Both Wound And Knife

While she baked, he used a dish rag to wipe off the small kitchen table; it was a size suitable only for one person, yet two chairs sat at either side—one which was routinely occupied by him, and the other that remained chronically vacant. When he looked at this barren seat, the one which he always neglected, he could not help but personify its emptiness by assigning it the desire to be sat in. Finally there existed a person in his life who would make use of this sad little chair.

Not very long ago, after an hour’s drive from Oxford, he would sit at this aforementioned table, play solitaire, smoke his cigarettes, and eat something uninspired for dinner. He would then reflect on the variabilities that made his simple life interesting. By himself, he had lost all hope for love through his own withdrawal, and became comfortable in the notion that he may live a life that was unconventionally lonely. The rest of his peers, who were married and with children, found him to be an intensely peculiar man. And now, here he was, joining in their chorus of marital hymns. 

Inside Cornelia, however, there inhabited an intractable confidence, a quality so recalcitrant that his nervous soul had shuddered under the influence of her story. It was the type of boldness that could only be inherited through the certainty of a bloodline, something that was present at birth and otherwise unlearnable. Despite lacking the noble titles that came with royalty, she still travelled in space with the poise of an empress; a self-possession that, in turn, possessed all of those around her. Arthur felt like a common peasant in her presence, for he could not match her grandeur sensibilities or her guiltless indulgences. She spoke of a gluttonous nature that reflected a similar irrationality to Tarrare, a French showman known for his insatiable appetite. However, within her words was the origin of her unsoundness of mind. The secrets hidden within the tale exposed this proclivity that had been developing since girlhood, and her mother’s own paroxysms had poisoned the water used to nourish a nursery flower. He felt increasingly sad for her as she honed in on her memory’s conclusion. 

Where childhood existed as some people’s only happy times, for Cornelia, her earliest years were pigmented with the bright red rage of a mother’s storm, whose own insecurities were projected onto her daughter in the form of turbulent, wrathful strikes of lightning. It stained the portrait of innocence like loose fragments of charcoal, which when accidentally brushed, tarnished the purity of the white canvas with an unerasable black smudge. His own relationship with his mother was antithetical to Cornelia’s, however, it did bear some resemblance to the indignance of his father. 

While his mother was alive—before she was tragically lowered to the ground when he had reached the diffident age of fourteen—there existed a sort of safety net from his father’s disciplinarian character. Opal had always been insistent that her children were never to be hit, but with this boundary came the compromised alternatives of stress positions, mouth soaping, or—in the case of an especially egregious misbehavior—kneeling on salt for an hour’s time. Her unresolved post-partum depression left little fight in her, which allowed for Clarence to control the dynamics of the family with an iron fist. After her death, any goodness that remained in his father was lost to his grief, and his teenage-hood was lived in the shadows from thereon out, Arthur's emotions carefully hidden beneath the floorboards. 

A Carpenter’s arrangement of  Rainy Days and Mondays played on Arthur’s outdated radio, its transistor static inducing a homesick yearning for his own childhood in the 90’s. The highlight of his early adolescence occurred in the privacy of his bedroom, the only company keeping him were bleeding Russian poets, the tragic compositions of Tchaikovsky, and lonely marathons of Twin Peaks. He wondered what Cornelia’s favorite memories were, or if she could even recall any good times through the haze of her trauma. Perhaps in the closet of her mind, under the heavy weight of her mother’s oppressiveness, all of her happiest memories were buried beneath pandemonium, rendering them unretrievable. 

“...Disgusted? Hardly!” His open hand met his chest effeminately, he was soft-spoken with a voice fractured by an empathetic ache, “Certainly with your mother, but never with you.” The look on his face suggested he had been not only horrified by her story, but simultaneously smitten by her anti-puritanical spirit.

“I admire the way you live your life without feeling bound by the expectations society has placed upon women. It’s very omnipotent. Disregard this if I risk sounding misogynistic, but I find most women to be prosaically conformative.” He dared not bring Rosemary’s name into the conversation, but she was the subject which he spoke of. “Too hastily some women hand themselves over; they carelessly sacrifice their autonomy and lose their entire souls to the men they chase. And what do they get in return?” He asked, hanging the used dish rag over the faucet of the sink. “For the same man to use them until they grow tired, bored! Longing for something less routine. Men then seek some other woman who exists as the opposite—unpredictable, volatile, vulgar. Freud called it The Madonna-Whore complex.” 

He began to rinse the variety of fruits, Cornelia continued to refine her stove-top creation. “Now, I need to clarify… I don’t believe that this theory is even respectable, but it exists as a common pitfall in heterosexual relations.” He went on, shaking his head slightly with his eyes fixed on the produce, “It would be impossible for me to grow bored of you, however. You keep me in a constant state of frightful captivation, and it gratifies me in a way that I doubt you can understand. You are no ordinary woman, you are paradoxical it seems; within you a Madonna and a whore, which live in perfect harmony somehow. I think you enjoy my inability to control you. I’m suspecting that this brings you pleasure, and that’s all I hope to be good for." He smiled down at the plums, which were glistening beneath the stream of tap water. 

She indulged almost sexually with that crowded plate, and this activated his arousal; her lips wet and pink like the decorticated juice vesicles of a weeping grapefruit. Watching them round about and suck the sap from the ripe fruit sent him into a fit of vulgar, monomaniacal thoughts (‘oral fixation’ had embraced new meaning.) He relished seeing her pampered, her desires quenched. He decided that he would do anything within his power to keep her in that constant state of pleasure, and with luck, she might permit him to eat her as a dessert.

She certainly could eat a lot, this was true. She devoured a slice of quiche, sampled every single platter laid out on the table, and encouraged him to do the same. It left him without wonder as to how she accomplished her impeccable figure, which he found to be a Junoesque example of the optimal female form; wide hips, rotund thighs, and, of course, her plump breasts which existed in perfect harmony with gravity. Even her hands were the most beautiful on earth, and they felt best and most suitable wrapped around his neck.

