Gristle & Bone

by Duncan Ralston

  The end of her finger was bleeding.

  She tossed the junk food aside and found the drawer empty, aside from the blade from a disposable razor at the far back, its surface rusty and crusted with a black, gritty material she recognized as dried blood.

  We're blood sisters now, she thought.

  In the trash, a candy wrapper uncrumpled with a small, insectile sound, suddenly blooming as if Daria had only thrown it out moments ago. Of course that was impossible, as Daria hadn't been here in weeks. Tara supposed it wasn't likely Daria's mother or father would have recently been sitting in the chair eating their daughter's chocolate bars, though certainly she'd seen and heard of stranger things.

  "Daria?" she said. "Are you here with me?"

  A sudden blast of chilly air met her query. She nearly jumped, but her reporter's instincts kept her in the chair, sucking at the hurt end of her finger, weighing the options. A moment later, she heard the tick-tick-tick of the air conditioner kicking in, and looked up. The overhead vent blew frigid air down on her.

  Jumping at shadows. But she is here. I feel something.

  Inspiration struck. She opened Daria's word processor program, letting the cursor blink. It was what she did when stuck with a blank page, waiting for the muses to work through her fingers. She took in a deep breath. Held it. Then let it out slowly.

  "Daria, where are you now?"

  She waited, watching the cursor. Nothing happened.

  What the hell was I thinking, anyway? It's a PC, not a Ouija board.

  But the tip of her injured finger was tingling.

  It tingles, Daria had said.

  "This is something, isn't it?" Tara asked the empty room. She held the finger over the keyboard, hovered there above the keys, and the ends of her other fingers began to tingle. For a moment, she worried they might begin to disappear, but they remained solid. She poised them over the keys, forefingers resting on F and J, and like Daria's emotion magnet, she felt the pull of some invisible force, and typed out a single word:

  yes

  Fear gripped her insides. I started this, didn't I? Nothing to do now but finish it. "Where are you?" she asked Daria's not-so-empty room.

  The answer came through her fingers. She watched them, frightened and incredulous, moving not of her own volition, but as if the fingers themselves were possessed.

  everwherenowear

  Tara puzzled over this. "Is there any way I can help you? Is there a way to bring you back?"

  confessss, Daria typed.

  "Confess? Confess to what?"

  Her fingers clacked at the keyboard. She read what Daria had typed:

  confesshun ezs th sole makes pane disapeer

  Confess, Tara thought. What do I have to confess to?

  But she didn't need to think hard. The old hurt spilled over and Tara began to type, this time on her own.

  "My Confession"

  Tara Maxwell

  I let it happen. I saw the signs and did nothing, and the girl who lived across the hall killed herself. I was so afraid they would start picking on me that I let them bully her into the grave. Anything to get their attention away from me. I could have befriended her, I could have comforted her, but I would have been shunned. Hope didn't cut her wrists or take pills—she threw herself out of her dorm room window while the rest of us were off on Christmas break. By the time we returned to school, a new year had started, and her parents had already come and gone.

  Her bedroom was empty. Nobody cared to wonder why.

  I've thought a lot about what I could have done to help her over the years, but by then it no longer mattered.

  I could have helped her, but I didn't. Because

  Tara paused to scratch her arm, and kept typing. Tears stung her eyes and ran down her cheeks, and she didn't spare a moment to consider the sudden itch in her arm. Her mind was on her confession, unburdening herself of her darkest secret.

  Because I was scared. I let them tease her. I heard her cry alone in her room, saw her withdraw from school, from life, and I said nothing. It's as much my fault as it is theirs, only they didn't care. They laughed and made jokes about it after she was gone. Said she'd come back as a slug, only nobody would be able to tell the difference. Like that was funny. And I laughed along. Because if I didn't, they would know how I really felt.

  My inaction killed Hope Chandra, and nothing I do will bring her back.

  Tara let out a long, ragged sigh of relief. She sniffled, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Confession eases the soul. Daria was right—she felt clean. As empty as Hope's dorm room had been after Christmas break.

