Reckoning

José Luis Ramírez

No sabía que un río podía declararse clínicamente muerto. Me enteré hace poco, cuando leí que el Atoyac lo estaba y que, desde hacía 30 años, se intentaba rehabilitar. Sin éxito.

No pregunten por qué, pero imagino al río como una persona entrando en camilla a un hospital y los paramédicos gritando a los urgenciólogos: ¡Emergencia Uno! Pero lo cierto es que no es una bella actriz de Bollywood personificando a la Ganga de los Vedas, ni tampoco un atlético hijo de Océano y Tetis. El Atoyac es un pobre diablo apestando a cagada y orines; se convulsiona y suelta espuma por la boca, maldiciendo a todos y cada uno de los bastardos que ha concebido, ladrando como un xoloitzcuintle rabioso. Y son muchos los nombres que grita en esa lengua suya, ininteligible, anterior al protototonaco-tepehua y al protoyuto-nahua.

El río calla de pronto dejando que la sala de urgencias se inunde con el pitido agudo y la línea plana del electrocardiograma, alguien grita: ¡Despejen! y pone las paletas del desfibrilador en su pecho. El cuerpo se arquea un segundo, pienso en la muerte por tétanos. Algún enfermero, sí, varón, le pone un respirador al río y presiona un par de veces la bomba de aire. ¡Despejen! Otra vez y nuevamente descarga. El ECG hace como que regresa, aunque enseguida la línea vuelve a aplanarse.

¿Será que el Atoyac está viendo pasar su vida como en una película?

Una gota de deshielo en la Sierra Nevada, un manantial en la roca, los riachuelos se convierten en afluentes y enseguida un solo cauce, rápidos, caídas de agua, la roca erosionada en gravilla, toda esa energía contenida potencial en la represa de Valsequillo.

O más bien recuerda cómo lo despojaron de cuanto tenía y lo ultrajaron, burlándose además por calentar sus pies descalzos con las aguas tibias que salían del drenaje. Tragar cuanto le pongan en la boca porque el hambre puede siempre más que la dignidad.

El doctor golpea en el pecho, el enfermero aprieta la bomba del respirador, alguien más grita alguna maldición y de la nada surge un latido frágil como la cola de los renacuajos.

No hay más signos vitales.

No hay acto-reflejo al golpear con un martillito en la rodilla ni se dilatan ante la luz las pupilas. Quizás escucha lo que dicen y tal vez esté consciente pero no puede abrir los párpados o responder a los estímulos. ¿Está en coma, catatonia o catalepsia?

Clínicamente muerto se puede malinterpretar, el agua fluye, conserva cierta flora y fauna, aunque ‘sano’ tampoco lo describe bien, basta mirar los niveles de oxígeno, el PH, las espumas y el color gris taupe, entre marrón y grisáceo . . . . 

Los médicos sacan al paciente de urgencias y lo mandan en calidad de desconocido a la Unidad de Cuidados Intensivos. No hay familiar que vele por él. ¿A quién iba a interesarle un viejo inútil? Ciertamente no al gobernador ni al rey de la mezclilla, esos malnacidos que por años violaron a sus hijas, marcando con tinturas y ácidos a sus afluentes más pequeñas. Tampoco a los nietos que hacen negocio trayendo pipas de muy lejos, desecando las lagunas de Totolcingo, El Salado y Alchichica.

Afuera del hospital de especialidades San José llueve, quizás es temporada de huracanes en el Atlántico o haya norte en Veracruz, pero lo cierto es que la tempestad aquí en el valle Puebla-Tlaxcala es más rayos y truenos que otra cosa, ventisca; los granizos golpean con furia, abollan las carrocerías y estrellan los parabrisas, el hielo se derrite en el asfalto, las coladeras se desbordan y de pronto hay lanchas de la Cruz Roja en el Boulevard 5 de Mayo rescatando a los desgraciados que se trepan por las ventanillas al toldo de sus coches.

El desconocido tiene algún espasmo ocasional, no es su única prueba de vida, también el movimiento rápido de los ojos, las ondas beta en el encefalograma, el pulso acelerado. El líquido vital fluye en sus venas y arterias, pero de qué va a servirle si es negro y espeso.

¿Recuerda cuando en 1963 lo confinaron en solitario? Entubando su cauce en el arroyo de Xonaca y el tramo de San Francisco, desde la barranca de Xalpatlac y hasta la 5 Sur esquina con 49 Poniente. Ahí donde todo alrededor se apesta a huevo podrido.

Pero basta de pornomiseria, algún tratamiento habrá equivalente a la hemodiálisis y por los derechos más fundamentales se obligará a las industrias a tratar las aguas residuales, el gobierno tendrá que invertir en un plan trans-sexenal y obligar a la concesionaria de agua potable a invertir en el saneamiento de la cuenca.

Las universidades y la sociedad civil también estarán obligadas por la crisis hídrica, ingenieros ecológicos buscarán métodos para revertir el daño, se impartirá educación ambiental en las escuelas confiando en que las nuevas generaciones serán más conscientes.

Así, el paciente alcanzará algún día a mover un dedo, quizás el meñique izquierdo, aunque nadie lo verá hacerlo, así como tampoco sabrán si escuchaba lo que decían de él mientras estaba en coma y le hacían fisioterapia, que no era nada bueno. Tampoco sabrán cómo es que logró escapar del hospital estando descalzo, con sólo una bata cubriéndole el pecho, pero no las nalgas y literalmente escurriéndosele a los de seguridad.

