Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes Page A

and I’ve been seeing things. I can feel it inside me, Betty, like an octopus in my head, getting its tentacles into everything.”
    “Sit yourself down, Clay. You want a cup of coffee? Tastes like gasoline, but it’ll perk you up a little.”
    He sank down into the seat by the door, lower than he expected it to be. She set the clay figure gently back into the box, careful not to damage it, then perched on the edge of the desk beside him.
    “You been sleeping?”
    “I don’t know.” He corrected himself, “Must have. I’ve been dreaming. Bad dreams. People with papier-mâché heads. Monsters in the woods.”
    “You’ve been neglecting yourself, honey. You should go home and get some rest, eat some food, then go see a doctor. Get some tests done. I’m sure it’s not a tumor.” She gave his shoulder a hard squeeze. He could feel how strong and bony her fingers were, like coral. “You get yourself home and take care of yourself. You got someone who can help you?”
    He nodded, fighting back the tears. Sympathy was the worst. Betty was savvy enough to see it. She closed up the box and changed the subject to brisk business. “Well. You leave these with me, and I’ll get them fired in the student kiln. Call you when they’re ready to come and glaze, unless you want to leave them raw, which could work for these. You want to pay now or COD?”
    “I’ll pay now. Can’t guarantee I’ll have the cash later.” He stood up to fish crumpled notes out of his pocket.
    “Up to you, sweets. Twenty bucks. You want to pay me now, that’s fine. You want to pay me in kind later, that’s good too. God knows the storeroom needs cleaning out. We got boxes of stock in there, I don’t even know what’s broken, what’s last season.”
    “I’ll pay now, I’m flush.” It was a lie, but he didn’t want to owe her. He smoothed the bill out on the desk, ironing the creases flat with his fingers. The moth-wing texture of it got into the back of his teeth. “You ever think about how rigid the world is?”
    “Clay isn’t. This material we work with, I mean, not you.”
    “But I’m rigid, too. We’re all locked into what we are. Take this,” he held up the bill.
    “I intend to, sweetie.”
    “It’s nothing. But people believe in it. Money makes the rules. This is what things cost . This is what you have, where you are, what you are, what you can be. Money is a dream that has made itself definitive.” He was caught up in it, his tongue doing a million miles an hour. It happened sometimes when he hadn’t seen other people for a while. “Do you know that story about Michelangelo?”
    “That he was homosexual?”
    “Not that. About the Pietà, the Madonna and Christ. When he finished sculpting it, he struck it and cried out, ‘Now speak.’ He expected his art to live. But it didn’t. How could it?” He was on the point of tears again.
    “I think God’s the only one who gets to breathe life into mud, sweetie. And you’re wrong, about being locked in.” She patted the box full of bird girls. “You see this, Mr. Smartypants? You see how far you’ve come, how much you’ve evolved as an artist? Late bloomer, sure, but you’ve transcended yourself, Clayton Broom. Don’t come here talking about rigid.”
    He nodded, trying to remember how to look happy, the precise facial muscle arrangements. “Thank you,” he managed. But he wondered if this was really what he wanted after all.

Trajectories
    There are trajectories that cut through our lives, Gabi has found, that link things together. Sometimes those are literal, like the scar under Bambi’s arm.
    A few years ago there were so many unclaimed bodies at the Wayne County morgue that the city had to rent a truck to store them all in, piled three-deep like a short stack. Only pancakes don’t get toe tags. It wasn’t that nobody loved them enough to come get them; the families had to save up to be able to pay for their funerals.
    Now they’ve opened an