Eat Me

started to smash it against his skull.

But before the blow could fall a man lifted her off her feet and pulled her away from Jim; her fingernails flayed to the bones of Jim's arm. She was still screaming, fighting to pull away, and the man, who wore a T-shirt with Boneyard painted across it, said, 'She's a fresh one. Sorry, mac,' before he hauled her toward the entrance. The woman's scream got shriller, and Jim saw her forehead burst open and ooze like a stomped snail. He shuddered, backing into a dark corner---and there he bumped into another body.

'Excuse me,' he said. Started to move away. Glanced at whom he'd collided with.

And saw her.

She was trembling, her skinny arms wrapped around her chest. She still had most of her long brown hair, but in places it had diminished to the texture of spiderwebs and her scalp showed. Still, it was lovely hair. It looked almost healthy. Her pale blue eyes were liquid and terrified, and her face might have been pretty once. She had lost most of her nose, and gray-rimmed craters pitted her right cheek. She was wearing sensible clothes: a skirt and blouse and a sweater buttoned to the throat. Her clothes were dirty, but they matched. She looked like a librarian, he decided. She didn't belong in the Boneyard---but, then, where did anyone belong anymore?

He was about to move away when he noticed something else that caught a glint of frenzied light.

Around her neck, just peeking over the collar of her sweater, was a silver chain, and on that chain hung a tiny cloisonne heart.

It was a fragile thing, like a bit of bone china, but it held the power to freeze Jim before he took another step.

'That's . . . that's very pretty,' he said. He nodded at the heart.

Instantly her hand covered it. Parts of her fingers had rotted off, like his own.

He looked into her eyes; she stared---or at least pretended to---right past him. She shook like a frightened deer. Jim paused, waiting for a break in the thunder, nervously casting his gaze to the floor. He caught a whiff of decay, and whether it was from himself or her he didn't know; what did it matter? He shivered too, not knowing what else to say but wanting to say something, anything, to make a connection. He sensed that at any moment the girl---whose age might be anywhere from twenty to forty, since Death both tightened and wrinkled at the same time ---might bolt past him and be lost in the crowd. He thrust his hands into his pockets, not wanting her to see the exposed fingerbones. 'This is the first time I've been here,' he said. 'I don't go out much.'

She didn't answer. Maybe her tongue is gone, he thought. Or her throat. Maybe she was insane, which could be a real possibility. She pressed back against the wall, and Jim saw how very thin she was, skin stretched over frail bones. Dried up on the inside, he thought. Just like me.

'My name is Jim,' he told her. 'What's yours?'

Again, no reply. I'm no good at this! he agonized. Singles bars had never been his 'scene', as the saying went. No, his world had always been his books, his job, his classical records, his cramped little apartment that now seemed like a four-walled crypt. There was no use in standing here, trying to make conversation with a dead girl. He had dared to eat the peach, as Eliot's Prufrock lamented, and found it rotten,

'Brenda,' she said, so suddenly it almost startled him. She kept her hand over the heart, her other arm across her sagging breasts. Her head was lowered, her hair hanging over the cratered cheek.

'Brenda,' Jim repeated; he heard his voice tremble. 'That's a nice name.'

She shrugged, still pressed into the corner as if trying to squeeze through a chink in the bricks.

Another moment of decision presented itself. It was a moment in which Jim could turn and walk three paces away, into the howling mass at the bar, and release Brenda from her corner; or a moment in which Brenda could tell him to go away, or curse him to his face, or scream with haunted dementia and that would be the end of it. The moment passed, and none of those things happened. There was just the drumbeat, pounding across the club, pounding like a counterfeit heart, and the roaches ran their race on the bar and the dancers continued to fling bits of flesh off their bodies like autumn leaves.

He felt he had to say something. 'I was just walking. I didn't mean to come here.' Maybe she nodded. Maybe; he couldn't tell for sure, and the light played tricks. 'I didn't have anywhere else to go,' he added.

She spoke, in a whispery voice that he had to strain to hear: 'Me neither.'

Jim shifted his weight---what weight he had left. 'Would you . . . like to dance?' he asked, for want of anything better.

'Oh, no!' She looked up quickly. 'No, I can't dance! I mean ... I used to dance, sometimes, but ... I can't dance anymore.'

Jim understood what she meant; her bones were brittle, just as his own were. They were both as fragile as husks, and to get out on that dance floor would tear them both to pieces. 'Good,' he said. 'I can't dance either.'

She nodded, with an expression of relief. There was an instant in which Jim saw how pretty she must have been before all this happened---not pretty in a flashy way, but pretty as homespun lace---and it made his brain ache. 'This is a loud place,' he said. 'Too loud.'

'I've . . . never been here before.' Brenda removed her hand from the necklace, and again both arms protected her chest. 'I knew this place was here, but . . .' She shrugged her thin shoulders. 'I don't know.'

'You're . . .' lonely, he almost said. As lonely as I am. '. . . alone?' he asked.

'I have friends,' she answered, too fast.

'I don't,' he said, and her gaze lingered on his face for a few seconds before she looked away. 'I mean, not in this place,' he amended. 'I don't know anybody here, except you.' He paused, and then he had to ask the question:

'Why did you come here tonight?'

She almost spoke, but she closed her mouth before the words got out. I know why, Jim thought. Because you're searching. Just like I am. You went out walking, and maybe you came in here because you couldn't stand to be alone another second. I can look at you, and hear you screaming. 'Would you like to go out?' he asked. 'Walking, I mean. Right now, so we can talk?'

'I don't know you,' she said, uneasily.

'I don't know you, either. But I'd like to.'

'I'm . . .' Her hand fluttered up to the cavity where her nose had been. 'Ugly,' she finished.

'You're not ugly. Anyway, I'm no handsome prince.' He smiled, which stretched the flesh on his face. Brenda might have smiled, a little bit; again, it was hard to tell. 'I'm not a crazy,' Jim reassured her. 'I'm not on drugs, and I'm not looking for somebody to hurt. I just thought . . . you might like to have some company.'

Brenda didn't answer for a moment. Her fingers played with the cloisonne heart. 'All right,' she said finally. 'But not too far. Just around the block.'

'Just around the block,' he agreed, trying to keep his excitement from showing too much. He took her arm---she didn't seem to mind his fleshless fingers---and carefully guided her through the crowd. She felt light, like a dry-rotted stick, and he thought that even he, with his shrunken muscles, might be able to lift her over his head.

Outside, they walked away from the blast of the Boneyard. The wind was getting stronger, and they soon were holding to each other to keep from being swept away. 'A storm's coming,' Brenda said, and Jim nodded. The storms were fast and ferocious, and their winds made the buildings shake. But Jim and Brenda kept walking, first around the block and then, at Brenda's direction, southward. Their bodies were bent like question marks; overhead, clouds masked the moon and blue streaks of electricity began to lance across the sky.

Brenda was not a talker, but she was a good listener. Jim told her about himself, about the job he used to have, about how he'd always dreamed that someday he'd have his own firm. He told her about a trip he once took, as a young man, to Lake Michigan, and how cold he recalled the water to be. He told her about a park he visited once, and how he remembered the sound of happy laughter and the smell of flowers. 'I miss how it used to be,' he said, before he could stop himself, because in the Dead World voicing such regrets was a punishable crime. 'I miss beauty,' he went on. 'I miss . . . love.'

She took his hand, bone against bone, and said, 'This is where I live.'

It was a plain brownstone building, many of the windows broken out by the windstorms. Jim didn't ask to go to Brenda's apartment; he expected to be turned away on the front steps. But Brenda still had hold of his hand, and