Baby Food

I heard the drone before I saw it. A loud beat of wings like an angry dragonfly and then an insistent mechanical voice demanding I come outside to sign for a package. I’d been getting communications about it all day. No indication of who it was from—just a message to say it was coming to my address and I should be ready.

Apparently, I wasn’t moving quickly enough. The voice began getting faster and louder with every repetition until I was sure the entire street could hear it. ‘Attend at once and sign, attend at once and sign.’

I opened the door and stepped outside and the red eye on top of the drone swivelled towards me. A robotic arm reached out and shoved a screen under my nose. ‘Sign here, sign here, sign here,’ the voice screamed. I did as commanded and the arm snatched away the screen and replaced it swiftly with a container about the size of a shoebox.

I grabbed it quickly before it could drop to the ground and held it close. The drone was already pirouetting and beginning to head off again. I hoped it was food. There was nothing left in the house and we hadn’t eaten since Tuesday when Krista had found five dandelions growing in the cracks between the pavement in the back lane. We steeped the flowers in water to make a tea, chopped the leaves into small pieces to form a simulacrum of a salad, and sprinkled it with pieces of roasted root. The process of doing that helped pass the time a little. We stretched the making and contemplation and eating of our ‘meal’ to help keep hunger at bay, even though we knew it was too small to make a difference.

I clutched the package to my chest and hurriedly closed the door. If it was food, I didn’t want to take the risk of having one of the increasing number of marauders grab it from me. They, like us, were starving and searching everywhere for something to eat.

Krista drew near with the baby on her hip. He was fractious and listless. She’d breastfed him as long as she could, but her milk had dried up months ago, and there was little else to feed him. We’d talked about the importance of staying strong and the uselessness of feeding the baby at the expense of starving ourselves because he would die without someone to look after him, but both of us still continued to sneak him extra mouthfuls of whatever meagre food we managed to get.

I’d tried to talk Krista into eating my share of the food but she refused saying she and the baby couldn’t survive without me. So, in the end we agreed to split everything three ways. There seemed little point. The amount of food we could forage wouldn’t sustain one person, let alone three. Unless the ration ships were able to break through the blockade, we’d soon be too weak to leave the house anyway.

It had been six months without any consignments and even before that, the ships were intermittent and fewer than we hoped made it through. Our next-door neighbour, Liam, said there was food for those with connections in the police and government—they were stockpiling provisions in great warehouses, but it didn’t make sense to me to let your population starve if there was another option. Who was going to do the work?

‘What is it?’ Krista asked as I began to open the package. ‘Who is it from? Is it food?’ The baby stretched out his hand, assuming in the way of all babies that it was something for him.

‘I don’t know, but I hope it’s something we can eat.’

The package contained a layer of paper. I unwrapped that and inside was a smaller box with a hinged lid like the sort you’d get with a fancy box of chocolates. I pulled the flap up and quickly snapped it back down.

‘What is it?’ Krista asked, crowding closer to me with the baby.

‘Nothing!’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I think it’s time Bubs had a lie down. Why don’t you take him into the bedroom?’

Krista looked confused, and the baby began some half-hearted screaming until I managed to distract him with the scrunched up paper. While Krista was soothing him to sleep, I took another peek in the box to make sure that what I’d seen was true and not some kind of practical joke.

‘Well?’ said Krista when she came back. ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t think you should look,’ I said, holding the box away from her. ‘It’s too awful’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘Do you know how irritating it is to be told something is too dreadful to know about. I’ll just have nightmares.’ She snatched the box from me and wrenched the lid up.

‘I think you’re going to have nightmares anyway,’ I said.

‘That’s not real. It’s got to be a joke!’ she said.

I shook my head and we both stared at what was inside. Nestled on a bed of white cotton was a severed human finger. It must have been fresh because blood had seeped out and stained the cloth.

‘Who does it belong to?’ Krista asked. ‘Why was it sent to us? Who sent it?’

‘I have no idea. It’s not like it came with a note.’

‘This is crazy!’

We began looking all over the box and searching through the discarded paper to try to find out who’d sent the finger, but there was no clue.

‘What about when you signed for the package? Who did it say sent it?

