by Ahimsa Kerp
When father was sure we were safe in the Fortress, he started his experiments to find a cure for this new disease. He quickly realised that a major symptom of this new disease was infertility (Mother says that this means men could no longer help the stork make babies?). For a while, more babies were born, but only some survived. Most were too deformed or were butchered - for food or sport. She says Mankind will die. I asked where I came from if babies were rare, and she told me it was a stork that brought me.
The page finished with a line that Elsie didn’t recognise. It is Mother’s handwriting. This baffled her more than where babies came from; Mother wasn’t supposed to know about the diary. The words that were written made her heart throb in her ears, ‘the outside world occasionally knocks, but it is the turrets that answer. They keep you safe, Elsie. Never have them at your back, keep behind them always.’
The next page was full of poorly drawn Superhero logos. Elsie loved action films and had often spoken to her mother about going on their own adventure. But Mother said the same thing every time, “Adventures were for big, strong men. Not little girls and their mothers.” Elsie wasn’t even big enough for a six-year-old girl, never mind a big, strong man. She looked at her reflection in a broken mirror. Pokey, skinny and small, knobbly knees, sharp elbows and hollow cheeks, she sighed.
Raaaaaawwwp. She puffed out her hollow rosy cheeks and wiped a bead of sweat from her freckled forehead. Sweat had even started to seep through her patchwork clothes. A top fashioned from curtains and patchy leggings held up with a belt of string. She knew what she had to do. The hunger couldn’t be fought any longer.
Elsie once loved sleeping with her mother. They used to share a big bed in the bedroom that she could sink right into. The fluffy linen was so soft on her skin and was cool to the touch, but that was then. Elsie now slept on the sofa in the living room where it wasn’t so… smelly.
Raaaaaawwwp. The walk to the bedroom was longer than Elsie had remembered. She breathed through her mouth to try to avoid the stench. At the door, she stopped silent and poked her head around the frame. The room was still relatively tidy, minus the thin layer of dust and the bloated corpse on the floor. It was the smell that was the worst, the smell.
Elsie gritted her baby teeth. The room was dirty to her, so dirty that it could never be clean again. The wallpaper disgusted her, the bed sheets made her gag and the carpet made her dizzy. All of the windows in the bedroom were sealed shut, and had been since the day her father had built the Fortress. The smell of rotting flesh circled the home with no escape, just like the insects.
The maggots were speeding up the decomposition, and created a breeding ground for insects and crawlies not affected by the change that had ruined all the men. Elsie gagged. She pushed the door fully open and stepped over Mother’s bloated body. It moves, she noticed.
Elsie looked at the baby pink blanket covered in cartoon bunnies. She had covered Mother the day she died so she didn’t have to see her eyes. Wet patches had appeared where the body had really started to decompose, and most of the pink was now black with flies. The whole mass underneath moved with the motion of feasting insects, and the smell was unbearable.
She remembered the last conversation they had shared. She asked her mother if her father was nice like the men in the films, or was he now a monster like the others. She could still hear the answer; ‘He was the nicest man you could ever meet and only left us because he had no choice. He was scared, Elsie. He was a man, and evil was in his genes, in his DNA.’
Oak cupboards and wardrobes lined the walls all the way around the room. Elsie skipped over Mother and flitted across to the other side. Even the smell couldn’t deter her hunger. She opened the first cupboard, but found only the fading scent of baked bread that briefly masked the stench of death. She went to the next cupboard, and the one after that and the one after that. She found no tins, no dried food, no water, not a cracker crumb, nothing.
Raaaaaawwwp. The food had run out and Elsie was running on empty. She wondered what Mother would do in this situation and she remembered him - the stranger that came in the dark. He only came when the food was low. Mother must have signaled him somehow, because he hasn’t been since she died.
Their Doctor, Mother called him, the family Doctor. I don’t want him to come.
He was always secretive. Mother would scold her when she tried to steal just a glimpse of him through the bedroom door. Her fear of him grew more and more. Why did Mother warn her about the world and say that men were dangerous, if she let one into the Fortress regularly? He only came at night, dressed from head to toe in dark, dirty rags. Then it dawned on her, he could return any day now, and Mother isn’t here to keep me safe.
The sound of insects chirping outside put Elsie on edge. She realised that there was only one option to survive. She had to leave the Fortress into an evil place, where feral men opened women up just to see why they were different, why they hadn’t changed. Females were sold to farms where they were bred to find a cure and the old and the barren were forced into prostitution. Others were killed simply for fun, and she knew all this at her age.
The world was not a place for a six-year-old girl.
XY is available from www.severedpress.com and Amazon.