Nevada Barr - The Rope

Waxed paper, that was odd. Nobody used waxed paper anymore. Only monsters who trimmed the crust away and served massive doses of sugar to their captives to fatten them up for slaughter.

Molly never cut off the crusts. She said they were the best part. Anna wished she had the crusts to this sandwich. Harder to put weird shit in the crusts. Meticulously peeling the top slice of bread back, she looked for anything suspicious, her mind clicking through images from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich . No eyeball, no obvious expectoration, dead cockroaches, or rat feces.

Closing the sandwich, her eyes, and her mind, Anna took a bite. Hunger roared, taste buds sang, saliva ran, stomach quivered with anticipation. For that instant Anna was transported from terror and agony to a glorious hedonistic plane. In short, it was the finest bite of food she had ever experienced.

Gourmet gave over to gobbler. She devoured the rest in three bites and was eyeing the second wax-paper-wrapped square in the bottom of the sack. Was it also a sandwich? The monster was into mind games. Maybe the one on top had been the bait and this second was the switch, the one with the razor blades in it.

She took a pudding instead. It had at least been factory sealed. Running her fingers over the smooth plastic tub and the foil top, she felt for pinpricks. In college, one of her roommates enamored with Psych 101, had used a hypodermic to inject blue food coloring into an unopened milk carton to see if anybody would drink blue milk. Nobody would.

No pinpricks; nothing had been injected into the pudding.

Anna pulled off the foil top. Chocolate. Again saliva flowed from some mysterious moisture source the rest of her body didn’t have access to. She licked the underside of the foil, then squeezed the little plastic cup, gushing the pudding into her mouth and over her tongue, and went again to the place where all was good and even better this time because all was chocolate. The last remnants she scraped out with her index finger and sucked into her mouth.

The monster hadn’t left her a spoon. Probably afraid she’d tap him to death with it if she got a chance. Which she would. Anna’d never been much on hate, but she hated this guy. Mentally ill or not, she hated him so much that to think of him filled her with an intense anger she could feel to the tip of her braid. Surely this kind of hate would cause one of them to spontaneously combust. Probably her.

Taking deep slow breaths, she blew some of the toxic emotions out of her body and brain. A semblance of calm restored, she folded the lunch sack closed. At the moment she didn’t want to know what was in the other package. Supper maybe, should she live that long. The canteen beckoned, and she knew she would have to drink sooner or later. Later was better.

Food had revived her to an extent that surprised her. A sense of optimism came with a full stomach and a shot of sucrose. The downside was now she had to go to the bathroom.

In New York she’d lived in many one-bedroom and studio apartments, some not as spacious as the bottom of her jar. Living small had taught her the necessity of living neat. The thought of fouling where she would be eating, maybe, and sleeping, druggily, was abhorrent, but life apparently was going to go on at least for a while.

Getting awkwardly to her feet, she chose to put her privy to one side of the datura garden. In the old days Chinese farmers used night soil to fertilize their fields. The scraggly plants couldn’t be getting much in the way of nutrients from the sand. Hoping the datura would be grateful for her donation, she carefully dug a hole a foot or so deep.

The business of living attended to, she began scooping sand in to cover it up in good cat fashion. Her fingers tangled in a web in the dirt, and hope flickered: Hemp to weave a rope? Old fishing nets to macramé into a ladder? Even if she could have done those things, there was no way to get it hooked to the outside world.

A bit of line with which to garrote a monster?

That was a cheering thought. She tightened her fingers and dragged out the nest of fibers she’d pawed up.

Brown and fine. It looked like human hair. Anna shook her hand free in sudden panic and fell back onto her hind end. The jarring loosed fire-bolts of pain in both arm and head. She almost welcomed them. They made it hard to think.

Nothing much looked like human hair but human hair.

“Help! Help me!” Anna screamed.

Regis was sitting in the bedroom of Jenny’s duplex, the one that Anna Pigeon had used for such a short time. It wasn’t his lieu day—like a lot of HQ employees, he had Saturdays and Sundays off just like normal people. He had called in sick. The parks frowned on permanents calling in sick or going on vacation at the height of the season, but he’d done it anyway. Seasonals never called in sick. At least he’d never heard of one doing it. They just didn’t.

Was it possible they never got sick? he wondered.

He never got sick. There wasn’t a day in his childhood he could remember staying home sick. He wasn’t sick now. He was—agitated. It wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, he liked a change from the neutral nothing he felt most days. A life lived in ecru, he thought wryly. Ecru. That was his mother’s favorite color. Half his genes were from a woman whose favorite color wasn’t a color at all. “Everything goes with ecru,” she liked to say.

She would have approved of the employee housing color scheme at the Rope: outsides gray with no adornment, insides varying shades of ecru. Possibly the original decorators—buyers was probably the more accurate term—who’d chosen the carpets and furnishings had dared a splash of color, but over the years time and use had sucked it out. Dust and the neglect of serial renters had done the rest.

The room Anna Pigeon slept in was no different: a double bed, stripped now, a dresser and bed stand of the processed woodlike substance that looks battered and old a week after it’s brought home from the store and limps on in that shabby state for the next hundred years. Opposite the bed were a shallow closet with sliding doors, the wood warping slightly, and a single window, blinds down, three of the bottom slats broken.

Anna Pigeon’s things had been taken, but Regis wanted to sit in the room where she’d stayed without people butting in and asking him what he was doing or why he was there. He was in personnel; as far as he was concerned he had a right to be anywhere he wanted. And, in the park, nobody bothered to lock their houses, especially not at Dangling Rope, Bullfrog, Hite, or Halls Crossing. They were too remote by road to attract thieves, and people who came by boat were too rich to covet the trash that could be bought on a government salary.

Regis sat on the bed and listened to his pulse racing in his ears. The emptiness of the shabby space was more than just the lack of a tenant. Too many people who cared too little about the room filled it with ghosts. Not the ectoplasmic phantoms fools pretended to see when they wanted to feel special. Real ghosts, the kind that don’t exist, the kind that are made up of dead air, the kind you see in the eyes of an animal when the vet puts it to sleep. The kind that are Not There.

Growing up he hadn’t been allowed pets. The first time he’d seen the Not There of death was the previous winter when Kippa died. Kippa was their six-month-old French bulldog. A golden bowling ball of love. Regis smiled, remembering. The image shifted into another, the wide grin red with blood, blood where his ears had flopped, screams that came out through his mashed nose. Regis had been holding him like a baby, looking deep into his brown eyes, when all of a sudden there was no dog, just dog meat, carrion. There, then Not There.