Vivian, Beneath

by Anabelle Taff

RUNNER-UP OF THE RIVER’S FALL 2025 HALLOWEEN BODY HORROR CONTEST

Vivian, one of the paper girls on paper route number six, knicks one tan American Spirit from her older brother Elijah’s silver Honda Civic every Sunday morning before work. She clenches the cigarette between her red, brace-wrapped teeth as she strolls the neighborhood, hucking newspapers onto wood porches littered by crow-pecked, rotting Jack-O-Lanterns.

On the first Sunday of November, when the feather-strewn, mushed, gourd-slop has been swept aside and the yards along Vivian’s route become an eerie, between-season nothingness, she walks at faster pace than usual. The warm spill of smoke down her throat does little to comfort her this morning; the fog creates a purgatorial haze with every step she takes.

The sun is rising, bleeding molten orange into the dissipating purple night.

At the Miller’s house, an old, chipping, yellow bungalow, Vivian turns to chuck the New York Times over their driftwood yard-fence. As the paper thwacks against the bottom step and bounces into the beige, dying grass, a rumbling, gravelly bark breaks through the silent street.

Vinnie, the Miller’s snarling fridge of a mutt, bounds out from behind the house with his triangle ears pinned back on his skull. Panting, slobber gushing down his jowls, he claws at the fence as Vivian jolts and trips. She extends her arm, bracing herself. Pebbles and dusty dirt cut into her palm as she holds herself up. Her cigarette tumbles from her lips, the burning, ashy tip falls directly onto her pinky, creating a deep, red ripple in the taut flesh around her knuckle. Her hiss of pain is drowned out by loud, wet barks. Breathless, she thrusts herself forward and hurries down the block, clutching the twitching worm of her finger.

Upon returning home, Vivian disappears into the cubicle-sized, downstairs bathroom. In the glaring, white, overhead light, her unmarred hand trembles as she turns on the faucet. Cold water intermittently spurts over her pus-dripping pinky knuckle, her eyelids fluttering, her saliva becoming sour on her tongue. Chills pulse down the notches of her spine as a flap of skin hangs over the edge of her finger, the water washing the blood and plasma into the porcelain sink and down the drain. When her wound begins to cool off and the screaming pain becomes a glaring numbness, Vivian wraps a brown latex bandaid taut around her finger. The material squeezes so tightly that the tip of her finger swells up like a smooth raspberry.

For the rest of the morning and for all of the afternoon, Vivian distracts herself from her throbbing pinky: she does the crossword puzzle on one of the never-delivered-newspapers, and she cuts and paints her toenails dark blue. A nap quickly follows.

The front door snapping shut at midnight rouses Vivian awake. Elijah had just returned home from his girlfriend’s house, his steel-toe boots dredging across the kitchen floor below his little sister’s bedroom. He tugs open the refrigerator door, eyeing taco leftovers, bagged bread, and a row of canned Miller Lite. Snagging one, he cracks the tab on the can and guzzles half of the beer as he ascends the stairs to his room, located across from Vivian’s.

At the top step, boot angled into the rubber stair-ledge, he pauses. Down the hall, sitting on the white carpet in front of Vivian’s ajar bedroom door, is an unraveled bandaid, smeared with slimy blood and black lint. He furrows his brows and approaches, his knees crunching as he crouches down. The tips of his nail-bitten fingers drag against the lint-dusted adhesive, and he exhales.

“Huh,” Elijah breathes, gently pinching one of the fuzz balls and peeling it free. Upon bringing it nearer to his face, he realizes that the little piece of black lint is in fact a small, fluffy, feather. “Vivian?”

He stands up and nudges his sister’s door further, taking another sip from his can as he pokes his head into her room. Apart from her bedsheets being very slightly rustled and a few tiny feathers on the mattress and floor, everything appears to be normal. Gripping the door frame with his free hand, he sighs, shakes his head, and turns to step back into the hallway, only to be met by a rattling whimper sound coming from the very end of the hall, from behind the upstairs bathroom door.

“What the fuck, Vivian?” Elijah grunts, swiftly moving towards the noise, his hand wrapping around the handle and roughly twisting it open, “stop fucking around–”

Kneeling on white, marble, blood-spattered bathroom tiles, Vivian is shirtless with her right arm laying across her slanted thighs. Her back is hunched as her left hand erratically drags the tip of her sharp, stainless steel nail scissors over her pointed elbow and up her bicep. What used to be her right hand is a matted, black, feathery mess; torn, pale skin hangs limply towards the floor, dripping with chunks of flesh and muscle, coagulating into a coppery stink-pile.

“Vivian?” Elijah squeaks out, watching as a mass of skin and gore slides into her lap as the scissors reach her collarbone, looking like mozzarella cheese and red sauce slipping off a scorching slice of pizza and onto a paper plate.

His little sister’s head swivels towards him, chin jutting upward. Her once green eyes are fully blown by her pupils, and she jerks her shoulder upwards, her ebony appendage flapping defiantly, blowing loose flesh grafts around the floor and startling Elijah so bad that he drops his beer, the can clattering loudly. Her head bobs forward and cocks to the right as her lips begin to purse and then open. The whiny rattle escapes her, once, twice, before morphing into a full on caw, excruciating and bouncing off of the walls as she begins to drag the scissors beneath her collarbone and between her breasts, revealing thick tufts of black feathers. Elijah whimpers, boots drilled to his place in the doorway, unable to take his eyes off of the horror before him.

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