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Surrounded on all sides by looming boxes of glass and steel, the Petrichoral Parks of Glottage formed a sudden depression in the city’s towering and angular skyline, like a collapsed chest. They had been a part of the city since its inception, a flat, marshy stretch of land which, no matter how many sacrifices were thrown into its depths, could not be appeased into being built upon. No matter how many times the Slag King attempted to pave over the seeping wetland the waters would rise and the ground would open its great earthen maw and every trace of scaffolding would be subsumed - nothing left behind but the rain rich reek of petrichor.
The developers gave up and built around it, and in time people became attached to the festering wilderness at the city’s heart. They began to flock like seagulls to its edge, haggling over the boats of merchants who’d harnessed its meandering waters to sell their wares. But, while the markets were a success, but the marsh itself, muddy and unusable to all but the criminals willing to seek refuge in its reeds, remained a blight. So, the city planners pivoted. If the land could not be built upon, it could at least be tamed.
Calling down the divine wrath of - well - herbicide, Glottage stripped the marsh bare and, once the piles of fetid rot were cleared away, seeded the dead earth with new and more pleasing life. Where once had been a sinking muck of sedge and reeds now lay a grand pastoral garden; a great stretch of grass dotted with artificial clusters of oaks and meticulously pruned shrubbery, nothing remaining of the wetland but the canals that wove through it like veins through a shattered heart.
Deep within that park, surrounded by the dappled light of the late afternoon sun, Adjudicator Shrue was sat on a bench, staring bleakly down at a pastrami sandwich like it wanted them dead.
They’d spent the day drowned in meetings, smiling and shaking hands and spinning metaphor after meaningless metaphor as they served themself up on a silver platter, and had managed to reach that incomprehensibly stupid stage of hunger denoted by incurable nausea - where your body is paradoxically both screaming at you to eat and also kindly informing you that all foodstuffs within a 5 kilometre radius are unquestionably poison. But they had work to do, and in order to work they needed to do something about their trembling fingers.
Trepidatiously, they raised the sandwich to their mouth and bit off a small chunk. It was curiously tasteless, betraying none of the flavour signified by the bright hues of the meat and vegetables that lay atop it. Which was … fine, honestly.
Shrue chewed morosely, watching pedestrians stroll past from their secluded place in the shade. A surreal performance of ‘rightness’ was being put on here. A confident insistence that “everything was just as it should be” rung out from every polished briefcase that paced casually by exactly the same as they always had done. As if the newly drafted weren’t being carted away like human chattel mere streets away.
But it wasn’t difficult to be convinced by the self-assurance of these suited passersby, here in this secluded square of green at the centre of the city. It was easy to feel cut off from reality here, boxed in on all sides by the thick trees that lined the park's edge and blocked the street from view. There were no air shelter advertisements, and fewer deluded propaganda posters proselytising the strength of the Peninsula. The grass remained a perfect god-blessed emerald through all the erratic seasons, the leaves fell just as they had always done. Slick and serene as it split the sky, the gleaming glass church of the Saint Electric towered to their left. A billboard on its side read: “The Church Electric: Keeping Glottage Going.”
Because what else could one do, but keep going?
The sandwich had disintegrated into a thick paste which settled into the cracks of their molars like glue. They swallowed, washing it down with a sip of coffee, and felt the lump slide down their oesophagus, coming to rest uncomfortably within their hollow stomach. The feeling unsettled Shrue, a stolid glutinous other suddenly occupying the space beneath their ribs.
Their sandwich was, in every sense of the word, mediocre; layers of gelid cold cuts and watery lettuce clasped between two over-processed pillows of saccharine white bread. But it was a testament to modern industry that, even now, at the very peak of this war, Shrue could so easily purchase such a sandwich. How many people had helped to produce this convenience that they mindlessly consumed? How many lives had converged just so they could sit here and chew on cheap bread because, yet again, they’d neglected to consider that hunger was an unfortunate reality of being human before walking out the door in the morning?
How many lives had been sacrificed for their comfort?
Unease curdled in Shrue’s gut, and a sour burst of pre-emptive saliva flooded their mouth. They winced, swallowing hard as they fought back the guilty nausea climbing up their throat, then glared furiously down at the offending stack of bread and meat, jaw clenched tight in aggravation.
They would not allow themself to feel guilty for the things they could not change. They couldn’t.
Shrue took another determined bite, raising the sandwich to their mouth mechanically, barely tasting the food as they ground it into a paste under their molars. Swallowing. Biting again. Chewing like a cow on cud.
They threw the wrapper into the bin with no small sense of relief.
If the war had sparked any camaraderie between the parasites that made their nests in the winding halls of the Moridame, it had united them against Shrue.
This did not come as a surprise to the Adjudicator; their position against the war had already made them the subject of considerable distrust prior to its enactment. Now that the Linger’s god-rockets were tearing their way across the territory, Shrue had been met with even more scepticism. “If they didn’t believe in the strength of this great country,” murmured those crawling chitinous things, “then why were they so insistent on leading it? Wasn’t it suspicious, that an Adjudicator would be so outspoken at a time when they all needed to present a unified front?”
Ever since that first CenSec meeting, that suspicion had devolved into full blown derision. Shrue was an embarrassment to their peers, a severed limb that hadn’t quite noticed it was dead and still wriggled obscenely on the ground, animated by a few remaining sparks of nervous activity. A triumph of dogged motor function over sense.
It wasn’t that they were being openly ridiculed. Long past were the days of schoolyard bullying, of puerile name-calling and split lips. No, it was subtler than that. That ever-present mask of legislative decorum stayed tightly fixed to the faces of their peers as they passed Shrue by - but they always passed them by. No one spoke to them, no one met their eyes. The only acknowledgement of their presence came in the tittering that rose in the air around Shrue as they made their way back to the solitude of their office, a nasty rasping hum like the thronging of insects, and in its cessation when they turned to face the source.
As they paced harriedly back towards their office, Shrue tightened their grip on the leather straps of their bag, pulling it close to their body. They were not fleeing, they told themself. Their frenetic journey across the tile was simply in aid of productivity. Evidence of a readiness to get on with things, and nothing more.
There was nothing they could do about it, at any rate. No plea they could make, no teacher they could complain to. That would only be an admission of defeat, more exposed flesh for the hounds to sink their teeth into. If Shrue wanted to be taken seriously, they had to be the bigger person and rise above this petty mockery. Outrage only invited more ridicule, quick to be labelled childish, reactionary and above all else unreasonable.
There were so many stories littered up and down the Peninsula of raving prophets and boys who called wolf. They always went the same way. An outsider, ostracised from their people for some past transgression, would be graced with a holy warning, a vision of some apocalyptic disaster about to swallow their town. Accordingly, the unlucky soul would race from their hermitage to warn their people, exploding out of the underbrush in a tangle of hair and scratched limbs only to be met with disbelief. Their past impropriety, their otherness and their panicked raving all worked fatally against them. They could not honestly expect that the rational cultured townsfolk they attempted to communicate with would take them seriously. After all, these people had paid their dues. They’d fed their gods. What did they have to worry about?
The prophet was never able to save them.
In some versions, they would watch from higher ground as the flood swept through the valley below before staggering off into the forest. In others, they’d stay doggedly behind, spurred on by the hope that they could just get through to their people if only they screamed a little louder, and would simply be the last bobbing head dragged below the surface. Invariably, they would end alone.
It was a parable about the dangers of leaving the herd, the consequences of crowning yourself anathema, but as a child Shrue had also taken it as a lesson in communication. Because, if only the prophet had explained themself better - more clearly articulated the issue instead of debasing themself with hysterics. Then the townsfolk might have been saved. In order to be listened to, you needed to be someone that others could respect.
It was a lesson they’d carried with them all their life.
