by Bryan Hall
She turned her face away, trying to keep herself apart from what was happening to her lover’s corpse below, but that only made her aware of her own problems.
She was cold; naked except for her panties. She had to pee. There was no food. No water. No way down—well, no safe way. No help coming. No hope.
Tina told herself to calm down. Meditate and take herself away from the hopelessness and fiery agony. She sucked big breaths in, and slowly pushed the air out in a rhythmic cycle. Four counts in, six out. And for a while, it worked. She took herself to the woods, to a warm, soothing setting and let her mind move away from where it knew she was.
Then, she felt things.
At first, she ignored the sensation. She often got tickles or itches when meditating and they’d go away. This was different, though. There was something on her back. More than one something. It tickled like crazy.
Tina moved, swaying on the frame as she twisted to see. It was completely useless. The farthest she could see was where her right shoulder blade was buried under a mountain of skin punctured by a metal hook. Her arm couldn’t begin to come close to touching the tickly spots, and the shift in balance only made the pain worse.
The tickling sensation on her back was persistent. She tried not to panic, but her mind filled with the possibilities of what they could be; flies? Cockroaches? Beetles? Whatever they were, they made her itch all over.
Tina could feel their small, hairy legs moving up and down her bare skin, moving around the burning holes where the hooks were punched through. She tried not to think about it, but those itchy things made it impossible. She could feel them and, in her mind’s eye, see them all over her. She thought of them burrowing into her open skin, eating before laying their eggs deep inside her so when their larvae, their maggots, hatched, they’d have something to eat.
Panic filled her and that swelling feeling made her thrash about. All she wanted was for them to get off her, leave her alone, but no matter how much she moved, they didn’t get off. They just crawled. Ate. And mated.
Hours passed, the dark turning to light. She pissed herself, panties clingy and damp, chafing her sensitive skin. It seemed humiliating, but hardly the worst of her problems. The agony was constant and the day was timeless but for the sun dipping and her growing hunger and thirst. Again, sunset.
As the hours passed, Tina thought about how resilient skin was, even though it appeared so fragile. She had been hanging by ten hooks through her skin, yet they didn’t just tear out.
As easy as a bullet or a knife or even paper can cut through it, her own skin was strong enough to hold up her one hundred plus pounds.
How much longer could it hold? How much more could it take with the bugs on her, nibbling and mating in and on her skin, feeding on the exposed fat and muscle? Was it resilient enough to keep her in the air? Would that even matter?
She looks down now at James, dead below her, and wonders how long until her flesh admits defeat and resigns her to the floor next to him. She wants to cry over it all—losing James, the pain that makes her want to heave, and knowing that, before the next twenty-four hours have passed, she will likely be dead.
Dying is bad, but anticipating it, counting down the minutes and seconds to it, she thinks, is the worst part.
The bugs feel as though they are swarming on her, as though the maggots are outnumbering the adults. She feels the itchy legs and worse, the small bites up and down her body. She can feel wiggly things working in the holes that even she can smell now.
Death may be better than this, she thinks.
The raccoons are still busy with James, and she wants to yell at them, scream at them to get away. Her voice is gone though, throat too dry, thirst making it sore and scratchy. Swallowing hurts and the dust in the air makes her mouth gritty.
I love you, James. You fucking idiot.
He was dead. She would die. The bugs and scavengers would probably clean up long before anyone entered the warehouse again.
Tina’s body is rattling from the cold. The cords vibrate between her and the frame. Tina knows death is coming, and she knows it comes down to a choice. She can die of starvation, thirst, or shock from the extended trauma. Maybe even exposure. It could take longer than she wanted to think about.
Lose-lose.
Without fear of death and bracing herself for the worst, she begins to thrash back and forth, kicking her legs, rocking side to side. Ten explosions make her eyes stream with salty tears and a guttural hissing rushes through her gritted teeth. But she can’t stop. She knows what she needs to do.
Hysterical, she is determined to make it down to where James is.
