Peggy’s eating cereal.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

She had has a sweet tooth, and Vidya couldn’t help but indulge her, making sure there was always one of those multicoloured boxes in the cupboard. Just in case.

Peggy looks up, mouth stretched wide around the silver spoon, a hint of straight, white teeth Vidya can see through chapped lips. A smile breaks the facade, a drop of milk leaking out the corner of Peggy’s mouth, running down her sharp, square jaw.

Could cut glass is the phrase they use, the word Vidya’s little sister used when she met Peggy for the first time. When the people who broke into their house were done with Peggy, her jaw hung loose from the rest of her skull, caved-in, now a stringy mass of pink, fleshy skin, cheekbone smashed to pieces, a jagged piece of it jutting out of the skin and up into the air.

A meat cleaver, the detective said, eyes shifting to the ground like he didn’t think Vidya needed to know that little detail.

But Vidya needed to know it all. She needed to know the numbers, make herself sick over them. 2:15 p.m.: when the burglars entered the house; 2:37 p.m.: when Peggy returned mid-robbery; sixteen minutes: how long it took for police to arrive after her 9-1-1 call; four: the number of times Peggy was hit with a goddamn meat cleaver.

Numbers.

That’s what it came down to in the end.

Even their life together. 9:13 p.m., the clock read the night they met in the bar. One shove, when some drunk had the audacity to pat Peggy’s ass like he was giving her a compliment. Which turned into three points of contact when Peggy’s intervention became physical, her wannabe assailant hitting the counter with a dull smack.

Later, breathless, in the alley, tasting of cigarette smoke, Peggy confessed to Vidya she kickboxed in her spare time.

Not that it did her any favours the night she died.

Sixteen minutes it took Peggy to ask her out. Four dates went on before having sex for the first time. Six years together, two years and four months married—

All drawn together to the fourteen minutes Vidya spent with Peggy’s dead body, her dead, broken, beaten body, hand on her still chest, in the dip of her sternum between her breasts, imagining its rise and fall. The sixty-three minutes Vidya spent at Peggy’s funeral, lowering her wife into a pit. People threw fistfuls of dirt; they laid roses on the closed cedar wood coffin, the devastation of Peggy’s once-beautiful face too much for even the mortician to fix. 

Vidya sat there, in agonising, ineffectual yearning for some sign Peggy was still alive, that she too owned a space in this universe, the space she’d occupied for twenty-seven years, the space beside Peggy—and Vidya thought, no, prayed, insisted she would be able to cut Peggy open and crawl inside her body, to sit in the cage of her ribs, and maybe that would be okay.

If she were this curled-up little child existing within her corpse, and the pine box, chestnut-whorled and worth a good chunk of Peggy’s life insurance policy, closed around them, and the two of them sunk into the earth, ten feet deep and stifling with grave dirt, maybe it would be worth it. 

Maybe that would be just fucking fine.

Maybe it would be better than living without her.

No. No maybes.

It would be better than living without her.

Instead, the grave closed up around Peggy alone, and Vidya was left sitting like an idiot, the guts and grief in her belly falling out like they were her intestines, a pool of flesh and bloodied tissue in her lap.

That was nineteen days ago.

Now, the cereal bowl makes a shrill noise when Peggy scrapes the last of milk and soggy strips of wheat from the side.

God, maybe she just fell asleep. Maybe it was all a nightmare. Maybe it never happened, and here they are, here Peggy is, drenched in sunlight, a cavern of warmth to sweep Vidya away if she allowed her feet to slide out from underneath her.

Maybe here they are, living their days, their life, as they were meant to.

Except for Peggy’s jaw.

No longer cut-glass.

A rent so deep, the size of a toddler’s fist, through mandible and bone and skin and strings of flesh that make a cheek, all torn to pieces and Vidya can see it—

She can see the caved-in teeth, half missing from the right side of her jaw.

The whole side hangs loose on that side, like Peggy’s skull compromised itself to accommodate her jaw. Like Peggy had befallen one of those medieval torture devices, the one where they hook your arms and legs to either side of a long, wooden plank, and they pull and pull and pull, until bones are popping and muscles are tearing, and maybe, maybe the skin survives, but it becomes this thin, tawdry, limp thing which serves no one and nothing.

“What’s wrong?” Peggy asks.

She was always like that, could take one look at Vidya’s face and know—uninvited, reluctantly, Peggy knew everything. She knew when Alexis, that bitch at work, made a dig at her in the kitchen; she knew when Vidya had a knock-down, drag-out fight with her mother; she knew when Vidya added too much sugar to her morning chai.