But respectability had become a cage, a construct of cold iron and bit-tongue blood that kept the gnashing jaws outside at bay. It kept them safe, separated from the beasts that snapped at its bars, but they were trapped within its confines. Day by day its walls grew closer, encircling Shrue in a vice-like embrace like the barbed wire angels that stalked the coasts of their territory. Leave, and they’d be swallowed. Stay, and they’d be crushed.
They closed the door to their office behind them, sealing themself behind its heavy wooden door. Thin light trickled through the curtained windows, filtering through motes of dust that reminded Shrue of the numerous employee cuts they’d taken as the war dragged on. It wasn’t just cleaning staff either. Slowly but surely their team had dwindled to a scant handful of advisors, a skeleton crew. One day the faces had been there, faxing documents, filing reports, and then they’d just blinked out.
A pile of fresh briefs lay on their desk, dark ink still drying on cream-white paper. They were stacked neatly, beautifully even, set in a perfect rectangle atop the mahogany and gently backlit by the light from the window. They were emblematic of everything this country had wanted to be. They were an omen of its death.
Shrue did not immediately move to read the papers on their desk when they sat down. They already knew what the reports would detail: displacement, fresh blood spilled across their soil, twisted new deities arising from the encroaching polluted lands. They still couldn’t believe that the government had managed to erase a whole month. Instead, they found themself reaching for the crystal bottle innocuously placed on the corner of their desk. It caught the light as they lifted it, casting dazzling diamond reflections about the room.
They poured out a glass of the clear liquid inside – a liquid which from a distance could so plausibly be water – and watched as it sloshed against the slides of the tumbler, light refracting into it through the geometric patterns cut into the crystal. They brought it to their lips, filling their nose with the burning reek of ethanol. They swallowed.
Fine curling lines of wood grain ran across Shrue’s desk, coalescing into great whorls of rich brown and red which danced under its polished surface. They studied that warped pattern with intent, drumming their fingers gently over the mahogany with a rhythmic ta-tap ta-tap ta-tap. There was a tightness in their chest and a sort of scratchy fog of panic in their mind, like their skull had been stuffed with cotton wool. They kept tapping, staring resolutely down at the space besides those papers. Still not looking at them. Not yet.
They kept on tapping, until their pounding heart came into time with the beat of their fingers. Until a warm haze settled over them like a weighted blanket, grounding, yet insulating them from what lay ahead. Until sensation lost its knife’s edge and their mind cleared and, finally, they turned the page.
It wasn’t something they were proud of, this desperate chemical courtship. They’d grown up around men who lived and died by the bottle, empty shells of soldiers left behind by the last war who’d chosen to drown under a tide of drink rather than face themselves. They’d told themself that would never be them. And yet.
But Shrue wasn’t drowning themself, not really. Ironically, that ever-present stream of spirit was the only thing keeping their head above water.
There was no end to it, the horrors unveiled in those reports, and absolutely nothing they could do to stop it. Reading through them was an exercise in self-flagellation, an utterly hopeless endeavour like unspooling an infinite ball of yarn onto the carpet, only the yarn was actually a tangled bloody mess of broken limbs that stained the floor a vivid carmine and, when they finally reached the end, Shrue would have to neatly wrap it all back up again and go about their day. Or worse, they would have to knit something out of it.
And their fingers always shook so much when they went dry.
They’d have felt worse about it, if they thought anything they were doing truly mattered. If Shrue could somehow use these bloody papers to bring an end to all this pointless suffering, they would. They’d do it in a heartbeat. But they had no say in anything that occurred on the front line, no sway with the unnervingly absent High Adjudicator. All they could ever do was work out how to spin it for the press.
So, this separation from themself, as their eyes swam over fresh death reports and diagrams tracking the creeping spread of contamination zones toward their childhood home? It wasn’t selfishness. It was simply self-preservation.
Besides what were they supposed to do, talk about it? They doubted that an answering tone would have much in the way of poignant advice.
Plus, there was always the risk that someone was listening in.
Shrue supposed they had talked, in a way, with the Katabasian of Tide and Flesh. And there had been a little comfort in that, the sort of desperate comradery of the condemned, but gods! What a person to unload on.
Out of all the people in the world of course they would have landed on Greve, the leader of a faith who, only a few months ago, Shrue had been planning to exterminate like a pack of feral hogs. Now, they were some of the only people Shrue even had a possibility of saving.
What a fucking mess.
They’d stayed in their office after that phone call, grappling with how easily they’d given in, how in a single phone call they’d condemned three hundred of the people who they’d pledged to protect to sainthood. Carson’s words had kept replaying in their mind, the ones he’d so flippantly said as he brushed aside the Withermark like it was nothing, not even bothering to look in the report.
“What we really need is bodies.”
Their contemplation had been interrupted by the blackout, lights beginning to flicker off across the city, a great wave of darkness spreading over the grid. From outside, there had been a swell of annoyance, cries rising from adjacent buildings as serials were interrupted and fridges powered down. Shrue had risen from their seat and gone to the window, gazing out over the no longer hazy horizon. They’d stood in that darkness, utterly alone, and stared up at the stars.
More and more contracts were being called in nowadays. It was an autophagic response to ongoing territorial losses (the north coast rigs of the Petropater for example had been entirely swallowed by the polluted lands) as well as the increasing demands for military service. Companies, terrified that the government would whisk away their assets and jeopardise their position in the stock market had unhinged their jaws and begun a cannibalistic banquet; eating their young before they could be plucked from the cradle.
There were, of course, things one could do to lessen the load. Ride your bike to work, unplug your electrics when they weren’t in use, take note of which churches had exceeded their annual sacrificial targets and make the firm decision to support more sustainable competitors when selecting produce at the grocery store. Everyone could pull together to keeps the gears turning. Every person, no matter how small, had a part to play.
Or at least that was the line that had been repeated to them. But, standing by the window and blinking in the sudden brightness of a restored grid, Shrue had not been able to convince themself that any individual act could prevent the inevitable. It would all just continue like clockwork, and the hands of those who tried to halt the gears would only be ground down beneath them.
Even the most outspoken among them, the Cult of the Woundtree, could not entirely escape the chains that bound them.
What would happen at the end of the day, when they’d all martyred themselves and only the complacent remained? Certainly, it would be an impressive sight, all those ebony thorns piercing through the heart of industry, but then clean-up crews would sweep across the factory floors and those wilting white crocuses would be cleared away and a new shipment of hastily prosecuted sacrifices would be bussed in to make up for the deficit.
In order to place any power behind their movement, the rebels had to give themselves up to a god and, in order to harness that god’s power, the rebels had to die.
It was the first thing you learnt as a child, wasn’t it?
A god must feed.
A god must be fed.
Shrue held the tumbler between their fingers, anxiously whirling the liquid inside with a repetitive motion of their wrist. The liquor swirled in response, spinning in sparkling little eddies around the confines of its glass, before it stilled and settled back into place.
The sun had set over the city and the last fingers of light scattered through the thick smog that blanketed Glottage, painting everything they touched a filmy polluted orange. Shrue drained the glass before setting it back down on the desk with a heavy thunk, and rose to their feet.
Stiff shoulders sang out in protest as they slipped on their jacket, slightly crumpled from its having been lazily discarded on the floor. It swallowed them up, neatly tailored lines hanging loose over their worn-out frame. They really needed to buy a new suit.
Shrue flicked off the lights as they left, the office having long since emptied, and began the long and solitary journey to their car. They were going to go home, they told themself. They were going to sleep.
Glottage was a shell these days. Checkpoints pockmarked the landscape and signs plastered across the broken windows of empty store fronts barked increasingly restrictive commands out across unoccupied streets.
“Curfews strictly enforced: 9PM to 5AM.”
“Gatherings exceeding four persons prohibited. Failure to comply will result in immediate relinquishment of all rights to legal representation, in order to facilitate effective prosecution by The Cloak.”
