THE MOUTH
THE MOUTH
by Kathryn Keane
I had been digging in vain for berries and roots for hours when I saw the chicken. Plump and ruffled up like a duchess, it waddled through the bushes and was gone. I straightened up and hurried after it without pausing to even remove the clods of dirt from my hand. I could wash them later. My stomach being filled, however, was much more questionable.
I went after it, pushing the bushes aside so I could follow the chicken directly. Parasite-ridden, warbling, wobbling spheres of meat on legs that they were, chickens were usually simple enough to spot. Thankfully the bushes did not grow back far. Instead they opened into a clearing filled with brambles, nettles and the occasional clump of grass. I pulled up a handful of grass. For a brief moment, the lushness of it in my hand, the colour, the sheer plenitude of it tempted me. Only the memory of trying the grass in despair last week held me back. I had chewed and chewed and chewed on it, desperate to wring some nutrition from it, only to vomit it up an hour later. Soft skids of mud squished under my feet as I ran. I listened intently, but heard nothing to guide me except the usual rustles of wind and creaking of wood that cloaked the forest.
And then the first cluck came.
I changed direction, angling further left than where I had been headed before. The sound was faint, but unmistakeably different from birdsong or caws. This was the deepest I’d ever gone through the forest; the light that filtered through the trees grew less and the brambles grew larger. I started to accumulate little scratches around my ankles as I went. Another cluck sounded. Clutching my handful of grass as if it was a torch to light my way I followed it.
I went through a knot of trees and, navigating the bumps and twists of the roots across the forest floor, emerged into a clearing. A rock face loomed ahead of me. A wall of jagged shadows, it dripped pungently with the last of the leftover rain. Ivy and moss dangled from innumerable edges, each plant swaying in the wind like hangman’s ropes. And at the centre of the rock face, the ground inclined sharply, leading downwards into the mouth of a cave. Even from here, the air that rose from it had the cold, granite heaviness of millennia gathered thickly underground. Were there mountains or hills backing on to the forest? No-one I knew who had ventured deep into the forest had ever mentioned it.
The maw of the cave opened wide, with stalactites hanging from the top lip like teeth. A warbling, querulous cluck echoed indistinctly from inside it. A cold wind blasted my back. I felt the thinness of my dress as it was blown against me. A tremor had started in my hands; it happened on and off when hungry days came, and I had had four days with the remains of a stale loaf to stretch out and make last. I squinted inside. Towards the surface, the cave seemed mostly dark, but every now and then I caught a flicker of light. If there was something to see by, it had to be worth searching.
I shoved the handful of grass into the pocket of my apron and entered the cave. The light was there but it was flickering and faraway. Daylight from the entrance stretched in so I could see most of the rough stone wall but I suspected I would be able to see precious little the further I got into the cave. Still, there was light. I leaned a hand against the wall of the cave, in case the ground was uneven further ahead. The cold, rough moistness was unpleasant, but I needed to keep my grip on something.
The cave curved downwards, past the ground level. As I walked I listened close. There it was – a cluck warbled and echoed up from further inside the cave. With it came another noise. Surrounding me was a rhythmic sound of air moving, as if something deep in the cave or wound within its walls was breathing, slow and heavy.
My imagination was playing tricks on me. This was what came of hunger lasting too long. I focused on the sound of my footsteps instead, the concrete rhythm of leather against stone. The cave roof grew closer to my head the further I walked in. When drips of water landed on my head, I started. The water filtered through cave walls would usually be thinned and made ice cold from travelling through rock. But this water was warm, and came down in thick strings, like saliva. I felt the hollows of the wall go inwards and outwards beneath my palm, and removed it from the wall. Was it the unevenness of stone, or the regular metronome of breath?
The light was closer now. It flickered and danced off the cave walls like firelight. I frowned. Up ahead, just before a small arch like a doorway, the reflections the cave walls gave off seemed so much smoother than stone should. Perhaps this change and the strange light would help me find the chicken. I squinted closely. The squawks still sounded, but I could see nothing of it. It seemed to have suddenly developed the skills of a wild bird to keep itself hidden.
