Waits for the response.
‘Please don’t think I’m insane.’
Carrie adjusts herself in the bath so she’s sitting, still under Yi but with her hands on Yi’s sides just under her bust. She confesses, ‘I saw one of my friends tonight fight off a demon that ripped open his right arm. He came in with this huge bandage covering his skin and as he left I thought to ask him more about it. Stepped outside and caught him all crumbled against a pole, talking with a ghost…’
Pause, a moment’s consideration, then, ‘So I guess I’d be stupid to say that strange things don’t seem possible.’
Yi feels the tears come to her face and she hiccups a little. To be believed…‘I-I’m so scared I’ll kill my sister if I don’t drink.’
Carrie has her in her arms once more. There there. Shhhhh. It’ll be all right. Come on, let’s get you out of the bath and into some nice clothes. That’s it.
Bedsheets roll together like the ocean’s waves. In and out until they find comfort. Pity the seas of the world for never finding stability, for Yi-Ting has discovered the equilibrium where waves become circles. Like the stars at night left to shine and rule over unruly waters. Stars are static points that have found perfection, and they are stars too, now. All perfect, here as the girls press together under the sheets. Light becomes waves as the ceiling lights go down and Yi sees Carrie resolve from the dark. A kiss on the lips all plump, the gentle scratch of a tongue finding a way into her mouth. Ah. Fingers dance over the waves of her skin and hips and thighs. Yi becomes lost. Where is she? What is this? This still-new world of experience…
Carrie is her guide. Carrie is hers, and she Carrie’s. Yi holds her lover’s hair as she feels Carrie work between her legs with a wet tongue, and…
Hours setting and set, minutes shaping those rivers of lust. Time is frozen and stalled. But the ultimate destination of time never left Yi-Ting’s mind:
I, and love, and you, all came together.
But there is more in the aftermath. Sleep rises gently in rhythm. Up. Down. Carrie sleeps but Yi does not. Not yet. For her throat burns. Tummy twists and turns. A lust returns. Even though the place between her legs tingles with satisfaction, her body craves a different kind of buzz. Her girlfriend’s naked shoulder peeks out from the sea of sheets. No. She shouldn’t. No permission, no warning. But Yi can’t help herself as the lust takes over and she is there in a flash. Gently – oh so very gently – she uses an eye tooth to scrape a little path of flesh until the liquid pools. Not blood. Melanin. A lick. It tastes like sweet cream. Mmm. Her throat closes over and the potent drop fills her tummy. That is enough. It always tastes better with love.
It burns in her belly like the devil’s seed and she sends a prayer to God, to Carrie, asking for forgiveness. Forgiveness in rest, forgiveness for indulging in sleep as her eyes close over and her mind shuts off. Yi-Ting dreams that she is a wave falling into a circle. Circle catches her and together they dance all evening over the sea.
I, and love, and you. Together.
Aerosol & Ice cream
Aerosol
Panic tears her sleep to pieces. A once peaceful mind lulled into calm now roars with fresh venom. Your sister is missing. A full two days after she had vanished. Here it comes: the build-up like an aerosol under pressure and shaken and shaken, quiet, then full force. Una receives a full dose of fear. A coating of bile and acid in the back of the throat. Upright and completely alert now, Una cups hand to mouth and runs for the bathroom. Ejects threat over mirror and sink. Ejects panic onto tiles and towels. She falls to her knees and tries to collect herself but is too finger-numb and cold to wonder where it all came from.
Una rests her head against the bathroom wall and cries until the sun rises. Rivers and time, past and present.
Clean up.
Shower: cold. Bathrobe: cold. So heavy down the stairs in her fur and slippers. Father: behind Financial Business Economics Daily Weekly at the table. Corn-based cereal. Una eats automatic, chews without feeling, without tasting. She misses the congee her mother used to make. Honey and sweet in the morning. How Yi-Ting would always go for seconds…
Una thinks of her baby sister in the arms of nowhere. Shadows with their fingers up her skirt, knives at the throat and cameras to record…ah, hear her scream as they enjoy her and take her and do with her as they please. Here come the rats to claim her body and suck the liquids from split-marble eyes. Una feels her hands shake but the shadows never leave. Whisper whispers in her ear the most awful things that most certainly happened.
