In Absence

IN ABSENCE

LAURA DIAZ DE ARCE

Copyright (C) 2022 Laura Diaz de Arce

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Graham (Fading Street Services)

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

Para mis abuelos.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Dear Reader,

This is a collection about grief. In the past few years, I’d found myself in this perpetual state of lingering depression that while bearable, was a cloying burden. Many of the works in this collection are a reflection of that time, of me working through my inability to process loss in a way that fully alleviated it. The stories, while mostly some category of horror, reflect those attempts to recontextualize my varying shades of grief into something moveable breathable. My attempts to excise these feelings means that I wrote in themes and scenes that were painful to myself. These include Death, Mutilation, Child Death and Mutilation, Animal Death and Mutilation, Body Horror, Violence, Cannibalism, Allusions to Miscarriage, and Raw Food Consumption. Please consider this if you choose to move forward.

Laura Diaz de Arce

CONTENTS

In Absence

Those Adrift in Calm Waters

Frijoles

A Great and Lonely Wind

A Murder on the Plains

Pain Eater

The Beast of Many Faces

The Devil Sat in the Last Pew

Of Memory

Iguana Hunting

Iodine

Floaters

Heartstrings

Strangers in the Night

Tokens Beneath the Tongue

All That Is Left Is to Dream

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Publication Information

IN ABSENCE

My head hit the pillow, and I thought that like other nights after exhausting days, I would soon be asleep. My eyes were closed, my breathing slowed, but minute after minute, hour after hour, I did not sleep. I tossed. I turned. I tried many different positions. The hours crept by. I did not sleep.

I had gone through many changes of late. The swell in my belly had deflated from lack of trespass, and I could lie on it as sleep became my solace. My life had gone from momentary possibility and a constant of company to a quiet aloneness in the span of a few days. That type of loss, one I chose not to think about, was a pattern in my life. It had become second nature to burn away the memory of things no more into an ashen pile and allow them to be swept away. Sleep helped me do that. It should have been easy to close my eyes and will myself into oblivion. Instead, sleep avoided me the entire night.

The day after the first sleepless night, I tried to keep pleasant, though at times I was unsuccessful and let my discontent show. That second night I lay down again, sleep still eluded me, and I was becoming frightful. By night three, I was filled with anger. That anger did not peak; it did not expel the energy in me. Instead, it built, like a fury, and kept my body quaking, unable to relax.

By night ten, I was delirious. Night and day had no meaning. I kept no time but wandered aimlessly around my home. I ate no steady meals, taking handfuls of whatever was in the refrigerator and within reach. Time was moving, but I did not feel it. I felt frozen, my actions like those in a delayed video. I was here. Then I was there. There was no transition, no passage, only what had been then what was.

Night twelve came and still, I did not sleep. I’d taken to staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, eyes bagged, and shoulders slumped. My body had become a stranger to me, unable to behave in the way I needed it to. It had given me pains which could not be ignored. Across from me, there was a crack in the mirror, and I traced my numb fingertip over the jagged edge. A bead of blood slid down the mirror. I tapped the glass and it shattered in that same delayed motion that had become endemic to my condition. My image became thousands of little shards.

There was no wall behind the glass. Instead, there was a long, winding landscape. It was gray, both the path and the grass beside it. The sky was gray as well, dotted by clouds of silver and charcoal. I climbed over my sink and stepped with bleeding feet onto the gravel. I must have moved, for before long when I looked back, my bathroom was not there.

As I walked, exhausted, further and further into the path, I noticed other oddities. There were plants, but they were rotated in on themselves. Twisted trees and swirling bushes dotted the landscape outside the path. There were no animals, none that could be seen at least, only the sounds of them. Strange birdlike calls came from nowhere. As did the flap of wings or the buzz of insects, though I could see none. It was as if a soundtrack was playing over the environment. An imprint of the things that must have once been there but no longer were.

Then I came upon the garden of hands.

