“They will not have me, sir. With my wounds, I am unable to meet the requirements of their ecstasy. I have traveled just the same as they. I have dreamed the very same dreams . . . and yet they will not have me.” She paused and wrapped her disfigured body around itself. “It turns out the heart is naught but a lonely place.” Puer studied the woman: the empty, bleeding pores where her ovaries should have been, the chipped remains of porcelain skin. “Your epiphany is nothing extraordinary,” he spat. “My goal has revealed itself as a house of cards . . . and here there can be no shelter.” “You may dwell with me, sir. If only you help me to eat. We can share this trench, sir, if only you help me to eat.” Puer reflected upon the futile hospitality of the fractured maiden. She had nothing to offer. The trench was wide enough to house dozens. “I will help to feed you this once, ma’am, but I will not stay here.” “Why, sir? Where will you go?” Puer grunted and ascended from the trench without another word. In those upper reaches, Puer searched for some morsel not coated in his brothers’ saliva. There was nothing. The horde had already begun to eat the interior of the World’s heart, as well as each other. Puer returned to the trench empty-handed. “Ma’am, there is nothing. It is as I told you before: this place has been stripped to a barren garden, dead and empty.” “We should leave then, sir. Retreat to somewhere new.” “There is nowhere.” “There is the wasteland. As a girl, I heard of the wasteland.” “The plane of banishment?” Puer scoffed. “Asylum of abominations? Home to the rejects of society and nature alike?” The female faltered. “Y-yes, sir.” “No.” Puer turned. “I am leaving.” The woman followed Puer’s retreat with shocked and wounded eyes. “Sir!” she exclaimed finally. “There is nowhere else to go! These highways, they flow in one direction. You will surely die!” “So be it,” the male snapped. “Death is better than this. And it is certainly better than what you propose.” “What I propose is life.” “Yes. But what piteous fool would want a life like that? Scrounging in barrens of shit?” For a moment, the pilgrims’ eyes locked in something that could not quite be called confrontation. “Please, sir,” the female said, wilting away from Puer’s glare. Her voice found itself suffocating in repressed tears. “I want a life. Any life. Please . . .” Feeling like a victim of extortion, Puer heaved a sigh. “Fine,” he said. “We will flee to the wasteland.”
Katherine Marzinsky · 17