Pieces of Julia

It had been over a year since his wife died, since the pieces of Julia started appearing, but Sean felt the pain as if it had just happened every time a new part resurfaced. Yes, she had been murdered, and yes, it was gruesome. What made Julia's death so unusual, though, was that her full corpse was never found. Only the remains of a hollow, limbless, decapitated torso had been recovered from the dreary abandoned field that was but a few miles from their home on the quiet banks of Orange Lake.

Sean rubbed his jaw, still feeling the effects from the new dental implants that were just put in mere hours ago. He had lost a handful of his teeth two nights back, getting into a bar fight with one of the locals. In fairness to the stranger that rang his bell, Sean did drunkenly accuse the burly man of killing his wife on multiple occasions; and on this particular night he was extensively belligerent about it. Poking and prodding the local townsman with outrageous accusations and questions, almost all of which were completely unfounded, until things inevitably boiled over into a series of angry blows.

That kind of barbaric altercation was not normal for the widower before Julia's passing, and those that surrounded him knew this. Sean simply missed his wife and felt entirely lost without her. The only sense of direction he felt anymore was the rage from not knowing what exactly had happened to her, guiding him out each and every night to find answers. His searches always came up empty, however, for during the day all Sean did was drink. He drank the unsavory bottom shelf whiskey that his entire house reeked of until the young man could barely stand. When all the bottles were empty, and the sun did finally go down, out into the world he'd go then. Staggering through the streets well past midnight, repeatedly accusing the random citizens in his small town of the terrible murder, always screaming and shouting:

"Stop sending me the pieces! Stop sending me the pieces!"

It was a shameful sight, but his sympathetic neighbors saw no harm in letting him go about this for a little while. Try to understand, it's hard enough to lose your wife, even more difficult if she was murdered, but to continuously have her body parts sent to your house afterwards... how does one cope with that?

Never was there a proper return address on any of the "packages" and moving did no good either. Sean tried this, but it seemed destined that no matter where he went, a piece of Julia would always find its way back to him.

First it was just a finger, sealed in a standard manila envelope. Not long after that came the rest of her hand, encased in bubble wrap, and tucked within in a much larger yellow envelope. Two months later, a foot arrived in a used shoebox. Thirty days after that, her heart was sent to him at work, wrapped in plastic, snugly secured in a brown paper bag, and then placed on his desk to make it seem as though someone had brought him a treat for lunch. Nowhere was safe for Sean to hide from these sadistic gifts.

With every discovery, accompanying each piece, was a small note that would read simply:

"Always with you."

***

The cameras at his job couldn't make out the fully cloaked figure that had broken into the office overnight and placed Julia's heart on the desk, nor were there fingerprints of any kind on the packages. The company Sean worked for, were partially embarrassed by this, and felt guilty that security measures were not better, so they too briefly gave the young man a pass whenever his drinking found its way into the workplace.

It's funny how repetition can make even the most macabre things seem normal; for when a full leg showed up on his doorstep just three months after the heart, Sean again broke open the bottle of whiskey from the bottom drawer of his desk at the office that day. This time, however, the mangers at his company told him to go home. They stopped short of firing their drunken grieving employee, but they made it clear that his self-destructive behavior couldn't continue, regardless of the eerie circumstances.