Sea of Roses - Short Story

(Content Warnings: Horror Themes, Body Horror, Murder, Blood)

I had just finished picking up groceries when I saw her enter my home. A bag in each hand, she walked up the driveway, gravel crunching underfoot and climbed the two steps to the patio. She stood before my door, my faded sandals by the mat, my curling pot plants under the windows. She placed one of her bags beside her as she reached into her pocket to pull out a set of keys. I heard them, like an alarm, rattling in her hand as she found one and slid it into the lock. 

I stood on the street, held in the shadows between two lamp posts. Couldn’t move as I watched her break into my home with such genteel ease. Other houses along the street were illuminated from within, and I looked to them, hoping I had mistaken someone else’s house for my own. But no. Through the leftmost window I saw him, my husband, swaying through the kitchen, bathed in the same orange light. 

She opened the door and I finally found purchase on the ground. He turned at the sound of the opening door. I saw him smile. He thought it was me. I stepped forward tracing her steps up my driveway. If he stayed in the kitchen, at least he’d be armed. Grab a knife from the block or the pan from the stove. But I saw him leave for the hallway, to greet me as always. And she placed her bags down in the entryway and bent to retrieve what she’d brought. 

Run, I muttered, climbing the stairs. I said it to all three of us. None of us heard. But his footsteps were in the hallway, nearing her as she rose. I could see a shape in her hands, sharp and red and painful. He called to her, to me, and I felt my soul calcify as he stepped around the corner. 

She kissed him. He kissed back. Tucked her hair behind her ear and pulled back to smile at her. She asked him how his day was. Better now, he said. She showed him what she’d brought him. A rose. She held it up, caught between them. He took it. And offered his own. He plunged the knife into her stomach. Sharp, and red, and painful. She sputtered, and reached her hands to his shoulders. Falling. She looked up into his eyes, moved her hands to his jaw. He drove the knife in deeper. Caught between them. Blood churned out of the butchered wound in her stomach, running down between her legs and pooling on the ground. 

I stood in the doorway. Watched her stomach hold his knife, his hand hold her rose. He let it fall to the ground as he wrenched the blade from her gut. The rose and the blood blending in with the dark floorboards. She fell to them, her keys rattling in her pocket as she hit the ground. 

I stood at her feet, the front door behind me. He stood at her head and we looked down at her like premature headstones. Why? I asked all three of us. None of us answered. My shoes, red now, felt a part of the floor, and the blood, and the rose and I couldn’t bring myself to run. Instead, I followed, as he grabbed a bruising hold of her wrists and dragged her to the hall. 

Our bedroom was dark, as it always was, and I felt a morose smell move through the air like a wave. Sharp, and red, and painful. I followed him into the room and saw them. 

Some were fresh and soft, sleeping if not for their injuries, with enough colour left to make them seem lucid. Others were stale piles of dust, sheets of dry skin draped over bones, cobwebs of sinew echoing long rotten faces. But many lurked between. Dug out by flies and transcending human form. Twisting into roots of bubbling meat and fluid. Once individual bodies, the women now formed a sea around the bed, melting and reformed into a great rotting beast. Knife wounds littered them, festering pits where stomachs had once been, and across the great sea; eyes, unblinking, watching him. 

He rolled her onto the pile, unphased by the flies that groped at his face. She settled in, as if a place had opened up for her. She lay, adrift, by the neatly made bed, her head bumping the bedside table. A half-read book lay open on its surface. And partially submerged beside her, I lay, face sallow and skin bursting with all that was once internal. I looked at her and me, down on the floor, in the sea of us, and then to him as he shut the door and walked back out to the entryway. I screamed. I screamed and never breathed again. He picked up the grocery bags from the blood pool by the front door, and took them to the kitchen to start making dinner. 

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Written February 2024

Cover image by Alessio Soggetti on Unsplash

Short Story