Jessica R Cull
This Too May Kill Us
He asked where I wanted to eat. I said a Chinese restaurant, covered in wall-to-wall glow-in-the-dark stars and with the smell of burnt oil so strong it might have made me sick.
He always chewed his food on one side of his mouth, munching down as though he was afraid of scraping his teeth against an ulcer or -
“You’re chewing on the left side tonight,” I said. Then the clang of metal against ceramic as he dropped his fork.
“For fucks sake, Ellie.” I watched the words spit themselves out in small pieces of broccoli and tofu. “Why do you always bring that up? It makes me so damn self-conscious.” I shrugged. I didn’t think anything could make him self-conscious. For a middle-aged accountant eating shit Chinese food with a twenty-nine-year-old, he was absurdly sure of himself.
“It’s not a bad thing,” I said, picking up my chopsticks and flinging a noodle into my mouth. I ate them one at a time, taking forever and never tasting anything.
It wasn’t a long walk home but he called for a taxi and I didn’t bother arguing. We bundled into the back, me going first so that I had to clamber across the back seats whilst trying to keep my skirt from flashing my ass. I sat down and laughed, a real bark and squawk of a thing.
“What?” he said, lowering himself into the car after me.
“I almost flashed my ass!”
He sighed, huffed, and buckled his seatbelt like a good boy. The city moved slowly past the windows as we began to move, and I looked upon it with famished eyes; the meadows of my youth replaced with all this steel certainty of skyscrapers and seduction. I smiled at the giant face of a woman who looked down at our car from a flickering billboard, lying out on a sofa in her underwear.
“Do you mind that my bra and knickers never match?” I asked, pressing my face right up against the glass.
“What? No, of course not,” he replied.
The car moved forwards and the woman disappeared out of view. Her pastel pink lingerie lingered in my mind and I thought that perhaps I had a crush on her. Or maybe it was just marketing. I moved away from the glass, then, worried about the other giants who might try to lure me in and turned to him instead. He was on his phone, scrolling through either his favourite tailor's website or looking at porn (he made the same face for both).
“Have you heard that the world’s going to end?” I said.
“No.” He continued to scroll.
“Yup,” I nodded. “Next Tuesday. So there are only eleven days left - if you count today and Tuesday. Do you think we should? Or should we say it’s only nine days? Or ten?”
He sighed and locked his phone with a swift click. “What the fuck are you talking about?” He was swearing a lot these days and it didn’t suit him. He swore as though his mother was going to hear.
“The world. It’s ending.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“But it’s not.”
“But it is.”
The driver looked at us in his rearview mirror and raised an eyebrow. Perhaps he knew what I knew.
We got home and had sex. He was having sex with other women, too, and he didn’t do much to cover it up. At first, I viewed his adultery as a mirror. The sadness I felt was closer to guilt; something that I tried to turn into a reality but could find no proof for. Such introspection didn’t suit me, though, so I drowned my guilt in persistent indifference and quelled any lingering anxiety by reminding myself that no matter who he slept with, I was the one who lived in his flat. His two-bed bachelor pad had me all over it.
I lay naked in bed afterwards, on top of the covers and listening to the world through the safety of a closed window. He had a shower and came back in pyjamas. A set of them; a button-up shirt and trousers with an elasticated waistband, both in green check. He was most vulnerable in his pyjamas and it made me sick. He got under the covers and put on his reading glasses whilst I tried not to vomit on the bedsheets.
“What do you think we should do before next Tuesday?” I asked, batting my eyelashes in his direction.
“Have you got a twitch?” he frowned.
I gave up and rolled back, looking up at the ceiling.
“No,” I mumbled, consciously petulant. Then I thumped the mattress with my fist, saying “We need to talk about what we want to do before the world ends.”
“Jesus,” he sighed.
“Personally, I don’t have a lot on my bucket list. I would’ve liked to go to Iceland - or maybe Norway - but that’ll be too late now. I doubt there’ll be any plane tickets left, anyway, what with everyone flying home to be with their families. Speaking of which, I definitely don’t want to see my parents. I can’t stand the thought of dying whilst Dad fills out a crossword. Besides, I’ve cut my hair short and Mum never likes that.”
He took off his reading glasses. “Why are you so hellbent on the world ending, for fucks sake?”
“I’m not hellbent on it. I’m a realist,” I nodded, waving my feet up in the air.
“This is the opposite of realism, Ellie. I wish you’d fucking stop.”
I rolled over onto my stomach and crawled over to him. I put my face close to his, my eyelashes almost touching his cheek. “When are you going to face up to the fact that we’re going to die?”
