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Dave Shrigley

#Hold On #You forgot #Cartoons #Shrigley

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You Forgot

The problem is that you think she came back wrong. You're forgetting so, so many things. The first thing you forgot, of course, was that this was a bad idea - that desecrating a body, tapping into these dark rites, opening the way to the unknown and hidden things of the earth is not a work for a person so weak-willed as to not accept the one thing all people are born to do. That didn't stop you of course. Far harder to part with was your dignity. Nobody can have dignity when in the dead of night they six feet down to unearth the corpse, stinking, infested with maggots and certainly no one can have any dignity when they've yelped at the sight of a centipede emerging from someone's mouth. You forgot all sensible religion and turned to the blackest, foulest alchemy one could imagine, the black stitches, the pale and bloodless skin graft, the yellowed teeth of dogs and babes, the fresh blood which rolled down your arm. Oh, yes, you forgot it for her.

And you forgot the law, too, to provide for her eyes, her hair, her joints. Animals could do for some but not for all - you wanted only the best for her. You forgot the common morality to provide for her toes and her tendons and joints, those sayings of common sense about killing five men to save just one. That didn't matter. What her family wanted didn't matter. The work mattered.

And then she woke after all your months of work. Oh, yes, then she woke, and you were so, so afraid. She breathed in through long-empty lungs, and her chest flexed around the scars of autopsy and replacement, and her breast heaved with that first gasp - and oh, you nearly screamed if it weren't for the fact that you had forgotten to breathe out of shock. As the damnable, contemptible man you are you became disgusted as she sighed out, spindly catsgut strings of her arms springing to life as she grasped the table and let out a great howl, a demoniac wolf-noise that must have been from the depths of Hell itself. You damn well forgot that the dead must keep their lips sealed for a reason; that the tombs out stay well shut, the corpses kept deeper, locked far away from the places of the living. Having forgotten your common sense you swallowed your bile and your fear, but not the disgust that sat in your head. You could never rid of that even when she was alive, not wholly. You thought that was the way love went sometimes, and so it seemed natural to you.

Foolish man you are, you clumsily tried to commune with her. She took well to talking, and still you seemed so disgusted with her. She said the same words. She took to the same mannerisms with only some new flesh, with freshly sharp canines and thirty-four more to spare - you'd forgotten how many she ought to have, but that was a small mistake considering everything else. But something was wrong, something was off - she was always needling you, irking you, trying to frustrate you or asking you too many questions. More and more that same disgust grew in you from the moment you first met. It occurred to you that perhaps something entirely different than the woman you knew was now inhabiting her body, and you quickly became certain in that determination, that sweet Vanya was gone and some daemon had truly come back that night and not her.

Of course, you were wrong. How could you ever be more wrong? A foolish little boy you were, skinning cats and sticking his nose where it ought not to be, you forgot so many things - the little things, like how she stirred coffee with her left hand, how she loved her meat rare, how she would delight in singing, how she would make cruel jokes and liked to poke herself with silverware, and how her arrangement with you left her bored and sad most days. No daemon-figure could imitate her mannerisms and her memories so exactly. But when you could not have her anymore, when Death snatched her up from you, when you lost the one person in your life you could control most, you forgot all of that. You say she came back wrong, that she isn't who she was. Deep down, you must know that you are lying, you sad fool. You forgot who you were bringing back.

#my writing #you forgot #horror #kind of started as a joke and then got very serious.