The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
Hydrangea Bushes by Julie Tran.
When Wendy found a face-down corpse in her backyard that morning, she wasn’t sure what to do.
The corpse was a man, with a square-ish, plump body and cropped bleached hair. It had its face in a large murky puddle. Now, Wendy’s backyard didn’t usually house large puddles — the puddle was only there because her sister, Kara, and her three horrible children had just come visit the other day. Immediately upon arrival, the monstrous snot rags ripped her house front to back, muddy shoes fully on, and poured into the backyard, where they proceeded to dig a hole while their useless mother laughed and commented on the preciousness of children. Wendy remembered too vividly the bottled, violent panic of serving Kara margaritas after margaritas (that woman downed drinks like a goddamn toilet) while watching her nieces and nephew ripped out the dirt and grass of her lawn — and smack in the middle, too! — like they were trying to claw their way back to hell where they’d come from. They only stopped when it started raining and their mother howled for them to come inside, once again befouling Wendy’s kitchen.
Well, mud stains weren’t her biggest concern anymore, that’s for sure. Wendy watched the corpse intently for a minute and a half before it occurred to her to kick it. Maybe it wasn’t dead yet. Maybe it was just some drunk stumbling onto her yard and passing out. She had had those before. Just yesterday’s afternoon, right after Kara and her kids left, the odd couple next door came around to ask if she and Tim would come to a housewarming party of yet another odd couple who’d just moved in. Wendy politely declined for the both of them, saying that Tim was in Chicago for business, which was real, and she herself had dinner plans with her parents, which was fake. Her parents never came around anymore, not since she married Tim.
The reason her parents disapproved of Tim was simple — painfully simple, to the point of being idiotic — Tim was scrawny and was head of an equally scrawny startup when she brought him home for them to see. Wendy’s parents didn’t have much money, but they had enough to look down condescendingly on people who had less, and down they looked on poor Tim, then with his horrible haircut — or lack of — a curly, untamed mess of dark hair that, perching atop his skinny body, made him look like a weird kind of tree. That was what she thought, and that was exactly what her father said. He forbade it, he said. It’s my life, father, she replied indignantly like a dame from the movies, not admitting to anyone, least of all herself, that her father was right and that she might end up five years later broke and divorced.
But that didn’t happen. You could see that it didn’t happen, because Timothy wasn’t scrawny anymore and neither was his company. Nowadays Tim walks around the house with a belly and a backside as expansive as his empire. Her parents still refused to talk to her, purely out of pride. Their estrangement — portrayed artfully in a sad, frustrated demeanor that she put on at the slightest mention of her parents — she wore like a carnival blue ribbon. She had chosen correctly and they did not. They had liked Kara and his Yale-graduate husband and her three children much better. They had stubbornly insisted so even when helping Kara with her mortgage. Kara’s husband left her for a slut in Switzerland. Tim had never left her. Never.
Of course, he cheated. What man didn’t cheat? The moment their house and bank accounts got bigger, so did their libido. She caught him several times, often with some artless skank either from work or a watering hole he frequented. But unlike Kara, she never lost her s***.
“Of course you would leave me,” she would say, or something along that line, with sad, glistening tears spread evenly on her lashes. “We have no children, and I’m an old, withering lady. It was a pleasure, these ten years with you, Timothy,” at which point Tim would start apologizing and blubbering about how much he appreciated her, and how he knew that behind every great man (i.e. him) was a great woman (i.e. her). Not the secretary, the bartender, the neighbor’s babysitter, or, on one occasion, a prostitute he’d stopped paying. Her, Wendy. Wendy, her.
Wendy held a secret suspicion that the female of the odd couple nextdoor, Jo, fancied Tim. It wasn’t anything obvious, just that Jo’s face would lit up a little bit too brightly every time Tim exited the house to go to work. And that she always seemed to be there every time Tim exited the house to go to work. Honestly, even if Tim wasn’t in Chicago, Wendy would still have declined going to the party.
Which was just as well, because just around ten in the evening a man, buck naked and howling, jumped over the fence of her backyard, squatted in her treasured indigo hydrangea bush, and took a s***.
