Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(61)
When Jetta’s ready, Sarah pulls down her skirt and her dirty tights, lies down on the exam table, and lets the woman do her work. Jetta pumps the silicone into her hips, five needles on each side. She leaves the needles in, each one atop a big round bubble of silicone, until she’s finished with both sides. Then she takes out the needles, says, “You know this gonna hurt,” and starts rubbing. Sure, the tearing flesh feeling of the silicone going in is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the rubbing Jetta calls her “special massage.” She pushes the silicone around, forms it into the perfect hips. She injects some more into Sarah’s boy pockets, the little dimples on the sides of each butt cheek that are supposedly a dead giveaway of ass masculinity.
Silicone is forever. Mostly. “You gonna lose some, maybe half by next week,” Jetta says, as she dabs superglue over the injection holes and covers them in Hello Kitty Band-Aids. The silicone absorbs a bit into the body, but most of it will stay. Hopefully.
All the girls have heard horror stories about silicone gone bad. The body can reject it, or it can move and disfigure you. But at least Jetta’s face is reassuring. Her cheeks are round, her lips are plump – all in a slightly unnerving but exquisitely beautiful way. She’s more than just a woman, she’s an artistic representation of femininity. Or one kind of femininity, anyway. She could be any age – 27, 43, 52 – it’s impossible to tell with such flawless skin. Clearly, she had work done before The Crash. Professional work. Maybe in Guadalajara, Bangkok, Rio. Quality work.
Sarah’s so sore, she tries not to cry as she leans over and reaches into her satchel, pulls out the Rolex. Jetta snaps it up and looks it over, gets a look on her face like Ursula in The Little Mermaid. “Mm, this is good. My boys love it. Next time you get something good, you come back here and we’ll top you up. Make those breasts of yours really pop!”
? ?
When she opens her eyes, slowly, sleepy, he’s not beside her. Runs a hand over the warm spot where her Johnny should be, and then she frowns and rolls over. Just a small shaft of clear moonlight coming in through the tiny grimy basement window, slicing through the dark room and hitting the edge of the bed. Her eyes adjust, and no Johnny. She catches the tension in her eyebrows as she’s squinting through the darkness, doesn’t need more lines, more reasons to get pumped. Relax.
Sarah gets out of bed, wobbles, rights herself, and makes her way carefully to the doorframe. One hand on the wall, she walks down the short hallway. First door, the bathroom. No Johnny. Farther down, she reaches the living room.
At first she can’t make out anything. Then a little whisper. She takes a step forward, so quiet, so careful, listens close for that little whisper. And there it is again. And then a little movement, enough that she can start to make out the edges of someone in the dark corner of the room. Her Johnny.
The only words she can make out, words spoken like terrible secrets, words meant to stay secret from her, are “I can’t.”
“Johnny.” Silence. Stillness. “Johnny, come back to bed, honey. Please.” Nothing for a few seconds.
He stands up and crosses the room, moonlight hitting just the lower parts of his legs as he sulks back over to her. “I’m sorry,” he says. Means it, too. Takes her hand and leads her to the bedroom. “It’s just so loud. It’s too loud in here, I couldn’t sleep.” Dead silence.
“I know, honey,” she says, climbing into bed. “But there’s nothing there. There’s no one there.” She almost catches herself, but it’s too late. The words have already fallen out of her mouth. He stops, won’t get into bed.
“You think I’m crazy?” Johnny says, the hurt thick in his voice. “I can hear them. I’m not crazy. Su Ling could hear them! You said you believed her.”
“Can we not have this fight? Can we not right now?”
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just, you know, trauma. Like it was hard on everyone, when it all went down, and we all process it different, you know?”
“That’s just a nice way of saying crazy.”
“Johnny, I’m sorry.” She reaches out for his hand in the darkness, squeezes it. “You’re not crazy. I just don’t know what to believe.” She pulls his hand, gently, pulls him back to bed. Sarah puts her head down on his chest and runs her finger across the long, thin line of scar tissue under his pec. “I’m sorry. I love you.”
For a while, they lie there in silence, neither of them asleep and both know it. “We need to get out of here. It’s better in the country, like Su Ling always said. We need to get away from the city.”
? ?
It started about a year after The Crash. After everything stopped working, after the fighting, after the looting, after so much death. First, the rich fled the city. No use staying, they’d just be a target for gangs of thieves and looters. Sarah heard there were rich families holed up in farms way out in the middle of nowhere, up near Algonquin Park or somewhere like that.
With no government, no one came to collect the bodies. The remaining city folk started to bury them, mostly to make things hygienic. But there were too many, and digging’s a lot of work. People made huge pyres. Sure, it stank up the place with the scent of charred flesh for a while, but that was quickly overpowered by the rotting garbage smells. Life after The Crash was smelly. And that’s when Johnny, Su Ling and, Sarah was certain, many others began to hear it.