And finally, it happens.
One of the hooks rips through, tearing open her flesh. The pain is blinding. White-hot. But she can’t celebrate the first one. It’s the first of many, a small victory.
A second goes, in her left calf. Then a third, at the small of her back.
Each one is awful. Her adrenaline is in overdrive. She’s crazed and smiling now, dangling fifteen feet above the concrete by the only two left; one in her left thigh, and one in her right lower back.
It’s only a moment of the awkward drape of her arms and torso to one side before the last two hooks give way, nearly at the same time.
Falling, not flying. But free.
THE HUNGER ARTIST
BY LISA MANNETTI
“The ultimate effects of starvation are identical whether the process be gradual or rapid, occupying days or years, and death results when the body has lost six tenths of its weight.”
~William Gillman Thompson, 1905
“Many serial killers are pathological liars.”
~Dr. Jack. Levin, Criminologist,
Northeastern University, 2012
1973
All this time and there were still the dreams. Iva heard the wind soughing in the pines, heard the pines themselves creaking, listing like shipboard masts when they swayed. It was summer, but it was terribly cold; the damp that settled on everything—tables and blankets and floorboards and skin—fled inward to her bones. There was never any moon lighting up these dreadful nightscapes, but she always saw her sister, Callie, standing barefoot by the lake, white gown plastered against the skeletonized frame of her body, hands rapidly opening and closing like a pair of gobbling beaks.
“I’m hungry, Iva,” she mourned. “I’m so cold and so hungry.”
And it was always a shock when Iva went toward her, and—moonlight or no—underneath the white cotton gown, she could clearly see and count her sister’s ribs.
Then Iva would wake shivering under the hospital blanket. Sometimes she rang for the nurse; sometimes it was enough to turn on the lamp and watch her fingers pinching the healthy flesh of her own hip or arm. Knowledge—certainty—that she was no longer the prisoner starving in the New England woods sixty years ago was balm that warmed her—to a point. Nothing, no one could soothe her completely; after all, her beloved Callie was dead.
Everything had gone wrong back then; two years that Iva still envisioned as a meager handful of dull, feathery ashes. No gust or exhalation ever stirred or scattered them. Sometimes she might forget the hideous physical ordeal when scenes from the trial intruded on her consciousness. Sometimes, recalling the shame and the heart-pounding fear that surrounded the weeks in court—when she was afraid Gretchen Burkehart would be acquitted and win—upset her equilibrium so badly, that visions of her own suffering and Callie’s extremis seemed almost benign by contrast. Both events were terrible. And the memories that were ashes lay eternally unmoving in her palm, she thought, because one day when they laid out her body (her elbows crooked, snugged to her waist, her hands crossed) they’d be pressed against her heart: that had been burnt past charring, too, during those black, seemingly endless two years. Ashes to ashes.
1912
“Just tell us in your own words, Miss Fredericks ...” Thomas Vining began, one hand gently curving the rail in front of the witness box—as if just by s
tanding close to Iva the prosecutor could steady her nerves.
She swallowed, but there was no spittle to moisten her throat and her voice was thin. “I saw an ad in one of the Boston papers for what sounded like a wonderful rest cure. Callie—she—maybe I indulged her too much, but she was my baby sister and our parents were dead; Callie was only twelve when Mother died, still a little girl ...”
1973
“Is that you, Maggie?” Iva turtled (her breasts had shrunk to the point where they were no longer an inconvenience), smoothly rolling onto her back to look up at the face of a young woman whose hand lightly skimmed her own. “No, of course not,” she said, “Margaret was twenty years older than I am and she’s been dead a long time. And your skin is soft ...” Iva paused, aware that she was looking at short brown hair, asymmetrically cut. Bareheaded. No cap. Instead of crisp whites, a peasant blouse. “You’re not a nurse.”
“Jill Davis. I’m a reporter. Well, a stringer, really.”
“Come to unravel something?”
