Breakable Things, page 5
Frederic shakes his head and spools a tendril of blonde hair around a finger. He grins as he leans forward, audaciously pompous, alive again. Vibrant. “Anyway, I can’t leave until we’ve had coffee at your place. You know that.”
“You will be destitute before that happens.”
“I’ll work,” he declares, without regard for our earlier exchange, arrogance clutched like an emblem of office. “I’m good with my hands. I’m charming. Spent a few years being a barista. I can even make latte art. Hell, I could work here. They look like they could need the help.”
He flutters an emaciated arm, pulling my attention to nothing, to an emptiness haunted by the smell of old ink and even older stories. The tomcat growls his amusement, begins washing his stomach. Frederic lapses again into a quiet, his gaze lamplight-bright, mouth veined with something like happiness.
The texture of the air alters, softens, acquires a moistness that is not entirely unpleasant.
“You should leave.” I tell him between sips of tea, my tongue crusted with sweetness. “There is nothing for you here. There never was.”
“There’s you.” Just a sigh, so soft that it might as well have been imaginary.
My tomcat disentangles from my attentions, dropping onto the cold floor with a yowl of displeasure. Somewhere, someone answers.
I smooth my fingers over my skirt, pick out the wrinkles in the material, before I speak again. “Frederic, tell me a time when I have expressed anything but the desire to be a competent host. Tell me a memory of my lust, or a shy smile that could misconstrued as want. Tell me if I have ever exhibited anything but the ambition to see you gone.”
Slowly, delicately, like a man extricating himself from the sweetest of fantasies, he turns to study my face, his gaze split between here and whatever topography his mind now travels. His smile is radiant and a little wry, one corner of his lips raised as though in farewell. “I can’t. But you haven’t said no, either.”
“I haven’t said yes.”
“All maybes become a yes,” he counters, unctuous as only he can be. “All things are made mutable in—”
His voice stutters, skips. Frederic’s eyes swell and I stretch over the table to close my hands over his own. His skin is dry, salt-dry, bone-dry, stone-dry, dry enough to flake apart, to fall into foam and rot. “Leave.”
“No.”
three
I find him on the rooftop of my apartment complex, disrupting the satellite reception, his longings intertwining with news broadcasting from the ‘60s. Over the last few nights, my face has been replicated on a hundred television screens, contorted by Frederic’s interpretations of rapture. In these visions, he imagines my breasts more colossal than they are, my waist more tapered, my hair longer and straighter, spume-white. In his fantasies, my eyes are rich enough to ransom gods.
“I told you to leave,” I tell him.
The moon fills the sky with blood. Frederic sits in a knot of razorblade limbs, cross-legged, his shoulders like knives straining against skin. He holds a kitten cupped in his hands, a wisp of grey fluff, too small to reason.
“I tried.” He whispers, voice coarse from disuse, feathered with phlegm. “I went to the bus station where we first met but I couldn’t remember what home was. I thought it was north, but the line doesn’t go north. Only to Yian and I am not yet worthy enough to walk even its first bridge. So, I thought about it and I came back, and Mara gave me tea and it tasted sweetly of salt. Like diabetic blood, I guess. Or taffy. Perhaps, taffy.”
Frederic frowns. “I would miss you too much to leave.”
“I would not miss you if you left.”
He only smiles.
I settle down some distance from him and stretch out my arms. The kitten jolts from his embrace into mine, coiling, curling into the crook of my elbow, its body a nest of deep vibrations. I caress her ears and she mewls in reply, eyes circles of pale light. “Can I tell you a story?”
“Yes. Eternity is infinite.”
“Once upon a time, there was a kitten and a boy, both marked by the depth of their color. Together with others, they travelled through the margins of the world, a breeze, never fully touching anything but each other. One day, they came into Ulthar.”
Something is singing. Frederic is singing. It is an old song, a song inked into cartilage and marrow, a cancerous elegy, the death hymn of hares, the eulogy of squids. His voice startles with its beauty, the notes tenderly shaped despite how they abrade his flesh. The music grows wet.
“I’ve watched you make love to yourself. With your hands and your mouth and tail.” Frederic murmurs between stanzas, scuttling closer, crab-like in gait. “I’ve seen us together too. In every position, every shape. They’ve shown me how much you want me.”
I ignore him. “There was an old couple there who took pleasure in the death of cats. Not quick deaths. Slow ones, long and sensual, choked with open arteries and cautious vivisection. They made coats with entrails and fur. They read the stars in the screams.” I sigh. “These days, I think they misunderstood some of those signs they saw.”
I raise my eyes to his. His gaze is moon-bleached, the hue of old bones. “Humans see what they wish to see. I am only your Virgil.”
“You are mine,” he agrees.
“I am not,” I correct. The kitten in my grip hisses her defiance. The choir stiffens and slows, deepening to a hungry rumble. “I never was. I never will be. The same way I was never for the old couple. Not that that stopped them. They were skillful, I will say that. I was alive when they flayed me open. Alive when they opened my gut to find a cure to liver spots and aching bones. But then my boy called to The Joyous Man and he appeared and he asked me what I desired most.”
