C. M. Rosens

October 24th – Lisa L Hannett – ‘Sweet Subtleties’ (2012) – Read it here. Listen here. Challenge list here.

This one fucked me up, honestly, I read it a few times and it’s just worse each time. Needless to say, I really like it and it is one of my favourites from the whole challenge so far.

This is Pygmalion from the statue’s point of view, if the statue was made of confectionary. It speaks to October 3rd – E.T.A. Hoffman – ‘The Sandman’ (1817) – (post here), with regards to Olimpia and Nathaniel’s relationship.

The whole story also reminded me very strongly of the song ‘The Doll People’ by Sofia Isella, and Suzan Palumbo’s short story ‘Her Voice, Unmasked’, which can be read in her collection Skin Thief. (Listen to my interview with Suzan here, transcript here.)

But this is also a story of obsession and a refusal to let go – a constant recreation of a wife now dead. There are loads of stories like this, but this one really got me, and I think because:

There are a lot of Vore vibes in this, in fact, which sets it apart from other stories I can think of, such as books like The Perfect Wife by J.P. Delaney, and films like Archive (2020) dir. Gavin Rothery, and Wifelike (2022) dir. James Bird.

It’s also a confectionary version of cosmetic surgery, and there are parts of this that parallel surgical horror, which made me deeply uncomfortable.

I think the best thing I’ve got for this is a short story I’ve published in my collection, The Sussex Fretsaw Massacre & Other Stories.

This is from the creator’s point of view, and it riffs on the ideas of control, of usefulness, and of puppetry. I thought I’d post this story also because of the cake in it.

Gerald

HE COULDN’T EVEN THINK of her name anymore without remembering how she’d tasted.

He filled the oil lamp for his father, remembering Mrs Antram and her kind eyes, the lines around her mouth, her grey sheep’s curls, and the slippery ridges of her brain, a similar shade of grey threaded with blood vessels, hidden underneath. He remembered the creamy, jelly-like texture that held its shape in his mouth until he chewed, the raw animal aftertaste on his tongue, but reminding him of eggs. Mrs Antram had taught him the words for all the parts of the oil lamp, and now they nestled in his head rather than hers.  

His father nodded, made him wash his hands, and said it was time for dinner.   

Ricky wasn’t allowed to eat too much dinner. Everything his mother cooked was dry and plain, boiled mercilessly to steam in the pans, but his father ate stoically without complaint and Ricky had to, too. At least today there was something. There usually was when Dad got Mum a new girl. She should be dead by now, and he didn’t know her name either. 

There was even a slice of Victoria sponge cake for dessert but he wasn’t supposed to have any. To him, it smelled impossibly sweet, the edge of forbidden fructose driving every other thought out of his head. The dead girl got a slice of cake taken to her on a small china plate. 

Ricky didn’t dare look over his shoulder as his mother hummed a little excited tune on her way down to the cellar. He focused on the sticky table edge, and the dark stain taunted him with shiny jam-thick glaze and the forbidden image of moist light flesh, sugary and risen to perfection, bleeding raspberries and clots of fresh cream. Maybe he could have what the ants left, when it was stale and crumbling to biscuit dust on the plate. Maybe the insects would fill him with cake he wouldn’t ever taste, like Mrs Antram had filled him with words he didn’t know. 

Maybe the dead girl would taste all the sweeter for rotting. He wouldn’t be allowed to find out. 

He wondered what her name was, or at least, what name his mother was using for her, but he wasn’t supposed to ask.  

There wasn’t any meat left in the outhouse. He’d cleaned up too thoroughly. His stomach gurgled, and all he could think about was cake. It clogged his farsight as surely as if he’d had a taste, pulling his focus away. His concentration was always worse as the days got lighter. He could read livers and the slippery parts of an animal easily in the darker, colder months, when the sharp blade of winter opened him up to the secrets steaming out of the guts in the frostbitten air. But now everything was hazy with the flourishing of Spring, everything thick and fertile and vital, and he was just as cold and dark inside and nothing matched, nothing fitted, he didn’t fit, and he couldn’t see the future, only wished he could crawl out of his own skin. 

