Free Bodies Are Disgusting by S. Gates Page B

disposal run for a
few moments before turning it and the tap off.
    Once he's out of earshot, you let out a
frustrated groan. Instead of going to all of that trouble last
night, you could have just put the fucking thing down the drain and
let the blades of the garbage disposal do the rest. Hell, you could
have flushed it once you'd cut it up, or just thrown it out with
the leftover mash you'd made and no one would have been the
wiser.
    But what's done is done and the ideas your
calm and collected brain provides are useless in the daylight. The
plate you'd left out is in the sink, licked clean by whatever
nocturnal creatures roam your neighborhood. And, more importantly,
Ori's "gift" is gone.
    * * *
    You can't sleep.
    Your next shift is that night, and it's less
like trying to drag a boulder behind you when you finally finish,
but you're still exhausted. You come home, throw your ink-stained
clothes in the laundry, and stand in the shower only long enough to
scrub off the worst of the grime from work. Once sufficiently
clean, you crawl into the same pair of boxers you wore last night
and haul yourself into your bed.
    But you can't sleep. No matter how exhausted
you feel, no matter the lassitude in your limbs when you try to get
up, do something else to occupy your brain and trick it into
letting you drift off. After spending nearly an hour tangling
yourself in your covers, you peel them off your legs and roll to
your feet.
    While sleep eludes you, you decided to start
in with video games. The character you'd created to play with Simon
in Diablo II gains several more levels and a rare piece of
gear before you get tired of listening to digitized monster
gurgles. By the time you're completely sick of it, three hours have
passed but you still twitch restlessly when you try to lay
down.
    Rather than sit again at your desk, you grab
your laptop and settle in against your headboard. Gaming no longer
holds any appeal, so you turn to the internet. The thought of
trying to while away the time on mindless web games curdles before
it manages to even fully form, so instead you fall back on an old
mainstay. You comb restlessly through your bookmarks for your
most-visited gay, lesbian, or gonzo porn sites. You cycle through
them one at a time, but you can't find it in yourself to be
properly aroused enough to masturbate before trying to sleep
again.
    Finally, you decide to browse to your favorite
message board. Your recent unnerving encounter with Lucien aside,
it's still an enjoyable way to pass the time with minimal emotional
or intellectual investment. The conspiracy theory board is as
volatile as ever: threads about the tsunami seem to have ebbed,
replaced by speculation about a fish-kill off the Louisiana coast
and a recent rash of bird deaths over Chicago (an estimated
$200,000 dollars of damages in windshield replacement and lawsuits
from Alfred Hitchcock's estate, one poster jokes).
    One thread, though, catches your eye. It's
dominated by a screenshot from the homepage of a small Virginia
newspaper. The headline reads: "Local girl hangs self with barbed
wire; Police suspect bullies to blame." In and of itself, a
common-place tragedy, but the post accompanying it strikes you as
strange.
    "Remember that night? That's
Marionettestrings," an anonymous poster says.
    A chorus of "what" and "who" follows, but then
another name that you recognize appears in the thread:
SilentHarper17. "She did what she thought was right," SilentHarper
says. "Are you fuckwits willing to believe me now?"
    You hover your cursor over SilentHarper's
screen name. An email link populates in the bottom corner of your
browser window, and it appears to be a legitimate address, rather
than something bogus provided to satisfy a required field. Not that
this particular message board is legitimate enough to have any sort
of fields be required for posting.
    Unsure of why, you click the link.
    It opens a new browser tab for your webmail
and auto-fills the address. The cursor