  The cursor blinked at the bottom of the page.

  "Daria?"

  Was she gone? Had she moved on to discover what dreams might come, now that she'd ridded herself of the misfortune of being human?

  The screen winked out, going back into standby. But the little red light beside Daria's webcam remained on. Tara never noticed.

  She felt it first on her shoulder. It wasn't quite a tingle, more like the splash of warm rain on her skin. Painless, and somehow that was even more frightening. She had predicted pain. Without it, she didn't know what to expect.

  Tara stood and peeled off her jacket, tossing it on the floor beside her, then pulled up her t-shirt to look at her arm. The skin was vanishing in small dots like droplets—like acid eating away at her flesh, only beneath there was nothing. As a child, she'd loved the rain. She'd waited for the puddles to gather, then thrown on her yellow slicker and splashed in them. She had tilted her head back and caught mouthfuls of fresh water from the sky, swallowing it in big gulps. She had stood and watched the birds, fluttering their wings, splashing in their birdbath in the backyard, and she'd wished she could be among them, small and frail in that enormous bowl of fresh rainwater. She'd wished she could fly up into the clouds as they threw down their fury upon the earth.

  The fear of this process—whatever was happening to her now, had happened to Daria—washed away.

  Tara slipped her t-shirt over her head, watched as her taut belly speckled away into the ether. Her right arm mostly gone, she touched the space where her stomach had been with her remaining hand, and found only empty space. Somehow, she remained upright as her body drifted away beneath her. She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor, unbuttoned her fly and shook out of her jeans, pulled off her socks, standing on one leg at a time, legs that had already begun to vanish as she danced out of her jeans. She wanted desperately to be unfettered, to feel only the warm, gentle rain on what remained of her body, her self. Finally, Tara stood naked in front of the computer, looking at what remained of herself in its mirrored black face, her arms spread out like wings, watching as she faded away into beautiful nothingness.

  Her breasts evaporated or dissolved—she couldn't tell, and it didn't matter. She felt the breath whoosh out of her then, and for a terrifying moment she thought she'd suffocate, as Daria had. But she calmed herself, not by meditative breathing but by counting the seconds which passed without breath, instinctually realizing that if she had no body, she had no need for oxygen.

  Her jaw, that embarrassingly mannish jaw, faded away, though she knew she would miss it. Her too-small lips didn't seem so girlish in retrospect, 20/20 hindsight, as they turned from red to pink to white like a fading flower and then to no color at all, becoming invisible. Her bumpy nose actually looked almost cute on its own, with just the eyes to compliment it—then it too whisked away. Her hair, which had never had enough body and was always too straight, disappeared from the tips to the roots. As it went, she decided a bob or a pixie cut would have framed her eyes nicely, which, she realized, were actually quite pretty.

  When at last the eyes themselves disappeared, there was nothing left of her to see.

  HAL WATERMAN'S BLACKBERRY beeped in the darkness of his bedroom, waking his wife first. Jean Waterman leaned over groggily and shook him awake, then fell back to her pillow. He put on his reading glasses, flicked on his bedside l
amp, and plucked the phone up from the nightstand.

  "All right, all right, hold your horsies," he muttered to the incessant beeps.

  He scrolled to the message: an email sent from Tara Maxwell, at just past 2A.M. A little late, he thought, though without much surprise. The message contained an attachment, not to the text file he'd expected but to a video with a bizarre title—everwerenowear.mp4, whatever the hell that meant. He considered it a moment, sleepily. Why would Maxwell send me a video?

  "She wouldn't," he answered himself. Jean uttered an inquisitive moan beside him. "Nothing, dear. Go back to sleep."

  He'd seen this before: someone's email was hacked, and sent out suspicious links. Open it, and the virus would infect you.

  Resolute, Hal Waterman deleted the spam, set his phone and reading glasses back on the bedside table, and snuggled up to his sleeping wife.

  Always trouble with that girl, he thought, and thinking this, he drifted off to sleep.

