Writer’s Digest 93rd Annual Competition Mainstream/Literary Short Story First Place Winner: “Offline Friend”
Congratulations to Angie St. John, first-place winner in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category of the 93rd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s her winning story, “Offline Friend.”
Offline Friend
by Angie St. John
I left early because I had a feeling about Carrington. When I got to my apartment, she was perched on the couch, stroking the cat I’d convinced her is not food. I said hello, and she gave her grunt-hum in return. I told her about the money we’d raised for the museum that night; the numbers were meaningless to her. I stepped on the scale; the numbers were meaningless to me. I preheated the oven for a DiGiorno. Then Carrington, who had steadily learned to modify her jaws, lips, and tongue into lingual shapes, said, “Food,” and pointed to a large cooked bird. Perhaps a goose, I wasn’t sure. The neck and head–leathery, umbilical–were still attached to the roasted body. I watched as she crouched and bit into the breast.
The Rite of Exhumation
I remember there were a lot of shamed faces, embarrassed for me, not sure how to talk to me. First of all, because of the details of my mother’s death, the taboos around suicide, the remaining fear of discussing and naming my mother’s neurological disorder–a fear mummified in the cause of her death. Secondly, I was sure, because they hadn’t seen me since I was a child, and I had failed to do the thing for which girls are put on this Earth; become beautiful by my society’s standards. I was pale and chubby, with acne, chronic lower-back pain, slight pronation in the knees and ankles, flat feet, a likely candidate for type II diabetes. All of these were, I know from my studies, results of dysevolution; my body hadn’t been selected for the environment it grew up in. Perhaps I hadn’t been well selected for my body.
The grave was filled at the burial. I watched the dirt pour out of the tractor scoop in brown, damp curtains. My grandmother put her cold hand on me, but I didn’t need it. I had my own secret salve. While others tossed mementos on the fresh grave, I relished in the memory of my most important dig.
When I was young, an abandoned construction site near the apartment complex of my childhood—Carrington Court—left much exposed dirt. Wonderful dirt. Dirt full of microbes and worms, immune system boosters, nature’s delights. The holes started with a spade pulled from a neighbor’s unattended flower box, then, when deep enough, an ice scraper and snow shovel. I never met rock resistance, we were too close to the river.
I dug, dug, dug, then struck bone. Piece by piece, as river-damp clay gave way, I pulled her. I spent that summer exhuming her body. I was ten, and imbibing a secret glory.
I snuck those precious findings past my mom in her room, her solitude. I wrapped each one individually in a towel or shirt. I retrieved a kitty litter box from the dumpster and buried my treasure chest in the back of my closet. An emptiness filled. Sudden and consummate. She was everything from then on.
I know what she looked like back then. I had a knack for keeping archives. I have drawings and measurements of the original pieces, scanned files on my computer and meticulous notes, 3D renderings of her original pieces on pirated software.
I got into a small midwestern liberal arts college, Princeton of the Prairie or Harvard of the Hayfield and other such titles. It was known for its museum curation program. I wrote my entrance essay speculating reasons for delayed decay of some bodies: burial environment, health, lifestyle. My thesis statement was something rudimentary like Being loved makes a human decay slower and yet they admitted me on scholarship.
I moved onto campus into a dorm and thought I would try to make offline friends. I had a few false starts. Church kids are inviting, but really their endgame is you participating in ill-defined communion. There were guys with blocky gaming laptops who made sport out of getting around the campus firewall, but they were overwhelmingly amateur. I focused on my classes, made friends with Lucy the Australopith and King Tutenkamen. I started calling her “Carrington” when I learned about Turkana Boy named for the place of his uncovering. She remained in my closet.
The Bones
Once she had been a woman, soft skin and warm fat pulled around the curve of hips, nipples puckered for feeding. Then her body bloated to twice its size, necrobiome to maggots who invite mice luring rattlesnakes. Then she deflated, her skin worn and leathery, like muddy clothes draped over a skeleton. She was consumed by the clay earth.
