The Gift

Content Warning: Extreme violence, gore, necrophilia, dismemberment, and disturbing fetish content. This is a purely fictional horror story written for the described image prompt. It contains graphic and deeply unsettling material that many people will find highly disturbing or triggering. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
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She had asked for it on the night the first snow fell.
Not in vague, romantic whispers. Not as a metaphor.
In precise, trembling sentences, eyes shining with something beyond love—something closer to religious ecstasy.
“When I’m gone,” she said, curled against his chest in the dark, “I want you to keep the most beautiful parts of me. My head. My feet. The rest… it doesn’t matter. Burn it. Scatter it. I don’t care. But those two pieces—I want them wrapped like presents. Gold ribbon. Brown kraft paper. Delivered to you on the day they finally declare me dead.”
He had laughed at first. A nervous, disbelieving sound.
She hadn’t laughed with him.
She spent the next eleven months planning it with the seriousness of a bride preparing for her wedding. She chose the exact shade of satin ribbon (burnt amber), the texture of paper (heavy 120gsm kraft), even the calligraphy font for the gift tag:
To my only love — forever yours, from the parts that mattered most.
On the last night she was still breathing, she knelt naked in their bathtub while he sharpened the cleaver.
She kissed the blade once, reverently.
Then she guided his trembling hands to her throat.
The cut was surprisingly clean.
Afterward, he worked methodically, the way she had trained him.
Head first—placed gently in the larger box, hair arranged like dark silk over the tissue paper.
Then the feet—small, pale, perfectly arched. She had painted the toenails oxblood red the day before, a final offering.
He tied the bows with shaking fingers.
Left the boxes under the small artificial Christmas tree they never bothered to decorate properly.
Three days later, the coroner released the official death certificate.
He carried both packages upstairs to the bedroom like a groom carrying a bride across the threshold.
He opened the head first.
Her eyes were closed (he had closed them himself), lips slightly parted as though waiting for one last kiss.
The smell was already changing—sweet copper turning toward something darker, heavier.
He didn’t care.
He talked to her while he used the rest of her.
Told her how beautiful she still was.
How perfect the curve of her cheek felt against his palm.
How warm the inside of her mouth still was when he pressed himself between her slack lips.
The feet came later—after he had cried, after he had come, after he had cried again.
He arranged them on the pillow beside him like sleeping lovers.
Sometimes he would press his face between the arches and inhale the faint, fading trace of her lotion.
Sometimes he would slide himself between them, slow and careful, whispering apologies and thank-yous in the same breath.
Months passed.
The smell eventually became impossible to ignore, even with the charcoal filters and the incense and the industrial-strength odor neutralizer.
Winter turned to spring. Spring turned to summer.
The skin changed color. The hair dulled.
But he never stopped seeing her exactly as she had wanted to be seen: perfect, eternal, his alone.
On the first anniversary of her death, he carried both boxes to the old stone fireplace they had never used.
He opened them one last time.
Kissed the cold lips that had once begged for this exact ending.
Pressed his mouth to the insteps that had once walked to him every night.
Then he built the fire.
He fed the rest of her body to the flames first—everything she had called “the unimportant parts.”
Only when the pyre was roaring did he place the head and the feet on top, side by side, like a king and queen being sent into the next world together.
He watched until the fire turned the last recognizable curve of her cheek into glowing bone-white ash.
When the flames finally died, he collected what remained into a small brass urn.
On the lid he engraved, in the same calligraphy she had chosen:
She was exactly what she wanted to be.
And she was mine.
He keeps the urn on the nightstand.
Every night before sleep, he touches it once, very gently.