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Description
Henry knelt down close to the ground, put his head against the soft earth, listening. A small, disappointed crease appeared on his forehead when he didn’t immediately hear it. He shifted his right ear a bit against the dirt and plugged his left, so that no other noises could distract him. And after another moment, there it was! Tick…tick…tick…. He couldn’t help but imagine that it was what any other person might mistake for an actual heartbeat, and each time he heard it, Henry would make believe he was in such a stranger’s position, listening with dreadful curiosity to the sound of the living earth, its blood flowing through the ground, if only one listened hard enough. And then the stranger would become so filled with this noise, so consumed by the need to know, that he would dig into the mulch-soft dirt with his bare hands to unearth the source. Did the earth live? Or maybe this was the exact spot that some poor, unknown soul had been buried alive, and to this day his heart still beat, trapped just a few feet below the surface. Tick…tick…tick….
Henry smiled to himself, raising his head up off the ground. This was the spot. He wondered if it was worth going to all this trouble just to find this place to leave it physically unmarked. A small X on the ground couldn’t possibly be conspicuous enough to attract the attention of anyone but himself, but even the small signs he had already put in place seemed like too much. What if the stranger he imagined actually did stumble over this place and start to dig? He would find something he really wouldn’t want to see. The chances of this happening were slim, but still, to him, worth the trouble.
Henry put these thoughts away and started to dig. He felt the familiar sensation—how horrible it seemed that this was familiar to him—of digging with his bare hands into the dirt, in the same spot as he always had before. Henry wouldn’t dare risk using a shovel, or even a gardening trowel, so that he didn’t accidentally damage what lay in such a fragile state just below the surface.
Soon the ticking grew louder, making a deeper tock…tock…tock…as it came out into the open. Henry’s own heartbeat became steadily quicker, matching the increasingly loud, desperate noise until he reached its source, and although he already knew what it was, he fell into the role of a perfect stranger again, digging for the first time into the earth to find out what secrets it might reveal.
And as he finally pulled out the last handful of dirt, it revealed a small, round, metal watch, the anticlimactic source of the ticking. It wasn’t a modern digital watch, or even a wristwatch, but an old bronze stopwatch on a rusted chain, from the early 1900’s at least, or even older. It was miraculous enough that such an old watch still ticked, and even more surprising that it kept the correct time. 12:32 it read, meaning AM, although it didn’t have any markings to tell if it was morning or night. The second hand ticked steadily, the minute hand went a bit more slowly, and the hour hand barely moved at all, each in correct proportion to the others.
Henry gently took the watch out of its hole and placed it by his feet in order to continue digging, and reveal the much more precious object underneath. Here he brushed the dirt away, like an archeologist slowly revealing a fragile artifact, as another precaution against damaging what the dirt covered. The soil seemed to fall away of its own accord in its rush to reveal what he sought, and his smile fell away just as quickly with it. Finally the dirt in one area had been completely removed, and Henry stood back to take in what damage the past years’ time had done to his wife’s long dead bones.
To anyone else the body would appear to be in about the same condition as it had been the last time he looked at it, about four years ago. Once decomposition of the skin and flesh has been completed, and nothing but bones and a bit of hair remains, the process of decaying becomes much slower, and much less noticeable of a change occurs over the years. What little change occurred in the past few years might have gone unnoticed to anyone else’s eye, but to Henry there was no mistaking the ravages of time to this body, these bones that he knew so well.
He stood still for a minute in order to take in the state of his first wife’s remains.
Victoria—he closed his eyes, breathed in deeply.
He thought back on how he remembered her, more than a decade ago, on the day that she died. Her hair, so black and pure, reduced now to a few pitiful gray strands; her bright, green eyes, now deep, empty sockets; and it seemed so ironic he use to say she was skin and bones, so thin, that now she was just bones. He took special notice of the small bundle of cloth lying next to her, although he didn’t open it up—he knew well enough what he would find.
Henry came closer to the present, comparing her to how she had looked just four years ago. Certainly her bones had been thicker then, more hair had been on her head, and he knew her teeth hadn’t looked so rotten and weak, some of them missing completely now.
But Henry hadn’t done all this just to observe the minor changes in his wife’s body. There was nothing he could accomplish in staring at her, so he got back down on his knees to continue where he left off. He carefully set watch back onto the left side of her ribcage, where it played a sad, ironic parody of her heart. Then he took up digging again, this time to the left of Victoria. Soon he unearthed another set of bones, put there a couple years later. These bones had a stockier, shorter build, with a few more, slightly lighter strands of hair. This was Helen, his second wife. He didn’t spend as much time looking her over, however. He was focused on his purpose, and quickly moved on, digging farther to the left. Next Claire, his fourth wife, was revealed. Charlotte, the third, lay to the right of Victoria, along with Melinda, the fifth. He would only dig up the graves he needed to in order to find the right spot, so he would leave the ones on the right untouched.
