Nothing Is Nice and Easy by Drew Piston

I remember the first time it happened—two days after we all found out about the food. It was just my toe, which was why I didn’t say anything. I stared at my foot for a long time before I put both pairs of socks on, and then, afterwards, at the wall. Sometimes it’s better just to let things be.

Don’t make waves, they had told me. It’s going to be bad enough with you and Charlie, they said. I was supposed to remember my role, and be passive, quiet, uninvolved. Out of the picture, quite literally. Set the tripod, point, shoot. This is not some weird romantic getaway to the coldest continent on Earth, they said. This is a professional scientific expedition. Document, don’t disturb.

I stopped staring at the wall, stepped into the common room, and Charlie creamed me in the face with her pillow. I wrestled it away and stared at her while she bit her lip and tried to smile.

“Vengeance,” she said, simply.

I sat down at the only table and looked at the bent cards, the strewn chess set, the paperbacks.

I’m not even sure what for,” she continued, sitting across from me. “I just have a vague recollection of telling you ‘when you least expect it…’”

“That time I taped all your socks to the ceiling?” I asked.

Charlie bit her lip again and shook her head.

Henry faltered into the room, and sat down. All the chairs in the place were so futuristic looking, made from one continuous curvy piece of plastic. Maybe fiberglass. One would hope that, in the future, the rooms would be bigger. Or maybe this was good practice for overpopulation.

Henry is skinny, like a wet rodent is skinny, and has hair that always looked greasy, even when there are showers around. Charlie’s got some muscle on her, and I’ve got a little mass in the right places, but Henry seems molded to fit the weak scientist. Big glasses, big nose, big face, but skinny little body. Can’t even fathom doing physical labor. Anything unsolvable with the mind is not worth solving.

“How could…” he began, and shook his head.

I picked up two pawns in the silence, a white and a black, and passed them around in one hand, like they were those Chinese stress balls. Wood on wood.

“Eleven days?” he asked.

“Henry…” said Charlie. We had been over this yesterday, the day before, so many times.

Julie came out of her room and didn’t say anything. Julie’s all angles, acute ones. She looks hard, like you could break glass on her.

Before too long she had passed out our food for the morning. I was trying to get used to thinking of them as rations, and had a pretty good trench warfare fantasy going in my head when Julie told us it was time to get to work.

When we got there, the penguins were doing the same thing they did every damn day. At first I had found it beautiful, and snapped pictures until the snot froze all the way up my nose and my head started to hurt. But then you start to notice the discolored snow, and the fights, and the little ones that don’t make it. Eight weeks of nothing but penguins and snow and scientists can change a lot of things.

That night, despite the fact that neither one of us wanted to, Charlie and I talked about the food. How could no one have noticed? Was it sabotage? An honest mistake? Some conversion error?

I had made sure not to take my socks off all day, and I didn’t think to see if anyone else had done the same.

The next day it was another toe, and I did my feet-socks-wall routine. I don’t like it when people tell me not to make waves.

Charlie wasn’t waiting to attack me in the common room that day. She was sitting at the table, her beautiful hands in her lap, wearing a snow hat. She didn’t look up when I came in. We waited around for Henry to show up, and then, afterwards, for Julie to come and pass out the food rations.

She finally came out, slowly, and looked warily around. No one had said anything all morning, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to start. But Julie gave a little grunt and dashed her hand out to yank the snow cap off Charlie’s head.

Charlie has a sort of boyish haircut that’s short on the sides and sticks straight up on top. It’s a sort of blonde color in parts, and brown in others. I think she dyes it.

Without her hat, Charlie’s ear should have been clearly visible, but instead there was just smooth, pink skin around a surprisingly small hole. And Julie’s right hand, which held the snow hat, was missing a finger from the second knuckle.

There’s one picture, a picture I took, that I brought along because I like to take it out and look at it a little. It’s of me and Charlie, standing in front of the bathroom mirror. Her left hand is reached around behind me, and tucked into my front pocket. I’m holding the camera at chest level, so that you can see our faces. Charlie’s smiling, and biting her lip a little, like she does, but I’m concentrating on taking the picture and my face is empty, expressionless.

The photographer is an embodiment of the passive. All the real work is done by photons and shutters and chemicals; his entire job consists of literally pushing a button. Then the world moves on, goes rushing by, while the photographer holes up in his dark room, obsessed with records of events long gone. No affect, no impact. He might as well not even exist.

When Charlie’s company needed a photographer for their penguin expedition, she dropped my name in, gave them one of my little business cards with the old Henry Clay camera on it. She pretended like it was a favor, but I knew better. This was our last shot, our last chance to try and develop into what we needed to be.

I spent a long time looking at my feet that day. There was no scar tissue, no evidence of cutting or cauterization, no sign of violence. Just smoothness. Smoothness instead of toes. I would run my finger in an empty spot, and I could feel the toes on either side, and the perfect smooth plane where my toe should have been. It might have been the smoothest thing I had ever felt.

I was feeling my feet, and maybe singing a little to myself, when Charlie came and told me to come into the common room. I put on my socks slowly, but Charlie stuck around to wait for me so I didn’t have time to lock eyes with the wall.

“Body parts don’t just disappear,” said Julie. I could tell she was still in charge. “There’s a logical explanation behind this.”

I didn’t want to hear about logical explanations. I wanted to go back to my room and feel the smoothness between my toes.

Julie had other ideas, though. For some reason she was pointing a knife at me, one of the field ones they issued even though there’s not much to cut around here. Her eyes looked cold in her head.

“You,” she said. “Lucas. You said you’re missing toes. I want to see them.”

