Stretching, Lizeth looked at the clock, then rolled her eyes when she recognized how pointless that was. The damn thing was hanging by a wire, the glass cover flipped open, both hands pointing at the 12. The clock broke two days ago – when whatever it was that happened, happened. She sat up and listened intently. Still no noise; no voices or bells. Sliding off the side of the desk and crouching down to hide herself, she sneaked up to the window. Nothing had changed: there was nothing moving outside, no people, no cars, no birds or squirrels. It was silent.
Turning from the window, she slid her feet into her shoes, and straightened her crumpled brown sweater. She sighed. She’d been a guidance counsellor for 5 years and the job wasn’t that exciting, but better than whatever was going on now. Two days ago, when she regained consciousness and found herself on the floor of her office? That’s when everything had changed.
She had hunkered down in her classroom figuring that sheltering in place until the rescue people found her would be the best idea. But she’d had to finally accept that no one was coming. And last night she’d eaten the last bit of food she had in her desk. She thought ruefully of the diet she’d been on and shook her head; her weight gain wasn’t her biggest problem right now.
“Ok last-woman-on-earth” she spoke aloud just to hear a voice “I guess we head home.”
She crept out into the hall and slipped out the side door onto the sidewalk. She stepped off the sidewalk onto the grass and pitched forward violently. She just managed to reach back to the garbage can at the edge of the sidewalk and prevent herself from falling face first onto the ground. She stood holding her breath. Something was wrong with the ground. Reaching forward carefully, hand still on the garbage can, she poked at the grass with her foot. It felt like a waterbed and rippled away from her in waves.
“What the hell…”
Her gaze followed the waves, then she spied someone sitting on the opposite sidewalk, their back against the building across from her. A student. Her heart leapt when she saw the girl’s eyes turning towards her. Lizeth raised her hand to greet her, but her arm slowed as one of the eyes rolled out of the girls face on a stream of brown blood. She watched in horror as it bounced down the girl’s shirt, leaving splatters of blood, finally coming to rest on the pavement. Lizeth stifled a scream, then another, when she saw the beetles; one crawled up the girl’s neck and into her gaping mouth, another dropped out of the now empty eye socket. Suddenly the need to get away from here became more urgent. She wanted to go home.
“Ok, ok, you got this.” She whispered, straightening her spine, pushing her shoulders back and collecting herself. She knew that beside the school was a dollar store the students frequented for school supplies. Maybe if she could find cardboard or a plastic tub to tie on her feet it would redistribute her weight and make it easier to walk on this strange undulating ground. It seemed like a long shot but maybe weight distribution was the answer. She sidled along the wall towards the store trying to stay close to the building and not step on the undulating grass.
Inside, the store was a mess – things had fallen off the shelves and the floors were littered with products. A large woman was slumped over on the counter and the beetles had already made a path through her eyes. Her nose was also part of the bloody mess and maggots were wriggling in the putrefying flesh. The smell was horrible.
Lizeth shuddered and turned away. Focusing on the debris on the floor, she made her way slowly down an aisle looking for anything that would act as a sort of snowshoe. She jumped when a movement in the next aisle caught her off guard, but her heart slowed to a normal beat when she saw slowly deflating helium balloons tied to a helium container. She was halfway back to the front door when an outrageous idea popped into her head. She turned and gazed at the helium tank again. She didn’t need to redistribute her weight. She needed to lose weight.
She emerged into the bright sunshine with many balloons tied to the belt of her pants. The balloons bumped and squeaked against each other. One large yellow foil balloon bobbed above the others, the happy face on it grinning most encouragingly.
“Don’t redistribute the weight, lose it, right?” she asked Smiley Balloon.
He seemed to nod in agreement. She could feel the pull on her belt as she stepped out onto the sidewalk. She tested the grass, and although the ground rippled slightly, was able to step lightly on the surface without breaking through. With the aid of the balloons, she felt like she was walking on the moon, her stride was long, and she was barely touching the ground. The ground rose and sank under her as she propelled herself forward toward a crack she spied in the grass.
At the edge of the crack it appeared that the ground was only about an inch thick. It was so dark underneath though, that the light couldn’t penetrate, and she couldn’t see anything. As she leaned forward, peering into the crack she suddenly heard a hiss and several voices whispering.
“Lizeth” whispered one
“Come down” another voice called hoarsely “Come join us”
She pushed back from the fissure, violently fighting her way through the balloon strings. With a sickening snap! snap! two strings broke, and balloons rose into the sky. She sank slightly and the crack widened under her increased weight, plunging her foot into the cold darkness. She screamed as she felt something wrap around her foot, pain shooting through her leg.
“Yessssssss” the voices hissed.
Her foot was now numb and the weight of it was heavy under the ground, filling her heart with terror. Panting, she heaved herself away from the crack, and half crawled, half bobbed along the surface. Finally bursting back into the store, she fell to the floor, trying to catch her breath as waves of pain washed over her. She didn’t want to look at her foot, didn’t want to know if she still had a foot. She couldn’t feel anything but pain radiating from her ankle.
Eventually she pulled herself up against the wall and made herself look at the damage. Her shoe had disintegrated and the foot that stuck out was a sickly white. She bent forward – were those ice crystals? Her stomach lurched as she realized that her foot was frozen. Solid.
“Ok, ok, don’t panic.” She closed her eyes; her breath was whooshing in and out of her lungs making her feel lightheaded. “Concentrate” she muttered.
