Kzine Issue 15

by Graeme Hurry

  The sign above the shelf said ’Long Life Loaves’ exactly as she had hoped. This village shop catered for the better class of touring sailor who needed industrially produced long life food that kept as they cruised the islands. The torch light fell on a small date printed on the loaf. 1st May. Carol swallowed and her stomach rumbled as if demanding she help it. She reached out and picked up the loaf. The bag collapsed in her hand, suddenly losing all shape as a thin black goo dribbled out of the end of the wrapping. Carol dropped the paper and it hit the floor with a squelching thud.

  She looked at a second and again checked the printing on the side. “Use By Date: 1st May. Today is the 26th of April. It should be fine.” Her voice took on a hectoring tone. She squeezed the paper wrapping and again the shape collapsed. A sob escaped her lips.

  She swung her light along the shelf to a box of biscuits. She picked it up and turned it over to find the date printed on the end. 1st of April. She dropped it on the floor and picked up one further back on the shelf. 1st of May.

  Carol ripped open the box and pulled out the inner plastic bag. It was half full of black goo, sloshing in the bag as Carol stared at it in horror. “But it says first of May.”

  Carol threw the bag on the floor and ripped open more boxes. Each was the same, dated first of May and containing nothing but black goo.

  She moved to the other aisles. The shelves were stacked with cheese, cold meat, soup, all the items she had been used to. All dated either first of May or earlier and everything she opened contained nothing but black goo.

  * * *

  ‘January 27th: Saw on the news today a load of farmers in China complaining about the end of life gene. They claim it’s what is causing their fields to turn mouldy. They’ve probably done something stupid with it.

  I hope this doesn’t put up the price of my Brown Rice again.’

  * * *

  Carol staggered out of the shop and collapsed on the road, the rain merging with the tears on her cheeks. “It’s not May! How can everything have passed its date?” She pulled out her diary and checked. Scrawled at the top of the latest page was ’April 25th’. She flicked back. ’April 24th’, ’April 23rd’, they were all there. The days of her life unwinding back towards the dark times when the consequences of genetic modification and strongly defined Use By dates became clear.

  Then she found it. Four months ago when she had narrowly escaped attack from a gang in a warehouse, the time it became clear that she had to get out of the city if she was going to survive. In her diary were two pages stuck together but with the dates matching on either side. Either she had written one very long entry, the pages had always been stuck and were blank or she had written up several days, the pages had stuck and she had written the wrong date on the next available page.

  “It must be May already. Even the long-life food is past its use-by date. That’s it then, the end of all the food. Stupid GM food with its hit the date, self-destruct genes. Oh you thought you were so clever, let’s make it easy to see if food is in date, make it turn to goo after the date.

  But then you slipped up, let it kick in while the plants were still growing, let it contaminate other plants. Now where are we? All the plants turning to black goo in the fields. No food, not even grass for the animals to eat. The entire food chain collapsing into black slime. All because you thought you would get some more money from us. Well I hope you survived the riots and the cannibals so you can starve to death like the rest of us. Why did my Sainsbury’s magazine not warn me of this?”

  Carol stopped yelling. As she had built up a head of steam she had found herself directing all her anger towards the small shop and its self-destructing food. Despite being the only person for miles she now felt embarrassed. Exactly what answer was she going to get from a photo of a joint of meat? She turned away, kicking a small stone towards the sea.

  It rolled and bounced across the road, kicking up into the air and disappearing over the harbour side to make a splosh noise as it hit the water. Carol looked at the boats before her and then at a gull out to sea as it dived into the water. She licked her lips, tasting the salty tang in the air and her mind wandered back to the day before when she had noted that the blight did not seem to be having as much effect in the sea air. “Maybe something in the sea does fight it? There are more birds out at sea than I’ve seen anywhere else. Wonder if I could get a net from the chandlers?”

  WITHER

  by Joshua D. Moyes

  Emma had made the choice to remain straight today. It would be bad form to kill herself while she was high. This kind of thing should be done in the right frame of mind.

  Her skin crawled and she couldn’t hold herself still. Her legs tingled from sitting on the toilet, and she couldn’t feel her toes, but her knees bounced like jackhammers. She gritted her teeth.

  Her face in the compact mirror was a wax mask. Bags under her eyes like soft tallow. Skin tight and shiny around her cheeks. Somewhere beneath all that hid a self she knew, the ghost-face of a pretty girl she recognized. Someone who loved. Someone who wasn’t afraid all the time.

  She applied makeup with shaking hands, clearing away blemishes with the base and giving herself some healthy color with rouge and eye shadow.

  She might be an ugly junkie, but her corpse would have some self-respect.

  Max was out. He’d driven over to Rory D’s to pick up some tweak, which meant he’d be gone all day, probably all night. Possibly all day tomorrow, too. Just as well he wouldn’t be here to stop her. If he’d even bother. Probably he would. She made good money for him. In dim light she was just shy of pretty, and regular Kegel’s exercises gave her the kind of control that made her a hit at parties. Sure, he’d stop her.

