by Tricia Reeks
When Death faces Stephanie, his eyes blaze, with what—anger, desire, remorse, anguish—she can’t tell. He slides forward, mouth, shoulders, and fingers tense, pressing their chests together. Stephanie’s whole body pulses, with anger and something else she doesn’t want to name.
“You aren’t supposed to be in here,” she says. “Go away.”
“Shut up, you’re so stupid, you don’t understand, so just shut up,” Death replies, then kisses her.
Stephanie is vaguely aware of clothes trickling away, of skin, of lips, of hands, of hips. But mostly, she floats, sinks, luxuriates in warmth. And it is good, great. The same pleasure as slipping beneath the surface of a hot bath except bigger, wider. A pool. A pond. A lake. A river. An ocean. A watery world. A viscous universe. She wants to drift down as far as she can. She wants to be consumed and come out on the other side. Or die.
Her senses stretch away from her. She doesn’t feel the body above her, the carpet beneath her back, the sweat covering her body. Her limbs have become dead weight, heavy and immovable. She doesn’t see the walls of the room. She doesn’t smell sex, or plants, or Death’s breath breezing across her face. She can’t hear a thing. There is no Stephanie. There is no Hayden. There is only darkness and stillness and silence.
***
When Stephanie wakes, the world is bright, sharp, and painful. The white sheets across her lap are so pristine they burn her eyes. The machines surrounding her whir and screech. Jagged agony races through her abdomen.
A woman is hunched in a chair next to her bed. The woman’s hair is limp and her arms are thin. She looks worried, run-down, exhausted. The woman is Stephanie’s mother. Stephanie is not surprised. Her mother always finds her eventually.
Through the hospital window, Stephanie can see blue sky and a portion of a thick Dogwood branch. It is covered in green leaves and small, pink flowers. She thinks, another spring, followed quickly by, the time of year Hayden died. When she cries, the heaves batter her ribs, the tears sting her eyes and scour salty tracks down her cheeks, and her throat and lungs feel rubbed raw, but still, she opens her mouth and breathes.
Jacinta’s Lovers
Steve Simpson
In the late nineteenth century, science was king, and the zealous Professor Weismann was on a mission. He spent his time chopping the tails off rats.
Weismann’s eyesight was weak, and his cages were in a poorly-lit basement at Freiburg University, but eventually he’d severed nine hundred tails, an inadvertent head—squirmy little thing that one—and the tip of his left index finger.
He allowed the mutilated rats conjugal visits, but all of their blind pink offspring had tails.
Weismann deduced that the acquired trait of lacking a tail could not be inherited, and making a modest extrapolation, that the genetic blueprint of a human child never reflects the changes that living has inflicted on the parents.
After mere centuries of scientific effort, Weismann’s conclusion no longer held true, but the researchers who made the breakthrough weren’t interested in tails, at least during work hours. They had nobler aims.
“The persistence of memory, passed on from generation to generation, will solve the problem of educating the poor of the third world. They will be born with the knowledge they need to survive and lead better lives.”
The altruists, always keen to help strangers, agreed, and parents saw benefits for their children. Others who were more rodent-like devised ways to make unconscionable profits from the project, and the wholesale manipulation of the human genome to map the brain’s synaptic intricacies began.
While everyone praised the pavement of good intentions, no one looked to the destination, where there would be no reason to heed the wise, where there would be no schools or teachers, and where learning itself would be forgotten.
Darwin’s laws, which had once paced themselves like Galápagos tortoises, ran like hares. The potent madnesses that are fed by power and wealth became congenital, tyrannical dynasties evolved and came to rule the world, and the human race destroyed itself.
***
Jacinta met Umberto at the Curitiba markets. It was a time when goods were still leaving the manufacturing sheds, when merchants occasionally had something to sell, and, although hungry rioters had hijacked and smashed the supply chains in the major cities, you could still find cigarettes and alcohol in a country town.
Umberto was thin, but everyone was thin, and there was a row of handmade kites lined up on his table at the markets. He didn’t bother trying to sell one to Jacinta. Instead he complimented her hair, her eyes, and her smile to well beyond embarrassment, gave her two kites for free, and talked about himself.
“My father was an unsuccessful artist. I inherited the paintings he couldn’t sell and his desire to create them. I have his poor brush technique as well.”
When he looked at her, she saw desire flashing in his dark eyes, and it never stopped, even later, when death was doing the rounds door-to-door in the streets.
Umberto invited her back to his place, which turned out to be an abandoned library. Apart from the symbols and signs on display in everyday life, Jacinta didn’t know anyone who could truly read. Human minds were filled with archives of inherited knowledge, and reading and writing were lost arts, dead-end traits off evolution’s new road.
Umberto showed her how he made the kites, papered with the pages of books that he sent soaring into windy skies.
“Not everything comes from the sheds, ’Cinta. I worked out how to do this myself, by trial and error. Nobody taught me.”
Jacinta had traveled to Curitiba from Bahia. Her parents had lived in an isolated town, far from the factory centers, and they’d known how to repair things, like harvesters and plows. With the factory sheds failing, broken-down manufactures could no longer be replaced, and Jacinta was in demand.
