“And the whole time… All I could think about was you.”
[TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNINGS: discussion of rape & fetishisation of Asian women]
I’m literally on my phone posting this at goth night lmao
This is a story about Annie Nguyen – who’s a full-blown goth by this point – and the goth gal she sees at the supermarket! I’ve decided her name is Erin, and maybe she’s very distantly related to somebody in the original Stepford Wives book, idk who specifically but I put Migliardi (as in the lady in the book who drops the bombshell that the MA is only a few years old) just as a placeholder y’know. And I know making every new character a relative of a pre-existing one is the dumbest legacy sequel cliché ever, especially in the case of Stephen Axhelm, but I imagine Stepford is a pretty small town anyway and some of the kids who grew up there would have followed in their fathers’ footsteps and joined the Men’s Association, under the impression that the life their parents led is one that they should aspire towards. I’m a sucker for a happy ending, especially for characters who’ve experienced unimaginable trauma, so I think Annie deserves one where she gets to make out with her fellow goth gf to The Cure on the grave of a guy who kidnapped and brainwashed her don’t you think??
no-one will ever take your place
It was a little after midnight when Annie Nguyen and Erin Migliardi hopped over the fence surrounding Stepford Cemetery, holding one another’s hands and giggling all the while. Breaking into a run, they darted along the headstones, the full moon and the flashlight from Annie’s phone illuminating their path, Erin holding onto her wide-brimmed hat to keep it from flying off of her head. Eventually they came upon several designated plots in the graveyard, headstones neatly grouped together in rows, and at once they both knew they’d found what they were looking for.
“I think this is it,” Erin exhaled, gazing solemnly at the polished slabs of granite jutting out from the earth.
Annie shined her flashlight on the stones, confirming what she knew all along; these were the collective resting places of the members of the Men’s Association, several of whom had either perished in the fire or had met their end at the hands of their Stepford Wives. The markers were plain and unassuming, with only the names of the men and the years of their births and deaths chiseled into the stone and nothing else, which was much more than they deserved in Annie’s honest opinion. The Cobas’ headstones were grouped together, Dale ‘Diz’ Coba standing tall and proud next to his two sons Dale Jr and Darren, William Everett just off to the side of the eldest Coba son, the rest of the men dotted sporadically around them; Annie briefly glanced at each one until she found the one she’d been looking for.
“That’s him,” said Annie, swallowing down the lump in her throat.
Stephen Axhelm, born to Claude and Marie Axhelm in Stepford, Connecticut in 1969, had only been married to his new wife Nancy for two months by the time he died in October 2024 from a subdural hematoma, theorised to have been caused by slipping in the shower and hitting his head on the edge of the bathtub. He’d used the last few minutes of his life to try crawling out, but he’d lost his grip on the damp tiles of the bathroom wall, and had barely made it out of the tub and onto the floor before the life faded from his eyes. Or at least that was what the medical examiner who performed his autopsy had thought.
But Annie knew the truth. She’d been the one to watch him die.
“How’d you do it?” asked Erin quietly, carefully.
Annie turned to face Erin with a deep breath. “It was a few weeks after I first saw you at the store,” she said as she approached Axhelm’s grave with a bottle of whiskey and a small Bluetooth speaker, setting them on the ground beside his headstone. “I was lucid, and I think I’d been hiding it from him for a while. If he found out he’d have me sent to that fucking mansion again for reconditioning.”
Erin walked over to where Annie sat, leaning against the slab, and joined her there, taking Annie’s hand in her own. For as long as they’d known each other, having reconnected through social media a few weeks after Annie returned home to Philadelphia, she’d never heard the full story of what Annie had experienced in her hometown. From what she’d read on the internet about that Stepford Wives article she knew it was something bad, something deeply disturbing in its banality, something she’d had to piece together by herself with her own prior knowledge and experience. Even if it gave Erin nightmares, she knew she’d have to hear it from Annie sooner or later.
“Hey, Erin, can we put on a song?” Annie asked her.
Erin quickly took out her phone and connected it to the Bluetooth speaker. “Sure thing, babe, which one?” she said, loading up her music library.
Chewing on her lower lip, Annie thought hard about her response. “Uhhhh, something by The Cure, I think,” she finally decided.
“I think I know just the song,” Erin grinned, and with a few taps on her phone, the song "This Twilight Garden" began playing from the speaker, the sound of flanged and delayed guitars and shimmering keys enveloping them both with a sense of much-needed comfort. Annie shuffled herself closer to Erin and leaned against her shoulder, gazing up at the sky as if she were telling her story to the moon itself.
“I knew he had a thing for Asian girls. Like, from the minute he snatched me off of the street to his last breath, I knew he didn’t like me for me, but for this idea of me that he’d cooked up in his head. But, y'know, he still had to take Viagra to even get it up. He was so fucking pathetic,” Annie couldn’t help but laugh quietly as she opened the bottle of whiskey and took a long swig. Even as the liquid burned her throat, she knew she’d need it for what she had to say next.
“I hit him in the back of the head with a table lamp while he was raping me,” Annie sighed, squeezing Erin’s hand as she set the whiskey bottle aside. “I mean, I can’t really call it anything other than rape, since I couldn’t possibly have consented even when I was locked up inside Nancy Axhelm, y’know? His last words were that he was gonna get me pregnant, that he wanted to see me all bloated and gross… and he talked about it like he thought it was hot. But he had this low sperm count that he’d been bitching about, so I don’t think he would’ve managed to knock me up anyway. And I was feeling around for this lamp on the nightstand, y’know?”