The city that did not sleep lay bare and empty most nights, strict curfews whittling down the bustling crowds to the few unlucky individuals who’d not made it to a shelter in time, subsequent patrols whittling them down to nothing. But, despite the various knocks that Glottage had sustained over the course of the war, the bar was vibrant with life. Golden light poured from its windows, illuminating the churning crowd within.
Everyone had conglomerated together here, pooling like moths to a flame, like soldiers making some desperate last stand. Shrue sat at the bar with a glass of whiskey and watched the figures in the flickering lamplight. They formed an indistinct mass, blurring at the edges and melting into each other as they moved. Friends sat chatting at tables, lovers laid their heads on each other’s shoulders and co-workers amicably clinked their cups in commiseration of yet another day spent subjugated to the mercurial whims of those towering gods of industry.
Maybe this was the camaraderie that supposedly brought people together in times like these, a sort of dogged solidarity that pulled everyone together and had them relishing the few moments of connection they had left. Maybe everyone here was just trying to distract themselves from the reality of defeat visible on the horizon, one final fanciful night of wild irreverent abandon before it all came crashing down. Or maybe, like Shrue, coming here was an act of ritual confirmation, a repetitive sealing of the covenant which bolstered their dwindling faith in the purpose of – well – all of it.
Maybe, like Shrue, they were all just trying to prove to themselves that this city was anything more than a corpse.
They’d taken to coming here most nights, sitting alone and watching the empty exaltations of the bar’s raucous and increasingly drink addled patrons until closing - until Shrue was too tired to register the empty apartment they’d come home to and could fade into unconsciousness without noticing the hollow space next to them in bed.
As a rule, they did not get drunk here, too aware of the vulnerability it would bring them since that night after the war vote when the Parish of Tide and Flesh had cornered them alone in a dank basement carpark and forced their hand. Shrue knew they were being watched, by the government and its enemies in equal measure, and couldn’t afford to misstep. They had to stay alert and in control. If they wanted to fall apart, they would do it in private, where no one else could see the shards.
So, Shrue would just have one drink while they sat and surveyed the crowd. Or maybe two, or three, but only ever enough to take the edge off. Something to soothe their frazzled nerves and smooth over the frayed and peeling edges of their personhood. Never quite enough for a full rapture though. They remained stubbornly sunken below that glib and gauzy realm of intoxication inhabited by their peers, paranoid of what would happen if they let the mask fall. They had to stay in control.
Part of them knew they were kidding themself. It didn’t really matter how much or little they drank, not when they so compulsively frequented the place that the bartenders poured them their regular upon entrance. If Carson wanted to make something out of that, he damn well could have.
Every so often, out of the corner of their eye, Shrue would catch the staff shooting them vaguely pitying glances, the sort of unsettled anxious look generally reserved for some bit of slow dying roadkill you pass on the highway. They couldn’t begrudge them for that. It was pathetic after all, their reliance on this place and the simulacrum of comfort it provided. Shrue was grateful for the staff’s subtlety at any rate. The bartenders kept a professional distance, they kept politely paying the bar’s exorbitant fees and tipping far more than the service was worth. It was a system that worked.
Shrue took a sip of their whiskey and leaned their arms against the bar, gazing out over the crowd. Once again, it was as if they’d stepped into another world. A tenuous bubble had formed around the confines of the room, a semi-permeable membrane built of song and spirit which protected those within from the world outside. One did not speak of reality within this bubble, because to do so would be to fatally break the spell. Those insubstantial walls would burst, and the world would rush in all at once.
So no one talked about the war. At least not directly. People preferred instead to wave their hands and redirect to more worthy topics of conversation, complaining over frilly cocktails about how their favourite kind of milk was out of stock and how hard it was to find a new housekeeper on such short notice. Illustrating the problem in the negative, with the space their words did not fill.
Shrue resented the bubble’s inhabitants, these whirling lotus eaters and their reverie in the face of oblivion. And at the same time, they were terribly jealous of them.
At one of the tables a pair of women sat intertwined, leaning across sticky, liquor-soaked wood to wrap their limbs around the other’s. A dark-skinned hand reached through a curtain of margarine blonde hair to cup blushing cheeks, and then flicked playfully at her nose. The pair of them dissolved into a fit of giggles, choking on the joyous naivety of youth.
Shrue worried at the band of gold on their finger. They’d felt like that, once. That sensation of wholeness that came from feeling truly seen and understood by another person. That absorption of yourself into another, as you became inextricably entangled and emerged a new coherent whole. But they’d also known the aftermath, the place after the euphoria where that person faded into the everyday regularities of life, constant as a limb you took for granted, only appreciating it when it was gone. Shrue hadn’t even thought to call before Carson mentioned it.
When was the last time they’d actually spent time together?
At least not since their re-election campaign, the spiteful, petty fight they’d picked after the attack and the glacial silence that had followed. And even before that a distance had built up between them, a perpetually widening rift like the near imperceptible grind of tectonic plates as they slipped past each other, pulling entire continents apart. They’d packed the children into the government car provided to take their family south together in silence and when they’d finished, all the living beating organs of their life stowed tightly away in the five- by- two confines of a sleek black sedan, they’d shared one final embrace. It had been quick. Then, Shrue had watched them all roll out of the city, filled with a sort of numb and deadened dread.
Had there been a promise to call when that car reached its destination? They couldn’t remember.
Shrue had built their platform on being a model member of the community, a local, a “family man.” But the more they invested in their work, the further that image seemed to be from the truth, and no number of reiterations to the press that they’d “grown up around the water” could detract from how far downstream the currents had carried them. The prestige of their position and the duties that came with it had spilled out over their world like an oil slick; a glimmering fetid iridescence that choked out all life beneath the surface.
Of course, this was all assuming they even had a family. Maybe they weren’t real after all, just a fanciful lie that had wormed its way into Shrue’s grey matter, writhing and warping the contents of their skull to make them pliant and manipulable.
Once, when they were a child, scampering alongside the riverbanks with their siblings, darting raucously back and forth between the skinny ghost-like birch that reached their limbs to the sky like so many grasping fingers, Shrue had tripped on a fallen log and pitched bodily into a gully. They’d skidded down the leaf litter, loose rocks grating at the palms of their hands as they scrambled for purchase, and, when they came to a stop, found themself face to face with a deer that was not, in their highly educated seven-year-old opinion, a deer.
The creature was emaciated, stumbling on too-slender legs, the bones of its pelvis jutting painfully through its skin. Its head drooped under the weight of its antlers and its eyes were dark pits in the sunken mess of its skull. Unlike the other wildlife around these parts, which would scatter in response to the slightest sound, the deer did not bound away into the underbrush in response to their noisy entrance. Instead it just stared at them in the fading light, swaying gently side-to-side, globs of viscous bloody drool dripping from a lolling mouth.
For a moment, Shrue could have sworn they’d seen a flicker of something within those hollow eyes, a sort of pitiful, desperate mourning. But then the thing listed towards them, grinding its jaw with maddening ferocity and Shrue had screamed and scrambled back up the hill, racing back to the safety of their stilted house on the water’s edge where they sobbed and babbled incoherently about a saint in the woods.
Their father had listened patiently to the insensate stream of words that poured from their mouth and, when they had calmed enough to listen, explained that this was a kind of disease that affected the deer around these parts, a sort of persistent echo of saintly radiation from the last war. It consumed the brains of the animals with godly fervour but failed to transform them fully, leaving them hollowed out vessels tormented by knowledge of a state they could never attain.
“They’re not dangerous” their father had said. “Not really. But” - and he sighed, standing and reaching for the rifle hung high up above the doorframe - “they spread the stuff like wildfire, and it decimates the herd.”
Their older brother had teased them then, for their wide-eyed childish terror, as their father left, stone-faced, to put the thing out of its misery.
“It’s not even a saint, Temerik. Just the memory of one.”
Shrue drained their glass, letting the bitter liquid slide smoothly down their throat. Then they poured another, watching the sparking facets in the crystal tint amber as the vessel refilled.
