For The Life Of Her

Gaseous clouds seemed to linger outside the window, enveloping everything Priscilla saw except the top of the cypress tree and the edge of the barn. Her family had left her in the house, and driven off in the car. She'd stayed behind with the animals, whom she'd eaten one by one, saying a prayer before she ate the first bite of each and cursing the lack of refrigeration. She threw the carcasses, after eating her fill, down the hole in the basement. When she heard the plop of their bodies hitting the water far below, she asked for forgiveness and tried to keep down the food these same corpses had provided her.

She was alone. The stars, if they existed any more, had disappeared weeks ago within the toxic clouds, and her neighbours, if they existed any more, were more than likely holed up as she was, eating what they could and preferring the taste of their own urine to that of the tainted water that still dripped out the municipality's tap.

The dream had begun so beautifully. After years of work and dedication, the town had come into its own. It had grown popular and been listed as one of the Top 10 towns in a guidebook that was relied upon as an accurate source. Tourists came and while spending their money and enriching the town, had also seemed to respect the quaint customs of its people.

Her mother and father had been in their 40s then. Both of them had worn glasses as nearly everyone, even Priscilla, did. It was a largely near-sighted town. The few exceptions, Priscilla now realised, had left years ago, during her childhood. They had disappeared one by one, as if they'd had an invitation to join one another extended from far-sighted individual to far-sighted individual. Her parents had only ever spoken of staying. "Taking root," her father called it.

At night, before the town became such a destination spot that he could no longer sit outside on the porch without strangers coming up to take his picture, he would whittle sticks into the shapes of cows or wolves or men. Priscilla had begun learning his skills at first, using soap because she was too little in the beginning to be trusted with the sharp knife one needed for wood. She found a stockpile of these soaps in the basement shortly after consuming Scruffy the cat. She brought them upstairs and arranged them on the coffee table in various configurations night after night.

Her brother, Tad, had taken the board games with him, stuffing them into the back of the family's hybrid station wagon somewhat desperately. "You won't need these," he'd told her. "You can't play them by yourself."

But Priscilla was determined, and before she knew it she had created a game of the carved soaps and a box of wooden matches that kept her entertained for hours. It was very much like Jacks, but with a higher degree of difficulty, as the carved soaps were both larger and slipperier.

Within three weeks she knew that no one was coming back for her. She wandered the house over and over and saw the objects that now stood in for family. The indentation on what her mother called her "ass pillow" and that she had carried with her from room to room to soothe her slowly desiccating bones. Perhaps, in fleeing, her mother had felt that other world outside the town, that other world where they all continued to believe no toxic clouds drifted, her joints would heal and she would feel no pain. Priscilla noted that she had taken her tennis outfit that she hadn't put on for years. The white, short-sleeve dress with the crisply pleated skirt and the matching sweater - cable knit with dark red and blue bands encircling the wrists and running along the sloped collar like a manufacturer's benediction.

Priscilla took the ass pillow off the rocker in her parents' bedroom and lay down on the bed with it for comfort. On the bedside table was her father's old military pistol. She knew now why he'd left it behind. Not for the animals or for any intruder hardy enough to make it through the poisonous clouds, but for her.

Somewhere in the house she heard a noise - the thump of one of the still living animals jumping from a high surface to the floor. She made a mental note of the location and tried to imagine killing it - from the weight the sound implied, it would be either Toodles or his sister, Mascarpone. How tired she was, after such a short time, of the aftermath of these murders. The taste of cat or dog or hamster or rabbit was not so good in the end, especially if one knew its name. Strindberg, the dog, had been a battle. She stared down the length of her thinning body at her own foot - the nail polish barely a chipped spot of scarlet on each toe. "Why not?" she thought. "It would surely be more tasty than Judy, the parakeet, and so available." (She had had to chase Judy around the room with her head tilted upwards and arms waving until she'd fallen against her brother's bookshelves and landed in a heap of Hardy Boys with still no dinner for the night.)

"You can breathe this stuff, Sweetie," her father had said. "I'm only going because someone has to take care of your mother and brother."

She'd nodded her head. It seemed like something good to agree to, that she was immune to toxic gas.

