The odor of rotting flesh rattled around in Anne's brain like an obsession. It would someday drive her mad. Drive her to pull up the floor boards in search of corpses. And he would come in to find her with bloodied fingernails, hunched over the earth, weeping.
Hunched over damp Southern earth, surrounded by decay. Rancid sun and mosquitoes and heavy air that catches her lungs and makes it hard to walk. To walk, to stand, to unfold from a bed and face the dripping branches and the swamp.
Weeping over her steering wheel, weeping over corpses, weeping over the Southern earth.
She drives away from the past.
And his future: she had one of those faces, one of those mouths where when she smiled, she looked like a toothless old lady, Anne thought. Or like a pointy little bird.
And there she is coming up the overgrown walk. And speaking to him in confidential tones with her little pecking beak. Peck peck pecking away what has happened before until it is insignificant nostalgia.
So Anne drives away and is enveloped in limbs and morbid night sky and the carrion scent.
Back home, she spread her arms wide across the bed so that the vines could wrap around her wrists and the smell could knock against her skull. And the flies, they tried to escape from her mouth so she swallowed them one by one.
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