by Tony Burgess
“I was afraid when I saw you. There’s bad people out in the cold and dark. But I guess you know that.”
“Oh, we do, ma’am.”
More eating sounds. Someone farts and excuses themselves. More eating. I’m beginning to think these kids are a little too polite. A little too wonderful. I bet they want this place and they don’t want to share it.
“I’m afraid the back rooms are dangerous cold. We sleep in here. All huddled like penguins.”
I hear dishes moving. Wonder what they’ll do with those. Tildy doesn’t use dishes.
“You’re very kind.”
“We have money.”
I can picture Tildy’s hands up. Refusing.
“Let’s go sit in front of the fire and listen to your story.”
They arrange themselves on the floor in spots far from me. I look in their eyes for Syndrome. Hard to tell. But if they had full-blown Syndrome, they’d be restless. Manic. They’d talk quickly, abandoning subjects, undermining themselves. If they have Syndrome, it’s incipient.
“Well. It’s what we have, isn’t it? We’re not going anywhere so we might as well talk about where we come from.”
Tildy is interested in them. She wants to talk about the Bible but she’ll wait till the end. She wants to get these kids to Heaven and she knows that time is not on their side. The girl looks to the boys and they nod. She will speak for them.
“Well, we come from Angus.”
“I know Angus. That’s a army town.”
The guys nod.
“We grew up there. That’s Greg, my brother, and that’s Jeff and Paul, his friends. My name is Holly.”
“I’m Tildy. Bless you.”
Holly smiles. The guys are a little embarrassed.
“We don’t remember pre-orbit. So we kinda grew up with it. But our parents and grown-ups have always been freaked out. Ever since I was a kid. We all grew up that way. It was kind of normal. I was in Grade 11 before it got bad. Nothing special. I worked at DQ. Hung around the mall a lot. I wanted to work in a dentist office. That is. Before. I don’t think I’ve seen a dentist for years. There’s probably none. I don’t know what these guys like. Bikes and scooters. Boards. It’s not much of a story up until things got bad.”
One of the boys speaks with his eyes cast down, fiddling with his sock.
“Tell her about the Seller.”
Tildy hisses.
“Seller? Wicked. Wicked. Wicked. Wicked. Wicked.”
They all nod. Holly glances at me.
“Yeah, so, I mean, a Seller came into our school and we had never seen one so we all went to hear him. I thought it was kinda hokey. He was like a rodeo clown or something. I thought it was just, like, a joke. Our parents didn’t though. They’d get pissed if we said anything about him. So, anyway, we all went to the airfield to hear him and he went on and on and he had, like, show people with him, like circus people.”
That’s why they’re afraid of me. They think they know exactly what I am.
“I didn’t pay much attention and figured it was funny. That night we all come back to the field in our pyjamas and sit around these big fires. The churches were singing songs and I thought it was, like, we all needed to have a break, so that’s what we were doing. I thought, Good. That’s great. Let’s do it. Let’s lighten up.”
I don’t want to look at them I can feel eyes coming to me and leaving quickly, then returning.
“So really, what happens is the clowny guy comes out and says a bunch of stuff then . . .”
Holly goes quiet. I glance up. They are all looking down except Paul, who is glowering at me.
Tildy lays the silence aside.
“I know, child. I know what happens.”
I close my eyes. I can’t speak. I have no tongue.
“But tell me, Holly, how did you get out?”
Holly takes a deep breath, holds it and exhales.
“Well, I guess, well . . .”
Tildy leaves for a minute, comes back with a tray of biscuits.
“You got away. That’s the important thing. You got here. I’m sorry for it all.”
She sets the tray on the floor. Greg looks at me, then Tildy.
“We saw some awful things happen. Things—”
“Shush now. It’s ok. I don’t think there’s need for those things ever again.”
The kids silently lift biscuits to their lips.
“Amen.”
Tildy takes the tray when they’re done. She gets Holly to help with blankets and pillows. Soon they are curled up in front of the fire.
Tildy reads from Ecclesiastes until she’s sure they’re sleeping then she goes down on her knees before me so her face is inches from mine. Her cool hands cradle my head.