“A stringer is a sort of freelance journalist—”
“My dear. I’m merely old, not ignorant.”
“Of course. I meant ...” She stopped, cheeks reddening.
In the brief silence that ensued, Iva pressed the electric button near her right hand and the top third of the bed glided upward until she was sitting, and now she could see the girl was wearing blue jeans. Sandals. Every year since she’d turned 99, about a week before her birthday the local paper sent someone to interview the oldest woman in Melton Lake. When she hit a hundred, there’d been articles written up in The Portsmouth Herald, The Manchester Union Leader—even The Boston Globe. But an old woman was old news, she guessed. So here was this hippie—this stringer—to ask the same tedious questions about whether she drank liquor (a weak champagne cocktail at five p.m., a glass of wine with dinner), smoked cigarettes, (only when she could cadge one; these days, alas, they gave her indigestion); exercised (absolutely—on warm days she pushed a wheelchair in front of her and walked to that pathetic little fountain out back, then sat and read a book in the sunshine—and that was surely exercise aplenty when you hit one hundred two); what she ate (anything that didn’t hurt her teeth when she chewed); what she did for amusement (the main thing was avoiding the nursing home’s idea of arts and crafts which consisted of gluing a mirror in the center of a paper plate, cementing macaroni around the rim, then spray-painting the whole shebang gold and attaching string to hang the monstrosity); and most importantly what did she—Iva Fredericks—believe was the secret behind achieving her great age?
But Jill Davis surprised her.
“I’m supposed to be writing a spec piece for the Millerton Record about the root causes of anorexia; and then, you know, throw in some historical background about turn-of-the-century fasting girls, tie it into new trends in teenage fad dieting—but the feature editor over there has about as much imagination as a humphead wrasse. I did some digging, read about the trial back in 1912 and—”
“And I guess you found out the term aphorism is a complete misnomer,” Iva said. Jill pulled out a pack of Tarreyton 100s, extending it toward the old woman, and Iva took one. Jill lit them both. Iva dragged on hers but merely let the smoke roll around her mouth briefly before she exhaled. “Truth is hard to come by, lies are easy. Maybe I wasn’t ‘too rich’—but I was definitely ‘too thin.’”
Jill nodded, absently blowing tarnished gray smoke downward toward the steno pad perched on her knee. Iva caught the wink of a small gold ring on the pinky of the hand the reporter used to rapidly flip through what must have been fifty pages of notes in tiny, precise handwriting. “There’s something missing. I must’ve read a thousand damn articles on microfiche and the court transcript, and the story’s out of whack—completely off-kilter.” Her eyes were ink-colored and Iva saw herself haloed inside their hard, bright shine. “And that’s before you take into account that despite the murder charge, Gretchen Burkehart was convicted only of manslaughter, before you consider that she was pardoned by the governor and that she only served two years out of twenty.”
Jill had wheeled Iva’s chair outside to the grounds of the small, old-fashioned hospital, while Iva clung to the younger woman’s arm and ambled slowly alongside before sitting down where they’d parked under a huge maple.
“What’s missing,” Iva said, “was stricken from the official record.”
“Well, I just assumed that naturally; but what’s really goddamn odd is that usually you can get a whiff of what happened or what was said from books or newspapers—especially contemporary newspapers.”
Iva shook her head. “Money can buy a lot, Jill. A lot more than someone your age truly realizes. I paid—or, rather, through me my lawyer paid—a great deal to keep the details you so cleverly inferred from showing up anywhere—”
“Bullshit.”
“Did you know that after Lizzie Borden’s trial, Lizzie bought up the entire edition—the entire printing run of thousands of copies, that is—of a book called The Fall River Tragedy? Lizzie was rich, but I had a great deal more money than she had.” Iva saw Jill’s gaze narrow and she could read that the younger woman was considering the idea. Local scribes, okay, no problem. Guys who, back in 1912, earned maybe ten bucks a week and were probably bought off regularly by hometown politicians for a few beers, a whiskey, a good meal; but what about reporters from Boston or New York? Could she have scuttled them, too? She had the means, though ... not to mention the Wren county prosecutor said there wasn’t enough money to go to trial, so Iva picked up the tab.
