MOTHS, WE ARE
With the fury of a forest thrashing in a gale, the girl whipped backwards, spine folding, vertebrae cracking, into a position that would've killed a normal human, should they have aspired to possess such flexibility. Milky shards of splintered ribs protruded from the pink fabric of her leotard. Her body, sylphlike, contorted with a liquid grace. The wet snap of her virgin bones, the taut twang of muscles and sinew, a symphony of ruin, punctuated each flowing movement. It was her first performance. Breaking-in.
The theatre was full, the gods heaving.
Bile singed the back of Petra's throat as she leant forwards, white-knuckled hands clinging to the arms of her seat. From this high above the stage, the performer was scarce more than a white blur amid a pool of glutted black: a ballerina pirouetting within a jewellery box; a feather caught on a whip of wind. It was horrific; it was beautiful. There was beauty in horror, horror in beauty. This close up, they were indistinguishable. That perverted pleasure of pulling at a hangnail, watching it snake a gleaming path to the knuckle, further, far further, until you don't know when to stop - before biting it off, watching beads of blood tumble from the gash. It was that shameful fascination, crystallised, cast in feather and soft skin.
The performer held her arms in an arch above her head like a fleshly aureole. She extended a leg, pin-straight, to her side. There was no wobble or waver; Petra thought of the wooden dummies used in art class, with blunt mittens for hands and smooth blank faces - though even they were cursed with rusted joints. In a flash of violent fluency the performer spun, and - in some unthinkable, impossible twist - threaded her outstretched leg through her arched arms, thread piercing the eye of a needle.
There was the beginning of a sound that suggested irreparable, or agony, or at least it was quick, but so suddenly were the audience applauding that the noise was swallowed.
"Foul, foul thing. People are dying, and they're wanting to dazzle us with glamour and glory and- and sequins." Granma punctuated the words with sharp jabs of her fork, the zeal of a cutlery-wielding pirate.
She was neck-deep in one of her rants, ignited by a small advert for a show in her evening paper - now sprawled, dismembered, upon the floor, tossed aside in a fit of revulsion. 4th of December, 8pm, it had said, The Genevan Theatre, Elysian Boulevard; Petra knew without reading, for the same details were printed on the ticket slipped between the pages of her biology textbook in her satchel under the dinner table.
"When I was young," Granma continued, "there were such beautiful things as hard work, and sacrifice, and determination, and people respected them - more so than the talent itself. Moths, we are, now. We're like goddamn moths."
Petra nodded mutely and pushed the charred chunks of venison around her plate. Granma insisted on burning the life out of any organic food they ate; to burn those buggers back to the devil, she said. They lived on a diet of flaccid leaf vegetables and blackened breads. Meat was a rarity, what with so few uninfected livestock remaining, but Petra couldn't bring herself to swallow another gristly mouthful. Her stomach was already choked with citrusy guilt, tight with nerves.
"You haven't finished your casserole."
"Eva's offered me dinner at her's."
Granma's eyes narrowed. "If anything tastes like-"
"Wine and earth, I know."
"-then spit it out-"
"I know, I know."
"-come straight home, brush your teeth, and chew mint leaves for half an hour - don't swallow them. Look at me, Petra. Promise."
Petra knew it was all fooey. It didn't spread through saliva, or festering produce, or touch or sex or pinpricks of liminal lifeforms that float upon a sigh. The crazes had seen people ravished, skinned of dignity - recumbent upon bathroom floors - clubs, theatres, gyms, boutiques - scraping tongues along tiles and empty lipstick tubes, searching for stardom with their jaws slack and teeth dry. There had been more deaths from whatever foul pestilences they had picked up on their pilgrimages than the disease itself. It wasn't impossible to catch, but it was rare. People were too avid with hunger to realise that the answers to their searches were looking right back at them. Then they introduced the blindfolds, and it became another task altogether.
She raised her eye’s to Granma’s and smiled. “I promise.”
The hot, acrid smell of vomit made Petra's nose wrinkle. Lights danced a few rows in front. People groaned and spat complaints, shifting, some standing, to maintain a view of the stage. Attendants wielding flashlights escorted a slumped figure from an aisle to a side door. Petra curled her lip. Some people couldn't appreciate art unless it was imprisoned behind a frame, static in oils, frozen. They couldn't appreciate pure, skinned beauty, as nature had intended. Why else would it unleash a plague to make us dance, to free us from the confines of bones and reservations? The ability to create in immaculate destruction; there was art in that alone. But the shapes.
Petra stood, to peer around the others who had stood.
Her mother, in that overstuffed, faded lilac armchair, her fingers beating a nervous tattoo upon her knee as she watched the snooker. It began then, though no one ever notices that early. A week later, and the rhythmic tick would spread to her wrists, seeping up her arm as synapses and tissue were gradually lured to the promise of a new god, one of cold earth and abandon and impossible geometry.
She had had her own performance, a glimmer of stardom, Mother. The frozen meat aisle of the market - empty, as those were the days people thought it spread through flesh; when it was a curse, not a blessing. She was reaching out a plump hand for a plastic packet of lamb, and then the hand wasn't reaching for the hunk of weeping meat, but for her throat. She was limp and flailing like a marionette under the hand of a child. Petra remembered the wet slap as the lamb had hit the floor, bounced. She told herself that that was what the sound had been. She didn’t want to imagine where it had come from within her mother.
