The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  “What would you be without this?”

  “Retired.”

  I sat down beside him, mute. When the silence stretched, I reached out and took hold of his wrist with all my strength. He attempted to pull away, but there was no way I was letting go. Instead, I stared him down.

  He wanted peace, but we both knew it, too, had consequences. If I cured him, he’d be left to think with a clear and vulnerable mind about all he had done. I worked the peaceful spell on him, but with a twist, and rather than fall into an easy stupor, he frowned at my fingers in anxiety. I waited until he looked as if he might vomit, and then I let go.

  “It doesn’t feel the same,” he gasped.

  Of course not. Ananda was compassion incarnate, filled with nothing but a desire for all the world to coexist. I, on the other hand, was the one who had to make that happen and it could not happen if everyone continued to believe that everyone else was wrong. My peace was filled with reckoning.

  Fearless, ceaseless, ruthless.

  “What does it feel like?” I breathed, my eyes narrowing. “Does it feel familiar? Isn’t it what you said the world needed?”

  He shook his head vaguely. His guard was down, and, in the uncontrolled recesses of his face, I saw the self-loathing.

  “I know who you see, when you look at Mara.”

  His gaze lifted like the flurried stirring of a murder of crows. He sat bolt upright, one breath away from a sob. A leader of men for centuries, planning and plotting and scheming, but deep down, he was still human. I knew exactly what he was feeling. I did not relish the thought of confronting my sister’s ghost either, but the world was not a fair place.

  “It’s a lot to ask. I won’t be angry if you say it’s too much.”

  “If you can do it, so can I,” he said quietly. His gift allowed him to see things in sharp detail unencumbered by emotion, and for that I was grateful. Just as threats were not necessary between us, neither was bravado.

  “I’m not sure I can, but with you on my side, I’ll feel stronger.”

  I took his hand again. It was cool and almost artificial feeling, but I laced our fingers together and squeezed. The gesture caught him unawares. He looked into my eyes and I knew we understood each other.

  “Just because life isn’t sacred, doesn’t mean it can’t be. You’ll see,” I whispered. I leaned in and kissed his cheek. It was as cold as his hand. “So can I trust you?”

  He smiled, and it was sincere. “I have always been trustworthy.”

  “Take care of them.”

  “I will.”

  I picked the glass up again and swallowed my gorge. It had all come to this moment, every word, a message sent through time. From Kali Ma to the snake, they weren’t just stories. They were the tea leaves of my destiny.

  The Siren was staring at me intently. I tilted the glass toward her.

  “To your health,” I toasted and, as quickly as possible, tipped the contents down my throat.

  The blood slid down like a fat slug, heavy and strange tasting. My stomach clamped down on it almost painfully as heat spread through me, flared, and then was gone. For a moment, I was disoriented. The world was spinning. I felt Devlin reach out and steady me as I planted my hands on the tabletop and coughed.

  I opened my eyes to find that the room had changed, or, rather, I had. My veins ran with ice water, my lungs breathed in the dank chill of the cave. The dark seemed transparent suddenly, and the echoes I saw whenever I was not careful seemed almost boring. Even the Siren, leaning forward curiously, eyes like starving Venus fly traps, seemed duller, less interesting, a list of things I could calculate. It was as if my entire personality had been sterilized.

  “I’m sorry,” Devlin whispered in my ear.

  I couldn’t answer. My body was fighting to come to terms with the sudden firmament of my metaphorical spinal column. Horrible possibilities became calculated risks, enemies just allies waiting to be manipulated, and monsters, an army in chains.

  I leaned back and looked up at the stalactites. They had seemed like the jagged teeth of some huge beast’s maw before, but now they were just mineral deposits. The world had faded and for the first time, I believed I was impervious to whatever it would throw at me.

  “Seeing how you see now.” Devlin let go of me and stood. “Do you still think the plan will work?”

  I stared blankly into his eyes. The gears of my thoughts shifted, at first grinding slowly, but soon a whirring symphony of mechanical clicks and measures. Like an equation, I solved the future and, with an easy smile, nodded.

