Short Story Orgy #6 is 'Dissolved Girl', from the newest addition to the OL fam, Lilly Pemberton. We first met Lilly at the Wolverhampton LitFest (we will shamelessly recruit from anywhere) where she read an excerpt from 'Dissolved Girl', wow! The LitFest reading was in equal thirds chilling, riveting, spellbinding. Not bad for a wet afternoon in Wolverhampton. We're totally thrilled then, to have the opportunity to publish the whole of 'Dissolved Girl' here.
DISSOLVED GIRL
The girl in my boot looked like an angel.
Even in death, she was no less beautiful. Her body curled within itself, like a fawn would as it slept. Pallor mortis had rendered her skin gaunt and brittle, her complexion a soft lily-white, an undercurrent of parasitic blue tainting the once lively pink of her blush. Round, pliant cheeks and her sweet buttoned nose and her ajar lips slightly cracked made up her permanent expression of gentle betrayal and disbelief. Her eyes, I had found, were awfully doe like; blown brown irises, glassy and vacant, frozen and upturned, as if she were imploring the heavens themselves to open and pull her from the coffin of my car. I stared blankly. Foolish girl. There is no such thing, not here.
Shakily, I allowed myself the momentary sin to look further, to reach out and to touch. Latticed lace lined her skin, dipping along the curve of her breast line and the hills of her thighs, flowers and swirls that sauntered along, provoking me. My index’s fingertip trailed against the hypnotising spirals, my throat constricting. I wanted to touch her further, longer, firmer. I wished I could feel her everywhere. The nitrile gloves I stole from the laboratory was a gorgeous dichotomy against her skin, but I yearned to yank those bloodied gloves off, to feel the bare flesh of my hands splay on the swell of her freckled knee without restraint, to creep along the inner workings and soft seams of her form, up, up, up… What kinds of sounds could those lips make? I took the pleasure to wonder; a wisp of a breath, heady yet soft, some gasp, sharp and jagged in the air, a purr of my name, her voice calling me, wanting me, begging me.
Explosions yanked me from my reverie, and my crimson palms faced skyward, as if on their own, they began to invent prayer. Gloucestershire University was set alight; against the carbon darkness, tendrils of colour exploded in stark greens and reds and gold, fizzling out before more came, the light just obscured by the peaked summits of Fullwood House. Cacophonies of bustling excitement, of bad decisions and drunken stupors layered themselves against thumping music and crackling bonfires. All of it crescendoed into an orchestrated chaos.
It all seemed a lifetime away from me.
A knife to the jugular, puncturing the brachiocephalic vein left a victim with approximately fifteen seconds maximum until death; combined with a deep puncture to the solar plexus meant a one hundred percent, agonising but quick fatality. There was little a paramedic could do to even save a victim with a wound like that. She died in exactly thirteen seconds. The girl couldn’t scream. Blood clogged her esophagus so thickly that there was only a gurgling sound, like how rainfall splatters in the guttering. My eyes glared back down to the boot of my car to the corpse, with her nightgown, off white like discoloured teeth, soaked in blood, a long ripped slit of the fabric missing from thigh to waist, the scent of her irritating like iodine. She spent her last seconds with her lips trying to say words that her throat could no longer form, her last seconds staring up at my cold expression, my unfeeling eyes, the knife I held high glinting in the slip of moonlight, her last seconds wondering what she did to deserve this.
It isn’t your job to ask questions like that, you just do what you're told, and everything will go smoothly.
The boot of the car slammed shut as I jerked my hand from her skin as if it burned me. Momentary pleasure is futile.
The chaos outside muffled once I sat rigid behind the steering wheel. With my teeth I tore off the black gloves, yanked open the glovebox beneath the dashboard.
Strips of torn fabric tumbled out, lace and cotton and silk, thick rectangles of corduroy, of polyester and linen. Pinks the soft colour of tongues, crimsons of arteries, whites of bones, all bundled together like crochet yarn. Their edges were frayed, capillaries of cotton sticking out of the hems, jagged. My hand pulled out another strip from my trouser pocket; off white, lace flowers and spirals taunting me. I held it out in front of me as if it were some dissected specimen, my thumb curiously sliding across the hatchings, gentle and thoughtful, until I bundled it tight in my fist, stuffing it against my nostrils. Copper and lavender, clean, recently washed with some cheap laundry detergent. Pheromones. Sweat. My shoulders went lax before I sat up rigid again, stuffing the fabric in the glovebox with the rest, pushing a new pair of gloves on and pulling out of the evergreen’s behind Fullwood House.
