So, I had to bust out the microscope to take a look at the chewed-up remains of some poison hemlock recently. Typical Tuesday afternoon for yours truly.
I was given this chewed-up hemlock by a new acquaintance, whom I’ll refer to here as Rosemary. She’d heard through a web forum that I’m something of an enthusiast when it comes to the supernatural/paranormal/generally weird shit, and wanted me to inspect the sample for, well, any of the above. Hemlock, if you weren’t aware, is a delightful little white plant in the carrot family, and eating it will win you everything from dry mouth to muscle death to respiratory failure. Nothing special next to most of what’s in my collection, but the story attached to the sample, now that’s something else entirely. I’ve included below the transcript of my interview with Rosemary. What follows below is her account of culinary chaos, and why the hemlock sample in my study shouldn’t exist.
*
ROSEMARY’S ACCOUNT
You can think I’m a bitch all you want, but you’re not the one who had to live with him. Anyone who had to be married to my husband as long as I was would’ve wanted to poison him, too.
No, he wasn’t abusive. As far as I know, no, he didn’t cheat. Though looking back, there were a few late work nights that might’ve roused my suspicions. But honestly, if it was just cheating, I wouldn’t have cared. Hell, if he’d been with some new slut every other night, if he’d been a total manwhore, I think I could have lived with that much easier.
No. The simple fact is, he got under my skin.
The way he popped his gum. The high-pitched sigh he made when he got out of bed in the mornings. Chucking his shoes by the door instead of the closet shoe rack. The rancid smell of his breath at the end of the day, worming its way up my nostril as he leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. It may all sound trivial out of context, but put it all together for ten fucking years and the thousand little miseries combine into something maddening. Like an itch wriggling deep in the bone that I couldn’t scratch. A persistent ringing in my ear. A maggot in my apple.
The worst of it was the foul blandness of him. He was perpetually unbothered by everything life threw at him, as apathetically content as a cow chewing cud in the field, and unaware of how all the little habits and details of him were starting to twist me out of my mind. He didn’t even have the decency to be ugly. No crooked tooth, no deep forehead wrinkle, no beer belly. He looked like nothing.
Before I made the decision, I told him he could leave me if he wanted to.
“Imagine if you left,” I mumbled, my head on the pillow, eyes on the stipples of the popcorn ceiling. “I wouldn’t hold it against you.”
All he did was laugh, reach over from his side of the bed, and kiss me on the cheek goodnight.
Tell me, what kind of man does that?
Anyway, that was the night I realized I had to kill him.
No, divorce was not an option. A prenup had been signed, was the problem. If I left him, I’d basically be left with nothing. He was the main breadwinner at the time, and had a sizeable life insurance policy. I had to protect my future. So, over the course of the year, I began to cultivate my garden in the backwoods behind our property. I bought the seeds on the darknet. Hemlock, oleander, foxglove, datura, hellebores, mandrake, deadly nightshade. A few others, too. I wasn’t sure how much of what would grow, so I wanted to cover all my bases. Yes, I’m not stupid, of course I thought about cleaning agents and stuff like that, but I figured all those would be easier to detect in an autopsy. Chemicals, you know. I figured natural stuff would disperse and disappear from the body faster. Then it’d just look like a heart attack.
I wasn’t worried about him going out to the woods and finding the garden. He wasn’t the type to go and explore. I definitely didn’t see him go beyond the back porch in the months and months it took me to grow it all. I always made sure to tend to it while he was still at work, so he wouldn’t notice me sneaking off. So, after a lot of time and care, I was able to start harvesting.
That first night was probably the giddiest I’d ever felt while cooking. It was a soup dish, I don’t remember exactly which. I poured out my own serving, leaving his in the pot for me to alter. As he kicked off his shoes by the fucking door and jammed his briefcase in the closet, yapping about some inane thing that happened at work, I began seasoning his soup.
“So Lewis was worried the deadline on the deliverables was too tight . . .”
“Mhm . . .” I sprinkled in oregano, salt, a pinch of the nightshade.
“And I told him, you know, we’ve worked on tighter deadlines before without issue . . .”
“Mhm . . .” In went the minced hemlock, shavings of mandrake, all generous amounts. I thought all that together would have to be enough. He’d be dead by midnight.
We sat across from each other at dinner as he continued talking intermittently about work, blissfully unaware as ever while he was spooning poison into his ever-babbling mouth. He must’ve wondered, if he ever wondered about anything, why I looked so unusually alert that evening, so smiley and engaged as he told his story. It was my most thrilling dinner in a while. Every time I saw him take a sip, it was like a hit of heroin surging directly through my veins. I just remember thinking, I’m finally doing it. I’m finally going to be free.
He finished the whole bowl, thanked me for the meal, and asked for seconds. I obliged.
We went to bed. He fell asleep, and I pretended to do the same. I waited, breathless, for his symptoms to kick in. I waited for the vomiting, foaming at the mouth, heart palpitations, all of it. One hour ticked by, then another, and another. I wriggled over and pressed close to his chest like I was cuddling, trying to figure out if his heart had simply stopped in his sleep. But nope, it was beating strong as ever, and he slept like a baby all the way until his alarm chimed with the sunrise.
I was just stupefied when he walked out that morning for work, looking right as rain, same braindead smile as he kissed my cheek and told me goodbye. All day I waited for a call that he’d collapsed at work, that he was in the hospital. Nothing. As if all my months in the garden, all the things I’d stirred into his bowl, had never existed.
I figured I must not have used enough after all. So later I went collecting from the garden again, this time everything. I knew I couldn’t cook soup again, that might seem suspicious. So I made stew instead.
