Page 14 of Of Monsters Of Kings

“Why am I not weak?” I whispered. Why am I not dead? They were right. I shouldn’t feel rested and capable of a full day’s work.

Unless this was a sick joke. Unless it wasn’t July.

The cloying smell of my mother’s body reminded me otherwise.

“You’re coming to the agency,” number one snarled.

“Yes,” I replied. “I suppose that will happen now.”

He jerked me forward a step, and the agents pressed in on each side.

“Wait,” I cried out. “I must say goodbye to my mother.”

There was a lull as everyone put together that I spoke of the body in the elevator shaft.

“Your mother?” shrieked the landlady. “Your mother is dead, girl.”

The agents exchanged a look, and one of them left my side. He pushed the top of a briefcase open and withdrew a folder. He flicked through the papers within. “Perantiqua, born in the pens. Raised across the city. Mother, deceased nine months ago.”

All three looked at the hole in the wall. I felt them calculating and deciding that, no, a body wouldn’t smell like that after nine months.

“Your mother had a stroke,” the landlady said.

I nodded. “She didn’t die. I hid her here. I took care of her.”

My words were incriminating, but I didn’t much care about anything except saying goodbye to my mother. Explaining this situation was beyond me and maybe beyond anyone. Best to have closure and to be free of the burden of a lie. The agency of Vitale wouldn’t evict me into the hostile, uninhabitable desert for hiding my mother, but they would evict me for murder if I left them to connect the dots alone.

“You’ll see I speak truth with an autopsy, but I would like to say goodbye to my mother. Might I do that?”

The agents released me as the landlady gaped. Part of me wanted to as well. They’d gone from shouting in my face to gifting a kindness.

I staggered to the wall before they changed their minds.

Mother. Did it matter that I was asleep for her death if I’d been curled next to her? Had she tried to wake me for more medicine to no avail and then died? Had she choked on pain before a spasm locked her heart rigid?

The agents didn’t stop me crawling into the elevator shaft, and I ignored the reek of decay to shuffle closer to the burlap mattress. I reached a hand out in the dark to find her head. Bowing my face in grief, I stroked her hair, then sucked in a breath when a clump of hair came away.

Pressing down the urge to crawl out of the elevator shaft, I wiggled my fingers until the strands fell free instead.

I had to see her. I didn’t want to. I had to. Stretching across the mattress, I flipped the cover off the pipe to the outside.

Soft light trickled in.

I sat back, and only then did I look.

I didn’t know what I saw. A dead body, I supposed. Suspended in denial, I wasn’t really here or there. This eaten-away shell once contained my mother, but she wasn’t inside any longer, and her shell—as it turned out—had not been her at all. She’d been the magic within, the hopes and dreams and purpose. That magic hadn’t died in an elevator shaft.

I smiled at the pipe to the outside, imagining I’d freed her and that she’d drift forever around Vitale. Or better yet, that the outside world was not unavailable and forbidden to her in death as it was to all of us in life. She would be wild and free as in olden days. I could suppose her off on a great adventure.

I replaced the clump of hair I’d pulled off her skull and then pushed away her bedcovers. I didn’t want either agent to handle her shell, though I would need help to carry her from the building. Oddly, neither agent hurried me along, though I could hear the landlady snipping at them.

I spread the bedcover flat on the floor and crouched beside the mattress to consider how best to transfer her across. Would she fall apart? My insides shuddered at the thought, but a strange sight made me squint.

The soft light beamed on the middle of her body, or where that part of her body should have been. Instead, her toilet cloths were visible. The top of her body ended, then there was a gap before her legs began. Her toilet cloths were clean, which meant she must’ve died almost immediately after I’d changed them and certainly before her next dose of medicine. That was a relief indeed. She’d died within hours of our last conversation.

But where was her pelvis?

My thoughts stuttered over that, and my throat worked. I wasn’t familiar with dead bodies, but surely a rotting body should have a pelvis still.

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