Unfortunate elements of.., p.1
Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, page 1
Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy
Hailey Piper
Contents
Also By Hailey Piper
Introduction
Feast for Small Pieces
The Law of Conservation of Death
Demons of Particular Taste
I’m Not a Chainsaw Kind of Girl, But…
Candyland
Elf-Bride
Aggressive Mimicry
Seven Signs He Doesn’t Love You
Crones in Their Larval State
Hairy Jack
Daisy
The Umbilical Chord
We All Scream
The Burning of the Blueberries
Jormungandr’s Dance
Forgive the Adoring Beast
Among the Creatures of the Night
Recitation of the First Feeding
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Publication History
Also Available
Praise For Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy
"In Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, Hailey Piper masterfully crafts a resolutely modern gothic, unearthing the rotten, the broken and the strangely beautiful. Piper wields incisive prose with empathy and deep intuition, carefully dissecting the monstrous bodies herein and spilling their stories onto the page. A compelling and essential collection."
- Laura Mauro, British Fantasy Award-winning author of Sing Your Sadness Deep
"With surgical precision, Hailey Piper's stories slice through the skin, fat, and muscle of her characters' lives, all the way down to the living bone and what is written on it. In terms of their prose, their wit, their insight, their compassion, their terror, these are the sharpest of stories. Read them, but be prepared for the cuts."
- John Langan, author of Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies
Praise for Hailey Piper
"You're going to be hearing a lot about Hailey Piper. She's the real deal." - Max Booth III, author of We Need to Do Something and Touch the Night
"Hailey Piper is a major new voice in the horror genre ..." - Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens and The Invention of Ghosts
"Politically and culturally important ..." - Joanna Koch, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Couvade and The Wingspan of Severed Hands
"There is no subgenre that Piper cannot make her own." - Laurel Hightower, author of Whispers In the Dark and Crossroads
"Eerie and visceral, Piper combines the supernatural with the deeply human ... " - A.C. Wise, Nebula Award-nominated author of Catfish Lullaby and The Ghost Sequences
Also By Hailey Piper
The Possession of Natalie Glasgow (Indie)
Benny Rose, the Cannibal King (Unnerving)
The Worm and His Kings (Off Limits Press)
Available wherever books are sold
Stories and Collection Copyright © 2021 Hailey Piper
Cover and Illustrations © 2021 Janice Blaine
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author or The Seventh Terrace, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
UNFORTUNATE ELEMENTS OF MY ANATOMY
ISBN 13: 978-1-990082-02-3
The Seventh Terrace
www.the-seventh-terrace.com
To J, destroyer of worlds and foundation of mine.
Introduction
I’ll always remember my first Piper. October, 2019, I’d picked up a copy of The Possession of Natalie Glasgow on the recommendation of the Ladies of Horror Fiction. Since I found this wonderful cornucopia of amazing new reads, I’ve struggled to keep up with my “to be read” stack, but TPONG didn’t languish for long on my shelves. On a night getting close to spooky season, I ran my fingers along the spines of my choices and settled upon the slim volume with the intriguing cover. I love possession stories, but it can be a tough subject to do right. Avoidance of the obvious source material, leading the story on a new path, mapping out fresh ways to turn your reader’s blood cold – not a light task to undertake. I’d heard good things, though, so it was with pleasurable anticipation that I ran a bath and settled in for the sliver of me-time I got every day back then.
The first page negated every relaxing property of my bathtub. I don’t think I ever even laid back, just sat with my teeth clenched, turning page after page until the water grew cold and I abandoned the tub for the couch. The house was dark and silent, everyone else having long since gone to bed, but I wasn’t going anywhere. I was being hunted, the same as Margaret Willow, and there was no way I could rest with the weight of those eyes behind me.
Tension from the first page is what I wrote in my five star review, and it’s not hyperbole. “Piper built dread from the first pages, and as everything comes together, it clicks like perfectly matched pieces.” I’m quoting myself here because this idea of Hailey’s work was prophetic, in a way. As I dove into the search for her words that had come before, perfection became a theme.
Now I’m really sounding hyperbolic. I get that, and yet pondering as I have on how to best express the way it feels to read Hailey Piper, I can’t change that impression. I know her work ethic, that she applies herself diligently to writing, that she churns out story after story which serves as its own education. I know, too, that she’s a keen and empathetic student of humanity, a supportive and thoughtful friend, and a soft-spoken Amazonian warrior. I know she reads widely, that she edits, and works with editors with whom she graciously shares credit (obligatory shout out to editors everywhere, you wonderful people, you), but whatever the process, what emerges as the completed product feels like a story that was waiting to be told, in precisely the manner in which she spins it on the page. There is always at least one line, and usually many, that feels like a long held truth you’ve only just heard expressed correctly, that both sings to your life and settles in as a dark reality. For there is no doubt that as you read more, that truth will begin to alter and grow, leaving you to see it in a new light whether you want to or not.
