Natalia Demko, creative fiction, 2023
“My feet feel heavy,” the woman’s partner says under their breath.
It was time for their daily walk around the forest– a ritual regarded for the crisp fall air when they both can journey as long as they want without the overbearing sun ahead. When the woman can point out mushrooms growing on redwood trunks and the bugs that crawled along
the wood. Especially the bark beetles. She knew her partner loved the bark beetles.
But as she put on her warm boots and turned on the porch light, her partner stayed still sitting at the bench. They can’t walk today. Their feet feel heavy.
The woman asks if her partner re-potted the mint in the garden yet, away from all of her vegetables. Mint is a weed if left unchecked. They do not respond.
After the woman’s solitary walk she prepares meatballs with marinara sauce for dinner– the savory aroma of the meal clashing with the scent of evergreens let in from the open window.
Through this window the woman sees her partner seated, eyes fixed on the mammoth mountains that dot the skyline. The longer they stare at the white dust atop the peak, the more the woman could smell the soil and redwoods through the window screen. It was dusk—her
partner’s figure only illuminated by the light from inside the kitchen that is attracting fluttering moths.
The woman calls out to ask if they will come inside. No response.
The woman walks out the front door and meets them at the porch. She sits next to them as their eyes follow a bat beating its wings along the forest landscape.
She says “Dinner’s ready.”
They say “I’m not hungry.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, just ate a big lunch at work.”
The woman puts her arm around their shoulders and kisses the side of their forehead. She takes out a gift box that’s wrapped around her palm from her coat pocket. Upon asking what the gift was, the woman states that it’s something they’ve been wanting for a long time– she now has the trust to give it to them. As her partner says they’ll cherish it, they set it off to the side.
She asks, “You’d tell me if something was wrong?”
Her partner nods.
She goes to place her hand on their knee. When they're lost in thought she’ll try to draw letters on their legs with her fingertips to get their attention. It’s like a game. She’ll try to spell out words related to inside jokes to see if they’ll guess them.
But as her index finger reached their knee, she was met with something much colder and harder than skin. A smooth and crisp surface that was distinctly wrong but not entirely unexpected. Recoiling her hand the woman looks down to see her partner’s legs turned to
cracked marble.
“Oh my god?!”
“Oh yeah. It started ever since I sat down.”
“And you didn’t say anything? We need to get you to the—“
“It’s not a big deal. I’m sure it will pass.”
“I would argue that is a huge—“
Her partner shuts down the conversation. It’s fine. They will come back inside when they feel ready.
The next day the woman peers through the window to find her partner still seated, still staring at the mountaintop. She wonders if zucchini soup could warm their frigid stone limbs. Making her way to the backyard with all of her gardening tools she finds that her zucchini bed is
still overrun with mint. She goes back to the porch and asks her partner how there was so much mint choking the life supply of her beloved vegetables. They reply that they never moved it– wanting it to grow freely, wishing the woman would use it in her cooking more.
The stone has crept up to their hips.
Rushing back to the garden, the woman rips fistfuls of mint from the earth, tossing the web of roots to the side. She uncovers her zucchini, frail and small. It won’t be enough to make a hot bowl of soup with. She sifts through her shed to find any kind of fertilizer to no avail,
slamming the shed door shut and plopping to the floor staring at her remedy far out of reach.
As she sits, the weight of her gardening belt pushes into her waist. The afternoon sun reflects off her pruning shears. She feels the weight of them in her right hand as she traces her thumb around the silver blade. She pressed the side of it down on her palm watching it leave fading pale marks on her skin. She continues to do this as she walks back to the zucchini bed, pressing the cool metal harder and harder into her palm until she turns the blade perpendicular to her skin in a clean slice, letting the blood seep into and nourish the soil.
While the woman cooks the mint and zucchini soup, the beetles of the garden feast on her pinky finger buried in the earth.
The marble crept to her partner’s stomach, rendering them unable to drink the minty cure. The woman darts inside the house to grab them a thick blanket—wrapping their torso and leaning as if her body heat can permeate the unyielding stone.
Lifting the blanket the woman finds that the stone is continuing to creep up toward her partner’s chest. She smells the salty aroma from her bandaged hand and thinks of the burn of the blade and the warmth it gave to her garden.
Holding onto her partner as tight as she can, the woman slices the delicate skin of her midriff and feels the stone sopping up her blood like a washcloth.
The woman asks, “is this helping? Is there anything else I can do?”
Her partner does not respond.
The woman looks up to face them, head spinning. Through faded vision she can see the marble creep up to her partner’s lips, beginning to overtake their mouth.
She presses the shears to the back of her tongue, and hears a rip as she slices the slimy muscle clean off and forces it in her partner’s mouth.
She tries to ask “what else can I do?” to no avail– the sounds bouncing off of the resonators of her skull with nothing to guide them.
She watches her limp tongue flop to the floor next to a crumpled, unopened gift box.
Her pleading cries turned to shouts of fury at the person whose skull has been overtaken by rock. In that moment the feeling that the woman’s efforts would have always been in vain sits deep in her burned-out heart. But she can not change the fact that there is a pool of oozing blood
between her and the person she loved, the stench of rotting organs unable to reach their marble nose.
The only human part of them left was their eyes. Maybe their dilating pupils will witness her suffering, maybe the flower petals of their green irises, maybe the brown spot above their left eye.
Instead they close— the pale skin of their eyelids contrasting the silver stone.