Squiddy
Two raps rap my door.
“Hold on!” I struggle off my mattress in my one-room apartment, my current squat, a good squat, and pass my magenta-colored Squid that soaks in a gray tub of water.
I open the door to a woman with long, black hair, her eyes sunken into cavernous sockets. Barefooted and wearing a red tank top, she’s got no pants on, only loose white panties, held up by sharp hip bones.
Like mine, like all squiddies, her nostrils are black like she’s picked her nose with an exploded pen. She holds a dripping plastic bag, the kind from when grocery stores existed. I know what’s inside.
“You Jocelyn?” Her voice is slight and raspy, a mile away.
“You got a job for me”—I nod at her bag—“or you just here to squid?”
“Both.”
Across the hall, this week’s neighbors are at it again, screams and curses, a baby crying. Poor little girl. There’s near no chance for the youngest since the Squids came. How they came, no one knows for sure. One day, unannounced, their squishy membrane bodies of changing colors, pinks and blues and greens, started plopping up everywhere. And since that day, they’ve kept plopping up everywhere, on the roads, on roofs, in yards, front and back, privacy fences be damned.
No spaceships. No missiles or bombs. No take-me-to-your-leader nonsense. As invasions go, it was yawn inducing. That was until someone stuck a tentacle up his or her nose. Give that squiddy a Nobel. A Darwin Award might be better.
I turn for the woman to follow. “What’s the job?”
“I’m told you find people.” She closes the door and kerplunks her Squid in the tub of water with mine. “You bring them back, too?”
“If they want bringing back.” I sit, cross-legged, on the mattress and ruffle in my black tote bag for my tin case of rolled cigarettes and Zippo lighter. “Who needs finding?”
“Daughter.” She sits on the floor against the wall, hugging knees to chest.
“Got a picture?” I toss her my cigarettes and lighter.
“She looks like me.”
Dammit, she doesn’t have a picture.
“How much younger?”
She lights her cigarette, inhales a drag, and blows a smoky stream out the right side of her mouth. “I was seventeen when I had her.”
“How old are you now?”
“Thirty-four or five.”
She looks much older. We all look much older.
I stand. My legs prickle. That sensation’s happening more often. I walk toward my red milk crate of supplies in the corner of the room and tousle inside. Rope. Carabiner. Duct tape. An assortment of knives, long blades, serrated blades, switchblades, and the like. There it is—my Polaroid camera.
I snap a picture of the frowning woman.
The camera whines as it spits the white Polaroid out.
I fan it until her image appears. “What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Anne Marie.”
“And your name?” I stuff the picture in the tote.
“Call me Ma Bev.”
“What does Anne Marie call you?”
“Everybody calls me Ma Bev.”
One of our Squids flops the water with a tentacle. They need moisture to survive. Morning dew is enough. After a long rain, there’s more of them than earthworms. So much, you got to play hopscotch not to squash one. And if you do? That’s a nasty day. Their juicy insides are acidic.
“Ma Bev, when and where did you last see Anne Marie?”
“Georgia. It was Georgia. Not sure when. I don’t keep track of time good.”
“Was it before or after the Squids?”
“Before.”
“Before in Georgia? Why you looking here?”
“She likes the ocean.”
“Last recall, there’s an ocean near Georgia.”
“She likes the Pacific.”
“Pacific’s a big sink.”
“She had a postcard from the Olympic Peninsula tacked near her bed.” She gestures like Vanna White used to do. “So, here I am.”
I got doubts a postcard brought Anne Marie here. We’re in a temperate rainforest, after all. Constant rain means constant Squids means a constant flow of squiddies. So, Ma Bev’s not telling me the whole truth. What of it? Everybody’s got secrets.
I got to eat, so I ask for half my fee upfront, the rest if I find Anne Marie. Ma Bev says she has a bag of ground cornmeal back where she squats between two large red cedars in Boyd’s Camp. I tell Ma Bev I’ll get started once I got the cornmeal, then I tell her I’m ready to squid. I’m jonesing.
