PostApoc

by Liz Worth

  We all stand in the living room doorway, watching, afraid to move, afraid to turn our backs. Tara’s the only one not with us.

  “She’s upstairs,” Aimee says. “Doing what, I don’t know.”

  Not even Taser, who snaps at everyone but Cam, will come into the house. “So much for a guard dog,” Aimee says, earning a “fuck you” from Cam.

  Below us, a leaden scrape across the basement floor. A dead man’s incoherent shouts follow a few seconds later. Even the spirits are disturbed by what’s in here now.

  Upstairs, Tara’s found an old tube of lipstick under a mattress and tried it on. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and crimson red smears down the side of her face. She looks at me and says, “Where’d you get to for so long?” The question comes through the lipstick slit, as if she’s just made a new mouth in her cheek.

  I don’t answer, just stare back her, speechless in the reflection of her eyes’ infected abyss.

  Cam and Trevor move their stuff into our bedroom. We lock the door behind us to keep out whatever’s still in the living room downstairs.

  It’s so hot that everyone takes off their shirts. The window’s wide open and the air’s got the same humid electricity as a summer storm, but it’s swamp-still. Not even a breeze is getting in.

  Energy ripples through the heat of the room. Cam offers up some grayline. I don’t really want to do any but don’t know what else to do to get through this.

  Energy ripples through the heat of our words. Shamans, each of us. At least we’d like to think when we’re high like this.

  Now that we’re all buzzing, Tara reconnects. Together, we go into a trance, and without her speaking I hear her tell us, “It occupies everything, this addiction. I never thought this would happen, or at least not so fast. I thought if any of us would get hooked it would be Ang, because she’s already given herself up and away so much. Every day I think, ‘This must be right near the end.’”

  Tara is at the door now, fumbling with the lock. It’s stuck. “I need out right now,” she says.

  Cam gets up, jiggles the handle, and Tara’s out. We hear her run through the house and out the back door. We watch through the window as she braces herself against the porch railing. Taser bucks against his chain, barking wildly in Tara’s direction.

  A few weeks ago Tara thought she would never need a washroom again. Some people’s bodies are either adapting or shutting down, everything turning to gristle inside. Now Tara’s innards are turning to liquid, language projectile.

  Aimee tells me to go help her and I get there in time to watch Tara choke in reverse on a ball of blue hair, same as her wig. She spits up a four-leaf clover, a crucifix, a cat with green gemstone eyes.

  Her body, previously filled with black and bile and bone, has started to rebuild from the ash of grayline. The dead are coming to reclaim their bodies and are siphoning from Tara’s, bleeding her nutrients, her bone density, her remaining muscle mass.

  Tara spits out red laces that could fit a pair Doc Marten boots. The backs of her hands shed white-blonde hair, opposite to what grows from her head. In documented cases of possession, it’s been noted that the possessed vomit objects: hair clips and bones and eyes. If grayline’s ingredients include the ashes of the dead, are we voluntarily possessing their spirits?

  Tara says she’s just hallucinating. “It’s like I’m having a vision of thinning blue jeans and an empty market stall and a flare of fraying denim over the tops of Converse high tops. The laces are undone and the feet inside are bare. The person has a face but all I can see is a thick patch of pubic hair growing from the cream of pale cheeks, flecks of dirt matted into coarse brown clumps.”

  Tara’s words cut off just in time for her to heave out sagging cargo pockets of bad directions. Her tongue’s as dry as a cat’s.

  “This might be right near the end, before everything breaks apart,” she says out loud this time.

  Tara’s body is uncontrollable, head rocking back with a dusting of laughter that starts out as a gag. Her bladder releases a gentle slide of dirt—cemetery earth. Tara recognizes the smell.

  A dog barks. I can’t tell if it’s from Taser or from Tara. She coughs and it sounds like snapping white teeth clattering across the porch boards. Out comes more gravel and dust, followed by dark, shining things that live under rocks.

  The tag on the back of Tara’s t-shirt itches in a place she can’t reach. I try to help but can’t find the right spot. Her shoulder blades are like discs of wax, her hair a wick waiting to be lit on fire.