She took her foot with her as she limped down the stairs, compensating for the new state of imbalance by leaning heavily on the walnut stained railing. She did not feel dizzy in the least and the foot had come cleanly off with no complaint. She thought of the cereal she had mindlessly eaten the first night. Its commercial slogan of "Snap, Crackle, Pop".

At the bottom of the stairs she held the foot out to Barchester, a somewhat obsequious spaniel that her mother preferred. The potential ease of killing Barchester had been countered by the idea that he was largely fur and his eyes looking up at her. It would have been like slaughtering the big-eyed children of Margaret Keane's poster art or parboiling an Ann Geddes photography model.

Barchester seemed greatly excited. He wagged his tail wildly and dared a tender lick of the heel.

She did not feel too woozy, she supposed, just light-headed, and miraculously, though the severed ankle seemed a lovely wine glass pooled with her own blood, when she looked down there was no blood coming from the leg itself.

"Perhaps this toxic air has healing properties," she said to Barchester, who was submissively peeing on the living room carpet.

She moved, with the foot borne aloft in front of her, through the living room and into the kitchen, and cleared the skittery hamster claws of Ralph and Plutocracy off the counter with her elbow. Barchester sniffed at them.

"Foot," she said, she guessed, to Barchester, "How does one cook it?" She placed it on the cleanish counter and began to prepare.

Stork-like, she hopped to her right to look into the increasingly empty cupboards for any spices that might remain. Her triumph so far had been dachshund in peanut sauce, having had, in that first week, fresh ginger, garlic, and coconut milk.

She stared down guiltily at Barchester, whose plentiful fur had saved him from the same fate as sweet, shorthaired Myrtle. If only her family had remained, she thought now, the steaks to be had of their arms and legs could have fed Priscilla and all the animals for quite a while, especially if they, like she did, recovered so easily from dismemberment.

With a cleaver she chopped off her toes against the butcher block and threw one down to Barchester who ran with it between his teeth, out of the room. She took the pinky toe and popped it in her mouth, savouring the salty, coppery taste and gnawing gently at it as it swirled from one side of her mouth to the other, hitting the shores of her jaw.

It had the effect of one of their mother's pep pills that she and Tad had discovered once as teenagers, when the old town was being razed like a ruined stage set, to be replaced with the vision that ultimately spelled their doom. Tad had taken one and on a dare Priscilla had consumed two, then three, and been so speeded up that she'd helped cut tile for the new open-air mall bathrooms for 30 hours straight.

The big toe, she thought, she could use for bait to catch Handel, the neighbour's great dane, whom she'd seen about five days ago loping through a low-moving cloud out near the vegetable garden. She placed it inside a small baby food jar and put it on the windowsill over the sink where at least a bit of cold air would flood it from all sides.

She set to her task, throwing in whatever spices she found. Marjoram and curry, belladonna and camphor, shrimp paste and screw pine, into the pot!

Why exactly had her mother's bones begun to disintegrate? Why did Tad seem so shadowy and malevolent most of the time? Though also achingly dull? Her father had the most to give, or so she'd thought until she'd gotten older. He had credit in the world. He'd won medals in the war that he kept polished and he had eventually been commissioned to build almost half the town. The other half being doled out piecemeal to various visiting foreign dignitaries. It was in her early 20s she'd noticed that the buildings he erected were praised long before their completion. "All your father has to do," her mother had once said bitterly, "is take a shit and the world applauds." No one had ever wanted to admit that the new town looked almost exactly like the old town.

The small amount of olive oil bubbled around the base of the foot. She wished she'd had greens or a small white onion to work with, but those had been consumed weeks ago. She knew what she needed next, but adapting quickly to hopping the length of the kitchen did not increase her confidence for the goal. She needed water and she believed that, if only she could leave the house, she might be able to find Tad's disused scooter that lay mouldering in the shed out back to go looking. The night before, she had dreamed again of the crumbling manor in the centre of the town, which had not been occupied for at least as long as she and her brother had been living. There was a huge greenhouse on the property. Her mother had attended a party there in her youth.

