Rusty and the Pit

They are alone in a bare lumber lodge. One empty floor with one alcove set aside for a cast iron cauldron long gone cold. Not even an ash decorates the alcove: was there ever a fire?

The weather outside hovers just below freezing. The size of the interior ensures that body warmth is no provision of heat. Each one exhales mist with each outward breath. Cold saps their limbs of whatever strength their vices had left to them: nothing worth mentioning. Each intake of breath lacerates their esophagus with frost as thin as cruelty.

The wall parts once, swinging wide like a door. The giant pokes its arm in long enough to cast them a pile of old cardboard and garments made of brittle straw strung on bent wires. The wall closes.

A blizzard. More snow. The sides of the lodge are reduced to supports for snow drifts several times taller than a man's head.

The Stranger scowls her way forward, a stained piss-yellow neglige barely hiding the burn marks covering her legs and hips. She takes a pile of the cardboard and straw and makes a nest, now hidden from the view of exactly one.

The Empty tries to dance. It is meaningless and trivial. No one watches.

The wall parts again, swinging wide like a door. The giant shuffles in, takes the cauldron in one hand, casts a mass of dead poultry into the alcove with the other. He exits. The wall closes.

The giant scoops a drift back against the outside of the wall and leaves for the distant forest.

He is not scared of hungry dogs.

The Empty drags the network of poultry to a corner. The Empty snaps something irrelevant and takes a batch of straw-work clothing to its corner of dead things. The Empty feigns pleasure. It has always been its way.

The Empty now shits itself. The Stranger squawks unattractively. Piss stains the cardboard, and both are covered in the odours of guilt. The Stranger claims what clean leavings she can, and so laden, she leaves.

The Empty and the Stranger occasionally trade idiocies while freezing in an ugly wooden frame. It has always been their way.

The wall swings wide. The giant, disgusted. He throws car-sized lumps of snow inside, hoping to blast a pit-sized pile of excrement and fluid lying in the middle of his once clean floors.

He shuffles in, scoops the Empty from a corner, and hurls her forcefully into the wall nearest the Stranger. There is no blood. It is too cold for blood.

He takes the birds in hand and plucks them with one pull of the other hand. He packs snow into the cauldron, now wedged where it ought to be in the alcove, held up by the walls on either side of it. He lays rocks as a border to the belly of the alcove, and taking brush from his jacket of branches, crushes them and scatters the tinder beneath the cauldron.

A fire is started and the chickens are placed into the packed snow. It will be many hours before the broth simmers. The giant turns and leaves the way it came, replacing the wall and the snow drifts as before.

It has things to do before the Yuletide.

She huddles in a damp spot between the alcove and the door, desperately clinging to an illusion of a piss-free existence, teeth chattering as she longs for neglige that is only the colour of piss.

But hers is stained.

The Empty takes the excrement of a nest and tries again. It makes a huddle against the opposite side of the alcove. This works for at least one hour before stupidity drives it to seek solace in the shitting of itself.

Will the shitting ever stop? It cannot, or it would cease to be Empty.

The Empty approaches her. Idiocies are exchanged. It is their way. It always will be.

The broth is warm now, and bubbles so merrily. The Stranger has a dangerous thought: any. Inexplicably, she climbs into the water; without explanation, she pisses in it. It was inevitable. She now simmers merrily in her own vinegar. The Stranger has a stupid thought: all. Will she be caught?

Can she drink the soup?

The Empty shuffles inanities out from its shitcoat of a habitat. It only wants the music to stop. The music never stops; the music only gets better.

The wall shifts. The giant returns. He picks up the cauldron, and is disgusted. The cauldron is thrown far and away. He scoops the Stranger and the Empty and stores them in snow for a spell. He cleans the lodge, restores a fire, and fishes the idiots. He hurls them angrily against the inside of the lodge, their bodies slamming into the far wall, leaving telltale spiderwebs of snow-dry blood where their skulls impact on pine.

It is too cold for sympathy. He wanted only to eat and to rest and to enjoy the Yuletide.

He hunches in the lodge while the fire builds and crackles. Chest heaving with exhausted patience. Teeth - hitherto unseen - grind impatiently as he considers his options. The Empty lies still, her scalp slowly binding; the Stranger stands already, glancing at the giant in her stained yellow guilt. Does he know? she asks; he knows. Everyone does.

He throws a root at her, to bide her sullen cow mouth while he takes time to think. She chews, her teeth crushing through febrile vegetable fibers; he grinds his teeth, thinking of a mass of meat and bone he will never get to eat. Does she know? he muses; she doesn't. She never did.

Finally grown tired of trying to understand the inexplicable, the giant departs.

The Empty sits up, blood clotted hair strung down her back. The Stranger breathes heavily around mouthfuls of food. Both of them glare hungrily at where the giant sat not one minute sooner. There, lying right there, are one dozen dime bags with one rock of crack apiece. The Stranger tries to be first hog at the trough; if she had her trotters, she would be the last. The Empty cries out, and for the first time in her life, she acts. The Empty and the Stranger crab greedily at the windfall.

No matter what they try, no matter how they spin, connive, or molest, one another, the result is the same. Six dimes apiece; six rocks of crack to help them push through the monotony of the lodge and the pure hell of the existence of each. Of either.

They were given cigarettes. They have the foils. They may smoke or ingest. Money for Nothing and some Sympathy for the Devil. They will be Dancing in the Dark before School. A Lake of Fire for everyone.

One smokes: the crackle pop of the crack pipe hits her like a freight train. Synapses light up and she feels the comfort warm harshness of smoke scouring a bovine tongue. It races down her esophagus, and that's when she feels it. A hideous, unwanted crawling slithering up her back as something clammy rubber garbles its way to her shoulder.

One ingests: a painless drop of instant that makes nary a ripple as it finds its way home. No fog settles in, no warnings light, no need for alarm. Soothing cynical distance walls her off from the inconstancy of daily interactions. And that's when she feels it. A hideous, unwanted crawling racing up her calf and inner thigh as something clammy rubber uggles its way to her shoulder.

The thing: a rubbery arachnid with the bloated foreface of a solifugid, minus the eyes. It is the unwholesome pink of rancid ham, its skin looks swollen and raw. And it accompanies the crack wherever it might be.

The Stranger and the Empty panic, but they are allowed to. Their crack is safe in its dime bag. They race here, they gesticulate there, panic, panic, everywhere. The clammy rubber stands stark still where it fell. The clammy rubber takes halting steps forward; twitches suddenly, leaps; takes stock.

But there are more. One just appeared in a seam between logs in the wall. One is on the ceiling, and its grip is not good.

One smokes; one ingests; the clammy rubber wants their mouths.