By the time they had concluded this abundant meal, Arthur felt the threat of discomfort swell as a consequence for their overindulgence. Neeltje did not warrant his decline of more calories with an ounce of seriousness, and she was a very insistent woman who was not satisfied by the word ‘no’ in any context related to a meal. While this could be perceived as an almost mother-like nurturing, he felt unnatural in ignoring his body’s signal to cease eating; Arthur had always been the type to easily set his fork down once he was satisfied, and hardly ate in excess—his ectomorphic frame was proof of this. Yet his wife, a true connoisseur of all things food, did not share this quality, and in fact, seemed to purposefully disrespect its function as if it were a mistake of evolution. She was in control of her vessel, and her ability to disregard any physical pleas to stop was an impressive display of mind power.  

Arthur was about to suggest they take an afternoon stroll about the property, where he was hoping to admire the impressive poplars and his rosebushes together, but Neeltje clearly had not eradicated her curiosities from the morning—this woman forgot nothing, and it was foolish for him to expect that she might. His face twisted into a comical expression of doubt at her proposition.

“Oh, well—” His stammering was always symbolic of his fears, “Surely sharing such a thing could only promote heartache and woes. Why ruin the afternoon?” He attempted to dismiss it, to redirect her, and resolved to burn the baneful evidence as soon as the opportunity presented itself. But as expected, Neeltje reacted poorly to this and he was left with no choice but to progress, knowing the end result would be a pair of hands uniting in supplicated prayer form. 

He regretfully guided her back up the stairs and was in both mental and physical anguish—his anxiety grew feathers; he couldn’t tell if he was experiencing indigestion or constipation, and this biliousness was most certainly the result of the meal, which now became emphasized by being followed with such an uncompromising emotional demand. But he persisted, nevertheless, and made no complaints out loud. It wouldn’t serve to calm him, anyway, and it certainly wouldn’t condition Cornelia’s prickly way of being. 

He opened the door to his bedroom, and revealed inside were a set of heavy barkcloth curtains, which were decorated with a dark paisley print and drawn over the windows. They eliminated all light except for a couple sunrays, which escaped desperately in flares through the corners of the windowpanes. The sunlight danced ethereally with the swirling fragments of dust in the air. He walked into the dim space with confidence, untouched by the blinding darkness, and turned the rotary switch until the heritage lamp at bedside illuminated the room with a yellow glow. The house was so old that there were no overhead lights, and so he was dependent upon lamps and the spare sunshine which was supplied naturally by the daytime in order to keep it bright. 

His bedroom bore a collection of very captivating relics, some of which seemed out of place for a bachelor’s bedroom, but some details remained especially unexpected of him, in particular. One most unforeseen detail was a small crucifix, which hung almost ironically in a known atheist’s room. It was an utter degradation of Christ, one that was incontrovertibly sacrilegious, but Arthur understood the crucifixion as not only an act of salvation, but a divulgement of man’s condition. As Christ hung upon the cross, his skin raw from the flagellation of the Romans, he was further mocked, beaten, and exposed to a thorny crown that symbolized a great shame. The scene serves as the ultimate expression of humiliation; a man who calls himself God is now reduced to weakness and the object of public mortification. Arthur felt there was justice in this. No man could be God, this title could only be granted suitably to a woman, and any man who thought otherwise was a fool. 

A print of The Siren by John William Waterhouse, made proud in its display by a tasteful golden frame, hung in solitude on a wall between two windows. His closet was slightly ajar, and inside one could see the evidence of tweed, oxford cottons, and leather belts organized in a way that made sense to only himself. 

Some things could have been entirely predicted, such as the ever-growing pile of books at both the table and floor of his bedside. This was somewhat humorous, as there existed another bookshelf only a stride away from where they were abandoned that would serve as the perfect home for these stray novels, however, the bedroom bookshelf was fully reserved. Inside this display were titles deemed too risqué, and thus were forbidden from joining the other novels found in the living room shelves. Titles by the Marquis De Sade, The Image by Jean De Berg, Delta Of Venus by Anaïs Nin, and the most undeniably worn copy being Venus in Furs by Leopold Sacher-Masoch—the bindings and paged were abused. Arthur was an avid reader of all kinds of stories, and the erotic genre did not go under appreciated by him. In fact, he had read hundreds, and resolved to collect only the ones that bore artistic substance, and which catered to his own fetishism.

But rather than wasting time on the fine details of his room—which his own familiarity had blinded him to—he drew her towards a large dowry chest, which made home at the foot of his bed. Perhaps this was his first and most crucial criticism of marriage thus far: there existed no privacy between man and wife. He looked at Neeltje, who was in this moment like a thistle to him, and offered her a begrudging look that made his hesitancy known and, if she were a careful spectator, she would see the element of fear hiding behind his glossy eyes. He feared her judgement, and prepared himself to feel disappointed by a strong reaction.

He lowered himself to his knees and opened the chest. Inside were a small pile of dirty magazines—one which sat atop was a publication from Skin Two Magazine featuring Dita Von Teese, who was dressed in a satin bustier and a leather skirt; in her hands, she held an intimidating whip suitable for nothing less than a beastly animal. The rest of the chest was a disorganized assortment of clippings that stimulated different areas of taste, such as women (all of which were shapely and mature as Neeljte was) dressed in high-end lingerie, some completely nude, and others draped in nothing but a silk robe or a fur draping. Beneath these lay a graveyard of erotic novelties, such as a flog, a riding crop, the typical things kept by a practitioner of manature, soft-core BDSM. The polaroids she sought were tucked in a small envelope, which Arthur retrieved and servilily handed to Neeltje without a word, allowing her to browse them freely and without his futile obstination. Like an anchor, Neeltje drew him down, down, down into the abyss of shame. At the bottom, he was left with a pang of arousal watching her eyes meet the debased photographs. His blood became hot as he anticipated her wrath. 

Inside the envelope were a total of five photographs. There was nothing especially derogatory about them, other than that they featured a faceless ex, and were clearly taken for the purpose of sexual gratification. The first photo was a display of muted color; a woman’s genitals lit up by the camera flash, her pubic hair a contrasting depth to her pale labia. In another, a pair of white nipples and a navel which sat on a gaunt stomach. The rest bore the same anonymity as the others, but showed the pale and thin body of the unidentified Rosemary. He was desperate in his hope that the secrecy of his collection would not impugn the sincerity of his affection and devotion to Neeltje, this was what he feared most.