He shook his head and moved away from me. “I’m going to sleep,” he said and turned off the light.
Despite my pleading, he continued going into the office. I’d been working in data entry since moving to the city; it was an easy job I could do from home and I didn’t have to talk to anyone apart from Steve. He was my ‘direct manager’ and he sent me an email every day, attaching the reams of data I was to upload to the system. Every Monday, he would start his email with “I hope you had a good weekend” and every Friday he would finish it with “Have a good weekend!”. I liked to imagine he was an old man - about the same age as my dad, maybe - and had a silver beard and a beer belly, and a dog called Barney that slept under his desk. I was sad to tell Steve I was leaving him, but I didn’t want to waste my last days plotting data into spreadsheets. Besides, I hadn’t been able to see any numbers on the screen for the past two weeks. Steve never replied to my email. I was happy that he’d gotten out, too.
He didn’t come home from the office, so I spent the evening washing all of our clothes. I emptied the wardrobe and put everything in the washing machine; then I emptied the drawers and did all of that, too. The smell of detergent reminded me of babies and the spinning barrel made everything else appear still and solid. When the final wash was done, I added the fresh clothes to the pile on the floor and stuck my nose into it until I could taste the cleanness. Then I went back to the washing machine and climbed inside. I was an acrobat, with my knees touching my chin and my nose touching my toes. The smell of cotton and detergent all over me as I spun around, and when I came out I was baptised. I knew, then, that everyone should get in their washing machine before they die.
His key turned in the door. He smelt like whiskey and tasted like perfume. I pushed him away when he tried to climb on top of me and he gave up, falling back against his pillow.
“I have one thing to ask that you do between now and next Tuesday,” I said.
He rolled to face me, breathing his cheapness all over my face.
“I want you to stop having sex with other people,” I said. He reached out and blindly found my face with his hand, doing a strange impression of stroking my cheek.
“Only you, Ellie. Only you.”
We fumbled our way around the kitchen making breakfast and I tried not to laugh at how absurd it was. We were children, playing make-believe at being grown-ups and in love. He threw me the mixing bowl and I dropped it on the floor, covering my ears as the metallic noise spun around and around. We tried to make pancakes but forgot to add the eggs. He ordered croissants and coffee from the local coffee shop.
“Do you know what I’d like to do before Tuesday?” I said, spitting flaky crumbs all over the kitchen counter.
“What?” he replied.
“I’d like to have a picnic. I’ve never had one before, not even when I was a child. My mum didn’t like the idea of mixing food with the outdoors. She wouldn’t even let me eat crisps outside. Can you believe that?”
He nodded.
“Is that a yes to the picnic or my mum's neurosis?” I asked.
“To both.”
On Sunday afternoon, we took supermarket sandwiches to the park. I thought about Steve at home with Barney, feeding him pieces of apple pie, and it made me want to cry. But I didn’t. Instead, I lay down on the picnic blanket and tried to spot clouds in the clear sky. He was reading a book and checking out women as they walked past — even the ones I knew weren’t his type.
“You’re chewing with the right side, now,” I said, sitting up.
“Fucking hell!”
We didn’t speak for the rest of the picnic. It suited us, not to have to hear each other talk. I think we both worried we’d catch a glimpse of what the other person was really like if we said too much and the glue in our papier-mâché romance would finally melt. We ate, we drank. I had a nap whilst he crossed the park to chat up a woman on a bench, and when we went home we had sex. It was the perfect last Sunday. Before we went to bed I thanked him for it.
“It’s going to be a shame not to have weekends anymore. I always enjoyed them - every one of them.”
He grunted and turned off the light.
Monday was cheerful. I skipped around the flat, waiting for him to come home from work. I ordered takeaway meals four times and went to the local supermarket to buy a chocolate birthday cake. At the checkout, I did my best impression of a full-toothed grin at the old lady behind the counter and said, “I’m surprised you’re open. I thought the world would have gone to shit by now.” She looked at me from beneath bushy eyebrows as she scanned my cake.
“Of course we’re open. It’s Monday.”
At home, I ate the cake with my hands in front of the window until I was sick.
He came home and I surprised him with a hug. He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back, raising his eyebrows.
“What’s this?” he said.
“I’m excited, I’ve missed you!”
“You never miss me.”
“Well, I do now. We only have one day left to get all of this done.” I waved my arms above my head.
“The end of the world shit. I’d almost forgotten.” He walked past me and into the kitchen, getting out his phone to order food.
“I want pizza!” I shouted and began to run around the flat in giant, overlapping circles. Energy burst outwards from within me and I felt, at last, like a star.
We ate the greasy pizza in bed and, afterwards, I attempted something close to intimacy.