She nods her agreement.
Two-handed, I scoop up my dripping Squid, now yellow, face the wall, and kneel, my cheek muscles grinning. I close my eyes and inhale its smell, that sour sweetness rising. I faintly register Ma Bev’s sighs behind me as I slip a thin tentacle up my pierced nostril, feel it slip and slide up through my nasal cavity, past that little hole that leads down the digestive tract.
More tentacles, like oily spaghetti, worm into my mouth, down my throat. The Squid does this on its own. Some evolutionary-derived sense humans don’t got. Pheromones or some crap.
I taste its metallic secretion, feel it hook into my esophagus with a tight pinch. So, I’m gagging now, eyes watering now, got that metallic taste now, when the Squid wraps its other moist tentacles around my neck to latch on. The parasite squeezes. It pulses. Pulse. Pulse. And it rips off my supple flesh from within, and it eats.
The anticipation, though. Even the anticipation makes my entire body tingle, from head to breasts to toes, limp almost. There’s no other high like Squid. Sex? Naw. Heroin? Nope. So other squiddies have told me. Heaven? Heaven might compare. I’ll never know.
And it’s coming. The euphoric, orgasmic hit is coming in three-Mississippi-flat. Count it. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Bliss.
I wake alone and naked on the mattress with a bag of cornmeal beside me. I kick off the white sheet that’s tangled around my ankle, grab my cigarette case from the floor, then sitting crisscross applesauce, I light a rolled cigarette and suck in and enjoy the smoky taste, relaxing amongst lazy, smoky spirals. Sitting there, looking down, my ribs are like the grill rack on a barbecue, the bottom two hanging over my belly button even when I bloat my stomach out.
This job’s all that’s keeping me alive, barely, chucking enough calories down my gullet to sputter along. Why keep on? I got to feed these parasites, get that high. I give myself another year, two at best. It’s happening to millions already, their cells shutting down, starved. You find these dead squiddies in gutters, under underpasses, in apartments and houses where they last squatted. Most often, the smell finds you. The smell is warm. The smell is rot.
I dress, put in all my studs and piercings, grab my tote filled with essentials—food, cigarettes, that Polaroid, blue poncho, and a switchblade—and leave for Boyd’s Camp.
As camps go, Boyd’s Camp is large on account of the many Squids that line the banks and swim and float the channels of the river. Boyd built a compound early and started charging rent to squiddies to simply exist near the river. The bastard charges high for protection, too. And if a squiddy doesn’t got the food? No problem. You work for the bastard, most likely becoming a bastard yourself.
Illustration by Tyler Vail
Long Description
The ground floor of the Olympic Peninsula, a wet mix of moss, decaying bark, leaves, and soil, gives with each of my steps. Green colors most everything: green ferns, dewdrops sparkling; green moss blanketing the bark of Sitka spruces, Douglas firs, and red cedars, their green pine needles overhead and around. Interspersed in this green world are tents and smoky fires and squiddies—the conscious and the unconscious—and zero plumbing. The smell is abrasively distinct, that of smoke, of moist earth, of human waste.
This camp’s a magnified microcosm the world over, the dial turned up a few degrees because of the rainforest climate. I imagine the Amazon is likewise bursting with squiddies, the Gobi Desert the opposite. Las Vegas, where I worked at a punk club before the invasion, is a ghost city, the lights long ago shut off. Its crumbling casinos, its paltry population, it’s a dying dry cough of its once spectacular form.
When I get to the squat of one of my informants, Margie, I see she’s unconscious and smiling. On to Gerald, I regret, another set of my eyes and ears. He grates me. A lawyer before the Squid invasion—I couldn’t care less which kind—Gerald believes it still matters. What matters now? That next hit, that next tentacle.
I stare at the Squid Margie last used. Pink with blue dots, it pulses in the mud next to her fire pit of damp, charred sticks and twigs. I huff louder than a sigh, shake my head, hop up and down, shake my arms and my legs as if that will shake this intense want from my veins. I leave.
