Ante Mortem

by Jodi Lee, ed.

  “Mother-fucker,” she spat.

  “What?”

  She looked up from the paper clenched in her fist, and her expression turned from rage to sorrow.

  “It says that your things have been moved to a storage facility. The address is on the bottom. Your friend’s father has generously paid for the first month’s fees.”

  “He kicked me out?” Hyun asked, unable to fully process the news.

  “This is ridiculous. I’m sure when Joon feels better, he’ll straighten things out. Do you have someone you can crash with for a few days?”

  Hyun shook his head. “Joon was my only friend here. I haven’t even started my new job yet.”

  “All right, well, at the risk of sounding impetuous you can crash with me. I don’t think they let you sleep in those storage places.”

  “I can’t do that to you.”

  “Sure you can.” Mai took his hand and led him back to the elevator. “I have an extra room you can use. Right now there’s nothing in it but book shelves and a fish tank. It was going to be my home office.” She rolled her eyes.

  Hyun didn’t argue after that, he was too miserable. It was easier to follow Mai. Since she didn’t have anything for him to sleep on, she put Hyun in her bed and took the couch.

  “We can buy a futon or sofa bed, if things take some time to work themselves out,” she assured him.

  Over a month later Hyun still hadn’t heard from Joon, despite sending him numerous emails and phone messages. Eventually he felt compelled to tell Mai he would need to get his own place, he couldn’t count on her charity indefinitely.

  “It’s not charity if you pay rent,” she countered. “Honestly, you’d be doing me favor.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “I’m serious.”

  With gentle prodding, Hyun learned the whole truth. Mai explained how her family had money once, and how her father loved to travel. Especially in Asia. Vietnam was his favorite, he named her after one of it’s native flowers. Unfortunately, a series of bad investments had bankrupted the family. Still, he clung to the dream of seeing his favorite vacation spot one last time. When he died, Mai did the best she could: She laid her father’s ashes to rest in the waters of the resort lake. It drained her bank account, leaving her to juggle credit cards until she got back on her feet.

  “Don’t feel pressured, I swear I can get by. And if you get sick of me you can always leave, no notice required!”

  Hyun couldn’t imagine himself getting sick of her, so they moved his things out of storage that afternoon. The next night, he got a text message from Joon.

  Where are you?? Your things are all gone!

  Hyun called him right away. Joon answered on the verge of panic.

  “Hyun, why did you leave? Are you mad at me?”

  “No! I didn’t want to leave. Your father…” Hyun bit his tongue. It didn’t seem right to disrespect Mr. Cheong.

  “My father did this?” Joon sounded calmer, but still unhappy. “That’s ridiculous, he can’t kick you out on the street. Come back.”

  “I’m not on the street, Joon, don’t worry about me. Are you all right? When did they let you out of the hospital?”

  “Yes, this morning. My father wouldn’t let me call anyone or use my computer. He’s ashamed of what happened.”

  Hyun thought back to the cabin and repressed a shudder. “But you’re all right now?”

  “I still ache sometimes but they gave me pills so it’s not so bad. Can I see you?”

  “Of course, I can come over right away.”

  After saying good-bye, Hyun told Mai the news. She was happy, but her smile dimmed.

  “Are you going to move back right away?”

  “I’m not moving.” Hyun felt genuinely surprised at his own words. “Joon will understand. He would have been happy to have his own bachelor pad, if he didn’t worry about me.”

  “I won’t be pissed if you change your mind. You two are like family.”

  “So maybe I should go move in with my mother,” Hyun teased.

  Mai laughed and he pulled her close.

  “I’m not leaving,” he promised. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  As soon as Hyun was in the door Joon eyed him suspiciously, then grinned.

  “You’ve been a bad boy. Who is she?”

  “Her name is Mai. You’ll like her.”

  “Who cares if I like her?” Joon poked Hyun playfully in the ribs. “Do you like her?”

  “Yes. We’re living together.”

  “So soon? Ah, you were always the romantic type.”

  They sat at the kitchen table and Joon became serious.

  “So you’re not moving back in?”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Be with your woman.” Joon patted Hyun on the back. “We’re grown men, right?”

  Hyun nodded, grateful.

  “Is your father still angry at me?”

  Joon sighed. “He always likes to blame others.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What could I say? He’d think I was crazy.” Joon took a napkin and began to nervously shred it into tiny pieces. “You saw it too, right? Sometimes I feel like I went insane that night.”

  “I saw it. So did Mai.”

  “That was Mai?” Joon looked thoughtful. “I remember her, a little. How did she know to come help?”

  “I was with her that night.”

  “That’s why you didn’t hear the window break.” Joon muttered, more to himself than to Hyun.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault, you weren’t doing anything wrong.” Joon chuckled. “Is that why you were in a bathrobe? I thought I imagined that!”

  “My clothes were wet from falling in the lake.”

  Joon howled with laughter. “You fell into the lake? Oh shit, you have the spend the night. I need to hear everything I missed.”

