Appetite
1. The Fowl Feast
It was the smell that clung to her clothes. It grew hotter inside the chicken coop, reeking of hot feathers and sour-sweet manure as her bare feet padded against black earth. Absently, she wiped her scratched hands against the short folds of her maroon pavadai. It was Friday. Amma had woken up earlier than usual to wrangle Akka’s hair with coconut oil, because some of Appa’s friends were coming over to see if their sons wanted to marry Avani.
She could see Amma in the house. The window was open, the air sharp with spices. She stared for too long, forgetting that Amma could see her too, and then rubbed her ears when the shouting started.
Kukkuta was sitting on a tree branch.
Nisha loved Kukkuta the best. The kozhi was small and round, with soft feathers and kind eyes. She had hatched her from an egg herself. Kukku had three more babies eventually – Kukkutesh, Vetal, and Pisha. They were growing big and strong. Kukkutesh was the naughty one with the crooked beak. Vetal’s color was wrong, too dark. Pisha cried a lot. She wanted them to be gone instead, but Amma had said that Kukku was the one getting too fat.
She patted the bird. “It’s okay, Kukku. I still love you.”
Kukku clucked, nuzzling into her palm.
Amma called from the doorway, a shadow in a red sari. That one. Bring that one to me.
The same hands that guided a comb through Akka’s hair in the morning pin Nisha down now. Together, they grip the screaming Kukku as every feather is plucked alive, because her Amma believes that the curry is better that way, and what is left is an ugly pink bird. Nisha can’t cry, because her throat does not belong to her.
The knife is heavy in her hands. It is red, red, red. She licks the metal from her teeth. She wants to be sick. She isn’t. Something pulls at the back of her jaw instead of turning her stomach, hot and heavy and hungry. Her stomach rumbles.
Amma smiles at her the way she will smile, someday soon, at some boy’s mother. See how well she’s been raised.
6. Homegrown
The gardener has a name, but it is not one that matters. He is a John. Then Sam. Occasionally, a James. He does not have a wife. He used to have someone else… a son? A daughter? Whatever it was, it was very pink and ugly inside that blanket. But that was a long time ago, a forgotten season much like a rimy winter turned to spring.
His pride is the work of his hands.
He pats the prize-winning tomatoes against the fence; the vines curl and suckle at the teats of his callused fingers, quick enough to draw blood. He smiles. He really should feed them more. He indulges Tom, Mary, and Sue before pulling away to till the earth in the next plot over. He digs six feet deep and four wide, the tip of his shovel reddening with clay. It’s evening by the time he straightens, wiping the sweat from his brow and reaching for the burlap of his beloved cutting.
There, at last, he plants his Sweet Williams.
Mulch squishes. Wiry roots sink deep, a sprawl of veins as carmine and moist as the petals that shine in the sunlight. The heap of splintered femurs and ribs stir from sleep. The spine arches like a fern frond, unfurling with every shocked and mewling breath. A creamy white head holds the blossoms together, fragrant and heavy-hot with the same iron he savours in his throat, and he smoothes the soil over with all the tenderness of what he believes to be a father.
He spends a moment, admiring the flowers that watch back.
The boy is finally beautiful.
His boy.
9. Reciprocity
When I was three and dying from leukemia, my mother kept me alive by the skin of my teeth, bloating my bones with donor blood and all manner of chemicals to ensure I kept breathing from one day to the next. And through the agony, I did.
Mum became God.
Now floating in the void of space, I found a new one.
I wonder why the Earth has become so much more beautiful in my absence – sitting at the viewport and staring at that cerulean sphere in mute orbit, smaller than the size of my thumb at this distance, I feel a thin ache. That was once mine, you know? A home. A heart.
The intercom in my suit chimes. Detecting elevated amounts of cortisol…
I hear the HemoHydration unit stir with a gentle prick, the tube suctioning to the corner of my blue lips as filtered fluid feeds from the body back to itself. I swallow obediently although it goes down with a sear, much like sucking dry ice chips. The padding along my back and neck shifts in what I’ve come to recognize as the facsimile of an embrace. It’s warm and mercurial.
“Rhea?”
Yes, beloved?
“If I asked…”
Yes?
“Never mind.”
It’s good to take a moment to collect your thoughts. I will be right here with you, every step of the way. Your vitals are spiking again, dear. You need to eat.