In death, burst-open as she is, Peggy still knows.

She touches Vidya’s cheek, and Vidya comes to life. She breathes; her lungs fill with dense, dreamy air, and she leans into it. God, she wants to fucking smother herself in it.

But she can’t, because she knows what Peggy is.

Peggy is a dream, a conjuring of her grief and hope and inability to confront reality; or perhaps, she’s something worse; perhaps Vidya manifested something awful and cruel—it had to be her, because they have gods for everything, for things like heartbreak and woe and sorrow, and there must be some rakshasa who would do this to her, who would appear as her mutilated, massacred white wife to nurture the seed of torment.

Vidya’s hardly worth the trouble, though.

What do they say?

Something like a hundred and fifty thousand people die each day. Why would a god or ghost haunt her?

I didn’t burn her. I didn’t free her. I listened to her mother and her sister and put her into the ground, tying her to meat, to pine, to dirt.

No, I tied her to me. I did this to myself.

“Honey?” 

Honey. So normal, so ordinary, a thousand other people might’ve called her the same name, but with its absence, Vidya was bereft.

“I think you’re burning up,” Peggy clucks, pulling the back of her hand away from Vidya’s forehead. “Maybe you should head back to bed.”

“Yeah.” Is that her own voice? Soft, worn away, scraped like it had multiple goes with sandpaper? Is that what Vidya herself has become, now the smoke has cleared? “Yeah, maybe I should. Will you—”

Will you still be here when the smoke clears?

“Come up with me,” Vidya says with urgency.

Maybe this is a dream. Which means she has to parse out how much is left to her, in slow increments, swim in them if she has to, if this is the last time she sees her.

Peggy grins. Molars poke through the hole, tugging the threads of skin outward.

“Honey, you say that like it’s a hassle to go to bed with you.”

🦷🦷🦷

It’s not a dream.

Or if it is, it has limbs which grow outward, clawing deep into every slant of Vidya’s life.

At 9:12 a.m., after she has indulged herself with Peggy, wrapped herself up in her cold, dead wife, pressed an ear and cheek to her chest, and pretended a heart still beat under the thick, raised autopsy scar bisecting Peggy’s chest in two, work beckoned.

It was conceivable she would be freed of Peggy’s phantom the moment she crossed the threshold, like a paroxysm only gripping her in the confines of the home they shared together. 

Cold, turned-down bedsheets, a porcelain bowl in the sink containing a half-inch well of cereal milk, and the ghost of a caress against her cheek, the only evidence of Peggy’s spontaneous repositioning into Vidya’s life. 

But there Peggy is, perched on the side of her chair at the big conference room table, playing with the ends of Vidya’s ponytail. In death, she’s regressed to a clingy, sticky five-year-old who will turn grey and grey and grey with neglect, unless she’s given Vidya’s full attention, unless Vidya makes Peggy her entire orbit.

And she wants to; she would make Peggy the sum total of her being in a heartbeat. She did it in life, why wouldn’t she do it in death?

But a mortgage is a needle through the seams of her bank account, leaking money every month. Paid bereavement leave is also fucking great but it only absolves Vidya of other responsibilities for so long. She was off for a week when it happened, and then back at it, moving emails into folders and throwing stray sheets of paper into the shredder bin, if only to keep her mind busy, if only to distract from Peggy’s not-so-unreal hands firmly planted around her ribcage.

She needs this job.

Which means she can’t be doing things like batting away her dead wife’s hand when it gets too close to the piercing through her earlobe cartilage.

Peggy changes course, stretching the closest lock of Vidya’s hair taut around her index finger, before letting it spring back to a curl.

Unable to help herself, Vidya hisses, “Stop it!”. 

A sticky, unhelpful silence falls over the too-chill meeting room.

“Uh… Vidya?” comes Alexis, one of her colleague’s dubious voice. “You good?”

It’s just on the right shade of mistrustful to set Vidya’s teeth on edge. She has always known this about her position, her place in this whirlpool which never stops its churning. Maybe the current stumbles, and she goes round and round in a circle, and she’s sick with disorientation, sure, but she doesn’t fall through into the pit, that tiny little pinprick of utter bleakness with God knows what on the other end. The churning is preferable.

There’s no more churning if her colleagues believe she’s seeing things.

And she must be seeing things, because if she weren’t, if Peggy had crossed the threshold from chimera to corporeality, and everyone else could see her too, surely someone would have commented by now?

