Kristine Muslim - Age of Blight - Stories

I returned to my accustomed place on the couch and watched television all day. There was an old cartoon showing the interior of a castle spire where black birds desperately tried to escape through the narrow windows. The tar man had awakened, and he ruffled the feathers on the black birds baked into the king’s pie. The birds shrieked when cornered. The evening news prominently featured the broiling Pacific storm. There were also reports about a volcano that was predicted to explode in Eastern Europe, about the black market that brimmed with forgeries of docile wives to replace nagging ones, about the new religion worshipping a radioactive potato which swept Nebraska into a frenzy. The news went on and on, lulling me to sleep.

The creature returned at the same time the next day. Its smell was not as strong as before. The sun must have done something to it, kind of disinfected it. When I spied it from the kitchen window, I noticed that its hair had receded. It was also standing upright. A slight limp and a bit of wobble on the left leg, but other than that, it now walked like a human. I half-expected it to say hello. I did not know what to make of its transformation. It must have wanted so much to be home and be accepted that it willed itself to change into something it wasn’t.

I did not know why I suddenly felt lonely when it ambled away and disappeared behind the bushes — as if something had been taken away from me.

Later that night, I woke up, crawled to the fridge, and wolfed two of the casseroles my neighbor brought for me. It felt natural to set the food on the floor, to use my bare hands to cram food inside my mouth, to lick clean the sides of the glass tray, to soil myself when I was too full to move. I could not understand what was happening to me. Maybe, things were supposed to end this way. I dozed off on the tiled floor. My fur kept me warm. I don’t know — I must have dreamed about strolling on the beach. I remembered that it was cordoned off by the military a long time ago. I’m not sure, I could be wrong.

It came back the morning of the next day. I expected it to push through the doggie door, which I had finally unlocked, but instead it turned the knob on the front door.

Oh, how it knew its way around the house! It switched on the television, started the percolator, and hummed to itself while it chopped vegetables, real ones, on the countertop. I liked how its footsteps echoed as it sauntered from room to room. It looked like it knew what it was doing. I’ve got my nose pressed against the floor, sniffing the underside of the couch after it shooed me away, swatting me with yesterday’s newspaper. But that was it. It did not do anything else to hurt me.

Every family had one.

So, when my sister came back from the dead, we accepted her. When she came downstairs for breakfast, we acted as if everything was normal. She smelled really bad — you know how human bodies can stink when they begin to decay after two days in room temperature. The interior walls of the house seemed to tremble in disgust, offended by my sister’s suffocating sweet-sickly stench. We observed from the corner of our eyes how she sloppily buttered her toast and crammed it inside her mouth. How was she going to digest it?

“You don’t have to pretend to be reading, Beth,” I told her. “It’s been two days. The worms are supposed to come out of your eyes pretty soon. I don’t think you can still see. I mean, tell me, can you still see?”

“I have to,” she said. “I’m going to be dead forever. It’s not like I’m going to live again. I might as well try to find ways to jumpstart my eyes. I might regain my sight if I do that. Blind dead is the worst kind of dead.”

“But that’s the only legitimate kind of dead there is. This, you, right now, it’s—” I trailed off and for a minute or two we chewed on our respective thoughts.

“You won’t be an undead dead forever,” I added. “The world is going to end soon.”

“Let me know if you are ready for the formaldehyde treatment.”

It was father who said this to Beth. It was father who was schooled in the inevitable reality of irreversible entropy in classical thermodynamics. He did not look up from his morning paper, did not waver for one second from his absolute lack of empathy. He never had it in him to care about anything except for matters directly related to his personal welfare. That and boxing. He loved boxing. Beth didn’t answer him right away. I looked out the window.

Outerbridge was particularly quiet this morning. Many parts of the world had been quieted down, too. There’s the forest near Chernobyl, for example, where fallen leaves won’t rot until forty years have passed. Had Beth been in Chernobyl, she might have a better chance at delaying the eventual corruption of her body. There’s also the town called Kalachi in Kazakhstan where people suddenly fall asleep and wake up after six days, none of them remembering anything. I sometimes wonder what the people of Kalachi dream of when they sleep for six days straight.

Meanwhile in Outerbridge, the choir from The Church of Henry was strangely silent. Exactly four months ago, not long before Beth died, the government announced that the world was going to end on a such and such date. We did not pay much attention to it. We did not even pay attention to how the morning sun began to develop a strange yellowish sheen. When the early light struck opaque surfaces, it did so by producing oily specks. Like the light was somehow liquefying and spattering its droplets. An announcer from the local radio station mentioned something about the early stages of redshifting, something about fluctuations in the quantum level that affected frequencies of light. We did not pay much attention to that, either. Because even if we did, we could do nothing about the impending cataclysm. Happy endings are just curses told evasively.

So we went on with our lives, what little remained of them. Then one day, Beth died and came back to life. Her dead body was wheeled out of the emergency room. Nine hours later, around the time when mother was making arrangements with the mortuary downtown and while father was insisting on cremation, Beth regained consciousness. Thing was, she did not have a pulse. Her skin still sported a deathly pallor. A physician, schooled in the science of human vital signs, pronounced her to be clinically dead and then sent her home to her family. He recommended prompt formaldehyde treatment for sanitary reasons. He also said that nearly every family had one like my sister, so we shouldn’t take it personally.

“Besides, the world is going to end soon,” the physician, who was schooled in the science of human vital signs, said. Then he winked at my sister, who did not or could not wink back.

“Turn down the thermostat in your room as low as it can go and stay there,” mother told Beth after father left the room, rattling the paper in his hands. “I’ll call home services for your formaldehyde treatment this afternoon.”

Beth did not nod in agreement. She did not say anything, either. Maybe she thought she didn’t have to. Or there’s the possibility that she had lost her hearing. Sometimes, the undead are completely misunderstood. They can’t help it if the living have to keep on living; have to keep expecting something from them. That’s the one true quality that defines life — the compulsion to draw something: an essence, a lesson, anything — from others.