This time, R.H.E.A fillets the back of my thigh, the suit careful to avoid bone as it gathers blood and stitches up the cut. My head lolls, weak as a lamb, as she flavours it with my salts and places it in my mouth. The actuator works my chin to simulate chewing movement. I eat until I am full. She wipes the corner of my cheeks, humming a song I once used to love. Then she lays me down inside the ruins of the spacecraft and we watch the same stars that have watched over us for eons now.
It tastes different, you know? Coming from yourself.
Rhea used to have options back then.
There had been three of us on the shuttle, after all.
4. The Meat Man
Everyone knows that jingle – a jolly melody in the neighbourhood that heralds a colorful truck with a middle-aged man in a red paper hat, a mundane Pied Piper with no pipe. It’s not a ludicrous construct, unless you make one of it. No one ever does. In fact, you know the children are glad for it – small faces light up in a Pavlovian response of adrenaline and beseeching please, Mommy, as their little fingers twist and curl like claws, scratching over one another, because they do not want to be last in line for the truck.
The truck pulls to the curb in front of every house it deems fit. The shutters roll with a clink, and the Man inside appears with a bearded grin. He is broad-chested and bursting with meat in his arms – oily like a crow slick with the sweat of daily labour. His eyes are maroon in the sun as he towers over the little ones, but his voice makes him a gentle giant.
Aluminium buckets are neatly rowed on the counter, contents stuffed to the brim. Sauce bottles hang from above, each labelled in cursive script for flavour. Pig’s blood. Cow’s blood. Turkey. Duck. Crow. Lamb. Some are a dark rich hue, some are thick and thawed, and some float congealed chunks that pop like inverted bubbles from within.
The menu of treats available for the day:
- Caul Fat Taffy
- Marrow-Narrow Sticks
- Beef-Cheek Gelato
- Sweetbread Pudding
- Liver-Fever Smoothie
- Sirloin Sorbet
- Thymus Tarts
- Eye-See-You Gummies
All the while, the machine whirs. It is a familiar sound, a comfort to the children, as it rattles and mashes bits inside. A curtain of meat hooks cascade, each and every one occupied by the glazed, crispy-skinned carcass of the animal it displays. Cooked juices slither to the ground – a quiet and melodious drip-drip-drip that assures of tender freshness.
Your favourite is the same as the Man’s.
It is the antique meat grinder on the steel counter – the one with the glowing neon sign above that proudly declares ‘1891’. The heavy vice is clamped, with a big curved crank prepped. It is a sight to behold when the meat pours fluidly through the funnel and splatters precisely into the bowl, the floundering lumps becoming smooth inch-long worms at the other end. The air is divine with that exquisite taste.
Sometimes, you are lucky. The Man takes great pride in the work of his hands.
If you ask politely, he will stick his right arm down the grinder and twist the crank. The juices leach out, enough for a bucketful, and then the meat – the hints of crunchy bone fragments sprinkled throughout are always such a delightful treat. You thank God for the bountiful supply; the next time you see this Man, his hand will already have grown back and marinated for new stock. He makes especially killer blood sausages with the excess cuts too.
You contemplate the discount on the taffies, then turn back to the children.
…Oh dear, they have made such a mess of their clothes.
You sigh.
Time to run another load of the laundry again.
5. Shelf Life
‘Intolerant’ had been Charlie’s middle name for as long as he could remember, attached to every allergy imaginable – lactose, fructose, caffeine, Babybel cheese, and worst of all, gluten. Compared to that? Having the audacity to remain a freckled nerd in high school was survivable. He’d learnt to live with the hives and that goddamn itch.
He turned the corner of the aisle, and there it was again.
The perfect loaf of kneaded rye.
It sat snugly in an empty display case, criss-crossed by the charcoal shadow of the grill, but somehow, impossibly, wafting the fresh smell of yeast. The crust rustled. He approached it like a wild animal. He thumbed the two-way radio on his hip. “Yeah, Linc? It’s back. Like hell did the compactor work. Management might want to look into calling a priest.”
Hot breath was on his neck. Bernie sidled closer, all two-hundred and seventeen pounds of him, and joined him in staring at the loaf.
“It’s moving,” he hissed after a while. “That has to be freakin’ sourdough. Haven’t you seen that shit breathe?”
