Deprivation- The Feast and the Famine

Chapter 13- Hospitality & the Guest

There was no time in this place, so Claudia didn't know how long it had been since her first sighting of the old woman. Her only measurement for time was hunger and fatigue.  These being variable things she was loath to trust them far.  Neither a long time nor an immensely short one had passed between watching the old woman walk and looking down at her here.

The old woman's leg had been ripped off; her left foot was missing.  A long trail of half dry, half wet blood fled across the threadbare carpet over the stone floor.  She wanted to turn away and retch. Her gut churned but empty as it was nothing came up.

Eudora knelt over the woman and gently spoke a prayer.  Her voice was low, and Claudia held her breath to hear.  Her lips moved on and on, and her hands slid over the body in what looked like a blessing.

Claudia had seen nuns off and on. Their piety she knew but not having so much as spoken to one, she had missed the rod-like harshness of their minds and tempers.  What Claudia thought of when she saw Eudora was akin to an angel brought to earth.  That was how she saw nuns; after all they were of another world separate and distinct from hers.  

When Eudora finished, she stood and turned back to Claudia.  Her eyes shone strangely.  Were there tears hiding in the depths? Her feet planted in the midst of a slick of blood.  "Say your goodbyes."

"I didn't know her," Claudia said.  She took a step back away from death.

"You will never know anyone again, little pretty one.  I mourn for all of them."

"Why not help them?"  Claudia accused.  She knew she should feel badly for the dead woman, but she was only a body.  She was a horrid frightening pile in front of her.  The bone protruded from her ankle, the flesh around it growing gray.  Even away from the wounds, her face was slack and oddly frozen.  The pale, lifeless skin clung to the skull beneath it making no pains to hide the torrid reality that lay beneath.  "She's dead.  She no longer matters."

"She did not matter last time you saw her," Eudora said.  "Then she was heading to the gallows.  No words she spoke would have any meaning.  It's always just blubbering. Now she has met her fate, and again she has meaning."

"Has God come for her then?" Claudia asked.  

She looked to Eudora.  She trusted in Eudora's infallible nature.  If Eudora said it, then it must be so.  Eudora would tell her if she had any right to hope.  Eudora's beautiful head shook in a soft denial.

"No, even God could not escape this place, so he does not enter.  We are in the box that hope has not flown."

"That means that we have hope?" Claudia said, unsure what way to take Eudora's jumble of words.

Eudora laughed.  "If hope had escaped the box than all the world would have been without hope. So how here, in the box, can we have any?  And how can we escape from such a box?"

Claudia knew this legend, had thought it silly.  Her priest had thought it pagan.  Suddenly it was all too real.

"When we escape, we shall doom the world but we will not escape We will die. They is what he wants and in the end, we will give him what he wants."  

Claudia sank against the wall trying to keep her eyes from the corpse.

"Come, we shall see where the blood leads."  Eudora smiled.  The suggestion was sick.  Claudia followed and was glad to follow.  She wanted anything that would take her away from this fresh corpse's eyes.  Maybe it could even keep her from her guilt, which though she did not admit it, was alive and well.

They followed to where the trail began. They found themselves in one of their prison's dining rooms. At the foot of one of the chairs the old woman's line of blood ended.

Whatever had consumed bits of the old woman left no trace of itself.  Claudia sat down at the dinner table where the trail ended.  She touched a bowl smeared with red.  It was a brilliant color, and Claudia thought it looked agreeable on the flatware.  

"I'd like bowls like this," she said.  Her finger trailed across the red, which, of course, came free onto her fingertips.  

Eudora hovered by the doorway.  Her expression was strange and filled with passion.  "And they fall to hunger or the hungry."

"Your eyes are bright as the sun.  Are you an angel or a demon?  Dora, what are you?"

"And what are you pretty one? You've fallen so far and yet your legs are unbroken."

"I am nothing.  I've know that for so long it's hard to remember when I didn't.  All I have is a heart."  Claudia rested her hand over the offending organ.  Did it beat again?  Could she see his face?  No, he was still hidden from her.  Her heart was blind, but it did beat.  

"Then you are ahead of me. I tore mine out long ago and watched as it stopped beating.  Once they come out, you can't help them.  And my heart just couldn't survive."  Again her hand stroked the pouch at her side.  She fondled it for comfort; Claudia realized.  Some relic of her old life must lie within.  

"Red, red, red," Claudia said as her eyes returned to her hands and the bowl.  Her mind met Eudora's words on seeing the bowl and the blood.  She puked; luckily there was nothing in her stomach to come up.

She darted away from the table, the wood-backed chair clattered to the floor. The remained of someone's feast mocked her from the table. Wet red bowl, a smear down the side of a crystal goblet.  Only a few small bones and blood remained, but it was enough.  "What kind of person would..."

Eudora laughed.  "Hunger."

Claudia ran blindly from the room.  Her feet brought her right back to the corpse.  The old woman's eyes stared out at her.  Eudora's soft footsteps approached behind her.  Claudia sank to her knees.

A memory surfaced, and she did not know if it was real or conjured up by fear.  She saw another pair of vague staring eyes.  Uncooked meat under her fingers and a fervent mindless hunger ripping through her.  Meat.

Could she really remember the taste of it, raw and cold against her teeth and tongue?  Her mouth tasted bitter at the memory that might or might not belong to her.  She could see it in her mind, teeth struggling to rip through the upper flesh on the arm.  The stringy impossible muscle dividing the small mouthful she could obtain.  

Claudia gagged again, and her head dropped down toward the old woman's stomach.  It smelt awful down there.  In her mouth, the taste of flesh bitter with the beginnings of mold lingered. Cold and chewy so that her teeth had to snap through it; her jaws crashing together with the force of it.

She could not remove her mind from this one moment.  There was no context just a taste and a feel, a desperate hunger.  A mind that is sure will remain confident.  A mind that has no reason to believe will not.  But a mind likes to believe in something, an existence or the absence thereof.  The longer Claudia's mind dwelt on this taste, the truer it felt.  She could taste it now, slick meat sliding against the sides of her mouth.  Her mind wanted to believe because doubt was worse.  She did not want to believe because nothing was worse than that.

"Dora, Dora," She called as once she had called to God.  "Oh, Dora did I?"

Eudora's hands pulled her back from the corpse.  "Perhaps they will bring us chicken tonight."

Claudia lay back against Eudora's chest.  She expected tears to come, but they did not.  "I think I remember but it's so distant...like a dream."

"Tis all a dream pet.  And you will never wake, so what does it matter one way or the other?"

There was logic in that.  Claudia stood and allowed Eudora to lead her away.  The taste remained in her mouth.  The flesh had been so cold, almost frozen.  It tasted bitter and dull with cold.  Claudia rubbed her tongue against the top of her mouth trying to get the taste to go away.  It remained.

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