The worst part was inarguably the not-knowing; the churning dread that had them second-guessing every judgement they made and the hope that haemorrhaged out of them like blood from a ruptured vein. They just wanted some sort of- well they didn’t even know what.
A confirmation that they could trust their memory? That their life wasn’t entirely built on a delusion?
They took another sip, willing themself back to that soft muted place somewhere above themself. Over the sound system, smooth smoky jazz had begun to play, winding through the crowd like a snake.
Then again, in a way, it might be easier if it was a lie, and the radio-silence that haunted them could be explained away by a simple failure of saintly power to deliver on its promises. Gods knew it wouldn’t have been the first time.
Maybe what Shrue really wanted was an ending.
A soprano shriek of, “Oh my gods!” split the air, pulling Shrue’s attention away from the depths of their glass where a dwindling ice cube was making a valiant last stand against the dry heat being overenthusiastically pumped in from the vents. The ice plinked miserably against the sides of the cup as they placed it down and turned to the source of the noise, ricocheting frantically backwards before resigning itself to its fate and dissolving away into a current of fermented grain.
The slender blonde had shot up from her seat, red lips parted in an ‘o’ of shock as she clasped both hands to her heart. Her partner was kneeling on the ground in front of her, brandishing a box upwards with a hopeful smile. On its bed of crushed velvet, the diamond ring glinted like shattered glass.
Behind the bar, someone fumbled with the speaker, the jazz abruptly cutting out halfway through a piano solo. Moments later, the dulcet tones of Erin Sands were warbling out across the crowded bar, cooing on about undying love and devotion and giving yourself up to someone entirely.
She’d dumped that particular boyfriend after a year, so potentially not the best song choice by the waitstaff. Honestly, the gesture would have been comic had it not been so sickeningly genuine.
Back on the floor, the kneeling girl was talking about war and uncertainty and about how, “They might as well do it while they can,” and the other one was smiling tearily and nodding her head frantically in assent and saying, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you, however long we have.” What a beautiful sentiment. Shrue hated them.
Why should they get to celebrate, a bitter voice whispered from the back of their skull, when the rest of us are so miserable? What was it about them, which made them so much more worthy of love and adoration at a time like this, which made them so confident that everyone else should be subjected to their juvenile, floundering attempts of making some meaning out of the mess of themselves? And what was it with war-time marriages anyways? As if dying with a new last name on your records meant anything more than more work for your estates lawyer.
A sudden tap came on their shoulder.
“You alright there?”
Shame descended like a hawk to a field mouse as Shrue realised they’d been staring – no – scowling at the couple. Face hot with embarrassment, they turned back to meet the eyes of the bartender who’d noticed their faux pas and cringed under his impassive gaze.
He was a weedy young man, his polished uniform and slicked back hair serving only to highlight the smatterings of acne that cratered his face, the haze of post-pubescent angst that clung to him like glue. He’d cocked one eyebrow up, skewing his weight to one side of his body with the feigned poise of someone trying far too hard to be taken seriously. It was a look that Shrue was quite intimately familiar with.
“Ready to settle up?” The barkeep nodded at their glass which, now devoid of drink, had occupied itself with weeping a circle of condensation into the wood.
Shrue sighed, running a hand through their hair. They felt very small, all of a sudden. They felt very tired.
“Sure,” they consented, if a bit tersely.
And then, after a moment’s deliberation, “I’ll take the bottle though.”
Part of Shrue, the sensible part of them that had grown up working-class along, as they apparently so liked to say, “the water’s edge,” balked at the prospect of paying bar price for an entire bottle of whiskey, no matter how desperate their need. They cleverly distracted this part of themself by jerking their thumb at the couple behind them, who had somehow not managed to tire of cooing and twisting their arms around each other, and saying, “I’ll pay for them as well.”
Might as well attempt to do something decent tonight.
That quirked eyebrow was back on the barkeep’s face and Shrue had to suppress a self-righteous “oh, fuck you” at his blithe failure to even attempt to conceal the blatant judgement written across his face. But, as ever, they held their tongue.
When Shrue turned to leave, their gaze passed one last time over the patronage of the bar. In the low and flickering light, their wavering forms were rendered waxy and golden, chiaroscuro. These were artists’ renditions of reality, these entwined lovers and amicable friends. A hopeful mural of the way the world could be, hastily plastered over its rotting bones.
A prickle of anxiety raised the hair on the back of Shrue’s neck.
They’d caught sight of a man in the far corner, peering out at them with a pair of sharp, spectacled eyes. The shadowed figure was staring right at them, tracking their movements with a subtle tilt of the head as they made their way to the door. His eyes bore into them, knowing, reproachful.
The stranger could have been a spy from the Lingers, he could have been a government informant, he could have merely been a bored civilian who vaguely recognised them from the news. It didn’t matter. Shrue was so sick of being stared at.
They stopped dead in the middle of the room and whirled to meet the spectator’s eyes.
“What?” they snapped irascibly. Silence followed.
For one tense moment, the pair of them held each other’s gaze; Shrue glaring daggers at the dimly lit spectre, the man looking cooly back. They must have looked a damned fool in that moment, a haggard and dishevelled drunk shouting at a stranger who’d not said one word to them. As if in confirmation, the man pointedly looked away, busying himself with some material in his coat pocket.
Shrue scoffed. It was a contemptuous noise, and they knew it as performative and self-preserving the moment it left their throat. Cowed, they turned tail and left.
Shrue’s loafers clicked rhythmically on the pavement as they paced single-mindedly towards their car. It was a bitterly cold night, and their breath fogged in great clouds as they walked, illuminated by the fluorescent glow of streetlights which towered over them like the legs of some great storks sunk into a river of asphalt and concrete. It had been bitterly cold most nights, despite the nascent summer and the heat that bore down during the day, reflected onto the streets by the glossy glass panels that lined the towers before rising back up from the ground in great rippling swathes of air.
Seasons had always been unpredictable on the Peninsula, a likely consequence of too many warring gods of weather all striving to answer their own worshippers’ prayers. In the old days, it had been all-out chaos. Growers of a more temperate crop forced south by territorial disputes would harness the winds to cool the clime, and the earlier inhabitants would respond by birthing their own god of sun beaten plains or subtropical monsoons to revert the change. The seasons had finally been brought into a tenuous balance during the unification, the government creating a patchwork eight-month calendar meant to accommodate the needs of all the Peninsula’s loyal citizens. Licensed deities had been rolled out to replace the less controllable regional variants, whose abandoned rage and fury had been swept up into an occasional ninth month, concerning which a national holiday had been established in an attempt to appease it out of materialisation. Kids loved that holiday. They got candy.
But, despite the legislature’s best attempts at regulation, there had always been an irregularity to the seasons, a stubborn unwillingness of nature to behave quite how they wanted it to, no matter how much blood they spilled across the earth. It had only gotten worse with the war, a desiccated brown winter deteriorating into a humid and sludgy spring. And now this peppering back and forth of hot and cold, as if nature was a set of old and banged up water pipes that faltered under the slightest demand from another tap. How much further could they force this beaten draft horse forward, before it collapsed under the weight of its load?
Shrue reached deep into the pocket of their coat and pulled out their keys.
The one remaining upside to being Adjudicator Shrue - if they were being honest with themself, maybe the only real benefit their position had ever offered them - was the money.
Maybe someone out there, deep in the besieged and pockmarked plains of the Peninsula, had been legitimately helped by the work Shrue had done. Maybe there was one person among the crowd of deaf ears who had actually listened to them, who had been inspired to keep going despite the odds. Shrue hoped so, they truly did.
But the fact remained that, in so far as tangible returns on investment went, all they had to show for a lifetime of impassioned equivocation was the pay-check deposited fortnightly in their bank account and the stream of comforts it afforded them: their inner-city apartment, the once-fitted gold watch that slid up their forearm as they reached one hand for the car door, the bottle of top shelf whiskey they held loosely in the other. And of course, the ability to procure a blind eye with a single swipe of a card.
