Last - 24th April 2000

Glass shards fountained into the air, froze in the dimness for a second, and shattered to the ground, and her footsteps fell over their edges. No sound caught in the meetings between the asphalt and her bootsoles. Glass from the window would wedge into the rubber, that was fine, create knives of her innocent feet. Iole trembled as her body adjusted to the outside air. She drew her cape around her and began south down the broken sidewalk, her feet stealthing around humps of pavement that jutted under her feet, so old that the moss had crept up from underground and shrouded them. Overhead a street lamp sputtered and died; her shadow was cast into the absence of light that the city breathed.

In recent years as the Mayorship declined into perversion, groups had grown in number and fierceness, pissing out the perimeters of territories, playgrounds and schoolyards, as their own. Just that day, under the heavy smog of mid-noon, Iole had descended Meme Way in the south of the city between two lines of bitter red eyes, each growling at her, grunting with each clack that sounded as her bootheel fell and threatened to puncture the pavement. It created twists in her foundations, that the entire overthrowing had resulted in the underprivileged people who had risen against the nameless massing of the privileged massing themselves into violent, silent hoardes.

She knew she would die soon. She had felt it days ago, when she stood up to go after eating in the basement of Hein's house, and had torn two ragged curtains off a window and to the ground, herself landing in a pool underneath the velvet one they made. That lightheadedness, the spasms at the top of her legs, she knew. The way her fingers would grow cold and her fingernails would split and bleed spontaneously when she tried to write, or sew. The way she would wake with black eyes, eyeballs filled with burst veins, split lips, bleeding ears. She had gone to Hein and told him she needed to decide. Stay and fight. Claw the Mayors apart with her fingernails which split into two and three, drag her trails of blood across their faces. Smear their suits with the pus that erupted from the sores that lined her legs and belly. Or run. Run to where the edge of the smog was, where there was an ocean. She heard there were people there, a meagre but sufficient population, and let them bathe her, and give her the pills she had run out of months ago, and wipe her forehead with rubbing alcohol so she could sleep, and put mint salve on her chest to stop the bleeding from her nose. She could imagine the sound of salty waves breaking over the waste that was left at all of the coasts, rising from sleep in a yellow dawn and feeling her muscles tighten under the heat and light. But it was none of it meant for her. Hein nodded, rubbed at his beard, and nothing was said as he watched her decide without even speaking.

After getting out of the warehouse where they had locked her, all that was left was to find Idrys. Mother was dead, belly slashed open by the Mayors, her four-month baby left there in its primal grave, umbilical cord intact. Father was gone, off to the ocean, banished by the Mayors and a coward anyway. She was the last. She choked back her poisonous tears as she passed elementary schools, remainders of stores and restaurants, charred bricks and drywall still dangling from iron support beams, staircases standing lonely in the middle of ruins of houses once occupied by families. She felt her body giving way, like the thread that she was, the last gate that held things closed, strained as she was, before the floods were released. She felt the ants eating through, she felt her organs giving way. Adjusting her mask and tube, holding her shoulders straight, she began the end.

West end of the city was nearly an hour’s walk away and by the time Iole had navigated through the maze of alleys, strong-legged as she was, she was having trouble controlling her intake of oxygen and her exhaling. Her breaths pounded through her, and she tried desperately to calm her heart rate, to get her intake even again. Wiping fog from her mask, she dropped, hand at the knife inside her cape, and crept almost level with the street, peering for street numbers. Things rummaged in garbage all around her; stinking piles of sewage became hulking human beings in the twitching flickers of half-dead neon bar signs, and Iole assumed that the opposite could also occur, hiding danger from her perception.

3323 was the address on the house, an old turn-of-the-century wraparound porch home split into two by walls erected with the help of heroin and alcohol, walls that collapsed if a kitten brushed against them, or a baby pawed them by way of exploration. The left side housed numerous dark folk, walking bruises that walked in with belts and knee socks and surgical tape already tied around their forearms, and stumbled out minutes later, breathing in rapture, sometimes spending the night on the porch with bodies of dead squirrels and chipmunks, too blind with intoxication to even descend the stairs. The right was where Iole and Idrys had lived, before the decline, before. Before.