Oh, your wife came back to life, how nice!

That hasn’t happened, so it must be delusion.

“I’m fine. It’s fine,” Vidya says, quickly, to appease the frown curving down Alexis’s mouth.

“Are you sure? We can take a break if you’d like. I know it hasn’t been easy coming back, but if you—”

“You should resign,” Peggy says unhelpfully, cutting Alexis’s comment off at the knees.

Not that Alexis would know.

“Respectfully,” Vidya interjects, when she means quite the opposite, voice sliding high in an odd way—she knows this, she knows it’s her own way of ignoring Peggy, ignoring her own longing, but it makes her look even stupider. “I’m fine, Alexis. Let’s get on with the meeting.”

By the look of discontent on Alexis’s face, she doesn’t like that.

But she’s done her job. If Vidya’s out the door come next quarter, Alexis will close the door to her office, confidants ensconced within, and lament that she had to go, especially with everything that happened, and you saw me that day, I asked after her wellbeing, I tried to encourage her to take more time off but look, it’s a terrible loss, maybe she needs some time, I’m sure she’ll find something else soon.

The meeting quickly returns to its regularly scheduled programming. Talk of budgets and receivables and whether the acquisition of that little software company and dumping all of its staff will move the needle filter through Peggy’s drawl in her ear, easily dismissed.

“Look at her.” Peggy’s hand twists around her ponytail. Light, at first, but Vidya’s toes curl in her uncomfortable heels when she remembers a gleaming moment during sex when Peggy did that, pulled on her hair, wound it around the width of her palm and yanked, igniting Vidya like a livewire. “She thinks she’s so sweet, so kind, so good to you. You think she’d throw a glass of water on you if you were on fire? I doubt it.”

I know. What are you getting at?

“So, quit.”

And do what? Sit on the couch, watch Gilmore Girls re-runs with a tub of boysenberry ice cream and pray I don’t end up living in my car?

She should pay attention to the meeting. The regret will come later, in a conversation she can’t contribute to, or in an email she needs to answer but will lack the words to. Spilt milk, compared to Peggy splayed over the armrest of her chair like the recalcitrant demon from Fuseli’s The Nightmare.

Peggy doesn’t stop, emboldened by the fact no one can hear her. “Seriously. I wanted to say that to you fifty times before—”

Before. Before you died, you mean. Before you left me alone in this world and expected me to trudge along, without you. 

“—but you would’ve slept on the couch for the rest of our lives before you ever entertained the thought. What’s stopping you now?”

The words themselves might be cavalier, a gentle offer for Vidya to consider. But they’re said with fervour which expects a certain response, an ending to this. Vidya leans back into Peggy’s fingernails, scraping them across the terrain of her scalp. If they were caricatured in charcoal, Vidya would have the expression of a gratified little puppy, tongue sticking out, the only thing missing the pants of want.

“It would be so easy,” Peggy coos. “Stand up, pack your bags, and walk out of here. Don’t stay. You deserve better. You deserve more. You deserved me. Imagine how many moments we could’ve had if you just left this place, this unworthy, unremarkable, unappreciative fucking death grind.”

Too many. I’m sorry, Peggy. I’m so sorry. I fucked up. I should’ve spent every speck of time with you.

God, it’s like that meat cleaver split Vidya in the jaw instead.

Peggy leans down, nose nudging the line of Vidya’s cheekbone. A pale hand curls around her jaw, forcing her to lock eyes with Alexis, busy searching for something on the silver laptop in front of her.

“She hates you,” Peggy hisses. 

She says it like a lit match arcing into a sink full of water, a splinter of vitriol and resentment and iniquity flung through the air which should land and dissipate —but no, the words carry, hit their mark and they fucking ignite, burning holes in her, smoke leaching into her skin.

“No,” Peggy laughs. An inhuman laugh, the laugh of demons. “She doesn’t hate you. She doesn’t think anything of you, and that’s worse. It means you’re nothing here. You’re nothing, and you were never anything, working in this place.”

This isn’t Peggy. This can’t be Peggy.

Peggy would never say such things to her. Peggy was only ever kind to her. Peggy only ever loved her.

“You were something with me, though,” she croons.

Vidya hates how much she likes it, how much she knows it’s the truth.

Here, in this sterile meeting room filled with no well-wishers, she would fade into the wallpaper. She could become a knick-knack on the desk, growing a thin sliver of gritty dust with every pointless moment that slipped by. And one day, maybe someone forgets about her, forgets about her importance, her significance, her fucking existence, and throws her out like she’s the pen caddy no one wanted.

