Sip Page 10

  Ultimately, the body is coughed up by the gulf, spat onto the beach sand, dead to the world.

  The wheelbarrow pusher goes to him.

  He removes his wet clothes.

  “Too big for me,” he says, but he keeps them anyway, because maybe he’ll grow. He folds them and sets them in his barrow beside a dull hunting knife he recently plucked out of a tree trunk. The notion strikes him. “What could they trade for legs?” He shrugs. He grasps the knife handle, goes to the dead man. He sets into his hips to disjoint the legs, each dull passing of the blade hacking gruesome noise, deep, dark blood spilling to the sand. A horrid clipping of tendons. Leaning his heft to throw the socket out.

  When he has each one freed, he hoists Drummond’s legs on his load. He smiles at his work. He knows where he’s going.

  The Town of Lost Souls

  The town’s history was uncertain, but what it had become was a sort of squatter camp for wastrels and profligates. There existed, on its perimeter, felled and molested signage which reported the population of the place to be 8,231, but that was civilizations ago, and most likely the true number of residents was around one hundred. This odd horde mostly dwelled in a derelict district of brick buildings set along eight streets, four running in each direction, and there seemed a sort of roving order amongst them that fluctuated based on the stages of the moon, which dictated the behavior of the inhabitants. This place, sometimes called The Town of Lost Souls, ran on Darwinian logic, and the only discernible structure to their lives revolved around a machine housed in a park at the town’s center. Produced daily from beneath a tarp of canvas, the machine was an abomination of science and nature. Fitted with hoses that ran back to baths of blood, the contraption was little more than a life support that maintained limbs which were fetched back for it. Mostly, the thing housed legs, which dangled from a crossbar that they were fixed to with hooks, tied into the circuitry of the system with hoses that seemed red, but were in actuality see through, filled with blood. These appendages drooped from their housings, live nerves fidgeting meekly. Barefoot, the toenails of them grew yellow and wicked. The wounds, where they’d been hacked from bodies at the thighs and shoulders, were wrapped in gauze that discolored with plasma. A stench of crude antiseptic, iron, and sweat wafted from them. The few arms that were hooked into the device had hands that would open and close at random, the sound of this happening curious and alarming.

  Like all things, these limbs aged and had to be replaced at intervals. This degeneration was much faster than the life of normal arms and legs. The oldest leg dangling at any time might have been on the machine two years. For a compensation, the citizenry of the encampment would retrieve new limbs to supplant those that looked on their way out. This exchange for a wage happened intermittently and was handled by a mustached fellow with indurate eyes, who governed over these transactions sternly. He wore a vest with shallow pockets he kept his knuckles tucked into. He had a pencil behind his right ear. He cleared his throat, tongued his teeth. Didn’t look folks in the eyes unless they deserved it. They called him Doc, though he never healed anyone.

  At the start of the day, a hermit brought him two legs.

  “Why’d you bring me both?” Doc asked. The legs had been wrapped in spent fabric that a stiff wind could blow bits off of.

  “For trade.” There was a spooky character to the leg holder’s eyes, a shellfish quality to his teeth.

  “This is a fickle beast we got here,” Doc said. “What it chooses to support and what it lets die on the hooks is beyond me and I wouldn’t tax the thing to take on two of the same risks.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re a moron, but I’m a patient man, so allow me to illuminate: some legs don’t make it. We hook them up, and then they die.” Doc palmed one of the odd man’s pilfered legs. “If this leg gets hooked in and dies,” he caressed the other, “this one would surely perish as well.”

  “But if it lives,” the stranger quibbled, “there’d be two new legs.”

  “Do you have a method of ascertaining the chances of that? Are you an actuary in this regard? Is there some math, some data, some figure you could present to me on the matter that would persuade me to chance making a payment for two limbs from the same stock to burden my machine with supporting?”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Monroe!” said Doc, and a broad figure of a man appeared from behind the machine. “How often do we buy two legs from the same donor?”

  “Never.” Monroe said.

  “Never,” said Doc now looking into the man’s face. “That’s known protocol to those who operate in this camp. But you’re new here.”

  “Been around a bit,” the hermit said, but he’d only showed up that morning, straying the streets analyzing the crude society, sort of peeking around corners cautiously. He had seen a pack of wild-shaped men set upon a young boy in some building’s entry, strip him of his clothes, chase him naked down the streets, howling at him.

  “Been around a bit?” Doc mocked. “I’ll give you shadow rights for a week on the one leg, and I’ll give you lodging for three day’s duration at my inn.”

  “Shadow rights?”

  “I don’t haggle,” Doc said.

  The leg holder didn’t know what to make of it, but Doc took his pencil from his ear, marked a card, called out, “Monroe.” He gave the marked card to him. “Get this man set up.”

  Doc was a kind of governor to the entirety of those eight streets. His chief concern was the machine and the maintenance of it and the profit it provided him, the power it gave him over the town. There was no set monetary standard he held allegiance to. He let those who came to sip shadows propose how he’d be compensated. But beyond the trinkets and knickknacks he’d take in trade, he demanded a kind of blind allegiance from his customers. In that encampment he moved and manipulated most endeavors with little more than his expression. Folks watched to see how he took things. They didn’t want to be cut off from the machine. Doc’s emotions were considered fragile, and everyone wanted to please him. He had the magic quality manipulative people achieve—he could make you feel like you were the true reason air existed, or he could make you feel like your whole life was some misuse of molecules.

