The Hope Chest

by Emily Harper Ellis

The Hope Chest

Gloria had never seen a dead man before and knew, as soon as her truck crested the hill, that she was experiencing one of her life’s defining moments and had better do it right. He was perfectly, doubtlessly dead: his hands and face were blue and every inch of him, from his black suit to his sweep of yellow hair to the rope around his neck, was covered in a sheen of frost that glittered in the sinking light. As she stared, a breeze swept the road and he turned slowly toward the truck, like he’d been waiting for her.  

She braked and stepped out of the cab. The road forked at the tree, the right path leading to Gloria’s cottage and the left to a wildlife preserve, closed for the season. She wondered if he’d tried to go to the preserve and, after finding the gate locked, had returned to the oak, which was fairytale-fat with low sturdy branches. Perfect for ropes.

She circled him slowly, making sure that his spirit wasn’t still hanging around: peering down at her from the rosy bowl of the sky, or clinging to the small of his back like a possum. A creamy piece of paper was lying in the shadow below his feet. 

The note was written in a puddling purple ink that had run so badly she could only make out the occasional word – can’t, alone, love. There was a name at the end that started with a V.  She thought it might spell “Victor” and, looking at the ridges of his cheekbones with tears in her eyes, decided it couldn’t possibly be anything else. 

The last time Gloria cried had been the previous April. She’d arrived for work at the Marshall Garden Center to find one of the rose bushes covered with perfect blooms, white and at the very peak of themselves. They had wilted and been packed away into someone’s Subaru by the end of the day, but stirring their image in her mind still moved her to tears. She felt that way now with Victor, his blurred note trembling in her fist as he dangled there, tragic as a poem. She couldn’t believe she was witness to such beauty and knew that, by the time the sun rose, he’d have softened enough for the crows to bloody his blue eyes, or for some early morning cyclist to call the police, who would shut him away in a dark drawer.

She touched his hand, half-wondering if he’d vanish under her thick, dirt-stained fingers. When he didn’t, she got a pair of pruning shears from the truck and cut him down.

At the Garden Center the waifish long-haired women often left Gloria to unload 100-lb sacks of soil from the delivery trucks while they fiddled with seedlings in the steamy comfort of the greenhouse. “You’re so strong, Glory,” they’d say, glad they were nothing like her. But her strength served her well that day. She heaved Victor in the cab and drove him home, sweat streaking her face despite the cold. 

Gloria had purchased her cottage with money she’d inherited from her grandmother. Back then it had been little more than a hunter’s shack, all ash-clogged floorboards and rusting piles of beer cans. But she’d seen the promise in the silvery birch trees flanking its crumbling brick walls, in the foxes that streaked through the yard like candle flames.  

Three years later, everything in the cottage had been made or improved by her own hands, from the thrift store sofa she’d upholstered in mulberry silk, to the handknitted Afghan draped at the foot of the four-post bed, to the soap she’d perfumed with her own back garden roses. Pretty things perched on doilies or squatted on fluffy rugs in every corner, but sometimes Gloria would revolve slowly in the center of them all and be overcome by the itchy feeling that something was missing.  

Gloria knew exactly where she would put Victor – there was no other place for him, really – and after much pushing and pulling he was lying neatly across her grandmother’s old dove-in-the-window quilt. A whiff of soiled clothing rose; the frost was already melting off his suit. When she began to peel it off, his erect penis sprang over the waistband of his trousers. She started at it for a long moment, then searched for something to cover him up. The quilt and Afghan were too heavy and warm, not right at all. She remembered the cedar chest at the foot of her bed. 

Amber-smooth and delicately carved, it was a Hope Chest, a gift from Grandmother on Gloria’s sixteenth birthday. It was filled with things she had taught Gloria to make over the years: pillow shams she’d quilted as a little girl, linen sheets she’d embroidered with flowers and vines, and the silk negligee – edged in lace, with a row of real ivory buttons – that she’d sewn as a teenager.  Grandmother had instructed her to picture these things slotted into her future life during the hours of sewing and knitting: she and her husband tucked beneath the embroidered sheets, or the negligee sliding beneath her robe as she splashed herself with rosewater, just before bedtime.  