In the passing years, microbes had grown riotous when her immune system slept and ate her from the inside. Her muscles, fat, ligaments were long expired in cellular death. And yet I yearned for her soft tissue. I wanted to feed her; give her carbohydrates and proteins and watch the space in her cavities fabricate and glisten into gorgeous squamous and cuboidal membranes, membranes that filter and diffuse while they secrete and absorb–O! to absorb her! To let her pass into me, epithelial and total. O! for her to billow into animation and bite my pulse! To love! To eat!
No, she was not flesh. She was architecture.
The bones I found in the original exhumation at Carrington Court in 1999 are as follows:
Teeth: intact except for both back molars, gone from decay or having been impacted
Vertebrae: curved unnaturally, but intact, except L7
Sternum: collapsed on her vertebrae and ribs
Ribs: broken and scattered, cartilaginous parts decayed
Fibula (left): intact
Tibula (left, right): intact
Femur (left): intact and gorgeous
Femur (right): decayed and busted up
Ilium and Pubis: chipped variously, powerfully wide
Skull: lovely
Carpals, Metacarpals (left, right): somewhat intact
Phalanges: a couple left
I noted that she needed a mandible, humerus, ulna and radius, more phalanges, bones for her feet, and a femur–but these would come. I was an exhaustive internet explorer.
As a teenager, I sat for years in a hunched position over my laptop, or laying back with it nestled and warm on my belly, probably killing any eggs in my uterus with radiation exposure, rendering myself near-sighted. Blue-light burned deep in my retinas. I was often blinking back white phantoms that rose in the dark, rose when I closed my eyes. My grandmother would knock on my door: “You come out and get some sunlight” and see me at work: “You sit up straight if you don’t want to be a hunchback.”
What I told no one: I was obsessed with harvesting information about laws surrounding human remains. Laws differed state by state and were vaguely worded. There were some corners of the dark web with need of human remain display laws but this research quickly bled over into corpse-abuse laws. I installed an onion browser, got an anonymous P.O. box, bought cryptocurrency, and went to work on my body. And it was, I’ll admit, sloppy. I couldn’t find matching femurs, for instance, so Carrington would eventually walk with a limp. But some of the work was inspired. This is when I attached the finger.
The Finger
I realized I had an oral fixation when I started reading Freud in psychology class. My mom had weaned me at one week old because I sucked blood out of her nipples; red and white marbling together became a part of my inner world, a clue to who I was. I chewed on everything. Even as an adult, if I don’t understand something, I have to fight the urge to put it in my mouth to know better what it is, especially now that I work with ancient artifacts that would dissolve into atomic dust at the touch of my lips. I remember being a kid and kneeling over my treasure box holding a single phalange close to my mouth, just barely brushing it against my lips. The sensation made my mouth buzz the rest of the day.
The thought of reburying Carrington only tempted me once, at my mom’s funeral. I fantasized about being there alone, unwatched, unperforming, and emptying the kitty litter box over her casketless body, my mom’s bones and the bones from my closet intermingling and coalescing in hard, beautiful ways, decaying together, vitality juiced and discarded, resting together. But I couldn’t bear to part with Carrington. And my mother had already been cremated.
After the funeral, I lived with my dad’s mom. She was very Catholic, in an old way, a macabre way. She wore black lace over her head at Mass and went to a church that only used dead Latin and miasmic incense that invoked the cloud around Sanai. Her house smelled of cobwebs and dried rose petals, always littered around her Mary statues as offerings, roses she claimed had appeared after her most recent Novena to Therese of Liseux. She had what she claimed was a piece of St. Teresa of Avila’s incorrupt finger in a reliquary on the mantle. Sometimes she touched her with her rosary, sometimes with gentle, shaking fingers, and always she talked to her as if she was in the room. I never talked to her myself, but I came to be comfortable around her, even curious.