At this point he barely paused at all, digging again to the left, and not bothering to be careful. There was nothing left to damage here, the third grave to the left, to be used as the resting place of his sixth and final wife, Dana.
He was past the need for a shovel. His hands dug mechanically, with no discomfort or pain at all, even though the untouched ground in this spot was harder than it had been in the others. When he was finished, there were a total of four rectangular holes in front of him, each about three feet deep, six feet long, and perhaps two feet wide. Three of them were occupied, and there was a large pile of dirt around each one. His job still wasn’t done.
Henry stood up slowly, taking his time to brush the dirt from his hands onto his pant legs, and then trudge back to his cottage. He paused to check the pocket watch, in its place with Victoria. It read 3:57. He had no reason to hurry. He walked up to the house, just a few yards away from the gravesite, to collect everything he needed. It was a tiny, two-room cabin, consisting of a kitchen and living room in one part, and a small bedroom off to the side, where he had left his wife.
As he came into the bedroom, Dana lay in perfect order—not a hair out of place—on the bed, with no sign whatsoever that she wasn’t simply fast asleep. She was in fact dead now for several hours. She hadn’t died violently, as a few of his past wives had, and certainly not in cold blood. She’d died from a lasting cold, leading to pneumonia, which, by the time he realized how serious it had gotten, he had been unable to help. Still he felt the need to be secretive about her burial, as a preventative measure to keep his other secrets safe.
Of course he mourned her death, her inconvenient and accidental death. She was his wife and companion of over four years, and Henry had loved this woman, just as he had loved each of his wives. But because this was the sixth time he had faced the death of a loved one, the sixth time he had been widowed, the sixth time something so similar had occurred, and because none of these replacement wives had meant as much to him as Victoria, Henry was too numb to go through the motions of grief.
He showed no outward signs of distress as he wrapped her in the bed sheets she had died in, carefully knotted them around her so that they wouldn’t come unraveled, picked her up gently in his arms, and carried her back through the house. He set her down momentarily on a small bench by the door, and glancing at her eyes to reassure himself they weren’t still watching, reached to remove a loose floorboard under the bench she occupied.
In the hole revealed were a small, leather-bound book and a pair of possibly dysfunctional scissors, just the way he had left them. He took both out of their nest and flipped through the book. It had no title, just a black, blank cover, no author name, no dedication, and no words at all until he flipped a few more pages. There was a name on the page he finally came to, Victoria, and two dates, April 15, 1968-September 17, 1991, and a small lock of crumbling black hair, pressed in between the pages so that it was preserved—while the hair left on her head was not. He flipped to the next page. Here too was a name, Helen, two dates, March 5, 1969-June 10, 1993, and a dark brown lock of hair. And the next page: Charlotte, 1973-October 28, 1995, with blonde hair. The fourth page: Claire, 1971-February 16, 1998, with a mousy brown lock of hair. And the last page: Melinda, 1970-December 25, 1998, black hair, and a pen.
Henry carefully flipped to the next page. At the top he wrote: Dana, 1978-August 13, 2003. Next he took up the scissors, opening and closing them once to make sure they still functioned and, satisfied, held onto the end of a small portion of Dana’s dark brown hair and snipped it off. He placed the fresh lock of hair below the dates he had just written, along with the pen, and closed the book with a decisive thud. He then put the book and scissors back in their place, closed them in with the loose floorboard, and got back to his feet.
Henry gently picked Dana back up. Her hair formed a dark halo around her light face, but her white nightgown contrasted against it to make her skin appear less pale. It enhanced the illusion that she was still living, even if she was a little drawn from the illness. The short trip into his backyard seemed to take a lot longer than it had before, with the weight of a life in his arms. The world slowed significantly as he knelt down by the freshly dug grave and lowered her into it, sadly another familiar sensation. He stood up for a moment to give her his last respects, then began the slow process of covering his secrets back up.
By the time Henry had finished his work for the night, he’d had plenty of time to think. And as he reburied his wives, he thought, as he always did at this point, that this would be the very last time he took a woman’s life away from her just to replace Victoria—which they never completely could. All of these women had voluntarily come to live with him—or had at least been manipulated in such a way that they thought it was voluntary—and he had been their entire lives until they all eventually died, but if they’d been given the choice in the first place, most of them wouldn’t have chosen to spend the last years of their lives with him.
And Henry knew this was wrong, taking away their freedom of choice. He wasn’t some conscience-devoid serial killer, he just wasn’t capable of living alone for very long. That’s why he had repeated this horrible mistake six times now. For now, his feeble conscience won out, looking at what had happened to these women because of him, and Henry made a promise to himself that this would be the sixth time, the last time, that he made the same mistake—and he actually intended to keep it this time.

