The Honeymooner's heart- Flash fiction story

By Heather Thynne

I watch the guides do as they’re told, telling the story of how each body part came to be. That they were donated to The Hunterian, embalmed and displayed for science, for education. Dead bodies resigned to an audience. They don’t know the truth. No one asks how the handprints appear every night, why the fingertips lay an inch away from the babies’ forever unseeing eyes. Preserved in glass cases, protected from nothing, from the horrors that no longer persist.

My husband took me to William, the museum’s namesake. Said that he’d know what do to, that he’d watched him work before. Our maid had found me, screaming into my nightgown. The baby wasn’t ready, I told them. My body was rejecting her, rejecting my purpose. 

The stone walls spoke of my future, of what was to become of me. That I too would be encased within its cold interior. Light to be cast upon me no more. 

His room was laden with tools - for experimentation, not survival. They ripped me open with no care, stole her from inside. My flesh hung like decaying meat; my entrails left like offal for feasting. They didn’t care for the pelt. They dumped me with the others, our children displayed like trophies they’d fought for.

There was no battle here. A chloroform tissue enough to do the trick.

I told myself that I’d stay, watch over her from the wings. 

For my husband there was no running from what he’d done, he couldn’t escape me.

The Honeymooner’s Heart, the guide will say next, moving to the adjacent array of specimens. A ruptured right ventricle. He married his maid and died suddenly the next night. So the story goes.

I live forever in their shadows. All that remains are whispers of reality.