They grew in pairs upon wooden stalks, in many shapes, ages, and colors. There was a sign in front:

TAKE A SET

-------

LEAVE A SET

It was accompanied by a friendly wooden table topped with a checkered butcher’s block and a large cleaver.

My hands had never been my friends. They were clumsy, small, and constantly in pain. There were many attractive sets sprouting from the stalks, in many colors and forms. There was a set there that almost resembled mine, but they were more muscled in some places, with longer, more elegant fingers. They were absent of the scars mine had accumulated.

The pair was easy to pluck from its stalk, no shucking required. I brought them back to the table and placed the hands there. The right one moved to the knife and the left hand gestured to me to put my hands on the table. With two quick slices my real hands were disconnected from me. My former hands finger-walked their way off the table and into the stalks, disappearing from view.

These new hands had young fingers eager to touch the world around them. They pulled me down to run themselves along the soft glass. We walked to some trees along the trail, me and these new hands of mine. They stroked the rough, knotted and fragmented bark. They pulled at the waxy leaves, sliding fingers along the veins.

There was a very familiar sound, but I could not quite place it. It was a loud and grizzled meow of an old cat. He approached me, his face having taken on a snaggle-toothed appearance from missing teeth. He came to a stop in front of me and sat down on his hind legs. The hands began to pet him, and then finally jumped on my wrists when the cat turned and bid us to follow. The taken hands stitched themselves to the stumps at my wrists and we honored the cat’s invitation.

The cat led us to an orange tree. Most of its leaves were withered, and the fruit stunted and shriveled. I plucked a few off the branch and picked at the peels, breaking them into small sour wedges. The oranges were bitter, but with each bite, I began to remember a dream from some time before.

THOSE ADRIFT IN CALM WATERS

Oceans are never as calm as they seem. Even as the waves are rhythmic and the sky is clear, there is always something lurking beneath. When the surface is hot, the sun at its peak, and the afternoon storms have yet to roll in, the ocean lets the light filter leagues down. In these conditions, the creatures below can see close to the top. Red Stripe could see up to the sky with his fine eyesight, though he sometimes confused the large clouds with the long boats that crossed the water.

Along the floor, his little eye could see the movement of other creatures. None were as large or as powerful as him. Though he ate many of them, he found he had a certain affection for those lower creatures. As the largest and most powerful among the sea life, he was beholden to be their protector. When large ships dragged their nets, when they went hunting in his domain, he attacked the upper-water creatures until they fled or were fodder. They often fought back, pricking him like the small bottom creatures that were irked by his presence, but none could combat arms such as his, that curled and moved as grand as the waves.

On a day when the view was crystal-clear, Red Stripe spotted the shadow of something moving slowly along the floor. He pointed his large eye upwards and saw a small boat held in place by the still waters. The small boats of the upper-water creatures were nothing to be bothered by, for they picked at the small fish at the surface and were soon gone. It was only when such a boat was followed by a larger one that he felt any alarm. He sensed a change in the water. A scent like blood was looming, and above him, the toothy-creatures were circling around the shadow, their sleek bodies like seaweed in their current.

Red Stripe could not help being curious and eager to know if a larger boat was in their midst. With a single push, he launched upward to where the water was warmer and lighter. He looked on as the little boat wiggled a bit, and then an upper-water creature leaned over the side. Red Stripe had to stop and float, for he had never been as curious as this. He’d seen many an upper-water creature. They moved with limbs like he did, albeit in a strange way and with noticeably less agility. The upper-water creatures lacked the fine grace that having ten limbs bestowed. This upper-water creature seemed different; its odd appearance intrigued him.

