“Answer me truthfully,” he said in a very grave voice. “Who took one of Mommy’s fingers during the night?”
Ann emitted a small scream and covered her mouth with her hands. Fat Peter turned a deep scarlet and started to bluster.
“I don’t know, Pop. Finger, what finger? Who, me?”
“Don’t lie to me, Peter,” roared his father. “Bring me the remains!”
Fat Peter, without another word, left the breakfast table and padded off to his bedroom. A moment later he reappeared and, flinching slightly, held out to his father a well-gnawed fingerbone. “I was hungry,” he said weakly.
“Peter!” breathed Ann.
Herb looked strangely at his son. “Didn’t you,” he finally said, “even try to cook it?”
Fat Peter shrugged, and stared at his shoes—a friendly pair of cheap Korean runners who bore the immense strain of the boy’s extremities with uncomplaining stoicism. Then he looked up again, clearly puzzled—as were we all—that Herb had not flown into a rage. His tic wasn’t even flickering. Instead, he was still gazing curiously at fat Peter who, it was now clear, had bloodstains on the front of his T-shirt. “Come with me, Ann,” he said; “I have something to explain to you. You stay here, Peter.”
Half-an-hour later Herb and fat Peter had laid a plastic sheet on the floor of the bomb shelter and stretched dead Gerty out on it, stark naked and face down. Then Herb took up his carving knife and sliced a few good rashers off one of his wife’s great buttocks, and set them carefully on a sheet of greaseproof paper. Fat Peter grinned at his dad and licked his lips.
“Not yet, Peter,” said Herb. “We have work to do.”
In the hours that followed I was forced to make serious adjustments to the high opinion I had thus far formed of your people. Of course I understood Herb Murgatroid’s thinking: the family was running out of food and Gerty had to be disposed of; these were apocalyptic times and conventional moral norms had lost all relevance; the family was cut off and therefore unlikely to infect the social body by its transgression; and so on. But even so, something galled me about the haste and ease with which the venerable taboo was violated. There was no sense of awe, no mystery, nothing of the sublime, and this I regretted. It seems to me that if you’re going to eat each other, there should at least be ritual, for anthropophagy, when all is said and done, is still a rather grand and dignified sin. It matters. I’m only a boot, of course, but Herb and fat Peter went about it as if—as if they were working in a fast-food joint. And most of the footwear in the fallout shelter were with me on this: it was a crude and vulgar display, and we all agreed that a European family would have handled things much more tastefully.
But I digress. In the hours that followed, Gerty Murgatroid was butchered, and her various limbs and organs carefully wrapped and deposited in the freezer, which had of course long since been emptied. And when the bloody job was over, and everything had been cleaned up, the two hungry males minced some buttock and fried it up in patties and devoured it with relish; and for the first time in many, many weeks a ruddy glow returned to their faces, and father and son grinned at each other in the lamplight, and murmured that it was mighty tasty, and so on.
Finally the black clouds of nuclear winter cleared, and Herb decided it was safe to go up. Since Gerty’s death the family had eaten well, Ann having gotten over her qualms after a few days, and all were plump and rosy as they hauled on their coats and scarves and boots. I was, of course, a member of this expedition, and I was extremely curious to see what had happened to that green and fertile earth I’d once known.
And so we emerged. It was, as I’ve said, a cold, bleak, black and dreary wasteland of a world we found, and we were all very disturbed. The three Murgatroids stamped through the snow, checking over the ruins and kicking aside small piles of charred bones. The sun was rising into a deep brown sky, and to the west, where once had been a complex of shopping malls and superhighways, there glimmered a dead gray lake, with an occasional blackened girder poking up like the twisted limb of some great fallen giant. Up here on the high ground it was still dry; and then fat Peter saw something.
“Look, Pop!” he shouted. “A bonfire!”
