Aurealis #135 Read online

  At Friday dinner, you are busy taking the dishes when one of the men says, ‘Did you hear, Green’s wife caught him with their Mary?’ You immediately feel uncomfortable and avoid the man’s eyes. ‘Had it bent over the kitchen bench.’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ one of the women says. ‘Like being with an animal.’

  Everyone laughs, including the man. Your face grows hot and you go to the kitchen. This feeling is new. What is it? Perhaps you have mistaken the man’s words and his looks. After all, you understand little of the complex facial movements of these people. You have read that a ‘puerile cognisance’ is all a Mary needs to function.

  You do not always understand the things they say either, though later when the other Mary is on shift, you stand in front of the mirror and practise their words. Oh, Paul you’re teasing. Shut up, you bastard. This duck is divine. Come over here, Baby. He’s a pretentious fuck. Like being with an animal. Some of their words are laced with cruelty. Some with fondness. And you adjust your face accordingly, as you have seen them do.

  At the end of the dinner, they linger over Vin Santo. As you pour, you listen to their words and study their faces. The woman notices your loitering.

  ‘Mary, go and clean up the kitchen.’ She flicks her hand twice towards the door.

  You nod and go. The way the woman addresses you scalds your insides, but you must be careful not to be too human. This visceral sensation is anger, something you are not meant to feel; a properly functioning Mary would not notice the terse tone. People call your kind lobos—they mean lobotomised, because Marys serve with empty bovine contentment. But not you.

  As laughter ripples from the dining room, you wish for the blithe ignorance of the other Mary. Or is she, like you, able to feel things? You think not. This distortion of sentiment is all your own.

  You finish the work and go to your bedroom. You are on shift until midnight. It is eleven pm but you can sleep as long as the child does. When you get there, the other Mary is awake. She’s in the bathroom where you want to go. She’s brushing her teeth and hair. You wait on the bed as she brushes exactly ten strokes. This is the number of strokes it takes to unknot your hair. She walks back into the room. She sits on the bed opposite you. She waits a second to see if you have anything to communicate. You seldom converse, and only about the necessities: the child has eaten; the child has awakened; there are clothes to be hung.

  She looks at you for a moment and then lies down; she too, may sleep as long as the child does.

  You go to the bathroom and brush your teeth and your hair. Ten strokes. You go to the bed, sit for a moment, looking at the other. You think briefly how you do things exactly as she does, like a belated shadow or a replay.

  A question forms in your head as you lie down. About the man.

  The other Mary is your sister but came from another womb, like many, many others of your generation. The other Mary is not your friend. She is nothing to you and you are nothing to her. You don’t know how she will respond if you ask about the man. Once, you asked her if she loved the baby and she said: What do you mean? Now you wonder what she was thinking when she said that.

  Your question about the man slinks back into the dark cave of your mouth.

  Mary is on shift when you wake. You quietly follow her around the house, predicting her every move. She will now make breakfast; she will now talk to the child as she feeds it; she will now play silly games to get the child to laugh; she will now clean the little face and place the child on the floor to play while she cleans up. The other Mary moves like you do and smiles like you do at the child, but you know that baby Faith prefers you. The child never comes into her bed. In the dark early hours, she comes to you. You have started to look forward to that part of the day when her little body crawls into the bed with you. At first you said no, because the woman did not think it right for baby Faith to do this, but the woman was rarely awake at this time and one morning when baby Faith made the short journey across the hall and climbed onto your bed, you pulled back the blanket and drew her close, the smell from the top of her head a divine tonic.

  ‘Mary.’

  When the child says that name, you feel like someone. You know she understands the difference between a real smile and a mechanical movement of facial muscles.

  As the other Mary moves around the house, you shadow her, unable to rest. You must be careful. If the man or the woman sees your odd behaviour you will be instantly retired. You are halfway through your serviceable life at 25 and you should spend the rest of it doing what you do now: cleaning, cooking, fetching, driving the child to appointments. You know too that Marys are sometimes retired early, once the children grow up. One of you will go because there will be no need for round the clock slavery once the child has gone. You hope the other Mary will be retired, though Marys should never have such optimisms and longings. Their pick of who will stay will be as random as that game children play with their hands. Rock, paper, scissors. Unless maybe the man has something to do with it.

  While you are on shift you are content, able to monitor the man. When you should be sleeping, you watch him and the child with the other Mary. During the day, you sneak into the kitchen and observe them in the pool. She laughs and tosses her head in exactly the same way as you, perhaps more jauntily, but you see no soft looks, hear no soft words spoken.

  You read articles about the manufacture of Marys. There are problems of course, because procedures miscarry and genes malfunction. You wonder if you are a malfunction. You are supposed to feel complete contentment and satisfaction in your role. You are not meant to yearn. The name of this concept you learned in a book. You like the pull of this feeling; it is both strangling and soothing at once.

  It’s a bright day and while you’re cleaning the oven, the woman is outside in the pool playing with the child. They’re laughing and enjoying the warm sun. The man calls you to his study and you go obediently, as is your duty, but feel excitement at this change of routine.

  ‘Come in,’ he says. ‘Close the door.’ You do as instructed. ‘I want you to do something for me.’

