by Tim Waggoner
When she’d been a kid, she’d read somewhere that together the human large and small intestines measured around twenty-five feet. That had sounded so long, and she’d found it hard to believe that all of it could fit inside a person. She had no trouble believing it now, though.
Aashrita’s intestines raised her several feet higher, turned her around to face the young woman and brought her closer until their noses practically touched. Flies now buzzed around both their heads.
Aashrita’s eyes bored into hers, shining with eager anticipation. “I’d like to say I don’t want to do this to you.” Aashrita’s weak voice was stronger now. “But that would be a lie.”
The coil of intestine wrapped around Lori’s neck began to squeeze tighter. Her lungs blazed with fire and her head pounded so violently she thought it was going to explode. Darkness crept into her vision, and she realized she was going to die – strangled by the internal organ of a girl she’d worked so hard and so long to forget. She was surprised by how little this distressed her.
I deserve it, she thought.
She fell into blackness, and there, in the great nothing, her memories broke free at last.
* * *
Lori sat on her parents’ front porch, right leg resting on a pillow her mother had brought out and put on a stool for her. A pair of metal crutches lay on the porch next to the chair. It was late afternoon in September, but the day was summer-warm, and she wore a T-shirt and shorts. No shoes. Despite the temperature, she had a fuzzy blanket draped across her legs. She didn’t want to look at the angry red incision on her knee, didn’t want to gaze upon the swollen, puffy flesh there. The knee throbbed with pain, but she’d discovered it was worse – or at least felt worse – when she could see the incision site, so she kept it covered whenever she could. It helped. Her pain meds helped more, and while she would’ve loved to take some now, her next dose wasn’t due for two more hours. She’d just have to tough it out until then.
Even though her meds had nearly worn off, she still felt spacy, and she sat looking out at the street, headphones in, listening to an Alicia Keys song on her MP3 player, and not thinking about much of anything.
After the accident during soccer practice, she’d needed to have a knee replacement, and now she had to wear a CPM – Continuous Passive Motion – machine to slowly move and strengthen her leg several hours a day, as well as doing physical therapy. At first, both had hurt like hell, even with pain meds, but the pain had continued to decrease as the days went by. At this point in her recovery, she didn’t use the CPM much, and she could get around without her crutches, unless she was tired or her knee started hurting too bad. She’d originally come outside so she could walk up and down the street and exercise her knee, as her physical therapist had told her to do. But once she’d gotten outside and felt the warm air, she’d said to hell with it and sat down on the porch and put her leg up. She was finding it increasingly difficult to stay motivated when it came to her rehab. Sure, she wanted to get back to the point where she could get around normally all on her own. But no matter how hard she worked, she wouldn’t be able to play soccer again, so really, what good were the painful exercises her PT wanted her to do? No matter how religiously she did them, she’d never be able to get back her full strength and speed. And if she tried to play, she’d risk screwing up her knee replacement, and she did not want to go through another operation and long recovery period.
So basically, her life sucked.
She’d sit out here for a half hour or so, and then go back inside. With any luck, her mother wouldn’t realize she hadn’t actually gone anywhere. Lori promised herself she’d go walking tomorrow, but she knew she didn’t mean it.
So she was in a dark frame of mind when she saw Aashrita coming down the sidewalk. Aashrita lived a couple blocks from Lori’s house, and while Lori only had one sibling – Reeny – Aashrita had four brothers and sisters, two of each, all older than her. She needed to escape the chaos in her house on a regular basis, and when she did, she’d walk over to Lori’s place and the two of them would hang out. It had been that way for the better part of a decade now, but Lori hadn’t seen Aashrita since the accident during soccer practice. Aashrita hadn’t visited her in the hospital, nor had she been over to the house since then. She had sent a get-well card, however, a small one that had come in a blue envelope. When Lori had opened it, it had begun playing music – soft and slow – in electronic tones, and it had contained a single printed word: Sorry, below which Aashrita had signed her name. Lori hadn’t replied. No calls, no texts, no emails. She’d been so damn angry at Aashrita that she hadn’t wanted to talk to her, see her, or even think about her.
