Photo by Victoria Shes on Unsplash
My phone dings but I don’t look at the text, not yet. I’m doing something else. I’m on my laptop adding food to my cart because it’s Monday, right? Mondays are for meat. Tuesdays are for produce. Wednesdays are for…
There’s a sharp burst of noise.
I look up. People walk by outside my front window, talking and even laughing. I tell myself it isn’t real, they aren’t real. What they’re doing—gathering like that—isn’t a possibility. Not yet. Not for me.
My phone dings again.
Shaking my head, I look away from the window and toward my phone, toward reality. The little photo icon for my friend Sean pops up, showing him shirtless and tanned. His apartment has a roof deck, so he’s been lying out the whole quarantine, looking like he’s covered in honey marinade while I’ve been trapped inside without so much as a balcony.
He says, Hey! Quick question.
I say, Sure, what’s up?
Dot-dot-dots form.
I know you’re still distancing, but I thought I’d ask... You wanna come out tonight? Maybe grab a beer?
My heart races. I haven’t seen Sean or any other friend in person for three years, not since the whole thing started. But it’s ended. The small voice reminds me quarantine has been over for months, everyone’s gotten a vaccine and it’s safe outside, mostly. Sooner or later, I’ve got to try to see someone.
I get up and shuffle toward my front window. A few more people walk by. Sharing air. It’s like I can see them breathing: puffs of toxic breath mixing in a noxious cloud on the street. I shake my head, backing away. I don’t want to get sick. I’m not ready to see people.
Sean messages again, sends a question mark.
He wants me to answer.
The quarantine started right after he and I first met through work. We didn’t have time to get to know each other in person; we’ve just been emailing and zooming and messaging. For a while, I’d get into bed at night and squeeze a body pillow, pretending it was him, thinking about what he might feel like, how his skin would taste. I’d run my hands all over my own body, across my stomach and breasts and up and down my thighs and imagine those hands were his. Because soon this would be over. Soon he would be a possibility. But then three years went by.
He’s a possibility now, the small voice says.
I’ve gotten so used to the body pillow, that’s the thing.
You wanna come out tonight?
And I’m afraid. I’ll admit that much. I’m afraid to go back outside. Do I really need to, anyway? We’ve been digital so long. Sean’s been reduced, shrunken down, just a person on my screen. That’s been all right, so far.
The voice grows bigger: You can’t stay in here the rest of your life!
I start breathing hard and text him back before I can change my mind. Okay, tonight is fine. I press send, hold my breath.
He texts back: Be there in a bit.
A bit? How soon? Oh, god. I turn my phone over, put it face down on the table.
What if he isn’t real?
Then he won’t come. It won’t matter. Nothing matters anymore, remember?
A drone flies past my building, the sharp buzz startling me, making me feel dizzy. I stare out the window again. It looks weird outside. Maybe the sky and houses and trees aren’t actually there. Maybe this is just a background I’ve selected for video conferencing. But when was the last time I was even on a zoom? I lost my job a year ago when my office closed, and the government started giving us all money to stay home. At first it was great: I read books I’d been wanting to read—three in the first week.
Now I can’t seem to read at all. I can’t find any meaning.
Spinning around, a ballerina move I used to do in high school, I think about going back in time, about time collapsing, about the before times and the after times and the now times. My apartment rushes past my eyes in a blur of unread books and piles of supplies. A tower of toilet paper. A pyramid of food cans. I can always order more and there’s some security in knowing that. Everything, I’ve learned, can be automated.
What was I doing, anyway?
My laptop is open. I go to it, sit down. Mondays are for meat. I need to finish placing my order. Double-checking my online cart, I add in a few extra sausages so I can cook a breakfast casserole this week. I confirm the chicken breasts I need are in there, too, along with poultry and eggs. I add in a last-minute package of bacon. An impulse buy, really. I press “done” and a tracker comes up, telling me how long until the delivery.
I watch the tracker over the next couple of hours, staring while it turns from red to yellow to green. The delivery is coming. Sean is coming, too. I should get ready. Grabbing the mask nearest me, I put it on, look at myself in the mirror.
For the first year of quarantine, I did a great job of exercising every day to keep my head on right, to remind myself there was going to be a future. The pandemic dragged on, though. I haven’t exercised much in the last year. Time has been slipping, falling away…
I turn to the side. My body is soft. I don’t recognize its shape. Will Sean even want me? I should message him back, tell him I’m sorry I can’t see him tonight. I’m busy. I’ve got a delivery coming. I pick up my phone and start typing the words, my hands shaking.
Thump-thump. A knock on the door.
“Hey!” A voice outside. Sean.
I gasp, dropping my phone.
“You alright?” He calls through the door.
I secure my mask. How could it be him already?
Another knock.
I back away, stumbling. It’s him.
“It’s me!” he says.
The small voice tells me to open the door. I tiptoe toward the peephole, but when I get close enough, I imagine his breath coming through the hole, through the door, infecting me. I’m not ready.
“I’m not ready,” I whisper.
“You home?” he says.
