Death Rattle - Part I
When I first read Savannah’s writing in a workshop, I was immediately compelled. Her characters are smart, and her sensibility is so finely tuned. I love the way language works in her writing, how a sentence can vacillate between wit and raw emotion.
“Death Rattle” does all of this. In this story, our narrator and her girlfriend have moved to El Paso and find themselves at a crossroads in their relationship. The story examines the waters of intimacy and open relationships in fresh and surprising ways with Savannah’s hallmark humor and sharp prose.
-Michael
A week after we moved to El Paso, my girlfriend had sex with a woman named Marta. My girlfriend enjoyed having sex with Marta. She told me Marta had double-jointed knees.
I wouldn’t have done anything if you hadn’t suggested it first, she said.
I know, I said.
So, you have no right to be mad, she said.
I know, I said.
We’d moved to El Paso because Cormac McCarthy had once lived in El Paso. He no longer lived in El Paso. His alleged former home was a thirty-eight-minute drive from our rental in a dusty lot that now only contained one suffering oak tree. The lot was ugly. My girlfriend wasn’t. She knew this. Presumably, so did Marta.
*****
My girlfriend had extensively googled McCarthy’s former address before forcing us upon a literary peregrination to cry at it the afternoon we flew in from Boston. She hadn’t read any of McCarthy’s books—she only bought books by women—but her father had died that summer of liver failure, and he’d loved McCarthy, or had read McCarthy —at the very least, he’d mentioned a book by McCarthy to my girlfriend, the title of which she couldn’t remember.
In the lot, I squinted at the sun as my girlfriend sobbed in scattered waves. I knew in a way she was grieving, but I’d seen those tears so often that I’d begun to feel a dull contempt whenever they appeared. She could regulate her feelings with curious precision, a skill she claimed reflected rare emotional intelligence. Google called it Psychopathic Behavior. On more than once occasion, I’d giddily reminded her of this diagnosis while tipsy. She never found it as amusing as I did.
I swatted her hand with mine, a lame attempt at affection, and then I strolled off toward the car to get my limbs moving. My sciatica was hell from the flight, smoldering in waves down the backs of my legs. I needed to be horizontal, if not immediately then within the hour; I needed to be gobbling Advil; I needed to sleep and forget I had a body. For the time being, stretching would have to do. Pump the blood with a few unwieldy swings of my legs. I hoped my girlfriend wouldn’t find calisthenics disrespectful.
I pressed a hand to the hood of the car for balance and seared it immediately. My wince sent her glaring.
She asked, Is something wrong?
In the neighboring lot, a sweating man on his knees glanced at us, eyes wide behind long strands of white hair. He was pouring pebbles from a dusty plastic bag into the basin of a three-tiered stone fountain. I wondered if he dealt with McCarthy sycophants often.
No, I said, just my back.
She pressed her lips together and studied her sneakers. I knew that to my girlfriend this pain had emerged—if I truly was in pain—for the sole purpose of ruining her moment. I tried to smile at her.
It’s cool to see all this, I said. I’m just kind of in agony, to be honest.
It’s okay. I’ll finish the ceremony myself.
I nodded, not having realized we’d been holding a ceremony at all. Perhaps we were honoring her father. His funeral and subsequent shiva had debatably made for disastrous commemorations. Imagine my girlfriend guzzling a bottle and a half of Manischewitz and cussing me out in her childhood bedroom. Imagine her mother collapsing from a burst appendix. I still preferred the experience to my ex-boyfriend’s sister’s service, an austere affair where no one except my ex-boyfriend had cried. His father, a hefty, balding brick mason from Tewksbury, loathed public displays of emotion and had not so kindly instructed my ex-boyfriend, seventeen at the time, to leave the church if he couldn’t control himself, since no one could hear the poor priest over the sobs. I didn’t like watching my ex-boyfriend cry, either, though I couldn’t articulate why at the time. In the waning weeks of our relationship, he’d named the feeling for me with a sneer: misandry.
In the lot, I walked back to my girlfriend, erratic wind whisking gritty dust at my shins. Now that I was a ceremony guest, my aloofness would be less defensible. Plus, a small favor would ease tensions when I inevitably screwed up again later. I rested a dry hand on her back, and she softened into my shoulder. Her tears were warm and slick on my skin.
He would’ve killed to see this, she said.
I nodded, unconvinced. Her father hadn’t been much of a killer, or a reader. I was quite certain he’d only seen the film version of the McCarthy book he’d mentioned to her.
Maybe he’s looking at it right now, I said.
You don’t believe that.