“It’s been a lovely night, Mosey. Our best night. These kids are good kids.”
Tildy kisses my nose and lays her powder-soft cheek on my forehead. I fall asleep to her hum.
In the morning the kids are gathered by the door. They are talking in whispers. I crane around looking for Tildy. She must be in the kitchen. I notice Holly is crying. I listen hard.
“She must have got up in the night.”
“Do you think she knew?”
“That she’d freeze in her own bed? Yes, I’m pretty sure.”
“That’s what she wanted, Holly. C’mon. That’s what she wanted to do.”
accidents are predatory.
They spend the morning cleaning the house while I weep for Tildy. She waited until I was with someone. She waited until she could find good people to raise me. Oh, Tildy.
Paul walks past me, then takes a step back. He stands over me. I am not Moses. He knows that very well.
“What do we do with this?”
Greg comes to his side and looks down.
“I know what I’d like to do.”
Holly moves in between them and me.
“It was Tildy’s. She left it for us.”
“What if we don’t want it?”
“Okay. For now, it’s mine. I’ll look after it until we figure out what to do.”
The boys all look down at me.
“Okay?”
Their eyes are full of the night everyone they ever knew died.
“Just don’t leave it alone with us.”
“Until you’re ready.”
Holly pushes the boys back. She looks at me and screws up her face.
“Fuck.”
She lifts the empty bottle.
“Seriously. What the fuck are you?”
She sighs through her nose and thinks.
“We live here now.”
I nod and try to show a kind face. I honestly don’t know what my face looks like any more. Can I even look kind?
Holly rises and returns to the kitchen.
Paul walks by and brings the fire back to life with thin logs. He sits and stares into the fire. He looks over his shoulder then directly at me. His voice is low and nasty.
“I’m gonna pretend you’re not here for now. And if that changes, if I have to think about you, then I will drop you in this stove. I promise.”
I nod. I want that. Pretend I’m not here. He stands and kicks dirty punk wood in my face.
“I think you’re an actual fucking maggot.”
He spits on my body.
“Paul!”
Paul steps back with his hands up.
“Okay. Okay. Sorry. I get it.”
Holly wipes the bits from my face and rubs with spit. I can tell the way she touches me that deep down she agrees with her brothers.
They move in another room. They are in Tildy’s room. I hear a bang. Another. They are moving Tildy’s furniture. No. They’re moving Tildy.
Don’t touch her! Leave her! Cold air and ash swoop into the room. No! I want to go with her! I want to die with her! Put me outside with Tildy! I clench my sides and spring. I shoot myself from the cushion and hit the floor. Air pops out of my lung or lungs and I struggle to return it.
I hea
r a scream. I snap my head around to see Holly’s boot coming at me. She kicks my throat and screams again. I try to call out but only manage a bark. The boys move in and wind up to kick. One raises a heavy log. I recoil and move on the muscled points at my shoulders. I am soon under the couch. I use the floor and the couch bottom against my muscles and move quickly to the back. A hand appears then reaches in. I thrust my head forward and bite down hard on the hand. I taste blood. My mouth fills with it. They are screaming. They are cursing and crying. I will cut you. I will bite you. I roll back and find a groove in the wood floor at the wall. I drop into it and tighten my muscles. A poker is thrust in and it pokes my chest hard.
“Did you get it? Did you get it?”
I lay still. A face peers cautiously under the couch. I watch through half-closed eyes.
“I think so.”
Holly is crying.
I wiggle along the groove and draw myself to the wall behind the stove. Too hot. Too hot.
“Well, let’s make sure. Pull the couch back. I want this thing in the fuckin’ fire.”
I roll quickly under the stove. My hair crackles and singes. I come out into the middle of the room. Holly and the boys are busy stabbing the couch with the poker. I move by, drawing my back end up under and pushing forward. I reach the kitchen and spot the door under the sink. It’s open. I wiggle through and push the bottles of ancient cleaning liquids aside. They’ll see me here. I manage to cram myself into a space between the wall and a box. I stop and listen.