He politely listened to her with the studious ears of an academic, her lecturing on blackcurrants and their complex flavor profile was riveting to say the least. It was times such as these that he felt fortunate knowing that they, as a pair, were so intellectually compatible. There was never a dull moment in their exchanges, and he found that the more he made a vow to silence, the many more revelations he made in regard to her character, which was as deep and mysterious as the Mariana Trench. 

Just by looking, he could almost feel the harsh heat of the car’s surface—which had been sitting in a partially shaded area for the last hour. As it met with her skin, he wondered how it was that the back of her thighs were so immune to this pain despite their dermal composition being no different than any other human, skin so prone to a cutaneous scalding, what with them being as soft as they were. 

“It goes beyond the pain of loss, Neeltje.” He replied, “Without sustenance, we wither away; it’s essential, it cannot be lived without. And as humans, we become starved; we will eat just about anything, even an unripe or rotting fruit, to escape the pains of hunger.” Arthur said, his knee parting her thighs ever so slightly as the frame of her legs were pressed against the hood further. “So perhaps it’s not that pleasure is unattainable without first experiencing pain, but rather, that the two are harmonious, and in a way, concurrent passions which mirror each other’s place in the human psyche. In addition to this, have you considered that pleasure may be heightened by pain—and that pain, in turn, becomes all the more acute in the presence of pleasure?” 

He leaned into her, and by her decree, he opened his mouth and closed his lips around the delicate berry, which immediately crimped the masseter muscles of his face. It was the exact opposite profile of her ferric thumb, which in the crevices of his gums he could still detect this lingering earth-like grittiness. The commands were identical, but the consequences were diametrically opposed; this morning, she force fed him dirt, and now as the afternoon approaches, she graciously shared with him the fruit of gods. This action existed as the live performance to his philosophy. 

“It was pleasurable, but not painless, not without the aftertaste of dirt. Now, open for me.” He said after he swallowed it, then cupped her small face with an open hand. With his other hand, he brought the pad of his thumb to press against the center of her chin, as if he bore the training of a dentist, and levered her mouth to unlock. With an open mouth, he kissed her and tasted the many lingering flavors of all that she had sampled at the market. He withdrew, his eyes one breath away from stellar death. “Can you taste the dirt?” He asked, preparing for the final propositum. “It made the flavor of the blackcurrant all the sweeter.” 

They climbed into the car and were soon homeward bound. “I’m going to bore you with a story.” He lit them another pair of cigarettes, “I promise, it’s relevant— and I can’t control myself if I otherwise have nothing to distract me.” He said frankly, his eyes frequently checking his rear-side mirrors (he was a very rigid driver, and detested those who had no respect for the laws of the road). He cleared his throat as any true story-teller did before painting the opening scene.

“When I was about four years old, my brother Dylan and I had gotten lost in the wilderness that surrounded my family’s estate. It was sometime in the early autumn. Anyway,” He exhaled a stream of smoke, “We had been lost for most of the day, and were becoming convinced that we may never find our way back home. Mind you, I was only about four then, and I have very little recollection of any of this.

“So I was completely dependent on my older brother—who at the time must have been five or six—to make the decisions of a survivalist. Well, we happened upon a huge collection of shrubs, which were producing fat, black berries. They appeared to Dylan totally identical to the blackcurrants that all us children loved to eat in the springtime, and we were really quite hungry. So, you’ve probably guessed what happens next.  

Before my brother had gotten his first taste, he was supposedly dissuaded by my reaction to its astringent taste. I collapsed within a minute of ingesting it, and of course his panic set in, and he began to scream and cry like any child might. So, you see, what we thought were blackcurrants were actually the berries of a deadly nightshade bush. Shortly thereafter—with God apparently watching over me—my parents located us with the aid of some officers, and I was rendered unconscious. My mother told me that my pupils were massive black orbs, and my breathing was severely shallow when I was found. Luckily, the antidote for a belladonna overdose is physostigmine, and I didn’t suffer any long-term effects… except that I grew up to be a neurotic kook.” He said this as a joke, “But this is the take away from the story: even as a child, I was drawn in by the deadly pleasures offered in life. I am almost a victim, but I can’t resist my own urges despite them resulting in my own suffering. It’s never left me, I think I am permanently poisoned to some extent.” The way he spoke were like the inky words that bled onto a damp canvas. He put his spare hand on her thigh, “My little belladonna.” 

While she baked, he used a dish rag to wipe off the small kitchen table; it was a size suitable only for one person, yet two chairs sat at either side—one which was routinely occupied by him, and the other that remained chronically vacant. When he looked at this barren seat, the one which he always neglected, he could not help but personify its emptiness by assigning it the desire to be sat in. Finally there existed a person in his life who would make use of this sad little chair.

Not very long ago, after an hour’s drive from Oxford, he would sit at this aforementioned table, play solitaire, smoke his cigarettes, and eat something uninspired for dinner. He would then reflect on the variabilities that made his simple life interesting. By himself, he had lost all hope for love through his own withdrawal, and became comfortable in the notion that he may live a life that was unconventionally lonely. The rest of his peers, who were married and with children, found him to be an intensely peculiar man. And now, here he was, joining in their chorus of marital hymns. 

Inside Cornelia, however, there inhabited an intractable confidence, a quality so recalcitrant that his nervous soul had shuddered under the influence of her story. It was the type of boldness that could only be inherited through the certainty of a bloodline, something that was present at birth and otherwise unlearnable. Despite lacking the noble titles that came with royalty, she still travelled in space with the poise of an empress; a self-possession that, in turn, possessed all of those around her. Arthur felt like a common peasant in her presence, for he could not match her grandeur sensibilities or her guiltless indulgences. She spoke of a gluttonous nature that reflected a similar irrationality to Tarrare, a French showman known for his insatiable appetite. However, within her words was the origin of her unsoundness of mind. The secrets hidden within the tale exposed this proclivity that had been developing since girlhood, and her mother’s own paroxysms had poisoned the water used to nourish a nursery flower. He felt increasingly sad for her as she honed in on her memory’s conclusion. 