  Tara grabs her middle as if hit with cramps. She squats and her colon sprays twigs. They fly off the porch and make spirals in the dirt, disrupt something black, a squirming body. The bug dislodges, runs disoriented towards Tara’s calf. She tries to flick it away but misses. It burrows into the thickest part of her leg.

  “This must be right near the end, before everything breaks apart,” Tara says again.

  She moans and out comes rigor mortis and latent misgivings. A canopy of curls, disappearances, x-ray vision, blue eyeshadow. Closed eyes and quick jabs and something that goes harder, faster, harder, faster.

  “This must be right near the end, before everything breaks apart,” she says once more.

  It’s my body and I’ll die if I want to.

  - 25 -

  OBITUARY

  We don’t last long all locked in the same room together. Cam finds half a mickey we’d hid under a pillow and drinks it in three gulps. Ten minutes later he’s all over Aimee, kneading her breasts.

  “They look bigger than yesterday,” he says. “Did they grow overnight?”

  Aimee pushes his hand away and moves over, wincing. She looks at me and says, “They’re so sore today. I must be getting my period soon. I haven’t had it in a while.”

  Now that Cam’s got a taste of alcohol in him he wants more. “Who’s coming with me?”

  “I’m going to sleep,” Aimee says, tired again. Tired all the time these days.

  Tara’s lying down already, too, an arm draped over her eyes. She doesn’t answer.

  “I’ll go,” Trevor says.

  “I’ll go too,” I say.

  Downstairs I hear the clink of bicycle chains and the click of Taser’s nails on the driveway. The two heads in the living room glare as I move towards the door, looking at me like I’ve got the taste of something they’ve always wanted. I finger the earring Tooth gave me.

  Later, Aimee finds me on the porch.

  “What’s going on?” she asks.

  “I just can’t be inside right now,” I say. None of Cam’s dealers were around when we’d gone out and the boys weren’t ready to give up when I was.

  Aimee’s skin has turned the colour of ash. She says the girls with the praying mantis body crawled into the basement when she came downstairs. Aimee ran and locked the door behind them. Minutes afterward, the phantom shouts started rising up and haven’t stopped. Something’s banging on the door, begging to be let out, and we don’t know if it’s the girls or the ghost.

  “A girl who’s kept herself close to death long enough that it’s left a smell—not of decay but of lilacs and roses just before they turn.” That’s what I’d want someone to write in my obituary, if there were such things anymore.

  I still have the first thing Hunter ever gave me, the only other thing of his I still have: a pressed flower in a compact mirror. I cup it in my hands now, afraid it will disintegrate if it falls out of my orbit. I call this unfortunate. A waste, my life.

  When I first see Cam and Trevor running up to the house, it looks like they’ve caught an animal the way Trevor’s cradling warm, red flesh. Taser isn’t with them as they bang past us and fly through the front door.

  But there’s no fresh kill. Trevor’s been bitten by Taser. Cam’s got him on the living room with a dirty t-shirt wrapped around his hand. Cam is yelling, “Don’t just stand there. Fucking HELP US.” Having drained the last of our booze earlier, he’s washing Trevor’s
hand with rainwater.

  I run upstairs for one of Aimee’s pads and a bandana. One of Taser’s teeth found a gap between the bones in Trevor’s hand and went right through from bottom to top. Fate line severed.

  Cam says everyone he knows is out of alcohol. It’s the only thing we might be able to use to clean Trevor’s hand and hasn’t heard of anyone who’s still got any. But Cam won’t do the same things we’ll do for booze, doesn’t use the same dealers, even though he’s aware of the options.

  “I know someone,” I say.

  Mike tells me he’s been dreaming about women’s underwear: light pink, lavender, charcoal cotton. He tells me he must be drying out inside because the other day he caught his wrist on a piece of glass but no blood came out. He pulls out a bottle of vodka and tells me, “This is the last one I can give you.”

