Story: Happyfacing… by Patricia Russo

Good morning. This particular story was won from the author in a game of Eye Spy off the coast of Bolivia. Let’s just say the author failed to spot my grandmother with her thieving toes…

happyfacing 

 

  

Happyfacing

by Patricia Russo

 

 

 

That Saturday she was afraid to leave the apartment, since she’d been pissing spiders. There was an omen for you, if you believed in omens. She did not, but still. Streams of pinkie-nail-sized buggers, eggshell and dove-gray, racing around and around the bowl. A person could be excused for thinking that might mean something. Besides, the last time she’d ventured outside, there’d been so many blue eyes. Face after face, set with sparkling blue eyes and china-white teeth. Gave her the willies.

 

But then, so many things did, these days.

 

Just before noon, someone knocked on the door. She could have yelled at the tap-tap-tapper to go away. But a lady did not raise her voice. She would have to open the door to tell whoever it was to fuck off.

 

Probably not a neighbor. They knew better than to bother her. There were only a handful of people left in the building, stubborn holdouts like her, clinging on by their teeth and toenails. She was surprised the old coot on the fourth floor was still able to manage the stairs.

 

Could be whoever was knocking was an itinerant merchant. Maybe even with something useful to sell or trade. Batteries. Dried meat. Wooden matches. Mothballs.

 

Powdered milk, she thought. It would be wonderful to have a bit of powdered milk. She had enough oatmeal, double-wrapped against vermin and sealed in plastic tubs, to last her for damn near ever, but it just wasn’t the same without milk. Or raisins. But raisins were too much to hope for.

 

The peephole hadn’t worked for eleven years. One day the glass had gone cloudy, as if a cataract had grown over it. Even glass got tired. She put her ear to the wood and listened, but could hear no breathing on the other side. Some people could hold their breath for a long time, and Rippy, just before he disappeared for good, had gotten to the point where he had needed to breathe only once or twice an hour, but still. She lived too close to Blue Street to take stupid risks. The last time she’d seen Rippy, he’d knocked on the door just like this, one-two-three, and then waited. When she opened up, he said he’d come to talk to her cats. You picked a fine time to lose your mind, she’d told him. She’d never owned a cat in her life. She’d kept finches once, a breeding pair pushed on her as a gift by a coworker in the days when people still went to offices and stores and factories, and collected paychecks. The birds had died inside a month. Naturally she still had the cage. She never threw anything away. Rippy had talked to the empty cage for a few minutes, then run out before she finished boiling water for tea. You picked a fine time to lose your mind. Those had been the last words she’d ever spoken to him. She still regretted that.

 

There was nobody on the other side of the door. But there had been. Though the rest of her was falling apart, her hearing hadn’t failed yet.

 

Falling apart. Falling to bits. Been falling for years, and years. Still hadn’t hit the ground. She had to admit to herself that the journey had become more than a little tedious. Nowadays, everything she used to do to smooth the passage had stopped working. Relief came intermittently, more by chance than design, and never lasted more than a few minutes.

 

Before, people had laughed at her for being a hoarder. Shook their heads when they thought she couldn’t see. Clucked their tongues and sighed when they thought she couldn’t hear. But she still had coffee, and aspirin, and vitamins, even now. Doled out, rationed, one-a-days become once-a-weeks, aspirin only on special occasions, coffee to commemorate some great, fleeting victory against entropy. But still. If she’d been younger, stronger, more of a wheeler-dealer, she might have done well for herself, peddling and trading. But she hadn’t had the energy for it. She lacked the necessary patience, and the smooth tongue. But still. She did well enough. Sometimes, when she felt strong, she dropped by the market place in the parking lot of the stripped strip mall. Some folks still accepted gold as a medium of exchange, and her brother had collected coins for years before the collapse. She’d salvaged them after he died. They’d both lived alone, and had entrusted each other with the keys to their apartments. He would have done the same, if she had been the first one to go. They couldn’t stand each other, but when the crunch came, they’d sat in the dark and held hands, and come to an unspoken agreement.

 

Getting old was gutting, even in the best of times. And these were not the best of times.

 

Day after day, she felt like pounded shit. That never changed. Her left ring finger twitched constantly. She coughed brown. Saw through a shimmer, like desert haze. She got dizzy if she sat too long. Sick to her stomach if she moved too fast. But if she lay in bed all day, her back knotted. Icicles stabbed her hips. When she was a child, she and her brother had played with icicles, holding the fat end in mittened hands, pressing the pointed bits against each other’s wrists, inoculating each other against winter.

 

There was no vaccine for what sickened her now. When the warehouses had burned, how many different toxins had been released into the air, the water, the soil? Thousands. Tens of thousands. That was the real border between the old times and the new. A line etched in time. No going back, except, sometimes, in dreams.

 

She was accustomed to caring for herself. She was used to people being useless.

 

That Saturday, she was afraid to go outside. But if she did not, then the next day she would be more afraid. And if she did not go out on Sunday, by Monday she would be cowering under the covers, all her elderly sheets, the quilt she’d stolen after its previous owner had jumped from the roof and which still smelled of cigarettes, the fleece throws she’d gotten cheap at the parking-lot market because their colors were so garish. Huddle and weep, and tremble at the thought of even touching the doorknob. No. She would not step on that path. The way back from it was too long for her now. She was too old. She’d never make it. And there was no one to help her.

