Scorched Earth

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I ask of the screen in my hand. It remains petulantly unchanged, its screen glowing in prism hues. The shapes on screen remain aggravatingly arranged into an indecipherable net of unmatched hue and size. I narrow my eyes and try, for the third time, to coerce the red jelly-cube into its desired spot, a diagonal upwards move that is usually disallowed by match-three games of this nature. This game is no exception to the rule, though I keep trying, willing the pixels to submit to my desire.

After the sixth attempt, the level must simply assume that I am a brainless chucklefuck and presents me with an unfeeling ‘Level Failed’ pop-up. It farts a cloud of confetti over my battlefield before prompting me to watch an advert to try again, or worse, to spend some of my precious gems to not only redeem myself but complete the level in ease. This tempts me about as much as the notion of holding my ass cheeks apart and sitting on a cactus.

The sounds of the advert play loudly out of my phone’s tinny little speakers, impacting the journeys of every single citizen trapped in here with me. The clickity-clack of the subway car is completely drowned out by the latest online scam working its hardest for my sweet, sweet clicks. I look up and cast my eyes around the car. When I boarded, I helped myself to one of the cushy, spacious spots usually occupied by pregnant women or their squealing babies. My legs are crossed on the seat beside me, blocking anybody from trying to take a pew in my breathing space, my threadbare sneakers protruding into the aisle. People keep brushing against them as they walk by, some more pointed than others, but I don’t move.

On the other side of the car, a rattish man with a narrow face and beady brown eyes is glaring at me. His head is appropriately squished on either side by muffling headphones. He’s a good boy, you see, and blasts his adverts directly into his skull. I tilt my head at him and smile sweetly. He’s clearly taken aback and doesn’t know what to do with his face at first, his small, puckered mouth seeming to war with itself over smiling back or deepening the self-righteous frown.

I tilt my head the other way and pull my lips together in a moue of faux sympathy. My lower lip juts out. My eyes widen theatrically. He grimaces back at me and I get to see it happen in real-time, the moment his fledgling frustration transitions into real anger. His feathery black brows lower over his eyes and just as he opens his mouth to speak, the commercial stops playing out of my phone and I look away from him, dismissing him in favour of digital serotonin.

I start to count within my head as I drag the tip of my finger over the screen. I get to fifteen before I feel a hard slap against the rubber sole of my shoe. I get to twenty before I feel it again. I look up, slooowly dragging my attention away from my screen for whatever interruption this may be. Naturally, Ratman is standing over me, his hands curled tightly into fists upon his hips and his headphones collaring his neck.

“You haven’t got a scrap of-” He starts talking, but whatever it is he’s about to start complaining about is abruptly dismissed in favour of moving the blue jelly-octagon into the perfect spot. My phone erupts with a chirp of jubilation as the masterful move equates to an enormous combo. Ratman’s tirade is buried underneath the electronic voice telling me that I am not only fabulous, but amazing, and stupendous and even - not to toot my own horn here - magnificent. I preen at the praise, feeling quite accomplished, until another smack disturbs my foot.

“You treat all your women this way?” I ask without looking up from my screen.

The rat blusters. I hear the rustle of wires and clothing as he turns his head to and fro, making sure no one else heard that particular implication.

“Do you have no common consideration?” He hurls this back at me and I hum as if I’m thinking about it.

The truth is that I do not. There’s only one person in this world I bother considering, and that’s me. I don’t care where Ratman gets his next meal. I care about where I get mine, though. I suck air through my pursed lips and teeth with a sharp, fleshy hiss and shake my head.

“Nope.” Strands of choppy black hair dislodge from where they have been stuffed impatiently behind my ears and hang around my face. The blunt hackjob I’ve done of my fringe settles just above my eyebrows. The final effect of this is that my eyes seem wider than ever, more piercing by contrast - the pale blue elevated to a kind of iciness that marks me as memorable, even if I never open my cherry-red mouth.

Speaking of red, Ratman has gone a very interesting shade. His cheeks resemble the bellies of robins, the brumal imagery made worse by the pasty white of his skin everywhere else. He looks like a baby alcoholic, glowing as hotly as he is.

“Do you want me to put this away?” I ask, jiggling my wrist to and fro to shake my phone at him. This clearly takes him by surprise and is obviously precisely what he wants me to do, but his temper doesn’t want to be assuaged that easily. He wants to sink his teeth into me and watch as I curl my tail and show him my belly. He wants to make me submit to him, preferably by force. Anything less is simply unappetising.

Usually, I would agree, but I really did want to crack level 474 before I get to where I’m going. I cut a glance out of the corner of my eye at the other occupants of the car: A brunette woman is knitting peaceably in a corner seat, but her hazel eyes are electric with attentiveness; a narrow businessman hunkers by the doors, trying hard to focus on the headlines of his newspaper; two older gentlemen are discussing politics over cardboard coffee cups. None of them are overtly watching as I and Ratman take shots at one another, but they all know. They all feel it in the air as well, the gradual charging of atoms pinging around their heads, infusing them with the same energy that thrums between I and the rat.

