Killspeak

Just as he misses the pattering feet of the tin foxes and the rustle of paper bears, he misses the taste of fish. He has tired of soups, of eating them under blacklight among the buzzing of image deflectors and the rumble of gentlemanly cars. Soup—too much of it—never any fish.

Too few were dismayed at how the wineglasses the Icthyds took were replaced with larger ones, glasses that would be filled with boxed wine, whose stems would be held in full fists. Reassurances were made, and, at the time, humoured. These things were temporary; the glasses would soon return.

He heard the neighbours knocking on the door at night. When this happened, his father would stand and stare at the door with his fists clenched; his mother would whisper to him from across the room. “You don’t need neighbours if you don’t have family,” she’d say. The knocking stopped the same night the windows were taped.

People looked at the ground when the sky began whistling. Walls went up and came down overnight, but nobody seemed to care. Concern had been reined in by the fighting. No one said anything when butter disappeared and the oceans closed. The Mega-Sun and the Icthyds struck a deal. War is to overwhelm all else. There are no secondary purposes.

He was wearing an over-large orange t-shirt on the day they moved down to ground level. The shirt was more like a dress on him, its bottom just below his knees. He had never liked this. As his parents climbed over the furniture piled at the windows, stretching to reach for the ends of the tape crossed over the glass, he guided his whimpered belongings out into the hallway. He did this with his left hand. He held the bottom of the shirt to his hip with his right. He was pushing a plastic basket of towels against Mrs. Ganymede’s door across the way when he heard his father laugh. He stood in the hall with his hand on the basket, burning with embarrassment. He willed Infectors to come riding up in the elevators and tell his father never to laugh again. When they did, swinging their image guns from their hips, he pushed his face into the basket and retched. It was demanded that they flush their supply den, the whole deck was to do it. The wine would be ankle-high in the halls for days afterwards. His father giggled through a cut lip as they rode down in the elevators.

Something seeks him out, the White-as-bones, and it speaks through regret. It’s something flawless and eternal. He cries for fish. He’s kissing the floor while the bombs go off. The smoke that fills the sky makes a bruise of the sun. He misses things more now than he ever did before.