I saw my dead ferret, Caesar, last night in my living room. I’d dozed off
watching re-runs on TV and woke up to the tickle-prick of whiskers against
my hand. When I looked down and saw him, I picked him up and settled him
under my chin. We’d always slept like that on the couch, him nestled
against me, a warm weight rising and falling as I breathed.
I closed my eyes and remembered; Caesar was dead. I sat up, bang, and he
was gone.
I told Richard about it the next morning at work.
“I think my ferret’s haunting me,” I said, hoping to start things on a light
note after our rocky parting the previous evening.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Kathy,” he snapped back.
It was the first time he’d ever been sharp with me. An awkward silence
sprang up and clocked in for the long haul.
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This was the first time in over a century that Garnet had found the courage to attend an exhibition. In those days the fashion had been deliberate deformity; men made with the faces of beasts, or misshapen into the likeness of a turning screw. The art of it had been to make the most severe possible departure from the human form, without creating something too monstrous to be viable; apparently, things had grown worse in a hundred and fifty years.
“Give us a blessing, little mother,” the man standing next to Garnet said to her. He clearly fancied himself a critic of the arts, dressed in the new-style – layers of expensive cloth and furs draped so that they loudly proclaimed the wealth of one who could afford natural fabrics, while doing nothing to clothe or obscure the body of the wearer. His laugh was as joyless and acerbic as bubbling vinegar.
“That one only blesses monsters,” his companion, who was neither male nor female, sipped its wine and ran its fingers along the surface of the blood-drenched ice.
I cut myself when I was younger, trying to make my outsides match my
insides. I slit my wrists in the bath the night that my mother told
me she’d only asked for custody so my father couldn’t have me. Slit
them the right way, palm to elbow. I passed out from blood loss, but
woke when the water grew cold, pale new skin glowing beneath the dried
blood, beneath the murky water. I could cut myself and watch it heal,
almost before I put the knife down. Once I let the knife dig deeply
while cooking dinner at my father’s house, through the bone in my
thumb. Even the nail was back by morning.
I’ve pierced my ears so many times I’ve lost count. If I sleep
without earrings in they heal over before morning, and I must redo
them before class, or go without earrings that day. Tattoos last
longer. The colors melt back into my skin within a month, white and
yellow first, blue and the black outlines last. By the time I moved
back to my father’s house, the tattoo I would have gotten to annoy my
mother would be all but gone. By the time I came back to her house,
she would have forgotten it completely.
She clutched the bag to her chest, felt the contents
poking against her breasts through the plastic. She
had been fortunate to find it, hidden in a
hollowed-out cabinet in a back room. The rest of the
store had long since been plundered. She swallowed a
ball of spit and crawled along the tile, worming
toward the back.
She heard yelling outside, the boys backtracking. She
crawled faster, her knees scraping against broken
glass. If they caught her they might not kill her, but
they’d do nasty things to her. The gangs had found her
sister once and had given her the Big Belly. A little
monster had squeezed out from between her legs,
wiggling and twitching for a few moments before going
limp. She remembered burying it, shuddering. The next
day she had buried her sister–
It was his first deep trek across the Mojave tundra with Dedimus, hours spent listening to the snowreaver’s hover jets pulverize powder and ice, his tiny nostrils filled with the tonic ozone smell of its ionized plasma engines and he could barely move in the half-dozen layers of insulation Mida added to his parka., and somewhere under all of that Dedimus preaching, always preaching, about Joshua’s bond to the ever-growing winter, his future, his responsibility. By the time they reached the Santa Monica coastline, Joshua’s ears were ringing and he was hungry, and despite the arctic chill he found he was sweating.
They stood on the shore and looked west. At first there was just the ocean, slow moving and rough-hewn gray, like unfinished sheets of steel. The frost shifted in heavy curtains above them. Then morning broke and the tide changed. Twenty miles off the coast, the white city blazed as pure and broad as the horizon itself. There were walls rising higher than any structure Joshua had ever seen. There were parapets. There were stalactite spires that stabbed the frosty fog billows.
