Feeding Them- Chapter I

A sequel to I Wish

The little orb of grey matted fur slowly slithers towards the black-and-white mountain curled up in front of the artificial fireplace. I follow its stealthy progress with mild curiosity from my perch atop the old armchair in the corner. The mountain is snoring lightly. 

My overheated right ear is starting to sweat. Fueled by the droning tirade leaking through from the other end of the line, the receiver emits enough infrared radiation to be mistaken for a blasted open-flame stove top. 

In her defense, if it weren't for my sister’s financial support I could never afford the luxury of working from home, thus avoiding the detrimental effects of communication with other human beings. Not to mention having a home to work in. Or an artificial fireplace.  And then there’s the electric bill. And my shiny new coffee machine. You get the drift.

I am by no means ungrateful. Alas, my gratitude doesn’t make our weekly chitchats any more agreeable.

It’s not that I’m not open to criticism, either, mind you. Sure, Deidre can be a tad overzealous in this department, and I’m by no means a fan of learning over and over again what an unredeemable failure I am. 

A retired dominatrix friend once told me of some clients who get off exclusively on verbal degradation. Not to be judgemental, but my personal preference leans more towards the banal comforts of positive affirmation and reassurance. Statements that remind me I’m not all that bad on the whole. Marginally manageable, even. 

But what really and truly gets to me is the monotony of it all. Deprecation I can deal with. Boredom is a different thing altogether. I would even go out on a limb and call it my ultimate nemesis. 

This being said, I’m doing my damndest to keep my side of the conversation. Or at the very least pretend my hardest to be listening. So she can rest assured that her brilliantly wrought diatribe does not go unheeded or unappreciated.

To my dismay, my surroundings constantly conspire to distract me. And it so happens that Deidre, bless her sorcerous heart, always knows when I’m distracted. Admittedly, her divination is occasionally based on subtle portents in the form of little snores.   

Mount-Monochrome lazily raises its bushy tail, only to lay it back down- just as lazily- on its opposite side. In its excitement, the ashy Tribble raises its own tiny stipple-shaped tail. Its ears are flattened so low against its curving back, I start doubting its ability to pry them back off later. I could cut the tension in the room with one of my decorative swords.

Once again, Deidre’s immaculately polished eloquence goes down the drain. It’s a shame, really. She’s quite the rhetorical genius. 

My sister is a cutthroat corporate lawyer. The type that makes a small fortune off major industry moguls tearing at each other’s balls to determine whose phallus prevails in size and stamina. 

The toughest and meanest among said moguls run a serious risk of staining their dress pants brown at the very mention of her name. It takes either massive cojones or severe mental retardation not to. Not sure as to which of the two applies in my case. Wouldn’t place too high a bet on the cojones, though.

As for the little dust-tribble, on the other hand, the idiot does prove to have some major league balls attached to it. And being too young for neutering has little to do with this. The kitten leans forward, sending one minuscule paw towards the tip of its rival’s gargantuan bush of a tail. The tail twitches restively in the orange glow. Like an independant life form, separate from its host. The mammoth’s seismic breathing quiets down. Its sides maintain their slow, steady expansion and contraction, but no sound emerges. 

I hold my own breath, bracing myself for the inevitable eruption. 

“Are you even listening, Amber?!” Deidre’s angry voice demands from inside the handset. I wonder whether she’s finally laid her hands on some neat sci-fi-esque long distance monitoring equipment. Big Sister is watching your vitals, bitch.

“Yeah, sure. I’m just… Hamster, I told you to leave your sister alone, you idiot!”

Too late. The mountain is wide awake, hissing and spitting. A very small, very frightened feline crusader materializes in the shadows at the far corner of the room, in the relative safety under the bureau.

In the next moment I’m willing to trade all my belongings for a chance to join him there. 

For better or for worse, one outcome of the nervous breakdown I underwent the previous year was a general consensus among my handful of relatives and acquaintances that I am an invalid of sorts, and should be treated accordingly. The result being a certain touch of mollycoddling present in most of my interactions. Not on Deidre’s part, though. Deidre doesn’t do mollycoddling. 