It was the latter of these comforts that Shrue only half-guiltily found themself indulging in tonight, as they collapsed into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. They weren’t being irresponsible, they rationalised. After all, they’d barely had two drinks and were hardly capable of actually losing control of the vehicle.
They’d always been a very careful driver.
Shrue pulled out of the carpark and began the familiar journey home through the dark streets of Glottage which stretched out in every direction like the claustrophobic tunnels of a rabbit’s warren, or some insect’s nest. Skyscrapers loomed over the avenues like forgotten reliquaries, impassive and empty, and, studded into them like the exposed cells of honeycomb, windows bled golden light into a dim and stagnant sky.
Silence blanketed the city like a shroud, broken only by the sound of their car rolling by. It was late, not yet past curfew mind you, but nearing the hours where armed guards would begin to patrol the avenues and politely inquire where you were headed, checking your documents as they did so, and “if you needed any assistance getting home safely.” Tonight, it seemed that everyone had taken heed and withdrawn proactively inside the safety of their own private bunkers. Shrue was the only person on the road.
Though it might have been stretching it, to call them a person in that moment. Alone in that vast sea of concrete and asphalt, and receding fast into a mechanical routine of left, right, break for the light, then straight on through the circle, right again, Shrue felt more like the faded memory of one. They felt insubstantial and empty, like a ghost relegated to mindlessly retracing the paths they’d followed in life, over and over, habit unbroken even in death. Like maybe if they turned to look, they’d see the flaming wreck of their car in the rearview mirror, lit up like a pyre.
There was a god for everything nowadays. There was a god for laundry and a god for superannuation, for creative inspiration and for a better than average cup of coffee. If you could name it and you could rally enough people around the concept, which usually depended on the size of your marketing team, sooner or later some strand of divinity would coalesce around it and carve out a niche for itself. The Blinding Bright Eyes that Lurk Upon the Crooked Turn (or as it had been initially monikered, Gearbox Gary) had been no exception to this rule.
Originally manufactured by a now defunct automotive company in an attempt to one up the competition across the water, it blessed the vehicles of devotees with superior horsepower and an aerodynamism that should have been physically impossible for the boxy structures to achieve. Because why improve your engineering when you could slit the wrists of a few dozen factory-hands and achieve the same outcome? Gary had been marketed as a friendly mechanic, a god of well-greased gears, of the elation of acceleration, and of break-neck speeds. The problem was that that last part had turned out to be a bit too on the nose.
Every now and then, a devoted acolyte would suddenly realise that the gas pedal had fused to the floor and the steering wheel had locked in place. That blessing of supernatural speed would take effect, and the sacrifice would careen wildly through traffic; one final joyride before they met a mangled and bloody end. It had spawned a massive class-action which ended up being a landmark negligence case because, while the drivers had signed waivers on purchase, the pedestrians had not. The company, already struggling to stay afloat in a market increasingly flooded with vehicles from the Straits, had been ordered to pay out millions to the affected families. Hence the “now defunct.” It had been a national embarrassment, and yet another nail in the coffin of Peninsulan industry.
The government had jumped on the issue in the wake of the decision, too late to claw back any scrap of consumer trust of course, and now all automotive worship was strictly regulated. The Blinding Bright Eyes lived on, the notoriety it had achieved in the trial making it far too difficult to neuter entirely, but it was rebranded and confined to elite motorsports, finding its disciples in those adrenaline junkies who looked upon the prospect of its crumpled steel and torn flesh miracles with reverence; eschewing the creeping decline of a complacent middle age for one glorious terminating moment of divine ecstasy. A life spent in service of selfish thrill seeking.
There was another use for the god however, a highly illegal strain of worship attractive only to the most desperate of fools. The disillusioned workers, the needy and overlooked, the unseen and unloved individuals who’d felt they’d faded into the background, despairing cries landing on deaf ears. Consigned to oblivion by a world which did not care to recognise them. To them, The Eyes was a god of catharsis and culmination. It promised the recognition that had so evaded its acolyte’s grasp in life. Battered steel would cradle the martyrs’ wrecked carcasses, twisting up around their bodies and fusing down into the surrounding tarmac, and the saint would emerge, a beacon of blinding light. Something no one could possibly ignore.
Equally selfish and equally stupid, Shrue told themself, though their fingers were tense around the wheel and they had been struck by a sudden irrational urge to press their foot to the gas pedal and keep it there, letting the engine kick into overdrive, watching towers and streetlights devolve into streaks of grey and gold across a dark blue canvas as their vehicle took flight across a glittering sea of tarmac. No one actually cared about those saints when they sprang up, hanging off of overpasses or tangled in the struts of bridges.
Or more accurately, no one cared about the people they had once been. For all the blazing glory that the god promised, its saints primarily took effect in the form of an inconvenient delay to one’s daily commute, and maybe a mandatory wellness session if your employer was the obnoxious type.
The car rolled to a stop at a light. Shrue flexed their hands, dispelling some of the tension that had built up in the ropes of their tendons. They drummed their fingers against the wheel, staring rather blankly out at the grey and empty intersection. The sudden stillness was disconcerting. It pulled everything into focus, compounding the silence that lay heavy against the concrete, the dim and dreary absence that blanketed the streets.
Shrue turned the radio on, seeking solace in the sounds of other people. Just their luck; GPR was in the middle of an ad break. Of course. But noise was noise, and the mindless babble of paid actors espousing the wonders of the Grinding Lord’s All New Premium Psychotropic Blend! ™ was far preferable to the alternative, so the radio stayed on.
The lights flashed green, and they pulled through the intersection. Through the windscreen, they could see the tower that housed their apartment, standing as solemn and patient as a lover.
From the speakers came the tinny sound of pre-recorded children’s laughter, underscoring a woman’s cheery voice. “As a mother of four, I’ve got enough to worry about between shopping, chores, housework, and these rascals!”
The last words were emphasised with mock chagrin, the tone of an exasperated sitcom mother who “just couldn’t keep up!” with her kid’s hijinks.
“Keeping my home warm and bright should be the last thing on my mind.”
There was more canned laughter, a near identical cadence of synthesised cheer. No, identical actually. The same rhythm, same pitch, the same two boys giggling in tandem for 8 seconds before an abrupt cut off. It was the exact same clip, lazily replayed as if the studio didn’t think anyone would notice. Had the producers had somehow struggled to source another track? Could they not have just, gotten some children and made them laugh?
Failing to realise her children were caught in a time loop, the woman continued genially on.
“That’s why I signed up to a Platinum contract with the Church Electric! And it adds my entire family to a shared licence as contracted worshippers of the Saint - so we don’t need to worry about an unexpected knock on the door, either. Now I can get back to what’s really important. Praise The Saint!”
That band of gold around their finger glinted resentfully at Shrue as they pulled the car up to their building and rolled down the window to punch in the keycode that would let them into the garage. The panelling that barred outside access retracted upwards in response, moving with a great metallic judder to reveal the concrete cavern that lay behind. The parking lot was crowded with cars, sleek convertibles and coupes which, with their meticulously polished exteriors, unsubtly signalled their owners’ tax bracket to the world. Vehicles which were utterly indistinguishable from Shrue’s.
In their parking space, they flicked the headlights off and pulled the key out of the ignition. Once again, Shrue stared blankly out over the dashboard. It was as if their mind was not quite able to parse the cessation of transit. Now that they’d stopped, what were they supposed to do? Gently, they laid their forehead to rest between their hands on the wheel, gathering themself. The leather was cool against their flushed skin.
There was a dagger stuck in their breast.
It had been there for weeks, ever since that first unanswered phone call had shattered through their sternum, sending shards of bone burrowing deep into the surrounding flesh. It ached constantly. But, afraid of bleeding out, Shrue had left the thing in, and in time the skin around the entrance wound scabbed over, fusing them to the cold steel. And they’d grown accustomed to the familiar dull ache in their ribs. It was something they could manage, something they could push into the back of their mind. For the most part, at least. But every now and then, something would cause the knife to twist, and all that pain would come flooding back.