  As the machine’s master, each evening, whether or not all the shadows had been consumed from each limb, he’d order a switch on the thing to be flipped. The blood slowed to a stall. The limbs wriggled and fidgeted, kicked and punched. When they were all still, essentially dead, the switch was thrown again. The blood flowed. The limbs reanimated. The process brought their shadows back to them.

  They were ready for the next day.

  Unlucky Clover

  The jail in The Town of Lost Souls was most likely antiquated before shadow addiction spoiled the world. It probably didn’t function in any capacity beyond lending a kind of curiosity to those who ventured to visit it—a museum of sorts that people would tour so as to see how criminals used to be treated. In its current incarnation it served as a makeshift depository for Doc’s goods. There were two cells, both in use but for severely different reasons. In one cell, Doc kept the things he considered dear: gold artifacts perchance, taxidermied species of note, weaponry of forgotten civilizations. In the other cell, he kept Joe Clover. It was out of spite he kept him.

  In that cell, no sunlight shone. The misery this brought Clover set him about to whine and wallow. He had naught but his nudity to keep him entertained, and he wanted his shadow the way babies want warmth.

  From the streets you could hear him moaning piteously. Because of this, they called him Unlucky Clover, and Doc made certain his presence was known. Clover was the only man who’d ever tried to upset Doc’s proprietorship of the machine, and Doc used Clover’s punishment as a cautionary tale to any who might chance something so stupid again.

  Clover’d been held captive for weeks. When he firs
t came in, he had hair down past his ass, but after a day or so in his cell, he’d made to hang himself with a rope he fashioned from the stuff—opting for death rather than a forced sobriety.

  They found him dangling, near blue, and Doc had his minions hack his hair off to prevent another such attempt. They kept his cell empty, Joe Clover naked. His sloppy-butchered hair made him look like an overgrown orphan.

  Doc liked to come in and watch Clover sulk. Liked to see him gross in his cage. He’d look down at the wreckage and chide him. “Sorensen says when you lift a rock, you do not find a preexisting shadow.”

  “Who the fuck is Sorensen?”

  “Roy Sorensen. A shadow expert before all this went down. My father’s favorite writer. A philosopher and great thinker, the antithesis of you.”

  “How long you gonna hold me?”

  “Indefinitely.”

  Clover had tried to starve himself to death but wasn’t strong enough a person. Doc had brought him steak and potatoes. The steak was cut before it was passed in, wrapped in paper. He gave him a plastic cup of grapefruit moonshine.

  “What did you even think would happen?” Doc asked.

  Clover’s hair was freshly butchered and he was a bit loose on grapefruit moonshine. “Fuck you mean think would happen?”

  “Do you remember any of it? Leading up to the cage?”

  The smell of rust from the bars of the jail cell. The blight smell of moonshine. The smell of stagnant water from Clover’s commode. Clover’s mind filled with grainy thoughts and dissolving half recollections. If he thought too long on any memory, it crumbled. He faintly flashbacked to pushing Doc down from behind. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t?” Doc looked around at the jail.

  Clover sipped his moonshine. “Give me some more of this.” He drained his cup, handed it to Doc.

  “Sure,” said Doc. He took the empty cup from Clover and tossed it to the ground. “Soon as hell turns to pudding pie.”

  “Asshole.”

  “You know how many shadows a person has?” Doc spoke at Clover as though addressing excrement.

  Clover eyed the ground where his false-light shadow lay. “Depends.”

  “No it doesn’t” said Doc. “You have exactly none. Sometimes you cast a shadow, but Sorensen says a hole made by an object is never part of that object. See, light travels in straight lines. Do you know why you’re in a cage?”

  “Sure,” said Clover, “it’s because you’re a crazy shithead.”

  “Nope,” said Doc, “my mental state’s beside the point.” He stuck a hand through the jail bars, sort of waved it. “It’s because of this here space between the bars. Otherwise, you’d be in a box.”

  “Hysterical.”

  “Suck the space out.”

  “What?”

  “From the cage,” said Doc. “Suck it out. Make it a box.”

  Clover grimaced. He brushed against the jail bars. Rusty iron things, textured like tree limbs, nearly. “Can’t be done, fucker.”

  Doc held up a finger. “I’m inclined to agree with you, except I’ve seen you do such a thing. No one has a shadow. People cast shadows. That is to say, your shape cuts a hole in the light. Drops darkness on some terminus in the approximation of your figure.”

  “Shadows ain’t holes, dipshit.”

  “They most certainly are. Absences of light. The way flute holes are absences of flute. We’ve just given them a name. You ever hear of a transplant?”

  “A what?”

  “For amputees? Before the world turned to shit, they could do it. Take an arm from one person, put it on another. Or a leg. Or a finger.”

  “You been in the sun too long dinking with your machine. You’ve lost your mind.”