My grandmother did not approve of my mother’s cremation. She once told me a story about how one of the sisters of the convent of Our Lady of Sorrows had died suddenly and they couldn’t afford a new coffin so they had to use one they had on hand that was meant for one of the hunched over infirmed sisters. The coffin was too short for the sister’s body, so Mother Superior said, Sister Ignatia Joseph, you were obedient to me in this life, you will be obedient to me in the next life. You fit yourself into this coffin. And the obedient body of the sister shrunk two inches and fit just right. We should let our bodies be, even after death, my grandmother thought. How is anyone going to know that you’re a saint if they can’t dig you up and see your holy non-decay.
Right before I left town for good, I stole the incorrupt finger out of the mantle reliquary. My grandmother sent an email chain that went to my spam with the subject line “bodies of holy virgins” featuring her speculations on if individual body parts could be assumed into heaven. St. Teresa’s phalange fit perfectly into the fleshless metacarpal, and it never came loose. In fact, Carrington could bend it.
The Rite of Exhibition
By my second year in college, Carrington was a complete skeleton, except for her back molars.
I sat in the cafeteria with my book, The Story of the Human Body. I watched a girl bring her boyfriend a couple of napkins at the cafe table. She reached to wipe his mouth at first, he let her, then took the napkin gently, hands lingering for a moment, eyes never leaving his computer screen, she went back to her work, they continued holding hands for a few seconds, it felt so long to me. The ease and comfort of familiarity.
I looked away and saw a dad holding his baby. When the waving mother, clad in a drab cafeteria worker uniform, walked by, the baby, eyes closed, little puff nostrils flared, lurched the direction of her scent.
I looked away and saw a girl from one of my classes eating a pear. She looked at me looking at her. I glanced away. But something transpired, because the next time we looked at each other was more pointed, in our Vertebrate Prep lab, and I really noticed her. She was skeletal; fabulously emaciated, mannequin like. I noticed the sharp edges of her cheekbones as she fastened her goggles and the veins straining against the thin skin of her hands as she pulled on her gloves. When instructed to find partners, we crossed to each other easily, barely nodding as we took our places side by side, facing the specimen on the table. Her voice came out deep, wet, so primal I couldn’t deny it, couldn’t hide from it– “Hey.”
I felt sweaty in my boots, bloated in my ill-fitting jeans, utterly drawn.
Her name was Gemma. She was also in the archaeology school. Chosen lab partnership led to out-of-class study sessions, which led to late nights of earnest sharing of personal histories filled with gaps and misremembering.
Gemma had many times explained to me that she’d never had a man do this, or say this, and that she didn’t think she could ever be–she used words like open, vulnerable, intimate interchangeably–with a man. I admired her trust in neuroplasticity; she was on a self-aware journey of “healing”. She could name the wound but could never really soothe those ragged neural pathways. She was on a constant hunt for father-figures, but at her age, father-figures weren’t usually thinking of her as the archetypal daughter they’d been missing. Her interest baffled them and made them act in ways they were ashamed of. Like them, I found her fascinating.
We settled in, and she scrolled through her emails while I pressed my fingers into the medial and lateral pterygoid muscles around her mandible, thick from frequent mastication; she chewed a lot of gum. “I want to make a mold of your skull,” I told her.
She smiled, her muscles lit up. She said, “Creep.”
Lounging on each other’s beds turned into sleeping in the same bed which turned into a lot of kissing, not sleeping, both of us gaining five-ten pounds, and me being much, much happier.
Every moment became about Gemma. I had a constant eye out for her on campus, changing my paths to cross her and exchange a secret smile. Evening plans were assumed. Embraces yearned for. Texts constant, lacking substance and full of words and emojis obscurely funny to the two of us, ciphers. Suddenly, porn did nothing. Suddenly, oxytocin charged my every thought, every movement. She said we were ‘just hooking up’ but gave a throaty hum when I called it ‘making love.’ And it was. Because if I was making espresso for me, I was also making it for her. If I was doing my intent-to-graduate form, I was doing hers. She was delightfully disorganized. I reminded her of tests, scholarship deadlines, filed her taxes, paid her parking fines. I even called a doctor as her–having committed her birthdate and social security number to memory–to set up an appointment to get her wisdom teeth out.
