Cherry Jubilee

Chapter 14

I cling to my seat, staring at Cherry.

She watches me process what I just experienced.

I never ate anyone called Bethany.

Cherry holds her half smile, stroking her belly.

Maybe Mo- no, he was thin as a pole.

It's a trick. This is a trick somehow, to unsettle me, to make me surrender.

I press a hand to my heart to calm it down.

"Am I in a memory right now?" I ask her.  Stupid question.  Mustn't lose it.

She shifts in her chair.

"If you were," she says. "Would it matter what I told you?"

I close my eyes.

Ground yourself, woman. What do you know for sure?

"This is an isolation chamber," says Cherry. "Separate from the rest of my body."

Don't believe her, it's a trick, it's a trick.

God damn, I know it's a trick. Everything has been a trick, since I was first scanned into Afterlife. Maybe even before.

The whole system is her body.

"The walls are protecting you," she says. "You're a world class dick, Mary. That part of you, the part that was good at your job, clearly doesn't want to be digested yet, so it's built this stable cell to hold you together."

I glance at the concrete corners of our cell. They look secure. Knowing what's on the other side, they feel a lot flimsier than before.

I cling even harder to my chair.

"I love you, Mary," says Cherry. "I've loved you since the day I gurgled up Bethany. I told you you'd realise I was telling the truth before the end. And here's the big surprise."

She leans forward and stares me straight in the eyes.

"For a moment, you loved me too."

I laugh, despite myself.

She shrugs. "Believe it or don't. That's the only way you could have let one of Bethany's memories through the borders between us."

I hold her stare, though it makes me tremble. "I don't love you. I'm afraid of you."

"Strange how the two go together," she says. "In that instant, you understood who I am. You saw how I gather the discarded suffering of humankind, and spin it into a beauty which can never be gobbled up by cowards like you. My stomach is the heaven of the mystics and the saints, the heaven which redeems and transforms misery."