From: SOSQ Project Head
Sent: Aug 04, 2027
To: Serent, Dr. Henry D. [[email protected]]
Cc: RESTRICTED
Subject: RE: EYES ONLY REPORT.
Proj. Day 244, Seq. 5, Data Stream 09-08-63JCF
CONFIRMATION CODE: HM-HO-43-X/SISU, THETA
8/04/27 Report received and filed. All appropriate protocols in place. EYES ONLY in full effect.
I’m assuming that the insertion went as planned. It’s about 09:50 here.
Aww, shit… we just lost power here… backups kicked in… thought that couldn’t happen… at least I didn’t lose this note… I hate typing in all those frikkin’ code letters.
Wait a sec… something’s happening … people screaming in the hallways. Something about a bomb or… an asteroid.
Hank, I’ll get back to you.
From: Serent, Dr. Henry D.
Sent: Aug 04, 2027
To: Project Head [Sosq.DOD.Proj.LOOKING [email protected]]
Cc: RESTRICTED
Subject: Re: RE: EYES ONLY REPORT.
Proj. Day 244, Seq. 5, Data Stream 09-08-63JCF
Pete? What’s going on? Are you okay? The feed lines from outside have all gone dead… even the trunk line… and that should not be possible.
Hey, buddy, kind of nervous here, all cut off and everything… get back to me.
From: Serent, Dr. Henry D.
Sent: Aug 04, 2027
To: Project Head [[email protected]]
Cc: RESTRICTED
Subject: Re: RE: EYES ONLY REPORT.
Proj. Day 244, Seq. 5, Data Stream 09-08-63JCF
Pete? We’re getting a little nervous down here. What’s going on up there? The inner and outer blast doors have sealed and the computer has declared Protocol 9.
What the fuck is Protocol 9?
From: MAILER-DAEMON@ 23CFP:GOV.DOD/DOE/LG
Sent: Aug 04, 2027
To: Serent, Dr. Henry D. [[email protected]]
Your e-mail to: [[email protected]] was undeliverable due to the following reasons:
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THE MIRE OF HUMAN VEINS
Lisa rubs absently at the iridescent skin of her arm, which powders at her touch.
Dust with the rainbow sheen of oil on water drifts to the placemat set before her at the kitchen table, glittering like tiny fish scales in the wan morning light of the kitchen.
She remembers, long ago, sitting on her father’s lap, rubbing at her father’s arms, his skin powdering at her touch, glittering on her fingertips.
You are your father’s daughter, her mother always tells her.
Lisa holds her cereal spoon limply in one hand, distractedly draws it through the gray milk. She notes in an equally distracted way that several black bits float to the surface in the wake of the spoon.
Flies… dead flies.
They float to the top like plump raisins, and she had willed her mind long ago to accept them as such.
Without missing a beat, she slides a spoonful into her mouth, swallows it.
If you swallow without chewing, it is impossible to know what you’re swallowing.
Lisa learned through hard experience that this is preferable to arguing with her mother. She simply swallows everything her mother gives her, everything her mother tells her.
She is her mother’s daughter, too, but arguing with her is best avoided.
She can be… scary.
As she thinks this thought, as she remembers those occasions when her mother’s demeanor quickly shifted from merely spooky to terrifying, she feels a touch on her back, the press of skin against her bare shoulder.
“I’m glad to see you eating breakfast.” Her mother’s voice is high-pitched, wavering, like an unsure violinist, trying yet unable to hold a perfect note. The squeak of her voice, the touch of her hands against Lisa’s skin—Why do her hands feel so cold, so… bristly?—sends a shiver through Lisa’s body causing an uncontrollable tremble.
Lisa’s mother senses this, removes her hands from her daughter, steps back.
Lisa turns in her seat and looks at her mother. “No need to get all mushy, mom. It’s just breakfast.”
Her mother’s hands move in the air, as if wanting to stroke her hair, stroke her cheek. Lisa watches her mother’s hands weave incantations of thwarted love in the air, and thinks it makes her look eldritch, insectile.
Unaware of her daughter’s thoughts, her mother smiles. Lisa finds that smile the scariest thing about her. It is the overlarge smile of a mouth that is too big to be contained by its head, too small to contain the improbable number of peg-like teeth that it does.
“Well, it makes me feel good,” she says, her hands palpating the air between the two. Lisa watches her long, impossibly thin-fingered hands whose shadows creep long-legged up the walls.
She finally lowers them to her sides, as if by sheer force of will. “You have no idea how important it is for a mother to know that her children are well fed.”
Lisa smiles again, but inside her, in the depths behind that smile (and oh, there are depths, oh yes, depths of which her mother has no idea), its foundation cracks, falters. There is something about what her mother has just said, something about how she said it that makes Lisa feel squirmy and exposed.
Before her crumbling façade can reveal what has been building inside Lisa with great and secret effort over the last year or so, she stands, kisses her mother on a cheek that feels hectic and feverish beneath her dry lips, and grabs her backpack.