Like in those nineteen days after Peggy died. The condolences dried up, along with the flowers, and the food in the fridge grew soft and tasteless, and the house became hollower and hollower, reminding her of just how alone she truly was.

Reminding her of how she only breathed with Peggy. 

In every soulful meeting of their eyes, in every cup of her hand around Vidya’s ribs, in every scrape of her nails through Vidya’s hair, in her unassailable ability to accommodate the gargantuan stretches of Vidya’s body around hers in the middle of the night.

But as these coworkers, spouting talk of investor meetings, didn’t care for her, neither does this Peggy. 

Death has morphed Peggy, tainted her, devoured her and spit her back out as a mimicry of herself. Rubbed down of her goodness and her kindness and her love for Vidya and varnished her with the basest cruelty, with all the small, insipid, bloodless things she knew of Vidya and knew to pick and pull and pare from her. 

Vidya once read the eggs tarantula wasps lay in their fucked-out, paralysed prey end up consuming its body from the inside out. 

Maybe she is left incapacitated by Peggy’s love, the old love and this new, scathing, spiteful one.

Vidya could be glad for that love to gut her. 

She was—

Peggy’s teeth sink deep into the bone of Vidya’s mandible. The pain spreads in veins of molten, violent heat to Vidya’s spine, arcs down it and the muscles of her arms, throbs in her fingers, throbs in her throat, throbs across her face. 

Her scream sunders the air, mouth warping around the sound, around the impression of Peggy’s once-whole jaw dug deep into her skull. Vidya lurches to her feet, wrenching herself from Peggy’s inimitable grip. 

When everyone looks at Vidya’s fetid freakshow of grief and compulsion, Peggy has the audacity to stand there and smile. Like all she gifted Vidya was a hickey, like she didn’t try to tear the flesh from her body. 

Vidya’s face bleeds with shame.

“I—” 

Her throat tightens around an apology she doesn’t want to make, she shouldn’t have to make, not to these people, not to anyone. 

The hard back of her laptop bangs against her sternum in her mad scramble to pick up her things. Clammy with sweat, her hand almost drops her phone.

All the while, Peggy’s eyes—green, playful, deliberate—hunt her out the door. 

🦷🦷🦷

Hot water crashes from the showerhead. Vidya tips her head up to catch it. The instant the water runs in rivers down to the gaping wound where her neck meets her head, she reels back and hisses.

She needs antiseptic, maybe even stitches. She should probably go to the emergency room.

But she can’t bear the thought of anyone laying hands on the indelible mark Peggy left on her. It’s a fitting reminder on her own body of the violence dealt to her wife in her final moments. 

A fitting blow.

Why should she live, unharmed, untouched, inviolable, when Peggy suffered the utmost, ultimate consequence for making a home with her?

Revulsion curdling in her belly, Vidya switches off the shower and steps out, tucking a thin white towel under her arms. 

The mirror is murky and encumbered. 

Her unrepentant curiosity wins out.

She reaches out with the flat of her hand, dragging it back and forth with the pruned pads of her fingers. Water races down the mirror’s hard edges, revealing a scratchy, wobbling image of Vidya in the glass.

Her damp hair curls against the nape of her neck, which she sweeps over a single shoulder, the shoulder without a bite.

The bite. 

It’s the size of a sliver of dried mango, beautiful and bloodied. That perfect half-moon, the imprint of her dead wife’s teeth, knitting into her skin and bone.

Her knees wobble.

If she touched it, pressed her fingers to the vague afterthought of Peggy’s teeth, reaffirmed that agony, burned it back through her neural pathways, she might slide away. The earth might slide away with her. 

That would be sweet.

“Looks good,” comes a cherry drawl from the doorway. “My teeth on you. I mean, not the first time, but I don’t think a thicker blouse or flesh-coloured stockings are going to hide this one.”

“True,” Vidya says, absentminded. “Concealer won’t cut it either. Not that I know how to make it go away with concealer.”

“So, don’t hide it.”

Peggy’s presence sucks all the oxygen from the small bathroom as she crosses the threshold. She slings thin arms around Vidya’s waist.

“Don’t hide it,” she murmurs.

Instinctively, tension climbs into Vidya’s shoulders, into the muscles in her back, until she’s stiff as a board. 

Preparing herself for another bite. Or worse.