Umberto earned pocket money selling his kites but that wasn’t why she moved into the library with him. It was partly because he didn’t fit, didn’t belong at the end of the world.
While she sawed and drilled and welded some urgent piece of take-home work for a customer, he would wander down the aisles, I love the books, their ancient smell, and run his fingers along the frayed edges of a thousand pages, and their soft mysteries.
In the evenings, they smoked dried out cigarettes on the balcony and talked nonsense like a pair of crows. When night was finally inescapable, his fingers combed her tangled curls and drew invisible symbols on her olive skin, and she was his book, a paperback romance with a clichéd ending.
***
On weekends, Jacinta and Umberto met up at the bar near the markets after work and listened to the tales travelers brought to Curitiba.
Power in Brazil, and the rest of the world, was inherited, and one piece of gossip was often repeated. The story was that the current head of state, Maria Antonia, the Duquesa of Matogrosso, was an inbred throwback with her great grandmother’s memories.
The Duquesa was a romantic who’d set about restoring a dying Brazil to an earlier age, which was itself an echo of a time long past. To her, the New Rococo era wasn’t ancient history, it was intimate and immediate, and she’d diverted the sheds from the production of life’s necessities to the fabrication of the elaborate and asymmetrical, the ornate and pointless. Gilded extravagances were being dumped in landfills, and crows perched on wrought iron furniture and fountains that rusted in the fields.
Jacinta thought the story was more entertainment than truth. The incessant shortages were inevitable, and the destruction of Brazil’s infrastructure by the desperate populace was simply hastening the ending.
***
After a year, when the alcohol and cigarettes had almost dried up, and you had to be a fighter or a thief to feed an addiction, when no one wanted to buy anything but life’s essentials, and when she found Umberto nibbling at the glued spine of an old paperback, Jacinta decided it was time to leave Curitiba.
***
“These were in the cag
e off Galheta Beach.”
Umberto showed her two small needlefish, and she shrugged. “I guess they’ll have to do.”
Jacinta added fuel to the wood stove, and Umberto filleted fastidiously, not losing an ounce of flesh and putting the heads and intestines aside for bait.
They’d been living on Florianópolis Island for six months, and living meant finding and catching whatever food they could. While their neighbors left for places that some unreliable traveler had told them offered hope, or died from illnesses that were unidentified but were surely caused by malnutrition, they survived, with Jacinta welding up traps and Umberto weaving nets out of string and thread.
***
In the evening, Jacinta did the rounds to check the bird traps. The skerricks of food, attached to fine trip threads, were mostly untouched, but there was a babbling crow caught under one of the nets.
The crows mostly ate carrion, and they didn’t turn their beaks up at human bodies. The rumor was that they’d been infected with a power of speech, rambling and nonsensical as it was, when they’d consumed human brains, and the genetic encodings for neural speech centers had been accidentally activated, albeit on a reduced scale.
The example under the net pleaded for its life. Its partner had flown off with another bird and left it to care for the chicks alone, it squawked.
Jacinta pulled on her gloves and wrung its neck.
***
After their meager evening meal, Umberto disappeared, but Jacinta knew where he was.
The deserted house they’d moved into had been the home of a collector, of anything and everything, washed up from the sea or discovered in the derelict buildings of downtown Florianópolis. They’d been through the collection and scavenged parts for their traps, but lately Umberto had been spending more and more time in the musty storerooms, and as far as Jacinta could tell, he had no idea what he was looking for.
After a time, he reappeared with a small metal box.
“This was in a crate in the basement. Listen.”
He pressed a button on the box, and it replayed a crackling recording. A voice talked about the inherited memories that filled everyone’s heads, described them as worse than useless because they stopped Brazilians from adapting to the new world order.
—There is only one necessity in the world, to survive, and if necessity is the mother, she cannot have inventive children until we free ourselves from the past.
The voice went on to describe a transition to the next stage, a new beginning at a place called Cabo Novo.
—Make the pilgrimage to Cabo Novo. Together we will save Brazil, and the message finished.
“We can do better than this, ’Cinta.” Umberto was wide-eyed, excited. “The first people on this earth found things out for themselves. Our inheritance, all that dead knowledge, holds us back. I’m going to Cabo Novo.”
Jacinta expressed reservations, starting with the detail that Umberto had no idea where Cabo Novo was—“I will find it,” he said, “there must be other pilgrims”—and finishing with the rashness of basing life decisions on a talking box, which he ignored.
***
Early the next morning, Umberto showed her a piece of paper with wavy scribbles of a fish, a robot and a bow tie, or possibly a butterfly.
“When I return I’ll be a different person. Memorize this and I’ll show it to you so you’ll know it’s me. Otherwise you may not recognize me.”
Everything was important for Umberto, every piece of nonsense. Still, Jacinta went along. There was a lot to put up with at the end of the world.
She nodded and spoke solemnly, “I’ll remember it,” and tucked a tiny parcel into his backpack. “I made lunch for you.”
