Read PostApoc Online

Authors: Liz Worth

PostApoc (10 page)

BOOK: PostApoc
2.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

- 17 -
SELECTIVE MEMORY

T
revor's let a dog into the house. It tore through a gap in the door, salivating at his heels.

Lucky for us, Cam just happened to be in the kitchen and came down on the dog hard with a cast iron frying pan. We knew we'd find a use for that thing one of these days.

The dog fell, unconscious, its head a block of brown fur and ear mites. Satisfied it would be still for at least a few minutes, Cam turned and brought his fist to Trevor's face.

Lucky for Trevor, Aimee rushed forward just a little faster than I did, seconds which made all the difference in yanking at Cam's t-shirt sleeve just in time to steer the punch clear of Trevor's nose.

“What the FUCK were you thinking?” Cam yells, red-faced, words flying with the same ferocity as the dog's.

“I—I'm sorry,” Trevor says through a quiver in his chin. His hand shakes as he pushes a stringy chunk of hair behind his ear.

“Fuck!” Cam says, spitting the exclamation onto the floor. The glob lands beside the dog's paw, splatters an outer claw. “Just get the fuck out of my face for a little bit, okay?”

Trevor nods, but keeps his head down, eyes from Cam. “Okay.”

“Why do you hang out with Cam so much, anyway?” Aimee asks Trevor upstairs as she pulls on another joint Tara had tucked away in her bra.

“Probably for the same reasons you stay here,” Trevor says.

Cam envisions himself a child-man soldier growing an army of deviants who will cultivate and dominate what remains at the end of the world. It's delusion. Or illusion. Ill, at any rate, and what we're all living with to some extent.

“He knows where to find things. He has connections I could never have made on my own. He showed me how to hold a knife so the blade doesn't break. He showed me how to stab a stick through a body on the first try. And he's not all bad, really, once you get to know him a little more. He can be nice. He's just had a lot of rough times. It's not his fault he's fucked up.”

“Oh my God,” Tara says through a veil of smoke. “You
like
him.”

Trevor smiles, looks away. “No,” he says. “I mean, you know how Cam is about—”

“Oh we know,” Aimee says.

“—and besides, it would never—”

“But just because it would never happen, or never work, doesn't mean you still can't feel,” I say. “You wouldn't be the first person to want what they can't have.”

“I don't, though,” Trevor says. “I don't.”

“Okay,” we all say, nodding in agreement.

Trevor tokes, leans forward into our circle. “Don't tell anyone we talked about this, k?”

Cam calms down, and Trevor disappears back downstairs. Tara crashes out at the back of a walk-in closet. She headed that way about an hour ago, her eyes swimming for focus, mouth a maraschino cherry brightly chewed.
The rest of her, legless, muscles tenderized as if someone's kneaded powdered lithium right into the meat of her. It's probably just heat stroke, but you never know.

None of us are drinking today. Alcohol to a dry mouth chokes like cracked black pepper swallowed too fast.

The buzz from that joint has disappeared and I don't know where the next one will come from. Sobriety is exhausting. Doesn't give any of the numbness of alcohol and keeps everything on the surface.

Today it's dredging up hazel eyes and narrow hips. Hunter's hands and the questions they hold for me:

Have you ever had days when you didn't think you could survive any other way than to become something built out of torn skin and teeth, all elbows and drudgery?

If you fail to die when you are supposed to, does it destroy the order of the earth?

Aimee used to ask me if I ever think of Hunter. I'd lie and tell her no, and eventually she'd quit the question. But I couldn't tell her yes, because it would only make memories stronger, harder to black out if I kept reinforcing them with words.

In case I die in another day or two, I try to feel out for his spirit, to see if he's close, waiting to help take me over. I used to imagine him standing right behind me, or watching me from a spot on the ceiling. I haven't thought of that in a long time. I reach out, but feel nothing.