“Thanks for doing that,” she said to me over lunch. Her hand was on my knee under the table, which is how she usually got after I completed a task for her.
“Can I have your wisdom teeth after your surgery?” I asked.
“Hell no,” she said.
“You know, Victorian women used to gift each other their hair and nails and shit. Tokens of love,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” she said, but she was smiling, and we both knew she owed me. She squeezed my leg and I yelped. She removed her hand when a tall guy from history club approached us. She removed her hand. We all exchanged pleasantries. She watched him walk away.
Gemma’s texts slowed down. She stopped inviting me out, but accepted my gift of food or study guides, especially when she was recovering from wisdom teeth removal. I’d make the delivery for her, but most times she was out and had me leave it on her desk.
When she finally told me she was dating a guy, my amygdala burned in what might be considered an overreaction. I bit my fingernails bloody.
Occasionally, we still spent the night together, we kissed like we used to. These reprieves from despair became fewer and fewer as she was drawn to Patrick or Bryan or whomever. I was filled with sudden, sharp loneliness. Oxygen seemed sparse. Food seemed spoiled. And Carrington–blessed Carrington–alone could pierce my darkness. I’d bring her out of her trunk–I had a proper treasure chest for her by college. I’d finger the various bones and notice how strong and supple they were feeling, how alive, hold onto her relict finger, and me and Carrington would be alone together.
One night, I went over to Gemma’s room, tears welling up. I was dropping off ibuprofen, chocolate, and takeout pho; she was menstruating and post-oral surgery and generally unwell. The thought of her body in pain obsessed me, so she gave me occasional grocery lists so that I could do something about it with my body. She wasn’t in, but there was a note for me on her desk, and a little jewelry box.
Her loopy ink scrawl elicited a learned dopamine reaction in me.
Mar– these are for you.
luv,
Gem
Inside the jewelry box were four molars. The roots splayed and twisted from their captivity in her mouth. I took them gently in my palm and sniffed them. They were so lovely.
I went to my room–Carrington still laid supine on my desk. Her mandible lay agape. If she had eyes, they’d be boring into me.
I understood Gemma’s gesture as a treaty; an emotional ceasefire. Gemma was buying out her debt to me. Fine.
I cupped my hand around Carrington’s jawbone. My own baby teeth rattled. I had placed them there years ago with super glue before I understood how to take care of human remains. A couple fell out and I refixed them into place quickly. Perhaps there was residual glue because they stuck.
I placed Gemma’s teeth in the empty back molar grooves at the back of the mandible–I swear a ghost buccinator muscle twitched. When all four were placed, they didn’t fall out, just like the saint’s finger on her right hand. Above the buzz of the air vent, I could hear a wet, stretching sound. I looked closely at the teeth. The roots were digging down into the mandible, finding something alive in there, pulling themselves into place.
I had to show Gemma.
It took some convincing, but she met me in my room after classes one day.
“You need to promise you are not going to tell a soul what you see,” I said.
“Stop being weird,” she said.
I led her into my room. My skeleton laid perfectly on a blue tarp over my desk, full. I noticed a change: tendons were vine-creeping, attaching bone to bone. There was something remarkably in between life and death in front of us. A valley of dry bones suddenly teeming with life.
“Jesus Christ!” Gemma said.
“Shit, maybe,” I said. I hadn’t thought of that.
Horror-stricken, “Are those my teeth?”
“Uh, yeah. But only your teeth, nothing else of yours.” She was still struggling to take normal breaths, so I said, “Don’t worry, I found most of it underground when I was a kid. Well, some I bought from, uh, overseas.” I thought, then added, “I didn’t kill anyone or anything like that.”
“No. Just, no.” She left. And she blocked my number.
