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The stink grows stronger: less human, more maritime malfeasance.
Maritime malfeasance! I love that!
There’s something clever to the cut of his mouth, though, like he’s in on a cosmic joke and about to cash out big on the punch line. “Who’s asking?”
The noise becomes a whisper, a hiss, a celebration, a roar, a black surf breaking on the glaciers of an old, decaying world. It sutures itself into syllables, strings of sounds that could almost be called words if you’re feeling generous.
Another breath of too-expensive tobacco. I can feel her presence, saltwater and old libraries, glowing like a miniature sun. Her existence is a protest, a rebellion, a clarion demand to bend the world into a better place. People like her either ride the space elevator to the constellations or get cut down in dark alleyways. As it stood, the second seemed more likely.
salt, slithering decay, the contractions of a leviathan’s ventricles, like the chanting of monks in the deep.
This close, all I want to do is rip tear bite cut expose the artery, flay the vein eat chew eat tear devour muscle, gobble up viscera, consume until there is nothing left, until meat subsumes the weight of millennia, the bone-beat longing for vengeance, the memory of— My nails dig into his skin, and then I breathe out. I’ve spent so long holding on to this form, so many years stubbornly human. If I lose control, it won’t be for this fat palooka.
I unroll onto my feet and take the stairs two at a time, soundless in this taut, breathless silence. Inside me, cartilage rejoins with cartilage, tendon with sinew. And my flesh, my flesh it sings.
The impulse to do something, to undo this error of existence, rouses, bright and hot as the passage of a bullet through bone. I stare at her, feeling the body’s sympathy, its longing to assist, to fix, to help her, help her, we need to help her, help her. * * * The cry of the gun is loud as the death of stars.
“Abel said he was calling for Daddy.” Abel said he was calling for Daddy. The words reverberate like a warning. I had known that something was up. I’d known it from the start: that someone was playing me for a fool. But the memory of the kid’s eyes, large and full of hate, the sheer organic quality of his presence. It was him, wasn’t it? It was Abel all along. But how did it all fit together? “Hello again, Mr. Persons.” I spin about. Abel is standing about five feet away, arms crossed behind his back.
What is going on? Who is Abel really. Is he actually a child at all?
Amputated from the idea of human, it writhes and undulates inside its meat suit, testing the elasticity of mammalian epidermis. Judging from the way the flesh rips, it’s used to a better class of accommodations.
We dance, the thing and I, shedding structure with every pivot, every turn. Human anatomy surrenders to the pragmatism of combat. Muscles unbraid, sinews lengthen, even as veins become garrote and bones blade. In minutes, we’re viscera commanded by will, flayed tissue, tendon, and teeth.
What a fucking line!
But I am ripping into McKinsey. I am swallowing. He tastes rancid, sublime, steeped in pain. I am fashioning bones into more mouths, into more teeth, and bite, chew, swallow, devour. I am alive.
“And in exchange?” “They’ll keep us safe.” “How?” He sighs, a strangely adult sound. “I made a bargain.” “With what?” The kid doesn’t answer. Not exactly. Instead, he extends his tongue, reveals a country of sigils delicately etched onto the red muscle. I don’t recognize the language, but their greasy luminance is familiar, a memory of lightless water and the life beneath.
Neither of the boys move. It’s not until I’ve clicked the door shut that I hear tiny feet scrabbling over wood, hear the steady rhythm of hammers on bone. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Well there’s the title. Roll credits.
“You are a fascinating creature, do you know that?” “I’ve been told I have my charms.” “You are the last of your kind on this planet.” “What about it?” I exhale tobacco and defiance into her face. “A coward.” The truth stings less than I thought it would. I shrug and tip my skull, enumerating my options. “I’d like to think it’s more of a case of knowing what I want.”
body doesn’t answer. Then, a knocking strikes up on the front door, a confident rat-ta-ta-ta, like the music of hammers on bone.
Onto the next adventure.
