Honey to Soothe the Itch Read Online Free PDF Page A

leave.
    I can’t feel the burning rubber anymore.  The zombies make a lot of noise but it’s soothing.  They sound like bees and it mixes with Amanda’s prayers.  The sun will come up tomorrow.  I won’t see it, but the world will.  And I can imagine what it will look like:  Warm and stretched along the horizon, framed in blues, purples, and reds.  Maybe, somewhere, the ocean will reflect the sun’s brilliant glow back to it and both the world and the sky will become happy together, like Amanda and Tony.
    I remember my old life, now.  I remember tasting apples and thinking they really don’t have a flavor, just a texture and the sounds of crispness.  My boyfriend laughed his big, hardy guffaw and smiled with his perfect white teeth.  “Oh, my beloved,” he’d said.  “It’s there.  You only need to close your eyes and feel it on your tongue.”
    So I close my eyes. 
    Another ghost, adjacent to the last:  I taste toothpaste, because I’m a good girl and Mommy said I’d get a story tonight, so I wash my face and brush my teeth and wipe up the sink.  I hold my favorite book, the one Grandma gave me, and I run to my bed.  My big brother’s a meanie but I love this book and I won’t think about him and Mommy fighting over who has to read it to me.  I hold it tight and I make it bounce across my lap because that’s what the cat in the story does and there’s a cuddly bear but he’s nice and it’s a safe place, where they live in the book.  No one yells, but they’re funny and they act weird and I love all of them.
    Where I am now , lying on a yoga mat stinking of death and hearing the very end approach, I recognize the story.  It’s a classic, one told many times.  I know the place this little zombie imagines quite well.
    And it is much better than the world as it is.
    I think, maybe, now’s when my brain is making its last blast of endorphins, and the itching stops.  The zombie’s story, her one last final frozen moment, resonates with my memories of apples and sunshine.  I wonder if somewhere, in that children’s tale of a trees and streams, if there’s an ocean with cresting waves of blue and green.  And I wonder if it’s real and unknown and if it will ever be seen again by the fresh eyes of a young person.
    I don’t know how efficient a kid’s mind is.  I don’t remember being a child.  But I do remember awe and wanting, more than anything , to take it all in—and continue to take it in, because even once I understood what it was, it never stopped changing. 
    And even though in the children’s world every one wore the same clothes every day, and they didn’t change, they gr ew.  And they lived.
    I wonder, as my last thought, if Amanda’s pregnant.  Tony’s s played his fingers over her belly.  Then he fires his gun.
    At my end, I feel the last screaming pulse of my implants as I take the child’s last moment and meld it to my mutated, cancerous buffer program.  It lashes out into the invisible tech’s collection systems, sending out tentacles that break off but don’t die. 
    I know, somewhere out there, the other implanted are watching, maybe praying that I do this right.  Maybe a couple of them are using me as a distraction, and are moving their enclaves.  Either way, I’ve done good with my last breath, and my endorphin high is justified.
    M y final frozen moment takes shape:  Change, but safe.  I want Amanda and Tony’s baby to taste the ocean’s salt on her lips and know that every time she visits, it will taste just a little different, like it should be.  I want her to grow up understanding that sometimes a lot of plants means different shades of green, and that’s just fine. 
    It means the world’s alive.
     
    THE END
     
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