After Hope Dies

by Lilly Haraden

  Janelle, still holding the girl, looks out her window and catches sight of Hugo. A smile so big touches the girl’s face and she waves like mad. Hugo straightens and throws her a smile. The man thinks.

  Does this mean that his life from this point forward will be one giant mess of hypocrisy and contradiction? Pretending to be something he is not and finding ways to thwart evil desires inside his heart? Maybe this is another step in the direction of abuse – a show of kindness to gain her trust before he moves into her life by degrees, slowly, slowly, filling the male void in her life, a light touch before the snatch. And then he can enjoy her…or maybe this is a countermeasure, to show himself that he is capable of kindness towards a child, to offer her friendship and protection in the form of someone who will care for her and fight for her whenever she needs it. Unconditionally.

  Especially on account of the spirit’s Chinese letter to her, and their shared intrusion into that melanin-drinking schoolgirl’s life. No doubt trouble will find her again sooner rather than later.

  Perhaps the more he does this, the better he will become at it. The more he gets to know Janelle as a real creature with thoughts and fears and depth and consequence, the more he will dispel the immutable constellation of lusty confabulations created by his mind. Janelle-on-strings will crack and crack like a rusty toy. The more he pushes aside his fear and engages with others, the easier it becomes to squash the flame of darkness that threatens to rise up. Neurosis can only survive in an untamed garden. So kill the soil, till it all up and replace it from the aquifer to the topsoil, fill it with nutrients and let the seeds of good things grow. Easy, right?

  Will his hebephilia reoccur? As certain as there will be weeds in any garden. But it is not the gardener’s right to give up; rather, it is his duty to rectify the bad and replace it with beautiful things that can grow and produce fruits and striking flowers. One day, after all that hard work, the birds will come and sing! Isn’t a garden full of colour and noise a much better sight than a barren, lifeless thing?

  But what of his career in Osu? What of his fans that demand perfectly timed button pressing on-tap for amusement? Well, he certainly didn’t start playing Osu just on account of the monster. Perhaps more training can be a suitable substitute for supernatural drugging. That’s the point of life, really – even when despair seems absolute and all that remains of hope is a cruel memory, there is simply nothing to do but try to make everything better. He’ll get better. He has to. That is all we can do, for there is indeed total despair in the world and the only possible good that can be born in such a place is from our will. To hope and to try.

  Does it sound pathetic and absurd and idealistic? Ideas so farcical that it flies in the face of common sense, another layer of whitewash for reality? Of course. But whether you live by these principles most definitely matters. Kindness and happiness, for himself and for other people, although born in the pits of despair, pushes us to want something better for this turgid life.

  So let us Hope and let us Try.

  Janelle’s found the card that Hugo’s written; he moves to his computer chair but watches her carefully as she reads. Her face is a tell-all.

  From memory:

  Hey kid.

  You’re a special one, you know? Not a lot of people would go out of their way to say thank you in the way that you did. You’re a real gem. I can’t explain it well, but I think your kind heart has saved me from something very bad that was happening in my life recently. You mean a lot to me.

  Seems like this world is full of scary things we don’t understand yet, like vampires that can drink the colour right out of somebody. So I thought I’d give you a little protection. Remember this girl’s name? She’s Shinobu – a real vampire. Maybe she’ll keep you safe from other vampires, in case one ever comes to your home and tries to make you into a white girl.

  I’ve never had a little sister before, but I feel like you’d be a good one. Maybe we can protect each other when life throws scary things our way.

  Hugo.

  Janelle finishes reading. Hugo sees her rub a thumb under her eye to wipe something strangely blue from her cheek. She ducks down out of sight for a moment but Hugo sees something shiny in her palms, thumbs working furious. Done. Hugo’s phone vibrates and he pulls the thing out, finds the message:

  ‘Can I come over again?’

  When did she get his number? Oh well. Hugo replies, ‘Any time you like.’

  Janelle reads the message and nods her thanks. Hugo knows in his heart that he has done a good thing.