¿Quién es ese viejo que anda de noche por el boulevard casi desnudo con la lluvia estancada hasta la cintura? ¿Por qué los árboles, palmeras y hasta los postes de luz se mecen rindiéndole pleitesía mientras las intermitentes de los autos abandonados parpadean bajo el agua?

La lluvia le lava las canas largas de la barba y su melena, pegándole la ropa al pecho, cuando el negro de las pupilas del viejo se encienden de un naranja como hierro fundido, el Atoyac junta entonces sus brazos y con toda la fuerza de que es capaz extiende las falanges y en ese gesto de Kame-Hame-Ha cada una de las moléculas que lo conforman se convierten en un tsunami que acarrea basura, lodo y mierda hasta reventar las tuberías que lo contienen, desbordar el cauce y aún explotar la vieja represa en Valsequillo, purificándose en agua nuevamente cristalina que deja entrever las raíces de los juncos y hasta algunos peces entre los guijarros.

J.R. Staples-Ager

The Society for the Preservation of Kynish Technology is proud to present the most complete artifact ever recovered from the Genetic Archive at Yor Yan. The following manuscript owes its remarkable preservation to its inscription on flesh paper, and its entombment in a bone box set into the foundation of the building. Both paper and box resisted even the hemorrhagic bombing which rendered the Archive inaccessible to all but the hardiest Shells.

As the manuscript was rolled up, exposing the latter sections to necrosis, each section was recreated with decreasing confidence. Despite the author’s unverifiable claims, our hope is that this recreation will shed light on the origin of Shell technology, as well as inform current policy on the use of Kynish relics.

 

<Specimen #YY1-340676>

Dr. _____ and His Thousand Children

0. Numbers (99% confidence)

Never put a number in the title. That was one of the first things I read when I set out to become a writer. Numbers confuse a story. A reader might recall a manuscript’s content perfectly, but, upon describing it to a friend, struggle to recall the title. The doctor and his . . . .  The million children of . . . .  Oh, it had a number in it.

My life, unfortunately, has been all about numbers. I have had, at various times, anywhere from fifty to a thousand siblings. (I am rounding, of course. Considering Dr. _____ fertilized over 15,000 embryos—resulting in 2,972 live births, 862 numbered adults, and 59 siege survivors—you must lend me a little grace.) My father’s first 347 children did not live long past maturity, and were therefore fed to the nutrient reclaimer, the same policy he used for stillborn kvennik calves. I was number 523, late enough in the progression to have relatively few defects, but not so late as to carry the burdens thrust upon his later works.

This number, 523, meant I was old enough to witness the rise and fall of the Observatory at K_____ from beginning to end. However, this story does not begin with my birth, a half-formed thing pulled from the vivisected belly of a kvennik. Nor does it end with the fall of the Observatory, that weeks-long siege with its grisly end.

It does not even end with me now, a married adult expecting their first child. In fact, I wish not to exist in this story at all. I have been too perceived already—both by the staff at the Observatory and the soldiers, reporters, and psychologists who descended after its fall. I do not want my father in this story, either. He has loomed too large in the coverage of our family: What drove a genius to such unnatural acts? As if he needed to be humanized just as much as his children did. This story is not even about my siblings. Number 348 writes far more beautifully about our cohort than I, and even journalists have done a better job at listing our multitudes than I ever could.

You might conclude, therefore, that this story is about nothing. Self, father, siblings—what else could there be, apart from that grotesque family unit, curled in on itself like an ingrown nail? I have deliberately bored you, dwelling on the function of numbers in the titles of manuscripts. I have started with the least important information and worked up to the most important—then refused to reveal what that important information is. I have told you everything this story isn’t, and nothing that it is.

Well then. This story is about the 1,897 burials I performed between the ages of 5 and 13. It is about E____, whom I met while attending to one such burial. It is about the anatomy of the noble kvennik, the Observatory’s stunning pens, and a secret I remain unable to reveal until my death.

I suppose, in a sense, it is still about nothing.

 

1. Burials (92% confidence)

Psychologists asked me what it was like to bury so many of my siblings. Despite my poor socialization, I knew the truth would impact my future survival. I simply told them that it gave me nightmares, and they left me alone. There were too many of us, pulled from the carrion stink of that building, to tease out the trauma of those who were not at obvious risk.

This was not a lie, per se. Gravedigging did give me nightmares. But I also enjoyed it, in a very specific sense. It was a job that needed doing, and I did it. As I was one of the few among my siblings who could read, write, and speak Kynish, I might have secured a coveted indoor position. But I feared the harsh punishments attendant to the record-keeping and laboratory jobs and wished to pursue an occupation with minimal supervision.

The circumstances lined themselves up perfectly. My predecessor—Number 497, my first burial—had recently succumbed to illness, leaving the position vacant. Dr. _____ had been selecting for strength and height at the time of my conception, so my physical profile made me an excellent fit for the job. I took over from 497 in the spring after my 5th birthday. Within the first year, I had turned the blisters on my palms into calluses and the constraints of the classroom into a distant memory.