I shrugged. She unfastened her silver locket that for the past six weeks had held a tablespoon of pale ashes. She pinched some out with her fingers and gently sprinkled them by her feet like birdseed. I found the ritual a bit of a waste. Why disperse the man on private property? Someone else’s family would likely plow and build over him, trap him for decades under concrete. But my father was still alive, and he’d never read McCarthy, so what did I know?
******
According to internet gurus, my girlfriend and I had entered a period in which we were significantly more likely to break up. Three, seven, fourteen years. All were hinge points, little itches during which casual tiffs could morph rapidly into deal-breakers. We were as close to marrying as we were to severing ties for good.
One such tiff: my girlfriend’s attraction to gruesome animal paraphernalia. In Boston, our duller friends from college—people we mingled with out of obligation to our younger, drunker selves who’d grouped up in states of oblivion—had found this quirk intriguing. They liked the unsettling collision of her fragile appearance and vulgar taste. It didn’t amuse me. My girlfriend’s fascination with the macabre was artificial, tossed on like a garish scarf. What I mean to say is that I could see through her. I understood how badly she wanted to be interesting. Provoking us was an easy stab at memorability.
The second day in El Paso, we toured a strip mall in search of a highly rated oddities shop she’d researched. The shop sold the jarred organs of animals excavated from bogs, apparently. We crossed the lot of the strip mall, chewing gummy egg kolaches while our shoelaces collected burs. We were discussing—in the strained light-hearted tones that preceded a real argument—which of us would make for a better survivalist should we find ourselves unlucky in the dessert. I felt closer to death here—it wove through the habitat like smoke—and I constantly wanted to talk about it. My girlfriend found the fixation irritating.
In the scenario you’ve set up, I’d have better navigational skills, so I’d survive, she said, bored. But only if I had a compass. Either way, I don’t think you’d last very long at all.
Why not?
She shrugged and said, I don’t know. I just don’t see you making it, is all.
I feel like I’d be resourceful. You’d forget to drink water and pass out.
Eh, I think I’d navigate back to safety, and you’d insist on waiting for rescue, and then you’d starve and die. That sounds like something you’d do.
This is assuming we wouldn’t help each other.
Well, in the end, it has to be one of us.
No, it doesn’t.
Then what’s the point of this conversation?
We had approached the shop. My girlfriend paused to admire a goat enamel pin in the window. She rapped the glass hard with a pinkish knuckle.
We’ll buy that, she said.
We meant me.
Inside smelled like corpses that a lunatic had braised in yard sale crock pots. A petite woman in a black bell-sleeved dress handed my girlfriend a snow globe filled with stillborn pig entrails.
This one is just for show, she said. We have a waiting list. $100, before tax.
That’s more than I like to spend on entrails, I said, swallowing a touch of vomit.
My girlfriend gleamed. A puppet smile colonized her soft face.
What we’re really interested in, she said, is that pin by the window.
It’s handmade, the woman said. You have a good eye.
When my girlfriend asked for her number at the register, I observed with quiet neutrality, like I’d rented the brain of a sociologist. The woman’s voice was more melodic than mine, but her head and neck were basically the same width, and her dark hair was thinning unevenly, as though a child had attached the strands with a bottle of glue. I paid her $45 in cash and hoped the bills contained a contagious, debilitating disease—a sluggish killer that infected her brain, her heart, her tits. I said a polite goodbye.
In the car, my girlfriend fastened her new pin to her pit-stained t-shirt.
It’s all posture, she said, I’m telling you.
What is?
Marta. She was hot, but half of it was posture, at least. We both need better posture.
Who?
The shop girl. She had nice posture.
How do you know her name?
She was wearing a nametag.
No, she wasn’t.
She was. You never notice those things.
She shimmed her shoulders and then snapped them back like a corset had tightened around her. Her smile shot her face into a whole new level of beauty. Everything brightened; the strip of freckles and the glassy pink lips and the shining round eyes. I couldn’t stop looking at her. The car panted warm air at our necks.
I don’t think she was that hot, I said. Or at least, she’s just not my type.
If I wasn’t your girlfriend, I’d say your type is stupid.
Hm. Well. Your pin looks nice.
She strained forward beneath the seatbelt and kissed me hard on the cheek.
To be continued…
Savannah Horton was the 2021-2022 St. Albans School Writer-in-Residence. Heidi Pitlor selected her story from The Cincinnati Review as a Distinguished Story for the Best American Short Stories 2020 collection. She has published in The Raleigh Review, Subtropics, and The Drift. Her novel opening has been longlisted for the First Pages Prize and the CRAFT First Chapters Contest. She is a graduate of the University of Florida’s fiction MFA program, where she received the Porter Fellowship.
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