Sacrifice

Themes of death, gore, mental health, and physical violence.

Arthur didn’t hear the wind anymore, only the rhythmic, wet thud-crunch of his own jaw as he ground a stray, sun-bleached animal femur into a fine, grey flour for a son whose heart hadn’t beaten in forty days. He spit a mouthful of coppery, thick saliva into the palm of his hand, mixing it with the dust to form a dense, hefty red tinted paste—the only mortar he had left to rebuild a skeleton he believed was turning to chalk. Arthur turned around to face the sled he dragged through the salt flats, his thumb caked in grey sediment. He forced his thumb past Leo’s stiff, discolored lips, storing the sediment in the pockets between his cold cheeks and gums.

There, Arthur thought as he resumed crunching, his teeth singing with the raw ache of exposed nerves, he’s just clay waiting to be fired. Calcium will heal his brittleness. He’ll set. He’ll harden.

He gripped the tow-rope—his hands curled into permanent, arthritic hooks—locked into place. As the sled groaned forward, Arthur began to hunt the horizon for the next rib, the next shard, the next wing to feed his boy. To him, the world hadn’t ended; it had simply purged. He looked at the vast, ashen landscape before him and saw a universe of salt and sand.

Not long now, he said to Leo, the words whistling through teeth ground to pink nubs. Only a day away, son. You’ll be up again soon.

Arthur remembered the times before like they were yesterday. He remembered the Great War they spoke of, the way people trembled and held one another, the way mothers froze their children in hopes they may survive. Leo was an infant, barely able to hold his own head up.

They’ll never drop the bombs, his neighbor, Charlie, would say. Ya’ll worry for nothing!

Charlie was a fine man. He attended neighborhood gatherings, babysat the children, and manned the grill more times than Arthur could bear to count. There was nothing special about Charlie; nothing extravagant or interesting, except, perhaps, that he had died.

Charlie’s wife, Jeanette, wasn’t as optimistic. Arthur remembered that most of all. She never screamed, never made an exhibition of herself. She was quiet when she spoke, as if the words could not bear to leave her lips, as if there was never enough air in her lungs. They’ll bomb us, she would say. They’ll bomb us and if we survive we’ll be chewing on dirt just to stay alive, but the radiation will eat us raw.

Jeanette was right about most things, but she was especially right about the radiation. The bones he gnawed on were full of it. The muscles in his face bulged like thick, ropy cords, his jaw dislocated and reset so often it sat in a permanent, predatory slant. His tongue, black like charcoal, had swelled so large that it barely fit in his mouth anymore. He was a creature of greyness and wet noise, lacking the ability to speak more than a sentence without paste from his own bloody saliva and leftover sediment catching in his throat. The radiation had stripped the softness from his cheeks, and his skin—bleached the color of a dead moon—seemed to flake away in the wind, adding his own cells to the carpet of ash. For forty days, his spine has bent into the shape of a bow, leaning so far forward that his chest was nearly parallel to the ground, his head thrust forward like a tortoise.

When he passed other scavengers, they did not approach. To them, Arthur was a wobbly beast lugging around a corpse with deformities too grotesque to look at. But Arthur saw himself only as a devoted father, doing whatever it took to save his boy.

By the time night had fallen, the winds had picked up. Salt raged and burned against Arthur’s skin, the fine grains weasling into the loose sockets of his clouded eyes.

Don’t cry, he murmured to Leo, as he did every night on the salt flats, misinterpreting the whine of the wind for the squeal of a seven-year-old boy. I’m here, Leo. Dad’s here. I’ll protect you. Arthur huddled over Leo, shielding him from the unforgiving winds and cold with his stone-hard, tumor-ridden body. He whispered a song his wife used to sing, ignoring the sickly stench of rot, copper, and decay.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…

When Arthur woke, chips of his enamel were stuck to his dry, cracked lips. He stuck two fingers into his mouth, pressed against his gums, and a tooth fell onto his swollen tongue. Arthur pinched the tooth between fingers, prying Leo’s jaw open to feel his gums. When his finger slipped where a tooth should be, he paused, fitted the spare tooth inside, and clamped Leo’s jaw shut. He had just lost that tooth a month and a half ago.

Their journey continued until Arthur could see his temple of light in the distance. As he hauled Leo forward, his head craned up to see the hollowed-out shell of a hospital with shattered windows and flickering, dead monitors. To him, it was perfect. To him, it was everything needed to save his son. He dragged the sled through a forest of tipped-over IV poles and mounds of skeletal remains that he mistook for “bins of spare parts.” The air smelled of ozone and ancient, sterile rot. He shoved his way into a theater, where a surgical bed sat in the center, illuminated by a single, flickering light that cast a jittering glow. Arthur unhooked the tow-rope from his chest, his spine groaning as it failed to straighten, leaving him hunched over.

With tenderness, he lifted Leo. The boy didn’t feel like flesh; he felt like a bundle of dry sticks or an unfired piece of ceramic. Arthur laid him on the stainless steel. He waited for the scanners to hum. He waited for the silver arms of the automatic doctors to descend and stitch Leo back into the world of the living.

Silence.

Not enough, Arthur whispered, a panicked vibration shaking his jaw. He looked at Leo’s chest, packed thick with red-tinted bone paste. You aren’t heavy enough yet. The machines…they can’t find you. You’re still too light.

He looked at the floor. No more avian bones, no more canine ribs. Empty. He had scoured the salt flats for a hundred miles and now there was nothing.

Then, he looked at his own hands. The realization brought a gummy smile to his face. He didn’t need the skeletons of other animals. Arthur reached into the tool-kit on his belt and pulled out a jagged piece of a rusted blade he’d found in the wastes. His harvest began in a frenzy of sacrificial love.

Arthur didn’t scream; he couldn’t. His vocal cords had long ago become raw from the salt. There was only the sound of a man working to save his son, a wet shuck-scrape as he began to harvest the long, tight strips of his own thigh to get to his femur. He worked with frantic speed, using his own jaw to grind his porcelain bones into paste.

Almost, Arthur thought to himself, wheezing as he smeared the fresh slurry over Leo’s sunken chest, layering it over his ribs like armor. Almost heavy enough.

As the blood loss began to cloud his vision, hallucinations took hold. The flickering light turned into a blinding, divine radiance. The rusted surgical arms became limbs of yellow light. In his dying sight, Arthur saw the grey, cement-thick paste on Leo’s body begin to glow. He saw Leo’s hand twitch.

With a final, triumphant shudder, Arthur slumped his upper half onto the table, grasping the hands of a still-cold boy. He locked his jaw open, a hopper of blood and bone for the celestial doctors to take. Arthur watched the boy who wouldn’t wake with the eyes of a man who had given his body, convinced that at last, Leo was finally made of a permanent, living stone.