Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  Amil looks around, spots the gun where he’s left it in his private corner. But before he can reach it, she backs out of the door and slams it shut behind her, all the while shouting: Not again. Never again.

  Wolf continues to writhe. Amil locks the door and then squats beside him.

  My eyes, Wolf says moaning. I can’t see.

  There is hammering on the door, followed by shouts to open it or have it broken down.

  We have to leave, Amil says.

  He leads Wolf towards the trunk, opens the lid and helps him to get in. Y

  ou should have killed her when you had the chance, Wolf says.

  Yes, Amil says, lowering himself into the trunk and pulling shut the lid just as the front door smashes open. Maybe next time, I will.

  IAN MUNESHWAR

  Skins Smooth as Plantain, Hearts Soft as Mango

  The beast in the folds of Harry’s gut had no heart and it did not need one for his was strong enough to keep them both alive. It had neither heart nor mind nor eyes to see; it was only lips and teeth and fingers like needles that slipped inside his tongue and his bowels and even those places he did not know he had. Those unfilled hollows made its gums throb with an emptiness that might have been desire.

  *

  That night a man came to the house whose face Harry remembered from the dimness of a childhood memory. His thinning hair was combed forward over the shining dome of his skull, and the line of a moustache traced the contours of his upper lip. He sweated with an unnatural persistence from the pock-like pores on his cheeks.

  “You remember your Uncle Amir,” Father said, a statement.

  Harry’s eyes flickered over to Mother, who stood just behind Father, her arms crossed over her stomach. The way she sucked her tongue over her front teeth told Harry all he needed to know: this man was no brother of hers.

  Uncle Amir smiled. His teeth were too large for his mouth; when the smile faded, his lips still didn’t cover the thick, yellowed ends.

  “It’s good to see you again, Harry. It’s been a while.”

  His English was excellent, almost unmarked. He reached a hand out, and Harry took it.

  “Dinner must nearly be ready,” Mother said, pulling away. “Come, Amir. Majid’s been cooking all afternoon.”

  The dining room was at the end of the hallway, behind a heavy hardwood door. The table was set for four. White candles stood in pewter holders; Mother’s best plates—white and blue chinoiserie shipped all the way from London—sat perfectly centered before each empty chair. The tablecloth had begun to yellow—because of the humidity of Guyana’s summers, Father would always say, jovially cursing the tropics.

  Father sat at the head of the table, striking up a conversation with Uncle Amir, and Amir immediately took the chair to his right. Harry cursed inwardly; this meant he would need to sit next to Mother.

  Father took the white linen from under the fork and knife, shook it open, and placed it neatly on his lap. Everyone else did the same.

  The cook, Majid, burst in from the kitchen, shouldering the door open, dinner balanced on the trays in his upturned palms. Harry had been listening to Father talk about work—a tedious monologue about the rising price of equipment for the mill, which had Uncle Amir nodding in vigorous assent at the end of every sentence—but his attention drained away as soon as Majid laid the plates on the jaundiced tablecloth.

  It was a richer meal than what they had most weekdays: two large tilapia, one leaned against the other, their meaty sides slit open and stuffed with lemon wedges and sorrel; plantain baked until its edges had crisped, caramel-brown; a steaming bowl of channa spiced with cumin and ginger and topped with rings of sautéed onion—

  —and back he came with still more plates: a pie of beef and goat (Majid’s poor facsimile of Father’s favorite: steak and kidney pie); okra roughly chopped and fried in ghee—oh, he could smell the fat!; and mango, sliced thin, spread like an orchid in bloom.

  Harry reached a fork out to the tilapia, and Mother swatted his hand away. “We have to say grace,” she scolded. Then, raising her eyes to Uncle Amir: “Would you mind?”

  Uncle Amir recited a short, elegant grace, thanking Father for giving him and the others at the mill such fulfilling work. Father nodded thoughtfully, and the meal began.

