Filaria - Brent Hayward [17]
Grunting to dismiss these dire thoughts — for he did not like to imagine the condition of the station after he and his brother had fallen to the bottom — he thought instead about how nice it would be to eat the sloth as a birthday treat, a feast like never before. One final celebration. A last, messy huzzah. He had not eaten meat for months. Maybe a full year or more. He could not remember the last time he had tasted flesh.
He probably would not have been able to chew the slothmeat had it been presented to him, sliced up and steaming, on a platter.
“Pah,” he said to no one, adjusting his old bones in the net.
A hundred years. A century of life. A monumental chunk of time. Unheard of. And the only person who had been with him through all those years had forgotten about the anniversary. No gift, no mention. Merezath hung there, lost in his own self-indulgent dreams. In fact, now that Mereziah thought about it, Merezath had not said a word since they’d started their shift, not even good morning —
Actually, once he had cleared his throat and spit phlegm into the void. Another time he had farted. Happy birthday, brother! Happy birthday!
Grumbling, Mereziah closed his eyes and took a short nap, during which he dreamed of a giant sloth, with damp eyes, reaching out one claw to caress his cheek and whisper benign encouragements into his failing ears.
He woke in a worse mood. Though he knew Merezath could barely see him, he glared over to where his younger brother hung. Merezath had started to hum — he always did around break time, and Mereziah decided, for the sake of his own health, that it would be prudent to speak up, to vent his feelings:
“Our dear mother, rest her bones,” he began, clearing his throat, for he liked his voice to be mellifluous when he related his parables and wisdoms, “after returning one day from this station, when we were knee-high sprats and your face ran with snot — like it probably would now, if you weren’t upside-down — imparted words of such august wisdom that I will never forget them.” Mereziah could even see his mother’s beautiful face before him now, though it had been decades since she’d fallen. His cheeks warmed. “There were many pods then, a steady flow up and down, each filled with migrants passing through, seeking fortunes and employment in the last years of the great — ”
Merezath began to snore.
“Son of a bitch,” Mereziah said. Resolved, of a sudden, to be alone, to get away from his brother, he turned angrily in the net, hooking his long fingers and bare feet in the meshing. Unfortunately, since he had hurt himself in many falls as a younger man, and with his advanced age, his exit was not as dramatic as he would have liked. Creaking and cracking, he moved slowly. These aches would never leave him. Not until the final fall.
He would eat lunch by himself, back at home, without even waking his ingrate brother. Maybe take the rest of the day off.
Upright at last, Mereziah wistfully glanced overhead once more, to spy those remote indications of a life missed —
And saw, instead, quite nearby, the green light of a descending pod.
He rubbed his eyes, looked again, squinted. Tried to focus . . . A slim single, moving closer with each second, was certainly approaching. About a sixteenth of a turn away, inside the curve. Putting his hands out, fingers splayed, he felt the vibrations, quavering the fine cords.
With one last glance at his sleeping brother, Mereziah made his way toward the track the pod travelled. Moving hand over hand, carefully placing his feet in the filaments that strung, like hammocks, between the unused pod tracks, not for one instant did he take his eyes off the green light. He saw a tangle of pale tubes and cables, everything strung with the mesh that he and his brother used to cavort in as kids but now wrapped themselves in like musty shrouds.
Possibly the nearing pod would pass