Vestigial by Jennifer Lesh Fleck

Such messes my spouse left behind. Our finances in tricky tangles. Closets, drawers, cupboards sloppily stripped. All the good LPs: gone. Evan took what he wanted, as always. Then he swayed all our old friendships and loyalties to his side. For I was just Jane—“batshit crazy,” “would-be witch”—who “cuts herself for attention”. And he was the charismatic tenured professor—beloved, revered, perennially innocent. Believed.

But Evan wasn’t blameless. I’d often suspected, though I’d never known for certain.

Two months ago, I found the newest evidence in our bathroom. Signs of his latest dalliance. The mirror bore handprints, the smudge of a cheek, and a partial lipstick print, like half a kiss. It told the tale of a figure who’d been rammed against the marble sink from behind, her hands braced and face against the glass. Someone who wasn’t me had left these signatures, perplexing as the Shroud of Turin. Damning as perfume on a collar.

I assumed her position, mirrored, doubled. I created a crime scene re-enactment, imagining his face by my shoulder, twisted in passion. A forensic middle finger. My stomach dropped. Here was all the proof I needed. It marked the end of my marriage. There are indignities you can survive, and others you refuse to endure.

Bereft, shackled by student loans, and shockingly poor—that’s how my partner of thirteen years left me. He moved in with her, their carryings-on now common knowledge. Not a student of his, but another professor, the one whose poetry readings I’d been dragged to all winter and spring semester: breathy and stilted word salads about love and affairs of the heart, long pauses while she sought my gaze in the audience with a smug glimmer brewing in her eyes. Thinking back on it—putting two and two together—I filled with rage.

Eventually my feelings cooled, clarified, became bitterness with an ice-sharp edge. My attention shifted from her to him. The way he’d taken her arm over the free wine and cheese, leaned forward, whispering something that made her smile. The blatancy of their affair, the publicness of it. As I stood nearby, tracing a scar that curled like a question mark on the back of my hand, feet aching. Hoping we’d leave soon.

I was now impoverished, alone in a house in an underwater market, my home slated to be sold soon at a loss. But I was not without my own ways and means.

There’s a ritual, rare in these days.

I informed work of an upcoming operation, a week needed to recover. I hinted at painful and intimate, which was no lie.

“It’s a female thing,” I told my supervisor, my eyes downcast.

The squeamish curl of his lip ensured me my privacy and space, no further questions asked.

I began the preparations by papering over the windows and checking the locks on the doors.

Laid in a larder of rich foods: fatty cuts of beef, sticks of butter, avocados soft and smoky with rot. When night fell and the ripening moon rose, I painted the sigils on my skin in moss green and pebble grey, family colors from the Old World. And began the fasting, the quiet chants that rose and fell.

As the pains came, I held my back and paced the hallways. I covered all 4,382 ridiculous feet of travertine and Persian wool. Pangs at first tedious and grinding, then nearly unbearable. I grunted and lowed like an animal. Went on my hands and knees, panting, slobbering.

A night and a day and a night and a day passed.

We’d never had children. Evan promised we’d try later, ever later, knowing I’d reached the age where such a pursuit becomes increasingly difficult. Once we were “settled”, he’d say, and I’d look around me and point out this expanse and plenitude, all we’d bought to consume and to enjoy, or to grow tired of and to throw away. He was placating me, no sincerity behind his sweet reassurances. He’d tuck a lock of my greying hair behind my ear, chuck me under the chin, and dismiss me by opening his phone.

Now, as the moon rose at last in all its fullness and my pain reached a zenith and edged past it, I arranged all the small mirrors so I could see deeply into myself. I took up my scalpel and scissors. I was no stranger to the particular pain of sharp blades, of cutting. The first long slice unzipped me from breast crease to pelvic arch, easing my labor pains. I peered inside myself. Everything seemed arrayed in the usual manner, yet I paused to marvel at the parts of me that trembled in their veils and viscera. I slowed my pulse. I only needed but a small piece of each organ. But it must be taken quickly, before my body caught on to what dark trickery I’d gotten into. I snipped, pinched, severed, pried, cut.

When I finished collecting what was needed, I closed muscle and skin, my stitches rough, harried, but strong.

I’d scar impressively, beautifully, crisscrossing all the old silvery tracks and trails. The oldest ones Evan had once traced tenderly, saying he’d never hurt me. The next-to-oldest, he’d inspected with a barely-concealed disgust. The newest scars—these he’d ignored entirely.

