by Aaron Dries
The man chews on his roots and leaves again, slops it from his mouth and slides the mush over her almost-healed wounds. She doesn’t fight him like she did those first few times. She has even come to find it warm, comforting.
Afterward, he gives her more mushroom dust. Amity snorts it straight off his palm.
He lies against her side, reaching around to touch the curve of her stomach. They lie on a bed of matted cotton and grass he picked from his most sacrosanct soil—the graveyard. She has animal skins to keep her warm. It’s often cold down here in the tunnels. And she knows these are tunnels because the man sometimes comes down here with a torch of charred wood. It glows red against all that black, and when it starts to dim, he blows with his foul breath and lends the embers the oxygen required to glow.
His face is hard and emotionless. The dark is better.
Yes, the dark is better.
The man’s fingers trace her navel. It tickles. Amity knows she is pregnant, although she struggles to remember when it happened. It had something to do with a storm. A child born of lightning.
She does not feel sick anymore.
3
Amity can hear the dogs growling. They are waiting for her to die, at which point they will claim the bones they’ve coveted for so long. In a way, their patience is admirable. Sometimes she thinks she can see them moving around. Sometimes she thinks she’s just being silly.
They run away when the man comes down to give her food and drinks.
Today—if it is day; she can’t tell—Amity is feverish. She shakes. Her breasts and back ache. She knows she’s moaning because of the vibrations.
Fear, agony…both are memories of memories. She is beyond it all. These are sensations she associates with some other time, some other place. Aboveground, up where there were blood and teeth and jungle hands clawing.
Her eyes are wide and yet she does not see a thing. Blind. Deaf. She is a worm in the innards of some dead thing. Feeding. Sleeping. Shitting. Building something inside herself. This routine is deeply comforting; it wedges a space between who she is and what she used to be.
There are moments of lucidity: times when she screams and tries to run away, scratching at the cave walls, yanking at the wooden planks that reinforce the narrow tunnels. This is when the man comes down with the dust. He blows it in her face—a hot gust of air, the inevitable sting. Things always get better after this.
Amity’s father rubs her shoulders.
“It’s going to be okay, Amity. You’re tough as nails. Trust me. You will be okay.”
A voice like velvet.
4
Dawn broke and the island shook from its sleep. The birds cawed as light inched through the trees, spiders dragged dead butterflies back into their funnels. Through it all, the island’s musical note was unrelenting.
The monkeys were on the beach.
They sat there, panting deep breaths, picking the bugs from each other’s backs and eating them alive. Their eyes didn’t burn with the intensity they once did. Some were missing clumps of fur from their hides. Little mouths opened wide in a pantomime of eating. The animals fought on occasion, though with little viciousness; territory and mates were the only things that were worth lashing out over, and even then, it was halfhearted.
Waiting. Waiting. It was as constant and rhythmic as the waves.
They came to this beach with the coming of every sun and studied the horizon for hours on end. Though their brains were small, they understood that their starvation was killing them. The babies, which usually clung to their mothers’ backs or shoulders, had been the first to sleep forever.
Yes; even these creatures knew of hope, even if the woman down below did not.
The boats did not come that day. Or the next. Or the next.
5
Amity walks through the tunnels. She hasn’t ventured this far before, but she’s restless and can’t help herself. Her abdomen, hands and the soles of her feet have been itching. Walking doesn’t make the sensations go away; it makes them bearable.
The tunnel fills with blue neon light when she runs her hands over the cave walls.
Thousands of miniscule insects live along the rock face and glow when disturbed. Touching them is like skimming water, ripples of light that allow her to see the bulb of her stomach and the uneven ground ahead.
She licks her palms. The taste gives her heartburn.
Amity continues, her father beside her. Weeds grow up out of his shirt. His face is a cardboard-cutout mask strapped to his head. Behind the cut-out eyes she can see flies twitching their delicate wings.
“You shouldn’t go too far,” he tells her. “You don’t want to lose your way down here.”
“I’m fine, Pa. I just can’t sit still. I’ve got to move. I feel like I’m on fire.”
“If you get lost, he won’t be able to find you. Don’t forget, he has your medicine. All good girls need to have their medicine when they’re under the weather.”
“I’m not sick, Pa. I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
They come to a large cave. The air is cooler here and it makes her nipples harden. Amity squints, realizing that the room brims with hazy luminescence. The insects are in here too. They twirl through the air like spores.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, kiddo. It’s lovely. Do you see that stuff up there?”
“Where?”
“Looky here.”
Her father points.
There are crops growing from the ceiling of the cave. Amity smiles, raises her itching hands to the hollow of her throat.
“Wow!”
It is like corn, or maybe even sugarcane—only it is neither. She inches closer and looks at the dangling stalks, which sway in whatever breeze filters through this space. Each arm of vegetation looks like a deformed hand and is ridged with rows of festering mushrooms.
The cave has a distinct smell: moss and wet rocks. Water drips from above, dotting her body in cold splashes. Each strike against her skin brings a smile to her face. Amity drinks it, bathes in it. It is wonderful here, below the downward-growing crops, in the blue glow.
