She lays the head down on the counter and pulls out her paring knife. When she makes her first slice into the cheek the head’s jaw jerks open, the creature letting out a moan, trying to groan out spores.
The water is bubbling. Sam focuses on that noise instead, as she cuts into the organism, slicing through the first layer of flesh. The meat itself doesn’t bleed, but growths spotted along the bone like stars are still alive like all plants are, and strands of tough plant fibre have replaced some sinews. In a way it’s fresh.
Her knife blunts a little as she cuts away the fatty cheeks from the bones and sets them aside, lichen-spotted. Keeping her hand on the outside of the jaw, away from the teeth, she saws through the tough root of the tongue. Tendons snap and the tongue comes free, a slick lump of muscle.
She loosens the eyeballs like getting muffins free from a pan, sliding the tip of her knife around them to cut through the clinging muscles. With her gloved hand she pulls first one eyeball then the other from their sockets, slicing through the optic nerve.
The nose she leaves, as it’s chewy.
The meat is still contaminated. She drops the cheeks and tongue into the boiling water. Patience is the first step to success.
While she waits she trims the nerves from the eyeballs and puts them in her jar of vinegar, screwing the lid shut tight. What’s left of the head is no use, and she takes it out back and buries it with the other bones, shoveling soil over the sightless ragged sockets. Even if it could make a decent soup she isn’t yet reduced to that, and she doesn’t want to risk eating any of the brain. She has to be smart about this.
As the meat cooks the smell grows more tempting, less ammonic now.
Sam brushes off her coat and bag outside, then washes her hands again. Then she settles inside on the couch with the floral pattern, and reads one of the books she’d raided from the old library. It’s the little things. Small touches. She’s able to keep her interest on the page, words making sense instead of crawling away into black dots and disasters, with anticipation warm in her dry empty belly.
After a few chapters she goes back, carrying her nicest plate. The meat is boiling, but not for long enough yet. Spores die at temperatures of over a hundred degrees Celsius, or that’s what she’s counting on. Anyway, she hasn’t noticed any lichen creeping in under her fingernails, itching at the back of her neck, scraping down through her throat and making her a dead thing walking.
Not yet.
It’s only a matter of time, so she may as well live a little. Make the most of her opportunities and the new possibilities of this awful world. Survival is finding things she wants to do in the time she has, and the meat is ready now.
She has a long ladle but doesn’t want to miss any pieces. Pulling on oven mitts, she takes the heavy pot and tips the water down into the drain, stopping the meat.
The cheeks and tongue look pretty on the plate, and her anticipation is lively.
If this habit ever does spell the end of her, maybe it won’t be so bad. The things are still alive, in a fashion. A whole other system living inside the rotting bodies. Sometimes she swears she sees intelligence in their eyes.
For now, she is stronger, and she is smarter, and she has won.
She reclines on the couch in the last late afternoon sunlight and spears a gobbet of cheek on her fork. It’s overcooked, but falling apart it’s so tender.
She places it in her mouth. Her eyes close involuntarily. The meat is moist with fat, melting on her tongue. The few strands of lichen are softened from boiling. They make it taste, just a little, like green tea.
She chews and swallows it down, then spears another.
She won’t need to break out the chickpeas tonight, so that’s another day worth waking up for. Treating herself is more important than ever here at the end of the world. There is no one left to judge her, if she wants to feast on monsters.
Fission by N. Tan
At the station, I see my binary on the other train, arriving in a squall of blinding wind. Me – I’m on the opposite train, the one about to depart, doors already wheezing shut, sealing me in with the rest of the rush hour crowd.
For a moment, we’re both wonderfully parallel, my binary and I, the compartments of our trains aligned. The phosphorescent oblong of the window frame makes a portrait of my binary’s outline: one arm raised to hook xir wrist around one of the suspended handles. Limp-fingered. Head snug against the raised post of xir arm. Xir entire weight strung up by that wrist. Almost exactly how I’m standing right now.
