Nothing exists beyond this room. I am floating in space. I was eating a marble column, it was sugar, I noticed after the first bite, they were mad I ate their history. It was tasty.
I woke up biting my own fingers, I craved sugar. We have no sugar anymore. I remembered sugar from when I was a child. The marble columns, burgundy, soft gray and white were also a far memory. I did not remember the real taste of sugar, I just knew it was delicious, pleasurable. My brain ranked sugar above any other human experience I lived afterward. Even above the time Diego put his hands inside my panties.
I remember this sweet brown bar, I tried to remember the name, but mom did not like the memories. Our house was tiny, beside a creek, men and women lived separately, I saw the man known as my father only once a year, I did not miss him, men were boring, except for Diego. He had hazel eyes and dark hair, long, with curls behind his ears. He would smile for me, I know he was one year younger, but when it was time for him to live with the rest of the men, he was taller than me.
Basket making was my main chore. I did it in the shadows, I made big, small, round, oblong, even square. Mom did not like square ones, it wasn’t natural. So I did hexagonal, the chief woman was a mathematician, whatever that meant. She would teach us names, numbers and shapes. I enjoyed hexagonal, because it reminded me of honey, and honey was the closest thing we had to sugar. Still, it wasn’t the same. Sugar was electrifying. My brain did not feel the same with sweet fruit and honey. No. Sugar was special.
Diego and I were on a secret quest to find sugar again. Since blood gushed out of me, mom became stricter, she explained what it meant and what men meant, I despised everything until Diego put his hands in my panties. Still, sugar was our top priority. Diego also learned from men to be careful. Men with children had to fish daily. Men without children fished only when they were hungry. Diego was lazy, and so was I.
We decided to meet as the sun came up from the treetops, hurting our heads. My shoes were becoming smaller, mom found me a new pair, but they were not broken in just yet. Other young people snuck out during the night, amateurs, it was safer when all the adults were grumpy, complaining about a thing called coffee.
“Diego, here…” I whispered, seeing his long hair covering his shirts full of holes, exposing his shoulders. We knew kissing was safe. He had a piece of sweet bread wrapped in a small dirty cloth. We kissed when our mouths were fed. No tongue. We needed to avoid babies.
“I was thinking… we can go down the hill, after the creek, we can find it there.” He asked me, my legs were on top of his. I knew we had to get up, tension was building up. He moved my legs and put his hands inside his shorts and showed me two blades and handed me one.
“We can’t come back before evening.” I deflated.
“We wouldn’t be the first ones running away.” He convinced me kissing my cheek, I hated him! “Are you afraid, Mei?”
“Of course, my mom will kill me.”
Diego looked at me puzzled, but said nothing, I also asked nothing. He showed his bag with some more bread and smoked fish in it. I had water and fruits. We went downhill, the trees safeguarded us from the sunrays, Diego was dark and it did not bother him. I, on the other hand, felt the burn on my skin, he laughed and touched the red spots. I kicked him in the boyhood. The path was not steep, but the large amount of human debris made it difficult to walk without tumbling around.
We reached the other side of the creek before the sun was perpendicular. One of my favorite words. Perpendicular, sounds important, sounds like a word somebody would use while dressed formally when buildings were still puncturing the sky. Puncturing too! The debris was not just debris, it evolved to full ruins of the place that used to be our home.
“Blades out, Mei.” I noticed my Diego hesitating to tell me the truth, I let him simmer in his mind and rehearse the words and finally he opened his mouth. “I heard the adults… There is sugar.” His face, however, was not happy.
“But?” I opened the rusty switchblade he gave me, and the orange dust stained my fingers.
“The ruin city has a population of quasi humans, they said quasi humans. Do you still want to go?”
“You aren’t making sense, we came until here, we won’t go back up without anything, adults are always talking shit, c’mon, let’s go.” I shook him and pulled him. “After we can kiss, c’mon.”
“Can I see inside your blouse too?”
“I’ll think about it.”