  “Then I’ll make the call.” He nodded. “Cry havoc, my dear, and let slip the dogs of war.”

  As he walked away, I got my bearings and sat up. The Siren was perched on the edge of her seat, following my every move like a canary eyeing a cat. I could feel my mouth twisting involuntarily and watched her squirm in response. I reached up and pulled on my cheek muscles. At some point, I’d have to eliminate that particular side effect or my friends would start sharpening wooden stakes and carrying bottles of water for blessing.

  Especially with the whole red eye thing.

  “Relax, Cleo,” I murmured. “You know what to do. I’m ready.”

  Her muscles unwound, but it was clear she wanted to be finished as quickly as possible.

  “If we do this,” she said quietly, and my spine resonated with the sound of it, “how will you get out? My brothers and sisters are strong, especially as a chorus.” Perfect in every way, her voice carried with it the full force of a psychic mind only just holding back.

  “Oh….” I waved a hand as Devlin might have, my smile growing a little. “I imagine I’ll have ample opportunity to eat at least one of you before I’ll have to worry about that.”

  She swallowed and her gum disappeared.

  “You know what I want most.”

  Large hoop earrings dangled as she nodded uncomfortably.

  “Then make it happen.”

  The harsh scream of sirens woke me. The Doppler shift pulled me upright. Flashing red lights stung my eyes but forbade sleep. I cradled my head in my hands as it threatened to split open.

  “Hey!” a gravel-tumbled voice shouted at me. There was a hacking cough near my back. “Hey! Are you okay? Did something happen to you?”

  I looked around blankly. I was in an empty lot. Dirt and weeds were fertilized and tilled with jagged bottles and empty cans. Nearby, a chain link fence lay half on its side, trampled into the dirt. An ambulance turned the corner, still shrieking at the other evening traffic, and sped away. An amber streetlight flickered like a guttering candle .

  “Hey!” the voice shouted again. It was thick and slurred. “You gonna answer me?”

  I turned, though my body felt as if it had been churned in a cement truck. An elderly woman stood behind me, draped in layers and layers of dirty clothes. Her face was filthy, and she gripped the shopping cart behind her protectively. In her free hand was a suspicious-looking paper bag.

  “I ain’t callin’ no po-lice.”

  I shook my head. Something inside it rattled loose and triggered my gag reflex. I coughed and spluttered and felt the vomit come out before I could stop myself. It was bloody. I wiped my mouth, and my hand came away tinted red. To my shock, the woman let go of her cart and inched closer to me. She looked down at my puddle of sick and shook her head. Her face had changed from streetwise to wise.

  “That ain’t good, Sweetie.”

  I looked at the blood. “Yeah.”

  “Someone beat you up?” She dropped down and touched my shoulder timidly. “You need to go to the hospital if that’s what happened.”

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t belong out here.”

  I looked myself over. I was wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, filthy with the dust of the lot. I looked at my hands, touched my face, felt for bruises.

  “What’s your name, Sweetie?” she asked, and as if it were some kind of signal, my mind stirred and spit out a chain
of events. With a sudden sob, I hid my face in my hands again.

  “Eva’s dead,” I whispered, and a pain that had been lying dormant with me thrashed and throbbed within my chest. Suddenly nothing meant anything anymore. “Oh my god. My sister’s dead!”

  The lady smoothed my hair. “Did something happen?”

  “She…”—but it seemed too horrible to believe—“she killed herself. I was supposed to take care of her and I didn’t! I yelled at her! The last time we spoke, I was angry with her! Why did I do that? Why didn’t I help her?”

  The woman held me up and took a deep breath for me. “Ah. Don’t you have somewhere to go?”

  “No.” I shivered. I had fallen asleep in the field without a coat on. “My husband left me. My parents are dead. I lost my house. My whole life is a failure.” Tears made little crusted circles in my thin covering of dust. “I don’t have anywhere.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “I don’t know.” I shuddered. “I can’t remember.”

  Another siren blared a few blocks away as a police car sped to meet the ambulance on its horrible errand.