Gloria had daydreamed obediently, a habit that continued into the quiet days she spent transplanting boxwoods and into the nights that she lay beneath the spikes of the four-post bed, listening to the cottage stir and mutter in the dark. She cast her husband in different scenarios: kissing her under a wild coil of mistletoe during a stroll in the snowy woods; pulling her into her arms under Grandmother’s quilt. Sometimes the imaginings melted into real dreams, her husband morphing into something dark and primordial that clung to her all over like a heady smell and left her slick and panting in the morning.

But no matter how hard she tried to bring him into focus, he always remained faceless, his chiseled chin turned firmly away.

How nice, how strange, to see such clear features resting against her down-plump pillow.

“Sleep well,” she told Victor.   

She hesitated for just a moment before slipping under the sheets beside him. 

Gloria’s grandmother had died on a Sunday, felled by a stroke after chasing the neighbor’s squatting tabby out of her petunia bed. She would have been pleased about dying in her church clothes, but not about doing so alone, which was her biggest fear. 

“There’s nothing worse, Angel,” she told Gloria one day as they sewed at the foot of her husband’s bed. Gloria was ten then, already bigger than the boys in her class, hungry all the time for something she couldn’t name. 

“I just want you to remember that, for after I’m gone.” Grandmother punched her needle, grimly, through the center of a rose.  “People aren’t made to be alone.” 

Photos of Gloria’s parents – who had died together, in a car accident – gazed out at them from Grandfather’s nightstand. That little table was slippery mahogany, but his bed was an ugly metal thing that the hospice people had brought over. It lurched upward at the press of a button, giving the impression that the old man was rearing like a startled horse.  

Grandfather’s breath sucked and stuttered, as if in agreement. Since he had begun actively dying, Grandmother and Gloria had made six full-sized quilts, stacked a foot high over his wasted legs.      

Sometimes, when Grandmother went to the bathroom, Gloria would set down her embroidery hoop and stare into her grandfather’s hollow face.  She wanted to see the exact moment that whatever made his breath rattle and his eye leak gluey tears skittered out and away. Sometimes she laid atop the stacked quilts, thinking of the princess and the pea that turned her black and blue.  If she stayed very still, perhaps she could feel it squirm free beneath her.  

But Grandfather ended up dying when she was at school, while his wife clung, weeping (she later told Gloria) to his cold hand. 

Grandmother’s words returned to Gloria on the occasional hot, restless night, when her embroidered sheets seemed to strangle and the faceless man in her head stood stubbornly out of reach. But with Victor beside her, the only voice in her head was her own.  

At first, she curled at the edge of the mattress, but her body soon pulled itself to the center. She drifted off with him cooling her flushed back. 

In the morning, she awoke with her face an inch from his pale cheek. She pressed her lips against it, then rose to her elbows and kissed him on the mouth. She thought of the buttons she used to slip into her mouth as a child, how their smoothness drew the moisture from her tongue. 

The following day, Gloria awoke to snow; drifts skirted the frozen ground like a dragged veil. She balanced Victor on her shoulder and they headed out into the sparkling world together. 

Glass-like hoar frost encased the silvery tree branches and the twining arms of the dead briars and crunched underfoot.  Gloria settled a blanket in a clearing, knit from beautiful indigo wool.

For a while, they lay on their backs and watched the flakes drift like black feathers across the sky. They settled over Victor, shroud-like. She playfully licked them off the tip of his nose, her tongue sticking briefly to his skin. Then, she wrestled off her jeans and sweater and started to climb astride him. Her knee knocked his hip and he rolled stiffly into a frozen clump of laurel.      

