honeymoon in Puerto Rico nearly sixty years ago, trying to get into that coconut. It wasn’t until a local showed her husband how to strike it on a rock, peel back the husk, then crack the nut on some sharp edge that they’d gotten the knack of it.
With a body, she’d found, the first bite was the hardest. Trickier than you’d think. A flat abdomen could have teeth scraped across it to no effect. Fat around the middle made it easier, but the easy kills were gone or had wasted down to bone. A bite along the ribs usually gave purchase. Once a hole was started, like digging that first finger into the skin of an orange, the rest could be gradually peeled away. It was a pain, however, when the orange was kicking you in the chest and clawing at your eyes. But the hunger always found a way.
Margie stuffed herself with the choice bits before she was crowded out. Glass from the old window broke off in her abdomen. The pack roared forward. A fat old woman grabbed some of the intestine hanging from Margie’s fist and chewed on that. A man caked in yesterday’s blood dove for Margie’s face to lick around and inside her mouth, lapping at the blood Margie was still trying to swallow. She recoiled in horror at this, and luckily her body did as well, lurching away from the man, a maggot stuck in her gums that must’ve come from him. The pack swelled in size and crowded close, and Margie was lucky to be squeezed toward the perimeter. There was the loud crack of more glass shattering. Someone began wasting their time going for the brains through the other door, that frustrating and alluring coconut.
As she stumbled away, overly full, Margie shat herself. There was no telling which feed it was, if it was the girl from yesterday or the old man from two days ago that ran down her legs. No one to sponge her. Staggering down the street, giddy and drunk from a feed, Margie thought of her old nurse and how what had seemed miserable in the days of the before was now a luxurious dream. Someone to bathe her, a feeding delivered on a plastic tray— old humiliations she would now kill for.
She passed a Bank of America with an odd scene, a man infected and stuck inside the glass ATM room, all alone. There were smears across the glass where he’d bumped against it or banged with his fists, a spread of gore from a long-ago feed. He gazed hungrily past Margie at the crowd in the streets. He was trapped there by the sudden loss of electricity, probably aware of what it would take to pry his fingers in the sliding doors and pull them aside, but unable to communicate this to his limbs. Margie felt bad for him. He was stuck in there forever. She thought again of that coconut.
Another faint scent pulled her past the ATM. It was difficult to nose over the fresh blood dripping from her chin. Ironically, the smell seemed to point toward the hospital, her old hospital. She thought of her nurse and the nice doctors there, helping her through those last years, a service that had become expected. Seven hundred dollars a day. More, when there were procedures. Gobs more when the procedures had complications.
Margie thought of her eldest daughter upstate and her grandson Nathan. Insurance covered much of it. Her savings and Carlos’s pension helped with the rest. It was a nest egg, a pile of nuts squirreled away that once tapped into was easy to keep chewing away at. Margie remembered watching those savings dwindle as she lay in bed, a daily sponge bath, re-runs on the TV in the corner, keeping her alive for another day. Another day just like the one before. Every day precious and miserable.
Margie pictured Nathan as she had last seen him, standing there beside her bed, fidgeting and glancing from the TV to the door. The boy had wanted to be anywhere else but standing there, that close to death. His nose had that wrinkle of someone scared to contract a disease. Margie wondered how much more disgusted he would have been had he’d known his college education was keeping her alive. Keeping her around to watch one more re-run, get one more bath.
She thought of the boy in the gray sedan near to Nathan’s age. Kicking. Screaming. Begging her to stop. As if she had any choice, any say in the matter. It was the way things worked. And so Margie Sikes lumbered down 68th, a faint smell in the air, a boy in her belly, remembering the times she had senselessly fed on the young.
33 • Carmen Ruiz
Forty-eight hours. A mere two days. That was the difference. Two days before they would’ve induced labor, before they would’ve stopped waiting. There was a time set—she’d written it down—her baby would be born, or begin to be born, at two o’clock, right on the dot.
Dot. Dotty. Dorothy.
Carmen still hadn’t decided on a name. They kept coming to her, every one imperfect. And now, it wouldn’t matter. Maddie. Madeline. She liked that one.
Something in Carmen’s belly moved. At least, she thought it did. It was impossible to tell. Her limbs were lifeless and yet full of some
Two days.
If she hadn’t been bitten by Rhonda, there would already be a new person in the world. A little baby to demand a name. If Carmen hadn’t been bitten, she probably would’ve given birth in the office building somewhere, maybe locked up in the break room with Anna and the others.
A scene played out in her head: Sam delivering the baby, Anna mopping her head with water from the cooler, Jackie holding her hand—
No, that wouldn’t work. The water from the cooler was almost out. They wouldn’t waste what was left on her.
She imagined lying on the floor, knees spread before her coworkers, the tile running red around her with amniotic fluid and blood and who knew what else. It was easy to imagine such a scene. Blood ran down her legs already from what she’d done to Alice. Two cubicles over for the last five years, and now she was the stickiness beneath Carmen’s maternity dress. Now Carmen’s belly bulged with more than one life.
The carpet beneath her feet was threadbare and stained. Coffee, ink toner, blood, cigarette burns, all from the past weeks: the panic, the fighting, the feeding. She roamed the same patches, the same winding circuit as the others, shuffling across a carpet that told stories, some gory impressionist painting.
Manet. What a beautiful name.
All around her, throughout the sea of neatly cubed personal spaces with their shoulder-high walls, the scent of the barely living stirred through lifeless vents and ducts. The odor caused Carmen and the others to gyre like leaves and sticks in a stream’s eddy, trapped but always moving.
Always moving.
A mere two days.
If she hadn’t insisted on working right up to the last moment, she might’ve been in Jersey with her mom right then. No bite. A doctor delivering her baby instead of Sam in the break room, instead of whatever would happen now. A hospital with food, water, the unimaginable glory of juice or any meal but meat. She’d be able to brush her teeth whenever she wanted. Take a shower. Talk. Say her baby’s name, hear what it sounded like in her ears rather than her mind. She couldn’t even whisper a name.
But she had insisted on working—she’d bragged about working right up to the last moment. She had fantasized about her water breaking at her desk.
So much to prove. So much guilt about being a mom, the maternity leave, the imagined whispers and the words she placed behind every glance at her belly. All Carmen could think of was the incredible amount of work the baby would mean for her, but what she imagined was everyone else thinking:
So much guilt. For what? For bringing life into the world?
Carmen fumed as her powerless meandering took her into Mr. Helm’s office. There was a vent in there that still oozed the smallest hint of life, probably from the break room, maybe from Louis’s antics in the ceiling. Bumping around the wide desk, arms wavering in front of her, she made a circuit past the tall windows, an executive’s reward for years of service, for never moving on to something better.
Through the expanse of glass, she spotted Jersey. Across the Hudson, where no boats stirred, no barges or