It was, indeed, a bonfire, burning brightly in the skeleton of a ruined building about half a mile away; and there seemed to be some movement around it. It was many months since the Murgatroids had known society, and as they hastened across the wasteland one could detect arising in each of them a small flame of hope. They entered the crumbling shell and made their way toward the bonfire, but as they did so the survivors clustered close to the flames turned to them, and the family hesitated. For these people were stick-thin, white as chalk, their faces cratered with running sores and the eyes, deep in hollow and blackened sockets, almost completely extinguished. They’d been roasting rats on sticks, but on seeing the Murgatroids they began to draw back into the shadows; and it was not hard to understand why. To these starving and irradiated half-humans the plump and robust good health of the Murgatroids must have seemed monstrous, truly monstrous. And so would it to me, I reflected, as Herb and Ann and fat Peter edged cautiously forward, puzzled, and calling out greetings to the people who’d all now vanished. Good health and a well-fed belly would of course seem monstrous in a world of chronic and terminal hunger, a world where deprivation was the norm; and barely had I begun to see the Murgatroids as monsters when the stick-thin people emerged from the shadows and battered them to death with clubs, and feasted on them as they’d feasted on Gerty.
My mate, as I say, was boiled in a soup a few days later, but I was somehow overlooked. The stick-thin people will cling to life for a few more weeks, a month or two if they’re lucky, and then they’ll succumb to postnuclear conditions. It’s a wonder they’ve lasted this long. I can still see a few Murgatroid bones here and there, protruding from the black snow and the ashes, and I wonder about the future. Sometimes I imagine a pair of small wings sprouting from my uppers, and I see myself flapping off, leaving all this behind, climbing through the clouds into the thin clear air, higher and higher, a tiny winged boot ascending to God.
The E(rot)ic Potato
I am a fly called Gilbert and I live by a pond, A stagnant pond in a bird sanctuary. The surface of the pond is covered by a carpet of tiny bright green organic discs. The reeds and the rushes still thrust up from the muddy bed below, and as the breeze plays over the water the leafy tendrils of a weeping willow on the bank stir gently. Climb the bank and you will find, set back in the trees, a tumbledown shed. This is where the E(ROT)IC POTATO is.
One day I flew up the bank where the shadows hang and the ivy claws at the gray stones edging flatly out of the irradiated earth. Forms of other insects flashed by me. I settled upon a branch and turned my compound eyes toward the shed which housed the E(ROT)IC POTATO. It lay beneath the trees, and though its windows were smashed and boarded up with cardboard, its roof was whole. The white paint was peeling off the boards, and the door was held closed by a rusty nail. One hinge hung loose. The sharp tap of a bird’s beak rattled suddenly through the air. A butterfly emerged from between the cardboard and the shattered windowpane. A rusting tool, half in sunlight and half in shadow, was leaned against the wall beside the shaky door. I did not go further. I knew I would be turned back. I was not yet ready to enter the presence of the E(ROT)IC POTATO. The emergent butterfly drifted by me in the dappled woodland sunlight, and I returned to the pond.
On the way I found a fairly large crowd of insects gathered round a poisoned water rat, and the air was abuzz with the vibrations of fine wings and the chatter of excited voices. The creature lay on the bank shivering, for its pelt had lost the sleek oily texture that insulates the mammal within. After a few feeble attempts to haul its body up the bank it collapsed limply and lay panting, near death, in the mud. A yellow fluid seeped thickly from its ears and eyes, and a greenish discoloration spread across its soft underbelly. As the breathing grew heavier, the mouth opened and sucked air and we saw that its te
eth had crumbled to impotent stumps. A rat without teeth was doomed, in our world.
Several flies and some ants had already mounted the body and were sampling tissue. They quickly discovered that the irradiation was mild, and once again we were confronted by proof of our biological superiority: that rat couldn’t breathe our air and live. A warm pulse ran through the crowd, and then we set to.
There was more than enough for all, but naturally we wanted to lay open the belly first and get at the inner organs. The biters and chewers were quickly ushered to the front, and went to work. The rest of us buzzed about, making inroads where we could. I was set to breaking down blockage in the left ear, to clear a passage to the brain.
Some time later word spread that the ants had got through, and we buzzed down to have a look. Ariadne the dragonfly had been flitting about the head for a while, and flew close to me on the short hop to the opened belly. I was thrilled by her proximity, and though our eyes did not meet I knew she was aware of me.
There was a buzzy crunch on the belly of the water rat, and in all the confusion of eager mandibles and flashing wings my body drew very close to Ariadne’s. I felt a tremor run through her as my proboscis glanced against her articulated thorax, and then something rather wonderful happened. Ariadne fluttered aloft and, hovering close, delicately displayed the milkwhite tip of her ovipositor to me. I was flooded by an irresistible genetic impulse to penetrate and fertilize her, but the trembling organ was withdrawn and the flashing blue-green dragonfly fluttered away.