The street was unrecognisable, nauseating, as a whole. But to watch this place where she had taken first steps, first words, made love for the first time, fought and loved and hated for the first time, fall in and gnaw on itself like a rabid rodent, made her eyes tear with that kind of sob that felt like a brewing sneeze. The cement staircase crumbled under her bootheels; her cape, dusting against the ground, caught on pebbles falling loose under her footfall. Closer she crept to the door, walking almost sideways foot-over-foot to minimise the sound that the air caught from her and amplified, and the musty smell of all she had left caught her by the shoulders and shook her. Each scratch of her fingernail against the door as she tried with her knife to pry the board loose nailed over it created a creak; when the wooden flat finally came loose, the entire house seemed to sigh, walls drawing a little closer together on her sister inside of it. Few more picks at the doorknob, and the mouth swung open, breathing an oldness and sadness onto her. Her mask misted. She couldn't tell which was more deadly, its breath or her own.

Their furniture, sofas and wooden chairs and tables and tall old lamps, shrouded by tarpaulins and sheets. The living room and adjacent dining room were filled with huge marshmallow shapes of places they used to sit, to play, to listen to music, to share dreams. A broken chandelier lay on the crook of its elbow on the dining room table, in a pool of large crystal hanging beads shaped like sharp tongues, that had once reflected light. The bulbs were ragged like misshapen tulips, probably exploded in a fit of heat meeting cold.

Iole gripped her own heart in a fit, afraid she would fall dead of her own poison there, in such a sickeningly ironic manner, in such a sickeningly ironic location. She pitched to the stairs, anger mounting as she crept, balancing on the step in front of her with her long fingers. Idrys lie in her bedroom, the room that Iole had slept in for fourteen years, on a mattress that had been hacked apart with blades. What a sight it was to see, Idrys, her baby sister, her face free and unmasked, the curve of her lips, the fall of her hair at her forehead, the tilt of her nose. Her eyes were rimmed with bruise and fatigue, but the purplish blue hue of damaged flesh was almost becoming to her. What a sight it was to see, at last.

"Idrys," and her voice was barely a voice. She stretched her hand to the woman, and Idrys's arm came as far up as it could beneath the ropes that bound it. She was an enormous bulb of pregnancy, her womb's inhabitant stretching her body as far as she could go, and Iole could see the strain in Idrys's neck, in her feet. She was barely covered, shivering, the way they had left her. Iole gripped her sister's hand tightly, ignoring the pain it caused her own hand. A pool of fresh blood was spreading to the edges of the filthy bedding beneath Idrys, on top of layers of dried blood that had already left her. The baby would come soon. The girl's eyebrows twitched with something impending. She beckoned to Iole and Iole knelt beside her.

"I am raped," she whispered. The voice crackled through the waves of electricity in the room and threatened to burst into flame. Iole bit her teeth against her lips as she listened to her sister's words claw their way out of her throat. "I want only to die in peace."

"Idrys," she spoke once more, and something flushed through her, like antifreeze, helpful and deadly. "Idrys, I am about to die myself."

"I want more than death, Iole," and her cheeks went cold. "I want to be erased. This child, this child will be born with strings for puppeteering. I want nothing left of myself on the face of this earth." Her head turned away in pain, and shot back again, eyes pleading, teeth bared. She stretched her arm out of the rope as far as it would go, clawed at the plastic that encased Iole's eyes and nose, and gripping it she brought it to her chin, and snapped the dry-rotted elastic band that held it behind Iole's head, throwing the thing to the other side of the bed. The mask had dug deep grooved scars in Iole's face. Her flesh was ivory, not with health and beauty, but with the tainted form of mould beginning to grow beneath. Her beautiful eyes had died; eyelashes fallen out, reddened with burst blood vessels, the color seemed to pale to grey. Intoxicated she took her first breath of herself and then realised with a violent gasp what her sister had done.

