The days following the funeral fuse together like unset broken bones.
Friends, family, a stream of sombre faces she only vaguely recognises, come to offer condolences, pay their respects.
How are you coping?
Is there anything we can do to help? Anything at all.
Just ask.
Please don’t ask.
A hellish conveyor belt of sickly sweet cups of tea and softly spoken platitudes. None of them with any idea how they’re supposed to mourn a life measured not in years but in breaths barely taken.
There are no fond memories to share with a rueful smile, no amusing anecdotes on which to peg their woes. Try and somehow make sense of the tragedy. A child they will never meet, see smile, hear laugh or even cry. Should they grieve its premature loss or lament the adventures which would have otherwise lain in store?
She has no answers for them. None they’d want to hear anyway. Yet still they hover expectantly, in the vain hope they might glean some understanding. Moths, inexorably drawn, wings beating frantically, trapped in the grubby half light of her sorrow.
She can hear them downstairs now, their urgent whispers flitting nervously around the room, starved of her grief to orbit. He, no more these days than a shadow skulking in her periphery, will have slithered into the vacuum she’s left behind. Leeching them for any residual sympathy they can muster up.
She runs her fingers over the knotted tissue. Still tender, angry, raised. The nurse told her the swelling would reduce in time to a thin pale line of discoloured skin. She assumes, clumsily implying all painful things given the proper treatment, heal until they are so distant as to be only faintly recalled.
The scar leers at her from the wardrobe mirror. Beautifully ugly. She has no desire to watch it slowly fade away. Its stitched lips, the gaping maw the child’s body had been dragged through. Still. Almost lifeless. Seven pounds and three ounces of flesh and soft bone, dead before the cord wrapped around its throat was even cut.
Her first kill.
Unintentional but … even so.
A realisation she’s come to slowly. Accepted. Embraced. Found comfort in.
It’s the only explanation.
She’d never really wanted it from the start.
A stupid, drunken mistake. But he’d been so excited and she’d foolishly allowed herself to get carried along, swept up in the wake.
It.
Her.
It’s easier now to gender the parasite that had consumed her, enslaved her bodily functions and imprisoned her for almost forty weeks. She’d danced around pronouns for months, ‘when the baby arrives’, never ‘when she’. To have allowed herself to think of it as either a nascent girl or boy would have given agency, purpose, to the monster growing inside of her. Turned the kicking, living malignant tumour with a face suckling in her womb into something other than a lifelong burden she was unwilling to carry.
The first kill is the hardest.
She’d read that somewhere. Heard it in one of those annoying police procedurals the shadow downstairs loved to watch. Didn’t matter where, when, couldn’t have been further from the truth.
All she’d had to do was think about it, will it into being.
Ask the universe, self-actualise and manifest her darkest desires. The power of her own poisonous thoughts seeping into and infecting the lump of nascent flesh in her belly.
She hadn’t even known what she was doing. How could she? Unaware of her own powers. Until it was actually happening. And she heard the urgency in the doctor’s voice, the hushed tones of the nurses harrying and busying themselves around her before the sudden and blissful quiet that followed. The chilling realisation there was nothing they could do finally sinking in.
Her own body, the perfect, what did they call them in those shows, kill room. She didn’t even need to bag the body or clean up the mess. The nurses, in reverential silence, unwittingly did everything for her.
She barely set eyes on it. It was whisked away so quickly and when they asked later if she needed to say her goodbyes she’d declined, worried in doing so her emotions, or lack thereof, would betray her.
A blur. A few days, two weeks at most, it’s hard to keep track when each day melts into the next. The almost orgasmic glow, the unexpected burst of euphoria that had pulsed through her the moment she knew, long dissipated. Lost somewhere in the clouds that had roiled over in its wake. The need to punch through the fog, feel the frisson of electricity course through her, overwhelming.
If the first is truly, as they say, the hardest then the second she imagines will be a breeze.
Her shadow. A boringly obvious choice she admits. Risky too. Aren’t you supposed to spread your wings, fly the coop and hunt away from your own doorstep? He was complicit though, culpable himself. She doubted, if he knew the truth, he’d see things the same way. Perhaps as the last drop of blood flows from his struggling body and she leans over him greedily inhaling the last breath he expels, he might understand. She’ll see it in his eyes, thanking her for the clarity she’s gifted him.
Probably not.
A sad pathetic unimaginative excuse for a man. How could she have been so blind to that? He won’t be missed, his absence easily explained away.
He couldn’t handle the grief.
He needed to be on his own for a while to make sense of things.
He was a fucking coward who’d bolted the first chance he got rather than be there for her, a shoulder to cry on.
Of course it will be different this time. So many unknowns. More hands on, she almost giggles out loud.
A joke.
Her mood lifts. Light dimly shines through the gloom. All she has to do is reach out, wrap her fingers around it and hold on tight.
Knives are clumsy though, she’ll have to learn her craft through practice she supposes. The pressure she’ll need to apply to puncture skin, to push on, slice through fat, sever sinew and muscle. The force she needs to splinter, crack ribs. The time it takes for a body to bleed out.
The mess all that violence makes.
She’ll need to be quick, swift, ruthless, if not precise. The first couple of blows, enough to slow him, incapacitate him.
Downstairs, the front door slams.
A pair of moths flitting off in search of brighter lights to transfix themselves with. The rest will soon tire of waiting and follow suit. Leaving just the two of them. Wraiths, haunting the house together.
She scratches a fingernail across her belly, perpendicular to the scar below. Mapping out precisely where she’ll mark herself after.
Carve the next trophy into her own flesh.
Space for so many more.
He’ll potter around for a short while, clear away the cups and plates. Before he tiptoes upstairs and across the landing. Tries to reach the spare bedroom without disturbing her. Without having to negotiate the awkwardness of occupying the same physical space.
The spare room.
Where she waits.
She pokes a toe at an upturned edge on the plastic sheeting she’s laid over the carpet. It mustn’t snag on the door as it opens. Give her away. Lose her the element of surprise.
Naked.
Still.
Shoulder blades kissing the wall.
She cradles the knife close to her chest.
Patiently listening for the creak of the stairs. Her bare feet attuned to any vibrations in the floorboards.
No.
It won’t be long now.
Amber Matthews is an Emmy Award winner in a former life just starting to share their prose. He/They is far too old to not really know who they are yet but somehow that’s still the case. They live in London, England with their partner and a ubiquitous feline. You can find them on Bluesky @jetboyjetgirl.bsky.social and Instagram @ambercandygirl
Published 5/10/26