  Finished with the makeup, she inspected the facsimile of her face in the mirror. She stared back at herself with sunken black eyes. Where did I go? She thought about crying, but that seemed like too much work. She ought to be able to cry. But all she felt was an immense weight that pressed down on her, numbing her and making her tired.

  She grabbed the bottle of pills from the counter. Neither she nor Max slept much in this apartment, and when they tried it took more than a scrip for Halcion to make it happen, so the bottle was mostly untouched. She pushed the cap down and twisted it open.

  On the counter, her phone rang. Only, the ringtone it played wasn’t her ringtone. Her phone announced calls with a generic, built-in jingle. Now, however, her phone belted out a heavy metal tune she recognized. Metallica, “Enter Sandman.”

  “What the fuck?” She stood and lurched to the counter on dead feet, nearly spilling the pills all over the floor. Fucking jitters.

  Fucking phone.

  The singer growled something about Never Never Land.

  She didn’t recognize the number. Probably a john, some new guy Max had given the number to. She almost put the phone down, but an urge to talk to somebody—anybody, about anything at all, about the weather or sports she didn’t watch or the price of a blowjob—had her stabbing the talk button with a shaking fingertip.

  The man on the phone asked for Angelina. Emma felt a moment of disappointment.

  “Sorry man. No Angelina here.” She scratched at the boil that bloomed on her lower belly when she’d been on a bender for a little too long.

  “My apologies.”

  Emma waited for him to hang up.

  He didn’t. She listened to him breathing on the other end of the line, deep and steady.

  Emma bounced on her toes, leaning over the bathroom sink to inspect the pores in her nose. She drummed her fingers.

  “Hello?” She scratched again at her boil.

  He spoke, slowly at first, maybe reluctant, like a confessor.

  “Years ago, sometimes I’d get warts on my hands. They say a virus causes that. Pretty benign, but unsightly. And they would catch on my pockets. Hated them. But I didn’t have much money to go to the doctor to remove them.”

  Emma licked the crusted skin of her lips. The man�
�s voice was low, mellifluous. The frazzled buzzing in Emma’s nervous system settled some as he spoke. “Uh huh,” she said.

  “So I would remove them myself,” he continued. “If you hold the wart over the lit tip of a cigarette, barely touching, it accomplishes the same thing as the doctor’s nitrogen spray, just with heat instead of cold. The trick is to get the skin around the wart to blister. When it does, the skin raises the wart up with it and unroots it from the deeper flesh. Not long after that, the wart dies and falls off. All you’re left with is a small scar.”

  Emma sat on the toilet again. “I don’t like scars.”

  He chuckled. “We all have scars,” he said. “The important thing is how we got them.”

  She ran her thumb across the puckered line in her thigh, compliments of Max. Argument over dope, probably, but she couldn’t remember exactly. She could remember that her legs used to be perfect, but that was another thing she didn’t have any more.

  “A wonderful thing, heat,” the man’s voice had taken a conspiratorial tone. “If you apply enough of it, you can excise just about anything.”

  You can’t get rid of everything. Some things just stay and stay. Emma’s vision blurred.

  She whispered, “Everything hurts.”

  “I know it does. Goodbye, Angelina.”

  A click, and the line went dead.

  Emma stared at the phone for a long moment. She didn’t realize she was crying until a fat tear splashed onto the screen. She wiped a hand across her face and snuffled through a thick nose.

  There had been stranger conversations than this, certainly. Enough meth, enough days awake, and everybody’s conversation is a monologue of a waking dream. This though, a random conversation with a wrong number, was a different kind of strange. Like those mornings after a rough night, when reality seems like two identical images superimposed but none of the edges quite line up and, for a moment, you can’t quite be sure who you are.

  She put the phone back on the counter and took down the bottle of pills again. They rattled against the plastic as she bounced the container on her palm.

  Emma stood and put the sleeping pills back in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. No hurry. Plenty of time after breakfast.

  There was nothing in the refrigerator but for some condiments and half a dozen eggs. At the thought of eggs her throat clenched against a surge of bile. She contented herself with a glass of water.

  Even though she knew there was no tweak in the apartment, she began to comb for it, scrabbling through the kitchen drawers, under the couch cushions. Behind the television. Ridiculous places. She checked the toilet reservoir, thinking maybe Max stashed a Ziploc in there for emergencies.

  By noon her biceps had begun to cramp, curling her arms to her face, the muscles knotting hard as pool balls. Her lips and jaw worked against the surging, gnawing want that welled up like hunger from her belly, from her back. From her hands and feet. She chewed the insides of her cheeks like a teething baby. A migraine bored into her skull, and if she didn’t find something soon she’d spend the next two days in the fetal position, moaning into a pillow.

  Max wouldn’t like that.

  He also wouldn’t like it if he walked in now while she bent over his sock drawer, rummaging around with arms that wouldn’t straighten. As she sorted through it, lifting out unmatched socks worn through at the heels and toes, she heard a rattle from the living room that sounded like the front door latch falling home. She froze, then scuttled to the bedroom door to peek down the hall.

  “Max?” Her voice echoed in the apartment.

  No answer.

  “Baby, is that you?” Expecting to hear nothing, or the kitchen faucet coming on, or Max’s voice. Instead, the faintest creaking sound came from down the hall.