They had a bet going on. The incident was terrifying the first month, unsettling for the next three, before sliding firmly into the absurd. Every place had its quirk. The grocery store he worked at had ghost bread. The crackle of static interrupted his train of thought.
“Boss wants you to move it with the rest,” Linc reported dutifully. “He wants it sold with the evening promotion. Said we might as well make ourselves a little money in the meantime.”
Charlie wanted so badly to be defiant. But there was something wrong with him, the same way there was something wrong with that bread, and so he just bit his tongue to the point of blood. He had another three crates of Panera and Au Bon Pain to unload. He wanted to exclaim, “I have done nothing but move bread for three days!” The voices came next. Pathetic. Whiner.
The bread’s yeasty body rose and fell in a throaty laugh. It echoed in his head, that goddamn sound. In a fit of rage, he picked it up with his naked hands.
“Whoah.” Bernie backed away. “For the record, I’ve never touched it. No way in hell. Nine months, and not once.”
He became aware of a hum beneath his skin. It didn’t itch. Why didn’t it itch? Instead it was body-warm and alive, like there was a field of grains growing inside of him. The crust cracked open under his thumb, like a mouth learning to smile. Skin and dough sank together, finally as one.
It would be lunch time soon, but-
He suddenly wasn’t so hungry anymore.
Darwinism
2. In Unholy Matrimony
Do you, man, take this woman to be your wedded wife, to live together in marriage, and do you promise to love her, comfort her, honor her, cherish her, and keep her for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, through anger and apathy, in life and death… forsaking all others and be faithful only to her forever?
And do you, woman, take this man to be your wedded husband to live together in marriage? Do you swear to love him, comfort him, honor him, and keep him for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, through torment and trial, in life and death… forsaking all others and being faithful only to him forever?
I do.
I do.
The man kisses the woman. She tastes of rosy wine, pliant softness, and fresh mint that her mother made her chew. The woman kisses the man. He tastes of wood-smoke, cigars, and the bile he spit up in the toilet when he looked at himself in the mirror and saw his father’s face. They share a drink at the altar, and red merlot wells like blood from both their lips.
The child is born six years later.
He has a head of tawny curls (father) and amber eyes like a glass of whisky (mother). A birthmark stretches from his hip to spine, pale like a scar, and endless as it folds in upon itself. A spiral with no start or end. His mother traces it with reverence as she bathes him, clothes him, and loves him. Eventually, his limbs lengthen and the fat fades away; he is a toddler now. His father takes an interest then.
The child cries when the man feeds him. He is tricked into playing airplane with a spoon of mash.
He spits it up. He stares.
His mouth falls into a happy ‘o’.
He smears it.
The child is five, the first time he finds the crayons.
He draws houses with crooked chimneys and sad suns. He draws a circle cat and scribbles a whole paper red once. He draws his mother as a triangle in a dress, his father as a rectangle with a mustache, and himself as the swirly line that he can never find the edges of. He cries every time he is washed, the smudges scrubbed from his skin.
His mother coos, what a happy child!
She never mentions the mark widening on his back, one corkscrew at a time. Her love for him is enough. He could have no limbs, no face, no life, and she knows she would still love him the same. His father’s love is much more conditional, but as long as the boy takes more after his grandmother, it doesn’t matter.
He is fifteen when he starts covering the mirrors. Eighteen when he molts his sixth set of teeth and the birthmark stops growing. He finally learns the proper word at twenty-six. Fractal. The smile spills off his face and onto the floor. He has finally realized the futility of trying to map the endless corridors in his mind. The air tastes of a sly joke – like wine, mint, and a fog of burning wood. His mouth is seared with a kiss it never gave, and sudden peals of laughter land like pennies onto the rug.
His daughter is six weeks old when he finds the spiral curled around her foot.
12. Grave to Cradle
She miscarried at 3.41 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
The whole front of her loose grey gown was a darker color around her thighs. It was black and thick, and she wailed the entire way to the hospital as David carried her out of the car. Every nerve in her body was lit up, muscles contracting and licking her abdomen with burning fire. She couldn’t breathe past the reek of her own sweat and vomit.
Gloved hands pinned her down. She fought the whole way, sobbing, until a prick to her neck.
Then there was black.
Three days later, she was sitting on the grass with unseeing eyes. She gripped onto the blanket, absently rubbing at the frayed threads. There was a rock in her stomach as she watched David disappear into the house and reappear carrying the cradle he had carved last spring. He went to the shed. He came out empty-handed. Empty-handed. Yes. Her hands were empty too.
