“I threw it in the trash,” Deja said. “What else would I do with a dead animal?”
“Which trash can?”
Deja led the women through the manor’s labyrinth and out the back door to a metal trash can pressed against the stone. She opened the lid. The fetid smell that rose to greet them was becoming familiar. Sabrina didn’t even gag.
Sabrina reached with gloved hands into the bin until her hands closed around the creature’s body. She pulled out the dead possum by its tail, which was thick and rigid. It cracked as she pulled, but it didn’t break under its heavy weight. Its skin was smooth, as seen by the anemic sunlight that stabbed through the cloud cover and washed over it. Its veins were black and visible. Like Tristan’s.
“Whatever infected this thing, it’s got Tristan, too.” Sabrina ran through the sensible possibilities: rabies, roundworm, blastomycosis. But it wasn’t those things. It was simpler: some kind of evil.
“What do we do?” Linda said.
To find a cure, she would usually need blood work, a lab, internet for research, a phone to call colleagues who might know more than she did. Sabrina shook her head. Science was failing her here, and she flashed back to her mother’s lessons. Sometimes, finding the answer was about embracing the unknowable.
“I’m not a vet.” Sabrina frowned. “But we should dissect it. See if that gives us any clues.”
“Don’t get your hands dirty, girls,” Deja said. “Your contract states I’m not to let you come to any harm.”
They kept talking, and talking, and meanwhile, Tristan was fading. He hadn’t signed on for that when Deja coaxed him into this “date.” He’d signed on to find someone to take home, to introduce to his doting parents, to love.
“It’s better than sitting around and doing nothing!” she yelled. Linda startled. “Aren’t you supposed to be checking for cell signal?”
Linda held the phone out. “Still nothing.”
“And you’re not at all worried about that, Deja?” As Sabrina kicked the trash can, the creature swung in her grasp. She wanted to kick it toward Deja, to watch Deja crushed beneath it, but she stepped toward Deja instead, thrusting the dead creature at her.
“I’m worried!” Deja raised her voice and jumped away. She pulled something from her pocket: a taser, electricity sparking at its tip. Sabrina stopped her advance and pulled back the creature. “I understand the value of keeping calm. Unlike you people, I understand the value of minimizing drama, not exacerbating it. I’ve been around girls like you all for ten years now. It’s all the same, and guess what? Freaking out has never solved any problem.” Deja took a ragged breath.
Linda held out both palms. “This isn’t helping in any way, shape, or form.” She gestured at the creature and its crooked tail.
When Sabrina exhaled, the breath calmed her down. “You’re right. Let’s get this thing inside and take a look.”
Deja waved them off as she ventured in the opposite direction. “I’m getting the fuck away from you two.”
Sabrina held the creature out far in front of her as they made their way inside. In the kitchen, Sabrina searched the cabinets until she found cooking implements. “I never asked: why did you come on the show if not for Tristan?” She unrolled a silicone baking sheet and set the creature’s heavy body on top of it, belly-up. Its arms and legs flopped open.
“I wanted to find love,” Linda said. The creature smelled like mold, fungus, a dank forest infested with decomposition.
Sabrina searched the drawers for the sharpest knives, testing them against the counter as she went, leaving minor scars for the terrible house to remember her by. “You’re not in front of cameras right now,” she said. “We can speak freely.” She chose three blades. She laid them out beside the creature as though for surgery.
Linda breathed in. “I wanted something to open me up.”
Sabrina held the knife point to the skin at the creature’s throat. “When I got divorced…” Linda paused as Sabrina pressed the blade into the skin—or tried to, at least. The skin hardly gave, and only the tip of the blade slipped into the creature. “No, before that. I was closed up from a young age. Bad family. I had to be. But I always had this hope that some grand gesture, somewhere in my future, would give me a reason to be…me. And that other people would see me, all of me. That I’d be okay, and that they would know I was okay…inside.”
Sabrina paused. “I feel you. And Linda?” She pushed against the end of the blade. Finally, it slid into the creature’s skin, which split from throat to belly in one long crack. The rancid smell of guts and goo wafted as she peered into the void of the creature’s innards. Bad family, Linda had said. And family was everything: blood, guts, skin, skeleton. It was all family, when you thought about it. “I don’t think you’re the only one.”
Linda leaned in, and together, the two women took in the thing in front of them. The creature’s smooth skin was oddly a couple of inches thick, but its insides looked, at first, like a typical rodent’s might: lungs, intestines, heart. Sabrina reached inside and removed each organ, laying them onto the silicone mat. They were hard and uncanny in her hands, like Tristan’s skin was becoming.
“They don’t feel right,” Sabrina said. A chill shot through her body.
“That’s the thing that got him?” Marion appeared in the doorway. “That’s the thing that fucked Tristan up?”
Sabrina moved to stand in front of the creature, overcome with the sudden urge to guard their findings.
“Let me see.” Marion took a step forward.
“You need to rest,” Sabrina said. “You’re going to make yourself sicker.”
“Let me see.” Marion stepped closer.
Sabrina tried to grab Marion’s arm and lead her away from the strange thing. For some reason, she had the distinct impression that Marion, in her weakened state, wouldn’t be able to handle seeing the mockery of nature that lay exposed on the island. But Marion shoved Sabrina away. Stunned, Sabrina stumbled across the kitchen. She tripped over the uneven wood and landed on her ass, screwing up her face in pain. Marion gripped the edge of the island in both hands and stared down at the thing, her lips curved in a snarl not unlike the snarl frozen in death on the creature’s face. She reached out, and before Sabrina or Linda stopped her, grabbed hold of the creature’s neck. She squeezed tight, and the veins in her hands bulged against the inflexibility of its skin. But skin wasn’t the right word. Sabrina reconfigured the language: shell, outer covering, trunk, bark. It was more like bark than skin.
Sabrina rose to her feet and grabbed at Marion’s hands, attempting to pry them from the animal. “You’re going to hurt yourself!” she cried out, but Marion wouldn’t let go.
Linda spoke up from the wall she’d pressed herself against. “Shouldn’t we check in on Tristan?”
With that, Marion relaxed her grip. “Tristan, yes,” she said. “Tristan’s all alone.”
“Charity’s up there,” Sabrina said.
“She doesn’t care about Tristan.” Marion turned and ambled out of the kitchen. Finally, they heard her footsteps on the stairs.
The creature still lay on the island, insides exposed, no longer a danger to them, but still a threat to the order of the world and its known equations. Sabrina shook her head and swept it into an open trash can. She had no more desire to pretend she’d ever figure out what was wrong with it, and what was wrong with Tristan.
“Nothing gained from that dissection.” She ripped off her gloves over the sink, leaving them crumpled in the drain, and washed her hands, scrubbing too hard. Her skin was red when she heard the shrill scream.
Sabrina and Linda shared one brief glance, then rushed the long stairwell. In Tristan’s room, Marion splayed her body over Tristan, wracked with sobs. Charity stood wide-eyed by the door. Sabrina trod forward to pull Marion away from the diseased corpse, then stopped herself.
“What the hell happened?” she said.