She goes to tell her father how happy she is, but he is not there to listen.
6
The man comes to feed her. Today the food is cooked. It’s a nice change. Either or, Amity is grateful. She clings to him. Her father tells her that it’s okay to need him, that holding him is better than being alone. He changes her dressings. There are scars.
Amity watches the dogs drawing nearer.
7
Life below is a string of tableaux in a vacuum. Swirling shapes against the nothing, tricks of the human eye sometimes disturbing the illusion of the calm. Amity gets distressed when this happens. When it does, she opens and closes her hands, opens and closes her mouth, like a dying fish outside its bowl. Doing this helps, but it doesn’t make the stillness any more still.
Sometimes her heart races.
Ba-da-boom. Ba-da-boom-boom-boom-boom.
Fear. It recedes. The nothing returns.
She is beginning to feel love for the thing inside her, so she doesn’t want her heart to stop beating. If she dies, the child will die, too. She wants to share her doom.
She continues like this for long stretches of time, not that time exists below. There is just the throb of blooming life interrupted by visits from the man, who always comes with fruits and meat. This, and the occasional dreams.
An overweight woman with long hair in a room of towering junk.
The dream has a familiarity to it, a taste like dust. Perhaps it is the woman herself, sitting there on her bed of bloodstained cloth and Memory Lane albums. Amity wonders who she is and what her sin was. But she does not get a chance to ask. The woman always lifts her head to stare with eyes that are not there. Her face is sand.
8
The dogs know about her baby. She wonders if they can smell it. Sometimes she wakes up to find them in the
insect glow, sitting on her chest and slobbering over her. Amity yells at them, swipes at their snouts. They flee like the cowardly scavengers they are.
Lies back down. Tries to sleep. Impossible.
Differentiating pain from pleasure isn’t as easy as it used to be.
Amity rolls onto her side and tries to talk to the man, but he does not reply. He just stares at her in the same numb way he always has.
A sigh. The rejection is infinite.
She wonders where he goes when he is not with her.
Her fingers reach out to caress his smooth, warm back. He flinches at her touch. “Hello, are you there? Please say something to me. Please.”
The man gets up and leaves. She can tell from the way he carries himself that his wounds are deep, and few of them are physical.
9
The island was empty of life, a place of gothic shadows and stillness. Little moved and nothing cried out. Its trees shook in nervous expectation of the next storm, those systematic beatings that only a seasonal change could stop. The sky was a giant welt.
Dawn was no different from those that had come before it.
There were monkeys lying dead along the overgrown orchardways, faces frozen in rigored grins, drawing flies. Their emancipated chests bloomed in decomposition, spilling maggots. Mist swirled and wandered like lost souls in constant searching, only there was nothing to be found—nothing except the surviving monkeys, who dragged themselves through the jungle on slow-moving legs. Such easy prey for larger animals.
And through it all, the music played on.
The monkey in the tutu was listening. It sat on top of the upturned boat in the middle of the clearing, the conductor of an invisible band, and limply tapped at the hull with a human jawbone.
10
“Pa?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got a brother, don’t I?”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I don’t remember his name.”
“You will.”
“Can I see him? I’d like to, if that was okay with you.”
“You can’t see him. Your brother isn’t here.”
“Well, where is he?”
Her answer is impervious silence.
The baby kicks. She can’t comprehend how it can be so energetic when she is so fatigued. It doesn’t seem natural.
11
Amity walks the tunnels, restless again. Her back twinges. She’s constipated. Not even the mushroom dust eases the discomfort like it used to.
She is used to getting around in the dark and isn’t afraid to wander farther than she has before. Exploration comes to her very easily. The dogs skulk close behind, snapping at her heels. When she spins around to throw stones at them, they dissolve into the dark and are impossible to find.
“Doggy, don’t!” Shrill. Hands clenched tight.
The quiet falls again, an iron shroud.
She comes to another large cave. It is similar to the one where the crops grow, only there is more light here. Tiny cracks in the rocky walls, spearing the air with gold slashes swarming with mites. It is an alien warmth, and it isn’t unpleasant.
Amity glances around and finds four large wooden crates. The sides are covered with stamps and ornate text she doesn’t understand. Each has been opened, the wooden tops ajar. Her fingers latch on to the first and push it aside, revealing the contents of the box.
It is almost empty, but along the bottom there are stacks of shirts wrapped in plastic. Amity leans into the crate and grabs one, feels the brittle crackle of the covering. It is artificial; it is odd to her. Amity holds the package up to the light and reads the words printed in bold type across the shirt.
STAR WARS.
Beneath these words are faces that she must have dreamed about once, because she could swear she has seen them before. This strange nostalgia makes her dizzy, and she drops the package back into the crate and hurries away, stops, kneels against the ground and sweeps dust into her hands. She eats it straight off her sticky fingers; the craving is insane. It seems to satisfy the baby. Her tongue goes dry and it’s hard to breathe again, yet it’s totally worth it.