  We’re sitting at the back of the house. The sun’s setting. It’s pretty but we don’t say so. It’s easier not to talk about these things. It’s too lonely, and too close to grieving.

  Instead Cam says, “Wanna see what I’ve got?” He reaches into his army pants. There’s a crinkling. He pulls out three granola bars. “Expired, but whatever,” he says. “They’ll still be good.”

  My stomach growls. I hadn’t noticed I was hungry. Cam offers me one. Chocolate chip and marshallow. My teeth ache over the honeyed oats. Cam sees my eye on the leftover bar.

  “Wanna split it?” he says.

  - 26 -

  CREEP MANIFESTO

  Tara walks out of the house with her wig back on and returns wrapped in a blue boa and silver spandex shorts, reciting a creep manifesto like nothing’s unusual:

  Decree the fate/unwilling

  Planetary intercourse/our command is

  Far reaching/

  For the unchangeable/

  Know your fires/

  Your cities/

  Escape plan C/section off

  Earth’s ancestors/text collaboration

  Creep chronicles/

  An un-history

  “Hey,” she says, giving me full-on eye contact, pupils contracted into speed-sucking focus. Her hands fly through her crooked hair. She’s high again but only has another hour left of this buzz. I can tell by the shake in her knee.

  “It’s a bad taste that can’t be killed,” she says. “Just like the first time I was ever asked by someone if he could lick the scars inside my arms. When I said yes he flattened his tongue wide across my wrist and worked it all the way up to my elbow. He said there was a taste to it. ‘Acquired’ was the word he used.”

  Tara has sacrificed herself as a host to a shadow drug, floored by slim collections of collective delusions. Her posture is a curve that ends in a point: a question mark.

  She laughs—split second—and then blanks out before being caught in forward momentum, with it again but not with us.

  “I’ve gotta go, Ang,” she says. “I met someone. Someone who knows where to get more grayline. More of everything. They’ve invited me to stay with them.”

  “Stay where?” I ask.

  “I told him about you,” she says, “but he doesn’t want a lot of people coming around.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “There’s nothing left out there,” Cam says.

  “That’s what they want you to think,” Tara says. She leaves everything behind but what she can carry in her purse.

  For every hour that Aimee sleeps, which has been most of them lately, Trevor’s hand blackens by another inch, no matter how much vodka we pour onto it. The infection’s spreading fever directly to his brain.

  “ANG,” he says. “I’ve figured out EVERYTHING.” I wait for him to tell me what everything is but instead a sob comes out of him.

  It feels like it might be what we used to know as midnight when Cam says, “He’s going to have to lose that hand.” It might be for another hour that he stares at me as if waiting for permission.

  “What do you want me to say?” I ask finally.

  “Just tell me what to do.”

  “I feel like you already know what to do.”

  It might be two in the morning when Cam looks from one knife to the other. “This one has a sharper blade, but this one can cut deeper.”

  “Whatever you do, just do it fast,” I say.

  Trevor’s pillow is soaked with sweat but he’s shivering through fever.

  “I don’t want to be here for this,” I tell Cam.

  Trevor’s eyes are closed.

  “Fine, then go.” Cam doesn’t look at me when he says this. He’s looking at Trevor.

  I only have two cigarettes left. Again. Aimee must have a few; she’s hardly been awake enough to smoke any. Not sure what’ll be left after this, if anything.

  Outside, the night air’s got a chill in it. I’m in a t-shirt but don’t want to go back inside. It’s easier to be cold.

  I’m a block away from the house when I hear a short, gruff cry. It could have come from the Victorian, but it also could just be an animal. I can’t let myself ponder it any more than that. Instead I think about Hunter: past life and what was wrong and what was right and what really mattered. Did we really matter? Yeah, I think we did.

  We spent so much time nurturing boredom and defense that our expressions took on early lines of flawed character. Every question I asked him started with an unraveling and ended the same way, but I was only a catalyst for one of them.

  I remember my ear against the mild swell of his pectoral, the rock of bone beneath a dark cavity, an obscurity where the heart should have been. When I get to him, finally, will we be able to work our way back to what we had?