There was something under his skin, he knew. Something waiting, something strong, something he had grown to love. Like everything he loved, he couldn’t touch it. He kept it jealously, his nameless secret, not wanting anyone else to give it a name or explain it to him, because that would feel like they were putting their grownup fingers on what should only belong to him. 

He clung to his secrets, hoarding them like stolen sweets. One day the big secret inside him would emerge, and then he would be whole, complete, and every season would feel right, and he would be able to see whatever he wanted. The Voice in his head told him so, but it didn’t speak to him often. That was a secret, too – and so was this, his taxidermy practice, something his father could be proud of him for. Ricky wasn’t sure which he was more excited about, the hope of an approving nod, or the prospect of his completed companion. Ricky had taken to his father’s hobby with intense interest, learning how to make other creatures as hollow as he was and fill them back up, and how to thread needles that stabbed through his own flesh just as easily as their skins. Like everything else, he learned the hard way. 

The dog’s forelimbs were ready to be attached to the body, his masterpiece. The rest of the dog was a bit useless with all the meat scraped off, so he had stuffed the bones and other bits he wasn’t sure how to get rid of into the skin of the donkey that made up the main mass of the stuffed chimera.  

The donkey had been a trusting old thing. It let him get right up to it, let him pat it and bury his fingers in its scraggy mane, as if it thought he was going to take it for a ride along the beach. Ricky knew at once this was the one. The other donkeys in the pen had showed their yellow teeth, brayed at him, snorted. Not this one. This one was friendly, and that was exactly what he wanted. 

Ricky had read enough to know this was what friendliness looked like. He decided he wouldn’t need to read books like that anymore, once he had a friend of his own. He could read other things, real things, factual things with diagrams and big colour pictures. He didn’t need books about other children and all the adventures they went on without him. They were silly, anyway. Nobody ever died in them. 

He’d realised some time ago that if he was going to make a friend, like in the books, he’d have to do it himself. 

He had managed to lead the donkey out of the stall and rode him all the way home, getting used to the smell of him, the soft feel of the hide under his hands and cheek. The donkey fitted in the outhouse pretty well, and Ricky had tied it up with the knots his father used on the girls. 

He’d ripped through the tough throat with his best, sharpest knife, all his weight behind the first thrust to break the hide, and it had nearly crushed him against the wall as it tried to shake him off and fell to the ground. 

His father had whipped him bloody with his belt for it, but let him keep it as butchery practice, and something Ricky could stuff by himself. 

Hacking the donkey’s head off had been hard work, but every time he saw it, he felt sick. It was a writhing kind of sickness deep in his belly, the cold and heavy kind. Ricky hated it. He couldn’t understand why it made him feel that way now, when the donkey’s expressive face had been so welcoming to start with. 

He got rid of the head and felt a little better. 

A deer skull, with two majestic antlers, would be a good replacement. It was his favourite thing after the smell of the donkey hide, now properly cleaned and treated. 

He sewed on the dog limbs with clumsy stitches, struggling to see and having to stop to wipe his eyes more than once. 

It didn’t have a name yet. 

That was worrying him. 

He needed to give it a name, or else it wasn’t a real friend, was it? But you didn’t name your friends in books, they told you what their names were, or someone else introduced you. His chest fluttered, tight. What if it didn’t want to be his friend when it was finished? What if – what if it thought he’d done something bad? 

Ricky couldn’t finish sewing it up. 

“I never,” he told it, and his voice came out in a tiny little croak. “I never.” He didn’t know what he was denying. He never really did. 

People said he did things wrong a lot, but no one ever explained why. He’d concluded that adults just made things up in their heads, the way they thought things should be, and then forgot to tell him. He couldn’t understand how his cousins seemed to play along, like they had been taken aside and someone had explained the rules of some game Ricky had never learned how to play. 

He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and sniffed. 

With one limb left to sew up, the creature was now very real and nearly ready. 

But Ricky didn’t know if it would tell him its name. He couldn’t bear the silence, the not knowing. No names came to mind – Ricky’s imagination drew a blank.   He ran out of the outhouse and snuck back into the cottage before his mother came back from giving the girl some cake.