Page 35 of Spread Me
“What’s with the shrimp?”
“It’s an inside joke.”
“I don’t want to die,” Kinsey blurts. Heat floods her face. “Sorry. I don’t—I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” Mads says. They sink to the floor, leaning back against the bed. “Nobody wants to die.”
Kinsey sits on the floor opposite them, her back to the wall. “Some people do.”
“Nah. Not really.”
“I think yes-really. They have hotlines about it.”
Mads crumples half their face, twists their shoulders in a pantomime of complication. “People who want to die don’t actually want to be dead,” they say slowly, feeling their way through the thought as they put voice to it. “They just want something to be different, something that feels like it can’t change any other way. So the only real way they can figure out how to change their circumstances is by dying. And sometimes they’re right. Sometimes, there’s really no better option. But mostly it’s just that the other options feel more impossible than they really are. Wanting something impossibly different—that feels like wanting to die, sure. But it’s not the same as wanting to be dead.”
Kinsey swallows a too-large gulp of water, coughs. “Shit,” she says after she’s sure she can breathe, “you’ve thought about this a lot.”
“Yeah. I think about it a lot. Used to think about it a lot more.” They shoot Kinsey a sidelong glance. “The point is, nobody wants to die, but that doesn’t mean nobodyhasto die.”
“Maybe you have a point, though. About other options feeling more impossible than they really are.”
Mads doesn’t answer right away. They drink their water, their eyes on the floor. “I think,” they say slowly, “it’s different for us. We aren’t talking about dying because we can’t stand the way our lives feel right now. We already know that we don’t want to die. But we have to. It’s our responsibility to die.”
“Is that how Nkrumah sees things?”
“I think so. I don’t think she’s happy about this outcome. She’s just… certain.”
Kinsey smiles down at the water bottle in her lap. “That’s Nkrumah. She always knows exactly what she thinks.”
They sit in silence for a few minutes, drinking water, listening to the wind. It almost seems to have a voice. Kinsey wonders if Domino is screaming in the exam room, if Saskia has started yelling for freedom again. If Jacques is still able to scream, out there in the storm. She wonders if she’d be able to hear him, if he was.
Mads interrupts her thoughts. “Do you ever wish you had that? The certainty Nkrumah has?”
“I think I do,” Kinsey says. “I just don’t always want to admit what I think. But that’s not the same thing as not knowing.”
Mads regards her. “Yeah. I think I know what you mean. I think I see that in you. You’ve got stuff buried.”
“Only a couple of feet down, though.”
A look comes over Mads, a deep consideration. “Why don’t you want to tell us about that stuff? The stuff you have buried?”
Kinsey thinks it over. “How much do you know about the thing we’re studying out here? The cryptobiotic crust?”
“Less than I should,” Mads answers right away. “I mean, I don’t study it. I just came here to make sure none of you die from diarrhea or whatever. So I know about, like, dehydration and scorpions. And Jacques told me something about algae a while ago. But I probably don’t know about whatever you’re thinking of right now. Tell me?”
Kinsey can’t help but grin. This is a part of Mads she adores—the endless curiosity, the genuine interest in other people. Mads always wants to know more, always wantsto learn, never gets defensive about the things they don’t know or don’t understand.
She can’t imagine them dying. She can’t imagine that part of them disappearing forever.
The pain of that thought is ignorable, though, so she ignores it and leans forward, still grinning. She launches into her pitch, the pitch she made to each team member she hired herself. It feels obscenely good to return to something so familiar. “Okay, so. The thing about the desert is, it’s alive. It’s—why are you looking at me like that?” she asks, noticing the horrified expression on their face.
Mads shakes their head, takes a few short, quick breaths. “Nothing. I just—I remembered the part Jacques told me, about all the algaes and stuff below the soil. Tell me the rest.”
Kinsey hesitates, wanting to press—but Mads gestures impatiently for her to continue, so she does. She continues clumsily, her momentum lost. “Anyway, um. Yeah. It’s all algaes and lichens and stuff below the surface, like Jacques told you. And… it’s like that with me. If you dig up the cryptobiotic crust, it dies. And when it dies, the whole ecosystem dies. That’s part of how we got the dust bowl, you know? It was the destruction of grassland root systems, but it was also the constant tilling. The soil couldn’t form a fungal network to keep the surface soil in place, so the wind just…” She makes a vague sweeping gesture with her hands. “And that’s how I feel sometimes. Like if I dig all the stuff up to show people, then the stuff will die, and I’ll die too.”
Mads takes a long slug from their water bottle, wipes their mouth on the back of their wrist. “Well. You’re gonna die anyway. You might as well tell me your big secret.”
Kinsey manages an anemic laugh. “Hey, look. I can tellI said something that hit you wrong. If we’re going to die, I don’t want my last thought to be,what did I do to upset Mads. Will you tell me what happened there?”
