CW: violence, misogyny, body horror.
This is a retelling of a Chinese folktale that I couldn’t get out of my head. It’s been through a lot of revisions. The two things that helped it come into its final form were cutting half the word count, and finding a voice for the main character that suggests that the horror is not only in what is happening, but those who might be complicit in the act.
—GU
After we are married, I take my wife to the Broken Harbour. That might seem like a strange choice, but I like it there. All that forgotten machinery. The waterlogged skyscrapers. The Ferris wheel that rises above the water like a man indicating that he is drowning.
It makes me feel at home.
My wife is endlessly beautiful. She doesn’t mind where we go.
• • • •
Our hotel room has floor-to-ceiling windows where I can look out onto the harbour, the lights of the boats playing echoes of themselves on the water’s dark surface. The ruined buildings, the facades peeling.
My wife studies her reflection in the glass and then goes into the bathroom. The door shuts with a click.
While I wait, I sit on the bed and watch the television. On the screen is a show from before the water. A person crouching in front of a tent, trying to start a fire, saying something about survival.
I fall asleep.
When I wake, the bathroom is empty. She is not here.
The light from the television plays on the window: a beacon call to no one. I wonder where she might be. Where she has gone without me.
• • • •
I dream of a shop full of masks. Porcelain and cloth and skin.
Someone who is and is not my wife approaches me and touches my lips. She gestures at me, an instruction to do something I do not understand.
I wake to the darkness of the room. My wife lying next to me, facing away. I lay there and watch the slow curve of her body. The smoothness of her skin.
Porcelain and cloth and skin.
• • • •
The next night, I pretend to sleep. When she leaves, I follow.
The bar smells of beer spilt on the wooden floorboards, sweat, and something frying in the kitchen. It’s half-full of men, curled around mugs like the fingers of a fist. There’s a dartboard on the wall, more holes than surface. Above it juts the head of something unrecognizable.
One man in particular—shaven head, an alcoholic sweat, thick-corded neck—does the rounds, forcing himself into the space of the few women at the bar. Finally, he orbits around to my wife.
“Jeez, you’re a looker, ain’tcha?” he says.
My wife turns to regard him, one eyebrow arched like a doorway.
“Whaddya say? I’ll show you a good time, hey? Give you what you’ve been missing.”
One hand clutches himself, a grotesque gesture. The other closes over her hand.
My wife closes her eyes and seems to bow her head.
He pulls at her. Towards the back, to the bathrooms. Nobody else does a thing.
I wait for a while and then follow. Past the kitchen, through a dark hallway where half-rotting vegetables are piled haphazardly in plastic trays.
I hear a girlish scream and open the bathroom door.
The man is on the floor, bleeding from the chest. My wife sits astride him, dress askew, her nails red from where they have carved trails into his rough skin.
“Her face,” the man says to me. A plea, perhaps. In their struggle, he must have scratched at her. Like a damaged painting, the right side of her face has been smudged. Where her eye was, ink smeared over blank skin. Half her lips trail down in the caricature of a grimace.
She looks at me. The corner of her mouth drips red.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You’re still beautiful to me.”
And I close the door behind me so she can finish what she has begun.
