Free PostApoc by Liz Worth Page B

side of my face. Her fingertips have the stickiness of a spider’s legs. They spin out a spiral across my eyelid, stretch the webbing across my cheekbone.
    â€œThere,” she says. “Done.” She’s smiling, proud, wants to show me, pulls a small compact from her pocket, holds it up. Except the mirror’s at the wrong angle and has me out of the frame. I reach for the compact, try to pull it down but she stops my hand, holds it in hers mid-air.
    She wants to know: “You like it?”
    All I see is sky. “I love it,” I tell her.
    It might be somewhere around what used to be 3AM and the show is breaking up. There’s still a small sputter of fire; a few people have stretched out around the fire pit, sleeping on their backs. Tara and I have lost the last of our time here, both blacking out after the singer went back inside and Aimee went off somewhere again. Shit Kitten said they were doing two sets but we can only remember seeing one.
    You never know how long it’ll take to walk across the Bloor Street bridge. Should only be a few minutes, five to eight depending how fast you are, but you never know what you might step into here. There are pockets of time, holes that’ll slow you down, ghosts that’ll pull you in.
    Tonight the only measurement of time I have to go by is the fatigue I’m starting to feel in my lower thighs, muscles straining to get to the other side, slowed by the cold that always creeps in up here. I want to stay, lie down right where I am on the bridge, but Tara pushes into the small of my back, tells me to just move, move, move. I fall behind anyway.
    Finally I crawl up the porch stairs, the last one in. Even Aimee has made it in before me, having come a different route with Trevor. No one waits to make sure I get in okay.
    The legs of my jeans are damp from something wet but I don’t know what. It’s absorbed upwards, left a coating of black grime, tiny pebbles across the calves of my pants. I pull the jeans off and leave them in a far corner of the room, don’t want anymore outside transmission on me than there already is. I throw my t-shirt there, too, wipe at my ankles. A few specks of dark sand fall onto the floor.
    I find another t-shirt to wipe at my face. It’s not clean but at least it’s dry. The sun is starting to come up, bringing in enough light to get at my makeup. The swirl the singer painted earlier is gone, nothing left even in the crease of my eyelid.

- 13 -
EMPTY HUNGER
    A imee wakes me up and asks “Do you want to get drunk?” and I say, “Of course I do.” She says, “A friend I ran into last night told me about someone who can hook us up.”
    I sit up. “Really? Who?”
    â€œWell it’s kind of weird,” she says. “Like, how we have to pay for it.”
    â€œOkay,” I say. “So what do we have to do?”
    Downstairs, the kitchen sink is backed up. Blowing chunks. Looks like stewing beef, meat cut at odd angles. Tough strands of white fat exposed. A circle of blood rims the drain.
    Five of us stand around trying to figure out how to deal with it, what to do. After this I think I will probably never be hungry again.
    From the right, a finger runs the length of darkness beneath my skirt, distracts me from the disgust of the sink. Cam, at the back of my knees.
    â€œWhat the fuck?” I spit, spinning to catch him.
    He laughs. “I’m kidding,” he says. “Besides, you better get used to it if you want to get drunk today.”
    Close your eyes and they could all be the same, guys like Cam, grabbing at ankles in the dark, hands reaching higher.
    Aimee says guys always like me because I’m one of the thin girls, because they think they can just flick me away. My raccoon eyes give me away, apparently, make it too obvious that I apply insomnia in place of eyeliner.
    I kick at Cam, heel to collarbone, prove Aimee wrong.
    We ride west, big empty