She gave him a peck on the cheek, embraced him, and wished him a safe journey. He told her not to worry, that he would be back soon, and strode off.
Jacinta busied herself for the rest of the day making new traps, fine mesh screens to catch insects, and tried to cook various wild plants, but once she’d sampled the astringent entrée, she discarded the remaining courses.
In the evening she thought about Umberto, where he might be and what might happen to him. She tried to care, to think of him fondly, but the real problem was that she didn’t and couldn’t. They’d been together for almost two years, but Umberto had changed, and she didn’t really want him to come back at all.
***
Late on the second night of his journey, Umberto reached Sharktown, strangely named because it wasn’t on the coast, and noticed a light flickering between the deserted buildings. He followed it to the town square where half a dozen figures were gathered around a fire burning in a blackened drum.
“Good evening, senhores. May I join you?” Heads nodded, and he took a seat on a worn wooden bench, resting his bones in the pleasant warmth.
One of the group, an old man with wisps of gray hair decorating his skull, offered him a drink. “I prepare it myself from sugar cane,” he said.
“Thank you, senhor.” And Umberto downed it in two gulps.
There was a scrawny carcass impaled on a spit above the drum, and his benefactor passed him a burnt slice on the tip of a knife, minute but still generous.
Umberto introduced himself.
“Everyone calls me Tubaron,” the stranger said, and poured him a few drops more of the drink.
“You’re very kind, Senhor Tubaron. Hospitality is a rare thing in these times.”
With the hollow pangs of starvation blunted, Umberto told the group about his quest to find Cabo Novo and clear his mind of its antiquated memories.
“Amigos, have any of you heard tell of it? A place where miraculous transformations can occur?”
There was murmured interest, almost excitement, around the firelit circle. Tubaron scratched his stubbled chin.
“Yes, I know the place. Occasionally pilgrims journeying to Cabo Novo pass through here. It’s further south, where the effluents from the old Osório factory complex once had their outfall to the sea.
“Years ago, I had a hacking cough, pneumonia, and I was certain that I was going to die.” Tubaron coughed illustratively.
“I’d heard a rumor that breathing the colored vapors emitted by the factory wastes would cure me, and I traveled there, but when I arrived I learned that the effluent had long since ceased to flow. A blockage had formed when the outflow crystallized in unseasonably cold weather, and it had backed up until a great mass of it grew out from the coastline.”
“And that’s Cabo Novo?”
The old man nodded. “They advised me to bury myself in the sludge. And it worked.”
“Your cough disappeared?”
“Yes, senhor.” He breathed pointedly for a moment or two without coughing.
“But there was more to it than that. There were physical changes—I no longer need a knife at the dinner table.” He opened his mouth wide and drew attention to the sharpness of his teeth with the flick of a fingernail.
“And my thought processes were clarified—I was able to achieve things I’d never imagined possible. My mother was a fortune-teller, but she’d never been able to read the future from entrails.”
He inflated his chest. “The effluent gave me that gift.”
Tubaron lifted his shirt and undid the large cartoon button securing his pants. He was much thinner than Umberto had realized, sleek, with flesh stretched like cling wrap over his rib cage, and there were rounded shapes poking out from his abdomen.
He pointed at a large shallow bruise. “That is the organ of Hipátia, its great size is a sign of good fortune.” He indicated a clustered group of small discolored bulges. “These are the Dionysian grapes. Their proliferation means a long and happy life.”
“Very impressive, senhor.”
Tubaron pulled his shirt back down. “I can teach you how to do it. Shall we start by inspecting your own future, senhor? Just a superficial reading, no need for an incision.”
***
As food became scarce, Jacinta’s
appetite contrarily increased, and she was always hungry. She baited the fish traps with what little she could find in crevices between the lichen covered rocks, the smallest mollusks with shells she could crack with her fingers, and prepared thin soups from the insects caught in her fine nets.
Even angel paste, shimmering and otherworldly but with no real meat to it, became part of her desperate diet.
The angel moths communicated in hissing voices made by a dry rubbing of their wings, and they had a fondness for fluttering into human ears and imparting unwanted advice. After their mission was complete, they would flutter away, but the draft of air under their friction-heated wings generally caused them to catch fire, and they spiraled downward leaving tiny smoke plumes.
The moths were too cunning to be caught in the nets, so Jacinta waited on the porch at sunset and preemptively snatched them out of the air before they could whisper their foreign truths in her ears.
***
Cabo Novo was a barren headland jutting out into the Atlantic, an unearthly landscape without the slightest hint of life, too challenging for terrestrial life forms, except for one that saw itself as special.
“No deeper, senhor, or you won’t be able to claw your way out afterwards.” Tubaron had come with Umberto to revisit Cabo Novo—for nostalgic reasons, he’d said.
Umberto had used a twisted metal rod to gouge through the hard white crust covering the ground, and then scooped out the oily muck beneath with his hands.
“Lie down and make yourself comfortable before I bury you. You will experience suffocation, an acidic burning, and dissolution. Don’t be concerned, you will lose consciousness soon enough. When the new Umberto emerges I will be here to greet him.”