Annie still remembered how the lamp had felt against her fingertips; cold, hard and heavy, ridged and nickel plated with a glass blown shade, and how it’d felt and sounded when her arm suddenly swung outward and the glass had shattered against the back of Axhelm’s head, cutting his grotesque soliloquy short – it was almost as if she was being propelled right back there again, naked and splayed beneath him, waiting for it to be over. Just then, Erin was brushing her thumb over the back of her hand in a repetitive comforting motion, the warmth of her touch bringing Annie back to the present where she belonged.
“Next thing I knew, he’d fallen off of me and onto the floor next to the bed, and he was bleeding out onto the carpet,” Annie continued. “Then I sat up and the lamp was falling out of my hand, and then all at once it hit me… what I’d done, what was happening, and he was just on the floor dying. I guess I must have thought he wasn’t dying quick enough, so I smothered him with a pillow. Then I just walked into the bathroom butt-naked and took a shower like nothing had happened. That was when Rachel Martinez showed up and helped me cover it up, and then she gave me a ride to the station.”
As Robert Smith’s voice echoed through the midnight air, Annie lifted her head from Erin’s shoulder and turned to face her with a deep breath. “And the whole time…” she began, her voice trembling, harder than it’d ever done even when she was recounting the trauma she’d experienced. “All I could think about was you.”
She swore she felt rather than heard Erin’s breath leaving her lips in a quiet gasp, tears welling up in her eyes and spilling down her face in black streaks. Before she had a chance to stop herself, Annie was lifting a hand toward Erin’s face, gently wiping a tear from her cheek with her thumb, and then she was leaning in closer to Erin, kissing Erin, feeling Erin kiss her back, Erin’s hand on the back of her neck, sliding up to bury her fingers in her backcombed hair, Erin, Erin, Erin. The scent of grass and damp graveyard earth mixed with Erin’s hairspray and perfume, the taste of Erin’s lipstain and the whiskey on Annie’s tongue, the feel of soft black velvet and moonlit pale skin under Annie’s fingertips, the sound of chirping crickets and the gentle midnight breeze and Robert Smith singing of a twilight garden that turned into a world where dreams are real, how no one would ever take Erin’s place – and Annie knew in that instant, that even after all the shit she’d gone through last year in this very town, brainwashed into subservience to a white man old enough to be her father, cooking and cleaning for him in an ugly floral dress while he bragged to his buddies about how she had the tightest pussy in Stepford, simply by virtue of her grandparents having arrived in the States from Vietnam so long ago, she’d still made the right choice coming back here… coming back to Erin.
Slowly, cautiously, they broke apart, still holding onto one another, and Erin laughed softly, quietly, reaching up to sweep a strand of Annie’s hair away from her face. “I never thought it could happen for me,” she breathed, “but I think I love you, Annie Nguyen.”
Annie bit her lip through a grin, pressing her forehead against Erin’s. “You said it right on the first try,” she chuckled. “You must really mean it, huh?”
“Oh, believe me, I’ve had practice,” Erin smiled, reaching for the whiskey bottle nearby and taking a sip.
“Shit, I think I love you too, Erin Migliardi,” Annie blurted out, her cheeks burning as if she and Erin hadn’t kissed passionately just a few minutes before. “The first time I saw you at the store with a basket full of Halloween decorations in August, singing along to Xymox until you walked into a pillar, I knew you were the best thing to ever happen to me. Not just in Stepford, but in my whole fuckin’ life.”
Now it was Erin’s turn to blush, turning her face away briefly with a soft chuckle before glancing straight back up towards Annie again, the smile never leaving her face the whole time. “You know, it’s every goth’s dream to make out in a graveyard to The Cure,” she said with a smirk. “I know it’s clichéd as hell, but with you it just… feels right. Like this is where we were meant to be, y’know?”
Annie knew in that instant she felt exactly the same way, and she could tell just from a quick glance at Erin’s face that she knew too, without her even needing to say a word. Maybe Stepford wasn’t such a bad place after all, she thought to herself, especially now with the Men’s Association gone for good, and the promise of a future with Erin here to stay in its place. “Hey, let’s go see the other women,” said Annie as she got to her feet, extending her hand towards Erin. “I should at least say hi to my mom-in-law before we head back, right?”
Erin nodded in understanding, taking Annie’s hand in hers and allowing her to pull her up to her feet, and she carefully brushed off some of the dirt from her dress before turning to gather up the speaker and the whiskey bottle. For a moment, Annie wondered whether she should replace the cap on the bottle as Erin handed it back to her, seeing as she’d intended on performing a libation for Marie Axhelm – the real flesh-and-blood Marie Axhelm, not the housebound animatronic replica that had taken her place – but just then, as if she’d read Annie’s mind, Erin had already found the cap, and she placed it gently in the palm of Annie’s hand with a smile.
“Thanks, you’re a lifesaver,” Annie laughed softly, before quickly adding, “I– I really mean that.”
With that, Erin stepped closer to Annie and slipped her arm through hers, that same smile never leaving her face, and together they turned their backs on Stephen Axhelm and headed off on the long stroll towards the Wives who’d come before, the moonlight guiding their way.
ok I’m done I fuckin swear
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