Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [47]
It was terrifically sudden and unexpected, like being dunked from behind in a pool. It was also as if her body had played a trick on her, by shocking the air from her lungs. She was unsure for a moment how to react, oddly embarrassed, like she’d farted in a crowded room. She cupped her hand and raised it to her mouth, ready to catch the mass when she spit it out, gagging as hard as she could, but there was no movement in her throat, and the sound that came from it was merely a small quack. She gagged again, her ears popping with the effort. Already she was at the bottom of the pool, every bubble blown from her lungs. She looked up. Ladd and Karen, no longer talking, were focused on the television. She could see only the tops of their heads above the chairs, their bodies hidden forms to which she reached out until her arm dropped in exhaustion. She doubled over, her fingers clutching her neck. It was like magic or being shot. Some giant bag containing all her energy had burst from inside her to spill across the floor. Little black flames licked the edges of her vision, and it was then she registered something she’d known unconsciously since coming to live with her aunt and uncle, something she’d felt since her mother had died and her father had abandoned her, something she’d seen whenever she told Ladd and Karen about her day and they’d ask questions her story had already answered or one of them left the dinner table to grab the phone when it rang, something that was part and parcel in the very room’s furnishings, the knickknacks on the coffee and end tables Karen always reminded her were fragile, the gun closet left unlocked, the two chairs before the television, all of these arranged without a child in mind. It was something she hadn’t been able to articulate until now.
She’d have to save herself.
She turned all of her concentration inward to this wet fist of pulp in her throat, focusing all her muscular control on her esophagus, as if she could squeeze the obstruction out. She braced the tip of her tongue against her bottom teeth and forced a gag, trying to clear the passage, but nothing happened. When she gagged again, she could feel her tongue’s deepest reaches, and it made her head shake. It felt as if her temples were about to explode. Though she tried once more, it was like bench-pressing a car: dead weight. She became distinctly aware of the tightness of the mass’s suction, of its perfect, globbed seal around her throat. She was now a torso, neck, and head; the rest of her limbs had been washed away like sand. Without oxygen, her sense of her own extremities was contracting, her awareness circling down a drain.
She began to float, and it seemed as if she was swimming underwater in the darkest night. Either surfacing or diving—there was no telling—she’d either taste air in a moment or feel the freezing edge of thermocline. It was quite pleasant, actually, pure anticipation. She made one last effort—as futile, really, as trying to see your hand in pitch darkness.
Then she was dead.
She knew she was, and it wasn’t a completely unfamiliar experience. More of an awareness, in fact, an eternal state of now—the same, she thought, as being an embryo, the buried memory of that waiting state. She was submerged, there was nothing there, and time wasn’t a concept but an environment.
She came to, but very slowly. Her limbs were utterly still; only her eyes moved. She was like a cat waking in a patch of sun.
Her mouth was full. She inhaled, sucking the pulverized meat back into her throat, then spit it out.
For a long time she lay right where she was.
Ladd and Karen were still watching television and finally Alice pushed herself up on her hands and knees and