Fermentation by Angelica J. Page B

‘Do you think this is close enough?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes, I think so.’
    ‘No. You are wrong,’ he said, walking me closer again and then stopping.
    ‘How about this?’
    ‘This is a good view,’ I said.
    ‘But still a little too far, wouldn't you say? Better closer still,’ and he led me so close that now I could feel the heat of the flames against my face and the smell of the burning body stung in my nostrils.
    ‘This is a good spot,’ he said.
    ‘Yes. Yes, this is very good too.’
    ‘You can smell the flesh burning, can't you?’
    ‘Yes, I can smell it.’
    ‘Fire is cleansing. It cleanses the air. It kills off impurities. Bodies should never be buried. They breed in the earth. Fire is the final solution.’
    We moved again and this time when we stopped we were only centimetres from the flames which leaped up from the inferno. The woman who lay at the heart of the fire was nothing but a blackened skeleton and I could hear her bones cracking. Soon she would disappear altogether, her body turned to ash.
    ‘Ash is softer than skin,’ he said. ‘Is your skin soft?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘Soft enough?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    The man was pressing up against me and then his hands ripped at the back of my dress. He put his arms around my waist to act as a support while he pushed himself inside me. I tried to struggle free, to prise his hands open, and then suddenly I was aware that the moment I succeeded, the moment I found a way to make him release his grasp, I would fall straight into the fire. The choice was mine.
    I awoke to an unnerving silence. The children were no longer playing. No one was there. I looked at my watch which read 6pm. I had been sleeping on the bench for over three hours and no one had thought to wake me toask if I was ill or needed help. They probably thought I was a tramp and that the bench was my home. I was very tired, my dress was wet from sweat and where my skin had been exposed to the sun it was red and sore. It took me a considerable amount of time to walk back to my apartment. I shuffled along the streets exhausted and sweating. I wanted nothing but to reach my bed and lie down and close my eyes and sleep a deep sleep. And yet I knew that when I returned home my body would begin its craving again. It was a hopeless cycle.
    It was at this stage that the child's movements appeared to lessen. After the first time I had felt it kick, it would repeat its aggressive action with apparent vengeance almost every day, but now this activity waned. I believed the child had become calmer or perhaps it too had begun to feel the heat and had grown lethargic like its mother.

GAMMELOST
    A Norwegian cheese reeking of juniper berries. The mould is introduced to the cheese by piercing it with long metal needles. It has an overpowering flavour with a pungent aroma and unless eaten in small quantities bears a punishing aftertaste.

    I walked through the city but I do not remember where I went or what I saw. The city had receded and my dreams were what I remembered. My world was being turned inside out: the waking hours vanishing or coming back to me in glimpses, the dreaming hours recalled in minute detail and mad, vivid colours. Or maybe both worlds merged but I could no longer tell where reality ended and the dreams began. The summer dragged on; July, August, September. I was floating at sea and the line on the horizon where the sea ended and the sky began melded into one. Perhaps it had always been like that but I had never noticed.
    It was the hottest day yet. The thermometer measured 42 degrees at midday, the air was thick with flies and the stench on the streets had reached unbearable proportions. The army had been ordered to clear away the rubbish. They patrolled the streets at night, standing by their trucks with guns slung round their waists like exotic pieces of jewellery. It was all cosmetic. The smell clung to the air and had seeped into the buildings and thepavements and the skin of