Sip

by Brian Allen Carr

  Bale looked at Mole. He looked at Jilly. He looked at Mole again. “Yeah, that’s probably all uncles,” he told her.

  The Stranger

  Murk and Mira left the jail and moved in the direction they’d come from, back toward home. They didn’t speak. Their tired footsteps caught the street in scuffs and low chatter floated from those who moved along. A passive sense of failure plagued them. Their hearts felt slack and bruised. Low emotions dozed in their stomachs, fluttered like static in their throats.

  “All this damn way,” Mira said.

  “And Bale held hostage.”

  “I wanna sit down.”

  They found a makeshift bench in the shade of a ramshackle building that bore a vacancy sign, and they supposed it a kind of inn. “Good a place as any.” They moved toward it downheartedly, slunk upon the wooden thing that creaked and shimmied in a way that suggested it might not hold them. Mira cradled her head in her hands, her elbows resting on her knees. Murk thrust his peg leg out toward the dirt road, sat favoring his good leg’s ass cheek.

  “Could be worse,” said Murk.

  “How the fuck so?”

  A man hoisting a kind of brown stained fabric bundled in a heap came and stood in front of them. He stunk of rotting.

  “What is that?” Mira asked. “Take it somewhere else.” She held her hand over her mouth and nose like a mask.

  “You lost a leg,” the man said to Murk.

  “Lost ain’t quite the right word for it.”

  “But it’s gone, replaced by that peg, and I got an idea. A thing I might part with for the right price.”

  “You wanna sell us an idea?”

  “No, no.” He pulled back the fabric to reveal the leg, swollen with rigor mortis.

  “What the fuck is that?” Mira said.

  “A leg,” said the stranger. “Thought you could use it.” He motioned the thing toward Murk.

  “A rotten leg? For what?”

  “For the bones,” said the stranger. “Just get rid all this.” He took a razor blade from his pocket and began nicking away bits of the gray skin, the darker muscle beneath. Dabs of the leg dropped off to the dirt. “Use the bones instead of the peg.”

  “No,” said Murk. “Get the fuck off out of here and take that foulness with you.” Murk stood and pushed the stranger, who dropped the razor, stumbled back a ways then rewrapped the leg.

  “This town’s just fools,” he said. “A perfectly good leg just wasted on all y’all.” He kind of held up the leg up for folks to see and walked off toward wherever else he had a mind to go, grumbling nonsense as he went.

  “Crazy bastard,” said Mira.

  Murk shook his hair.

  The bits of leg on the road had a funny, yellow shimmer to them. A kind of iridescence to their death.

  But then the razor snatched Mira’s attention.

  “Murk,” she said, “what would you do if you couldn’t drink shadows?”

  Murk’s black eyes pondered. “Kill myself,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Mira. “We need to find a mouse.”

  five

  In outer space, unperceived by the naked human eye, traveling at up to forty miles per second, Halley’s Comet raced toward its perihelion where it would appear like a blade of white fire slicing across the Earth’s aphotic night sky. Its visibility could last weeks, depending on distance and atmospheric conditions. A celestial anomaly that will spook creatures’ hearts for certain.

  You must understand, for most of collective human consciousness, comets have symbolized God’s wrath—black omens of streaking light.

  The first known mention of a comet’s appearance couples the sighting with an execution. Montezuma saw two comets shortly before Cortes reduced the Aztec civilization to history. This particular comet, Halley’s, is credited with William the Conqueror’s taking of England, Genghis Khan’s invasion of Europe, the birth of Samuel Clemens, and the death of Mark Twain, who claimed “these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”

  Of course, by Twain’s time, Halley’s Comet was completely accounted for.

  Edmond Halley, namesake of the celestial body in question, postulated that perhaps a close-passing comet caused the great flood of Genesis and Gilgamesh. Which one motivated that catastrophe is a mystery, but when Halley’s Comet passed the Earth in 1682 almost nothing was known about these wonders at all. Halley had, at that time, been studying the strange things for less than two years, and it wouldn’t be until 1705 that he would publish his Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets, claiming that recorded sightings in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were all of the same orbiting comet that would come again in 1758.

