–Sherry Shahan
Ginia and Vitti meet each night in the mangled milieu of glass, steel, and concrete that was once museums, libraries, couture shops, and bowling greens. Endless debris unfurls around them like hot tar. Rust grows where nothing else will.
Vitti plays guitar. Ginia paints using the old-world technique of fresco. Tons of plaster litters the ground, so no problem there. Vitti watches Ginia—shy and vulnerable, though clothed in brilliance—as she separates areas on a scrap of plaster with a piece of metal. She sketches skirted girls in satin with cherry lips, hailed by cupids, flouncing across fertile fields and swelling seas, bucolic places they’ll never see or smell.
“Tell me what you think?” Ginia asks.
“It’s your best work yet—so organic and alive.”
Ginia lulls her love with tales of paintbrushes woven from her hair and tints mixed from blood and tears. Other fluids, transformed into vibrant pigments. Her precious rat Michelangelo perches on her shoulder, his long pink tail skimming the hollow between her breasts. Vitti has to look away.
“I tried State-sanctioned art,” Ginia says with a lazy stroke, adding carmine to an otherwise colorless world. “We were forced to replicate the work of unimaginative men from archaic books. Mine were exact copies of course, garnering great approval and favor, but I was lifeless inside. Neutered. I once suckled my own breast as a way of calling myself back from nothingness.”
Vitti gasps a little. “It’s up to us to create light.” The only things worth saying are what she’s feeling. It’s sometimes so simple.
“Do you believe we have mothers other than those in the lab?” Ginia asks. “I once dreamed of being scooped from the hollow belly of a wailing woman.”
“I’ve had similar dreams.” Vitti’s voice trembles.
“The State only wants us to know what they want us to know.” Ginia pauses as if falling into the center of the universe. “Imagine Michelangelo, years spent lying on his back painting a ceiling. So long ago, yet his images tell the story of creation and the fall of humanity. Did you know he wrote sonnets?”
Vitti marvels at the way great thoughts seep from Ginia’s mind. The cosmos dropped the perfect lover in her junk pile. They have the same thoughts at the same time. Like all star-crossed romances.
Vitti wonders if being in love means you’re a little bit crazy. If allowing yourself to feel, like the State says, is the definition of madness. But then, only they hear birds chirping in Greek and King Edward VII uttering curses from burnt rubble.
Luxurious nights pass in secrecy near the opening of a subterranean unit with glass and steel life-pods where gas is pumped in to eradicate memories of how their ancestors expressed themselves. Strangely enough, some things are erased, others replaced.
“Elder Abraham showed me a book well-hidden,” Ginia says. “I touched pictures of walnuts and pomegranates, a sheaf of corn, a bowl of jubilee grapes. Is it possible that such marvels still exist?”
Vitti stares at the curve of Ginia’s neck. Perfect, unflawed. She sweeps her beloved’s cheek with the back of her fingers. Ginia blushes as if brushed by a ripe apricot.
“I was once so hungry and without a stitch of clothing. I thought of chickens but stole a capon instead. Was I mad?” Ginia asks. “Or was it a dream?”
“Are you hungry now?”
“Ravenous.”
Vitti lifts the top half of her neoprene wetsuit and unwinds her nutrition tube. She licks the end, shuddering as it swells, and gently inserts it through a tear in Ginia’s uniform. Vitti is gentle, working the tube into her navel clamp, allowing her own life juices to flow into her love, all without spies or regret.
Ginia moans as the tube pulses and releases bursts of pleasure. “It’s too dangerous to keep meeting here,” she says, her eyelids fluttering. “We must find a place that is ours alone.”
Ginia grinds plaster and mixes pigment in preparation for their journey. “Being together is like soaring with butterflies,” she says. “Our hearts will always remain free.”
Vitti tunes her guitar to Ginia’s breath. Then she stands for a moment, uncertain. There’s so much to do. What will they need?
Her movements are uneasy as she gathers essentials: antiseptic swabs to clean her nutrition tube and a tarnished brass box of fire-stick matches she unearthed, worth a fortune on the black market. A corroded hubcap becomes a second seat on her bicycle. Her guitar, strapped on the back fender.
When it’s time to set off, Vitti slips her shorty wetsuit over Ginia’s tattered uniform. Nothing but rags, nothing left to barter with.
“If only . . .” Ginia pauses.
