Cosmic Crust Read online

  “It smells really good,” said the woman, who leaned into the light and smiled. Dark curls hung down over her eyes. Her lips were chapped and red with sores. “You a cook or something?”

  Bhu stumbled over his words as the man looked on with his ugly condescension. Something must have slipped out about working at Signoretti’s because the man nodded, saying, “The place down the street? My grandparents ate there every Sunday after church. Good church-going folk. Not many of them left, these days.” He grew solemn, briefly thoughtful. “This whole building, you know, it’s so quiet. Might be everyone’s gone. It’s just you and us in here, and your yappy dog.” The gloved hand scratched at his nose again, then reached out and plucked at the taught chain connecting door and jamb. “And this little chain here is just … not very welcoming, you know what I’m saying?”

  Bhu could get more meat. From Phan, in the morning. With an apologetic glance at Lucy, he wrapped up the meat in the pan, and squeezed it through the gap, then closed and deadbolted the door.

  The woman shouted thanks from the hallway, and the man said nothing at all.

  * * *

  In the morning Lucy stayed on her pillow, bleary-eyed and lethargic. Her breath came in quick, shallow snorts. Bhu took her in his arms and carried her outside. The air was clear of flies and the sky was a deep cerulean blue. The plague had passed, but in its wake the sidewalks, the streets, the cars still parked sloppily on the street, everything was coated in a dark grey ash, as thick and heavy as snow. It crunched underfoot and left behind a sticky, rotten residue. Bhu sifted through a pile of it with the toe of his boot and groaned. It was composed of the tiny bodies of dead flies. He wondered if there would be more.

  The strays chased each other through the streets, mouths wide, tongues lolling. They rolled joyously in the insect ash. They stood and shook themselves, coated with black grime that clung to them like sap.

  Lucy took notice of them, a rare fascination. She barked at them, and howled weakly. The dogs stopped and stared, ears vertical, tails flat. Bhu set Lucy down, and she tottered a few shaky steps to the edge of the sidewalk. She knelt to pee and could not stand again.

  Bhu swept her up and carried her back inside.

  Lucy trembled and huffed gently in his arms, her eyes moving rapidly under closed lids. Her skin hung on her like a heavy coat. He wrapped her in blankets and left her snoring on her bed.

  Bhu went to wash his hands and wept quietly into the sink.

  There was nothing for her to eat.

  Outside, the dogs began to howl.

  * * *

  Phan stood on the sidewalk clearing the crusted fly shells with a leafblower, throwing up billowing clouds of crushed wings and shattered chitin. Bhu watched him from across the street. The sticky residue remained on the sidewalk and Phan stared at the streaks and gobs contemplatively. He knelt down and scooped some of it up in his palm. “You ask me? Mana from heaven, that’s what this is.” He brought it to his nose and sniffed it. He pinched some of it in his fingers and tasted it.

  Bhu walked past him, his gorge rising. Bhu started to ask about getting more of the meat but Phan revved the leafblower and walked toward the empty parking lot.

  Bhu waited for a good time to ask but Phan stayed by the oven, perpetually busy. A new recipe, he said. With a large pizza peel he deftly scooped up a large pie and held it out, steaming. “It gets to the point where you think, maybe all the good I can do is one thing, done right.” Phan brought the pizza close, his hands flexing around the handle of the peel. His nose wrinkled into a sneer. “Could be better,” he said. He turned and laid it on the counter: a large, round, thin-crust thing, topped by a white and wispy cobweb pattern, and greasy round discs of meat. Bhu suspected that the green sauce was made of ichor from the fallen flies, but still—the smell was extraordinary, and his stomach knotted with hunger.

  When Phan put the pie out, customers fought over the few slices that were available. They sweated, spat, and screamed. In the commotion Bhu snuck away and went to the door by Phan’s office. He turned up the padlock and inspected it. He searched Phan’s office and found a silver key in the top drawer of the desk under a stack of old Hustler magazines. He returned to the door. The key slid in easily. The padlock clicked. Through the open door the acrid smell of metal and musk made him gag, but he descended anyway, down the stairwell and into the dark.