  In between those two sightings, the one that he saw and the one he predicted, Edmond Halley died. They named the returning comet after him. Since its last pass in 2061, societies have faltered and waned. Anemic versions of civilizations left behind like footprints. Before his death, in what would become the groundwork for actuarial statistics, Edmond Halley proposed that in order for mankind to sustain its population “it is necessary for each married couple to have four children.” He came to that conclusion through a deep study of Paris and London, taking into account the typical rate of births, marriages, and deaths in the context of those urban areas’ population densities. It’s hard to say if he accounted at all for bastard babies, and in the shadow-addicted world, marriages were nearly as rare as comet sightings themselves, but regardless of all that: mankind had not lived up to the numbers, and hardly any humans will see the comet at all.

  In outer space, adhering to its orbit, the coma of the comet, a frozen peanut-shaped thing, just a little bigger than Manhattan, races along toward humanity’s view.

  Murk and the Machine

  “Something wrong?” Doc asked.

  Murk had taken off his jacket, held it draped over an arm. Black-eyed fools stumbled about the machine, their dark veins throbbing beneath their pale skin, and Murk contemplated them as they staggered. “I wanna try it.”

  “The machine?” said Doc.

  “Yeah. I got this for trade.” He lifted up his jacket.

  Doc regarded it.

  Earlier, Murk and Mira had searched a woodpile for a mouse. It took them nearly an hour of upending logs, but they came on one, and Mira whispered her silent language at it, convinced it to lend assistance. In the pocket of Murk’s jacket, it sat hid, the hermit’s razor blade accompanying it. The plan was this, the mouse would lay in wait. It would cower in the jacket until taken to the jail, to the cell where Doc kept his things. Once there, the mouse would abscond from the garment, cross into Unlucky Clover’s cell, carrying the blade in its mouth, drop the thing close enough so Clover’d notice the implement. In that way, Clover could do the murdering deed for Mira, Murk, and Bale. Off himself and set Mira and her mother free.

  “It is a nice jacket,” said Doc. “Tell you what. One turn on the machine. One night in the inn. I don’t haggle, and I won’t entertain haggling.”

  “Two nights,” Murk said. He didn’t want to seem too eager.

  “One.”

  The arms and legs dangled. Some of the limbs had already been sipped from. The shadows that remained listed back and forth on the ground.

  Mira had made him promise to take the shadow of an arm. “We don’t need you any darker than that,” she had said, assuming, correctly so, that the smaller quantity of shade produced by an arm would send him into a less-deep stupor, and that if he consumed a leg’s worth, Murk would go mad beyond recognition.

  “Fine,” said Murk. “One night and one swallow.”

  Doc held out his hand and Murk handed him the jacket. Once the garment traded hands, the shadow of the thing reappeared on the ground. Doc put his face to the jacket, breathed deep its leather scent. “Monroe,” he called, and Monroe came running. “Put this
in the cell for me and get this man and his friend a room at the inn.” And Doc handed the jacket away. “Take your pick,” said Doc, and Murk ventured beneath the machine, touched a few of the limbs, stood in the mess of them, the arms and legs dangling down around him like gruesome treasures.

  Standing in that wreckage, the smell of near death thick on his tongue, Murk nearly abandoned his notions, nearly dropped to the shadow of a leg, but something at the last minute gave him pause. Perhaps the sound of Mira’s voice echoed at him.

  He touched a wrist. Ran his fingers toward the elbow. Delicate, but it swayed on its moorings. The hair of it, twinkling in the sun. Murk dropped to the ground. The shadow lay on sand, mysterious now to Murk, strange and delightful.