“What are you going to give me to make me put it away?” I prompt.

“Give you?” My aggressor repeats, as if I’ve asked him to open a wrist for me.

I grin, showing him all of my teeth this time, and he takes a step back.

“Yuh.” I nod. My free hand grasps the back of the seat and I use the leverage to pull myself forward. My long legs stretch over the edge of the seat, the worn soles of my shoes seeking the rattling floor. “Give me something if you want me to do what you’re saying.” I give him each word a little more slowly, only because I enjoy the way his eyes seem to get beadier with each one.

I can taste his frustration on the air, coming off of him in waves as thick as any bodily fug. He tastes like burned sugar and energy drinks and how you’d imagine the crumbs in your keyboard to taste after a decade of getting smashed in there under your greasy fingertips. I know, in the same way that I know I have a nose on my face and cosmic horrors in my heart, that this guy is a keyboard warrior. He’s a top contributor in almost every subreddit he visits. He moderates servers on Discord. He’s a small, powerless man that wants nothing more than for this encounter to paint him as a hero.

My phone screeches with another cartoony jingle. It wants me to play my level. I want me to play my level.

I run my tongue over my teeth, tasting his fust on the back of my tongue, and make myself stand. I teeter. My spine needs a minute to get back to fit-fighting condition and waves like a cooked noodle. It has an unintended effect: Rat stares at my chest, at the flat landscape of my stomach and the narrow angle of my hips, jutting like cliff’s edges out from beneath my own pasty, sunless skin.

“What- What do you want?” He asks. He may as well have surrendered his Queen with that question and I suck air into my cheeks, pillowing them out.

“That’s the eternal question, isn’t it?” I shrug, bony shoulders lifting towards my ears. He watches every move I make, but he doesn’t see me for what I am. He won’t. Not until I want him to.

“Look,” he says, and I know what he’s going to try before he does it, but I let him enjoy the motions anyway. “Can you please just turn the volume down? Mute it, maybe. No one wants to hear you playing Candy Crush.”

I make a show of inching my eyebrows up towards my hairline. I turn my face and thrust out my lower lip again. I give the meagre crowd of civilians another quick look. I was prepared to argue with him about how he couldn’t possibly know what everyone in this human-ferrying tin can could want without at least asking them. I was going to pressure him to ask the knitting woman what she wants out of her morning, because she seems to find the entire thing funnier than anyone else on the train, but I change tracks (ha!) at the last moment.

“Oh, brother. This-” I thrust my phone at him, too quickly for him to see my impressive score nor my incredible amount of gems. “-Is not Candy Crush.” I clutch the device against my chest.

Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for me and my plans for him, the car hisses to a hydraulic screech at the next station. My mouth is open, tongue just barely pressed to the flesh of my lower lip, words just beginning to enter the universe as they funnel up from the pitch of my throat when the automated voice beats me to it.

“Now arriving at Village Station,” it announces, somewhat unhelpfully. A fresh press of people swells up against the doors. The businessman has to shuffle out of the way to accommodate the beating hearts that rush in. They find seats and fill the space with noise, moving around Rat and I as we stare, hard, at one another.

I wanted him to ask me what it was, if not the ever-popular sugar-based game. I wanted to have the satisfaction of referencing a particular film of historic importance before planting my shoe in his chest and kicking him through the window. The moment has since passed, however, and we are locked in a moment of staring at one another, wordless, edgy, seeking ignition.

“Just, you know,” he says, his eyes flicking away from my face in order to take in all of the new people that have materialised around him. “Think of your fellow man.” He shakes his head, aware that the statement is simultaneously impotent and lacking the devastation he wanted to wreak upon me.

If only he knew that I spend every waking moment thinking about humans. If only he knew how often I turned my sight inwards and chewed on the bones of interactions held with these fucking heaps of flesh with eyes. My back teeth begin to grind together and I taste him on the air again, scenting that shitty, male assurance that has pissed off every woman ever born since the moment the universe imploded and shat out life.

I think Rat has realised that I haven’t blinked since he started speaking to me. There’s something a bit wary in his eyes now, something cornered and animal, a mouse that has just realised that the pot of cream he’d been drinking from is tainted. He swallows, and I wonder whether he can taste me now, whether his tongue writhes in revulsion against what he finds squicking around his molars.

Alarm comes into his eyes as I raise my eyebrows at him. He watches me, paralysed, as I tuck my phone into the pocket of my jacket. His head twitches on his neck. A cord pulses in his throat with the effort of swallowing what he now feels worming around his uvula. His lips part and I see it! Just for a second, a flicker of wet shadow creeping between the soldiers of his teeth. His tongue flaps from side to side, tasting and exploring and learning this new beast that has taken up residence, impossibly, in the cave of his face.