She has, in her defence, made some effort to be a tad more subtle- for all that it’s worth, considering my family’s exceedingly broad definition of subtlety. I can hardly remember when she last asked me how come I haven’t killed myself back in highschool, for once. Sometimes I suspect a part of her would rather I did. I wonder if she knows how easily she could have arranged it a hundred times over by now. With my angsty shitshow teen act and the notebooks of crappy emo poetry left behind, the scene would appear a perfect textbook suicide. No doubts raised, no trace of suspicion thrown her way. Odin knows she lacks neither brains nor balls. It’s probably only her pervertedly overdeveloped sense of righteousness that kept her from staging me a monologue a la Jeremy Delle.

So having gone months without mentioning the topic is nothing short of magnanimous in her book. 

Magnanimity aside, though, this time I’ve pushed her patience a step too far. She throws any attempt at subtlety out the window, not bothering to open it first. All decorum lost in a raging tempest of valkyrian frenzy, she resorts to the basest form of slur slinging. 

She says I’m infantile- which I certainly am, an idiot- which I probably am, and an ingrate- which I most definitely am not. I think. 

In a devastating triumph of nature over nurture, she crowns me with an overwhelming plethora of colorful epithets, some of which I have actually been tested for in the past- with varying results. 

By the time she’s done with me, I’m a blubbering heap of viscous misery. My self esteem has never been much of a showstopper to begin with. But living with a minor inferiority complex is one thing. Being repeatedly bitch-slapped with your ineptitude until you can no longer doubt the fact that you are the world’s sorriest piece of shit- that’s another affair altogether. No one deserves that, even those of us who were born with a permanent brand of inadequacy stamped on our forehead. 

I remain entirely incapacitated long after the receiver is safely cradled in its crib. Too agitated to stay seated, I lean my elbows on the windowsill, chilling my burning face against the glass. It’s almost dark by now. The sky is littered with patches of bluish steel and dirty black. Twilight imbrues the air with gentle swirls of darkness, inkdrop by inkdrop. I smell the wintery freshness through a crack beneath the pane, thirsting for more but not daring to open it any further. I can’t afford to lose this last bit of warmth, the ephemeral spark of artificially produced comfort. 

Instead, I watch the world outside submerge into murky greyness, inch by dreary inch. The murk moves across the firmament in gauzy veils. It floods the streets with liquid gloom, carpets the pavement with ashes. Lays in tarry sheets over the stretch of road visible from my window. The buildings are flat slabs of solid smoke, with the occasional crudely cut rectangle of yellow light mocking me through the soot. 

One dimly lit window right across the street harbors a small pallid mask. A paragon of apathy, the face is half hidden by a lace curtain dotted with tiny lime-green floral atrocities. 

My brain still a mush from Deidre’s nuclear cannonade, I need a second or five to take the image in. However, once processing is complete, my mind clears to the point of near-distorted sharpness. 

Nothing has moved, but from one second to the next everything has gone entirely and irreversibly wrong. As if the whole world was tilted by a single degree. Not something you can put your finger on, but definitely something that makes your esophagus squirm a tad in search for better shelter.

My view tunnels down, too narrow for doubts. Nothing short of Knowing can fit in. And Know I do. Know- with a capital K. With the same certainty with which I know that oxygen is good for you and flying attempts are not- because gravity. 

It’s neither a metaphor, nor a delusion. Humanity is dead. It’s a fact, plain and simple. For one fleeting moment, the whole human race has been wiped out. For a brief eternity, it’s just me and the little ghoul, staring at each other across layers of thickening grime. 

And with this revelation comes a bizarre sense of serenity. Complete surrender without the bitterness of defeat. All is not lost, but nothing is left to fight for. 

Moreover, there is something strangely familiar about these ghostly features. Something vaguely relatable in their utter inability to relate. 

The girl’s complete disinterest is beyond the trivialities of boredom and fatigue. The word ennui readily comes to mind. I recognize the little spirit as a mildly distorted funhouse mirror reflection. This in itself is about ten times the sum of sympathy I’ve extended towards humanity in total over a lifetime in its midst- not to mention towards a single specimen. Least of all a little girl. 