Peggy has the nerve to chuckle, like this is some fucking joke. Her fingers, long, elegant, tuck around the length of Vidya’s hair, parting it from where it rests against the back of her neck. Vidya remembers the supple hold of them around the hilt of a knife, as it carved an apple into wedges. 

But now she knows. Peggy doesn’t need a knife to do damage. Not when she still has teeth in that butchered jaw of hers.

“I won’t do it again,” Peggy promises. “I made my point. I just wanted us to match.”

“Match,” Vidya echoes, dull.

They do, though. Like the bite bound them. Peggy’s teeth in Vidya’s skin, Vidya’s blood staining Peggy’s mouth, tying them together. A ritual carried out by both of them, like a surgery, stitching not their skin or bones or blood together, but their warmths, their truths.

“I lied,” Peggy hums. “I’m not quite done. Not yet.”

Her hand splays over Vidya’s belly, possessive, warning.

“Yet?” 

Peggy nuzzles the back of her ear.

“You like this.”

Vidya swallows. “I like this.”

What does she like? She likes Peggy. She likes her hands, her mouth, her voice, her eyes, her body, her heart, her lungs, her teeth and that beautiful, disquieting pulse in her throat.

A pulse no longer beating.

“You love me.”

There is no doubt.

Vidya loves her.

“You miss me.”

She misses her.

“Peggy,” Vidya sobs, once.

“We can make this better, Vidya. We can stay together.”

Peggy’s open cheek presses against Vidya’s whole, round one. She is breathless with yearning.

“How?”

“You know, honey. You know what you need to do.”

Vidya’s hand curls around Peggy’s wrist, poised over her flank. “I do.”

“You know,” Peggy says, confident, resolved. “You know what to do. So, what do you say? I’ve missed you too, Vidya. I’ve missed every moment since the police came and took my body away, since you buried me in the ground. You buried me in the ground. You shut me in a box, closed the door, put the Earth between us, and you walked away. Like you couldn’t wait to be severed from me. How could you do that? How could you do that to us?”

“I’m sorry,” Vidya mouths, the noises strangling in her throat. “I’m so sorry.”

Peggy hushes her. “It’s okay. It’s okay, honey. I forgive you. I forgive you. How could I not? You’re my wife, my everything, my home. I want to come home. Let me come home. Let’s end this.”

Her thumb strokes over Vidya’s stomach, back and forth, back and forth. Grief sears Vidya’s veins; tears sear her eyes.

Whoever thought she would have this again?

Whoever thought Peggy would hold her like this again?

It soothes her like heroin, blurs her body.

She could stay like this forever.

“Okay. How do I—” Vidya’s mouth is dry and taut when she purses her lips, scraping and scratching. “How do I do that? How do I bring you home?”

Peggy’s hand cups her jaw. Her thumb bears down on her bite, and Vidya gasps in agony. But Peggy’s mouth closes around hers, swallowing it whole. Swallowing her whole.

When she pulls back, she kisses Vidya once, then, twice. 

“You know, honey,” Peggy croons, a slick-sweet drip of honey. “You know what to do.”

“I know,” Vidya echoes, and meeting Peggy’s fathomless brown eyes, she does.

She knows. 

They exit the bathroom, holding hands. Vidya doesn’t bother dressing, towel clinging to the damp spots still loitering her body. They descend the staircase to the kitchen. 

As they make their way to the kitchen, Peggy tightens her hand around hers. She lifts it up, pressing her mouth to Vidya’s knuckles like a cultured, conciliatory knight.

Vidya lets her hand slip, comforts herself that it’s momentary, a transient sliver before all’s put right once more.

In the third drawer she finds what she’s looking for.

The meat cleaver went with the police when they were done. They needed evidence, fingerprints, DNA, to put Peggy’s murderers away.

Vidya’s a vegetarian. She has been since birth, never wavered, never thought to waver. She didn’t know what possessed her, but the day the police took the meat cleaver away, she went to Williams Sonoma and paid through her teeth for a new one. Stashed it in the drawer.

She never used it. She needed to know it was there. 

She tests the weight of it in her hands.

It’s heavy, solid, meant for cleaving things in two. Marriages. People.

“It’s okay, Vidya.”

Vidya and Peggy lock eyes across the kitchen counter.

Peggy’s voice is soft, softer than a cloud, softer than a whisper, softer than death.

“You know what to do.”

Yes, she does. 

And there she goes. The cleaver swings. Right over the bite. 

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Now they match. Cut-glass jaws no more, but a marriage made right, nonetheless.

🔪💀