Auphyus
an excerpt

Auphyus

Karen made the very conscious decision to not turn left.

Campus Drive was to her left. It was 3:46am on a cold, early spring evening. To take Campus Drive from the west side towards the east side in the small hours of a chilly morning was to remember one of those times in her life when she’d been most alive.

At a similar hour, late in October, nineteen years earlier, Karen had driven that same road, the engine of her car just starting to feed heat to the vents. She was so cold that night, so very, very cold, because she’d just left a very profound warmth. She’d been kissed for the first time, most pleasantly taken by surprise to find out that he’d fancied her.

His breath, when she was up close, noses almost touching, smelled faintly of sour milk, but in a way that was welcoming. His mouth, at first, had tasted strange to her, but after two hours of pressing their lips together, ever more intensely and fully, there was nothing but a subtle taste of blood.

Whenever she drove Campus Drive, from the west side to the east, she recalled that night. She’d been almost nauseous with excitement and confusion, a furious need for touch asserting itself from between her legs after having been tightly suppressed by a curious cocktail of good sense and fear. She remembered yellow-surfing the stoplights the whole way home, the tiny thrill just making each one shading the previous hours with just the right touch of perfection.

That drive, taking in the cold and dark, was always a drive of pure and joyous life for her. Even the time she took that road home from the hospital where her father had died of a slow, lingering cancer, it was a drive of life. She took the quiet happiness time had attached to those memories of her first kiss, and used it to unlock other memories, the best ones, of her father.

At 3:46am on February 27th, however, to take that road would have destroyed that old, warm association. Much like the night her father had died, she was leaving the hospital, but the death she’d just touched was much, much worse than watching the agonizing, chronic waste of her father’s cancer.

Truly, her brother had died much quicker than her father had, but she knew with every raw, quivering nerve in her body, that he’d suffered infinitely more. Before allowing her near the morgue room to try and identify the horrid, semi-liquid mass that may or may not have been her brother, the hospital staff had pressed her to change out of her clothing and into disposable scrubs. They gave her a respirator mask, but the stink of it still locked her throat within a microsecond of her first attempt to inhale, nausea rammed a brass-knuckled fist into her guts.

She had dumped the scrubs into a burn bin and showered for a very long time, but still the stink of whatever had happened to her brother seemed to hide in her nostrils and sinuses.

They had recovered his ID from his wallet, just long enough to read the name before the rot in his flesh also rendered it illegible. His two gold rings had survived, but they only had a photograph of his watch, taken before the leather band melted away and the base metal of the case corroded.

His name, his rings, a picture of his watch.

And his eyes. Whatever freak disease was putrifying his flesh, fast enough for her to watch him melt, had spared his lovely hazel eyes.

There was no way Karen could turn left coming out of the hospital and drive down Campus Drive after she’d seen and smelled that. She turned right, took University Avenue towards the west. When she reached Century, where she should have turned right to skirt around the big lake and eventually get home, she kept going straight. She had three twenties, a few small bills, and some random coins in her purse. She decided she would drive west as far as she could on that money, then decide what to do.