I shook my head. ‘It was all so fast and the stupid drone was screaming at me so loudly I didn’t really look.’

Krista made the kind of disdainful face that partners reserve for one another and then said ‘what are we going to do?’

In the end we decided we should take it to the Polis. The city Polis, not the Garda who were posted at the end of every street and who tended to be big and brutal and not very bright. They were as hungry as the rest of us and used their power to shake people down for food and bribes. For all we knew, the Polis would be the same, but it seemed safer to try them. But we knew we’d need a story to get that far.

We agreed we’d tell the Garda we’d had word Krista’s mother was sick, and we wanted to visit. Marieka lived in the Inner Ring not far from the central Polis station, so if they decided to check our story would have some semblance of credence. As far as we knew she wasn’t sick, but we trusted that her love of family, her quick wit and her constantly expressed wish to see her grandson would mean she wouldn’t accidentally give us away if Garda turned up unexpectedly on her doorstep.

After some discussion we decided to rewrap the box containing the finger and hide it in the baby’s nappy. We knew the Garda would search us and we definitely didn’t want to explain why we were carrying a severed and somewhat hairy finger about town. Baby nappies are unpleasant at the best of times and were especially bad now soap supplies had dried up. The soap shortage began early in the blockade once people realised that most soap could be rendered down to component parts including fats or oils that could be used for cooking. It made for some unpleasant meals and smelly clothes that were washed only with stones and water, but there was no other choice.

Krista gave me the baby as we approached the Gard post because she thought it would make me seem less threatening, but as it turned out we needn’t have bothered. Once it became obvious we didn’t have any food hidden about us the Garda were more interested in feeling Krista’s breasts than anything else. She stood it with more than her usual patience, but if looks could kill there would have been two dead Garda laid out on the floor. I pinched the baby so he began to wail and they eventually let us through.

When we finally reached the Polis station, we asked for the Communications Crime unit. The finger had arrived by drone-mail so it probably fell under some kind of rule about not using a carriage service to menace and harass or convey dangerous goods or cause some other offence. In fact, when we finally got through to the senior officer after showing the finger to three different tiers of junior officers, that was her first question.

‘Why did you come to us?’

I told her the truth. ‘We thought you might take it more seriously than some other units.’

The woman nodded and said ‘hmmnn,’ before asking us the questions we’d already answered too many times.

‘Did we have any enemies?’

‘No.’

‘Did we recognise the finger?’

Again, ‘no’. Who really looks at a finger anyway? Could anyone tell who a particular digit belonged to if it was detached from a body? Besides, neither of us had wanted to spend a long time examining it.

‘Could the package have been meant for one of our neighbours?’

‘Unlikely’. But who can tell? Our neighbour Liam seemed interested in petty spying in the hope of finding out who might be using contacts in the underground market to get extra food, but it hardly seemed on a scale to warrant sending a finger to scare him off, and we never saw the people in the house on the other side.

It was after dark when they finally let us go. We were tired and dispirited. The Polis said they’d take charge of the finger and advised us to notify them as soon as possible if it happened again.

‘Certainly officer,’ I nodded, while thinking that in the unlikely event it happened again, I wasn’t going to submit my family to another gruelling and unnecessary confrontation. Besides, I’d convinced myself it had been an unfortunate mistake that wouldn’t be repeated.

One of the junior officers saw us out. He gave us a pass to make it easier to get through the Gard posts and a small fruit leather to share. ‘I’ve a little one myself about that age,’ he said.

‘Thank you, officer,’ I said, knowing we were probably taking his whole food allowance for the day. We set off for home with a small spark of hope in humanity.

That spark quickly died the next morning when we were woken by the sound of a drone and another insistent shouty voice ordering me to ‘attend and sign.’ This time I tried to see who the sender was, but the screen was held at an angle that meant sunlight hit it and I could see nothing. The voice was so loud that Liam came out and stood on his doorstep with his arms folded and watched as I clutched frantically at the parcel and retreated inside. Whatever was in the package I certainly wasn’t going to unwrap it with Liam standing there.

I put the box on the table and Krista and I just stared at it, neither of us keen to see what was inside. After a few moments I said ‘this is stupid,’ and began to unwrap the package. Inside was a larger version of the box that had been delivered the day before. I lifted the lid and then had to retreat suddenly to the bathroom to vomit. There was little enough in my stomach, but what there was came up cherry red from the piece of fruit leather I’d eaten last night.