Frederic’s breath blisters, fever-sweet. “What did you want?”
“What any other creature wants: to live.”
Shadows convulse in the horizon, dividing into slick and clever shapes, to an ocean of eyes. They flit across the rooftops, one after another, on tongueless paws, their ears pinned flat against their scalps. And they are singing, all of them, that prayer we’ve carried from decade to decade, century to century, our psalm to The Joyous Man.
The cats make circles of their bodies, ring upon rings, surrounding us, connecting us. I slide onto my feet, onto claws obsidian-deep, my kitten flouncing away to join the pack. “The problem with man is that he does not know when he is unwanted and that he will do anything to impose his want on another. I have told you to leave twice already. I will tell you again: leave.”
“No.”
It is not ugly, his death. The cats are careful. Frederic sings while they devour him; a new song, his own song, a sweet thing that smells of summer and rosemary. His smile is beatific. As his toes and his calves are winnowed to bone, Frederic leans forward to gather close the tide of velvet bodies and like fish, they nibble at his fingertips. It is only when his stomach has been excavated, abdominal cavity hollowed into a perfect blackness, that he rests onto his back, his arms spread out, as though in imitation of the martyred deity he so loathes.
The cats do not let even one drop of blood escape.
I stay with him until he ceases singing, until two kittens flee with an eyeball each, tattered membranes dripping from delicate jaws. I stay with him until he is gone, dispersed into Ulthar, a new wraith for her coffers.
There are many things that are said of Ulthar, most untrue and some interesting, but it is never said that we are unkind.
the truth that lies under skin and meat
english breakfast, $15.20
Plump sausages laced with spice; black pudding still thick with the taste of copper; bread fried in pools of butter; mushrooms roasted in puddles of butter; baked beans soaked in grease and thinned-out tomato sauce. More butter. A bottle of sour brown sauce.
Like nothing skinny, pretty Molly would normally eat.
Meat was too triggery, Molly used to tell her friends, whenever they asked why she preferred finger-bone slivers of raw carrot to veal, heads of broccoli to lamb brains stewed in an intricate masala sauce; raw things, clean things, vegetal and bloodless. They had laughed. But it is a half-true fact.
Meat isn’t wasn’t triggery.
Meat triggers triggered.
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Last week, he told her everything.
Molly plucked at the seams of the armchair with her short, sharp nails until its stuffing fell out like clumps of hair and skin. Over and over, while her voice held steady and her heart thrashed in its cage of ribs.
“And you let her just… get away?”
“What else did you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Report her—?”
“I can’t. I’ve I told you already. She has a daughter. If she goes to jail, they’re going to give custody to her next of kin: her parents.”
Molly felt a throb of hunger, a loosening of tendons. Under her skin, cells conspired against their veneer of humanity. “So?”
“Her parents are the reason she is the way she is, Molly. I can’t—I can’t do that to an innocent girl.”
Molly swallowed. In her head, the words “innocent girl” were indistinguishable from “meat”.
“Seven years,” he whispered to her. “If you’re going to do anything stupid, promise me you’ll wait seven years before you do anything stupid?” he asked and Molly said yes, okay, even though all of her, bone and blood and brain, ached to disobey.
bottom-shelf whiskey, $125.50
Molly drinks in gulps, not sips, without pleasure, only an inchoate fury. The alcohol glimmers like a fire in her veins, almost enough to distract from the insurrection of her flesh, the mutiny of her marrow. Almost, but not quite.
She drains the first bottle in an hour, orders a second, a third. Halfway through the last, a man approaches, a milquetoast accountant with chins in duplicate, emboldened by booze. She does not protest his company or his conversation, nor does she argue the arm around her waist, the hand on her thigh; not even the smell of him, rank and oily with want.
At the end of the night, he says to her: “Do you want to get out of here?”
And Molly, burning inside the husk of her skin, burning with anger, burning with hate, replies: “Why not?”
room in a two-star hotel behind the bar, free
He lays her out on the white sheets like a bride. His touch is reverent, cautious. His fingers quiver. Molly sighs as he pushes her shirt up.
For a moment, she thinks blearily of giving in, of delighting in his layered softness, his eager attention, the way his mouth, wet and hot and hungry, climbs the rungs of her ribs.
She twists fingers in his damp, thinning curls and he moans as she pulls at him, inhumanly strong. Molly lets one small, sleek smile escape before the change eddies across her, skin and fat sloughing in ripples, dripping gore atop the sheets.
He shrieks, high and thin, even as Molly’s bones rewrite themselves in the language of carnivore lusts, muscles growing long and lupine. Her skull crunches as jaws lengthen into a muzzle, and teeth into knives.
Too late, he attempts to run.
She lunges.
He screams.
entrails, free
He is delicious, meltingly tender from a lifetime of inaction, marbled with broad strokes of fat. Better than wagyu, Molly thinks, as she cracks his sternum like an egg. Better than sex, she sighs, as she pries loose pustulant alveoli. They burst on her tongue, copper-sweet.
