residue

8/26/23 - My first time participating in NYCMidnight! This was for their 2023 500 Word Fiction challenge. I procrastinated the whole weekend and wrote this in 2 hours, but it was a really fun challenge nonetheless!

“Ming?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m hungry.’”

“Nico,” Ming says. The name echoes through the hallway; worn carpet dampens her hawkish voice into something soft, cotton-like. “Not yet.”

“Why!” Nico pouts, his lower lip jutting out, trembling–a typically charming act in other circumstances. “I’m hungry.”

“Soon.”

“Now.”

Thunder. Rain sluices across the night in sheets, an onslaught against the windows. Ming tastes moisture in the air, and she folds its terrible, torrential flavor across her tongue. 

“No, Nico.”

He looks down at his hand, small in the grasp of long and spindly fingers, and he does not comprehend. “But–”

Ming drops her load and kneels before him. She takes his small face between her hands: feels his youth in his skin’s warmth, in the fullness of his cheeks, in the hummingbird thrum of veins. Her thumb plumbs at the pout.

“I know, but I need to finish my job first, okay? Then, you can eat.”

He sighs. She suppresses a shiver. 

Ming’s light is a fingernail under the rind of night, finally peeling the shadows off from their destination. She tugs on one end of their bundle.

The dumbwaiter is a forgotten thing–wooden door flush against dull panels. It is the only door left in the hallway, the rest having all been ripped from their hinges. The emptiness is a stench, an odor of moth-bitten fabric, black mold, and sour, soiled last moments. Ming’s own loneliness rises from within her like bile.

Ming remembers the coalition of undertakers that used to haunt this hotel. Reapers by profession, with their long cloaks sweeping the floors. Their spotless, soft palms were at odds with such gruesomely filthy nail beds. 

This place had once felt like the most glorious of endings, a last paradise for the damned.

Clearly, she thinks, as she pries open the dumbwaiter and dust pillows through the stale air. Immortality was bad for business.

The child gags. The smell of fetid decay increases as the mechanism pulls the platform upwards.

“Nico,” Ming calls. “We drop the load off here, see?” She points at the platform that finally arrives. Stray morsels litter the wood.

Together, they heave the load into the cramped space. It’s almost too large, and, jamming her shoulder against the door, Ming has to forcibly shove the extremities to fit it all in. Finally, it does.

“Are we done now?”

“Yes, Nico.” She smiles, finally. “Let’s go get dinner.”

“Okay.” The child turns to her, eyes wide. “And papa too, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why we had to help him into the elevator?”

“Yes.”

“Kay…”

Ming reaches down and replaces the hand that he had been holding earlier. His father was a skinny thing, and the rigor mortis had left imprints in the youth’s skin that looked skeletal and cursed. 

One hundred years of loneliness, where natural death had ceased. One hundred years of craving another soul, of craving company, after having killed all the rest. And she had found her protege.

“Let’s go downstairs and eat, Nico.”