I try not to dawdle at every Squid I pass nor dwell on the shame that builds and fills me. I got a job to do, personal agency to uphold, that when I pass five Squids in quick succession, feels as solid as gas, as true as the belief we humans are the apex predators on Earth. These five Squids are a prism of changing colors. Blue. Red. Pink. Was that emerald? I blink. Now it’s turquoise. Dazzling, they beckon the promise of escapism.
Gerald. I got to find Gerald to find Anne Marie.
At his squat, Gerald’s eating from a can of cold meat ravioli. He is wearing that faded Blue Jays hat he wears. He doesn’t like baseball, nor is he from Toronto. His polo shirt, pink and stained, seems to grow bigger each time I see him. Pockmarks dot his face. His nostrils are squiddy black. The orange and yellow glow of his crackling fire dances off his blue tarp overhead. Steam rises from his tin pot of boiling water.
“Jocelyn, my girl, Jocelyn.” His deep voice drips with pretentiousness. “Plumbing’s what I miss most.”
“Plumbing was nice.”
“Marvelous magic is what it was. Turn a metallic nozzle and, abracadabra, safe cold water comes to your beck and call. No need to squat by a fire to burn the danger away.”
I hand Gerald the Polaroid. “Know her?”
Whistling, he examines it near the fire. “That’s Ma Bev. She’s a working woman.”
“So, a surviving woman.”
“It’s more than that.” He hands back the Polaroid. “She entered camp last week. Made a stir because she’s now got two girls working under her. They were Boyd’s girls.” He shovels in a spoonful of ravioli and continues in a muffled voice. “I hear she takes twenty-five percent of what her girls make.”
“What did Boyd take?”
“My guess is fifty.”
“I don’t pay you for guesses.”
“Then pay me more.”
I toss Gerald a small red box of raisins.
He catches it one-handed, scrunching the box between palm and spoon. “Raisins?”
I smirk and give him two cigarettes. “Know anyone that looks like Ma Bev? Say eighteen or nineteen years old?”
Gerald snorts a laugh. “By God, Anne sure does.”
“Anne Marie?”
“Just Anne.” He scrapes his spoon along the inside of the can, plowing the red sauce and meat bits into a drift. “She’s Ma Bev but younger, fresher, what Ma Bev might have looked like before life beat her down. Never made the connection until you asked. So, what is she? Ma Bev’s sister? Daughter?”
“Where can I find her?”
“Anne?” He spoons the last of his meal and tosses the can. “She’s inside Boyd’s compound.”
“One of his girls?”
“The girl. He doesn’t share her.”
Outside Boyd’s compound, I crouch next to its tall fence made from the trunks of Douglas firs, the nostalgic smell of Christmases past engulfing me, and question whether to wade farther where a known killer lurks.
Yes, Boyd’s deadly, but I’m already a dead gal walking, been tiptoeing that plank since the day I first squidded. If knowing her mother’s on the scene might get Anne Marie rambling, I’m doing some good in this squiddy world. If she wants to stay put like a stone, good on her, that’s on her.
I sneak up near the ranch gate of the compound where a thin, shaved-headed guard stands under a wooden archway, his hands in his jeans pocket, his nostrils inked black like all nostrils that sniffed these days.
I press my body against the moss-covered trunk of a giant big-leaf maple. Next to me, nestled between two thick roots, pulses a Squid. Red chatoyant circles spot its gray membrane.
I want it, envision the tickle of its tentacles squirming up a nostril. I scoop it up, feel its slippery cool skin in my palm. Intense craving blooms inside me, its thorny vines curled into every cell of my body. Not now. Not yet.
Squid cupped in hand, I sprint at the guard when he turns his back. I’m upon him when he faces me, and I smack his shocked expression with a Squid washing as if the Squid were snow and we were children.
He flails his arms as he falls onto his back.