  Harry went at once for the fish, taking a whole tilapia for himself. He cut it open just down the middle, pulling away that sweet, flaky meat with his fork before lifting out the spine and troublesome ribs— he’d come back for those later. He scarfed down the fish skin and all, gratefully swallowing and immediately returning for more. The beast rumbled pleasantly in his stomach, its jaws receiving the food Harry chewed for it, its snakelike throat slicked by Harry’s saliva. He returned to the tilapia’s charred head and used the point of his knife to carve out its fleshy cheeks. He especially loved the salt, the sweetness, and the softness of the cheeks—next, the eyes.

  He only slowed when he noticed, after a few more throatfuls of fish, that Mother was pinching him under the table. She had dug her fingers into the skin just below where his shorts cut off, twisting the fat on his thigh.

  “Harold,” she hissed, mouth drawn. “You’re eating like an animal again.”

  Harry put his fork down, pulled his leg away, and wiped his mouth with the napkin. He ignored the heat of her stare, the nettle of her prying, meddling eyes, and focused on his plate.

  “That’s settled then!” Father broke away from a conversation with Uncle Amir that Harry hadn’t been listening to. “Harry, my boy, you’re coming to see the mill tomorrow. How about that?”

  Harry lifted a slice of the pie off of the serving dish.

  “Sure.”

  He ate a heaping forkful. It was wonderful: the goat was soft, savory, fatty; the salt and animal juices and hot water crust all came together on his tongue. The beast pushed up, stretching open the base of his esophagus, unfurling its own eager tongue.

  Mother put her fork down as she watched, then pushed her full plate away.

  “You’ll be lucky to have your Father’s job one day,” Uncle Amir said, wiping his moustache with the crisp edge of his napkin. “You have a few years yet, but it’s never too early to get started at the family business.” He gave an ostentatious wink.

  Mother excused herself, saying she was beginning to feel nauseous, and Majid came to clear the plates. As he did, heaping dirty silverware on top of plates balanced expertly up his arms, Uncle Amir came and sat next to Harry.

  “I have something for you,” he said. “Something you might like too, Reginald.”

  Father leaned in, his curiosity piqued. Harry swallowed a mouthful of plantain.

  Uncle Amir removed a thin magazine from his briefcase and placed it on the table in front of Harry. It was an old copy of The Cricketer. A player posed heroically on the cover, his bat pitched at a perfect angle, his eyes on an unseen ball spinning into the distance. Beneath the picture it said: frank de caires does it again!

  “Good lord.” Father reached for the magazine. “This was your mother’s, Harry. She had a dozen of these, back when we were together. She loved this man. Worshipped him. What was his name?”—he spoke it slowly, savoring the syllables—“I never thought I’d see this again. Do you know, Amir, did Bibi ever get to see him play?”

  “Oh, sure! Mommy them went to Bourda whenever they could.” For the first time since he’d come, Amir’s accent slipped through. He corrected himself: “I remember it fondly.”

  Father passed the magazine back, and Harry took it gently. He didn’t care much for cricket—sacrilege, if you were to ask the other boys at school—but he knew his mother had, and that was enough. “Thank you,” he said, glancing up to Uncle Amir. “My pleasure.” “Well,” Father said, pushing himself up from the table and giving a mighty stretch, “your Uncle and I have some things to talk through. You should get to bed, my boy. We’ll have a long day tomorrow.”

  Harry was in no way looking forward to a long day at the sugar mi
ll, but he gave Father a quick smile, thanked Uncle Amir again, and closed the dining room door behind himself.

  The beast flexed its long fingers, pushing a little deeper into the warmth of Harry’s groin, and settled its tongue against the lining of his stomach. There were whole hours when Harry would forget the beast was there at all, hours when he could let his mind wonder at a life that was not consumed by its needs. But it would pop another vein, gorge itself on his blood, his bile, his mucus—and then heal his broken body. He suffered it all without so much as a bruise.

  Instead of getting to bed, he eased open the kitchen’s side door. Majid was still there. He had his apron on while he washed grease out of dishes, his face buried in a cloud of steam rising from the sink.

  “Oh!” He started when he heard the door close behind Harry. The dishes clattered back into the sink. “You scare me, boy!”

