Age of Blight by Kristine Ong Muslim Page A

Beth contained inside her had already dribbled and been absorbed by the area rug, seeped into the floorboards beneath, leached into the baseboard’s tiny cracks. Some of Beth had already evaporated into the atmosphere. And so Beth—what was left of Beth—stayed inside her room most of the time. There was no need to eat or drink. There was no need to sleep. There was no need to need anything. As expected, isolation would draw her in, because pureisolation, having no notion of emotional pain, would seek out those that belonged to its fold.
    After her formaldehyde treatment, she helped me clear her room of unnecessary objects. The undead don’t have any use for a bed, for example. Or a chair, a desk lamp, a mirror. So, we emptied her room. Of course, I did all the heavy lifting to avoid accidents that might injure her. People like Beth won’t ever heal.

    She kept on looking out of the tinted glass windows of her empty room, observing with a clinical detachment, which could be mistaken for curiosity, the children playing on the street. The children who rolled the glittery red things, the children who thought they could still live forever, the children who did not know that it could someday happen to them.
    The children could not see Beth by the window.
    Beth could not see the children.

Beautiful Curse

    I t was not an accident at all. I planned on the most opportune time for my family to find out that the removal of my tentacle had not suppressed my predatory urges. And in all this time, I also could not stop thinking about that room in our house, the one with no windows and a thick door lined with steel, a door that only locked from the outside.
    I chose a Sunday afternoon in April. April was the time of the year when the northern sky developed a loathsome purple tinge, a consequence of the early stages of redshifting. The government issued warnings about this phenomenon, warnings which were useless because they could not change the eventual course of things—that we were all headed for extinction and no one could do anything about it. That afternoon was perfect. My family deserved a little pep in their long uneventful lives.
    When my family discovered me behind the shed, I was disheveled in all ways that a person could be disheveled. I crouched in the bushes. My mouth was clamped to the neck of the bloodied, still twitching chicken. The feathers made me gag, but I kept onchomping, kept on tearing at the doomed fowl’s flesh until, at last, the animal, the prey, stopped twitching—a weakling’s ultimate recourse.
    My father restrained me, gagged me so I couldn’t bite him, and then half-dragged, half-carried me inside the house. It was probably out of shame that he ended up manhandling me. He needed to get me inside the house before anyone could see the bloody spectacle I had created. With her screeching, my sister woke the neighbors and our hibernating house pets. Oh, I wanted to snap her neck just to shut her up, eat her and my father, devour their corrupted bodies and leave only the bones for the rare scavenging birds of prey to pick, but I just could not get to them. They managed to chain me up and plug my mouth.
    My mother said that I had the peculiar maniacal look she associated with the residents of Bardenstan, the place nearest the epicenter of the 2115 fallout. Her comment was not meant to be an insult. She said it in the manner of someone expecting me to reform afterwards. My mother was a first-rate Loyal, thus the genuine kindness. My father bought her from an auction house. I never heard him complain about her expensive solar upkeep and collagen sustenance. If he did, well, that would be another story. My mother, a first-rate Loyal to the core, was wired to love me unconditionally with or without my tentacle.
    Do you know that there’s a picture of me hidden inside my parents’ safe? In that picture was the real me. It showed how I looked the day I was born. I saw it