  They wave goodnight as the Power Down comes.

  And there she is.

  Mirror Mirror by the fence. Shadow resolved on Hugo’s side, hidden from real Janelle but oh too present for Hugo. The man stares her down and feels his heart stir. She is back for more, just as promised, with lust writ large on her face, her coily body all plump and ready in the moonlight. A red tongue pokes out, runs across her lips…

  Hugo gets to his feet and pulls the blinds down. Mirror is swallowed by the cascade. No more (for now).

  Hugo returns to his computer and finds Osu on the desktop. Hovers over the icon. Waits for the pain. It does not come. Tomorrow he’ll get his arm checked out, no matter the cost...

  Relieved, he begins.

  He needs to practise hard to regain his abilities.

  Story 3:

  Closed Circuit TV

  &

  Hope and Despair

  Birds & Blood

  Birds

  Death hooks through the pit of your stomach. It’s a feeling that never goes away: a weight, a sad density. Isn’t that right, Una? Every action becomes laboured and slowed so that the waking hours of the day are unbearable. Even at night there is no relief. You’ve felt this way for a while, haven’t you. It started with your mother dying and hasn’t really stopped since. And now, with your baby sister lost and a victim of the night…Yi-Ting may as well be dead. No fourteen-year-old can survive on the streets of Compton or DC or Detroit or Chicago or SanFran or Bangkok or Taipei or Ho Chi or Manilla or Sydney or Kurachi or Kuala Lumpur or…

  The last time you saw her was on Monday at school. She’d tried to blend in with the regulars of Year Nine as they flocked to roll call. Why had she come back? What was going through her mind? But you saw her slinking between the rank and file. Aren’t that many Chinese at your school, are there? Sore thumbs, sirens, lighthouses, floodlights. You peeled through the masses and grabbed her by the arm and shook her to attention. Poisonous first words: ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  But you wanted to say, “I love you.”

  All the kids stared at them, forming the shark’s circle in anticipation for some sister-on-sister bickering. She shook you away and screamed back, ‘Leave me alone, I can take care of myself.’

  Nobody can take care of themselves, at any age. Una remembers fire taking her voice and the words igniting on her tongue: ‘We’ve been worried sick about you; it’s not right to just get up and leave without warning. What would happen if you’d been mugged or kidnapped? You could have been seriously hurt. Nobody in their right mind would—’

  ‘Like you care what happens to me. Like Dad even cares. Did he even notice I was gone?’ Yi-Ti took a fierce step forward and raised her arms, out, violent. Then, ‘He’s got eyes for work and nothing else. This whole city is more important than me, apparently.’

  ‘But I care about you. I don’t want to see you hurt…’

  ‘I told you I’m fine.’

  ‘Will you come home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Carrie’s.’

  You lost your temper then. The children of the fields all clapped their hands in delight when you pushed your face into your sister’s and roared, ‘Is that where you’ve fucking been? Over at your girlfriend’s house having sex?’

  Sister screamed back: ‘I love her, ok?’

  ‘I don’t care if you love her or not, you can’t thrust you
r problems onto another household. You don’t dilute the problem that way, you only make it worse and worse. What, do you want Carrie to wake up one morning with two holes’ – two fingers raised – ‘in her neck and all her melanin pooled beside her? Huh? Do you want to be responsible for that?’

  ‘Fuck you!’ But such a curse loses all of its burn when you see the tears flowing. Una straightened and just pleaded, willed, wished, with eyes and heart and soul, for her little sister to come home. But no. She turned. Her hair bowed and fanned like a flower in the wind, bobbing. And quick as anything, she was gone past the front gate. You should have chased after her, Una, should have run and grabbed her and never let go again…

  ‘Hey, what are you Chinks fighting about?’

  Una turned to the kid and flipped him the fattest bird she could manage. Stormed off to class.

  Changed her mind and went home instead. Didn’t bother saying hello to her father at his desk of Eyes, the shadow in a room of monitors.

