Rites of Extinction by Matt Serafini

Author:Matt Serafini [Serafini, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941918463
Publisher: Grindhouse Press
Published: 2019-03-29T21:00:00+00:00

20

REBECCA SITS CROSS-LEGGED ON THE bed, her clothes in a muddy ball at her feet. Bret is busy feeding another string of texts through the phone. She barely acknowledges them. The book rests in her lap.

She flips toward the earliest pages while around her the mirrors make predictable hell. These are raucous knocks—they’ve never been this loud or this agitated, going well beyond fingernail taps on glass. These are the sounds of rounded fists falling and falling and falling.

Because they want to get in.

But human beings are nothing if not adaptable. People teach themselves to live with all kinds of setbacks: limp legs, ringing ears, or lumps beneath their arms. Anything to avoid going to the doctor. Inconvenience is a sliding scale that tips surprisingly far when it needs to. And Rebecca has decided she’ll go the rest of her life without ever seeing her reflection again.

“Is that the best you can do?” she taunts, elbowing the wall. Her headache is especially sharp tonight. It makes her irritable. Those hands don’t care. They continue to pound as if on instinct.

“Where’s my fucking Advil?” Rebecca says. This pain has laid eggs inside her brain. She feels as though she’s dealing with a hundred hatchlings at once. Mini migraines crawl into every crevice of her skull, wreaking havoc on her thoughts and keeping her temples pulsing. Her eyes, watery.

She finds the bottle of Advil on the desk, opened and knocked aside. Empty. Can’t even remember how many she’s taken today. Recalls her doctor cautioning against liver damage and the way she laughed in his face.

“Screw it,” she says. She’ll push on. The weathered page between her fingers feels culled from another world. Old and faded sketches show undocumented history. She flips further back and realizes the text is all symbols.

Somehow she understands it.

You know why, she thinks.

“I do?” she says.

She does.

Rebecca picks up her phone, sighs as she sees herself in low light. It’s not the same as looking at oneself in the mirror. The knocks don’t come through here. She looks slightly out of focus and no matter which way she turns her head, just looks damn old. Every angle, an unflattering one.

She stares straight into the screen and clicks the button. Has to zoom in close in order to see it, but Cortez was right. One of her eyes is the color of jade. But it’s even worse than that. The entire shape of that eye is different and now that she’s scrutinizing, she realizes it’s altered the structure of her face.

This is a stranger’s face. Parts of it still belong to her, but continued scrutiny makes her headache grow.

She throws the phone down and slips into sweat pants and a loose top, walks down to the office—glad to leave the sound of knocking mirrors behind.

“The hell do you want?” the manager says as she steps inside. He looks up from a Hungry Man and has brownie crumbs plastered to his chin. She doesn’t have a chance to respond before he picks himself up out of his recliner.

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