  You wonder if he will brush your face with his fingertips. A soft touch. Your body anticipates the shiver you will feel.

  ‘I want you to go to the jeweller and get this necklace for me.’ He shows you a picture. ‘It’s Celeste’s birthday on Monday.’

  You take the picture.

  ‘Do you think she’ll like it?’ he says.

  You look at the gold, the rubies; he always spends a lot on her presents. ‘It’s very pretty.’

  Then the man touches your arm and squeezes gently. ‘Thank you. I trust your taste you know, Mary.’ His brown eyes linger.

  You fold the paper into your pocket and go back to the cleaning, his touch preserved on your arm like sunburn, his soft words pressed into your brain.

  The next day when the other Mary finishes her morning, she comes into your room.

  ‘Are you ill?’ she asks, because you are lying on the bed, instead of brushing your hair, instead of tending the child. A strange malaise has overcome you.

  ‘No,’ you say.

  She looks at you with your own green eyes and goes to the sink and brushes her hair, one stroke, two, three.

  ‘If you are ill, I will take your shift,’ she says, reaching the count of ten and placing the brush on the counter.

  You stand up and eye her in the mirror. She looks back to you. You see yourself, then realise you are looking at your own reflection. You shift your gaze to her. ‘No. I am well.’

  Perhaps now would be a good time to ask her about whether the man has any soft words for her. You think of his hand on your arm and his words. I trust your taste, Mary. There is more than trust in the deep brown of his eyes. You know it, like you know baby Faith loves you.

  ‘Mary,’ you say. Then you think of his laughter, and the others when they talked about the man caught with his servant. ‘Disgusting,’ they called it. This makes the yearning cease for a moment, repl
aced by the same heat you felt that night when those words first cut the air.

  ‘Yes.’ She comes and sits on the bed opposite.

  Your pulse elevates; you are malfunctioning badly and if the other Mary knows it she will tell the man and the woman and you will be retired. ‘Nothing,’ you say, and go to work.

  Over the next days, the man is paying the woman a lot of attention, taking her out to dinner for her birthday, giving her the necklace you bought. They make love more often than usual. Of course he must do this, but when you hear their cries in the dark, there is something akin to a pain in your body, and if a physician asked you to, you could not point to where it originated. Despite this you know the aetiology of your discomfort; he has had no soft words for you in a while. You finish each shift wishing the next one to begin.

  The woman is out resecting babies from uteruses. You lurk behind doors and in hallways to hear the other Mary and her conversations with the man, but he says little to her. You go to bed comforted. Later you are woken by the man’s raised voice.

  A moment later, Mary comes into the room. She slumps, wet-eyed, on the bed.

  ‘What happened?’ You say, sitting up. ‘Are you ill?’

  She looks at you for a second. ‘I made a mistake.’

  ‘What mistake?’

  She contemplates you. ‘I thought he had a softness for me,’ she says.

  Your heart thuds against your sternum, once, a sickening lurch. ‘That’s a strange expression,’ you say and your eyes go to the book on the table between your beds. The Crucible.

  ‘I read it in that book,’ she says. ‘I thought… he touched me, so I…’

  You find yourself in the living room where a light is on. The man is sitting on the couch. He looks up from his amber drink. ‘I told you to go to bed,’ he says.

  ‘That was the other,’ you say.

  ‘Oh.’ He waves a hand in the air. ‘I can’t tell the difference.’

  His words bounce before they suddenly resonate and sink through your skin.

  ‘I was the one who bought the necklace for you,’ you say.

  ‘Right, okay.’ He swirls the liquid in his glass. ‘What do you want?’

  You return to your room, understanding enough about humanity to feel the iron and winter in his words. You lie down and the other Mary rolls over to face you. Her eyes are cold.

  You think with detached clarity. In the morning, first thing, you will tell the woman that the other Mary has malfunctioned and needs to be retired. You gaze across at the other, and for once you know exactly what she is thinking.

  The Author: Fiona Bell

  Fiona Bell is writer and teacher based in Cairns, Queensland. She writes short stories in various genres, but is particularly fond of those set in dystopian worlds. Fiona also writes YA fiction and in 2018 University of Queensland Press published her novel Waterhole, which is a mystery set in the far north. She is currently working on another YA novel. She can be found on Facebook as Fiona Bell – Author.

  Story Behind the Story

  The potential for humans to exploit one another and for governments to control society through the destruction of individualism are ideas that have always fascinated me as a reader. I was first introduced to these ideas through novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale. Through Mary’s dilemma of being too human, I wanted to explore the idea of the danger of independent thought in a dystopian world and how humans have the frightening capacity to disassociate themselves from the ‘other’ in order to exploit them. And being an English teacher, I wanted to connect the idea of individualism and independent thought to literature, in this case, The Crucible. I’m also intrigued by the idea of doubling and the potential psychic connections between clones.

  The Artist: Andrew Saltmarsh

  Born and raised in country South Australia, Andrew now resides in Melbourne where he works in an office by day and illustrates by night. You can follow his work at https://www.facebook.com/saltysart.

