Hush, Hush, My Love

                                                                              Hush, Hush, My Love

The bedroom would have been black as pitch if not for the light shining through the partially opened bathroom door. Although it was only open a crack, tendrils of steam wafted out, adding to the humidity that surrounded Elmira as she lay naked on the bed. A thin sheet covered all but her upper chest, exposing her bare breasts. An annoying fly darted through the thick air, buzzing through the sweaty post coital atmosphere.

Stuart stood in front of the bathroom sink, following his steamy shower, and whistled as he lathered shaving cream across his cheeks and neck. He peered at his watery reflection in a streak he wiped on the fogged up mirror. Once his face was fully lathered, he unfolded his straight razor, an heirloom given to him by his father.

He checked his blurry reflection—the humidity in the bathroom caused the mirror to continually fog over—and wiped his hand across the surface again. With a clearer view of himself, he carefully drug the blade down his cheek, removing a swathe of shaving foam, leaving behind smooth skin.

“You know, you really wore me out,” he said to Elmira while he looked at himself in the mirror. He puckered and squeezed his lips to one side as he shaved the rest of his cheek. He continued talking as he rinsed the dirty blade under the running faucet. “It was nice, but you were better, you know…before.”

There was silence from the shadowy bedroom. Mira, as he referred to her, didn’t answer. She simply lay in the dim, muggy bedroom staring at the ceiling. The fly continued buzzing through the air, momentarily landing somewhere before taking flight again.

Stuart paused and looked out at the dark room. He did not hear any answer over the sound of the running water, but he didn’t expect one either. He shook his head and continued shaving.

“I saw in the paper yesterday that one of my high school sweethearts recently died. Her name was Camilla. Camilla Parker.”

Although he had gone to school with Camilla, she was never one of his sweethearts. If she had been alive to hear him say any of this, she would have shuddered with repulsion. Stuart had had a serious crush on her when they were teenagers, but Camilla ran with a different crowd back then, a popular crowd, and never gave him a second glance even though he had once asked her on a date.

“I’ve always loved Camilla. I think she liked me too, but she was too scared to admit it when we were in school,” he said and looked back out the bathroom door to see how Mira was taking all of this talk about Camilla. He was trying to find a way to break it to her gently that she was yesterday’s news, used up, finito.

After a moment of continued silence, he ran the metal blade under the water and said, “If she had a choice, I know she would want to be with me.”

He scraped the blade down over his chin and rinsed it again. He kept reminiscing about his adolescent crush. The way Camilla had looked in school, and how she would brush her long hair off her shoulders or out of her eyes.

Despite having just had sex with Elmira, he felt his cock grow rigid at the thoughts of Camilla, and how she might feel beneath him in bed.

Camilla’s smell was always so inviting and fragrant. He remembered her smelling of sweet exotic fruits because of the body spray she wore.

So unlike Mira who had begun to smell ripe and pungent. It was time for him to dump her. Stuart knew she had had a good run but now he would have to get rid of her before any of his neighbors could smell her.

He knew there would be severe consequences if anyone caught him with her body. He had kept Elmira’s body around the longest, nearly three weeks, but so far, she had been the most gorgeous, freshest young women he had ever been with.

Stuart always kept an eye on the obituaries for newly dead young women that he could dig up from the cold lonely ground and love. Necrophilia they called it. People thought it was gross. A taboo, but Stuart didn’t care what they thought.

They don’t even know what they’re missing.

In his opinion, making love to the dead was the way to go. Loving the dead had several advantages. He never faced rejection and he could get women that would normally have been way out of his league. Women that wouldn’t have given him so much as a second look. Women like Camilla Parker, for example.

Not to mention, he could do what he wanted to with them and not face judgment, things that so-called normal women would never let him do. He liked to get kinky during sex. There was no worry about a long-term commitment or infidelity either. And pregnancy was definitely not a worry when you screwed a corpse. Unlike most men that had to wear a condom during sex, Stuart never had to worry about this restriction; yet another perk to loving the dead. To Stuart, these women were the perfect friends-with-benefits.

He looked out into the bedroom again. Mira just lay there, as before, staring at the ceiling. He set his razor on the edge of the sink and walked to her.

“There, there. Don’t be that way, baby. We had fun together,” he said, a smirk on his face, caressing the ashen skin of her cheek with his finger. She was really beginning to stink now. He had noticed it for the past couple of days. Luckily, the fragrant smell of shampoo and body wash from his shower filled the bedroom, but even that was not enough to cover up her odor completely. The stench of death and decomposition swirled and mingled beneath the clean aroma.

“It was fun while it lasted, but like they say, ‘All good things must come to an end’.”

Before walking back into the bathroom, he stroked her breast with his fingers and then poked her areola. Her tit had begun to stiffen, was less pliable than it had been when he first smuggled her into his house. The nipple felt indistinguishable from the rest of her skin whereas days ago it felt as though it was a soft tiny rubber knob. He knew the formaldehyde would not preserve her forever.

Back in the bathroom, he picked up his razor, rinsed the shaving cream and stubble from it, and resumed shaving. Thoughts of spending time with Camilla played in his mind. First, however, he had to get rid of Elmira’s body. He would dispose of her the same as he had the last few women.

Breaking up with the dead was so easy to do.

He would drive to a nearby lake, to a secluded cove, where a bridge spanned the dark water. A cinder block strapped to each of Elmira’s ankles would be enough to drag her dead weight to the bottom of its murky depth and out of his life forever. He had dropped three bodies there over the past eight months without detection. She would be the fourth to take the plunge.

Just as he was about to rake the blade under his chin, down his neck, he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye, some movement. Stuart turned his head quickly back to the bedroom, careful to keep the blade away from his neck.

His eyes met the filmy gray eyes of Elmira, and he realized she was not lying motionless on the bed as before, but was now standing at the bathroom door. Her face wore a hurt expression like a Halloween mask.

Stuart felt a cold chill travel through the body that seemed like it was no longer his, but one that now held him trapped inside. He did not have the strength to scream and felt the legs and hands of this alien vessel trembling.

Elmira stepped behind him and looked over his shoulder. She reached around, clasped his hand—the one holding the straight razor—in hers, and drew it horizontally across his neck.

Stuart had enough time to watch the scene play out in the blurry, fogging strip of mirror. His eyes were wide—as though he’d seen a ghost? You bet—and in that blurry, fading swathe of mirror, he watched a red line appear, from left to right, and flow downward across his collarbone.

Before his world collapsed upon itself into darkness, she brought a single finger up to her lips and he heard her speak in a burbley, phlegm-choked voice: “Hush, hush, my love. There’ll be no more of that talk.”

As his blood ran out through the slit, her voice began to fade. “We’ll be together…forever.”