It was shock beyond shock for Wendy. And she recognized that man! An insurance lawyer just at the end of the street, with a dotty hairstylist little wife. Incensed, she came charging out to the yard, a lit Tiki torch raised over her head and shrieking at Don Gallagher, Esq. to get out of here, you crazy freak!
Even in the daylight, the corpse looked bleak. Sucking in a breath, Wendy raised her slipper-covered foot and tap slightly on the meaty back of the man. Nope, not even a snort. No rise and fall breathing happening anywhere there, either. She bent down just a little. The close vicinity of the corpse reeked of sweaty alcohol. So that made two smelly things in her backyard.
She didn’t clean up Don Gallagher’s s*** after chasing him out, but instead went in a beeline to the housewarming party, Tiki torch still alight in hand. The homeowners were nowhere in sight, but Jo and her idiot husband greeted her at the gate. She pushed past them. She was intent on finding Gallagher’s mad wife and yelling at her, because even a lunatic must know that squatting and s**ting on your neighbor’s lawn was unacceptable.
Up to that point Wendy had never walked so fast. She was out of control. The stench of excrement from the hydrangea bush had drilled itself deep into her nostrils all the way up to her brain and burrowed there. The party looked and sounded like a frat party. She wasn’t the one out of control! Everyone else was! There was the Fraises, who had a daughter in seventh grade, waltzing on the pool bar! Eloise Hemmings, the dumpy teacher with a hedge fund husband, in the middle of a singing circle! And the host, Joe Whatshisface — where was his wife? Did he even notice? Wendy grabbed her hair and pulled at it like garden weeds, as if going crazy herself would stop everyone from acting like wild dogs. Unsophisticated, uneducated wild dogs, like hoodlums and hooligans in crummy crevices of dodgy cities. Wendy was practically sobbing with confusion at this point as she and her Tiki torch went into the house, looking frantically for the mad Gallagher wife, because she sure as hell wouldn’t be cleaning anyone’s husband’s s*** out of her garden. But Gallagher wasn’t in the living room, or the kitchen, or any of the bedrooms. And then she went into the guest bathroom and found Tim and Joe Whatshisface’s wife having sex.
So the story went: Tim had just returned and decided to bring both his body and suitcase over for a drink before coming home, perhaps to rinse off stale female perfume with stale beer stink. And the hostess was simply cheating on her husband. She hadn’t an idea that Tim was also cheating. And, oh my, did she take it hard. Personal betrayal, really, because Tim knew she was married and she didn’t know squat about him except for, well…
The hostess’s wrath exploded so fast and violently, Wendy’s outrage was blasted to a side. Mrs. Whatshisface was obviously drunk, drunk on the same bottled suburban crazy all her guests was, because she shrieked and shrieked and before long people had started to come and watch. Alarmed and embarrassed, Wendy tried to lug Tim out of the bathroom and slink home unnoticed, but it was impossible, impossible. So she saved herself and exited on her own.
Fine, it was fine. She’d be the hurt, faithful wife that the street will sympathize with. She’d be the one they force Tim to be nice to. She’d open a goddamn book club, if that was what it took. As for Tim, well, the time had come for him to go down alone.
The party raged on like an acid trip, but Wendy didn’t see or hear it. She just went to bed in disappointment and cried.
But she wasn’t crying now, that was for sure. Admittedly, she was still disappointed. Disappointed in the world for throwing horrible children and s**ting lawyers and alcoholic corpses in her lawn with green grass and hydrangea bushes and reasonably-priced lawn sprinklers. She was hella disappointed.
Wendy sighed. She planted her feet into the grass. Then she lifted one foot. With a sure push she heaved the corpse on its side, and then on its back. Before the corpse’s back even touched the grass, though, she knew.
She knew she had to call the police, and she knew she had to do it in a crying, panicky voice, because the man in her lawn had shredded clothes and filthy fingertips and inked skin, on which the words “BASTARD” had been scrawled on everywhere and repeatedly in red markers; because the man’s face was fat and bad and his hair was gaudy, courtesy of the party and the mad Gallagher hairstylist, no doubt; because in light of his misdeeds the man’s fly was wide open and everything was all there for good God to see and it was utterly distasteful, too distasteful for her. And also because the man was dead and he was Tim. Filthy, exposed, bloated, and hers — Tim.