  “How would one go about that? Losing your mind? You can’t cut the thing off me. You can’t transplant it like an arm.”

  “You ain’t even making sense.”

  “If we took your arm, and put it on my body, would I be guilty for all the wrongs you did with that arm?”

  “What?”

  “If somehow your mind took sanctuary in my skull, would it be a sin to execute my body on account of the crimes your mind did prior?”

  Clover closed his eyes.

  “What part of us makes us us?” Doc asked. “The arms and legs out there? On my machine. With the right tools, I could make them anybody. Are they only objects then? Like hats or pants?”

  Joe Clover grabbed his junk. “If you ever get done talking,” he said, “feel free to suck my dick.” He wallowed off to a corner of his cell.

  “Guess I’m done,” said Doc. “But if your dick ever ends up in my mouth, I’ll make it an object to suck shadow from. I’ll dangle it from my machine.”

  The Trip toward Town

  The night before they left, Mira had a look at Bale’s feet. He had his boots kicked off, sat back in a recliner. She stood in front of him, cradled a foot against her waist. The soles of the things were sullen black, direful. “I don’t know how you can stand to walk around like this.”

  Bale lifted his chin, refined his gaze on her. “Must be all the years of dish washing.”

  Mira set the one foot down, lifted the other. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Oh no,” Bale said, “it’s a tough gig.”

  Murk rubbed his stump. “I fucking hate washing dishes.”

  Bale leaned forward toward Murk, the crown of his Mohawk aimed at him. “I’d wash for ten hours every day. They’d come in in cartfuls. Bowls and spoons we ate rations off of. They kept the wash water so hot it made your hands fall apart.” He opened a palm toward Mira and she touched it. “Feels like shit, right?”

  She shook her head.

  “Out here’s been the easiest my life has ever been. Which is funny because back in school they made soldiers sound like immortal things. All you do is stand around pointing a gun at shit. Washing dishes takes a hero by comparison. Even hauling the tracks. No big deal. It’s all easy compared to dish washing.”

  “All of it’s easy?” Mira said.

  “Sure. The walk to town will be nothing. How far is it anyhow?”

  “It’ll take a day and some.”

  “Will your mom be all right alone that long?”

  “Gotta be,” said Mira. “I’ll do something I haven’t done in a while.”

  In the morning, Mira led a goat from its pen and into the sun. She whispered some words at it, apologies mostly. She knew the thing was dying regardless—eventually it would be food. Mira would bind its hind legs and run a knife across its jugular, hang it from a tree branch above a bowl to catch its blood. Something in this, though, felt darker. It was a fouler molestation, perhaps akin to rape. The taking of a thing’s shadow was felt in a different and dirty way. Animals seemed embarrassed by it. Afterwards, they’d trot off—or amble in whatever manner they maneuvered in—and look at Mira accusingly. They’d seem spooked, badgered.

  In her whispering way, once it was done, she’d apologize again. It was the case with this nanny kid. She arched her back and bucked off a ways.

  It did hurt, the thing said.

  Hurt? said Mira, of course none of this actually with words.

  Maybe not quite.

  Mira led the thing back to its pen, walked into where her mother sat, huddled in her agony, oddly draped in dark. Mira lowered to her, breathed into her lips. Once swallowed, her mother gave her an odd expression, but then she was asleep.

  They packed food and water, some blankets and matches. Bale made to bring his rifle.

  “I like where your head’s at,” said Murk. “But that thing would give us away. Not many people have those out here. We show up to town with it, every eye will be on us. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I’d say there’s at least a hundred there. Even if those are magic, five-people-killing bullet
s there’ll be plenty of folks leftover pissed ’bout what we done to their friends. So, we leave it here, it don’t help us at all, but we bring it and it don’t help us enough for the attention it calls to us.”

  Bale patted his rifle, reluctantly set it aside.

  They walked for hours. They had divvied up the weight of their provisions, sharing the load.

  “Did we bring a rope?” Murk asked.

  “No one’s fucking flying you,” Mira said.

  On and on they went—the slow steps and the drudged task of taking them.

  “Back in the dome,” Bale said, “I would’ve killed to get to walk this much.”

  “Now?”

  “I’d kill to get carried.”

  “Wanna piggy back?” Mira asked.

  “Serious?”

  “Of course not.”

  A deer ran across the glade.

  “Did y’all have pets at all?”

  “We had some stuff in aquariums we could go look at. Aside from that, there were roaches and rats and things like that. Cats that didn’t really belong to anyone. Geckos. I tried to keep one of those once but I tore off his tail holding it and then looking at the thing just made me feel bad.”

  “What’d you do with it after that?” Murk asked.

  “Put it in the trash. I think.”

  “So you all took showers together?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Boys and girls same time?” Mira asked.

  “Nah. They split us up.”

  “And you’d just be together all the time? Must be weird being with that many people who’ve seen you naked.”

  “I’ve seen you naked,” said Murk.

  “When?”

  “When I did.”

  “Recent?”

  “Recent enough that you had titties and kitty feathers.”

  “Well you don’t count anyhow, and you’re just one. If it was hundreds, that’d be a different thing.”