Cherry Jubilee

Chapter 12

I return to the present with tears in my eyes.

My beautiful sweet baby. I feel hollow, unworthy.

I can sense myself hovering right on the edge of a breakthrough, but for some reason I can't quite find the right direction to face.

Mo's body is gone, slurped up into my fungus-shaped midriff.

Tammy is running her hands over the growth, redistributing the flesh onto my other curves, smoothing me out to resemble a human body again, albeit a thicker and meatier one than before.

The feeling of my new fat sloughing around under my skin at her expert touch gives me tingles all up and down my body, burying the bitter aftertaste of Faith's memory.

"Roll over," Tammy says, and I do. She pads out my bottom with excess flesh from my hips, and sculpts it with the side of her hand. I almost coo in delight.

I lean on my elbows, watching Michael Koresh squash a pair of slender young women face first into his arse cheeks, and bite his lip as he sucks them into the cottage cheese. He rolls over onto his back, smushing them beneath him and sighing. I know how he feels.

I notice something unpleasant rising in my throat, tickling the back of my tonsils. It feels like fear and horror and unspeakable loss. I start choking.

Tammy hands me a napkin.

I cough up what looks like a hairball. It's the most joyful relief to have it gone from my body.

Tammy takes the napkin back.

I remember at once what she said about the people we absorb being left as a knot of trauma.

My intuition snaps back into gear. I grow suddenly excited.

"Where are you taking that?" I ask her.

She sniffs. "Don't worry about it."

I touch her hand. She looks repulsed for a split second, before correcting her expression.

"Please," I say. "It could help with Cherry."

She frowns at me, considering.

"Would you like me to show you?" she asks.

She takes me to the void behind the restaurant.

"We're not supposed to be able to get back here," she says. "Only Cherry is supposed to have access. But someone has to take over for her while she's locked up."

I don't think I've ever seen or even contemplated such emptiness. This is the edge of everything.

Tammy opens the napkin. The hairball is bristling.

"Is it alive?" I ask.

"In a manner of speaking," she says.

She brushes it away into the oily nothing, and shakes the napkin free of residue.

"What happens to it now?"

"Don't think about it," she shudders. "I try not to. You don't have to."

She turns to head back inside.

"Thank you for the meal," I call after her.

She stops.

"Yeah," she says.

She returns to her task.