EVIL FLESH
by Charlotte Shields-Rossi
We stand looking down at the pen, they squeal and oink in delight while we stand in horror and relief. Our dresses are still stained in his blood and I soon realized how similar it looked to her college graduation dress - baby blue and puffy. And the night we danced around in our shared apartment, cap and gown, dodging the cardboard moving boxes scattered around us. And how I knew that night things were going to change, but I was unclear of how. And after two years of not being close, getting coffee twice a month with a stranger who knew all my secrets we found ourselves here a week later. As the sun began to rise and his tender, evil flesh was almost gone I interlocked my pinkie with hers and felt nothing but gratitude for how close we were again. But I wished that it could have happened in a different way, that it didn’t take this to realize that we missed each other.
They are almost done. When they are finished feasting we will open the pen and let them go with full bellies filled with his flesh, blood, organs and bones and then we will leave and start anew. The secret of what we did will stay between us and the pigs, only few would understand. I let out a little smile at the irony of it all. We first met dissecting a fetal pig in high school. I wasn’t brave enough to cut the pig open, I couldn’t even look. She cut the sow’s intestines with the scalpel, as she was instructed to do, and when the digested porker slop spilled out I knew that we were going to be friends. And then years later, today, when she plunged the knife into his heart for me I knew that it would be forever. I have never felt more loved than when she did something that I was too scared to do. I want to think that what we did was wrong, she killed a man and I let her. But I don’t feel bad and I don’t think I ever will. My only regret, my only mistake, our only mistake was realizing that far too late that he was bad. That when he kissed me on the forehead that night for the first time, but not the last, it wasn’t the romance of two broken star-crossed lovers, it was a precursor to his ultimate plan - to eviscerate me. I think that what he really wanted to do that first night was to swallow me whole like a snake, and now I know that if he could get his jaw unhinged just enough to actually eat me alive he would have. I justified his evil, entertained it, because I didn’t believe that someone so handsome and charismatic and often kind and nurturing was capable of being wicked, that someone like that could possess the insatiable urge to inflict pain. Being blind was our sin, my sin - not this.
I don’t avert my gaze, like that day I did in biology class, I watch them devour him like he tried to do to me. I watch it all and when he is reduced to nothing but bones and then nothing at all we embrace for the first time in forever, squeezing one another and when we release she plants a kiss on my forehead without malice or motive.
Charlotte Shields-Rossi is a current journalism student at Duquesne University. She works as the arts and entertainment editor for The Duquesne Duke and is currently the editorial intern at Pittsburgh Magazine. In her limited free time, she enjoys writing short stories, reading and yoga.
