On my walk back home, I couldn't stop thinking about that little girl.
I had no right to question the fashion choices of the younger generations, but why did her parents let her dress like that—in all black?
Where were her parents? They just left her in the meat room like that?
What did she mean when she said—
Ah, what the heck. The world was a messed-up place. If we'd had it all figured out, none of us would be here.
Liz only ate one meal per day and she'd already had one this morning, so I didn't need to rush. But that child at the grocery just made me want to come back home as soon as possible. I never thought a child could make an adult feel that way. Usually it'd be the other way around.
I saw a figure standing on the path of red clay in the distance. He must be waiting for his friends or something.
No.
It was a girl, because as I came closer, I saw she was wearing a dress.
A black dress that extended to her shins.
She definitely saw me now. We were eleven meters away from each other. I slowed my pace as I continued to close the distance.
Be cool, polite smile. Maybe ask her a question while you pass: where are your parents, are you lost...
"I thought you'd be home by now, sir," she said.
"What's that?" I stopped in my tracks.
She knew where I lived.
"They say it's dangerous to walk around these areas by yourself."
"I can manage." I forced myself to grin.
"I doubt it. For a cripple such as yourself."
The grin evaporated. I imagined the white in my eyes was becoming more exposed.
"You think you're funny? Where are your parents?" I was now standing next to her.
"Jokes have punchlines, sir. All we have here is a tragedy. Pathetic, really."
"Listen here you—" I stepped forward and reached for her ear.
She slowly raised a hand as if to catch mine.
The bones in my fingers cracked before I could even see what was happening.
"Aaaaahhh!" I screamed, kneeling on the ground. I tried to pull back but that only made it more painful.
She was holding onto my right hand with her left, crushing every finger and dislocating the joints from their sockets. It was almost as if I'd stuck my hand in a sugarcane juicer. The grocery bag I was holding in my left hand slipped from my fingers and tumbled to the ground.
"A tragedy worth salvaging, nonetheless." Her gentle, toddler voice froze my blood. "This is fresh meat."
A broad smile. Like a kid sitting in front of a birthday cake.
Her hair wasn't gray. It was white, like snow. Some of the strands glittered like jewels under the sun.
Desperate, I took a swing at her with my other hand before immediately regretting my decision but failing to pull back. I was too slow. She caught that one as well.
"Don't make this hard for me, sir. It makes me look bad."
"What do you want from me?"
"Don't struggle so much."
Krak.
"Aaaaah!"
She crunched my broken right hand, deforming it even further.
"Shhhhhhhh. Shhhh." She shushed, holding onto me as I jerked madly, trying to tear myself off her.
My body crumpled to the earth floor. She finally let go as I fell to my stomach and cradled my hand.
Raising one foot, she stepped on my back.
With my chest against the ground, breathing became impossible.
It was as if there was a motorcycle on top of me.
Then, a thin stream of warm air brushed the back of my head.
"You felt that?" she asked. She was blowing the air against me. "Felt real, didn't it?"
"Aack—"
"How's granny doing? My sister."
She meant Liz? Were they related somehow? She'd been watching us.
"Why are you even with her?" she said. "Is it love? What's the word... empathy. Do you love all humans the same way? Must be genetics."
It truly felt like her foot was about to sink through my flesh and bones and into the earth.
"You just can't help it," she said. "It's natural conditioning for you low-intelligence species at the bottom of the food chain. You are hard-wired to believe that you have the ability to think thoughts, hahahaha!" She laughed heartily. She laughed with all the disgust and vileness in the world. "That you're different from an amoeba ahahahahahaha!"
Painfully hissing for air, I gnashed my teeth.
I had no chance of getting out.
Maybe I could...
"One body—" I wheezed the words.
The child leaned closer to listen as she took some of the pressure off my back.
"Per month..." I groaned. "Construction site... where I work. Workers... die from accidents. I can... make... arrangements."
The child giggled.
"Lifetime... supply," I squeezed out the last bit of air in my lungs. Of course I'd made it all up. I just needed to get out of there.
Then, she laughed. Her foot was once again sinking into my back.
"How adorable."
My vision started to blur.
The weight was unbearable. I ground my teeth so hard I thought they were going to break.
