A Woman Possessed by Becky Robison
CW: suicide
Managing editor Randi Clemens on today’s bonus story: Robison’s story takes readers somewhere warm and sunny and simultaneously somewhere dark and sad. The quippy characters in this piece pull us in by teaching us about wood rot, coconuts, and loss, then take it further. In this story, experience the catharsis of a widow who can’t seem to shake the thoughts of her late husband.
A Woman Possessed
On the advice of her therapist, Meryl fled her haunted house for an extended vacation somewhere warm and sunny. On a single income, all she could afford was a motel in Nowhere, Florida, rotting wood steps leading to her room on the second floor. “Wood rot is the second most common cause of deck collapse,” she said to no one, while she lugged her oversized suitcase inside.
Now the blue plastic pool raft sticks to the skin of her back. The bottom and sides of the pool are painted a bright, nearly neon blue, a blue meant to evoke the blues of faraway tropical shores. The sky is a natural, clear blue, cloudless. A palm tree floats into the periphery of her vision, a tall one, clusters of green coconuts nestled at the base of its fronds. From that height, one of those coconuts could really hurt her if it fell. More than hurt. One good crack against her skull, a trickle of red blood down the curve of her cheek, dissolving in the chlorine.
That’s a Paul thought. He’d take it further, though. Cartoonish. In his version, both the skull and the coconut would split, mashed gray brains mixing with the wet white meat of the fruit.
If he were here, Meryl would mention some trivial fact about coconuts, whatever she could dredge up from her memory. “Did you know that coconuts aren’t only nuts?” she’d say. “They can also be classified as fruits and seeds.” If she didn’t know anything about coconuts, she’d look something up, using neutral objectivity to combat her ghoul of a spouse.
When Paul kissed Meryl at their wedding, he bit her tongue so hard it bled—on the altar, right in front of everyone. The photographer pleaded with her to smile bigger, a happy bride, but she refused to reveal the red in her gums. To fall asleep at night, Paul would turn on the TV, switch to a channel they didn’t receive, and stare at the static for hours. He’d ruin things around the house—a sliced bedsheet, a gutted couch—simply because he didn’t like them anymore. These mutilations were his way of telling Meryl that they needed to redecorate.
“Did you know that Americans purchased 14 million new couches last year?” Meryl would ask.
“I didn’t know that,” Paul would reply. “That’s a lot of couches.”
When she found Paul in the garage with the back of his head missing, red splatter barely visible over the shiny red body of the lawnmower, Meryl was not surprised. She was only surprised that he hadn’t told her he’d bought a gun. She would have expected him to brandish it in front of her whenever she couldn’t run, twirling it like some Western sharpshooter while her arms were laden with groceries, placing it gently beneath his pillow before bed. “It’s not loaded,” she would have expected him to say.
Her friends were surprised about Paul. “He seemed so happy,” they said. “Enthusiastic.” They sent cards, baked casseroles. A well-meaning neighbor brought a whole case of wine.
The wine: that’s when Meryl had her first Paul thought. It’s like they want me to join him. Bereaved widow drinks herself to death. She took it further, like he would. They’d find her on the floor below the couch, sour purple tongue poking from between purple lips. She’d have lost control of her bowels, soiled their pricey Persian rug, a housewarming gift from Paul’s parents.
The Paul thoughts didn’t stop, not when she packed up and sold his things, not when she started a new job. It was as though whatever remained of him had possessed her mind, using her arsenal of trivia against her. Pigs can experience depression. Silver medalists feel worse about their achievements than bronze medalists. 52.3% of Americans are unhappy at work. There are over 2 million orphans in the world. CPR almost never succeeds. 30-50% of food on Earth goes uneaten. Most people donate to charities to feel good about themselves. Suicide risk is higher in those who have lost a spouse to suicide. Termites don’t cause wood rot, but they’re attracted to it.
Floating in Nowhere, Florida, the blue plastic pool raft sticking to the skin of her back, she drags her fingertips through the cool, blue water, and she imagines what she’d look like drowned. She considers the coconuts—green clusters of them, nestled beneath the dried and dying fronds. She takes it further.
Becky Robison is a karaoke enthusiast, trivia nerd, and fiction writer from Chicago. A graduate of UNLV's Creative Writing MFA program, her stories have appeared in PANK, Paper Darts, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. When she's not working her corporate job or walking her dog, she serves as Social Media and Marketing Coordinator for Split Lip Magazine.