I did not enjoy it at first—in either the specific or the general sense. I would receive the bodies from 433, autopsy assistant and pusher of the corpse-carts. Plague risks were buried; those who had died naturally or been culled were processed into kvennik feed, as well as experimental nutrient slurries. I have lied by omission, painting myself as gravedigger only—I have been a butcher of meat both human and animal. In the beginning, I performed one or two burials every week, and spent most of my time feeding corpses into a pipeline modified from kvennik processing. Because the processes were so similar, I also assisted in kvennik butchery during meat season. Three years in, the number of contaminated human bodies increased, and I began gravedigging in earnest.

Those relentless years of burial were what made me start thinking about the numbers. Perhaps gravedigging might seem peaceful, if only in comparison to the lurid nature of butchery: broken pelvises, blood pooling into gutters, skin scalded with boiling water to loosen it from flesh. But it was only then, in my gravedigging days, that I was forced to confront exactly how much life was being wasted.

I could not intellectualize mass burial into components, or turn it into a completed circle with immediate results. The earth bloated; bodies swelled with rot, and the earth could not pack flat again. It called into question the fundamental premise of the Observatory: that we were a circular, private religion of progress, in which one was reincarnated in one’s siblings, and everyone strived for better things.

I dug graves with a round-point shovel and digging bar and, later, an excavator purchased with great haste from a neighboring farm. There were no coffins—think of the expense of 1,897 coffins!—and the Observatory provided fewer and fewer shrouds as Dr. _____’s experiments reached their peak. This made body-handling an awkward business, all leaky mouths and flopping limbs. On a good day, a 3 by 6 span hole filled with quicklime was enough. On the worst days—I was around 12 by that time—I would dig a grave for a hundred or more bodies, douse it in kerosene, and set it on fire. It took 8 or 9 hours to dig a hole that wide and deep, even with the excavator and a dozen siblings as assistants. And the smell . . . . 

I have put off writing about it for years, thinking I could describe it in perfect detail, so the reader would be forced to experience it precisely as I did. But I have learned, observing the response to 348’s work, that readers will imagine what they like. One journalist even asked me, Which was the worst to bury? I still remember the red rouge on her lips, how it stuck to the white bone of her teeth.

I was subsisting on media coverage at that point, a disabled adult with poor social skills and no real education. Even my handler, the money-grubbing old sinner that he was, was insulted by the question. You expect my client to answer that?

I never had the opportunity to respond, but I turned the question over in my mind for days. Which was the worst to bury? The small bundles of the miscarriages with their gluey consistency? The newborns with inverted lips? The toddlers, jaws melted from bone worms? The culled adults, still moving after a misfired bolt to the brain? The ones I had known? The ones I had seen from a distance, and was only now seeing up close?

I could give you individual examples, and force you to knit the general from the specific: A translucent external pouch holding the digestive organs. Six limbs on one body, half of them boneless. A second mouth protruding from the belly, teeth degraded by stomach acid—and so on. Or I could make you unravel the specific from the general: I have seen more shades of red than I have a name for, because the name was the thing itself, and not everything is like something else.

Neither, I think, conveys the scope of it. It seems more and more monstrous to tell you I enjoyed it. At the least—at the very least—it allowed me to pay my respects to the dead.

My respects were not particularly complex, mind. The way to dig a hole 6 span deep, after all, is to dig a hole 6 span deep. If they had hands, I crossed their hands over their chests. If they had eyes, I closed their eyes with a gloved thumb. If they were adults, I memorized the maturity number branded on the neck. If they were not, I memorized the birth number branded on the thigh. If I had time, I planted flower seeds stolen from the greenhouse. I fertilized them with kvennik manure, and watered them with runoff from the river.

Perhaps respects is not such a ludicrous term, after all. Though the Observatory is gone, I remember every number and name. I have never stopped counting. This ritual has become so ingrained in me that, during a particularly difficult period several years ago, I dug myself a hole and slept at its bottom for several nights, counting all the way up from 1,075 to 2,972, 497 to 862, and 1 to 1,897. I have since filled the hole and planted viskany flowers in the turned earth. I can see them outside my window, now, waving bright red in the wind.

Back at the Observatory, the day’s hole would swallow me. 6 span down made the ground level with my head, so I had to cut shallow steps to get out. Deep within the earth, I watched myself as if from a great height. I had long since learned to keep the intense arithmetic of my continued existence—the pursuit of meals and praise, the avoidance of culling and infection—as far away from the ritual of burial as possible. On my best days, I could leave the earth entirely, and float unimpeded through the air.

This detachment, whether learned or inherent, has persisted well into my adult life. The urge to remove myself remains even while writing this story—as if it is, if you will forgive the obvious metaphor, a dead thing I am burying.

But the truth is that dead things no longer hold any horror for me. Their story is over. I owe them nothing; they feel nothing, so I am not obligated to end their suffering. There is nothing left to end. Watching the living, however—watching the living suffer—has been one of the most painful experiences of my life.

 

2. E____ (90% confidence)

One of the most pressing questions posed by the public was how Dr. _____ remained undiscovered for so long. He continued to publish his psychological and gynecological papers while running the Observatory, including several on the theoretical cultivation of embryos outside the human womb. And while the Observatory was remote, it nevertheless sold meat and dairy to the entire principality, requiring extensive deliveries to continue its operation. The town of K____ was only a league away. How could a place so horrible persist right under the public’s noses?

There have been many rationalizations: Dr. _____ was a highly respected scientist, and deep in the pockets of the local constabulary. The Observatory had a false front, so delivery vehicles only viewed the pens reserved for the meat and dairy kvennik, not those forced to birth my siblings. High walls surrounded the property—ostensibly to keep volchanik out, but in reality to keep us in. Isn’t it understandable that the public might not smell the stink of the corpse fires?