"That's why you'll always be my favorite food. Still, Dad always talked about treating food with respect. Which one do you want to go first?"
My body was like a balloon that was about to burst.
"This one," she tapped on my left hand, "or this one?" A tap on my right.
"Go to hell." I couldn't even hear myself when I said those words. My ears were ringing.
"This really is fresh meat. You know what, this broken hand already can't feel anything. Let's go with that."
She pulled back my right arm like she was holding up a rag, bending it.
"Love, huh?" she said.
Without letting go, she leaned close and looked at me from above with her big, round marble eyes.
"Do you think you can love me, too?"
Her head disappeared from the corner of my eyes.
I could feel her lower teeth slowly ripping through the palm of my hand like a knife slipping into warm butter.
Ssszzzzz—
The skin sizzled like a piece of steak.
Somehow the fact that I couldn't breathe was more painful than what she was doing to my body.
What it was doing to my body.
Fire tore through my lungs, screaming for air as I thrashed uncontrollably, my limbs flailing, jerking madly as if possessed.
So this was what drowning felt like.
Drowning on land.
The world was full of people, and yet.
There was no one.
The whole world had decided to stand and watch from a safe distance.
As if we were the only ones remaining.
The world was an empty place.
Somebody.
Somebody, please help me.
The animal tore its teeth from the flesh it was eating.
"Haahhh," it sighed.
It raised its foot into the air, momentarily pulling me up along with it. For a second, I could feel my skin stick to the ridges of its shoe before my body crashed into the earth again. Dust bounced in the air around me.
I gagged loudly and inhaled as hard and as deep as I could.
"What a shame." It stooped and leaned closer to my ear. "Say hi to my sister for me. We'll meet again when you're ready."
Crunching the dirt in my hands despite my broken fingers, I lay there for a while, gagging for air.
After a couple of minutes, I raised my head to look around for the child.
It was gone.
Liz was lying on the sofa.
"Robert? Are you okay?"
When she saw me at the door, she didn't even walk me inside. Instead, she bolted straight to the medicine cupboard in the kitchen. Her priorities were different like that.
If it had been Margaret, she'd call up an ambulance. Hell, one time she took me to ER because I had a cramp in my sleep.
Liz was treating my broken hand and bloody back, while I told her what had happened.
"Do you have a sister?" I asked her.
"I've no idea who she is."
"Liz."
"I don't. And how did you even survive that?"
"She wasn't human. She said we'll meet again when we're ready. Are you sure you're the only one who's like this?"
"I don't know."
"What about your memory loss?"
"Robert." She stopped rolling the gauze and looked me in the eyes. "Even if I had siblings, I don't consider them that way. My siblings wouldn't eat human flesh."
I said nothing.
"I just want to live. I don't want to eat any humans."
"Is that how it's always been?"
"What are you trying to say?" She glared at me.
"You remember nothing about your past?"
Do you enjoy human flesh? That was all I had to say, what I wanted to ask her.
Do you want to eat humans?
Then she looked me in the eye before I could say anything more.
"You don't trust me," she said flatly.
I couldn't say anything in response.
"I get it. You don't have to trust me." Her voice was somehow even flatter this time.
I felt a jolt in my stomach.
For some stupid reason I forgot she vomited everything she ate.
I'd seen how she lived with me for the past few months.
She couldn't even eat a pizza without scrunching her face like she was being waterboarded.
"Maybe that's a good thing," she said. "The more you trust someone, the more you'll suffer when they suddenly decide to turn their back on you. It's the only right thing to do. I'm not asking you to trust me, Robert." She turned her head and glanced sideways, toward the front door. "I just want to end our curse, so things can get back to normal."
"Liz—"
"—you're doing the right thing." She stood up. "Frankly, I don't know myself all that well. We'll just have to wait and see."
"Be serious."
"I am serious. I have always taken all of this very seriously. Every night those things would come to kill us and I deal with them."
"That's not the way to go, Liz."
"Who knows. Maybe I have nothing to do with them, and they're actually coming just for you."
"That's not true."
That wasn't what the homeless man in front of the station had told me. Liz and I had also done some experimenting last month to see which one of us the spider was coming after. This was her idea. That night she waited outside while I sat in the living room.
There were two spiders and they came for both of us. They didn't have a preference.