Maggie squinted into the distance with one sunburnt hand doing its best to shade her from the unforgiving sunlight. The water was clear, she assumed, but the glare made it too difficult to see below. She knew that the distance as far as she could see was nothing but water on all sides. After two days adrift, Maggie realized that the ocean was far more vast than she ever imagined. Maps and movies had never done it justice. And beneath her was even more vast and haunting. She had a healthy respect for sharks and knew that the head wound which kept reopening and bleeding over the side when she went to heave was probably a temptation for them below. In the hours between starving and lying under the light canvas of the life raft she needed to do something to distract from the aches of her injuries and the ever-present boredom. She pretended she was measuring her eyesight by looking out. She had severely hit her forehead in the boating accident and the resulting injury had swelled her left eye shut. Luckily, the small space she currently navigated didn’t require a lot of depth perception.

The sun was high, and the wind still, and there seemed no movement but from below by the steady rock of the waves. Maggie looked down, and with her dim vision, she could have sworn she saw an impossibly large shadow. Something the size of a freighter. She prayed it was a large, friendly whale passing through as she peered off the side.

Red Stripe tried to understand why he was frozen beneath the upper-water creature. It was an odd thing, half the size of his beak or his smallest hand. Like him, the creature had one large eye and one small eye. Its long fin-follicles were a bright color, the same as the small tang fish that swim in the reefs. There was a streak of red on the creature almost as red as his red stripe. His body changed color to match her, and he did not want to strike the thing and bring its boat into the depths. Instead, he wanted to swim and spin, and then let one of his arms wrap around the upper-water creature. He’d never taken long to wonder what upper-water creatures felt like. Certainly, he had tossed many and others he had eaten. They tended to taste foul. He had never taken the time to feel one before letting them get devoured by the toothy-creatures or shoving them in his own beak. Would its scales be like that of the smallest sea creatures? Would it feel like the skin of the jumping creatures, the ones that could leap and jump in the upper- waters?

He swam closer.

Maggie had many regrets. She regretted not making up with her friend Sara before Sara’s wedding. She regretted majoring in economics instead of following her passion for music. Even in the loneliness of her situation, she kept making melodies out of the sea sounds that she would have loved to put to her piano. Her biggest regret was most definitely booking the excursion tour from the resort. Especially as it had been thrown off course in a summer storm and hit something, which led to the little dingy to take on water. Which also led to a fight to reach the two life rafts that got tossed opposite ways in the storm. She regretted that she took the wrong survival pack. One that had leaky and dried out water bottles, which meant the water was all gone the day prior, and the moldy protein bars, which she ate piece by piece anyway.

After the initial fear, guilt, panic, and anger, Maggie had settled into a sort of nihilistic calm. She had not seen another boat, plane, or even a bird in over twenty-four hours. She would die out here. If rain came, her demise would likely be from starvation. If there was no rain, then dehydration. It did not help that there was not a cloud in the sky here or in the distance. There was the off-chance that a giant Jaws-like shark may also bite her in half. And there she was, without an oxygen tank and a harpoon gun to defend herself with.

What she did not predict was that she would die in the clutches of the giant creature below.

Red Stripe’s shadow loomed closer. Maggie scooted back into the raft. She still held out hope that what was beneath her was a friendly whale coming up for air. The water billowed and the raft pushed backwards as the top of a large, yellow squid rose out of the water.

The sea creature was massive, something very well out of a science-fiction movie, with a large yellow eye that she could have walked directly into. It had a grand red stripe down the center of its forehead the size of a sidewalk. Maggie went beyond panic into a type of shock that belies a certain acceptance of the inevitable. Ah, so this is how I die, she thought. Despite the lingering horror of this almost mythical giant, some part of her recognized how beautiful it was, this sunlight-colored beast rising out of the water, the sea sloshing off of it to reveal this vibrant golden god of the oceans.

The upper-water was dry and bright, it hurt Red Stripe’s eye. He forced himself to stay and look at the little creature with the mismatched eyes. It cowered with one limb up against him, like the hard-shelled creatures below. This was the first time he was actually bothering to look at one up close. What an odd type of scale. What interesting fins. How does it swim here where the water is thin?

Red Stripe took a tentative limb and reached up to touch it. The creature made a noise like those gliding, both-waters