By Cor de Wulf
Following Phaebea out onto the ice plant, Flake carries the empty canning jar she has put in his care. Its lid glints with afternoon light as they move along the quarry-stone wall built in an attempt to slow the sand’s relentless advances on their saltbox house tucked between the North Sea’s grey dunes.
Flake is listless today, awakened again by another of Jens and Phaebea’s late-night quarrels—hushed assaults that he doesn’t understand Phaebea has come to believe are her lot and, perversely, her privilege. Emboldened by her worsening state, Phaebea has taken to force-feeding Jens his shame of her, to proving to him that he is the architect of her deterioration. She has taken to rubbing his nose in just how vicious he has become with the insidious loathing he’s adopted from an ever-growing caucus of aggrieved zealots cropping up among colleagues and neighbors.
Flake knows none of this, nor that Jens has recently come to a decision: he will no longer suffer Phaebea’s accusations in exchange for the cold comfort of never speaking of the thing that’s poisoned their marriage. Jens will no longer indulge her appeals for him to justify the vile dogma now wedged between them, driving them—and, suddenly, the world—towards an inexorable precipice. Jens has decided that Phaebea needs treatment, a regimen he intends to take a strong hand in prescribing.
Flake also has no idea of Phaebea’s chance discovery of an aversion Jens has until recently managed to keep from her, a terror she never imagined plaguing her husband. But his is a phobia of such unexpectedly luminous proportions, she sees it as a gift—a stroke of caprice, of serendipity.
So, to make the most of it, she has planned a lavish meal at which she has assured Jens’s attendance with the promise of a rare spread of sumptuous delights. And, to further entice him, she has gone so far as to hint at more decadent indulgences to follow. Despite his contempt for her, she can still tempt him, a price small enough to ensure his presence at her singular feast. It is a means made bearable by its glorious end: her pitiless Jens swiftly humbled, as humiliated as she; more importantly, the sight of his irrational fear burned indelibly into his adoring son’s consciousness.
Motioning him to her side, Phaebea calls to Flake by her favorite endearment—her Dutch diminutive for his proper name, Falco. He is to her, after all, perfect as a snowflake.
“Come, Vlokje. Father will be home soon.”
Smiling down at her beautiful boy—pale as bone china, eyes like spring water—she takes the jar from his small pink hands. Removing the lid, she uses it to scoop into the jar something suspended in a crevice between the stones. Replacing the lid, she hands the jar back to Flake, introducing him to her special evening’s guest of honor.
Magnified by the curve of the jar, Flake is beguiled by her. The largest of any he has watched feed from their webbed snares, her curves are supple, the red hourglass flirting from her underside, a majestic leg stroking his palm from inside the jar. Escorted by Flake to the table Phaebea has prepared for her coming out, she is warm and content in her glass cocoon. But by the time the sun drops behind the dunes, with Phaebea’s extravagant meal laid out before her and Jens, she will be ravenous.
As the unexpected guest at his homecoming—an ingénue darting between the candles, polished flatware, and the crisp white linen that will complete Phaebea’s exquisite table—she will be eager to present herself to the unsuspecting Jens. And, when she feels the tingle of his dread and adrenaline thrum across her abdomen, she will be all the more eager to flaunt her every savage charm.
Following Flake and his charge back across the ice plant, Phaebea reaches out to tousle her pale boy’s sun-white hair, humming serenely, pleased with her son’s fascination with their visitor’s beauty. Drifting in a kind of delirium, she counts the seconds of the glacial hour before Jens’s return, picturing the surprise on his face when he first takes in the elegant table set for him—still unaware of the guest with whom she means him to share it, and of everything else to come after.
* * *
Cor de Wulf divides their life between the Pacific Northwest, Normandy, and the Zuid-Limburg region of the Netherlands. Their short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Club Plum, Coffin Bell Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, The Writing Disorder, Every Day Fiction, Ink in Thirds, and Blood Tree Literature. Their work has also recently been nominated by editors to the Best of the Net 2025 Anthology.