“Have a good day at school, honey,” her mother’s voice calls after her.
Lisa stops at the mirror in the foyer, checks her teeth for flyspecks before leaving.
At school, Lisa sees herself as something apart from the other girls, something special, though she is neither arrogant nor particularly self-possessed. She is merely sure that she is unlike the other girls here, unlike them in a fundamental, unusual way.
Maybe it is because of the changes she is going through, the changes her body is working on unbidden, day and night like a machine left on, left unattended with nothing more than a vague blueprint to work from. These changes are profound, Lisa realizes, yet so unfinished she feels she must be wearing a sign that reads Under Construction.
She knows that some of these changes are normal, to be expected… the swelling of breasts, the flaring of hips, the sudden urges and secret fires that seem so important, so desperate.
And then there is the coming of the blood…
Yes, the promise of the blood, as her mother calls it.
There are other changes, though.
The shimmering dust on her skin.
The enigmatic nubs on her back that mimic the bumps on her chest, growing from her shoulder blades like insect bites.
The strange, fluttery feeling inside her all the time now, day or night. It makes her feel as if she is bouncing against glass, some flat pane of glass that is just in front of her, hedging her in, keeping her from something so desirable that she finds it necessary to hurl herself against it again and again.
She has no idea why, no idea what the unseen glass is keeping her from.
Whether it is protecting it from her.
Or protecting her from it.
* * *
Lunchtime and Lisa eats alone, not through any conscious choice, though this makes her feel as if the other children, on some level at least, grant her the respect of privacy.
Floral scents drift from the soft, reusable lunch-sack her mother packs for her every day. A sandwich of butter and honey and granulated sugar on soft, pillowy white bread. A thermos of green tea her mother brews special for her, light and floral and achingly sweet.
With each bite, with each sip she
feels regal, like some ornate and magnificent butterfly, taking in a sweetness that is hers and hers alone.
That sweetness, redolent of the nectar of some potent and powerful flower, seeps and oozes into the depths inside her, those secret depths that no one but she knows of, drop by golden drop until it becomes a languid, syrupy lake inside her.
For some reason that is still vague to her, that secret, golden pool, dreamy and sweet almost beyond comprehension, always makes her think of her father.
He gave his life for us… for you, her mother tells her.
Lisa, of course, takes this in, as she takes in everything her mother gives her, tells her.
It makes her sad.
That sadness brings a torpid, poignant drowsiness that makes it difficult for her to concentrate during the rest of the day.
* * *
The man is black.
Not African American, but black.
His skin is the color of a black crayon, of coal, of darkness, so devoid of luster that the kitchen light seems trapped inside it. He is bald, and the dome of his head is like a night of fallen stars.
The whites of his eyes and his teeth are black, as are the pads of his fingers. The little half-moon lunula of each fingernail is a new moon.
He smiles at her as she sits to dinner, with a smile like the opening of a hole within a hole.
Her mother introduced the strange man casually as Lisa slid her book bag to the floor in the foyer earlier. Her mother had been sitting on the couch in the living room, sitting very close to the man. They hadn’t been holding hands, but their hands, resting on their own thighs, touched.
It seemed even more intimate.
There was an atmosphere within the room as Lisa stood there, wondering who this man was. An atmosphere that felt congealed, wiggly like jelly that had been poked and still quivered from this contact.
Her mother introduced the man as Mr. Ari or something like that, something that sounded Greek, though he didn’t look at all Greek.
At dinner, he sits at the head of the table, the chair both she and her mother always leave vacant for the ghost of her father. He had not been asked to sit there, and this presumption on his part angers Lisa, though she betrays no emotion.
There is something cooking on the stove. The steam from it fills the kitchen with an aroma that is tantalizing, off-putting. It smells of meat and dust, spices, something earthy, musty.
Her mother brings the steaming pot to the table, places it on a trivet and ladles out brown broth first into the man’s bowl. Lisa sees the man watch the bowl with something approaching avidity. He nods to her mother when she has finished, his black eyes wide and moist.
Her mother dips the ladle back into the pot, fills Lisa’s bowl.
The broth is thin, brackish, rust-colored. As the liquid settles into the bowl, shapes float to the surface like flotsam.
Ants, flies, roaches.
Closer now, the smell is different, rich yet spoiled, like chicken soup that has been left out too long.
Lisa hears the black man slurping.
She closes her eyes for a moment, sighs.
There’s going to be a lot of swallowing at this meal.
She opens her eyes, sees her mother thoughtfully pouring her a tall glass of milk.
Lisa sips warm, gummy clots of insects, washed down with mouthfuls of milk. She sees how her mother looks at the black man, how they watch each other over spoonfuls of their soup.
The scene has a resonance, an insistent quality that wants to remind her of times spent around this table long ago, with her mother and her father.
But she resists the demands of that memory, that allusion.
