Pontypool Changes Everything

Grant Mazzy stood, surprised, looking down at the girl with the burnt, skinny face. He opened his mouth to call out for Greg, when a hatchet whacked his knee, cleaving the cap into free halves. He reached up into the air as the cap halves rolled under skin to meet at the back of his leg. A second whack of the hatchet released a sandwich-sized pair of intestinal loops. He reached down, gloving his hand inside the base of his abdomen. A deep and desperate flex of muscle, still clinging, bent his fingers back. A third whack cleared the hand from his arm, dropping it, like a coin tossed from a balcony, deep into his torso. The hand turned backward off the bottom of his heart and sprang back up from a mattress of lung, landing, finally, to rest, partially clenched, in a rack of ribs. These ribs lay across the threshold at the front of the hut. The ribs were protecting the hand as best they could as blows reigned down from above, but soon they too collapsed under the silver eye of the hatchet.

Jimmy looks through the fingers that cage his face. Julie’s body is dripping with the blood of the now nearly liquid intruder.

“C’mon, George, gimme a hand here.”

Soon the bottom of the freezer is lined with heavy oblong objects neatly bundled in newspaper. Each bundle is clearly labelled in felt-tip marker: shoulder, calf, upper arm, lower back, tongue. In the days that follow, the children lay out elaborate meals on the picnic table in the evening shade of a birch tree behind their home.

At night they go to sleep on the floor as husband and wife, rocking their tiny hips together in sexual intercourse. During the third week of their residence a tiny sperm cell turns on a fatal dime, throws open the front door of a very modern egg, and strolls down the hall where his wife is busy mixing martinis. They kiss and tug at each other’s clothes until they, too, are fucking like happy children.

19 Death

Greg is certain he’s going insane. He is sitting at the picnic table waiting for Grant, who went around the back of the shack some time ago, to return. His thinking has become deformed in repetition and crude rhymes. He notices his thoughts tear off in directions he cannot control. So he doesn’t control them, including himself instead in an audience that has crammed the stands overlooking a racetrack. Greg allows others to watch the progress of monsters toward the finish line. He discovers that he can survive in this crowd: anonymous, wordless, and undetected. He flicks a seedling from the table and it spins in the air on helicopter wings that carry it to the edge of the fresh graves beside the shack.

I am never going to become an adult. A film running backwards streaks its tail around the track. I don’t even think there is such a thing. I don’t think there are any adults anyway. I might as well be dead. Greg hears his name being called out from behind. He turns toward the road that leads away.

His Higher Power is standing in the half-light. His clothes, usually so crisp and black, are white with dust. His face is streaked with sweat and his hair is hanging in white tips across his forehead. He raises his hands and gestures for Greg to come to him. Greg pushes up from the table and sees a tear fall from his face and drop into wood. It is quickly absorbed, darkening the dry pores only briefly. I don’t want to die.

“I know.”

The Higher Power is sitting in the middle of the path and Greg is lying with his head in his arms. Dust from the Higher Power’s palm clings to Greg’s cheek and a single tear is held by it.

“You are going to die, Greg. You’re disintegrating. And soon you won’t exist.”

The Higher Power smiles and wipes his wet hand on Greg’s shirt. Greg looks down and pulls the fabric from his chest to look at the smear. He releases the shirt, sighing, and holds his hand over the wrist that rests across his neck.

“And I’m going to stay with you. Right here. We’ll wait here until you die. OK?”

Greg looks down to where the shade ends and the sun blazes down on the picnic table. A white moth leaps up from the grass and curves between the seat and the tabletop, disappearing momentarily before reappearing on the other side, where it drops again, almost heavy, into the lawn.

“OK.”

They sit in silence and watch a girl walking through the forest on the far side of the shack. She drops down occasionally, pulling at something in the ground. The Higher Power points to her, and Greg looks up to him, smiling.

The Higher Power squeezes Greg’s hand and it collapses limply.

20 Nearly Well Again