Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  “You expect us to just—”

  “It’s Tohn’s cousin, Lousi. It could be beneficial for everyone involved.”

  “Beneficial, he says!”

  The brother steepled his long fingers. “I don’t bring it up lightly.”

  Merclaire fixated on the brother’s fingernails. Pink ovals with thin even white rims. Years ago when he had first visited Lousi’s family, that same brother had socked him in the face with a bag of deer’s blood fertilizer. Merclaire found himself unable to imagine the experience of prison.

  He took two steps up to the porch. “I can do it.”

  Lousi looked dubious. “Baby, you don’t—”

  The brother not speaking was texting intently. “She can be here this evening, if you like.”

  Lousi twisted and twisted and twisted the muscular braid of her hair. All the ties which Merclaire had been led to believe would bind her to him turned out to have little hold. She was looking at them all and then for an instant she was looking at none of them.

  “I can’t skip class tonight.” Regret and relief chased each other through her voice.

  He shook his head. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He shook his head. “It’ll be fine.”

  The taller brother spread his hands out as though he were balancing two columns of sky. The appreciation of basic freedom still radiated from him.“If you have any doubts, we’re happy to—”

  Merclaire remembered the Erasmo children staring at him from within the dim cave. Their faces orphaned and dangerous. Do you know, each of them had taken a turn with the heart. They had grated it against the exposed cinder block of the basement until the pericardium was shredded to fluff. They had pried a stone up out of the floor and set what remained underneath.

  He shook his head. “No. Of course not. I understand.”

  In the evening they fed the daughters creamed corn and waited. Havana and Havarti were two and four and still assessing the boundary between self and decorum. They poked their creamy forklets into each other’s mouths and cheeks and hair. He swooped them into the tub, enthralled them by scooping water in a cup and pouring it from a high distance.

  Then Lousi had departed for class and the girls had departed into sleep. Merclaire rocked on the porch. He dreaded this hour after their bedtime, the way the quiet advanced. He never felt confident he could retrieve himself from it.

  There is so much to the world that is not seen or felt, he thought. The light and limp breeze and distant traffic noise remained the same, yet everything was different. Their home, the daughters, the high chair, the kitchen with its yellow walls, the beadboard and the linoleum siding, in a day it had all become improbably flimsy. A clot of sticks floating down a river, just barely cohered through the motions of chance and water. On all sides tumbled tires and segments of infrastructure and more massive flotillas of junk. At any moment something could collide with their nest and scatter everything as thoroughly as if it had never existed.

  He rode the speeding island with the bravura of insolvency. It sailed around a bend and he found himself whirling toward a girl, submerged to her waist in the middle of the river, her arm sheathed to the pit in the throat of a monstrous fish.

  He jerked awake; gnats departed his arm hairs. Rocked his wife’s porch chair until he could reincorporate himself. The sky at the top of the street was deepening, white to orange to blue.

  Two bikes crested the hill in staggered formation. The trailing one ridden by a bulky two-headed creature. Merclaire squinted and this resolved itself into the shorter brother, with a stranger perched behind him on the pegs. As they descended the stranger let go of the brother’s shoulders and stretched her arms out to the sides. The dark shadow of their combined forms spread its wings, swooped down the long hill.

  The brothers parked their bikes and unloaded gear from the panniers. Something bulky, jointed metal pieces wrapped in canvas. A slender scuffed tool case. They bore both up the stairs into the house, following the pointing of the stranger’s hand. Merclaire nodded as they passed but the brothers’ eyes had narrowed to business and they were unable to respond.

  Up close his understanding revised again: she was so bulky and misshapen because of the coat she wore. A pillowing of winter parka with a giant hood mounded on her shoulders. Meanwhile he had on only a windbreaker. At her approach he broke into sweat all over, a cold rubbery layer that chafed his armpit as he raised a hand in uncertain greeting.

  “What can I say, I’m a heat creature.” She spoke to his silent thoughts from within the burrow of her hood. A round dark face he barely saw, thick wings of eyeliner. Beads of sweat crawled down his neck. She tickled his outstretched fingers as she passed—a handshake? Dap? Low five? Then the door of his house was closing, and she was inside and he was out.

