Free A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims

anthropophagous father, and she would be aggrieved and confused to hear that Mazoch feels any differently. 28
    Would be aggrieved and confused, for that matter, if I were to defend Mazoch, to devil’s-advocate for him, or especially if I were to continue to accompany him each morning in full knowledge of his ‘plan.’
    This would all be easier for me if, like Rachel, I could simply condemn patricide outright. If I were not even tempted to defend it as an option. But the fact is that the ethics of undeath are murky to me. The questions that Matt and Rachel have been made to face, in the wake of the epidemic, are not questions that it has made me face. This choice between the grave and the quarantine, the shovel and the baseball bat… I have trouble, truthfully, even imagining myself in their shoes. Because my own parents both died (car crash) and were cremated years before the
epidemic, they have always been ineligible for undeath. I scattered their ashes myself. I never had to worry about their reanimating, or ask myself what I would do. What my duties would be. Unlike Rachel and Matt, I’ve never had to think of them in terms of undeath. I’ve had to think only of myself in terms of undeath. So whenever I try to align myself with Rachel, and work up some primordial disgust at the thought of patricide, I find that I cannot do it. Who knows how I would react, if I were Matt? It’s his decision.
    This, like so much else, is not something I can explain to Rachel this morning. So I do not try to. Having finished buttering our barely toasted toast, I bring the plate to the table and sit beside her. ‘I still don’t know,’ I say to her. ‘I don’t know what he wants to do. But I’ll ask.’
    â€˜Michael,’ she says, reaching over to put her hand on my hand. ‘Mm,’ I say. ‘Just promise me you won’t let him use that bat.’ And here I exhale, immensely relieved, for at last she has given me something that I can truthfully tell her: ‘Rachel. Honey. You know we never use the bats.’

    Â 
    LATER THIS MORNING, I WATCH FROM THE passenger seat as Matt uses his bat to break into a building.
    We’re staking out the antiques mall in Denham where Mr. Mazoch used to rent a booth. It’s a squat stucco box isolated on an empty stretch of road, and it’s been locked up for as long as we’ve been coming here: the glass double-doors in front are both expertly boarded from inside, with a length of chain wound around the push bar and a heavy padlock dangling dull and scrotal from the links. Since Mr. Mazoch couldn’t have broken in, we’ve never tried to. Normally Matt just cases the place and we sit in the parking lot to wait.
    But today Matt pauses at the double doors, and I watch from the car as he scrutinizes the windows. He taps at the glass, as if experimentally, with the bat handle’s beveled knob. Then, before I understand what is about to happen, he plants his feet apart, cocking the bat at his shoulder, and swings a tremendous arc into one of the windows, which must be shatterproof, for it wobbles indomitably and the bat recoils. Even from across the parking lot I can hear the hollow pdunk of it. Undeterred, Matt simply rides the recoil of the bat and heaves his hips into a second swing, which recoils again, and then into a third swing, and so on.
    After the fourth or fifth swing, I realize what Matt must be thinking. It is the same thing he was thinking at Mr. Mazoch’s earlier this morning, when he insisted on inspecting the house for a second time: he is determined to find another trace today. A trail of muddy bootprints. Another scrap of blue plaid cloth. He’s going to find something , if not at his father’s house then here, and he’ll beat down those double doors to do it. Never mind
that the mall—likely boarded since the outbreak—cannot be home to any recent traces. And never mind the