Leftovers

Leftovers

Lazarus picked at his arm until it hurt and then Jude came and struck him, tying the bandages back up again while his head spun and multiplied the world. All around was the smell of slow death, of rot and decay and loosening bodies. On a crowded mattress, a child wept and none moved to comfort or quiet. Lazarus, his one good eye swiveling about green and alive, tried to understand that he was going to die in this stinking construct, suffocation filling the air, crawling down this throat, making his fingers itch.

He started in on his wound again, shredding flimsy gauze with his cracked nails until it was lying open before him. He didn’t trust a thing he couldn’t see and somehow looking down into his own puckered flesh gave him a real sense of the thing and how it must feel to die, if this is what that was. And looking into himself, Lazarus thought for perhaps the first time in his life that he was beautiful. Working away in his forearm he could make out tightly woven veins as they embraced grooved muscle and were anchored by knotty cartilage. Peering inward he saw the diseased cells sliding up and about the bend of his wrist, pulling and sucking and sipping, drawing out each last tender bit of life.

And then he knew he was dying, his beautiful machinery cast open for a world that could offer only infection, only rust. Inside he knew he was butterfly parts, little entities flapping with shuddering delicacy, wings brushing wings brushing wings, until the whole system rose and fell like the faintest of breath. His body was only a cavern to be hidden in, a structure grown to weather the world and wither until that day, that long last day, when what was built up within was ready for flight.

He tried to tell Jude at first. His lover only cried and cried and cried, large sickly tears enlarging the pinprick holes of his tear ducts until they threatened to swallow his face whole. Lazarus told him again and again and again, until one day the ducts did eat him all up, and from then Jude became not-Jude, became Jude altered. This other Jude only looked at Lazarus with those devoured down eyes and did not cry anymore, not when his whole body was crying all the time, just with an absence of tears.

               

Lazarus could feel the twisting welling up inside, knew the moment of finality was upon him. He would have liked, perhaps, for Jude to have been there. But then, Jude had never known anything about insect-life. Jude would not appreciate the unraveling of the cocoon for the marvel of the newly born; he was too concerned with the shell, not enough with the thing moving on about inside.

Lazarus laid himself down one last time, breathed out until he could feel it, the motion of hundreds of thousands of tiny little bodies circling within, crawling forwards, their soft sticky legs finding purchase in his lungs, clouding his mouth, beating up against his temples. He breathed out until he saw with his one good eye the brilliant tip of a filmy wing brushing up passed his cheek. Then it all stopped, and his eye became less alive and whatever was inside him, if ever there was a thing buried, rushed his boundaries, spilled out and never bothered to look back at the body it had left. His chest compressed downward, and in the morning Jude found him and stared at him until he wasn’t sure if what he saw before him was anything at all or just whatever had been left over.