Frank refused to leave when I asked him to. He actually appeared hurt that I would even suggest such a thing and tried to remind me I was his wife—and his place was in our home. But I was in the car accident with him. I saw him die in the hospital afterwards. I watched as they closed the casket and lowered him into the ground. Yet, there he was, making coffee like nothing had ever happened.
At first I thought the whole thing had been a bad dream—the shattering glass and grinding metal, the sirens and screaming, the tears and mourning—then the stench hit me. His horrendous body odor wasn’t sweat. His gray pallor wasn’t from a lack of sunshine. And his short-cropped hair had a different kind of grime to it than what normally followed him home from the warehouse.
His words were full of pain, “I belong here.”
I laughed. I'm not sure if it was nerves or fear or a momentary crack in my hold on reality, but I snickered, rather loudly—right in his face. It doesn’t matter whether it was the absurdity of the statement or the situation on a whole. Falling back on humor helped me deal with the atrocity standing in my kitchen. This was not Frank. Frank was dead. I just had to convince him of that.
Of course, that sounded easier than it turned out to be. Every day for the next week, I’d wake up to my dead husband and a freshly brewed pot of coffee. And every day, after selfishly helping myself to that first cup, I’d remind him he was dead, and ask him to leave.
Pete came over several times that week. We watched TV, sat on the couch and talked by candlelight, and even played one of Frank’s favorite video games. I knew the final straw would be seeing me kiss another man, but I couldn’t bring myself to that stage. Not yet. Surprisingly, Pete understood and didn’t push the subject. Frank did, though.
“Whore.” Anger actually made his broken speech easier to understand and I clearly heard the next sentence. “I married a whore.”
“Frank, you’re dead. I’m allowed to date.”
He shook his head and I thought I saw a chunk of flesh fall free from his face, “No,” he said. “You’re not. You’re mine. You’ll always be mine.”
I tried reasoning with him, “Frank...”
He cut me off, “Whore,” and said nothing else as he wandered off into the dark.
This was not working.
When Pete chanced a goodnight kiss the next evening and I responded, I heard Frank from the shadows—a dry intake of air, a human reaction from the undead flesh of my husband. It was a strange feeling and my emotions were once again torn. I loved Frank. I didn’t want to hurt him. But I needed to get rid of him.
The sound of Pete’s car had muffled whatever derogatory term Frank had called me that night and I questioned the darkness of the backyard. “What?”
Dark Faith
He stayed in the shadows but responded, “I want a divorce.”
“You… You’re… You’re dead.”
I heard something like a snort, a corpse’s attempt at a chuckle perhaps, and he replied—sarcasm dripping from his ruined voice, “Obviously, I’m not.”
“Well, undead. Or something.” My confusion at his state mingled with the shock of his request and I walked into the house without registering what he said after that.
The next time Pete came and went, Frank’s comment scared me. For the first time since we’d met, and more importantly, since he had clawed his way out of the grave, I feared him.
His eyes were cold, his voice serious, “Divorce me or I’ll kill him.”
Pete wasn’t exactly a catch, but that didn’t mean he needed to die.
That night I closed all the blinds and propped chairs under the knobs of the doors. I stared at the moonlit ceiling of my bedroom, unable to sleep. The faintest hint of Frank’s cologne still lingered from something in the room. It made me miss him. Yet, I had his baseball bat propped up against the nightstand to protect me from him.
Divorce? I never thought I’d get a divorce. Then again, I never thought I’d be a widow before thirty. And I had certainly never contemplated the idea of my husband's corpse stalking me. The rules had changed in my life, so why not throw divorce into the mix.
I'm sure the lawyer thought I was crazy. The judge looked at me with bewildered pity when I spilled my story of religious beliefs and an obsessive necessity for paperwork that would never be signed by the second party. But after some forced tears and pleas for my own sanity they both gave in. The lawyer shook his head as I initialed here and signed there, agreeing to keep all of the possessions and forgoing any form of alimony. The wording was definitely unique, and I’m sure they both told the tale of the crazy widow to their colleagues, but I didn’t care. The deed was done.
I was no longer a widow. I was a divorcee.
I think in a twisted sense of self-righteousness, I was more upset about the divorce than I was with Frank’s death. I cried for two days, saying my good-byes privately, before I presented him with his copy of the paperwork. Even with his inability to express emotions properly, I saw the chagrin and anguish sweep across his face. The slight movement of the bones showing through the rotted recesses of his cheeks and the way his remaining hair slid back and forth on his bleaching skull told me what his eyes no longer could. In that instant I realized his request had been a joke. A hollow threat expelled in a moment of anger.
I felt bad, as if I had betrayed him after all, and set the papers on the steps next to me as I sat down. “I’m sorry, Frank.”
He grabbed the papers with clumsy, rotting fingers, and shuffled away—his gait an odd mixture of resignation and decaying muscle structure.
I heard him whisper, “I love you.”
Those words burned into my brain. I no longer remember what he said to me in the wreckage of the car or in the hospital before he died. I can only hear his slurred final words from that night on the back steps. When his heart finally died and joined the rest of his body.
I broke up with Pete the next morning. Pete presumed I just wasn’t ready. I wasn’t, on more levels than he knew or could understand. I hadn’t been ready to lose my husband and I certainly hadn’t been prepared to divorce his corpse.
I’ve been out to the cemetery every day since the divorce. The ground never appeared disturbed, and I wonder if any of it really happened. But I know better. I have the paperwork at home, and someone, or some thing, has scratched the words “Beloved Husband” from Frank’s tombstone.
