Issue 11.2 Spring 2016

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Pandemic

 

Andrea Berns

 

 

It was about seven years into our marriage when we became flesh-eating monsters. We never thought we would catch the disease like Molly’s parents or that peevish older gentleman and his apathetic wife who only have each other and the floral-imprinted wall that divides them when they dream. Sometimes humans get infected in couples. It’s a saving grace compared to those miserable situations when only one is infected. Because one is still vibrant and rosy-hearted, watching helplessly as their spouse slowly decays like burning parchment, eyes rolling back, saliva dribbling down their drooping lips as if having just been lobotomized.

 

 

Molly and I are the lucky ones.
Our feet have been dragging around the headstone-gray carpet of our apartment for nearly two years. Lifeless. Deprived of the sweet taste of human.


There are many of us and spreading. And we roam among the healthy ones as if one of them. But we’re moths pretending to be butterflies.

 

I wake up at her side like I have for the past three thousand, two hundred and sixteen days. And then I just lie there and breathe.


My alarm groans.


“For God’s sake, Ted, that thing’s been ringing for ten fucking minutes,” Molly mumbles before she throws a pillow over her head. The disease brings out the worst in us all.
           

“Okay, honey.” I switch it off. And I lie there some more.
           

Forty five minutes later, I am dragging my feet down the hallway, one before the other, mechanically, like slowing clockwork. I search under the table, behind pillows, and then in the refrigerator where I stare at its contents for several minutes.

 

Molly staggers in, her eyes drooping and her mouth sagging the way it has been for the past two years.
           

“What are you doing?” she grumbles.
           

I stare at her, my hand on the handle of the open fridge. “I can’t find my work shoes.”
           

Her eyes roll up in the back of her head for a split second. Whether it’s from annoyance or fever I can’t decipher.  “Underneath the coffee table. In front of the TV.”
           

Our communication rarely extends beyond this these days.
           

On the bus to work, a woman in her twenties sits directly behind me. She’s chirping happily into her cell phone with someone whom I can only assume is her fiancé. It’s only after you’re infected that you truly come to understand how aggravating the healthy ones are. They’ll be infected soon enough, though. They always are. Wait until they have a couple of kids.
           

Many of my coworkers are infected. It shows on their faces. It’s present in their eyes, their mouth, their voice. They slug around the office, mumbling and moaning. Undead. Like me.
           

But then there’s Dwight Lyons. Bright-eyed and dimpled. Healthy. How does he do it? Middle-aged and lively seems oxymoronic these days. Only he and the younger workers are still thriving. Their skin still glows, ripe with health and life and happy. There is a bounce in their step. Just wait until it hits them. The disease will one day coat their lives with apathy, crippling their bones and triggering something in their brain to crave the taste of human flesh.
           

At five o’clock, I don’t return home. The younger ones leave giddily, rushing home to their lover’s embrace, a relaxing dinner, and a roll in the sheets.


Instead, I go to the bar. I’ve been going there a lot lately. The cold vodka glides down my throat like soda water. My sight gets hazier. The women get prettier. And I look at them and all I see are veins and circulatory systems and flesh, and my cannibalistic craving brings a pool of saliva to my tongue.
I stay there until ten. Maybe ten-thirty. I get piss-drunk. Then I take the bus home.
           

The lights are off. Molly must have gone to a movie again. She’s been doing that a lot lately. I open the door to our bedroom, flip on the lights—
           

And find Molly and Dwight Lyons on our bed, devouring each other’s faces. They’re peeling transparent skin from each other’s cheekbones with their teeth and yellow fingernails, tipping their heads back as they dangle it over their mouths and eat, licking their fingers like a healthy human would do with cheese on a pizza. They chew and tear and grind and bleed until I can’t tell whose flesh is whose because it all combines into one.
           

Dwight is the first to notice me. A flab of torn skin hangs like a skin-toned rose petal across his bleeding face. Then Molly’s gaze follows. And as she looks at me, blood the color of tomato juice blooming around her mouth, a string of loose flesh hanging from her upper lip, all I can say is:
           

“I’m divorcing you.”

 

 

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