Her bowl shatters into fourteen separate pieces on the wall. A bloodstain of milk and cereal. Una is at her feet now. She doesn’t remember throwing her breakfast but her haggard breath and that taste of adrenaline are the giveaways. Father throws aside the paper and asks what the fuck is wrong with his daughter.
‘Where did she spend last night?’
‘Una.’
‘You know! Don’t you? At least, you think you know.’
Her father straightens tall and walks to the kitchen for pail and brush. Over his shoulder, ‘At her friend’s home. I rang her father to confirm.’
Una doesn’t believe it at first – remember, Macaques do form pretty masks for the uninitiated – but a phone call? Could the monster really imitate human voice and throw her father into an illusory answer?
Father returns with implements and thrusts them into daughter’s hands. Quiet, Una sets about cleaning the mess. Her mess. This is her fault. If she hadn’t rid herself of the Macaque then the beast wouldn’t have touched her sister. Yi wouldn’t have taken it upon herself to protect her family. Yi would still be here…if Una was not. Una slides her mess into the metal mouth of a trashcan and catches her Kandinsky reflection in the silvered surface. If she herself were to leave home, then Yi could come back and be safe.
Their roles are reversed. She is the one that should be protecting her little sister.
On the back stairs now with daylight trying to make hope in a sky of despair. Robes no match for the wind. Hands on face to keep cheeks warm. Yes. This is the right decision. So out comes the phone and in a matter of seconds she’s already typed the message that holds smatterings of what she’d written down for the cranes before:
“You don’t have to protect me anymore. I’ll leave the house and stay with Sammi for a while until we can figure something out. That way, you won’t risk hurting me. Please, come home to Father. Come home.”
Hovers over send. Will it work? Both her plan and pleading? And will Macaque let her be or make Yi’s life even worse upon her returning home? To ingrain into the young thing’s mind that home is where the pain is. That’s not true…and surely Yi-Ti knows this, otherwise what reason does she have to stay away? Everything crumbles to dust. Una discards the message and pockets phone, stands, turns for inside.
But a sound catches her and holds her heart. Whoosh and swoop, claws into metal fence. Even before she sees, she knows, and her heart flushes with the warm thrill of hope.
The cranes have returned. Una cuts the distance and stands before her pearl saviours. Two gifts this time. Left holds a strange piece of plastic in its beak – very thin and very shiny, unblemished save for the logo of her father’s company at the base: LCCE. Right holds a little piece of paper dangling from red string, with a golden character written on the card. Right makes a little movement with her head; Una reaches out and gently plucks the card from the beak. It doesn’t feel like card, though. Cards holds weight and density – this little piece of rice paper feels crumbly and thin. What do I do with it? Right opens her beak and out pops the dry tongue in a quick flash. In out. Una thinks she understands. The card slips easy on her tongue and the moment of touchdown comes with sweet lemons and sugar. Ah! Shivers down the back and fingers on fire as the paper dissolves.
Una feels the creep of change. Not slow. Not fast. No haste or snail-pace. Just a constant rise in her heart like the sound of music fading in, or a sheen of warm plastic being pulled over th
e world. Her vision changes. Everything is now strangely cloudy and just a little fuzzy. As if the world has been oil-ified and set onto wobbly canvas, yet traced over a real setting. The odd inconsistencies make her head spin and it’s not until Una looks to Left Crane that she understands the true effect of the charm. For on the once-clean piece of plastic under the creature’s grasp now stands a naked eye. Crane keeps the portal still as Una peers into the orb and understands with some magical intuition in her veins, on her tongue and blood, that this eye is no window to the soul. Rather, the keys to the city. An eye made up of lines like a printed circuit. Look closer and deeper within the pupil. Stare in.
Come. And the eye swallows her little body before coughing all that is her into atoms. Vaporised. Black infinity and spinning, but very quickly the ground sets and she finds herself in her backyard once more. No, this is not entirely her backyard – only a little section of it exists before darkness cuts in. An incomplete picture. Una pads a little through the blue world and finds the border where dull, grey anti-patches of earth reign. Nothing. No data. No eyes and ears. See the silence: Hsssssssss.