Where childhood existed as some people’s only happy times, for Cornelia, her earliest years were pigmented with the bright red rage of a mother’s storm, whose own insecurities were projected onto her daughter in the form of turbulent, wrathful strikes of lightning. It stained the portrait of innocence like loose fragments of charcoal, which when accidentally brushed, tarnished the purity of the white canvas with an unerasable black smudge. His own relationship with his mother was antithetical to Cornelia’s, however, it did bear some resemblance to the indignance of his father. 

While his mother was alive—before she was tragically lowered to the ground when he had reached the diffident age of fourteen—there existed a sort of safety net from his father’s disciplinarian character. Opal had always been insistent that her children were never to be hit, but with this boundary came the compromised alternatives of stress positions, mouth soaping, or—in the case of an especially egregious misbehavior—kneeling on salt for an hour’s time. Her unresolved post-partum depression left little fight in her, which allowed for Clarence to control the dynamics of the family with an iron fist. After her death, any goodness that remained in his father was lost to his grief, and his teenage-hood was lived in the shadows from thereon out, Arthur's emotions carefully hidden beneath the floorboards. 

A Carpenter’s arrangement of  Rainy Days and Mondays played on Arthur’s outdated radio, its transistor static inducing a homesick yearning for his own childhood in the 90’s. The highlight of his early adolescence occurred in the privacy of his bedroom, the only company keeping him were bleeding Russian poets, the tragic compositions of Tchaikovsky, and lonely marathons of Twin Peaks. He wondered what Cornelia’s favorite memories were, or if she could even recall any good times through the haze of her trauma. Perhaps in the closet of her mind, under the heavy weight of her mother’s oppressiveness, all of her happiest memories were buried beneath pandemonium, rendering them unretrievable. 

“...Disgusted? Hardly!” His open hand met his chest effeminately, he was soft-spoken with a voice fractured by an empathetic ache, “Certainly with your mother, but never with you.” The look on his face suggested he had been not only horrified by her story, but simultaneously smitten by her anti-puritanical spirit.

“I admire the way you live your life without feeling bound by the expectations society has placed upon women. It’s very omnipotent. Disregard this if I risk sounding misogynistic, but I find most women to be prosaically conformative.” He dared not bring Rosemary’s name into the conversation, but she was the subject which he spoke of. “Too hastily some women hand themselves over; they carelessly sacrifice their autonomy and lose their entire souls to the men they chase. And what do they get in return?” He asked, hanging the used dish rag over the faucet of the sink. “For the same man to use them until they grow tired, bored! Longing for something less routine. Men then seek some other woman who exists as the opposite—unpredictable, volatile, vulgar. Freud called it The Madonna-Whore complex.” 

He began to rinse the variety of fruits, Cornelia continued to refine her stove-top creation. “Now, I need to clarify… I don’t believe that this theory is even respectable, but it exists as a common pitfall in heterosexual relations.” He went on, shaking his head slightly with his eyes fixed on the produce, “It would be impossible for me to grow bored of you, however. You keep me in a constant state of frightful captivation, and it gratifies me in a way that I doubt you can understand. You are no ordinary woman, you are paradoxical it seems; within you a Madonna and a whore, which live in perfect harmony somehow. I think you enjoy my inability to control you. I’m suspecting that this brings you pleasure, and that’s all I hope to be good for." He smiled down at the plums, which were glistening beneath the stream of tap water. 

The stare of this woman, which was currently gleaming with joy, was only a facade. Still behind the temporary gaiety was the vision from one hour ago; her eyes downcast, throwing a net of wickedness about him until he was entirely subdued. The moment was so nightmarish; his soul had escaped into a Hamlet-ish performance of raw vulnerability, and she had thoughtlessly pelted him with spoiled tomatoes.

Arthur subscribed to the thought that, perhaps with each visual taste he took of her, a piece of him was set ablaze by her fire; she was an electric green inferno, whose excited electrons only emitted its resplendent fluorescence in response to a very specific kind of nourishment, which seemed to accept two methods of love: his own servile way of navigating her affections, and then Holger’s ambivalent hatred disguised as love. How could one woman be so weak in another man’s world, yet so absolute in his? 

In the parked car, Arthur impassively took a final drag of his cigarette before stamping it out into a porcelain ashtray, which was settled snugly in a cupholder. Beside him, a thousand words were being said by his wife, which all pertained to food, and he felt allayed by the normalcy. Finally, something predictable was coming from her mouth rather than the uncharitable opinions she secretly bore of him—those words that lingered like the trace evidence of a virus. He allowed himself to be swept up by the fantasy that his wife enjoyed his company as much as he did hers, but there was an ache that settled like sawdust in his stomach. This underlying feeling called doubt, insecurity, dread—and it marred every other happy thought that it touched.

Ciche, coq au vin, citronate to drink, cookies—and every ingredient used to cultivate such complicated recipes she listed… He could hardly keep up with the grocery haul she aspired to collect, and he cursed himself for not bringing a pen and paper.

“That sounds deli—” 

“Well I—” 

“I’ve never tried—” 

His attempts to interject his own thoughts were bulldozed humorously by her zestful canto, but at the very least, he did manage to confirm that he did, in fact, like muddled mint. His wet eyes cherished her as each passing word crossed the border of her cushion-like lips, and eventually he lost interest in competing with her passions; the treasures that lay ahead at the farmer’s market were far too demanding of her attention, and any possibility that her ardent ranting may cease was unlikely. He could sit, just like this, and be subjected to her natural passionate state for many hours and feel perfectly fulfilled. 

They evacuated the car and Arthur watched as his wife dove into the wavering lake of people, quite dumbfounded by her leopard-like pace. Luckily, his long legs aided him in catching up to her, and he trailed along her denim skirt like a sheep, who was otherwise guideless without the presence of their shepherd. 

The pathways between vendors were narrow, and Arthur was becoming crowd averse the deeper they advanced. The excess of bodies was especially gruesome in the sultry June heat, for under the tarp it was intolerably warm and felt like the inner workings of a hot-air balloon. The cicadas’ screaming grew insufferably loud as the summer atmosphere became more dense. He was amused by Cornelia's contentment, which had become evident in the presence of others; with ease she could engage in conversation with perfect strangers despite the heat, which seemed to bother her very little. Was it a sense of community that pacified her, he wondered, or just the food that surrounded them from all angles? 