So Lori was not pleased when Aashrita reached her parents’ front walkway, turned, and started walking toward the porch. Toward her.
If she’d had full mobility back, she would’ve gotten up from the chair, quickly gone inside, and shut the door before Aashrita could reach the porch. But she didn’t want Aashrita to see her awkward movements as she reached for the crutches and tried to get to her feet, so she remained seated.
Lori tried to read Aashrita’s face as she approached. She saw several different emotions there – fear, hope, anticipation, guilt, shame, defensiveness – all swirling together in an uneasy mix. Like Lori, Aashrita was also dressed in T-shirt and shorts, only her shirt was the one given out by the Oakmont Recreational Soccer League. Had she worn the fucking shirt on purpose, intending to mock her, or had she simply been unaware of the ramifications of wearing it to visit the girl whose knee she’d fucked up so badly it’d had to be replaced? Either way, it was a pretty shitty thing to do.
Aashrita came halfway up the porch steps and stopped, as if reluctant to come any closer. Maybe she felt she needed permission to step all the way onto the porch. Maybe she wanted to keep her distance to avoid getting an up-close look at the damage she’d caused to Lori’s body.
“Hey.” Aashrita’s voice was tentative, the word almost a question. Are you willing to talk to me?
Lori did not want to talk to her, wanted to tell her to turn around and get the hell out of there. But she found herself saying hey back, her tone neutral, noncommittal.
“How are you, uh, doing?” Aashrita asked.
Lori felt grim satisfaction upon seeing how uncomfortable she was. Bitch should be uncomfortable.
“I’m all right. Getting better every day.” She spoke these words with a cold edge that she didn’t bother trying to hide.
“Good. Glad to hear it.”
Lori didn’t respond to this. She just looked at Aashrita, watched her grow ever more uneasy as the silence stretched between them. She liked seeing Aashrita this way, liked seeing her hurt. If only a little.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come over sooner. I…was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me. You know, because of the accident.”
Was it an accident? Lori thought. Or were you tired of not being the best on the team, so you decided to take out the competition?
Lori knew this wasn’t fair of her. Aashrita had never shown any sign of being jealous of her before, and honestly, had Lori really been the best player on the team? She’d been good, one of the best, but the best? That was debatable. This was a reasonable way to look at the situation, an adult way. But she didn’t want to be reasonable. She was angry, and she wanted to lash out at the girl who had robbed her of her future.
With a magician’s flourish, she pulled the blanket off her legs and tossed it aside.
“So what do you think? Pleased with your handiwork?”
Aashrita flinched as if Lori had slapped her.
Lori continued speaking, her voice becoming louder and angrier as she went on.
“I’m never going to be able to play sports again – not unless I want to risk fucking up my new knee. Hell, right now it’s all I can do to walk up and down the street a couple times. It still hurts like a bitch, too – es
pecially if I use it too much. My physical therapist says it won’t hurt forever, but I think he’s full of shit. I think it’s always going to hurt. Maybe not as much as now, but I think the pain is never going to not be there. I’ll have it – and the scar – to remind me of you for the rest of my life. Better than signing my senior yearbook, right?”
Lori knew she was being cruel, but she couldn’t stop herself. And part of her didn’t want to stop, wanted to keep on hurting Aashrita.
“Don’t know what I’m going to do about college now that a soccer scholarship is out of the question. Maybe I’ll get a job at a fast-food place after graduation instead. ‘Would you like fries with that?’ How’d I do? Think I got what it takes?”
She thought Aashrita might get angry and lash out at her. Lori wanted her to, wanted to get into a shouting match with her, wanted to yell and scream and cuss her out. But Aashrita said nothing. Her eyes shimmered with tears, but they did not fall, not yet.
“I’m sorry, Lori. It was an accident. I didn’t mean it. I’d do anything to take it back.”
“Well…. There is one way you could make it up to me.”
Aashrita wiped the nascent tears from her eyes and gave Lori an uncertain half-smile.
“What is it?”