“Are you trying to hold my hand?” he asked as I foraged around under the covers.
“Yes.”
“But we don’t do that.”
“Well, I thought it might be nice to try.”
“Okay.” He found my scrambling hand and held it still in his. We sat like that for a few seconds, not looking at each other. Somewhere a clock ticked, which was odd as we didn’t have one.
“No,” I said, pulling away. “You’re too clammy and your skin feels like raisins.”
“Ha!” he huffed. “Fucking charming.”
During the night I turned off his alarm. By the time he woke, he was already thirty minutes late for the office.
“Shit!” he shouted, jumping out of bed and fumbling to unbutton his pyjama shirt. I waltzed in, completely naked and holding two takeaway coffees. He was red in the face and had only managed two of the buttons. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he asked.
“I called the office,” I said. He stopped. “I told them you were sick and wouldn’t be coming in.” He shook his head. “It’s the last day, silly!” I laughed. “I thought we could spend it together.”
“Oh,” he said, dropping his arms to his side and leaning his head back towards the ceiling. “But I was meant to have a meeting with John…” his voice trailed off. Then he shook his head. “Fuck it. You know what? Let’s do it. Let’s have your end of the world. John can wait until tomorrow.”
We spent the last day in bed, having sex, eating leftover cake, and ordering coffee. Somewhere in the midst of it, I told him I loved him. It wasn’t true, but he was chewing with the left side of his mouth and it moved me. I felt I had to say something. I think he pretended he hadn’t heard me.
The sun dipped below the skyscrapers, then below the office blocks, and then below the few bungalows that stood their stubborn ground in the high-rise city, and I knew it was time to go. He was asleep, wearing his god-awful pyjamas, but at that moment I didn’t even care. I kind of liked the vomit-green checks. I woke him up. “Come with me,” I whispered. He may not have been empathetic or witty or anything close to spontaneous, but he was obedient when I wanted him to be. He stood and dressed in the suit I’d laid out for him and I stepped into the nicest red dress I owned.
He followed me up to the roof of our building as dusk slipped into twilight.
“I should’ve brought a jacket,” he mumbled behind me. Our block of flats was tall and the wind buffeted around us, but the view of the sky was clear and unbroken. I laughed, delighted at our front-row seats.
“It’s as if it were made for it!” I cried into the wind.
“What?” he yelled back. I laughed and skipped and danced. Then I stopped and looked up, the pure darkness of space revealing itself from under its violet-hued cloak.
“It’s starting,” I whispered.
In the distance, I watched two stars spark and glow in a sudden culmination of energy. Then they went dark. “I have regrets,” I began, maybe to him, maybe to myself; maybe to something else. “I wish I’d read more books and spent more time looking at other people. I wish I’d taken more cocaine and less iron tablets and eaten chocolate cake every day.” The wind stirred and groaned as another star, smaller than the tip of my fingernail, went black. “I wish I’d tried to love something. Even a houseplant. Why didn’t we have any houseplants?”
“I don’t know,” he said, squinting up into the sky.
“I wish I’d had matching underwear - something pretty; something pastel! Something I might have felt something in. And I wish I’d talked more about how meaningless this has all been because at least that would’ve been worth saying.” I was shouting now, reaching my voice over the wind as it chased the violence of a hurricane. A star closer to Earth burst into a plethora of light, painting the universe in a watercolour of gas and ancient atoms before it, too, faded into nothing. “I wish that I had told you that your sleeping with those other women made me hate myself!” He looked at me then, his face raw and bright. “I always thought that I was the reason you did that; that it was some hardwired fault everybody could see in me. Even when I told myself I didn’t care anymore, I couldn’t stop looking at my damn reflection and wondering what it was about my face that made you fuck other people.” I laughed, then, and began to cry. “Which is funny, because I never loved you anyway. And you never loved me.” All across the infinite expanse of the universe, suns were burning out in a glorious triumph of inevitable ends and new beginnings. A final wave to those that had been gazing upon them for millennia; a standing ovation before they left the stage. Sirius, the second brightest star in the sky, grew impossibly magnificent and shook the planet, sending the tallest buildings plummeting to the ground and raising the ocean from the sea bed. Somehow, our block of flats stood, solemn and stubborn like a well-bred soldier. But the Earth was rocking and I knew it was almost time. I’m here and I’m ready. I wish I’d said goodbye to Steve. Is that my final thought? I won’t be angry if it is.
He’s swearing, looking up at the sky and saying, “Is this it?”
Jessica R Cull is a content writer living in Sussex, England. Her short story "Fifteenth Year" was published by Literally Stories.
