Nathaniel Neil Whelan, author of “Sins of A Sister”, is the winner of the 2020 Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest for his story “A Failed Artist’s Paradise.” Whelan lives in Ottawa, Canada with his partner and pet cats Goose, Loki, and Peggy.
Gemma leaves at midnight. This is part of her Sunday routine, as is hauling the burlap sack into the boot of her car and driving away with the evidence. Her hands burn white-hot on the steering wheel. She hates how deeply implicated she’s become in the Doctor’s work. She hasn’t committed murder, but she’s disposed of murdered people.
She never should’ve volunteered Gisela for surgery. But what choice did she have?
“Yes, I can save her,” the Doctor had said, his greasy hair a tangled nest. Round spectacles threatened to slip off the end of a bulbous nose. “I can save you both.”
“Are you sure?”
He smiled, his hands resting heavily on their shoulders. “Yes, my dear. I promise.”
Like a gullible schoolgirl, Gemma believed him. She thought the Doctor to be a man of morals, that his experiments were driven by altruism. But her sister’s ever-worsening health never interested him. And it blinded her. By the time she clued in to the nature of his work, it was too late, and Gisela was long dead.
Death scares Gemma silly—the mystery behind it, the brutality of it. Perhaps it’s how the Doctor takes pleasure in dissecting innocents for the sake of science, or maybe it’s the fact that sinners spend an eternity consumed by flames, their flesh burning black until the end of time.
Flee. Lose yourself to the night.
Death scares Gemma silly—the mystery behind it, the brutality of it.
This thought crosses her mind every Sunday like clockwork. But she knows she can’t flee. The Doctor is a man with deep connections and even deeper pockets. He’d find her. Plus, she admits to herself, she doesn’t have the courage.
Gisela was brave. She’d have driven until she ran out of petrol, and even then forced herself to keep going, hitchhiking her way out of Germany.
The only way to assuage her guilt now is to turn the Doctor in, but she knows she can’t do that either. She’d go down with him. She isn’t a brilliant military tactician or politician, and so would never receive a trial as public as the ones at Nuremberg, but that doesn’t make her any less complicit. She has sins, ones she doesn’t fancy paying for by staring down the barrel end of an Allied firing squad.
The gilded cross fixed atop the cemetery chapel looms closer. She keeps returning to this awful place to delay being buried in it.
Gemma parks the Volkswagen in a pocket of fog. Balancing a shovel within the crux of her arm, she drags the burlap sack to a pair of wrought-iron gates. They creak open like nails on a chalkboard. An owl hoots from nearby, the only witness to her sins if you don’t count the dead.
Beaten and broken from centuries of abuse, a maze of gravestones silently honour the names of the departed. Plinths dot the vast property, stone angels poised on top, the tips of their swords reaching toward the canopy of leaves above.
It’s exhausting work, dragging that sack through the labyrinth of gothic stonework. During the war, back when the German government sanctioned the Doctor’s horrific misdeeds, failed experiments were burned in an incinerator. Those days, test subjects were supplied, plucked from camps and sent in trucks. These days, the Doctor has to use more nefarious means. Chloroform. Coercion. Nothing is off limits.
The bottom of the sack snatches on a jagged root. A sudden jerking motion to free it sends the usual shooting pain up Gemma’s left side. She grunts, teeth clenched, her grimace sour.
Resting a moment, she notices the knot at the top of the sack has come loose. A hand, chubby and dimpled, hangs limp from the opening. With a hesitant finger, she inserts the tiny fist back into the bundle and ties off the top in a double-knot. Feeling the pressure of tears behind her eyes, she continues onward, hauling the sack and shovel to the back of the cemetery where a grave with freshly repacked earth awaits.
The smell of dirt assaults her nostrils. As children, Gemma and Gisela loved to play outdoors, the scents of summer a sweet treat from the musty smell of their classroom, but recently, she can only associate the stench of dirt with death and decay.
Hands on hips, she regains her breath. Ideally, she’d have chosen a grave much closer to the entrance, but an earlier scouting trip to the cemetery revealed this to be the only disturbed plot—a rectangle of brown soil in a sea of green grass. The tombstone reads: Hans Schmidt. Whoever he was in life, his funeral had been held recently. This is good. The groundskeeper won’t be suspicious of foul play if the earth around a tombstone is supposed to be upturned.
