
“I nearly hit you! You obviously need help. It’s cold. Come in.”
My hand still clutches at my lighter. I flip it shut, oddly embarrassed, my cheeks coloring in the darkness. I feel like a small child caught doing something they shouldn’t.
She has large, brown, expressive eyes. She’s got that no-nonsense look about her, tied-back hair and loose jeans. A conservative blouse - but then again, it’s cold. She’s on her way to San Diego. I can see her wondering what I’m doing on a boring stretch of road, chain-smoking, no car in sight. I could be high, I could be lost; I certainly don’t look like I’m waiting for someone to die. She motions, and I climb in. I can walk back to my car, anyway.
“So, you mute or something?”
“No. I… I was lost.”
She takes her eyes of the road for a split second, glancing at me. I stare at her cotton shirt, stretched tight over her breasts. She’s older than I am. Late thirties, maybe early forties - in contrast to my thirty-two. I’ve the younger, boyish look, however, so I can imagine her thought process: helping out some poor, high, lost kid on the side of a highway at two in the morning on a weekday night.
“Helluva place to be lost, ain’t it.”
“Yes.”
Wispy strands, not long enough to make it into her ponytail, curl over the back of her neck. I have a very good view of it from the passenger seat, as she checks the left rear-view mirror.
“So, where you from.”
“I live... around.” I make a vague gesture with my hands.
“I almost hit you like that, stumbling into the middle of the highway. Good thing I was going slow.” Irony in its purest form.
I cough. “Thanks for picking me up.”
She’s nice. Beautiful, even. I wanted to ask her about her life, and then fantasize about her death. Would it be slow and drawn out, perhaps torturous? maybe burning or fast - a piece of shrapnel for a quick death?
I’m not usually the awkward kid at the party, but it’s been too long for me, too long. I love her voice. It’s soft but with that hard, accented edge to it. It’s unpolished, with some interesting angles. I would love to see it cut short.
“What led you to pick me up? I could be a serial killer.”
The conversation is stilted, so stilted. But I want it. I want her so badly I can feel it.
“It must be cold, on the side of the road. And besides-“ she laughs, going into her pocket and pulling out a Taser, “I have insurance.”
The car goes silent again. I wrack my brain to see if I have anything worth talking about. But I have nothing. I am nothing. Besides the humping-dead-bodies thing, at least. No special talents outside of taxidermy; no interest in sports, art or music. I don’t keep up with current affairs. I haven’t realized it until now, but life is a staggering void of so-so unimpressive averageness.
I have no friends - I don’t share enough of myself with other people. But I feel the compulsion to share myself with her. All of my secrets - I want all of them to end with her.
In my imagination, we talk about art. We talk about love. We talk about my deepest fears, the ones I don’t even know. We talk about hers - I want to know it all.
We make small talk. She asks where I’d like to be dropped off, if I have any friends or family in the area. I ask her the same. We both dance around the subject, give vague answers, until there isn’t anything left to talk about.
It’s a uncomfortable silence, the kind you have with people you don’t know at all.
She’s the one to break it. “You know how to drive, right?”
I wordlessly show her my California license.
“This is gonna seem abrupt, but I’m going to take us to the bridge.”
We pass a sign saying ‘Viewpoint, Next Exit’. I look out the window, unsure of what to say. Her arms flex as she turns into the rightmost lane.
“I’m going to jump off it.”
She wants to die. She is telling me she wants to die.
I don’t want to ask why. Not after fantasizing about her death for the past half-hour. If she wanted to know she’d have told me. Does she want me to talk her out of it? I don’t know. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself, in love with the idea of being in love, to notice. Her eyes are sad. The way she grips the wheel is resolute. I want to put a hand on her arm, tell her that whatever she decides, she’s still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“You can take the car, if you want. I drove far away from my family - and what few friends I have left. I want this to be clean.” She laughs, for real this time, a harsh barking sound. Now that I’m actually listening, I notice a certain strain in it. “I have cancer, you know? Leukemia. Third stage. They told me it’s irreversible.” She blinks once, twice. “I’m not going to let it get the best of me.”
