Sometimes, comfort and escape is not what a reader wants when heading to the beach. For those readers interested in horror and explorations on the body, Heather Parry is a writer to watch. Following on from the success of her novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, comes an unsettling but brilliant short story collection, This Is My Body, Given To You. Here, we share one of her stories, ‘The Small Island’.

This Is My Body, Given For You
By Heather Parry
Published by Haunt Publishing

The Small Island

There has been a blight about these islands. Their grain has ceased growing; their livestock no longer breeds. Fields lie flat and the hills are barren, devoid of new life. As the last of the mature animals are slaughtered and rationed out, the future holds a horrifying uncertainty.

On the larger island, the people are reaching desperation. Angry seas have kept them from the mainland for too long. Each time they send out a boat, it comes back terrified, or sinks while still in view. The remaining people are afraid to try again. And so, for the first time in a hundred years, they are looking to the smaller island. The small spit of green that is lush with sheep and teeming with generations closed off from the rest of the world. The island that, as their grandparents told them, held witchcraft and sorcery and the horror of humanity.

Aboard the boat – the best they have, though it creaks beneath the weight of its small crew, and rocks with the gentlest wave – the youngest and strongest of the community’s men tie knots and plug leaks. They hammer wood to wood, pull tarpaulin and secure it. The others stand at the tiny harbour and watch them as they work.

It is ready, the captain-of-sorts announces to his uncertain crew. It’s time.

A girl runs forward, a creature somewhere between a child and a woman. She is going with them. She has always wanted to be more than the place she was born in. The girl’s mother knows better than to protest; the crew find that there is little point in it either. A life jacket is handed to her. She straps it on and sets herself down at the front of the boat.

The crossing is difficult and strained by the same indignant seas that have kept them from the mainland. But the distance is much shorter. They could have done this journey many times before. They did not.

There is no port on the smaller island. No harbour or jetty. A vast beach is their only welcome. They navigate the rocks and take the boat into the shallow waters. Two of the younger men go to haul their bodies out of the boat and into the sea, but the captain blocks their path with his outstretched arm.

Wait.

They look up across the sand and over the grass and up to where the village begins, where houses hundreds of years old still stand with thatched roofs. They look to the buildings beyond, the small church and the meeting hall. They see not a single movement; not a breath.

Why don’t you jump ashore and see, the captain says to the girl. Why don’t you take a wee run up that beach and tell us what you find.

They push her onto shore, a tester, a little yellow bird without her cage. She runs from the water, over dunes and up the gentle incline. She goes willingly, an adventurer.

The fields are empty. Amongst the buildings she finds nothing but death. People that have dropped seemingly in an instant. Bodies at desks and in kitchens, bodies intertwined and bodies alone.

She runs back to the water, the sand moving under her feet, and finds that the boat is further out than it was before.

A plague, she says. There is nobody here left alive.

The captain hauls the anchor back into the boat. Paddles slip into the water and they begin their escape. The girl runs forward, made slower by the sea.

You’ll have breathed it in, says a younger man. You’ll have caught it.

Another says, We can’t let you bring it back.

There is silence, then. Silence from her and from the men who leave her. Silence because there’s nothing to say.

She stays amongst the dunes for three days, shivering and starving and clinging to hope, running up to the village only to drink water from the well. On the fourth day she accepts that they are not coming, and makes her home amongst the dead.

She steps around their bloated forms, pink foam escaping from their noses and parted lips. She searches their houses for what might sustain her. It is a week before the canned foods and pastes and butter and cream run out. Another of stomach cramps and the rotten corpses of rats and snails. Of chewing the straw from roofs and hallucinations of beef. Of glances at the reddening, rictal bodies scattered about the floor, as if abandoned in an abattoir.

It is the twenty-first day of her abandonment when, free of tears and resolute, she takes a handsaw from a tool shed and slices the biceps off the largest man she can find. Those that have fallen outside are colder and better preserved. She is so hungry she barely thinks of the morals. She builds a fire and rubs the muscle with salt and sits it to smoke and cook and become delicious.

She devours it within minutes. She is human again. She sleeps full.

The next morning, the brightness of the day wakes her. She strips naked and heads down to the water, her bathtub, and takes herself into the frigid sea. She runs hands over skin and goosepimples and feels a swelling under her fingers. From elbow to shoulder she has grown; not on both sides. Only one. She brings her arms out of the water and flexes the left. The bicep rises, strong and round and firm. She grasps it with her other hand. She grins.

There are two dozen dead outside the croft buildings and tiny homes. With her new strength, she uses her left arm to flip them over, to uncurl them from their poses, to tear them from one another. She appraises them. Blood has pooled; teeth and nails drop from fingers and gums. Yet each body has its own benefits. A pair of round buttocks, large feet, strong shoulders. She first takes the lips of a woman at her sink. A knife will do this; two slices and it’s done. She fries them up in oil in a pan. They slip down with ease, and she sleeps. The next morning, her face is heavier. She finds a cracked mirror. There they are, full and red and hers.

She takes calf muscles and forearms and the glutes. She takes daintier ears and longer fingers and breasts twice the size of hers. She pops out two gelatinous masses, barely clinging to their shape, from the body of a teen. The next morning, when she wakes, she has the blue-grey eyes she’s always wished for.

She is strong. She is powerful. She can run and bend and move and lift and swim just as she wants to. She spears fish from the still-living seas, and grasps eels, and holds her breath to dive for scallops. She hears the absence of her people every day, but she no longer cares.

She shears a cock from the groin of every dead man. She lines them up, five in total, and imagines them turgid. She looks for girth and length and erectile tissue. She swallows one whole, holds back a retch, and goes to sleep with a smile on her face.

The next morning, she wakes with a weight between her thighs. It sits in front of her vulva. She thinks of the things she always thinks of at night, and it grows and swells and brings sheer delight. She has chosen well. She is perfect.

The boat comes after three months. She hears it from the hillside. Wrapped in blankets to hide her new form, she strides down to the beach where they sit still metres from the shore. They are afraid, again. She lets them speak.

We need you, says the captain. We want you back. We can’t handle the shame. There is one word that he does not say, and she notes it.

Go home, she thinks. I am happy here. But she does not say it. Instead, she runs her gaze over sturdy hands and firm hips and brows that sit heavy over eyes.

There is life here, she says. Things growing. Things that have sustained me. Come and see.

She waits a while. They do as she tells them. She takes them one by one around corners, into dark rooms, to show them something. She wrings their necks, smashes their skulls with rocks, stabs their chests with cold pokers. She picks over flesh and sinew and muscle and marrow, waiting for the next boat to come to rescue her.

She takes the parts that she wants, and leaves the rest to rot.

This Is My Body, Given For You by Heather Parry is published by Haunt Publishing, priced £9.99.