The following is an excerpt from Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill. She is a writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her spouse and three children and has had her writing appear in Strange Horizons, Vastarien, ergot., PANK, and multiple award-winning anthologies. This is her first novel.
Wife Shaped Bodies is about an isolated young bride, raised under rigid rules and covered in fungal growths, who begins to unravel both her body and her beliefs after entering a controlling marriage. As she forms a dangerous connection with another woman, she uncovers buried truths about her community and confronts her own autonomy, desire, and transformation. It is now available from Saga Press.
CHAPTER ONE
The night before my wedding, my mom shaves off my growths. I climb into our cooking tub and undress. An expression somewhere between pride and fear passes over my mom’s face as she stands beside the tub, razor in hand. Then she leans over and begins.
It takes hours. She starts at the creamy-orange shrubbery of my shin. Works her way up the woody folds coating my knees. Slices into the overlapping tangles at my thighs. My hip growths are moist enough that they splatter when they hit the porcelain at my feet.
She skips over the complicated masses at my torso. She’ll do those last. I extend my neck so she can get the razor into the doughy polyps at my nape. I lean back and expose my throat so she can slice away the leathery kernels at my jugular, the fingerlike nubs cresting over my sternum, and the beads along my jawline, like an extra row of teeth that sharpens to incisors at my chin.
“It won’t take so long next time,” my mom says in a soothing voice.
I’m silent as all of this comes off me, as I am cut down to the size and shape of a wife. I watch my clippings roll into the drain in slippery trails, gathering streaks of ash.
As I lose more of my body, I lose track of time. I close my eyes and steel my jaw each time the razor cuts in. It doesn’t hurt, not exactly. But it’s something like pain.
“I don’t feel good.” I put my hand on the edge of the tub to steady myself. My body revolts. I want to throw up.
“I’m almost done, and then you can lie down.” Mom pats her gloved hand between my shoulder blades, on my spine, which she has just cleaned of its downy spurs. She whispers, “It’s okay. You’ll get used to it.” That’s the last thing I hear her say clearly.
She helps me out of the tub and dresses me gingerly. I am too aware of my new, raw body. I am ungainly as she puts me to bed.
I lie motionless and stare at the ceiling and spin and spin. I fall into a tunnel of blackness from a great height, no room to remember before I hit the bottom.
CHAPTER TWO
On the morning of my wedding, I wake to the sound of a woman weeping.
At first, I think it must be an effect of the shaving. That from now on, I will always wake to this sound. But even after I blink away my more persistent dreams, I keep hearing it coming from inside the house. Coming from my mom’s bedroom.
I roll out of bed and open my bedroom door and walk down the hall. My heart pounds, disturbing the rashy stubble on my chest. With less of me, the blood is confused. I hear the whoosh of it in my ears. As my pulse quickens, more of my skin flushes with itch and pain. I totter, can’t find my balance. My breath hisses fast through my teeth. A heaviness builds in my chest as I get closer to the keening. Part of me wants to hurry. Part of me wants to shut myself up in the closet and go back to sleep and never see what’s waiting for me. I stop between the sawed-off braids hanging on the wall. I stare at their ragged ends as I catch my breath.
I push open my mom’s door. The usual smell of mildew hits me. Then another, like the ointment Mom gives me to put on my lips when they’re dry. It’s so strong that I can taste it, bitter and flaky.
Wearing just a sheer nightgown, Mom lies on her bed, her hair fanned out around her. Luminescence spreads over her pillow and the top of her blankets. My throat aches as I swallow. Every day of my life, I wake up knowing that this is a possibility. And here, it’s finally come.
Except for my mother, the room is dark. A gash of sunlight perforates the drawn curtains, slicing the room in half. Mom’s eyes are closed, her breathing is labored and fragmented.
I’m surprised to see my older sister, Maggie. She sits cross-legged on the floor, beside the mattress. She lifts her face, misshapen and swollen from crying. “Look who finally decided to grace us with her presence.” Her eyes may be dull with grief, but her mouth is as acidic as ever.
