Drink for the Thirst to Come (25 page)

Erin’s twisted little claws reached for the warm, fragrant breast. They closed softly around it. Oh, and it seemed so right for them to be there, the broken little fingers.

Erin wasn’t aware, but now she leaned back. Mommy and her breast came with her. The little girl drew Mommy through the bars. The cold steel tore through the ghostly flesh, sending electric fires through every dead organ of Mommy’s body. She tried to scream. Being dead, she couldn’t.

Finally, the steel bars flowed through her and Mommy was in the cage with her little girl.

To Erin, the titty had a will. It knew how to feed and comfort her and her mouth bubbled with good milk, soothing, easing every part that ever hurt.

Soon, Mommy’s arms embraced her once again. She felt herself grow smaller and smaller. That felt so good.

Erin’s eyes closed. Through her lids the light bulb was red and sparkly black. Soon the light went away and all was dark. She felt mother heaving under her but that was fine. She felt her mother might be screaming, but no. Both were dead now and wasn’t that nice? Both of them, mother, daughter, dead together.

The oozy things in Erin’s belly, mouse chunks and thick bug jellies sucked from things in the dark, the nose snot she’d swallowed, the dirt, mud, the pieces of herself, the bone bits and teeth parts, the Baby’s sock she’d taken one thread at a time, all that now flowed from her. When it started to come, it burned a little. But then the hurt stopped. It flowed and flowed and flowed from her from every part. For a moment, Erin worried that the stuff had gotten on Mommy. Then she stopped worrying. If it had, Mommy would have let her sure as shit know about it...

When it stopped, Erin was clean inside. Just Mommy’s sweet, sweet milk still streamed into her from that pretty, pretty titty.

Mommy stiffened, then began to buck like a wild thing. Erin’s eyes stayed shut and she soothed Mommy with her little hands and mouth.

“Mommy’s dead. Mommy’s dead,” Erin said quietly to the invisibles making Mommy do these dumb and twitchy things. “She can’t cry. Don’t make her cry!”

Erin was still hungry. Erin got smaller. She felt herself snuggle so close and warm to Mommy, Mommy’s flesh felt so nice and soft and warm. Erin pressed her mouth fully around the big, big nipple then she flowed inside. She flowed inside her Mommy where it all was dark and soft and warm and smelled so like food and goodness.

Erin laid her head on a softness in the dark. It was sooo easy. It didn’t hurt to breathe anymore because she didn’t have to breathe. Mommy breathed for her. Erin sighed so sweet and felt her mother try to scream again

“No, no, Mommy. It’s okay. We’re good. We’re good.”

Even then, Erin was hungry. A good hungry because food was there. She pressed her mouth to the fragrant Mommy flesh by her cheek and she kissed it, kissed it and licked it. With the kiss she felt her belly fill. It felt so much better. Later, she’d eat and eat and eat some more, eat until forever was over.

Mommy tried to scream.

“No, no, Mommy, we’re together now. And this is heaven.” Mommy tried to scream.

Erin had always loved her Mommy. That’s why Erin was here for her now. Because she loved her Mommy.

Mommy tried to scream.

Erin slept. Soon she’d be awake and the rest of forever could begin.

A VERY BAD DAY

Later that afternoon, the world nearly came to a burnt toast kind of end. It did not, not just then. And that was a shame, because at that moment that was just the kind of thing Leslie would have appreciated. At that moment she had just been dumped by her third (and, for her, that was it, he was the final, absolutely last, no, this time he was really the last) boyfriend.

When she walked past
Chrysanthemum: Books—Used and Cheap
, she knew just how the stock felt. She barely paused. Then she saw the sign: Going Out of Business.
Chrysanthemum, going out of business, for goodness sakes,
she thought.

Books had accumulated in there for forty years. They had lain on tables jumbled together in a mathematically mystical way. Horror fiction lay cover-by-cover with cooking, European economics muddled alongside fairy tales and other self-improvement books.

In back, on the farthest table in an improbable corner, lay three books. Separated, they meant nothing. Taken together, these disparate volumes would have proved with fatal certainty that for the past quarter-century Earth had been in the thrall of the vanguard of an alien invasion force. The force was biding its time.

Really. The truth was in there as inescapable and incontrovertible as, as... well, as the fact of Leslie’s having been dumped. Again.

