A TALE TAIL HEART tale no.2

Freyja couldn’t figure out how she had been caught, but she knew that Bogran must have flipped on her the second her locket started burning inside her chest. It wasn’t just the normal soul-sucking sensation, it felt like her sternum was being ripped inward as the wicked thing took sinew and bone with it. It damned near felt like it would take the earth beneath her feet if she stood still for too long. Worse than that, the one installed in Delphi was starting to send jolts and her little neck was red. She could hardly breathe. Those massive fucking assholes. Big gaping pile-stricken taint pustules… enough.

She had to think.

Death no longer held any terror for Freyja because whatever this was, it wasn’t living. Everyone lived in fear of the Neo-Yamnayans, who in their ten-thousand-dollar suits, recently announced in the Midnight Sun that there would be no more judicial expenditure. Trials were expensive, they said, and the Supreme Court was no longer needed because in the last failed attempt at a democratic system, none of them could agree on any one measure and verdicts had become too fraught with rebellion. In fact the penitentiary system was also being phased out in favour of more economical immediate termination strategies, according to the article.

Freyja Nichols had been a journalist until her car had been set on fire, and her house burnt down. Nauru, Delphi’s father, was hung drawn and quartered in the old English way and his corpse had been strung up by one ankle hanging from the flagpole at the Post Office just after she published the piece on restoring sanity to leadership in the Daily News. Other than the company insisting her fingers be burnt until she had no more fingerprints for writing seditious words, which they only did because they were scared of the Neo-Yams, not much else happened to her.

If there was a beginning to the end, this was how it started. Well, it started way before that, but this is when shit got real. Now she was getting ready to torch the new house on the way out. Déjà vu much? She knew she probably had less than an hour to live, and if she was going to get help for Delphi she needed to divest her of all of her pink clothing and glittering pink jewelry. If they thought she was a rich kid, bad things would happen. She needed to make Delphi look like a homeless mongrel so that when they collapsed on the street, the Sentries would not give them another thought.

She took off her skin-hugging jeans and her chic eggplant coloured turtleneck sweater, the one that made her look so well endowed with her small waist, and she pulled out an old man’s shirt that she took when she cleaned out her parents’ house last year after Dad died. The old shirt over her fat jeans, minus the jewelry she hid under the shed in back, made her look dowdy. There was some palm oil leftover from the Orangutan cull, and she ran it through her long dark locks to make them look dirty. Her arms were so heavy now that she could barely lift them and her tits were turning black. Buttoning the shirt was exhausting. They were almost ready. She hated to die looking so shit, but this was the only way to save Delphine.

“Come on, Delph, we gotta go,” she whispered, meaning to scream to the girl who was trying to crawl back into bed.

` “I can’t” cried Delphine. “I am so tired, and my chest hurts so bad, Mama.”

“I know. But baby, if we are gonna get you help, we gotta go. Come on now,” Freyja urged her.

Slowly the girl clasping her throat came out of the bedroom with a dirty sweatsuit on, and sneakers that were found in the trash when the neighbors did a family suicide earlier in the day. Freyja had a feeling her locket was going to be next, so she grabbed them out of the dumpster just in case. It was only a matter of time after pamphlets were printed and distributed in the underground that the author of these tools of rebellion could be located in any number of ways. She didn’t begrudge Bogran. He likely had no hands or feet left. That is what they did to get answers out of people. They had a laser bath that they just removed peoples’ extremities in. It was quite expedient, as finger by finger would vaporise and cauterise in seconds. Hurt like fucking hell, but was quick and neat. Nearly bloodless, in fact. The Neo-Yamnayans loved nothing so much as an economical solution.

Here we were at the end though. Freyja didn’t even know why she wanted Delphi to live in this horrible fucking neo-normal. After the government fell, the looting started, and then the silt storms hit. It was then that the worst of all humanity took the reins of leadership and started with the mass exterminations. “Fewer People, Fewer Wasted Resources!” rang their happy slogan.