His voice grew deeper, more broken each day. His sentences more truncated and to the point as he pleaded, “My place is here.” Yet, the more succinct his conversations became, the greater the stink of his rotting corpse, and I found myself staying on the opposite side of the kitchen to avoid the smell.
The sheer idea of my dead husband walking around made me uneasy, but I tried to be strong when talking directly to him—tried not to let him know how much it upset me. He was not only a reminder of what I no longer had, he was asking to get back something that was impossible. I tried to use logic and hide my panic, “Honey, I love you, but you died.”
He stared into my eyes as he replied, “So?”
I was more than a little freaked out and had the locks changed.
In retaliation, he sat in the Buick and waited for me to leave for work the next morning. At least in the kitchen I could walk away. I had the freedom to leave and go to work—it wasn’t like I couldn’t trust him in the house alone. But I couldn’t very well drive through town with my dead husband in the car.
The cramped space of the LeSabre allowed for the aromatic proof of Frank’s decay to gather and swirl and stick in my nostrils. It reminded me of that camping trip we took, where we had forgotten to clean the cooler—a week later, opening it and finding a rotten, maggot-ridden fish had almost made me throw up. That had been sight and smell, Frank was just the smell, but it was strong. Worse than the fish had been. And it clung to the seats of the car… seeped into the vents. I left the door open and rolled down the other windows. I was convinced everyone would be able to smell him in the car, or worse, on me. I tried to hurry that morning’s argument. It didn’t work.
For a man reduced to simple sentences, Frank could argue for a hell of a long time. Then again, I’d spent eight years watching Frank talk about nothing, for hours on end, with the neighbor, the mailman, whoever... By the time he died, he was well practiced in the art of long-winded rhetoric. I should have known better than to think he would have changed just because he stopped breathing.
I started to lock my car. In a town of only four hundred residents, I was locking my car, my house, my life, and shutting out the dangers—not of society, but of my own husband.
He started sitting on the porch in the mornings. I started sprinting from the house to the car.
Death’s visual side quickly caught up to Frank’s aroma. I guess the rot had been internal before, now it was more and more evident in his outward appearance. Thick syrupy goo seeped from tears in his flesh, leaked from his nostrils, and turned my husband—buried in the suit he’d worn to marry me—into a disgusting parody of our wedding day. I tried not to care when I noticed his skin peeling back from his cracked, blackened lips and an ear hanging from his head in a half-mangled fashion. A part of me wanted to reach out to the man I loved, the rest of me just wanted him to die, again—and stay buried.
I found I couldn’t help but wonder where he went when he wasn’t harassing me. Surely he wasn’t hanging out around town. And none of his friends had called with outrageous tales of ghostly visions. Could he be digging out every morning and reburying himself every night? The layers of dirt didn’t seem to change, only the decay. I wanted to know but couldn’t bring myself to go to the grave and check. I was afraid he’d see it as me looking for him or—god forbid—accepting him this way.
After three weeks I started just ignoring him. A week later the stench was gone and it became easier for him to sneak up on me, to startle me. His skin hung loosely from his face, his nose became something akin to a Lon Chaney make-up effect, and his eyes—his eyes were the worst. The bright blue eyes that used to sparkle at me, or shimmer with a hint of seduction, had become matted orbs of discoloration. He’d lost the ability to express emotions with those dead, milky eyes. And I lost any residual affection the morning I noticed one of the sockets was empty.
I knew there were stages to grieving, but no one had ever explained the catalysts from one to the next. I figured it out sometime during week six. Frank needed to see me moving on, so HE could move on.
When the doctors told me Frank had died, I never thought I would date again. I cried until I couldn't breath and declared my undying loyalty for my one true love. I swore to the sky that I would never betray the relationship by replacing it. I prayed for God to bring it back. Now I really wish I hadn’t done that—even though the remnants of my sanity know damn well God had nothing to do with this.
After almost two months of Frank’s incessant arguments and uncomfortable expectations, I finally cracked. My once passionate love for Frank had become disgust and bordered on hate. So, I approached Pete at work.
Pete wasn’t a bad guy, just misguided. I knew it wasn’t something I would have normally done, but I was desperate, and didn’t have time for the formality of the dating world. Pete was the perfect candidate. He had been flirting with me in an unabashed fashion for over two years, point blank telling me he didn’t care if I was married.
Technically, I wasn’t anymore.
Pete jumped at the opportunity to go out. And while he wanted to go to a hotel room—I think Pete may be one of those guys that prefer to dirty a relationship just to give it an edge—I convinced him to come to my house for dinner. If Frank saw another man there, maybe he would get the hint. I knew he’d be upset—he obviously retained strong feelings for me. Of course, his spouse wasn’t a rotting shell of what he’d married, complete with small insects and increasingly disgusting physical reminders that it was over.
Throughout the evening, I caught glimpses of Frank in the windows. His expression was impossible to read through the flaccid skin and nonexistent facial muscles, but I could see his lips moving. I knew he was reacting. I hoped it was working.
A barely audible comment came from the shadows beside the back porch as Pete pulled out of the driveway, “Slut.”
“No, Frank. Widow.” I shut the door and locked it.
The evening had definitely had an effect on Frank, but not the one I had expected. I’d have to do it again. I’d have to invite Pete back over for normal activities. Frank would accept it eventually—he’d have to.
Residing in