‘Don’t look,’ I said to Krista. ‘It’s a hand.’ I don’t know why a hand seemed worse than a single finger, but it was.

This time Krista showed no inclination to look. ‘Did it have all its fingers?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know…’

I walked down to the Gard post and asked the Garda on duty to call the number the Polis officer had given me. I didn’t want to have to trek all the way back into town. This time they could come to us. Unfortunately, that meant three units of Polis arriving by helicopter and a full-scale search of our house. Everything that possibly could be was pulled out and opened. Liam outdid himself trying to peer out of the upstairs windows or see over the fence to find out what was happening.

After about three hours they left, with every piece of furniture overturned, and every dish, every item of clothing, everything we owned turned out and thrown on the floor. The baby had cried the entire time and both of us were worn out.

‘Never again!’ said Krista as she slammed the door behind the last officer. ‘Someone can send me a dozen human heads tomorrow and no one will ever hear about it.’

I was in complete agreement, so when we heard the drone arriving the next day we both knew telling the Polis or the Garda was not going to be an option. Krista came out with me in an attempt to see if we could get a clue as to who was sending us body parts, but again the screen was angled into the light and snatched away before we could see. Krista waved and smiled at Liam who was peering through a gap in his front curtains and the curtains twitched shut.

‘What are we going to do?’ I asked. We were both staring at the contents of the new package—this time an upper arm and shoulder blade. ‘We can’t call the Polis and we can’t throw it out. I’m sure Liam goes through our garbage looking for food or evidence we’re getting things on the underground market so he can turn us in to get a bonus.’

Krista put her head on one side. ‘It may just be that I’m starving, but it looks kind of like a leg of lamb to me.’

We looked at one another. ‘We couldn’t, could we?’ I asked.

It turned out we could. We began by pretending that we were just going to put the thing in the oven because cooking it would make it easier to dispose of, but by the time the smell of cooked meat came wafting around the kitchen we both knew what was really going to happen and once it was sliced up on a plate it was much easier to eat than I’d expected. I only wished that we had some baked potatoes to go with it.

After all, it wasn’t like we’d killed whoever it was. They were dead anyway, so we may as well make the most of it. I looked at Krista and the baby both sitting back with full bellies and grease around their chins for the first time I could remember, and smiled.

There was a gap in deliveries the next day, but the one after that brought a pair of shins which we put into the slow cooker like beef shanks and cooked all day with water and some herbs that Krista had managed to forage.

Three days after that brought another package. A large one. I was standing on the front step looking forward to seeing what was inside when I heard Liam’s voice.

‘Looks like you’ve become very pally with the Polis, lately. And I must be hallucinating from hunger because I keep thinking I can smell meat cooking in your place.’

I thought about telling him that I’d noticed the smell too—but coming from the neighbours on the other side of us, but he looked at me with a particular gleam in his eye and I knew that he knew where the cooking smell had come from. He clearly thought he’d caught us giving information to the authorities and being rewarded for it with food from some secret government stash.

The last thing we needed was him snooping around and discovering the truth, so I decided to invite him over for dinner. ‘We have had a bit of a windfall lately,’ I said, with a pretence of openness. ‘Why don’t you come over and have a bite to eat with us tonight?’

Today’s delivery had been a slab of thigh. With the bone removed it cooked up to look just like a roll of baked pork complete with crackling.

Liam complimented Krista on the meal and then sat back, wiped his lips on a napkin and said, ‘I’ve developed a taste for meat. Now, why don’t you tell me what’s really been happening and we can come to some arrangement.’

‘But the meal’s not over yet,’ I said, pretending not to know what he was talking about. I retreated to the kitchen as if to bring out another course.

When I returned, he was sitting staring at Krista’s breasts with a sly smile on his face. I walked up slowly behind him and brought a hammer down on his head. Three quick whacks. He fell slowly to the ground. The baby clapped as if he thought it was a clever game.

‘I’ve developed quite a taste for meat too,’ I said. ‘And the trouble is, once you start, it’s very difficult to stop.’