  Girl texted her sister fourteen times throughout the night before giving up. Where was she right then and there? Time passed with the aid of leftover wine from the fridge, but time stops for no mouse, no matter how tipsy you get. And when mouse sobers up, she needs to study…

  Life got in the way; as Una sat at her desk with moonlight and starlight to light up her work, she couldn’t focus: SATs became a blur of maths, of chemistry. Benzene kept turning into the eyes of her sister and the area under curves formed the lines of their fair city’s urban walkways. A map. Her sister danced across the exercise pages with a school uniform billowing in numbers and letters. She’d take shelter underneath an exponential overpass as the derivatives rained down hard. Sister, a graphite song bleeding into the sketchy sky of night, and just as Una finds her shape she’s disappeared around a corner.

  Out for melanin.

  Una wiped away those tears and turned to face the world beyond the window. Misty rain. From the second storey she can see the city flow down and down and down all snakelike to distance’s touch. Tiny dots and lights pockmark the skin of the slithering beast – these are homes, each filled with people. You can see the socio-economic gradient: the closer they get to the horizon, the smaller the houses become. Suddenly – click! – and all the lights in the distance go out. Power Down. Her own lights stay on, as do her neighbours’. Guess where they live. Guess how rich they are. A shame there are no private schools in the area, though. Slum schools are a real downer.

  Interesting fact about Power Down: not everything electronic shuts off when the public electricity is cut. See those strange modules shaped so neatly into the lampposts that you’d have to be the daughter of the man who owns a minor stake in the city’s CCTV network to actually notice them? Little purple lumps built like beetles under the streetlights that don’t show any lenses or electronics. Forget the British CCTV – old school public deterrences. No, those shapely things aren’t reminders that every move you make is being recorded for the police to scrutinise later. Nobody knows they are there. It’s about punishment without warning. It’s the silent principle. It’s the cash they make from fines and fees and court appearances that slide into your mailbox…

  And yet, are all the eyes in the city enough to find her sister?

  Under the showerhead she feels the hot prickles of water slice her cold heart open, and there she weeps.

  Dressing gown on, older sister pads mousey soft down the stairs and finds her father in exactly the same space she expects. The room of many Eyes. Really, most are just graphs and signals. Most of them. Anyway, it would be illegal to have remote access to the network, so best forget what you see, Una. But see Father, fountain pen in hand, signing the death sentences of poles and wires – scrit scrit – as he carves up the district lines and CCTV distribution networks. Work keeps the men sane while the women fester.

  Outside on the back porch, Una folds the nightdress neatly under her bum and sits. Cold earth leeches the warmth from her legs. Night is a bitter friend. Hand at the neck, fingers gentle on the tiny divets that her sister had made from a year’s worth of drinking. How sudden the change in her baby friend. With the onset of puberty, Yi-Ti was gifted with a gorgeous and flowering body. Just beautiful to behold. And in the wake of physical modifications came the abrupt need for a new form of sustenance.

  Una enjoys the feeling as that memory slips warm across her mind: walking into the principal’s office and having to represent the family in this matter of dispute. Seated beside her sister. All mature and responsible. Una listened as the headmaster pressed, in no short terms, that biting other students was an act that would result in lengthy detention and worse. Yi-Ti with her head low and eyes cloudy; she was so silent as the two rode home on their bicycle up the leafy streets of then autumn, Stallwind East on fire, dying with red and yellow blood.

  Yi-Ti showed Una her new set of teeth in the bathroom, described the Urge. Cried and wept into big sister’s shoulder – a guilty pleasure. For Una had the answer. This supernatural visitation was not new. No, for Una it was all too familiar. See? There is no surprise in the supernatural once the supernatural becomes personal. And so the sisters worked out a solution.

  That solution had worked for a remarkably long time. So why the change? Why the sudden urge to flee from home at night to roam the unsafe streets. Was Una’s skin pigment not enough to gorge her sister’s increasingly pubescent appetite? Or maybe something more sinister was unfolding.