“I’m sorry.” She folded her arms over her bare breasts.   

Of course, he didn’t answer.   

Besides her regular dalliances with her faceless future husband, Gloria had only come close to making love twice before. The first time had been with Junie Wright, who lived on the same street as Grandmother. Junie wore thick nicotine-stained glasses from the Salvation Army and sometimes arrived at school with an odd musk floating around her, a smell that made Gloria think of wild creatures and fresh-turned soil.  Both girls liked to crouch behind Grandmother’s rose bushes and make fairy tea sets out of acorns and violet stems, even when they were in middle school and should have been well past believing in fairies. During one of these playdates, Junie announced that she would like to practice her kissing, since Gloria was as tall as a boy and a good substitute for the real thing. “Hold still,” Junie commanded.

Gloria let Junie suck at her lips and lash her peanut-buttery tongue around her mouth, which was unpleasant at first, until she deeply inhaled Junie’s exotic muskiness mixed with the lushness of the roses and something quaked and burst deep inside of her and made her dig her hands into the girl’s waist. Junie had pulled away, declaring her a freak, and they never spoke again.  

Gloria’s second sexual encounter occurred years later, with a former Garden Center manager named Jerry who he had hired her at eighteen, freshly Grandmotherless. Jerry was balding at 26, but he would always smile at her and ask how the cottage renovations were going, even as the other gardeners eyed her like she was another species, a bear trained to wield pruning shears. Sometimes he shyly showed her photos of the rare, stunted cacti he ordered from Arizona and arranged in his bedroom next to a $700 dehumidifier. He pulled her aside one evening after closing and whispered that he thought she was beautiful, with such breathless urgency that she almost believed him. She let him pull her clothes off and rub against her in the stock room, waiting for the rush of desire that had seized her with Junie behind the rose bushes and during her dreams of the faceless man. When it didn’t come, she’d shoved him into a tray of tulip bulbs and driven home alone.  

Gloria grappled Victor out of the bushes and back onto the blanket. He was unruffled, despite her fumbling.  By some biological magic, his penis was still as hard as ivory.  

When she sank into him and there was no pain, just a pure coldness that gripped her from the inside out. She allowed herself to be held by the snow and stone-hard ground and the clear light and was certain, for a long shivering second, that she was making love to the winter itself. 

Gloria and Victor began to have sex several times a day: in the dark mornings moments after she awoke, watching the two of them rock in the speckled antique vanity mirror like pair of swans; in the in the afternoons after she returned from work, with the sun sinking beyond the frosted window and draping his skin in gold; in the woods, with the cardinals flashing through the naked trees and Victor’s frozen skin clinging to her inner thighs as if he would keep her there forever. 

One evening, when she straddled him and ran her hand through his blonde hair, a chunk came away in her fingers along with a flap of skin. It left a dark patch right by his temple. Gloria wanted to cry. She could hardly believe what she’d done. 

Then she had an idea. From the cedar chest she withdrew a beeswax sachet and one of the embroidered napkins. She cut out a patch, warmed the wax, and spread it all over the dark wound. It dried smooth and white and she took to pressing her lips to it whenever she walked by the four-post bed.     

While Gloria was at the Garden Center, she daydreamed of Victor: wallowing in every detail of their most passionate encounters, and planning what they’d do when she returned home. He didn’t quite replace her faceless husband – who still lurked at the back of her mind, watching them through his smeary eyes – but the memory of Victor was so sharp, so real, that she could almost feel his flesh beneath her as she stripped wilting poinsettias or pulled dead birds from the koi pond. 

She wasn’t the only woman who thought of her lover during work. Fragments of the other girls’ chatter flapped constantly around the greenhouse, low giggling stories that took place in dim club bathrooms or in creaking dorm room bunks. “He just can’t keep his hands off me,” they’d say, as if being the target of such constant sticky wanting was a point of pride.  Gloria would smile to herself, half-wishing she could join in the conversation, if only to tell them what real romance felt like.   

