Arcane II

by Nathan Shumate (Editor)

  It’s not Jerry Mathers.

  It’s Darby.

  “My name’s Jerry. Where’s the hot sisters?” he asks, and you realize that he doesn’t even realize who he is. The house had mentioned breaking the rules, but those rules are still quite unknown to you. Apparently, nobody ever really dies, even though you saw the flaming wolves rip this piece of shit to shreds.

  He looks full again, as though he’d been suckling on pudding for quite some time. Gone is the emaciated Holocaust victim that you’d witnessed the death of.

  Here is a new man, reborn like Jesus Friggin’ Christ, full of devious grins and a scrappy beard. His name is Jerry Mathers, but you know his real name.

  “Darby,” you say, and the man cranes his head to the side, like a curious dog who just heard a high-pitched noise from its master.

  “I don’t know Darby,” he says, pushing past you. “Why do you have all the lights out?” he asks, but you only stare at him, completely taken by what has happened. He shuts the door behind him.

  You’re not sure what the rules are, but the biggest rule of all is that nobody ever really dies.

  Ignoring Darby/Jerry, you call out to the house, “What are you doing to me?”

  The house doesn’t reply.

  Instead, pudding starts to blast from the wall sockets, putting out several candles as it does so.

  “Is that pudding?” Darby/Jerry wonders, a childish grin escaping his lips. “God, I love pudding.”

  He runs to the closest outlet and sucks like a hungry piggy.

  Outside, the wolves howl in delight. In the basement, the half-dead cats mew, wishing to be shoveled on to the fire.

  ***

  On Jerry’s first morning in the house, you open the photo album again.

  Instead of strangers, you find pictures of you and Darby. Of you and Jerry Mathers. It’s full of them because you’ve been here before. You’ve always been here.

  And this time, it’s Darby’s chance to win.

  The Last Laugh

  Brooke Miller

  The sisters both heard the can fall and hit the board-layered floor of the box car at the same time. The can had been sitting behind a piece of steel grating near the ceiling. It hit with a heavy thick sound that meant that it was full. Both of the sisters’ hearing picked it out without a problem. Their vision had faded mostly due to the atmosphere which seemed made of cigarette ash and what used to be trees, and everything else. The rest of it; what they had always had and never noticed, like calcium, had been sacked during their journey; up until that can hit the floor of the boxcar, that journey had seemed to have been at an end.

  Mother, the anthropologist, had spoken at length of the many peoples through history that had seen the end of the world. The Native Americans, the Maya, plenty of unnamed races who were simply erased from history just as easily as a backward j from a blackboard, regardless of what their names might have been.

  “History has no patience,” she was fond of saying. “When you are gone from it, you were never there.”

  ***

  Ingrid and Dulcinea were missing more than most of their vision and their hair, well on the way to their very own mother’s maxim. Their mother, no doubt citing Pacu incidents in Papau New Guinea, would say that animals react the same way as humans when their main food source runs out, that they eat whatever they can to survive. But even Mother couldn’t have said what was happening now.

  When you are willing to eat anything and there is nothing.

  The sisters had had to learn this on their own. The answer was that eventually you lay down and you wait for something to eat you.

  There had been less and less as time went on after the flash. The blast, or series of blasts, that changed the world into a scorched bowl. They had been walking for so long that time had stopped being a concern, and when they found the overturned box car it had seemed like Xanadu after so many miles. In fact, that was what they had called their makeshift home. The lap of luxury was indeed a gutted-out train car. At that point the problem had been food, and what of it they could eat with the teeth that they had left. Dulcey, perhaps more outfitted for survival by years of weight problems (not to mention low self esteem), had approximately ten teeth left. Her sister Ingrid had more in the area of six.