  ARTIFACT (#37)

  THEY ALL HAD their jobs to do: Ugly Karl did the driving, Mad Bastard did the videotaping, and Meat did the girl. It was how they'd always done it; deviation from the plan would inevitably lead to disaster.

  The Filthy Lessons crew dumped Nora West, a new girl in the business, out of their white van and onto the side of the road under the Dolphin Expressway overpass. Bastard tossed her purse, keeping her in frame as she caught it. Most of its contents spilled out onto the sidewalk. Nora collected her clothes, strewn along Northwest 35th: the yoga pants, the loose-fitting pink halter, bedazzled with the word HAWT, the frilly white panties Meat had scrunched up and stuffed into her mouth to muffle her cries.

  She'd had time to put on her sandals and nothing else, the acne on her forehead shimmering in the mid-afternoon sun below a blonde fringe. She was still trying to scoop the contents of her purse back in with her right hand, while in her left she still held the rag she'd used to sop Meat's cum off her face and out of her hair.

  "What about my two hundred dollars?" she said, looking worried, her face all squinched-up and somehow still attractive. Zellweger-esque.

  "Lesson learned, biatch!" The Bastard shouted at her. The line served a dual purpose as the Filthy Lessons's catchphrase and Ugly Karl's cue to peel away from the curb, but Ugly's foot remained still. "Dude, let's get the fuck out of here!" Bastard yelled, slapping Karl on the shoulder.

  Improvising, Nora began running naked toward them, looking supremely pissed, her sandals going skid-clack! skid-clack! against the pavement. No one cared. People might have gawked as they drove past, but nobody braked or made a hasty call to the MDPD. Welcome to Miami, ladies and sperms—the Gateway to America.

  Bastard's little brother, Ian, who'd co-created and maintained the Filthy Lessons website, drove a few blocks behind them, ready to pick up Nora, hand over a good wad of cash, and have her sign the release. It was a trick Filthy Lessons played on their audience: paying semi- and non-professional models to pretend they were everyday girls picked up off the street and tricked into having sex for money. These were "ordinary, respectable girls" in desperate need of quick cash to pay off that student loan, that credit card bill, that trip to New Orleans where they just might flash their boobs for Mardi Gras beads with a few too many drinks, or that visit to the clinic to fix their "little mistake."

  The illusion FilthyLessons.com had cultivated was that any idiot could pick up any girl off the street, so long as that idiot had a bit of cash. And because the illusion was so authentic, they could never deviate from the plan. It was something they didn't speak of anymore, yet its presence still weighed heavily on their minds—particularly when they drove over the embankment under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, where it had all gone down.

  After a year or so in the business, an urban legend had begun to grow: that despite the disclaimers, they weren't actors at all, but real girls relearning the earliest lesson we're all taught, the one about not getting into cars with strangers, and learning it the hard way. Most women in their right minds were wary of men in white vans. They called them "creep vans." Rape vans.

  Members had begun to suspect that the coercion and humiliation they were seeing was real.

  When the rumor started, the site had grown to a million subscribers in little over a month, and Filthy Lessons had become filthy rich. At the height of their popularity, they'd been on the list of top 500 dot-com companies, raking in over a million dollars in one year alone. (This was before porn "networks" like Brazzers.com swallowed up all the smaller sites, like Linda Lovelace deep-throating Harry Reams, and free "video sharing" sites like XVideos and XHamster all but boned the independent market.) Currently, Filthy Lessons was a division of Porn Identity, netting barely six figures in 2014, despite the dozens of videos they'd put out that year.

  With overnight infamy came attention from the State of Miami, where coercion was synonymous with rape. Thus had begun The Bastard's own filthy lesson in the fuzzy legalities of porn production. Whoever said "There's no such thing as bad press" had never found himself under the constant scrutiny of the Miami-Dade P.D.

  And then came Jim Alan Biggs, but they no longer spoke of him—nor of #37, who'd spent such a short time in the Filthy Lessons van, but had learned the hardest lesson of all.