There were also times that her fantasies would take a dreadful turn: she’d imagine that she’d forget to close the shutters and someone would spy Victor through the window; or that she’d return home from work one day to find the cottage door wide open, yellow caution tape strung around the stripped bed. In the weeks since she brought him home, there had already been a couple of close calls: once, when she aired her sweat-stained sheets out the open cottage door, a newly-hired postal worker had tried to deliver a package to her hands instead of her P.O. Box; another time, just after dark when she was slipping into bed with Victor, a park ranger had rumbled down the driveway to inform her about scheduled road closures. But both of those men had said their piece to Gloria without so much as a glance into the shadows behind her. 

So, she had not been especially worried when, on a Saturday afternoon – as she and Victor were making vigorous love, waiting for water to boil for tea – there was a knock. 

Gloria covered Victor in the quilt and wrapped herself in a robe and went irritably to the door, expecting the postman or the ranger. But it was a girl, chewing on a ragged fingernail as a camo-patterned truck idled behind her. She was younger than Gloria. Her eyes were ringed in dark makeup and her hair was dyed a greasy green, but she was fine-boned and beautiful and Gloria was overcome with an impulse to dress her in lace and strip the foul color from her silky hair.  

“Hey,” the girl said. Her voice was a flat, teenaged croak. She scuffed the toe of her boot into the paving stones, raised her eyebrows at the ceramic fairies crouched in the hellebore. “I’m Greta. That’s Todd.”  

She jerked her chin towards the truck. The thin boy hunched in the driver’s seat was digging a pocketknife between his teeth and staring into the trees.  

“My brother went on a camping trip,” Greta explained. “He was supposed to be back by now. We’re asking around.”  

In the depths of the cottage, the kettle whistled, shrill and panicked. The girl tried to peer around Gloria.  Her nose crinkled, as if she smelled something foul. 

But Gloria’s mind had suddenly gone buzzy and blank, and all she could do was stand and stare at Victor’s high cheekbones and Victor’s rose-petal lips and wonder – wildly, fleetingly – what it would be like to kiss them on a living face. 

“The Preserve was his favorite place,” the girl said. Her voice lost some of its flatness. She rubbed her boot hard into the stones.

“What was his name?” Gloria heard herself ask. 

“Vance,” said the girl. 

Gloria backed away and slammed the door. 

Her heart throbbing, twisting, she went to Victor. He was a stoic range of curves beneath the quilt. She was struck with the thought that if she pulled it away, she’d find a little boy blinking up at her – sticky-fingered and tousle-headed and gap-toothed – asking where his sister was. 

She felt the flesh beneath the fabric, lightly. She tugged it downwards, inch by inch.  

The face there belonged to Victor.  As peaceful and pale as it had been the day they’d met, turning in the dying light. Gloria bent close, studied the sweep of his eyelashes, the storm-clouding of bruises where his jaw met his throat. If he had wanted to be Vance – if he had wanted to be with Greta and Todd and their ugly truck and whatever else he’d left behind – he would still be there. 

And really, what would they do, even if she were to hand him over? Turn him into grit and ash. Say a few words in a highway-side cemetery and never look into his beautiful blank eyes again.  

She pressed her mouth to the linen on his temple, tongued its familiar smoothness until she steadied.  

When Gloria reopened the door, the girl was still standing, wide-eyed, on the paving stones.  

“I’m sorry about your brother,” Gloria said. “Here’s some soap. I made it myself.”  

The girl accepted the basket without comment, pulled a rose-scented heart out of its nest of shredded tissue and turned it in her yellow-cold hands.    

“You live here alone?” She was staring at Gloria with a sort of wonder.

“No,” Gloria said. 

Greta continued to eye her curiously, until Todd leaned on the horn. She dug into her pocket and produced a card for Trowbridge and Sons Refrigerator Repair.   