  The dirt floor writhed under the soles of his shoes. Things moved in the dark, sounds like animals in cages, things rustling in beds of heavy leaves. In what little light there was Bhu found a work table and flicked on a small work lamp.

  In the harsh light Bhu’s eyes struggled to fall on any one thing in the maelstrom of form and motion that surrounded him, anything that he could structure, concretely, into an object. So many shapes and forms and hues battled for attention, denied comprehension. His mind grasped for any larger, unifying pattern. By a wall of the large cellar, taking up perhaps half of the available space, there sprouted a huge and bulblike plant. Its enormous petals curled open like a strange orchid. A profusion of fronds and tendrils spread out from its base, entwining around each other, wrapping and undulating around a broad, central stalk. From the tendrils sprouted blood-red leaves and other, less plantlike forms. Puckered sphincters spat long cobwebbed veils that spread in a wide radius, clinging tentlike to the floor. Meaty limbs ending in undeveloped claws, hoofs, and fingers that strained against restricting vines. Mouths full of small, square teeth opened and closed and moaned wordless exhalations.

  Bhu turned at the sound of footsteps on the stairs and turned just as Phan stepped into the light. Phan’s hand brushed the table and he drew a broad-bladed cleaver. Bhu staggered back, then tripped and fell onto a carpet of wriggling life.

  Phan walked past Bhu, toward the bulb. Fronds and tendrils moved to intercept him. He grabbed them by the handful and hacked at them until they fell away.

  “You know what’s up there?” Phan jutted his chin upward. “Right above us. The oven.” He chopped at the central stalk. Thick red ichor oozed from the gashes. “I told you, didn’t I? About the signs that I put in the bricks. It must have worked, somehow. These things, they started to come up through the floor.” With one hand he pulled loose hunks of raw, bleeding meat loose from the trembling stalks and hairy flanks, and he returned to set the hunks down on a plastic mat on the table. “I gotta trim it back because it grows so fast.” He paused, then spoke to Bhu without turning. “I would have shown you,” he said. “If you asked. I’m not really hiding it. It’s just—it’s hard to explain.”

  Bhu felt the floor squirm underneath him. Small tendrils twitched and coiled on the ground, and small white maggots wriggled between them. Bhu sat up and retched.

  Phan looked down at him. His eyes narrowed. “What are you doing down here?”

  Bhu stared at the giant bulbous thing, his jaw working soundlessly, unable to speak.

  Phan sighed, shrugged. “Look, I didn’t—I thought it would help. I think about ousia and energeia, essence and energy. In Eastern Orthodox theology, they say that we can’t comprehend the essence, but we can know the essence by its energies. The ways that it acts on us, on our bodies, on our world. We follow the traces back to the source, but what can we really know about the source?”

  Lucy, Bhu said. What about Lucy?

  Phan shook his head. “Like I said, energy and essence. This is the energy. Whatever happens to your pup, that’s energy. But I don’t know what’s going to happen because I can’t tell you a thing about the essence. I’m sure that it comes from someplace deep and holy. The Godhead.” He stepped back and hefted the chunks of matter that had collected on the mat. “You might ask yourself, because I ask myself, what I might be doing by feeding this to people, whether I’m the one who’s making them sick. But the world was sick long before I started any of this.”

  Bhu stood and frantically brushed off the worms and tubers that clung to him. He had not finished when a loud thump and a series of shouts dre
w his attention to the ceiling. Shattered glass crunched on the floor above them. Phan rushed upstairs. Bhu followed, eager to leave the bleeding, moaning plant behind.

  The crowd from the dining area overflowed. They broke through the fiberglass counter and trampled each other to vault to the other side. Phan screamed at them to calm down. He tried to hold them back, but they ignored him. They filled their mouths with handfuls of pizza, garlic knots, breads, cheeses and calzones, even the raw dough that sat untended on the counter.

  They did not hurt Phan, in fact they treated him with great care, a kind of reverence. When Bhu last saw him, he was alive and smiling.

