Vee lived in a morgue, which is to say her house was full of dead bodies. The kind of dead bodies that took up space, asked to borrow your tops, called you down for dinner, cheated on their wives. The kind of dead bodies that breathed and lived and covered their feeble trembling hearts with bone and skin and blood and all the other things they finger in the autopsy. 

Vee sat at the dinner table across from her sister, her mother on her left, father on her right. Her father wore a navy-blue suit with a white button-down shirt, his mistress’ favorite. The smell of infidelity ruffled his collar and tousled his hair as he looked across the table at his wife, the mash potatoes holding the silence between them. 

“How was work sweetheart?” her mother’s voice was the slow release of something captive.

“Good.” her father replied, motioning for her to pass the potatoes to him. 

Her fingers wrapped around the ceramic. With her arm outstretched across the table Vee could see the beginnings of her wrist and the raw melting flesh that covered it. She could see how skin was slipping from sinew, the congealed blood bubbling to the surface forcing its way past the ruined tissue. A drop fell to the table; it didn’t spread. Thick and sticky on the table it would stay there, her mother staining everything. 

As the girl’s father extended his hand to take the bowl, the skin around his fingers purple and paper thin, the girl’s mother asked, “did you sleep with her again?” 

“No.” 

All that followed the silence was the sound of the girl’s fathers ring finger hitting the table. The rotting puss filled mass surrounded by peas and the saltshaker and her grandmother’s fine china was the definition of a family portrait. 

Dinner continued and so did Vee, watching love eat itself from the inside out. Her mother served her heart cooked medium rare, still beating in the midst of shallow breaths. Her father sat at the table and gagged at the taste of it. Vee’s sister sat across the table; she was a doll of a girl. The stitching on her upper right arm had started to come undone, empty veins and arteries spilling out at the seams. Her empty eye sockets looked at Vee in somber understanding that their bloodline would wrap around their necks like a noose. 

Vee hated her father for planting this poison in the basement of their family home and for the way his black and blue body would tangle in the sheets with some woman who would never catch their disease. She hated her mother more for still loving him. The smell of their desperation would choke her as they all sat in this room with not enough air, not enough room for separation. The mundane questions being passed around at room temperature would get stuck in the back of Vee’s teeth, too tough and chewy to go down easily. While all the things left unsaid sat untouched in the back of the fridge growing colder and more unrecognizable as the days went by. 

“Could I spend the night at my friend’s house tomorrow?” Vee’s sister asked, the black holes in her head trying not to catch eyes.

“Which friend?” Her father replied through a mouthful of black cracking teeth. When you have your cake and eat it too the sugar gets stuck and it eats away as well, but for a man like him there was no such thing as too sweet. 

“Jen from my English class.”

“Oh, darling you don’t want to go over there, their home is so… unkempt.” Her mother spoke as she tried to dab away at the blood from earlier, it didn’t move but more came out. Three more drops. 

Those four red stains sat on the white tablecloth saying more than her mother ever could. 

Jen’s home was unkempt but at least it was a home. Here there was a house and the four bodies that occupied it playing hide and seek with the idea that purgatory was something you lived through, and family was something you suffered while you waited for the mercy of that last shaking breath.