The Other Side

by Daniel Willcocks

  I believed that was it. That whatever crazed experiment surrounded the islands was over, and I could at last be free. I’d been stripped bare of all that I was, cast into eternal famine, tortured by the frivolities of strangers. The islands reflected the true needs of humanity, forsaking the wants of the mortal body and demanding an acceptance of the raw basics.

  The bare necessities.

  I chuckle, a faint image of a loin-clothed boy and a bear. I cough. But I don’t. That cough isn’t mine.

  There’s someone else here.

  I stare at her for hours, the latest yield of white fruit balancing in my shaking hands. Sat and hunched by the water’s edge, arms folded about her knees as she stares into the infinite beyond. Long hair trailing to the crack between her cheeks.

  I daren’t approach her. Make a noise. I fear the slightest disturbance will cause her to vanish. A wisp in the forest. Immaterial. I knew I was starved for food, I didn’t know I was famished for friendship, too.

  I wait.

  She’ll notice me.

  She’ll come alive.

  Surely?

  “Tell me your name.”

  It feels strange to speak out loud. My throat, once raw from hollering, is now somewhat recovered, though the sensation of vibrations of sound are alien.

  She sighs.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  She stares out at sea, unblinking. I trace her eye line, wondering which island has her fixated. They’re all entertaining, now. Life is buoyant. Life is vibrant. We sit on the couch, sedentary and sad.

  “You stink.” The first two words she utters to me. Disdain laced in each syllable. Her nose retracts into her face and an ugly snarl appears on her lips.

  I nod. Why lie?

  I extend a handful of fruit. “Here.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Not hungry.”

  “How did you get here?”

  She shrugs.

  I ask more questions. She chooses to answer in silence. I bow my head and cry.

  The bush has become an empty tree, and now I’m flanked by two wells that have run dry. On one side a tree that offers nothing to sate my hunger, on the other a woman who does nothing but sit and brood.

  Life on the island is utter torture, and each passing moment stretches the limits of my patience. I wish for transport to the other islands, I get down on my knees and pray to Mother’s God, and still the universe giveth nothing more.

  My body withers once more.

  So does hers.

  Mine has greater effect, it seems. These skeletal arms shouldn’t be mine.

  Yet, here we are.

  And there she is.

  My mouth wastes water with salivation.

  I awake to the crunch of fruit and find her there, stretched on tiptoes as she picks the tree bare.

  With wide eyes I examine what is left, only a few fruits the size of apples hanging from the branches. The sandy floor littered in husks of what has already been consumed. She turns from the tree, leaving a few morsels left as white-hot letters blaze into the sand.

  From stone to seed, all things feed.

  Ignore the wants, take what you need.

  Anger coursing through my veins, my malnourished form in sudden shock at the few fruits remaining, my mouth casting highlight reels of my former gorging. My stomach remembers its distention and aches for the pain, but it will not come. There is too few left.

  The woman laughs and the sound offends my ears. I shove her aside, surprised by her strength as she watches with malicious content. I can barely reach the fruit and it hurts to jump. My spine has curved as my body shrivels away, but after a few attempts I seize one, bite into the skin, and scream in agony.

  Blood soaks the fruit, staining the virgin flesh crimson. Teeth stick to the fruit, pulled free from my gums and protruding from the skin like stubby wooden pegs, yellow-brown in their discoloration. I bring the fruit to my lips and suck, free the blood from the skin, use my remaining pegs to break off a piece and chew as though my life is depending on it. The sweet, citrus taste is tinged with the flavor of death and necrotic deterioration but at least it’s something. I swallow my teeth whole because what else is there to do? Tears paint my cheeks and all she can do is stand there, watching with head at an odd angle and those strange, unblinking eyes. In another life I’d have marveled at her body, feasted on her flesh with my gaze, wanted nothing more than to take her here and now, lose myself in the throes of sex and discard her like a wet rag later.

  My penis stiffens.

  I guess old habits die hard.

  The fruit did nothing to restore my vitality.

  I’m at the end, and yet still I don’t die.

  She’s asleep when I eventually open my eyes.

  My hunger has returned with renewed fury. My stomach, so shrunken that the flesh caves below my ribs and almost touches the inside of my back, grumbles, rumbles, vibrates, rolls, yearns, longs…

  They’re eating hog roast—or, whatever passes for a hog in this land. The fire is blazing, two naked women rotating the creature on a spit. Plumes of smoke and heat rise into the air. An island, within easy swimming distance, yet a million miles away. The men are drinking from cups made of coconuts, and all I can do is lie here, on my side, dying…

  Dying…

  Dying…

  I trace my tongue around wasp nest lips, no liquid to soften them. Sand has fallen into my mouth and I swallow it down, coughing as it trickles through my esophagus.

  She’s asleep. Snoozing by the island’s edge, her chest rising and falling. She is sideways, as am I. The cosmos above glitters its iridescent hues of bruises upon us, great galaxies and space dust and blazing suns at various stages of decomposition…

  …all that once was must die.

  Must die…

  She must die.