Food was a true universal language, and a quote rang in his ears: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” This resonated, not because he agreed with its significance, but because it had him reconsidering how much of her instability was ascribable to her empty stomach. He had known her to be very fixed in a three-meal-a-day routine, and they failed to breakfast together that morning. Perhaps the blame was his own, having fallen short in keeping his pedigree kitten well-fed. 

Still, dealing with her ever-changing emotions was entirely exhausting, and certainly this sort of energy could not be sustained in placating her; he wondered how realistic she felt it was to put upon him this encumbrance—was it meant to be easy as it was for the raindrops to roll off of a slick umbrella? But with this thought came the golden shimmer of empathy; if this was a difficult task for him, he could only imagine what her inner world was like.

As she was exchanging bills with the merchant who sold her the fresh fruit, there was a minor discomfort that festered in him; he came to realize this sprouted from all of her questioning about the produce (or alternatively, because her nipples were visible, just as frozen mountain peaks were). Since his youth, he had been trained to converse politely, yet he still found useless banter to be an odious labor. Because of his strong efforts to avoid being social with strangers, Cornelia’s natural affinity for extroversion always impressed him. They were so unalike from one another, and each passing moment was a reminder of this. 

Just when a moment of fleeting, ignorant bliss washed over him, he was dragged back down by his memories of hell. He couldn’t put a stop to his endless recounting of her harsh words, and he began to criticize her privately for her lack of self-governance once again.

But then he watched her bite into the blackcurrant. Her dainty mouth puckered in such a way that melted into his bloodstream, and he found himself vicariously salivating when watching her eat the berry. A hot throb ambushed him at the sight. It was at her most effortless that he became completely undone by her. He noted the blood of its flesh exude through the parting line of her lips, and abruptly he felt the urge to put his whole tongue into her open mouth. 

Were this appropriate, he certainly would have done so. But instead, he stood there puerilely, observing her with frustrated angst and saying nothing at all. 

They left one vendor and leapt to another like frogs traveling by lilypad. Her tote bags were becoming heavy with goods, and he relieved her of the weight by securing the bag's loops into the anticubital space of his arm. 

“You enjoyed those blackcurrants.” He finally broke his long hiatus of speech. They were almost certainly ripe, and Arthur felt that the springtime of their love had been bombarded with nothing but cold rain thus far. This was hugely disappointing, as he knew that fruit-bearing plants were at their most fertile in this season.  

He politely listened to her with the studious ears of an academic, her lecturing on blackcurrants and their complex flavor profile was riveting to say the least. It was times such as these that he felt fortunate knowing that they, as a pair, were so intellectually compatible. There was never a dull moment in their exchanges, and he found that the more he made a vow to silence, the many more revelations he made in regard to her character, which was as deep and mysterious as the Mariana Trench. 

Just by looking, he could almost feel the harsh heat of the car’s surface—which had been sitting in a partially shaded area for the last hour. As it met with her skin, he wondered how it was that the back of her thighs were so immune to this pain despite their dermal composition being no different than any other human, skin so prone to a cutaneous scalding, what with them being as soft as they were. 

“It goes beyond the pain of loss, Neeltje.” He replied, “Without sustenance, we wither away; it’s essential, it cannot be lived without. And as humans, we become starved; we will eat just about anything, even an unripe or rotting fruit, to escape the pains of hunger.” Arthur said, his knee parting her thighs ever so slightly as the frame of her legs were pressed against the hood further. “So perhaps it’s not that pleasure is unattainable without first experiencing pain, but rather, that the two are harmonious, and in a way, concurrent passions which mirror each other’s place in the human psyche. In addition to this, have you considered that pleasure may be heightened by pain—and that pain, in turn, becomes all the more acute in the presence of pleasure?” 

He leaned into her, and by her decree, he opened his mouth and closed his lips around the delicate berry, which immediately crimped the masseter muscles of his face. It was the exact opposite profile of her ferric thumb, which in the crevices of his gums he could still detect this lingering earth-like grittiness. The commands were identical, but the consequences were diametrically opposed; this morning, she force fed him dirt, and now as the afternoon approaches, she graciously shared with him the fruit of gods. This action existed as the live performance to his philosophy. 

“It was pleasurable, but not painless, not without the aftertaste of dirt. Now, open for me.” He said after he swallowed it, then cupped her small face with an open hand. With his other hand, he brought the pad of his thumb to press against the center of her chin, as if he bore the training of a dentist, and levered her mouth to unlock. With an open mouth, he kissed her and tasted the many lingering flavors of all that she had sampled at the market. He withdrew, his eyes one breath away from stellar death. “Can you taste the dirt?” He asked, preparing for the final propositum. “It made the flavor of the blackcurrant all the sweeter.” 

They climbed into the car and were soon homeward bound. “I’m going to bore you with a story.” He lit them another pair of cigarettes, “I promise, it’s relevant— and I can’t control myself if I otherwise have nothing to distract me.” He said frankly, his eyes frequently checking his rear-side mirrors (he was a very rigid driver, and detested those who had no respect for the laws of the road). He cleared his throat as any true story-teller did before painting the opening scene.

“When I was about four years old, my brother Dylan and I had gotten lost in the wilderness that surrounded my family’s estate. It was sometime in the early autumn. Anyway,” He exhaled a stream of smoke, “We had been lost for most of the day, and were becoming convinced that we may never find our way back home. Mind you, I was only about four then, and I have very little recollection of any of this.

“So I was completely dependent on my older brother—who at the time must have been five or six—to make the decisions of a survivalist. Well, we happened upon a huge collection of shrubs, which were producing fat, black berries. They appeared to Dylan totally identical to the blackcurrants that all us children loved to eat in the springtime, and we were really quite hungry. So, you’ve probably guessed what happens next.  