There's so much I've tried to blank out. Experimented with selective memory, envied amnesia patients and afternoon television plots. If I could forget the disappointment in my mom's voice and the concern in her eyes. Or the guilt of once having a childhood. And the recurring reminders of what can't be undone. The first morning I woke up beside Hunter and curled between his arms. The loss of identity when I questioned whether I'd ever really wanted to die. The confusion when Aimee's friendship made me want to live. The hopelessness in finding an easy answer.

I did forget things, but none of what I'd made an effort to erase. I forgot people's faces, names. Forgot I'd ever met them, made out with them. It was easy to laugh off, just giggle and feign popularity. Assume that kind of bullshit behaviour was acceptable because I'd been dating one of the best-known singers on the scene. I knew everybody, but couldn't possibly be expected to remember anybody.

I even forgot them when I spent six months trying to cover up the remnants of Hunter's kisses with the spit of strangers. Anoint and cleanse.

You know what? I remember them all now. Every face. Every prick of stubble of their chins. I remember where we stood when we pushed our tongues together and the rush of wet when a hand went down my pants.

As everything else disappears, the memories come rushing back. Every boy that ever crossed my hips and every word that left my lips and every look I gave and every one I got back.

These were all the things I thought I'd lose forever. I've let them all back in. There are just so many people who aren't around anymore. What I remember of them is all that's left.

The room stifles. My hair is sticking to my skin. Brushing it away, I can smell my underarm.

I fall asleep and dream within a dream. A spiral in the sand. One spiral leads to another to another to another, and from those come worms, each thicker than the last, all glistening. Sand flakes off their bodies. Their mouths are wide, trying to scream.

It's the exposure.
They never wanted to break through the surface. The next worm I uncover will have a voice and I don't want to hear what it sounds like.

I've been sitting on my heels, feet and legs tucked under me, drawing the spirals that drew the worms out. My legs are jelly, no blood in them anymore. It takes a strobe light of strength to get them out from under me.

I finally swing my legs out, sit with them crossed instead, making sure the sides of my shoes brush away the spirals in the process, closing doors I shouldn't have opened.

I wake, still dreaming of a cold moon, low in the sky, its pale pink shadow twin peering out from behind it.

My face is in the sand. The moon's cratered face is a grimace, features fallen. It has its eyes on me. The skin along my right arm rises with bumps, hairs on end. An electric chill.

Down at the beach there are voices followed by a hard-edged laugh, a sound with too many blades to belong to either of them. I stand and start running. Not because anything I see or hear tells me to run, but because something inside me just knows to do it.

I wake, for real this time, snagged off the night beach on shards of words spurting up from the floor below. For a second I think it's the ghost in the basement. It takes a full sentence before I recognize the voice as Cam's. Aimee answers him, but I can't hear what she's saying. She keeps her voice lower than his.

Footsteps on the stairs, moving fast, and then Cam's face is in mine. He's gotten mean again. His face his red, lined with anger. I don't want him this close to me but I don't have the strength to move. I wonder how he does it, maintaining his strength. Maybe it's just adrenaline.

I brace myself for the boom of his voice but instead he gurgles, scrapes phlegm from deep in his chest. Spits a green gob on the wall above my head. I close my eyes and hear it connect, feel the spray. I open my eyes and he's already gone.

Aimee comes in with a glass of cloudy water for us to share. It smells like earth. I swallow my half in two gulps.

She frowns at Cam's spit on the wall, which has slid down a couple of inches from where it landed and started to dry to the paint.

“I don't know what his problem is,” she says before I have the chance to ask. She hands me her bandana to wipe it up. “I'd help you get it off but I feel sick just looking at it.”

I double up the cloth so I don't have to feel the firmer lumps of mucus. I dig a hole in the front yard and bury it so the dogs aren't attracted to the smell.

The air outside feels good. Better than inside. There are dark clouds moving in, shadows of rain. The closest thing to optimism we might have for a while.