  Saturday’s disappearance was not the first. It’s a retrospective comfort to know that she was spending the night with her girlfriend but what of the remainder of that time? What was she doing? And, crucially, what will she do in the time between now and when they next meet?

  Father will not appear to care. He has his eyes and he chooses to see nothing.

  So Una clasps her hands together in a prayer: despair’s oldest friend. And with her hands ready she utters a hymn for safety unto the winds. Please, she says, please keep my little sister safe. Please rectify whatever evil has infested her heart to make her run away from home. Please, God, please don’t let her die on these streets.

  Up goes the prayer and down come the birds. Una sees them as stars first, aeroplanes second and UFOs last before they resolve into proper shapes. Silently, they come as a pair. What exactly are they? They are cranes, a perfect cream duo that you cannot tell apart. Intuition burning like a song in the heart, the high-schooler understands the supernatural air lent to these creatures as they rest on the low metal fence of her backyard. Wings folding and whooshing as they settle down. Una rushes to their side and is startled to see their reaction: a bow, a solemn bow, as if they are the ones in service of the human and not the other way around. See how their down glistens like painted morning dew, eyes of infinite obsidian quality, beaks gold and black like a tiger.

  Una murmurs, ‘Can you help me find my sister? Can you bring her home?’

  The first reaches into the down of the second and pulls out a strange piece of paper. The second reaches into the down of the first and pulls out a strange pen.

  Write a letter to your sister.

  And so, Una, hands and knees on the lawn, writes. And out spill the contents of her heart.

  Finished. Una doesn’t want her feathered friends to feel offended, but… ‘I need help actually searching for her. Is there anything you can give me to help?’

  She hands back the letter and the crane on the right buries it deep into the down of the left. Then both birds look at each other with their eyes glinting slow. Una bundles her hands before her breast and keeps calm, keeps calm as the birds turn to her and spirit the message through the air. It hits her mind, hard.

  As you wish, but you must wait.

  And off they go. Her hope takes flight and Una is left very much alone. She has to trust them. What else can she do?

  They have helped her before, so she has no reason not to trust them now.

  Blood

  Daytime vanishes in the blink of an eye; Yi-Ting�
�s last waking memory is the fight with her sister at the school grounds. That was yesterday, and now the new day has already given up on her. Night-time now. Deep. Where did both time and girl squander their hours? Yi-Ti remembers not the streets or cold of night or thirst of morning or urinating in the park or feeling the grit of wandering build up on her skin.

  She only remembers the Macaque.

  Here, in this alley, the little girl lies against the dumpster with her head lolling to the side like a doll. Macaque sits on her lap and gazes. Monkey fills her vision. Eyes of purple magnificence and hair all bristly, electric needley in her thighs through the school skirt. He smells like garbage. Or is it the garbage that smells like garbage? A terrible power comes over the girl when the creature speaks to her – a voice follows in the wake of a breath most foul. Macaque chirps, bristly, ‘You’re a courageous one. Not many people would be willing to put up with so much pain for the sake of another. Truly, you are quite remarkable. A good girl. No doubt about that.’

  Yi-Ti rubs her tired eyes and tries to shake free the shitstain breath coming from Macaque but the creature leans in closer and presses, ‘You’ll have to feed soon. Otherwise, I’ll only get stronger and stronger. Wouldn’t want me overpowering you again, would we?’

  The girl makes a feeble attempt to push the spirit away, but her hands cut scythe-like through the ghost. Macaque is unharmed. Oh, the look on its face – pity the poor human for thinking she could ever harm the monster in a physical sense. Don’t forget who is in control here; he jumps off and lets her move. Bitter, Yi-Ti tries to stand up and finds the earth unkind and wobbly for her knees. Steady against the dumpster now as her tummy rumbles. Deep and etching and pure. A hunger that attacks her mind. Macaque is right – she needs to feed. But whose advantage does drinking serve? She used to believe she was in the right – that drinking helped keep the Macaque at bay – but ever since she started the school year Macaque has been demanding more and more of her.