Sitting there in the semidark, content. She coughs and spits three rotten teeth from her mouth. They glitter in her palm like promises.
12
The island watched its last son as he whittled wood among the slate gravestones marking where his fallen were buried. This was revered ground to him, and his visits were frequent.
It was midmorning and he’d been hunting since the sun crawled out of hiding. His kills—three mouse deer, four fish—were laid out on a bamboo sled. Once he finished whittling with the rocky blade his brother made for him two seasons ago, his plan was to drag the food back underground. There he would prepare another meal for himself and his mate. Maybe on the way he would stop and pick berries from the shrubs near the sacred trees his mother had harvested. Some juice would be nice, something they both could enjoy together.
The blade carved through soft wood and stopped. His ears pricked.
There were monkeys in the trees around the clearing, perched along the extended lengths of gothic branch. The last son stood up, pulling taut the thinning fabric of his patchwork shirt, and watched the animals jump up and down, screaming and dropping scat.
Now they were leaping from tree to tree, zigzagging toward the shore. The last son’s eyes grew wide. He blazed—the heat of expectation—as he followed close behind.
He ran through the jungle and stopped where the scrub began to thin. Sand whipped at his shins. The winds were strong and carried with them the stink of the approaching boats.
The last son began to weep. He’d known that the men and women with the fruit and drinks and laughter would come back, given time. All creatures sought retreat in the end.
13
Amity has nightmares that make no sense, and they carry over into her waking life, like the heavy light of blind stars. It makes her pain all over. The fever is back. Sweats come on quick. It’s so hot down here. Her stomach continues to grow and the baby shifts, content. The two of them, mother and child, live similar lives of dependence and darkness. Each would die without the other, a snake eating its own tail.
Her father comes to hold her. He smells of the ground. “You’re going to be a good mother.”
Amity asks him what that means.
14
The last son threw his shoulder against the door and climbed up out of the boat. Wind blasted, throwing him off balance and sending him over the hull. He landed on the sand. The sky was a heavenly bruise of yellow and green. All of the colors were wrong. His hands didn’t look like his hands. They couldn’t be, just as his suffering simply couldn’t be his suffering.
It was another mega storm brewing. The reek of ozone suggested that it would be one of the biggest of the season, or at least the most aggressive. A westerly gust sent the man’s dreadlocks into knots; dust blew against the blood lathering his face, hands and thighs. It stuck. It stung.
He arched his back and cried until he had no air left in him. The scream was filled with everything that made him who he was. It was an exorcism. He grabbed the collar of his patchwork shirt and tugged, splitting stitching and exposing the gaunt chest beneath. The material flapped between his fingers.
Even with the wind as it was, he could still smell traces of her womanly stink on him. So nauseating. Once the rain began to pelt down and scrub him clean, he was thankful. His body ran red, pooled pink against the sand. The island drank it up.
There had been so much of it. Blood.
The last son flung his shirt against the nearby bottles, tipping them over. They splashed and clattered. There was no music in their whistle anymore; it had become nothing more than a constant, high-pitched wail. It hurt to hear, and yet that hurt was nothing compared to the shock of what had happened, or his regrets.
It was gone.
He drove his fists against the ground as though it were to blame—and not her. Knuckles snapped
, dislodged. Bit his lip so hard blood spurted in his mouth. Spat in the storm’s face. It spat back with icy fists of water. The sky’s strength was frightening. He watched, impotent, as trees fell around him; one swirled and landed in the clearing.
The wise thing to do would be to rush back underground. After all, that was what they always used to do, back when they were a family. Together they would close every portal— and there were many—and then reinforce the tunnel walls. But the last son did no such thing, not this time. Down below was dead to him now; it was a tainted place.
She had bled so much.
Lightning blades carved sky, speared earth. Everything shook. The thunder was outrage that matched his own. It was hard to see his tears in the rain, but they were very much there, pouring like clouds, spilling truths and purpose and life.
He ran through the clearing and did not bother to close the door to the old boat. It drummed against the hull.
Crack-thud.
Crack-thud-thud.
Its wooden planks had sustained far stronger beatings.
He glided into the scrub. Snakes scurried across his path, searching for cover. Most of them would die, but pity cost effort and there was none in him to spend. He continued on, not knowing where he was running to until he arrived.
The air was cold and burned; his lungs felt like they were close to exploding. He’d lost much of his muscle mass since the death of his family, who in ending their lives ended most of the routines and responsibilities that kept him healthy. Nursing the woman in his warren was an undemanding chore, and his body had taken a toll as a result, though he’d assumed it would be worth it.
Whipping wind. Squinting against a storm in full force.
Leaves covered the last son’s chest and legs, bright green and brown jungle tattoos. The rain was horizontal up here. Birds tumbled from the sky with broken necks, thumping into puddles around him. He recoiled; they were such beautiful creatures when they were alive, elegant and inspired, but death made them ugly, repellent. One gull thrashed in the water, its matted wing flapping once. It died screaming.