Step back into the light of knowledge. Una turns and spies…herself, her old body, sitting Lotus-calm on the lawn. But the Cranes have vanished. Listen: she hears the scrape of wind as it cuts against the side of the home, the grumble of an oil engine…What is that, over there beyond the fence? A little star of light hangs above the street; Una stares at the CCTV node and all understanding flows to her as she looks from grey anti-world to blue world.
This is the world as seen through her father’s camera eyes. And where he cannot see, nothing exists.
Una hops over the fence with ease. She is weightless. The fence across their back garden is all fake. It feels like wood but when she inspects the fibres she sees only a cloud of blue. Clouds and atoms. Like a pressurised, atomised can of reality swirling together. Plankton in the vapour sea. Dust lingering in the air. That same motion.
So, is this how she can find her sister? Using this strange and unreal magic?
Una reaches up with her index finger and blocks out the light of the CCTV node over the street. In reply, thousands of other stars take flight from earth and overlay the sky in a network marking different points over the city skyline. Maybe…yes, see how they hover and orbit specific parts? But which to pick and where to start? She selects one nearby, one down the street, and the world dissolves into aerosol spray. Resets. Dries. And a new scene rolls out underneath her feet, from just down the street. A little block of reality bordering the intersection. Eerily, that same blackness grows like moss where the star cameras do not see. These parts unnerve her in a fundamental way…monsters in the dark. Unknown.
Una thinks. Maybe there is a way to pinpoint her sister in a central database, or…
And then…
Una sees her. She sees a blue and streaky version of her sister walking on the opposite side of the street. Down and away. Una springs into action and comes in alongside ghostly recorded Yi-Ting. She’s carrying the same pack she took from her room on Saturday night. That look on her face: head down and so very determined. Una murmurs, ‘Sis, where are you going?’
They’re nearing the edge of the camera’s sight – jungle black cuts reality before them. Here, I end. Una runs a hand through her sister, trying to grab her and hold her back, but the aerosols scatter and regroup under her touch. They’re approaching the darkness now. Please, don’t go! Yi-Ting enters the dark field. But as soon as she sinks a foot into the black mess, reality unfurls and zooms and crops. A new camera feed reveals like a hole cut into a hedge maze. Yi-Ting doesn’t even change course as she walks through into the next setting. Una leaps over the dark and comes in beside her. New scene. As her sister stands at the shopfront waiting for the lights to change, Una tries again. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘I’d rather die than let that creature harm you.’
Una shakes her head. ‘It’s my responsibility to take care of you, not the other way around.’
‘But he nearly killed you, didn’t he?’ And off she walks across the road as the ghostly cars and bikes pile up on the blue lines.
They cross and Una continues, ‘That doesn’t mean you have to shoulder the same burden.’
‘You’ve gone through enough.’
They hit another black pool and the next scene stains the darkness. They walk though. Outside Carrie’s home. Night in pixelated, inky navy. A home buzzing with lines of digital decay. Yi-Ting hikes up her bag and strides to the door. Una watches from the pavement as her sister is swept up into the home by Carrie, who’s making it quite obvious to all who can see that this is a secret arrangement. Door closed now.
‘Show me where you slept the next night.’
Reality obeys. Una blinks and sees the last wobble of time and space set. Where are they? Some part of town they’ve never been to before. Inside. White and blue tiles, lights. Lots of buses lined up outside, sleepy and empty. Una turns and spies the little figure of her sister curled up on the depot seats. The time reads two in the morning over the empty service desk.
Una sits beside her ghostly sister and murmurs, ‘You must have bought a morning ticket and slept here. Didn’t really plan on leaving town, did you? You just wanted a place to stay.’
With eyes closed, the girl croaks, groggy, ‘How can you tell?’
‘I had the same idea once.’
