Editors’ Note
This week, in my ongoing selection from the recently published UEA MA Anthologies, I’m sharing the opening of this wonderfully strange story, at once Gothic and tender, by Amy Honeywell. There’s so much to like here – the relationship between Elise and her inadvertent guest, the slow exploration of the logical consequences of the situation. “Revelation” was first published in the MA Prose Fiction Anthology, available from Egg Box Press. Read this, and more great pieces of writing, there.
Revelation
It started with the pets. Cats buried along the cemetery boundary clawed their way out of the earth, hacking up clods of mud and fat worms. Dogs shook themselves, their coats hanging loose, before walking home and scrabbling at their backdoors. A man visiting his elderly mother was bemused to find the puppy he’d received for his eleventh birthday waiting on the doorstep, its ribs caved in on one side by a sharp kick from his stepfather.
Then the screaming came, bloody and thick. Men ran into the cemetery with torches, looking under brambles and behind the bulging bodies of trees. It took them a while to realise that the noises were coming from underfoot, muffled by six feet of dirt. Builders lent their diggers. A husband took a shovel to his wife’s grave, breaking the lid of her coffin with its steel handle swung down hard and fast. When she saw him, she screamed louder, hiding behind her stiff fingers.
This was how Elise came to be sat at her kitchen table across from a woman she didn’t know. She’d found her in the front garden, her face turned to the morning sun. Elise picked up the parcel left by the front door. The woman didn’t turn around, her dress crumpled and muddy, the white fabric yellowed. It had stains where it had been pressed against her body, where skin had become moss soft and seeped through the satin. The sleeves of her dress puffed to just above her elbows, the joints wormed white and dry, dark muscle and sinew stretching as she bent an elbow and leaned back further on the dewy grass. Elise didn’t want to interrupt, but her lungs were still fragile against the January cold and she was beginning to feel the air catching in her chest as she exhaled. Her ex-girlfriend, Clare, called the rasping shudder that escaped Elise’s spasming lungs her death rattle, her hands over her ears in protest.
‘Excuse me,’ Elise said. The woman on the grass didn’t move. Elise’s teeth were chattering and she wished she’d put her coat on. The back of the woman’s head was mostly bald, save for a scattering of blond hairs around the base of her neck. The skin enveloping her skull was paper thin and so tight Elise was sure it would split.
‘Excuse me,’ she said again. She walked forward and placed a hand on the puffed yellow sleeve. When her fingertips touched the curve of the woman’s shoulder it was cold and hard as granite. ‘Would you like to come in for some breakfast?’
The woman turned and Elise saw that the hollow of her cheek went straight through to sparse teeth. Her eyes were like pebbles just pulled from the sea, shiny and dark. When the woman stood, she rustled and snapped and whistled as a breeze passed through her ribs. A body sucked dry by the earth sounds like a fire being lit. She was slightly shorter than Elise and decay flowered across her face: lips pulled tight, eyelids pooled with dirt, her skin the colour of the earth. Elise’s chest felt tight and she couldn’t tell if it was in fear or from being stood up for too long. She walked inside, the parcel in her cold hands. The woman followed, closing the front door behind them.
After breakfast, two untouched bowls of cornflakes left on the kitchen table, Elise showed the woman round the small terrace held hostage between a student house and the devastated cries of a newborn. The woman stood for a long while in the bathroom off the kitchen, flushing the toilet and stroking the edge of the porcelain sink.
Upstairs, Elise shoved clothes under the bed and pulled the duvet straight.
‘I can change the bed, you can sleep in here,’ she said. The woman looked out of the window.
That night, Elise slept on the sofa. An electric heater filled the room with dry heat, making her cough. In the dark, she listened to the movement over her head and tried not to think of the woman who had spent years underground and was now flicking through her books and filling the sinks with water just to pull the plug and watch it spiral away. She tried not to think of the shards of teeth pressed into moon pale jaw. She tried not to think of the dress which had been white and long and lacy, now fused blood brown with the skin of her shoulders and hips.
Elise coughed, pushing herself upright as her lungs spasmed. She tried to stand but couldn’t find her footing and dropped to one knee, gasping. She ran her hands over the carpeted floor, feeling for her inhaler, fingertips bumping the coffee table legs, her work laptop stacked to one side, a recipe book Clare had given her for her 31st birthday that she still begrudgingly used. Panic surged as she attempted to steady her breathing enough to pull herself up and turn on the lamp next to the TV. The footsteps across the landing upstairs stopped and Elise felt her solitude so completely. She tasted salt and realised that she was crying. She jumped when the door to the living room creaked and a few seconds later the overhead light came on. Her inhaler was on the floor, barely a foot in front of her. Too desperate to chastise herself, she grabbed it and put the plastic between her lips, inhaling as fully as she could. Then, she felt the cold dry hands of the woman on her back and elbow, guiding her up and towards the front door. The night air was bitter cold and they stood together in the garden, Elise breathing deeply, the woman at her side.