Then, before my reeling senses could recover, they were again bombarded, this time by a meaty waft of warm fresh mammalian intestine. At that point I lost control completely and plunged into the innards of the rat’s body with my fellows and fed.
The meal continued as the sun moved across an intensely brown sky. In the late afternoon, when the pond lay in shadow and nothing stirred the reeds, and the dripping tendrils of the weeping willow ululated imperceptibly and the tranquility was broken only by the endless declamations of the throstle-throated birds, and the countless tiny bright green organic discs had silently meshed to form an unbroken slimy weave over the poisoned water, the crab arrived.
“My turn, I think,” he murmured as he eased his great plated frame sideways up the bank. There was a din of protest at this, but the crustacean could not have cared less for the shrill outrage of a fly. He thrust a massive claw into the cadaver; and then, in full view of the assembled insects, he scooped out and consumed a dripping, glistening mountain of our eggs! The uproar intensified, but with utter indifference the hoary old scavenger shuffled his cantankerous and exo-skeletal self entirely inside the rat’s body, and within a few moments a steady, muffled grumble, basso profundo, was all that could be heard. He emerged, some time later, eructating, and made his way sideways back to the pond.
That night Ariadne admitted me to the E(ROT)IC POTATO. In a darkness strangely alive we flew from the body of the dead rat up the bank and through the trees to the shed. A full moon, tinted with toxins to the color of a rotting orange, bathed our rickety little temple in the febrile glow of postapocalyptic romance. Ariadne’s articulated rear segment trailed through the moonbeams and I flew steadily in her wake, inhaling drunkenly the subtle wisplets of insect love juice she was secreting. She landed with grace upon the edge of the windowframe and I came down beside her a moment later, swooning foolishly, barely conscious.
There were wasps everywhere. They swarmed about the shattered windowframe and squeezed themselves between the shards and the cardboard in the moonlight. Ariadne, her long smooth gauzy wings folded perpendicular above herself, twitched her slender tail sharply as one of these guardians approached us. I knew enough to let her do the talking.
“Good evening,” said the wasp smoothly.
Ariadne, rubbing her gossamer wings one against the other and filling the air with a silky rustle that excited me beyond words, graced the handsome big stinger with a dazzling multifaceted glance.
“Ariadne,” said the wasp, with pleasure. “And—a small fly?” I blew out my bulbous thorax, somewhat pricked by his tone.
“Roger, isn’t it?” murmured Ariadne, and as the wasp inclined his head with slight irony, she went on briskly, “Yes, I shall be taking him in with me.”
Then she rose into the air and hovered there, flicking her tail. “No problem, is there, Roger?” she breathed, glancing down at the wasp.
“None at all,” he said, and with a small smile playing about his segmented lower mouthpart, he ushered her through the broken windowpane. I prepared to follow.
“Out late, little fly,” remarked the wasp. “Fancied a bit of dragonfly, did we?”
The way he pronounced the word dragonfly left me in no doubt as to his meaning. It was a scurrilous imputation—so I buzzed him.
“Brat!” hissed the enraged yellowjacket, his sting-charged rear end whipping upward like a scorpion’s. I zipped at high speed through the laser-thin gap between the shards and the cardboard and swept abuzzing into the temple of the E(ROT)IC POTATO.
And was immediately stopped short in my trajectory by the sheer majesty of the spectacle that lay before me. Ariadne hovered near a moonlit rafter and, wordlessly stupefied, thrilled beyond language, I joined her. Together we gazed down from the high regions of its cathedral upon the splendor of the E(ROT)IC POTATO.
It was a dead man lying on his back under a table, with one hand on his breast and the other on a book on the floor. His chest had caved in and the hand itself had flopped limply into the cavity where once had been the heart. The heart itself, of course, was long since devoured.
And the man’s eyes and ears and mouth and belly were alive with insects! And the space between his body and the table was filled with flying insects! And their sounds were amplified by the gabled roof and filled the gloomy chamber like the very drone of Eternity itself! And that vast booming buzzing harmony was a sonic articulation of the Triumph of the Insectile Will!