The ground past the arch seemed particularly steep. I put my hand back against the wall to steady myself – only to withdraw it with a cry. The wall felt gelatinous – slippery and sticky and smooth. What on earth could have replaced the stone? I would not risk walking through the arch, and to keep my balance instead went down on my hands and knees. This low down, I felt like a beast, like the chicken wobbling on its sticklike legs. It was only when I had straightened up and cleared the dust from my apron that I saw what was all around me.
Meat. Fresh meat, everywhere. I stood in a cavern great as a cathedral and instead of walls of stone they were entirely made of pink meat. The cavern was illuminated by a campfire in the centre and beside it lay a single butcher’s cleaver. I licked my cracked lips. Tears welled in my eyes, and I shook. Some nights lately I’d wake, my belly groaning its same old song and I’d feel death’s breath on the back of my neck, death’s arms slithering around me like a lover. This cavern had a hundred times the meat a single chicken would provide. The mouth of death would at last close, and I would no longer look deep into its wetly breathing expanse.
But I had to keep my head. If the meat was rotten or diseased I could end up weak and hurling up what little I did have in my stomach, and then I would be five times worse off than when I’d begun. I picked up the cleaver, moved closer to the wall, and prodded the meat. The meat looked almost exactly like a chicken breast, pink and glistening, and it had the firmness of fresh meat when I touched it. This cavern was going to save my life.
I raised the cleaver and sliced into the wall – only to stop. The cleaver refused to move. I poked the meat again. It felt exactly as gelatinous and giving as any other chicken meat. I tugged at the handle of the cleaver again, but the blade would not move. Tugging more and more, I put all of what meagre strength I had into it. I needed that chicken. My hands were starting to slip on the handle. I put one last desperate pull into it – and fell backwards. Letting go just in time, I thrust my arms behind me and landed palms and bottom first, rather than head.
The knock of the fall juddered through me. As I got my breath back, I registered the stinging of skin having been scraped from my palms, and the grittiness of pebbles and dirt getting into the cuts. As gently as I could, I began to pick some dirt from the cuts. A little blood welled from each of them. When I thought I could trust my strength and my balance again, I got to my feet. Grabbing the handle of the cleaver, I braced myself for another desperate pulling session – only to almost fall backwards again. The blade glided through the meat, parting it as easily as if it were silk.
I let go of the cleaver then and stepped back to look at the wall, trying to figure out what had changed. Everything looked exactly the same, except for the blood I had accidentally wiped on to the cleaver handle.
There had been no change to the wall, no alteration except the addition of my own blood. I stared into the incision in the wall. I would not have to dunk the meat in boiling water to melt the feathers away. Nor would I have to wrench my fist into the carcass and pull out the slippery intestines. There was only fresh meat, stretching back and back into darkness. And all it would cost was a little blood of my own.
What waited for me outside? Soil to scrabble in and come up empty, the windows of the abandoned houses in town dull as corpses’ eyes, and likely, a place upon the stinking piles of the dead. I was not merely shrinking in body. Hunger was hardening around my brain like an insect’s case, coming up around my eyes like horses’ blinkers – my blank refusal to acknowledge anything but day-to-day survival. I had to eat. I had nothing to eat. Now I had something.
I picked up a sharp rock that had been lying on the ground. First, still half-hoping, I poked it into the meat. I might as well have been poking it into stone. Then, giving in, with only a little hesitation, I pressed it into my palm. The point of the rock scraped my skin away. It was not bleeding much, but it seemed that a few drops were all I needed. Quickly, I pressed my injured palm to the cleaver’s handle like a kiss. The tool went from rigid to light in my hands once more, and I made another slice down through the wall. A chunk of meat was dangling loose on two sides now, looking for all the world as if it were about to be wrapped in white paper and handed over the butcher’s counter. The relief of it was enough to make tears well up in my eyes.
Until I noticed what was behind it.
The meat closest to me resembled chicken meat in every way, with its pale pink colour and glistening surface. But further inwards, even as I watched, the pale pink colour darkened before my eyes. It was replaced by a meat in a yellowish colour, with an uneven texture, that wetly slid atop the surface of a much darker red type of flesh. I frowned. Then I heard a sickening sound behind me – as if ivy had decided to grow a thousand tongues, and each licked the surface of the unfortunate tree they were encasing.