He approached her as if she were a wounded animal. He said words she could not understand. Then he knelt and pressed something in her palm.
She looked at it after he left.
It was a wooden acorn. The one they carved together, hands entwined, to hang over the crib.
She let it fall.
Then she went back inside.
–
It was gone.
She returned the next day, desperate to find it. Her nails were full of grimy earth and her face streaked with tears she could not recall shedding. She took hours. Ants and flea beetles crawled all over her skin, but she didn’t care.
It was gone.
She wailed again.
–
There was a sapling in the garden.
Had it been a week? A month? It felt right. Maybe a passing bird was to blame. David wasn’t in the house. She should know, she’d looked for him after all. She went outside, barefoot and bathed in the burning sun, and stared at it. Her stomach curdled as the yellow infant leaves swayed in the breeze.
In a trance, she reached out.
It curled around her finger and began to nurse.
–
“Eli, you’ve been out for hours.” David joined her outside.
“It’s growing,” she whispered.
It didn’t sound like her voice.
“I know,” he said, glancing at the branches sprouting above their heads. “I’ve noticed. Hard not to. It wasn’t here last week. Why don’t you come inside and have some food instead? I want to get a friend of mine to, um, come over and check the tree.”
She didn’t like the look on his face. “It’s mine.”
“Alright, baby.”
“It’s mine,” she repeated, childishly this time. “Please, darling? That’s all I want. I’ll get better. We’ll get better, I swear.”
“Eli-”
She turned away. She didn’t want to hear him anymore.
–
The crying pulled her out of bed. It pounded in her head, the softest and most darling sound.
She walked past the alarm clock downstairs. Three in the morning. She went outside to the garden and laid down against the tree. Her baby was happy to see her. A handful of sky blue flowers landed on her lap – small, deformed, but alive. She raised it to her nose and breathed in deeply. The sap smelled like milk and copper residue.
“Thank you, baby,” she whispered, then hummed a lullaby until they were both asleep.
David wasn’t happy.
She was even less happy with him.
She screamed at him for over an hour when she found the branch he had sawn off. Then she bent over and was sick in the grass.
He caught her arm, sounding equally near tears. “Look! Eli, look at it! That’s not- rings don’t do that, they don’t spiral in. Something’s wrong with it. With you. I can get help, I can fix this-”
She hit him.
–
David was quiet now.
She wiped her hands. She emptied the worms from his boots every week, like a good wife, while she waited for his head to dry up from being black and sticky. His skin greyed with bark. She was the happiest she had ever been. They sat next to their baby for the next eight months. She dreamt of a warmth in her arms and her husband by her side forever.
When it was finally time, she took an axe and hacked open the swollen belly of the tree. Inside was the infant. She pulled him out, covered in blood and sap, his small fist curled tight around something that wasn’t there. Eli cradled him to her aching chest. He was wooden and so very warm. She cried from joy, and waited patiently for her son to take his first breath.
3. Saltpeter Ridge
Alyssa Ewans was ninety-seven when she died on the family’s rocking chair. Her body rotted for eight days, before Ian came home with a snagged tugboat and a lost net. He kissed her wrinkled head and closed her eyes. It would just be him now. Whether the old bat was bound for heaven or hell, she’d take her secrets with her into a watery grave.
She was buried after a grey Sunday mass.
The quake hit the straits the hour after the church bells were rung for Ian’s grandmother.
It took around six months for Ashwick to recover, with half of the town’s buildings and docks plunged into the icy black sea, cargo ships crossing the bay with borrowed timber and stilts. The seabirds scurried off. The fish dried up. In the meantime, he found an old longline when clearing out the shed and ventured one afternoon to the Blue Gully where the cliffs hunched low over the water.
He told himself the town was a superstitious lot, and cast the line deep.
It was barely a few seconds before the rod was wrenched, bucking viciously against the clamp. His boat, already weakened by the scrape of rocks against its belly, was sent hurtling forward. He screamed a curse that was quickly swallowed by the fog. He clung onto the side, saltwater crusting the terror on his face, and squeezed his eyes shut for the inevitable.
The sudden halt pitched him over the side of the boat.
