Suspended In Dusk (31 page)

Baxter jumped out of bed and ran to the boy’s side. He couldn’t get a hold of him as the boy’s body shook and writhed. Blood coated the boy’s arms, made it impossible to get a grip.

“Someone help me! Get some help!”

The kids stayed on their beds, grins tight over their faces as they watched the boy buck in his own blood on the floor.

“What’s wrong with you people?” Baxter jumped to his feet and ran out the door. The night air chilled him, turned the blood on his hands cold. “Help! We need help!”

An owl hooted above him, but no other sound came besides bugs and wind.

“Randy!
Help us!
”

He ran around the camp, passing cabins and banging on doors. Nobody answered.

“Hello?
There’s a goddamn hurt kid over here!
”

He rounded a corner, and finally found a cabin with lights on inside. Shadows moved in the windows, and as Baxter ran toward it, the sound of voices and laughter became audible.

He burst through the door without knocking. “Someone’s in trouble! We need—”

The counselors. All of them. Naked.

They danced, laughed, sipped from plastic cups, smoked from glass pipes. They stopped their dance and watched Baxter enter the room.

“What the fuck you want, fat ass?” Kyle said from the corner. He stood and unveiled the female counselor that had been under him, her legs spread wide. Kyle’s glistening penis pointed at Baxter, bounced as Kyle walked toward him.

“One of the k-kids. He… he needs help. He’s bleeding badly.”

“Another bleeder. There’s always at least a couple of ‘em,” one of the other counselors said, then sucked on a pipe and blew the cloud of smoke toward Baxter.

Kyle stood in front of Baxter, grabbed the pipe from the other counselor, and put it to his lips. He blew the smoke directly into Baxter’s face, stinging his eyes and inducing a round of coughs. Kyle held the pipe out and offered it to Baxter. “Go ahead, lard ass. We won’t tell.”

They all laughed, continued their party as if all was well.

“Did you hear me?
We need help!
”

Kyle’s fist smashed into the middle of Baxter’s face.

Baxter felt his nose crack under the force of the knuckles, and his body hit the ground as his legs gave out from under him. Stars sparkled at the edge of his vision as blood rushed from his nostrils and into his mouth.

Bursts of laughter were barely audible behind the ringing in his ears. Kyle stood over him, his erection still at full salute. He raised his fist again, and Baxter covered his head with shaking arms.

“Leave him alone!”

Baxter recognized Randy’s voice. His spirits rose, hoping Randy would end this craziness and help him. Baxter sat up, wiped the blood from his face, and searched the room for the head counselor.

Randy stood at the opposite end of the room, also fully nude, his body covered in coarse black hair. He stared at Kyle with disgust on his face.

“He made his choice. You don’t touch him, you know the fucking rules.”

Kyle backed away to his corner where he hopped back on top of the girl. Within seconds, his hips were thrusting and the girl was moaning. Through all the pain in his face, Baxter’s pants began to tighten.

Randy stepped past the counselors and held his hairy hand out. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

Baxter took his hand and stood. His nose throbbed and his mouth was coated with blood. Randy pulled Baxter toward the rear of the cabin, away from the front door.

“A boy needs help. We have to get him some help.”

Randy turned his head. “We can’t help him.”

“But he’s bleeding––”

“You need to see something, Baxter. You weren’t supposed to see it yet, but you have to see it now.”

His grip tightened around Baxter’s hand as they entered a room. As soon as they walked in, Baxter felt a sense of well-being, like nothing bad could ever happen to him. The room was dark except for multiple black lights hanging from the ceiling. A slurping sound came from somewhere.

“What is this?” Baxter said, unable to stop smiling.

“It’s our mother. She’s feeding.”

They walked toward the center of the room where a soft whimpering could be heard between the slurps.

A creature sat cross legged on the ground, tentacles writhing from its torso, its pebbled skin glowing blue under the black lights. A long straw protruded from its featureless head, the other end stuck into the stomach of a girl. The black girl who had stood behind him in line earlier that day.

“What’s happening to her?”

“Mother is relieving her. Taking away her burden. She is merely cattle, Baxter. You shouldn’t worry about her.”

The creature slurped mouthfuls of fat as its tentacles waved in the air with delight. As Baxter stared, he realized that Randy was right. A creature this beautiful, this magnificent, deserved it. The girl was nothing. The boy bleeding back at the cabin was nothing.

“She’s wonderful,” Baxter said.

“We want you to join us, Baxter.”

“Join you?”

“With a kiss and an embrace from Mother, you’ll live forever. We want you to join our family, Baxter.”

The creature slurped once more, then a tentacle reached up and pulled the straw from the girl’s body. Baxter saw that the straw was attached to Mother’s face, and she retracted it into her mouth where it disappeared behind thick, bulbous lips. The girl lay unconscious before Mother, a small giggle escaping her lips. The gaping wound in her belly dripped yellow and pink globs onto the floor.

“She’s ready for you, Baxter.”

The creature’s tentacles opened, as if welcoming Baxter for a hug, a soft cooing sound tickling his eardrums. He stripped off his clothes and climbed into Her warm embrace.

“I love you, Mother.”

* * *

“But we drove all this way, honey,” Mom said.

“I know, and I’m sorry, but I love it here. Can’t you see it’s working?” Baxter spun, showing his slimmer body to his parents.

“You look great, son,” Dad said. “I say we let him stay. It couldn’t hurt.”

Mom hesitated, then smiled, reached out to Baxter and ran her fingers through his messy hair. “Fine. I guess this is why we brought you here in the first place.”

“Exactly,” Baxter said.

“You like it that much?”