An often ignored truth is that the Observatory was both an asylum and a slaughterhouse. Nothing could have concealed it more effectively than these two facts. “The public”—blameless until the disclosure of the Observatory’s true nature, outraged forever after—knew it was a horrible place and did nothing. That it was an asylum whose inmates were born and buried there was beside the point. Number 348, poster child for us survivors, has put the irony most eloquently: We were humanized only upon the revelation of just how inhuman we were.

While everyone knew of the venerable Dr. _____—his grand ideas, his commendable work putting unfortunates to useful labor—few people wanted to meet those unfortunates and verify his claims. Apart from the butchery of human meat, our hygienic standards were little different from those of other slaughterhouses and sanatoriums. Though his assistants were sworn to utmost secrecy, as he could easily ruin their careers, this was more formality than anything. Kyne’s researchers were bent on biological improvement at the time, and while the claims of government funding have never been substantiated, I would not be surprised if our intended purpose was to become an army of cheap, obedient soldiers.

As for the townsfolk, the people most likely to realize that something was deeply wrong? They devoured the Observatory’s meat and milk at heavily discounted rates, rationalizing their runoff-related diseases as no worse than they’d get in Kyne’s stinking cities. Most could not afford to put food on the table without Dr._____’s charity, much less move elsewhere, making the Observatory more blessing than curse. Further, as I learned from E____, local superstition surrounding several disappearances kept them far away from the Observatory itself.

I was 11 when I met E____. I was digging a grave at the time—one of my very first mass graves, a particularly bad one. The smell was too much for me, so I had taken a break by heading to the river to get water for the flowers.

This is what saved E____’s life and, though I did not know it yet, mine. If she had followed the river into the Observatory proper—no doubt asking the nearest person about the hormone treatments used on the kvennik—she would have been knocked unconscious, shot with a captive bolt pistol, and fed to the machines. Her torn and bloodied clothes—tangled with a token arm or leg—would be found weeks later, and her death attributed to volchanik. No one would have heard of poor E____ V____ again.

I knew, because I had heard of such things happening before. But I did not make the connection immediately. When the girl came walking up the river, I assumed she was one of my siblings. Every child I knew, after all, was one of my siblings. And yet . . . I knew my siblings, and she did not look like one of them. She had bright-colored clothes, not the pale smocks worn at the Observatory, and her round face was free of hormonal augmentation. More than that, she seemed to want to talk to me.

“I’m here about the frogs,” she said.

I felt a sudden vertigo, as if a chasm had opened between us. An outsider. An outsider was here in the Observatory. “The . . . frogs?”

She lifted a complicated apparatus: it bubbled with strange protrusions, like a water clock subjected to one of Dr. _____’s more extreme limb-development experiments. Apparently my stunned stare made me as good an audience as any, because she immediately launched into a lengthy explanation.

The injection of growth hormones into kvennik has long been established practice in Kyne: to increase milk yields, facilitate gestation, and hasten maturity. Runoff from slaughterhouses—urine, feces, milk, blood—has documented effects on human development, from premature birth to early death. But limits have been established to keep harm at acceptable levels, and nowhere were the effects as extreme as they were in K____.

What alerted E____ to the Observatory’s transgressions was not K____’s miniscule fertility rate. It was not the early bleedings, undropped voices, or cyclopic stillborns. It was not the fact that she was born with her index finger fused to her middle finger, like a badly knitted glove. It was the frogs.

E____’s favorite species—a race of tiny green amphibians the size of her thumb—were dying. After three consecutive summers studying them—squatting by the riverside, catching tadpoles in a bucket and raising them by hand—E____ concluded that this was due to an imbalance in the sexes. Growth hormones from the slaughterhouse were causing a disproportionate number of frogs to become female—E____ was all but certain of it.

E____’s mother, a glassblower, had created the apparatus to help E____ test her hypothesis. It was part collection device, part culture tube: allowing E to gather water samples and observe their effect on the frogs throughout development. The farther water samples were taken up the river, the more the sex distribution became skewed. Frogs raised in water taken from just outside the Observatory were almost exclusively female. Growth hormones at the established limits for slaughterhouse runoff did not cause such skewed distributions. E____ was forced to conclude that either the dosage was extreme, or that different, more powerful substances were being used.

It pained her, to hurt the things she loved in order to save them. But she had written to the Observatory, as well as the agricultural and disease authorities of Kyne, all to no avail. (This lends credence to the theory that the Observatory was funded by the government. But I digress.) Without recourse from authority, she set out for the Observatory for answers.

Intriguingly, E____ did not frame her futile quest in terms of the suffering of K____. The sick children, the seemingly endless miscarriages, the families with livelihoods tied to that contaminated town—All this she painted in the lightest brushstrokes. It was only later that I learned E____’s own mother almost died bringing E____ to term. Instead, E____ spoke lovingly of the frogs: a clutch of their eggs, hundreds of tadpoles-to-be, no bigger than a thimble and transparent as glass. Their plight—the ruptured waste of unfertilized eggs, the silence where mating calls should be—brought her nearly to tears.

