Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

THE SUMMER JUNO AND her sister turned fifteen, their uncle had died. Juno remembered waking up to her mother’s wailing, the unnatural quiet of the funeral home, poking her finger at the coffin lining. It was softer than her own bed. Her mother’s mascara left gritty charcoal tracks down her cheeks.

She hadn’t grasped the reality of their uncle’s absence until the next week, when she noticed that no one had taken out the rubbish bags. He usually did the job, hauling them out into the front garden on Wednesday nights, but the black sacks were still out in the garden, baking in the sun. She’d tiptoed out in her socks and picked up two of the heavier ones, carrying them through the kitchen and then out the front. She was halfway across the tiled floor when she’d noticed a grain of rice on her hand, on the boneless stretch of skin between her finger and thumb. But, just before she could flick it off, it had moved, shrunk and then engorged, slithered on her wrist. She’d gasped and dropped the bags to flick the maggot off her hand. As she did so one of the slimy rubbish bags had burst open, spilling thousands of maggots everywhere. They’d surged across the tiles in a seething wave. It was something about the way they’d moved their fat white bodies, the horrific stench, the surprise of suddenly being surrounded by living wriggling things, that had made her scream.

Astrid had heard her and run downstairs. ‘What is it?’ she’d asked, but Juno had looked down at the tiles just in time to watch the maggots writhe into the shadows under the dining table. They’d slipped into the dusty slits of darkness under the fridge and the dishwasher, they’d slid into the unreachable warmth behind the radiator. Before she could squish even one of them, they had all vanished. Juno kept rubbing the skin on her arms to check that nothing was nibbling at them. She’d asked her mother to check her hair for bugs. No matter how much she scrubbed that evening, she could not feel clean. She’d never walked barefoot in the kitchen again.

That was the first day that she really missed him, her uncle. The man who performed a thankless task with faithful regularity. She had relied on him and she didn’t know it. Without her uncle this might have happened earlier – the bags rotting in the sun – but every week he’d kept her safe from it. And it was strange, his absence came only then as a sickening surprise to her, like finding maggots twitching on the tiles, like sunlight pouring on the unmade bed that still smelt of him.

The memory of that summer flashed across Juno’s mind when she opened the disposal unit to find that someone had stacked plates in it and they had gathered a fluffy green layer of mould. The macronutrient broth had separated in the unwashed bowls into an acrid brown liquid, with soft green clumps floating like curds across the top. The smell was overpowering, and even when Juno slammed the door shut she still had to fight the urge to vomit in the sink.

‘Whose turn was it to do the washing up last week?’

Jesse shrugged. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his mouth full.

‘It wasn’t me,’ Astrid said, looking up from her book.

Juno swallowed back nausea and headed for the fridge, where the cleaning rota – written in her own hand, and colour-coded with her own fine-liners – was displayed. Under ‘Washing up’ and ‘Disposal’, Poppy’s name was printed in red.

‘Poppy,’ Juno said, stabbing a finger at the name and gritting her teeth. Of course it was. Poppy had not only neglected the washing up, but she had stowed the dishes away in the darkness to fester. A cup of milk had spilled down the side of one of the walls in the disposal unit and a green scum clung to it. Juno shuddered at the recollection. Seven days. Poppy had shirked her duties for seven days, hiding the plates away like a thief. It was not only lazy, it was dishonest.

This could not go on.

Juno stormed down to the bedroom, her gut hungry for justice.

Poppy was bundled up in her yellowing bedsheets, face down, her back rising slowly. ‘Poppy,’ Juno said, reaching out to touch the other girl’s back. When Juno touched her, her skin was damp with sweat. ‘Poppy, wake up.’

When Poppy finally rolled over, her eyes were sticky with sleep. She squinted up at Juno and moaned something incoherent.

‘Poppy, it was your turn to do the washing up last week.’

‘Juno,’ Astrid said, standing in the doorway behind her sister, ‘just leave it alone will you.’

‘No – this affects all of us,’ Juno said. She turned again to Poppy. ‘You are impossible to live with.’

They had been tiptoeing around her for weeks. Her misery seemed to suck all the air out of every room. She lay in bed, if not sleeping then quietly crying. When had she last taken a shower? Looking at her greasy hair, the black dirt under her fingernails, the sour smell of Poppy’s doughy body, Juno felt something of the disgust she’d experienced when she’d opened the disposal.