She nuzzles between coils of intestines, finds the cooling gelatin of his liver, slurps it down. She has missed this so much. The years, bland, thin into nothingness, replaced by the damp, salty pleasure of fresh offal.
So much better than anything else she has tasted in these last years. Better than this human helplessness. Better than this waiting, this endless counting of the hours and the weeks and the attoseconds until she is free.
private investigator, $598
“She has a daughter,” he says reproachfully. “An eleven-year-old girl who needs her mother.”
The P.I is not a bad man. Molly wouldn’t have contracted him otherwise. He is merely unethical, encumbered with a vein of compassion no amount of money could drain. In a different life, he might have been a hero, a hunter, armored in whaleskin leather and dressed in blades. Not here, though. Where the law defangs, defuses, defeats any instinct but the urge to hunker down and endure.
Molly smiles, shrugs carefully. Her skin feels too tight, the ridges of her vertebrae jagged against the underside of her skin. She is afraid that if she moves too quickly, her epidermis will split, disgorging clumps of muscle and slivers of change-whetted bone, the hair of the accountant from the night before, snarled like yarn in the pit of her belly, a bezoar in infancy.
“I know.”
The P.I hesitates, nails digging into the sheaf of brown folders, held out like temple offerings. She can tell he is second-guessing himself, weighing the consequence of a refund, balancing this month’s rent with a lifetime of guilt.
“I made a promise,” she adds. “A promise to wait seven years.”
He does not ask her why, or what she intends after that statute of seven. Some secrets are best left buried in the earth. Besides, there is something mythic about her proclamation, an officiousness that resonates with his intrinsic humanity, an honesty that borders on religious hypothesis. The P.I., who is really a good man in a terrible world, slumps, suddenly old.
“Seven years?” he asks, and in the echoes of the words, she can hear him beg don’t hurt her, please don’t hurt the girl.
“Seven years,” she lies.
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She calls him again, tells him about the accountant but not the detective, or her roadmap of a woman’s daily rituals, demarcated by activity and hour, the photographs of a little girl with dark, thoughtful eyes.
“It was a mistake,” she says, power writhing like a butterfly trapped beneath her skin.
“You ate him?” he whispers, incredulous. The revelation frightens him.
“The world is better without someone like him.”
His riposte cuts her. “That’s not up to you to say.”
Molly’s anger thumps against the cup of her skull, a warning she can’t quite define, full of thunder, full of danger, full of rot. Her mouth thins and her blood grows hot. She runs her tongue over sharp teeth that are no longer short.
“He was just meat,” she tells him, still blood-drunk, still warm from the fat she suckled from the accountant’s breast. “A wastrel. No one will miss him.”
“What you’re doing is not right.”
She chokes on his defense, on the memory of his defense, of all the times he’d prescribed life to the undeserving, of all the times he had told her to sit, sit, stay, good girl, stay. For a moment, she loathes him.
“It’s not like I can get caught.”
It is a truth. There can be no case without evidence, no arrest without a body to put on display.
“That’s not the point.”
Molly pauses.
“Is it because you’re scared I’d hurt her?”
“No. It has nothing to do with that.”
“Liar!” She screams, throat throbbing with the impulse to change. “It has everything to do—”
“It has everything to do with you. We talked about this. We talked about what the change does to—”
“You’re afraid this means I’ll find her and that I’ll hurt her.”
“No, but—”
“Yes.” She thumps her fist against the wall. The concrete flakes. “Yes. It’s exactly that. And I know… I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me to think about the girl, about her daughter, about that stupid, useless child that will do nothing but grow up and consume and take and—”
“And what if she grows up to become someone compassionate, someone who understands pain, someone who changes the world, someone worthy?” A shivering breath. “She didn’t hurt me. It wasn’t right. What she did. But she didn’t hurt me and her daughter shouldn’t suffer for this, regardless.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No, it’s exactly the point. This is not your story.”
Molly freezes.
He continues, relentless. “This is not your story. This is mine. You understand that, right? And I am choosing to let this go. Why can’t you?”
Rage blisters her vision. The phone smashes when it hits the wall, geysering electronics; motherboard shards and bits of plastic like shattered finger-bones lodged in her teeth.
kitchen knife, $5.60
She buys a dozen, even though they’re nowhere near sharp enough, intended for the softest cuts, the simplest meals.
But she doesn’t mind. They are only for show.
rope, masking tape, plastic bags, $21.50
“It’s a serial killer’s shopping list!” The clerk laughs nervously.
Molly does not correct him.
taxi ride, free
The money he quotes is more than she would have ever paid for a cab, but she endures the cost the way she tolerates the driver’s advances. When they arrive, she devours him whole—an appetizer, a prelude.
retribution, one relationship
She thinks about sending him an ear, a skin graft taken from a porcelain cheek, a bone strung on a loop of black rope.
She thinks about sending him a picture.
As she sits licking pancreatic juices from her fingertips, Molly thinks about many things, but mostly how much she’ll miss the tobacco-warmth of his scent, the weight of his arm about her shoulders, the years that will never happen, the price of vengeance.
In the end, she does nothing at all. This was not for him, after all. This was for her.