I back away, into my bedroom where it’s dark, where I feel safe. The knocking keeps coming, inside my head now, following me in here. Get up. Let him in. The small voice is very, very weak now, and I want it to stop. I want all the noise to end. I scream at it, making it smaller, until it’s teeny-tiny, just a whisper. Let him in. Now it disappears entirely.
Silence, at last.
I breathe a sigh of relief and stand up feeling lighter, feeling new, and walk with slow steps out into the living room. It’s getting dark.
There’s a sharp buzzing outside, a thud at my door.
I startle, then realize it’s only my delivery—the drone with my Monday meat.
Adjusting my mask, adding a pair of gloves, I walk to the door and open it a crack, my eyes scanning the patio for Sean or rogue neighbors walking by. The coast is clear, so I drag the box inside. It’s a lot bigger and heavier than I expected. I wonder if I mis-ordered or if the box is meant for someone else—a big family. I place it in my disinfecting station. When I’m done cleaning it off, I grab a knife and slide the blade into the tape, slicing from the top to the bottom, and flip the box flaps open.
The meat is sealed up in one of those insulated bags. The package is big. Must be a roast I ordered by mistake. I’ve actually done this before because the “add roast” button is so close to the “add chicken” button in the food delivery app. I once had to eat stew for weeks. Hoisting the cool, insulated bag out of the box, I bring it into the kitchen, placing it on the counter, and reach inside.
The meat is wrapped with twine and feels cool to the touch. The texture is unusual—smoother and firmer than I expected. I yank up on the twine, the insulated bag falling loose to the floor, grazing my leg as it floats downward.
Staring, I try to get my eyes to tell my brain what I’m seeing.
A male torso, severed at the neck and arms and just below the naval, red at all its edges, leaking some blood, sits on the counter. The skin is bronze, and the muscles are pronounced. It’s the chest of someone who has been working out though all his other parts have been cut off.
Feeling a wave of nausea, I run into the bathroom and vomit.
Flushing the toilet and rinsing out my mouth, I tell myself I imagined the whole thing. There is no human torso in my apartment. I’ve been alone too long and I’m finally going crazy. My mind is turning to goo. I just need to do some squats, some leg lifts, some cardio. I wonder if I still have my old jump rope. I could move some furniture to make room. Breathing in and out slowly, I tell myself, there’s nothing in the kitchen but a big roast I ordered by mistake.
I return to the kitchen. The torso is still there on the counter, facing upward. If it had eyes, it would be looking at me. More buzzing outside, a drone passing by my window. Now, another thud at my door. Another delivery.
I inch my way toward the door and crack it open. Two new boxes wait. I look side to side. No neighbors come, so I yank the boxes inside, sliding them across the threshold toward the disinfecting station. I tell myself this must be what I ordered—my usual meat delivery. But these boxes aren’t the right size either.
After disinfecting, I slide my knife carefully along the tape that holds the flaps closed and open each box, revealing more insulated bags inside. In each parcel, I find a man’s arm, kept cold and wrapped in plastic. Each arm is muscular and cleanly severed at the shoulder, extending all the way down to include the wrist and hand. Small pools of blood linger inside the wrapping.
Leaving the arms in their packages, I back away and go into my bedroom, hiding under the covers, thoughts racing. Did someone kill this guy and send me his severed parts? No, no, no, because this didn’t happen. This isn’t happening. I’m having another one of my lucid dreams. I choose what I do in a lucid dream. So, I’m going to rest a minute, imagine another reality.
When I finally pry myself loose, I return to the kitchen and look at the counter. Nothing there. No torso. What an insane dream. I walk toward the sofa. I’m about to collapse onto the cushions when I see it on the rug in front of the TV.
The torso and arms are lying together facing upward, everything unwrapped, the arms properly aligned with the shoulder cuts. There are still visible seams at the shoulders, some red areas oozing, but the body—despite the headlessness—looks normal, like the arms are fusing to the torso. I touch the skin with my fingers. It’s warm. It feels alive.
Photo by Edi Libedinsky on Unsplash
Buzzing again, outside my door. More packages thudding. Another delivery. I turn toward the sound. Before I can stop myself, I rush to the door, grabbing the new packages and yanking them inside, bringing them to the disinfecting station.
There are two big boxes, long and heavy. Opening them, I find one man-size leg in each. Hands shaking, I pull out the legs, placing them on the rug below the torso, leaving a gap where the groin should be.
Buzzing. Thudding. Another box outside.
I drag it into my apartment, skip the disinfecting entirely and sit cross-legged with the box on the rug. I’m careful with the knife, inserting the blade into the tape only as much as is necessary. When the box flaps are open, I stare at the insulated bag. Is this really happening? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore. I pull the bag open, unwrapping the groin. It wedges precisely between the torso and the legs, a final puzzle piece. Backing away, sitting on the sofa, I watch the body parts stitch themselves together.
My phone dings. I turn to look at the screen, see a new text from Sean.
I tried to come by.
My heart pounds. I’m sorry.
Can I come back later?
I look over at the parts on my floor—joining up seamlessly.