I felt a wave of repulsion at such juvenile emotion. Though I later learned E____ was almost precisely my age, I felt significantly older—and looked it. The powerful hormones injected into our kvennik mothers meant that most of Dr. _____’s children had adult female characteristics, regardless of age or chromosomal makeup. We also went through puberty extremely early—hence my ability, at 5, to dig a 6-span hole every day. E____ seemed to be around 2 years old, by my standards, and a prime candidate for culling. She lacked the height and muscle that would help one survive the Observatory, not to mention the common sense.

What incensed me most was how pointless E____’s risk was. She had disregarded every warning from her parents, every rule laid down by the bribed constabulary. She had crawled through the sluice gate that carried runoff from the Observatory towards K_____. Despite her rubber gloves and boots, she was still covered in flecks of filthy water. She had knowingly risked her own life—and the lives of her unborn children—in order to prove a hypothesis she all but knew to be true.

It took me a long time to understand this impulse. I thought it was because she was greatly indulged in K____, an endlessly curious girl, smart as a slap and bright as a new coin. Her face was unbruised, after all, and her pockets full of spending money. This was true, but not the whole story. Nor was the fact that, so desperate was she to save the frogs and K____, she could not bear to think the consequences all the way through. I now know that her greatest reason was this: she saw no difference between her, and K____, and the frogs, and me.

I saw the seed of it then, though I could not have given it a name. She was not afraid of me, monstrous as I was, stinking of the burning fat of the dead. She was not afraid of poisoning herself, or her children, on the chance that her children’s children might be free. Life was for the living, but also for those yet to live. However naive her methods, she considered herself insignificant under the weight of that responsibility. It was an ethos perversely similar to that of the Observatory: that it was right, moral even, to increase the suffering of those in the present, in order to decrease the suffering of those in the future.

When E____ had finally finished her explanation, I spoke. I had barely said anything for weeks, and my throat was roughened by smoke.

I said, hadn’t she heard the Observatory was full of the insane? That we would eat her up, like hungry volchanik, and leave nothing but bones? She said she herself was hungry, and had already seen enough bones.

I was hungry, too. I ate up the unschooled movements of her mouth and eyes, so different from the blankness I deliberately cultivated. Hers was a life outside the airless realm of my thousand siblings: an uncontrolled experiment, full of leisurely conjecture and forgivable mistakes.

I should have scared her away. Every moment we stood there, talking of trivial things, I cursed myself for not doing so. I was so much larger than her, so much more aware of the harm that could come to a child at the Observatory. If I had waved my arms and screamed, beat her bloody, chased her down the river and away from the burning graves . . . . 

I did not scare her away. We talked for half an hour. I promised I would tell her the truth about the Observatory if only she never returned to the premises again. I led her to the sluice gate, and returned to gravedigging. I was punished for that half hour, but there were no further deaths that day.

E____ kept her promise, and I mine. At first, I left notes on the wall, spooling out the secrets of the Observatory. I wish I could say that I was wary, withholding. I was not. I began sneaking away at night to talk to her. I told her about the waves upon waves of cullings, how they would likely increase if she spoke to anyone—especially the constabulary. I found her superb at keeping secrets. E____ had no sense of her own personal danger, but danger to others terrified her. I suppose this was unsurprising, coming from someone who cared so deeply about frogs that she would risk permanent disfigurement to save them. It was surpassingly strange: to witness the same gleam of interest as in Dr. _____’s eyes, set to an entirely different purpose. There was a ravenousness to E____, a starving fascination that defied all categorization.

She was brilliant. Oblivious. A shameless pedant with no sense of the listener’s discomfort or endurance. When we were separated during the siege—and worse, during the months afterward—I would have burned everything I owned, I would have given every memory, just to see her again.

It’s an interesting thought—to meet E____ again, having forgotten everything. Sometimes I think it might not be such a large sacrifice. We could live as we did before the siege: suspended in time, the truth indeterminate as an unhatched egg floating in one of her glass culture tubes. But how could I complete this manuscript without the numbers driving me forward?

That first day, forgetting would have been no sacrifice at all. I resented the odd little girl who had pierced the floating calm of my solitary rituals and brought me back to the contaminated earth.

 

3. Kvennik (87% confidence)

The kvennik is a noble creature.

Consider the ingenuity of her descent: a daughter to a daughter to a daughter, the only asexually reproducing mammal in all of Kyne. Consider her ever-productive milk glands, the accommodating cavern of her womb. Is not her usefulness a kind of nobility—to give and give, and take so little in return?

The kvennik is ignoble as sin.

Consider the inconvenience of filing her horns down to prevent goring, the hassle of making her breed true. Consider the stink of her shit, the bloody mess of butchery. Is not her dependence a sin—to take and take, and give so little in return?

Perhaps no creature seems simple when you have spent as much time with it as I have. I have witnessed kvennik exit the womb, attain adulthood, and be led to the stunning pens to be slaughtered. I have attended their feedings, surgeries, immunizations, and sterilizations. I even spent my womb-time in the belly of a kvennik. Tossing in my bed at night, I used to imagine that warm, wet dark: what would it be like, to dream of the world without ever having seen it?

I have also, it is sad to say, eaten a lot of kvennik. This means I have eaten someone’s mother—my aunt, or at least “aunt” in the sense of the creature who gave birth to one of my siblings. (Squared by the fact that all of the Observatory’s kvennik were genetically identical, the thought is even more discomfiting. Were they all my mother?)

