MARRIAGE WAS EVERY WOMAN’S end game. From the time she slid wet and screaming from the warm, tearing doorway of her mother into her father’s waiting arms, every woman was preparing to be a wife.

Claire never learned any different. She spent her time between birth and marriage practicing. She learned how to cook, to clean, to mend, and to bake. She learned how to do it faster, better, longer. She learned how to do it with a smile and a promise that she would learn how to do it all faster still and better still, and longer still, than all the other wives.

The rope appeared like a leash the first time Mark said the word wife.

The rope was not metaphorical.

It was their wedding night, during their first act of consummation. The wet fibrous strand pushed through his teeth and past his tongue. It was slick with saliva and something even more viscous from the depths of his gut. It danced in the air like a charmed snake, dripping sticky red fluid over the swell of her breasts and the flat of her stomach.

The rope, thick as her husband’s wrist and smelling like soured sweat, wrapped around her throat first, then her chest, then her waist.

She wasn’t afraid. As a woman, she was prepared for it. Her mother had told her, this would happen. When you became a wife, your husband would bond with you this way, knotting himself together with you permanently.

Her father had even shown her how it would happen. His ropes had been lesser, however, looser. He only wanted to teach her, not to claim her for himself.

She knew it was coming, so she didn’t scream, not even when the tiny filaments of the larger rope sank into her skin. Those small fibers bored and burned their way inside, unlubricated until her tortured pores wept blood to ease their entry. She could feel them inside, threading themselves, fusing between meat and bone. She felt their process as they weaved around her ribs, tying all of her organs together in one continuous loop.

As the fibers began to cinch tight and grow inside her, the detonation of pain was clarifying.

I don’t want this!

This alien thought, the first time she had ever let it surface, surprised her as much as the physical discomfort. She knew what it meant to be a wife, and with simple lucidity, she also knew she didn’t want that for herself.

She clawed at the ropes. She clawed at her husband. She clawed at herself.

She peeled her skin back in ribbons until the blood flowed fresh, and felt the truth inside. But she had found her courage too late. Her husband had completely infiltrated her body, every inch of her insides braided tight with the cording of his flesh.

She was no longer herself, but an extension of him. Nothing her parents had taught her had prepared her for the erasure of her essence.

She screamed.

Mark gagged and choked out more ropes, which headed directly for her open mouth, claiming the one thing he had not already taken. Her voice.

The next morning the ropes were gone. All that remained, at least visibly, was the leash around her neck. But the woven fibers remained buried within her, keeping her soul in check.

Afterward, Mark wept. He apologized, promising to be better. Her mother told her he would. All men told that lie afterward. They never kept the promise, but still, she would learn to love him for better or for worse, in keeping with her vows.

The ropes tightened, and Mark took her away.

***

Their new house came with a white fence and a bedroom that reeked of resignation.

Claire unpacked slowly, folding her old life into new drawers, finding ways to fit, even if it meant getting rid of things she’d rather keep.

The community brochure claimed “traditional values” in cheerful serif font. Her husband, Mark, said it meant the neighborhood was quiet and safe. She smiled softly, pressing her lips closed.

At night, she dreamed of rope.

Thick cords protruded from her like exposed ribs. They knotted her into the walls and ceilings of the bedroom. They held her even tighter than the rings around her finger or the leash around her neck.

She awoke drenched in sweat and needing to pee, but she was pinned to the bed by Mark’s heavy arm across her chest. His limb felt weighted down by an anchor, pulling her under water, drowning her.

“You’re grinding your teeth in your sleep,” he said at breakfast. “You’ll ruin your smile. You should be happy… you’re finally where you wanted to be.”

She hadn’t wanted any of this.

***

Claire met Rowan at the grocery store, when they both reached for the same bruised peach in the discount bin.

Rowan had inked arms, a swollen, busted lip, and a laugh that rebounded obscenely off the dim walls of the building.

“You look like you’re choking,” Rowan said, gently fingering the hanging end of Mark’s rope.

“On air,” Claire added. They were her words, but her eyes communicated something else: it wasn’t the air that was killing her.

First, they became friends. When they talked over coffee or during brunch, the conversations went on just a little too long. When Rowan touched her wrist, Claire felt something unspool inside her chest, a loosening she hadn’t known possible. One gentle gesture, and she wanted more.

Inside her, Mark’s rope began to fray.

The town watched them, and Claire watched the town.

The church signs and PTA smiles never wavered; neither did the tilt of neighbors’ heads when Rowan walked past, as if assessing her and finding her wanting.

Mark noticed changes in his wife. As her body grew more restless, her voice grew clipped, sharpened. The part of him that lived inside of her was repulsed by a nameless new desire. After talking with the other husbands, Mark sat across from her at the table, confident in his knowledge of her problem.