  Her form is silhouetted in the stunning glow of above. The islands beyond her are alive with activity, some as large as football pitches, one now holding at least fifty people on its banks, dancing, playing, sleeping, fucking. In the misty warble of my dying vision she morphs, two prongs appear and she is suspended by sticks. The fire blazes beneath her as she spins on its axis, the world spins on its axis, the universe spins in loops and cycles, the cycle continues…

  I’m next to her before I’m aware that I’ve moved. She smells of sweat and hope. The sweat is salty and my body writhes with pleasure at the sensation of the smoothness of her skin on my tongue. Pin pricks like mountains mottle my skin.

  She doesn’t stir.

  Light shines from behind.

  Letters in the sand.

  I ignore their message.

  From stone to seed, all things feed.

  “Please…No…”

  “It’s too late.”

  “No… The message… Heed the message!”

  Her voice amplifies. Struggles against my grip. There’s no going back.

  “Stop!”

  Words turn to screams.

  Screams turn to weak protestations.

  Then fade.

  Silence in the overworld.

  Chaos in the inner.

  I can’t shake it, but I can’t stop. My body speaks for me, speaks with insatiable hunger, speaks with gurgling stomach and throbbing erection. Her voice lingers, a gong struck inside an echo chamber the size of a thimble, reverberating in my skull. Each syllable a dizzying pulse of pain and torture as the blood dries on my lips.

  Ignore the wants, take what you need.

  I laugh as I chew, great slathers of salty meat. I cry as I swallow. The laughter comes back in waves. Hands slick with grime, specked with sand. Still the endless dark swims by, unflinching, unknowing, even death must go on, it seems.

  But she no longer will…

  From stone to seed, all things feed.

  Ignore the wants, take what you need.

  The words won’t leave.

  Stomach distended, fingers like brittle twigs, eyes clouded
with tears, I ponder…

  I think she was a test.

  Her corpse vanishes before I can pick the bones clean.

  So much for simple pleasures.

  I fucking hate this place.

  My dying body sinks into the sand. It’s been days since I’ve moved. Weeks since the tree has given. A lifetime since she appeared.

  There isn’t much of my body left to waste away. My organs are dried fruits inside a papier-mâché case, left outside in the rain for fair too long. They’re dark like stones. My skin is grey and blue. It hurts to open my mouth. I’ve lost the ability to blink.

  My last ounce of strength was spent on turning my head away from the other islands. Now, even that has gone. The nearest island is fixed in my gaze, a place where I have no choice but to watch as the crusted remains of blood finally lose their stink and become a part of me. The words are somewhere nearby, casting a faint luminescence of starlight that I can no longer read.

  And still I ponder.

  The other islanders are happy. Their bushels are full, their trees are heaving with fruit. Creatures of all sizes and shapes, though none of the world I once knew, dance and run and chase each other, dark tongues lolling out between moist lips. The people are happy. Their smiles are the scars of my world. In their frivolity I see my mother, the woman she had once been, beaming as she dazzled the dance floor and claimed her jive trophy way back in another lifetime, when ’86 felt like mere days before. They laugh, yet still the sound evades me as I am cast into this eternal cocoon of muteness. I have no liquid with which to cry. They have it all where they are. Even the ocean can’t save me. It never could.

  In the center of the throng of islanders sits a woman, crouched on a log, arms wrapped tightly around her as though in hugging herself she has gifted herself the world. She hasn’t moved in some time, and while the others cast dreary distraction around her, she seems settled. Happy.

  Familiar.

  I look at the form of my mother, a woman whose years have rolled back like tides peeling from the shore, dark hair trailing down her back where once it was grey. There’s a peaceful expression on her face, one that I haven’t seen in all of my lifetime. One that I only knew existed in monochrome polaroids and nostalgic storytelling.

  It is then that I read the truth in her face. A truth I knew all along, but refused to accept.

  I killed my mother.

  Maybe it hadn’t been a direct transaction, I never once traded blood for coin or violence, but the years weathered her from the moment I was born. A restless child with an insatiable appetite for destruction, chaos, and greed. I can see it, then. Life flashing before me in pulses. A mother losing her patience and reaching the end of her tether long before I found the needle. Her conditions exacerbated by worry, love, and heartache. Cancer may have claimed her, but I was the judge, jury, and executioner, and that was the truth that had evaded my former life. The one thing the island has given me is time. Time to play out the tapes, rewind them, analyze them with excruciating keenness. I was selfish, I’ll admit. Mother was an enemy, even though she wasn’t. I tore her apart, piece-by-piece, day-by-day, and, in kind, the afterlife has sunken me into a pit of my own creation.

  From stone to seed, all things feed.

  Ignore the wants, take what you need.

  The island knew. So, now, do I. My greed was my largest downfall. My life was made of wants, and never by needs. In consuming everything, I was left with nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing is all I had once she passed. Emptiness is what I returned home to every night. Each night I crawled up inside my sleeping bag, windows smashed, floor littered with other users, shivering, fighting their own battles, staining the tiled floors with melted-butter urine. Wallpaper peeling, stained from nicotine as the sun rose and stung eyes that wouldn’t close and still I wanted more, more, more, needed more, because all that I had known was gone, all that was good was vanished, and life was less worth living than in the nothing it had been for so long, and I cried for days, weeks, more days, until I was a river run dry and my pain had eroded the banks of what was left to be human, until my reflection in the shower of broken glass on the floor showed me a man who was not a man but a husk and in that husk was only damnation and anything had to be better than this because she was gone, buried in my rose garden, and I was now gone, too…

  I killed my mother.

