Viola, Honey

By Whitney Sederberg

 

Viola is not very good at cleaning up after herself. This is something I’ve known since I started seeing her, and something I’ve tried to work on with her. Yet, two and a half years in, I still found myself wiping light pink stains from the bathtub.

She would buy hydrogen peroxide but never get around to using it. She seemed to think it’s fine to just rinse it off with water. That night was extra messy, too. I think it was blunt force trauma. The sheer volume clogged the drain all sticky, but she would never notice that. There was a trail of blood and brain goop from the basement when I got home.

“VIOLA! You better clean this up before it dries!” I shouted into the kitchen. She was boiling down the bones. I hoped she wasn’t using my bisque pot.

“I will, sweetie!”

I love it when she calls me sweetie.

Anyway, it was a wonder she hadn’t been caught yet. Well maybe the wonder was me. Sometimes I wished she’d appreciate me for all that I did. But when I thought about it enough, I was just happy to be with a beautiful woman that I love.

We met at a poster-making workshop for a protest. I noticed the ghosts before I noticed her mesmerizing, sleek black hair. They were all whispering to each other about the Marlboro Killer and looking in her direction. She noticed me staring and waved me to the seat next to her.

“Hi, I’m Viola,” she said.

“I’m Imogen.”

I was honestly shocked that a girl so beautiful would want anything to do with me, but I found myself kissing her in the bathroom twenty minutes later. Fingers in my hair, unclipping my bra. Her poster was kind of hard to read and had an indiscernible image painted onto it. But I told her it was lovely.

“Imogen,” a ghost I was familiar with came up to me as I left. I winked at him; to show I heard him but didn’t want to make a scene in public.

“Imogen, that girl you kissed was the Marlboro Killer. You know, the one that leaves those piles of bones in weird places with the cigarettes.”

My face went cold, and I looked around to make sure I was alone.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. Her latest victim came here to support the protest and told all of us who she was.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll definitely avoid her, then.”

But when she texted me for drinks the next day, I thought just maybe I could fix her.

“Imogen,” the ghost said when I arrived at her house that night. “You know the other ghosts aren’t gonna like you if they know you know who you’re sleeping with.” I waved him away when Viola wasn’t looking.

She never told me formally that she was the Marlboro Killer, but I’m sure any idiot could have figured it out from the strange mix of smells in her house (rotting, cleaning fluids), the closet full of suspicious items (duct tape, body bags, miscellaneous instruments of maim), or the occasional screaming coming from the basement (“Viola, can you turn down your movie a bit?”).

I moved in after a month of knowing her, though, and we’ve been happy ever since. There was just one time I questioned my choice to stay, which was when I stumbled across her collection of teeth in the medicine cabinet. When I opened the door, they cluttered with a hollow sound against the sink.

“Oops, how did these get here?” she had laughed.

I tried to laugh, too, but it really was an impressive number of teeth. She washed them down the sink. I was a little put off, would we have to call a plumber? But I told myself not to be judgmental. Love is about compromise.

Then there was the time that my ex (Ariel, a ghost I met in the library) (yes, the sex was weird) confronted me about my choice in women.

“You can’t possibly be serious about this woman, Imogen. She’s literally a serial killer,” they said as I was burying some stray eyeballs in the backyard.

“She never told me that she was.”

“One of her victims literally told you.”

“Well…” I looked around, angrily. “What would you do if you had a girlfriend this pretty? Would you fumble her like you fumbled me?”

Ariel rolled their eyes. “You seriously need to check your ego if you think she’s not gonna face the consequences of her actions. Or you, for that matter.”

“Can you just get off my property? I thought we agreed no-contact.”

“All the ghosts in town, plus a few from the city, had a protest at the police station yesterday. People are getting angry, Imogen.”

“Dead people.”

Ariel’s face twisted into a ghostly mixture of anger and disgust. “I did not fumble you. You’re just as crazy as the bitch you’re dating.”

I threw my shovel through their transparent body. “Get OUT of here!”

They flew off into the sky. I was left alone with the itchy goosebumps you get when an angry ghost flies past you.

“Viola, honey,” I said when I got back into the house. “I found some garbage on the basement floor. I buried it in the backyard.”

“Oh sweetie, thank you.” She touched my cheek and all the anger withered from my body.

“But babe,” I said. “You really need to start cleaning up a bit better. I know you try, but sometimes I think if a stranger were to walk through our house, they’d see something that I missed.”

“Imogen, sweetie. You’re so thoughtful. Now, I’m not calling you crazy, but I think you’re being a bit paranoid. Everyone’s house is a little messy, no one will care that ours is. If anything, they’ll find it relatable.”

“Oh, Viola. I guess you’re right.” It was impossible to disagree with her big, dark, eyes.

But the police didn’t have so much difficulty with that when they busted our house. None of the ghosts warned me in the least, though I’m sure they all knew what was going on behind the scenes of the station.

We lost the house, our backyard, and our cats. We lost everything. Except each other, of course. We ended up in the same wing of our maximum-security prison. The best thing about being gay, I suppose, is that you still get to see each other in prison. We sit together in the cafeteria and make daisy chains yard time. I didn’t mind losing everything else, my home was with my Viola.

 

Whitney Sol from US is an undergraduate student at NYU studying English with a concentration in creative writing. Her work has appeared in the student publications The Baedeker and The Guillotine, and has been featured at the NYC Poetry Festival. She writes a Substack called Se Telefonando and currently lives in Chinatown, New York.