“You’re embarrassing me,” he said. “You used to be softer.”

He forbade her from seeing Rowan again.

That night she bled in the shower.

Threads poked out from her pores, waving, like worms thirsty for the hot spray of the water. They often came out like this when she was naked and vulnerable, but never this many.

She pinched a fiber with her fingernails, yanked it free, and let it go

The blood began as a trickle, a pink rivulet almost invisible through the steam, washed away by the pulsing water. But as the heat of the shower coaxed the ravaged pore open, the blood bubbled out thicker, bolder. Water slapped against her skin and ran rust-red down her thighs, collecting in the shallow dip of the drain. It clotted and clogged there, the frayed strand she pulled loose nestling within a clump of hair and soap scum.

The hole it left behind didn’t close. She plucked another, and more blood eagerly followed it, splattering against the tile. She watched this unfold with a strange calm. Those two had already been loose. Some wouldn’t be that easy.

She continued to pluck rope fibers from her skin like stray hairs. Some came loose without protest, others were more stubborn. Yet more refused to come free at all, and she had to work at them. When the recalcitrant fibers were pulled hard enough, her skin dimpled, then split in a clean line, straight as if drawn with a ruler. These cuts would be impossible to conceal, but she decided she didn’t want to hide her wounds.

She would display them with pride.

She laughed, once, a barking, hysterical guffaw that escaped her lips and bounced off the porcelain before she could stop it. Mark knocked on the door to ask if she was okay, and the rope shuddered inside her. The neat lacerations opened wide and showed her what was underneath. Her own meat, dark and slick, infested throughout with more cord.

Claire kept pulling.

The remaining strings tried to retreat back into her body, so she chased them. Her fingers dug into the fresh crevasse, and she heard and felt little pops as connective tissue gave way. She grabbed one strand that triggered a tug deep in her belly, causing her knees to buckle.

Her body, more rope than hope, more him than her, punished her for these transgressions. Skin tore and blood sprayed the shower curtain in fine arcs. Her footing grew treacherous as clots and fibers blocked the drain entirely. Blood lapped at her ankles.

Still, she didn’t stop.

She pried herself open wider. Her hands disappeared inside her flesh, wrist-deep, knuckles grinding against bones that flexed and complained. She grabbed a fistful of rope and pulled, meaning to unmake a knot that had been cinched for generations.

The rope came out in bunches, suddenly. It was slick, heavy, and warm from where it had been living. It spilled into the bloody water in a snarled heap, slithering and looping over itself. It drank her blood from the shower floor, the fibers darkened until they were no longer Mark’s careful brown but something closer to rot. Now outside her body, seeking the sustenance it was being denied, the rope sucked what was hers from the shower floor until the pooling water rippled clear.

Her body didn’t like being emptied.

It clung to the rope still rooted inside, even as the remaining strands within her tightened.

“No,” she said through gritted teeth, and tore another length free.

By the time the water ran cold, the shower resembled a slaughterhouse. The exposed rope lay slack, dying, no longer able to reabsorb her leaking fluids as she bled. Claire stood shaking in the middle of the carnage, wrapping a thick cord of rope around her hand once, twice, three times, before pulling until something inside her screamed and let go.

She yanked it free and dropped it, staring at the pile mounded at the shower drain. It reminded her of a mass of tangled necklace chain or a knot of Christmas lights. Still there was more rope, more ends dangling from her battered skin. Exhausted, Claire knew she would not be able to extract it all on her own, no matter how much she pulled.

She ran.

She bled across manicured lawns, rope ends dragging behind her like entrails. Where she passed, curtains twitched and doors locked. The neighbors were not going to help her. Someone called the police and described her as a woman unhinged. She expected Mark to appear any moment, to reel her back in with the strands of himself leaking from her.

Claire collapsed behind the bar where Rowan worked nights. When Rowan emerged to find Claire, slumped in the darkened alley, she didn’t flinch at the bloodied ropes hanging from Claire’s body. Instead, she knelt on the ground next to Claire, as if the blood and rope were nothing more than spilled beer and broken glass, something she’d cleaned up before and would clean up again, as often as necessary. She reached into her shirt and revealed a chain that hung around her neck. At the end of the chain was a sheath, from which she freed a knife. It was small, nicked along the edge, the kind of blade that opened boxes and cut limes and was never once meant for surgery or salvation.

Rowan didn’t ask permission, she just cut.

The sensation rattled through Claire’s teeth and down her spine, the rope screaming through her bones.

When the blade bit, the rope tightened reflexively, hauling Claire’s shoulders back hard enough that something popped wetly inside her chest.

Claire pressed her lips together, refusing to cry out. Rowan didn’t pull away either. She cut again.