We came down and the roads had cars, Diego was more interested in vehicles than me, what impressed me the most weren’t the houses made of bricks and the cars, but the fact men and women were forced to live together in the same space. But I had no time to think about it further, I saw it first, while Diego was inside a car, holding the wheel, the sugar ghoul walked slowly, rainbow colored round body, red cheeks and purple lips, expressionless round eyes. I froze. I was not well versed in surviving, perhaps that was the point of adults keeping us inside.
“Diiieeg…” I tried to whisper, but despite his large humanoid shape, the sugar ghoul was fast, and before I could say ‘o’, he was in front of me, it was a ‘he’, his thing was a sugar cane. I was snatched. I couldn’t scream. The sugar ghoul stuffed my mouth with my own shirt and soon I was inside of his sugar temple.
No time to cry when the light walls and tall shelves contained small bits of my childhood memory, it was a supermarket, I remembered that, food inside packages, I did not remember the packages, the brands and the semiotics, no human could care unless they were constantly fed. Semiotics was also a great word. Our batch of humans cared about food and food only. Rain and fish. It was a shame we were less civilized than the humans that domesticated cattle. I still remember beef, more than I did sugar. Beef with onions, we still had onions. We did not have beef. The sugar ghoul placed me between the registers. It was fun reading large print, we barely had books. Nobody told me I could draw large letters on the sand. Fed humans had time for creativity. I won’t say we didn’t, but they were rich!
Behind me, I heard Diego trying to use his blade to remove the two tiny hard candies from the ‘she’ sugar ghoul. “Mei! Mei, I will save you! Mei!” I knew he wouldn’t when he was thrown by my side. Before we could say anything, our mouths were stuffed with white crystals on a spoon. I cried. It was not as exactly as I remembered, but that was it, sugar, it was sugar! I kept it inside my mouth and let it melt slowly, while Diego chewed it and send it down, I savored it. I did not realize the tears of happiness, my smile, while Diego, terrified, tried to repel the ghoul pinching his arm.
They did not speak, they vocalized in high pitch, and their purple lips did not move. The female sugar ghoul vocalized louder and the male disappeared and returned with packs in his large fluffy arms letting them fall everywhere, he wasn’t very intelligent, empty baskets clumped around, and he could not think of using them. As a basket maker, I was livid!
“Mei, what do we do?”
“We eat! It’s sugar, it’s our dream, when we come home, we can mate, all the way!”
“Shouldn’t we come of age first?” Diego was shaking from the ghoul lifting his shirt and pinching his flanks.
“Why don’t we mate now? Hmm, we eat first!” I did not care, I snatched the packs from the male ghoul, and they were full of tiny colorful pebbles with oh, the name I was looking for was chocolate! It was chocolate, we ate so quickly, we should have savored them better. We ate cookies and candy bars; we ate chocolate bars. We cried and laughed, we were having the time of our lives, elated, we did not notice the sugar ghouls multiplying around us.
The male ghoul threw more sweets at us; we ate until our stomachs hurt. When we touched our bellies and put the food aside, their large lips finally moved and their mouths opened until it reached their ears, revealing more than one line of teeth.
“Mei…” He held my hand, stained with chocolate and sticky with sugar.
“I have a plan.” But I didn’t, how could I? Diego was younger, I was the responsible person, I tried to look around, but the sugar ghouls were blocking the door. “The plan is… close your eyes and die.”
“Mei, no…” he cried, sobbed hard, the sugar ghouls retreated. I held him and cried too. The large sugar ghouls hissed and retreated from us crying. I got up first and screamed ahhhh and cried some more, Diego almost smiled and grabbed his boyhood and squeezed and the howl was enough for the ghouls to move to the back of the supermarket. We looked at each other and cried with a basket in our hands, snatching all we could without paying attention, our eyes blurred by fear and tears. We continued until we filled two baskets each, and we cried our way up to find the creek and uphill.
“Do you think they will follow us?”
“We can’t go back and jeopardize the settlement.” I was on fire! Perpendicular, puncture, semiotics, jeopardize, it was almost like I had swallowed all the important words with my brain! “We can live off this…”
“I don’t know, Mei, what if they follow us? What if they eat our families?”
“We tried sugar, we ran away from the quasi-human sugar ghouls, aren’t we lucky?” I laid the baskets on the floor and let my Diego finally see inside my blouse. All was well.