“So what was the big, deep, dark secret you suppressed, Iva?”
“It’s very easy to grind someone into submission when you’re starving them,” Iva said. “And it’s even easier to hem them in if you convince them—if they believe—you have occult power.”
1912
“Miss Fredericks, can you tell us about this picture?” Vining asked, handing it to her.
“That’s a picture of me and Maggie. Margaret Woodbridge. When Callie and I were growing up, Maggie was our nursemaid, and even after we were adults she stayed on with us. She was like a second mother, really. And ...”
The photo had been taken a few weeks after Maggie had come all the way from Australia to rescue her and Callie. The telegram. Callie sent it—somehow sneaked it out of the filthy cabin they shared at Lakemere Rest Sanitarium. Maggie, bless her, had sailed immediately, but she wasn’t in time, because Callie’s weight had dropped to 40 pounds. Iva felt her face flush. Is that what she looked like almost a month after Maggie had taken her away from that terrible place?
Her face was nothing more than a skull thinly layered with dark flesh. The eyes themselves were vacant, glittering; her gaze, empty—as if impossibly remote and infinitesimally tiny stars had been caught inside the deeps of her eye sockets and flickered there indifferently ... meaninglessly. Her cheeks were smudged hollows with the sere look of ancient parchment. Her pale hair lay in knotty clumps, barely concealing huge bald patches. Her starched dress—size four—had been pinned, but it was still so oversized it appeared as if it might fall from her slight frame the instant she stood up.
Vining passed it to the jurors and Iva could see them cringe with revulsion. Looking at the picture was like looking at a ravaged mummy that had been spelled back to half-life. Worst of all, Iva clearly remembered how she carefully primped—so she’d look her best.
His voice startled her. “Miss Fredericks, how did you come to be in this condition? In this photo you weighed sixty-eight pounds—not kilos, pounds. And before you began “treatment” with Mrs. Burkehart, your weight—completely normal for someone who stands five feet, two inches tall—was one hundred four pounds. How did it happen, Miss Fredericks?”
Iva’s chest heaved, her stomach knotted, but she took a deep breath. “She advertised—the only doctor, she called herself—who was a licensed fasting specialist. She advertised that she’d cured everything from syphilis to ulcers to blindnes
s. Over and over, she told us and stated in writing, ‘All functional disease is the result of improper diet,’” Iva said. In her mind’s eye, grim sequences and flashing images unspooled.
Callie unwrapped the pamphlet with such excitement, she tore the paper.
Iva read it, but Callie studied the damn thing and within hours of its arrival could quote whole passages verbatim. Iva knew that some of their relatives thought the girls had too much money and too much time and that, as a result, hobbies and interests became fads with them. Aunt Caroline said as much when the girls refused meat at her table: “Being a vegetarian is a luxury—those who work for a living can’t pick and choose what they eat. If you girls were shipwrecked, you’d soon enough be eating fish and fowl.”
So, when they decided to take the fasting cure, they told no one.
Gretchen Burkehart professed to be uncertain about whether they were candidates for her cure. Callie told the osteopath she had a tipped uterus that caused awkward pains. Iva complained of a feeling of torpor in her limbs.
They expected massage and a carefully controlled but bracing diet that would cleanse them. They expected to be in a lakeside rest home with awning-covered balconies. They got nothing but a cup of watery broth made from canned tomatoes served twice a day and hot water enemas that lasted six hours at a time. Within a few weeks, neither of them could really walk ... they were stinking, wasted scarecrows lying on narrow cots listening to the rain patter against the metal roof of the “cabin” that was really a shed, listening to Gretchen Burkehart and her “nurses” rifle their trunks for clothes, shoes, jewelry, books—anything they could lay their hands on. But even that wasn’t the worst of it ...