Before my brother had gotten his first taste, he was supposedly dissuaded by my reaction to its astringent taste. I collapsed within a minute of ingesting it, and of course his panic set in, and he began to scream and cry like any child might. So, you see, what we thought were blackcurrants were actually the berries of a deadly nightshade bush. Shortly thereafter—with God apparently watching over me—my parents located us with the aid of some officers, and I was rendered unconscious. My mother told me that my pupils were massive black orbs, and my breathing was severely shallow when I was found. Luckily, the antidote for a belladonna overdose is physostigmine, and I didn’t suffer any long-term effects… except that I grew up to be a neurotic kook.” He said this as a joke, “But this is the take away from the story: even as a child, I was drawn in by the deadly pleasures offered in life. I am almost a victim, but I can’t resist my own urges despite them resulting in my own suffering. It’s never left me, I think I am permanently poisoned to some extent.” The way he spoke were like the inky words that bled onto a damp canvas. He put his spare hand on her thigh, “My little belladonna.” 

While she basked in the luxury of a hot, soapy bath, he utilized the kitchen sink to rid himself of the outdoor grime. His clothes were discarded directly into the barren washing machine, and he regretfully washed his hair using the standby dish soap, watching the whirl of water become brown with dirt as it was fuzzled by a slow-draining pipe. A quick trip to his wardrobe and he looked perfectly renewed; a dobby-woven collared shirt, pleated trousers, and a pair of derby shoes. His hair was doomed to be soaked for sometime, and he was hesitant to ask for access to the blow drier. 

Arthur returned downstairs and fell onto the divan with an unintended heaviness. He stared blankly at the wall, the only sound cutting through the ringing silence was the pitter-patter of rain that had dulled in a slow decrescendo. Once it had stopped completely, a ray of warm light drained in through the curtains, and a chorus of birds chirped maniacally. Arthur appeared as a cat soaking up its heat, though he was not so simple-minded to find any satisfaction in it. He was still very numb, a worse feeling than a lithium-induced hypoesthesia. 

From his luggage, he heard an unending sequence of vibrations sounding. He peeled himself from his rotting position on the divan, and went to dissect the suitcase in its corner. Once he found his phone, he was appalled to see over eighty notifications lined up on his homescreen—most of which were from social media accounts he hardly engaged with. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter… it was all nonsense to him.

Apprehensively, he swiped up and a flood of tabloids immediately drew him into their intended chaos. 

The Cookbook Conspiracy! Internet Speculation Swirls Around Surprise Collaboration –Blogger and professional chef Neeltje Peeters took the internet by storm with her celebrated recipes, candid trials and hilarious errors, and her personable baking videos. But with the promise of a new book release, fans began to notice frequent features of an unfamiliar character, spotted increasingly in the background of her livestreams. That man is Arthur Melbourne–British award winning author of horror novel The Taxidermist. (We haven’t heard of it either!) Melbourne’s profile on LinkedIn was found by Neeltje fans, where they discovered that he advertised himself as a freelance editor alongside past teaching experience at Oxford University. Fans conclude that this suggests that Neeltje is working closely with him to produce her highly anticipated cookbook. While Melbourne followers are left confused by his drastic switch from horror to home-cooking, Neeltje fans have expressed concern over Melbourne’s character.  Online spectators posted on major platforms such as TikTok and Twitter that Melbourne was committed to Serenity Path Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Winchester, UK, for treatment back in 2012. The specific reason for his admission remains unknown but a mental health crisis is highly speculated. Given the dark nature of his most notable work, fans express concern for Neeltje as tensions rise following her sudden social media absence, and as a result, online conspiracies have been gaining popularity based on the information recovered. Mirror Weekly reached out to both Melbourne and Neeltje for a statement on the matter; we have not received any response. 

With an immediate swipe of his thumb, he cleared his notifications and angrily threw the phone at the wall. His screen cracked clear in half. He smothered a pillow over his face as he made a pathetic attempt to self-sooth before Cornelia returned from her bath, but even screaming into its feathery void did nothing to ease his sudden influx of anxiety. Arthur felt victimized by such a deplorable stigma—it was a deep pain to be both misunderstood and vulnerable, totally exposed without any defense.

Her footsteps made a path from the bathroom to the bedroom above him. A deep breath in, and a heavy sigh out. He wore a mask of equanimity, but seeing Cornelia ascend down the staircase was a sight. She was fresh out of the bath, perfectly groomed, and when he had the opportunity to visually consume her in all her wholeness, he could hear the high pitched wheeze of his heart as it deflated. 

“Of course.” He said, not daring to deny her anything. If she wanted to go to the market, then he would take her. Once inside of his car, they sat in silence as the sun poached the remnants of the sky’s tears from the windshield. The car bore a potent odor of hot leather and stale cigarettes, and a crackling radio played Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, which could barely be heard over the car’s droning engine. 

The stare of this woman, which was currently gleaming with joy, was only a facade. Still behind the temporary gaiety was the vision from one hour ago; her eyes downcast, throwing a net of wickedness about him until he was entirely subdued. The moment was so nightmarish; his soul had escaped into a Hamlet-ish performance of raw vulnerability, and she had thoughtlessly pelted him with spoiled tomatoes.

Arthur subscribed to the thought that, perhaps with each visual taste he took of her, a piece of him was set ablaze by her fire; she was an electric green inferno, whose excited electrons only emitted its resplendent fluorescence in response to a very specific kind of nourishment, which seemed to accept two methods of love: his own servile way of navigating her affections, and then Holger’s ambivalent hatred disguised as love. How could one woman be so weak in another man’s world, yet so absolute in his? 

In the parked car, Arthur impassively took a final drag of his cigarette before stamping it out into a porcelain ashtray, which was settled snugly in a cupholder. Beside him, a thousand words were being said by his wife, which all pertained to food, and he felt allayed by the normalcy. Finally, something predictable was coming from her mouth rather than the uncharitable opinions she secretly bore of him—those words that lingered like the trace evidence of a virus. He allowed himself to be swept up by the fantasy that his wife enjoyed his company as much as he did hers, but there was an ache that settled like sawdust in his stomach. This underlying feeling called doubt, insecurity, dread—and it marred every other happy thought that it touched.