  “This is Tohn’s cousin.” The brother making introductions looked impatient to be proven right.

  This time the cords of her wrist stood out as she wrung his hand. “Jessyup.”

  Despite the lines around her eyes Jessyup could not have been more than twenty-one. Her coat hatched to reveal a soft mustardy dress and black leggings. Merclaire was unskilled in interpreting the outfits of young people—did this clothing suggest going out, or staying in, or participating in some kind of athletic event?

  She embarked on an impressive choreography of explanation and arrangement; indifferent words belied by crisp motions. He marveled at how such opposed mechanisms of self-preservation could coexist.

  “We do the, we call it the parturition, first.” Simultaneously she telescoped the table’s metal legs and snapped them into place. “For the mother part. Then, make sure it sticks? Then the, like, matricide.” Sitting on the joint of the folding table, she jogged her weight until they heard a click. “The killing part.” The stirrups at the end of the table remained folded.

  She clipped a cheap work lamp to the arm of his chandelier, wrapped her hands around the table end, and scudded its rubber feet two millimeters to the left. One millimeter to the right. He had never before seen a spell cast; still he recognized its presence.

  The pad of her thumb clicked on the lamp. The light was soft and warm but aggrieved his mind like a nail. He could not recall what hung on his own walls. Drawings from the girls? Of what? All of the house outside the glow was called into question. The brothers, standing on either side of the kitchen door, were shadowy pillars. Now she laid a sheet over the table and her tone was so offhand he knew it would be okay.

  He managed, “Is there anything to sign?”

  He could have sworn her tone of voice turned wistful. “No.”

  As though on a long fog-obscured road, he looked back over his shoulder. He saw behind him the line that held back his old life from this hidden zone, demarcated in blood. He had not noticed when he crossed the border, but looking back, yes, perhaps he had felt it.

  Jessyup extracted the tools from her case. A plastic squeeze bottle. A knife, the blade curved and nearly blue. A flat metal plate with a half-moon cut in the middle.

  “For the parturition, only part of you needs to come out of me. More substantial the better, but, uh—we strike a balance. Most people use a foot.” She gestured helpfully to Merclaire’s feet. “Then for the matricide, you take this”—the curved knife—“right here”—the meatless plane of her sternum. “And I got the guard”—the perforated metal plate—“so don’t worry about taking too much off.”

  She scooted herself onto the table. Without him noticing she had peeled off her black leggings. Now she sized up her yellow dress, clicked her tongue. “Didn’t come here prepared. Thought I was going to Ellen’s.”

  He said, “No, you don’t have to,” as she shucked the dress over her head.

  “Don’t want blood on it.” Then folded it with an attention to seams that he associated with middle age.

  The light altered the landscapes of her
bare skin but her manner was unchanged. Scars, some pale, some pink and fresh, dappled her chest like leaf shadows. She crouched to inspect something inside the case. Her genitals obscured by her folded shins. Merclaire was acutely aware of his own dense body. Even his shoulders sprouted hair.

  She looked up and frowned, as though gauging the correct aperture through which to view him. “You need to take your shoes off.”

  Her eyes were hard, granular. He wondered what part of yourself you had to banish in order to get that look, and where you sent it to.

  “Hey! Focus.” When she opened her mouth he saw not a tongue but a stretch of flat gray water, reflecting the black branches of trees overhead. She nodded. “Some people need a minute.” She buffed the knife with a gray microfiber cloth. “Know why my cousin’s in jail?”

  He didn’t know.

  “You don’t know. Fishing!”

  Fishing!

  “They didn’t like him fishing how he did. Believe that bullshit?”

  He couldn’t believe. He worried he wasn’t hearing her correctly and scooted his stool closer. Sitting again on the table her legs dangled, her toes brushed the surface of the river.

  “He’d take me with him sometimes. They make their holes in the silt. Catfish. You do it all with your hands.”

