To the fleshless people of the afterlife, at least, she was luscious.
They, too, had forgotten what real flesh looked like: and how they could see her with eyeless sockets Emily didn't know, but they still made her a pet. Nobody here cared if one day her arm decided to lose all of its flesh…as long as they could see enough to tell that she'd once been beautiful, to them she was.. Bonejangles still chatted her up and she still felt like she was blushing. (She couldn't, but still.)
Regardless, she'd tried to remember, but how soon she'd forgotten the proper appearance of skin.
The ones down under simply didn't have it. Quickly flesh rots away under most circumstances-- gone, along with eyes and brain and the other things that make afterlife sort of like regular life. The things that make one skeleton look different from another eventually disappear, leaving behind calcium. Rocks that used to be people.
With flesh, leaves personality… along with the last parts of your molding brain, leave you. Or so it seemed to Emily, at least at first.
In those first days all she could see were dancing bones, a blur of the horrible things from nightmares. It took her weeks to find the differences in skeletons; to tell one voice from the other. It was hard to decipher people talking, she found, when their lips didn't move at you—instead a hollow version of what they sounded like in life would quaver around them, like an unseen ventriloquist pulled the strings of these people.
And now she thought that maybe there were degrees of being a pile of dancing bones… maybe there was hope, of a sort. Because there seemed to have been those who chose to retain who they were, and then those who rejoiced in the blessed final unity of looking like everyone else. There were the tattered old matrons playfully (desperately?) still wearing plumed hats, and then there were people who swapped heads, sang in unison, and had what sounded like the same voice.
She knew enough now to guess that maybe eventually everyone ended up a head-swapper.
Because cloth decayed no matter how much you sewed it. Your hair would thin and fall out in the street one day, eyeballs mush and maggots eat your muscles. Ashes to ashes dust to dust. You'd look gross for a few years and then eventually be picked clean of identity.
Emily thought, being dead, she'd be past being afraid of it. But she was--- both dead and petrified of it.
She already looked so very different...
Frigid late October had been good for the body. Thank God--- no… thank somebody the cold had preserved her when she fell, body frozen overnight in the snow, dry snow luckily to prevent mold, then another layer, and she was sealed for the winter, mummified in a heap under a tree.
But she still was rotting!
She had had full cheeks when she came to the underworld two years ago. Still high cheekbones but rounder, a hint of the blush of the living left on them even as she saw they were pale and cold. Eyes not black but blue. Hair…oh, snow melting and unmelting and birds' nests and twigs falling had not done good things to her hair. It had gone from silky and heavy to rougher and lighter-feeling to knotted, downright knotted, gnarled enough that it would take out her finger bones as she tried to comb it rather than her finger bones taking out the tangles. The first time that had happened she sobbed.
It was frightening to watch herself leaving being beautiful bit by bit, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it. The whole process of decay was random to her, why that arm's flesh gone instead of the other? Why this leg's ligaments poking through withered flesh and the other's flesh frozen solid, so that if you squinted it still looked normal?
Was this a punishment, she thought now, for the vanity of the night she was killed?
She had gone up to bed, "Good night, Mother and Father…" a code for "Goodbye, Mother and Father". And she had stayed stiffly in bed until there was snoring from the room down the hall. Ten-thirty. They were firmly, solidly asleep. Emily lit a solitary candle to find her way to the carpetbag in the wardrobe.
On her way something flashed ahead of her. A ghost!… no, not a ghost, not yet: a familiar face. Her own, reflected over the dressing table in the three-fold mirror resting on it. She stopped. She was… so white. Oh, drawn and tired-looking, not a charming bride at all…yet with improvement?
And she could not see herself properly in this light. Another candle lit, then three, finally Emily sat at her bureau glowing. Alone in the darkened house she was surrounded by yellow shining wax tapers, her face eerie in the dark but alluring, fluid and limpid. Sexual she dared not—dared to think. Her eyes fluttered beguilingly. "Barkis…" she murmured.
Did she dare this too? Her hair was wonderful, she thought to herself at night sometimes as she brushed a hundred strokes into it. Yet he had never seen it in its full glory. He is to marry me, she thought now. Surely he should want it more when he sees me tonight. Alone in the clearing he will wait, his heartbeat the only thing he can hear, when suddenly footsteps—and I step out--- and his heartbeat thrums like a startled bird's wings---
Because I am not Emily Oglivie but someone else entirely. I am stunningly beautiful, a creature from his dreams. And I am to be his bride. A bun tonight will simply not do!
The coil fell down her back and she rustled it with her fingers. Scandalous! she thought gleefully. Clean and shiny it fell gratefully around her shoulders. Her scalp tingled.
Clumsily Emily undid the buttons at the front of her dress, stepped out of it and hung it in the wardrobe. She fished in the suitcase and pulled the bundle out. It was impractical but so tempting… the snow wouldn't hurt it, after all, it was just like wash-water, wasn't it? She could put a cloak on after she surprised him. Until then she could stand the cold. Her bare arms could take it. Gleefully Emily had pulled her mother's wedding dress over the corset, laced up the bust, patted it and stood in front of the mirror.
…And the way she looked then, the apogee in stun power of her entire life, hadn't mattered at all.
Barkis had had his mind on one thing and it wasn't what she'd imagined he'd had it on. Instead of his throbbing heart in the clearing it was hers that she could hear:
the surprise had been his not hers and instead of love she was dead.
A mark of how little he had cared: he throttled her with her own shining hair...He had choked her beauty and left it to freeze and decay. Slowly the meat was falling from her bones. And she'd been able to forget that, been able to enjoy being dead, until he'd come along. Victor, who, like Barkis, made her want to linger in front of the mirror.
Instead this time, she perused each wormhole with bone-hands, weeping.
That was why Victor didn't love her...because she'd forgotten how ugly she was. Because his darling Victoria could obviously still glow in the candlelight. Victoria's face would be bronze and alluring, while Emily's would soak in light and terrify. Because Victoria, in short, had...skin.