Friday Flash: "Experience"

"Experience"
by Jen Brubacher
I thought it would be like chopping wood, but the human body has so many hidden angles and planes the axe didn’t crack through bone at all but bounced from a flap of skin and slid sideways across the chest, redirected towards the jaw where it painted a thin line, and then settled against the tilted throat without breaking the skin. My shoulders ached with the effort and yet the body was still in one piece. It was going to be some job. I considered again my other option—the chainsaw—but in my mind’s eye saw the shower of cubed flesh through the air and shrugged, pulling the axe up for another try. This time I aimed low, and it buried without remark into the thick flesh of the stomach. Had it hit the spine? Was it severed? I imagined the body split there, the results spewed out in slithering trails of intestine, and I let go of the axe.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said.

“No kidding,” said the body.

“What do you suggest?”

“Um.”

We pondered.

“Fire?” suggested the body.

***
There was plenty to burn that smelled good. Cedar branches and juniper giving a heady, spiced smoke. Half an apple tree that had fallen in a storm, chopped and dragged through the yard to the bonfire. Rosemary clipped from the communal garden, stickying up my hands as I shredded it onto the pile. And then when it was very hot I added the oranges whole, because I didn’t have enough orange peels and I couldn’t eat that much fruit in a few hours. Altogether it was a perfumed inferno. I nestled the body with its face to the fire, flames and shadows licking and obscuring so you couldn’t quite tell if that was an arm or a branch. Never was a pig roast so seasoned and sweet.

My closest neighbour: a fellow with perpetual baseball cap and Cat boots, usually drinking beer with his friends on his porch, raising his bottle in a salute. Of course he had to come over and see what smelled so good.

“Make him go away,” the body whispered.

“Just thought I’d clear the yard a little.” I accepted the extra beer my neighbour offered and washed down salt and ash with cool malt.

“Ayuh,” my neighbour said. “Good time for it.”

We both nodded at the damp leaves weighing on the yard. No chance of wildfire. That was something at least.

“You got, uh,” my neighbour started. He belched into the back of a hand. “You got a permit for this? Because they’re a little paranoid down at the fire hall.”

The body was whispering so quickly now I couldn’t hear what it was saying. It was a static buzz at the back of my head.

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Ayuh,” my neighbour said.

***
The skeleton was matte black. All the troublesome flesh melted away, including the soft tilted throat, so maybe that was why it was so quiet.

“I’m a little unsure what to do at this point,” I prompted.

There was that hum in my head but I couldn’t hear the words. I leaned close to the skull and noticed that flesh remained deep within the eyes, and soot cracked off the teeth to show a yellow-white grin.

It was an old farmhouse, so the floorboards came up readily, their long nails giving the barest squeal. The body curled around itself in the space and I asked if it was cold. I would have asked anything to get it to speak up. The silence was unnerving.

“I’m a little disappointed in this whole process,” the body finally said.

I was relieved. I pushed a few more blackened sticks and logs down beneath the floor and put the boards back into place. This time the nails made no noise and I stepped on them a few times to make sure they’d hold. It seemed so.

The body said, “This is not what I expected.”

“I understand. I’m new at this. But next time I’ll know better.”

I hoped I sounded reassuring.

From outside, near the bonfire, I heard my neighbour’s body yelling.

---

Photo: Bonfire by Mark Bridge on flickr