They didn’t know what about that advertisement had rankled them so much. The shameless predation on people’s concern for their children? The “happy family” angle? Or maybe, it was its overtly palatable sitcom-esqe tone, its slick over-produced style.
Its obvious falsity.
Air whistled through their teeth as they sucked in a steadying breath. Shrue turned their head to the passenger seat, where they’d placed their bags, and, through the tangled mop of their fringe, fixed their gaze on the bottle of whiskey. Under the bright lights of the parking garage, its contents glowed a rich smoky orange, like a crackling woodfire.
Shrue dragged a clammy palm over their face and pushed themself up; a vague and futile gesture at fixing their appearance before grabbing both bag and bottle and extricating themself from the vehicle. The door gave a resounding slam behind them, echoing through the carpark.
Perhaps a tad bit more aggressive than they’d intended, but it didn’t matter. They were utterly alone down here.
Ever conscious of the service staff’s watchful gaze (and propensity for gossip), Shrue stowed the bottle deep in their bag before slinking towards the elevator and beginning the ascent towards their apartment. They lived on the upper levels of the building, a penthouse with, the real estate agent had told them, “A spectacular view of the city.”
Shrue barely noticed it most days. They noticed it more now, now that the sky was constantly lighting up with the fire of god-rockets. When that saintly glow split the night, Shrue would find themself out on the balcony, watching those sparks on the horizon. They would count the number of impacts, wondering where exactly the saints had hit. How many people, for each explosion?
They had tried buying curtains to block out the light but hadn’t worked out how to put them up. It was a two-person job.
The elevator doors parted and Shrue stepped out into the grey carpeted corridor, making their way through a warren of stark white walls before arriving at their door. Rummaging in their jacket for their key, they went to open the door but then paused at the threshold. Their fingers shook slightly around the metal, key poised just above the lock.
They hadn’t wanted to give in to the creeping paranoia Carson had slid so sinuously under their skin - had tried so hard to resist the urge to hold their life up to the light and determine if the story made sense - but it had been no use. One night alone had been all that it took before anxiety took over. Shrue had spent the better part of a weekend tearing their place apart, brick by brick, desperately searching for proof their family was real.
It had presented itself in the following:
- Three strands of long hair threaded between the teeth of a comb.
- Four bagged evening gowns in the walk-in, left behind because there was no cause to wear them in those safe houses down south.
- The two rooms down the hall from the master bedroom, both containing neatly made twin beds, a small dresser, and a child-size desk. Devoid of clothes or toys but, then again, those would have been taken down south.
- The crayons spilled haphazardly inside one of the desks.
- The childish graffiti marring the surface of the other.
- The six framed pictures that hung in the hall, photos of birthday parties and of Shrue and their wife standing side by side at official dinners, everyone smiling brightly for the cameras.
- The scale of the apartment itself, far too big for one person.
- Finally, the tacky ghost of a set of sparkly unicorn stickers which the kids had used to decorate (read: vandalise) the dining room table. Just residue now, but still there. Still proof.
Having dredged up a sizeable body of evidence supporting the existence of their family, Shrue had been confronted with a new question. Could they trust the validity of this evidence, when it could have so easily been created to give credence to the lie? Surely, they could. Right? Even a saint as cogent as VAL wouldn’t have fleshed out the narrative to this extent. How could it? Something like that wouldn’t know the first thing about family.
But Shrue hadn’t been able to shake the doubt. Their mind kept casting back to that deer in the woods, stumbling blindly through the underbrush, brainless and exposed. Forever chasing a mirage.
They still weren’t sure if they could trust their eyes, or mind for that matter. As they slipped the key into the lock, hearing the satisfying click of the bolt retracting as they turned it, Shrue wondered whether they would ever be able to again.
The apartment was the same way they’d left it this morning. Clean and empty. They’d been trying to spend as little time as possible here, something which – honestly? – just meant life as usual.
In the kitchen they poured another glass, fishing the bottle from their bag. As they drank, they leaned on the marble island, gaze intermittently flicking between the smooth amber depths of their glass and that “spectacular view.” The horizon was mercifully dark tonight, but the glittering lights of the city were omnipresent as ever. Even as the Peninsula disintegrated around them, those lights would stay dutifully on.
Shrue raised their cup in mock toast to the deity that kept Glottage going.
“Praise The Saint!”
Their flat and mirthless tone was met with the resounding silence of an empty room. They drained the glass and poured another.
Maybe it was better if their family wasn’t real.
It would certainly be better from a political standpoint. It would mean the government had less leverage over them and it would also mean that no one would be hurt if Carson made good on his threat. They still weren’t quite convinced that the Press Secretary had been joking when he blithely suggested they be shipped down to the hallowing chambers.
But it would also be better for Shrue.
If their family never existed, Shrue wouldn’t have to worry about what that silence could mean; whether something had happened or if this was simply repayment for a decade’s worth of absence. They’d been so preoccupied with work, buoyed along the euphoria of being someone important, that any real moments of connection had been far and few between. Scattered dinners. Rare moments late at night when they hadn’t both been too worn down to do anything but fade into bed. More cohabitation than anything else. There was comfort, of course. Of course there had been comfort. But it had been accompanied by an emptiness, a sense of isolation sunk deep into their marrow.
If they had always been alone, that hollow space inside them would make sense. There would be a rational reason for that starved animal yearning, an explanation for why they felt so perpetually on the periphery even when they were the centre of attention. If they’d only been so dissatisfied because some part of themself knew that they’d been fed a fantasy, well- that was alright then. They could live with that.
There was another alternative though.
What if their family had actually been manufactured, not just staged and inserted into their memory, but made tangible, given flesh, and the only manifestation of the lie that could ever be suitably convincing lay in these un-answering spectres? What if they were just so inherently wrong that even a creature that made its nests in mistruths and could unravel reality with a single word could craft no more for them than this façade of a family? This pathetic, miserable mockery?
They were twisting the knife again, and they knew it. But they couldn’t stop. Nor could they remove the blade, despite their growing certainty that every tale they could tell would end the same way – with them alone. They’d grown possessive of their pain, scared of what it would mean to remove the dagger and examine the wound. Scared of losing it.
The phone stared at them from its place on the wall. Shrue stared back, before gritting their teeth and turning away. It was too late anyways. If their family did exist, they’d all be in bed by now. Shrue was tired too, flat and numb and brittle. And maybe things would look better in the light of day. They always did, didn’t they?
The floor swam in front of them as they dragged themself down the hall and collapsed in a crumpled heap on their bed, indistinguishable from the unfolded laundry that lay atop it. Drunken dizziness made them feel as if they were a piece of driftwood in the ocean, rocked side to side by gentle waves. Finally – mercifully - the dead weight of their body was pulled beneath the sea of cotton sheets; dragged down towards oblivion.
Late afternoon light was pouring in from the kitchen windows, casting long shadows across the oak floor where it collided with the gangly limbs of the dining room chairs and table. Shrue was standing in front of the sink, idly drying out the inside of a mug with a rag, twisting the ceramic back and forth in their hands. Outside, the sun hung low in the sky, gilding the leaves of the birch by the window a brilliant autumnal gold.
A pot sputtered on stovetop, lid cracking off as foamy water boiled over, racing down the cast iron towards the flames below. Urgently, they put down the cup and turned down the heat, letting the water reduce to a simmer before poking a long metal skewer inside and probing for readiness. Not quite done yet. They placed the lid back on and drew back. Steam had collected on their skin, turning it flushed and dewy, and they sighed in exasperation as they wiped the damp from their forehead with a fresh rag, before turning back to the basin.
In the foyer, the sound of a door cracking open, a coat being hung. A voice like music to their ears, the familiar comfort of a childhood hymn.
“Honey!” their wife called out. “I’m home!”