Vitti understands completely. No one can be wholly beautiful in State-issued shoes. Guaranteed ugly for life. She steps from her combat boots. “Wear these.”
Ginia smiles, lovely as a cellulose rose.
Vitti puts on her non-skid rubber booties.
Ginia laughs. “You look like a victim of pyrotechnics.”
“I’m properly dressed for the occasion.” Vitti simpers. “Best to blend into the inky night.”
They travel under a moonless sky. No stars. No asteroids. Only dust particles and chemical pollutants extending into other galaxies. Vitti chokes the handlebars and beats the pedals with her rubber booties. Then she laughs.
Ginia hugs her sturdy waist and coos to Michelangelo perched on her shoulder.
They pass a billboard with enormous words: ‘Fear Books! Paintings! Music! Poetry! Thinkers!’
Vitti immerses herself in a new theory, letting it expand from conjecture to verity. What if State-professed enemies are imaginary? Who would know in a world where truth is a lifeless reflection of the few in power?
“Can we really survive on our own?” Ginia whispers in her ear. “Find a place far from wicked men who are sleepless?”
Vitti inhales Ginia’s breath, so sweet—often it’s the little things. “A wish is waiting for us on the wind.”
No one had ever been so in-tune with her, not even her Petri-parents. Sure, they’ll miss her as she misses them. No doubt they’ll spawn a clone from her DNA but without the passionate gene.
Vitti’s diagnosis had come in Institutional Day Care when her brain rejected the requisite digital-chip. A month of interface examinations revealed a hypersensitivity to touch and affection. Her QR tattoo scans “loving, generous, independent, courageous.”
Vitti stares into the raven night, alert to danger. She blinks against the hum of drones and hovercrafts, praying the bike’s metal frame will protect them from thermal sensors. The State sanctioned unspeakable torture for those who flee: Displayed in glass cubicles, brushed with milk and honey while insects dine.
It’s cold and getting colder.
They pass burnt-out trees along the banks of an ancient waterway. Bodies impaled on spikes, dried and shriveled. Their garments rotted off. What’s left of a large horned animal, its legs sticking out stiff and straight. The stench, long gone.
A dusky sky turns its face away in shame.
Ginia sobs. “What could they have done?”
“Dared to think. Dared to love. There are infinitely more punishments than wrong-doings.”
In a different time, they would have found a way to bury the remains.
Another day, here and gone.
On the seventh day of their trek, Vitti and Ginia settle in the bowels of a toppled theme
park in a moat where the head of a decapitated Alice in Wonderland lolls in a cracked teacup. They
stow away during the day, foraging at night for anything useful—hauling off smashed and broken bits
of this and that.
A miniature castle door becomes their front gate. They plant a plastic palm, add a one-legged garden flamingo. Scraps of wire mesh are woven into a dome-type roof to protect them from winged spies.
Vitti digs a waste pit.
Ginia chips grime from a plastic bench. “Look! It’s Beauty Pie Pink.”
Vitti rushes over to kiss her. “The perfect settee.”
They sit on the settee, stretching their arms over the filigree back, laughing as if rolling in a field of clover.
“Do you see the yellow butterflies?” Ginia asks.
“Yes, my love, and I hear the buzz of bees.”
They were in tune to the tides in their bodies, the highs and lows.
Michelangelo eliminates marauding rats, pulverizing bones, devouring fatty organs with pulsing veins. Ginia soaks and tans the hides, stitches them together, and fabricates something she calls a rag rug.
They rummage around, uncovering a sealed case of deep-fried Mars Bars which somehow survived their expiration date.
“Caramel.” Vitti cries. “Corn syrup!”
“Monosodium Glutamate!” Ginia presses her lips to Vitti’s sweet mouth, Vitti loses herself in a primeval memory of vanilla and orange blossoms.
“Ours is the Happiest Place on Earth,” Ginia says.
Even wearing a wetsuit, Vitti feels sticky leakage from her tube. She picks up her guitar, arranging words in an elaborate language.
Ginia works pigment into wet plaster, languishing over her latest fresco, Vitti’s Song. Michelangelo nibbles her bare foot.
Vitti shoos him away. “Your toe,” she says, “it’s bleeding.”
“Red! Quick! Fetch a receptacle!”
Soon the trees in Vitti’s Song bloom scarlet.
Vitti never hungered for her more.