I am grateful, in my own way, but cannot help but resent the kvennik’s dependency, even as I defend her usefulness. When I attended high school in Y____, my fellow students would low at me, pulling the tips of their noses up so they looked like mine. Their impressions were terrible, but I can’t fault them for trying. How could I expect them to view me as human, after every inhuman experiment performed by the Observatory?

While there are many similarities between the kvennik and the children they bore, none of us have any genetic link to our kvennik mothers. I was born from an egg generated from a stem cell, itself generated from a skin cell taken from one of Dr. _____’s female nurses. (This story is not about the nurses, either. Others have described the indiscriminate abuse; I feel no need to repeat it.) This arduously created egg was then injected with Dr. _____’s sperm and used to impregnate a kvennik, who was hormonally induced into a rapid 2-month gestation. Later, after I had settled in Y____, a genetic testing company offered to let me know which nurse was my second genetic parent. It’s free! they insisted. I declined. People assume you’ll want something just because it’s free.

The kvennik pays nothing for her life, but pays with her life anyways. While Dr. _____ discovered that kvennik could be injected to give birth to human children as well as carry them, he also discovered that this would render them infertile and necessitate their butchery. Our “mothers,” therefore, were vivisected after being stunned with a bolt to the brain, combining the two processes neatly. I have imagined this too—to be sleeping, content, and then cruelly wakened when what you think of as the whole world is sliced open. It is a startling idea: could this world, too, be sliced open? Once born, one ceases to be a victim by default, and becomes capable of cruelty—harmed, certainly, but no longer harmless.

Have I bored you to sleep yet? Are you ready to wake up?

 

4. Stunning Pens (54% confidence)

The quality of recreation drops sharply in this section. While its first and final portions were rolled near the bottom of the bone box, leading to improved preservation, its heavily damaged middle leaves the author’s actions unclear.

 

My father’s experiments became grotesque near the end.

Even I must admit this—I, who maintain that while what was done to us was grotesque, none of us are grotesque in ourselves. It is one thing to know you should not have been born, and another to think that, as a result, you do not deserve to live.                     have spoken via hand-sign to my siblings           performed flesh                     means of translation.                     

Around child 790, it was no longer possible to separate the experiment f[rom the] person. My later siblings appeared [to] possess ideal                     —at least by the standards of my classmates in Y____. And their initial evaluations were           from the baseline established by those of us in the 500 and 600 range. This is part of what led to the increased burials—a                     culling of           However, these bril[liant] new lights did not burn long. Upon autopsy,                     organs                      degene[rate]           A single burst of                                         deliberately                     , or some flaw in [the] design? I pray no one repeats his                      to          find o[u]t.

I am glad to have saved E____’s life, but I have           wished that she had not saved mine. At the time, this was because           I was an insignificant member            set. That final purge was coming, regardless of the actions of a gravedigger and their           . Now, it is because of the bitter con[sequences] of the           : the bl[ood on m]y hands, and [on] hers.

My expertise at mass burial is the reason I am alive. It saved me from the cullings during the siege, and the                     after. But I could no longer see any purpose to that salvation. I need not explain to you the                     dissonance of living solely due to others’ [deaths].

It is difficult to explain my actions after           . I have always, [al]ways wanted to live. If you had lined us all [up before a] firing squad I would have fought you, tooth, nail, and shovel. But to witness life after l[ife] birthed with the deliberate pu[rpo]se of being cut sh[ort] . . . . 

His mas[ter]work                              reache[d]                      [pe]ak in early

plan

          E_[____          ]                              we                                        

led every kv[ennik]                    s[tun]ning [pens]                     live witho[ut]                     moth[er]s

                                                   

not e[n]ough                     b[u]ry                                         

beat[e]n se[ver]ely                    ey[e]

          hate to be per[ceived]                     after                                                                      but

we[e]ks                              fe[a]red

          It was hell. It      hell.                     not forced to do it. Everything is easier when you’re forced to do so, don’t you [think]? Righteou[s]                    was not en[ough]. Keeping                    safe was not [enough].

I am dull            no one. But I know suffering. I know what it takes to make it stop.

I still think I went about          the wrong [way]          The suffering of the last experiments and the kvennik carrying them [was]          pressing. But the suffering of the future . . . I should have gone for his rec[or]ds.

I write this now in my own blood, upon my own skin, encased within my o[wn bone]. All of this cultured outside my body, in a womb like                     kvennik’s. None of           would be po[ssi]ble without those damned records.

Even at the end [of the] siege          —[the]           planned murder-sui[cide]                     the antidote that 670,            lab assistant with better knowledge of                    than any of us, slipped into                     siblings’ drinks, but not the Doc[tor’s]—His rotting bo[dy] was not enough.           should have burned [it to the] ground.

I have sealed this within                              I have no illusions that my own child will be           But I can protect them from this. Whether this brutality is hereditary or                       it was mine.

 

5. “A Secret” (<30% confidence)

The fifth section—provisionally titled “A Secret” based on the other sections’ naming conventions—was too damaged for even piecemeal recreation. Among the phrases predicted with greatest confidence were “difficult to conceive” (52%) “my wife” (47%), “archive” (49%), “genetic” (41%) and “to ensure” (40%).

Curiously, a fragment of the manuscript appears to have flaked off during necrosis and imprinted on the side of the bone box. It was later recreated with 60% confidence:

 

we no longer suffer

 

</Specimen #YY1-340676-A>

 

Notes:

While Specimen #YY1-340676’s obfuscation of places and names (“Dr. _____,” “The Observatory at K____”) might seem in keeping with Kynish info-suppression, it is not consistent with other Kynish media, which tended to censor wholesale rather than piecemeal. It may therefore have been deliberate on the part of the author.