Momentary relief coursed through Shrue’s veins, like a tidal swell. And then the feeling ebbed and they caught themself wondering – why on earth would they be relieved that she’d come home? Where else would she return to?
Footsteps wandered into the room, pausing as she discarded her briefcase on the table before striding over to them. She kissed them on the temple, a brief peck of greeting. Shrue smiled into the embrace and turned to face her, but she’d drawn back, face screwed up in consternation. “Eugh!” she exclaimed. “You’re all wet!”
They cackled at that, rising mirth quelling an inexplicable pang of disappointment as she moved away from them. She flicked water from her hands, sleeves wet where they’d touched the edges of the sink as she’d leaned down to greet them.
“Sorry,” they snickered, unable to disguise their laughter at her faux outrage. “Sorry! I should have warned you.”
Shrue propped themself up against the counter-top to face her, still grinning crookedly as they resumed wiping iridescent suds off a plate. They watched her fix herself up, wringing out her cuffs and sweeping a loose strand of hair behind one ear. In the softening light, her earrings sparkled like stars.
“Kids are in the garden,” they offered.
The girls had been playing at being detectives, picking through the shrubbery in search of the illicit prayer marks, which were usually just clumsy arrangements of sticks, that would lead them to their quarry. They’d sought the assistance of the dog in this endeavour who, not being a scent-hound (or remotely well trained), primarily lent them moral support, bounding excitedly at their heels as they ran wildly through the garden.
When one of the girls would uncover these ‘marks,’ she’d shriek and collapse on the damp lawn, writhing like an upturned beetle in faux ascension, and the other one would hold her hand, swearing vengeance through muffled giggles. It was usually at this point that the unlucky sacrifice would stop wriggling, miffed by her sibling’s lack of dedication to the craft. She’d pout, pushing herself up off her grass-stained back to glare accusingly at her sister, and would petulantly cry, “You gotta take it seriouslyy!!”
But now shadows had begun to blanket the garden, colours receding to a dusty monochrome blue as night fell.
“Want to bring them inside?” Shrue suggested. “Food’s nearly ready.”
The family was clustered around the table, bathed in the yellow glow of the lamp which hummed with electricity as it hung high above them. Shrue was serving everyone from a dish at the centre of the table, laying thick rounds of meat and crispy golden chunks of roasted potato and carrot across a bed of greens, which both girls stared at with baleful reproach. Their mother tsked at that and said, demonstratively, “This looks gorgeous.”
She took a long sip from her glass of merlot as Shrue sat down, having passed out every plate. Then, she lifted her knife and, as if they’d been waiting for her cue, the children began to hack away at their meal, sawing messily into the roast and tearing away great hunks of meat with their forks. “Manners,” their wife called out, warningly. She primly placed a cube of carrot in her mouth, emphasising her closed lips to the girls as she chewed.
Smiling at the scene in front of them, Shrue settled into their chair and sliced into their portion of meat. Watery myoglobin oozed out of the gash their knife left in it, a rosy fluid with a greasy sheen which bled out across the vegetables and stained the potatoes pink. Their fork clinked against the plate as they speared the flesh, and then brought it to their lips. A cool kiss of metal as they gingerly prised the meat into their mouth. The tines withdrew. They chewed, and the food seemed to lose form under the weight of their molars, dissolving and distorting into something … different. It coated their tongue in a thick and mealy paste.
Shrue winced as the flavour hit them and looked up, about to apologize for whatever had gone so horribly wrong during the cooking process, but the constant scrape of cutlery on plates had not ceased. No one else appeared to be bothered by the meal. They were all just rhythmically chewing, ritually bringing fork to mouth.
Shrue forced themself to swallow, feeling every movement as the viscous substance slid down the back of their tongue and into their throat. They shuddered and reached for their glass, letting heavy red tannins coat their palate until they could no longer taste anything but the wine’s bitter tang.
They were being stared at.
Three questioning gazes were being beamed down at them like spotlights, eyebrows around the table raised as if in expectation of some answer. Shrue blinked, a little self-conscious.
“Did I miss something?”
Their wife breezily waved off their concern. “Oh it’s nothing, darling. I just wanted you tell me about your day.”
Shrue opened their mouth to answer, but the response died on their lips. They honestly couldn’t remember.
They’d been in the kitchen, and the kids had been home, which must have meant that they’d picked them up from school, except – when? What had they been doing before? Why couldn’t they remember?
Those lambent eyes were still fixed on them. They needed to say something.
“Same as usual, I suppose?”
It was a middling response, and she seemed just about to enquire further when a great clatter came from the kitchen, the sound of metal crashing to the tile. Everyone stood and bolted to the door, where they all stared gawkishly at the culprit. The dog was scrabbling for purchase on the counter-top, covered in a fine coat of flour and sugar – the corpse of the cake Shrue had been planning to make for dessert.
The children erupted in screams of high-pitched delight and Shrue flinched away, instinctively squeezing their eyes shut in response to the noise.
And then they opened them and found themself in bed, staring up at the dully glowing ceiling light. A rustle of paper to their left told them that their wife was reading beside them.
Insects were circling the light, moths and buzzing mayflies and other tiny, winged things. They were entranced by its luminance, drawn in by a promise of warmth and security. Their small bodies would tink against the ceramic, hurled forward in a vain attempt to reach the filament inside, before falling back into the corps. Trapped in an endless dance of fluttering wings.
Shrue sighed, readjusting their head on the pillow. They really should have closed the window before the sun set. Bugs always came in off the river this time of year.
There was a low murmur from their side and the sound of a turning page. She was saying something about the book. Something that Shrue should respond to and something which they couldn’t. Because that wasn’t right, was it?
Was any of it?
Something unfurled in their chest, bone and flesh giving way to a hot and thick panic which twisted up through their body, blooming like a rose. It took root in their ribcage and pushed its way up past their lungs, a tangle of petal and thorn prickling painfully in their throat until they could no longer hold it back. They tried to keep the tremor out of their voice as it tore past their lips, but it blossomed into the room just the same. Ugly and wretched and wanting.
“Are you real?”
The words sounded childish and plaintive, and Shrue immediately wanted to reach out and pull them from where they hung in the air, wrestling them back inside where they belonged. But it was too late.
A silence lay between them, thick and heavy as the humid summer air which clung to them like a shroud, broken only by the drone of cicadas and the occasional fizzle of an insect as it finally breached the ceramic barrier that separated it from its idol and sacrificed itself to the light. Then, the sound of a book closing, the rustling of fabric as she repositioned her body towards them.
“Oh, darling” - and a bit of Shrue’s heart broke when they heard this, the irrefutable love etched into every syllable, overlayed with a slight tinge of hurt that they’d ever question it – “of course I’m real. Why ever would you think I’m not?”
Guilt welled up inside them, constricting their throat and turning their lungs leaden. They swallowed thickly, searching for the right words, resisting urge to curl in on themself as they realised there weren’t any.
“I don’t-” Shrue blinked fiercely, fighting back the heat that had begun to build behind their eyes. They kept their gaze fixed stubbornly on the ceiling, ashamed of the rawness in their voice, praying desperately that some reason would descend on them and supply them with the words to fix this. There still weren’t any.
“I don’t know,” they answered hopelessly. “I just –” A warm hand reached out and caressed their face and Shrue drew in a sharp gasp, flinching slightly.
Their skin tingled where she touched them, an electrical current which seemed to build beneath her fingers. They ghosted gently downwards, tracing the contour of their cheek, brushing across parted lips, half-frozen in shock. Shrue breathed shakily out as she continued her descent, skimming down the bared arch of their neck. Heat radiated through their skin in her wake, Lichtenburg figures that thrummed with sensation long after the touch had departed.
Finally, her hand came to rest over their pounding heart. She placed her palm flat over their chest and held it there, letting them breathe against it. They felt the weight of her as they inhaled, a solid and grounding pressure that moved with the rise and fall of their ribs.