  Nora West waved her arms furiously as the van peeled away from the curb—its windows tinted, with a F*CK GONZALEZ sticker on the bumper.

  "Why the fuck did you hesitate, bro?" Bastard swatted Ugly Karl, who muttered something unintelligible and shook his head. The Bastard ignored him, thumbing off the camera, and texted his brother. Less than a minute later, Ian texted back two words:

  GOT HER

  BASTARD AND HIS brother viewed the footage a few hours later, splitting a celebratory bottle of scotch Ian Howard had bought for the occasion of their 200th video. With only four or five repeat Filthy girls and a handful of pre-existing starlets worked over in their van, Filthy Lessons had introduced just over 170 hardworking young women to the industry—And still not a single AVN award to show for it, the ungrateful pricks, Bastard thought.

  On the HD monitors, Meat's face showed zero fatigue as he sweated over #200's tanned little tuchas.

  "Shoulda made a t-shirt for her to wear," The Bastard said, raising his glass to point at the screen.

  "Or for Meat." Ian mimed a slogan over his open-collared shirt: "'Over 200 Spermed.'"

  Bastard chuckled and divvied up the last of the scotch into their glasses. A splash dribbled down the back of his hand and he licked it off.

  "Why didn't Karl follow cue?" Ian asked, eyes glassy from the booze.

  "Probably spaced-out from the weed," Bastard said. "Burnout motherfucker."

  Ian nodded, but he didn't seem convinced. "Looks like he was staring at something out the window." He rewound the footage. "See that?"

  Bastard did. Karl's eyes widened in slo-mo. His mouth fell open on his shitty teeth and the braces he'd gotten a few months ago. Along with the ratty John Holmes 'stache, he looked like the oldest kid in high school. The shot swished away slowly, fast movement in slow motion, much too blurry to see whatever Karl was looking at, before the frame hovered over Nora.

  "Looks like he saw a ghost," Mad Bastard, born Kevin Howard, said.

  "The vengeful spirit of Andrea Dworkin." Ian threw up his hands and shook them. Bastard wasn't sure if he was miming a ghost or channeling Al Jolson. "Woo-oo-ooh! Pornography is harmful to womennnnn!"

  Bastard laughed and shook the rocks in his scotch. Ian eyed his brother. Eventually Kevin looked up, catching his look. "You goin' fruity on me, bro?"

  Ian gave his big brother a smile he hoped didn't look as patronizing as it felt, and shook his head.

  "What, then? Something on your mind?"

  "You ever think about—?" Ian stopped, aware that he shouldn't continue: the subject was verboten, especially here at the office. It was technically his own den, so he should have been allowed to say whatever the fuck he wanted—but to what end? If it was just to get the
thing off his chest, was there really any point in saying it at all? Why not get a psychiatrist, if that was his motive?

  "Doing it with Ann Coulter?" Bastard suggested. He grinned over a sip of his drink, then added, "Just about all the time." He spoke slowly and slightly slurred, his head weaving a bit, and that was good. Kevin had been under a lot of stress lately, with bills and bad press and 14-hour days. He needed to unwind, but Ian needed to say it.

  "You ever, uh...?"

  "Spit it out, E. You know I love talking to you, bro, but sometimes it's like having a conversation with an impacted bowel."

  Ian heaved a sigh of disappointment. What he wanted to say—Do you ever think about #37, Kevin? Because I think about her all the time. I see her in the dark behind my eyes when the lights are out, so I leave them on, and I still can't sleep, so I drink myself into a fucking coma. Ten years, Kevin. Ten years this has been my life, and I'm just so. Fucking. Tired... To voice this would be too difficult, and not just for himself. He might as well slash both their wrists, and then ask Kevin to forgive him and clean up the mess. So instead of spilling their blood, he said, "You ever think about leaving the biz?"

  Bastard eyed him suspiciously. "And do what? This is what I was born to do, bro. You don't buy silk sheets and sleep on the couch. You climb into bed and get nice and cozy. Just because the sheets got a little dirty, doesn't mean it's not still your bed."