From a southern Gothic tale of destruction and revenge, to haunted houses and cursed lovers, Unthinkable is a queer gothic anthology that captures a snapshot of the gothic talent out there. Dive into this exclusive story extract below, but for the ending? Well, you’ll just have to treat yourself to the book.

Extract taken from An Epitaph, Epistolary
By M. Špoljar
Taken from Unthinkable: A Queer Gothic Anthology
Published by Haunt Publishing 

You come home from my funeral and take off your dress. You do it by the door, without undoing the buttons fully – you slip it off, leave it where it fell, and it’s still there three days after- wards. Maybe waiting, for the woman you just buried to come pick it up. Maybe celebrating, that it was just your dress and not all of you left crumbled by that doorframe.

You wear the same shirt for ten days afterwards. You eat nothing but canned soup and plain bread, and usually in full darkness. You’re about to run out of spoons – all the used ones now a crinkly isolation lining your sink – if you notice, you don’t care. You only leave the flat for cigarettes. You text your friends that you’re fine, that you just need to be alone, and they’d all know how much of a lie that is the moment they caught a glimpse of you now. You never used to answer the door without some lip-gloss on, let alone forget to wash your hair for a week. You’re turning almost unrecognisable. The neighbours will think both girlfriends got buried.

You’re grieving. You went through a loss so striking it took two days to fully hit, two days for your ribs to collapse against this gaping hole, the vast nothing the woman you were ready to marry disappeared into. It feels surreal, the way nightmares do, and unfamiliar in a way you can’t wake up from. The logistics of mortality, the fact of a cold body you were called in to identify all fall short of how it feels – all fail to explain how, exactly, you are supposed to rearrange sense back into anything that resembles a daily routine. You are angry at yourself, angry at a heart that stopped beating – angry at the way your bed still fits two, the way your neighbour still smokes outside every day at 7:30. Angry that anything could still go on, like a crack doesn’t run through the very fabric of time, like there isn’t a void where something so important used to be. You built this life like a house and then something knocked the load-bear- ing wall down and now, now it has the gall to not even sink – not even a little – not even a small crack down a window. Just something to show this suffocating feeling exists outside of your body – that someone else feels the same, in this world with the audacity to go on turning – that you are not so terribly alone – that the only other person who ever seemed to get you wasn’t put in the ground ten days ago.

And you were really ready to commit for life. That test you found online had said you had the avoidant attachment style, but I guess somewhere along the road you changed your mind. You never said so out loud – never made that announcement to m – but there is a ring in your closet, hidden in the back where only you were tall enough to reach. And that fancy dinner you had planned was only a month away. It’s safe to say you were about to let me know.

Years of dancing around the subject, around that relationship problem where one person isn’t really into the idea of marriage while the other dreamt of it since high school – the accident happened before you could pop the question but if it matters any, I would’ve been okay without the ring. I might have died not knowing I had changed your mind, but I died at peace with it too.

And, like, obviously, I would have said yes.

* * *

I didn’t follow you from the funeral. I wasn’t even at the funeral. I hope it was a lovely service – you know how I loved my event planning – but, me, not there. I appeared once you realised I’m not coming back. And we’ve both been sitting here since.

And, before you ask, yes, I did try picking your dress up. Didn’t work, my fingers phase through. I swear it’s not an excuse, though with my past record of chore-avoidance, I can see why you wouldn’t believe me.

I don’t expect you to believe this either, but I really hadn’t done it on purpose.

It was an accident. A very unfortunate accident, both in the sense that it killed me, and in that it so very resembled what a severely depressed person with manic tendencies – such as I was, before I was dead – might do to herself. I can’t even act offended that that was where everyone’s minds had gone first. I sure set the reputation up myself.

I wanted to die when I was younger, yes, I made quite a few attempts to. There were times when I didn’t particularly enjoy being alive near the end – dangerously near the end – but acting on it was a thing of the past. I do not expect you to believe me. But I really had no plans to die by my own hand.

I could say it was because of you. I could say loving you showed me how to love myself. It wouldn’t even be wholly untrue. I could say loving you made me love myself (that would be untrue). It would be a good story. People like that kind of a story.

The truth is that the things that made me want to die weren’t the kind of things falling in love could fix. There are danger- ously few things falling in love can fix. Maybe no things at all. I wanted to die before you and during you and should we ever have broken up – you know, with me still alive – I would have probably continued wanting to die, though not because of you. My depressive tendencies had nothing to do with how much love I was receiving. My symptoms were not going to go away for a romance, no matter how grand, no matter how lasting.

We used to talk, back when I still had a mouth that could speak, about what we thought our ghosts would look like.

“They’re always the young versions of themselves,” you’d say, “in the movies.” Glorification of youth, you’d then say. Refusal to hire older women. Then we’d get distracted talking about the Hollywood age gaps. We always got so easily distracted.

You were a fan of ghosts looking the way that they did, the moment they died. Every outfit you picked had to pass that test – I used to hate this– the would I agree to wear this for an eternity test. It didn’t matter where you were going – it didn’t matter how much of a hurry you were in – be it date night or a quick run to the corner shop, you picked what you put on with so much care. If it had been vanity, I would have encouraged every second. But I knew you well enough to know how you were raised, and whose voice guided you to look for yourself in every reflective surface. That the way you pored over your lipstick was not adoration, but scrutiny.

You’ve been wearing the same outfit for two weeks now. It’s a sweater and some leggings. First time I’ve seen you in either. You hate how your calves look, and think baggy clothes make your torso look boxy. I’d be proud of you for forgetting to give a shit if it looked like anything but a mental health crisis.

(Also, I’m wearing whatever you remember me wearing. In case you wanted to know. You really liked me in a suit, huh.)

What I’m trying to say is, if love could fix broken wiring, ours would’ve. What I’m trying to say is, if it were possible to love so right a wrong is forgotten, we would know, because we would have done it. What I’m trying to say is, I loved loving you even if it did nothing about my symptoms. What I’m trying to say is, you pushed me to try.

What I’m trying to say is, I really didn’t do this to you on purpose.

And, god, you need to wash your fucking dishes.

Unthinkable: A Queer Gothic Anthology is published by Haunt Publishing, priced £9.99.