“See,” she said. “I’m real.”
Relief coursed through them, and they threw themself into her waiting arms. She hummed soothingly, playing her fingers through their hair as they buried their face in the warmth of her chest. And then looked up.
Through a curtain of tangled locks, a warped and flesh-toned mass peered incuriously down at them.
Shrue recoiled in horror, pulling away as they blurted, “Your face-!”
In retrospect, this was a rather stupid and obvious thing to say but their wife, forgiving and patient as always, was undeterred. Her hand knotted in their hair and pulled them back into that firm and loving embrace and, in a tone coloured with disdainful amusement, she completed their sentence for them.
“-is just how it’s always been.”
Then somehow, she was straddling them, pinning their shoulders to the bed with more force than they would have thought possible. They sputtered weakly in protest, blood rising to their cheeks at their sudden vulnerability, the pressure of another body on top of theirs. “Shh,” she murmured, dragging another trail of sparks down their heaving chest. “Let me take care of you.”
Longing spilled out of them like blood from a wound, warm and slick, and the creature on top of them lapped it up with delight. Shrue, succumbing to the heady rush of endorphins summoned by her touch, surrendered.
A warm staticky fuzz was building between their ears and beneath their skin; a rising sea of pleasure drowning out the waves of panic which spun like eddies through their body.
The thing that was not their wife leaned forwards, closing the distance between them and Shrue was struck with a sudden and alien urge to kiss her. Their limbs responded automatically, unconsciously. As if it were the most natural thing in the word. Their hand threaded up through that dangling mass of hair, reaching out to cup the cheek and bring it into the light.
A hand caught their wrist in a vice-like grip and slammed it down on the mattress. Shrue tensed, breath hitching in anticipation. In one sinuous movement, she brought her face to the side of theirs, lips close enough to graze the ridge of their ear. Hot air puffed against their skin as she spoke, the sensation sending shivers down their spine, but her words held only a cool and confident surety.
“Don’t worry Adjudicator.”
Then she drew back, cold air rushing in to fill the space that she left behind, and that a face that was not a face contorted above them. Silhouetted against the light, her hair a radiant bone white halo, the Saint of the Last Word smiled down at them.
“I said I’d give you a family, didn’t I?”
And then her hands closed around their neck.
Shrue shot up in bed, heaving. Their fingers instinctively went to their throat, feeling the racing pulse of blood pounding through their jugular, and they tore at their collar, fumbling with the buttons and crying out in horror and frustration for the things to “Get off!” of them, each word punctuated with a new thrashing motion like the desperate clawing of a cornered animal. Once they had finally loosed the noose of panic that had constricted so tightly around their throat, they sat there on the bed, panting. Their heart was still racing, jackhammering against their ribs with the frenetic speed of a rabbit’s, but, slowly, they managed to get a hold on their breath. In and out. In and out.
Filth pervaded every aspect of their being in that still and silent room; their mouth sour and thick, hair plastered to their forehead, tangled sheets clinging to their bare and sweaty limbs. It crawled under their skin, writhing like maggots, spreading like mould. Between their thighs, an awful slickness, a residual heat in their core that they really didn’t want to think about. They clawed their fingers into the sheets, squeezing the balled fabric beneath their fingers until they shook – and let go. Abruptly, they stood and paced down the hall. They needed to take a shower. A cold one.
Liquid ice rained down from above, pattering down in numbing crystalline droplets that ran into rivulets across Shrue’s shivering form. The shower felt too small, its walls constricting their movement, closing in on them, but the glass left them open and exposed. It was an observation chamber, a zoo animal’s cage. A perverse glass coffin.
Blank bright light shone down from the ceiling, illuminating the room in sharp detail with the impersonal monotony of bleach. A steady electric buzz from the light underscored the constant rush of water from the nozzle, a low drone like the humming of cicadas which resonated in the back of Shrue’s skull where a steadily building pressure heralded the beginnings of an oncoming migraine.
They stood in that casket, gasping with the shock of cold, eyes stinging with soap and shame, and scrubbed their skin raw. “It’s fine,” they muttered wretchedly, voice high and thin as they raked a loofa across their arms. “It’s fine, you’re safe, they’re real” – their voice broke, shattering like glass, but they hauled the shrapnel furiously onwards, gritting their teeth and speaking with renewed fury – “you KNOW they’re real. It was just a bad dream. Get over it.” They spat the words out one by one, each one its own bullet, a volley of acidic despair levelled straight into their exposed and hateful flesh.
No amount of numbing water or frantic scrubbing could cleanse them of the filth that clung to them like a second skin; that seeping pollution, that crawling claustrophobic heat, that feeling of warm fingers trailing across their skin, telling them for the first time in months that someone could possibly want them, could possibly care. There was a stirring of horror in their gut, knees weakening like jelly, as Shrue remembered how vivid and real it had all felt. How easily they gave in.
They slumped down to a crouch, head bowed under the bucketing water, drawing their limbs protectively into their chest, and attempted to slow their breathing. Something within them ached for recognition, for completion. They forced it down.
A symphony of endless water echoed around them: the high-pressure hiss from overhead, the drumming as it pounded against their body, the hollow gurgle of the drain. Droplets rebounded and formed on the glass, held still for a single moment before plummeting downwards, losing shape as they joined the puddle of water on the floor. Shrue sat there, staring at the tile until their eyes unfocused and everything blurred in front of them. Strands of hair clung to their cheeks, a lacework of dark wet roots directing streams of water across their face. They put their fingers to their face, gently touching the damp skin below their eyes. Were they crying? They couldn’t tell.
How much time had passed was also a mystery to them, but their fingers had begun to prune and Shrue was suddenly conscious of their nudity, the gooseflesh expanse of their body sitting exposed and vulnerable on the bathroom floor. The whole thing suddenly felt quite absurd, embarrassing honestly, marinating alone in self-pity and a shallow pool of water in the dead of night. They hauled the meat of their body up off the tile, gripping the shower knob for support, and turned off the water, bringing an end to that ceaseless drumming.
Careful where they placed their wet feet on the floor, Shrue gingerly stepped out of the shower. In their periphery, they could see the movement of their body reflected in the mirror. In its cold and crystalline expanse, they were a hunched and defeated blur. They turned away, enveloping themself in a thin robe before exiting the room altogether.
Stumbling exhaustedly back to their room, Shrue passed the hung photos of their family in the hall. Smiling faces beamed down, frozen in bland approval of their soaked and shivering passage across the carpet; tracking water down the hall in the still silence of night, back to an empty bed.
The phone shined on the wall, its plastic illuminated by those ever-present city lights. Shrue paused in front of it, stuck.
They shouldn’t do this, they told themself. It was selfish and pathetic and most of all it was pointless. They already knew how it would end.
But the receiver was already in their hand, their fingers were already fumbling across the keypad, and, in their head, that familiar litany of prayer had already begun.
Please pick up, they prayed. They mouthed the words silently into the phone, ashamed of what it would be to say them out loud. Please just pick up.
The shame only mounted as they heard the phone ring.
And ring.
And ring out.
The answering machine babbled out its greeting – an answering machine, not even a personal message – and then terminated with a low electronic beep. Trying desperately to keep their voice even, Shrue spoke into the silence.
“Hey! Um. Me again.”
Brittle and artificially casual; the voice of a child that’s hurt itself and doesn’t want you to see the wound. They should’ve just hung up. They should have just hung up and gone to bed and forgotten about this whole embarrassing ordeal. What were they even supposed to say? What could they say - surrounded by long blue shadows, staring out over a sea of blinking lights - to possibly explain any of this?
“I – ah – I’m sorry for calling so late. You’re probably asleep, and honestly I should be too. I just…” they trailed off, swallowing thickly around a lump in their throat. “It’s been a long day?”
Shrue exhaled shakily, curling inwards as they repeated themself. “It’s been a long day and I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Call me back, when you get this. Please?”
“I love you.”