The pulsing Squid finishes my dirty work, latching on, stilling the guard into unconsciousness seconds after he hits the humus. I envy him.
I enter the compound, built on a clear-cut, and walk on tacky mud as if I belong, wearing confidence for a mask. I’m surrounded by wood buildings in a helter-skelter pattern.
One of Boyd’s people, an older woman of Asian descent, shovels up Squids and plops them in a wooden cart she’s pulling. She’s humming, smiles a few-tooth smile at me, and continues with her work.
How does she smile amongst all those tentacles in the cart twisting and stretching for her black nostrils? Her willpower to not squid until off-duty, I get. Boyd has a real nasty flair for punishing his rule-breakers. But her smile? That perplexes me.
Two-storied amongst the many one-story buildings, Boyd’s wooden cabin is easy to spot in the center of the compound. On my way, I pass several troughs, filled with murky river water, and I pass a young, bearded Black man, who is wearing bib overalls that hang loosely on his tall Squid-eaten body while boiling water in a brass cauldron. I nod to him. He stares back. Next, I walk by the foul odor of wooden outhouses and step over a muddy puddle with several Squids, yet to be collected.
It’s a bad place, worse time, to fall into a Squid stupor, so I move on with feet of lead, the resolve of wet paper. I glance back at those Squids, fantasize about threading tentacles in my nostrils, and sigh. Then I see her, Anne Marie.
Tan towel in hand, she’s walking toward me. To say Anne Marie resembles Ma Bev is to say a bird of paradise resembles a sparrow. Long, black hair, freckled and plump cheeks, her body is thick curves, wrapped in a blue sundress. Inkless nostrils. Meat on her bones. She doesn’t squid! How has she resisted?
I stand speechless, my mouth wide open as she walks by me, doesn’t register me, singing softly to herself in her own world, surely a better world. I don’t catch the words of her song. I do note her lovely voice, mezzo-soprano, divine from above. I also note her bruised right eye.
She picks up two plastic pitchers of steaming water near the brass cauldron and fire and sings herself into a wooden stall and sings herself a bath.
I should walk on to give an impression of purpose, but I can’t, caught in a trance, her spell, with a feeling long forgotten. This feeling fills my chest, tingles my arms and toes. It’s not pure lust, certainly not love. It’s an intense curiosity of a person, an attraction to her full being.
I dig in my tote bag, grab my cigarette case, and sit on a log next to the bearded man purifying the water. I offer him a cigarette and tell him that besides squidding, nothing’s better when on a break.
He silently takes one.
Sitting near the fire, the heat warms half of me. Inhaling from my cigarette, my body buzzes as soft as a tiny bee. Those Squids in the puddle pull for me although not with the same brute strength as before, for I have another pull, a greater pull. She’s singing in the bath stall.
I blow wisps of smoke. I inhale, hold it in, blow out. I wait as dark clouds, pushed by the cold wind blowing, sweep the pastel blue from the sky. With each cold gust, flames from the fire reach hot tendrils toward me.
The man clutches a hand towel and turns a nozzle on the cauldron. Water, hot and potable, pours from a spigot into pitchers, its steam billowing up and up and gone beneath the dark rain clouds.
We do not speak. We do not make eye contact. We smoke our cigarettes. He tends the cauldron. I tend my patience and my cigarette, tended by Anne Marie’s sweet melody behind the bath stall. Rain comes, a drizzle at first, then it pours. Towel-covered head, Anne Marie runs out.
Putting on my poncho, I watch her splash through puddles, the mud dirtying the bottom of her dress and legs. I dare not leave immediately nor follow her direction, less the man at the cauldron takes notice. I get up, stretch my arms and back, act like I got no place to go and all the time. I hand the man another cigarette.
He pockets it as water drips down his unsmiling face, off his nose, his nostrils Squid-darkened, and off his beard.
I walk perpendicular to where Anne Marie had run and don’t pick up my pace until I’m out of sight from the man at his cauldron, the line of outhouses blocking his view. I got a clear sight of Anne Marie at a distance near Boyd’s cabin. I fear I gave her too great a head start.
