C Fletcher - A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

But the tiny click of the lock closing me in drowned us both. Maybe it was so loud because we knew it had no key to open it again.

I remember a jumble of voices after that, muffled by the heavy steel door. The gist was that they had to keep us quarantined, but they couldn’t have Brand and I locked in together in case we fucked.

They didn’t use that word. They said “bred”. Somehow the way they said it stained the day much darker than an honest swear word would have done.

Brand’s protests that the door was without a key were met with assurances that once the quarantine was up they would find a way to get me out, even if it meant knocking a hole in the wall.

Don’t worry, Ellis said. We’ve not got so many that we’re going to let her rot in there. She’ll be fed and watered as good as you. We’re not bad people. She’ll come to see that. We’ll treat her well.

By “not so many” he meant breeders.

I don’t remember much more of that day because I spent most of it dazed by seeing Joy alive, and then seeing her full of hate for me. I was torn apart. Like the lightning tree I had found on the ridge, the source of the light I’d seen from the tower. I was split in two—my heartwood blasted and burned out. I was dead on my feet. I couldn’t get the taste of blood out of my mouth. It, and the thought that it came with, made me sick. Literally. I lay on the bed ledge, my mind stumbling around the horror of it, trying to catch up with itself, deaf to whatever Brand kept saying through the slit in the door, and then I felt my body convulse as if rising in rebellion against the facts of the day. I only just made it to the bowl before I threw up the contents of my stomach in what seemed like an endless chain of convulsions. It felt like I was trying to vomit myself inside out, and when it did finally stop I was left shaking and weak but too tired to be able to find any relief in sleep. I lay there, convinced I would never sleep again. The horror of Joy pushed everything out of my head. I don’t think I thought of Jip or Jess or anything other than the nightmare I had woken into.

Somewhere in that blurred-out day, they brought me food and they brought me water—water to drink and water to flush the steel toilet. They set up a length of old steel pole poked through my window and poured from a distance as I mechanically filled a jug and the buckets. And then they asked if I wanted anything else and I did have enough sense to ask for my backpack and they brought it and took anything like a tool or a knife from it, as well as medicines, but that’s at least how I got this notebook I’m writing in.

Welcome to the now.

I suppose everything becomes a routine that you can get used to if you do it all the time—even sadness and horror and loneliness. I miss Jip and Jess, though I do sometimes catch a glimpse of them being walked on a rope in the distance through the trees. I find I miss them even more than my home, which is strange. Maybe it’s because they are close enough to see and almost near enough to touch.

I have been stuck in this concrete box, on my own and writing all this for twenty-three days. It feels like I am never going to be allowed to leave.

I have quarter of a pencil left. I will have to ask for more.

They feed us well enough and they keep the water coming and they often ask if I want things. I say I want to get out and it’s so routine that they think it’s a joke when I say it and laugh like they’re sharing something pleasant and fun with me. They’ve explained being walled up in this cement box is all for my own good. It’s for my protection (from Brand) and theirs (from the imaginary germs I might be carrying to blight them). They probably believe it. They say that when I am allowed to leave here they will make it up to me and I will like them and their home and want it to be mine. I try and smile and say maybe, but I don’t smile well when I would rather shout. I smile to help them relax about me.

They do not know what I do at night.

They come and sit on an old stool outside my window at any hour of the day and ask all sorts of other questions. About my family, how I got here without being eaten by wolves, would I like to know about their god because he’s really good at helping you understand why the world has trials and tribulations and how it’s all a way for him to show his love, and much other stuff like that. They keep their masks on because they believe in germs too.

I tell them my family is dead, because I don’t want them knowing where they are, and I tell them that I was safe deeper in the mainland because Jip is great at keeping wolves away. I want them to feed him and treat him and Jess like something of value. I also tell them I’d like to know why—since they seem to think breeding is such an important thing—that their god is a father and not a mother. I told them I did like the sound the bells on their church make though.

And that’s true. I like hearing them at the end of every day when they all go in to have a big pray-up together, because that means there’s one less day until they come and knock down the wall and get me out of here, and then all I have to do is grit my teeth and trust that Brand will be good on his word and help me escape before it gets too grim or repetitive. Though since Brand and I aren’t talking at the moment I write this, maybe I do also hate the church bells because they might just be marking off the time until he betrays me again.

Ellis told me that my liking the bells was a start and that I should likely come to love his god because his god loved everyone. I didn’t argue. Everyone in my family likes the lobsters we pull out of the deep clear water. I don’t think the lobsters like us much. Nor do I think they’re obliged to do so.

Ellis asked me if I’d ever been with a man. His manner was equal parts swagger and furtive.

I didn’t answer.

He dared to come closer, as if shy about being overheard.

He told me I should like it. He told me in a soft voice that made my flesh creep. That he would make me very happy. That it was not a painful but a wonderful world of sensations he would introduce me to. He told me not to worry about disappointing him, that he would show me how to give him pleasure too.

I think he stumbled as he left because the glass on his gas mask had steamed up a bit. I saw him wipe it as he took it off and walked away.

When Brand and I were still talking, I asked him about Joy’s hand. Why it was twisted. Why she wore a glove.

What he told me hit as hard as that knotted fist coming through the bars.

I only know what they told me, he said. I don’t know how much is true.

Just tell me, I said.

He was looking at me through the Judas hole in the door.

Ellis gave her a child, he said.

Do you mean he gave her someone else’s child, or that he made her pregnant? I asked.

He made her pregnant, he said.

There’s a word for that, I said.

I know, he said.

But I had no words. Just sadness. And a sudden need to find Joy and hold her and say I understood why she was so hard and angry. I was still a fool. Soft. I didn’t know anything.

She carried the baby but it was delivered dead, he said. Maybe once upon a time doctors could have saved it.

Joy. Breaking my heart again and again. I sank to the bed and stared at the floor.

She was too young, said Brand. That’s what the woman said.

What woman? I said.

The tall one who was beside Ellis, said Brand. Mary. She’s called Mary like the mother of their god. She said Tertia was too young, so the baby died and then she was useless as no life could cling to her womb any more.

Her hand, I said.

Ellis wanted to try again is what she told me. Years later. Maybe he said it was for breeding, but I expect it was just for the doing of it, said Brand. He has hot little eyes, Ellis. He tried to force her and frighten her with a hot poker from the fire. That’s how her hand got burn-scarred into a claw like that.