alone in the jungle.
A narrow footpath wound through the overgrowth, dense and still and quiet except for the hectoring cry of a macaw. Henry remembered the sound like a dream. He heard his muffled footfalls as the undergrowth thinned out below the towering trees, and he shrank into the landscape like a child. It was all too familiar. When he coughed, the sound resonated in the hushed forest sanctuary. The silence was also known to him. Henry’s breathing grew shallow but audible, almost the only sound except for the mosquitos that welcomed the great blood feast that was offering itself to them. He could almost hear the sweat boiling out of his skin.
He came upon an abandoned fire pit. A hatchet. Drying fish hanging from a rope line strung between two trees. Then Henry saw that he was in a village of mud-brick huts and thatched roofs, so much a part of the land that the place was almost invisible until he was upon it. Some of the huts were open on the sides. Then he heard the flies.
It was as he pictured it in his dreams—dozens of people lying in contorted positions. Everyone dead. Just like Jonestown.
He saw women with brilliant feathers in their hair. Men with blue tattoos. A teenage boy wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, his arm sticking upright in the air.
“Hello?” Henry said into the emptiness, then louder, “Hello?”
Flies. There was a cage of chickens, all dead.
His heart drumming, he went from hut to hut, searching for human life, knowing it was pointless except as a form of mortification. The image he had been holding at bay his entire life forced itself into his mind: his own parents, sprawled on the jungle floor. Just like this. Killed because of some madman’s fantasy. Bodies massed together or scattered, solitary or in pairs or threes. Exactly like this. Families piled on top of each other, clawing at their faces in agony. A dead child lay under his father’s arm, staring blankly into space. I could have been you, Henry thought. I should have been you.
A dead mouse lay under a chair.
In one hut there was a powerful-looking man with facial tattoos, lying on his side and reaching toward his wife. His last gesture. For love, for protection. Toward her naked, very pregnant belly. Two dead children lay beside them. Henry silently begged their forgiveness, feeling unworthy of even asking. Then he saw the woman blink.
Henry almost jumped out of his shoes. She was alive, staring at him. Did she know he was responsible? Was that blame in her eyes—face-to-face with her killer—an expression of such intense focus that it felt physical, burning, lacerating, a look that would stay with him until Henry took his own final breaths? There was nothing he could do to save her.
Then he saw movement in the woman’s abdomen, rippling like the surface of a pond when a fish has stirred, and he realized what her eyes were asking.
Not thinking—no time for that—he took a scalpel from his bag and sliced into her abdominal wall, rudely pulling aside the liver and reaching into the body cavity. The mother made a deep guttural cry. He could feel movement inside her, as if the baby were reaching for him, for life. His fingers found the ropy umbilical cord and he tugged on it, but the mother’s body still clung to her baby, so Henry cut deeper through the uterus into her womb and severed the cartilage that held the pubic bone together. Her body opened like a book. She had nothing left to grasp her child. And then it came out of her, like an offering.
The baby was still inside the amniotic sac, a bloody stocking that covered its body. He was tiny, but he already had thick, dark hair; his arms were crossed in front of his chest, and as Henry looked at him, the baby yawned. Henry made a light incision through the membrane and the baby flailed, pulling himself free and screaming into life. He showed him to the dead mother, wondering what he would ever tell Jill.
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$34.27
Since Jill’s death, Helen had been sleeping with a monkey-like stuffed animal that she had named Joe Banana. She used to sleep with him as a little girl. Night was the only time she allowed herself to sink back into the irresponsibility of childhood and imagine that her parents were still there, still taking care of her, and that she was only waiting for them