Archive for the ‘Edd Vick’ Category
Minka’s Gift
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Minka’s gift was to see how others would die. “Consumption,” she would say to herself while walking through Budapesht’s Jewish Quarter. “Accident. Consumption. War. War. Heart. Consumption.” Her only comfort was that her own reflection remained free of any sign of how she would meet her end.
Came the day she was waiting tables and a man sat down alone. Minka looked at him, and looked again. “Never will he die,” she thought. “He is immortal.” She hugged this knowledge to herself, and served him coffee, goulash and halaszle. After awhile he came every week, and after another while he came every day, and always sat by himself. By and by they talked, and by and by she sat with him so he was no longer alone, and by and by she walked with him by the banks of the Duna.
Their marriage was a small affair. He had no friends, and it saddened Minka to see how hers would die. They both observed the rituals: not seeing each other for a week, the fast for the day of the wedding, her veil. The rabbi thought it a curiously quiet ceremony.
Minka did not tell him of her gift. He might think she wanted only to learn how to live forever. She became pregnant and in time gave birth to a boy and a girl. When they were born she averted her eye at first, but could not avoid gazing on her little loved ones.
“Murder,” she sighed, and “Murder.” Immortality escaped them, then. She hadn’t even known it was what she was looking for until she saw it. She mourned her children even as they suckled.
The marriage lasted a year and a day. On the last day, Minka woke as usual before her husband, and turned to gaze at him before rising. She was shocked to see the age of the man with whom she had been sleeping. His hair had fallen out, his cheeks were sunken, one hand shook as if with palsy. And yet it was still he; he with the neverending life.
He sighed in his sleep, and said a word that chilled her. “Hungry,” he murmured. She knew, with a heartbreaking assurance, that it was not mere food that he must eat. She knew now how murder would visit her children.
Minka eased herself from the bed, backing away toward the kitchen and the very sharp knife. She kept her eyes on him.
“Murder.”
Sandy
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
She was born not quite dead. The doctor at first said, “No head?”. Yet how to explain the thread of clumping sand that led from her spinal cord to more sand, two pounds of it expelled with the eponymous girl.
Given up in horror, Sandy landed in a foster home run by Betsy and Jim, who cared for the children just a bit more than they cared for the money that came with them. Mostly they wanted ones who would lie abed and cause no ruckus.
Sandy was not one of the quiet ones.
At a year, when most children would say their prayers and ABCs, Sandy was spattering her room with blasts of sand that scoured paint and varnish, bodies and faces. The moan of the sirocco presaged her darker moods. Of sunny days she had few.
Everything would taste of grit.
Jim and Betsy dumped Sandy on the street ten years later. She wandered from street to street, sleeping under bushes and avoiding contact.
Slowly the rest of her body turned to sand.
She learned to infest buildings. Any window or door left open, any crack in a wall was an entrance. She spread herself across buildings and blocks. She got into everything.
Sandy ruined it all.
Bits of her in gears, in food, in valves. Things broke down, people grew unhappy, as unhappy as she was. The first death was almost anticlimactic. A clogged fuel line, an auto that balked at the wrong moment, and just like that Sandy was a killer.
She liked it.
There was no stopping her after that first fatality. She made buildings and vehicles explode. She choked people, she tripped them, she blasted them with herself. Simplest of all, she blocked their bloodstreams. People had so many access points.
Sandy was the ultimate predator.
Almost.
Humans struck back. One by one, they captured her grains, weakening her. When they thought they had all of her, they stuck her into a blast furnace and fused her into a beautiful glass cube. It sits today on the desk of the president.
But they only thought they had caught all of her. She’s out there still, a particle here, a granule there. Some day you may feel a bit of her, a kiss almost of sand against your skin.