  She stretched a hand out to him. He almost but not quite moved to take it. Each goose bump on her arm possessed a distinct shadow.

  “What he taught me was, it’s all about confidence. You find a hole and then you reach until you feel the mouth. Doesn’t take much. The fish can’t help himself, he wants to clamp down. He wants to feel something inside him.”

  Where she was from the catfish lived for centuries. They grew as large as children. The people who lived by the water understood fish the way they understood their own limitations. They knew how to walk to the river door and knock.

  By the time Jessyup was eight her gift was plain. Her cousin Tohn would end up in prison but she was the true transgressor. She would squat in the opaque muck of the river, face tilted to the sky, eyes glassy and unnecessary. While below the surface her hands performed an intricate petition. The fish snuggled in the mud. She brushed its forehead. The fish declined and curved back toward its unknowable life. Her fingers skipped in pursuit and grazed a query along its lip. Her touch as light as the breeze that bows the wheatfield hairs along your arm. The fish, appalled, entranced, assented, unbolted the garage of itself. With the pads of her fingers she discovered where the bony rim of its mouth gave way to slick rippling ridges.

  Tohn sat on the dock end, knocking the pylons with his heels, flecking the water with picked scabs. He watched his baby cousin in the water, her face at first blank with concentration, then spreading into a smile. A slow unfurling of satisfaction. She was not in yet but she would be, she knew. She would not be refused.

  And then—there. She punched her hand all the way down its throat. Strata of muscles convulsed around her arm like a new atmosphere. The creature recoiled but could not regain itself. They moved as one organism bound by red-hot wires, the flesh of a single violent animal. She tilted her body into its pitch and heave as her hand worked its way deeper, seeking the place where soft flesh gave way to air.

  And then—there. Her fingers reemerged through the slit of its gills. She clasped her two hands together so the massive creature was threaded onto her embrace.

  In a rush she straightened her legs, rose from the river. Water streamed from her sopping hair, brown shoulders, blue bikini. She bore the fish up with her, still threaded on her arms, still hurling itself toward escape. In a smooth motion she heaved it over her shoulder so its pale belly shone to the sky. With its flank pressed to her face she could see its white scales glittering every color. They took the light and gave it back in pieces. Its massive body smelled of murk and innards. Its slime flecked in her eyes. She braced her feet, waited for it to thrash. Her breath deepened, exulted. It’s not that she’s a brute, though. It’s not that the fish is a beast. It’s not that she finds purest joy in the conquest of another body—no wait, it is. It is.

  “Hey, Tohn,” she called, laughing. “Tohn, watch!”

  She drew one hand back into the sheath of its body. Negotiated anatomy. Then, radiant in the sunlight, the silhouette of her hand took shape, pressing outward from inside the belly of the fish. Five fingers and a palm, rising from the taut white flesh like a creature straining to escape.

  “Here.” Jessyup smacked into his hand a bottle of icy blue jelly. “Use this. Be liberal.”

  He was still there, under the bare bulb in the dark room. The vapors of her story lingered in the shadows, dissipated. The bottle had no brand name but several labels’ worth of fine-print warnings. He assumed it had come from a multipack. He felt close to the true shape of his pain. As crisp and revolting as the outline of a girl’s hand pressing through the white belly of a fish. He inverted the bottle and ejected a mound of blue gel into his palm.

  He had forgotten to peel off his sock; now he had to do it one-handed. He tried to raise his foot while standing, teetered, steadied himself on the table where she sat. Black shreds of lint stuck in the humid crevices of his toes. The pile of lubricant slid around in his palm. He denied himself a glance back to see if the brothers watched.

  He slicked down the hairs of his ankle with blue gel. It did not sting but he nonetheless perceived pain.

  As Jessyup went to recline on the table her hand slipped off the edge. She fell toward him and instinctively his hand caught her shoulder. His thumb pressed into the dip of her collarbone. The hand-shaped area of contact between them grew warm. Jessyup observed his grip on her shoulder and nodded with thin lips. “Okay.”