Her eyes opened as she heard the faint scratching and saw a beetle crawling clumsily across the floor towards her. Towards her dead foot. She lifted her other foot, and as the beetle got closer, she smashed her heel down, feeling victorious at the sickening crunch of the beetle’s carapace. She suddenly knew what she had to do. Pulling herself along the floor she looked for the hacksaw she had spied earlier; she tried not to think as she leaned over to pick it up.
Curiously, she felt nothing as she sawed through her frozen skin. With her right ankle propped against her left knee, she worked to get the offending foot off. It seemed that as long as she stayed below the bright red line where living flesh met frozen flesh, she was fine. With a zip, zip, zip, she deftly sawed through the ankle. Crumbled skin and flesh fell to the floor.
Eventually, she got through the flesh and bones, and by twisting the foot in a circle, managed to pull it free of the last strip of skin that held it to her leg. She held the frozen foot up, admired the cherry pink toenail polish, then examined the striations that the saw had made at the cut. She could see clean cut bone, severed arteries and veins with the blood frozen blackly within.
“It looks like vivisection” she held the foot up to Smiley Balloon, “no better way to deal with a weight gain.”
Her giggle seemed a bit maniacal even to her own ears. She put the foot on one of the shelves. The pain was no longer as agonizing as it had been, but it was there. Using her hands and good leg, she pulled herself up and balanced on her left foot. The balloons held her weight up even better with the weight of that pesky foot gone, she thought. She propelled herself away from the shelves with her hands, and float-hopped out the door.
Lizeth grinned as she floated-hopped right over the grass, bouncing off of the ripples as they spread around her step. She turned toward her home; hopeful she could get there.
She paused briefly on the main road. There were cars stopped in the road with bodies still inside. But the beetles were everywhere doing their job, diligently getting rid of the remains. She wished briefly she’d brought her foot with her; the idea of the beetles getting it was kind of gross.
Suddenly a balloon popped, and she dipped a bit heavier onto the surface. Immediately another crack formed under her increased weight, and the hissing voices started to call. She pulled herself up on to the back of the nearest car and looked up. The balloons were perilously close to a tree that hung over the road and probably the cause of the popped balloon. She peered through the cracked spider webbed glass of the car’s back window. The driver was flopped over onto the passenger seat and the beetles worked tirelessly to reduce them to a pile of goo and bones. Lizeth looked back up at her balloons.
“I need to lose more weight” she said to Smiley Balloon. He nodded in agreement, “But how?” she wondered.
His smiling face turned toward her other foot.
“Not that” she pleaded “please, not that”.
She stared down at her foot, then back at the balloon. But he was right. She had to lose more weight. She slid slowly across the trunk of the car, gripping tightly and lowered herself to the surface. She pushed her foot into the crack nearest the car.
Her shrill scream echoed off the buildings around her, and she sobbed noisily as she shook with the effort of holding her foot in the freezing void. The voices were whispering to her, calling her, thanking her.
“Let go,” they whispered, pleading “Come be weightless with us”
But she ignored them, and held on as long as she could, before pulling herself back onto the car. Her left foot was numb but there was pain blazing from the ankle. She knew the foot was dead.
“I didn’t bring the hacksaw” she whispered to Smiley Balloon, pain sweat beading on her face, “I don’t know how to get the foot off…”
He wouldn’t turn around. He wouldn’t look at her.
Without the saw there was no way to remove her foot…and fewer balloons couldn’t handle the extra weight. Panic flared as a beetle crawled across her neck. She grabbed it and flung it over the edge of the car.
“The beetles will come after me” she screamed at Smiley Balloon “They’ll come after me because part of me is dead…”
Looking around frantically for anything she could use, she spied a beer bottle inside the car. She pulled frantically at the cracked window with all her might. Blood dripped from her fingers as the ragged edges pierced her skin. Finally, with a loud crack, the glass gave way. She sat splay legged on the trunk, pulled her frozen foot up and rested it against the other thigh. Closing her eyes for a moment she prayed silently that this would work. She raised her arm and brought the bottle down on the frozen foot with as much force as she could muster. There was a dull thud, and nothing more.
She looked. The bottle was intact. The foot was intact. Well, there was a small dent where she’d hit it, but nothing more. Screaming she rose up and started pounding the foot with the bottle, smashing and smashing, all control lost, till she fell back, sobbing.
“I’m going to die if I don’t lose this weight!” Lizeth yelled to no one in particular. A Beetle scratched across her sweater, its delicate legs tangling in the brown thread.
“Fuck off!” she screamed and swiped the beetle off.
The voices from the crack whispered to her,
“There are none of them down here” a slow hiss “You will not be pursued by the last ones down here”
She closed her eyes, chest heaving, a cold sweat washing over her. She realized she could feel a slight pain in her right foot. In her absent foot. Ghost pains? She bent her leg and brought the stump up so she could look at the wound. She could see a beetle’s hind end and legs protruding from the flesh. What was once frozen was now thawing, blood was oozing through the cauterized flesh, attracting the beetles. Revulsion swept through her; she hadn’t hated this body so much since she was a pudgy little teen.
Staring at the beetle, tears coursing down her cheeks, she reached up and snapped a balloon string. Snap. Snap. Snap. She continued until all the bright orbs floated up into the sky. She freed every balloon except Smiley Balloon. Gazing up into his black oval eyes, she let herself slip from the trunk of the car. Sinking slowly onto the ground she pushed herself into the cold underneath. The voices whispered to her excitedly,
“Welcome to the dark, friend”
She forced herself to look up at the sky before she was completely consumed by the pain and the dark. She watched when Smiley Balloon’s string broke from the cold and he floated, bobbing weightlessly, up to the sky.
Categories: fiction, short story, writing
Sandy Kenyon 