  Back to Contents

  The Sin Eater

  Michael Kellichner

  Even though it was the point, the bread was too salty. It sucked the moisture from my mouth, made my jaws ache to keep chewing. But I did. That was my job. All around, the gathered watched my motionless back in the flickering candlelight. The anticipation in the air was palpable, the unspoken desire for me to hurry radiating from everyone except the dead man lying on the floor in front of me. Without looking, I knew they were balanced on the precarious tension of wanting to lean forward to implore my haste and wanting to lean away to not be so near me and death. Fearing that I would take too long, but also fearing their speaking would stop my chewing. Fearing I might look at them.

  A sin eater was both desired and detested. A necessity that the village loathed, but dared not openly speak of their loathing. If they believed we understood just how low we were in their eyes, we might not come and consume the sins of the dying and the dead. Then where would their loved ones be? Forced to enter the next life slipping on all the oily sins they had accumulated through this life.

  I swallowed the bread, focused on even breaths through my nose to not choke as it slid, centimetre by centimetre, down my throat like a stone. When it reached my stomach and sat there, I stood, and the room seemed to expand as the gathered family eased back. I turned, lowered my hood, and told them it was finished.

  The man’s mother shuffled forward, bowing her thanks and offering her payment: a basket of apples from their orchard. She set it on the floor and stepped back quickly, less our hands touch in the exchange. I used to smile. I don’t bother anymore. I took the basket and went out into the drizzly, grey dusk.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until I was back on the main road, boots sinking deep into mud, that saliva managed to make its way back into my mouth. It wasn’t until I reached the woods that I realised I couldn’t describe anyone who had been in the room. Not the family, and especially not the man who had been lying on the floor. I had the sense of him being young. But he’d just been another pile of sin, another mouthful of salt. My stomach clenched, and the bread, like always, did little to alleviate the pain.

  * * *

  At our cottage, Mother was waiting for me. Shrivelled by time, she sat on a tree stump outside, beneath the far-reaching branches of an ancient oak. Her cane leaned against her knee, and her eyes, so tiny beneath deep folds of skin, didn’t glance at me as I came up the path. She sat serenely surrounded by the sound of tiny raindrops sifting through the canopy.

  ‘Mother,’ I said when I was near enough she could hear me. ‘You’ll catch cold sitting out here.’

  ‘Autumn is ending quickly,’ she said. ‘Much faster than when I was young.’

  The trees were streaked with deep red and burnt orange, but already the forest floor was covered with a layer of matted, rotting brown that made the earth spongy to walk on.

  ‘I’ll start a fire, Mother,’ I said. ‘Come inside and warm yourself.’

  She’d taken to sitting outside for long stretches, soaking in the sun at the end of summer. But then it continued, even as the weather turned cold. She stared up at the canopy, the sky, and each day seemed to withdraw further from a world where only the fringes had been allotted to her.

  ‘My daughter,’ she said to me. This was also new—she’d never called me by anything other than my name for my entire life, usually with the same cold distance she’d shown the rest of the world.

  ‘They paid me in apples,’ I said. I showed her the basket. ‘They didn’t have much else.’

  She nodded. All her movements had slowed, and her head rolled forward like it was being pulled down by a weight she was constantly resisting. ‘People give what they can,’ she murmured.

  ‘It’d be nice if they gave respect,’ I said.

  ‘They do. In their way.’

  I’d always sensed Mother housed an equally deep and bitter hatred of the larger world as I did, but had never allowed it to mat
erialise as speech. As she shrank into old age, that hardness had began to flake away. Like an old wall cracking apart that she could no longer bother to repair. Perhaps remaining at the hut while I went out to eat the sins of the villagers had made her forget how reviled we were. It’d only been a few years, but I knew it would take a lot longer for me to forget how people shied away at my passing, how they would never look me in the eye.

  * * *

  Mother wasn’t my real mother. I don’t know who holds that title. I was the unwanted outcast among the unwanted, and Mother, the local sin eater, had been starting to grow too old. She’d needed a successor and the village needed someone to take on the weight of their sins.

  The families who relied on the sin eater hadn’t been clambering over each other to volunteer for the job. To offer their children to the profession.

  So, they’d let her come into town and visit the orphans. She came where we were staying—an overcrowded house where the walls did little to keep out the wind, and food was scarce even in times of plenty. We all knew who she was. From afar, we’d seen her come into the village, always in a black robe and a deep hood, and knew that she was the one who took away the sins so that the dead could walk upright and confidently in the next world.

  The women who watched over us always taught how the path to paradise was a steep slope. Sins of this life accumulated as oil on your skin, on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. It ran down over your knees, your shins, your forearms. Carry too much sin into the next life, and you’d slip and slide as you tried to ascend the golden road to paradise. You’d keep falling and sliding back down, while those without sin walked easily up the road.

  Of course, there were so many sins that it was impossible to get into the next life unburdened. Hence, a sin eater.

  I’d expected a monster: a twisted old crone covered in boils. Ragged, knotted hair. A giant nose. Hooked hands. But Mother, though she was no longer young, had possessed a beauty in her face, a power in her eyes. She’d looked no better or worse than the others.