The boy found himself in a long, dark hallway, at the end of which Florian could see another set of curtains through which shone a sullied light. A black shape lay on the ground near that doorway. Florian stood observing it for a time, but it did not move. A rivulet of bile trickled down the back of the boy’s throat. He could feel his heart beating in his ears. Florian advanced towards the shape, the hallway narrowing and blackening until he was close enough to see.
It was one of his own kind, wearing a blue dress with a white apron, both stained, and a pair of dark green rubber boots, lying on her side, head forward, wrists inward and pressed together, legs scattered apart. Not legs exactly, nor wrists, but only a skeleton wrapped in desiccated grey-black flesh and burst open in parts, eyes like black boreholes leading into the skull. Here the smell was strong, disgusting even, but Florian was not scared. He knew this was only the shell of a creature long disappeared. His heart beating more steadily now, the boy pushed through the curtains.
The room was split into sections by a short chain-link fence. Against the right wall stood a large structure with tubes hanging from the ceiling and into steel scaffolding. It was connected to a fenced-off corridor leading into the main part of the room, a large enclosure filled with black things piled one upon the other: ribs, vertebrae, femurs, tibias, skulls, fur, leathery black flesh, horns, hooves, and plastic tags in blue and yellow. All of these things springing from one another as if they were part of some greater molten organism filling the entire room. In the corridor beneath the scaffolding Florian could see individual corpses laying on the hardened filth, their dried udders collapsed into the black nozzles of milking tubes. Just as the old man had gathered Florian’s urine, this machine had stripped the goats of their life.
This was not death as he had known it in the wild. It was a new death binding the putrid and burned smells of metal, plastic, piss, shit, ash, wood, flesh, and vomit. Dull wide smells and sharp acrid smells reached Florian’s nose inseparable.
When he finally exited the building Florian did not even notice how cold the air had become. The hair on his arms and legs raised and his skin turned to gooseflesh and his muscles hardened and his testes rose towards his navel and his prick shriveled into a nub. Beneath the pale dusk Florian shuffled along the road towards the farmhouse, scraping his bare toes on the asphalt.
The old man called the children to dinner and Marc ate his portion faster than Sabine and walked out into the courtyard, away from the weight of his sister’s silence. Even as he watched the fields sway and the rocks jut from the dirt and the wind blow steadily across the courtyard, the boy’s solitude was not peaceful. She had touched Marc in a cold and dead way. He made his way to the pond.
It was a crooked thing, rutty banks overrun by goosefoot and heather. From this tangle of weeds grew lopsided elms and meandering beeches and a single weeping willow on the northernmost bank. From the shallow waters on the pond’s edge came flowerless daffodils and dead reeds growing in tight bunches. It was on the path along the eastern bank that Marc noticed Florian floating along in his baggy clothes like an empty thing, and he did not know what to make of him. Marc hid behind a tree and observed the other boy.
When Florian reached the edge of the pond he leaned over the water to watch the shapes change, as he had often done. Beneath the surface something swished, stirring the mud, and the dying light caused Florian to see only the faint outline of a face rippling on the surface. My face, he thought. Wind blew the grass back and forth around his bare feet. They were wet with dew and very cold.
The round shapes purled in tones of grey and green and brown until Florian was unaware of his surroundings and found himself thinking again about the place of shines. At the bottom of the muddy water, there everything existed as it had before the snake, before the winter, before the building filled with death like a lamp full of flies. And there the girl would be waiting for him with her glowing ruddy cheeks and stubby teeth, the way her lips were wet and warm, the smell of her hair and her clothes and her underwear, the way she might chew her nails or toenails like a distracted dog and make noises like a bird. All these tangible things transmuted into diamond-light spinning into and out of itself. Yes, to put an end to his suffering, Florian had only to release his body from the shackles of posture and let it topple forward into the water.
Marc watched Florian sway back and forth at the edge of the pond. The boy was in a trance. Back and forth he swayed with his eyes closed, each time more precariously, until finally he tipped forward and fell from sight.
It was curiosity that led Marc to the pond, but this alone could not account for his speed. He sprinted towards the mound from which Florian had vanished and looked into the water and saw beneath the surface a mass of clothes billowing like a jellyfish midst the swirling mud.
Marc leapt from the bank, cheeks blown out, eyes furious, body going rigid as it struck the water and was swallowed by the cold darkness. The boy’s feet plunged straight through the pond-bottom and Marc was forced to thrash about until they came unstuck from the thick mire. His lungs seized violently and he swam in a panic until his arm struck Florian, a hard and unmoving thing, perhaps dead already, or perhaps never having contained life, so dead did he feel when Marc gripped his wrist. He attempted to pull Florian towards the embankment but could not even keep himself afloat, and Marc’s mouth and nose filled with water until he was certain he would drown, but he did not accept this certainty, and so he fought with all his strength against the cold water and did not loosen his grip on Florian’s wrist. He pushed at the mud for leverage but found none. After a long struggle Marc found himself among the reeds, arm wrapped around Florian’s neck, grunting and sputtering, bending and crushing the daffodil stalks, pulling at them desperately and finding in the sum of their roots the solidity required.
Soon the boys were in shallow water and Marc was able to stand with his head above the waterline. His legs labored through the mire and slowly he dragged Florian to the edge of the pond where he left him lying against a thick bunch of reeds as he pulled himself onto the bank. From there he leaned down and gripped Florian’s wrists and attempted to pull the boy out of the water. Marc dug his feet into the grass and struggled to find leverage. He ground his teeth, biting both sides of his tongue until he tasted blood. After several moments of effort, he succeeded in dragging Florian’s torso onto the bank, and then his legs, and as he did so the boy’s head lifted, and Florian’s face was covered in mud, and two eyes opened to look at Marc, white and bloodshot around the dark pupils, and Florian lunged forward with his mouth open and sunk his teeth into the other boy’s hand. Marc screamed and kicked but Florian refused to loosen his jaw and finally Marc struck his face, fist plunging through the sludge and connecting with a nose bone. Florian fell backwards onto the hard ground, where he gasped and writhed and vomited brown water.