The Killing of a Sacred Deer #ONC2023

Part III: Under the Skin

The Pastor's grandson was there for the Sunday mass.

He stood behind Mrs. Marzyciel — hands folded down his sides, chin tucked low. His grandfather's rifle-green suit hung off his frame like a second oversized skin. He didn't look up. Not at his grandmother who greeted the attendants softly as they filtered in. Not at the hushed, polite inquiries directed in his direction. Not at the curious, prying eyes probing him over his grandmother's side. However, his body slumped into the sympathetic hugs as if strangers' fleeting comfort was the single thing keeping him upright. When the older men and women pulled away to pat his jaws or squeeze his wrists, for a second, his mouth's tight corners tipped, before it straightened back to a careful line.

"Come, love," Nolan's Mom murmured, tugging on his elbow, fingers gripping the bouquet in her hands. Nolan nodded. Squaring his shoulders, they trudged up the Church's front stoop.

The only one strong enough to meet Mrs. Marzyciel's glistened, beady pupils was their Mom. Nolan stared the cross sitting in the hollow spot between the old woman's jutted collarbones while he and Callan echoed empty consoling phrases, bitterly formulaic. The words left an acidic aftertaste on his tongue. The Pastor's wife's stare scrawled long, deep gashes down his skull. Still, he leaned in, anyway, arms wrapped around her fragile form. Vacancy — cardamom, leather, sandalwood — bled into the collar of his jacket and the elbow crooks of his sleeves.

The old woman rubbed Nolan's shoulder blades, lips twisted into a not-quite-smile as he shifted toward her grandson.

He had expected it. Nonetheless, when Jacob's unfamiliar dry, cold hands clasped onto his forearms, and blunt fingernails dig into Nolan's suit, he flinched. A queasy wrongness squirmed under his flesh, writhing and thrashing at the shrinking space between them. Still, he let Jacob reel him into a suffocating embrace. The burning in his chest distilled into something foreign.

Nolan's nose pressed against the spot under Jacob's earlobe, and without thinking, he absorbed it in, like a hungry animal tearing into a sacrifice — the sharp, crisp scent of fresh-fell pines filled his lungs. Nolan could hear Jacob gulp — the long lines of his throat muscles pulled against Nolan's shoulder, expanded and contracted. For one singular moment, the faint pain throbbing in his peripheral consciousness dulled to the ghost of Jacob's pulses, thrumming underneath Nolan's fingertips. Fast, strong, steady. Mesmerizing. Reminding him of—

A deer's heartbeat.

Nolan jerked. A half-scream choked in his windpipe.

He'd have doubled over if Jacob wasn't grabbing onto him. He stumbled, wheezing and wincing, paralyzed by a high-pitched psithurism ringing in his ears. His vision swam and blurred. His brother's voice, floating somewhere from his left, the words were a string of static.

It took Nolan a long moment to reorient himself, and longer to realize the painful pounding at the back of his brain was his heart thumping erratically against his rib cages. His brother was peering up at him — an expression Nolan hadn't seen on the kid's face since their Dad died now scrawled across Callan's face. Nolan's Mom shot him a frown. He shook his head.

"'m okay," Nolan said, the answer came out a shaky whisper. He yanked himself off the Pastor's grandson. His hands were clammy. "Got a little emotional, that's all." Giving a cursory bow to the Marzyciels, he scurried after his Mom, Callan in tow. Nolan and Jacob's eyes met for a brief moment, before he snapped his gaze away, crossing the Church's chamber threshold, ushered inside by the crowd flow.

/

Plenty lined up to read eulogies about Pastor Marzyciel. Less came to his cremation.

Nolan watched the flames tentatively licked across intertwining stems and leaves doused in gasoline, before it opened its jaws and engulfed it all.

The smell of burnt vegetables and roots wafted across the Church's ground. Pastor Marzyciel's body blackened and charred, crimping like the flowers he was surrounded by. The abundant condolence wreaths piling and crowning the Pastor at the coffin's center like a terrible, ironic joke. The regal man who was supposed to be larger than life was now rendered naked and motionless, his corpse whose skin stretched and swelled from bulging potatoes and carrots underneath his flesh — their green sprouts sticking out of his gaping pores.