Description
Henry knelt down close to the ground, put his head against the soft earth, listening. A small, disappointed crease appeared on his forehead when he didn’t immediately hear it. He shifted his right ear a bit against the dirt and plugged his left, so that no other noises could distract him. And after another moment, there it was! Tick…tick…tick…. He couldn’t help but imagine that it was what any other person might mistake for an actual heartbeat, and each time he heard it, Henry would make believe he was in such a stranger’s position, listening with dreadful curiosity to the sound of the living earth, its blood flowing through the ground, if only one listened hard enough. And then the stranger would become so filled with this noise, so consumed by the need to know, that he would dig into the mulch-soft dirt with his bare hands to unearth the source. Did the earth live? Or maybe this was the exact spot that some poor, unknown soul had been buried alive, and to this day his heart still beat, trapped just a few feet below the surface. Tick…tick…tick….
Henry smiled to himself, raising his head up off the ground. This was the spot. He wondered if it was worth going to all this trouble just to find this place to leave it physically unmarked. A small X on the ground couldn’t possibly be conspicuous enough to attract the attention of anyone but himself, but even the small signs he had already put in place seemed like too much. What if the stranger he imagined actually did stumble over this place and start to dig? He would find something he really wouldn’t want to see. The chances of this happening were slim, but still, to him, worth the trouble.
Henry put these thoughts away and started to dig. He felt the familiar sensation—how horrible it seemed that this was familiar to him—of digging with his bare hands into the dirt, in the same spot as he always had before. Henry wouldn’t dare risk using a shovel, or even a gardening trowel, so that he didn’t accidentally damage what lay in such a fragile state just below the surface.
Soon the ticking grew louder, making a deeper tock…tock…tock…as it came out into the open. Henry’s own heartbeat became steadily quicker, matching the increasingly loud, desperate noise until he reached its source, and although he already knew what it was, he fell into the role of a perfect stranger again, digging for the first time into the earth to find out what secrets it might reveal.
And as he finally pulled out the last handful of dirt, it revealed a small, round, metal watch, the anticlimactic source of the ticking. It wasn’t a modern digital watch, or even a wristwatch, but an old bronze stopwatch on a rusted chain, from the early 1900’s at least, or even older. It was miraculous enough that such an old watch still ticked, and even more surprising that it kept the correct time. 12:32 it read, meaning AM, although it didn’t have any markings to tell if it was morning or night. The second hand ticked steadily, the minute hand went a bit more slowly, and the hour hand barely moved at all, each in correct proportion to the others.
Henry gently took the watch out of its hole and placed it by his feet in order to continue digging, and reveal the much more precious object underneath. Here he brushed the dirt away, like an archeologist slowly revealing a fragile artifact, as another precaution against damaging what the dirt covered. The soil seemed to fall away of its own accord in its rush to reveal what he sought, and his smile fell away just as quickly with it. Finally the dirt in one area had been completely removed, and Henry stood back to take in what damage the past years’ time had done to his wife’s long dead bones.
To anyone else the body would appear to be in about the same condition as it had been the last time he looked at it, about four years ago. Once decomposition of the skin and flesh has been completed, and nothing but bones and a bit of hair remains, the process of decaying becomes much slower, and much less noticeable of a change occurs over the years. What little change occurred in the past few years might have gone unnoticed to anyone else’s eye, but to Henry there was no mistaking the ravages of time to this body, these bones that he knew so well.
He stood still for a minute in order to take in the state of his first wife’s remains.
Victoria—he closed his eyes, breathed in deeply.
He thought back on how he remembered her, more than a decade ago, on the day that she died. Her hair, so black and pure, reduced now to a few pitiful gray strands; her bright, green eyes, now deep, empty sockets; and it seemed so ironic he use to say she was skin and bones, so thin, that now she was just bones. He took special notice of the small bundle of cloth lying next to her, although he didn’t open it up—he knew well enough what he would find.
Henry came closer to the present, comparing her to how she had looked just four years ago. Certainly her bones had been thicker then, more hair had been on her head, and he knew her teeth hadn’t looked so rotten and weak, some of them missing completely now.
But Henry hadn’t done all this just to observe the minor changes in his wife’s body. There was nothing he could accomplish in staring at her, so he got back down on his knees to continue where he left off. He carefully set watch back onto the left side of her ribcage, where it played a sad, ironic parody of her heart. Then he took up digging again, this time to the left of Victoria. Soon he unearthed another set of bones, put there a couple years later. These bones had a stockier, shorter build, with a few more, slightly lighter strands of hair. This was Helen, his second wife. He didn’t spend as much time looking her over, however. He was focused on his purpose, and quickly moved on, digging farther to the left. Next Claire, his fourth wife, was revealed. Charlotte, the third, lay to the right of Victoria, along with Melinda, the fifth. He would only dig up the graves he needed to in order to find the right spot, so he would leave the ones on the right untouched.