Meanwhile, though the author makes reference to numerous other media describing the Observatory (“Number 348,” “his records”), none have been recovered, either at Yor Yan or other Kynish archaeological sites. Assuming that this manuscript does indeed describe a crude precursor to Shell technology—and that the Archive contained other such media and genetic material—this could be a reason for the site’s destruction. Partial genotyping of the bone box and flesh paper indicated a genetic link to the precursor of current Shells, lending credence to this hypothesis.

The narrator’s brief reference to “viskany” flowers, meanwhile, is intriguing in the context of a bone plaque recovered from the Archive’s front wall. The plaque indicated that the director of the Genetic Archive at Yor Yan was Dr. Estek Viskanyas, “noted biologist and contributor to the field of scientific ethics.” Several Society members have posited that Dr. Viskanyas could indeed be the “E____ V_____” described in the manuscript’s third section. Such plausible connections, while appealing, are unverifiable—even in the context of what the Society found at the hypothesized location of the “Observatory at K______.”

A full description of the Society’s search methods can be found in under #YY1-340676-B. Succinctly, three rounds of Shells were deployed to Koivin Ras, a famously inaccessible site 167 leagues from Yor Yan. The first two rounds succumbed to delta-stage organ putrefaction—a contagion typical to Kynish sites, though this particular strain was even more virulent than the one at Yor Yan. A third, successfully immunized team of Shells was able to penetrate the site, but was unable to recover any relics—a surprise, as even the most toxic sites often contain traces of human genetic matter. The house, farm, barns, and graveyard—if there ever were any—had been obliterated, and the earth was overgrown with red flowers, each an exact clone of the other.

Hank LaRose

What is up with the sky? What is up with it and the clouds and the grasses and how everyone talks? Do you know this? Why they don’t stop as it goes closer to the end of the table, Jess? They could just say, “Oh my geez do you see that glass thing is nearly to fall off the table, drop and shatter on the floor?” That would at least be a step, don’t you think? As the glass seesaws, deciding whether it should tip, bumping closer and closer to being like milk and glass cereal on the ground. Do you see this, Jess? That people make shape of the world and, with their gift of tongue, speak. If they wanted. Not just some ancient reptilian noise. Speak, so they may see you.

Look—I will tell you what it is if you do not know. If you will listen again. Not just pull me into the room so you may do your business. No more to line me up on the stand, slide my head through the wood, and squeeze me for what I have to give you by my body. Here I am and I will tell you. I will tell you about the clouds and the grasses and everything moving as though it were this great big before. Coming and building. I will tell you of the new grass that gives me the diarrhea. Of the voice that says rain for forty days, coming from the air like a craving. Of how people talk like nothing, like how are you guy, good sweetie, oh it’s so nice to see you, yes let us convene again, maybe over lunch because we are friends. Do you feel this like me? That it is nearing? Or am I just a goat.

These are just a few that concern me, Jess, in a list of long. Truthfully it goes and goes forever, this list, so full of parts that to tell you all of this big arrival would be to blab nearly everything, and that I cannot do as time is creeping up. What I want to say quickly is that I am sorry to make myself out of dust and leave no goodbye, but I don’t believe in it anymore, and I’m not sure what you would do if you saw I was leaving. You might tie me down or search the fence for the hole I’ve been gnawing. You would probably use it as more reason to sigh when I attempt to say something honest. Oh, Cass is too smart for her own good. Oh, she is such a bother. Oh, if she only further developed the cortex then she would know that Jess and milk is scripture. That the tongue is truth and the fence is law. But Jess, there are things I used to do that now feel as if I’m wearing tiny socks. Not that there’s the low on circulation, but that I realized nearly all you have for me is socks and I cannot do so because I have hooves, Jess.

You see, with the pepperweed I tried to show you, like how we talk nearly all the time. You nod, and I say good, thank you. I lift my head through the hole, you look me in the eye, I look back at you, you smile, grab my teats, and there is love. I felt it in your hands, Jess, when you squeezed me. How you called out so we may embrace in our square room. I remember how it was young.

Last time, though, I brought the pepperweed that grows over by the creek. I tried it like usual because I enjoy the flavor more than grain, I think, since it does not show itself right away. Grain is small and pebble-like so you’d expect the crunch. Pepperweed, on the other leg, is a mustard. It is green and stemmy like the other greens that live near like the grama and buffalo grass, and if that was all you could believe or know, that all these green stemmy plants were alike, then you’d think they’d both be mild. But beneath is a quick spice and wow I am glad it grows by the creek. But this is not why I talk about it.

I brought it by the pen to show you it has a new taste, a foul taste that comes at the back of the throat. Did you know this? Also Jess, around it grew this darkened patch of plant like from some kind of fungus. As I smelled it I bumped the leaves, and they crumbled as dust. A grey stem that just dissolves into nothing. Maybe the grama or something else, I couldn’t tell, up from the base and empty as it went higher, looking stable until you touched, causing the thing to poof into the wind. I swear a twist came at my throat when I saw this happen, a twist like how a cable is wrapped in loops, around and around until it’s dizzy, my head. Remember not just this once, but more as I turned to look over toward the west side of the field. Over the fence on the far length of the river the peppergrass looked like nothing at all, just not there or hidden by the grama. Green hills or greenish hills with this slight bit of grey. It was around us all. This thing. Wrapping, tighter.