We look nothing alike any longer, but my body recognises xir. The tingling that starts in my forehead radiates across my eyes, down my neck, torso, the length of my spine, all the way to my groin. The train starts to move, throwing my balance, and then I’m pressed against the window, handprinting on the glass. As though I’m trying to reach across the gap between the tracks, through the glass and aluminium casings of the compartments that insulate us against each other.
*
I don’t have an explanation for what happened. All I know is I’d been feeling off for weeks.
I broke up with my girlfriend Mai for no reason, and then the next day I ran to her office in the middle of a storm, begging her to come out to dinner with me. At dinner, I ate an entire plate of boiled squid pieces without offering her any and said to Mai’s face, “This is not what I want to say, but honestly, nothing’s working. At all. That includes us.”
Mai didn’t say anything, but with her fingers gingerly clipped a hollow cylinder of ice from her glass of tea and threw it at me. Then she left but not without telling me to make up my fucking mind.
That was it: I couldn’t make up my mind. About anything. I was vague, restive, went out walking all through the city searching for nothing, coming home, and then going out again. Forgetting to eat, then buying food and being sick before ever consuming it.
The split happened while I was walking past the train station. It started from the top of my head. My skull chimed again and again with tiny bell-hammer notes that soon enough rolled up the whites of my eyeballs. Beneath my scalp, my nerves opened fire. The pain dulled quickly as my body released some kind of self-anaesthetising enzyme, and numbness overwhelmed me.
I nearly threw up while stumbling into the nearest toilet, inside the station. I locked myself in a cubicle even as the centre of my body turned spongy. I prodded the flesh on my neck, leaving fingertip-shaped dents in my skin. My scalp began to tear, from the top down. Another point of fission began right above my belly button. Skin and bone and muscle softened, sludged, and breached as my body diverged along the invisible axis that determined my bilateral symmetry. My jeans and shirt were straining at the seams so I pulled them off.
Then I was halved like an apple, pressing one-handed against the wall for balance. My binary was the half that stepped away. The consciousness that opened in my binary’s one staring eye was new, too far away from me to be mine. I looked at xir. Xe studied me in return. One-armed, one-legged, with unfinished bones, half-slurry, garbled blood vessels, plasticine tendons that even then were lengthening, restructuring.
My face grew back. So did xirs. We regenerated the replacement halves of our separate bodies. Xe was a perfect copy of me.
*
I snap a selfie and study it before uploading it to the community lookup network. I haven’t changed. I’m sure of it. I got older, yes. There are a few extra creases around my eyes, pulling my lids into a slight droop. I still don’t smile in selfies. But I look the same. It’s my binary who has changed over the years.
Xe must have surgically altered xir facial structure. I remember the glimpse of xir cheekbones, slanting in a way mine can’t. Xir forehead accentuating the rest of xir features instead of drawing attention to itself. Xir nose cut into a slim triangle.
Still, the lookup network’s AI recognises some root of xir origin from my own uploaded selfie
and hauls up a cache of data on my binary.
I skim through everything. The name hasn’t changed; it’s still mine, still Ellis Teoh. The date of birth is the same as well.
But the pronouns. My binary’s pronouns are listed as she/her. It feels like I’ve been punched in the soft mass beneath my ribs. I’d assumed my binary’s pronouns would be the same as mine, so carefully chosen all those years ago, written along my lifelines, in the clefts between my knuckles, bangled in endless loops of ink around my wrists.
Her name is Ellis. She gets on the train. She is herself. She gets off the train. She sells seashells on the fucking seashore. Not me. She. I sing the sentences in my head, whisper her pronouns over and over, listening to the way they hiss between my teeth.
That’s not the only difference between us: she’s also married. When I stalk some of her many profiles, I see photos of her wife – Mai. I haven’t been in touch with Mai, not since I fled ten years ago and moved to a new town. I never thought of Mai as someone I’d want to stick around with for long, but apparently this other Ellis does.
