Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh [Ottessa Moshfegh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

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“Will you be mine?” were the last words I remembered in the morning when I woke up. I’d been dreaming of Walter, his ashes piled around me like an anthill, and then it all turned to quicksand, and someone’s hand was reaching out, a diamond encrusted watch on its bony wrist. The time was ten thirty. I grasped at the fingers, but all I felt was air, and then fur, and from a distance I could hear the clinking of glasses and cutlery on bone china. “Wilst du be meinen?” It wasn’t Walter’s voice exactly, but close enough. When I opened my eyes, there was Charlie, tail wagging ferociously, head nudging my hand, my chin, then his soft, thin tongue lapping my cheek like a warm wet towel.

“Oh, all right, my sweet,” I said. I could feel the lack of rest immediately in my bones, in my eyes, my joints, my feet. I eased myself down the stairs and to the kitchen, laying my eyes firmly on the papers on the table by the windows facing the lake, nearly aflame now with the rising sun. It was late morning. Usually Charlie would wake me predawn, and we’d be up and out the door—my teeth brushed, face washed, and fully dressed—just as the first needles of light were breaking over the horizon. The table, however sunlit, was just as I’d left it. Empty mug, pencil, pen, the questionnaire, and my notebook, which I hadn’t used. I was proud of my work. It was as though I were a sculptor, coming down to his studio bleary-eyed after a long night’s toiling with his clay; and from the hard work and exhaustion, he’d gone up to bed unaware of the brilliant life-form he’d created and left downstairs to dry, to take to itself in the night, to become a real thing apart from him. And so Magda had become a real thing.

In the kitchen, I opened the door to let Charlie do his initial business, preheated the oven for the chicken, and bent down to get a can of nutritional supplement from under the sink. This was not an ideal source of nutrition, but I knew I needed one. Walter was always poking fun at my thinness, comparing me to other women around, at once humiliating me for being slight, bony, flat-chested, and them for being fleshy, big-bosomed hogs. He didn’t mean to be cruel. That was just his sense of humor, a bit like Magda’s. It was hard to have friends without making Walter feel I was conspiring against him. I think he felt left out: he could sense most people didn’t like him. “People are idiots” was how he rationalized his loneliness. Sometimes he complained that being as intelligent as he was made it difficult to feel truly accepted. “People are frightened,” he said. “Peasants,” he deemed them. Occasionally he read someone else’s scientific work and claimed to feel comforted that he was “not the only intelligent being on the planet.

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