  I didn’t say anything at the time, but did you hear how hard Slug cried? Huge shuddering sobs that could engulf a whole person, that could swallow a body like a well and give back only water. Through the whole thing. See, there is grief immense enough to convert you into something other than a solid, something incapable of wielding any tool. See, there is nothing new in this story after all. They want only what we want. The heart that is also the house. The arm of another wound through our own lungs so that goose bumps rise along its wrist every time we take a breath.

  It’s worth noting that even now, Merclaire never stopped believing in the possibility of kindness. Perhaps not for him or for her, but for someone, somewhere, the gentlest route was being taken.

  Let’s say in this world there is a ledger somewhere, in which this persistent faith is noted down. Let’s say it matters.

  She arranged her heels in the stirrups. Her vulva was tinted with the same blue jelly as his foot. He felt the clench of something around his heart. And his heart was the handle to all the rest of him, and so held him paralyzed.

  He said, “I can’t do this.”

  She said, “You must, or else they will shoulder you from your home and throw your babies to the asphalt and rain your belongings down from the windows onto your heads.”

  She said, “You must, because you cannot avoid it. You must see by now. Violence is like matter, neither created nor destroyed, it only changes form.”

  She said, “You must, you promised Lousi.”

  Just kidding. She shrugged and fished a pulp of pizza crust from behind a back tooth. Said, “Oh, come the fuck on.” She propped herself on her elbows and let her head fall back. Her face looked toward the ceiling and her eyes looked beyond. Her knees were pitched open. Her chest heaved. “Quit acting like you’re saving somebody.”

  Merclaire did not see her expression so he did not know which way she meant it.

  He lifted his foot. His ankle bore the weight of all the silence in the room.

  He set his foot down again. “I can’t.”

  Jessyup spoke from a distant riverbank. “Of course you can.”

  He lifted his foot.

  He set his foot down again.r />
  He lifted his foot.

  Ultimate Housekeeping Megathrill 4

  Just look at her, dozing at the conveyor belt with her chin almost thunking her chest. Mouth slightly open, spit strand spanning her cracked lips. Her arms dragging like seaweed in a warm tide. All the while a river of junk flows past her, unexamined. Wake up Offie you are missing some real treasures! Offie is Initial Quality Control, see. Without her the Initial Quality would just go spiking all over the map, and what would everybody do then? It’s not like the waste items will just separate themselves out of the reclamation stream. (Those days, kiddo, are past.)

  Offie yawns. Yaaaawwwwwwnnnnnn. The strand of saliva breaks as her lips part. She winches her eyes open. Her vision all blurry and flecked with yellow crud. She wipes the crud away (with the wrists, remember, not the hands! The hands are coated in pale blue sanitary gloves and we all know what those gloves encounter) and then she stands for another moment, shoulders just barely rise-and-falling.

  She doesn’t look left or right. If she did, she would see similarly zoned-out persons on either side of her, wearing similarly stained canary-yellow jumpsuits. Three more such people sway on the other side of the conveyor belt. (Initial Quality Control, obvi, is not a job entrusted to just one single saggy dozer lady.) She doesn’t look ahead or behind. If she did she would see the conveyor belt meander away through the vastness of the warehouse, branch into four daughter belts, chunter the mixed paper up a series of rollers, spew the remainder off a cliff so it clatters down in a waterfall of plastic/glass/metal. She doesn’t see the belts that slink low under magnetic panels so that the tin cans leap out like mad salmon from a river. She doesn’t see the distant, even more zoned canaries, whose sole purpose in life is to scrape away the metal junk clinging to the walls.

  Most of all, Offie doesn’t look up. Up is where the claws hang, and Offie decided on her first day at this luckytoget job that she never needed to set her eyes that way. Within a week she understood it didn’t matter, she could have come to work blindfolded. The claws call forth new eyes from the back of your head. They brush their precision-tipped pincers over the tender hairs on the back of your neck. We are sleeping lightly, they rasp, swaying as a rare breeze wends through the warehouse. We are waiting for you to fail.