How could we have veered so starkly away from each other? Wasn’t she once part of me? If I go to her, if we see eye to eye, maybe the whole process will be reversed. Maybe half of me and half of her will detach and disintegrate to dust, and the remnants of us, struggling for coherence, will somehow reconcile.
*
My binary arrives home in a rideshare. I watch her from the playground across the road, like I’ve been doing every day for nearly a week.
She swipes across a console in the transport, paying off her tab before getting out to walk to the door. Her hair creeps past her shoulders, striped with ugly pale highlights.
Her gait is still mine, though slightly pigeon-toed and slump-shouldered. Some traces of me in her are indelible.
The door slides open and Mai appears. They kiss, flick laughter at each other.
I’ve never seen Mai laugh like that, not when we were together. We were always so tense and elaborate about everything, trying to saturate every small movement, every word we said to each other with arcane meaning, trying to read clues about each other’s psyche and mistrusting each other’s replies. (“Oh, I’m good and you don’t have to worry. What does it mean for you if you’re worrying about me?”)
It got to a point where we couldn’t reach across the table for salt or chilli sauce without eyeing each other, intrigued and suspicious, saying, “You could just ask me to pass it? Did something go wrong? Are we on speaking terms today?”
We weren’t happy like Mai is with this other Ellis. I get embarrassed, resentful, watching them.
The playground I’m in looks like it hasn’t seen a child in decades. There’s a heavy log seesaw, a merry-go-round, and a bouncy horse and a bouncy caterpillar mounted on springs. A dried-up paddling pool full of dirt, the bottom covered by a sheet of dead leaves. My palms, gripping the chains of the swing I’ve been rocking on, smell like I’ve sweated rust.
After an hour of stalling, I finally cross the road and approach the house. I’ve pulled my cap low over my larger-than-life forehead and put on an oversized pair of shades. The speech is weaving itself in my head – all the things I’ll say to my binary. All the tears I might shed. All the accusations I want to press on her. Is it so bad being me? I want to ask her. Do you really have to be so different?
There’s an intercom system but nobody answers when I hit the buzzer. Instead, the door slides right open. It’s not my binary standing before me; it’s Mai.
I stare at her for a long time and she stares back. The speech peters away in my mouth, blows like dry wind out of my throat. Nothing. Mai doesn’t say anything at first, but the frown lines dredge deeper into her face, and suddenly it occurs to me: she doesn’t recognise me at all.
“You just going to ring and stand there?” Mai says. She’s wearing big silver-rimmed glasses and a lot of black stone jewellery around her neck.
I swallow and try to distort my voice into a rasp. “Is Ellis there?”
“You know my wife?”
“In a way.”
Mai squints at me, at the melon-wedge swath of my forehead, at the lump of my nose, my cropped hair. “Do I know you?”
“Probably not,” I lie. The way she looks at me – it’s like she’s on the cusp of a memory, a snapshot of someone from a different timeline.
“So, I don’t know you, and yet you know my wife?”
“You keep tabs on everybody your wife knows?”
Her eyes turn into crevices. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
There’s no resemblance between Mai and the laughing wife I’d seen not too long ago, greeting my binary at the door. I’m starting to recognise this Mai, and maybe even like her a little more. By the looks of the screwed-up corners of her eyes, still netted in that frown, she’s getting closer and closer to calling me by name. Maybe she hasn’t changed that much after all.
“I’m sure I know you. From somewhere.”
“No, don’t think so.” Then I decide to play with her. I can’t resist – she brings out the worst kinds of play in me. I shift my stance, so I’m standing the way I used to around her, hip leaning to the side of the wall, one hand in my hair, head to one side. Giving her a sliver of a glance, a slice of my expression. That “slice of judgement” look that Mai once said was what attracted her to me in the first place. It was the only pose she could imagine me in when we weren’t together, and she missed me.
