Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

Josie leaves the stage. Her dress swirls against legs encased in nylon, blooming roses. The skirt catches light in its folds, red on red, pooling blood. She wears a flower in her braided hair. Once upon a time, I may have given her a flower the same shade—a real one, not a silk monstrosity with hot-glue dew-drops clinging to its petals.

Her eyes meet mine, their moss-green accentuated by the underwater light. A smile touches her lips but not her gaze.

“Ara.” Josie brushes her lips against my cheek, making sure to catch the corner of my mouth.

She smells of powdered lily-of-the-valley, dusted heavy to hide the reek of fear. Someone very wealthy must have bought it for her. Scents like that are hard to come by.

Guilt spreads patterns of frost across the surface of my heart, but it doesn’t touch the core. Pain flickers in Josie’s eyes. I’ve forgotten; she hasn’t.

I tip my head towards Lorence; it’s the least I can do. Josie orders something as blood-red as her dress, but with far more kick.

“What are you doing here?” Josie asks.

Her fingernails are ragged, as if she’s been raking them across the walls in her sleep. A tendril of ink slips from beneath the strap of her dress, a questing tongue tasting the air. She shivers. The ink-shadow stains her eyes for a moment, too, turning them the colour of lightning-struck wood.

“I was lonely,” I say. It may be the most honest thing I’ve ever said; I don’t know.

“Oh?” Her eyes are green again, sparking mockery.

She lifts the long, black braid lying over my shoulder, running it through trembling hands.

“I wish I could do something for you.” The words fall, a numb rush over my lips.

Josie is the most breathtaking woman I’ve ever known. Why can’t I feel anything for her? I know what she meant to me, what she means to me, but I don’t feel it. Not anymore. Her skin flickers, the ink shivering across its surface and underneath. I mimic the motion unconsciously, my body responding to her hands on my hair.

“There’s nothing you can do.” She drops my braid, a soft slap against my leather.

Josie hes her drink and orders another, her mouth set in a hard line that reminds me of Madam Senator and the case I should be on. What am I doing here?

“There’s nothing I can do for you, either.” Josie steps back, eyes as hard as the line of her mouth.

She’s right. There’s nothing I can do except buy her drinks. And isn’t there a selfish hope that her inhibitions will drop and we’ll end up back in that decaying hotel room, listening to the remnants of humanity leave the Teatro while we fuck?

Once, in the space between midnight and dawn, in the half-dark—an unnatural glow belonging to caves and never aboveground—I tasted the nightmare-sweat slicking Josie’s skin. I traced the writhing lines of her tattoos with my tongue. She didn’t wake. That sweat wasn’t sweat—it tasted like the oil born of the rotting bones of prehistoric beasts, oozing beneath the skin of the world.

Josie’s next words send my pulse into the roof of my mouth. “Do you remember what you told me about your stepbrother and the night you got your scars?”

“No.” The word comes out hoarse, terrible. Josie’s smile is worse. I can’t remember if it’s a lie.

What did I tell her? What if I took her between, trying to make her forget?

Josie leans forward, her lips against my ear, her breath raising tiny hairs on my skin. Her voice is smoke, rough whiskey, shattered amber. “He called you his angel. They’re shaped like wings, your scars.”

When she draws back, I feel the absence of her breath.

“I don’t think you’re even human, anymore.” Her hips sway as she walks back to the stage.

God help me, I’m wet and trembling. I want to throw her over the bar and bury my head between her legs, nipping the soft flesh of her thighs till she bleeds. Maybe she’s right about me. Maybe I’m not human. Maybe I’m too much so.

Josie grips the microphone like she wants to throttle it. Her voice is steel wool, scouring flesh; her eyes are fixed on me.

The blood-and-seawater light fills my mouth with salt. The world rolls. Firelight flickers, throwing shadows against the thinness of my eyelids.

“The world is going to end.” A voice speaks against my ear.

“It’s already ending.” I smell wet leather, tangle my fingers through wheat-gold hair, and pull wine-stained lips against mine. Rain drums. Hay prickles bare skin. “So, fuck me,”

I bite down hard, yank fabric roughly over hips; a body pushes into mine. A cry of pleasure and pain, and after, the world burns.

Josie’s voice wails. Her smile is blade-edged, her tattoos unmistakable, now. They slither across her shoulders, beneath the neckline of her dress, chasing the ghost of my fingertips across her skin. Josie tips her head back, throat working. The song becomes a scream, her body shuddering, eyes rolling white between agony and ecstasy.

The bar squirms in murky half-light. Tentacles unfold. They undulate across the walls, wrap my arms, lift my hair. I drift in the green deep and they caress my bones.

I stagger for the door, retch on fire-scored pavement. Chill air slaps my face; I shift without meaning to. The threads binding past to present catch me, hurl me forward in time. My bones nearly shatter, filled with desire to part company with my flesh. I want to scatter wide enough that I don’t have to remember anything ever again.

In another reality, following another skein of time, I follow Josie back to her tiny, hot apartment, overlooking S. Francesco della Vigna. We listen to distant water lap. We fuck. Her tattoos writhe; she whimpers with pleasure and fear. I taste her while she screams. She tells my future in her sleep. I say goodbye. And she forgives me this time.

I brace myself against a wall, trembling. Damp, heavy breezes push air through the narrow, winding streets. My skin cold-sweats with borrowed dew. Where am I? When?

I walk, boots hushing over time-worn stone. I sympathize with Marco. I wonder why I’m hunting him. The Senator’s envelope presses against my chest. I want to get this case over with and pretend there’s a place I can go to that will feel like home.

Blonde hair, the smell of leather in the rain. I survived; he didn’t. Fire scored my back with a thousand whips, tracing the shape of wings.

I walk along the waterfront, fighting memories that insist on surfacing, no matter how many times I try to give them away. I’ve begged the dark spaces teeming with star-ripe tentacles to take them away, but they never do. There are no refunds on the price of survival, once it’s paid.

I pass a nightclub where a church used to stand. Tentacles—half-seen—lash the night. Shadows obscure the stars and they are just right. The club-beat is a heart-sound, a pulse-thump. The building sways. It shivers. Pigeons weep and mourn in cages embedded in walls of slick, trembling flesh. Overhead, gulls still scream their laughter, but then they would, wouldn’t they?

I know where I’m going now. Farther down the wharf, where, once upon a time, goods used to be delivered in rusting, corrugated containers, is the man I need to see.

Vincenzo sits at the end of a pier jutting out into the water. The piles are ghosts against the lapping dark. Each weed-slicked piece of wood is topped with a creature with too many arms, suckers gripping rotten wood. They sing.

The eerie-sweet sound licks my spine, too much like the timbre of Josie’s voice. But instead of smoky-hot, the tentacles sing cold. How can things without mouths sing?

Their voices—if they can be called that—are vast, reaching distances but also reminiscent of the deeps, of cavern-glow and waving fronds. Their tears—should they ever cry—would taste of copper, iron, sulfur, and flame.