Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
CW: Cannibalism, death, self-harm.
When you get to the body, it’s still warm.
Maybe because you’re exhausted, because your joints are feverish and your chest feels like it’s scraped dry, for a second, the face in front of you morphs and you see Ru splayed out inside the bathtub instead. Her wrists are splotched with welts, her eyes milked over with a knot of veins, but it’s the head that makes you rigid: Ru’s skull hangs to her chest, like something impossibly heavy is squatting on her neck.
The sound of footsteps in the corridor makes you snap out of it. You take a breath and steady yourself, bracing a palm against the bathroom tiles. The stranger flopped in the bathtub is only a stranger. Ru is in your room, safe. You won’t ever let your sister become this wasted thing. You’ll make sure she gets the treatment tomorrow—whatever it takes.
You look at the body again, this time assessing it for extraction points. Underneath the squash of a hip, you see a dribble of shit pooling out—the stench grabs the soft inside of your throat. There’s movement, beetle-black spots crawling in the mess. The critters fly up and land on your arm. You jerk back.
“Hey,” José’s hand rests between your shoulder blades and though you’d never admit it, the heat of him calms your muscles. “Keep quiet.”
“These flies—” You stop abruptly because the last time you tried to skewer one of the bloated bodies with your scalpel, the last time you were on the verge of furious tears about these fucking flies, José swept the hair off your sticky forehead and said: Cariño, there are no flies here.
“Be quick,” he says. “Pa’s gonna get here in five—”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do.”
José’s hand falls away. Days like today, when your belly, your lungs, your mouth are scratched with fire and a scream’s building and building inside you, you wish he’d just bite back. Instead, he steps closer. You hold your breath. Because he reeks of embalming fluid and dead bodies, you tell yourself. Because you’re a hypocrite. His words are gentle: “I’ve been reading up on the leaked court transcripts, and get this, each expert they interviewed stated that engaging in excessive peeling, for reasons other than personal rapture, causes irreversible harm. That making it into a commodity has damaged something vital in a large percentage of the populace. It made me think of Rupika. Her symptoms, there’s been a plague of them, have you heard? You should stop—”
“Don’t.”
You feel his eyes on you, but you can’t turn to him. After a moment, he steps back, away from you, to lean against the doorframe. It’s enough distance that you can take a breath, focus your attention on what’s important. Ru. Money. This corpse with its lolling head.
Months ago, when every doctor you’d consulted said there was nothing wrong with Ru, not really, not according to their tests and charts, it was José who’d found and led that alternative therapy practitioner to your home. You’d wanted to—needed to—prove that Ru’s pain, her debilitating condition, wasn’t something fabricated in your heads. That had been before these hushed-up reports came out, of a sickness spreading through crowded estates and dirty tower blocks. The woman that came with José had taken Ru’s limp hand, held it in her own for long moments, and you’d been so grateful for that gesture of tenderness. I can see it, the woman said. When you asked her what, she told you about a creature that squats on the curve of a neck, about the slow crush of its unshakable weight. How do you get rid of it, you demanded. You don’t, she said, Once it climbs on, it never lets go.
Where the fuck did it come from? The woman made a sweeping gesture with her arm, as if to say: All of this. It was bullshit. But sometimes when the heating’s cut out and the bulbs have blown again, the two of you sitting stiff in the dark, sometimes when you’re spooning broth into Ru’s mouth, trying to lift her chin to massage the passage of her throat, you feel resistance from the other side of her neck, like something tangible, something thick-footed is bearing down on it, and you can’t bring yourself to look at the dense mass above her head.
That day, before that practitioner had left your home, she’d glanced at the strip of scar tissue peeking out below your shirtsleeves. Her lips hadn’t curled in disgust as others did, but that look, that zeroing in on the telltale section of your body—you felt yourself recede. Your life shrunk to those few moments from the past. You were stuck in time. The present vanished. You had no future. In her eyes, you became someone something happened to, your body nothing but a source of compassion. It made you sick—how you evaporated—but it was also the reason the woman waved away the cash you tried to offer, the reason she left saying, May we all be graced with compassion.
The memory sharpens your focus now.
