Page 110 of Gifted & Talented

Meredith: You’re a fucking cliché!

Dzhuliya: I’m not talking to you.

Meredith: Do you evenhearyourself?

Arthur’s sparks shower again. His hands start to shake violently.

Gillian: Art? Are you okay?

Meredith turns to Eilidh.

Meredith: You know, I just want to hear you say it.

Eilidh’s teeth are gritted so hard she can hardly speak.

Eilidh: Say. What.

Meredith looks terrifying with ill-begotten triumph.

Meredith: That I was right about him. That he was always a complete fucking shitbag. He never loved us. Heusedus.

Eilidh:

Meredith: You were the devoted one. Theonlydevoted one. And how did he reward you?

Arthur: Death.

By now the pulse of faltering electricity is jarring and epileptic. Meredith ignores Arthur’s warning, continuing to address her sister.

Meredith: You let him steal your life, Eilidh. You let himswallow you up,and for that, I’m fucking furious with you. I’m so fucking angry at you I can barely even look at you.You really thought his love was worth it. You’re honestly that fucking stupid.

Eilidh looks at Meredith. It’s the first time that Eilidh has looked lucid, and painless, in the last five minutes, as if something inside her has finally ruptured. As if, at long last, something broke.

Meredith stares at her as if she is seeing something in her sister’s eyes for the first time.

Dzhuliya steps forward hastily to intervene.

Dzhuliya: Look, I really don’t think—

Eilidh: Shut up, fatherfucker!

The buzzing has become unmistakably audible to the others in the room. Monster shrinks into Lou’s chest, burying his head apprehensively in her neck. A hot burst of flame hits the dining table from the chandelier just before Arthur falls to the floor.

Gillian: Arthur!

She drops to check his pulse and begins CPR. Yves lets out a cry and kneels to hold Arthur’s head in his hands. Eilidh is still staring at Meredith, but she is standing straight now, as if the pain has burst from somewhere inside her and materialized in vapors from her skin.

Eilidh: Don’t you understand that Ihadto be this stupid? That if he didn’t love me, then no one would?

Meredith looks at Eilidh as the swarm grows nearer. Outside, the darkness is so thick that it’s not possible at first to see its parts; the way it has become a cloud of black wings hurling themselves at the house’s windows. The force of the collective bodies is such that the panes seem to physically strain.

On the floor, Arthur is no longer breathing. Death comes in threes. Gillian bends her forehead to his and weeps. Eilidh’s resolve seems to break, the last of her mask dissolving just as the windowpanes give way, as she sobs to her sister,

Eilidh: WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST LOVE ME?

The force of the swarm is so great that the room is rendered unseeable almost instantly, within seconds. The high, desperate sound of a child crying pierces through the clamor of insect wings, the room’s inhabitants beginning to scream as the air in the room grows thick with an ancient plague of flies. They are drawn to shit, is the thing——they consume it. An appropriate plague, if not a sequential one.

For a long moment, there is nothing but the swarm.

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