  Murk realized then what it represented. His fake leg tingled, phantom feelings that flittered impossibly. Each of those shadows—or the vacant spaces where shadows should be there on the ground—denoted some horrific amputation, some unwarranted molestation that bore a permanent absence. Murk conceptualized the accosted creatures they belonged to, far away sufferers, most likely with blackened-out eyes. He imagined—in a fascinating moment that seemed unbound by true time—how their lost bodies, those that belonged to these limbs, were elsewhere dawdling through wildernesses or struggling to clutch at some necessary task with a single hand. And then the occasion of the dismemberments occurred to him. In one sharp synapse, some glowing space in his brain, lit up by grievous fantasy, Murk manufactured the dozens of settings that would represent the moments of these limbs being filched off their rightful owners.

  In the snag of a river, at the trunk of some live oak, mired in a forgotten town’s wreckage, in the crotch of a ravine: the addled personages beset by terrorists, who’d chased down prey in order to offend them forever, placated only by this dastardly deed when shadows were made unavailable to them.

  Envision now the victims gulping at shadows with faces terrified, their panic-stricken bodies tangled in shock. Mouths bore open with last-resort binging. Dreadful. Tortuous. Hog-shaped consumption. Savage-streaked gobbling. And the caterwauling of the assailants, robust sermonizing of the pain to come.

  Then they produced blades.

  Murk’s face lost in thought at these dangling limbs.

  Murk’s mind bereft, crammed down in the cracks of his dark illusioning.

  Spent bits of suffering being dealt out like cards.

  A counterclockwise circle.

  Endlessly moving.

  Now at this arm . . .

  Now at that leg . . .

  Snippets of the slicing, new faces and discomforts.

  A bad positioning of blood-slicked limbs. Teeth glimmering absurdly in shrieked-open mouths.

  Angry-faced disasters that keep transmitting in Murk’s mind.

  Hollow and haunting. Shriveled and swollen. Happening the way accidents happen, the way dead children die repeatedly in their mothers’ minds daily. For no reason. Set off by some unfair trigger of memory. The shape of an eyebrow. The crack in a sidewalk. The false music of a distant nothing mesmerized by a breeze that isn’t even there. And for what? So that we can say of these lost peoples or past tragedies, of these wound scars or cemetery plots that we existed? That we hovered with hearts beating in the motion of the multiverses with minds that could accumulate harms in order to remind us we were alive? That it wasn’t all just dreaming. That it can be touched with fingers in the future and that these feelings will launch our hurts anew.

  “Son,” said Doc, and Murk’s face showed shock at him. Doc shook his head, “You don’t have all day to choose.”

  Murk lowered. Sniffed the darkness, felt its odor in his gut like a cramp. His mouth went wet, his skin jittery. He lowered his face. The black magic of his doing it like a dream. The intoxicant was on him even before his lips touched the shade. He huffed and the dim drew from the dirt like a whisper, slithered across his tongue, filled his body with the taste of precious woe, and things got glossy. He could feel his eyes darkening, his skin color draining. His veins thrummed, constricted. Coiled down. Warmed through. A hollow kind of wizardry engulfed him.

  The world lurked beneath Murk’s understanding.

  “What do you think?” said Doc, and the language he manufactured seemed a thing of glass that Murk could rub his fingers over, cut himself with.

  He tried to answer, but the ability was lost to him. His mouth felt like a stranger’s mouth—like stranger’s teeth touched his teeth. Murk stood. The town quivered about him. Had he forgotten how to swallow? Were his hands still his own?

  Doc laughed. The laughter squirreled away into the afternoon.

  Murk wandered away.

  Murk didn’t feel like himself.

  Near dusk, Doc reached for the pencil behind his ear, set his teeth into it, clicked his tongue. He took the pencil from his mouth, placed it again behind his ear. He paced. He eyed the streets some more. He wiped his palms against his vest. “Monroe,” he said, “I imagine the day’s done.”

  Monroe stood from a stool where he had been nearly nodding off. He shook his head to get the blood flowing, his dreadlocks fanning out this way and that. “Want me to throw the switch?”

  “Go for it,” Doc said. “Close her down.” Doc walked off toward the inn, all the townsfolk smiling at him as he passed.