Una rests a hand over her dear sibling’s head and smoothes the wavy lines of her blue hair. No touch. She wishes desperately she could feel her and wipe those tears away. Sniffing, the older sister says, ‘I wish Mum could have seen you. Not like this, of course. But I think she would have wanted to see what kind of person you’d become.’
‘Dad was a lot happier when mum was alive.’
‘He was.’
‘Ever since we’ve moved to East America, life hasn’t been too good for us.’
‘No. It hasn’t been good.’
Change: Yi-Ting is slumped against the wall of a seedy alleyway with a turquoise blanket over her skin. No more bag. Was this after they had the fight at school? Yi’s body falls half outside the sphere of reality so it looks like she’s covered in the drapes of a buggy shadow. Split right in half. Una sits down beside her and rests her hand over her sister’s. Nothing. Una bows her head and continues on, ‘Nothing was going well for us. Maybe that’s why I made the Macaque. I wanted things to be like they were when we were all together. And happy. And not here.’
‘You’ve got an evil mind to create such a monster.’
Una nods. ‘I think so too. I wanted something that could suck out all of my problems…and maybe restore something I had lost. Macaque was supposed to do that but he turned feral. Some days he would follow me around and I couldn’t eat. What I could eat I threw up later. At first I couldn’t control it, but then I started pushing and pushing it. Anything to appease it…’
‘You must have been hungry.’ Yi-Ting shuffles under her blanket and turns to mouth silent words in the dark, as if she is having a conversation with something out of reach of the camera. Still, she addresses her sister. ‘Where does the melanin fit in?’
‘I don’t know what the colour means. Vital substance, or an image. Something that I could hold down in my grumbling belly and keep.’ Una rests her head against the brick wall and recalls, ‘I remember the first time I pulled the colour from someone. We were in phys ed class and doing a swimming course at the local pool. Some stuck-up bitch made fun of me in the change rooms for having a flat chest. She was nice and black and juicy. I baited her to stay behind while our classmates left. Drank so much melanin from her she became a ghost. She ran from the bathroom screaming but nobody recognised her. I vomited her colour back up all over the change room floor. Not sure how I managed to escape that suspicion. This was back in Grade eight, by the way. So I was petrified – what if she reports me? What if the others find out? Well, she didn’t show up at school the next day, or the day after. I thought I might have kille
d her but she’d just transferred on account of ‘anonymous bullying’. I was lucky then but it became more difficult after that.’
‘I’m lucky I have you. At least I can feed without getting in trouble.’
Una shakes her head. ‘You’re not lucky; I’ve done something bad to you. When I finally rid myself of the Macaque, I never thought he’d latch onto you.’
‘How did you do it?’
‘Do what, get rid of him? I made a trade.’
Cautious now, sister asks, ‘What did you give him?’
Change.
Yi-Ting’s climbing up the last stair from the metro exit. On ground level now along a fancy and leafy street, close to home. Una checks the time on a digital clock scrolling through a shopfront. Two pieces of information: afternoon, and street name. Yes, she knows this place well. Una walks over to a nearby store and presses her nose against the blue glass, peering inside. See all the ice creams in their little boxes?
Here. Yi-Ting comes in beside her sister as she stands there like a pauper looking for scraps. So Una reveals the truth to her sister:
‘To get rid of Macaque…I gave away the face of my mother. I can’t remember what she looks like anymore.’
Yi-Ting turns to her sister, wild. Una looks her up and down and understands that this apparition can see her, the real her, inside this simulation. Dear sister….Yi whispers, ‘You shouldn’t have given away something so precious. How could you throw away the memories that keep us all together! That’s all we have, sis. That’s everything we have.’
How dare you, older sister. Such a crime is akin to forgetting this very street and afternoons stacked together where sister and sister learned the rules of biology and the law of ice cream. Here! How could you give away something so precious…
Una replies, ‘It was either that or ending my life and the Macaque along with it.’
Change.
Yi-Ti is nowhere. Nowhere here. Una looks around at the plaza and spies the buildings closing them in from all sides. Trees and picnic tables join the urban parkland in blue harmony. Una spins around, looking for her sister but knows almost instantly that she has been whisked away to parts unknown.
After Hope Dies Page 21