Had she entered, had she browsed, had she gone back there, picked up each book—had she so much as glanced at the titles—had she lain the ideas those titles would have sounded, one against the other, inside her soul’s brain, the tumblers would have clicked.

“Oh my goodness, my word, THAT is what it all means!” she would have said aloud.

She would have gone to her chum Daryl from
The Tribune
. He would have caught on like/that. He would have broken the story. The world would have known. The aliens’ hand (well, not “hands,” but you know what I mean) would have been forced and the world would have come to a char-dog, burnt toast kind of end.

Leslie, in her I-don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass mode, never went into Chrysanthemum. In minutes, a customer had picked up one of the three books, carried it for a half-hour then laid it on a table near the front. A second customer bought one of the others, took it home, where it would have ended inexplicably at the bottom of the hamper, below the stuff that never got washed. The third book? Who cares? It was pointless without the first two.

And, of course, Leslie’s chum Daryl of
The Trib
was the prick who’d ditched her. The world was saved.

On the other hand, Leslie wasn’t doing at all well. She went home and screamed for a while. Then she went to the bathroom and took off all her clothes. She stared at herself in the mirror on the back of the door as Wellington purred and rubbed ’round her ankles.

The view: Leslie: Red hair. Okay, not bad. A lot of people liked red hair. She’d cut it herself. Not a half bad job. A little spiky on one side. The back? Well, who knew what was back there?

She sniffed her armpit. Not bad. She stared at it for a moment. Well, a lot of people didn’t mind a little fur. She thought it was nice. Some found it sexy. Not everyone, apparently.

She lifted each breast by its nipple. Not difficult. They were breasts in concept only; she could have gone topless even at Oak Street Beach and not gotten busted, so to speak. No one would have noticed. Well, a lot of people like small. “Or say they do,” the mirror said to her.

Below, down there, she was bushy. That looked sort of pretty. Red, airy. She fluffed herself, peered close in the mirror. “Pouty. Now, that’s cute,” the mirror said to her down there. She slid her hand between and gave her labial folds a little flub. Nice. The rest? She sniffed her flubbing finger. A heady cross-scent: sweaty butt-crack, Fulton’s Fish Market. Well, some people did like that sort of thing. “Think it sexy.” At the moment, she wanted to believe.

So did Welly, she thought from his urgent rubbing ’round her ankles. That felt nice.

The phone rang.

Leslie and the mirror had momentary jerks of the soul, an urge of the feet to get it.
Might be Dar…
Leslie thought.

“Fuck him,” the mirror said.
Fuck. HIM. No. Don’t
fuck
him
, they both thought.
Fuck’m!

She ignored the second ring and made an overall assessment of the woman in the mirror. Lithe. Muscular by miracle (she ate like a pig and never exercised). Youth and nervous energy accounted for that. She’d have to watch it in years to come. She gave a bitter, ironic little snort at the notion.

Okay, so that mirror-woman? A little bony. She has... knees, elbows. Breasts? She lifted them again, gently this time, supported them underneath. Which gave the whole effect dignity. With a little help, a pregnancy or two.

Oh, cut it out!

Wellington continued to nudge, more insistent. He nudged her toward the living room, the door.

The phone chirped again.
The hell with it
, she thought.
If it’s Daryl, the hell with it. If it isn’t... the hell with it.

There was nothing wrong with her. Nothing, absolutely. She was, in fact, adorable. No Angelina-y, Scarlette-y sort of beauty, more along the Amy Adams-Ellen Page-Emma Watson axis. Smart, tough, a pal, a partner in a pinch and cute as hell.

Yuck, Cute!
Yesterday, she would have groin-popped anyone using the C-word. Today: Cute was okay. She’d take cute.

The phone peeped a fourth time...

Okay, the phone was not Daryl. It was not even NOT Daryl. It was, in fact, radio station WLLB. Radio station WLLB, Classical 97.3, had absolutely nothing to do with Daryl. Had Ms. Leslie Groves of 831 Roscoe Avenue answered within the first four rings and if she had been listening to WLLB (She was.) and if she had been able to tell Freeman Yasgar and the 97.3 WLLB Classical Musical Firmament who had been the wife of composer Richard Wagner (She could. Leslie so admired Cosima Wagner and loved the romantic tale of the
Siegfried Idyll
, composed secretly by Richard as a Christmas present to Cosima and their newborn son...
Oh God, what a beautiful story.
) she would have won an all expense paid trip for two to anyplace in the world. The grim irony of
Trip for Two
would not have been lost on her but a change of place would have been just what she needed. In addition, the correct answer would have put her name into a pot to be eligible for a two-million-tax-free-dollar prize drawing.