For the rest of the year, I obsessively cataloged changes in Carrington. Sinews crawled up bones. Muscles leeched around limbs. Fibers hooked tissues. The brain stem ran down the spine and drew itself into the heart. Before the brain’s dura fully formed, I could see the pinkish hills and valleys, the blood vessels coursing over its surface, a cloudy membrane with spots of fluid.
More flesh sprouted on her fingers. I resisted the urge to put them in my mouth, nibble the growing fingernails, suck the bulbous knuckles. Something like comfort, like clouds, spread throughout me when I’d touch them.
The Heart
Two months after Gemma had blocked me, after I signed out of her emails for good and erased the memories from my password manager, I looked up from my laptop and saw her chest—thinly skinned, mounded breasts now—rising and falling.
I sold my plasma to the blood bank and bought a stethoscope.
And in the quiet dark of my room, I would press the metal to her skin, and perform medical listening, which became intimate listening.
I saw a living heart when I was a kid. Before Carrington, before school, before my father had been totaled with his Saturn, he took me to the St. Joseph Cathedral in Sioux Falls to see the traveling heart of St. John Vianney. The Cathedral ceiling towered gothic above. People thronged and pulsed inside like neurons carrying a message, and we followed the pathway, past the nave, around the altar on the crossing, past the choir stalls, to the back altar. The heart was a crusty crimson maroon in a little golden reliquary, glass bordered, like a tiny temple. People took turns pressing crosses and rosaries against the glass revealing the strange piece of flesh. My Dad gave me a Miraculous Medal to touch against the heart. What my dad did not see: I pulled a small plastic baggie from my corduroy pocket containing the baby teeth I’d lost up until that point. I pressed those to the glass. I made my own relics.
The Rite of Burial
I posted about Carrington to a speculative thread. There were certainly theories: curses of ancient religions deep in the soils, or an electro-magnetic field supplying a lifeforce, proof that neural-impulses could control external matter, or some epigenetic potential yet to be understood. I posited that she was an incorrupt saint, which seemed implausible to users.
After college, we moved to the city and I started a museum job where I’d handle artifacts and give presentations on contemporary digs.
Her prefrontal cortex must’ve grown because suddenly I could watch her control her impulses. She became cooperative overnight, helping with the day to day tasks of apartment keeping, gathering trash, doing dishes, folding clothes.
While I was away at work, Carrington kept house for me. In a way. Her pre-frontal cortex must’ve grown because suddenly I could watch her control her impulses. She became cooperative overnight–she captured a number of cockroaches that crawled in and out of the outlets in the kitchen and brought them to me folded in a hand towel, motioning that I should eat them. She fermented squirrel meat in a catgut pouch on our patio. She learned to make frozen pizza. She’d be perched on the counter, barefoot and in my robe, hovering over half the DiGiorno, saving it for me. I would record her behaviors and continue my research.
I wanted Carrington to meet my grandmother. I’d have to get Carrington into clothes, which she hated, and brush her matted hair. I could say she was foreign. I could say she was Deaf-mute. I could say she was my friend, or my girlfriend.
I looked at Carrington, watched her eat for a moment. She snapped all of the fried chicken bones in half after expertly stripping all the meat, and she sucked out the marrow. But too soon, I got a chain email from my grandmother. She had died. She preset the email to be sent out by the funeral home. I imagined she told St. Teresa that she wanted to go, and the demigod obeyed and sent a lightning bolt of bone cancer. Carrington would remain with me alone.
That night, we ate the roast bird she killed and prepared with our fingers, tossing pieces of gristle aside, wiping our oily mouths with the backs of our hands. My head was spinning with the savory meat and the feeling of being cared for. She wet a hand towel under the faucet and dabbed my face, tap turned baptismal. She looked at me. I started to cry. She pulled me close—a split thought, was kissing ingrained rather than taught?—but she pulled my head down to her chest and arrested me there. And I did. In a moment amniotic and familiar. And then she was lactating. And I cried harder. She puckered. I let myself be fed.