Free Here Be Monsters - an Anthology of Monster Tales by India Drummond, S M Reine, Jeremy C. Shipp, M. T. Murphy, Sara Reinke, Samantha Anderson, Anabel Portillo, Ian Sharman, Jose Manuel Portillo Barientos, Alissa Rindels Page B

but I don’t care.
    “Don’t wash this off,” Teresa says, and sets the egg timer beside her. “You’ll fully absorb the oil in about ten minutes.”
    “Alright,” I say.
    Teresa lies down with her head on my lap.   I caress her hair. Sweat pours from my face.
    “Do you love me?” Teresa says.
    “Of course,” I say.
    “How much?”
    “So much it hurts. The oil you put on me feels like a thousand angry fire ants.”
    “You’re sweet.”
    After Teresa’s egg timer goes off, she stops kissing me and says, “Happy anniversary.”
    I laugh. “What?”
    Her smile withers. “You really don’t remember, do you? You don’t recognize me at all. I mean, from before.”
    “Um.”
    Teresa stands and holds out her hands. I take them. I gaze into her eyes, and they’re like tiny planets, full of life and death and power.
    “You and Teresa were a couple,” she says, squeezing my hands a little too hard. “Teresa didn’t tell me all the grisly details, but a year ago, you killed her. You can’t imagine how much that hurt her feelings. Her spirit screamed at you to repent, but you just ignored her. You erased her. I can’t even find anything that smells like her in your apartment. How could you forget her like that?”
    “I…I don’t know,” I say.
    “Well,” Teresa says, grinning. “You’re not going to forget her ever again.”
    Teresa kisses me, and when she pulls away, her flesh rots and cracks and shrivels. She holds out her skeletal hands, as if she’s going to choke me.
    “What are you doing?” I say.
    “Posing,” she says, without moving her mouth.
    I lift my camera with trembling hands, and take her picture. I hear Teresa screaming. All the photographs I’ve deleted over the past year flash in my mind. I see hatred and bigotry and death. I see the dark marks on Teresa’s neck where I choked her. I search Teresa’s corpse and I find the word whore eight times. Bitch, twelve times. When Teresa opens her mouth, a dead baby bird wriggles on her tongue.
    I say, “I’m sorry.”
    I can’t take back what I did, so I do the next best thing.
    I delete the picture.
    But Teresa doesn’t go away. Instead, she knocks me to the ground, and gazes down at me. Her eyes are like post-apocalyptic worlds, full of all the destruction I caused.  
    “I love you,” she wheezes.
    Then she holds down my arms, and presses her decomposed face against my chest. The angry maggots tickle my chest hair. I know I should push her off me, but when I think about Joining with Teresa’s corpse, my heart yells her name, and I can’t stop it, and I don’t want to try. Teresa keeps pressing and I keep screaming, and she and I swirl together in a whirlpool of life and death.
    Finally, we Join.
    After tossing the Nikon into the darkness, we pluck a fig off our white tennis shoe. We sniff the moldy fruit as loud as we can.
    We love the smell of rot.

Deals and Demons
     
    Samantha Anderson
    ©2011
    All rights reserved.
    Edited by M.T. Murphy

    The wrecking ball came down, the force of it blowing the hair back from my face.   A rumble went through the ground as it impacted the building it was aiming for. I didn’t cry for the destruction; it was a bittersweet moment. I held the whiskey bottle in my hands and poured some of the contents to the ground in a silent toast as the bricks started to fall.
    “To new beginnings,” I whispered. Capping the bottle, I slipped the whiskey back into my pocket. A month ago my life started over and now was the time to focus on bigger things and get back to the basics of purpose. Loyalty and duty were the only things I was concerned with at the moment. I headed to the darker side of town. Even a village as remote as this had its unmentionable areas.
    I opened the door to the jingle of little bells and was bombarded by the smell of incense, tobacco and musty hardwood flooring.
    “Be right there,” a gruff voice from the back said. I looked at the artwork on the walls, flipping through