Gum

It was half-past two. Rainy. The policeman came to the door of a house that looked like it should have died years ago. Tin roof, weeds dried and dead under his feet. The windows were painted black and bottles were broken and cigarettes had been stamped out on a porch that growled when he put his weight on it.

He knocked.

The door opened.

“Well?” he said.

“Still downstairs.” The door opened wider. The man behind it eyed the policeman with greed, clear-colored eyes and wispy hair making him look damp as the raindrops. The policeman stepped inside.

“The basement is this way,” said the man, leading him. “She’s downstairs.” This is added on as though worried the policeman may have forgotten.

“Thank you.”

They walked. The door to the basement was dark brown, padlocked by a silver chain. The man in the house had bought it years ago when he first moved in. He unlocked it now with shaky hands. The policeman drew his flashlight and stepped inside.

Stairs growled under his feet. He did not switch on the light as he walked. The stairs were long, dusty and dank as the rest of the house, leading to a basement that traveled very deep. As he walked he began to hear a crinkling sound and the wet smacking of lips.

He paused above the last few steps and shone his flashlight towards the sound of crinkling. A mountain of silver and white paper waited for him, stretching its spine towards the ceiling like a cat and dribbling over the edge, trailing into the walls and the corners of the basement. Scraps of paper greeted his feet, flooding the last few steps of the staircase.

“Oh,” said the girl, “you’re here.”

He moved his flashlight towards the source of the voice. She sat beside the mountain and was the source of the smacking noise. As he watched, she unwrapped another piece of gum and dropped the wrapper on the ground. Stuffed the gum into her mouth. “What are you doing here?”

He did not answer.

She reached and grabbed a fluttering wrapper by her feet. “Did you know that a stick of gum only has five calories? Yeah. It takes a lot of gum to reach eight hundred calories every day.”

“One hundred and sixty pieces.”

She looked pleased that he knew the answer. “Yep. One hundred sixty. Sometimes more, if I wanna have a cheat day.” She opened her mouth to show him the wet ball of graying gum, shiny and sticky under the flashlight’s beam, reddened by the lipstick on her lips. “See?”

He looked around the room. “What do you do with the gum you chew?”

“I also have water,” she said, gesturing towards a pile of water bottles on her other side. “I drink two bottles a day. That’s how much you’re supposed to drink. Then I chew gum for the rest of the day, then I get eight hours of sleep. Exactly eight hours.”

“Are you hungry?”

Her eyes were deep-set, the cheeks round and puffed as roses. “No.”

Silence hovered for a moment, till she picked up another pack of gum and tore the plastic lining off with her teeth. “Do you want some?”

“No.”

“It’s good for you.”

He took a breath, let it out sharply. “Do you… want something?”

“Gum.”

“You have gum,” he reminded her.

“Then nothing.” She unwrapped two, three, four, five pieces of gum, tossed the wrappers aside and crammed them all into her mouth. “Did you know that someone can live quite happily off of gum?”

He looked down at his feet and took a step back, carefully. “I didn’t.”

“It keeps you thin.” Her eyes were very blue. “At the end of the day, that’s all that matters.”

“I wish you didn’t think that.”

“Have a piece,” she said, soft. “Here, I’ll even put it in your mouth for you if you open wide.”

The wrappers had crawled farther up the stairs and he took another step back. “Thank you, but no.”

She continued holding the gum out but let her eyes wander to the mountain of wrappers beside her. She directed her questions to it. “Did the tenant send you down here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I suppose he’d like to use his basement.”

She laughed. “He can. I won’t hurt anybody.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m thinking of doing something about this though,” she said, still staring at her mountain. Her thin wrist remained steady as it held out its offering. “I don’t know what.”

He considered, shifted his shoes away from the slow tide of wrappers crawling towards him. “My wife used to make origami animals. Out of napkins and such.”

“You must miss her.” She’d noticed the past tense.

“I do,” he said coldly.

“I might try that. Origami.”

“You should.” Stiffly. “But maybe you could somewhere else.”

Her eyes finally slid back towards him. The blue in them looked lighter, accentuating the streaks of yellow in her hair and contrasting the red of her lips. They looked at him from gloriously eyeshadowed sockets of skin, from a face that seemed to be little more than a skull with leathery skin wrapped around it. “I think I’m happy here.”

They stared at each other from across a vast expanse of blackness and through the smell of mold.

“If you’re sure,” he answered.

“I have people to wait for,” she answered. “I am thirsty, though.”

He tossed her a water bottle from his pocket. Her hand stretched up to catch it, very very long and white like an eel swimming through a black sea.

“Thank you,” she said. She cracked it open and poured it over her face. He kicked a few wrappers off his shoes and took another step back.

“I’ll see you then, I suppose,” she said, voice drifting up from the floor like a drowned woman. “Till next time.”

He let the door click shut without answering.

The tenant stared at him.

“No,” the policeman told him, and then he put his hat back on and headed for the front door.

When he came back a year later, the gum wrappers had been folded into swans and dogs and dragons and ducks and salamanders and cats and faces. They littered the floor, sat tucked into empty water bottles or waited quivering on the staircase, prepared to pounce.

She gazed up at him from the floor. Her eyes were pools of cold water. “Hi.”