Priscilla thought that inside the greenhouse might be a great deal of condensation, perhaps even enough to collect and to steam the foot in if she was capable of making the trip back. She took another one of the toes and popped it in her mouth for the journey, throwing the other blindly into the laundry room for Toodles or Barchester, Walpole or even Petunia, the salamander. For the efficacious balance she would need she hopped into her father's study and found a large but lightweight dictionary, printed on recycled paper it seemed, then bound it to what remained of her ankle with the duct tape her mother kept under the sink. With this her gait was almost restored, though the flexibility of the toes - one of which frolicked on her tongue - was gone, of course. She would clomp about, she supposed, but make do.

She put on a windbreaker she had bought with a girlfriend when they were both 15. They wore matching windbreakers at the time and the purchase had made Priscilla feel like part of a team. But this girlfriend had moved shortly afterwards, one of the far-sighted set taking flight for distant shores where movies were watched on seductive flat screens. Suited up as she was with her torso in bright red nylon and sporting reflective zippers, as well as the recycled dictionary firmly grafted to her flesh, and a toe ripely leaching its nutrients into her flesh, she flung open the back door and let the toxic cloud envelop her.

She would have screamed if not for the precious toe in her mouth. She would have left the door wide open if not for the foot on the stove and the animals - both her companions and prey - that remained in the house. She closed but did not lock the door. The keys something she had lost one afternoon while rummaging through her mother's dresser for clues to her past. She'd had a theory that Jughead, the parakeet Judy's boyfriend, had flown off with them when he'd found an open window following the feathery bloodbath that had finally resulted in his winged mate's death.

She kept her eyes open, though they burned, and descended the three whitewashed steps to the ground. Almost immediately Handel emerged around the side of the barn and came loping toward her. He was certainly large enough - if so inclined - to have a go at her, and with her dictionary foot she would hardly be able to outrun him. He came through a scrubby patch of trees which she hadn't been able to make out from the window since week two, but his pace was not menacing. Sure enough, when she removed the toe from her mouth and offered it to him, he fell in by her side immediately and they were off to the shed together in search of Tad's scooter.

Razor wheels, what a fine invention! They allowed her to go as fast as Handel at a pleasant trot and this meant that the houses falling in on their foundations, which only weeks ago had been pristine examples of her town, did not seem so sorrowful and the strange mess of sodden children's clothes in the street not quite so portentous. They were items in the landscape that she and Handel chose to pass. He had the smile of a hound on him now, with the toe consumed and a colleague - be it wheeled and be it human - to roam the streets with. There was nobody. Nobody out on the sidewalks or in the alleys. No light or noise emanating from any window.

When they entered the street, which ended in the manor, Handel suddenly stopped. He needed reassurance and Priscilla gave it to him, petting the large black head and moving, with her scooter, all the way back to the tip of his undocked tail. When she moved forward again, he placed his head against her stomach and gave a slight tender grumble into the folds of her windbreaker. She interpreted this as a noise of surrender and trust, though she could hardly be sure.

They approached the manor now and, as if it had been silently agreed between them, Handel stopped outside its rusted iron gate, turned toward the desolate street attending it and sat grandly upright on his haunches.

"Good boy," she said, "I'll bring you back a prize if I can."

The manor looked as it always had - stately, dark, dominant, and utterly devoid now of any humanity. Inside, she supposed, there might be someone feasting on lead paint and dry chalk, but she could not imagine it and would not, for the life of her, enter the manor itself.

It was the greenhouse she was after, and so she skirted the edges of the great bulk of stone and masonry that had been added on to over the years until it had fallen into disuse, and hurried on her scooter, over the cracked path that led down along a slope toward the newer servants' quarters at the back of the manor house and then ended all together at a somewhat knobby and now disease-ridden boxwood hedge.

She saw the greenhouse through the noxious air that seemed particularly thick since she'd entered the grounds with Handel alone at the gate. It was perhaps half a football field away and now that the path had disintegrated, charting the course of bumpy ground that lay between her and it seemed like something better done on her own two feet - or the devious plus one she had constructed from a stump and a dictionary. She abandoned Tad's scooter in the hedge and took several deep breaths, filling her lungs almost entirely, as she did so, with the perfumed poison of what could only be the future.

