9781250816214

She finishes before morning and sits on the floor of her kitchen, on the
black-and-white checkered tile, her throbbing spine against the oven, her
hair cold and wet and stinking with exertion. The fruits of her night spread
out before her in a dark mandala.
The fingertip bone. The brush, its pig bristles pointing at the ceiling.
The lock of hair.
And a tooth.
A thighbone. A cracked vertebra. A kneecap. A desiccated lung
retrieved from the dirt under the hedges bordering Mrs. Lyon’s property.
More teeth. Five or six of them still stuck in a lonely jawbone. A severed lip
she thought at first was a scrap of beef fat fallen between the stove and the
butcher’s block. A thumbnail, all the way down to the quick, with a line of
dried blood still clinging to the bottom edge. A lump of petrified meat that
Sophia thought was probably a spleen, but she couldn’t be sure. A tiny doll
made of golden skin with pins for eyes. A little spice bottle with a faded
label that once said basil on it in someone else’s handwriting, but was now
filled up with blood, capped, and hidden behind the really spicy stuff she
never used.
It had been there a long time. The blood wasn’t very red anymore.
Half a skull. A shriveled husk that was absolutely, beyond question, a
human heart. And hair, so much hair, all tied lovingly with ribbons, all sorts
of colors, straight and curly, thick and thin, fine and coarse. Without
thinking about it too much, Sophia had organized them in a gradient circle
around everything else, and all together like that she knew it could not
possibly all belong to one poor, miserable person.
And then there was the rest of it, less grisly but somehow so much
worse. Jewelry that didn’t belong to her. A pair of long sewing shears she’d
never seen before, so often used that the handles were yellow with the oils
of someone else’s skin. A crystal perfume bottle with a lavender squeeze
bulb, though Sophia had never worn perfume in her life. A tube of cracked
lipstick in a shade she’d never think to wear. And other, more private
objects: a squat flask of yellow milk-grease with a rubber tip covered in
mold, a tiny lace cap, a stained quilt barely big enough to fit on Sophia’s
lap.
Do you understand? Mrs. Palfrey had said, still wearing her stage
makeup. Still wearing her dark wig.