The university became a pharmaceutical nightmare, as it always did on Bonfire Night. It seemed tradition for it to be so. Slowly I traversed the labyrinthine expedition to get out onto the main roads, paranoid as scatterings of people weaved on and off the gravel pathway, stumbling around like headless ants to a broken colony, red cups in hands, vomiting on the pavement, hiding behind trees, tongues and lips and spit spattering, hands groping, hips jutting. Everyone was high, drunk or both, and all of them seemed to have lost their common decency too. I could have dragged someone by the hair back to my car and none of them would have been none the wiser. I was half tempted to. The noise outside was muffled by both the car and the blood pounding in my ears, explosions outside mere knocks against the wall of the sky. Bare of leaves, the veins of trees gnarled downwards at their ends and obscured the fireworks’ colours. I found myself cowering a little in my seat. They loomed, those great big hands coming down as if they were snatching at me, their aged indexes curling towards me as if they bore witness to the sacrifice – it is sacrifice, never murder – I had taken.
I was so engulfed in the sight that I barely had time to slam the brakes.
Some boy stumbled against the hood, my gloved fingers clutching the wheel as I found myself panting. He grinned as if he were proud of himself, sauntering over to tap my window.
It came natural to me, how quickly I could change; the etched stoned marble of my tense expression softened into a lazy smirk as I rolled down the window.
“Be careful where you’re walking there,” I teased, the sultry lulling of my voice completely unnatural on my tongue.
He swayed, clutching onto the car door for stability he so desperately seemed to need.
“Sorry,” he slurred out.
His sclerae were lined with lightning bolts of red, pupils blown so wide his irises were no longer visible, upper eyelids sagged and body euphorically disoriented. Blonde hair that must have been charming to someone looked windswept, as if the fingers of gale had come and pulled at the roots, tousled his clothes. He was high, that was for certain, but the cockiness seemed to come natural to him. I schooled the aggravation that threatened to spill over with a charmed laugh.
“You always jump in front of vehicles for someone’s attention?” I goaded. “Because it worked like a charm.”
I received a slow shake of his head in return.
“Just you, baby. Just you,” he crooned. The flirtation made me sick. “See, those flowers are f’me, ain’t they?”
His hand reached through and pointed at the passenger seat. My head turned to follow his fingertip.
I stared at them, propped up on the passenger seat. They arrived on my flat doorstep whilst I was halfway through my Pathophysiology assignment that mid afternoon. Those bright yellow things which I later learned were forsythia’s, a whole group wrapped in a week old newspaper, headlines in that tauntingly bold, concrete font: ‘Third Time’s the Harm! Third Body Found in Rural Gloucestershire: Possible Serial Killer Suspected.’ They were a provocation, a reminder of who I was turning out to be. Remember the greater good, remember how you’ll be rewarded when the time comes. The card hidden in the petals poked out.
Cate Heath.
51.869237 / -2.261188
Latitudes and longitudes. North, east, south, west. I had learnt quickly not to think in addresses, or places, or directions. Every thought that occupied my head was numerical. I relied on codes, on coordinates, on directions that may as well have been morse code scribbled on cafe napkins, through muttered breaths through random payphones, through texts with numbers that would magically cease to exist a day later. I found myself devoted to a God with no name, a religion with no tangible scripture, a faith with no hymns or gospels to sing. Your body is your place of worship, your mind the pulpit. Invent your own prayer, but don’t stray too far. Remember what your purpose is: salvation.
I turned back with a grin that didn’t quite reach my eyes.
“No, they’re not for you sweetheart,” I drawled. “But if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
He responded with only an amused laugh.
“Maybe next time?” He offered.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
My forehead rested against the handle of the shovel, breath jagged in uneven bouts.
It took me an hour to dig her grave. By no means did I lack upper body strength, but the dirt beneath the shovel was stubborn with a sleek, glazed layer of frost. But nothing good comes without a testament of faith, not without trial. Blood, sweat and tears.
The coordinates led me to Alney island Nature Reserve, a thirty minute drive on pebbled paths, notched and serrated. Baritone hums of the November air along with my heavy breath broke through the soundless, lifeless glade. There were no fireworks, no evidence of excitement, no ditzy, intoxicated creatures leaping in front of my car, just pews and pews of trees. The eerie stillness seeped into the marrow of my bones, concocting with another deep seated feeling; whether it were of anxiety or excitement, I could not differentiate, not until I held her body again in my arms.
Like a groom would to his bride, I held her against my chest, one hand on the underside of her knees, the other tangled in her tresses, her face pushed against my neck, as if to obscure her from the view of her unceremonious grave. What would her eulogy be, if I had been kind enough to give her one? Cate Heath, noble sacrifice, I thought as I lowered her down, as far as I could before I let the body fall into its pit.
Autolysis is the self digestion of the body, the molecular cannibalism which occurs when blood circulation stops and excess carbon dioxide creates an acidic environment where the membranes rupture, releasing enzymes that consume cells from the inside out. Then follows rigor mortis, bloating, active decay and so on. The process is quicker for the forsythia’s I buried her with. It was safe to say though, as the soil piled back atop the gaping hole, that by the time the fireworks fell and the December festivities hung against Gloucestershire’s shoulders like tinsel, Cate Heath’s angelic beauty even in death would be no more.
© 2025 Lilly Pemberton
Essential Information
Main image: supplied by the author
