The Troop

Faint, beautiful weeping. Shelley drank up the sound the way a succulent plant drinks up the sunlight. His jaws were strangely elongated, the lower part a half-inch longer than the upper to reveal a wet ridge of teeth. He looked like a salmon in rut.

“Thank you for answering my question, Kent. Now, what would you like to eat?”

“Anything. Anything.”

“I mean, there’s so much. I can’t carry it all back here. So you’ll have to tell me. We have apple pie and chocolate-glazed doughnuts and big steaks and—”

“Meat. Meat.”

“You wait here,” Shelley said, as if Kent had a choice. “I’ll be right back.”

Shelley stole through the cabin’s shattered door. Early afternoon sunlight fell through the roof’s broken latticework, quilting the floor in honey-colored bars.

The roof sagged down before him. He unscrewed an old glass light fixture that now sat at eye level—amazingly, it hadn’t been smashed during the storm. Inside the frosted glass bowl were several dozen insect carcasses. Flies mostly, along with a few dragonflies and moths. He shook the crackly remains into his palm and went back to the cellar.

“Here’s the first course, Kent. It’s… peanut brittle.”

Shelley placed a desiccated dragonfly corpse in Kent’s fingers. They disappeared through the crack into the darkness. Eager crunching sounds. The fingers reappeared.

“More.”

Shelley fed Kent dead bugs as if he were feeding a goat at a petting zoo. Kent made pitiful groveling sounds as he ate. Shelley couldn’t believe his good fortune. This island, the isolation, this distracting illness—it was the ultimate playground.

His eyeballs felt tacky in their sockets; a dry saltlick taste lay thick on his tongue. His penis throbbed fiercely inside his trousers; he pushed it with the heel of his palm, squashing it against his thigh to achieve a dizzying, elating pleasure. Quit playing pocket pool! Mr. Turley would’ve said if he’d caught Shelley doing it in gym class. But Mr. Turley wasn’t here, was he? No adult was here—except the dead ones in the cabin—meaning Shelley could do exactly as he wished… but he must be careful. It would be so easy to make a mistake—to “blow it,” his father might say—ruining his lovely game. He mustn’t get carried away.

“More,” Kent whispered.

“All gone,” Shelley said. “No more. You ate it all.”

“Please.”

“Tell me how it feels, Kent. Tell me and I’ll give you something else.”

“It feels empty. There’s a hole and it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Forever and ever and ever. It wants me, Shel—and it wants you, too. Wants all of you.”

Shelley crouched for a moment, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. Kent sounded bad—seriously bad. Bugfuck nuts, as the island phrase went. A pang of concern snuck into Shelley; at first he didn’t know what it was, seeing as he didn’t experience emotions the way others did. An uncomfortable nibbling in his belly, like hungry baby mice.

Shelley returned to the cabin. The dead man, or what was left of him, had fallen off the sofa during the storm. His limbs were ramrod-straight with rigor mortis. His legs stuck out straight with his toes pointed up. Patches of bright green fungus bloomed around his eye sockets and the edges of his mouth.

The man’s nose had fallen into his face. Shelley watched a beetle crawl out of his sunken septum. It climbed to the crest of one nostril rim—just a hardened hole of cartilage like a little manhole in the man’s face—and hung there unsteadily.

The interlocked halves of its exoskeleton came apart. A high pressurized hiss: it sounded like a steam valve blowing from very far away. The beetle cracked open. Shelley could see white things wriggling inside of it.

A subspecies of some raw emotion—not fear, but something hovering at its edges—spider-scuttled into Shelley’s chest.

He knelt beside the big dead worm on the floor. It had hardened and toughened like an earthworm sizzled on a summer sidewalk. He scraped it up with the edge of his knife. Its insides were still mushy and gelatinous. Custardy-yellow goo squeezed through slits in its skin.

A new, wildly intriguing idea formed in Shelley’s mind.

He returned to the cellar. Kent’s fingers wriggled at the slit.

“Supper’s on, Kent,” Shelley said.

The leathery strap of the dead worm disappeared through the slit—jerked with sudden violence, it slipped between the slats with a breathless zippering hiss. Next: sucking sounds. Contented babyish coos. The fingers appeared again, streaked with yellow slime.

“I’m sorry,” Shelley said, although of course he’d never been sorry for a single thing his entire life. “No more food. Kent, you went and ate it all. You greedy pig, you ate it all.”

Shelley walked away. He’d become bored with Kent, whose throaty cackle followed him back to the firepit.

“You promised!” Kent shrieked. “You promised me meat! Come back! Pleeeease!”