When I say I threw in everything to his portion, I mean everything. Along with the nightshade, hemlock, and mandrake, I added enough datura seeds to make his brain pop like a bubble, and crushed every bit of the hellebores into a powder to add. Plus all the oleander, hell, everything, just everything. And then I had to throw in spices from my kitchen to mask the taste.
Again we were sitting across from each other at the table, and he was happily wolfing the stuff down.
“Taste alright?” I asked him, picking at my own meal.
“Delicious as ever,” he said. “Actually, this is my favorite thing you’ve made in awhile. This a new recipe?”
“. . . yep.”
“Nice. You should definitely make it again.”
Another night spent waiting for him to die. Nothing. He didn’t so much as shiver. When he left for work again the next morning, I was racking my head for answers. Did he have some sort of hyperstrong immune system? Had I overcooked the additions to his, somehow boiled all the poisonous parts out? I’d put in so much, there was no way it wasn’t enough. It should have choked him from the inside. It should have cooked the blood in his lungs. It should have sent the veins bursting in his eyes, flooded them red.
At this point I was getting sleep-deprived and desperate. For the next several dinners, I stopped depending solely on my garden and started getting creative instead of staying careful. I found out from a TV show that you can poison someone with gold and silver, so I started breaking down my jewelry and ferreting tiny bits into his food. I slipped spoonfuls of drain cleaner and detergent beads into his afternoon smoothies. I went to visit my grandmother’s house to chip off the lead paint on her walls, and added that to all his dinners. My cleaning agents, in they went. Every dinner I upped the ante, and every dinner he ate with the smile, insisting it was delicious, before retiring for another peaceful night of sleep while I screamed inside my head.
It all came to a head by the tenth dinner. I was watching him slurp down a concoction of henbane, crushed pills, and formaldehyde.
“Yum,” he said.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I snapped.
He blinked at me, all surprised. “Language, babe.”
Something inside me splintered, the threads of my patience and mind snapped from the sleepless nights and the impossible failures and the years and years of waiting for something, anything to change. I was beyond controlling myself. I was beyond stopping the words from leaving my mouth.
“You just keep eating it,” I said, choked. “Eating it all, and nothing happens. How do you keep eating it? Why won’t you say anything? I’m barely able to do anything about the taste anymore, don’t you taste it? Don’t you feel it? Why the fuck are you acting normal?”
My husband didn’t say anything. He just stared at me from across the table. And then this slow, lazy smile spread across his face.
“What?” I rasped. I’d never seen his face look like that.
He smiled wider, then wider, showing all his white teeth and stretching his lips thin as hairs. Then he . . . his jaw. It unhooked. Slack.
I watched, frozen, pinned to my seat as the man I’d been married to for ten years thrust his arm down his own mouth, all the way past the elbow. He didn’t break eye contact with me as he reached in deeper and deeper. He stopped, and I heard a wet squelch. He began pulling his arm back out, and gripped in his hand was something round and pink and fleshy, trailed by ropes of misshapen, bloody tubing. It quivered in his hand. Gurgled.
I fought down the bile rising in my throat as he slapped the organ down on the table, the intestines still hanging out his gaping mouth, yellow fluid seeping into the white table cloth, leaking from the corners of his lips. The air swelled with the smell of rotten meat. He grabbed the knife to his right, plunged it into the smooth tissue of the organ, and sliced it open. He reached into the newly made slit and began picking things out, plopping them onto the table for me to see.
Chewed-up hemlock. Blue detergent beads. Little black datura seeds. Paint chips. Foxglove leaves and petals. Specks of gold.
One by one he plucked each poison and toxin out that I’d fed him over the last several days. All of it pristine, undigested.
Finally, he picked out a leaf of deadly nightshade, and flicked it right onto my cheek.
I think that’s when I finally screamed out loud.
I leapt out my seat and ran, just ran. Behind me I could hear him laughing, a low wheeze dampened by the innards choking his mouth. I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. I just grabbed my keys off the counter and bolted to my car, that horrible laugh dogging me the whole way. I swear I heard it right in my ear even when I drove clear out the neighborhood. Sometimes I still do. Always behind, just outside my vision.
*
I went back, of course.
The next morning, with the cops in tow. And you know what we found? Nothing.
Not a trace of him, not a whisper. His car was gone, and the whole house had been cleaned out, completely empty. Years later, I even hired a P.I to try and track him, and all he was able to find of my husband was a few old photos on other people’s social media. In the words of the investigator, “it was like he scarcely existed.”
In a way, I guess I got what I wanted. Not with the money, all the bank accounts were cleared once he left, but at least he was gone. For a while.
Last few months, something’s changed. I’ve started getting things in the mail, in unmarked envelopes. Paint chips. Datura seeds. Specks of gold. This hemlock is the latest.
I tried changing my name and moving, but the envelopes keep coming. It has to be him. But I have no idea what he wants. No idea if he’s sending me these as a warning, or a joke, or a promise.
I only know it means he’s coming.
END OF ROSEMARY’S ACCOUNT
*
Well, I took a look at the hemlock and other samples under the microscope per Rosemary’s request, as well as to satisfy my own curiosity. That, along with other tests, didn’t yield any results out of the ordinary. But I did find something else interesting.
Rosemary had also given me copies of the photos her P.I found (she hadn’t kept any from her marriage). The man photographed within was fairly bland looking, and wore the same perfectly pleasant smile in every single one, as though he had that exact facial expression down to a science. I cross-analyzed the photos with some face databases and archives, and came up with one match.
From 1945.
The photo show’s him standing in the center of a group of young, laughing men just outside a bar in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Now, could it be a coincidence? Could it be a simple case of Rosemary’s husband having a look-a-like from way back when? Sure. It definitely makes more sense than the alternative explanation.
But it’s the smile. That same, perfectly pleasant smile, frozen in black and white.
Think I’ll skip dinner tonight.