Slowly, I turned around. It seemed as if the gap through which I had entered the cavern had narrowed. And the meat at the very lip of that gap looked strange. Right up until the last inch or two, the meat resembled the rest of the pale pink chicken. But right where meat met air, it looked like the meat I had uncovered as I cut. I squinted. It was that same meat. Why did it look so familiar? I was sure I had seen meat like this before. And as I looked, I saw it, as if I were witnessing the growth of some fleshy, alien plant at night. The meat grew, just a little further over the cavern.
My breath caught. If my only means of exit were shrinking by the second, I had to be finished and be out fast.
I tugged at the cleaver, but it stayed infuriatingly still. I would need more blood if I were to snatch a meal. I grabbed the stone and scraped at my palm again. I winced at the pain, but dug in anyway, until the first drops of blood arose within it like shoots of grain on a spring morning. Smearing the blood across the handle, I got as tight a grasp as I could on it and made the third slice. The chicken meat flopped from the wall now, hanging on only by a few inches. Inside of it I could see even more of that new, strange meat.
And then I realised what it was.
The first to die of the hunger when it hit our town had been my mother. She had barely been able to walk, but had insisted on staggering outside our door to fetch the water. In hindsight, I wondered if the water had merely been a cover for feeling the sun upon her face before the end. She collapsed on our doorstep before I could stop her. Even if her heart had not failed, she hit her head on the way down, and that was that. We were not the only creatures starving, of course. House pets and livestock had long since been eaten in every house, or simply cast out. My mother’s hand lay outstretched in death; that detail stuck absurdly in my mind. That, and one other. One of the cats, a creature that might once have been indulged upon an owner’s lap or grown sleek off barn mice, cam e crawling from an alley like a living piece of old carpet. And before I could bat it away, it got hold of the skin of my mother’s hand between its teeth and tore it.
When the skin parted, I realised as I looked up at that wall, the sliding yellowish fat encasing the deep red of tendons and sinews and muscle had looked exactly the same as that new meat, softly growing in behind the chicken. I wondered with a queasy tremor of my stomach if that wall had been grain not so long ago, and what, precisely, had happened to the chicken I had chased.
The new flesh – my own flesh – had begun to spread. Just as the chicken meat was growing over the back wall that had once been grain, so my own blood and muscle and flesh was writing over the pink chicken breast. My mind swayed at the sight, it actually slopped like a bucket of guts about to be thrown on the midden heap. But I could still make it out. I could not come back over and over again, but if I were quick, I could still cut down a fillet and run with it. One more cut. That was all it would take. Was it better to partake in one’s own wounding, or to wait for the world to wound me?
Even in the time I had spent thinking this over, the flesh that was my flesh had spread further across the wall. A fair chunk of it was now human flesh and not poultry. I placed the tip of the stone at my palm and scraped – or tried to. My hand now shook so much that the stone glanced off painfully rather than digging in deep. I could hear the breathing again now, moist and great and hot. I desperately willed myself to stop shaking and tore my eyes away from the sight of my own flesh surrounding me. Then I desperately pressed, and as soon as I started bleeding, grasped the handle of the cleaver like a life raft and pulled.
The meat I had cut down landed in my hands, jellylike and nauseatingly giving. For a second I only stood there, clutching it like it was the hand of someone saving my life. Then I recovered my senses and bolted for the opening. My own flesh chased me out, rippling forward and forward. I tried to keep up, but my legs shook and my heart pounded desperately in my chest and behind my eyes and at the back of my mouth, a warning signal from me to doom me. Faster and faster now the cavern changed, until at last I stood before where the opening had been. But there was no opening now. All the cavern was made of me, red and sickening and throbbing, and I stared at where the flesh had – I had – closed over my escape route. Then I looked down at the chicken fillet. I held it in my hands, between what were just two slabs of meat, just like this one, the last one I would ever consume.
Fiction © Copyright Kathryn Keane
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Kathryn Keane writes speculative fiction, poetry and essays, and makes The Worm Transmissions, a podcast of stories fermented in mulch and compost. Outside of The Worm Transmissions, Kathryn’s work can be found in Luna Station Quarterly, Seize the Press, Poethead and many other publications. Kathryn lives in Ireland, and is on Twitter and Substack..
