Sunday, June 1, 2014

Day 1: Toxic


Today’s Prompt: Fifteen years after a toxic spill in a small town, strange things are happening.
                                                                                                            —Courtesy: Writing.Com

Word Count: 1,534
A man was standing in the middle of the road when her SUV came bumping along busting on the scene from a sharp corner. She was doing approximately, 120 miles an hour and barely had time to coordinate her reflexes and slam down the brakes to avoid running over the man who as it turned out was totally unaware of the situation. All he did was stand by and watch like the whole incident was playing out on one of those big screens you spotted at a movie drive-in. Her final thought, before she rammed the bumper into the railings and went flying off the road into the cliff below, was, Oh God, I’m going to die. Not this way, oh God, please. She was wrong on both counts.

            “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?”
She opened her eyes to blinding darkness. She was lying face up on a bed. She said the only thing that felt reasonable in this peculiar situation. “How did I get here?” And immediately, her mind supplied an answer. I must have survived the drop off the cliff. “What’s that rumbling sound? Is there a mill of some sort close by?”
            “No. that’s the sound of the train coming down the track. And don’t worry, nobody’s catching a train today, the rail’s a few miles off this place.”
Something struck her funny about the voice talking to her. It had the timbre of a child’s voice yet, bore the weight of maturity.
            “Where are your parents?” She turned her head as much as the racking pain in her body allowed her but all she made out in the darkness was a silhouette.
            “I am my parent. Who are you? Where are you from? How did you get here?”
            “My name is Ayara.” She didn’t know if she could trust this strange personality but given the circumstance, she didn’t have a choice. “I had an appointment to meet a client. Shortcuts are my fetish.” She shrugged like that ought to explain the details.
            “Shortcuts can be wrong cuts.” The kid-man said, not unkindly.
            “I stayed in the middle of the road. Okay, I admit I leaned a little too hard on the pedal but the road was deserted.”
            “Explains a lot about your predicament.”
            “Don’t give me lip. I know I’m a guest but I’d have been in some meeting if that vagrant wasn’t standing smack down in my path.”
The reply was low when it came. Ayara couldn’t believe she heard right. “You should have knocked him down.” He said.
            “What did you just say to me?”
The kid-man bent over and whispered into her like he was afraid somebody might overhear him. “What I said Miss, is that you should have run him over then gone ahead and met your appointment. Che sera sera.”
Ayara let the words piece themselves together into sensible whole rather force them into a traditional pattern of rational thought.
            “It was a plot to waste him so you and some bastard as sick as you are made him stand there. Then it would look like a roadkill and the driver takes the blame and you and your murderous crew walk.”
            “It was best for everybody. For him.”
            “Why?”
            “They come back.”
            “Who?” And then the truth dawned on her. “It’s some kind of sick ritual isn’t it?”
            “What it’s called doesn’t matter. Names often go with faces and we got no face to save here, in any case. They come back. That’s the important thing to keep up your sleeve. But you, Miss, was supposed to splatter his brains all over the sidewalk and by the time the sun comes the next day, that’s two days ago, he would heave been reborn a new man. A kid. Like me.”
Ayara had stopped listening when the kid said, ‘two days ago’. She was ticking off the days on her mental calendar. “You mean I’ve been out cold for three days?”
The kid-man ignored the question. “He would have started over another lifecycle if you have listened to your instincts. But now, Nicholas is dead indeed. Disintegrated bit by bit like a vampire in the heat of the sun. by sparing him, you killed him.” He slammed his fist into something close to where Ayara’s head lay, hard enough to startle her. She heard an object topple over and crash to the floor.

The silence hung on the air like shed skin. After some moment, the kid-man walked over to where Ayara lay in bed in semi-paralysis. She flinched.
He sat at the edge of the bed but didn’t touch her. Up close, Ayara searched his face to see if she could make out his features in the darkness. All she was more confusing then she would allow herself to believe. It’s the darkness. Yet, she couldn’t stop thinking over what the man-kid had said, ‘We have no face to save.’

            “A few years ago, not quite twenty years, we had a factory in this town running tests and all kinds of illegal researches that would raise the eyebrows of every Rights and Activist association. And it did. I remember there were a few court cases to get them to pack up and leave town. But you know the way it is with high profile cases, envelopes changed hands and the matter…”
            “What kind of tests are you talking about?”
            “Cloning. Human cloning through the use of nuclear energy. Of course, the fallout came as the Rights groups had predicted. Folks in the vicinity of the factory when it happened… let’s just say, they would have been better off if they’d died immediately. The factory owners quit the site and left us to count our losses.”
            “Was the man on the highway one of them? Is that why you sent him out to die?”
            “Close your eyes.”
She obeyed, dutifully. He slid off the bed and she him move across the room. There was a faint, sharp click, the sound of someone throwing a switch and the light came on.
            “Open your eyes,” the man-kid said not unkindly but his voice had taken on a grim tone.

He was standing in the middle of the room. It was where she spotted him when she peeled off her eyelids. He was a kid, alright no doubt about it. And now the full weight of the phrase he’d spoken earlier, the one she’d kept someplace in the backburner of her mind came thrashing every wall of well-constructed ideals to pronounce itself justified. She thrust her fingers into her mouth and bit down hard. It was all she could do to keep from screaming. A scream that would have paid out for forever. “Names often go with faces and we got no face to save here,” the man-kid had said.

The thing standing in the middle of the room called up Ayara’s childhood memory of an episode of Daffy Duck which featured the hand of the cartoonist drawing the series character fitted into weird costumes. At one point, it had Daffy Duck bickering incessantly. The cartoonist took his eraser and wiped out his beak. The man-kid had two holes where there should have been a nose. A face with no visible features.
            “How do I hear when you speak since you have mouth? Is this a form of some sick joke?”
            “You been hearing my voice come through as fine as wine in summertime and you haven’t guessed the difference in the resonance?”
            “Telepathy.” She half-screamed the word like it would ease the terror. “We’ve been communicating through our minds. Neither of us has actually spoken a word all day.”
            “They say ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ it had to find a way to fit into the natural sate of things. Here we are never dying and never actually, living. And if you would have it, the vagrant you thought you saved by throwing you jeep over the cliff was my brother. I died a few months ago. Got killed is the appropriate word but here I am. I came back. We never marry. We have no use for reproduction since we never die. We do not feed. With no mouth, who needs food, right?
            “I guess those bastards achieved what they aimed at if only they hadn’t out and left town in a hurry. Maybe, someday, we the hybrid would be the only ones left in this world.”


            “Miss, are you okay? Miss, wake up.”
Ayara woke up to see a traffic warden bent over her and shaking her looking deathly serious.
            “Are you okay? What happened here? Can you talk?”
She looked around. She was back inside her SUV but the scene was different. Even her clothes had been changed. It couldn’t have been a dream. She has got to find a way to prove it. While the cop was still fretting over her, she tried to move and something fell out of her blouse landing on her lap. She fetched the piece of paper and turned it around. It bore an inscription.

            “We got no face to save.”

It was a confirmation and a warning lumped into one message.


Eneh Akpan
June 1st, 2014




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