The diminutive blade sawed through fiber and flesh. There would be no clean separation. The rope frayed at first, then disintegrated into gristly-wet strands that writhed and pulsed and struggled to burrow back into Claire’s muscle, even as they were torn loose.

Rowan hacked through them, hands and arms slick with Claire’s blood. Each cut freed something and destroyed something else, at once hurting and healing.

Claire felt herself opening wide, her body being rent apart by hands that refused to stop. And she didn’t want them to.

Rowan leaned closer, bracing Claire against her shoulder as she cut. Her cheek pressed briefly against Claire’s temple, skin on skin, electric.

Claire’s eyes fluttered. She felt herself slipping away. Easier to give in. Sleep would come and it would all have been a dream. She would wake up with Mark’s arm pinning her down, his ropes binding her tight.

“Stay,” Rowan murmured. “Stay with me.”

Claire stayed. Even as her ribs began to creak, then crack, she stayed. Even as her chest split wider, sternum bowing outward, she stayed.

When Claire’s chest was opened and her heart lay exposed, Rowan cut faster, the urgency of her movements sharper than her blade. The rope had gathered there, galvanizing, tightening around Claire’s heart, constricting in an attempt to pull the house back into order. Claire’s breath hitched. Her vision dimmed. Rowan dropped the knife, grabbed the rope with both hands, and tore with all her might.

The rope continued to fight. It burned Rowan’s palms raw. It dragged her forward, skinning her knees. But Rowan kept pulling, screaming wordlessly as the rope finally gave.

Claire’s body opened like a confession, expelling every lie fed to her by her mother, her father, her husband.

For the first time since her wedding night, Claire screamed, and rope burst out of her mouth. She didn’t gag, like Mark had when he forced the rope into her. There was no room left in her throat for a gag to escape. Her mouth tore wider at the corners. Her jaw wrenched loose with a sickening crack.

Everything vile that had been packed so tightly inside her came pouring out: the rope, her blood, blackened knots of belief and obedience, strands slick with Mark’s voice and her parents’ lessons, the silence made solid every time she’d pressed her lips into a wifely smile. It spilled out in an endless stinking mass, until Claire was empty.

Mark’s fibers were brown, and with Claire’s blood soaked into them, red. The mysterious mass that knotted itself together—the threads, the cords, the braids, the oppression, the hate, the disgust, all forming Mark’s perfect wife—lay in a solid black heap on the ground before Rowan and Claire.

Claire tried to stand, but sagged forward, boneless and empty.

Rowan caught her. She held Claire together with hands pressed against ruined flesh, not trying to fix what was broken, just refusing to let her fall apart. Rowan’s hands shook; her voice didn’t. “You’re you,” she said.

They burned the rope-wife and all its remnants together.

Claire sobbed into Rowan’s shoulder until there was nothing left of the false woman. Rowan’s hands held, steady and safe and most importantly, accepting, not asking her to fit into any mold.

When Rowan finally lifted the leash from Claire’s neck, it slid free without resistance.

***

Mark came for her two nights later.

By then, the rope that remained in him was decaying. It had burst from his eyes, his nose, splitting his skin into unruly seams. He moved like a marionette, joints yanked into place by a system he could no longer control.

“You belong to me,” he tried to say.

His words were only halfway out when his voice collapsed and his throat, soft with bloat, sloughed inward as the rotten fibers gave way. His mouth puckered, shrinking, lips pulling tight over teeth that loosened and sank back into his gums.

Claire didn’t move.

She watched as his chest caved.

Her body had expanded when she expelled the rope, but Mark, he imploded. His ribs folded inward one by one in dull, meaty pops. His collapsing lungs burst like blackened fruit. Air hissed out of him in short whistles.

His stomach went next. It drew in on itself, as if something inside were drinking him dry. Brown fluid seeped from his navel, thickening and clotting as it hit the floor. His spine kinked sharply, vertebrae snapping forward as what was left of his rope reeled him in, shortening him inch by inch.

He dropped to his knees and tried to reach for her.

Skin and muscle fell away from bone in limp sheets. His fingers curled inward, shrinking, nails cracking, popping loose and fluttering to the floor as his hands tightened into useless little knots.

One frantic rope, no thicker than string, crawled weakly from what was left of Mark’s torso.

Claire stepped forward. She took the rope and tugged it gently.

That was all it took.

When it was over, only a small shapeless pile remained, no indication that it had once been a man.

Claire shook with rage and fear, and with a surprising sense of a loss she hadn’t expected to feel.

Rowan took her hand. Both women bore scars now that would never fade, and held one another with hands that would never feel clean. But it was worth the price.

The community called what happened an avoidable accident. To them, it was a tragic story of a man who worked too hard and a wife who didn’t love hard enough.

Claire felt the community’s disdain, but it didn’t matter.

She had Rowan now, and the knowledge that she could unmake anything that sought to cage her.

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