Early one morning, Ginia weeps over something she can’t explain. Vitti believes her tears are opalescent from the absorption of fluids through the feeding tube. Ginia must have taken in too many nutrients, Vitti reasons, because Ginia’s breasts are overflowing with the same milky substance.
Ginia fashions a tent-like dress for herself. “Rock-a-bye, baby, on the treetop.”
Vitti doesn’t know if it’s a song or a poem or how she knows the next line. It seems to sprout from an ancient spring. “When the wind blows the cradle will rock.”
Summer heat rages and violent winds consume the crumbling ruins, sweeping away Ginia’s last morsel of plaster. She weeps and wails, her tears raining on seething thermals.
Vitti curves a splintered wooden stake into a bow. She braids twine, knots it over the ends, and pulls it taut. Another stake becomes an arrow with a razor-sharp point. Ginia fashions an over-the-shoulder sheath from rat hides.
Together they repair a broken handcart. “I’ll gather enough plaster to last forever after,” Vitti says.
“When we’re together I’m rarely afraid.” Ginia’s smile gathers her in. “Stay with me in this moment and the next.”
“Oh, my cherished. You’ll be much safer here.”
Ginia rubs the round of her belly. “We share a past, things only we know. Things only we can talk about, together.”
Vitti shoulders her sheath and places the bow in the cart. “Your heart travels with me.”
She stumbles, feeling a nervous twitch, and pushes the cart into a twilight of strange colors. It’s as if someone sprayed everything gunmetal grey. She thinks about her life with Ginia—how Ginia creates art from nothing, knowing no one but her will see it. Just as she shapes songs, knowing no one but Ginia will ever hear.
She frets over Ginia’s swelling belly, fearing it may be an invasive growth. Instead of looking for plaster she should whisk her love underground to a clinic. But that would mean turning themselves in to the State.
Vitti presses on beneath black and yellow smoke, a steady rolling haze that creeps across the horizon. The wheels on the cart leave ruts in an expanse of Stygian ash. Dead bugs crush underfoot.
Clouds peel back but don’t reveal the next form.
On her own she feels like a pirate, reckless, circumventing danger. She steps in something squishy and refuses to look down. Something is behind her, its hot breath mists on her neck—but when she turns, alarmed, there’s nothing. She leans into the haunting wind, pretending it’s a song. There’s plenty of nothing in every direction.
It’s impossible to know how far she’s gone. She grows weary, retracing her path to avoid sinkholes, and stops near a pyramid of broken asphalt where a mischief of rats groom themselves. Their fiendish eyes are ghastly. All wear gilded collars.
“Domesticated!”
The implications leave her breathless. Pets? Spies? Carriers of poison? Impossible to know.
A mangy rat skulks forward, barring its fulvous teeth, strings of drool quivering. Vitti grips her bow, retrieves the arrow, and fires. The winged shaft rips into hide and flesh, taking the rodent by surprise.
She recovers her arrow watching one rat assault another. Bones are exposed, pulled and twisted outward like great wings. The head of the attacker disappears as feasting moves to the bowels.
The sky continues to move too fast to settle into a single shape.
Further on, Vitti exhumes a chunk of moldy stucco—a thrilling moment since Ginia doesn’t have that shade of green. She leverages it into the cart and visualizes Gina’s impish glee.
Vitti feels the hardening ridge of her nutrition tube which had been tucked back between the folds of her buttock cheeks. Juice bursts like guava seeds with microscopic tails.
The windstorm dies as the day’s last light shakes a dusty haze.
Closer to the moat, an unfamiliar scent assaults her. Sweet and salty. But not unpleasant. The fragrance lulls her, pulling her the rest of the way home.
Vitti rushes inside the compound to find Ginia, lovely in reclining nakedness, a primitive
portrait. Her hair is knotted up like the petrified bird’s nest they discovered early in their journey. “Ginia!”
Her beloved smiles, cradling a writhing bundle.
Their daughter lets out a wail, a cacophony of hope and promise. Life is full of astonishing and wondrous surprises.
Vitti kneels beside her nearest and dearests and serenades them in song. Michelangelo hunches by the gate, ichor staining his whiskers.
SHERRY SHAHAN is a teal-haired septuagenarian who writes in a small beach town in California. Her stories live in Hippocampus, Critical Read, december, F(r)iction, Progenitor, Antitheses, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize in Poetry.
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