Packed tight, the ground resists her meager strength. It takes a few tries, but she finally manages to pierce the first layer, huffing with each subsequent shovelful of dirt. Bent forward, a gold chain with a tiny crucifix dangles from around her neck. A chill sweeps the area. Thunder booms like a toy drum in the distance.
Through a tangle of brown curls, Gemma can see the moon searing a white circle in the canvas of dark sky above. Her face quickly becomes caked in sweat and her fingers, callused and bruised, begin to tremble on the wooden handle of the shovel. But still she continues to work. The effort sends that familiar jolting pain up her side.
If she so wished, she could spare herself from this torment, but she refuses to give in to temptation. The Doctor’s instructions have always been crystal clear: dump the bodies in the Elbe to be carried away with the current. Instead, she chooses to dispose of the bodies here, to give them as proper a burial as possible. It’s unceremonious, devoid of pomp and circumstance—unlike the funeral for Hans Schmidt, she has not doubt—but it’s all she can do to ease her conscience. And secretly, she hopes, it’ll save her from the fires of eternal damnation.
The horizon is lit up by a flash of lightening before a grumbling belch rents the sky.
God, judge me not based on my actions toward the living, but on my endless compassion toward the dead.
The pile of earth beside her grows larger with each shovelful of dirt. Her palms begin to bleed. She sucks at the wounds, the bitter taste of iron blanketing her tongue.
Finally, after hours of back-breaking labour, the blade of the shovel clonks against wood. She leaps into the grave and dusts off the lid before prying it open. Tucked in a bed of purple silk, a man as fragile as a paper person lies with his hands crossed upon his suited chest. His face is completely shrouded by shadow which comes as a huge relief to Gemma.
Joints aching, she hops out of the pit to deposit the sack into the coffin, adjusting the Doctor’s playthings so that it lies flat. She once dared to open the bag and lay out the bodies as naturally as possible within the already crammed coffin, but the act of putting together a human jigsaw puzzle haunted her dreams for months afterward.
As she closes the lid, she feels a grain of guilt for desecrating Schmidt’s final resting place. But still she refuses to dump the dead in a river. They deserve better. Hopefully this Schmidt had been an empathetic man.
Another rumble of thunder. A single drop of rain pellets her forehead.
Wary of the dead whispering in the wind, Gemma never strays longer than necessary, but when she twists her torse to leave, her side protests in agony. Yelping in surprise, she doubles over. Under her blouse, rough fingers trace the zigzagging scar where the scalpel had made a mess. Her lips form a curse, but the word never comes—her priest taught her better than to swear, especially in such a sacred place. Why add to the list of sins?
She makes her way back toward the entrance, one arm caressing her abdomen, the other dragging the shovel behind her.
On the way, she recognizes a familiar grave, not because of the original occupant, but because of who secretly sleeps with them. Burying those two girls had hit Gemma harder than the others. While most surgeons during the war conducted studies on undesirables, the Doctor had a peculiar obsession with conjoined twins. Over the years, his tastes did not change, the two nameless girls under the ground a testament to that.
“Medical abominations,” he used to say under his breath. Even though his words were laced with venom, he always worked as daintily as a skilled seamstress.
The wrought-iron gates close a lot quieter than when they opened. Gemma stashes the shovel in the boot of her car and slides into the driver’s seat. The engine coughs to life as rain begins to slash at the windshield. She floors the gas pedal, her foot as heavy as an anvil, but soon eases up, her left side still throbbing violently—a side effect of the surgery. The illness was sure to spread. There was no way they would have both survived. In a way, Gisela’s abrupt end at the hands of the Doctor spared Gemma’s life.
“We don’t have to do this,” Gemma had said, hot tears pouring down her cheeks. “It’s always been me and you. I can’t go on without—”
“Have faith, dear sister,” Gisela replied, caressing her cheek, their body on the cold slab. “There is no reason to be afraid. Everything will be as it should. No matter what happens, I will always be with you.”
It’s death that terrifies Gemma, not the dead itself. She sees her sister every time she lays eyes on that messy scar. She feels her every time she heaves that sack. Truthfully, as much as it hurts, she doesn’t mind the pain in her side. It helps remind Gemma of her sister. Of her phantom limb.
A sudden spread of warmth protects her against the night chill as if an unseen figure is hugging her fiercely. Among the downpour, she finds comfort. As long as she’s alive, Gemma doesn’t mind carrying the dead with her.
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