Read by Lucy Mabbitt (first story in podcast: click here)
Esme’s heart beats so quickly that even super fast songs, 160 beats per minute, sound as though they’re in slow motion.
My pulse could outrun anything, she thinks to herself as she lies awake each night, her bedsheets palpitating in time with the blood pumping fast through her veins.
The thought that her pulse could outrun anything is something of a comfort to Esme when she reads news headlines, daily, about women being raped, murdered, deleted from her city. And yet she still cannot will herself to close both eyes.
Men with sticky-floored hearts send her lines of poetry from sticky-floored bars; You still up, DTF?
Sometimes no, almost always yes.
The men arrive, they fuck, and then they disappear like genies in a bottle.
Stop using that app, it’s like a ouija board for men who are terminally repressed, says Minnie, Esme’s best friend.
Minnie rolls her eyes but Esme can tell she enjoys her role as the wise and successful truth-bearer. It’s the only way that just-married women like Minnie know how to speak to perennially-single women like Esme, she’s realised.
Think you’ll see him again? Minnie asks after each of Esme’s dates, her optimism like bubble wrap.
Esme doesn’t know how to tell her best friend: I’ve been ghosted so many times, by so many men, that I feel as though I’m becoming one myself; a ghost, a ghoul, a spectre. Invisible, infinite, I will live out the rest of time smoking cigarettes on top of skyscrapers, touching paintings in art galleries, haunting all the men that have kept me awake, so mercilessly, all of these long nights.
Meh, probs not, Esme decides is an easier answer. Minnie rolls her eyes, with pleasure, again.
*
Esme rarely goes to their houses, but on this particular occasion he asks and she accepts. He lives not far from her place, two streets along, in a studio flat by himself.
He is very tall and very thin. His hair, black and curly, is like a child’s scribble on top of a stick man. His eyes pebble-brown and unremarkable, bricks in a wall. Noah, his name.
Noah’s studio is full of headless women.
Bum-sculpted vases bought from high street homewares departments sit obediently in rows along his shelves, hourglass-curved candles cast seductive shadows across his floorboards, vulva-shaped bars of soap are stacked high in his bathroom.
Wait, look at this, he says proudly, opening up a fridge well-stocked with breast-shaped butter moulds he found (on discount!) at his local Costco.
Esme doesn’t ask what’s up with Noah’s perversion towards de-limbed women. He offers her an explanation anyway.
Nothing makes me angrier than the commodification of women’s bodies, Noah explains with clenched fists, whenever I see women’s bodies being mass-produced by corporates, immortalising unhealthy beauty standards for women and girls, I can’t just walk past. I have to buy them, to protect the girls and to prevent the guys. I’m not like other guys, you can probably tell. I’m out here fighting the good fight.
During sex, Esme lies on her back, trying to count all the headless girls and women festooned around his studio as casually as fairylights. 51, if her arithmetic skills serve her correctly. He stops just before he comes and asks very politely if Esme would at all mind if he put a pillowcase over her head for the final stretch. She concedes and updates her total: 52.
When it’s over, he offers to walk her out to street level. One of the good guys, after all. He starts to get dressed, opening his wardrobe to reveal an assortment of French workwear jackets, each in a slightly nuanced hue of blue and with varying numbers of fake pockets.
Your blue period? Esme jokes, trying to fill the silence while pulling on a pair of laddered tights.
Please, don’t compare me to him, you know what Picasso did to women?
Noah then proceeds to explain to Esme what Picasso did to women as they walk down what feels like a never-ending staircase to his building’s front door.
Text me when you get back safe, women are machines for suffering, are Noah’s final words before kissing her on the forehead and closing his door.
She does not text him when she’s back safe and he does not text to check.
*
Some news a few days later: Minnie is having a baby.
And a few months later still: there is a gender reveal party.
A pink doll for a girl, a blue doll for a boy, Minnie explains with excitement, as though she’s a marketing maverick who’s just come up with the concept of gender tropes, about to revolutionise advertising sector-wide.
Esme has not slept for swiping and wears all black to the party. For diplomacy. She spots her father, who has known Minnie since she was a baby herself, by the drinks table at the end of the garden.
It’s an unusually warm October day and she hugs her father lightly, cheek brushing cheek.
Hello Esme.
Hi dad.
Terrible what’s in the news today, did you see?
Another girl missing, I know.
I hope you’re keeping safe?
Of course, dad, as safe as I can be.
Be lucky, Esme, remember to always be lucky.
He’d been using this catchphrase – be lucky – for as long as she can remember; by way of a greeting to his staff, in lieu of a tip to starcrossed waitresses, and as something of a threat to his only and not particularly lucky daughter, Esme.
She watches as his gaze floats away from her and to more interesting members of the guest list. She tries to follow where his eyes land – on the new mums, the soon-to-be mums, the could-be mums – but he’s wearing sunglasses parked across his face like a blacked-out limousine, and it’s like playing a game of tag in the dark.
Besides, something strange has happened to Esme since the night with Noah. She tries to tell herself it’s the lack of sleep, or maybe all the late-night doomscrolling, or perhaps some new sexually transmitted disease, a medical enigma of sorts, brought about by the after-hours dating app; whatever it is, Esme’s mind has started dismembering women.