  Now it was six months after the world had decided against settling its differences. The trial by fire to see who was right left only this. The immediate fallout of the attack, the sequence of events, was never fully documented, although they had run across a piece of newsprint blowing across the ground. Somewhere a printing press had kept going, at least for a little while. Maybe the paper had been someone’s effort to feel like they were all going to come through this, that humanity had not moved on or been burned up like everything else. The headline had read, simply, “God, Help Us.” The story had gone on the depict the destruction of major cities, refugee camps and straggling bands of survivors, some of whom were formulating plans to incorporate a commune or a long-term refugee camp.

  The sister’s father had had ideas of his own about communes. In the early days the sisters were very relieved that they had provisions enough to survive in their family’s estate. Then Mother had died and they buried her in the blackened yard where her garden used to be. By that time their hair had begun falling out. But Father had always said communes were socialism in the guise of piety. Ingrid actually cursed him after the last of the food and water was gone and they had to leave home for what they both knew would be the last time. She cursed him for dying of intestinal cancer three years before, leaving enough money for them to burn to keep warm—there were no banks, after all. She cursed him and wanted to think that he took the easy way out, so he wouldn’t have to encounter people from his very own town, possibly, who looked like burn ward victims or medical accidents. Living babies in the arms of burned-up mothers who were still trying to nurse when they died.

  The sisters were almost skeletons now, frail bones draped with a layer of pale yellowish skin. Fat had given way to muscle, then to wiry ligaments holding extremities and bone together. Every movement was an effort that brought a menacing creaking sound and pain and always ended up in exhaustion. That was the cycle.

  But they used what they had now to search around the floor of Xanadu, searching along the boards and scraps of carpeting to where the muffled metallic sound marked the impact of the can and, more importantly, what was inside it. They moved painfully as soon as the understanding dawned: something had been up there all this time, something with food had been sitting over their heads as they lay dying. Moved like the trigger of a carnivorous plant by the medulla, the one thing that had not been blunted by starvation but sharpened.

  Food.

  They searched with hands like crab legs across the floor for the food. Oh God, there is food here.

  As young children growing up in Langley, Virginia, the sisters were taught to abide by rules appropriate to young ladies. Keep your hands to yourself was one. Don’t be selfish. Love thy neighbor and clean your plate. Be polite.

  Many things had changed since then, and there had even been a brief period of bitterness on the part of Dulcinea, bitterness at coming from “rich stock,” but that was what you found in Langley. She realized later that it was nothing to be ashamed of; still, as a young woman she mourned the fact a bit. She had also been the stricter of the two and had wanted to call the shots since the beginning of this, since Mother died.

  They had been pretty girls too, Ingrid more so outwardly. Dulcy was more of a discovered thing whereas Ingrid had known it on a daily basis. It was her that the gardeners watched when the two of them were out at the pool behind the house, from the time she was thirteen and on. Ingrid got the calls from boys. Dulcy had no more than three boyfriends up through college. At the time of the fire they had both been unattached and both just home from college. It seemed a cruel coincidence. They were good girls, and good girls who come from money can have a hard time finding a suitable husband, believe it or
not, and that was a cruel coincidence too, who would have thought? Was that fair? Now all they had was each other.

  ***

  It was Ingrid who found the can of Burt Baked Beans. She held the can close to her eyes while Dulcy was still searching around. There was something else written beneath the name—Secret Family Recipe, it said.

  She said nothing immediately about finding. The reason was something that had happened days ago, after Dulcy drank the bad water that Ing warned her not to. Things had begun going downhill fast after that. The thing that had happened was that Ing had seen a cockroach in the box car. A big, fat sucker too, in fact she wasn’t entirely sure it was a cockroach at all or some other kind of beetle bigger than a cockroach. It was more than enough, anyway. She surprised herself with her speed in catching it—she swatted the big bug, it was stunned. Dulcy had been sleeping or something like it, and she had come awake to see Ing with the big bug. She asked no questions (Ing was later sure that there was enough for them both to get a half, it would have been something, and her bitterness had grown). She reached a skeletal hand back and slapped Ingrid across the face. There was more power in that slap than Ingrid would have thought Dulcy had in her whole body, but it had rocked her sure enough and Dulcy had taken the big bug, whose legs were beginning to move again, and crunched the entire thing. Just chewed it up, all the while looking Ingrid in the face with her one living eye. They hadn’t talked since then.