  “Come on,” she murmured and propped me up with an arm. “There’s a shelter in this neighborhood. We can go together.”

  “Who are you?”

  She smiled. “Name’s Camille, call me Cammy. Everyone does. What’s your name?”

  “Lilith.”

  She pulled me to my feet. I was grateful for her help. There was no way I could have made it by myself. She put her arm around my waist and walked me unsteadily to her shopping cart. We rolled along slowly as I limped beside her through the throng of nightlife.

  It was some city, somewhere, with the distinctive Californian crispness of smog, sea air, and cows. People ducked around us but refused to look at us. Out of sight, out of mind, I supposed. It was what I deserved, after how I had treated Eva.

  A nondescript building appeared between a clinic and an abandoned storefront. A line trailed out of the door and around the corner. The air smelled of tomato soup, trash, and stale beer.

  “Here we are,” Cammy said with a cackle, “I guess you could say this is home.”

  Chapter 25

  Lost and Found

  I stood up in the dumpster and tossed over the half loaf of bread in its sealed bag. Only the top piece was moldy. Cammy untwisted the tie with stilted coordination and discarded the odd piece. The loaf found a place in her cart.

  “You’re always so good at this!” She cheered as I hopped out. The sack of malt liquor was passed to me. I took a swig and grinned. “Glad I found you. Can’t be jumpin’ in and out no more, with my leg.”

  “Wanna hit that one over behind the Starbucks?”

  I pushed the cart along while she braced herself on it, limping a bit worse than usual. “Naw, they don’t toss until after closing.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t so bad, really. The houses and soft beds, the good food and hot water, they were all lies. They were comfortable, but they couldn’t stop Eva from taking her own life, from leaving me. They hadn’t kept Howard in my arms. They hadn’t saved my parents. In many ways, they were the cause of all those hardships. When people lost the struggle, they got bored. Boredom led to trouble. At least that’s what Cammy said when she’d had too much to drink.

  After the first couple days I had asked her why she had given up on life. She told me she hadn’t; she just couldn’t bear the life she’d had, the fake life, she called it. The reality where her husband had died was too much for her. This was the reality that took training and armor, filled her thoughts up with survival, dug a huge moat between her and the past. I could certainly understand that. In many ways, I felt that her story was exactly why we had gotten on so well. We knew each other at first sight.

  “How about the park? Or the boulevard?” I flicked her bottle and took another swig when she handed it to me. “We’re almost out and you know I’m good at looking destitute.”

  “You were born to be a panhandler, sweetie pie!” she cackled. “Sure we can. If you want, but I gotta sit a bit.”

  She grimaced. I could tell her leg was bothering her. It often did when the temperature dropped. Something about the cold made the tissues seize, then the infection would flare up. I stopped the cart beside a bus stop and pointed at it.

  “Sit you down, woman! Let’s see it.”

  “One hell of a way to catch a bus,” she tried to laugh. A cough cut in and shook her so hard I thought she’d fall over. I braced her with a hand on her back until she could catch her breath.

  A man walked by, giving us a wide berth.

  “What the fuck are you staring at?” I growled.

  He shook his head in shock and looked away almost instantly.

  “Hey now,” Cammy said, “don’t bother them. They don’t know no better. Wait till the wheel rolls around.”

  I put the wooden crate from the cart down and propped her leg up on it. I hadn’t looked at it for a few days, but I could tell by the stretching of her pant leg that it was swollen. I lifted it slowly, halting carefully at each wince. She was wearing a pair of old men’s boots, but the edema had increased to such a degree that the roughened leather edge was slicing into her ankle.

  “Jesus fuck,” I gasped. I tried to loosen the laces, but each tug sent her into agony. The skin above it was purple and a strange shade of bluish green. My heart skipped. “Cam, I gotta get this off you.”

  She glanced down and shook her head forlornly. Shoe laces were currency, but they couldn’t purchase a life. “Knife’s in the sack. Give me the strong stuff, will you?”