  Hyun agreed and made a quick call to tell Mai. She told him to have fun and say hello to Joon for her. Meanwhile, Joon stood a few feet away and pretended to make out with a pillow. Hyun gave him the finger; it felt like old times. They ordered pizza and beer and spent the night talking about easy topics. A few times Hyun noticed a sense of discomfort on his friends face, but Joon waved off his concern.

  “It’s fine, much better than before. When they first took me to the hospital, I couldn’t shit for a week.”

  It was the closest he came to talking about the incident again. Once the pizza was finished, Joon put in a “Girls Gone Wild” DVD and they played “real or fake.” With no way to know for sure, it was a silly game, but it was their tradition. If they had eaten take-out Chinese, they would have put in old Kung Fu movies on mute and made up their own dialogue. Around midnight, both Hyun and Joon were starting to nod off, despite the barrage of “barely legal” Spring Break breasts on the wide-screen TV.

  “I think I’m going to call it a night,” Hyun said.

  “OK, but where are you going to sleep? My douchebag father took your bed.”

  “The couch is fine.”

  “The couch is shit. Come on, my bed is big enough so that we can sleep without bothering each other.”

  Hyun shrugged. As kids, they had sleep-overs all the time. It wouldn’t be the first time they shared a bed.

  “All right, but don’t hog the covers.”

  “Right,” Joon winked, “you need your beauty sleep for your woman.”

  Because it was a pleasantly warm night, both men stripped down to their boxers before getting under the sheets. Hyun noticed that Joon’s abdomen was swollen and bruised. He quickly flipped over, so Joon wouldn’t catch him staring and become self-conscious. He was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  At first, Hyun thought the hot breath in his ear was Mai. When his eyes opened to Joon’s bedroom, he jolted awake. A strong arm pushed him back down on the mattress.

  “I’m sorry Hyun.”

  Joon
’s voice was ragged and trembled over the words. His hands grasped the edges of Hyun’s boxers and pulled them down.

  “What are you doing?”

  Joon put his hand over Hyun’s mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “But I need it out of me.”

  Hyun struggled but Joon took his arm and contorted it painfully behind his back. Hyun yelped against his friend’s hand.

  “Don’t fight,” Joon hissed. “It hurts more if you fight.”

  The skin of Joon’s stomach burned the small of Hyun’s back.

  “Raise your hips up. I’ll be was quick as I can.”

  When Hyun shook his head, Joon wrenched his arm harder.

  “I can hurt you, Hyun! Do you want that?”

  Hyun jerked his head back, sending his skull squarely into Joon’s nose. Joon fell back and Hyun flipped around to punch him in the stomach. His hand sunk in up to the wrist, and white hot pain lanced the sides of Hyun’s palm. As Joon tumbled off the bed, Hyun pulled his fist back to find two puncture wounds weeping blood.

  Down on the floor, a pair of black glistening eyes peered out of Joon’s abdominal cavity. A spasm shook his body, sending the giant larvae out in a swirl of intestines.

  “Hyun?”

  Joon’s voice was dreamlike. Hyun went to his side, careful to avoid the squirming maggot on the floor.

  “Is it gone?” He smiled and Hyun forced back his bile.

  “Yes, yes Joon. It’s gone.”

  He took Joon’s hand and told him to hold on, that he needed to call for help. Joon was dead before he even finished the sentence. Unable to let go, Hyun wept.

  * * * *

  To Survive the Beginning

  Gina Ranalli

  The gods were angry.

  The man and the boy were in the forest, just past the clearing of the burial ground, when the sky grew dark and the first stone fell from the heavens and shattered against the earth a mere twelve feet in front of them.

  The boy looked at his father, eyes wide with fright, spear hanging loosely at his side instead of firmly in his fist and raised to the height of his shoulder. Under normal circumstances, this lack of preparation and grace would have earned him a scolding, but now his father gazed skyward, head craned back as though searching for predators. When he glanced down at his son, his own eyes were more confused than frightened. He opened his mouth to speak as a tremendous crash shook the ground beneath their feet, causing them both to stumble and turn in the direction of the explosion, crouching low, unconsciously covering their heads with their hands.

  This time an even larger stone had fallen behind them, directly into the clearing where so many of their family had been laid to rest. Generations of dead, including the father’s father, mother, several siblings and other children he had spawned. His clan had lived in this area a long time—an area lush with vegetation and brimming with wildlife. There had never been a reason to move on. Starvation had not been the cause of any of the deaths. Sickness, accidents, animal attacks, murder. But never starvation.

  A deafening crack that the father and son recognized: the sound of a tree snapping, and a moment later, more cracks as it took other trees down with it, then finally the thuds as they struck the forest floor.

  The smell of smoke was on the air and the father shouted at the boy, pointed, and then the two of them were running back the way they’d come, shoulders hunched forward, chins tucked down against their chests, sprinting through the burial ground as more rocks fell all around them.

  Most of the stones were small enough not to cause serious injury but the two fleeing figures cried out whenever struck by one of them. Not only were they falling at a great velocity, but they were also hot. Hot enough to burn, and strangely shaped, not smooth like most rocks, but jagged in places, bumpy and rough around the edges. Their color was odd as well—not black or gray or even white, but more of a deep dark purple with veins of yellow striping their hides.