Her hair is fake. A wig. I can tell now. It must be my fantasies again, combined with the semi-darkness and the cool yellow-orange glow of the dashboard - and her hands, which seem so very thin. With every movement, she strains to control the wheel. She’s probably much younger than my first guess - five, maybe ten years younger. Suddenly she feels like a bird to me: a tiny, dying bird.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be bedridden. The chemotherapy rendered me nigh-retarded. I used to be the soul of the party, get it? But now my friends don’t come to visit any more. I just watched daytime TV for hours on end - I couldn’t even wipe my own ass without help.” A pause. Even she seemed surprised at what she’d just divulged in one go, to a complete stranger. “I used to be a tennis player.” She looks down, at her shrivelled arms.
Isolation. Incompetence. It must have been horrible, soul-crushing, for a free spirit. I’ll bet anything that her journey here was one of back roads, of shitty motels and small-town diners. My hands shake a little as I fumble for a cigarette. She neatly plucks it out of my hand, rolls down the window, and throws it out. The look she gives me makes me shrink back a little. Smoking is bad for you.
“So I stopped taking the pills. Stopped going to the sessions. Fuck them. Fuck them all.” She laughs again. “This is about as far away from them as I can get. And I think it’s about time I end this, you know?”
The car screeches to a halt. It’s the Highway 480 viewpoint, freezing outside, and I grip my one, thin jacket around me. We get out of the car. She hands me the keys, closes the doors, leans on the low railing of the bridge. She takes a deep breath. The night wind howls at both our faces.
“You’re not going to stop me?”
I shake my head.
“Most people would. I guess you’re just odd.” She laughs again, this time carefree, joyful. “I like that.”
She balances one foot on the railing. It’s a 400 yard straight drop. Below us, the lights of some generic Californian suburban community wink knowingly. It’s a perfect moment.
Time appears to slow down. I think about how elegant her death would be. I don’t have enough materials on me to salvage the body, but I could be back here four hours from now. I’ll make my way down to the bottom of the cliff, and take her - or what’s left of her. I’ll put her remains in my freezer and keep them as long as I live. No one would ever know. No one ever needs to know.
She steps onto the railing, balancing precariously. I open my mouth, and suck the freezing night air into my lungs.
“Wait.”
I would be most appreciative if some writing-styled peoples on my friends list would tell me what they think.
Do you know how hard it is to be a necrophiliac? On the list of sexual fetishes, this is definitely one of the toughest. No, let me rephrase that - there’s vore, and then there’s unbirthing, both of which are equally physically impossible. So some would say I’m lucky. Though honestly what I’m doing right now - perching on the side of a highway, waiting for someone to get hit by a car at two in the morning - is not one of the high points.
Do you know how hard it is to store an entire body? It’s not just something you can put in my freezer. In this Californian weather the body stays good a day, maybe two - and then the neighbors will start complaining. You need special equipment.
I held jobs as a gravekeeper, as a coroner, a burger-flipper, a hand in a processing plant. Right now I work the graveyard shift as a janitor in a hospital. But it is so very hard to get time with the bodies - alone.
People don't talk about it much, but when they do, they get angry. They paint pictures of drool-encrusted neckbearded basement dwellers and slavering hand-wringing Hannibals. They don't paint me - a regular guy with a regular face.
I like to think I’m a pretty decent person. I pay taxes. I drink only moderately. There was the time I ate those weird brownies that made me shit bricks for an entire day, but nothing else. While others were looking at glossy magazines - and later, glossy computer screens - filled with busty blond girls, I was looking for roadkill. I found a whole squirrel covered in green fuzz.
In my line of fetishes, you don’t get much choice. Beggars can’t be, you know. I think I would prefer soft skin and red hair, if I could choose. But I can’t.
Which is why I’m here. It’s the third night in a row I’ve sat, crouched on damp grass, half-hidden by some scrub on the edge of a lonely highway turnoff, smoking a cigarette for heat, hoping there’ll be a car accident.
Fantasy is almost as good as the real thing. It’s a curvy, empty, rail-thin California highway. I hope for a drunken frat boy driving, veering into a big-rig as the drink dulls his reflexes against the rain-slick road. Or a girl, straw-yellow hair and cheeks red with laughter, living on borrowed time, going way over the speed limit in her daddy’s car, feeling invincible with youth.