Her daughter, Eloise, sits sobbing beside her, just out of reach. “Mom?” I step into the room, cross the slice of sunlight. I reach out, ready to fall onto the mattress beside her.
Maggie grabs the neck of my shirt and yanks me back. “Don’t touch her, you idiot.”
“I’m wearing gloves.” I snatch my shirt out of her hands. She’s right, though; it’s dangerous. Gloves fall apart too easily at the seams. My mom doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge that I’m in the room. “What does this mean?” My voice sounds high and childlike.
Maggie says, “Shut the door, Nicole.”
My first instinct is to balk at any of Maggie’s commands, but I close the door quietly. The longer Reese doesn’t know, the better.
Several flies, fat and clumsy and pregnant, circle around the room, bumping into walls and faces. They won’t settle. They are hot and confused and too heavy with young to cling to the lace curtains, and there’s nothing else in the room but the mattress, a dresser, and a single, mildew-warped picture of Reese and his first wife on the wall.
I sit next to Eloise. I can’t remember how old my niece is. I’ve seen her out in the street, but she’s never been inside the house before. She’s tall enough to reach my chest when she stands, but right now, hunched over her folded legs, she looks smaller than that. Her eyes are wet and needy. I’m always shy around her. When she comes to the window, she never talks, but always looks like she expects something from me, and I never know what to do. Not knowing what I should do to help, and unable to swallow down the tightness in my throat, I look away.
Heat collects like a wet rope around my neck. The humidity is awful in this shut-up room. This side of the house faces the sun, and the day is gathering strength. I wipe my forehead with the heel of my glove. It comes away slippery with mucous, leftovers from the egg-shaped lumps that used to grow there.
“What happened?” I ask.
Mom blinks slowly. I sit up higher, ready to go to her. Did she hear me?
Mom keeps silent. I force myself to slouch back down.
She’ll say something when she’s ready.
Maggie says, “What does it look like? Fell on a lantern. I found her like this.”
“You came over?” I frown. My mind is whirring. “In the morning, while Reese is here?”
“I had a dream. A feeling things weren’t right.” Her eyes slide over to me in condemnation. I slept in. I wasn’t in tune enough with Mom to know that she was in trouble, even while living in the same house. She looks away. “Also, I brought your outfit.”
“Outfit?”
“Your bridal outfit. From your husband’s house. He picked them out.” She gestures to a T-shirt and a pair of jeans sloppily thrown at the foot of my mom’s bed.
I close my eyes. I’m going to lose my mom. I was prepared to lose her today, but not like this. I open my eyes and try to soak her in. The landscape of her fungus, grown overnight, pokes into the threadbare fabric of her nightgown. Caps and puffballs and branches bulge and swell against the holes in the lace. Through the sheer fabric, I can see dim streaks against her glowing flesh, like someone has dragged their fingertips against her thin body. Abrasions discolor her chest and obscure her new glow, as always happens with lantern fungus. The touch of it bruises women from the inside, chews away at their ribs and bones until they break.
“Where’s the lantern?” I stand up halfway. My voice rises in panic. “We aren’t sitting in it, are we?”
Mom gasps, and her eyes open. Our heads jerk toward her. “Mom?” we say in unison.
It’s more of a choking gurgle than words, but I can just make out, “Get him.”
She’s not looking at me, not looking at Maggie. Just at the ceiling.
“No, Mom, no,” says Maggie. Her voice breaks under the strain of trying to sound firm.
Each of my mom’s words is deformed, altered as if she’s speaking around knots in her throat, but she manages to say, “I lived under him, I’ll die under him. He’s my fate.”
“No,” says Maggie. “I won’t do it.” Her hand darts out and pins Eloise’s knee down. “Eloise, stay.”
Eloise shows no intention of obeying her grandma, whom she barely knows. She grips the carpet with her fists, her body tense, like she’s about to bolt out the door.