I’m a fan of Hailey’s longer fiction – An Invitation to Darkness is Gothic horror at its best, and Benny Rose, the Cannibal King is both immensely entertaining and the bearer of deeper truths about the role of the young, and specifically girls, and how they’re regarded by those that should know better. I’d recommend any of these titles without hesitation, and I can say the same about Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy.
One of the first impressions I had of Hailey’s short fiction, and that continues to awe me, is her ability to start her readers on a path just familiar enough to recognize and take the first steps, before branching off into the unknown. This collection travels from the farthest reaches of space, to times long beyond and before our own. To windswept beaches, and high school corridors. To kingdoms and covens that lie just past the borders of our reality, waiting for the right combination of intention and need to open a veil that we, as a reader, know should stay closed. But it is Hailey’s gift for empathy that has us parting the veil alongside her characters, even as we flinch away from what is to come. She shows us the ancient dangers of folk horror, the inevitable end in apocalyptic horror, horror which we visit upon ourselves or our loved ones, and that they visit upon us, for the crime of being human and vulnerable. There is horror, too, in the everyday. In bathrooms and bedrooms and vacations, in grocery stores and the very music we make. There is horror in trust, and in love, and in refusing to love. There is tongue in cheek horror and horror in which we cheer the ostensible villains, monsters made infinitely more likable than the humans they hunt. Hailey thinks around corners, and deftly speaks from within the minds of a wide cast of characters. Every point of view she tackles, she sinks deep inside to know their dread and make it ours.
It is a well-known axiom that to understand a genre, it is necessary to study the past masters of it. I don’t disagree – there is wisdom to be gained by reading those that came before, but I would posit that it’s just as important to read the new ones as well. This is particularly true when it comes to diverse voices. Hailey Piper gives her readers a master class in short fiction, with every tale she writes, and these stories resonate with a wide audience. “Make horror gay AF” is the first line in her Twitter bio, and it’s a maxim she lives up to, weaving a strong LGBTQ+ worldview into her work in a successful effort to normalize a life experience that has spent far too long being trampled and marginalized. In so doing, she makes horror human AF, including all of us in her skillful prose, and making it impossible to escape what she’s about to visit upon us. To that I say, more, please.
One of the many facets that I enjoy about her work I wasn’t able to fully articulate until I recently reread Carmen Maria Machado’s The Husband Stitch. Machado points out with enough clarity for my literal mind to catch what has always bothered me about most urban legends. There is a common undercurrent of warning to them – warnings against being prideful, being poor, being a bride. Even against facing your fears or going on a date. I’ll be honest, when I saw those warnings all laid out together, it pissed me off. Which of any of those things is a sin at all, let alone one punishable by death?
The only cautionary theme that runs through Hailey’s stories is a dire warning against underestimating the female of the species, and I love it. There is pain here, there are choices that lead to more of it, but as is true in real life, the only way to avoid it is not to be human. Since that’s not a possibility for readers or characters, I suggest you settle in and travel the road Hailey shows us. Just don’t expect a peaceful ride.
- Laurel Hightower, author of
Whispers in the Dark and Crossroads
Feast for Small Pieces
Never underestimate the seductive power of a woman who’s minding her own business.
“There’s just something about her,” they say. I see myself splashed across a pulp magazine cover, a distraught man in the background. The tagline reads, “He met a woman he Could. Not. Resist.” As if that’s my problem.
These writers don’t realize it’s me they’ve placed in their stories. I’d hoped to escape them when I left England, but their tide is unending. They scarce remember passing me on the street, only the fire I’ve lit in their minds, hearts, and other places. Later they sit with their notebooks or keyboards, tapping out the story of how a man’s peaceful life was shattered when he met me in some chance romance.
Sometimes I’m cast as a vampire. Other times I’m the half-human spawn of an elder god. I might be Eve. Never the same, but always me.
Half of these fictional sisters show no interest in men, while others drown in men’s wishes. She dressed that way that night knowing she’d rock his world. Her genetics must’ve known she’d meet him someday and grew her bones and flesh to suit him. We’re all so subtly loud in men’s eyes.
Feast on a true story.
I visit a grocer to buy tomatoes, plump ones. A man approaches. Were he to write about me, it would be my fault, but the pen is in my hand today. Whether I wear a hoodie two sizes too big with baggy jeans that hide my figure or a skirt that barely passes my waist, it does not matter. I am buying tomatoes.