They die, and I - I salvage the body, bring it back on a blue plastic tarp I have stashed in the back of my truck. I’ve parked it on a lonely back road, hidden from the main highway. I could carry him or her - or, at least what parts I can find. I’m a decently sized guy, and young enough - I could manage it. I have everything planned out, set up at home. A plastic-covered, easily washable area. A human-sized icebox, the kind they use in those fancy seafood restaurants you see off the main drag. It completes the illusion. I could do this, and the thought arouses me like none other.
(I have a severed foot - got it in a motorcycle accident. As far as I know, the guy made it out alive, but I have his foot - he won’t walk again without it. If the surgeons had found it, they could have reattached it. But I stashed it away in my icebox carefully, unwilling to give away my one memento. I’ll move it to a jar of alcohol this weekend.)
I dream about death. About the frozen look on someone’s face, blackened, charred flesh. Mangled stumps where limbs used to be. Of slivers of bone protruding in awkward angles. I have an active imagination. I think about removing the gastrointestinal tract from a cooling body - leaving 12 inches of colon, just in case - then the kidneys, liver, everything else that’s in the way. At this point, anal or vaginal penetration seems so pedestrian. I push into the hole in their diaphragm, imagining a corpse giving one more deep, gasping breath, pressing the esophagus neatly into itself. I push against the bottom of a once-beating heart.
Blood would be in the cavity and - the excitement makes me flub lighting my next cigarette, and I drop both the lighter and the pack onto the dry grass. I reach for them, and the movement makes me pitch over onto the road, my cigarettes spilling everywhere.
Headlights rush towards me as I stumble to pick them up. My hand closes around my lighter, and the lights blind me. My mind goes blank for a second.
“Hey, do you need a lift?” It’s a woman’s voice.
It’s still dark enough, and I’m still blinded by the headlights. My mouth gapes open and closed like a dying fish.
“I nearly hit you! You obviously need help. It’s cold. Come in.”
My hand still clutches at my lighter. I flip it shut, oddly embarrassed, my cheeks coloring in the darkness. I feel like a small child caught doing something they shouldn’t.
She has large, brown, expressive eyes. She’s got that no-nonsense look about her, tied-back hair and loose jeans. A conservative blouse - but then again, it’s cold. She’s on her way to San Diego. I can see her wondering what I’m doing on a boring stretch of road, chain-smoking, no car in sight. I could be high, I could be lost; I certainly don’t look like I’m waiting for someone to die. She motions, and I climb in. I can walk back to my car, anyway.
“So, you mute or something?”
“No. I… I was lost.”
She takes her eyes of the road for a split second, glancing at me. I stare at her cotton shirt, stretched tight over her breasts. She’s older than I am. Late thirties, maybe early forties - in contrast to my thirty-two. I’ve the younger, boyish look, however, so I can imagine her thought process: helping out some poor, high, lost kid on the side of a highway at two in the morning on a weekday night.
“Helluva place to be lost, ain’t it.”
“Yes.”
Wispy strands, not long enough to make it into her ponytail, curl over the back of her neck. I have a very good view of it from the passenger seat, as she checks the left rear-view mirror.
“So, where you from.”
“I live... around.” I make a vague gesture with my hands.
“I almost hit you like that, stumbling into the middle of the highway. Good thing I was going slow.” Irony in its purest form.
I cough. “Thanks for picking me up.”
She’s nice. Beautiful, even. I wanted to ask her about her life, and then fantasize about her death. Would it be slow and drawn out, perhaps torturous? maybe burning or fast - a piece of shrapnel for a quick death?
I’m not usually the awkward kid at the party, but it’s been too long for me, too long. I love her voice. It’s soft but with that hard, accented edge to it. It’s unpolished, with some interesting angles. I would love to see it cut short.
“What led you to pick me up? I could be a serial killer.”
The conversation is stilted, so stilted. But I want it. I want her so badly I can feel it.
“It must be cold, on the side of the road. And besides-“ she laughs, going into her pocket and pulling out a Taser, “I have insurance.”
