Kissing Carrion

She passes the shell of Hank’s car, cracked

wide and bleeding blazing lines of oil across the asphalt—steps over one and onto part of another, leaving a sizzling black smear. She doesn’t feel the flames; the damage she has done here is nothing to her. She isn’t sad, or particularly elated. Just full.

For a while, at least.

She turns her back, and leaves it all behind.

North, always north. This is her country. Its frozen soil holds her up, as winter creeps a little closer with every step she takes. It knows her hunger. It knows her need.

Toronto. And Myron.

And—then?

Arjay was born at five in the morning. The Hour of the Ox. When the dead bell rings. Her father lived in a house full of carefully preserved lovers who never answered back, never grew old—just a bit dustier, and less elastic. From this house her mother ran, naked to the Winnipeg night, into the street to flag down the first truck she met. Arjay came a half-year later, suited in blood—her mouth full of half-eaten placenta.

Her mother took one look at her, and let go.

Now she moves, a canker on the world’s dreams, past the houses of the unwary. A circle of darkness follows, constant and pure, impinging briefly on all she touches. Leaving scars. A rising flood, leaking through the ill-kept seams of neat yards and tidy gardens. A draining slough of numbness. Sleep.

And visions which vanish, on waking. Yet remain.

Arjay knows her path well. An inner compass keeps her steady, marking off the miles.

She has an appointment to keep.

Job 37

Speak to me for Gods sake.

There are worse things than death,

though you and I are not likely

to experience any of them.

—Pat Lowther.

—. . . TWO, THREE. OKAY: Looks like we’re go.

This is session seventeen, research project 4.7, Freihoeven ParaPsych Department; we’re interviewing subjects whose professions are associated, prospectively, with the accumulation of psychic fragments, and this particular tape will be filed under the heading of Job 37.

Anyway, uh—how’s that mike sitting? You comfortable with that?

—Yeah, it’s okay, thanks. (Pause) So . . . what do you want to know?

—First off? Well, first off . . . why this? Pretty—odd—career to specialize in, by most people’s standards.

—I guess. (Pause) You mean gross, though. Right?

—Okay, I’ll be a little more specific: You own your own business—a cleaning business. And you clean up . . .

—Blood, mostly. Blood, brain-matter, decomposed flesh; sick, shit, kinda bugs feed on sick, shit, dead people. All that.

—How’d you decide to get into it?

—Um. (Pause) I’ve always cleaned, always been a cleaner. I never really went through any other jobs, when I was a kid—always did like janitorial work, maid service, hotel cleaning staff jobs, whatever. Because that was what I grew up around, right? My Mom, her Mom. They used to take me around when they were cleaning up office buildings, ’cause they couldn’t pay for anybody to watch me at nights. One time when I was almost one year old I even drank some solvent ’cause I was crawling around in the supply closet while they bagged shredder waste two floors up, and my Grandma wanted to call 911, but my Mom was like: Hell no, they’ll take her away from me for sure.

—Jesus. What’d she do?