  By the time they reached the mouth of the cave that was their home, both man and boy were covered with welts, lumps and blisters of various size and severity. The boy wept freely, gingerly touching a bloody gash atop his head, though it was not the pain that caused him to weep: he was terrified.

  Just outside the cave stood the women, clutching each other, their eyes wide with fright as they watched the man and the boy approach. The woman—mother of the boy and mate to the man—used both her voice and hand gestures to hurry them on, while her two daughters whimpered beside her.

  “Run!” she urged. “Run or be killed!”

  She needn’t have shouted because both her son and her mate were already running as fast as they could, spears dropped somewhere along the way, completely forgotten.

  They bowled into the cluster of females, nearly knocking them over in their attempt to get inside to safety.

  “What’s happening?” Teva cried, grabbing her son by the shoulders to examine his wounds. The boy, whose name was Gel, rubbed the snot from his upper lip with the heel of his hand, trying mightily to hide his tear-streaked face from his sisters. The lip, just beginning to show the first wisps of facial hair, trembled despite his efforts to still it.

  Napro stood just inside the cave, looking out, absently rubbing a blister on his forearm. Outside, the stones continued to rain down, some of them still smoking and fire-red. He was amazed that both he and his son had made it through with no more than superficial wounds.

  “What does it mean?” Rani, his eldest daughter asked, stepping up beside him.

  He shook his head, hands moving slowly, reluctantly. “Maybe the end of the world.”

  Rani’s eyes narrowed as she raised her chin in defiance of the situation, though she made no reply.

  A shuffling sound from behind caused them both to turn and see Fee, the old medicine man who had joined their clan less than a season past. Napro and Gel had found the old man near the lean-to that had been his home. Fee was maimed after a battle with a wolf, close to death and had not the man and the boy happened upon the scene and frightened away the beast, Fee would certainly have been killed and eaten by the wolf.

  Together, father and son had carried the old man back to their cave where Teva had patched his wounds, fed him animal lard and broth and kept his temperature as low as possible. By the time Fee was well enough to return to his lean-to, the clan had discouraged it greatly, insisting that he was far too old to live out in the wild without the protection of stone walls to shield him from future animal attacks and inclement weather.

  At first Fee had been stubborn—he had many seasons left, he argued, though that was clearly not the case. He had already seen his fortieth winter come and go and no one had ever heard of anyone living to be as old as he now was.

  Fee insisted it was the herbs and roots he made into a thick tea and drank nearly every day that had kept him alive long after the times his own clan had perished.

  Now the old man peered over Napro’s shoulder at the falling stones and grunted. Both Napro and Rani stared at him and he signed, “The gods are angry.”

  Napro nodded grimly. It was the very same thing he’d been thinking but hadn’t wished to say aloud. “What have we done to anger them so?”

  Fee shook his head, his eyes more sad than frightened. Behind them came the sound of Zic, the youngest child, weeping. Zic, unlike her older sister, was sensitive and wept easily. Only nine, she spoke of wanting to leave this place, go somewhere “without so many spirits.” She was convinced the land around them was haunted with the ghosts of the dead and often spoke of seeing specters while out gathering berries near the burial ground.

  For the most part, her clan let her speak of such things without much protesting. In fact, they barely listened to the child’s senseless rambling when she went on about such things. Only Fee paid what the child said any mind at all, for he had seen many things in his lifetime that could not be explained away. Sometimes, he suspected the child might be right. Perhaps humans weren’t the only ones sharing t
he land with animal, plant and insect life.

  The next hours were spent with Teva attending to Gel and Napro’s injuries, Zic’s constant sniffling as she clung to Rani’s side and Fee watching glumly as the outside world grew dark.

  The stones continued to fall, but only sporadically now. An occasional thump from a far distance and, even rarer, the cracking sound of rock on rock when one clattered against the roof of their cave. They could tell by the thuds that the stones were growing smaller as the night wore on, until finally it sounded as though nothing more threatening than hail was falling from the sky.

  Still, no one slept that night, wondering what it could all mean.

  The following morning, they were all up before the sun rose, as was their custom, though none of them dared venture beyond the perimeters of the cave until the sun was up and peeking over the horizon.

  Without any sleep or their evening meal, everyone now suffered from grumbling bellies and short tempers. Napro finally raised the courage to poke around outside and check to see if all was safe. If so, he and Gel would pick up where they left off the previous afternoon, retrieving their spears and hunting for game.

  What he found scattered around the area near their cave was just what he’d expected to find: stones, of various shapes and sizes, some of the larger ones having shattered like shale upon their impact with the hard earth.

  Napro crouched, examining one of these split open stones. It appeared as though the rock had been more than just a rock; more like an egg of some sort. The inside of the stone sparkled wetly in the sun, a thin sheen of something almost gelatinous coating the hollowed out insides of the rock.

  Frowning, Napro found a nearby twig and poked at the slime. The tip of the twig dripped thick, snot-like fluid and, disgusted, Napro tossed it away before rising to his feet once more.

  He picked his way carefully around the fallen stones, giving an especially wide berth to those which had cracked apart. He had never seen anything like them and the sight of that snotty liquid made him wary and nervous.