 

There was a certain relief in that, in knowing that nobody would help you. One less thing to hope for. Hopes were so heavy; she’d been glad to lay that particular one down, and kick dirt over it.

 

So she got dressed. Brushed her teeth with the ancient brush and the trickle of water that still came from the tap. The city was dead, but it wouldn’t lie down and be still. Occasionally the electricity even came back on for an hour or two. She wondered how many people it took to accomplish that, and what in the world those folks did to keep themselves from giving up. Cheerleading squads in the power plant, prayer circles around the generators. There was no point in combing her hair. Anything she tried only made it look worse. Outside, she always wore a cap. Which fooled nobody, but still. She’d always frightened people. When she was younger, she’d taken a certain glee in that. Boo! It’s the scary lady. When had that started to become tiresome? Long ago. Before the end of the city.

 

The only reason she’d gone back for Rippy was that he hadn’t been afraid of her the first time they met. She’d been working as a messenger. The package hadn’t been for him. But he’d looked her in the eyes, smiled, pointed her to the right address. So casually calm, so nonchalantly polite. So when everything crashed, she made her way to where he was and said, Come with me. I know a safer place than this. She had saved his life that day, but the man never could sit still. Wouldn’t stay where it was safe. Wouldn’t hunker down to survive.

 

He had big hands. Always chapped. Always rough-looking. She’d wanted to ask him if they hurt. She’d wanted to offer some lotion. Never gotten around to it. Never had plucked up the courage.

 

He had been the last person to ever wish her a happy birthday. After he vanished, she’d stopped numbering her years.

 

All right, now.

 

Look in the mirror. Smile. Outside required happyfacing. Not for others. Screw other people. She did it for herself.

 

If she didn’t leave the apartment today, she might never leave it again.

 

Calmly, reasonably, she talked herself into courage.

 

Outside, though, her vision swam. Her heart raced. She listed to the left. I can’t make it, I can’t make it. But if she turned back, the defeat would finish her.

 

Courage was a fine thing. A necessary thing. But she was falling, and courage was no parachute.

 

The sky was yellow. She could still see yellow the best, through the circles of gray. White, gray, and yellow. Yellow used to be her favorite color.

 

Perhaps the spiders had been an omen, after all.

 

She had to sit down on the steps of the building. Her fingers twitched. Her face poured sweat. The rest of her was dry. Her mouth, driest of all. No spit to speak of. To speak with. Glass splintered in her back. The hairs in her nostrils burned. She sneezed ash, and her shoulders cracked.

 

All courage fled. But still. Assume a virtue if you have it not. Oh, that boy had been such a prick to his mother. The girl had been a fool, wasting her sympathy on him.

 

She was not sorry she’d gone outside. Better to land here, than on her kitchen floor. She remembered holding her brother’s hand. They’d hated each other. But in the end, all hands were the same.

 

She managed to get the keys out of her pocket and lay them on the step beside her.

 

Who had been knocking on her door? There had been no footprints in the hall, no human smell lingering in the still air.

 

There were humans on the street. She could hear them. Boots and flip-flops, stealthy edgings and dragging gaits, a few confident clops. Humans. And others. But still. They were all in the same mess together, above Blue Street and below, in the dead city and the dying world.

 

Spiders trickled, tickling, down her legs.

 

Spitless, she cleared her throat. Once there had been a woman named Judy. Rippy had loved her. He’d never said it; she’d read the devotion in his eyes. When he lost her, more than his heart had broken. She had thought, once, that they might have comforted each other. But she had been too beaten down to reach up, and he had gone numb to words.

 

She put on the biggest smile she could. Happyfacing. Not important, except to her. But still. Go out the way you came in. Her mother had told her how she’d laughed as a baby, laughed so loudly that strangers on the street turned to look, and couldn’t help but grin themselves. Not that she could remember what had been so funny, but still.

 

“People,” she called. The breath she took drew sand into her lungs, gray grains, spiked and jagged. “Everybody. Go to my place and take something. Spring cleaning.”

 

She was used to people being useless. In the end, this did not absolve her. One more strike against entropy. The last one. It did not make her a good person, but still. Would she have taken them all with her if she could? No. They all had a right to fall at their own pace.

 

You lived with regrets; died with them, too. They were not as heavy as hopes, but still. Burdens.

 

She missed aspartame, and the internet.

 

It couldn’t have been Rippy, knocking at the door. Though it had sounded exactly like him. He had trudged down into the heart of the triangle below Blue Street, and never returned. She regretted, now, that she hadn’t been able to scratch up the courage to touch him, not even once. Nothing would have changed. But still. It took courage to lay that regret down. In the end, she didn’t have enough.

 

She had stopped breathing before the first scavenger snatched up her keys.

 

—

 

Patricia Russo has been published in the anthologies Corpse Blossoms, Zencore, Read by Dawn Volume Two, and The Best of Not One of Us.  Recent work has appeared in Talebones and Tales of the Unanticipated; other stories will soon appear in Coyote Wild, Lone Star Stories, and Electric Velocipede.