“Wh… Fuh…” He makes many of these mushy noises at me until he seems to realise that I am not the woman that’s going to rush to his aid. He pivots on his heel and turns towards the other passengers, his eyes moving uselessly over the strangers that have occupied the cabin with him for the longest. The politickers are still locked in conversation. The businessman is gone. The woman with the needles is, apparently, his only hope. He surges towards her, pushing around a pram that has blocked the aisle.

As he jostles it, the baby within starts up its daily routine of testing the function of its lungs. It screams as though someone has padded its swaddle with legos. The noise cuts straight through every single one of these poor bastards. A slim woman in a trench coat subtly plugs earbuds in and turns towards the window with renewed interest.

Rat has found his position of pleading, and falls into the seat opposite the crafty woman. She looks at him, pink lips curled in an entertained smirk. He opens his mouth in an effort to speak, his face red with exertion, eyes watering. It looks almost like he’s suffering an allergic reaction. His veins throb beneath his skin, standing out like green worms against reddening skin.

When he tries one last time to form a word, all Rat manages to do is spit on the knitter’s hard work. A fat, gleaming puck of phlegm immediately sinks its grubby, unhealthily dark ooze into the scarf she had been putting together for her wife. I lean my hip against the back of the seat I’ve vacated and prop my elbow on top of it. A few other bystanders are also watching this encounter, if they find they can hear through the squalling child’s continuing screams. They gaze at him impassively, waiting to see whether his attitude will worsen, or if this was some unfortunate accident of the body. Unlikely, they think, but not impossible. He has a chance to walk himself down from the gallows here.

Foolishly, he opens his mouth again. Another disgusting clump of organic matter oozes out of him. Less phelgmy on this go-around, though I can see a tuft of black hair sticking out of whatever he has expelled. Looking at his face, I can see the busy tentacles of my ire poking out of the corners of his mouth. They snake up towards his nose, eyes and ears, hunting for orifices to occupy.

The knitter, and the watchers, notice this as well. A blanket of tense horror settles over all of them, put together by the careful needlework of yours truly. They are warmed by disgust and latent chivalry, many of the men feeling compelled to jump to their feet and defend the dishonoured lady. Someone actually gets to their feet.

Just in time for Rat to release a noise like a sausage being stepped on. Meaty and wet, his stained tongue thrusting helplessly through his lips. He whirls back in my direction, eyes wide with terror, and I make a show of reaching for my pocket and taking out my phone again. Without breaking eye contact with my new friend, I rotate the device horizontally and click open the camera function. Unblinking, I raise it to chin-level and begin recording.

Others quickly follow suit, reaching for their own electronic assistants to capture this nasty moment as it happens in real time. Rat screams as the first hero starts in on him, reaching for his shoulder. I click my tongue against my teeth in sorrowful understanding of what comes next. The moment the new actor in the play makes contact with Rat, his dark hitchhiker latches on to a new host, multiplying in the single beat of a heart. The stranger’s good intentions are immediately dissolved, replaced by a sudden desire to inflict massive violence. He staggers, surprised by the intensity of the feeling, immediately aroused by the power loaded within it. He briefly loses his footing and claps a hand down on the knitter’s shoulder.

She gasps, unnoticed by anyone but me, as the darkness sinks into her, too. By the time her would-be hero has swung a fist into Rat’s face, she has lunged forward and punched a hole into the verminous man’s thigh with one her needles. Her work-in-progress scarf pools limply on the floor at her feet as she jumps up, hunting for her next victim. It isn’t enough to merely attack the rat-faced man. She, and her compatriots in violence, want more. They quickly turn on the other commuters making use of the city’s public transport and violence blooms around me in a garden of red and black.

I breathe deeply, sucking in the perfume of blood and sweat and terror through my nose. My lungs inflate, my rib cage spreading open to make room for all of the feeling that pours in with every blow and shout. The baby’s screaming is abruptly silenced and I jolt with that particular delivery of anguish, feel it running up and down my spine like a lover’s finger. My tongue is a wet, living thing in my mouth, swimming in saliva so dark that it stains the insides of my lips and teeth.

The subway car rolls into the next station thirty seconds later. The windows are sheeted red with bodily fluids, disturbed occasionally by clumps of flesh and hair. Someone’s watch hangs hilariously from one of the handles overhead. The timepiece still ticks, though the front pane of glass is completely absent. The minute hand is missing, also, which seems oddly apt. I help myself to it, unlatching it from its hook and slipping it onto my wrist. It’s too big and hangs like a bracelet, smearing red against white flesh as I step onto the station platform.

There are worse ways to spend a journey.