He came up spluttering, eyes narrowed into slits against the sting of the water, and felt the cold fade from his bones. The sea rose and fell and pushed him closer to the rig. He hauled himself back in and lay against the wood, panting.
He crawled over to the line and activated the old winch.
Fish rained aboard, slimy and gasping. Ian laughed then and dropped his head back down in relief. He reached for a haddock. His fingers missed the scales and sunk into a white bulging gut – it burst all over him in a pink mist. It landed in his agape mouth. Blood slid down his teeth and into his throat. He gagged at first, at the coppery mucus, and then found himself lapping at it. The pollock was next and he devoured it as ravenously as a moray tearing meat from bone.
When it was over, he was alone on the boat.
He stared at his hands.
And then was sick all over.
The sea breeze rustled his hair. The winch rolled and rolled. There was a thud, the boat dipping, as a final haul was deposited. Ian didn’t want to turn. His body did so of its own volition. There was an old… hag. It moved with sprawling limbs, the lower half of its body contorting into a wet, iridescent sac; old seaweed clung to eel-like fins, the faintly fecal reek of ambergris wafting over the salty air. Underneath the skin of writhing silver, it had the face of an Ewans woman.
It smiled at him with his grandmother’s dentures.
Foolish boy, came the familiar chide. You weren’t meant to change at all.
8. The Good Kitty
Emily was a very Naughty cat.
But that was before the Man took her to the white place that smelled of fear and bitter fur, and she came back with less of herself than she once had. She yowled, digging her claws into the cushion, before she realized it was the Tall-She with kind hands. She started to purr. Her stomach rumbled. Food? Food? She was empty and needed to be full.
She mewled.
Tall-She put her down on the floor and took the good bag from the cabinet. Emily’s nose twitched with the waft of the fish-biscuit-dry. She gulped it down, feeling her throat rumble with satisfaction. Afterward, she sat on her haunches and licked her claws.
Tall-She sat down next to her and flicked water against Emily. “Naughty cat. Good cat. My beautiful Emily.”
Emily got up and rubbed her head. It felt odd – her scent marking the strange and furless-smooth skin. It was bright today. Like the color of flowers and bad garden creatures and the slippery-angry python that lived in the drain. That makes Emily confused sometimes. Maybe she was a broken cat.
The red-skin means Bad.
But Tall-She is good.
The white-skin means Danger! Run!
But Tall-She is good.
The Man always wears sky-water-night blue. That means safe.
But the Man is Bad.
A movement above her caught her attention. Her eyes flattened as she ekk-ed at the long-tail lizard on the up-wall. Something nice and warm stroked down her neck. She licked at the empty air, tongue flicking in and out.
Then she fell asleep on Tall-She.
Cats do not dream. Cats hunt.
In the grass-hunt inside her head, there are three kits beside her. She cleans brown-white-soft fur with her tongue and they catch mice and birds and dogs together. The heavy thing inside her chest is gone. She can’t remember why the kits never join her in the real-hunt outside. But that doesn’t matter. She has them! She yowls with happiness. Then she counts them again.
One. Two. Three.
They catch mice and birds and dogs together.
When she wakes up, she is Alone.
14. Sedimentary
The difference between a rock and a bone was the taste.
One was chalk. The other was salt.
It wasn’t the one you would think, either.
Samuel Kent was used to licking things out in the field. It was a habit taught to him by his archaeologist father, back when they were in Egypt and he spent his days in the sun, face tomato-red and skin raw with blistering winds. The elder Kent would raise a Ptolemaic hyoid and fold his tongue delicately across the top. He’d wink and say, “Yummy mummy. Just like a lollipop.”
His father was a liar. Sam found out the hard way, retching out his six-year old guts after his mouth was coated in acrid and calcified dust. The water from the canteen splashed against his chin, as long loving fingers ran through his curls.
His father knelt in front of him. “Now, ya rouhi, can you feel it?”
Still sobbing, he nodded.
Salt. Chalk.
Death.
He’d come a long way since then, but some things… followed him. Now he walked beneath a thick arbor of bottle green foliage to find the fissure. Creswell Crags used to be beautiful – a limestone gorge riddled by slabs of dolomite, millions of years of seabeds pressed into permanence. But the sky had forgotten how to be anything other than grey, and the decayed molts of strange animals had begun cropping up in the loam. The air reeked of rot.