“That isn’t possible!” I shout though he can’t hear me. Tears roll down my face. Big sloppy tears. The kind I cried when we first locked down and I realized it was going to be this way a long, long time. My computer and phone ding with messages, but the sound lessens, shifts into the background. This could be one of my lucid dreams again. It doesn’t matter what I choose to do. There are no repercussions. Nothing’s real.
My eyes roam the headless, nude body on my rug.
He moves, imperceptibly at first, but now I’m sure of it: his ring finger is curling upward. Now his middle finger, his second finger, his pinky, his thumb. His fingers are balling into a fist, releasing, and stretching out. Then his other hand. Same thing.
I sit completely still, transfixed.
His abdominal muscles contract and he curls his body upward a few inches, then more, bending, sitting. His legs engage and he stands, pushing himself up from the floor and now—oh my god—he’s sitting next to me, taking my face in his hands.
I look over the stump of his neck, at the wall behind him.
He reaches behind my ears.
My eyes go wide.
He removes my mask, tosses it to the floor.
I exhale deeply, like I can breathe for the first time in years.
He peels off my latex gloves one at a time until my hands are free. His fingers intertwine with mine. They’re warm. So warm. Then he holds his chest against me, wraps his arms around my body, hugs me. The feel of his flesh against me makes me cry. When was the last time someone touched me—at all? I bend my neck, resting my cheek on the stump. It’s still red and raw, but I don’t care. He wants me here.
His hands release from my back and travel under my shirt up my stomach. I didn’t bother to put on a bra today and his palms find my breasts, his warm hands gently squeezing. A sound I didn’t know I could make erupts from within me, a deep groan like the cry of a prehistoric beast calling all the others to the cave. I wrap my legs around him. A voice in my head tells me to think twice, insisting this is wrong. I tell the voice to shut the fuck up. She’s the crazy one.
When he goes hard against me, burnt-out lights all over my body turn on for the first time in eons. I’m a brought-back Christmas Tree. Now my hands are around his torso, sliding down, fingering the gummy edges where his legs meet his groin.
I’m barely conscious of taking off my clothes; now we’ve moved, skin-on-skin, to the floor. We fall back onto a pile of collapsed delivery boxes, packaging peanuts flying into the air and static-clinging to my skin, falling away only when I begin to sweat and he slides inside me, the static charge releasing.
The feeling, the elation is like eating all my favorite foods at once. No, it’s more… It’s the rush of a crowded dance floor. It’s people breathing hard all around me. It’s packed rows at the bookstore. It’s touching free pizza samples. It’s being close enough to smell perfume. It’s naked hands on a park swing. It is maskless and gloveless and warm. It’s sanitizer-free. It is everything.
After, I collapse on top of him and feel his body deflate beneath me.
He doesn’t follow me to the shower, but that’s okay. I need these moments alone in the hot water to recover. I wash myself and his sticky juices flow off me. When I’m clean and dry, I slip into my black silky robe. I haven’t worn it since before the quarantine started. Usually I find myself in my tattered old terry cloth number, but that one has a couple of holes. Walking back into the living room, I feel the fabric slide against my skin. My whole body feels good—satisfied. This is what happiness feels like.
“Hey, I was thinking…” I say then pause.
He’s gone.
I look all around the room. He’s missing. He’s abandoned me.
Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash
Where I left him on the living room floor, there’s a pile of something squished and brown and red. My mind starts to process the fleshy colors, the fibrous strings, the fatty mush mixed throughout. I get closer, crouching down to see remnants of a roast, a few broken hot dog parts, some chicken breasts, and a large, smooshed breakfast sausage.
My breathing comes in sharp bursts. I find my mask and gloves, plucking them from the floor and putting them on. Before I can think too much, I grab a trash bag and shovel all the meat parts inside. There’s a stain left behind. I grab a rag and wipe the rug furiously. It’s impossible to get the red out. I want to scream. The cleaning bot will be here in a couple of days, though. Everything will be okay. I’m on schedule. Monday: meat. Tuesday: produce. Wednesday: cleaning bot. Thursday…
Another group walks by the window, talking, chattering, one woman laughing loudly like she can see me, like she can see inside. Why don’t you rejoin the world? You’re a loser. You’re pathetic. You’re going to die alone in there! I fill the room with a cloud of disinfectant spray and push my mask up even higher, covering the bridge of my nose. Tears roll down my cheeks, soaking the cloth edges of my mask. I can still hear the woman’s awful voice, piercing through the window.
Leave your apartment!
I can’t.
You can.
I need to wait. I need more time.
For what?
I shake my head. It doesn’t matter. I sit on the sofa, smoothing the cushions on either side. I adjust my mask. This is my life now. I’ll wait for the next delivery. It’ll have what I need.
END
Kathryn E. McGee's horror stories have appeared in Automata Review and Gamut Magazine, and anthologies including Horror Library Vol. 6, Winter Horror Days, and Cemetery Riots. She moderates a monthly horror book club at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles and is a member of the Horror Writers Association. Her other work includes co-authoring DTLA37: Downtown Los Angeles in Thirty-seven Stories, a non-fiction coffee table book about Downtown Los Angeles. She has an MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside Palm Desert.