She noticed the morning after.
Late for work, Esme dragged herself into her bathroom to draw on the good night’s sleep she did not have. Red lips, winged eyes, tubes and tubes of concealer. That should do it.
But when she looked in the mirror: surprise, her head was no longer there. Her body, arms and legs were all visible in the stark light of her yellow-tiled bathroom, but Esme’s reflection came to an abrupt stop around her collarbones, like a portrait someone couldn’t be bothered to finish.
The only valid explanation, Esme tried to rationalise as she stared out her window at a street peopled with headless girls, was that she was finally asleep and dreaming. Sleep had become such a distant concept to her, a mere smudge on the horizon, that surely she’d just forgotten how it felt, how the subconscious mind can play horrid little tricks on you. Content with this theory, she’d skipped work and slipped into a matinee without paying.
But oh, I am not dreaming, Esme realised when she received an uncharacteristically concerned call from her boss the following day.
Where are you, Esme? We’re worried about you, Esme. Is everything okay, Esme?
Rushing to get to work she realised that it wasn’t just women’s faces that were erased; entire parts of their bodies were missing. Floating breasts, bums, thighs, hips, bare midriffs, bulging midriffs rode the tube alongside her. In the office, Esme tried to look at where she assumed her boss’s face would be, when only her legs arrived for their catch-up.
Where are you, Esme? We’re worried about you, Esme. Is everything okay, Esme?
*
Esme wants to tell Minnie what’s happening to her but she doesn’t know how to explain it:
Forget chlamydia, I think I caught the male gaze from a misogynist on that app.
I told you to delete it, she can hear a headless Minnie saying. Esme doesn’t have to see the eye-roll to know it’s there.
Glancing around the party, Esme watches dungareed little boys chase floating frilly dresses around the flowerbeds. Bumps hover by the gift table. They belong to Minnie’s cohort of married-mum friends who exist at the centre of the heterosexual man’s Venn diagram, ropes lassoed around them from straight men of all ages, all professions, all vantage points.
One of the bumps, a green one, is heading right in Esme’s direction.
Esme and Paul, predictions please!
A little girl, her father answers, without hesitation, a smile strapped across his face as without asking, he puts a hand on Minnie’s bump.
A boy, Esme follows with. For diplomacy. She quickly puts on her cat-eye sunglasses before Minnie can ask her why she looks like shit. As her bump moves away, to vox-pop the rest of the party’s guests, Esme notices a mass of hair, like an atom symbol in a chemistry textbook, in the far corner of the garden.
It can’t be, but it is: Noah.
Esme has never seen any of the men from the app in daylight, despite them all living within a two-mile radius. She half-expected them to not exist at all past sunrise. But there he is, in the flesh, standing near James, the father-to-be, in a slightly darker blue jacket than the one he’d worn a few months ago.
Noah seems equally surprised to see her when she makes her way over, as though he’d assumed, given the lack of text confirming her safe return home, that she too had made the transition from human to headline like the other evanescent girls.
What a surprise, he manages, I didn’t know you knew James?
A friend of Minnie’s, actually. And I need to talk with you.
Sure, sure, he says, with alarm, it’s not about anything baby-related, is it? Like, you’re not? Or is it a … STD, he mouths, as though to protect all the unborn babies from the horrors of modern dating.
Esme knows what she wants to say: I want to know, I demand to know, what you passed onto me, why it is that ever since that night, I cannot stop dismembering women. I have chopped up and erased the body of every single woman I’ve seen, every woman who walks in my path, I haven’t seen a woman’s actual face in months, not even my own, not even on TV, every woman is just an arbitrary selection of discarded Barbie limbs.
What did you do to me? Did you curse me? Did your vases voodoo me? Undo it, undo it now.
But looking at him, at the childlike fear in his pathetic pebble-brown eyes, the words do not come out. She considers screaming but Minnie beats her to it:
IT’S TIME!
Everyone turns to face the patio where a balloon arc frames the father-to-be, stood next to a floating bump and box belonging to Minnie.
The box that will reveal the fate of this unborn child’s relationship to horror and violence, she hears Noah whisper in the air. But when she turns around he is no longer there and her father is there instead. He grips her waist.
Esme watches as the box begins to open, in front of the bump, as though by its own accord. She can hardly feel her pulse, her heart beating as fast as the earth is spinning, as the party guests hold a collective breath.
And then it is open and fate is decided. Piercing screams come from everywhere and nowhere all around her and all at once.
Esme looks in the box: it is empty.
(c) Hannah Downes, 2023
Hannah Downes is a fiction writer and journalist. She's an alumna of City University’s Short Story Writing course and is currently working on her first novel as part of Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel programme.
Lucy Mabbitt is an actress from Derbyshire in the East Midlands: she is a graduate from Guildhall School of Drama and is based in London. She recently appeared in Gambit for Exeter Fringe at The Northcott and previously read “Kaleidoscope Girl” and “While You Were Sleeping” for Liars’ League.
Comments