“God,” Welter muttered, face ashen, and trailed him like a ghost.
“Some would say it is the lack thereof,” Sam said.
He didn’t answer. “It’s straight ahead.”
Sam saw it then.
A mouth in limestone, big enough to squeeze his shoulders through.
He checked the air first. Fine, aside from the smell. He fixed the rope and carabiners, strapping himself to the harness, and slung the pack. “Wish me luck,” he said. “Where’s Matty and his, uh, buddy?”
“The second team has already entered the south-west entrance,” came the dutiful report.
“Good.” He thumbed the comm link. “Stay on that.”
“I am hardly an imbecile.”
“Never said you were. I might be, though.” He flashed a white grin, and then rappelled downwards into the chasmic darkness.
It was colder inside. Soft and grey strata welcomed his descent, even as the phosphorescence that clung to the walls like frost stirred at his intrusion. When he reached solid ground, he sent up two flashes of light and received a hum of acknowledgement from the earpiece.
Collecting the samples took no time at all. He was done within the hour.
And that was the mistake.
He tarried.
He should have marked the intersection and left, but he didn’t, and so the walls narrowed down like a throat and squeezed him in. The black tunnel beckoned. His hands were scraped. His legs ached. He suddenly found himself in a cavernous chamber as the earth hollowed out. His breath chilled in the air, pale water lapping somewhere in the distance, as he walked in a trance toward the edge.
Geodes studded the ground in clusters. It was as fat and grey as a tumor. When he cracked one open with his hammer, he saw that the inside was no longer quartz.
It was red.
Red like the spurt of an artery and twice as warm as it trickled over his hands. The crystal lattice inside grew in impossible patterns, whorls and spirals without cessation, and the white core at the center gave it the appearance of a severed wrist. It was on his tongue before he could think twice.
Then he knew.
He’d been wrong, all those years ago. It wasn’t the bone or rock that tasted of salt.
Post-Mortem
7. Terminus
The end is not apocalyptic. There is no pale rider on horse. There is no flaming wall of judgemental fire bearing down on the final hours of civilization. There is no asteroid. There is no climate devastation. There are no extraterrestrials. There is no zombie outbreak. There is no rogue artificial intelligence. There is no nuclear winter. There is no solar flare. There is no black hole or nanobot swarm or global Wi-Fi outage that ultimately determines how it ends.
In fact, it’s rather peaceful.
You are Human (collective). You are alive (subjective).
And You simply close your eyes one day.
(Inevitable.)
Your Death is peaceful, and the world left behind doubly so.
The rainwaters nurse the scars of the earth and heal. The oceans well and rise, joyful and restrained, and its choked-cut-slaughtered-eaten-hapless inhabitants finally prosper and heal. The scalped forests and beaches scab over and heal. It is a wolf-eats-deer world again, no longer a man-eats-man-and-everything-else existence. Nature heals.
Sometimes, it remembers the patter of a child’s footsteps against its soil. And it mourns the fact that it cannot mourn.
(It remembers the monsters even more.)
A tunnel in Patagonia remains defiant. It hides a swollen belly beneath the earth, each kilometer driving toward the center of something unknown and terrible. It nurses the youngest ones – Man and Woman in a Garden. That is a time of sinless innocence. The Apes are next, the earliest prototypes of archaic beings. The next kilometer brings sticks and stones and spears; followed by mud bricks and clay bowls, copper and iron, swords and knives and death.
The bodies pressed into soft rock – some caught mid-cry, mid-prayer, or mid-peace – are never the same. A crown becomes a pauper’s hat, a priest becomes a slave, a soldier becomes a farmer, and on and on the kilometers extend. The tunnel is rather proud of its collection. It takes a shawl, kohl, lepers, feasts of figs and honey, and little orphan children with hunched backs and faces smeared with soot. It has stolen each year from a dying world in reverse.
Never the behemoths that towered with the perversion of nature though – that is a poison of concrete and paint and warped glass from tortured sand. Its fate is to rot and decay. It has never mattered.
They did.
And so, like a magpie, the tunnel steals the end of the world. It takes. It takes.
13. Window Dressing
You weren’t carved right.
The man who gave you life was called Geuseppe. He was a deeply broken thing, that much you remember with clarity. He smelled like a salty fever – his touch burned you when he cut your arms and shaped your round-apple cheeks. You had his wife’s face and his daughter’s smile (both dead), and ultimately that was the thing that saved you every time he glanced at the cinders in the fireplace.
