The Orchid Nursery. Louise Katz

horrible pointy little doggie-dugs off, and stuff its outsized pockets with my gear. In the foyer I pass the glass Vitrine of Shame and the old-fashioned opaque porno-dress from the Museum of Iniquities in there. It takes my fancy so I slide the panel open and nick that too. I quickly slip out of my dressless and and pull my new frock over my head. Glancing at my reflection, I’m pretty chuffed at the coverall effect. See me, titless and cuntless porno queen! I’d like to steal a lot more, but there’s nothing more I need. I’d like to kick and punch and bash the glass in, but that would be very noisy and stupid.

      Then I tear the first page from the notebook and scribble out a note to Asa. I tell him everything is changed and now we have no time to plan, for if I wait I will soon be on my way to Perfection tomorrow and a limbless vegetable by next week. I tell him where to meet me. By Big­Amass. There is no other landmark as clear as that. And then I write: Only wait. Wait a day and a night and if I’ve not been caught and bundled back like a sack of dead hope, then perhaps I am safe. I underline this instruction to wait many times, for I do not want a dead man, but a living-breathing-loving one. I secrete the note in our hiding place, where we have always placed our messages, here under the sheeny moon with her luminous face all riddled with craters of some ancient pox that’s faded now to old scars … and still she shines! She shines. And I too will shine and I too will beam when Asa and I meet, oh yes, we will fall together down into the bracken and I will wrap myself around him and we will move together and there’ll be no need for quiet, no more hush-hush secret silence, no – never mind any more those other boys or Men or damned mothers listening and watching and sharpening their nasty little knives and baring their nasty little teeth …

      I love him almost like I loved Mica, my Mica always, my stern and sweet love. I’m so sorry Mica, sister of my heart, but I’m twisted with a sickness that perverts all common sense, thank the long-dead gods! It’s my disease and it’s spread from my head and down down down, and it’s spread from that deep ache in my cockslot and up, up through my bowels and further, further up in a wave, in a phalanx of soldiers, and they beat with their hammers on my anvil of a heart, saying let me in – let me in! And I did. But oh my darling little Mica, keeper of the faith, so loyal, I’m sorry!

      But because she is pure and good and believes in Perfection and the States of Civilisation with all the passion she has in her hot little heart (that heart she guards so well, that she locks down into silence, always and ever) I could not tell her. But I knew of a way to leave her a message. If she could find a way to recognise it for what it was …

      But all the rest could go to hell.

      I walk and walk until I pass the wall of the Men’s compound, its many windows set into the big high walls of wine-red brick where they have their cells, some dark and others bright and gleaming like wet teeth in purple gums. And I pass the soldiers’ quarters, all windows dark there, for they are (wo)Men and must follow different rules. On and on I walk and my mind is teeming, though I don’t know much except that I am wrong and evil, but there is no way in hell I am going to end up an underground hole in an underground hole.

      Don’t ask me how I missed the point of all that saintliness that drives Mica. She never knew how bad I really was, for no matter how close our love bound us she could never never understand – must be that lacking bit of me, some vital part like a conscience or will to righteousness. But it doesn’t matter because now I have a hope, that tiny hope that blew in to our cunnydorm one night on a piece of paper shaped like an ancient aeroplane from the time before, the time when Men flew in the air so that GodFather struck them down for their hubris, blew them out of the sky and crushed them into big craters in the earth. But why should a Man not fly? Why should a girlie not flee?

      Why should a girlie not flee from a place that is all rules and restrictions and walls to a place that is open and wide and breathing, like the ocean I have yearned after forever?

      The paper plane that flew through the window showed me a way to somewhere else. The X was marked at the spot where Civilisation ends and nowhere, elsewhere and otherwhere all Unruly begin. Hagovel, where the cursed one lives. The thought makes my skin prickle in fright and terrible, wicked, wayweird excitement, for now I too am damned, just like her.

      But now is not the time for recollection. Now is the time to be aware of all that is around me. I see that while my brain has been ranting I have already walked well beyond the outermost ring of our Perfect State and into Stone Plain. Has any alarm yet been raised about a bad bad candidate for Perfection who is not in her bed?

      Then, a light. Oh yes and oh no. A light that is not the moon, but lower, brighter, not close but getting nearer. I lie down, flatten my back into the hard, hard ground and look up through the spindly grasses at the sky so wide and dark. I am so small down here below all that vastness, so small here in my burrow of grasses, like a stone rodent, a stone rodent that hides and seeks and burrows. Surely no-one will find one lone girlie in a broad broad plain of stone and grass under a sky wider than imagination.

      The light is strong, its beam irradiating the sky, and then there is another, and two more. Four in the party then, each one following a point of the compass. So only one will manage to come near. That much is good. What else is good? Not much, I think. I stay still and thinly trembling in my little hollow. Four people out looking for me. Am I so grand? I could laugh at the absurdity only I’m terrified. They are after me, to catch me and take me back and put me in a cell reserved for the worst kind of criminal, put me under the earth with nothing but a shit bucket and maybe a candle. Would they give me a thin book to write out the short conclusion to my little life? They could use it in a lesson to girlies of the future. A little book like the one in my pocket next to the pencils and the razor blade. I touch its sharp edge with my fingertip. I have the freedom of suicide at least.

      One of the lights is slowly becoming stronger. It wavers with every footfall of the one who holds the torch. Voices now, (wo)Men’s voices. Foot-soldiers. Two. Likely assisted by some sneaky silent skulking careforcer. And a third voice, male. So they think I am worth the time of an Ecuman.

      Here they come.

      I will fight and maybe I can kill, but I am only one and they are four. What a pathetic death this will be. But at least it will be my own.

      MICA

      11.

      The eye of the cat is amber, a black stripe down its centre. I lash out with the blade, sinking it deep into the socket. Hot blood pulses out over my hand, my arm, and spatters my face. The creature screams in pain and flees, his brothers and sisters in his wake. I sit a while longer, wishing I had been able to sever the cat’s artery for then at least I would have had meat. I lick the blood from my hand and arm, then clean the blade in the earth and slip it back into my pocket. I make myself slowly and methodically force down more of the hard little pulses I have collected.

      An hour of so later, tired to death, chilled and heartsore, I see in the near distance the beginning of the forest, a dark fringe seemingly cut out of the whitish-grey sky behind it. And there, at the pale of Civilisation is a solitary house, squat and low and blank faced. It is pale in colour and it shimmers mirage-like in the failing light. It isn’t until I come quite close that I am able to make out its details. It too is made of granite. Each stone is a stolen grave marker split lengthwise and laid horizontally, one atop the other, a travesty of Man’s pride. I feel sick to gaze upon it. And then, then I hear the sound that I can only think is surely the last thing I will ever hear – a guttural growling, hoarse and menacing, issuing from the direction in which I gaze all moveless with terror – and then the door opens and light spills out and in a rush of air the thing, massive and bulky yet moving with all the speed of a shot from the Martinette’s rifle, is all but upon me. A voice rings out, ‘Get back, Black!’

      But the shadow-beast does not halt. It keeps coming straight at me and I am knocked from my feet to the ground, landing heavily, my shoulder crashing into stone. The voice cries again and it seems to come from within the hot pain