The shift must really unnerve her in the wrong way, because her gaze snaps straight to mine. “Who the fuck are you and what do you want with Ellis?”
I start to back away. I’m not prepared for this at all. “Hey, sorry, didn’t mean to disturb you, okay? This is a mistake. I’ll go.”
“A mistake? You and Ellis – you’ve been seeing each other, haven’t you? It’s so obvious. Of course.”
I start laughing. I can’t help it. It’s fucking hilarious that this is the first thing she can think of. Me, some shady figure from her wife’s past who has sunk xir claws into their charming domestic arrangement. Me, her ex. The ex of myself. The interloper.
Mai turns and calls over her shoulder. “Ellis! Someone here for you. Another one of your dirty little secrets. Ellis!”
I turn and break into a fast stride, trying not to run. It’s like she’s calling both of us, me and the shadow surfacing from the weird domestic depths of that house.
*
Ten years is plenty of time to get shit done. You can score a handful of qualifications and get a job that doles out a decent salary. You can find yourself a nice place to live, and if you’re successful enough, actually own it, buy it off the phantom real estate corporations that own so many of these housing estates. You can find yourself, fit yourself into a body you’re comfortable with, get married and carve out your share of a happy ending.
Or you can do absolutely nothing. You can live in transit all the time, slip through jobs and only surface in the interstitial periods between employment. You can adapt to a new city, learn to change trains and then how to miss them because you no longer want to get on them. You can meet people and then leave them before their names wrap around your lips and tongue like clingfilm.
You can spend all your time wondering if what happened to you was a fucking hallucination or not, pinching your arms, pulling your hair, trying to do splits while holding on tightly to the edge of the table. And yet you don’t dare look back. Ten years can hollow you out if you don’t use them.
After the fission process cut me in two, while my binary and I were both in the midst of regenerating our missing halves, I lifted my right hand and she raised her left. I touched her cheek and she touched mine. We studied each other’s shoulders, breasts, stomach, rounded hips and thighs and body hair patterns. I trailed my hand across her half-face to the growing, feathering, writhing mass of her body, and felt her
own fingers brush against the rawness of my exposed windpipe.
I remember recoiling from her, from the disgust on her face, which must have been reflected on mine. We were a mirrored phenomenon. But when our bodies were whole again, two separate entities standing awkwardly in the cubicle of a public toilet, she broke away from my stare and examined her own hand at eye level, fingers flexing, fist clenching and unclenching like the first trace of a rebellion.
My mind was clear that day. My heartbeat slowed right down and I nearly forgot to breathe as a miracle of thought dawned on me. Very calmly, I put on my jeans and shirt.
“Where are you going?” my binary asked, a note of panic in her voice. My voice. “You can’t leave me here like this.”
I picked my jacket up off the floor and pushed it to her chest, careful not to touch her skin. “I need to get you some clothes. You stay here.”
“What happened to us?”
“I don’t know. Stay right here and wait for me. We’ll talk when I get back.”
“How long will you be?”
“I’ll run back as fast as I can.”
I left the toilet and stood outside the door. I thought I heard a sudden, sharp intake of air from inside. Perhaps a sob. I laid two fingers on my pulse. The rhythm was so slow, so beautifully languid that I could hardly feel it. My limbs were loose. They flowed like air. Someone walked past me, music blaring from their headphones, and I recognised the song. I sang a few lines as I got on the first train that pulled into the station and forgot about my binary, about Mai, about the train itself.
*
The other Ellis and Mai are having a fight. I followed them both when they left home together, to go out for dinner. From outside the restaurant, they look like a pair of statues, hardly moving at the table, their eyes locked on each other. Just like how Mai and I used to be.
They leave dinner, both stony, and call separate rideshares. But they both end up back at their house.
The sound of their amplified conversation leaks outside, before graduating into screaming, crying, laughing, and finally, the sound of something shattering. The door opens again and out comes my binary, striding down the road.
Year's Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 4