  I had hoped the highway would kill me, too.

  Ah well. At least it gave it a damn good try.

  My bones break with years unnumbered.

  They look like stones.

  The ocean claims the island.

  Bones to stones.

  Stones to sand.

  An existence made of loops and cycles.

  Mum waves.

  Piece by piece.

  All turns black.

  Secret Places

  By Harvey Click

  Carey’s apartment wasn’t in a nice part of town, and Denise was glad Greg was in the car watching her as she climbed the steps. She knocked because the doorbell didn’t work, and after a minute she started banging with her fist.

  “All right, you don’t have to knock the whole damn building down,” Carey said when he finally opened the door. He sniffled and wiped his nose with a blue bandanna. “Come in.”

  “I don’t want to come in,” she said.

  “Then you better go wait in your car.” He glanced at the wristwatch she had given him five years ago as an anniversary present and said, “It’s only 8:45, and Tommy’s mine until 9:00.”

  Denise gritted her teeth and went in. The living room looked tidy and bare as always—Carey had never liked to own a lot of things. Some quiet piano music was playing on the stereo upstairs, a tune she thought she recognized but couldn’t place.

  “Where’s Tommy?” she asked.

  “Upstairs playing with my keyboard,” Carey said. “Can’t you hear him?”

  Denise felt a sharp pang of resentment. She had never known that Tommy could play a note. Maybe he wasn’t really her son any longer.

  Carey grinned and wiped his nose again. “I’ve been teaching him a few licks,” he said. “He’s catching on pretty well, don’t you think? Sit down and get comfortable.”

  “I don’t want to sit down, I don’t have all night.”

  “Well, he’s mine for twelve more minutes, so you may as well get comfortable. I’d offer you a drink, but all I have is that sugary soda pop he likes.”

  Denise sat down and said, “Bullshit. You always have an extra bottle of bourbon stashed away somewhere. You’re just saving it to guzzle after he leaves.”

  “No bottles up my sleeve and no track marks either,” he said. “I told you, I quit all that junk twelve months ago.”

  “Sure you did. You told me you quit snorting coke too, but every time I see you you’re wiping your nose.”

  “I’ve got a sinus infection,” he said. “I’ve been clean for a year, now.” He sat down and stared at her with that sweet, annoying smile.

  She tried to find something else to look at, but there wasn’t much in the small living room—a futon, the two chairs they were sitting on, a coffee table and, on the walls, half a dozen paintings that Carey had painted himself. She stared at her watch for a while and then glanced at his face.

  It didn’t look healthy, and she felt something stirring that she didn’t want to feel. Eighteen years ago, when she met him, he had looked like a blue-eyed, golden-haired angel. Three years ago, when she left him, he had looked like a sunken-eyed, fallen angel, his golden hair greasy and his face ravaged by drugs. Now, he looked like someone who just needed a good deep grave and a mound of dirt to cover him.

  “Listen, I’ve got to get up and go to work tomorrow,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t remember what that’s like.”

  “I remember a lot of things,” he said. “I remember that night in the old house when we ate psilocybin mushrooms and made love all night long with the tape
recorder recording our moans and sighs, and the next day we ran them through my synthesizer to make a symphony of love. Remember that one, babe? That’s probably the night Tommy was conceived. He was our greatest creation, but I’m sure we could still make some nice music together.”

  Denise stood up and brushed her skirt down past her knees. “Get real,” she said. “You haven’t made anything like music since you turned your brains into jelly. You’re a drug addict, and you’re killing yourself a little faster every week. You don’t deserve any custody rights.”

  She was beginning to shout, and the music upstairs stopped. Carey grabbed her arm and pulled her outside onto the little front porch.

  “Tommy heard you,” Carey said. “I don’t want you talking like that around my son, do you hear? I told you I’ve given up drugs and, even if I hadn’t, you know damn well I’d never use them around Tommy. He loves me, he thinks I’m the greatest dad in the world. That’s the only thing you can’t steal from me.”

  “I didn’t steal anything,” she said.

  “You stole my house,” he said. “You stole my dreams. You steal my paycheck every month, but you’re not gonna steal my son.”

  “I paid for that house,” she said. “As far as child support goes, the kind of money you pay isn’t even worth taking to the bank.”

  Carey smiled his sweet smile, and his ruined angel-face told her she was lying. In fact, he had paid a sizable down payment and several years of mortgage for the house and the ten acres of land she lived on. That was back when his arty rock band had made a couple of albums on a major label. Then, the bass player had died of a heroin overdose, the guitar player had become a born-again Christian, and now the drummer was selling insurance in an office on High Street. The only band member still playing music was Carey, and the music he played now was the kind he hated most, light piano jazz four nights a week at a pretentious cocktail lounge. The money he made didn’t add up to much child-support.