  Sunset

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that,” Bale said, his eyes on the sunset.

  “More small talk?” Jilly asked. She was cleaning her rifle.

  “Got any more stories?” Bale asked.

  “She doesn’t,” said Jilly. “She doesn’t even really have the one.”

  Mole threw a pebble at their fire. They’d kept it going the whole day rather than have Baby Boo chance trying to build another. “I got stories,” she said.

  “Really,” said Jilly. “Let’s hear one then.”

  Mole rubbed her chin. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Thank fucking God.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Bale.

  “Well, not everyone’s as talkative as you, dome boy. We don’t all just love the sound of our own voices and feel compelled to wax philosophical on the sunset and our opinions of it.”

  “No,” said Bale. “What did you guys have to do to get so shafted?”

  “Shafted?” said Jilly.

  “Seems to me,” Bale said, “this is the kind of job you’d get if you were in trouble. Like, back at the train, all the good soldiers were guards and stuff. This child-chasing stuff, following around this redhead and all, seems like a thing you’d do if you pissed someone off or weren’t worth much. Like, our equivalent would be latrine detail. Don’t get me wrong, that’s an admirable job. Hard as fuck though. Like this. Just kind of thankless shit work.”

  “The good soldiers?” said Jilly. “At the train? What good soldiers might those be? Every time we’ve gone up against a train we’ve taken ’em down easy as could be.”

  “And you’ve been part of that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve been there when the trains were taken down? Or were you off chasing a little boy?”

  “Mole,” said Jilly. “I don’t like how he’s got me thinking.”

  “Everyone in our army has an important job,” Mole said to Bale. “We’ve been at trains before. Right now, we’re here.”

  “Sure,” said Bale. “But that doesn’t mean that some jobs aren’t more important than others. Chasing a little boy is very important, but it’s probably not as important as attacking a train. Right?”

  “Can we shoot him right now?” said Jilly.

  “No.”

  “Why not then?”

  “Because we promised.”

  “So, in your army,” continued Bale. “What would you have to do to get a more important, important job?”

  “Yeah?” Jilly asked Mole. “W
hat would we have to do?”

  Mole messed with a fingernail. “I guess we’d have to prove ourselves, somehow.”

  “Seems to me,” said Bale, “y’all should get on figuring out how to do that. Instead of sitting around bickering about who tells the shittiest stories, or whatever.” Bale looked away from them. “But that’s just, like, small talk.”

  The fire crackled. The sun set.

  Doc and Mira

  Doc saw Mira sitting on a rickety bench, her head hung, elbows on her knees.

  “Got problems?”

  Mira shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  “You have a room,” Doc said. “Your friend and I traded.” Doc stood then in front of Mira, his eyes filled with gladness. “Come in, we’ll get you set up.”

  “I stuck my head in there earlier. Looks a little rough.”

  “It is, but I told you earlier. Won’t nobody bother you. I know what it’s like to travel far for no reason. You drink?”

  “Drink?”

  “Moonshine.”

  “I’ve had fruit wine before. It made me feel funny.”

  “It’s supposed to. C’mon.”

  They entered the inn and the place went quiet. Every eye in the saloon aimed at Doc. A one-armed man raised his good hand which clutched a glass. His hook-shaped nose seemed daffy. “To Doc,” he hollered, and the whole bar toasted. “To Doc,” they said in unison, his name coming out slurred and grand. The one-armed man set his glass down, ran his fingers through his stringy hair.

  Doc shooed off the gesture, and the crowd got noisy.

  “You’re famous,” said Mira.

  Doc shrugged. “They don’t want to end up like Clover.”

  They approached the bar, and the bartender skipped the other drinkers, handed Doc two glasses and a bottle of moonshine. “Over here,” said Doc, and the two moved to a yellow-pine bench on the far wall from the piano. The music chimed in whacky fashion. The chatter of the fellow drinkers clucked out like white noise. They sat down and Doc uncorked the bottle. He poured for Mira first, then himself. “It’s strong.”