  I walk the same four blocks until the sun comes up, consider myself lucky that it even makes an appearance for me today. I didn’t want to be back in that house in the dark.

  Cam and Trevor are gone when I get there, along with their clothes, books and knives. Trevor’s mattress is bare. There is as much blood left behind as I’d expected. It’s the blood on Aimee’s crotch that surprises me, scares me.

  Her face is that of someone drowning, lips blue and slightly swollen.

  “I have the worst cramps right now,” she says. “I might puke. This is the worst period I’ve ever had.”

  The window is open all the way but there’s no air coming in. Nothing moves outside. Aimee’s hair is plastered to her forehead. I crouch down beside her but she sits up and bolts for the bathroom. The bedroom door slams open against the wall and shakes on its hinges.

  On Aimee’s bed is a circle of blood—more than the start of a period. I run into the bathroom after her. She’s curled up on the floor, red soaking her jean shorts like piss. Her left hand covers her abdomen like she’s trying to calm whatever’s inside.

  I kneel over her, try to get her on her back, but she keeps her body coiled. “Let me,” I say, reaching for the button of her shorts. They don’t even need to be undone they’re so loose, but I give her time by popping the waistband, unzipping the fly before pulling them toward her ankles.

  I’m not ready for the smell of so much menstrual blood. In this heat it could rot on her body; its odour already holds a hint of heavy brown.

  Aimee’s panties are soaked all the way up to the waist. I peel them away and a strand of mucous breaks from between her legs. She’s breathing fast now.

  “Relax,” I say.

  “Ang,” she says, “it hurts.”

  “I know. I won’t last, though.”

  Her midsection contracts and another stream of blood pushes out from her. “Shit, Ang,” she says. “What’s happening?”

  I wanted to bring her back to bed but she said she didn’t want to move just yet. That might have been three hours ago. We’re still on the bathroom floor, my body against her back, arm overtop of hers, leg wrapped over her hip. Together, we shake. Her shivering is violent enough for both of us. I can’t let her chill take me over. She needs all the heat I have.

  With everyone gone now but
us, the house is the quietest it’s ever been. There isn’t even a skitter from the ghosts upstairs or down. In the night, I tell Aimee, “Breathe.”

  She breathes.

  In a dream I’m cutting the anchor tattoo out of Aimee’s arm to keep us weighted down. In another dream I realize I’ve fallen asleep too long to remind Aimee to breathe. Beside me, she’s gone stiff. I am no longer in a dream.

  Overnight Aimee’s body has gained the volume of death and I’ve lost all muscle mass. I cover her with the blanket left on Tara’s bed because I don’t know what else to do.

  Miscarriage. From that pick up she did alone.

  I am on my own in a way I’ve never been before, but now, more than any other time in my life, I have the feeling of being closed into a crowd: mental crush of space, claustrophobic estimates, emotional perception in overdrive.

  I believe I’ve made a mistake in waking. I go back to sleep to see if I can correct my reality. But every time I start to fall asleep I think of Aimee’s body beside me and get an adrenaline jolt. It would be easier not to think at all.

  It’s my body and I’ll die if I want to.

  - 27 -

  AFTERBIRTH

  Aimee’s already decomposing, decaying in fast-forward. Her tattoos are shriveled but the colour’s still solid. I know I should move her, but I’m not ready. At least with her body still here, I can feel a little less alone.

  I don’t wear my own clothes anymore. I live in hers. Aimee’s sweatshirt fits me like a dress. In it, I soak in my own sweat.

  I wait two days before I close the bathroom door but the smell still gets through the hallway. It’s dark green with spots of maroon. By now I thought I knew what death smelled like. If I sit with her body long enough and talk to her, I can get used to the scent. The only problem is, it seems like it gets worse by the hour.

  I wait two more days after that before moving downstairs because the smell is all over the second floor now. There’s a mark on the kitchen ceiling below Aimee’s body. Is she leaking through the floor?

  I can’t sleep here at night because the smell’s gotten outside. The animals know what I’m hiding in here and they claw and cry to get in.