The Collector of Surplus Mouths

I am not mad. I wish to be perfectly clear on this point, for what I must relate will strain the credulity of even the most charitable reader. I am a woman of education, of standing, of unimpeachable rationality. And yet I must confess that on the morning of October the fourteenth, the morning my gardener Mr. Blackwood failed to arrive for his duties, I discovered upon my person a second mouth.

It appeared just below my left clavicle. A small, perfectly formed rosebud of lips, no larger than a sixpence. I touched it, God help me. I could not stop myself. It was warm and slick and it kissed my fingertip. In the mirror's honest light, I watched it part, revealing teeth like seed pearls, and whisper a single word I could not quite hear. But I recognized the voice. I had heard it begging, once, in a garden shed. I had heard it go silent.

You must understand that Ashworth was a village that valued discretion. We did not speak of the mill owner's fondness for the bottle, nor the vicar's debts, nor the circumstances under which the Hartley boy had been sent so abruptly to Australia. We extended to one another the courtesy of mutual blindness. I had relied upon this courtesy for eight years, ever since my husband's death from what the doctor called fever and what I called a necessary correction. Mr. Blackwood had witnessed certain domestic irregularities. He had received generous monthly payments in exchange for his silence.

But Mr. Blackwood had grown bold. He wanted more money. He wanted the cottage at the edge of my property. He wanted, he said, certain considerations that a woman of my position might find it advantageous to provide.

I struck him with the garden spade. I did not plan it. I simply saw the spade, and I saw his smile, and my hands made a decision my mind had not yet authorized.

The killing itself was disappointing. I had expected revelation, transformation, some terrible threshold crossed. Instead there was only a sound like a melon dropped on flagstones, and then a mess to be managed. It was what came after that changed me. The weeks in the root cellar. The meticulous butchery. The slow, methodical work of making a man disappear into myself. That was when I understood what I was capable of. The murder was merely practical. The consumption was personal.

I told myself it was necessity. I did not tell myself that I found satisfaction in it. The intimacy. The knowledge that he was becoming part of me against his will, just as I had been consumed by his threats for eight long years. By the first frost, there was nothing left to bury. The roses I planted that spring grew from what little remained.

I consumed him to silence him. But the body, I have learned, refuses to digest certain sins.

The mouths multiplied through autumn. I would wake to find new lips budding in the soft places of my body, splitting through skin with a sound like silk tearing, wet and eager for air. One in my throat that hummed childhood hymns. One in my palm that laughed whenever I touched silver. By November they numbered seventeen, and I had learned to feel them coming, that terrible itch beneath the skin, the pressure of words forcing themselves into flesh.

They remember everything. They recite every meal, every preparation, every swallowed secret. "Liver on the Tuesday," they chorus. "Heart on the Friday. You salted him like pork. You went back for more when you did not need to. You liked it. You liked the power. You would do it again if you could."

That is what I cannot bear. Not that they remember what I did, but that they remember what I felt. They speak the hungers I will not name.

I took to my bed. I dismissed the servants. I burned my mirrors, for I could no longer bear to see what I had become: more mouth than woman, more confession than flesh, a body colonized by everything I had tried to swallow.

In the final days, they began to sing in harmony. I understood then that I had become a reliquary of my sins. I had spent a lifetime swallowing secrets, swallowing silence, swallowing a man whole. Now he was speaking through me, with me, as me.

I can feel myself becoming less solid. The mouths are opening wider, and I am opening with them. Soon there will be nothing left of Evangeline Thorne but a chorus of confessions, a congregation of the consumed.

I am not mad. I wish to be perfectly clear on this point.

I am simply, finally, being digested in return.