At the end of Elise’s road was a gate into the cemetery which was locked from dusk until dawn. The screams had lessened since they began digging people out, but there were still more to be released from the heavy darkness of their graves. Elise could hear a thin wail just beyond the locked gate. The woman heard it too, turning her head towards the sound. Elise felt the woman beside her charge with it, the rise and fall of the sound pulsing through her as though she was also breathing deeply. The woman opened her mouth and let out a scream.
For a couple of days they lived alongside each other, neither of them going beyond the front gate. Elise took the bed once it became clear the woman didn’t sleep. She began to ask her questions, what’s your name? when did you die? why are you here? Mostly the woman didn’t respond. Occasionally she fixed Elise with an exasperated stare or screeched in irritation. Clare called on the third day.
‘I’ve seen the news,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ Elise replied. She hadn’t been watching the news.
‘Digging up dead bodies is sick.’
Elise watched from the kitchen through to the bathroom where the woman was running the hot taps in the bath and the sink. Steam rose around her and clung to the window.
‘Have you seen any, Else?’ Clare asked.
Elise paused, listening to the sound of her ex-girlfriend’s breathing. It was hard to believe that until six months ago she’d been lulled to sleep by the slow metronome of Clare, curled around her with a hand on her stomach feeling the digestive gurgles as dinner moved through her. It’s funny how quickly things change. You’re in hospital for two weeks and suddenly your girlfriend can’t look you in the eye.
‘Elise? You have to stay away from them, don’t let any in. It’s an old house, one might turn up. I’ve read that once they’re in, they keep coming back.’
Elise sighed. Water was running over the edge of the sink and on to the lino, pooling at the woman’s bare feet. ‘I’ve not seen any, don’t worry.’
‘That’s good.’ The care in Clare’s voice felt like stepping on broken glass. Elise forced a cough, made it guttural and rough. Clare was silent at the other end of the phone.
‘I’d better go,’ Elise said into the silence.
‘Yeah, me too.’
Elise paused, the call tethering them to one another for a moment.
‘Bye, then.’ She hung up and held the phone to her chest.
That night she sat up in bed reading the news on her laptop. It was a phenomenon across the country: people waking up from death and returning to their homes. She flicked between news sites which reported fearfully on what this might mean for homeowners and forums of people discussing how to get the smell of the undead out of their sheets. Religious leaders couldn’t agree to whether it was a positive or negative sign, with one priest in Winchester setting himself on fire in anticipation of apocalyptic chaos.
Scientists interviewed suggested it could be to do with changes to the chemical balance of the soil, the acidity of rain or the seeping of rubbish causing a catastrophic shift. One online paper had a poll, trying to establish the demographic of those coined ‘the resurrected’. Elise clicked ‘woman’, then after some deliberation ‘35-49’. She took a screenshot of the results and posted it to a few forums with the message, what does this mean? After a couple of minutes someone replied: women always want to make it a woman thing. Someone else wrote: does it matter? And another: man, woman or fucking dog, they all stink.
The next morning, Elise woke early. The house was quiet and for a moment she forgot about the dead woman and the dirt that fell from her crevices and the toilet blocked with tissue and flushed until water streamed to the floor. She forgot about the delicate shape of the woman’s skull and the wedding dress that smelled of bile and rot. As her eyes adjusted to the half-light edging through the curtains, she let Clare slip into her thoughts. When the front door opened and then slammed shut a second later, Elise was sure Clare had just left for work and that if she extended her hand, the other side of the bed would still be warm.
The woman was out the front in a deck chair Elise had set up for her. The neighbour across the street didn’t like her, said she scared her children, and asked Elise to keep her inside. The students next door gave her no issue; one explained over the fence that their friend’s mum had come back after five years and screamed until her husband and his girlfriend left the house. They lent the woman a floppy sun hat which looked comical in the frost, but she took to wearing it all the time. She was wearing it now, her few blond hairs curling out from beneath the rim.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Elise said, slowly.
The woman ignored her.
‘Come on, it’ll be nice.’
The woman let out a hiss.
‘Right now.’
The woman flinched at Elise’s tone and hissed again, but began to stand. Elise gripped her under one arm. She’d grown used to the woman’s cold brittleness, the way her dry tissue gave way under gentle pressure. She thought of her as a calcified starfish, solid but prone to cracking. They walked together out on to the road, past the houses and through the gate into the cemetery.