Ciche, coq au vin, citronate to drink, cookies—and every ingredient used to cultivate such complicated recipes she listed… He could hardly keep up with the grocery haul she aspired to collect, and he cursed himself for not bringing a pen and paper.

“That sounds deli—” 

“Well I—” 

“I’ve never tried—” 

His attempts to interject his own thoughts were bulldozed humorously by her zestful canto, but at the very least, he did manage to confirm that he did, in fact, like muddled mint. His wet eyes cherished her as each passing word crossed the border of her cushion-like lips, and eventually he lost interest in competing with her passions; the treasures that lay ahead at the farmer’s market were far too demanding of her attention, and any possibility that her ardent ranting may cease was unlikely. He could sit, just like this, and be subjected to her natural passionate state for many hours and feel perfectly fulfilled. 

They evacuated the car and Arthur watched as his wife dove into the wavering lake of people, quite dumbfounded by her leopard-like pace. Luckily, his long legs aided him in catching up to her, and he trailed along her denim skirt like a sheep, who was otherwise guideless without the presence of their shepherd. 

The pathways between vendors were narrow, and Arthur was becoming crowd averse the deeper they advanced. The excess of bodies was especially gruesome in the sultry June heat, for under the tarp it was intolerably warm and felt like the inner workings of a hot-air balloon. The cicadas’ screaming grew insufferably loud as the summer atmosphere became more dense. He was amused by Cornelia's contentment, which had become evident in the presence of others; with ease she could engage in conversation with perfect strangers despite the heat, which seemed to bother her very little. Was it a sense of community that pacified her, he wondered, or just the food that surrounded them from all angles? 

Food was a true universal language, and a quote rang in his ears: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” This resonated, not because he agreed with its significance, but because it had him reconsidering how much of her instability was ascribable to her empty stomach. He had known her to be very fixed in a three-meal-a-day routine, and they failed to breakfast together that morning. Perhaps the blame was his own, having fallen short in keeping his pedigree kitten well-fed. 

Still, dealing with her ever-changing emotions was entirely exhausting, and certainly this sort of energy could not be sustained in placating her; he wondered how realistic she felt it was to put upon him this encumbrance—was it meant to be easy as it was for the raindrops to roll off of a slick umbrella? But with this thought came the golden shimmer of empathy; if this was a difficult task for him, he could only imagine what her inner world was like.

As she was exchanging bills with the merchant who sold her the fresh fruit, there was a minor discomfort that festered in him; he came to realize this sprouted from all of her questioning about the produce (or alternatively, because her nipples were visible, just as frozen mountain peaks were). Since his youth, he had been trained to converse politely, yet he still found useless banter to be an odious labor. Because of his strong efforts to avoid being social with strangers, Cornelia’s natural affinity for extroversion always impressed him. They were so unalike from one another, and each passing moment was a reminder of this. 

Just when a moment of fleeting, ignorant bliss washed over him, he was dragged back down by his memories of hell. He couldn’t put a stop to his endless recounting of her harsh words, and he began to criticize her privately for her lack of self-governance once again.

But then he watched her bite into the blackcurrant. Her dainty mouth puckered in such a way that melted into his bloodstream, and he found himself vicariously salivating when watching her eat the berry. A hot throb ambushed him at the sight. It was at her most effortless that he became completely undone by her. He noted the blood of its flesh exude through the parting line of her lips, and abruptly he felt the urge to put his whole tongue into her open mouth. 

Were this appropriate, he certainly would have done so. But instead, he stood there puerilely, observing her with frustrated angst and saying nothing at all. 

They left one vendor and leapt to another like frogs traveling by lilypad. Her tote bags were becoming heavy with goods, and he relieved her of the weight by securing the bag's loops into the anticubital space of his arm. 

“You enjoyed those blackcurrants.” He finally broke his long hiatus of speech. They were almost certainly ripe, and Arthur felt that the springtime of their love had been bombarded with nothing but cold rain thus far. This was hugely disappointing, as he knew that fruit-bearing plants were at their most fertile in this season.  

His mouth made no attempts to resist her thumb’s invasion, and he quietly gagged on the ferrous flavors that coated his tongue, obediently tolerating the blatant maltreatment until clemency moved her to wean him from the fleshy pacifier. He was lost to a wistfulness at the peak of this suffering—only yesterday, his broad tongue laid out like a serpent’s against the pedals of nature’s most erotic, secret garden. Now, he was subjected to choking on her dirty thumb. His once longing gaze corroded, and his eyes became inhabited by the wounded tears of an animal kept in captivity, stripped of all the freedom it once knew, and mourning the lost hope that it may ever return to the open pasture.  

No longer did he overload her with his trivial talk of philosophy, as the belittlement that stained her each word suggested a complete and total intolerance of his fanciful ideas surrounding love. The unfriendly detachment behind the veil of her eyes confirmed that her true, unspoken opinion was that his bizarre fascinations were government by a kakistocracy, and from the perspective of a misandrist looking down upon him—the caricature of a whipped man—she laughed from up above, with a foot that kept his face buried on the holy ground where she stood. 

The abstraction of his grander tenet felt like a harsh dismissal, a blasphemous simplification that hurt him immensely. If not her, then who would care about his sensuous testaments? He was suddenly alone, ditched and left to die in this hole of complete solitude, one which he dug for himself in compliance to her commands. Her unexpurgated talk of destruction roused his cells awake, instilling the fear of a wrathful god which caused an earthquake-like shudder to consume his entire skeleton. It was a seizure, a total bodily submission to the pain every human on earth desperately avoided. Their marriage dissolved through the gaps of her girlish fingers, and something more sinister had emerged from its dimming light. 

He once could see his future quite clearly; warm visions of himself and her sharing a home, creating pictorial memories belonging to a hand-crafted photo album, what with scrapbook trimmings and all the rest. This prospect eroded as Cornelia exposed it, seemingly without a second thought, into a fuming flame. A charred hole emerged from the center of the photograph and expanded its way to the square edges, until it was nothing but a whorl of smoke. The dream was illusory. This vow was made under false pretenses, he began to realize, and a panic jolted his heart with an electric bolt. Wake up! 