You secure the mask, roll on the gloves, pick up your tools and kneel beside the body. The flies cling on, still and unperturbed by your movements. José can usually only give you five minutes with a body before his own crew arrive, and you make the extractions as clean as possible. You’re good at it. But today the delicate grip, the demand for steadiness and precise lines are straining the nerves of your wrist, firing hot all the way to your brain. The blade wavers. You almost slice too deep. You can’t afford to fuck this up, not when it’s the first body you’ve had access to in weeks. It’s been too risky to call you out now they’re doing random check-ups on our cleaning jobs, making sure we’re not harvesting the bodies, José said. You gotta lie low. This one has to work. Has to be immaculate. Ru needs you. You swallow the heat creeping up your throat and refocus. Grip the blade just right and continue.
When you carry out these extractions, you make it like the peeling was always there, like the dead did it to themselves before they passed. The recent crackdown on anything short of ethical extraction and ethical consumption has been brutal: the last harvesting scandal secured the death sentence. You can’t afford death either.
He likes you, you know, Ru’s teasing voice floats in from a distant past. Why would he risk himself otherwise?
But as you’re snapping the icebox closed, rolling off the gloves from trembling fingers, wiping and sterilising your blades, José says, “This is the last time, cariño.”
“What?” Two flies have plopped onto the bag you’re tying, their fruiting bodies seeking out fresh waste. Once, they’d found their way into the icebox and spoiled three months’ worth of rent.
“I won’t be able to call you out anymore.”
You look up at him and notice a sharpness to his face, a wolfish quality in the way he looks at you. Immediately, you think of The Hunger. You think you see his eyes flicker to your scar. You think of his mouth on you, a half-remembered night when you shared a secret part of yourself—but no. José and his Pa and this cleaning up of broken bodies, the burials and cremations they do for a mere pittance for those that the police refuse to touch, that the ambulances won’t come out for, those not deemed worthy enough by the state, that’s enough, more than enough. They don’t need to eat scraps from the likes of you to feel compassion. They’re spilling over with it, spilling over with salvation. “What do you mean?”
“Pa saw you last time.” He makes a face, and something inside you brittles. You know what his Pa thinks about you. The last time his Pa caught you, stooping like an overgrown vulture and picking away at one of the pitiful bodies they were supposed to lay to rest, you’d heard him raging as you scurried away: It’s disgusting. They scavenge and eat their own. It had hurt. You want to lash out at José now, tell him that what his Pa does, what he does is dirty work too, even though it’s a lie, you want to tell him that it’s debasing, this trauma cleaning, the wiping up of shit and blood and scum, but he puts a hand on your arm and says, “I’m sorry.”
His thumb brushes your bare wrist. A fly sits right next to his hand, almost touching. “I can’t—”
“Hey,” he says, “You’re burning up. Are you okay?”
You snatch your wrist out of his grasp. José knows you can’t go scouting underground like you once did, can’t even do the basic door-to-door Sell Your Trauma For Salvation spiel in the hope you’ll strike lucky and get a voluntary donation. You can’t leave Ru for more than half an hour at a time. “Without this, we’ll have nothing. Ru—”
He’s shaking his head.
Your eyes burn. You shove past him, but before you do, you spit the words: “You have no compassion.”
For a few seconds, the stricken look on his face, however brief, however useless, calms the panic surging inside you with such force you can’t breathe.
• • • •
The trauma collector hasn’t had anything since her four shots of espresso and stale croissant this morning—she hadn’t wanted to eat and look uncouth at the lunch meeting with the CEO, not when she wants this promotion so bad—and now her stomach feels like it’s been punched, that hollow sharp ache of The Hunger. The backs of her ankles are fucked too, scrubbed bloody by her new leather brogues. They’d been a gift to herself, an expensive reward for the life to come. Makes sense she’d have to bleed for them. At least her chest has been a little better recently, all that weird shit she was coughing up. The vial she’d sent off to the hospital last week had looked like ashes, but that sample had been misplaced too. They told her the bile in her gullet, the heat of her bones was most likely a psychosomatic stress response. Nothing to worry about. Just some rest and yoga and has she heard about the latest mindfulness app? Since securing these meetings with the CEO though, she’s let herself take it a little easier. She can’t wait to get home, stuff her face with some leftover pizza, and lance these blisters with a safety pin. She can almost feel it, the spill of hot release.
But the girl’s late, of course.