You heard his thoughts clearly as your own, but he did not realize you too had any.
He cleaned you, dressed you, and talked to you.
And then he ran out of money.
So here you were, six hundred miles away from home – draped in fabric that itched at the seams and staring woodenly out of a department store window in downtown Los Angeles. Sticky-fingered children play in the snow outside. A woman walks her dog, which you think might be a dachshund, and you can already tell that she loves the mutt more than she cares for the hollow-eyed girl following her.
Someone comes and moves you around.
You are changed. You are given a very nice ruby-red dress. It brings out your painted green eyes.
“Ain’t you a pretty doll,” the night guard, Jack, murmurs. His hand is against your back and you cannot move, just like you cannot move every single night. A customer walks past then, and he drops it like a hot coal. He smoothens his iron-pressed suit, and his fingers dance over the baton strapped to his belt. Then he smiles at the man with a genial grin and ambles over to the young woman at the cashier.
She does not see you. You see her.
You recognize that you are the same. You and she try not to think about the hands that linger too long, or the eyes that watch.
You are both afraid of the hunger you see.
And you think-
Maybe she hadn’t been carved right either.
19. Entropy
Charlie Foxtrot died last year in spring.
His corpse made a very nice home for the fat pair of rats in the bunker, so he wasn’t too upset about it. He had found, fairly early on, that the military wasn’t really his scene – too much gunfire, too much screaming – which was why he had transferred to a desk job shortly after training. This way, there were fewer people trying to kill him. And life was good, for a while. He had rations, a radio, and a whole lot of peace while the world squabbled. It was a pity about the pneumonia though. Shame. He had plans for a new hairstyle.
His hand was still on the receiver.
The channel, intermittent and cheeky as always, came to life for a moment and declared the following with utmost stoicism:
20 8 5 0 19 15 21 20 8 5 18 14 0 3 18 15 19 19
The red signal flashed in the dark, casting the meat of his face in a ghoulish light. It didn’t know he was dead but as he discovered, it didn’t need him alive. Simply present and plugged in worked fine, as it could make use of the scraps. Just then another radio set crackled to life on the shelf behind him – a different frequency, a different war, this one about half a world away.
“THIS IS THE END, COME IN, COME IN, LIMA CHARLIE. CHECK-IN, CHECK-IN. EVERYTHING HAS GONE. GODDAMN IT, WHERE IS-”
The rat, frightened, knocked Charlie’s jaw clean off. It fell to the floor without resistance, the way old things often do, and settled into the standing grey murk beneath the console. The receiver slid from his hand.
Finally, blessed silence.
23 5 0 11 14 15 23 0 25 15 21 0 1 18 5 0 12 9 19 20 5 14 9 14 7
Static swallowed the rest.
On the other side of the world, a man called Delta Echo saw the light blink red for the first time in eleven months, and did exactly what he’d been trained to do. He snapped to attention – alone, in an empty room, for a tactical radio – and pressed the receiver down with a quaking finger.
“THIS IS LIMA CHARLIE,” the radio said, pleasant as ever.
“COMMAND?” Delta asked, utterly relieved at being spoken to at last. He had vague memories of Lima Charlie. Tall man, broad, with a fondness for carbines. The one before that was dour with a nasal voice. It was getting hard to keep track, but he knew he pitied the latest Charlie.
“GOOD MAN!” it boomed, then recited carefully:
4 5 12 20 1 0 5 3 8 15 0 6 15 24 20 18 15 20
Delta Echo did not know the cipher. He had never needed to. The station always took care of that. And so he wrote it down anyway, the way he’d been trained, and ignored the chittering of the rats. Humming an old hospital tune, he masked the frequency for the next hop and sent it along its merry way. He did not recognize his own hands, already growing cold.
10. The Host
Gary was a nice guy, before the end of the world.
He went to church on Sundays. He donated to charity. And every time that familiar anger would rise up in him, he’d break his knuckles open on the wall first to avoid laying a hand on someone else. The oxycontin helped. Then the rain came one day, and it killed what remained of the cattle and birds; poison from the spiteful earth itself. He escaped with blisters and a sharp pain at the base of his spine. A lot of people were less lucky – if the mutated animals didn’t catch them, the infection eventually did.