Would this cruelty become contiguous, where every day brought a new, harsher form of labor that went unappreciated by his dissolute and increasingly laudatory mistress? Did he love her, or did he hate her? Suddenly, he didn’t know. He thought, perhaps, two things could be true. 

“But Cornelia, my loyalty is so much more than what you see in the pointless marriages of today—the common and cheap practice of so-called ‘faithfulness’—what I have is a fealty to you, the woman who I adore fervently, who rules my entire world! You are the ultimate.”  But he was silenced again. His words were empty to her, and to continue in his coercion was very futile now. 

‘I love you’ had never sounded so baleful. These words that once brought such a strong comfort to him now filled him with an impotent anger, and he winced as she ran her intimidating fingers across his filthy face, bracing himself for an open handed strike which never came. The revelation he had was that this was not an open conversation—this was her oration, and his interjection would be like interrupting the rapture. His silence was non-negotiable, any argument instantly awarded with the death penalty.  

By the end of her speech, he had been mutilated beyond recognition. The severance from his pride was a bloody, throbbing mess on the floor. His tears were running dry, and his sobbing had retreated back into his chest, for the pain had transcended these superficial symptoms of grief. Arthur had been successfully emasculated by her, and upon her commands to return her to their ‘home’ (which would now indefinitely be his barred cell), he frantically abided by her directives. He knelt, turning to present the broad saddle of his back to her, then hoisted her hips onto it with practiced ease. As Arthur rose to his feet, heavy clumps of clay-rich earth broke free from his knees and thudded back to the ground. He carried her back in complete silence like a well trained mule.  

Once they returned to the house, the disasters laid unchanged on the kitchen floor. Rosemary’s cheap perfume could be just barely detected in the otherwise neutral air. Arthur lowered Cornelia down to her feet, and being too weak to look her in the eyes, he said “I’ll prepare a bath.” 

He disappeared up the stairs without another word, and the gurgling pressure of an old faucet could be detected from the main level. Arthur’s hands, which were still shaking with dread, clumsily sifted through his bath accessories. The water ran hot with steam bellowing out the sides of the clawfoot tub. The task of preparing it properly for Cornelia was the only thought that controlled him, for he had been lessened to a mere servant. He poured in a generous amount of ivory suds, and laid out a clean set of towels. When he had gathered the nerve to face her once more, he stood dutifully in the corner of the room when addressing her. 

While she basked in the luxury of a hot, soapy bath, he utilized the kitchen sink to rid himself of the outdoor grime. His clothes were discarded directly into the barren washing machine, and he regretfully washed his hair using the standby dish soap, watching the whirl of water become brown with dirt as it was fuzzled by a slow-draining pipe. A quick trip to his wardrobe and he looked perfectly renewed; a dobby-woven collared shirt, pleated trousers, and a pair of derby shoes. His hair was doomed to be soaked for sometime, and he was hesitant to ask for access to the blow drier. 

Arthur returned downstairs and fell onto the divan with an unintended heaviness. He stared blankly at the wall, the only sound cutting through the ringing silence was the pitter-patter of rain that had dulled in a slow decrescendo. Once it had stopped completely, a ray of warm light drained in through the curtains, and a chorus of birds chirped maniacally. Arthur appeared as a cat soaking up its heat, though he was not so simple-minded to find any satisfaction in it. He was still very numb, a worse feeling than a lithium-induced hypoesthesia. 

From his luggage, he heard an unending sequence of vibrations sounding. He peeled himself from his rotting position on the divan, and went to dissect the suitcase in its corner. Once he found his phone, he was appalled to see over eighty notifications lined up on his homescreen—most of which were from social media accounts he hardly engaged with. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter… it was all nonsense to him.

Apprehensively, he swiped up and a flood of tabloids immediately drew him into their intended chaos. 

The Cookbook Conspiracy! Internet Speculation Swirls Around Surprise Collaboration –Blogger and professional chef Neeltje Peeters took the internet by storm with her celebrated recipes, candid trials and hilarious errors, and her personable baking videos. But with the promise of a new book release, fans began to notice frequent features of an unfamiliar character, spotted increasingly in the background of her livestreams. That man is Arthur Melbourne–British award winning author of horror novel The Taxidermist. (We haven’t heard of it either!) Melbourne’s profile on LinkedIn was found by Neeltje fans, where they discovered that he advertised himself as a freelance editor alongside past teaching experience at Oxford University. Fans conclude that this suggests that Neeltje is working closely with him to produce her highly anticipated cookbook. While Melbourne followers are left confused by his drastic switch from horror to home-cooking, Neeltje fans have expressed concern over Melbourne’s character.  Online spectators posted on major platforms such as TikTok and Twitter that Melbourne was committed to Serenity Path Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Winchester, UK, for treatment back in 2012. The specific reason for his admission remains unknown but a mental health crisis is highly speculated. Given the dark nature of his most notable work, fans express concern for Neeltje as tensions rise following her sudden social media absence, and as a result, online conspiracies have been gaining popularity based on the information recovered. Mirror Weekly reached out to both Melbourne and Neeltje for a statement on the matter; we have not received any response. 

With an immediate swipe of his thumb, he cleared his notifications and angrily threw the phone at the wall. His screen cracked clear in half. He smothered a pillow over his face as he made a pathetic attempt to self-sooth before Cornelia returned from her bath, but even screaming into its feathery void did nothing to ease his sudden influx of anxiety. Arthur felt victimized by such a deplorable stigma—it was a deep pain to be both misunderstood and vulnerable, totally exposed without any defense.

Her footsteps made a path from the bathroom to the bedroom above him. A deep breath in, and a heavy sigh out. He wore a mask of equanimity, but seeing Cornelia ascend down the staircase was a sight. She was fresh out of the bath, perfectly groomed, and when he had the opportunity to visually consume her in all her wholeness, he could hear the high pitched wheeze of his heart as it deflated. 

“Of course.” He said, not daring to deny her anything. If she wanted to go to the market, then he would take her. Once inside of his car, they sat in silence as the sun poached the remnants of the sky’s tears from the windshield. The car bore a potent odor of hot leather and stale cigarettes, and a crackling radio played Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, which could barely be heard over the car’s droning engine.