  Smoke poured from the oven, and its mouth belched swirling gouts of flame.

  * * *

  Home. Bhu wanted to go home to Lucy. All belief in a rational universe had fled from his afflicted mind, but he knew that his dog loved him, and that he should never have left her. Bhu rushed through empty streets while a yawning red welt opened in the sky above.

  If he looked back, he would have seen the bulbs of strange plants sprouting and blooming in his footsteps.

  The door to Bhu’s apartment was open. Inside stood the split-nosed squatter, the woman with blistered lips, a tall man in a loose down coat, and others. Bhu’s belongings lay smashed and scattered on the floor. The squatters faced the bedroom door, which was closed and barricaded with toppled shelves. Something on the other side scratched and banged on the flimsy wood.

  Bhu called Lucy’s name. The woman with blistered lips turned and lunged at him, swinging something that looked like a table leg. It must have connected. Bhu fell to the floor, tasting blood.

  “What the fuck did you feed us?” asked the split-nosed squatter. “What the fuck did you feed your dog?”

  Bhu asked where Lucy was, and the woman replied.

  “You killed her. You killed her.”

  Bhu coughed.

  “We only found her skin. Did you feed her to the other dog? Is that the kind of person you are?” She raised a hand toward the bedroom. Something heavy thumped against the door and growled, a growl that Bhu felt in his hands, his palms flat against the floor.

  Other dog? Bhu understood nothing. Only that Lucy was gone. He couldn’t believe it, at the same time—he felt, somehow, that he would have known.

  “We gotta get outta here,” one of the squatters said. “That thing is going to get out, and it’s going to be pissed.”

  The thing in the bedroom howled. The strays answered—in the street, in the alley, and in the hall.

  For some reason Bhu smiled. He had forgotten to close the door.

  With a rapid clicking of claws the dogs came running into the apartment, skidding on the tile floor, black with insect soot, white teeth bared and ravenous. They hurled themselves at the squatters, who beat them back with pipes, pans, pieces of furniture.

  The bedroom door split open down the middle, and whatever was on the other side slipped through. It leapt at the split-nosed squatter, pitching him backward over a table. Bhu saw the creature briefly: a strange, muscular, simian thing, with grasping, clawed fingers, and a long, coiled tail. When it was done with the man, and all the squatters had gone, it came to where Bhu lay and licked his face with a tongue like a tenderloin. It searched his face with bulging saucer eyes that Bhu found very beautiful.

  For a while, it stayed with him.

  * * *

  Winter came, and the days grew short and brutal. A windy chill was the only constant, oscillating between white snowfall and grey dust, still rich with the carcasses of flies. Only the strong remained, and the blessed. They came to Signoretti’s still, clustering around the burned ruins like the site of a holy pilgrimage. Only the oven remained standing, with its perpetual flame. The pilgrims were a strange-looking sort, but Bhu was never the type to judge.

  Others moved in the fringes, huddled together in the cold, scooping the fly carcasses into large buckets. They spread the residue on good soil, in basements and greenhouses, and survived on the strange bulbs that sprouted from the plots overnight.

  Bhu went for walks on grey streets buried in dunes of ash and snow and the bodies of the flies and other things that swarmed. They ignored Bhu completely, sometimes circling around him with deference.

  He followed the howling of the dogs. They still haunted the same vacant lots and boarded spaces, somehow hearty through the long winter, warm in thick coats of jet-black fur. He searched for their leader, and sometimes he found her. Some days he could track her by the sound of her labored breathing. She dwarfed the others in size and splendor, with a shining silver mane, high sloped shoulders with short, stunted wings, three curled tails, eight loping legs. Her face was concaved, her mouth a wide and toothy indentation in a face as wide as a compact car.

  No part of her matched the other half. Bhu theorized that the Godhead did not favor symmetry. Long teats sagged from her bloated belly—seven, the number of divinity—and she suckled an endless number of flat-faced, muscular young. Bhu fed them morsels from his kitchen, and they yapped a strange semblance of speech.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 Alex Sherman

  Art copyright © 2020 Samuel Araya