Gwangju Writes
Thanksgiving, 3:00 AM, End of the World
Written by Robert Hinderliter
Six months later our city is still burning, dark beasts still shuffling through the streets, and last week you came home with a forked tongue. Bifurcation, you called it, your voice husky with painkillers, your mouth struggling to form sounds with its new mangled occupant. You stuck it out for me to admire: ragged stitches down each side of the newly peninsula’d flesh, blood beads slowly forming. Soon, you told me, you’d be able to move both sides independently, watch them curl around each other, dart out to taste the air like a serpent. I turned away.
“You’re as bad as the creatures,” I said.
“Oh,” you said, “I’m much worse.”
This is the life that is left for us. Six months ago the earth split open with a terrible roar, and the horrors from below spilled to the surface. Savage creatures as big as cars, black-furred, razor-clawed, mouths packed with teeth made for sawing and piercing. And with the beasts came a poison wind, a deathly exhalation from deep in the earth that erupts into flames in the lungs, burning its victims from the inside out.
The weak and indecisive died quickly. You were neither. You loaded your shotgun, strapped on a gas mask, and joined the Hunters. When the goal of fighting the beasts proved hopeless, the gang turned to pillaging and robbery. The old laws, you told me, were for the old world. You bring home food, and I cook it silently. I don’t ask where it’s from.
During the day, when you’re gone, I sit by the window in the living room and look out over the ruined city. Smoke in the distance, pick-up trucks with beds piled with bodies passing on the street below. Sometimes a black shadow stalks across the sidewalk, claws clicking on the cement, head twisting from side to side, sniffing the air. In the evenings you come home always drunk, often high, and occasionally with a new tattoo, red and raw, on your back or arm. And finally your tongue. Your voice, now wet and lisping, is hideous to me.
Today is Thanksgiving. Or rather, yesterday. It’s 3:00 AM, and you haven’t come home. It’s raining. The only light in the city is a fire in the window of a distant building. A cat is screaming wildly, as if it’s being pulled apart.
I remember our first Thanksgiving, eight years ago, when your parents flew in from Maine and your dad kept spilling rum on the reclining chair and making comments about my weight. I suppose I was a little heavy then, but you told me I was carrying it in all the right places. Your mom had picked up some sort of virus on the plane and was blowing her nose every ten seconds and stuffing the tissues between the couch cushions. It was the first time I’d met them.
In the kitchen, I had a terrible time getting the turkey into the oven. I’d bought a new pan to accommodate a large bird, and it turned out to be an inch too wide. I had to tilt it to make it fit, but then the turkey started to slide, and in my panicked overcorrection, I burned my arm on the oven door. I cried out, and you stopped mashing the sweet potatoes and rushed over to help. Together, we managed to cram the pan into a stable position and slam the door shut. It took you a minute to realize I was crying.
You took me by the hand then and led me past your belching dad, past your sniffling mom, past the window where I am now, and into the bedroom. You shut the door behind us. From outside, we could hear your dad grumbling over the sound of football on the TV.
You lowered me onto the bed and lay down beside me. You pulled me close against you, pressed your cheek to mine. I was sobbing by that point, great silent heaves. You stroked my hair and whispered in my ear. “It’s okay,” you said. Your voice was so gentle then. It was a sound I longed for. “I love you,” you whispered. Again and again. “I love you, I love you. I’ll love you till the end of the world.”
This short story first appeared in Night Train magazine.