“Anne Marie!” I scream through cupped wet hands.
She drops her towel and stops several strides from the front steps of the cabin that lead under the wraparound porch to dryness. She stands there, her long black hair soaked to her back.
I look around to see no one else, only her, and I scream again. “Anne Marie!”
She turns around and walks to me.
Wet black hair, wet pale skin, Anne Marie is stolen from Celtic lore. Close enough, I can see her quizzical expression.
“What did you call me?” she says when we’re close enough to shake hands.
“Anne Marie.”
“Call me Anne.”
I hand the Polaroid to her.
“Ma Bev,” she mouths, examining the picture in shaking hands.
The rain’s a cold rain, and my hands have gotten numb and have lost dexterity, so I clasp my hands as if praying, and blow into them, and think maybe I should start praying. I’d pray for the Squids to never have come, for if they vanished today, having gotten my taste, I’d pray the Squids on back.
“How’s Ma Bev know I’m here?” she says, tears welling in her eyes. She drops the Polaroid.
“The postcard.”
Anne Marie droops her head and sighs. “I dropped Marie from my name when I ran away.”
“Ma Bev wants to see you again.” I cannot distinguish her tears from the rain that wets her freckled cheeks.
“She made me do things, terrible things, for money.”
My heart sinks and anger builds, not solely toward Ma Bev, but myself. I’m a dangerous tool.
“Ma Bev hired you?” she asks.
I nod and gesture to her bruised eye. “Boyd do that?”
She wipes her cheek and sniffs. “That don’t concern you.”
“He’s a bastard.”
“World’s full of them.”
“Leave him.”
“Boyd?”
“Boyd.”
“Boyd’s none of your concern.”
She turns and runs. The downpour drenches us with numerous drops, battering the mud in numerous plops, drenching her sundress, off her bare shoulders, dripping, splattering off my hood.
“Anne!” I yell.
She stops.
“I’m gonna tell Ma Bev you skipped out.”
She walks on to Boyd’s, steps in a muddy puddle, ankle-deep beside a Squid, its indigo body cresting the murk beneath, and I realize, for the first time since the invasion, I want a life with another, a better life, a future beyond my next tentacle fix.
I leave under the ranch gate, the guard’s workmen boots jutting out amidst lush green ferns.
The torrential rain abates, from heavy to steady to a drizzle to drips from overhead leaves and branches. The drips are fat and irregular. When they hit my hood, their drops echo.
When I get to the darkened hallway outside my apartment, my door’s open an inch. I push the door with my boot and wait.
“Jocelyn, is it?” says Boyd’s baritone voice from inside.
I pause in the hallway, considering my options. I could run, and if I’m not caught, I could find another camp, get started from ground zero.
“If I wanted you dead,” Boyd says, “you’d already be so.”
I walk in.
Boyd and the bearded man from the cauldron stand near the window, its venetian blinds down. Boyd is tall, basketball-player tall, White, and bald. With little flesh and sharp angular bones from squidding, Boyd could be confused for a skeleton dressed in a white polo shirt and muddy shoes.
“I decided to visit your abode uninvited,” he says, inhaling from a cigar and letting the smoke seep out his inked-up nose, “as you have visited mine.”
I finger my switchblade in my tote.
“Don’t get any stupid ideas.” Boyd nods to the expressionless man next to him. “George here’s got a gun. George, show Jocelyn your gun.”
George digs a hand in the front pocket of his bib overalls and pulls out a silver nine-millimeter and lays it out on his big right palm. It’s not pointed at me.
“What do you want?” I ask, trying to mask my fear with assertiveness.
“To warn you not to be so nosey.”
“OK, I’ve been warned. Now get out.”
Boyd smiles. “George, it looks as if we’ve outgrown our welcome.”
“You never were welcomed.”
Boyd walks out, tracking mud with each footstep. George follows, stops, and faces me. I feel his breath on the top of my hair.