“Hey, pretty lady. Doing anything tonight?” He shuffles behind me, impatient. “What, you have a boyfriend?”
It’s never the same. A compliment, an insult, requests for my name, marital status, smiles, evening plans, swept to sea on tides of apathy.
“If you’re single, why not go out with me?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
Here comes the outrage. Some don’t need to be spurned first. Even seeing a woman they like reminds them of their frailty, how their blood is dragged as the moon drags the tide. I don’t know them inside, but I’ve seen what comes out. I’m more fortunate than most. For the woman across the street, this is the moment he beats her or runs her down with his car, anything to destroy her.
His angry words breathe down my neck, all names I’ve heard before.
I turn, the first time I set eyes on him. “You will leave.”
A writer would have slunk away to jot me down as beldam or succubus. A painter might color me an untouchable mother. To a musician, a ballad would pretend we were lovers. They dream of joining me as I dream of leaving them. We live in a world where my fantasy is to buy groceries unmolested.
But this man is no creator. There is no art to him, only crude craving by the responsibility in his pants that I never knew was mine. He would destroy me.
I abandon my shopping today, tomatoes in their basket. “Follow,” I say. A stupid part of his brain might believe he’s going to get his way.
Killing him would be kind. He would die believing himself like those pulp heroes, a tragic figure who lays his fate at my feet. When they persist, I give them purpose. These men wish I was a vampire, a cosmic demon, a witch. They wish for a clean death.
My workshop is a wooden shed behind my cozy house. By the rustic shingles, sweet green grass, pleasant canary yellow paint, you could never tell what I do there. I keep it insulated, the walls soundproofed. It stinks with heavenly residue. No matter how many airings out I try through its open wooden double doors, the smell remains.
The persistent men never notice. I lead this one inside, where on a wooden workbench I keep my tools shaped from fallen stars, across from the four poster bed. It’s soft, comfortable; its guests will spend a great deal of time on it. I order him to strip and then lie down. He’s too eager to tear his clothing away and stretch across the crimson sheets.
That isn’t the only stripping I need.
Doors closed, I dig my fingers into the workshop wall and tear aside a curtain that blocks this world from the shining heaven few ever notice. In that place, flesh is scarce and sanctified. Even his. Its cosmic perfection pours into his body, makes him ready to be given purpose. My fingers begin the work.
“Lie still,” I tell him. His fearful eyes dart this way and that, but he won’t get up. It is enough to work with.
There are worthy causes everywhere you look. Here, a woman’s vertebrae rub together, causing her daily pain. There, another’s skin is missing after a house fire. Blood, hair, eyes, intestines, bones. When I’ve placed a persistent man in my workshop, I strip what he has, cleanse it in unearthly light, and use it to mend the hurt I see around me. His pieces live on in these healed women, aware. They are pieces put to better purpose than serving him.
A month passes. He is only bone and fragments of skin and muscle. Still aware, still staring from the bed. I need not tell him to lie still anymore; he has no choice. In my neighborhood, a girl falls from a tree and snaps her leg. It could heal with a fracture line, but I make it good as new. Another woman cannot move on after her mother’s untimely death. She doesn’t know, as I offer her coffee, that it’s laced with the strength to find purpose again. She thanks me for the coffee, not the gift from the persistent man.
Everything he was becomes forfeit, even his time, even his will. I waste nothing.
The work finished, I eat what little is left of him. It is only fair after he’s put me off supper for weeks. He lives briefly in my digestive track before those remnants, too, are stripped away, become me.
Eventually the women and girls he’s helped will grow new cells in their livers and skin, replacing his pieces. He’ll fade from the world little by little while the good he’s done persists.
Hand that fate to the pulp hero, to the writers, painters, musicians, let them blame me for finding that some men are greater as the division of their parts. I do not shatter lives. They shatter themselves against me, panes of glass thrown at an immovable rock, long weatherworn by rain, eroded slick by frothing waves.
And the tide is unending.
The Law of Conservation of Death
On the fifteenth birthday of your third reincarnation, you feel his breath on your skin. New skin, never tainted until now. At once the sky darkens, and balloons, gifts, and cake no longer matter as your lives come rushing back. You’ve turned fifteen before, but that’s the least of it.
He’s found you again.
THE FIRST REINCARNATION
Once upon a time, you and he shared a life together. Eventually that life ended. It’s a mystery what metaphysical laws dictate who becomes a ghost and who reincarnates, who forgets their past lives and who remembers. You only know his place in the universe and yours.
