Free Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy

Flesh of My Flesh
    T he bed that Marion is lying on has a huge red Leatherette headboard in the shape of a heart. Marion remembers the headboard from when she and John Bucci came here. She remembers that the wallpaper—in this room, anyway, in the honeymoon suite—was turtle-doves. It’s Eiffel Towers now, supposedly to go along with the new name, Bit O’ Paris, except nobody calls it that. Everybody still says the Meadowview Motel, and when Marion went to the bathroom she saw they still had the old towels with the entwined M’s on them.
    There’s cable tv , though—that’s new. And this red duvet looks right out of the package. Marion has wrapped herself in the duvet because she suspects she’s in shock. From owning a pet store she knows that if an animal goes into shock, the first thing you do is cover it with a blanket or your coat. Then you raise its hindquarters to counteract internal bleeding.
    “Not that I’m in danger of internal bleeding,” Marion thinks. “Lord knows.”
    She lets out a short, incredulous laugh. The kitten on her stomach rides the movement. It is completely black, black lips, pads, black inside its ears. Every three hours Marion feeds it formula with an eye dropper, then she puts it in the bathtub and tries to make it pee. Sam was the one who said they should bring it along. “You can’t expect anyone else to get up twice in the night,” he said, and she thought, What a wonderful man. Now she thinks that this was just him leaping at the prospect of diversion.
    Where is he? He’s been gone almost two hours, but shedidn’t hear the car starting up. She imagines him standing on the wooden footbridge where they stood after supper and waved at their fluttering shadows way down on the river. She asks the kitten, “Do you think he’s okay?” and runs a finger down its spine. It frantically licks where she touched. Even its tongue has black on it—two black spots and a black tip.
    “In the movie of my life,” she tells it, “you can cross my path.”
    Marion had just turned nineteen when her mother was murdered. About a week after the funeral a white-haired secretary bearing two rabbit pies showed up from the school where Marion’s mother had taught grade three. “Nothing this terrible will happen to you again,” the woman said with such conviction that Marion snapped out of her hysterics, and from then on, whenever she found herself presented with some death-defying risk, she was inclined to take it.
    Why she had become hysterical was that as she was putting the pies down, she saw a piece of skin stuck to the side of the refrigerator. She knew immediately what it was, although up until that moment her imagination had steered clear of the smithereens her mother was blown into. She’d been away when it happened, visiting her grandparents in Ayleford, and then, by the time she got home, the police and detectives had come and gone, and the kitchen had been scrubbed down by Mrs. McGraw, who had heard the shots across three fields and claimed she knew from the sound it was no regular shotgun.
    The murderer was a man named Bert Kella. He was the janitor at Marion’s mother’s school. At about eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, when Marion’s father was in Garvey pricing wheelbarrows, Bert Kella drove to the house in his nephew’s ‘67 Mustang, kicked in the door, shot Marion’s mother twice from behind as she stood peeling potatoes at the sink, thenshot out a living-room window and drove back to the school to drink a bottle of whiskey and have a nap. When he woke up he stole a tape recorder from the office and drove to the Catholic cemetery on Highway IO . He pulled over and started confessing. Marion never heard the tape, but her father did and there were excerpts in the papers. It was mostly a deranged ramble about all the stuck-up, cold-hearted “bitches” Bert Kella had ever met. It seems that he wrote Marion’s mother a love letter, which she never mentioned to anybody