TRASH CAT LIT

Leigh Loveday

Listen to Leigh read his flash

In through the fourth-floor window comes the Divested, oily and sinuous, sloth-like claws clacking on the frame. Its mouth is a wicked ring of bone shards.

The lights are off. The TV is off. All is still. It sidewinds towards a figure that sits facing the doorway, seemingly asleep, her breathing ragged. One entire leg and arm are missing, the shoulders shrunken and bent, and she is as slight as a throwaway slur beneath a nightgown blooming with stains.

Only when the Divested is upon her does she raise her head. This moment, now, is when a watcher might notice the droop of her face, the cratered eye sockets. She lets out a low moan as the thing climbs into her lap.

***

Greta had dedicated her life to this. Not the chaotic outcome, but the intensive study. DNA guided by human hand: electroporation to disrupt, reshape, curate. Aggressive targeting of scarring, grafts and birth defects in men, women and children – eventually to stimulate regrowth of anything damaged or lost. Staggering in its arrogance, really. But under the auspices of the renowned Dr. Montrose, Greta’s team were just months from changing the world.

That schedule, and her life, folded like a burning tenement block during those first human tests, as volunteers expired in heart-stopping scenes of bodily transgression and cellular collapse.

The company divested itself of Greta’s team before the clean-up was even done. That was the word they used. She recalls it with broken-glass clarity, the same way she recalls standing in the street watching traumatised ex-colleagues lurch by, oblivious to the pounding rain, a whirlwind of corporate damage control spinning up in their wake.

***

Here, now, the homunculus settles into its favoured position. She gasps at the ugly heat, the violation as it reintegrates. Fabric rustles as if probed by rats where her missing places start to refill. It is miraculous, horrifying, this rewinding of time on such extensive mutilation. She’s glad she no longer has to see it. She’s seen enough.

She has no choice but to feel it. More than that, in the throes of this wretched reassembly, she will feel and remember everything the Divested has done tonight.

***

Greta and Montrose had been involved for some time before her career imploded. Nothing about it was appropriate. He was their department head and, in loose and undemanding terms, a celebrity; she was well acquainted with his wife.

But the work was stressful, and in an environment that fostered power-grabbing and misogyny, Montrose had always seemed to respect her contributions. Neither of them resisted the relationship’s wayward swerve.

He had been keen to preserve this even after Greta exited his professional life, and she was grateful for the lingering connection to a world from which she had been severed. So she bit back the bitterness as repercussions rolled off his back, and made time for their liaisons in a life that remained, otherwise, ferociously focused on work.

***

Greta had been sure she knew which corrections would drive the technology forward. Over the years, she had stockpiled enough tech and accrued enough favours among peers with laboratory privileges to fuel these frenetic attempts to maintain momentum.

No guinea pigs now. Just her.

As it transpired, Greta’s revisions did not exactly fix the issue. What they did was change things dramatically enough to leave her in an entirely singular position.

Since her first, shocking Divesting, since the hysteria of that separation, she had yearned to know if the process might differ for others. Would they produce something antithetical to that disgorged by her own body? This simian thing of wet muscle and ill will, that left her razed and shrivelled each time she set it free?

Her control was growing, but the process was still exquisitely painful. Nothing, at least, was ever lost, only taken into her familiar. And by taking so much from her, Greta’s castoff was an appalling force in its own right.

She had not told Montrose. At first, to protect him. And then – when her backdoor access to the old system turned up those damning statements, blacklisting her team and mandating the transfer of all patents and credit to him – for reasons that were markedly different.

***

Now, as the Divested reincorporates itself in the hush of her downtown apartment, re-embalming its borrowed meat and sinew and marrow, lurid new memories intertwine with her own.

Montrose has cooked for her. The air shimmers with scents of oil and rosemary that the Divested can almost but not quite savour with its stopgap senses and interim organs. The table is immaculately laid.

Greta has spent weeks burning with shame, with hurt, with a black and punishing purpose. She is only glad about the secrets she kept from Montrose, just as he kept his own. Now she can show her hand.

The Divested drops from the ceiling with a chittering hiss, wrapping the man in limbs like heavy flesh on a pyre, vice-tight. She hears the shouts and a cacophony of dropped plates and feels him overbalance, chairs crashing. He gets only awful, partial glimpses of the thing that has hold of him and Greta relishes these, the few seconds of ringing panic before the homunculus does its work – secreting as it gnaws on his joints like butchers’ offcuts, a numbing foulness breaking his body down – and all other concerns become irrelevant.

***

In the world above her recollections, Greta hears sirens across town. It was quite a commotion, no doubt, but she is sure the Divested escaped undetected. And as she reconstitutes, euphoria mingles with the pain.

Montrose is the first. He won’t be the last. That company may no longer be her house to clean, but Greta will clean it anyway. They have pursued her research, she’s sure. In all likelihood they’ll soon begin Divesting for themselves.

She smiles, twitchily, through the last nerve-burning wave of reabsorption. No. Not on her watch.

There is a new purpose now. A legacy to protect.

She needs nobody for this but herself.

Leigh Loveday grew up on the South Wales coast and now lives in the English Midlands, besieged by cats and foxes. He edits videogame blurb by day and writes fiction aggressively slowly by night, with stories landing in the likes of Uncharted, Cosmic Horror Monthly and Shoreline of Infinity.

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