Cam is at the front window, watching me. I decide not to go back into the house, at least for now.

I close my eyes and ask, “Where should I go?” My dream comes back to me and the answer that comes is: “Go where there used to be water. Go where the lake once stood.”

The beach is dry, just miles of rock and sand now. Even if the lake were still here, it would be too polluted to drink from, or even bathe in.

Still, I wish for the hypnosis of the tide, a sound that could distract me from everything I don't want to think about, and from everything I'd rather not be living through.

I imagine water on rock, wiping my thoughts away. Instead I get a vision of white on white, ripped satin and crinoline, a stained slip imitating marrow.

The vision manifests as Shelley and Anadin, two girls who live down here in an old beach house.

Anadin: People get us confused. Believe us to be twins. Me, in long black hair, off-white lace. Shelley, white-blonde and always in antique slips, feet bare and beautiful.

Shelley: Anadin's the one whose head snaps when she feels eyes.

Ang: They send me a vision of sand, dead water. Birds that can't breathe, suffocated, mid-flight, their hollow bones too weak against the weight of smog.

Shelley: No one comes down here, to the beach.
They're too afraid of what the water's left behind. It all looks so empty. It'll make you believe you're alone, but things follow you here. And they'll follow you out.

Anadin: We haven't seen another girl in so long. And now this one who's here, well, we knew right away we wanted her.

Shelley: Ang shouldn't have had eyes. She would have been stronger without them.

Ang: I found braids of psychic debris. Shelley, a girl in furs, all head and bone, teetering on spokes of ankles. Anadin, her sister, held together by a long string of pearls, bound in delicate underwear. Their arms, whips. Their faces younger than they should have been.

Anadin: Ang, a wisp. Barely able to stand up under the weight of her own dreams. Our arms wrapped around her.

Ang: They had been picking up shells and glass smoothed by waves. Oracles, they said. They asked if they could show me what they meant. I said yes.

Shelley: The End was caused by an omen misaligned. A coagulation of a frequency pitch that's needled into everyone's ears, settled permanently.

Anadin: It was a miscalculated rule of thirds. Cyber energy and radio transmissions dead and released, bound.

Ang: They invited me in. Their place an ancient beach house filled with antique birdcages. Feathers and bones.
They pulled out husks of still wings from behind golden doors, held them to my face so I could see how the connective tissue was starting to show through. A contrast of sharp white and black shine, they said. Something they said would make beautiful jewelry after the process of decay was complete.

Anadin asked me if I wanted to hold it, put it back to rest in the cage. I cut myself on a stiff beak reaching into the confines of thin bars. Blood that looked as thin as I felt beaded between the hairs of my arm.

Shelley: Ang told us about where she lives, about the care packages. We gave up on food years ago. Losing that habit has kept us out of touch. We'd forgotten that people wouldn't understand what had happened.

Ang: Shelley unwrapped her ballet slipper, pointed her foot to me. The skin of her baby toe, covered in fish scales, skin sharpened to a grey glint.

Shelley: The diatribe, it came out as rust at first. Not a conspiracy theory, but a leveling. A cleansing.

Anadin: A belief in the strongest. Of who will be left. Of who's made it this far without meaning to. Structural pyramids ignored.

Shelley: Something that barely needs to be spoken. As in: If you don't know, we're not telling.

(Here, an aside, as Anadin and Shelley confess: We are always half-blind and fully drunk on these words. We've tried to write them down, but as they come out we start to wobble. Haven't managed more than a scribble. That's why we prefer oral.)

Anadin: Cataclysm. Simultaneous and personal.

BOOK: PostApoc
2.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Mystics 3-Book Collection by Kim Richardson
Pirate Queen of Ireland by Anne Chambers
Rodzina by Karen Cushman
Rebel on the Run by Jayne Rylon
A Mischief of Mermaids by Suzanne Harper
Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis
A Knight to Desire by Gerri Russell