Lori’s words came out of her mouth like daggers of ice. “Go kill yourself, you brown bitch.”
She shocked herself, perhaps more for the racist barb she’d hurled than for telling Aashrita to commit suicide. She was deeply ashamed, but at the same time she felt dark satisfaction at knowing how much her words had hurt her friend. Her former friend.
Aashrita’s eyes went wide and the tears came now, flowing fast and free. She looked at Lori for several seconds, mouth open as if she might say something. But then she whirled around and ran down the walkway. She kept running when she reached the sidewalk and didn’t look back.
Lori almost called out for her to stop, almost shouted that she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant it. But she remained silent and watched Aashrita go, not knowing it was the last time she’d see her friend alive.
* * *
Lori fell out of the memory and found herself looking into Aashrita’s face – the version of the woman whose exposed intestines had a life of their own. They were still almost nose to nose, and the loops of organ still wrapped tight around Lori and held her above the ground. The loop coiled around her throat had loosened a little, just enough so she could breathe, but only shallowly. A cloud of flies still buzzed around them.
“You didn’t know depression ran in my family, did you?” Aashrita said. Her voice started out weak but grew stronger and more forceful as she went on. “My family was in denial of it. They self-medicated – Dad with booze, Mom with drugs. My brothers and sisters used both in various amounts and combinations. And when my parents saw I was quiet, moody, and withdrawn, they assumed it was nothing but normal teenage angst. Nothing to be concerned about.” She released a bitter laugh. “No therapy or antidepressants necessary. ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ they told each other. ‘It’s just a phase.’ They knew better when they found me in the bathtub later that night. The water was long cold by the time they entered the bathroom, but it was still red. I’d used a pair of garment scissors to slice deep vertical gashes in my forearms, just like I’d read on the Internet you were supposed to if you wanted to do it right. The scissors lay on the bathmat, blood on them still wet.
“You know what the funny thing is? The racism didn’t bother me all that much. You kind of get used to it after a while. It hurt because it came from you. You called me a brown bitch not because you were racist, but because you knew how much it would hurt me to hear those words come out of your mouth.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lori said. “No, that’s a lie. I did want to hurt you. I blamed you for my knee getting fucked up, and I wanted to get back at you in some small way. I was a stupid, self-absorbed teenager wallowing in pointless anger.”
While she would’ve hopefully found her way out of that emotional state on her own eventually, Aashrita’s death – and the guilt and shame she felt over the way she’d treated her friend the afternoon before she killed herself – had shocked her out of it. She’d stopped focusing on herself after that, dedicated herself to helping others. As a PT student in college and as a professional working at Get Moving!, she’d come to have a much better understanding of how people could react emotionally to receiving a chronic injury. Her own experience with such feelings gave her far more empathy for her clients than a lot of other PTs had. But while her guilt had motivated her to make positive changes in her life, it had also caused her to bury the memory of Aashrita’s suicide, and sometimes she didn’t remember Aashrita at all. She remembered now, though, and she wouldn’t allow herself to forget again.
“You say you wanted to get back at me in a small way?” Aashrita’s voice burned with barely restrained anger now. “Well, small actions can have pretty goddamn big consequences!”
Lori said nothing for a moment. She looked into Aashrita’s eyes as the woman’s words sank in.
“You’re what I need to confess to and atone for,” she said. “I mean, what I did to you. You were teetering on the edge, and I thoughtlessly pushed you over. I’m so, so sorry.”
“You can’t confess to me. I already know what you did. But congratulations on your little epiphany anyway. There’s more you need to know, though. A lot more. Think you’re ready?”
Lori answered truthfully. “I’m not sure.”
Aashrita’s smile was cold. “Too bad. You don’t have a choice.”
Aashrita’s brow furrowed in concentration, and her facial muscles tensed. Lori heard a wet tearing sound, and Aashrita let out a cry of pain. The lower end of her intestine came slithering out from her body cavity, disturbing the flies gathered there. The intestine swayed like a viperous snake, and Lori realized she was looking at Aashrita’s colon. She’d caused it to tear free from her anus, and now it was rising further upward, snaking between their two bodies.