  “I’m sorry, Majid. I’m just looking for a little food, if you have any left,” Harry said, playing at coyness as best he could. “Sometimes I’ll just get a little peckish at night.”

  “You not eat?” the cook replied testily, cracking open the icebox. “Look how skinny you are, boy.”

  “I ate. I’m just still hungry.”

  Majid wrapped yesterday’s roti and a hunk of leftover tilapia in paper towels, then put it all on a small plate. Harry took the plate, and the cook returned to the dishes in the sink.

  Food in hand, he headed upstairs. Father and Uncle Amir had retreated to the drawing room. He watched for a moment as their shadows moved behind the door’s frosted glass inlay; their voices were pleasant, muffled baritones.

  He padded along the hallway at the top of the stairs as softly as he could. The door to Mother and Father’s room was just ajar and the lights were off. The hallway grew darker the further he went along, until he came to his room at the very end. He pulled the door just shut behind himself, slow, then switched the lamp on.

  The room had been his for the twelve years he’d lived in this house, but it had been Mother’s collecting room before then. She had a fascination with the tropic wildlife, a real naturalist’s eye, as Father said. She trapped insects—damselflies, dragonflies, orange-spotted butterflies, blister beetles, darkling beetles, velvet ants, boring weevils—and pinned them to huge sheets of Styrofoam leaned against the walls. She’d refused to relocate the collection when Harry moved in, so he’d grown up with them here. Year after year, the bugs’ hollow carcasses would be eaten away by mites, but there was an infinite number of insects in the jungle and Mother never tired of finding more.

  Harry was allowed the two bottom drawers of the dresser in his room; all the others were filled with longhorn beetles and boxes of pins. In the very bottom drawer, tucked in a corner behind his always freshly-starched school uniforms, he kept the few things he had that reminded him of his birthmother: a fishing hook, a photo of her in front of her old house, and now, The Cricketer. On his knees, he took out the photo. She wasn’t especially beautiful. Her skin was dark—at least, because of Father, Harry was light enough to pass as British— and, like Uncle Amir’s, her front teeth stuck out when she smiled. But his only memories of life with her were golden, sweet things—memories that didn’t include the beast.

  “This is disgusting, you know.”

  Mother stood in the doorway. Harry shoved the picture back into the drawer, slid it shut. She stepped into the room, blocking the lamplight, and reached a finger down to the plate of food. She flicked the corners of the paper towel apart, revealing the heaping roti and half-eaten fish.

  “What’re you going to do with all this?” She adjusted the bow at the neck of her powder blue nightgown, pulling it breathlessly tight. “I get hungry at night.”

  “You should be eating downstairs. With a fork and knife. At a table.” She crinkled her nose at the lukewarm tilapia, covered it again. “I’ll tell Majid not to let you upstairs with food anymore.”

  She left, and Harry closed the door tightly this time. Even cold, the roti smelled of garlic and mustard oil—he had to stop himself from reaching out. He was hungry now, but the beast would be much hungrier before the night was over.

  He turned the light out and lay on top of his sheets. He listened until Majid finished in the kitchen, Uncle Amir said goodbye, and Father had come upstairs and eased the bedroom door shut behind himself and the house was entirely silent, entirely still.

  *

  Harry packed the food into his schoolbag, slung it over his shoulder, and made his way downstairs. He knew just which floorboards would groan under his weight, just which stairs would squeal in the early morning’s dusty quiet. He never left through the front door—the clunk of the deadbolt as it slid open would wake Mother from her shallow sleep—so he padded down the hall, to the kitchen. Majid was long gone by now, back in his home with wife at the far end of town. The kitchen had a door that opened onto the backyard so Majid could take garbage out unseen by Harry’s parents. Harry gently opened this door, left it unlocked, and slipped into the warm night.

  The waxing moon split the world into pale greys and slanting darkness. No light came from the queer, square houses of the compound, but even in the dark Harry knew his way across the lawns and to the break in the wooden fence that separated British families from the town itself.

  The beast lurched as soon as he stepped onto the street and the fence hid the compound from view. Harry expected this, though. He feared, sometimes, that the beast knew his mind as well as his body; he stayed up some nights imaging that if it pressed its long tongue to curve of his brain it could taste his intentions in the sparking of his synapses.

