The Corridors of Starvation Island
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
She found the first door in the loading dock behind her apartment building, a door that had always been there—she remembered it clearly, remembered it being locked, remembered the smell of rust on its handle—but on the third Thursday of March, it opened onto a corridor that smelled like her grandmother's house, though her grandmother had lived three states away and had been dead for eleven years. The ceiling's lamp drawn on with pencil lines formed a triangle, superimposed upon a solid block of gray paint. Someone had scribbled a crude pencil mural on the bricks of the corridor walls and the fibers of the carpet. White chalk sketches of flowers, big blooms rendered with soft blocks of dust, common on curbs and walls and fences in her neighborhood, made from castoff toothpaste tubes, sidewalk pavement, paint splatter from basements and factories, red flecks from bicycle brake lights. Trivia, these flowers, blooming in the cracks of the sidewalk, brightening drab and dull drabs, more jarring to behold than beautiful. This corridor had a crash's desperation, and she knew it better than the fresh smelling room her grandmother had hers.
"Niño!" she called again, though she knew he did not have a name. She did not know his name, and he did not know hers. Friend of Angelina's three-year-old?
Niño flailed around and hit his head, and it was the blood that frightened her away.
*
"When was the last time you ate?" the officer asked me, blowing smoke into his palm and filling the air with ash and light. I could not tell him it was Gram's birthday, that he had eaten my spicy cornbread, fat with beef fat and heavy with butter, that it was sweet as candle smoke. I could not tell him that we had not done much; she cooked, we ate, I waited.
"Three years ago," I said.
"You mean to say you've not eaten anything in three years?"
We sat immobile and cold on the countertop, which was not granite or aluminum or stainless steel, but a vault-door thick. I checked my watch: 7:11 a.m. On the city bus, I had gazed out at the faces along the streets and watched them from the crushed vinyl frames of the bus window, remembered a city map that showed no hints of where I was, no bread crumbs of forward progress.
"No," I said. "Four years. It'll be four years tomorrow."
After a long silence, the officer climbed out from beneath the LED light of the Geiger counter and returned his instrument to his apron, where he hooked it over his belt. "What about water?"
"My plumbing stopped in 2003," I said, expecting surprise, receiving none. I smiled. "I think that's what happened: my pipes froze, but that was the worry of that winter: snow and ice and pipes, so they just shut the water off."
He inhaled deeply, held his breath.
"I've not eaten or drunk anything, but I just used to go into the stores and take what I wanted—"
drawn-in breath, expunged in a rush now,
—along with what water I needed. After a while I had basically everything I needed at home..."
"Okay," he said, reaching for his notes. "You've heard of Starvation Island?"
I nodded and watched him rifling his neatly typed notes.
"Have you ever been to Starvation Island?"
"No," I said.
"How would you get there?"
"From Atlanta."
"That's where you said your sister lived?"
"Who, Angelina? Yes. From Atlanta."
A crisp breeze of wind blew ragged shadows beneath our electric bulb. The map pressed to the wall near us intently peeked out from beneath his arm. Officer MacPherson drained the safety latch from the heel of his shoe and took a step toward the map. "Who's Angelina?"
I watched my toes move about. "Angelina◆ About the ending
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