From the hallway, Boyd says, “George, show Jocelyn what we do to nosey people.”
George snatches my nose ring and rips.
The pain is sudden and surprising. I scream, cup my face, feel warm blood slicking my palms.
Down the hallway, Boyd shouts, “Stay nosey, I’ll kill you!”
The next day, my nose bandaged and hurting with each breath, I go to find Ma Bev to tell her Anne left camp long ago. I plan to do the same. Where? Don’t know. Don’t care. Far from here, far from Boyd.
I find the two large cedars. Between the giant trees, a red tarp stretches wide over a fizzled-out fire and three bodies. In Squid stupors, I first think, then understand their grave state a few steps closer. Dead. Ma Bev. Two other women. They are face up and blue-skinned with blood congealed from slits in their necks.
Boyd. I got no doubts.
I’ve seen the two other women before, soliciting food in exchange for their bodies. They worked for Boyd then. One woman is blonde and young, the other Latina and old enough to be my mother. I don’t know their names. This upsets me.
I sit cross-legged next to the older woman and cry and think of my mom. Lung cancer took her before the invasion. She was a strong mom, a single mom, a beautiful soul with a hard exterior. Short on words, Mom showed her unflinching love by working long hours in smoky strip clubs filled with pricks. They groped her. They jeered her. Try as they might, they never could reduce her humanity.
Mom endured that, so I had shelter and food. What would she do in my stead in this world where Squids have reduced the humanity of all? She’d do it differently.
I reach for a nearby Squid. It’s black and glossy like obsidian and has brown and olive-green pine needles stuck to its skin. Its tentacles dance and squirm as I lift it to my face. I undo my bandage, and the tentacles find my painful nostrils. As I lie on soft humus, I think of Anne and her internal strength not to squid and my mother and her loving grit. And I think how I want what Anne has, and what Mom had, and wonder how to find, then tap into and use, that resilience if it exists at all.
It isn’t found with tentacles deep in my throat and nose, so I rip that Squid from my face, its tentacles stinging my nostrils on the way out. I got to find Anne.
Outside Boyd’s compound, I don’t remember the last time my heart beat so hard, so fast. I welcome the nervousness, my apathy flaking away. I feel lighter, excited, and scared.
At the ranch gate, a different guard stands post. She’s tall, Black, and dreadlocked. I think about squid washing her, then think better of it. Another guard in a stupor would prickle Boyd’s suspicions.
When I spot a nearby Sitka spruce with a helpful limb that reaches just shy atop the fence, I know what to do. I hide behind its thick trunk with visible patches of rough bark amongst spongy moss.
The guard bends down to tie her boot, and I shimmy up, pushing off and pulling on gnarled limbs that contort like arthritic fingers.
Her boot tied, the guard stands up.
I stop, rest my head on mossy green, see black ants march in line, see the tip of a red tentacle, then the Squid, bedded on a knot above me.
Uncurling and stretching its tentacle to me, the Squid senses me however Squids do. The tentacle squirms inside my sore nose.
I plow that Squid off the knot with my forearm.
It plops in the undergrowth with a rustle and a thump. Startled, a rabbit hops from where the Squid landed, kicking up pine needles with its hind legs as it zigs, and it zags, and it zips away.
The guard squints my way.
I do not move.
She walks toward the fallen Squid and my tree.
The closer she gets the faster my heart beats. I try to regulate my nerves with slow breaths.
Don’t look up. Don’t look up, I mouth, feeling the verbal stresses of this silent mantra on the tip of my tongue, on the back of my teeth. Don’t look up.
Below me, the guard squats by the fallen Squid, which is now neon pink. She pokes, then pierces it with a stick. Blue blood oozes, then bubbles and sizzles. It disintegrates the end of the stick into rising steam.
Don’t look up.
From this distance, I smell her thick odor. Can she smell mine?
Don’t look up.
She stands, turns, doesn’t look up, and walks back to her post.