“It’s wonderful.” A toothy grin spread across his face. “I could stay here forever.”

Quarter Turn to Dawn

Sarah Read

Andrea drank, and savored the sweet toxins.
The ocean is a toilet,
she thought
. A vast fucking toilet where a trillion creatures shit every day and Mother Nature flushes away her unwanted pets. Still. Can’t beat the view.

She pulled the crepe umbrella from her rum and stuck it in her hair, too drunk to remember she’d done that with the last few—a bright, boozy tiara pinned down her salt-stiffened brown curls.

The waiter, Santino, continued to bring drinks, on the house, crowding them onto the small table by her deck chair.
He’s probably hoping I’ll black out before the police are done and the reporters move in. Maybe I won’t remember a thing in the morning.
But his eyes were warm as he winked at her and grinned.

Rob’s voice carried from the lobby, a tight throaty tone to it that the police wouldn’t know meant
back the fuck off
. Another few minutes of questions and they’d learn the hard way, like she had. She rubbed at the sore lump under her hair.

The trip was supposed to fix everything—get away for a while, get to know each other again. It had been a bad idea.
Better off not knowing.
Still. Can’t beat the view
.

She had let her glass sit too long. Fine black silt settled in it, clung to the tops of ice cube rafts, and stuck to her teeth so that they crunched when she clenched her jaw. Best to keep the glass tipped, let the ash fall on the bottom. The empties, their bases full of ice in various stages of melt, were fogged with ash.

The sunset over the sea, through the haze, cast a brilliant red glow over the beach. Coastal officers swarmed over the sand, hauled wreckage, and lined narrow black bags along the shore. The palm leaf-coated nylon awning, collapsed on one side, formed a lean-to over the deck that blocked her view of the street where flashing lights and sirens whizzed past. Footfalls crunched on broken glass behind her. Rob stepped through the frame where the glass door used to be.

She squeezed her eyes shut and felt the sting of the sharp grit collected in the corners, felt the horrible pull of his stare on the back of her head.

Rob pulled a toppled deck chair back onto its legs, dragged it through the glass to her side, and dropped into it. A wooden slat from the back clattered to the deck.

“They’re leaving. I told them what you saw. I guess they’ll match it up with whatever they find down there,” he said, shaking his hand at the beach.

“You told them what I saw?”

“Well, yeah. I told them what you thought you saw. What you thought it looked like.”

“They were swimming.”

“Those wrecks are old. You’re not even supposed to swim close enough to see the bodies. Have some respect. And you’ve been drunk, like, all day.” He bounced his left leg on the ball of his foot, rapidly, shaking the dilapidated frame of the deck.

“I have
not
been drunk all day. And my O2 tank was full. When that boat moved—”

“The
Fenix
.”

“When it turned over and started coming up, there were people swimming out of it.”

“They were probably just sharks.”

“They had faces. Some had
hair
. Are you telling me sharks have hair, Rob?”

The bouncing leg sped up. “No, what I’m telling you is—” The chair joints creaked and unfolded, and dumped him onto the scattered shards of glass.

Andrea’s body shook with restrained laughter; a cloud of fine ash rose from her shoulders.

Rob pulled himself off the deck. His ash-smeared white linen Bermuda shorts were now speckled with blood. He plucked at shards, swearing, face as red as the smoke-cloaked sun.

Andrea snorted and choked on the grit in her throat.

“Fuck you,” he said, and flipped the small side table. Her collection of glasses flew into the awning. “And quit drinking. I’m not carrying your drunk ass to safety if there’s an aftershock, or if that mountain blows again.”

“What about the dead people?”

“Jesus Christ, what about them?” He pushed his hands through his hair, flashing the white line of scalp where the fake orange of the tanning lotion hadn’t reached.

“Will you carry my ass to safety from them?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Why did I even bring you here?” His flip-flops slapped at his heels as he stomped back into the hotel lobby.

“To fuck me,” she said, and took another drink.

Probably going to try and get his money back,
she thought,
as if it’s the hotel’s fault the country is trying to shake itself off the map.

She pushed herself out of the chair and stumbled down the sloping deck to the railing.

Fire trucks lined the beach and aimed their floodlights at the work crews. A hulk of rusty metal and twisted wood had been hauled up onto the sand, dragged from the shallows where it had resurfaced in the quake. Figures in reflective jackets swarmed the wreck, pulling apart old seams and draining pockets of brackish water.

The line of narrow, slick, black bags stretched beyond the reach of light.

Andrea shivered. The sun was gone—just a red glow left on the water. She turned, steadied herself on the railing, and climbed back into the hotel.

The whir of generators around the lobby drowned out the rising tide of commotion that washed up on the shore.

* * *

Rob slept facedown on the bed, above the covers, his blood-speckled butt bare to the room. If he’d shown any sign of humor, she’d have spanked him. Instead, she pulled a crepe umbrella from her hair and slipped it between his cheeks. He snorted.

The ice bucket full of water sloshed when Andrea set it on the floor. She pulled the sink plunger up and filled the basin from the bucket. The washcloth turned grey from the ash she scrubbed from her face. Salt crumbled from her swimsuit as she peeled it off and stepped into soft cotton shorts. She pulled on a tank top Rob had given her that said ‘BITCH’ across her tits. A ‘token of affection’. She wore it because he thought she wouldn’t.

Her fingers caught in the tangles of her hair as she tried to tame the curls. She pulled it back into a knot and a small red barb of coral tumbled from a curl. The coral’s sharp tine sunk into her thumb as she retrieved it from the floor.

The pain was slow to travel to her foggy brain. She pressed the cut to her lips, soothed it with her tongue, and tossed the barb in the toilet.