The Corpse
She left his corpse in bed, shrouded in a blanket.
And then she waited.
She passed the days kneeling on the hardwood, joints aching, arthritic fingers laced around the beads of her grandmother's rosary, praying out loud until her voice was raw. She wore gravel in her shoes on the walk to the grocery store, the liquor store.
On the fourteenth day the neighbours came by to ask about the smell, the flies congregating on the bedroom window.
She shaved her head and added an extra hour to her nightly prayer routine.
The children hung fly paper, sprayed air freshener, sealed the bedroom windows with duct tape as best they could. They stopped answering the door and stayed home from school to spend the afternoons praying.
On the twenty-eighth day the children shaved their heads and burned their stuffies in the backyard BBQ pit.
Still, he didn't come back.
She checked on the corpse sometimes, late at night when the children were asleep --she didn't want them to witness this lapse of faith. She tried to memorize the precise position of his body, the way his hands were folded across his chest, the exact angle of his neck, she way the blanket fell in delicate cascades over his abdomen. She wanted some sign -- any sign -- that he was coming back. Even just a finger-- just one finger. If he would move even just one finger, she thought, it would make the wait bearable. She prayed for hours, tears streaming silently down her cheeks. And then she covered him back up with the blanket, made sure everything was exactly as she had left it, and went to bed.
On the fourty-ninth day she drank a bottle of sherry and stormed into the bedroom at 3 a.m., cursing the man and his false prophecy, while the children cowered in the bathroom, plugging their ears. In the morning she would vomit, recite her penance while the children prepared breakfast. That night, she swapped the gravel in her shoes for broken glass.
On the fifty-sixth day the police showed up, neighbours peering through their blinds to watch the drama unfold.
And, though the children wailed and begged her not to, she let them in and showed them to the bedroom.
According to Dante, Judas Iscariot occupies the lowest of all stations in the inferno. The great betrayer resides between Lucifer's jaws, his flesh ceaselessly shredded between the beast's fangs -- an external torment with no possibility of death's consolation.
She would carry this image with her, going forward. Like the shame, the embarrassment, the overwhelming relief.
This story, while fictional, draws inspiration from a real event: the strange story of Peter Wald. The tragedy enfolded in my hometown of Hamilton, in a location not so far from my own home. I remember reading about this back in 2013, when it was circulating around on the local news. The story stuck with me for years and now, finally, ended up serving as inspiration for art.