Mom’s eyes widen, and she makes a pathetic, muffled sound. “Get him,” she pleads again.
Her weak panic tugs at my heart. She’s afraid and in pain. I stare at her, willing her to stand up, to ask for tea, for a wet washcloth, to tell me to get dressed. My need unfocuses my eyes. She becomes a swarm of bees, a tangled rat’s nest, a field of dried grass. I blink. She becomes my mother again, suffering. I stand up. An obedient daughter to the bitter end, I guess.
As I go, Maggie cries, “Nicole, come back here.”
I whirl around. “Do you want Mom to beg on her deathbed?” Maggie’s eyes are sickles, cleaving into mine. Before she can let out whatever evil is in her mind, I turn away. “You can’t control everything, Maggie.”
When I walk down the hall, I expect her fist to take me from behind. Expect, and a little bit hope. She doesn’t chase me, though. As I peek into each of the rooms, I consider how to break the news to Reese gently. I dredge through words, trying to pick the ones that would be least likely to direct the blame toward me. I knock on his door and swallow hard. Silence. Only the belief that he’s not in there gives me the courage to open it.
He’s sitting on his bed, face drawn, and I see that he already knows.
“She’s ready,” I say quietly.
His eyes are rimmed with sleeplessness. I wonder how long he’s been awake.
A luciferin lantern lies at his feet, smashed. Strewn across the carpet lie shards of glass and sticks and the bioluminescent fungus that makes the lantern glow. It was in Reese’s room where Mom fell on the lantern, touching the fungus, meeting the inevitable.
Reese’s hands lie open in his lap as if they’ve been sitting like that for a long time. “It’s not my fault.”
I don’t look at him. I don’t do anything he can interpret as accusing.
He gets up from the bed. I stand aside and bow my head. He lumbers through the doorway, his head lowered as if his top half is too heavy to hold upright, as if he’s about to tilt forward and walk on all fours like a beast.
I follow him at a distance down the hall, but I don’t enter my mom’s bedroom. Through the open door, I can see the dresser and the window, but not the mattress where my mom lies. Reese passes through the slash of light, then out of sight.
“Come on, Eloise,” I call out. I don’t want her to see.
She runs out of the room like she’d been waiting for someone to give her permission. She darts past me, stops at the end of the hall, and turns to stare. Far enough from this soldier of Death, but not too far from me or her mom. Maggie lingers in the room, eyeing Reese like she’s going to push him out with her speckled, meaty hands. Of course, she won’t. You can’t just shove a man around, even to save your mother.
“I have to collect Mom’s things,” she says.
It’s not clear who Maggie’s talking to, but she walks to the dresser in the corner and rifles through the drawers, pointedly not looking at Reese or the bed. I can’t believe she has the audacity to be in there right now. She goes through Mom’s personal items, taking out a couple of stones and a dried flower, a daisy chain I made for her a week ago. She stacks the fairytale book on top of the one with the Greek myths, the only two books I grew up with. But Maggie can’t take them, and I can’t. We have to leave behind anything that will be useful to Reese’s next wife, a girl named Rebecca with the same strong jaw and gap between her two front teeth as my mom. She’s been living in a house three doors down with her mother and younger sister, waiting her whole life for Mom to die.
Maggie is stalling, but there’s no point. Reese might as well be a storm. Weather doesn’t listen to reason, or people.
Eloise is watching me, her long sleeves pulled up over her mouth, her eyelashes just cresting over her arms. She watches me while I watch Maggie. Mom murmurs something to Reese I don’t catch. Reese doesn’t answer. There’s a whine and an awful choking noise. The sound of too much weight on a mattress, floorboards straining. Toward the end, Maggie looks up. I see on her face when Mom is gone, and Eloise sees it on mine. In this way, Mom’s death passes through us, a chain of grief, the shadow of a crow passing overhead.
Excerpted from WIFE SHAPED BODIES by Laura Cranehill. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of Saga Press at Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.