The car goes silent again. I wrack my brain to see if I have anything worth talking about. But I have nothing. I am nothing. Besides the humping-dead-bodies thing, at least. No special talents outside of taxidermy; no interest in sports, art or music. I don’t keep up with current affairs. I haven’t realized it until now, but life is a staggering void of so-so unimpressive averageness.
I have no friends - I don’t share enough of myself with other people. But I feel the compulsion to share myself with her. All of my secrets - I want all of them to end with her.
In my imagination, we talk about art. We talk about love. We talk about my deepest fears, the ones I don’t even know. We talk about hers - I want to know it all.
We make small talk. She asks where I’d like to be dropped off, if I have any friends or family in the area. I ask her the same. We both dance around the subject, give vague answers, until there isn’t anything left to talk about.
It’s a uncomfortable silence, the kind you have with people you don’t know at all.
She’s the one to break it. “You know how to drive, right?”
I wordlessly show her my California license.
“This is gonna seem abrupt, but I’m going to take us to the bridge.”
We pass a sign saying ‘Viewpoint, Next Exit’. I look out the window, unsure of what to say. Her arms flex as she turns into the rightmost lane.
“I’m going to jump off it.”
She wants to die. She is telling me she wants to die.
I don’t want to ask why. Not after fantasizing about her death for the past half-hour. If she wanted to know she’d have told me. Does she want me to talk her out of it? I don’t know. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself, in love with the idea of being in love, to notice. Her eyes are sad. The way she grips the wheel is resolute. I want to put a hand on her arm, tell her that whatever she decides, she’s still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“You can take the car, if you want. I drove far away from my family - and what few friends I have left. I want this to be clean.” She laughs, for real this time, a harsh barking sound. Now that I’m actually listening, I notice a certain strain in it. “I have cancer, you know? Leukemia. Third stage. They told me it’s irreversible.” She blinks once, twice. “I’m not going to let it get the best of me.”
Her hair is fake. A wig. I can tell now. It must be my fantasies again, combined with the semi-darkness and the cool yellow-orange glow of the dashboard - and her hands, which seem so very thin. With every movement, she strains to control the wheel. She’s probably much younger than my first guess - five, maybe ten years younger. Suddenly she feels like a bird to me: a tiny, dying bird.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be bedridden. The chemotherapy rendered me nigh-retarded. I used to be the soul of the party, get it? But now my friends don’t come to visit any more. I just watched daytime TV for hours on end - I couldn’t even wipe my own ass without help.” A pause. Even she seemed surprised at what she’d just divulged in one go, to a complete stranger. “I used to be a tennis player.” She looks down, at her shrivelled arms.
Isolation. Incompetence. It must have been horrible, soul-crushing, for a free spirit. I’ll bet anything that her journey here was one of back roads, of shitty motels and small-town diners. My hands shake a little as I fumble for a cigarette. She neatly plucks it out of my hand, rolls down the window, and throws it out. The look she gives me makes me shrink back a little. Smoking is bad for you.
“So I stopped taking the pills. Stopped going to the sessions. Fuck them. Fuck them all.” She laughs again. “This is about as far away from them as I can get. And I think it’s about time I end this, you know?”
The car screeches to a halt. It’s the Highway 480 viewpoint, freezing outside, and I grip my one, thin jacket around me. We get out of the car. She hands me the keys, closes the doors, leans on the low railing of the bridge. She takes a deep breath. The night wind howls at both our faces.
“You’re not going to stop me?”
I shake my head.
“Most people would. I guess you’re just odd.” She laughs again, this time carefree, joyful. “I like that.”
She balances one foot on the railing. It’s a 400 yard straight drop. Below us, the lights of some generic Californian suburban community wink knowingly. It’s a perfect moment.
Time appears to slow down. I think about how elegant her death would be. I don’t have enough materials on me to salvage the body, but I could be back here four hours from now. I’ll make my way down to the bottom of the cliff, and take her - or what’s left of her. I’ll put her remains in my freezer and keep them as long as I live. No one would ever know. No one ever needs to know.
She steps onto the railing, balancing precariously. I open my mouth, and suck the freezing night air into my lungs.
“Wait.”
I would be most appreciative if some writing-styled peoples on my friends list would tell me what they think.