SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“I have some meat for you,” Ruhan says.

I know it isn’t real meat, with blood in it. It’s a block, processed and shaped to look and taste like meat. But I’m not hungry. I haven’t been hungry in years. I can’t remember the last time I tasted cooked food. I know this is a phase that will soon end. The cycle will come around and I’ll need another kind of food, as I have many times before.

“No, thank you,” I say.

“You have to eat, osita ,” he insists. Little bear, he calls me. If only he knew.

“I’ll eat later,” I tell him.

A brief silence hangs beyond the door. “How about we eat together?” he suggests. “Me on this side and you on your side. We’ll eat and we’ll talk. How about that?”

I smile, but of course he can’t see it. Perhaps he hears it in my voice. “CJ9 won’t be too happy with that,” I say. “What if he catches you?”

“CJ can kiss my ass,” Ruhan replies. “What’s he gonna do? Send me to prison?” He laughs at his own joke.

I don’t say anything. Outside, the creatures swim languidly past my window. A sudden, incoherent longing rises in my chest, leaving me feeling fragmented and jumpy. I reach over and push a button. Portal shades descend and hide the view.

A series of clicks and hisses announces the arrival of my meal. A small door in the wall slides open to reveal a plate of food and a cup of water in a steel-reinforced box. I remove them both and set them on the table by my bed. Later I’ll drink the water, but I’ll send the food back to recycling. I don’t need it.

The life growing in my womb feeds me, and in turn eats me. Together, we live.

“Tell me a story, osita ,” Ruhan says. “One I haven’t heard before.”

We’ve been on the Lonecross for twenty years. I’ve been telling him stories for the past ten. Perhaps he is the observer after all, the collector of information. He knows more about me than anyone else aboard the ship.

“You’ve heard them all, Ruhan.”

“Guess I have,” he says. “You sound tired.”

“I am.”

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

“Old age, eh?” His concern is brief. Through the speaker I hear him take an eager breath. “Tell me about the alien in the sea, then,” he says. “I like that one.”

I’ve told it a hundred times, it seems. But I comply. “The year was 1620, and I was eighteen,” I begin, as I always do. Ruhan chuckles.

I stop. “What’s funny?”

“That always gets me.”

We’ve discussed this countless times, but he won’t accept it as truth. “You never believe me.”

“That you’re 900 years old? It’s a good story.”

I want to argue with him, to convince him of the truth, but the urge passes, and I continue my story. “I was one of many young women hoping to become wives,” I continue, and I’m transported back once again.

I wasn’t the only person who saw the glow under the waves. I was one of a hundred or more passengers looking for opportunity and perhaps love in Virginia. Several had joined me on deck that night, as well as a few of the crew, all of us staring down into the depths, curious and maybe a little frightened of what we saw. One of the crew said, “It’s only the phosphor glow of tiny sea creatures. They cluster together and sometimes they grow in number to the millions. We’ve seen it before.”

That reassured us a little, but still we watched. Soon we realized that the glowing object was rising rapidly and would soon break the surface alongside the ship. We all stumbled back, stifling cries and gasps. The crewman who had offered the explanation leaned over the railing and said, “Damn.” It was all he was able to say before something from our nightmares rose up from the water and rocked our vessel so violently, we lost our footing and fell, grabbing for anything to prevent us from being catapulted overboard.

It was an oval-shaped thing and huge—almost the size of our ship—with a ring of shining eyes pulsating in colors of blue and green. The object slowly circled our vessel. When it completed a full circuit, it stopped, as if considering what to do next. It moved sharply to the left and then to the right, finally hovering a few feet above us, perfectly still and silent. I felt all those eyes scrutinizing, examining, sorting. The others on deck shouted and screamed, scrambling away, but I remained, paralyzed, transfixed by the sight.

A long appendage appeared from beneath the object and lowered itself closer to me. I felt the sensation of heat in the back of my head just as I had in my dream. In my weakened state, the shock and terror were too much. My ears filled with a high-pitched ringing, and all the stars in the night sky winked out.

“What happened to the ship?” Ruhan asks. “After you were abducted.”

I realize he’s never asked that question before. “I don’t know.”

“Kept on sailing, maybe. Minus one passenger, eh? Must have been like a hammer to the head: that whole experience, the whole ship telling wild tales of aliens. You think they went crazy after something like that?”

“How would I know that?”

“Seems like it could’ve happened. Maybe the ship sank and they all drowned.”

“Maybe.”

“And that sumbitch dropped you on the beach like nothing happened. What did it do to you?”

“You know what it did to me…what he did to me.”

“But you don’t remember.”

There’s much I remember. But to Ruhan I lie and say, “No. I don’t.” I choose not to share the details of an encounter with a creature so foreign and yet so humanlike that I wanted to both flee from and embrace him. He was altogether beautiful and entirely repulsive, an outsider in the fullest sense of the word, trapped on a world not his own, who knew he’d never see his home again. He did what he needed to do. He made a way to escape, if not for the whole of him, then for a piece.

I knew none of this at the time of my abduction. I was convinced I had died and been carried to hell for my sins. I thought I was facing a demon disguised as an angel of light. Only later in my dreams did the revelations come. But at that first encounter, I thought only of eternal torment. He studied me with a piercing, ferocious gaze that dissected my soul and stitched it back together. His touch burned, but stirred in me an intense longing I couldn’t begin to comprehend. It didn’t ease the pain and terror that overwhelmed me at the insertion of some part of him into my womb.

“So when did you know you had a baby inside you?” Ruhan asks.

“Not for a while.”

“Until the natives found you.”

“Yes.”

“And you turned cannibal.”

I cringe at the word. I don’t need human flesh. I don’t need blood. I did it for the life within me, my enemy lover who required a particular type of nourishment. I had no choice but to get it for him. I tried to stop myself, but I could no more prevent my burrowing into a brain or a neck or an abdominal cavity than I could prevent my blood from coursing through my veins. At the time I didn’t know the names of those things I craved, but now I can name them: the thymus, pituitary, thyroid, pancreas, liver—those parts rich in vitamins, amino acids, and hormones.

“I don’t consider myself a cannibal,” I say.

“I read your file. It goes back a long time. Hundreds of years. You’ve always been a cannibal.”

“I thought you didn’t believe I was that old.”

He chuckles.

“It’s all true, Ruhan.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. Let’s just say it is true—”

“In the twenty years we’ve shared space on this ship,” I push, “have my stories ever changed?”