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“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I said. “You’re dead.” A beat. “Aren’t you?”

She made that thrum again. Just as low. But more—liquid.

“Well, you tell me . . . Mr. Man.”

I know what real contempt is, now. Not what we think hurts us. Not words, not deeds. Not even physical pain. Real contempt is a waterlogged corpse you’ve cried over for a day, wordless and amazed at the depth of your own loss, who stands in front of you at sunset with her hair like a bloody halo—and doesn’t even have the decency to pretend she remembers your name.

“You bitch,” I said, dry-mouthed. “I’d do anything for you. Don’t you even care?”

She smiled, then. And I saw her mouth was ripped at one corner—not much, just enough.

A freshwater leech pulsed, black and fat, at the base of her pale tongue.

“Care,” she repeated, as though tasting it. “There’s a word for you. Impressive. Like it should mean . . . something.”

Smiling wider. Showing more.

“Problem is, I don’t know what.”

She sank down in front of me, there on the dirty sand. Lay right on back amongst the fast food debris and the frost-bitten weeds, easing her chemical warfare jacket’s front flaps slowly apart.

Clip by painstaking clip.

“We did meet before, though,” she said. “Once or twice. Your name—is—”

“Chris.”

“Oh, riiight.”

She pulled it open, then. For the first time. Saying, not unkindly:

“You’re all the same to me, man. Nothing personal. I just am what I am. And being what I am, I take—what I—can get.”

And when I finally saw what was under it, I heard myself mewl like a crushed cat.

She just looked up at me, from under her wet white lashes. A level gaze, flat-eyed. Not secretive, so much—as patient. Like dust.

Because I wanted her. Still.

“So,” she said. “You coming?”

Still. And always.

“Or what?”

* * *

And I let her draw me down. Like she always knew I would, whether I’d ever found out or not—what she was. I mean, is. Rachel, Ruth, Rebecca, maybe even Rita-turned-Rictus, mouth open wide, some milky kind of liquid spilling up from deep inside her like an undertow. Oh, Christ, suffering Christ. A real man-sized portion poking up from me into the dark beneath her coat, sausage stuffed fit to fry and pop, right on up where it’s tight, and slick, and ragged, and cold. Christ. I knew exactly what I was doing this time, and it didn’t even matter. Up through the snapped wishbone of her pelvis, nudging aside a few soft coils of intestine, up through the muscle wall, up as far as I could go into that clotted seam full of black blood, the autopsy scar I’d thought all along was her vagina. Deep into the black, sweet, caustic heart of the matter. The core. Where it all gets broken down to the lowest common denominator, meaning eff-all. Nothing to the infinite power. A dead girl’s stinking stomach flapping open in the wind, cold enough to burn.

Then a rasp of unstrung suture caught me on the back-stroke, and I screamed as I came, clutching her close—‘til her corpse’s grin finally got too much for me, and I jack-knifed my face hard into the top of her spine.

This time, when I bit her shoulder in the grip of my passion, a bit of it tore away.

And I swallowed it.

* * *

“Skeleton Bitch” went top ten in a week. I don’t care if I never sing again.