The children who opened their eyes to me hampered that work, since obviously I couldn’t send those poor couples home with that kind of photograph. Increasingly they seemed angry with me, and increasingly I was irritated with them for the obstacle they had In-come.
“Okay… uh, could you move her to the left just a bit? There, that’s good. That’s perfect.”
And she is. This child, this Amy, my flesh, my blood, my niece. Tom grips Janice’s shoulders a little too firmly. I can see the small wince of discomfort playing with the corners of my sister’s mouth. I look at Tom, he looks back at me, relaxes his hands. He looks so pale — I think if I don’t take this family portrait soon he might faint. The twin boys stand to each side of him, beautiful and sullen, yet they pull in closer to his body for his support and theirs.
Janice looks up at me, her little brother, not sure what she should do. I offer her a smile; she takes it, attempts to make it her own, and almost succeeds.
Then I look through the lens. I look at Amy, and she’s otherworldly, beautiful as her mother. And then she opens her eyes, giving me that stare I’ve seen a hundred times before, but it’s different this time, because this is Amy, this is one of my own. I see the anger coming slowly into her eyes, but I smile at her anyway. I make a kiss with my mouth, and I hope she understands it is just for her. And I take the shot, this one for me, and she closes her eyes again, and I take the other shot for them.
Gemma Files
Kissing Carrion
Though she recently betrayed her Gothic roots by beginning to wear colours, Gemma Files still often invites all and sundry to, as Susan Musgrave puts it, “bite into [her]/and open [their] mind to blood.”
Previously a freelance film critic, she now teaches Screenwriting and Canadian film history at the Toronto Film School, and has adapted two of her own stories for The Showtime Network’s The Hunger cable TV series. Her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999.
“Kissing Carrion” is the title story from her first collection of short stories, available from Prime Books. A second collection, The Worm in Every Heart, is currently available from the same publisher.
“I first got the germ for ‘Kissing Carrion’ back in 1993,” Files remembers, “when I’d just quit my job as Vibrator Room floor attendant at Lovecraft, Toronto’s most upscale sex shop. The virulent combination of having an eighty per cent employee discount but no significant other to share the spoils with had already begun to screw with my ideas about ‘healthy’ sexuality. I also spent a fair amount of time listening to early Nine Inch Nails while reading underground comics and ‘zines, simultaneously jealous and admiring of their creators’ capacity to self-publish material which seemed to come straight from the same vein of icky, suppurating, intensely private darkness I was becoming somewhat afraid to tap into myself.
“The turning point came when I discovered an article in one of said ‘zines about those wacky folks down at Survival Research Laboratories (whose self-destructive industrial antics would later inspire NIN’s ‘Happiness in Slavery’ video), which led me to rent their performance tapes from Suspect Video — I was particularly struck by the infamous “rabbot”, a rotting bunny corpse hooked up to a system of rods and pistons and technical what-have-you which puppeted it around, making it parade itself back and forth until it started to fall apart. Mix well with the Pixies, and Pat Calavera’s Bone Machine was born.
“But things soon slid to a halt, as they often do with me, and the story lay fallow for years… I had vague ideas of submitting it for a zombie anthology, like John Skipp and Craig Spector’s The Book of the Dead, which is how the whole ‘triangle between a man, a woman and a corpse splits apart when the corpse objects to the arrangement’ theme came into play.
“Still and all, it took until 2000 for me to finally realize that the narrative perspective should come from Mr Stinky, rather than Pat or Ray. A deadline was proffered by Ellen Datlow, for which I’ll be eternally grateful, even though the story itself didn’t turn out to meet her needs for the anthology in question. And the rest is history.”
Q: Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new Gods?
A: Yeah.
I am persecuted by angels, huge and silent — marble-white, rigid-winged, one in every corner. Only their vast eyes speak, staring mildly at me from under their painful halos, arc-weld white crowns of blank. They say: Lie down. They say: Forgive, forget. Sleep.
Forget, lie down. Drift away into death’s dream. Make your… final… peace.
But being dead is nothing peaceful — as they must know, those God-splinter-sized liars. It’s more like a temporal haematoma, time pooling under the skin of reality like sequestered blood. Memory looping inward, turning black, starting to stink.
A lidless eye, still struggling to close. An intense and burning contempt for everything you have, mixed up tight with an absolute — and absolutely justified — terror of losing it all.
Yet here I am, still. Watching the angels hover in the ill-set corners of Pat Calavera’s Annex basement apartment, watching me watch her wash her green-streaked hair under the kitchen sink’s lime-crusted tap. And thinking one more time how funny it is I can see them, when she can’t: They’re far more “here” than I am, one way or another, especially in my current discorporant state — an eddying tide of discontent adding one more vague chill to the mouldy air around her, stirring the fly-strips as I pass. Pat’s roommate hoards trash, breeding a durable sub-race of insects who endure through hot, cold and humid weather alike; he keeps the bathtub full of dirty dishes and the air full of stink, reducing Pat’s supposed bedroom to a mere way-stop between gigs, an (in) convenient place to park her equipment till the next time she needs to use it.
Days, she teaches socks to talk cute as a trainee intern on Ding Dong the Derry-o, the world-famous Hendricks Family Conglomerate’s longest-running preschool puppet-show. Nights, she spins extra cash and underground performance art out of playing with her Bone Machine, getting black-market-fresh cadavers to parade back and forth on strings for the edification of bored ultra-fetishists. “Carrionettes”, that’s what she usually calls them whenever she’s making them dance, play cards or screw some guy named Ray, a volunteer post-mortem porn star whose general necrophiliac bent seems to be fast narrowing to one particular corpse, and one alone… mine, to be exact.
Pat can’t see the angels, though — can’t even sense their presence like an oblique, falling touch, a Seraph’s pinion-feather trailed quick and light along the back of my dead soul. And really, when you think about it, that’s probably just as well.
I mean, they’re not here for her.
Outside, life continues, just like always: Jobs, traffic, weather. It’s February. To the south of Toronto there’s a general occlusion forming, a pale and misty bee-swarm wall vorticing aimlessly back and forth across the city while a pearly, semi-permeable lace of nothingness hangs above. Soft snow to the ankles, and rising. Snow falling all night, muffling the world’s dim lines, half-choking the city’s constant hum.
Inside, Pat turns the tap off, rubs her head hard with a towel and leans forward, frowning at her own reflection in the sink’s chipped back-mirror. Her breath mists the glass. Behind her, I float unseen over her left shoulder, not breathing at all.