And more about that phone call. In selecting the 2-mil-winner, Freeman Yasgar would have groped among the entries in the bowl and grabbed the card bearing the name of Mr. Willie Luddens, 18 years of age, and the sole support of his slightly dotty mum and her thirty-two unaltered male cats. Before drawing Luddens’s name from the pot, however, Yasgar would have had A) an overwhelming sense of his own power and of how that hand of his would alter, forever, some poor life out there and B) an itch in his right ear. Since this was radio (and not television, where Freeman
really
belonged,
damn it
), Freeman would have dropped Willie’s entry, scratched his ear, then snagged the card of Ms. Leslie Groves of 831 Roscoe Avenue. The two million changes in Leslie’s life would have caused Daryl to reconsider dumping her and would have given Leslie the wherewithal to flee Daryl and the horde of former and would-be suitors who would suddenly have found her allusive beauty utterly irresistible. She would have resettled anonymously in Dublin. In Dublin she would have met, been courted by, and given her heart to Middle Eastern oil septillionaire Musa Ben-Mustafa. At Leslie’s gentle urging, Musa would have placed subtle but inexorable pressure on several warring factions within his home region to sue for peace with their neighbors and with everyone else. Dominoes would have fallen. A cessation of hostilities among the globe’s organized religions would have cascaded from what would have become known as “The Dublin Accords.” This, naturally, would have pissed off all the right people and dear, dear Musa would have been assassinated, thus precipitating Universal Armageddon. If only Leslie hadn’t answered that damned phone!

Which of course she never did.

She debated, again, whether to shave her armpits or not. She decided not. The phone stopped peeping.

Thank God. No wonder Welly’s so excited,
she thought.

At about that same time, she also thought she might try being a lesbian. What did she have to lose?

(Do you want to know? I won’t tell. Too depressing.)

There were three women of her acquaintance whom she knew to have had... experience. The first was Allison, tall, soft, lovely, sweet, feminine. You’d never know looking at her, but Leslie had it on several good authorities.

When Allison answered her phone, Leslie said, “Ho. Hi. He.” Brain lock. Finally, “It’s Les.” She used the hated short form of her name. Today, she thought it might be a useful hint.

“And ho, hi, he there, back.” Allison sounded pleased to hear from her. “What’s happenin’?”

“Oh, Allison, Allison, Allison,” Leslie sobbed. The sobs were only half-forced. “Daryl broke it off. Today. At lunch. Imagine? The Prick. Lunch. Not even dinner. I don’t know.” She waited. “I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do.” She swallowed. She listened to the quality of silence on the other end. “Do you want to come over tonight and, well, sit with me...?”

No imagination. Graceless in the extreme. Just what Daryl had said about her: “You’re graceless,” he had said. Worse, he said, she thought she knew everything.

“I know, I know...” Leslie had said, half in jest, half without realizing the irony. Now the silence from Allison’s end of the line was terrifying.

“Allison?” she asked.

“You want to go to bed with me,” Allison said. A chilly, questionless way of saying. “Don’t you?”

“No,” Leslie said.

“No, I can tell. The idea. Where did you get the idea? I’m not. I have no idea where you could have gotten the idea I was. That I was that way.”

Leslie had nothing.

“Well, okay. Goodbye,” Allison said. “Okay?” she asked. Then she hung up.

“Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Damn,” Leslie said to the damn dial tone. She was blushing. She felt it. She was also still naked. And sweat-stinky.
I’m being needy
, she said to herself and made her second call wrapped in a bathrobe.

“Hi, Deirdre,” she said when the line connected. “It’s Leslie.” She was getting better.

“Hi, Les,” Deirdre purred. “I was juuust thinking of you. Feature that? Then the phone rings and who is it? It’s you! Hiii...” She sounded at ease, comforted by her life. That was good. According to rumor, Deirdre would do it with anything mammal. Pretty and lithe and…