This, she won’t miss. The waiting, traipsing to sketchy streets, freezing her ass off without any guarantee she’d even procure a product worth anything. Fuck, it will be good to sit in an office for a change. She’s salivating at the thought of a monthly paycheck. No more pawning off bits of Aama’s wedding gold to make rent. No more dysfunctional boiler. Maybe she’ll even get more than four hours sleep each night. The promise of it is intoxicating.
When a wraith-like figure slinks out of the fog into the light of the lamppost she’s leaning against, she can’t help but snap, “You’re late.” She tries to school her face, keep it smooth and professional, but the girl stinks like something dead fruiting in a gutter. Her face looks rattier than usual, cracked dry at the corners, and whatever cheap material her “leather” jacket is made of is peeling off in strips.
“Sorry, my sister—”
The collector rolls her eyes and waves a hand to cut the girl off. She knows this sob story, has heard it—and many like it—many times before. Aama would tell her not be so callous, that compassion is the greatest gift given to us, that there is no bigger purpose. But Aama is dead. Now there’s no one to confess to: that what she thought was the calling of her life—shining a light on people’s stories, giving their suffering meaning, touching the hearts of others, bringing compassion to the world—has in fact dulled her own ability to feel. Passing judgement on other people’s pain is a casual day’s work for her: how much is their trauma worth, how much money will their story fetch, how long will it be popular for. She is adept at hand selling even imperfect cuts because she knows how to sell the potential contained in the raw mess of flesh. It’s an art form, knowing what will go down well with the buyers, knowing what aspects of the tragedies to highlight, what specific intersection of demographic data and cultural trends will crosspollinate well, and she’s made sure she’s fucking good at it.
So yes, the collector can stand here and roll her eyes at this girl whose skin happens to be the same shade of brown as her own. She watches with distaste as the girl scratches at her arm, swatting at nothing. Her movements are loose and unfocused. The sight of her unsettles something deep inside the collector. If this same girl were at the lunch meeting today, all dolled up in a fresh cut suit, shined brogues and immaculate lipstick, she could have easily been mistaken for the collector. The girl is a haunting, a possibility of what the collector could be.
“What have you got for me?”
When the girl opens the icebox, she’s pleased to see the fine curls stored carefully within. The skill of their extraction is evident. Maybe the collector can leave her hustling days with a bang after all. It’s this hope, dark and delicious, that this piece will be the next big thing that seduces her one more time.
She takes out the lighter-shaped sampler from a coat pocket and scores through the barest sliver of a piece. She lifts it, her hold reverent. She can’t afford these pure premium cuts, only the synthetic shit that gets mass produced into pizza toppings and cheap vending machine snacks, so she savours these. The moment her mouth closes around it, liquid pleasure rushes in. Gold flashes behind her eyelids. Then comes a glimpse of the story, a taste of the trauma braided into these temporarily frozen cells.
But before the first trickle of emotion touches the frayed edges of her, before it can soothe and heal, she senses something wrong. When she extricates herself, the ache of her stomach has quieted but the precious hit is ruined.
“I can’t use this.”
“Why the fuck not? It’s fresh. I did the extraction myself.” The girl’s eyes are narrowed, jaw tight.
The collector sighs. She can’t wait to get off her fucking feet. “Look, where did you get this?”
The girl glances away, and the collector notices how brittle the bones of her face seem, how her neck looks like it might go with a snap. “A donation.”
“Well, it reeks of post-mortem extraction. The opening is literally the final gasps of a savage strangulation, so unless you got proof this was approved by the deceased, I don’t fancy a turn at a death sentence, do you?”
The girl covers her face with her hands. A stream of fuck fuck fuck. The collector watches her limbs quiver violently. Pity wells up inside her.
She knows this kind of post-mortem extraction wouldn’t have mattered before, but ethical consumption is the latest trend taking the industry by storm. It will die down soon enough, as all fads do—police brutality against black communities had been the last one, and before that, the deluge of sexual abuse allegations—but that harvesting scandal had made every company, every buyer suddenly concerned with the ethical sourcing of the product, the dignity of the donator, the working conditions of the labourers. Mostly lip service, of course. The current climate has given the collector the professional step up she’s been struggling for—We want more compassion and diversity in boardrooms, a direct ear to our pool of donators and survivors from marginal backgrounds—so she’s not complaining.