“Well, if you hear anything, this is my number,” she said. “Really it’s Todd’s, but he’ll tell me if you call.”  

Gloria watched her walk back to the truck through a gap in the curtains.  Greta sat in the cab for a while, talking and scrubbing her knuckles across her eyes, until Todd put an arm around her, swirled his fingers through her green hair. Once their truck had disappeared over the ridge, Gloria threw the card into the wastepaper basket and locked the door.   

She awoke before dawn the next day, when the air was especially frigid. She washed the contents of her cedar chest and soaked them in her hand-steeped floral oils, then lay Victor on a tarp in the back garden. With the dripping linens under one arm and a butcher knife in the other, she joined him in the brightening cold. 

She’d watched a few videos of deer hunters cheerfully field-dressing their kills the night before, but was too tentative to break the skin when she first pressed the blade into his sunken belly. If she ruined him, she wasn’t sure if she could repair the damage. Gritting her teeth, she pressed harder.  The smell cut through her lavender-scented bandana and made her gag, but she was a strong girl with a strong stomach. She snapped on her rubber gloves and gritted her teeth and soon all the old and dark and rotten parts of him were buried in her compost bin.

It wasn’t so bad after that. Carefully wadded, the embroidered pillowcases fit perfectly where his intestines had been. A baby blanket, pale pink and edged in lace, took the place of his stomach. His lungs became the pair of quilted shams. The place where his heart had been was small, so she balled up her silk negligée and pressed it deep into the cavity. She sewed up the incision. It split the perfect whiteness of his torso, but the stitches were so neat it looked better than it had before, the daintiest embroidered vine.  

That night, when she moaned and moved against him, she could feel her linens rustling beneath his skin.  

Slowly, she bent over and breathed into the cold curve of his neck. She craved his scent; a strange almost-sweetness, like a flower that springs from the darkest soil.   

“I love you,” she whispered. She hadn’t intended to say it – she’d felt the words bloom unexpectedly in the very pit of herself, float up and out like embers – but she knew she meant them.     

She curled into his unyielding arms and was soon asleep. 

Several hours later, Gloria was awoken by a light, frantic scrabble, as if something mouse-like had slipped under the covers. 

The cottage was quiet, its familiar shapes swimming gently in the dark, but the embroidered sheets had been kicked to the floor. She pulled them over herself and Victor.  As she tucked them beneath his chin she pressed her lips to his moonlit forehead.

It was warm. 

He started to scream. 

Gloria’s legs carried her almost as far as the bathroom before they buckled.

Victor continued to scream. Muscles and tendons and veins – everything that had been still and hidden for the duration of their relationship – jolted and jumped. His wet eyes rolled, bulging when they saw his own shuddering face in the vanity. Then they found Gloria, frozen in the corner.  

His jaws clattered together. Elbows folding and unfolding like broken wings, he leveraged himself against the headboard. His throat worked furiously, but nothing emerged but a hiss. He coughed once, twice, and something white – a button from her negligee – shot out and bounced off a bedpost. They both watched it roll across the floor. 

“I love you,” he rasped.  

He lurched towards her.  

Gloria scrambled into the bathroom and slammed the door just as he rose on his shuddering feet. 

She tried to breath, to still the churning in her head. What had she done? That morning in the garden, what beside her linens – what dirty spores of magic – had she let slip into his opened skin? Or did real love simply need to be able to sweat and squirm?   

There was a soft thump at the door; then a long, lingering scratch. 

“I love you.”  The voice was so close, it might have whispered in her ear. The scratching stopped, and she just heard him breathing, an uneven rasp.  

She opened the door, slowly. He stood there blinking and scrabbling his fingers against the doorframe. He still looked like her Victor, except for his eyes. They were still blue, and still staring, but were filled with something new: a wanting. 

She took a step forward, then another, and pressed her lips to his open mouth.  