I could have made a joke about how I could only show her the ones I wasn’t missing, but I didn’t trust myself to get the timing right. So I took off my socks, both pairs, and wiggled the eight I had left. I was lucky to have that many. Before Julie lost a finger she was down to five.

I guess two missing toes was enough, though, because Julie turned the knife on Henry.

“All right, Henry.” She sort of spat out the name, and for the first time I realized that maybe not all scientists got along. “Care to join the dismembered, or do you still happen to be perfect?”

Henry didn’t look scared at all, which I thought was sort of surprising. I would have pegged him for the cower-in-the-corner type. But he just sort of looked back into Julie’s eyes like nothing worse could come from there.

“I’ve never been perfect,” said Henry, almost thoughtfully.

“You little bastard,” said Julie, but Henry was already standing up, slowly. He undid his belt, and with more dignity than I had ever seen him with before, he let his pants fall to the ground. Henry had no penis.

Charlie didn’t get out of bed one morning. I managed to get my socks on with just one arm and went to visit her. I guess I thought her wall would be as good a one to stare at as any.

She was missing her nose, now, too. I told her I loved her, and let her feel the new smooth place on my shoulder where my arm used to be. So smooth, I told her. So smooth. She didn’t say much, just lay in bed and let me try to comfort her. I don’t think it did either one of us much good.

When I came out to the common room I heard voices from Henry’s room. It sounded like some sort of argument. I knocked so I could ask Julie to get me and Charlie some food. She came out all red in the face.

I didn’t mention her fingerless hand, and she didn’t mention my missing arm. It worked out better that way.

While she got out the food, Julie looked at me sort of sideways.

“Lucas,” she whispered, “some people are born without a penis.”

About half, I thought. But I know when to keep quiet.

“I don’t know how he’s doing it,” she said, whispering again, “but it’s him. We’ll stick together, you and I.” I hated to look at the coldness in her eyes.

I took the food in to Charlie, but I couldn’t stick around to watch her put it in that face with no nose.

There’s this picture from Shackleton’s expedition where a burly-looking man has a penguin under each arm. The caption is something like “Penguins have no natural land enemies, which makes them extremely easy to catch.” The burly man looks mighty pleased with himself, as though all the other burly men are only carrying one penguin, but he’s got two. The penguins look completely at home, as though they get carried around by burly men all the time, and you get used to it after a while.

I hadn’t seen Henry in days, and Julie was talking only in whispers, around her missing teeth. But I had seen how little food was left. It was time, for once, to take action. I couldn’t make sense of everything, but I could do something about the food.

I had to get Charlie to put my hat on for me, and lace up my boots, and tie both my empty coat sleeves together so they wouldn’t flap around in the wind. We were both missing noses now, which might have made it easier to kiss, but we didn’t take the time to find out.

The penguins were standing around in the discolored snow again, blocking each other from the wind. I’d seen enough nature films to pick out a smaller looking one a little bit apart from the group.

I tried to sort of sidle up to it, nice and easy like, but nothing is nice and easy against that landscape. Some of them made that little squawking noise, and the one I had picked out flapped its wings a few times. They slapped against his fat little belly, making ripples, making waves. The smell was awful.

He came up to about my waist, and by nudging him with my knees I was able to start him waddling about. At first he kept circling back around to the others, but by being a little more aggressive with my knees I got him over a little bump in the snow and there he stood, apart from the group. He looked so small in the snow and wind, but he carried his fat body with pride. He stretched his neck out and shook it, and then waddled a bit forward and settled down.

All the cheap imagery struck me. The bowling pin, the little man, the tuxedo. I could have sworn he looked up at me with those black eyes, but I could have sworn a lot of things. I took aim at the top of the bowling pin and kicked.

The penguin toppled over and made a soft sound. He began to toboggan away from me, using his flippers and feet to push his body across the snow. Some penguins can toboggan at more than five miles per hour.

I used the tip of my boot to urge him back onto his feet, and then kicked him over again. A little harder this time.

Julie, early on, had told us a story about the penguins in Antarctica. When they were on land, she said, their world consisted entirely of the snow and ice beneath their feet. There were no trees, no other animals, nothing but the ground. They had never seen anything taller than other penguins, who at most stand four feet off the ground.

When airplanes began to fly across Antarctica, surveying the continent of ice, it was the first time penguins had ever seen anything in the sky. The planes, cruising low to the surface, would come across huge rookeries of penguins. The penguins, hearing the noise, would all turn to face the incoming airplane, mesmerized by this new sensation. They would watch the airplanes fly closer and closer, and crane their neck to keep watching this thing high in the sky. As the plane flew over, waves of penguins would topple backwards, trying to keep their eyes on the plane as it passed.

Somehow, trying to kick his dead body back to the camp was even worse. We came to a little ridge of snow, and I couldn’t get him over it. His fat body was almost perfectly round, and it would come rolling down and bang against my shins. He was surprisingly heavy. Eventually I stepped on his flipper and tripped and banged my face against the icy ridge.

How would this end? Would we disappear all together? Would the food run out before we did? Would they ever know what became of us? Would they find Charlie’s clothes under the bed covers, all flat with nothing inside?

Without arms, I couldn’t even tell if it was blood or tears freezing to my face.

I’ve finally gotten the camera set up. I think I can use my chin and the timing feature to start documenting some of my missing parts, some of my smoothness. Maybe, when they come looking for us, they’ll have some idea, some inkling of what happened here. Maybe they can stop it from ever happening again.

Julie’s outside now, hopping around on one leg, digging for the buried body parts she keeps saying must be out there. She still whispers to me, through her missing teeth, when she gets the chance. I heard Henry’s screams through the door, though, saw her try to hide the bloodstains on her sleeves. Somehow I got the door locked with my mouth.

Charlie hasn’t spoken to me for days.