The performer thrust her arms out, an acrobat's resignation, an upright prostration. Her chest was heaving, her eyes flashing white. A dribble of inky liquid crept from between her lips, leaving a sapphiric scar in its wake as it reached her chin, trembled, dripped onto her leotard. It left a black stain, no bigger than a fingernail.
Applause lapped at the edges of the crowds as the audience emerged from a mutual stupor. It was a tremor, the thunder of a body of racehorses as they rounded the track, drawing closer to the stands. Petra found herself whooping, cheering along with the crowd as it rose, one body, to its feet.
When Petra grasped her bird-bone hand later, beneath the sterile paper bedsheets - when it wasn't really her hand, not hers, not any more - the fingertips writhed at impossible angles, like the prying feelers of an arachnid, feeling for gaps and light.
The performer's wail was lost beneath the tumultuous ovation. Something fine and shimmering, spider's silk, had snapped within her, and she crumpled to her knees, clutching her arms around her. Her mouth split open in another silent shriek that seemed to swallow her face, wider, wider, until she was only teeth - shining, sooty teeth - and a gaping wet cavity of tongue and throat.
A gasp of silence punctuated the applause. Then it returned, that striking of skin, louder than before; fervent, ravenous. The punch of fireworks, glorious disaster. It continued as the performer was escorted from the stage. Attendants tied a blindfold around her head, and half-led, half-carried her behind the curtain as her legs bent forwards at the knee when she tried to walk.
"Marvellous show. Simply marvellous. A snake of a woman."
From the seat beside her, somewhere beneath a mound of glaring minks and frothy pearls, came a woman’s voice.
"Hm? A snake. Yes."
"That jump she did, God - Her hip bones, where did they go! She almost flew."
"Yes."
"Though, I must say, it was rather tame.” The mound rose, and began adjusting its furs with a pearl-pustled hand. “This other act I saw, the other week - at the Iphigenia, across town? Yes - this man- Who was it? John- Johannes- You must have heard of him, no? A maestro. He falls upon the stage, makes a great dent in his head - all bloody and gaping, truly fatal - then gets up and continues to dance! Exquisite showmanship. Bleeding all over the place, stinking of copper. His last show, of course. A shame - but truly a glorious watch, the reviews later did it no justice. So raw - literally, at times, ha! It truly is a sport for the worthy."
Petra was pulling her school fleece over her pantsuit. She would have to wash her smudged eye-makeup off, later, in the theatre restrooms.
"Yes," she said.
Mother had been braver than the others. When the cause of the disease had been identified, spilled onto front pages of newspapers and glowing text scrolling along the bottom of news reports, Mother had taken her bread knife. In the early hours of the morning, in a curt sweep, steadied before the kitchen sink, Mother slashed away her vision.
Her eyes had been blue, like Petra’s.
It was fate, perhaps; or the shortcut she had always favoured. It was the promise of curled toes on a cliffedge, or a blade poised above skin; a bowl of nectarines left unguarded; a hangnail, clinging.
The performer sat on the bottom steps of a metal fire escape. A thick stump of bandages encased her entire left arm, bruised fingers protruding dumbly from the end, like tentative enoki from withered bark. The other arm hung limp in a scarf tied around her neck. Her feet were bare, and beneath a silken dressing gown she still wore her leotard. Sterile squares had been cut in the fabric to apply elixir to the torn skin, though both were so similar a shade of tender pink that flesh and vestment were indistinguishable.
She didn't look up as Petra approached, not until her footsteps sent shadows skittering across the greasy surface of the puddles that pitted the alleyway. Even then, when she raised her head, she peered somewhere within Petra’s chest, seeing through, not looking at. Petra pulled her coat tighter around her and clutched her satchel under her arm. She took a step, looked over her shoulder, back at the gleaming crowd on the pavement at the alley’s end, a golden snapshot. People were still spilling from the theatre in their furs and shawls and cloak, their laughs echoing hollowly down the alley.
“You were beautiful,” Petra said after taking another step, towards, away. “It must feel amazing.”
When that kindled no response, she crouched, stealing another glance. They were alone, in the shadows. It was quiet. Reaching out, she framed the performer’s face with her hands, until both were each other’s horizons; pale, cold-blushed suns.
“Look at me,” Petra whispered.
The performer’s eyes met hers. Eye to eye. Or for.
“Get much studying done?”
“Yes. Biology.”
“And you didn’t eat her food, did you?”
“No.”
“There’s spare casserole on the hob.”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Granma harrumphed and turned back to her sudoku.
Petra leaned against the kitchen counter, waiting for the kettle to boil. Her knees were still damp. She tapped her nails idly against the rim of her empty porcelain teacup.
R. Rosalind, 16, East Riding of Yorkshire - England ✯ r.rosalind22@gmail.com
“R. Rosalind has too many stories she wants to tell and not enough discipline to commit any to paper (or Google Docs - her preferred burial ground for malformed ideas). She likes candles, unnecessary commas, and prefers history to geography (though studies both).”