Her stomach heaved but she carried out the kiss, searching for his familiar over-ripeness, sweet and wild. Pushed herself against the goose-pimpled length of him, his frantic bird-beating heart. His lips hung open, and his tongue thrashed gently against hers. It was shockingly wet, with a mushroomy taste; a stalk of fungus bred from sludgy land that never should have thawed. 

He tilted his head, curiously, as she flung back the velvet-covered toilet seat and vomited. 

Gloria worried that it would be a struggle to get Victor into the truck – that she’d have to put her hands on his warm heaving flesh, truss his flailing limbs – but he followed her willingly, crushing the emerging crocuses as he tottered on and off the path.  As she swung around the dark curves of the road his head swiveled at the dripping trees with a fearful sort of wonder. Soft moans and grumbles fell from his mouth, like a parrot rolling new sounds around its tongue.

It was a long drive to his sister’s apartment, and Gloria – trembling, disoriented by the squirming and muttering beside her – missed the exit twice. Greta lived in a boxy beige complex across from a service station, stripped vans and trucks crouched like gutted beasts in the grayish glow of the streetlamps. Her unit was dark, but dogs began to bark as Gloria’s truck idled on the curb. 

She helped Victor out of the truck. He was naked and shivering, bare feet sinking into the half-melted snow; in her haste and shock, she’d forgotten to dress him. The white stiches on his torso twitched, as if all the things beneath them were trying to peek through the seam.  

“I love you,” he said. His lips turned up a little. “I love you.”  

A window lit up behind him, sudden as an opened eye. 

And Gloria saw herself – a too-tall, sunburned girl with soil-stained fingers – climbing into her empty bed as Victor was dressed and fed and fussed over by his sister in her bleak apartment. She would slowly make him into Vance again, all traces of Gloria dissolving in his newly hot and acidic core, while Gloria grayed and hunched and pruned and sewed, her faceless husband cracking and sputtering like a failing television.  Her coworkers would share stories of engagement rings and honeymoons and babies and prom dresses, while Gloria remained silent, forever eyeing roadside trees and ditches for a flash of blue-toned flesh that would never appear again.  And when she finally died – collapsed in the well of her mold-streaked bathtub, or tugging a dandelion from a weed-smothered rose bed, voles gnawing at her blackened fingertips – she would be alone, her mind utterly empty, every daydream she’d ever forced through it abandoning her to rot.    

And suddenly she was burying her wet eyes into Victor’s trembling shoulder, and his fingers were swirled in her hair, and she was driving away into the dark with everything – she was sure – she could ever hope for.  

*

Every night, Victor waits for Gloria on the four-post bed. His hair has thinned over the years, pink gleaming through the parted gold. The flesh around his silk stitches has bulged and softened from all the pot roasts and oil-dribbled baths and hand-knit sweaters, but the thread holds firm.       Every night, before he falls asleep, he holds her under her grandmother’s quilt and whispers his love into her sun-scorched skin. His breath is as warm and damp as the coming spring. She watches him until it stills, until the shadows grow enough to bury him, until he is cool enough to touch.

---

Author Emily Harper Ellis (she/her/hers) is a writer from Western North Carolina. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Epoch, The Mississippi Review and The Greensboro Review.

Artist Serge Lecomte (he/him) was born in Belgium in 1946. He came to the States where he spent his teens in South Philly and then Brooklyn. After graduating from Tilden H. S. he joined the Medical Corps in the Air Force. He earned an MA and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Russian Literature with a minor in French Literature. He worked as a Green Beret language instructor at Fort Bragg, NC from 1975-78. In 1988 he received a B.A. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Spanish Literature. He worked as a language teacher at the University of Alaska (1978-1997). He worked as a house builder, pipe-fitter, orderly in a hospital, gardener, landscaper, driller for an assaying company, bartender and painter. You can find more of his work on his website: https://sergelecomte.weebly.co/.