The sample itself is of fine quality because in this moment, after ingestion, after only the briefest hit, the collector truly feels for the girl, compassion pulsing bright and hot inside her—which frankly is inconvenient because she just wants to go home. There’s that tickle in her throat announcing nausea and she’ll be damned if she’s reduced to retching into some piss-sticky grate on the road. She knows very well she won’t be able to sell these pieces legally, but she tells the girl to get up and since it’s her last day hustling the streets, she thinks the hell with it and gives the girl a name and address of a private buyer known to indulge in contraband exotic cuts, tells her to try her luck there.
Maybe Aama wouldn’t think her so callous after all.
Later, as the collector leans over the toilet at home, an inky substance splattering into the bowl, she looks back at her split-second decision and marvels at the true miracle of compassion: You can feel overcome with pitiful love even for those that disgust you. You can be moved to engage in acts of benevolence. You can change someone’s life.
The revelation—her own magnanimity—will sustain her for weeks to come.
• • • •
It’s the child that opens the back door of the grand house. The child has been told not to open doors, certainly not to strangers who look like they don’t belong within the splendour of these grounds, but the child knows today is a special day and Mama is playing hostess to the esteemed guests of the White Lady of the house. It’s an honour, Mama said earlier as she patted her hair to make sure no frizz was flying loose, as she smoothed her freshly ironed uniform with trembling hands. Mama’s been labouring over the menu for ages: today is the first time she’s allowed to host, to appear before the guests as curator of the meal, and not just lurk and fret in the basement like a shameful secret.
The child had shadowed Mama through the careful preparation of each cut in the enormous kitchen above, and because Mama’s voice soothed the feeling of unease she got every time she was in the upstairs bit of the house and she couldn’t think what else to ask for since Mama was no good at telling made up stories, the child begged Mama to recite the White Lady’s Gospel. You know it’s called Our Gospel of Compassion, Mama said, as she always did. And don’t call her that. She would be very hurt if she heard you. But the child found it delightful that the White Lady’s name was actually Mrs. White.
Mama tells the Gospel in a way that the child can understand, and she says it like this:
We have been blessed with The Hunger so we may seek out Compassion, so we may love our neighbours and be brave in the face of hardship and suffering. Our life’s purpose is to feel Compassion, its Beauty, its Generosity, its Salvation. Do not let your Hunger grow so large it blinds you and makes you dull to the plight of others. Do not glut on Compassion that is offered kindly and freely. It is to be shared so all are fed, so all are sated, so all understand what empathy is and can act with kindness. The Hunger is a gift, not a disease nor an addiction. It enriches our life and enables us to feel deeply for the pain of our neighbours. To eat in order to sate The Hunger is to be nourished, made better, made whole with the blessing of Compassion.
Now, the child sits at the bottom of the stairs and watches Mama whisper at the door. The stranger is small and sad. The child can see the jut of bones shining too close to skin. When the child opened the door earlier, within touching distance from the stranger, she felt sour heat creeping out from beneath those tatty clothes and wanted to lie down in a cold bath. The child wishes Mama would give the stranger a tall glass of lemon sugar water, so she may wet the cracks of her mouth, soothe the burn of her, but Mama is shaking her head no.
The child knows Mama never eats the special cuts she prepares for the White Lady, but even so, Mama is always kind. She’s moving to shut the door but when the stranger says, “Please, my sister’s life depends on it,” Mama gets that still look on her face which the child knows means there’s something hurting inside her and if she moves, even a tiny bit, she will give herself away.
Mama says, “I’m sorry I can’t take this. We’re already serving a few cuts of rape and we got an immigrant woman and a transwoman on the menu, and these ladies get bored—no sorry, that’s unkind. Their systems get numbed by too much of the same thing. It stops working, you know? But I could make an extra slot for tomorrow if you bring me something fresh and if you get it to me by midnight. No guarantees though.”
The child watches the stranger stagger against the door, hands reaching to brush Mama’s clothes, saying thank you over and over, a fever of a prayer, before stumbling back into the fog. The child wants to beam at Mama, but just then the door to the grand hall opens. Through the slim gap spills out warmth and light. The child catches a glitter of chandeliers, the clean scent of mint, champagne glasses, huge tables with dainty plates. On them, the most delicate curls of meat. It’s Mama’s artwork and the child is dazzled by it. The shapes, the contrast of the dark pieces on the gold-rimmed china.