“It’s gone!”
“Gone!”
The shrieking begins again.
“Look for it! Find it!”
Things are crashing around in the room. Furniture overturned. Cushions tossed into corners.
“It’s not in here!”
“Fuck! Fuck!”
“What do we do?”
“Keep looking!”
“Check the bedroom! Check the kitchen!”
“Hurry! I’m not stayin’ in here with that thing!”
They ransack rooms. I push myself hard into the corner, trying to compact my bundled body. I put my face into a spider web. A nest. A thin light cuts in through a crack and I see hundreds of red dots fan across the shroud of silk. I blow into it and the web’s upper canopy drifts across my face. The baby spiders trek on my skin. It feels as if my skin is hallucinating. I blow and snort frantically. They have heard me. I am found. Something stabs into my side and I squawk. I spring from the cupboard. I am going to be wild. I am going to scare them to death. I shoot, shrieking into a boy’s ankle and bite so completely that my teeth stop deep in bone. Then I twist like a corkscrew. He yells but I am louder. A foot kicks my side and I use the bounce against the wall to fly up. I catch a hand in my teeth and fall with fingers in my throat. A shadow rises but I am too fast. I throw myself upright and spring. I smash a throat and shake my face like a buzz saw. A hand grabs my middle and I attack the wrist. I’m on the ground. I am a poisonous pig. I am a devil stomach.
They have run. Crying comes from the other room. The floor is a violent painting. My lung is sore. The kids are piling furniture in the doorway. Blocking my way. I hear sobbing. Gurgling. One of them is dying. I regurgitate fingers onto the tile. I can’t go back under the cupboard. No point now. The cold is starting to hurt my underside. I need to go up. I flip over so I can see. The door behind me. The stove and fridge. No way up. I don’t know if I could climb anything anyway. The frozen tile bites my back. I tear my bindings from ice blood as I turn. The screaming has subsided. Melodramatic teen death. Soon they’ll be making a better plan. They’ll kill me fast. Nowhere to go but down. I pull against the tack of ice and reach the cupboard again. I go the other direction this time. There’s a pile of fetid rags. I mount it to see if it’s warmer on top. Snap! A mousetrap bites my side and flies off, hitting a pipe with a high ping. It stings but there’s a burning sensation building around me that feels worse. I smell bleach. I’ve been crawling through bleach. The burn turns into a point against my side. He must have put a hole in me when he stabbed. The bleach is dissolving fat under my skin. I roll quickly on the rags hoping to pull some bleach away. The pain is intensifying. I am moving involuntarily. I turn under the rags, trying to escape. The rags tighten as I twist, constricting my breathing but I can’t stop. My body is trying to flee itself.
Goodbye.
Hello. I’m having a dream. I can see a wide band of red. On it, active lines twitching and bouncing. When two lines touch they are joined. Then they become three and so on. Soon all of the lines are part of discrete tangles evenly spaced along the band. I am aware that the band is trying to impress something on me. That the agitation has resulted in this perfect spacing. I see it all as only inevitable because of the way the band has presented itself. If it wanted to make me feel something, it needed to begin somewhere else. Maybe closer to one cluster as it forms. Or stay in the space between. I don’t know. I feel disappointed with the band. It has tried too hard to say something. It believed it was magic. I don’t know the solution and the band dims. The lines fall to the bottom. This reveals that the dream knew what it was going to say before it said it. And that it used what was nearby to do so. And it ended saying nothing, turning its back and then never having been dreamt.