I exhale, realizing I had stopped breathing altogether, and climb what remains of the limb to the fence. In my hurry, the rough bark bites the exposed skin of my arms and legs.
I reach the fence when the guard reaches her post, and I peer over to see the muddy compound. On the other side, there is no activity, so I heave myself over without grace and land on my hip and my arm.
The impact hurts, a deep-bruising hurt, and I hobble up, and I hobble on, bruised and scraped and scared in Boyd’s domain where his threat hangs over my head like a guillotine blade, its shimmer gone from dried blood.
And within the compound, I see that guillotine’s dirty work upon that guard I squid washed yesterday. His body is lying limply, tied up on a post and dead, his eyes sizzled on out as Boyd’s retribution for letting his guard down and a warning to all his bastards to squid on their own time.
Is the guard’s blood on my hands? Perhaps, partially. And that rips me up, gets me conflicted and defensive about how the guard knew the score when becoming Boyd’s bastard.
And I have a gal to find, so I limp on past that guard’s body to Boyd’s cabin and pass the trough of river water and that cauldron. George is gone, the fire beneath the cauldron long put out. I hear humming, the squelching and slurping of mud, the crunching of stone, a creaky wheel. I rush behind one of the outhouses.
Smiling her few-tooth smile, the old woman from before wheels her creaky wheelbarrow to the cauldron where pitchers of full water stand. She grabs two pitchers, water sloshing, and puts the pitchers in her wheelbarrow, water splashing out. She wheels the pitchers to Boyd’s cabin. Humming, grinning, she walks up the porch steps and places the two pitchers before Boyd’s door.
Despite her nonthreatening stature—she’s five foot nothing, as frail as she is old—despite her seemingly sweet disposition—she reminds me of my long-passed grandmother—I assume she’s a bastard like all who work for Boyd. I let her and her creaky wheelbarrow pass, positioning the outhouse between her and me.
When she creaks her wheelbarrow around a wooden shed, I eye other empty pitchers, stacked one inside the other, on the table by the cauldron. A delicious idea comes to me.
I take two empty pitchers and slosh them in the trough of river water, sediment and algae swirling, microbes unseen, and feel my grin as I swap them for the purified water at Boyd’s doorstep.
I decide to hide near the bath stall to wait for Anne. Beyond informing her of Ma Bev’s fate, I have no other plans, only hopes. Walking toward the outhouses, I fantasize about a different future, and I feel a smack of a Squid to my face, the slipping of its tentacles up my nose, and smell the Squid’s unearthly scent, that salty sourness. I taste its metallic secretion, feel that gag before that pinch, then its pulsing pulse.
Squid washed.
On my back, I hear the old woman humming. I’m as good as dead, scared. Lights out.
I come to in an empty room, its walls made of wood. Its piney scent smells of luxury. Boyd’s cabin, I presume. Sunlight shines through a metal-caged window, bare of glass or curtains. In a Squid fog, I stumble to my feet to try the door. Locked. My tote is missing, with it my cigarettes. I sit against the wall, droop my head, hold my knees against my chest, and wait for my death.
I wait all day and into dusk. I got nothing to do but picture my end. I hope it’s as quick as a bullet. Wishful thinking. Time creeps on at an agonizing pace until the night and its numerous stars and its crickets and its frogs replace dusk.
I hear faint moaning like the wind. It ebbs and flows in pitch and duration. Did Boyd drink the water?
My optimism increases with my time left alone, perhaps forgotten. I smile with each moan. They increase in frequency and decibel. When the doorknob rattles, my optimism squashes out. I’m not forgotten.
The door opens wide, revealing Anne in a red sundress, her black hair French-braided and swept to one side over her bare shoulder.
I jump to my feet.
“I told you I want nothing to do with Ma Bev.”
“She’s dead.”
Anne takes several steps back, knees slightly buckling. “Dead dead?”
“There’s only one kind.”
With the door open, the moans are much louder.