And then she clomped, and she listed, and she almost fell but did not, finally. She began to hear noise at some point, but perhaps that had only been the echo inside the hollow tree that she clung to when a lean had turned to a list.

It was shortly before she made it within sight of the greenhouse door that she noted Scruffy lying on his side and licking his one remaining paw, but it was undoubtedly her own Scruffiluvfacous! He hissed at her as she came near but he, more hampered then she was, lay outside the greenhouse door like a one-legged stone.

The noise, she knew now, was coming from inside. It sounded quite warm. The voices had the same tinkling sound of hundreds of pieces of cutlery in use in a large town hall. As she reached out to turn the old lever arm that was made of iron and pockmarked with thick, white paint, the door opened inward and she fell, for the first and last time in her life, at someone's feet.

"On the floor is how we always find them," a woman said. "Let's hustle you in. I see you've found Scruffy. He's pretty peeved."

Priscilla stared up at her. Had she once been her mother's friend? Why did she appear so much older than her mother if this were true? Her face was like a punched-in handbag riddled with sores.

"Ah, dictionary foot! Good trick," this woman said. "We've got a few of those here. Better than the sewing up of the old pleasure box option. That one is particularly painful. I chose old-man-mask myself. You get to keep all your animals and your limbs."

"Shut the door!" someone yelled in a husky voice from deep inside the greenhouse. "There's a draught!"

Cursing, but fully able, the woman dragged Priscilla past the doorjamb and shut the door.

"Nothing special, I'm afraid," she said. "But there's air and light and enough vegetation to keep us fed. Some of the younger ones go out at night and seem to be fine when they come back in. Building up resistance, is what it is. Very important, that."

"What's your name?" Priscilla asked her.

"Me? I prefer to remain nameless, actually. Just call me that."

Nameless brought her farther into the greenhouse, where among the thriving rows of hothouse plants were women of all ages sitting behind humming typewriters - old-fashioned IBM Selectrics and Smith Corona cartridges and even upright Royals. A few worked on yellow legal pads and one, who appeared quite secretive, worked with her back to the rest of them and scribbled across sheets of creamy vellum. An old-fashioned fax machine with slippery paper on a roll was being monitored by a tallish man who reminded Priscilla of her uncle who had come to visit her family only once and whom her father had deemed "off".

"Success!" he shouted, "The lesbian Dominicans have tunnelled into the manor. They've requisitioned the supplies and say they'll return shortly."

"After a fine dish of smelly seafood no doubt."

Priscilla looked at the person who'd spoken.

"Kathy Acker," said this slight, fine-boned woman. "Free your mind and the rest will follow."

"Priscilla is new here," Nameless said. "Let's try kindness first."

"A breach," the off uncle croaked, a bit hysterically, reading again from the constantly whirling fax. "At least one platoon of literary critics with oxygen tanks has been spotted at the edge of town."

Priscilla saw that beside the Smith Coronas and the humming IBMs there were stacks of manuscript. She felt dizzy suddenly. All her life she had seen her father do exactly this, building stacks that went to nowhere.

"Let's get you situated, dearie." It was the woman who had been scribbling on vellum. Her face appeared to be one large sculptural ear. Priscilla's original escort was hurrying back to the front of the greenhouse, muttering for a drink of scotch.

This new woman was even older. She moved slowly but determinedly, ushering Priscilla to an empty spot in the middle of a row of women punctuated by artichoke plants, their beautiful purple blossoms on the verge of opening.

She sat down like a good girl while her hands fidgeted at the sight of the ergonomic keyboard comprised of two halves - like two separate cups lined with keys.

"Good luck, dear," the woman said. "Do let us know how you get on." She hurried away, if hurrying took you away by inches.

Priscilla thought of Handel, out by the gate, and of the animals, living and dead, back at her house. Then it was that she began to hear whispers through the dozens of spear-like leaves of the neighbouring artichoke plants.

It was a calling of names.

For some minutes, while she reflected on the events that had transpired to bring her there, she could not move, but her fingers never remained anything but poised above her keys.