There is another dream behind it. Much more aggressive, much more certain. It knows that it can fool me into thinking I’m awake in the middle of its story. We’ll see. It takes place in a parallel time. There are no orbits or peels or Syndrome. The sky is blue and the clouds are white and we grew up under them and now we live. I still have no arms or legs or sex organs. But I am slightly different than I was. I can move well. I have company. Many others. Thousands, just like me. We are burrowing and feasting on a dead person’s leg. We are a maggot horde. It is wonderful to feel part of this mass. My face is a black cowl with snips. My body moves in pulses, forward and back, and this is mirrored thousands of times around me. The leg enters my mouth as strands and excites my body so much that my tail twirls, propelling me. I occasionally cross half-eaten maggots. There is some cannibalism here, but I believe it’s caused by ecstatic eating. I accidentally bite into someone. It tastes too sweet. I buckle under to suck more leg. It is becoming liquid under us. It is becoming hot. There is no way we can’t win. I pump my face in and feel pus fill my body. This triggers a reaction I don’t expect. I tumble off the seething limb and land on the ground. It is colder down here and I soon stop moving. I feel my skin pulling up and my guts falling in. I try to move but I am stiff. All of my excitement is drawn in close to my head. I feel like the mass of maggots is now inside me, an infinite number of infinitely small faces. It is a sensation of profound happiness. I am being built.
The building sensation slows to quick random clicks. It stops. I feel air around me, under my skin. I am a distance from my own skin now. I contract a muscle around my eyes and it starts a choir on my back. The singing is deafening and joyful. The singing drives my old skin into the dirt and carries me into a sky made of a million dazzling suns. It is a dream but I am happy for it. Grateful. It was very finely crafted. When I awake I will be more than I was when I fell asleep.
The rags are keeping me from freezing. They have lessened the corrosion. Some of my lower body has sloughed off into my wrap and smells of putrefaction. I hope the bleach can stem advancing infection. I may well be lying in my last place on earth. I have fought very hard not to die. Did I fight too hard? No. It was my point not to die. It was never my point to live. I am a perfect result of the path I took. I hear movement in the kitchen. The barricade is being disturbed. I lay still and listen.
“I don’t see it.”
“Oh, it’s in there.”
“There’s knives in a block by the sink. Just run in and pull a couple out. When you see it just carve the fucking maggot.”
I hear things being moved. Carefully. Something heavy topples and bounces twice. A crack. The floor cracks under weight. A foot in the kitchen. Another crack. Someone is walki
ng.
They think I’m an animal or a demon. They don’t know I can hear them and understand them. I am not going to just offer my soft body to their knives. No. I am buried in caustic rags in a dark confined space. No one is going to take a chance on this. I hear the knife sing a high note as it leaves the block. His feet are so close. I could dive to them from here. Cram his heel in my mouth and dislodge it with a single flex of jaw. He would fall backwards. No heel. The knife would fall. I’d fly across him like a crow and yank his face clear off with a cinching tear. The rest would of them would faint of fright. They would give up. Wander off. Freeze to death on the hard ash.
I stay. Who can say what would happen? Cupboards are opened. He yells and jumps back every time. The door to the rags is opened. A knife is plunged into my cheek. He pulls the knife but it’s imbedded in bone and I come out with it, hanging in the air, twisting and howling. He drops me and bounds back up the barricade.
“I got it! I got it!”
I turn against the blade and ease it from my face. I see two heads peering over the pile. I killed the other two.
“It’s still alive! Go back in! Finish it off!”
“No! No!”
A heavy black log sails in over the barricade and shatters beside me.
“What are you doing?”
I fire a dead mouse from my ass. When did it crawl up there?
“Burn the fucking thing!”
The coals are spread across the floor and are melting tile. Another log. There are flames on the wall and in the box I hid behind.
I have to go down. These two will die. They will end up combined and moving like Paula and Petra in the ashes of this house. I will escape down.
I return to the rags and press my cheek. I will do this until the flames are close. I have to slow the bleeding. I see a dark triangle in the back corner of the adjacent cupboard. I launch myself at it and slip through. There is a wide plastic pipe. I try to move along it like an inchworm but the surface is too smooth and I slip off. Hit the concrete floor very hard and have to lie still. They are burning the house down to kill me. I manage to fill my lung again and roll over. I hear the floor above me crackling and the air in the kitchen start to hammer. This house will go up fast and all the children will die. Fire goes up. I go down. The house will come down eventually. I try to move. My skin has dissolved into linen. The hole in my side is like a deep canker. I have had a long knife in my face today. My one lung is scorched with ammonia. The children will die in my funeral pyre. I look for the place I want to die.