Even the ruffled lace collar peeking from beneath the apparition’s pointed chin fails to provoke any dislike on my part. The eyes scream “outcast” much louder than the lace screams “mommy’s little princess.”

The moment’s gone as abruptly as it has come. The universe is brought back to life with a husky mechanic growl, as if someone hit the ‘rewind’ button on Apocalypse. A second later, every trace of Revelation is crushed under the wheels of a painfully prosaic moving truck. 

The powers that be dip another dozen of dirty paint brushes into the bowl of liquid heaven as the rusty ruin crawls into view from behind the corner. An act of protest against the insolence of the profane, daring to thus materialize among them. Its mere existence is a bold encroachment on Dusk’s sacred realm. It will not go unpunished. Not on a day like this, when the apocalypse has come and gone. 

Though the doomy determination of the previous minute is gone, I will later recall the whole evening with more than a touch of trepidation. How could I not, with signed vows of vengeance smeared in burnt brimstone all over the sky.

The intruder comes to a halt in front of my building and starts spewing its contents on the sidewalk. Tacky black furniture for the most part- a maudlin interpretation of the Baroque. Bulky unsightly settees spill onto the ground alongside bulky unsightly recliners, bureaus and movers.   

The procession of decorative monstrosities is supervised by what appears to be an avid Anne Rice fan. An anthropomorphized extension of the furnishings, their owner boasts a black overcoat, an elegantly coiffured shoulder-length mane and an honest to God silver-topped walking cane. I can’t quite make out the details from my vantage point, but the topper seems to be carved in the shape of some animal’s head. My skin is crawling with secondhand embarrassment. 

It’s not that I have anything against Anne Rice. I’ve read her Vampire Chronicles with all sorts of pleasure, often devouring an entire novel in one sleepless night. I regard her as the supreme authority on vampire lore, and shall trust no other.

I do not, however, want a whiny Louis de Pointe du Lac replica for a neighbor. The real thing, sure, why not. Whiny or not, a vamp is a vamp. A little bitch like Louise merely needs his mouth kept properly occupied, nothing wrong with him otherwise. But a walking, talking, corpse-paint crusted cliche with a penchant for cheaply framed Louis Royo prints- that’s way too much bathos for my liking. 

When the enormous surround sound system comes out, I start getting genuinely concerned. I pray to Apollo the guy is a music snob. This would mean delightfully disturbing underground doom metal, with intervals of Wagner, Beethoven’s 5th, and an occasional progressive experiment. The alternative, alas, can only mean wailing female vocals, emo-flavored pop ballads and The Phantom of the Opera on repeat. In this case, I’ll have to stock on wooden stakes. To shove in my ears. 

I’m not sure about ghoulie-gal’s musical preferences, but judging from the subtle shift in her expression towards disdain, she seems to share my distrust of the new tenant.

He raises his gleaming makeup cast in my general direction. I momentarily sense my distant image register somewhere deep between layers of smeared mascara. In one abrupt instant, every last morsel of mental, emotional, and physical energy is drained out of me. Lethargic to the point of near catatonia, I’m as hollowed out as I sometimes get after an exceptionally nerve-grinding shrink session. 

A sudden gust of wind carries the sound of metaphysical marrow being sucked out of my bones. In the silence that follows, I can hear the dry rustling of the remaining husk. By the time I’m ready to report back to earth, Hamster has mustered the courage to leave his shelter and managed to utterly annihilate the back of my right slipper. The pink plush bunny proves a better suited opponent than my middle aged cat-shaped hippopotamus. 

Having torn through most of the fabric, the brute proceeds to peel half the skin on my shin before I sense any disturbance in the force. Once the pain registers, though, it’s all I can do to keep from kicking the little shit. Having patches of skin ripped off the back of one’s foot is one nasty bitch of a torture- even in retrospect. 

I scoop the offender in one hand, ignoring his squealing protests, and crush him gently against my chest. He makes a final little hiss of resignation as we curl up on the couch, a double image of utter exhaustion. 

Before long I sense Snickerdoodle’s tremendous weight land somewhere along my legs. Then nothing at all. Victorious, Morpheus stands silent sentinel over the snoring pile.

Somewhere far below, a truck engine roars back to life.    

Chapter II