Long ago when she was being injected with the poisons and medications, and she and Idrys had lay side by side on the enormous operating table, each too tiny for her own, they had gripped hands. Leeches had tacked onto their skin, ointments rubbed on that burnt the silken hair away, needles in every vein possible so that her body held more of them, of the Mayors and their Doctors, than it did of her own blood. They lay gripping hands and they promised to never let the other down, and they gripped hands and tried to walk weakly, bald little girls, after the Mayors and Doctors had let them free. They gripped hands as they watched their father be dragged away with an elbow under each of his armpits, his eyes closed and his heels sliding submissively across the planks of the wooden floor, having given up years before. They gripped hands as their mother frantically searched town on foot, for an Anti-Doctor who could give her girls an antidote to the poisons they had received. She knew there had been no cure for cancers, no help for some of the infections they might develop, but she tried anyway, tears dripping into her lap as she waited in countless waiting rooms, sitting on floors of abandoned and condemned buildings, trying to find cures. And Idrys and Iole had sat together on the makeshift gurneys, gripping hands, as they were fed pill after pill crushed in rationed applesauce or pudding. Idrys had received more medication, she was three years younger and was considered more of a citizen of the Anti-Nation than Iole. The closer to birth you were, the less indoctrinated by the Mayors, therefore the more a citizen, that was the scale for children under fourteen. Iole had received some rations of pills, but more importantly the mask that she wore every second of her life onward, until seconds before, the mask which filtered out her poisonous breaths and fed her oxygen through a tube.

But here she sat, maskless and feeling faceless, touching her hands to her cheeks in wonder that they were still there, she hadn't felt them in so long. It would take mere minutes for her to exhale enough to surround herself in her own poisonous gases. The chemicals they had given her, the Doctors, she was so full of them now that she would die within the hour. She exhaled, not knowing how to help it, and smelled the faint sour odor her breath held. By reflex she clamped her hand to her mouth, and it burned horridly as she exhaled again.

"Idrys!" she gasped, falling back onto her bottom and scampering away from her sister, terrified.

"Please just let me die, Iole, please just don't let me down." And she let her hand fall, and her eyes squinted shut in pain and terror, as the baby began to come. Iole sat, breathless, beginning to weep. All around her she felt things falling, dying, and her own acidic tears began to burn her cheeks. She would never be that girl again, never put her braids up and listen to her mother make fantastic tales about far away at the oceanside. She was the last. Rolling up onto her knees she crawled to her sister.

"Idrys, you have to push, Idrys," she whispered frantically. She had only seen a live birth once, a neighbor of theirs, right before the Mayors began seizing people out of their families. It had been gruesome to her then, her mother acting as a midwife. Plenty of still births, purple and yellow, broken bones and spidery, glassy skin, but very few who lived through the long months of torture. She had no idea how to take that role, what to do, how even to touch Idrys. "Push hard and scream if you need." Iole bent, sickened momentarily by the change in her altitude, however slight it was. She got motion sickness just from walking and sitting down and standing up. The space between her sister's legs was open, a mouth gaping, and she could see a sphere of flesh beginning from it, shiny with mucus, pink with blood and transparent skin. Her sister's knees fell suddenly, and her hands, gripping the bedding, had released and fell slack. "Idrys you have to push, the baby will suffocate inside you!" She screamed at her sister, pinching her hands, and weakly Idrys pulled her knees back up into bends and grunted as she pushed outward. "Please Iole!" she howled, so hauntingly that Iole could not keep from weeping, however painful it was. She was starting to intoxicate herself, become nauseated, feel faint of head. "Let me die in peace!"

Iole's tears made hissing sounds on her sister's face, seemed to melt her flesh like acid on plastic. She wanted greatly to whisper that last hope, to tell her of love, to walk her through to wherever she was going, to which she was already halfway gotten. But only breaths came. She clamped her sister's nose between her thumb and forefinger, forced her mouth open, and breathed, the smell giving her head an ache. The air concentrated around them seemed to turn green. Idrys's breaths turned to pants, her eyes widening, and she coughed terribly, once, twice. At the third the cough stuck in her throat, and she coughed no more.

A spasm went through her, electrical energy and the last bit of life leaving, and the baby slid from her with it, moaning unnaturally. He was a boy, arms and legs so spindly he barely looked human, with a big head, veins pulsating weakly and slowly, barely protected by his translucent skin. His eyes were glued shut with sleep and dream and mucus, and he came with his mother's cough, sticking more and more in his throat, and his crying was otherworldly, howling, so hoarse and clogged Iole could not stand to listen to it. She crawled to him, pinched his tiny nose with the very tips of her thumb and her forefinger, and breathed into his open mouth once, twice, thrice, until his poor little body racked with coughs stilled. It seemed to her as though his eyes never opened. Seconds later his aunt fell to the panels with a creak, consumed by herself, her last breath erasing from existence all that had gone before.