Chapter 4
I retreated to my room and picked out some clothes.
The bathroom floor was wet, a crumpled towel lay like a tongue across the toilet, and the shower door was still fogged: all signs that Piglet had just left.
I got into the shower but couldn’t shake the image of the old woman.
Regardless of how much I scrubbed, I couldn’t get clean.
The dirtiness was inside. I lathered up, rinsed off, and got dressed with that image still burning behind my eyes.
When I went back to the living room, a shapeless thing was attached to the hooks, red and resembling a leg of beef.
There was no longer anything human about it, just a suspended mass of flesh and bone without skin or a head.
As she dismantled it, Cora said, “I think you’ll be able to use a lot of it. ”
I nodded quietly and turned toward the front door, when I saw the woman’s head on the coffee table, adjacent to a statue of the Virgin Mary that my mother had gifted us years before. Even with her eyelids closed, she was staring right at me.
“What the fuck?”
“Oh, I left it there to remind me to ask later,” said Cora, lowering one of the ropes. “Do you know if Hugo is planning on doing something with the head?”
“Something?”
“Some people like to roast the cow head to eat the brains. Or fry the brains. It’s really tasty.”
“We’re not going to do anything with the head.”
She shrugged. “Okay, bring it over here, then. Just grab it by the hair.”
“I’ve gotta go.”
I quickly bolted out the door and desperately pressed the elevator button. In the excruciating seconds before it arrived, I fought to slow my breath and swallowed the vomit rising in my throat.