She’s so busy drinking in the sight, always forbidden to her, that she doesn’t hear what the White Lady says. She only snaps to attention when: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, it will never happen again.” Mama says this many times. The child hears the crack in Mama’s voice, and in that astonishing sound she detects an emotion she’s heard rarely. Fear. The child looks at the White Lady with her perfect red lips turned up in that perfect smile.
The smile doesn’t break once.
The White Lady doesn’t look at the child the whole time this happens, not even when the cough rattles up her chest and the child has to gasp her mouth shut, and it’s that strange feeling the child gets sometimes, that maybe she’s invisible to everyone but Mama, that maybe she’s really a ghost. The White Lady slips back into the grand hall where she belongs, pulls the door closed, and leaves them in darkness.
Mama doesn’t go out to host the dinner. Mama goes straight to bed and doesn’t leave, not even to tuck the child in or to check on the crumbling plaster above their heads. The child does it herself before shutting the light and moulding herself around Mama’s hip like an orphaned comma, belly aching because they hadn’t earned their dinner today and the White Lady is very strict about that.
The next morning, Mama hands her a glass of lemon sugar water and tells the child that they are going to find a new home, and that yes it will be a lovely place without any drafts to grab the child’s throat through the night, and yes it won’t have strange sounds infesting the walls either so she can sleep without concern, and yes the White Lady is truly compassionate to let them go and live in their own grand house now.
Yes, darling, may we all be graced with such compassion.
• • • •
You knew, even as you were stumbling away from that house, the glimpse of its insides so beautiful it hurt your eyes, even as you caught sight of a creature staring at you from the shadows and you thought that must be it, the thing crushing Ru’s neck, you knew that you were out of options. If it was worth anything, you’d slice off your own flesh, whole curling strips of it, carve it finer than any delicacy served up on an icy platter in a grand house. But you’re not enough. They’ve consumed too many of you. They’ve had a glut of your pain. You barely register now.
But Ru.
The strange alchemy of trends. Before the sickness, you’d both lived off Ru’s donations. As your own harvests became prosaic, hers continued selling. You begged her to stop when she became bed bound. But now—now—
When you reach home, jittery, bones rasping, your legs fold beneath you. The bottom half of your body is fog-chilled. You’re on your hands and knees, dragging yourself to the bathroom.
Somehow, Ru knows. She must. Because when you push the door open, what you find in the bathtub is her splayed body, head hanging to her chest, eyelids flickering as if she’s flickering in and out of consciousness. You’ve left her too long. Fuck, you’ve left her alone too long. You see it in the way she’s tinged blue, mottled with phantom bruises. You have to get her the treatment tomorrow. You have to. It’s already weeks late. Her grasp is fraying, moments from snapping. A jerk of a movement—and a beetle-black dot crawls onto her thigh. You suppress the scream pushing up through your lungs. You feel the shadow of death thick in the air, a pressure on the bend of your neck.
Before midnight, the woman said. You’ve only got half an hour left to make it back with something. Your legs have thawed enough that you can stand. Your tools, the blades, the sterilising fluids are right there, where you left them.
Right there.
Your whole body trembles as you kneel. You take Ru’s hand. The limp and clammy meat of it rests in your own, still warm.
You get to work.
After, you find yourself holding a strip that will be too pulpy for their refined palate. It gristles, they will say, it’s too heavy, too bloody, too much. You won’t be able to sell it. You knew it even as you were slicing the piece, even as the scalpel dug too deep, even as the whimper coming from the other end of the bathtub fainted away, turned into the starved ghost of a sound, yet you kept going.
You look at the chunk of it in your palms—the inside of your fingernails clotted so deep it will be impossible to soak out, your hands stained with the truth of her, the truth of you—and you can’t help but think:
This precious aching thing.
You can’t help but think: Better not waste it.
There’s a gasp of a moment when you are still, when even the skitter of your heart is muted. You can choose something else, even at the scraped edge of desperation, you can choose. But The Hunger—it eclipses everything. The moment disappears. You lift the strip to your mouth, through the parted crust of your lips, the wet scalpel dangling in the loosened grip of your left hand.
The carved-out bit sits on your tongue. She pulses there, unsterilised and raw. Your mouth closes around her, your teeth sink in, and you feel it streaming down your cheeks, hot and salty, you feel it flooding into you, liquid and gold.
Compassion.
You are so grateful for the gift of it.