He’d thought all of it a message to him, each and every mark. But instead, they’d been tiny doorways I’d cut to find my way out of temporary states of anguish.

But now wasn’t time to dwell in the past. I was a mother, my body given over to lives not my own.

The taken pieces lay bloody in an enamelware bowl. Five in all I bore:

One from my spleen, child of earth and the songs at summer’s end.

One from my lung, she of cold metal and colder tears, autumn’s darling.

One from my kidney, birthling of black water and brine, winter and fear.

One from my liver, the green wood’s babe, bright with anger and fresh insult.

And the last from my heart, red as fire, seat of joy and bitterness both. The runt, still as a stone. With blood-sticky hands I wrapped my heart’s child in black coffin satin and fell back in exhaustion. The others squirmed to me like newborn kangaroo kits, latching wherever they could to my flesh, sinking their new teeth, nursing with vigor.

Rich foods near spoiling nourished me during my confinement; I devoured skin and rind, pit and bone. And my body, in turn, fed my brood.

My heart’s child finally stirred in her satin trappings, revived. Sluggish at first, then her needle teeth pierced me and I felt how starved she’d been.

“Plenty of fight in you yet,” I murmured, stroking what I thought might be her cheek.

Only a mother could love children like these, and I brimmed with admiration and adoration. Like kittens stripped of skin, only the barest impression of limbs and paws.

They quickly grew larger. In terms of fruit, cherries became clementines became apples, then cantaloupes, then pie pumpkins. When they threatened to overgrow, I knew the culling time had come. Only the strongest could live.

For the ritual is firm on this point, as cruel as it is exacting.

Had those sightless eyes of theirs—too many, like spiders—fixed upon me, I’d have lost my nerve. So I waited until they fell into one of their collective drowses. Into a plastic garbage sack went liver and lung, spleen and kidney. I heard angry panic seething from the Mercedes’s trunk as I drove, barreling through the dark to a forgotten beach I knew. By the time I’d hurled them into the river, four had become two, having devoured each other.

I returned home to little Heart. It took hours to calm her. It took many promises, whispered into the ears now growing under her new hair, its silken strands the color my own were in youth.

By Saturday morning Heart was fully developed. She stood before me, my golem-daughter—dressed in the best clothes from my wardrobe. Diamonds on wires I pushed through her lobes as she winced, hissing. Then the whisper of stockings, the pinch and teeter of stilettos with blood-red soles. My will ran through her, traveling spreading nerves, the branches of a tree made of lightning.

At the threshold of the world, she stood, hands clasped, awaiting instruction. Like me, but better, like the best me possible.

Heart’s been out in the world a while now, doing my bidding. I’ve managed to hold back the realtor who’s all too eager, ready to drive a stake into my yard.

For if all goes well, this child of mine will come back to me reformed. She’ll have pried out Evan’s heart and substituted herself, her body shrunken again, all beating muscle and machine-like purpose. She’ll come back to me clothed in his form—to all future curious and prying eyes, a vision of my husband returned: contrite, dutiful, doting. She’ll hand me his bloody heart, gone cold and still. This offering we’ll dedicate to family—to those in the Old World, going back and back in history, our family line a network of scars, of backs broken on wheels, of bodies bound as flames rose and consumed them.

We’ll sing, we’ll chant, we’ll rejoice.

Then, the final task the ritual demands. We’ll burn Evan’s vestigial organ—this blind pocket of questionable origin or function—to cinders. The ashes of his heart will go in the morning’s trash.

All who whispered, judged, and disparaged me: they’ll assume he came back to me, Evan did. They’ll think of this surprise outcome as a reconciliation. A love story.

And maybe that’s exactly what it is.

Author’s note

This wicked tale was born from a kernel of truth—mysterious evidence found on a bathroom mirror, a treasured relationship unraveling. The resulting story is (thankfully!) fiction. I wanted this broken-hearted, discarded person to “win,” though it’s a dark and painful path she travels to reach her reward.

This story first appeared on Creepy podcast in 2023.

Jennifer Lesh Fleck

Jennifer Lesh Fleck has work published or upcoming in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Gamut, If There's Anyone Left, Heartlines Spec, Flash Fiction Online, and the 2023 Shirley Jackson Award winner for best anthology, among others. Her work is often informed by lifelong hidden disability from a rare inherited disorder.
Website: https://www.jenniferleshfleck.com
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