  Maybe that was the beginning of what the bad water had done to Dulcinea. She had already been blind in the right eye, having it knocked most of the way out by a falling board in a house they were searching through in the days before they found Xanadu. Ingrid thought she was going to die and she dry-heaved when she put the misshapen eyeball hanging by its knot of strings back into the gaping hole in her sister’s face.

  It had taken some time but Dulcinea had come most of the way back. She was a little confused about things and didn’t always talk right and half of her face was black for days, but what can you expect from a steel support to the side of the head? Then she drank the water which they found, ground water of a dark brown, almost black. Ingrid told her not to but she drank anyways, she wasn’t going to be told no after two days with no water at all. It was later that very day that they found water that seemed safe and they didn’t talk about the groundwater, but Ingrid had seen the tiny things in it, like worms only smaller, they had a reddish color and they stayed in one spot but when the water was disturbed they twirled and squiggled back and forth. She had no idea what they were and she never mentioned them to Dulcinea.

  Ingrid knew that it was at that point or shortly thereafter that that Dulcinea started losing her mind. She sat in a corner of the boxcar for long periods silently staring off, occasionally chuckling to herself or searching all around herself looking for her keys, what had she done with them, she had to get to the, the... where was she going? She couldn’t remember... And then laughing at the silliest things. Ingrid asked her why the chicken crossed the road and Dulcy laughed fit to burst. It wasn’t amusing, it was frightening. At one point Dulcy asked Ingrid if she had a tampon because she needed to make a phone call.

  Dulcy had slapped Ingrid because of what the poison water was doing to her, Ingrid understood that. She could not, however, kill the anger that still welled up in her like a bruise taking a long time to heal and then getting bumped on a sharp corner. The anger was what kept her from saying anything right away when she found the can.

  She would, she told herself, because she needed the help to get it opened, but she wanted to relish the few moments of having it while Dulcy did not have it the way that Dulcy had had all of that last meal, the few calories, that Ingrid did not.

  Her fear was that Dulcy would take the can from her as she had before and Ingrid shook, turning her head this way and that, searching for a place where she might hide the can away for a few minutes. Then she would bring it out in a while, just a little while.

  Just a little while.

  She looked longingly at the label which read Burt’s Beans—Secret Family Recipe. She had no idea how they would get it open. Her lips peeled back and her jaw hanging loosely, Ingrid’s mouth of mostly gums was already watering.

  In her mind there was a different world inside that can. Things were in there that no longer existed anywhere else, maybe. Maple brown sugar was in there. Chubby little beans lying naked against each other in all their curdsy, meaty goodness. So sweet.

  There was probably even a fat sliver of—oh, God help us—meat bacon. Brown sugar-cured bacon no doubt, swimming amongst the chunky beans.

  Lost in all that, Ingrid had stopped paying attention to Dulcy’s throaty mewling sounds as she searched. Then Ingrid felt the skeletal hands crawl in between her own and grab at the can.

  On instinct Ingrid pulled the can in, making a curling shape with her body. She gripped it as close as she could against the place where her breasts used to be.

  Perhaps Dulcy had more strength than she, or maybe whatever strength she had left was sharpened by desperation and her encroaching madness. Once she got her hands on the cylinder Dulcy tried as best she could to yank it away from her sister. “Give it, skinny bitch.” Her bony fingers laced together and she fell backwards, adding the body weight that she had left to the force of her pull. Ing tried to hang on, uttering the only thing she could—“N-n-nah, nuh nuh.”—as she tried to hang on. Like the chorus of a song. On the second attempt, the can popped out from between them. It made another low bump on the floor. It was Dulcy who got her now free hands on it. Her eyes, or her eye, gleamed with triumph.