“He was gonna kill you, you know.”
“I know.”
“Was gonna do it publicly, painfully. Was gonna make your pain a lesson for others. Then he got sick.”
I smirk. “I’m the one that got him sick.”
She smiles. “How?”
“Dirty water.”
“I don’t think he’s gonna make it. Like most everyone, he’s got no fat to him, no strength to him.” She shakes her head. “No, he’s not gonna make it.”
“Is that why you don’t squid? Because you want to make it?”
“Ma Bev was always doped up on something. You name it, she popped it, shot it, snorted it.” Tears well in Anne’s eyes. “She had a costly life, a soulless life, so she sold my life. She sold me to men. She sold me to women. They used me like I was single-use plastic.” Anne wipes the tears from one freckled cheek with her forearm, then wipes the other. “When I thought I could be used no more, I ran away and promised myself never to use.”
I revere Anne’s strength and wish her fortitude for myself and all others.
“Are you leaving?” I ask.
“I gotta do something first.” She turns.
I follow her out of the room, down the hallway, the moans growing louder. The hallway smells of human waste, the pungent odor growing stronger. We pass a stuffed black bear on hind legs, its mouth opened in a silent roar. We pass a canvas print of Mount Rainier, snowcapped, blue clear sky. We pass a closed-door room where those moans originate, the effluvium eye-watering, nose cupping.
Anne turns to the right into a bathroom, its bathtub stocked with Squids.
She scoops a yellow Squid up. Water drips from it onto its cephalopod brethren. She opens the mirror vanity, pulls out a straight razor, and leaves.
I step out to see her open the door to the moans, a trail of water behind her.
“Anne.” I hear Boyd’s voice, a whisper. “I need water.”
Then Boyd screams, and amongst Boyd’s screams, I hear sizzling.
Anne comes out of the room, expressionless, Squidless, razorless.
“Where did you burn him?” I ask, Boyd still screaming.
“I’ll never be used again.” She brushes by me.
I peek, then walk into Boyd’s room, his screams dimming to whimpers and moans.
He is writhing on a king-size bed, tangled in soiled sheets. The smell is horrendous, the sight much worse. From below his waist, steam rises and blue blood sizzles and pops in a cavernous hole like a geyser. When he rolls, I see the blood eating its way through the mattress, dripping, bubbling, and hissing on the floorboard below.
I rush out the room, down the hallway, past the bear, down wooden stairs, out the cabin door, and I leap down the porch steps. I see Anne, walking by the cauldron.
“Anne, I’m coming with you!”
She stops, doesn’t turn around.
I catch up. Out of breath, I put my hands on my knees. “I said—”
“I heard you.” She walks on.
“So?”
“So, how are you different from everybody else?”
“I know I can’t do this like this alone no more.” I blurt the words out as involuntary and as surprising as a first hiccup.
Anne stops and hangs her head. “I’m lonely, too. But what’s gonna keep you from using me?”
“I’ll never use you in any way you don’t want to be used. And you use me the same on back. Besides,” I say, marinating in hope, “traveling is safer when traveled together. So we’ll be using each other for that.”
Anne turns around, looks at and into me. “If you squid, I keep walking.” She about faces and gets going.
Smiling, I step over a puddle with two Squids, full of luster and changing colors. Despite their intense pull—I feel it in my marrow, my gut, my tongue, my fingers, and my nose—I don’t give them a second glance. Can I fulfill Anne’s precondition? I’ll sure give it my damnedest. Hope toward a less lonesome future will help pull me along. That, plus a non-squidding example. Two good-as-any reasons to do more than cling on between fixes.
“Let’s stop at my squat for food and supplies,” I say.
“Boyd emptied your apartment and made a bonfire.”
“Bastard.” I’m starting fresh, starting free, my life from after the invasion in ashes. Good riddance.
“Want to go to the ocean?” Anne asks.
“There and more.”
Anne grabs my hand and smiles.
My endorphins fire, a high like no other. Bliss.