“We’ve covered the past,” Aashrita said. “Now I need to show you the present and the future. I wouldn’t be much use as an augur if I confined myself solely to what was, would I?”
Lori tried to protest, but the colon shot toward her mouth, slid past her teeth, and wiggled its way down her throat. And then it began pumping something thick and sludgy into her. She tried to scream, but all that came out was a muffled moan.
Images began to flash across her consciousness. She saw Shadowkin moving through the streets of Oakmont, destroying anything in their path, including people. There were so many, far more than had broken into her apartment last night, and more than she’d seen at the cemetery. Three times that number, maybe more. They moved so swiftly, killed so many…. They were far stronger now than they’d been when they’d broken into her apartment. They’d fed on her then, taken some of her strength. And had they retreated afterward so that they could digest what they’d taken? She thought so.
The images changed then, and she saw Melinda, Katie, and Justin riding together in Melinda’s white SUV. Melinda drove, her gray braid swishing back and forth behind her head while Katie – who now had tufts of fur on her face, along with cat teeth and cat eyes – scanned the sidewalk for something. Or someone. Justin sat in the back, face expressionless, his shirt open to reveal a chest covered with a mass of misshapen, discolored growths. What the hell had happened to them, and how had they ended up together? But she knew the answer to that, didn’t she?
The Cabal.
The images in her mind changed yet again, and now she saw the inside of Horizon’s Edge Mall, saw people running, mothers with children mostly, saw bodies and blood…. Reeny was on her knees, tears streaming from her eyes, mouth open in a silent scream as she cradled the limp body of Brian. Lori’s nephew had blood on him, a lot of it. Near Reeny and Brian lay the body of a uniformed police officer, gun in
hand, the top of her head blown off. There was lots of blood on her, too, but her features were clear enough, and Lori saw she was one of the two officers that had come to her apartment last night to investigate the Shadowkin’s break-in. Officer…McGuire. She’d never learned the woman’s first name, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was poor Brian and her devastated sister. Lori focused on them, tried to reach out mentally to Reeny, to let her know she was not alone in her grief.
Then Brian opened his eyes.
Lori felt almost giddy with relief. He wasn’t dead! He was only wounded, and despite all the blood, evidently not too seriously, for he sat up easily, displaying no sign of distress. He started speaking, and although these visions came with no sound, she could tell by the increasingly angry expression on Reeny’s face that whatever her son was saying, it was making her furious. What the hell—
The vision faded, was replaced by yet another.
This time she saw a scene of Oakmont viewed from above, as if she were flying over the town. There wasn’t much left, just some scattered buildings here and there. Most of the structures had been destroyed, reduced to broken brick and concrete, splintered lengths of wood, shards of shattered glass, bent and twisted metal. The ground was torn up too, as if dozens of tanks had rolled through, treads churning the soil. It looked as if a mass of tornadoes had swept through Oakmont, their merciless winds pulverizing everything in their path. There were bodies, too, so many of them, some more or less intact, some only partials, others smears of bloody meat and crushed bone. There were no signs of life, not even animals – no dogs or cats, no birds.
She tried to scream, needed to release the horror she felt, but the sludge from Aashrita’s colon was still being extruded into her, and it clogged her throat, and she could make no sound. And then the coils of intestine grew slack and she slipped through them. As she fell to the ground, the end that had been forced into her mouth came free, and she was able to breathe again. She pushed herself onto her hands and knees, her body shaking so violently that it was all she could do to keep from collapsing back onto the ground. She opened her mouth to scream at last, but instead a torrent of thick black liquid shot forth. The muck that came out of her smelled foul – and tasted worse – and the sensation caused her to vomit even harder. She continued vomiting, abdominal muscles contracting painfully, spine arched and rigid, for what seemed like hours. But eventually the flood of sludge became a trickle, and then she was dry heaving. She felt the blanket being draped over her body, and she might’ve flinched at the unexpected contact if she hadn’t been so physically spent.