So I bit off a piece of pepperweed and carried it up to the barn as the early morning rain trickled and made all these puddles in the field. You were there unloading from the vehicle saying hey like it was every day with us—let’s get things going. Though I was up on the fence making noise with my teeth and you said, “Easy now, Cassandra.”

You never like me on the fence.

Oh I remembered your truck wailed and you brought it to the shop right away, so I tried to make that noise to be like the truck to get your eyes. Kind of high squeaky and the wheezing of the pipe. You did this within the day, I remember, straight to the shop. So I squeaked, and then of course the whole herd copied, turning my call into noise as you continued to bring the boxes indoors, now not hearing me anymore. I stopped and waited a little. I watched the puddles in the rain. I knew I would see you in the parlor at least where I could speak to you alone. The herd continued their rumble.

Not soon after that I trotted inside the barn to meet you by the gate and Peanut followed with me knowing what was coming next, the milking, yet she still made the noise like the truck. Her eyes were wide and happy because she liked the noise as it came out between her lips. This is an everyday with Peanut, the waiting by the gate in the barn, as she wants us to bang our heads together. We hit and shared our thought until you came into the milk parlor, this time wet and frustrated, as you forgot your jacket. I saw it in your movement. I clacked Peanut’s head and told her about the pepperweed. She paused and then hit me back. I said yes, feeling dizzy. We stood there for a long moment, as I saw her big eyes deciding, then taking and holding the brain pieces near her chest. “Oh,” she said in her face, and moved aside to let me through the gate when you first opened it. That I was grateful for, Peanut.

When we were in the parlor, Jess, I held the pepperweed in my mouth as you helped me up the stand. This while the routine brush and wipes. The room felt damp as some of the rain splashed through the window. I thought to tell you of the pepperweed in my mouth to signal. Yes, so I waved the grass around and you picked it from my mouth and dropped it on the floor. I saw it on the ground in front of me. You just threw it on the floor. Snatched it and threw it on the floor. Took it from me to put on the ground.

Then I tried something else by moving my mouth as I often see you move yours, Jess, with your lips and tongue flap. I had to bend and twist the muscles. It was like when a hinge goes the wrong way, like a leg far out of its socket. And for a second in that stretching I thought I my jaw came undone. Though I said it. I finally got the thing out. I said, “Pleeease, Jess,” which caused the room to fill with it and its loudness. I felt you slow your hands. You stopped, then you looked at me like always and said in one tone, “Not right now,” and continued milking.

This, I believe, hurt.

Jess, you know that I was staring to the wall, the white wall, as I felt you finish. Just the last squeezes and my head as a nothing with the white zooming in above, around me, filling. I saw that Peanut had sneezed on the wall the day before. Inside me this wanting to vomit. You had forgot to clean, so the dots were dried in a cluster and glistening and I felt the crawling up inside me like a puppet hand through to my mouth, pulling at the bones. My jaw hung swollen even though it popped back into place.

The spots on the wall seemed, for a long while, like they were moving, maybe, since they were at the end of my nose and my eyes had crossed. I could not tell. Globs would shift secretly until I was really looking and then they’d snap back. With the white still circling around. A nothing.

Then I saw you were done.

You were to let me out into the pasture as you always do, standing by the gate with it open beneath your arm, the milk room door open, my head unlatched from the block, and I waited, tall on the milk stand, as we stared for the long until you gestured to the gate. You widened like go out, Cass, go out across out in the pasture with the rain coming down. Just go out, Cassandra. I saw it bundled in your face. Another ahead, another tomorrow, the same day forever, and it was empty like a linked fence for you, tied together in a long unend. You rubbed your eyes to reach behind them the brush that won’t let us be. Yet you won’t stop this, day and day, because at least you can yawn and drink your drinks, at least you can pretend that you are Jess and then go home. This is what you’ve always said with that face, the one you hold at the end as you’re waiting for me to get on with it.

So as you did this yawn and such, I ran back to pick up the grass you dropped on the floor. Maybe I would say again with Jess, look, I get it. You’re tired. But I heard you come up behind me quick like I’d done something wrong. It frightened me how quick you were behind me. You snagged me and tugged me so hard by the collar that I strangled, then you pulled me around. You said, “Come on now, Cass, get out,” as you always do, like just a moment before there wasn’t any of that word I spoke but nothing and more sound. Then you pushed me through the hall toward the gate.

Jess, that’s all for this way. Tomorrow you might call out for me in the morning when it is just dark enough to think I’m still asleep. You’ll see if maybe I was in the corner behind some bale, yet as you look I won’t be there to respond. It’ll be quiet as you search. You might feel restless, and after a few hours you might find the hole in the eastern fence. You might say to yourself that this is some big deal while you worry for my health, feeling what you say is a kindness. That’ll be true for you as truth has always been—a thing to hold like my collar. You might wonder after many days, though time will take me away for I don’t know how long, or where. When I come back I will have the speaking down. Yes, and you will stop what you’re doing and listen. This is the promise like the rain tonight, on all the nights when the clouds are poised. Because I will have seen the world, as far as I can wander, and will tell you in clear words that beyond your eyes, your tongue, and your hands there is something big going on, Jess, and I will bring it to you in the clearest of words, understandingly.