“Come, Gilbert,” whispered Ariadne, and I followed her through the shafts of orange moonlight and descended with reverence deep into the bowels of the E(ROT)IC POTATO. There, in the darkness, I observed once again the milkwhite miracle of her ovipositor; but this time the organ was not withdrawn.
And then every dawning genetic tremor I had ever felt was finally fulfilled, not once, not twice, but a thousand times! A million times! A thousand million times! I quivered to the very quick of my being; I surrendered, fragmented, melted in the molten intolerable pleasure of it and dissolved to pure nonbeing, wrapped in shattering slithering Ariadne and sinking deeper and ever-deeper into the glow and pulse of the degenerating intestine of the E(ROT)IC POTATO.
Later, still intoxicated, I lurched out, creamed and filmed with the eggy juices of insect love, and crawled away to lick my wings. The dull buzz of Eternity roared warmly through my drained and sated body, and I knew I was changed forever. As the moon sank to the horizon and the first brown rays of a new day probed the eastern sky, I knew I had finally become a fly.
Blood And Water
Imagine, finally, a dignified British butler hold-ing aloft a very large teapot and, followed by a serving maid pushing with some difficulty a tea trolley containing cups and saucers and plates of cucumber sandwiches, advancing the length of a smooth and extensive lawn at the bottom of which flows a river, and on the bank of the river a large weeping willow tree, and in its shade six young people and an elderly dame reclining in various postures upon tartan horse blankets and swatting idly at the flies. It is August 1936, a cloudless Friday afternoon, and England is at peace.
Now turn your eyes to the house which overlooks the lawn, and see above the French doors giving onto the terrace a woman standing at an upstairs window. She is a pale woman in a white silk gown, utterly motionless and devoid of expression, and she is gazing out over the copse of chestnuts on the brow of the distant hills, and into the deep blue sky beyond. There the tiny dot of a lone kestrel circles in the heat, dropping and rising as the c
urrents dictate. It is at about this time, too, that a gray car comes into view at the end of the driveway in front of the house, shimmering in the heat and throwing up dust in its wake, and sounding at this distance like an insect. Just as the butler down by the river is pouring the seventh cup of tea, the woman in the white silk gown leaves off gazing vaguely at the distant circling bird and turns back into her room. It is on her account that an eminent Harley Street specialist named Gordon Cadwallader is alighting from the gray motor car which has by this time come to a halt in front of the house; without waiting for his baggage he passes through the front doors and is quickly spotted by the master of the house, who ushers his guest into the study off the entrance hall and closes the door behind them.
It is not until a few hours later, then, that we get our first clear glimpse of Dr. Cadwallader of Harley Street; and it comes as he rises naked midst billowing clouds of steam from his bathtub. Observe, first, the stoutness of the man. His chins and bellies are all pink and wobbly, and his great jowly buttocks dimple in the late sunlight as he gingerly lifts his hindparts and with enormous caution sets first one, then the other foot down upon the tiles. The head is large, bald save for a black mass of snaky curls about the ears, with small eyes set close together, a small bulbous nose, and a long drop from nose to lip. The bottom lip projects like the jaw of some cantankerous freshwater fish, and is flanked by overhanging flaps of flesh which pouch smoothly into the soft pink folds of the ample throat.
As he lifts his towel from the back of a chair and stands upright to dry himself, his breasts compose themselves upon the first swells of his gut like deflated cushions, wide, soft-nippled tires of flesh which but for the baldness of the man and the little pink hose-end of a penis peeping out from below would certainly identify the body as female. In the corner of the room stands an off-white, life-size statue of Minerva, goddess of plumbing, one outstretched arm snapped off at the elbow and Cadwallader’s puce bathrobe draped over the stump. It is to this statue that the breasted physician now waddles, and taking up the bathrobe, he ties it loosely about his bulk. Pausing only to slip his feet into a pair of red Moroccan slippers, he tosses the damp towel onto his shoulder and steps into the corridor. As he does so, his air of scrubbed complacency is rudely jarred by a muffled explosion from somewhere deep in the bowels of the house; and a moment later he hears the distressed voice of an elderly woman cry: “Oh, Christ, Norman, there goes the bloody boiler again.”
Blood and Water and Other Tales Page 16