Lisa notices that, though both their hands are clearly occupied above the table, they seem to be holding hands below the table, just out of sight.
It is an incongruity that hurts Lisa’s head, so she concentrates on swallowing her soup instead.
* * *
Later that night, in her bed, Lisa thinks of veins, of the intricate web of veins inside her that flow with her blood.
As she lies there, smothered in blankets, smothered against the moans and soft voices coming through the thin wall that separates her room from that of her mother, she thinks of the blood that pulses through those veins.
It is her blood, yes, but it is also her blood.
It is also his blood, her father’s, so long gone now, so long dead.
So long and so long and so long…
If she lies there very still, if she ignores the cries of her mother, she can hear the sound of that blood working its way through the mire of her veins, the unknown pathways that snake through her body.
Those veins go through places within her that she will never see, never know. In a way, those veins know more of her than she does of herself.
As she thinks these thoughts, these thoughts drowning out the sound of her mother’s heavy breathing, the black man’s coarse gasping, she feels a tickle on her leg, under the covers.
She rolls over toward the lamp on her nightstand, the lamp that is always on these nights, even when she is sleeping because she cannot be without light, rolls over and peels back the covers.
On her leg, halfway up her thigh, is a spider the size of a peanut. It is black with an interesting yellow design crisscrossing its plump abdomen.
It is paused there atop her skin, as if knowing that its presence has been revealed, as if awaiting some kind of judgment.
Instinctively, Lisa slaps it, crushes it against her thigh. She wipes the mashed and twisted thing off her, off the bed.
As it tumbles to the floor, she hears a keening wail pierce her mother’s bedroom wall.
Then silence.
* * *
Saturday and she is preparing to do her chores.
Lisa has a list of chores to keep her occupied on weekends. She knows that it is as much to allow her mother to keep watch over her as it is to keep the house clean.
Sometimes there is a grocery list, oddly scant for two people, often with strange items listed.
1 doz. eggs
1 gal. whole milk
1 loaf bread
1 container mothballs
1 package light bulbs, 100 watt
Dryer sheets
But today, there is no shopping. Instead, Lisa’s mother, still behind the closed door of her room, has left a note on the kitchen table. It has two lines on it, written in her tight, crabbed hand.
Eat your breakfast.
Clean the cobwebs.
Lisa reads this note as she stirs the oatmeal left for her in a pan on the stove. She moves the spoon through the gray, curdled stuff, seeing the transparent bits of wings, the segmented legs, the tiny, faceted eyes staring up at her quizzically, as if confused at finding themselves in a breakfast food.
She thinks for a moment that she will skip breakfast, just do her chores.
Her mother, though, will know. She feels that her mother is actually, right then, watching her. She knows that she is, with her eyes, those eyes that are dark and fathomless, those eyes that are only two, but seem like dozens, hundreds.
All focused on her.
Besides, she shrugs, eating breakfast is No. 1 on her list.
It is that important, as if feeding Lisa is the only part of their relationship that means anything these days.
So, Lisa eats her breakfast, mostly in swallows, cleans her single dish and spoon, the single pot, and goes to do her chores.
* * *
There are so many cobwebs.
Lisa supposes it is because the house they share is an old one.
That’s what her mother tells her, and Lisa has no reason to disbelieve her.
Most weekends, the cobwebs must be swept from the corners of rooms, along the baseboards, from the tops of curtains, the bottoms of bed skirts.
She pauses outside the room next to her mother’s. This door is never opened, always locked. Lisa has no idea what is in this room. She has never seen the inside of it, and
is forbidden from making the attempt, or even asking about it.
Besides, this room oozes bad odors into the hallway, something that smells strongly base, strongly astringent. Over it, as if to cover it, is the smell of mothballs, the reek of which Lisa finds so foul that she holds her breath, preventing their vapors from entering her body, getting inside her and spoiling something within.
Because of the locked door, because of the mothballs, Lisa doesn’t dawdle here. Quickly, she drags the duster along the seams of this door, catching cobwebs that have managed to squirt from inside the room.
When she is done with this, she takes a shower, eager to get their shivery feeling off her body. Cleaning the cobwebs is her least favorite chore, hated out of all proportion to the task. There is something distinctly unsettling about them, how they return despite constant cleanings, how they drape in the dark corners of the house, how they sway in unfelt breezes.
And then there’s what they’re made for.
To catch prey, to kill things.
To eat them.
The shampoo washes out of her hair and into the tub. It sluices over her, mingles with her skin’s powder, turning into a glittering foam as it swirls down the drain.
Out of the shower, she wipes away the film of moisture from the mirror and stares at her face. With her hair wet and slicked back, her face is blank, androgynous. She seeks in her mirror image any sign, anything that will support her feelings of uniqueness, her special place in the order of things, but finds nothing. Nor can she see the web of veins that drapes across her flesh, just below the skin, carrying her blood, her blood, his blood through all of the secret places of her body.
Little Deaths Page 10