“Let’s Keep Those That Matter” was the follow-up ad, all designed to prime people to produce something extraordinary on a dime or make their final arrangements.

She supposed that it was the state of human biology, that self–preserving inclination that was making her dress them in sad-sack clothing so that her daughter would live. Maybe. The best thing you could do with these people was to escape their gaze. So two negligibles on the side of the road? Not a passing glance.

She set the incendiary devices to go, and took one last look at their home. The memories weren’t all bad. When it was just her and the kid, it was almost like old times. They had had a secret Christmas and a secret Easter, which were comical because before all of this happened, she could not have been less interested in either. In fact, she routinely worked through holidays, so that she could actually afford them in retrospect. The drill usually involved working for overtime and shopping the after-sales. Win-win. But in the aftermath, and after Nauru was murdered and the lockets implanted by mandate at the cardio cath lab, it gave her a particular pleasure to celebrate something forbidden. Pleasure was such a strange word. The locket tended to start dulling things like that from the time it was implanted. They tried to make it subtle enough, so they said, that you could not feel it. It was supposed to be practically unnoticeable. It wasn’t. A few years in, everyone noticed that they no longer cried or laughed much. Usually laughter was done as a polite gesture to acknowledge when someone said something bright.

She set the timer to twenty minutes. It would save her having to go through every last seditious morsel and implicate Raff and the others. It was best. She figured they would be far enough away from the house by then, even though it should only have taken them a minute or two to get away. They were dragging.

“Take my arm, Delphi,” she said, as they closed the door.

“Don’t you wanna lock it, Mama?” The child asked.

“No, honey,” she whispered, “Not today, it won’t be necessary.”

` Delphine took her arm, and together they clung to the railing as they descended the four or five stairs down from the porch onto the pathway to the curb. Freyja was having trouble focusing, and one foot wanted to curl in front of the other, but Delphine held hope that the two of them might be saved, so she dragged her mother by the elbow and held as much of her weight up as she could. She could see her mother’s elbows turning black and she wanted to cry, but the locket would not let her so she concentrated on her own breathing which was really hard to do.

Somehow they made it to the halfway point, and then to the three- quarter mark, and then to the curb. It was some distance from the house, and just after they hobbled across the street, the house blew.

Freyja started laughing. “Buh bye you motherfuckers. Try and come after us now.” In her last gesture upon this earth, she lifted her left fist with her right hand, taking all the strength she had, and gave the whole of her life one last middle finger. “Fuck… you,” she said and collapsed into grass and rolled into the gutter.

“Mama, no!” Delphi sighed, apathetic.

“How Can a Heart Break, If It Can’t Be Broken?!” was the advertisement from the Neo-Yams that went through Delphi’s childlike mind. She shook her head, as if to loosen some fog, but it made her dizzy, and she had to sit. She stared at her mother’s open eyes. They were soft and wet and full of love. The locket could no longer suck anything out of her, and what was left was beautiful. She almost wished she could keep her mother like a butterfly pinned to a velvet cushion in a display box. She wanted to forever remember her eyes and the love she could finally give in death.

Delphi realised that she wasn’t standing anymore, that she was hunched over and her fingers were turning blue. She yawned. What a gorgeous day to sleep in the sun it was. She looked up at the clouds and tried to see a sign. Nancy next door had told her mother that she had the gift, the sight she called it. Delphine hoped not because all she saw was the angel of death hovering over everyone in that household. Of course she didn’t tell them that. She knew better, her mama had taught her to hold her tongue when she saw bad things. Of course, she had been right, for just months later, they all had died. It was funny, she never saw the angel hovering over her mama. She wondered why that was. Maybe the gift doesn’t work on people who are too close. She shut her eyes to save on the breath which was barely coming now. Dreams of clouds in a vacuum being pulled out of the sky filled her mind until the noise stopped, and she found herself standing on a mirror somewhere in the inky blackness. The nothing. The void was soft as it wrapped its arms around her.