The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

I could live the rest of my life without seeing what happens to a mouse when it kisses death, especially weird death;

I saw, if not the meaning of patterns then patterns of meaning, and for me that was enough.

“Kind of crank. I’ve been takin’ them all day.” She dry-swallowed them; I’ve never been able to get over how she was able to do that. It almost gags me just to watch.

You can get used to being wrong all the time; it takes all the responsibility out of things.

No, I am not Funhole Messiah, I just know too many weird people.

if I can’t see you, Mr. Hole, you’re not really there.

It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right?

“God,” thick mucus voice and tears running out of my eyes, “oh God,” and I wept into a paper towel, crying hard in the kitchen’s warmth, my body half-folded against the table, retching sobs like vomit.

“When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade.” Well, life had given me shit, and I was making a compost heap. Or more succinctly, life had given me a Funhole, and I was making a grave.

“If it doesn’t hurt,” she said, death’s-head above me in the dark, “you’re not doing it right.”

“I thought you’d’ve taken a swan dive by now.” “Out the window,” I asked, pushing the open door, “or down the hole?”

I sat in the darkness and thought about Vanese, arms held to embrace the sorry mess of me, the look in her eyes as open wide. I never saw her again.

a little red box of raisins and my eyes filled with quick and stupid tears: I remembered eating them in my lunch at school, saving the box to prop on my desk and pretend the Sun Maid was winking at me. As I thought this the little face on the box came alive, melted like living wax to become Nakota’s, complete with her customary impatient sneer, the basket she held filled not with grapes but tiny skulls. Sickened by this cheap cruel grotesquerie—was it really necessary to fuck with everything, did it all have to twist into the same gleefully ugly shape?—I flung the box away, heard the minute dusty sound of its landing, the immediate and larger sound of its retrieval, fetched back to me with the box turned so I could see the face again, the Sun Maid again, her little eyes rolled backward in terror as the crooked teeth of the skull bisected her.

I started to laugh from the perfect depths of my revulsion as the motes beneath my skin roiled and dribbled into a living tattoo: NAKOTA. “Eat shit,” I said.

white as a maggot creeping onto the lip of a fabulous wound.