  Ingrid lay slumped against the side of the box car, out of breath, hate burning its hopeless and thin way at her sister, who grinned in the light of the boxcar with her one milky eye. She looked like a monster.

  Ingrid looked at her sister, and then she started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. She laughed at Dulcy, which coaxed a puzzled and rather stupid look of concern from her. She had won it, she’d won the food locked away inside the can and for what all the water had done to her she still knew that winning it was still only a step away from losing it again, just like everything else they had lost.

  Dulcy craned her head down to level her laughing sister into the best part of her vision. Ingrid stopped laughing; it hurt. It was a dangerous thing to laugh. Ingrid pushed herself almost upright. Dulcy eyed her with suspicion in her vulture-headed way.

  “Never could keep you from a meal, fatso,” Ingrid wheezed. And she giggled again, but her bony frame was only able to keep it up for a short time before a fit of phlegm-darkened coughing came on.

  The suspicion dulled in Dulcy’s face. Her eyebrows furrowed and her eye looked around, like she was trying to figure what was funny. She even looked a bit hurt at being called fat (force of habit). But she saw her thin wrists and it was like she came back a little from where she had gone, the place where she was spending more and more of her time these days.

  “Shut up.” She said. “Shut up, skinny bitch.”

  “Ish that what you called me?” said Ing, “If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle a skinny bitch.” Sometimes Ingrid’s “s” sound came out as “sh.”

  Dulcy laughed and then snorted. Now they were both giggling. Ing knew if they got really started then Dulcy might not be able to stop. She had seen it happen once since Dulcy drank the water. She’d seen her do a lot of things, but this one reminded her of when they were children and it started an idea in her head that she didn’t much like.

  She had to stop though, because laughing was a dangerous thing. That, and there just wasn’t anything to laugh about. Not in this world. In this world laughing could kill you. It was of no use to two working holocaust victims. But still, for Ingrid the idea was there now and it wouldn’t go away. That idea was that it might not be a bad thing if Dulcy died.

  She was dying already. They both were, sure, but Dulcy had drunk the water and now it was doing things to her.

  ***

&nbs
p; “Go suck a cock.” said Dulcy.

  It was about the hundredth time she had told Ingrid to go do this. The thousandth maybe since junior high when Dulcy had caught Ingrid doing just that thing to a boy who was her secret boyfriend at the time and who both of them liked.

  To Ingrid it had been an innocent but dangerous thing, having him in her mouth in her room, how they had snuck in through the back door, not knowing quite what they were going to do but having thought of things up until that point and been above all curious and willing to explore. It was a memory that could have been different, not one she thought of often, but when she did it was interrupted by that phrase, her sister telling her, “Go suck a COCK!”

  That was what Dulcy thought about when she told Ingrid to do that and she always wore the same face when she said it; the expression that had been on her face when she walked in on them that day, cold and surprised and concerned. That look and that phrase was a cold sharp stone that they would always share.

  She looked down at the can of Burt’s Baked Beans in her hands, then back at Ingrid. And as if she’d forgotten what she had just said a moment before she said, “I’d tell you to go suck a cock, but I... don’t think... there are any you haven’t... already sucked.” She trailed off in breath between. She managed to wheeze through a smile, and it was a hideous thing. That milky orb that always looked up and to the right, looking nowhere, was snotty gray and more and more that useless eye ran a viscid brownish liquid.

  “Just how you like it, shishter,” said Ingrid. “Now let’s find the can opener. We can share, and you need help opening that can.”

  ***

  The truth was neither of them knew if they had a can opener. Ingrid thought that she may have thrown it at Dulcy in the fight over the cockroach. The thought of it made unwanted feeling well up in her again. She kept looking back at the can sitting upright on the floor; an object so familiar in a former life as to be unnoticed most of the time now seemed foreign, like something she had never seen before although you would see them stacked up and down and side by side on supermarket shelves, back when supermarkets still existed. It was everything. The Holy Grail. There was more nourishment in that larger-than-average can than either of them had had in weeks.