  The knotted pain in Emma’s arms and head was replaced momentarily by a cold tingling in the center of her back that spread outward into her limbs. She ran her hands over her arms and felt gooseflesh.

  Emma breathed through her mouth to hear better. She lowered herself into a half crouch and crept up the hallway. Only a slice of the living room was visible from the hall, but it was filled with sunlight and cast shadows of the sofa and coffee table. The front door was right in front; its deadbolt was still shot. The television faced her and she stared into its blank face, searching for any movement in the reflection.

  Seeing nothing unusual, she straightened. A shiver passed through her as her pebbled flesh smoothed itself. Nothing down there. Before she could decide differently, she strode down the hallway and into the living room. Went around the island counter and peered into the empty kitchen.

  Nothing.

  She shrugged and went back to the sock drawer.

  There was no meth. The pain in her arms worsened with each minute. Her calves began to feel brittle and hot. She beat her fists together in frustration as she tossed the socks. Just as tears threatened to blot out her vision, she found the baggie.

  When Max got high, he enjoyed staying awake as long as possible. He thought of himself as a poet, and when he’d tweak he would sit at the kitchen table for days, talking to himself, freebasing, scribbling in notebooks that he never let her see. When he’d come down from that kind of high, he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He’d just stagger around with red eyes and a voice scratchy with burns.

  So he had the Roofies. No matter how high he’d been, how long he’d been up, he could throw back a couple of those and sleep like a stone.

  Of course, ever the party animal, Max didn’t keep the drug just to himself. Every so often he’d make Emma take one. He would never talk about what he did while she was out, but he didn’t have to. The greasiness between her cheeks, the deep discomfort when she’d sit down for the next few days told her everything she needed to know. She supposed it was a blessing to not have memories of those experiences. Sometimes, though, when Max wasn’t around to read the trouble on her face, she allowed herself to wish that he didn’t do those things to her. That he’d left her something, anything that was still just hers.

  The Roofies were a blessing of their own. She peeled open the baggie, plucked out a pill and dry-swallowed it. The she put the baggie back at the bottom of the sock drawer and fumbled the socks back into some semblance of the disorder Max left.

  A few minutes later, she was asleep in the tangle of thin sheets on the bed.

  * * *

  When she awoke, the room was dark except for the bluish glow from the face of her phone. Thrashing guitars and a shrieking singer instead of her ringtone. Emma slapped at the nightstand and grabbed the phone.

  “Angelina,” the man said.

  “No. Man. There’s no Angelina here.”

  “I’m returning your phone call. You called me and left a message three hours ago. I’m calling you back.”

  Her mouth was dry and bitter, and her head still thumped. “Dude, I didn’t call you. I’ve been asleep. I haven’t called anybody.”

  Silence for a moment. A sigh. Then: “I’m sorry. I must have been mistaken.”

  “Wait. Don’t go.”

  “Yes?”

  “Who are you?’

  An intake of breath. He said, “I used to be afraid all the time. Afraid of going out, afraid of people. Afraid of phone calls. I had troubles in school, with teachers, other students. I hated it, I couldn’t stand going there and being around those people. You know what that’s like?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed, her elbows on her knees. “Yeah.” It came out not much louder than a whisper.

  “Fear, you know. It’s like anything else. You get it hot enough, it’ll wither right away. I went to the school late one night. I broke in with ten gallons of gasoline, and I poured it all over. Tossed a match as I was going back out the window.”

  Emma held her breath.

  “I stood as close to the blaze as I could. Singed off my eyebrows. That close. The fire touched me, and as it did I could feel it burning my fear away. I haven’t been afraid of anything since.”r />
  “Why are you telling me these stories?” Emma’s voice broke and her eyes stung. Her feet went suddenly cold, and she pulled them underneath her.

  “Because they’re your stories too, Angelina.”

  “I’m not Angelina!”

  “You tell me a story now. Tell me about the baby.”

  The world tilted around her, then righted itself. “What?”

  “The baby. Tell me about it.”

  Her voice sounded in her own ears like a puppy whining. “You sick fuck.”

  The connection broke with a click.

  Emma called the number back. The phone on the other end rang and rang. She listened for a couple minutes, then hung up. She doubled over on the bed and lay that way for a long time.

  Sometimes, if Max let her have all the dope she wanted, she could go days at a time without thinking about the baby.

  She’d never wanted a baby until the moment she knew one nested within her. Part of her didn’t want one even then. Babies weren’t a good fit with her lifestyle. When the blue plus sign appeared on the self-test stick, she sank to her knees on the damp tile. She rubbed at the mark with her thumb. If she rubbed it enough, maybe it would go away.

  She looked again. The blue plus sign was still there.

  Everything would have to change.

  Although the father of the baby could have been any number of men, the only obvious man to whom it could belong was Max. If he owned her, he would own this baby. He would be the father. She rushed out of the bathroom, found him in the kitchen.

  Max hated being interrupted from writing his poetry, but he was remarkably calm as she showed him the stick. He even smiled a little. Then he turned and went back to his notebook.