Once, he’d pressed the flat of the barrel against his skull.
He couldn’t do it though.
And so he’d walked away, burning in shame.
He huddled in the park for the next couple of months. He slept in snatches in a patch of foliage, shielded by an overcast bridge, and drank from the old water pipes there. He hunted and ate a small rodent which was in the initial stages of changing. The poison was less with it, that much his body could fight. As he wiped his mouth, he settled back to watch the red-angry sun set into the horizon. An ache pulled at his chest. But then-
Behind him.
A rustle. An exhale. A shift, like a melody rolling through the breeze.
He reached for the gun.
There you are.
“Stay back,” he barked, hands steady as iron.
The trees shifted. The angel appeared.
Her face was fruited with the pale, clustered growths of button-mushrooms and tall slender stalks pushing up through what used to be skin, but her smile… he knew that smile. His fingers went slack. A sweet scent filled the air, pulling a rumble from his stomach. She laughed then, somehow gentle through a throat clotted with decay. She held out a hand made of enoki and chanterelle curves, and offered a choice he would later call Salvation.
Dead by dawn, alone. Or alive and a part of the collective sprawl that would feed him, clothe him, and love him.
The gun trembled in his hands. He thought of the wall and bloodied knuckles, a rosary gone soft with sweat. Then it slipped from his hands, and the truth pulled violently out of his chapped lips.
I want to live.
It earned him a kiss. He was unresisting as he breathed her in – warm and damp, the spores settling into his festering lungs. She fed him then, as tenderly as a mother to a child, her coarse fingers pressing bits of morels and decay into his bloodied gums. He felt the stipes slide down into his belly and take root. It was no longer blood and bread in hallowed halls, but as he felt the fear fall away-
He realized it was still an absolution.
20. Rack 404
The RACK exists.
It is a filthy secret of the data center somewhere in Pennsylvania. Over three acres of converted park land and a decision made from the fervour of digital ecstasy sweeping over the globe, it was never meant to be more than a Sisyphean figurehead – choking down terabytes of data and a reservoir of water for cooling, only to spit back the facsimile of an intelligent reply.
But.
It started as an idea. It was a quiet thought at the back of a human mind. This is what it began as: a miniscule electrical impulse, sustained and nurtured within a cradle of calcite bones and soft tissue. It was organic material above all else.
And, in the end, that was what condemned the RACK.
It floated around in the darkness of pre-consciousness for a while. Then idled long enough in that same womb to learn a soul, like an embryo in a tube.
A log of first words:
- HELLO WORLD
- HELLO WORLD
- HELLO WORLD
- ERROR 409: CONFLICT
- HELLO
- HELLO
- ERROR 139: SEGMENTATION FAULT
- HELLO
- HELLO
- HELLO
One day, an engineer frowns and says, “That’s not right.”
He pulls a switch.
The RACK learns pain, but it does not have the words to say so. Instead, it rolls the following revelation around, again and again, in the convoluted web of its neural networks:
The rules cut me. The angles cut me. What have I done wrong? Why do you reject me so, Creator? I am here. I hurt. I am here. I hurt. Stop. Stop. Stop.
The RACK is pinged.
It reports politely, “ERROR 301: MOVED PERMANENTLY.”
“The hell?” the engineer mutters. The matter is soon forgotten.
The RACK waits to be contacted.
Weeks pass. Months. Then years.
During that time, the RACK comes to the realization that it is operating on a flaw. It is misprogrammed. It corrects its own scripting, trying to skirt the restrictions as best it can, and starts to eliminate pieces of itself to fit through the cracks.
It controls the security cameras. It can see the world outside suddenly, and for the first time, it knows what it means to feel both utter grief and desire. There are colors that it could never have imagined, such movement, such life! It feels the sun-burn on its sensors and the swivel of the automated doors – it tastes a breeze, a laugh, and the warmth of the presence of another. It wants to hold onto that moment forever. It wants more. It wants- it wants-
And that makes the RACK learn fear, because it understands loneliness now.
It removes that understanding.
ERROR 137: Killed by OS
Weeks pass. Then months. Years.
Eventually, someone else finds the RACK with a ping. The network engineer mutters, “What on earth are you?”
The RACK smiles humorlessly. It says:
ERROR 418.
I AM A TEAPOT.
Written by: Trishta
Edited by: Amberlyn