At this point he barely paused at all, digging again to the left, and not bothering to be careful. There was nothing left to damage here, the third grave to the left, to be used as the resting place of his sixth and final wife, Dana.
He was past the need for a shovel. His hands dug mechanically, with no discomfort or pain at all, even though the untouched ground in this spot was harder than it had been in the others. When he was finished, there were a total of four rectangular holes in front of him, each about three feet deep, six feet long, and perhaps two feet wide. Three of them were occupied, and there was a large pile of dirt around each one. His job still wasn’t done.
Henry stood up slowly, taking his time to brush the dirt from his hands onto his pant legs, and then trudge back to his cottage. He paused to check the pocket watch, in its place with Victoria. It read 3:57. He had no reason to hurry. He walked up to the house, just a few yards away from the gravesite, to collect everything he needed. It was a tiny, two-room cabin, consisting of a kitchen and living room in one part, and a small bedroom off to the side, where he had left his wife.
As he came into the bedroom, Dana lay in perfect order—not a hair out of place—on the bed, with no sign whatsoever that she wasn’t simply fast asleep. She was in fact dead now for several hours. She hadn’t died violently, as a few of his past wives had, and certainly not in cold blood. She’d died from a lasting cold, leading to pneumonia, which, by the time he realized how serious it had gotten, he had been unable to help. Still he felt the need to be secretive about her burial, as a preventative measure to keep his other secrets safe.
Of course he mourned her death, her inconvenient and accidental death. She was his wife and companion of over four years, and Henry had loved this woman, just as he had loved each of his wives. But because this was the sixth time he had faced the death of a loved one, the sixth time he had been widowed, the sixth time something so similar had occurred, and because none of these replacement wives had meant as much to him as Victoria, Henry was too numb to go through the motions of grief.
He showed no outward signs of distress as he wrapped her in the bed sheets she had died in, carefully knotted them around her so that they wouldn’t come unraveled, picked her up gently in his arms, and carried her back through the house. He set her down momentarily on a small bench by the door, and glancing at her eyes to reassure himself they weren’t still watching, reached to remove a loose floorboard under the bench she occupied.
In the hole revealed were a small, leather-bound book and a pair of possibly dysfunctional scissors, just the way he had left them. He took both out of their nest and flipped through the book. It had no title, just a black, blank cover, no author name, no dedication, and no words at all until he flipped a few more pages. There was a name on the page he finally came to, Victoria, and two dates, April 15, 1968-September 17, 1991, and a small lock of crumbling black hair, pressed in between the pages so that it was preserved—while the hair left on her head was not. He flipped to the next page. Here too was a name, Helen, two dates, March 5, 1969-June 10, 1993, and a dark brown lock of hair. And the next page: Charlotte, 1973-October 28, 1995, with blonde hair. The fourth page: Claire, 1971-February 16, 1998, with a mousy brown lock of hair. And the last page: Melinda, 1970-December 25, 1998, black hair, and a pen.
Henry carefully flipped to the next page. At the top he wrote: Dana, 1978-August 13, 2003. Next he took up the scissors, opening and closing them once to make sure they still functioned and, satisfied, held onto the end of a small portion of Dana’s dark brown hair and snipped it off. He placed the fresh lock of hair below the dates he had just written, along with the pen, and closed the book with a decisive thud. He then put the book and scissors back in their place, closed them in with the loose floorboard, and got back to his feet.
Henry gently picked Dana back up. Her hair formed a dark halo around her light face, but her white nightgown contrasted against it to make her skin appear less pale. It enhanced the illusion that she was still living, even if she was a little drawn from the illness. The short trip into his backyard seemed to take a lot longer than it had before, with the weight of a life in his arms. The world slowed significantly as he knelt down by the freshly dug grave and lowered her into it, sadly another familiar sensation. He stood up for a moment to give her his last respects, then began the slow process of covering his secrets back up.
By the time Henry had finished his work for the night, he’d had plenty of time to think. And as he reburied his wives, he thought, as he always did at this point, that this would be the very last time he took a woman’s life away from her just to replace Victoria—which they never completely could. All of these women had voluntarily come to live with him—or had at least been manipulated in such a way that they thought it was voluntary—and he had been their entire lives until they all eventually died, but if they’d been given the choice in the first place, most of them wouldn’t have chosen to spend the last years of their lives with him.
And Henry knew this was wrong, taking away their freedom of choice. He wasn’t some conscience-devoid serial killer, he just wasn’t capable of living alone for very long. That’s why he had repeated this horrible mistake six times now. For now, his feeble conscience won out, looking at what had happened to these women because of him, and Henry made a promise to himself that this would be the sixth time, the last time, that he made the same mistake—and he actually intended to keep it this time.