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(Acceleration alone would see to that, in the end.)

America’s child. The Revolutionary. The one for whom there were no borders, no traditions—to whom no one, and nothing, applied anymore.

So catch me if you can, you effete techno-illiterates—you self-obsessed history-whores masturbating over your glyphs, your archives, your ruined, buried monuments.

I’m leaving, on a jet plane. Don’t know if I’ll be back again.

(Ever, ever, ever.)

Maybe she would go out into darkness and find nothing there at all—nothing but emptiness, endless starvation, an infinite sentence of unslaked hunger. Or freedom from the cycle, even at any cost—the tyranny of vulgar desire, of pleasure and pursuit: Wanting, having, consuming, wanting again. Slash and burn and waste.

Or maybe she would find herself sitting by the side of some different sea on some different world, under the potentially far less harsh light of some very different sun. Maybe she’d cut her palm on some alien rock, drop a few pulses of her own infected blood into the warm, saline tide . . . and stay there as long as it took, to see what might grow to sentience from the impetus.

If you only wait long enough, Elder thought, then whatever you can conceive of, no matter how improbable, must surely—eventually—become possible.

“Man,” Flynn had begun, once, while stoned on some fellow stoner’s blood—blissing out on the concept of space-travel, then glitching over its logical consequences, “you ever come back, the whole Earth could be gone, it could be just that long. We might not even be here anymore.”

“’As Venus dives into the sun . . . ’”

“Yeah. Yeah! That’s what I’m sayin’, man.”

And: But everything I knew already is gone, Flynn, she remembered almost replying. The whole structure of my universe, changed beyond comprehension. Cars, electricity, recorded music; fast food, open all night. I died damned, and live on in a world where science kicked the Holy Ghost’s sorry spectral ass too long ago to mention.

So what should I miss? What should I cry over leaving behind? I have—literally—nothing left to lose.

(Not even you.)

Good thing Flynn died when he did, she thought, with a sudden stab. HE would have missed me, after. He was just that dumb.

But—

Elder raised the filtering visor of her helmet, cautiously—for who knew what radiation lurked out there, what stray wandering portion of the ultraviolet spectrum? And space would be a particularly bad place to cook and drift in.

She looked out on the great wheel of constellations, the endless hub: Stars whose dead light washed over her, whose positions she was already beginning to watch alter. Whose hidden faces she would view from every angle, before the arc of her passage finally brought her home again.

A long trip, and a hungry one. Blood of every sort, on every sort of world. A universe of unmapped loneliness and potential prey. A forever-distant horizon—no borders to cross, no boundaries to push. Just on, on, on, on, on.

The stars, turning. The constellations, splitting and reforming into new animals, new myths. New monsters.

Rivers of gas and dust and heat. Cradles of light, already cooking up new worlds for her to drain.

Elder’s ship, like Elder’s corpse—a viral net, animated forever by its own disease. A universe of dead bodies . . .

. . . possessed by furious motion.

Q&A

DISCLAIMER:

Though framed as a (hopefully amusing) Q and A session with the disembodied voices inside my own head, the following afterword deals mainly with the ins and outs of my creative “process.” Those of you who like this sort of thing may find this the sort of thing that you like, while everyone else may well find it excruciating or disillusioning, or both. If you happen to fall into the latter category then thank you, goodnight, and please do keep an eye out for my next collection of short stories, The Worm in Every Heart (October, 2003), also from Prime Books.

And now, without further ado—

Q (grinning nervously): “So, like—where do you get your ideas?”

A (grinning evilly): Well, since you ask . . .

I first got the germ for “Kissing Carrion” back in 1993, when I was still in the most formative possible stages of what would eventually become my career: Writing stringer articles for eye Weekly magazine on every subject under the sun, dodging calls from the government about back taxes relating to my last year at Ryerson, placing stories here and there for copies, telling people I was a writer, feeling like the world’s biggest minimum wage-earning, unqualified, futureless loser. I’d just quit my job as Vibrator Room floor attendant at Lovecraft, Toronto’s most upscale sex shop, where the virulent combination of having an eighty-percent employee discount but no significant other to share the spoils with had already begun to screw with my ideas about “healthy” sexuality; I also spent a fair amount of time listening to early Nine Inch Nails while reading underground comics and ‘zines, simultaneously jealous and admiring of their creators’ capacity to self-publish material which seemed to come straight from the same vein of icky, suppurating, intensely private darkness I was becoming somewhat afraid to tap in myself.