  The beast settled, pressing its weight into his bowels, and Harry walked on.

  Provenance was a long city, a strand of streets and homes clinging to the hem of the Demerara’s silty waters. He walked to the river’s edge, turning off of the paved roads and onto smaller, muddy paths, and continued west. The city changed the further out he went. The British Officers’ groomed, orderly houses gave way to smaller homes: squat, wooden constructions, balanced on stilts, that overlooked the swollen river and the jungle beyond.

  He finally had to stop just before he reached the docks. He could stand a little pain from the beast: a clip of its teeth, a prick of its fingers. But it grew more incensed the further out he went, sinking its fingertips into the knobs of his spine and drawing its teeth over the tendons holding his kneecaps to their muscles. He fell heavily onto his hands and knees, his breathing labored.

  He slid the backpack off and took out the tilapia and roti. He ripped off a chunk of the roti and crammed it into his mouth, barely chewing before choking it down and readying another fistful. He felt the beast heave upward out of his stomach and reach its greedy jaws to the base of his esophagus. It downed the food heartily, thoughtlessly. Harry ate and ate until there was only a thin layer of roti remaining and the beast had settled back into his intestines, gorged for a time.

  He came to a narrow pier at the end of the street. It rocked gently with the current, the water sloshing beneath. A girl, Alice, stood at the far end. She raised a hand to wave; Harry smiled and waved back.

  “Wasn’t sure you’d make it,” she said when he got to the pier’s end. She sat back down, dangling her bare feet over the edge.

  “Every Friday.” He took a seat beside her and scrounged a lighter out of his backpack. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  Alice slipped two loose cigarettes out of her jeans pocket. She was an Arawak, one of the people who lived in the jungles before the blacks and coolies were brought by the British, and before the British, too. She lived on the other side of the river with her brothers, who fished the Demerara by night.

  She put a cigarette between her lips, and Harry fumbled with his lighter, rubbing his thumb raw against the wheel.

  He didn’t care much for girls at school—another failing in the eyes of his cricket-obsessed classmates—but Alice was different. He wasn’t sure that what he felt for her was sexual: she was older
than him, and boyish, too, with her close-cropped hair, square face, and jeans. She smoked with a practiced, world-weary ease, and when he first told her that he’d never even lit a cigarette before she did not laugh or condescend; she simply showed him how.

  Harry finally got a steady flame from the lighter and he lit the cig, breathing in deeply. He let the smoke settle in his chest for as long he could stand. The beast was quiet while the tobacco lingered in his throat and pricked his gums; for the time it took for the cigarette to burn itself low, Harry could try to forget that his body was not his own.

  “My father’s taking me to the mill tomorrow,” Harry said after a while. “He wants me to be ready to work with him when I’m done school.”

  “Is that what you want to do?” she asked.

  “I haven’t really thought about it.”

  Swarms of gnats hung low over the river, rising and falling as if touched by the breath of an unseen giant. A fish broke from the water, leaping high in a flash of silver, its sinuous body curved with the effort of flight. When it fell it hit the river with a crack like a gunshot.

  “It’s not such a raw deal,” Alice said, tilting her head to look at him. “You’ll have all the money you’d need, and a job lined up. Better than fishing this river for money. Better than cutting cane.”

  “You know,” Harry said, regretting he’d brought up the mill at all, “I’ve never been on the other side of the river. At least not since my mother died. It’s so long ago, I don’t remember.”

  Alice laughed her dry laugh. A cloud covered the moon, and for a moment the only light came from the reddened ends of their cigarettes.

  “I’m not sure you’d like it. It’s not like Provenance. No shops, no bakeries, no buses to take you to school.”

  She pulled her feet out of the water and positioned herself closer to Harry, her elbow on the pier and the back of her head cupped in her hand. She looked up at him, and smoke drifted lazily from between her lips. Her eyes flickered upward, made contact with his. The urge to lean down and touch her—to just kiss her—overtook him suddenly, and he slid his hand along the pier’s pulpy wood, closer to hers.