Joshua never saw anything like it, not in pictures or among the small holographic images Mida used to teach him.
“Who lives there?” he’d asked Dedimus.
“No one,” the old man told Joshua. “That is the fata morgana, an illusion created by the cold. Like any worthy opponent, winter tricks your eyes, draws you into falsehoods.”
This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.
Paul Toland liked it best as high up as he could squirrel himself beneath the bridge, right up there at the nexus, where with superstructure of the bridge itself sliced in to connect with the finished concrete of the street. Here, with his bag of belongings, his bottle, and his razor, he felt safe and content. A small voice from his earlier life told him that this was only a primitive retreat to the womb fantasies that everyone had somewhere in their subconscious; he told the small voice to shut the hell up.
Paul was younger than most of the residents under the bridge and in somewhat better condition (though certainly no poster boy for Health & Fitness Magazine), so he had little to fear from the rest of them. In fact, he was sort of like their king. As long as those damned spike-haired, body-pierced punkers stayed on their own turf, anyway.
Tonight was a sweet one. Late May, nighttime temperature hovering around seventy, almost too warm, but with a frisky and teasing wind to alleviate any discomfort, bringing with it the salty taste of the Bay. It was moonless and quiet, too. By four a.m., Paul was in a deep sleep that was unbroken by even the dreams that tended to haunt his nights.
“I saw the kids this morning,” he said suddenly, as if he knew it was on her
mind. “They’re growing like weeds.”
“Yeah,” she nodded vaguely, dumping out the last of the birdseed, “William
is just like you. He fell in the canal this morning.”
He laughed at this, and then started walking away toward the barn.
“You wanna come for dinner?” she called out after him, already knowing the
answer.
“Cain’t,” he yelled back.
She stood there as he disappeared, then turned back to the doves. Some were
coming out now, eyeing her warily as they pecked at her offering. Suddenly
she heard squawks from the salt cedar brush, and saw a crow taking off,
eggshell and a bloody squab hanging from its beak.
This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.
It was truly a wretched sight. They walked, little more than
shambling, for it was the last thing that they possessed the will to
do. Eyes grim, fixed and hollow, almost lifeless, they still kept on.
Johnny Jones watched them go by, fetching up a silent prayer that
Bryn was inside, resting, and wouldn’t have to bear the sight of them.
His child was within her, so big these past few weeks, and he knew
seeing this might drive her into some kind of fit.
The mules tripped to a sullen halt and the cart behind them stopped.
At this, the slow procession came to life. One woman, thin hair tied
back with a strip of burlap, and one little boy missing three fingers
from his left hand, burst into tears. Weariness and exhaustion still
bleeding from their eyes, the other women clustered around her like
mother hens. The children only stood mutely by while the boy bawled
angrily at the sky. Johnny ran forward. He was strong, he should
help.
Pamela squirms as the needle cuts into her sensitive heart tissue. “It hurts!”
“Shh,” the seamstress says. “It’s almost done, honey. Just a few more
stitches and you’ll be like mommy.”
The seamstress bends forward as she presses her needle into her
daughter’s heart for another stitch, squinting to make sure she sews
tight and even. As she pulls the thread taut, she realizes this stitch
marks the midpoint – she’s now halfway finished sewing Pamela’s heart
onto her sleeve.
“Susie… Susan…” Jeremy’s eyes struggle to find me. His voice is coarse, beleaguered. “I must know how everything….”
“Jeremy, love… everything’s fine,” I interject. “Min’s round and about, Fidel has been fed, and Edward is coming today, with the papers you wanted.”
Edward, Jeremy’s solicitor, has been back and forth with his secretary a lot lately, regarding Jeremy’s will. Edward did tell me, last time, that he’s getting concerned, in view of Jeremy’s extreme medication and state of mind. Most of the estate and the house go to me, but… well… after… I’d rather not stay.