  I jumped up and dug through the old vinyl purse filled with our collected valuables. Not really so valuable, but when you were trying to forget everything and trying hard not to die while doing so, a bottle opener, a knife, a book of matches, and some duct tape were pretty important. There was also the ring, Cammy’s one treasure. It was nestled inside a bottle cap, wrapped in tape. No matter what happened, she never sold it.

  I came back around and handed her the flask of Popov. I flicked open the knife and hooked it beneath the bow. “Hold still. It’s gonna smart.”

  She smiled in agony and took hold of the bench. “Can’t hurt that bad. Nothing can hurt that bad.” She tipped up the bottle and guzzled down a quarter of it one good swallow. I slit the laces. The boot popped open and the bottle fell. When I looked up, she was crying.

  “You okay?” I whispered.

  She shook her head. “Whole thing feels like fire, just burnin’ in my bones!”

  “When’s the last time you cleaned it up, Cam?” The cut around her ankle was black. I pushed the pant leg up past her knee. It was an angry red mass. Her entire calf had broken out in a kind of hives, little boils that made it seem as if her leg was about to burst.

  “Dunno,” she said, slurring. “Can’t touch it anymore. Hurts too much.”

  I lifted the boot gently and tried to remove it. Her shriek surprised me. “I’m sorry! Oh Cam, this is horrible!”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “Says the girl who throws up blood!”

  Her fingers were digging into me, her whole body shaking with pain.

  “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  She shook her head. The answer was plain. No point in worrying me when the Popov could solve the problem. I bent back over her calf and palpated it gently, stunned she had walked so long on it.

  We’d only been together for a few weeks, but our friendship had been as fast and strong as super glue. She had never been unkind to me, even though I was a newbie. She had shared her cart and its contents with me as a Duchess would her home, and all she’d asked in return was a little dumpster hop and a few dollars a day. I had done it willingly; anything to not be alone. Caring for her better than she could care for herself was the only thing I’d ever done well. Maybe in some ways it was an attempt to make up for the mistakes I’d made with Eva, but so what? Things like that were easily justified.

  “This i
s bad,” I whispered. I had been pre-med, and, even though it was years ago, I knew diabetic neuropathy and gangrenous infection when I saw it. When I looked up at her, I saw my grave expression reflected in her eyes. “You should’ve said something sooner!”

  Her breathing was ragged. She searched my face as if the answer to the problem was written there. “Well...I’ll just have to take some aspirin….”

  I stood up and put my hands on her shoulders. “This is way past aspirin, Cam. You’ve got to go to a hospital.”

  A terrified glow filled her eyes. Her husband had died in a hospital many decades ago. She had been pathologically afraid of them ever since. “No! I can go to the clinic!”

  I shook my head insistently. “No, Honey this is really bad. You’ve gotta get checked in!”

  She reached up and pushed my arms away. “No! I can’t, Lily. Can’t do it.” The vodka tipped up again.

  I sighed. She outweighed me by almost a hundred and fifty pounds. I couldn’t force her, nor could an ambulance if I called them. I flapped my arms helplessly. “What do you want me to do, Honey?”

  The cough struck a second time and rattled around in her chest like a thunderstorm. When it finally subsided, she was exhausted. “Go get me some more of this.” She shook the bottle. “It’s all I need.”

  My insides eroded into an immense hollowness that made my quickening heart sound like a Taiko drum. “Cammy…,” I began, but when she looked at me with unholy wrath in her eye, I held up my hands in defeat. “Okay, okay. I’ll go. You stay here, okay? I’ll be back soon.”

  I walked quickly toward the boulevard, a busy street of shopping complexes and foot traffic, the perfect place to find charity if any existed. I put the paper cup on the ground in our usual corner and sat behind it.

  Sometimes it could take moments, sometime hours. When it was the two of us together, we made a killing, two women, one old and sickly, one young and not too terrible on the eyes. When Cammy was alone, she said it sometimes took days to scrape up a few bucks. Since I’d come along, she’d been eating a lot better.

  “Spare some change, please,” I said to a passing couple. The man stopped and tossed some nickels in. The girl on his arm smiled at his generosity.